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Boston communists say they want a revolution. Now they just have to agree on how to bring it about.
By Mike Miliard
A pimple-faced teen with Coke-bottle glasses and a self-satisfied smirk stands near the doorway of Harvard Square’s tiny Revolution Books. He’s skinny and draped in a large black T-shirt adorned with a full-color portrait of Joseph Stalin, the iron-fisted despot responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of millions.
"Stalin is my friend," the kid says, at once cockily and geekily, as he stares at the floor.
"Yeah, yeah, but we can do better than Stalin," says the guy behind the counter who, even though it’s hot, is wearing a heavy sweater under his SERVE THE PEOPLE T-shirt. "We can do a lot better. You can have socialism without suppressing intellectualism." His name is George Bryant, and he’s a volunteer at this decades-old bastion of unabashed communist agitation, a bookstore that, amazingly, still survives in the ever-more-corporatized "People’s Republic of Cambridge." Bryant gestures toward a stack of books and DVDs from the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), whose chairman, Bob Avakian, is "really offering a deep critique of America and an in-depth defense of communism — in a sense reinventing it without throwing out the whole."
The kid and his friends, high-schoolers obviously flirting with jejune hard leftism, seem noncommittal and a little nonplussed. "What would you guys think about taking a bunch of these?" Bryant asks, offering a stack of the Maoist RCP weekly newspaper, Revolution, for them to proselytize with. The kids demur, and they leave.
As they do, two other guys walk in. Josh Koritz, gangly with a backpack and scraggly goatee, and Jesse Lessinger, long-haired with sandals and open shirt, are both 22, just out of Tufts. Before long, they too are debating with Bryant; this time it’s a vociferous back-and-forth about the merits of all-out revolution versus a more gradual socialistic approach to class equality, working through the system:
Koritz: "I don’t think we’re in any situation where the masses of people are ready to move up and actually get to a point where the ruling class feels like there are concessions they need to make."
Lessinger: "One of the first things we’d like to see is the organization of workers on a large scale, a legitimate third party. A labor party, a workers’ party, that is not part of the bourgeois bureaucracy, that is actually fighting for the needs of the vast majority of the people."
Bryant: "What makes you think the bourgeoisie would allow something like that to even exist?"
Lessinger: "You need to have a certain level of consciousness to be raised. And that’s done by small victories. By people fighting in the smaller, local areas, and the realization that they do have power in society, power over production."
Bryant: "That’s an illusion. The goal is overthrowing, not trying to get elected and to build unity. It’s a war between classes, and if you don’t prepare to get them, they’re gonna get you. Communism has to be out there again."
It may be the anarchists, agitating at World Trade Organization summits and political conventions with their bandannas and black hooded sweatshirts, who get all the press these days. But communism is still alive and well.
You’d be forgiven for being surprised. The Soviet Union long ago collapsed into dust. China, flush with its dizzying economic boom, is a different beast entirely. North Korea is a nightmare, Kim Jong Il a late-night punch line. Cuba is decrepit, Castro a senescent shell. Communism is far from the all-threatening bugaboo it was two decades ago — to most people, it’s just another discredited ideology, a failed experiment, a joke.
But still, there are believers. Most disavow the few extant communist regimes as perversions and corruptions of the doctrine. Indeed, they see the failures and dilutions of the Soviet Union and China as definitive proof that their own conception of communism is the real thing. (Not long after the USSR’s disintegration, Avakian published a book called Phony Communism Is Dead ... Long Live Real Communism.) The communists in Boston and Cambridge are a small group, numbering only a few hundred. They subscribe to different party lines, and there are fissures between them and other leftist groups. But they exist. And they believe that, despite the hard-right depredations of the Bush administration, despite the fact that present-day Cambridge is more suburban strip mall than People’s Republic, the world is ripe for revolution. The End of History? For these folks, it’s just beginning.
Commie creep-out
"I tell people, ‘Hey, three tours of duty in Vietnam earned me the right to be a communist, so you can go fuck yourself,’" says Gary Dotterman, the hard-nosed 61-year-old director of the Center for Marxist Education, in Central Square. It’s in this second-floor walk-up, closed most of the time, that a cadre of leftists from labor and community groups talk shop — Marxist economics, Chinese history — every Thursday evening. There are monthly lectures, too, and organized trips to mainland China. Dotterman also hosts a weekly television show on CCTV (Tuesdays at 5:30 pm) where he discusses communist issues and where many mainstream local pols and candidates have been guests.
