'Never to Have Been Inside a Shoe Factory'

Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) joined the Communist Party in 1933 after a visit to Hitler’s Germany and quit fourteen months later. Dahlberg was constitutionally unclubbable. Temperamentally, he makes Evelyn Waugh look like Dale Carnegie. Dahlberg was already the author of three proletarian novels which today read less like political screeds than expressions of deeply personal rage. Nothing pleased him. He treated women like dirt and disowned every friend he ever had.

But in rare moments, in parts of Do These Bones Live (1941; revised and retitled Can These Bones Live, 1960) and Because I Was Flesh (1964), Dahlberg could write beautifully. In 1971 he published The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg, in which he describes his experiences with the CPUSA before, during and after his membership. Often his observations sound applicable to the recent vogue for Marxism-Leninism:

“I could see no real distinction between Dostoevsky’s unfilial nihilist Stavrogin in The Possessed and the Stalinists who viewed the Old as the nemesis of the New.”

And this, which is remarkably prescient, perhaps because those attracted to criminally moronic strains of political extremism haven’t much changed in ninety years:

“The old traditional style of feeling, embedded in such words as morals, good, evil, honesty, kindness, pity, and principles, was now deemed sick symptoms and the cant shibboleths of the middle class. Gratitude was tabu or regarded as sycophancy.”

At the same time Stalin was demonizing (and killing) millions of kulaks, his American followers were dabbling in similar pathologies:

“The writers of the Left had fallen into a utopian oscitancy [OED: “drowsiness as evidenced by yawning; dullness; indolence, negligence, inattention”]—a sort of political nympholepsy had taken hold of the intelligentsia. We were in such a drowsy state of madness that we looked upon the proletariat as a sublime superhuman race. We were grieved and felt degraded because we were not the regal progeny of peasants, colliers, or sharecroppers. How unlucky it was not to have been a cotton picker, or never to have been inside a shoe factory or a laborer in a sweatshop.”

And this, about schooling the wayward elite:

“The general feeling among the Stalinist clerks was that the intellectuals were politically ill, and should purge themselves with lapis lazuli and a deep study of Stalin’s treatises, also the tracts of Bukharin, Radek and Plekhanov.”

Bukharin was arrested in 1937 and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. After a show trial he was executed in 1938. In 1937, Karl Radek was arrested and confessed to committing treason after two and a half months of interrogation. He was found guilty during the Second Moscow Trial and sentenced to ten years of penal labor. In 1939, he was beaten to death by other prisoners. After disagreements with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Georgi Plekhanov fled Russia after the October Revolution and died of tuberculosis in Finland on May 30, 1918.