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gizedcom · 4 years

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The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of ‘The Last of Us Part II’

The real horror in zombie fiction is usually not the legions of undead, but the frailties and cruelties that they expose in the living. The differences between stories in the genre come from the specific fears and frustrations that they render into their metaphors. The Last of Us Part II fits perfectly within these genre conventions, but what’s different here is its sources of inspiration.

The Last of Us Part II focuses on what has been broadly defined by some of its creators as a “cycle of violence.” While some zombie fiction shows human depravity in response to fear or scarcity in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak, The Last of Us Part II takes place in a more stabilized post apocalypse, decades after societal collapse, where individuals and communities choose to hurt each other as opposed to taking heinous actions out of desperation.

More specifically, the cycle of violence in The Last of Us Part II appears to be largely modeled after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.

The game’s co-director and co-writer Neil Druckmann, an Israeli who was born and raised in the West Bank before his family moved to the U.S., told the Washington Post that the game’s themes of revenge can be traced back to the 2000 killing of two Israeli soldiers by a mob in Ramallah. Some of the gruesome details of the incident were captured on video, which Druckmann viewed. In his interview, he recounted the anger and desire for vengeance he felt when he saw the video—and how he later reconsidered and regretted those impulses, saying they made him feel “gross and guilty.” But it gave him the kernel of a story.

“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”

Druckmann drew parallels between The Last of Us and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict again on the official The Last of Us podcast. When discussing the first time Joel kills another man to protect his daughter and the extraordinary measures people will take to protect the ones they love, Druckmann said he follows “a lot of Israeli politics,” and compared the incident to Israel’s release of hundreds of Palestinians prisoners in exchange for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. He said that his father thought that the exchange was overall bad for Israel, but that his father would release every prisoner in every prison to free his own son.

“That’s what this story is about, do the ends justify the means, and it’s so much about perspective. If it was to save a strange kid maybe Joel would have made a very different decision, but when it was his tribe, his daughter, there was no question about what he was going to do,” Druckmann said.

Naughty Dog and PlayStation have presented Druckmann as The Last of Us Part II‘s creative lead and public face. Game development is a highly collaborative practice that demands the backbreaking labor of literally hundreds of programmers, testers, writers, and artists, all of whom make creative contributions and without whom a game of this size and scope would not exist. So while it’s impossible to pin a big budget video game’s themes and inspirations to one person, parallels between The Last of Us Part II and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict manifest in the final product, not just in what Druckmann has said in interviews.

Besides the familiar zombie fiction aesthetics of an overgrown and decomposing metropolis, The Last of Us Part II‘s main setting of Seattle is visually and functionally defined by a series of checkpoints, security walls, and barriers. There are many ways to build and depict structures that separate and keep people out. Just Google “U.S.-Mexico border wall” to see the variety of structures on the southern border of the United States alone. The Last of Us Part II‘s Seattle doesn’t look like any of these. Instead, it looks almost exactly like the tall, precast concrete barriers and watch towers Israel started building through the West Bank in 2000.

The history and power dynamics of The Last of Us Part II‘s Seattle map to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well, if viewed from an Israeli perspective.

The main faction in Seattle is the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), known as the Wolves. The broad strokes are that after the outbreak, FEDRA, an emergency militaristic government agency, took over the city. With food shortages, constant fear of infection, and FEDRA’s increasingly brutal measures of keeping order, an insurgency rose: the Wolves. They were outmatched, but prevailed with a series of hit-and-run attacks, assassinations of FEDRA officers, and other guerilla tactics. Eventually, FEDRA abandoned the city and ceded control to the Wolves, who in turn implemented an equally harsh (or harsher) regime.

In one in-game note, a FEDRA commander in Seattle writes to Central Command to explain that he has lost the city the Wolves, which he describes as terrorists. Here, there are parallels to early Zionist organisations that fought British rule in the region. These organizations were also described as terrorists, and leaders of those organizations later became leaders in Israel, much like how Isaac, the leader of the Wolves, came to control Seattle. Other in-game notes, scenes of urban ambushes, and the bodies of executed FEDRA officers laboriously walk the player through the cliche “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Once Isaac and the Wolves seized control of Seattle by violent means, however, the same means were used against them by another group—one that uncomfortably matches Israeli caricatures of Palestinians.

