HONOR THE MEMORY OF JOHN REED-Harvard Class Of 1910  

 

COMMENTARY

HONOR A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST MOVEMENT –AND A CLASS TRAITOR, TO BOOT

John Reed, Harvard Class of 1910, epitomized the best of the pre-World War I radicals. Unlike the vast majority of his Class and class he cast his fate with the working people and oppressed of America at a time when the dominant left bourgeois movement- the Progressive movement- was busy applying band aids to the increasingly inequitable capitalist system. The radical movement is always in need, sometimes desperately in need, of intellectuals to tell its side of the story. Despite some exceptions, like Reed, the intellectuals then, as now, either stood on the sidelines or at most acted as ‘fellow travelers’ to the movement. Reed on the contrary put all his energies into the movement. As a journalist he sought out all the radical hotspots of his time starting with his coverage of the Mexican Revolution through the various strikes of the 1910’s in America culminating in his coverage of the heroic period of the Russian Revolution. His journalistic account of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Ten Days That Shook the World, stands even today as one of the best eyewitness accounts of that turbulent time in Russia.         

John Reed’s political development also offers today’s militant leftists an insight into how the swirl of events drives the best militants leftward. Reed started out in the typically Bohemian milieu of New York City's Greenwich Village and imbibed its avante guarde cultural pretensions. However, as the United States lurched into participation into World War I he grew stronger as an anti-war advocate and placed himself on the line to oppose that war. This was the great dividing point in the radical movement of the time. This separated the dilettantes from serious revolutionaries. Not an unusual political development, but an important one.

Under the influence of the Russian Revolution Reed led the left wing of the American Socialist Party on a program of opposition to the war and defense of the Bolshevik Revolution. When the left wing was forced out of the Socialist Party he formed a communist organization based on the centrally of the native American working class as the vanguard of the American Revolution. Opposed to that were left-wingers, mainly foreign born elements based on the various language federations of the old Socialist Party, who essentially wanted to act as cheerleaders for the Russian Revolution-and no much else. The result was the creation of two communist organizations that caused no end of problems both here and in the Communist International. But the fights to lead the Socialist party leftward and later between the communist organizations are stories for another time, and worth separate space. 

Reed’s political trajectory parallels that of some of the more serious elements of the radical generation of ’68, the class traitors of that generation, in this country who were won to radicalism by the civil rights movement and early opposition to the Vietnam War. As always some remained dilettantes, lost energy or capitulated to the power of parliamentary politics. However, the better elements came to understand, sometimes fitfully and haphazardly, the need for a Leninist-type organization if one was to fight the monster of American imperialism to the end. Reed would have applauded such efforts. Reed’s untimely death in 1920 before the Communist movement got off the ground has left some room for speculation about what his ultimate position would have been toward the Soviet Union. And that is where it remains, speculation. What we know for sure is that when the deal went down he was on the side of the angels. Damn, we could use a few more class traitors like him these days. Are there any out there?