My Review of Maurice Isserman's "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism"

Original Sin

Maurice Isserman, a man of the Left and a history professor at Hamilton College, has written an important history of the American Communist Party. Isserman tells two stories: one of misplaced idealism of those who supported labor rights and civil rights in support of a socialist America and the other of a group of Americans who bowed to every wind coming out of Moscow. The latter is the original sin of American communism by blindly following the party line coming out of Moscow which twisted its members into pretzels.

 

From the beginning in 1919 the American Communist Party was subsidized by “Moscow gold” to 1989 when Gorbachev finally cut them off. Isserman thoroughly recounts the changes in the party line from calling for outright revolution, supporting existing trade unions to supporting dual unionism, and with the rise of fascism in Europe working in a broad coalition of leftists to form the popular front. All that would come to an end with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 calling World War II a capitalist war until the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941.  Of course, during the 1930’s American communists refused to believe that there was mass starvation in Ukraine and looked the other way as the purge trials in Moscow led to the deaths of their former heroes. Along the way we meet Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and Dashiell Hammett, among others affiliated with the party.

 

If there are heroes in the book, they are those communists who helped build the CIO, Earl Browder, and Dorothy Healey.  Browder, who as leader of the party, actually changed the party to a political association to make it easier to participate in the normal political processes. However, his reforms went array when Moscow criticized him via what was called the Duclos letter in 1945. Within a year he was expelled. Isserman underplays the Duclos letter because it was a harbinger of the Cold War to come. His other hero was Los Angeles communist Dorothy Healey who was also a reformer, be she stayed with the party through Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning Stalin, the Hungarian revolt, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She wouldn’t leave the party until 1972. This highlights the fact how hard it was for long-term members to quit; their whole lives were bound up in it. As an aside I was once acquainted with Healey.

 

I have three criticisms of Isserman. The first is that although he discussed the use of party members in the Soviet spying apparatus, he doesn’t show how deep the penetration was in the New Deal and in the role of the Rosenberg spy ring. He wrote that rank and file members were oblivious to the secret work those communists were involved in. I don’t think they were that naïve.

 

My second criticism is that he underplays the role of the Comintern’s American Commission which Stalin actually chaired. Theodore Draper, in his “American Communism and Soviet Russia” highlighted its importance. Simply put, under the orders of Stalin, such leading communist officials as Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, and Bertram Wolfe were purged. That sent a message to the American party that the knee must be continually bent towards Moscow. Thus, there would be no Titoist party in America, meaning the party could not adapt to the unique conditions in America.

 

Third he doesn’t fully cover the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, a campaign that run entirely by the Communist Party. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benn Steil's "The World that Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century" ) Today we would call that foreign election interference.

 

Those criticisms aside, Isserman has written an important book about a movement that enthralled more than a few Americans and far more fellow travelers. In a very real sense, the taint of Soviet Russia has haunted the American Left for decades. Isserman tells us in a very interesting way what went wrong. 

Political Realignment is Here

In 2016 and 2018 I authored two blogs on the coming realignment of American Politics ( Shulmaven: The Coming Political Realignment and  Shulmaven: The Coming Political Realignment: Part II ) I believe the realignment I spoke of then and in subsequent related blogs is now here. The recent Republican convention once and for all buried the Right Hamiltonian* roots of the party and firmly made it over into a rightwing populist party combining the 19^th century Jacksonians and Know Nothings into one 21^st century coalition. Consistent with that, the party renominated Doanld Trump for president and JD Vance for vice-president. The party is now firmly isolationist, anti-free trade, anti-immigrant, pro-entitlements, and in many respects anti-Wall Street and above all “anti-woke.”

 

Prior to his withdrawal from the race, Joe Biden was veering sharply to the left with calls for national rent control, more student debt relief, medical bill relief and restructuring the Supreme Court. No longer a Left Hamiltonian, Biden was moving in the direction of a new social democratic party with policies along the lines of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. My guess is that Vice-President Kamala Harris who as of today seems the likely Democratic nominee, will pull the party in same direction Biden was headed with an even greater emphasis on identity politics.  Afterall, she grew up in the hot house of far-left San Francisco Bay Democratic politics.