Most of the Wolves regime’s restrictions are directed at a post-apocalyptic religious sect called the Seraphites (the Wolves call them “Scars” after the ritualistic scarring of their faces). These Scars vexed FEDRA as well when it was in control. The dynamic in the city when the game begins is one of conflict, escalation, and a broken truce. The Wolves, like FEDRA, leverage more resources and raw power, while the Scars rely on surprise strikes against Wolf patrols, and a zealous willingness to die for the cause.

To run through just a few key ways in which the Scars uncomfortably reflect some Israeli stereotypes about Palestinians:

The same note from the Seattle FEDRA commander that bitterly says the Wolves are in charge explains that it’s now their responsibility to not only feed and shelter the people of Seattle, but deal with the “religious fanatics,” referring to the Scars.

Later in the game, Ellie finds a location called “Martyr Gate,” where the Scars’ spiritual leader apparently died, indicating a religious significance of a specific and disputed location, and emphasizing the notion of martyrdom as central to their culture.

The Scars are able to get around Wolf patrols and various barriers around the city via an elaborate, secret system of bridges between skyscrapers. These function as a kind of flipped version of the underground tunnels Palestinians use to bypass Israeli blockades and other means of limiting free movement in order to get supplies and carry out attacks on Israel.

The Last of Us Part II goes to great pains to impress that it sees no innocent players in this conflict. It’s not just that Isaac and the Wolves seized control of the city by vicious (but necessary) means—the society they’ve built, prosperous and protected by the walls of Seattle’s CenturyLink Field, is buttressed by fascisim and cruelty to an outgroup. The Wolves’ bountiful crops exist to feed an army that ventures far beyond its territory to punish the Scars. Its kennels of adorable dogs are just disposable weapons. Isaac leads from a forward operating base that sits atop torture chambers. After a truce fails, the only way he can imagine peace is through the total annihilation of his enemies.

It is not a peaceful or just society, or even a sustainable one in the long run, despite its perseverance and resourcefulness. It is one that is doomed to collapse because of an inability, or unwillingness, to resolve a perfectly resolvable conflict.

This conflict comes to a head when Isaac decides to push deep into the Scars’ land to finish them once and for all. We don’t get to see how the battle ends or who comes out on top, but we see Isaac die in the fighting, and get the sense that the battle is so brutal and bloody, whatever survives is not worth keeping.

Rather than step back, cooperate, and seek truth and reconciliation, the Wolves and Scars keep seeking revenge for past grievances in a cycle of violence that eventually ends them both in literal fires sparked by hate. The game’s message seems to be: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” another cliche that The Last of Us Part II indulges in by taking away Tommy’s eye at the end of the game for seeking revenge for his brother Joel.

A “cycle of violence” is a tempting way to interpret this conflict, or any conflict, because it signals careful nuance while quietly squashing more difficult conversations. By suggesting that since both Wolves and Scars are equally implicated and equally in pain, we are free to stop thinking about the problem. All parties include both good and bad actors. We’re all human. Both sides.

This common, centrist position on violent conflict, while better than absolute dehumanization, is not coincidentally a world view that allows conflicts to drag on forever. Suggesting moral equivalence and a symmetry in ability between sides also invites us to throw up our hands and give up on better solutions because of implied and unexamined perceptions about “human nature.” Indeed, the game is unrelentingly cynical, and this cynicism animates most of the 30-odd hour experience. Whereas Abby and Ellie find interpersonal resolution at the end, the game seems content to leave the question of community-scale cycles of violence as a regrettable fact of human existence. Even if the Wolves and Scars meet their mutual end, the game leaves us with the knowledge that a resistance group from the first game, the Fireflies, and other groups, are regrouping and gaining strength. The cycle continues.

Despite the lengths it goes to, The Last of Us Part II can’t help but reveal that its perspective is firmly rooted in one side and not the other.

