A mighty wind: Susan Sontag’s 1982 defection to anticimmunism cause

Susan Sontag's conversion to anticommunism

BY HARRY RING

2 April 1982 issue of The Militant

Susan Sontag's speech last month proved to be quite a media event.

A prominent critic and essayist known for her radicalism in the Vietnam War period, Sontag was a featured speaker at a February 6 meeting in New York City's Town Hall in support of Poland's Solidarity.

The event was publicized as a forum for radical intellectuals and unionists who wanted to speak out against the Polish crackdown without aiding President Reagan's demagogic exploitation of the issue.

Sontag took the occasion to deliver a virulent anticommunist speech and to assert that she and other radicals had been dupes of communism.

Time magazine devoted two-thirds of a page to Sontag's conversion.

The New York Times provided an extensive report of the meeting. It published a second article recounting the debate her speech sparked in intellectual circles.

The New York Post, an anticommunist gutter rag, ran a story on the meeting with a block-type headline pegged to her speech: "Communism== Fascism."

The Los Angeles Times reprinted her speech on its Op Ed page.

The Washington Post did an extensive feature on the debate around Sontag's speech.

A San Francisco Chronicle editorial welcomed her to the anticommunist fold.

In his syndicated column, right-winger William Buckley saluted her "courage."

Liberal anticommunist columnist James Wechsler wondered "where she had been so long."

The New York Village Voice devoted a number of articles to the speech.

The Soho News, a liberal weekly, ran the text of her speech. (Sontag initiated a damage suit because they did so without her permission.) The paper followed up with responses to the speech from academic and literary figures here and abroad.

The Nation magazine also ran Sontag's speech with permission and followed up with a similar symposium.

Why did Sontag's declaration of her conversion to anticommunism create such a media stir?

The right moment

For one thing, it came at a moment when the anticommunist campaign in this country around Poland was flagging. It was a few weeks after the government-sponsored "Let Poland Be Poland" extravaganza, which went over like the proverbial lead balloon. ,

And it had the added value of being the first such declaration by a significant intellectual figure in a good many years. It's obviously hoped that the Sontag stand will help speed up other liberal and radical intellectuals currently on a rightward course.

One might wonder how Sontag happened to be on the platform at the Town Hall meeting.

In a March 2 Village Voice article, Ralph Schoenman, principal organizer of the rally, said he felt "particularly aggrieved" because he had invited Sontag to speak. And he had explained to her that the meeting was being organized because it was "essential for the left to take up the cause of the Polish workers . . . and, above all, to deny to cold warriors the support of a workers' mass movement in Poland, which they would be the first to crush in the U.S."

Sontag, Schoenman said, declared her "full support for this approach." And, he added, there was "no intimation" that she intended to deliver her anticommunist tirade.

That may be. But Schoenman did know in advance about another anticommunist who was given the platform at the meeting.

In the same article, Schoenman describes his discussion with Joseph Brodsky, a right-wing Soviet dissident. Despite the declared left-wing purpose of the meeting, Brodsky had been invited to speak.

This exception was made, Schoenman explains, because Brodsky had been "supportive" of individual Polish exiles.

Brodsky, in discussing the program, demanded to know why "those ridiculous PATCO people" had been invited.

He accused Schoenman of wanting to have "liberal chestbeaters and fellow travelers up here."

Schoenman reports that his response to Brodsky was: "Don't feel obligated. You should only come if you feel that this is a place you want to be and a program with which you are comfortable."

Schoenman doesn't say why he didn't simply withdraw the invitation. 

Forget El Salvador

In his speech at the meeting, Brodsky expressed irritation with those who spoke of Reagan's dirty war in El Salvador. The main issue, Brodsky advised, is containing the Soviet Union. He called on Reagan to impose a trade embargo on Poland.

Regarding Schoenman's aggrieved surprise at Sontag's performance, a certain skepticism is in order.

Sontag and Schoenman have known each other for years. Was he really totally oblivious of her political evolution?

Was he unaware that her latest book, Under the Sign of Saturn, is dedicated to Joseph Brodsky?

The invitations to Sontag and Brodsky, in the name of an undefined "unity of the left" against Stalinist repression, signified a substantial adaptation to the right.

Certainly there were worthwhile things said at the Town Hall meeting. Gregory Pardlo from the air traffic controllers and other unionists effectively exposed union-buster Reagan's crocodile tears for Solidarity. Paul Robeson, Jr., pointed to Solidarity's struggle as confirming that socialism and democracy were inseparable. Pete Seeger spoke in a similar vein.

But insofar as the public impact of the meeting was concerned, all this was drowned out by the media's almost total focus on Sontag's reactionary speech.

The propaganda blitz developed around the Sontag speech makes it obligatory for left opponents of her reactionary ideas to analyze and rebut them.

At Town Hall, Sontag insisted that she agreed with the purpose of the meeting. And she did attack Reagan as a union buster and the puppet master of the Salvadoran dictatorship.

But her attack on Reagan in relation to Poland like that of her friend Brodsky was from the right, not the left.

Like Brodsky, she flayed the "Western governments" that is the imperialist governments for continuing to refinance Polish bank loans and for not cutting off grain sales to the Soviet Union.

"That," Sontag bitterly declared, "is the kind of retaliating the Western democracies are prepared to make for the enslavement of Poland."

What kind of "retaliating" does Sontag favor?

An economic blockade of Poland and the Soviet Union by the Reagan-led "democracies"? Will that aid the Polish workers' struggle, or simply compound their difficulties?

And if such a blockade failed to end their "enslavement," what next? Military retaliation?

Defending her thesis that "Communism is fascism," Sontag declared that the entire left is corrupt and bankrupt. Not just those on the leftand they are not just a fewwho closed their eyes to the crimes of Stalinism or tried to justify them. But even those who did not.

"We tried to distinguish among communisms," Sontag declared, "for example treating Stalipism, which we disavowed, as if it were an aberration."

To buttress her claim that communism equals fascism, Sontag argued, "The similarities between the Polish military junta and the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and other South American countries are obvious."

Putting aside the question of whether the repressive regimes in South America are military dictatorships or fascist regimes, Sontag here displayed a total lack of comprehension of what fascism or communism actually is.

For Marxists, it is essential to distinguish as precisely as possible between differing social systems and differing states and governments. It's not a matter of semantics, or idle theoretical speculation. Such criteria are indispensable if you're determined to help change the world. You have to know what you're fighting for and what you're fighting against how to fight effectively for what you want and against what you don't want.

The key to this problem, for Marxists, is a materialist analysis, a class analysis. This is totally absent from Sontag's approach.

For example, there are currently repressive regimes in Argentina and Poland. But in Argentina you have capitalism. In Poland you don't.

In Poland capitalism was overturned following World War II, and a workers state a bureaucratically deformed one replaced it.

A class difference

So the difference between Argentina and Poland is substantial. In Argentina, the military discharges its responsibility of preserving capitalism. It is in step with the capitalist class.

In Poland, the privileged bureaucrac: is a major obstacle to the advancemen of the workers state towards socialism Its interests conflict with those of th• workers.

Those looking at it superficially will argue, "But what's the difference? Th« workers have no rights in Poland or Argentina."

That's like arguing there's no difference between slavery and wage labor.

The capitalist exploitation of wage Ia bor is intense. And in many cases i means the most brutal repression fo: the workers. Yet, as counterposed tc slavery, or feudalism, capitalism repre sented an historic advance for humani ty.

The same holds true for the countrie· of the world where capitalism has beer abolishedthe Soviet Union, the coun tries of Eastern Europe, China, Nort Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba.

That is the case even though Cuba the only one of these countries whert workers democracy prevails.

Fascism equals communism, declares Sontag.

Nothing could be further from the reality. Fascism, which arose in it classic form in Italy and Germany, rep resents the total crisis of capitalism am the manipulation by fascist demagoguE* of a socially disoriented middle class a a battering ram against the organizet working class.

In that sense, fascism is also different from military dictatorships that are imposed when capitalism cannot "afford' democracy. Fascism is a far deeper form of repression because, at least in its first period, it maintains power not simply with a military club, but with a mass-based counterrevolutionary movement. What base?

Can anyone seriously argue that the regime in Poland has a mass base? It rules primarily by armed force, and even that would be insufficient if it were not backed by the.potential use of Soviet troops.

And, not only is communism not equal to fascism, but what you have in Poland is not communism. Genuine communism a classless society of cooperative producers remains humanity's great liberating goal. We have yet to achieve anywhere even a socialist society, which Marx described as a society of economic superabundance where conflicting class antagonisms have been reduced to a minimum and the state is in the process of withering away.

Poland is a workers state. That is, it is a state where the principal means of production are no longer privately owned, where there is planned production, not production for profit.

But Poland is obviously not a healthy workers state. From the outset the Polish revolution has been dominated by Kremin-sponsored bureaucrats who utilize their positions of power to ensure tl:iemselves substantial material privilege in the midst of general scarcity. Because they are a parasitic drain on the economy and incompetent bureaucratic mismanagers to bootthey cannot abide workers democracy. That's why they have fought Solidarity so savagely.

