Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

On March 21, the NY Times profiled John R. “Rick” MacArthur, a trust fund magnate who is the publisher of Harper’s, a magazine that dates back to June 1850. Like its liberal cohorts, The Nation, The New Republic and Atlantic Monthly that are all over a century old as well, it was at the mercy of deep-pocketed men whose commitment to the left can prove mercurial.

For example, when Martin Peretz owned The New Republic by virtue of his wife’s largess (a heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune), he turned it into a Zionist propaganda machine. When magazine publisher and DP funder Win McCormack bought The New Republic in 2016, many on the left—including me—were delighted to see Chris Lehmann named editor. Lehmann left the bad memories of Peretz behind and turned the magazine sharply to the left, even outflanking The Nation. Only last month it was announced that McCormack had replaced Lehmann with Michael Tomasky, a self-described Tough-Minded Liberal (TLM) who wrote venomous attacks on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaigns. So, you are left with McCormack’s whims or that of any other of these rich bastards. As A.J. Liebling once put it, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

I’ve been a Harper’s subscriber for about 40 years now and have generally been satisfied by the content. It has only been recently that I have felt like I’ve been stabbed in the back again. The Harper’s Open Letter stuck in my craw. Even though it did not mention anybody involved with the “cancel culture” by name, it was obviously directed at the left. With signatures from Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss and J.K. Rowling, it was clearly aimed at BLM activists, anti-Zionists, transgender rights and any other leftist causes that were supposedly trampling on the rights of people with bully pulpits at the NY Times. Signatories like Bari Weiss, David Brooks, and Michelle Goldberg evidently needed protection from vicious Tweets.

Williams, a biracial contributing editor to Harper’s, and MacArthur worked closely together on this project as was reported in the March 28 NY Times:

And so last July, when another American expatriate in Paris, Thomas Chatterton Williams, was looking for a place to publish a broadside against the “intolerant climate” to which some of the most famous writers in the world — Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood, among others — had signed their names, he emailed Mr. Beha. The letter was already finished and approved, but Mr. MacArthur liked it enough to add his name, and Mr. Beha published it in full online.

I should add that despite being editor, Beha would never dare to challenge MacArthur. His boss’s reputation for firing impudent editors is legendary.

Long before the Harper’s Open Letter had appeared, I wrote a brief email to Beha about a Williams column from January 2020 that irked me. Tobi Haslett, a Book Forum contributor, had written a brutal take-down of Williams’s latest memoir that included this barb:

What he cannot grasp is that any effective challenge to white hegemony would have to take place not in the perfumed realm of private choices and elective affinities, but on the harsh terrain of real life: where collective struggle is waged, and wealth is made and spread. Apart from a single glancing mention (in parentheses) of the social democrat Bernie Sanders, there is no serious and explicit treatment of the gap between rich and poor.

In keeping with his steady attacks on the left, Williams reminded Haslett that “Regardless of what progressives would like to think, by this ostensibly commonsensical measure, most black and Latino Americans can be safely defined as conservative.” Now, remind me what it was that Freud said about projection, especially since Williams joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as a visiting fellow about a year after he answered Haslett. There he joins Charles Murray, the F. A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at AEI, who is best known for writing “The Bell Curve”, a book arguing that since Blacks are genetically hobbled by lower IQ’s, it is a waste of money to fund social programs that benefit them.

Every Harper’s op-ed I’ve seen by Williams since first encountering that one has been a repetition of his basic talking points that are distilled from gaseous 20^th century liberalism, not much better than a Max Lerner op-ed from a 1965 NY Post. Mostly, I have ignored them except for my brief complaint to the editor but Williams’s latest in the current issue provoked me into writing something in reply.

Titled “Campaign Literature” and targeting a NY Times op-ed by Viet Thanh Nguyen for calling out poets and fiction writers for avoiding the big political questions of the age, particularly white supremacy, Williams’s goal is to defend art against the propaganda that outrages him. Viet Thanh does not mince words:

My problem with “craft” is not only that it’s not even art, but also that it’s espoused by writers who speak of the labor of craft and the workshop but who generally have no theory of labor, its exploitation or the writer as worker. No surprise that writers without such a theory have little to say about politics, and why the norm for writing workshops is not to deal with politics.

“Colonizers write about flowers,” Ms. Hindi writes. “I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.”

This is my kind of poem.

“I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies,” Ms. Hindi writes. “When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.”

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Viet Thanh Nguyen, which was of zero interest to Williams, was his background. He was the son of  Vietnamese parents who fled to the USA in 1975 to escape Communism. As a youngster, he became curious about the war that shook up his family’s life and began reading as much as he could, particularly from the Vietnamese perspective. That led to an anti-colonial politics that remains key to his own fiction.

As is customary, Williams creates a straw man out of a more complex person to his left. He reduces Viet Thanh to demanding that “all writers will have to take up overt activism” when in fact, he simply praises those who take a stand in their writing. He singles out the crime novel for its ability to diagnose the American malaise. “So-called genre literature has been better than so-called literary fiction and poetry when it comes to the kind of critical and political work that unsettles whiteness and reveals the legacies of colonialism. Smart crime writers, for example, are often political because they know that an individual crime is a manifestation of a society that has committed wholesale crimes.”

