End of the Journey

...What now...

...there was a simple division of labor—the editors read, we organized, and all that was forthcoming from International Publishers—the party publisher—were rehashes of the [Marxist] classics...

...In the end, ideology finally cracked under the strain of reality...

...This is the fact (in the end more relevant to understanding the author's life and political experience) that Charney was a deracine, one of the uprooted of the world...

...The innocence of the young boy, yearning for the Promised Land, remained as the permanent face, even though the persona of the functionary was worn as the mask...

...Indeed, it is the tension one can perceive between the molding process and the individual that makes A Long Journey interesting...

...But what is remarkable, and what gives the book its freshness, is the quality of innocence that he is able to project...

...In a recent issue of Progressive Labor, the "theoretical" magazine of the Maoist faction, I read an essay by a Columbia SDSer, Roger Taus, attacking another sds member in an article entitled "Len Marcus: Marxist or Scab...

...of the psychological humiliation of men, proud as Communists to the world, yet reduced to frightened souls as they cringe before the vicious onslaughts of others who charge them with heresy and cast them out of party life...

...It is not a bitter book (as some accounts by former Communists are), for Charney does not really think of those years as a waste...

...He was neither an apikores (the philosophically literate who self-consciously rejects the tradition), nor an am ha'aretz (the illiterate who is ignorant of the tradition), but that product of modern times, the half-educated am ha'aretz or semiskilled apikores who is spurred to learning yet indifferent to his own past...

...he is a naif, and his book is peopled by individuals, not by cardboard Communists...

...And that "inner distance" between person and role eventually allowed him to break the mask and again become himself...

...Yet if hope remains, one has also to remember that, as the story of Noah reminds us, the rainbow in the sky comes at the end of the flood...

...It is the story of a man who joined the Communist party during the depression, became a full-time party functionary laboring in the middle echelons of the leadership, and finally left in despair after the shattering events of Poland and Hungary in 1957...

...From one aspect, it is hilarious, a script written by Jonathan Swift, as devastating as his "Battle of the Books...

...In this way, too, the party sought to make "Bolsheviks...

...But the most shattering moments in the experience—and here Charney's innocence breaks through?are not the disillusioning ones of the external events but the internal savagery of party life when it is in crisis: the cruelty of factionalism...

...The issue—do the specifics matter?—is that if the students follow Marcus' tactics they will fail to have the "correct" line in leading the workers to accept the Revolution...

...Each man makes his own journey, but can we learn from one another...

...The "shell" or dogma may be monolithic, but the individuals within are not...

...The retention of innocence, however, is not enough to explain the act of joining or leaving the movement...

...and these colors have to reflect some underlying ties...

...As a number of studies of quite varied social situations have shown, "primary group" membership is the necessary condition for ideology...

...Men do not live by gray alone (even when the Owl of Minerva has flown), but need some color in their lives...

...This is the fatal error many writers have made, most notably Frank S. Meyer in his book The Moulding of Communists...

...Len Marcus, the pseudonym of a Columbia graduate student (for Len-in and Marx, get it...

...has become the guru for a schismatic Maoist student faction which has captured the sds Labor Committee in New York...

...What this leaves, and this is the especial tension of all marginal men, is a hunger for faith and a need for belonging...

...To see Communism as a faith is not to see it, as many mistakenly have done, as a monolith...

...This is a crucial question when one beholds the young Left today...

...But there was no genuine feeling for either, and like many immigrant children Charney was cold both to family and shut...

...If Charney, and others, had been able to grasp the psychological mechanisms then being employed, and to understand the paradigm of domination that was being played out (a paradigm detailed so precisely by Hegel in his drama of the Lord and Bondsman in his Phenomenology), they would have been better prepared, 10 years later, to understand the nature of Stalinism not as a personal but rather as a social phenomenon...