Dotterman himself ran as a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) candidate for the late Brian Honan’s Boston City Council seat in 2002; he finished eighth out of 10. Unlike the Maoist RCP, which views the capitalist democratic process as an anathema, the CPUSA often fields candidates in local, state, and national elections, and it endorsed John Kerry in 2004.
He’d always been left of center, a socialist even as he was waging war against the "red menace" in Southeast Asia. ("I wasn’t fighting communists," Dotterman explains now. "I wasn’t bringing democracy to the poor people in the jungle or defending against the domino theory; I was just doing a duty. I can’t blame anybody but myself — I joined the service.") But he didn’t affiliate with communism until the 1980s. Prior to that, his political connections wouldn’t allow it. He says he worked for Bobby and Ted Kennedy, and "doing that kind of work, for various government office-holders around the country, my fear of reprisal if I had joined the Communist Party always kept me from it."
In the end, the decision made sense. "I came to acknowledge that if I were to be true to my own politics, it was more important than ever to join," he says.
There are less than 200 members of CPUSA in the Boston area, Dotterman says, but the Center for Marxist Education has a couple thousand people on its mailing list, even if only handfuls show up for meetings.
"It takes a lot of courage to walk into a room where people are identified as communists," Dotterman explains. "There’s still a fear from some people that they’re going to have their picture taken by government agencies."
Is it a valid fear? Dotterman doesn’t think so. But he points out that commies creep out the Bushies more than they did their predecessor. "In the Clinton administration, when a person applied for a green card or citizenship, they were not asked if they are or have ever been a member of the Communist Party. That phrase has been reinstated on the applications," he says.
After all, he argues, for all its failures and wretched perversions over the last century, communism, in its purest form, makes sense. "The progress that we attribute to the Roosevelt administration came out of struggles of the Communist Party."
These days, so many of those advances are being set back. Yet, at the same time, "we have a socialist society for the rich. You see Chase Manhattan and the other corporations when they get into trouble, run straight to the corporate trough and open up their suitcases. On 9/11, 3000 workers were killed in one afternoon in one worksite, and the first thing the government does is indemnify the insurance companies from having to pay, and sets up a special fund so the most wealthy can get paid off. And whose money is that? That’s our money! The working people’s money."
Dotterman is a communist because he has to be. "Too many Americans today are getting fucked. People don’t realize it, or if they do realize it, they feel frustrated that they can’t do anything about it. And then they decide to go with their hat in hand and say, ‘Oh, please, Mr. Sir, give me one more plate of shit!’"
Luckily, Dotterman sees more and more young people showing up at the Center, "looking for answers and understanding that they’re not gonna take this bullshit anymore."
Toward a just society
Alpana Mehta first found herself thinking hard about Marx and Lenin in 1993, after she’d spent considerable time and energy helping get Bill Clinton elected. It wasn’t long, though, before Mehta, now 32, noticed a "series of broken promises" — the promise of universal health care, that Haitian refugees would be allowed to enter the country — and wondered why she was wasting her time with the Democrats. So she joined the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a Trotskyist group that, blaming capitalism for poverty, racism, famine, war, and environmental despoliation, works toward international revolution culminating in a society "where we all have control over our lives."
With approximately 1300 American members (only about 25 in Boston), the ISO is one of the largest socialist organizations in the US — but it’s still quite small. "Part of that is because of the devastation of McCarthyism," Mehta reasons. "And part of it is the relationship of the left to the Democratic Party. I think the biggest stumbling block for the left right now to building genuine movements for social change is the Democratic Party. That party is not a party of ordinary working people. It’s a party of the rich. A party that supports the war."
For Mehta and the ISO, the only way forward is a radical rethinking of people’s relations with one other and with their government. "Would we consider ourselves communists? The word ‘communism’ is associated with Stalinism. Or with Cuba and Castro," she says. "That, we completely separate ourselves from. Genuine Marxism is about control from below by workers. Marx, he talks about a future communist society, an ultimate society that is classless, and that’s not what Russia or North Korea or Cuba look like."
But it is what America — and the world — can look like, says Mehta. One of the arguments habitually put forward as to why communism will never really work is because "human nature" won’t allow it: people are too greedy — and too lazy — to really make a society based on "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" possible. Mehta doesn’t agree. "I actually think that human beings, when put in situations where they have to come forward and help each other, always do. Like the tsunami effort — people gave millions of dollars. When children are kidnapped, people come out and look for them." It’s capitalism, which puts people in a situation where they’re forced to compete with one another, that’s the problem.
