Home from the Dark Side of Utopia. Clifton Ross

      FOREWORD

      by Staughton Lynd

      I

      In Home from the Dark Side of Utopia, Clifton Ross offers an account of his personal pilgrimage through several varieties of religious extremism, counter-cultural life in Berkeley, and Latin American radicalism.

      Ross’s journey began with a childhood on military bases. It appears to have left him with an image of a ­hermetically-sealed world of close-cropped lawns and unrepealable dictates from above. Ross discerns a kinship between what he experienced growing up and a vision entertained by both the Right and Left that is Utopian and apocalyptic. Accordingly, his version of the Emerald City is, first, a world in which decision making is decentralized and communal, but also, and just as important, a world in which the desired social transformation comes about in a spirit of experimentation, with an understanding in advance that what happens will be a patchwork of failures as well as successes.

      These are problematic objectives in the United States. To begin with, America is home to three hundred million people who are notoriously non-communal: a “lonely crowd” (David Riesman) of individuals who increasingly “bowl alone” (Robert Putnam).

      Moreover, too many Americans believe that the good life will be achieved suddenly, almost magically, as a “world turned upside down” or in a miraculous moment of “rapture.” Even the most inspiring of our home-grown prophets on the Left tend to imagine the coming of the Good Society as a rush of events that will produce a qualitatively different state of affairs in a very short period of time. James Baldwin and Malcolm X seem to have anticipated some version of a fire that would sweep through established institutions. The Wobblies’ theme song, “Solidarity Forever,” imagines a new world coming into being, after such a fire, from “the ashes of the old.” I think that fire is a form of violence, a hoped-for shortcut to social change that doesn’t work. My own daydreams are of little green things that poke up after a fire through the blackened forest floor.

      What can be distressingly rapid, in my experience, is the collapse of Left organizations. Having lived through the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers, I am left with a sad but stubborn belief that it is just as important to try to understand our defeats as to clarify the character of the new world to which we aspire.

      Through a number of initial chapters Ross struggles with the conflict between the hope for a Kingdom of God that would materialize all at once (“when the stars begin to fall”) and the common-sense delays of ordinary life. For example, a visit to Berkeley by Daniel Berrigan gave rise to an epiphany. Berrigan cut through clouds of “cosmic millenarian reverie” to call for confrontation with the nuclear arms race and with a demonic, cold, rational utopia, as well as for empathy with the needs of the poor. Yet Berrigan in his own way fixed his gaze on “the end” and “embodied the prophetic voice of the apocalyptic vision.”

      A by-product of this state of mind for many young radicals is a quest for a particular society in which the promise of the future is, at least for the moment, displayed. Lest I seem to be exempting myself from this generalization, let me be clear. In high school and the first years of college I supported the Soviet Union. This ended when a friend quoted Trotsky’s ultimatum to the Kronstadt rebels (“surrender or I will shoot you down like pheasants”) and Bukharin’s abject response when accused in the purge trials of the 1930s of being a “running dog” of imperialists who wished to destroy the USSR (“Citizen Prosecutor Vishinsky, you have found the words”). After reading Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia I held out the incipient State of Israel as a model of decentralized socialism until another friend told me, “Staughton, they stole the land.”

      My wife and I used our two- or three-week summer vacations to make five short trips to Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s. I was resolved not to deceive myself again this time. But I did. Not until I read Margaret Randall did I fully grasp what it signified that the highest official in the Sandinista women’s organization, AMNLAE, was not elected by the membership but was appointed by the predominantly male Sandinista directorate.

      I still view Zapatismo through a reddish haze but I fear I may have much to learn. I may discover that young people in the Zapatista villages still leave for the coast or for el Norte. Alcoholism and male chauvinism may remain stronger than one is led to believe. Above all, the Leftists who shepherded the emergence of Zapatismo in those wet mountains may have had, and may continue to have, a good deal more influence than they let on, just as in Sandinista Nicaragua.

      II

      This brings us to the question of Venezuela, which takes up the second half of Home from the Dark Side of Utopia.

      I have never been to Venezuela. I do not speak or read Spanish well enough to learn very much at a distance. I am unable to offer a reliable assessment.

      Nevertheless, I think the compendium of facts about contemporary Venezuela that Clifton Ross has assembled demand attention. In The Dark Side he tells us how he acquired them, year by year, visit by visit, friend by friend. They are most conveniently available in another of his recent books, The Map or the Territory: Notes on Imperialism, Solidarity, and Latin America in the New Millenium (New Earth Publications, 2014).

      Leaving aside currency manipulation, which I do not pretend to be able to summarize intelligibly, the following are facts offered by Ross (in one or the other of these two books) about the Chavista years: