The Disgust that Sparks the Socialist Spirit
(Common threads in the lives of Jewish Leftists, including Bernie Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, Lillian Hellman, Michael Gold and myself)
The Disgust that Sparks the Socialist Spirit
(Common threads in the lives of Jewish Leftists, including Bernie Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, Lillian Hellman, Michael Gold and myself)
By
David Gottfried
My most recent posts, which defended Russia with respect to the recent controversy regarding Ukriane, have prompted people to call me a Jewish Commie.
I am not a communist, but I proudly acknowledge my Marxian leanings. And I am proud of my ancestors who are also tagged with the appellation “Jewish Commie.”
This is how the cookie crumbles, or the revolutionary attitude is roused, in some Jewish Leftists I have known:
1. The Jewish Dialectic Between Rich and Poor
The Jewish people are split. A huge proportion of Jews are fervent capitalists, proficient in making money and possessing a penchant for exacting legalistic logic that always compels the other guy to pay-up. Just as many Jews, perhaps many more (There are many more Jews who are tenants, whose apartments are submerged in a sea of cockroaches, than Jewish landlords guffawing all the way to the bank.), are decidedly left of center, were once stridently socialistic, and are as red as bloody beef.
For many centuries, Jewry has been rent by a dialectical war between Jewish capitalists and Jewish leftists. Of course, there are commies and capitalists in all ethnic groups, but among Jews a rather large proportion side with either bankers or Bolsheviks. We have our Bernie Madoffs and our Bernard Bergmans.
(The Bergman scandal was a headline in New York in the 1970s. Bergman was a Rabbi who persecuted elderly Jewish Nursing home residents while ripping off Medicaid; instead of hiring sufficient staff so his patients wouldn’t have to lie in shit and piss, the money he got from Medicaid made his life grotesquely lavish. Incidentally, my criticisms of rich Jews have been decried as Jewish self-hatred. Hell no, I am lambasting rich Jews who have made life miserable for poor Jews. Consider the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire of New York City, circa 1912. The company was a sweat shop owned by Jews. The employees were adolescent girls, all, or almost all, Jewish and Italian. There was a fire, and the girls couldn’t exit; some say they were locked in the shop so they couldn’t steal fabric. All or almost all of the teenage girls died. Over one hundred dead bodies lay on the street.)
At the same time, we have many men like Bernie Sanders. In Hungary, after World War One, there was a socialist revolution, and its leaders were mostly Jews – and many of those socialists had parents who were elite businessmen.
Actually, the structure of our liturgy underscores the dynamics that make for class war. During Sabbath services we read from both the Law and the Prophets. The study of the penny pinching, nagging, nerdy law is conducive to the formation of what Freud would call an anally retentive tight wad and what John Lennon would call a “Nowhere Man." However, the prophets are entirely different.
The prophets are refreshing, revivifying waterfalls of Justice: Damn the petty, parochial, clutter of injunctions and condemnations of almost everything in life that makes us love life. Feed the poor. Screw the rich.
The prophets are contained in the Haftorahs which are read by the Bar Mitzvah boy. I think this lay-out is perfect as it reflects the greater willingness of the young to rally around the banners of Justice and goodness. My quarrel is not with the Jewish religion; it is with my co-religionists on the sunny side of the street.
For whatever reason, the battle and angst over economic accomplishment seems amplified in many Jewish communities. My uncle was never bar mitzvahed because his mother decided that since they could not afford an expensive Bar Mitzvah, they would have no Bar Mitzvah at all. My Grandmother knew that she couldn’t endure the Shonda !!! (Scandal) of not having a rich bar mitzvah celebration. That the bar mitzvah had something to do with our religion, and not acting like a preening lady at a debutante ball, never intruded into my relatives’ petty, stupid skulls.
I was in large measure raised by my Mother and her Sister. They were both single women and were poorer than most of the other Jewish women in the neighborhood. It seemed at times that they wanted to get an Israeli Uzi machine gun and shoot up the synagogue’s women’s club as they had complete and total fits of rage whenever they encountered a woman with a hubby and a mink coat. (I might be too hard on my faith. Impossible rich ladies, like the ones who irked my Mother and Aunt, come in all ethnicities and times. Indeed, in 1963, our Ambassador to the U.N., and two-time Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, was physically attacked, for being an alleged commie, etc. by a gang of rich women in Dallas known as the “mink coat mob.” This was shortly before JFK was assassinated in Dallas.)
I was a commie before I had ever heard of Karl Marx. It’s because I knew there was a war going on: There were the Jews on Shore Road (A road along the perimeter of much of Southwestern Brooklyn) and then there were Shleimeils like me, who lived a few blocks to the East on 4th Avenue which was substantially poorer. (Actually, the Rabbi lived on Fourth Avenue as well, but he was not important. He wasn’t rich.)