The system, she says, is broken, so it has to be "smashed and overthrown." Mehta points to "our own back yard" in South America, where revolutions can and do take place. "They’re similar conditions to what people are facing here. We don’t have peasants, but we do have multinational corporations that are devastating workers." And it doesn’t have to be bloody when the revolution comes. "Russia in 1917 was incredibly nonviolent."
Josh Koritz and Jesse Lessinger, on the other hand, aren’t quite sure they’re ready for — or even necessarily want — revolution, violent or not. At Revolution Books, Koritz offers me an issue of Justice (PRICE $1 ... SOLIDARITY PRICE $2), the newspaper put out by his group, Socialist Alternative. It’s a group of union activists, in solidarity with Committee for a Workers International, one of whose tenets is that "as capitalism moves deeper into crisis and recession, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership." It’s a group for and by young people, focusing on issues like unionizing fast-food McJobs and countering the military’s efforts to recruit the poor. While it’s not straight-up communism, the ideals are there.
Koritz talks of getting into an argument at a campus party with "products of the Tufts economics department." But Koritz and Lessinger also went to Tufts, an expensive liberal-arts school, populated largely by rich, white suburbanites. How do they square that with their agitation for the working class? "The fact of the matter is, if you look at Marx’s background, Lenin’s background, they come from more wealthy backgrounds," says Lessinger. "It doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t know what’s going on."
Eat the rich
Growing up in a working-class town on the South Shore, Mark Kronstadt noticed the class antagonisms early on. "It goes to your head," he says. "On the other hand, there was a positive side. In my community a lot of people shared resources, took each other for rides to go shopping, watched each other’s kids. It was sort of an innate sense of communism, I think." Kronstadt is 28 now, but says he’s been a committed leftist for 15 years already.
He’s sitting in a walk-up loft in the Lucy Parsons Center, the leftist bookstore in the South End where he volunteers. He has two rings in his lip and one in his nose, spiky black hair, black shorts, and black Doc Martens. He wears a T-shirt bearing the image of the jaunty Monopoly millionaire, dead of a stab wound. WE FUCKING HATE RICH PEOPLE, it reads. Entertainment!, the classic album by hard-left British post-punks Gang of Four (named, of course, for the cadre whose arrest and removal from power marked the end of China’s Cultural Revolution), plays on the stereo next to him.
Kronstadt describes himself as an anarcho-communist. He’s a member of the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists, a group that bills itself as a collection of "workers, students, unemployed people, and assorted revolutionaries who are disgusted by the current state of the world and committed to fighting for a better future." Kronstadt is well plugged in to the leftist scene in Boston: the eco-anarchists, who reject the notion that humans are superior to the natural world; the anarcho-syndicalists, who work to build revolutionary unions; and the anarcho-primitivists ("They wanna go back to pre-civilization ... they’re a little wacky").
Asked why younger people these days seem more drawn to anarchism and its offshoots than to straight-up communism, Kronstadt says it’s a matter of appeal.
"I’ve known them for 10 years now," he says of the Maoist RCP members at Revolution Books, "and they’re doing the same thing." Still, he says, "at least they’re committed."
While he sees obvious commonalities between his own anarcho-communist group and the Maoists, he thinks the older communists have "a hard time applying their ideas to struggles without sounding rigid and robotic and turning people off completely." He also thinks they "missed the train" on important contemporary issues like the anti-globalization movement.
Kronstadt recognizes that all-out revolution is a long shot — and, at the very least, a long way off. In the meantime, he busies himself with labor-solidarity work, winning anti-gentrification campaigns in Jamaica Plain.
Revolution, says Kronstadt, is obviously "easier said than done."
And "in the bigger scheme of things, I think the entire left is getting its ass kicked right now." But he doesn’t think that will last forever. Eventually the pendulum will swing the other way and the fat cats will find themselves on the outside. "Right now we’re living in relative affluence, but I think there’s going to be a period where there’s economic and political crisis. The economy’s gonna shit the bed sooner or later. I think all of this is going to lead to a crisis at some point. I think then it would be realistic to talk about whether there would be an abrupt change. At a point, there’s gonna be a push from the bottom, and the people in power aren’t gonna want to relinquish power. It’s gonna require some sort of force."