Seattle is so clearly inspired by Israel and Palestine without naming either, but it does notably spend time presenting Jewish identity. One of the first things Ellie and Dina do when they arrive in Seattle is explore a former synagogue. It’s a short scene, maybe 20 minutes out of a 30-plus hour game, and it serves as a kind of a Jewish experience amusement park ride, bombarding the player with references and history as Dina and Ellie walk around a bimah, find a Torah, and so on. Almost the entirety of this section is spent explaining Jewish identity as that of survivors in the face of other groups that want to destroy them. In the span of those 20 minutes, there are three separate references to the Holocaust.

Survival in the face of persecution is a pillar of Jewish identity for good reason, and has been since before the Holocaust. It’s also one that is relevant to the characters in the game, all of whom are survivors of a zombie apocalypse. But this is only one aspect of Jewish identity. The Last of Us Part II doesn’t spend any time exploring, for example, Talmudic traditions which define so much of Jewish notions of justice and scholarship. Instead, in a non-optional section of the game, it spends a significant amount of time telling the player that Jews are always persecuted and fighting for survival. This is not wrong, but it is serving a specific purpose in the ham-fisted allegory about Israel and Palestine that is The Last of Us Part II, much like the Holocaust is cynically leveraged by some to justify Israel’s actions.

This sermon is notably delivered by Dina, who is Jewish and serves as the game’s moral compass. Dina is pregnant, dreams of a life of peace, and tries to turn Ellie back from her murderous quest. When Ellie chooses to pursue it anyway, the heaviest price she pays is that Dina leaves her.

The more moral characters in The Last of Us Part II all want to escape cycles of violence rather than reckon with them. Lev and Yara want to escape their cult. Owen and Mel want to get on a boat and sail away from Seattle. Dina wants to walk away from the mess and live on a farm secluded from the rest of society. Even our main characters, Ellie and Abby, after far too much suffering, essentially end their emotional journey when they decide to walk away from revenge.

It’s certainly true that individual lives get wrapped up in larger conflicts in horrible ways. Cycles of violence exist in practice as escalations and retributions. A defining feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the macabre bargaining over which violence is worse. Images of exploded public buses are presented next to collapsed buildings and children being pulled from the rubble. Armed factions swear to deliver retaliation over specific incidents, and do.

But “cycles of violence” are a poor way to understand a conflict in a meaningful way, especially if one is interested in finding a solution. The United States, for example, hasn’t been at war in Afghanistan for almost 20 years because it’s trapped in a “cycle of violence” with the Taliban. It is deliberately choosing to engage with a problem in a way that perpetuates a conflict. Just as the fantasy of escaping violence by simply walking away from it is one that only those with the means to do so can entertain, the myth of the “cycle of violence” is one that benefits the side that can survive the status quo.

In The Last of Us Part II‘s Seattle, Scars and Wolves hurt each other terribly, and the same can be said about Israel and Palestine. The difference is that when flashes of violence abate and the smoke clears, one side continues to live freely and prosper, while the other goes back to a life of occupation and humiliation. One side continues to expand while the other continues to lose the land it needs to live. Imagining this process as some kind of symmetric cycle benefits one side more than the other, and allows it to continue.

As a result, The Last of Us Part II never quite justifies its fatalism. As Rob Zacny wrote in his review and again in his closer examination of The Last of Us Part II‘s ending, at the end of the day Ellie’s journey of revenge seems especially cruel, even idiotic, because we are never given a good reason for why she keeps recommitting to it. Acts of cruelty along the way, like Ellie’s torturing another character to get information, are presented as inevitable. This seems to be The Last of Us Part II‘s thesis: humans experience a kind of “intense hate that is universal,” as Druckmann told The Post, which keep us trapped in these cycles.

But is intense hate really a universal feeling? It’s certainly not one that I share. I, too, have seen the video of the 2000 mob killing of the Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, and it’s horrific. Yet, my immediate response wasn’t “Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people,” as Druckmann said.

This is not a universal feeling as much as it’s a learned way of seeing the world. There are many other ways to react to that video: compassion for the victims, compassion for the killers, questioning why these soldiers had to drive into the West Bank in the first place, questioning what would drive a mob to this kind of violence. Revenge and hate is just one option.

The Last of Us Part II is an incredible journey that provides not only one of the most mesmerizing spectacles that we’ve seen from big budget video games, but one that manages to ask difficult questions along the way. It’s clearly coming from an emotionally authentic and self-examining place. The trouble with it, and the reason that Ellie’s journey ultimately feels nonsensical, is that it begins from a place that accepts “intense hate that is universal” as a fact of life, rather than examining where and why this behavior is learned.

