Russia and me

2 - I, Communist

The guy called me a communist. On my way to Russia a guy calls me a communist! And you know, in a way he's right. I cop to it. Even proudly. I never read Marx, but I listened to a lot of Pete Seeger records when I was young. You could say I was a Pete Seeger Communist, the way a friend long ago once characterized herself as a "Kerouac Buddhist."

My parents had those Pete Seeger records. And Josh White. Paul Robeson. Mission to Moscow was on their bookshelf, along with a heroic set of watercolors from the Spanish Civil War. No Paseron.

At one time I remember knowing that the FBI was tailing my mom. I don't know why. Maybe one of these days I'll try to get their files. It doesn't really matter. Party members or fellow travelers, it's not the point. My parents, their friends and relations, the people who sang on our records and wrote at least some of the books on our shelves, believed they could build a better world in which human rights prevailed and the earth's bounty was shared in an equitable way. Some of these people got called communists, and some of them were communists. And year after year, decade after decade, I watched my own country do despicable things under the rubric of fighting communism.

I am not insulted to be called a communist.

I WAS INTENDING to put a story here about two kids I know and their likely prospects, to personalize the reality of class in America. Maybe I'll come back to it, but it's obvious, you all know it already. "Anyone who is smart and works hard and follows the rules can succeed," the Nigerian doctor said. But the kid who grows up in the sweet environment of privilege — and here I'm not talking great wealth but a whole set of factors that includes income, but also attitudes and expectations that come with the territory — can have a good life without working quite so hard or following all the rules, while the kid who grows up among people living at a subsistance level, check-to-check, with a whole different set of attitudes and expectations, has to be a really superior person capable of working extra hard and following just about every rule all the time to achieve the good life.

"Some rise, some fall. That's the way of the world," The Nigerian doctor said. "There's nothing wrong with it." But I know these kids. I hang with them. It isn't fair. The inherent problems of capitalism persist.

And now I'm on my way to Russia, where not so long ago people thought they could do better, and ended up doing a lot worse. The great Russian Revolution which promised a classless society pretty quickly descended into a totalitarian nightmare from which the country is perhaps now emerging. I wondered what the people thought of it.

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