 

Now, where does that leave the Right Hamiltonians of the Republican Party and the Left Hamiltonians of the Democratic Party. For the time being they are without a home. Furthermore, the mood of the electorate seems to be very anti-establishment which will make it very difficult for the Hamiltonians of both parties to gain traction. However, it is likely that either political party will unfortunately drive our country into a ditch, making it likely that in 2028 a merged Hamiltonian Party will come to the fore. That will either be within the Democratic Party sans its social democrats or as a centrist third party.

 

*- I broadly define Right Hamiltonians as those who would use the power of government to support business and Left Hamiltonians who would use government to support labor. Both wings are internationalists.

My Review of Ruchir Sharma's "What Went Wrong with Capitalism?"

Frightened of Risk

The essence of capitalism is risk taking, but over the past forty years or so both governments and the public at large are frightened of risk. With governments and central banks following a low or even zero interest rate policies and with the fiscal taps wide open at the sign of the slightest disturbance in the economy, capitalism no longer functions as it should, according to Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller Capital Management.

As a result, we now live in a world of zombie companies that should have purged in recessionary environments and because of very low interest rates we have the giant corporations swallowing the smaller and more dynamic businesses. Further instead of investing in new projects, the low interest rate environment encourages share buybacks and financial engineering at a time when the economy needs real engineering. As a result, the growth in productivity has collapsed.

Thus, in exchange for less volatility in the overall economy, real growth has slowed, and capital flowed into the financial markets. As Hyman Minsky noted many years ago, stability leads to instability, hence the crisis in 2008 and the crisis that likely lies ahead of us.

Sharma notes that over the past 40 plus years the growth of government has inexorably continues. Even under the Reagan and Thatcher regimes, governments continued to grow, taking an ever-larger share of the economy, and piling debts upon debts. Sharma argues the ball and chain of debt has been one of the reasons behind the tepid growth among the developed economies.

Sharma’s thesis made a great deal of sense up until 2022. Why? The zero-interest rate environment ended in 2023 with dramatic rate hikes in most of the developed world, and yet the economy did not mis a beat. Deficits remained extraordinarily high and the higher rates, save for parts of the real estate sector, have yet to see a surge in bankruptcies.  

Sharma would like to have us return to an era of a smaller state sector and a more relaxed policy towards recessions. Perhaps all good in theory, but the public would not stand for it. There is the rub! 

My Review* of Sergey Radchenko's "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Bd.........."

 The Rise and Fall of Soviet Foreign Policy

 

Johns Hopkins professor Sergey Radchencko has given us a deeply researched and encyclopedic book on Soviet foreign policy from 1944 – 1991 from the point of view of the Soviet leadership. He gets into the heads of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and their foreign policy minions. The Soviet leadership faced the tension among three incompatible goals of maintaining its revolutionary ideology, the need for security and its search for legitimacy among the nations, especially the United States.

 

He starts off with Stalin as the ultimate European focused leader whose “percentages agreement” with Churchill in late 1944 opened the way for Soviet control over Eastern Europe. He argues that Stalin did not initially want to Sovietize the Eastern Europe economies until he witnessed the failure of the French and Italian Communist parties to win electorally in the mid-1940’s. I don’t really buy that because the hardening of the Soviet position occurred while the war was still going on. Further, Radchenko fails to mention the Duclos letter to the American Communist Party in April 1945 criticizing its softness which signaled a hardening of the Soviet position worldwide.

 

What Stalin envisioned in 1945 was that Russia, as in 1815, would be part of a new Concert Europe that would run the continent. Hence Soviet power would be viewed as legitimate. Russian actions in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Berlin soon stripped away any sense of legitimacy, and in response NATO was formed. What I found fascinating was that anglophiles in the foreign ministry, Maksim Litvinov (ex-foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S.) and Ivan Maisky (ex-ambassador to the U.K.) played leading roles in developing Stalin’s European policies.

 

In Asia Stalin did not believe that Mao would succeed and for a time played the nationalists off against Mao’s communists. Mao accepted Stalin’s leadership as a junior partner. He would not feel such obedience under Khrushchev. In Iran Stalin was very cautious and he withdrew his forces from northern Iran thereby selling out the local communists who supported him.

 

Khrushchev was far more reckless. In Europe he ignited a Berlin Crisis, n caused a nuclear war over missiles in Cuba, and was an early supporter of Third World revolutionaries. Russian influence had to be reckoned with throughout the world. All the while the Soviets were building up their missile and nuclear capabilities in a direct challenge to the United States. This was crucial to Khrushchev because he sensed the unfairness of the United States having military bases surrounding the Soviet Union while he couldn’t have bases close to the United States. Hence, the big play in Cuba.