Critically, by not asking these questions, and by masking its point of view as being evenhanded, it perpetuates the very cycles of violence it’s supposedly so troubled by.

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gwarren-smith-blog · 5 years

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‘Feminising the Fitbit’. Pedometrics and Proxy - By Gudrun Filipska & Carly Butler

There are many ways in which making journeys (walking or otherwise) by proxy can be liberating – to be somewhere else without losing time, to be in two places at once (1). This is not an argument in favour of cultures of dual distraction - watching TV while playing on your phone for example – but a proposition for a way to use technology as a conduit to thinking, imagining and fantasising about other places, which may have important implications for those unable to travel (due to parenthood, economics or disability). In the midst of designing our dual physical-virtual proposition with the ‘S project’ it should have come as no surprise that we would encounter anti-female bias in the very technologies we used to produce the work… … Devices enabling the counting of steps have existed for at least 500 years, Leonardo Da Vinci has been credited with the invention of a mechanical device with a basic pendulum swing which moved back and forth with each step and recorded distance travelled. This is recorded in paintings and sketches by Da Vinci (2). Numerous inventors have created similar devices; Abraham-Louis Perrelet, a Swiss inventor built a device in 1777 based on a self winding watch that could measure walking distance; Thomas Jefferson introduced the pedometer to the American public in the 1930’s where it was unsurprisingly, very popular with long distance trail walkers and branded the ‘hike o meter’. A British man John Harwood, was awarded the first patent for a pedometer in 1924. Pedometers have also since been a big feature in the 1960s Japanese walking model and programme, based on 10,000 steps, called Manpo-kei (3).

Gudrun uses the popular wrist-worn Fitbit to count her steps, and early on, realised that large amounts of steps were being missed when pushing a buggy. Experimenting using a phone step counter strapped to her as well as the Fitbit, the phone-app counted 16,000 and the fitbit only 6050 steps. There are numerous suggestions in the online Fitbit forum for parents trying to get around this problem including; jogging and pushing the buggy one handed - so the Fitbit arm may swing freely (which could be dangerous for the buggy’s occupant); putting the device around the ankle (it is too small for this); or putting it in a pocket which can result in inaccurate readings and the item falling out. The device offers a 'rowing mode' and a 'cycling mode' but the world's most popular pedometer, does not account for buggy pushing, wheelchair pushing, carrying, or even the simple human act of handholding. This is reflected by the comments in the Fitbit community pages where there is currently a petition asking for the introduction of 'stroller mode', the status of which according to the makers, is unsurprisingly 'currently not planned' (4).

The commodification of human ambulation ---as Bjorn Nansen points out in his essay 'Step Counting: The anatomo- and chrono-politics of Pedometers' although seemingly innocuous, actively participates in 'shaping of temporal rhythms of everyday life', and exists within a complicated nexus of marketing, health and governance (5). Naturally by extension, devices skewed to a male centred bias - which make female routines and use of space seem odd and non conforming – perpetuate the historical normative already established, that mens' use of space in the public sphere is somehow more valid.

Male-centric design bias of course stretches far beyond pedometric devices, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can also be prejudiced due to its design and according to the bias of those who 'train' it. An algorithm used by Amazon to sort through applicant CV's was recently found to be discounting female CV's altogether -- this was not done consciously on the part of the designers but had arisen due to the way it had been taught by men using male colleagues CV's as examples of successful candidates (6). This embeds the urgent need for women – and those living and identifying as female, and people of colour - to be involved in the design of algorithms in order to counter trends, which, as society becomes more reliant on AI technologies, may deem any non white male as a less valid member of society.

The ‘gender data gap’ as described by Caroline Criado Perez in ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ is key to understanding how the seemingly simple task of counting daily steps is riddled with unseen bias against typically ‘female’ tasks (75% more likely to push a pram, for example), and in turn against the female body itself (7).

Carly uses a smartphone to count steps on a pedometer app. As Criado Perez has discovered:

“The average smartphone size is now 5.5 inches. While the average man can fairly comfortably use his device one-handed, the average woman’s hand is not much bigger than the handset itself. This is obviously annoying for female customers – and shortsighted for a company like Apple, given that research shows women are more likely to own an iPhone than men” (8).