While not exactly upholding “art for art’s sake”, Williams identifies with writers who write from their own experience such as Ralph Ellison, the African-American author of “The Invisible Man” and his patron saint. In 1963, Irving Howe, a former Trotskyist, took Ellison to task in Dissent Magazine in terms reminiscent of Viet Thanh: “How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh or mild, political or private, released or buried?” Williams obviously sees Ellison’s rebuttal to Howe as equally applicable to Viet Thanh Nguyen:

In Ralph Ellison’s coruscating 1964 rebuttal to this well-meaning but condescending account, which unfavorably contrasted both Baldwin and Ellison himself with Richard Wright, he argued against denying, “in the interest of revolutionary posture,” that nonrevolutionary, non-political possibilities of “human richness” also exist, even in terrible circumstances and among seemingly oppressed demographics. To do so, he wrote, is “not only to deny us our humanity but to betray the critic’s commitment to social reality. Critics who do so should abandon literature for politics.”

I had a sense of déjà vu reading Thomas Chatterton Williams versus Viet Thanh Nguyen. When I first began to become radicalized in 1967, I carried a lot of ideological baggage from the Cold War about the West’s cultural superiority. Their artists painted tractors; ours were abstract expressionists. Their writers wrote proletarian novels; ours wrote about the human spirit. It was only the spectacle of B-52s bombing peasant villages that helped me get past my anti-Communism. I’d be okay with the proletarian novel even if it meant achieving peace and self-determination in Vietnam.

It was only after meeting with George Novack in 1967, shortly after joining the SWP, that I began to see that you can have your cake and eat it too. It was the Trotskyists who respected the writer’s integrity, while at the same time leading the fight against imperialist war. George filled me in on the writers of Partisan Review, who had broken with the CP and championed both literary modernism such as the novels of James Joyce and world revolution. Among the most prominent of them were James T. Farrell, the Irish-American novelist who wrote the trilogy “Studs Lonigan”. Unlike the typical proletarian novel that had square-jawed workers fighting the good fight against the bosses, Farrell’s eponymous hero is seen in the final page cursing a May Day parade for the commotion that disturbed the peace he sought on his death bed.

The other was Edmund Wilson, the literary critic that I had some familiarity with from high school days. The school librarian, a one-time leftist herself, urged me to read “Axel’s Castle”, Wilson’s survey of modernist poets and novelists since it had a chapter on James Joyce, whose “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” had become my favorite novel. At the time, I had no idea that in 1931, when “Axel’s Castle” appeared, Wilson had already begun to question the introspective symbolist aesthetic it championed. After two years of the Great Depression, he once remarked to his friends how selfish it was “to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers are taking a beating.” In other words, he was responding to the same kinds of urgency as indicated in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s op-ed.

By 1938, Wilson had hooked up with James T. Farrell and the luminaries at Partisan Review who identified with Leon Trotsky both as a revolutionary leader and as someone who had a dialectical understanding of the relationship between literature and revolution. In the early days of the USSR, Trotsky warned against trying to create a “proletarian” culture. You might even say that he sounded a bit like Thomas Chatterton Williams in a 1923 article titled “Communist Policy Toward Art”:

It is childish to think that bourgeois belles lettres can make a breach in class solidarity. What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoyevsky will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious, etc. In the final analysis, the worker will become richer.

That dovetailed perfectly with the high modernism that reigned at the Partisan Review. This was not to speak of Leon Trotsky’s authority as a leader of the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, at least one of the writers championed in “Axel’s Castle” saw himself a proletarian novelist, even if it didn’t correspond to the CP’s definition. When James Joyce heard about his being disparaged at the Writers’ Congress in Moscow chaired by Karl Radek, he rose to his own defense. In conversation with his friend Eugene Jolas, he pointed out that all his characters, from Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, belonged to “the lower middle classes, and even the working class, and they are all quite poor.”

Published in 1938, Edmund Wilson’s “The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subject” was the first major attempt at achieving a grand synthesis. In the chapter on “Literature and Marxism”, he defined the aesthetic that would define Partisan Review:

Trotsky is a literary man as Lenin never was, and he published in 1924 a most remarkable little study called Literature and Revolution. In this book he tried to illuminate the problems which were arising for Russian writers with the new society of the Revolution. And he was obliged to come to grips with a question with which Marx and Engels had not been much concerned — the question of what Mr. James T. Farrell in his book, A Note on Literary Criticism, one of the few sensible recent writings on this subject, calls ‘the carry-over value’ of literature. Marx had assumed the value of Shakespeare and the Greeks and more or less left it at that. But what, the writers in Russia were now asking, was to be the value of the literature and art of the ages of barbarism and oppression in the dawn of socialist freedom?

What in particular was to be the status of the culture of that bourgeois society from which socialism had just emerged and of which it still bore the unforgotten scars? Would there be a new proletarian literature, with new language, new style, new form, to give expression to the emotions and ideas of the new proletarian dictatorship?