And because the bureaucrats' political rule is so costly and oppressive, the Polish workers and farmers can be relied on to continue the struggle by any means necessary. The battle in Poland is far from over.

The Polish workers are not struggling against "communism." They are fighting to democratize a bureaucratically deformed workers state.

There may be varying degrees of political consciousness among the Polish workers varying degrees of Marxist understanding, if you will but they are not fighting for the restoration of capitalism.

Waiting for GM?

The workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, the militant miners in Silesia, the Polish· workers as a whole, are not looking for the arrival of capitalists to take over their nationalized enterprises. They want to take control of them and run them themselves democratically.

In short, despite the present setback, the Polish workers are in the process of making a political revolution. That is, the logic of their movement is to overthrow the bureaucratic regime in Warsaw and replace it with democratic institutions of the workers.

The term political revolution is key. It distinguishes the process from the kind of revolution needed in capitalist countries, that is, a social revolution to eliminate private ownership of industry.

Sontag's failure to grasp such a class, or Marxist, approach to the political revolution in Poland stems, not from a nonclass approach, but from an anti-working-class approach.

Sontag not only despises Poland's bureaucratic hacks. She fears and despises the Polish working class as well.

In her response to critics in the February 27 Nation, she bitterly declares:

"Neither the ruling elites nor the enslaved and disaffected people of Eastern Europe can be called Marxist'; and if and when these oppressed manage to overthrow their tyrants, it will not, I fear, be to embrace an alternative of our liking.

"What is brewing in Eastern Europe is not democratic socialism. The centrality of a particularly fervent Catholicism to Solidarity is not an accident or an instance of cultural lag; and, in Russia, among those who are not cynics or merely demoralized, new converts to religious fundamentalism outnumber the liberals and democratic socialists a thousand to one . . . .

"Is it now proved that we have been wrong to be hopeful that out of Communism something much better might emerge? Yes, it is now proved. We were wrong. It is the people who live in those countries who tell us that."

So much for Sontag's solidarity with Solidarity.

Response to Sontag

But what of her critics? I speak here of those who responded to her in the pages of the Nation and Soho News.

These include a range of intellectual figures and political writers, some radical, some quasi-radical, and some liberal. Plus there are others who speak in the name ofliberalism or even socialism but in actuality postulate unadulterated, right-wing anticommunism.

Daniel Singer, a Polish writer now resident in Paris, makes a particularly cogent point in the Nation symposium. He notes that Susan Sontag, Leonid Brezhnev, Polish General Jaruzelski, and Reagan all agree on one point - that what you have today in Poland is "communism." And, Singer adds, "They apparently also agree that there can be no other Communism than that."

He caustically adds, "Her [Sontag] other catchy definition, fascism with a human face' was obviously meant for stubborn suckers like myself who refuse to swallow the cheap, fashionable equation between Marx and the barbed wire."

Singer's point is buttressed by the historical fact of Marx's political work, as well as his writing. And by the fact that Stalinism was able to come to power in the Soviet Unionand then imposed elsewhere only on the basis of mortal struggle against genuine communists.

A slashing rejoinder to Sontag is off€red in the Soho News by Columbia University Prof. Edward Said, a Palestinian.

Said observes that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to respond first of all to "what is closest to them," U.S. policy. Otherwise, he declares, "they become willing agents of the state, legitimizers of its policies."

"Above all," Said declares, "it is not for intellectuals to be amateur national security advisers, certifiers of patriotism, or unpaid voices of America." 

Solidarity with Palestinians

He concretizes that stern admonition by citing the horrendous crimes of the Washington-sponsored Israeli regime against the Palestinian people.

"So far as I know," Said wrote, "no right-thinking group of prominent American intellectuals has met at Town Hall to protest the denial of Palestinian rights."

Is it too much to say, he inquires, that Poland's "present misery has been the occasion for much hypocrisy and bad faith?"

Unfortunately such voices as those of Said and Singer are a distinct minority in the Nation-Soho News symposia. Several other contributors reject Sontag's equation of communism and fascism but offer few cogent arguments against her.

Others - writer Diana Trilling and Nation editorial board member Aryeh Neier chided Sontag for tardiness in joining the ranks of the "democratic" anticommunists.

With some of the contributors, the line is a more hard-nosed anticommunism.

"The situation in Poland alarms me more than the one in El Salvador," worries Prof. Julia Kristeva.

Ben Wattenberg, coeditor of Public Opinion, opines that such regimes as the one in El Salvador may not be as free as "we would wish," but, "do any of those nations target their missiles on America? Are they really as unfree as the Soviet-style totalitarian countries? If you're harassed in Chile these days you can leave, but can you leave if you're harassed in Russia?"