Another study on the accuracy of pedometers showed that they are:

“within 5 percent of an established criterion of accuracy when placed on the waist, chest and arm, but the divergence rose to 7.3 percent for placement in a purse and 7.7 percent for placement in a pocket.” (9)

If your arm is too small to comfortably have a smartphone strapped to it, and it’s not practical to hold a large smartphone while walking, it goes in your pocket or bag and your step count is compromised.

The promotion of the Pedometer as a fitness aid follows a health crisis caused by sedentary office centred lifestyles and a society built around vehicle infrastructures. It represents a marketing opportunity created around people’s health anxiety. The use of health apps, heart rate monitors and pedometric devices lead to a culture of self awareness in movement and a constant monitoring of the body which could be read as government intervention masquerading as self care echoing Foucaultian Biopolitics. The issue over who your pedometer data belongs to is opaque, as privacy around pedometers is questionable and there have been a number of incidents where data has been used without the customer's consent (10).

Time, borrowing and lending steps.

In a culture of 'learning analytics' and the pitfalls of data harvesting, if any new meaning is to be ascribed to step-counting through pedometric devices it may involve the re-inscribing of stepcount data to other uses, other routes, journeys, diversions and cultures of lending and borrowing.

Walking is often described by artists and writers as a thinking process – the idea of using proxies and avatars (as we have in the S Project) who walk our steps but on different trajectories- opens up a dual walking/thinking space, where the every day A to B routes may parallel the long distance avatar journeys and walking meanings may interpolate between the quotidian and the symbolic. In our S Project walks for example, we may be on the school run, while our avatar crosses the Bering Straight or food shopping while walking across East Iceland. The presence of the two narratives within the same step count opens up an interesting temporal proposition;

The histories of the ‘non spaces’ which often make up the point to point practical journeys are now also spaces of presence and non presence. The ‘non spaces’ designated by Marc Auge – transitional zones such as Supermarkets and Airports are rapidly being by-passed through digital means, enabling non presence (i.e. online deliveries of shopping and video calls replacing distant meetings) (11). The idea of ‘Junktime’ is an extension of this – a recent article by Hito Steyerl outlines an ethical position for 'non-presence' in a contemporary art world which places increasing demands on artists to ‘be there’ in person. Her position is developed through Heidegger’s expression of Dasein:

“The point is: people use proxies in order to deal with the Terror of Total Dasein or an economy of presence based on the technologically amplified scarcity of human attention and physical presence.” (12)

‘Junktime’ is the fragmented result of trying to be present in all spaces. Henri Lefebvre writes about ‘constrained time’ or ‘compulsive time’ through moments somewhere in-between work and leisure, including travel and time for official formalities. Of course schools runs, dog walks and domestic tasks can't really be designated as 'non' or 'junk time' – they can be complicated and relational, more so, we would argue due to the repetitiveness of their use, but the model still holds as they are not licensed spaces of either productivity or pleasure.  

Studying the emerging and marginal forms of digital media use in everyday life, Bjorn Nansen states:

‘the pedometer participates in mediating and (re)configuring the meaning and rhythm of this in-between time in a way that reshapes physical activity, as well as experiential and embodied modes of comportment… this questions the possibility of an in-betweenness to time as it blurs distinctions between the rhythms of times and places – there is less of a temporal demarcation between the free time of leisure, the enforced time of work, the dead time of commuting, and the liberating time of play or exercise.’ (13)

Step counting in its compulsiveness, represents an erosion of the idea of; ‘in between time’ altogether; the back and forth of the commuter; the steps while shopping or at the park that become ‘useful’ in the sense that they add to a step count in exactly the same way as playing; getting lost; and working or setting out to dérive the city. The mundane/domestic walk may reside in the same territory through this egalitarian model as the highhanded psychogeographical game or the epic walking adventure.

There may be something in the everyday and embodied repetitive and self consciously performative practice of counting and recording steps which makes ‘every day’ walking slip out of the net set for it by the demands of the dérive; we can challenge the masculine walking histories which suggest that interesting moments can only happen if the everyday is left behind.

