Pete Seeger sings with fellow activists at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963. (photo: Adger Cowans/Getty Images)
29 January 14
Like his party associates, Seeger was consistently on the right side of history
hen the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger died
Monday at the age of 94, remembrances of him, unsurprisingly, focused
less on his music than on his social activism. All the better - Seeger,
the epitome of tireless commitment to "the cause," would have liked it
that way.
Some comments were laudatory, praising every aspect of his advocacy. But most of them struck the balanced tone of The Washington Post's Dylan Matthews, who tweeted: "I love and will miss Pete Seeger but let's not gloss over that fact that he was an actual Stalinist."
Such attempts at balance miss the mark. It's not that
Seeger did a lot of good despite his longtime ties to the Communist
Party; he did a lot of good because he was a Communist.
This point is not to apologize for the moral and
social catastrophe that was state socialism in the 20th century, but
rather to draw a distinction between the role of Communists when in
power and when in opposition. A young worker in the Bronx passing out
copies of the Daily Worker in 1938 shouldn't be conflated with the
nomenklatura that oversaw labor camps an ocean away.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, time after time
American Communists such as Seeger were on the right side of history -
and through their leadership, they encouraged others to join them there.
Communists ran brutal police states in the Eastern
bloc, but in Asia and Africa they found themselves at the helm of
anti-colonial struggles, and in the United States radicals represented
the earliest and more fervent supporters of civil rights and other
fights for social emancipation. In the 1930s, Communist Party members
led a militant anti-racist movement among Alabama sharecroppers that
called for voting rights, equal wages for women and land for landless
farmers. Prominent and unabashedly Stalinist figures such as Mike Gold,
Richard Wright and Granville Hicks pushed Franklin D. Roosevelt's New
Deal to be more inclusive and led the mass unionization drives of the
era. These individuals, bound together by membership in an organization
most ordinary Americans came to fear and despise, played an outsize and
largely positive role in American politics and culture. Seeger was one
of the last surviving links to this great legacy.
"Stateside Communists were the underdogs, fighting the establishment for justice - the victims of censorship and police repression, not its perpetrators."
American communism was different during those years.
It wasn't gray, bureaucratic and rigid, as it was in the U.S.S.R., but
creative and dynamic. Irving Howe thought it was a put-on, a "brilliant
masquerade" that fought for the right causes but in a deceptive,
opportunistic way. But there was an undeniable charm to the Communist
Party - an organization that hosted youth dances and socials, as well as
militant rallies - that first attracted Seeger. One need only reread
the old transcripts
from his 1955 run-in with the House Un-American Activities Committee to
see the difference between the stodginess of the interrogators and the
crackling wit of the young firebrand.
Stateside Communists were the underdogs, fighting the
establishment for justice - the victims of censorship and police
repression, not its perpetrators.
Seeger, like other party members, came to regret the
illusions he held about the Soviet Union. He apologized for thinking
that "Stalin was simply a 'hard-driver' and not a supremely cruel
misleader." But he never abandoned his commitment to organized radical
politics. Along with Angela Davis and other prominent former Communist
Party members, he helped form the Committees of Correspondence for
Democracy and Socialism, a democratic socialist group, in 1991.
Remarking on Seeger, Bruce Springsteen once said
that "he'd be a living archive of America's music and conscience, a
testament to the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to
push American events towards more humane and justified ends."
In stark contrast to the role played by state
socialists abroad, that's a good way to describe the legacy of the
Communist Party at home, a legacy Seeger never recanted.
See Also: Here's the Amazing Transcript of Pete Seeger Pissing Off the House Un-American Activities CommitteeBragg plays tribute to Pete Seeger
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