International Communism
Any discussion of group political behavior would be incomplete without mentioning international Communism. Since Stalin’s ascendancy over his domestic opponents in the late 1920s, the Communist movement has increasingly become an instrument of Russian national policy rather than a worldwide movement receiving help from the Soviets. Concomitantly, Communism and Communists in England, the United States, Germany, France, Greece, and China have much in common. An indication of the way in which this force cuts across national lines is the fact that nearly a quarter of all the novels in this study deal in varying degrees with Communism. Even though the behavior of this group is theoretically based upon reinterpreted Marxism, it contains definite patterns which relate to Party discipline, strategy, and tactics which seem organizational rather than ideological. One of the primary ones is the prohibition of original political thought outside the limits laid down in the Kremlin. Deviationism is a cardinal sin which destroys Nicolas Rubashov and endangers Rocco de Donatis. In a pious attempt to avoid such error, Dr. Jane Sparling in The Grand Design immediately consults Elmer Weeks, head of the American Communist Party, to discover the proper attitude when Hitler invades Russia. Another pattern is the interpretation—and use—of every action not in terms of its immediate significance, but of its place in the overall plan. The strikes of miners, apple-pickers, or pecan-shellers are not local disputes between management and labor but battles in the class struggle to be used to educate the masses and provide useful martyrs. But all the while, the pretense that Communism is an international movement must be maintained. In Adventures of a Young Man this view is purveyed to West Virginia miners:
Less Minot got up and said that the American Miners was affiliated with organizations all over the country that was working to overthrow the rotten capitalistic system that kept the working class down to starvation wages with guns and grafting officers of the law, and that if that was being a red, he was glad to be called a red, and as for the Rooshians, he didn’t know much about them, but so far as he could hear tell the working class had overthrown its capitalistic oppressors over there under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and was running the country in their own interests and was ready to help the workers in other countries to do the same.
In Darkness at Noon this diversion of Communism from the goal of international revolution to the service of the Russian state is clothed in a theory meant to make it both logical and necessary: when world revolution did not follow the Russian Revolution, it was resolved that the primary task was to preserve “the Bastion” in order to protect gains already made and to maintain a base for later advances. Therefore in each country where its activities are revealed, the Communist Party is found to act primarily in the interests of the Soviet Union.
The use of racial minority groups has not been neglected by the Communists. Several recent American novels have touched upon this subject. The most vivid and powerful is Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1947). The book’s nameless protagonist flees the South dogged by discrimination and bad luck. He is drawn into The Brotherhood (a euphemism for the Communist Party) and rises rapidly to become “Spokesman” for the Harlem district. Despite appreciable gains he has made in membership, the young Negro leader is shifted downtown. A bloody riot makes it clear to him that the change in the Party line is deliberate. He finally understands the full meaning of his ideological tutor’s words, “your members will have to be sacrificed.” His break with the Party is basically the same as Glenn Spotswood’s. But here the emotional involvement and subsequent disillusionment are much greater. Farrell makes the same point in Yet Other Waters through the speech of a Socialist Negro labor leader directed at Communists who have come to disrupt a meeting. In a long passage completely italicized for emphasis he says, “You are trying to manipulate and betray my people. You are no friend of the black man or the white man. You are the cancer of the working class. You are the architects of defeat.”
War, no less than domestic conflict, is seen as an opportunity to extend Communism which transcends the immediate national issues. The Spanish Civil War was both a skirmish and a testing ground in which the full extent of Russian intervention was concealed to prevent direct reprisals. In The Grand Design Jed Farrington tells Georgia Washburn: “In the short term war we’re allied to the Squire in the White House and his big business friends but in the long-term war they are our most dangerous enemies.” The subjugation of satellite party interests to Soviet interests is made clear in The Crack in the Column by Moscow-trained Zachariades, who arrives to deliver his post-mortem on the unsuccessful EAM uprisings: “Our friends want no more premature, independent revolutions. They have Italy and Palestine to think of.” Even the details of authorized revolutions are foreseen and attended to. Leaders like Zachariades and Kyo Gisors in Man’s Fate are made to order. Hemingway’s Robert Jordan reflects about the Moscow-trained, bogus peasant leader of the Loyalists, Valentin Gomez: “You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war.... You couldn’t wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manufacture one.” These novels illustrate Communism’s diversity of character and tactics and the rigid discipline it imposes upon its followers under pain of expulsion or death.
Analysis of Mass Phenomena
Interest in mass political phenomena is sometimes expressed by these authors not only through action, but in direct analysis and examination as well. Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle opposes two theorists: McLoed, who thinks this particular strike is a good one because it will give him a chance to “work out some ideas,” and Doc Burton, who serves as the strikers’ doctor to observe contagion in the social body. Sounding more like a social psychologist than a physician, he says
Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you.
Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers to reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the group to attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to mob one strike leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from this assault to the one he desires. There are other instances in which a specific theory of the effects of violence is used for political purposes. Just as Dostoyevsky’s Pyotr Verhovensky has his circle kill Shatov to cement them together, so Hemingway’s Pablo had made his townsmen communal executioners of the Fascists: “To save bullets,” explains Pilar, “and so that each man should have his share in the responsibility.” The basic attitudes behind mass political phenomena are analyzed by some of Koestler’s major characters. Both Jules Commanche and Julien Dellatre discuss the ills of France and Western man in general. Their conclusions are very similar to Rubashov’s critique of Communist policy. Finally Koestler himself sums up this consistent point of view when he explains the cause of Hydie’s constant and unsuccessful search in The Age of Longing: “the place of God had become vacant, and there was a draft blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.”