If my account of the psychological casualties of capitalism were restricted to myself, my ideas could be dismissed as merely the hang-ups of a self-indulgent character who uses his own misfortunes to indict a society he does not like. Therefore, at the risk of boring my reader, I will step out of my childhood of catty matrons and provide a more abstract and universal account of capitalism and its material and psychological ills.
2. Why Capitalism is more of a drag than an obese, aging drag queen. (This should be obvious to everyone save those precious preppies who are the product of young Republican clubs)
a) Why increasing incomes often don’t make us feel richer.
America claims that capitalism is the best economic system because it maximizes output and wealth.
As the Gross National Product (The contemporary yardstick is the Gross Domestic Product ) soared, per capita income and wealth soared. This supposedly meant that as the rich were getting richer the poor were getting a whole lot less poor.
Of course, in objective terms the poor were getting less poor. Workers who in the 30’s did not have a car had, by the 1960’s, a car and a cornucopia of electronic gadgets to stuff into their homes.
Of course, the Bourbon kings of France did not have televisions or refrigerators or machines to pop popcorn. However, most people in Harlem do have televisions and refrigerators. Does this mean that people in Harlem are richer than the kings of France.
Very simply, a person will feel poor when other people have more wealth than he does. And the more rigorously capitalistic a country, the more the absence of a trinket will hurt. In America, we practically posit that one’s worth as a person is simply measured by his total cash assets minus liabilities. Therefore, if you have a Television and fifty useless gadgets in your home, you are still extremely poor if 75 percent of the population has more money than you do. Maybe you should not feel this way, but it is hard not too when we are bombarded with ads that make owning junk the alpha and omega of life, people shun you for owning inferior junk and, in my case, awards in the synagogue are given to those kiddies who Fathers contributed the most to the temple.
Accordingly, no matter how hard we all work, 50 percent of all American men will always feel fractured and crippled because they are in the bottom half. If you think my assessment is too bleak, use your eyes. More specifically, look at the eyes of men, over thirty, who are not in the top half of income and wealth.
If you look into the eyes of poorer men, over thirty (when one is younger, one’s social station is more fluid), the great majority seem sullen or depressed or disaffected or unhappy. Of course, in any society, some people are poor and some people are rich, but it is worse here.
b) Why American capitalist freedom nurtures self-hate
In this country we uphold the lie that one’s status in life is one’s own doing. Because we are supposedly free, we adhere to the lie that if one is poor, it is simply because one lacked talent or initiative. Of course, we have now agreed that color or sex can depress income and this has given birth to the nasty implication that all poor white man are either shiftless or stupid. (Actually, a million and one variables can influence income and wealth: Taller men make more money than shorter men. Boys who don’t have Fathers have lower incomes. And I would venture to guess that having bad skin, or bad breath, or a tendency to fart, or relatives who made you positively insane (I know boys whose raving maniacal Mothers talked to them about castration complexes when they were six), and having just plain bad luck can depress income or wealth.
And one does not have to be a Jewish communist to think like me.
The American psychologist William James said that Americans worship at the altar of the “Bitch Goddess success.”
c) How American capitalists make money by increasing poverty
Thorstein Veblen, in the “Theory of the Leisure Class,” said that in advanced capitalistic societies we venerate the men who do the least work and make the most money. Hence, we actually exalt those qualities that can undermine a nation’s wealth, not augment it. For example, Veblen explained that capitalists make money by sabotaging other capitalists. Consider the Great Recession of 2008. The big sheisters shorted out the real estate market betting that mortgages for sub prime real estate would go into default. At the same time, they increased the likelihood that homebuyers would default by cluttering up realty contracts with punitive clauses for late payments. In a word, instead of increasing the Nation’s wealth, they made a mint by making millions of people lose their homes and jobs.
Short selling on wall street is the codification of Schadenfreude, or getting pleasure from another person’s pain.
Also, David Ricardo explained that one segment of entrepreneurs held the world hostage to their selfish whims: Landlords. He said that because the amount of land is finite, ever increasing population and industry would raise rents higher and higher until half of the world confronted eviction. Until recently, some thought this prophecy of hyper febrile rents bordered on dystopian fantasy, but it can’t be so easily dismissed now as homelessness soars on the West Coast and even middle-class people are living in their cars.
d) How Capitalism undermines political freedom
Of course, my detractors will say that capitalism is fine and dandy because it increases the scope of freedom and liberates us. They utter paeans to freedom and capitalism, and utter both terms at the same time as if they went together like soup and sandwich. True, as a capitalist’s power waxes, the government’s power wanes. However, at the same time, as your boss’s power increases, his employees’ freedom is constricted. If you are like most Americans, and you don’t have a union contract, or can’t make a credible claim of discrimination based on race, sex or religion, your boss can fire you for any reason at all.