We are not advocating for the purchase of these heavily marketed devices – and readily attest to the problematic (governmental/health/marketing nexus) already mentioned, but find the act of counting steps and the possibilities of lending and borrowing steps as a re-appropriation of the devices intended use, to be an intriguing one. Nansen further states 'the pedometer extends walking practices and routines from monochronicity and modularization to polychronicity and modulation' (ibid). This polychronicity and modulation could swing two ways: towards a neoliberal culture of population monitoring perhaps, but also, through the self aware act of lending steps to other uses by avatars and others we may abstract linear time into a further splitting and create the possibility of being in more than one place at once – to be going somewhere and going nowhere, to be able to travel without ‘inserting’ ourselves physically into a distant landscape and maybe in a small way, de-stabilise an established and stale male centric techno-political walking framework.

References & Notes

(1) There are a number of examples of travelling without leaving home or travel by proxy in literature, notably ‘A Journey around my room’ by Xavier De Maistre, and Proust’s flights of allegory and metaphore in ‘In Search of Lost Time’, also Andre Breton’s ‘Nadja, where the character vicariously (and dubiously) lives through Nadja’s vision of the world to subvert his quotidian existence. Contemporary examples include the agoraphobic photographer who uses street View to travel the world. (Available online).

(2) Da Vinci’s Step counter was invented to measure the steps of Roman soldiers – (Roman’s used steps to measure distance – the Roman Mile was around 1000 paces or 2000 adult steps – his device was worn around the waist, with a lever reaching to the thigh, when the leg moves, the lever rotated the cogs and counted the steps.For further information see Step Counting: A Review of Measurment considerations and Heath Related Applications. Sports Medicine Aukland. 2016. David R Bassett, Lindsay P Toth, Samuel R LaMunion and Scott E Crouter.

(3) Others credited with inventing similar devices include Jean Fernel, a French craftsman, in 1525 or Robert Hooke, (an English scientist) in 1674, or Hubert Sarton, in 1778.

(4) Fitbit Community (2016). Available Online.

(5) Nansen, B (2008) Step-counting: The Anatomo- and Chrono-politics of Pedometrics In: Continuum, University of Melbourne.

(6) BBC News (2018 Amazon scrapped 'sexist AI' tool. Available online.

(7) Invisible Women, Exposing Data Bias in a World designed for Men - Caroline Criado Perez.

(8) Williams, R (2016) Women more likely to own an iPhone than men. In: The Telegraph. Available online.

(9) Jegtvig, S (2014) Placement and speed affect accuracy of new pedometers. In: Reuters. Available online.

(10) Weinstein, M (2016) What Your Fitbit Doesn't Want You to Know. In: Huffpost. Available online.

(11) Auge, M (1995) ‘Non Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’. Available online.

(12) Steyerl, H (2010) The Terror of Total Dasein. In: Dis. Available Online.

(13) Nansen, B (2008) Step-counting: The anatomo- and Chrono-politics of Pedometrics. In: Continuum.

#fitbit #wearables #pedometrics #feminism #gender

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cabiba · 7 years

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve puzzled about why people become communists. I have no doubt about why someone would stop being one. After all, we have a century of evidence of the murder, famine, and general destruction caused by the idea. Ignoring all this takes a special kind of willful blindness to reality.

Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.

Even the theory of communism itself is a complete mess. There is really no such thing as common ownership of goods that are obviously scarce in the real world. There must be some solution to the problem of scarcity beyond just wishing reality away. Perhaps ownership and trade? Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.

But how communism would work in practice is not something they want to talk about. They just imagined that some magical Hegelian shift would take place in the course of history that would work it all out.

So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?

The Red Century

The New York Times has been exploring that issue in a series of remarkable reflections that they have labelled Red Century. I can’t get enough, even the ones that are written by people who are—how shall I say?—suspiciously sympathetic to communism as a cause.

The most recent installment is written by Vivian Gornick. She reflects on how her childhood world was dominated by communists.

“The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers….

When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism).

While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice….

The Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith.”