‘You can’t deny it’
"The future is bright, but the road is torturous," says Jane Sullivan, looking at me over her glasses as she lights another Pall Mall. She’s been volunteering at Revolution Books for years. (The store’s been around since 1979, and at its present location on Mass Ave in Cambridge "since the Zapatista uprising.") And she says it plainly: "I’m a communist."
She’s been a member of the RCP since the 1980s. She doesn’t truck with the CPUSA’s efforts to work within the system, or the socialists’ desire to gradually level the playing field. She wants total cultural revolution, akin to Mao’s. She wants to make America a communist country, and she thinks it can happen. The fact that other communist states have failed or are nightmares of repression and deprivation doesn’t faze her. When the Soviet Union collapsed, "the bourgeoisie were saying, ‘It’s the end of history. Communism doesn’t work, human nature doesn’t allow it, people are just selfish, this is the best of all possible systems.’ But you’ve got half the world living on two dollars a day."
Sullivan doesn’t think the tactics employed by the Communist Party USA are effective. "The CPUSA see themselves as just an extension of bourgeois democracy: ‘We can do a better job in the system than the capitalists. Just vote for us.’ They’re not about making a revolution. They’re about appealing to the Democrats." And as for the anarchists and assorted leftists who frequent Lucy Parsons, "Well, we want them to be out there. It would be a loss to the people [if they weren’t]. But we have our differences too. We believe in communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They’re the non-aligned left, and they’re anarchists. They don’t believe in tearing the state down. They’re not interested in transforming society all the way. The Revolutionary Communist Party is."
But, it has to be asked: how?
"You’re gonna have to have a revolution," Sullivan says.
An armed revolution? A civil war?
"Yes. Yes. You’re gonna have to overthrow the capitalist class."
How does that happen?
"Well, you prepare it now. You’re in political battle now. And then, when there’s some kind of crisis, an opening, you have an armed insurrection."
I gesture toward the open door, the preppy passers-by on the sidewalk. So you yourself would be out there, marching down Mass Ave with your weapons?
Sullivan smiles and shifts in her seat, avoiding the question. "Ummmm ..." She laughs, a little nervously. "That’s looking at it from today’s ... I said it would be a civil war. You’re gonna have the army and two sections of society going at it."
I don’t press her: it’s apparent that the reality of all-out armed revolt isn’t something she’s expecting any time soon. But when might it happen?
"I’m not a fortuneteller," she says. "But you gotta prepare the ground. You gotta talk about communism."
When you look at the map of America, with all those red states filled with people who see George W. Bush as semi-divine, do you really think this country could ever turn communist?
"Well, there’s millions of people who hate that shit, too," she says. "But we’re gonna be doing some stuff this summer, going into those red zones. Getting into it. All these people who were voting for Bush, they were never confronted that Bush lied about the war. Kerry never really challenged that. We’re gonna challenge that." (George Bryant says there’ll even be room for truck-driving red-state Bible-thumpers when the revolution comes. "I think we’d have to have a place for them within the framework, debating with them, giving them space.")
These ideas may seem outmoded or even naive, but they do find a receptive audience.
James Herrington — a shaggy 17-year-old dressed in a Clash T-shirt and a German-army jacket, a pair of large headphones slung around his neck — is something of a regular at Revolution Books.
He’s been a self-described communist for a year or two, and he put his ideals to work protesting at the Republican National Convention ("that was a lot of fun") and starting a socialist club at his school (BC High, of all places). But while socialism is all well and good, communism just makes more sense to him. "Socialism is nice, it would be great if it could happen, but the whole election thing is not very likely, at least here. And anarchism ... I don’t really understand anarchism. They’re like ‘no government,’ which is kind of scary. Y’know that Dead Kennedys song ["Where Do You Draw the Line?"] where he’s like, ‘Who’d fix the sewers?’ With communism, you get the problem solved, and you really get something done."
When Herrington looks at the world around him, he sees a need for a drastic makeover. And he thinks it will happen. Just you wait. "Do you really think you can keep billions of people in the staggering, crushing poverty they’re in right now?"
Sullivan shares his certitude. "You can’t deny it," she says. "The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way."
I ask how many other communists she knows in Boston.
"A few. A minority of people."
Is that enough to bring about a full-scale revolution? A fundamental, 180-degree reshaping of the sole remaining superpower — and the rest of the world along with it?
"Well, history’s always made by a minority," says Sullivan with a quiet laugh. "We’re not gonna wait for the vast majority of people to be ready for revolution. We’re preparing the ground now."