Also, as the private sphere is enlarged, we forget all about the political sphere. People are so busy making money that they have no energy or time to exercise their freedom of speech or assembly, and in America they suffer from the delusion that voting once every four years is all that is required to have a free country with an active citizenry. The only people who care about poverty, or global warming or the growing potential for pandemics are students and retired people and the political pros consider young people and old people ineffectual, silly, do gooders.
e) How capitalism snuffs out individuality
Capitalism has but one overriding command: Make a Sale.
How do we sell the most products: By merchandizing the tackiest and most banal products.
The Brady Bunch sells. Hogans Heroes, a situation comedy which told us that life in a Nazi POW camp was great fun, sells. Foodstuffs that are a conglomeration of sugars and salts pretending to be innocent snacks sell. And so we have a cotton candy culture of boring, snoring vulgarities and inanities.
The imperative of selling also warps the way we behave with other people. Because we are so intent on inducing people to buy our garbage, we flood their ears with an endless barrage of false compliments and professions of affection. Almost every day, I am compelled to call a large corporation, and I am put on hold, and I am told, ad nauseum, that Walgreens or some other entity values me as a customer and would go to the mat to love and defend me.
f) Why a Successful Capitalist is a Good Liar
Capitalism is rife with “unactionable lies.” It is unactionable because it is not a flat misrepresentation, and if it’s not a blatant misrepresentation, one can’t sue for it.
However, almost everything merchants say it an artful obfuscation of the truth designed to rob you.
The essence of capitalism is robbery. It is buying something for 20 dollars and convincing some poor shnook that it is worth 50 dollars.
Therefore, when we reward capitalists, we are rewarding better liars. And the most successful capitalists, those bastards who are regaled for their wisdom, wit and wherewithal in creating kingdoms of gold, are the biggest liars.
Henry David Thoreau said that most Americans lead lives of “quiet desperation.’ Of course, they were desperate. They feared going into the poor house.
3. A Few famous Jewish Leftists
The playwright Lilliam Hellman, who famously said to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee that she would not “cut her conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” had a particularly peculiar childhood that turned on economic class. She was continuously shuttled back and forth between New Orleans and New York. Half the year she lived with her father’s family in New Orleans, which was relatively poor, and half the year she lived with her mother’s family in New York, which was relatively rich. From her mother’s family she suffered the snide sarcasm of the well-to-do.
As I read the opening pages of her memoir, “An Unfinished Women,” I felt as if I were reading about my own childhood. She talked about Friday night dinners at her grandmother’s house, in New York, that were just like Friday night dinners at my Grandmother's house. The reigning emotion was derision.
They derided relatives that did not know how to handle their money. One of her relatives laughingly explained that before he rented tenements to his victims, he removed the toilets and sold them elsewhere. He reminded me of my relatives in health care who laughing derided the deterioration of their sick patients whom they seemed to catapult into coffins.
Hellman was a fiery, scathing leftist. Some of her colleagues considered her underhanded. The writer Mary Mc Carthy said that every word she writes, including “the” and “and,” were lies. If she was a liar, I know where she got it from.
Abbie Hoffman and Bernie Sanders.
Abbie Hoffman, in writing about his childhood, said that he felt particularly persecuted for being poorer than most or all of the Jews in his neighborhood.
I don’t recall Bernie Sanders ever saying that he felt poorer than other Jews, but he has continually discussed the relative impoverishment of his youth.
Michael Gold
In the 1930’s, Gold wrote “Jews Without Money.” In his preface, he said that he wrote the book to refute the Nazi contention that all Jews were loaded. In his book, he recounts the searing poverty of his youth in the Lower East Side. It is an amazing book presenting a portrait of a Jewish world light years away from Great Neck and other gilded Jewish neighborhoods of today. The people starved. The people believed in spirits and demons and cures approximating witchcraft (When he developed a fear of horses, an old lady in the neighborhood prescribed a rag, soaked in a horse’s urine, to be worn around his neck.) The people were terrified of imminent doom.
Oddly enough, toward the end of the book, when he is consoling his Father for their poverty, he says something to the effect that there are plenty of Jews who are as poor as they are. However, the book already made it clear that the vast majority of the Jews that they knew were dirt poor. So why does he have to remind his Father that plenty of Jews are as poor as they are ? He does not give the answer, but I think I know why: The wealthier Jews had a certain flair and ostentatiousness that makes them more memorable.
I hope I don’t sound antisemitic. There is nothing particularly bad or evil about rich Jews. Just as there are rich Jews, there are wealthy Italians who are very adept at being loan sharks, wealthy Catholic clergymen who made a mint through the sale of Indulgences (Read Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly”), wealthy blacks who are captains of the drug trade, and wealthy Protestants who made billions by exploiting Catholics, Jews and blacks.
We Jews simply have a special ability to bring in the dough. The origins of this ability is something which I may try to explore at a future date.