There had been in Russia a group called the Proletcult, which aimed at monopolizing the control of Soviet literature; but Lenin had discouraged and opposed it, insisting that proletarian culture was not something which could be produced synthetically and by official dictation of policy, but only by natural evolution as a ‘development of those reserves of knowledge which society worked for under the oppression of capitalism, of the landlords, of the officials.

Now, in Literature and Revolution, Trotsky asserted that such terms as “proletarian literature” and “proletarian culture” are dangerous, because they erroneously compress the culture of the future into the narrow limits of the present day.’ In a position to observe from his Marxist point of view the effects on a national literature of the dispossession of a dominant class, he was able to see the unexpected ways in which the presentments of life of the novelists, the feelings and images of the poets, the standards themselves of the critics, were turning out to be determined by their attitudes toward the social-economic crises. But he did not believe in a proletarian culture which would displace the bourgeois one.

Given Ralph Ellison’s sharp rebuttal to Irving Howe, one might assume that he would be part of the Partisan Review crowd. Ironically, all of his fiction appeared in “New Masses” in the 1930s, the literary voice of the Communist Party edited by Mike Gold, the author of the 1929 “Go Left, Young Writers”, which upheld the “proletarian literature” prevailing in Stalin’s USSR. Gold would have no use for namby-pambies like James Joyce. He was for the 1930s equivalent of Joe Sixpack:

The old Masses was a more brilliant but a more upper class affair. The New Masses is working in a different field. It goes after a kind of flesh and blood reality, however crude, instead of the smooth perfect thing that is found in books. The America of the working class is practically undiscovered. It is like a lost continent. Bits of it come above the surface in our literature occasionally and everyone is amazed…The young writer can find all the…material he needs working as a wage slave around the cities and prairies of America.

Does this sound anything like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s op-ed? Certainly not. Although Thomas Chatterton Williams would have you believe that it was some sort of “cancel culture” exercise that would result in any novelist or poet being expelled from some literary society for touting J.K. Rowling, Viet Thanh has very little power in the publishing world that churns out 25 novels about family dramas in the suburbs  for every one that aims to plunge a stake through the heart of imperialism. The men and women who make decisions about what gets published or not belong to an elite that comes out of the Ivy League and that relies on an old boy’s network. Rick MacArthur decides to hire Thomas Chatterton Williams as a contributing editor since his “color-blind” politics meshes with his own sense of privilege and sanctity (sanctimoniousness might be more accurate.) The same kind of self-selection goes on routinely in publishing. I ran into it at Random House, even if they relied on Joyce Brabner to shit-can the memoir I did with Harvey Pekar.

This is not to speak of the academic training most writers get today in places like the University of Iowa or NYU. Do you think that writer’s workshops are breeding grounds for Bolshevism? Instead, they are largely responsible for convincing the young aspiring novelist to write about what they know best, like their father’s alcoholism or their first romance, either heterosexual or homosexual. Not something so irrelevant as trying to get a union going at Amazon.

Returning to the Partisan Review, its trajectory after 1940 was to the right. Like some of intellectuals under Max Shachtman’s influence, the editors saw the USSR as a new type of society that was as bad in its own way as capitalism. Once the patriotic fervor over Pearl Harbor kicked in, many of them naturally came to the conclusion that the USA was a model for the rest of the world, a conclusion Shachtman reached in the 1950s himself. So sharp was the Partisan Review’s turn to the right that contributor Dwight Macdonald decided a new leftist alternative to both it and the Stalinist New Masses. He created a magazine called “Politics” that attracted a number of the old Partisan Review crowd that had no stomach for the Cold War. Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson were unrepentant leftists who joined up but James T. Farrell, like Jon Dos Passos, became a raving right-winger.

Eventually, Partisan Review found its métier. Like other literary magazines such as Encounter and the Paris Review, it accepted funding from the CIA in order to promote the Cold War mythologies that had my brain twisted like a pretzel when I entered Bard College as a freshman in 1961. I am not sure when I read it, but I am certain I read Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” at Bard. I was curious to see what the former Bard professor had to say in the highly regarded novel. All I knew about Ellison’s time there is that he used to get drunk at Adolph’s Tavern (as did I) and pick fights with the townies.

I might even find time to read it again just to get a handle on a political current within Black America that has a high-profile character like Thomas Chatterton Williams taking a position with the American Enterprise Institute. Surely, something toxic is at work. But wouldn’t it be more productive to engage with his adversary Viet Thanh Nguyen, who might at least give me an idea of what new writers are about? It has been ages since I have read fiction, after all.

His website offers up samples of his work. I opened a short story titled “Look at Me” that convinced me that Viet Thanh is a writer for our epoch. Son of Vietnamese parents who fled Communism, his story is about an American army veteran sick with cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange during the war in Vietnam about to take revenge on the executive responsible. It is the best short story I have read in years and proof that literature and revolution are not only compatible but necessary. Never forget, however, what Hollywood 10’s Albert Maltz once said, “Where art is a weapon, it is only so when it is art.”