 

Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin sent ripples throughout Communist Parties around the world triggering revolts in Poland and Hungary. While Chairman Mao respected Stalin, he had no such respect for Khrushchev and hence the long simmering Chinese jealousy towards Russia began to boil.

 

The split with China would widen to even include military action and a break in diplomatic relations with the Soviets and the opening of relations with the U.S. after the Nixon visit in 1972.  In 1978 Deng Xiaoping took power and embarked China on a capitalist road to prosperity. His goal was modernization, but as early as 1982, after he realized that the U.S. would stand by Taiwan, China gradually began its drift back towards Russia. In fact, two weeks before the 1989 Tiananmen massacre China resumed diplomatic relations with Russia. Thus, it should not be surprise to see Putin’s Russia and China cozying up in recent years.

 

In 1964 Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev and simultaneously accelerated the nuclear arms race and sought détente with the United States. In making arms deals with Nixon, Brezhnev at once lowered the risk of a nuclear holocaust and achieved the legitimacy he sought from the United States. One of the most powerful vignettes in the book is that Radchenko recounts that at the height of the 1973 Yom Kippur War Nixon was asleep and drunk and Brezhnev was zonked out on sleeping pills. The decision over war and peace was thus made by Kissinger and Andropov.

 

Brezhnev’s failing health later in the 1970’s was emblematic of sclerosis seizing up in the Soviet economy. Even allowing for Soviet gains in Africa, Soviet power was falling under the weight of its weakening economy. That economy would be put to the test with Reagan’s military buildup in the early 1980’s. Simply put the Russian leadership went into panic mode fearing they could not keep up. If you learn one thing from this book, it is that Reagan’s foreign and defense policies brought the Soviets to their knees.

 

Gorbachev tried to turn things around with his glasnost and perestroika, but the Soviets were too far gone. To ease the pressure on the economy he made a series of arms control deals with Reagan and Bush thereby legitimizing his country and he cut loose Eastern Europe because the economy could no longer afford to subsidize its satellites.

 

Gorbachev was a proponent of the Gaullist notion of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. He called it “Our Common European Home.”  It was too late. Radchenko notes that there were discussions about limiting NATO’s reach in Eastern Europe. However, not commitments were reduced to writing and thus under Clinton NATO expanded to the borders of Russia.

 

One last point the Soviet Union had two diplomats who were survivors, and they appear throughout the book. Andrei Gromyko was a power from 1945-1988 and Anastas Mikoyan was a major player from 1935-1966. It was though them that Soviet foreign policy has continuity and historical memory. Radchenko has written an important book, and it will be useful in gaining insights into how Putin’s policies are both a continuation and a departure from the history he has outlined.

*- I am engaged in a dispute with Amazon about my ability to post reviews on their site. Amazon alleges that I have gone afoul of their community guidelines. Amazon is very difficult to communicate with so dear readers if you have a way of weighing in with Amazon, please do.

Incumbents Beware

The tide of elections around the world are sending an ominous signal for incumbents everywhere. In India Prime Minister Nerendra Modi failed to achieve the widely expected super majority in parliament, the Conservatives in the UK got wiped out with their vote total dropping from 44% to 24% in the prior election, and while Labour won a huge majority in Parliament sending Keir Starmer to 10 Downing Street, it did so with only 34% of the vote. The spoiler was Nigel Farage's fringe Reform Party which took 14% of the vote. In France the votes are still being counted with the French Left winning a surprising plurality of the votes, while Marine Le Pen's rightwing party disappointed, but the real loser was French President Emanuel Macron

What all this means for the United States is that President Joe Biden. with all of his age related troubles. is in a world of hurt. Even if Vice President Kamala Harris succeeds Biden as the nominee, she will be viewed as an incumbent and hence a loser. The only choice the Democrats have would be to nominate a new candidate in an open convention. That candidate would certainly not be an incumbent. Indeed, in the minds of the voters Trump would then be the incumbent and headed for a loss. I know it is high risk, but that is the only path for a Democratic victory. 

Before the past few weeks was my view was that we would see a reversal of fortune in American politics with the Republicans retaking the White House and the Senate and losing the House to the Democrats. However, if things don't turn around soon, we could be headed for a Republican sweep.