heiss93
11th July 2009, 19:28
In 1967 the American writer Joan Didion published a short piece in the Saturday Evening Post entitled Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M-L). The comrade of the title was Michael Laski, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA (MarxistLeninist) a tiny cadre of American Maoists.
http://books.google.com/books?id=_pgrUFe9Fh8C&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=%22michael+laski%22+cpusa&source=bl&ots=J798A7p9Ld&sig=OBM75v-M5K0oxuycJcSfDLbFzw4&hl=en&ei=XddYSqjbKdiMtgfardHdCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5
Didion describes him as a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. At the time of their meeting he was a drop-out from UCLA in his mid-twenties.
Didion interviewed Laski at the Workers International bookstore in Watts, the black ghetto in Los Angeles made famous by the riots that took place there in 1965. Sitting at an old kitchen table, surrounded by portraits of the communist saints Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao she watched as the self proclaimed professional revolutionary fidgeted with a copy of the Great Helmsmans poems, aligning it with the edge of the table, one way then the other.
Though separated politically from this intense young man she had after all voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 Didion had some sympathy for him. She thought his ideas were stupid, but she appreciated his existential predicament.
I am comfortable, Didion wrote, with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
And, of course, she might have added to her list another of the peoples accessible opiates: gambling.
Plainly the Laski encountered by Didion is a man on a mission. Like his hero Mao, he believes power comes from the barrel of a gun. The partys bookshop, he informs her proudly, is protected by comrades armed with a small arsenal.
What we do may seem a waste of time to some people, he tells her at one point, Not having an ideology yourself you might wonder what the party offers. It offers nothing. It offers thirty or forty years of putting the party above everything. It offers beatings. Jail. On the high levels, assassination. The fact that his party only has a few dozen members does not deter him; he has history on his side.
Didions piece ends with a description of Laski tallying up the days income from selling the partys political organ, Peoples Voice. Grand total for four hours work: $9.91.
There is an even bleaker coda to Comrade Laskis story. A few years after being immortalised in Didions essay, Laskis sense of destiny deserted him. He lit out for Las Vegas and lost the partys entire treasury at the tables.
I like to imagine him bowling down the highway in a stolen convertible, a Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth, desperately contemplating the revolution he would fund with a simple roll of the dice.
At the next meeting of the Central Committee, perhaps not surprisingly, guns were drawn, but luckily for all involved no blood was shed.
Comrade Laski had blinked in the face of history. He had shifted his gaze from the hard to come by opiate of historical materialism and found himself following the easy route to the American Dream, just like all the other opium eaters.
At one point in his encounter with Didion, Laski contemptuously tells the bourgeois writer: I talk to you at all only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services And yet theres a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence.
Didions essay is pretty much the final resting place of Comrade M. I. Laski as far as history is concerned. Calling on the Great God Google elicits only the smallest of traces: a brief Wikipedia entry; some mentions in a few out of the way articles.
If hes still alive Laski would be about the same age as Keith Richard. Is he a wizened old left-winger still bemoaning the fall of the Berlin wall? Or is he a denizen of The Strip, walking the neon-bathed streets of Las Vegas, still hoping his luck will change?
And how did the CPA Oz Lotto syndicate do? Well, it seems, the workers even when united will be defeated by the odds, especially when theyre forty-five million to one. Just like Comrade Laski, they didnt win a cracker.
Brett Evans is the author of The Life and Soul of the Party: A Portrait of Modern Labor (UNSW Press)
http://books.google.com/books?id=_pgrUFe9Fh8C&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=%22michael+laski%22+cpusa&source=bl&ots=J798A7p9Ld&sig=OBM75v-M5K0oxuycJcSfDLbFzw4&hl=en&ei=XddYSqjbKdiMtgfardHdCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5
Didion describes him as a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. At the time of their meeting he was a drop-out from UCLA in his mid-twenties.
Didion interviewed Laski at the Workers International bookstore in Watts, the black ghetto in Los Angeles made famous by the riots that took place there in 1965. Sitting at an old kitchen table, surrounded by portraits of the communist saints Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao she watched as the self proclaimed professional revolutionary fidgeted with a copy of the Great Helmsmans poems, aligning it with the edge of the table, one way then the other.
Though separated politically from this intense young man she had after all voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 Didion had some sympathy for him. She thought his ideas were stupid, but she appreciated his existential predicament.
I am comfortable, Didion wrote, with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
And, of course, she might have added to her list another of the peoples accessible opiates: gambling.
Plainly the Laski encountered by Didion is a man on a mission. Like his hero Mao, he believes power comes from the barrel of a gun. The partys bookshop, he informs her proudly, is protected by comrades armed with a small arsenal.
What we do may seem a waste of time to some people, he tells her at one point, Not having an ideology yourself you might wonder what the party offers. It offers nothing. It offers thirty or forty years of putting the party above everything. It offers beatings. Jail. On the high levels, assassination. The fact that his party only has a few dozen members does not deter him; he has history on his side.
Didions piece ends with a description of Laski tallying up the days income from selling the partys political organ, Peoples Voice. Grand total for four hours work: $9.91.
There is an even bleaker coda to Comrade Laskis story. A few years after being immortalised in Didions essay, Laskis sense of destiny deserted him. He lit out for Las Vegas and lost the partys entire treasury at the tables.
I like to imagine him bowling down the highway in a stolen convertible, a Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth, desperately contemplating the revolution he would fund with a simple roll of the dice.
At the next meeting of the Central Committee, perhaps not surprisingly, guns were drawn, but luckily for all involved no blood was shed.
Comrade Laski had blinked in the face of history. He had shifted his gaze from the hard to come by opiate of historical materialism and found himself following the easy route to the American Dream, just like all the other opium eaters.
At one point in his encounter with Didion, Laski contemptuously tells the bourgeois writer: I talk to you at all only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services And yet theres a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence.
Didions essay is pretty much the final resting place of Comrade M. I. Laski as far as history is concerned. Calling on the Great God Google elicits only the smallest of traces: a brief Wikipedia entry; some mentions in a few out of the way articles.
If hes still alive Laski would be about the same age as Keith Richard. Is he a wizened old left-winger still bemoaning the fall of the Berlin wall? Or is he a denizen of The Strip, walking the neon-bathed streets of Las Vegas, still hoping his luck will change?
And how did the CPA Oz Lotto syndicate do? Well, it seems, the workers even when united will be defeated by the odds, especially when theyre forty-five million to one. Just like Comrade Laski, they didnt win a cracker.
Brett Evans is the author of The Life and Soul of the Party: A Portrait of Modern Labor (UNSW Press)