Sounds fascinating, if bonkers (Marxism is hardly a “civilizing worldview”). It sounds less like an intellectual salon of ideas and more like a religious delusion. Those too can be well intentioned. The key here is a dogmatic ideology, which serves as a kind of substitute for religion. It has a vision of hell (workers and peasants exploited by private-capital wielding capitalist elite), a vision of heaven (a world of universal and equal prosperity and peace), and a means of getting from one to the other (revolution from below, as led by the vanguard of the proletariat).

Once you accept such an ideology, anything intellectual becomes possible. Nothing can shake you from it. Okay, that’s not entirely true. One thing can shake you of it: when the leader of the cult repudiates the thing you believe in most strongly.

Khrushchev’s Heresy

She was 20 years old in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet Communist Party about the crimes of Stalin. Apparently the unrelenting reports of famine, persecution, and mass death, from the early years of Bolshevik rule – and even the revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact – would have demoralized them earlier. But no:

“The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.”

Amazing.

The Early Reds

And speaking of this small 1919 sect, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies: Reds (1981). I could watch it another 20 times. It explores the lives of the American communists of the turn of the 20th century, their loves, longings, and aspirations. The focus is on fiery but deluded Jack Reed, but it includes portraits of a passionate Louise Bryant, the gentile Max Eastman, an edgy Eugene O’Neill, and the ever inspiring Emma Goldman.

These people weren’t the Progressives of the mainstream that history credits with having so much influence over policy in those days. These were the real deal: the Communists that were the source of national frenzy during the Red Scare of the 1920s.

The movie portrays them not as monsters but idealists. They were all very talented, artistic, mostly privileged in upbringing, and what drew them to communism was not bloodlust for genocide but some very high ideals.

They felt a passion for justice. They wanted to end war. They opposed exploitation. They longed for universal freedom and maximum civil liberty. They despised the entrenched hierarchies of the old order and hoped for a new society in which everyone had an equal chance.

Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful.

All of that sounds reasonable until you get to the details. The communists had a curious understanding of each of these concepts. Freedom meant freedom from material want. Justice meant a planned distribution of goods. The end of war meant a new form of war against the capitalists who they believed created war. The hierarchies they wanted to be abolished were not just state-privileged nobles but also the meritocratic elites of industrial capitalism, and even small land owners, no matter how small the plot.

Why be a communist rather than just a solid liberal of the old school? In the way the movie portrays it, the problem was not so much in their goals but in their mistaken means. They hated the state as it existed but imagined that a new “dictatorship of the proletariat” could become a transition mechanism to usher in their classless society. That led them to cheer on the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages, and work for the same thing to happen in the United States.

The Dream Dies

Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful. Goldman sees the betrayal immediately. Reed becomes an apologist for genocide. Bryant forgets pretending to be political and believing in free love, marries Reed, and tends to his medical needs before his death. O’Neill just becomes a full-time cynic (and drunk). It took Max Eastman longer to lose the faith but he eventually became an anti-socialist and wrote for FEE.

The initial demoralization of the early American communists came in the 1920s. They came to realize that all the warning against this wicked ideology – having been written about for many centuries prior, even back to the ancient world – were true.

Eastman, for example, realized that he was seeking to liberate people by taking from them the three things people love most in life: their families, their religion, and their property. Instead of creating a new heaven on earth, they had become apologists for a killing machine.

Stunned and embarrassed, they moved on with life.

But the history didn’t end there. There were still more recruits being added to the ranks, generations of them. The same thing happened after 1989. Some people lost the faith, others decided that socialism needs yet another chance to strut its stuff.

It’s still going on today.

As for the Communist Party in America, most left-Progressives of the Antifa school regard the Party as an embarrassing sellout, wholly owned by the capitalist elite. And when we see their spokesmen appear on television every four years, they sound not unlike pundits we see on TV every night.

It would be nice if any article written about communism were purely retrospective. That, sadly, is not the case. There seem to be new brands of Marxian thought codified every few years, and still more versions of its Hegelian roots that take on ever more complex ideological iterations (the alt-right is an example).

Why do people become communists? Because human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of illusions, and we are capable of working long and hard to turn them into nightmares. Once we’ve invested the time and energy into something, however destructive, it can take a very long time to wake us up. It’s hard to think of a grander example of the sunk-cost fallacy.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

#fee.org #communism #max eastman #Max Forrester Eastman

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