...One is struck by the failure to make the imaginative leap, to relate these events of internal party life (for example, the episodes Charney recounts of the purge of Browder's followers) to the larger public humiliations, such as the Moscow Trials (which are mentioned only once...

...So, too, did the followers of the "secret Adam" dispute the text...

...Whether he was that innocent, I have no way of knowing...

...In effect, we see again that the hold of Communism, as of all radical experiences, is of a quasi-religious character, in which there is a faith and a church...

...There is a second crucial element, and one gleans it from remarks that are almost marginal to the main story...

...Charney was an immigrants' son who, despite the usual cheder experience, had no real ties to Judaism...

...The only possibility of change comes when there are schisms of dogma (which frequently merely reproduce the sects), or when the original innocence, confronted by dismaying experience, finds a like-minded group to sustain that painful act of separation and disillusionment...

...It is striking, and typical, that Charney joined the Communist party with a group of friends, stayed in it because of a network of friends, and left it only when he could depart with a group of friends...

...Will they learn...

...nor does one gain wisdom through knowledge, but by the reversal of hopes (and the reflection on that experience) which makes one aware of the recalcitrance of human organization and the demonic extensions of human ambition...

...During that time he fought for social betterment, and for this reason he laments the betrayal done to him by Stalinism...

...Reviewed by DANIEL BELL Professor of Sociology, Columbia University One does not become a saint through piety, but by suffering...

...And the question is how many floods do we have to endure for wisdom and hope to be joined...

...The primary group is the social cement and the ideology is the color or hue...

...Charney reverts to the "principle of hope," which Ernst Bloch, himself a Marxist who left the East, has defined as the permanent value of radicalism...

...Yet it is also painful: the lack of consciousness on the part of those who prate of the necessity of raising the consciousness of the masses but who, lacking any sense of the past, have their heads buried in the sectarian sands of an imaginary future...

...Charney's account of Bill Lawrence, the first section organizer and superior he encountered, is (if Charney will forgive me) strikingly like the psychological accounts one reads of the efforts of the drill instructor to reshape the raw recruit in Marine boot camp: He is tough and demanding, he criticizes and humiliates, and by breaking the independent spirit forces the recruit to take on a new persona imitating the person who has "broken" him...

...of "auto-critique...

...Charney was not an apparatchick, the functionary who becomes cynical and hardened, and whose character becomes fused into his political role...

...Twenty-five years of his life—his entire adult experience —have been given to the movement, and these are the reflections on those years...

...Once a person is in the movement he becomes encapsulated not only by an ideology that gives him ready-made judgments for all events, but by the totality of a way of life...

...This is not to "reduce" the power and value of ideas...

...I can go only on the evidence of the text...

...Prophecy failed, but it had to fail several times (as Festinger points out in his classic account of such movements) for the interior distance to break open and for innocence to reassert itself...

...That depends on reality, the retention of innocence, and the nature of the group...

...As I examined my own library after the upheaval," Charney writes, "I found that scarcely a book had remained that was not Marxist...

...The capacity to retain that interior distance, the ultimate willingness to risk disillusionment as a way of risking one's life, is the clue to why (and which) individuals leave the party...

...they have mistaken the role for the person, the belief system for the motivation...

...Rational argument is often ineffective precisely because men are tied not only by a faith but by a church (or sect...

...This is why the literature of disillusionment is as old as the literature of hope, and why where hope has been tied to Messianism—political or religious •—there is a dialectical relationship between the two...

...George Charney's book is one more contribution to the dialectic...

...And Marcus is lashed in withering terms...

...Charney is not a theoretician, that peculiar ideological type that is always seeking to forge the unity of role and dogma for the movement...

...The store and the synagogue for some twenty-five years remained the economic and spiritual centers of the family...

...The important point about A Long Journey is that though it is a cautionary tale, it is not a counsel of despair...

...So much does History depend on the "word...

...Only tangentially?and then ruefully—does he reflect on the painful fact that he too, as a party functionary, helped mislead others...