I made a new friend this weekend. I possibly made several friends, but one of them seems solid. Let’s say she is pre-solid.
She asked me a bunch of questions about myself, and I sent her an essay I wrote several years ago called The Movie Assassin, because I believed it would answer them better than I could.
My new pre-friend read the essay Tuesday night. I woke up Wednesday morning to this text: “I’m amazed you’ve stayed committed to being a communist. It’s not easy to opt out when everyone else is desperately hanging on.”
For purposes of this article, and simplicity, the labels “communist” or "Marxist” that I use for myself (and they’re not interchangeable, but I am comfortable using either, and would not call myself an anarchist, though I am fond of them! and I am also not a tankie) means that based on study of the works of Karl Marx, I see history as shaped not by ideas but instead by the way the stuff we buy is manufactured and distributed and how people are compensated and what conflicts and alliances arise as a result of these relationships of compensation. By extension, I believe that private property (private ownership of land, corporations, homes, not so much toothbrushes, shoes, butter knives) is threatening to the survival of humans, animals, and plants. I may have made errors in my explanation but that’s pretty much how it goes.
What’s hardest for me about being a communist/Marxist is not being a communist itself but living through and bearing witness to the things that encouraged me to study communism/Marxism, and to then see its analysis of the world as accurate.
I’ll begin with what I experience in my own life. It’s hard to live in a home and a place that could burn down any day. It’s hard to know that the thing I do to survive (writing) is becoming cheaper and cheaper as a commodity. It’s hard to have everything about my sensory experience confirm what I intellectually know capitalism has taken from me and all of us. The air is too hot and smells of smoke. The hills are green for fewer and fewer days every year. Leaves brown and crisp as they wave in the wind. Wind is no longer fun or dramatic, it is scary, it is a pair of bellows. The rain struggles to make it over the hill or if it makes it, stays too long. I buy vegetables and cook them to find sometimes that they taste of nothing. Also, Covid. It is harder to experience all these things than it is to have had these experiences lead me to become a communist.
Then there is what I see in the lives of people who at this moment suffer more acutely than I do. It’s harder to see people and animals and plants being killed in Gaza and now Lebanon by Israel with U.S.-financed weapons than it is to be a communist. It is harder to see people who support the armed struggle of the Palestinian people against genocide fired from their jobs and called anti-Semites than it is to be a communist. It’s harder to see the Amazon burn than it is to be a communist. It’s harder to see people in Asheville, Maui, Paradise, Whitesburg, New Orleans, Fort Myers, San Juan, etc. etc. sit dazed in lawn chairs next to the pile of sticks, whether black and charred or shit-covered and sodden, that used to be their home, than it is to be a communist. It is harder to know other communists are in jail for fighting back than it is to be a communist.
It is painful and alienating to have spent most of my life in agreement with those around me and then to be in serious and intense disagreement with them. It is embarrassing to be thought stupid when demanded to explain or defend the entire history of communism to people who don’t even know why they’re liberal, or what it means. It is destabilizing to have realized a full twenty-five years into adulthood that much of what passes for maturity in the U.S. is the willingness to accept its murderousness as a burden it carries, a sober duty. But the horrors of the world are no longer a mystery to me. I don’t have to invoke human nature or take seriously its invocation. I don’t need to waste precious hours of my life being obsessed with Donald Trump because I know conditions made him what he is and can make men who are worse. He is, in that sense, if I may quote Neil Young, like a hurricane.
Now that I’m thinking about it I would say being a communist might be the easiest thing I have ever done.
❤️
✊🏻❗️
(And thanks for sharing The Movie Assassin, which is great.)