Welcoming Sontag to the anticommunist ranks, Prof. Seymour Martin Lipset also once a radical advises of the need "to recognize that Western society, including the United States, is more humane, more progressive . . . than any and all of the regimes that call themselves communist.

"Those who seek utopias," Lipset warns, "are the true villains."

Another disgusting contribution to the discussion was provided by Christopher Hitchens, a contributing editor of the Nation.

Good anticommunism

Hitchens assures that he sees no sign that Sontag has moved "noticeably" to the irrational anticommunism of "the bad old days."

He adds that people can defend the Polish workers "without any throat clearing about El Salvador."

He says: "Surely I am not the only socialist who finds comparisons between Solidarity and the fate of PATCO to be grotesque? The rights of highly paid Reaganite air controllers may have been violated, but the rights of Polish coal miners and shipbuilders have been abolished." (Emphasis in original.)

I would submit that Hitchens is as much a socialist as General Jaruzelski is a communist.

Someone who is unwilling to even "clear his throat" for the Salvadoran rebels and PATCO strikers has no moral or political claim to being a socialist. At the same time, such people are a deadly obstacle in the fight against Stalinism.

Stalinism can be fully comprehended only in the context of the international class strugglethe fight of the world's workers and peasants against capitalism and imperialism.

The whole thrust of world history today is away from capitalism and towards socialism. The rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and its damaging effects, there and elsewhere, was a product of defeats and setbacks for the world working class. The problem of Stalinism will find a progressive resolution only in the context of the fight against capitalism and for socialism.

In explaining the political degeneration that occurred in the Soviet Union with the rise of Stalinism, Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Russian revolution, likened the revolutionary process to a trade union that had achieved state power.

And, with the emergence of Stalinism, he likened the process to the bureaucratization of a previously healthy union with a class struggle perspective.

Such bureaucrats, he explained, do a terrible disservice to the unions. They not only supress democracy in order to protect their privileged positions, but they work consciously to achieve a status quo relationship with the employers.

The bureaucrats recognize that the ranks of a union which fights militantly to preserve and extend its gains is not likely to tolerate for long a conservative, parasitic bureaucracy.

Antibureaucratic strategy

The question is posed for members of bureaucratically dominated unions, how can we get rid of these hacks who loot the union treasury, deny the members a voice, and make sellout deals with the employers?

Point number one, of course, for serious unionists, is to conduct the fight in such a way that it gives no aid or comfort to the employers, nor to their mock concern about labor bureaucratism, which they use to discredit unionism.

Point number two is that the bureaucrats can be fought effectively only in the context of deepening the fight against the employers. Those who aren't ready to take on the bosses will hardly be effective against people who are essentially the bosses' agents within the union.

When rank-and-file unionists are locked in combat with a bureaucratic gang, all partisans of militant, democratic unionism will rally behind them.

But these workers don't need help from people who are antiunion, who advise that unionism is the root of the problem, that bureaucratism is an "inherent" feature of unionism.

Nor do workers need the help ofliberals who assure that they're very much prounion, but simply concerned that maybe there's a problem of "big labor" vs. big capital; and who maybe believe it is a bit utopian to think that ordinary workers can take control of their unions and give the bosses a run for their money.

Similarly with the fight against Stalinism, it takes consistent, revolutionary socialists to fight that bureaucratic monstrosity without giving an inch to the capitalist rulers and their politicians.

In this connection, it is interesting to note that the organizers of the Town Hall meeting rejected a request from the Socialist Workers Party for a speaker at the meeting.

This although the SWP stands in full solidarity with the Polish workers and has fought Stalinism from its inception without ever compromising with capitalism.

Poor excuse

The explanation given was rather thin there would be no representatives of organizations on the platform. That may have been the formality, but the views of such organizations as the reformist Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee were presented at the meeting.

[....] In the pages of the Nation, Susan Sontag brands the song, "The Internationale," as "the anthem of the oppressive state." She says she was glad the Polish workers didn't sing it and hoped the Salvadoran liberation fighters wouldn't either.

Sontag is as wrong on that as she is on everything else. Stalinist regimes may offer formal claim to the song, but they choke on its call for the revolutionary solidarity of the oppressed of the world.

Today, whether Sontag likes it or not, "The Internationale" is being sung by increasing numbers of those fighting for a new and better world. And for good reason. It is, and remains, the only way forward. In good time, the Polish workers, those of El Salvador, and yes, the U.S. workers, will together sing, "We have been naught, we shall be all."

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