1966
Comrade Laski, C. P. U. S. A. (M.-L.)
michael laski, also known as M. I. Laski, is a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is. He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dropped out of U. C. L. A. his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U. S. A. (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group of Stalinist-Maoists who divide their energies between Watts and Harlem, he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of doctrine, including the notions that the traditional American Communist Party is a “revisionist bourgeois clique,” that the Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyites, and “the revisionist clique headed by Gus Hall” prove themselves opportunistic bourgeois lackeys by making their peace appeal not to the “workers” but to the liberal imperialists; and that H. Rap Brown is the tool, if not the conscious agent, of the ruling imperialist class.
Not long ago I spent some time with Michael Laski, down at the Workers’ International Bookstore in Watts, the West Coast headquarters of the C. P. U. S. A. (M. -L.). We sat at a kitchen table beneath the hammer-and-sickle flag and the portraits of Marx, Engels, Mao Tse-tung, Lenin, and Stalin (Mao in the favored center position), and we discussed the revolution necessary to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary. He had with him a small red book of Mao’s poems, and as he talked he squared it on the table, aligned it with the table edge first vertically and then horizontally. To understand who Michael Laski is you must have a feeling for that kind of compulsion. One does not think of him eating, or in bed. He has nothing in common with the passionate personalities who tend to turn up on the New Left. Michael Laski scorns deviationist reformers. He believes with Mao that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, a point he insists upon with blazing and self-defeating candor. His place in the geography of the American Left is, in short, an almost impossibly lonely and quixotic one, unpopular, unpragmatic. He believes that there are “workers” in the United States, and that, when the time comes, they will “arise,” not in anarchy but in conscious concert, and he also believes that “the ruling class” is self-conscious, and possessed of demonic powers. He is in all ways an idealist.
As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest “depression,” did venture that it might have been “depressing” for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them. Michael Laski, you see, did not feel as close to me as I did to him. “I talk to you at all,” he said, “only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services. Basically you want to conduct the same probe the F. B. I, would carry out if they could put us in a chair.” He paused and tapped the small red book with his fingernails. “And yet,” he said finally, “there’s a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence.”
Still, he was not going to discuss with me what he called “the underground apparatus” of the C. P. U. S. A. (M. -L.), any more than he would tell me how many members constituted the cadre. “Obviously I’m not going to give you that kind of information,” he said. “We know as a matter of course that we’ll be outlawed.” The Workers’ International Bookstore, however, was “an open facility,” and I was free to look around. I leafed through some of the Uterature out of Peking (Vice-Premier Chen Yi Answers Questions Put by Correspondents), Hanoi (President Ho Chi Minh Answers President L. B. Johnson), and Tirana, Albania (The Hue and Cry About a Change in Tito’s Policy and the Undeniable Truth), and I tried to hum, from a North Vietnamese song book, “When the Party Needs Us Our Hearts Are Filled with Hatred.” The literature was in the front of the store, along with a cash register and the kitchen table; in back, behind a plywood partition, were a few cots and the press and mimeograph machine on which the Central Committee prints its “political organ,” People’s Voice, and its “theoretical organ,” Red Flag. “There’s a cadre assigned to this facility in order to guarantee the security,” Michael Laski said when I mentioned the cots. “They have a small arsenal in back, a couple of shotguns and a number of other items.”
So much security may seem curious when one considers what the members of the cadre actually do, which is, aside from selling the People’s Voice and trying to set up People’s Armed Defense Groups, largely a matter of perfecting their own ideology, searching out “errors” and “mistakes” in one another’s attitudes. “What we do may seem a waste of time to some people,” Michael Laski said suddenly. “Not having any ideology yourself, you might wonder what the Party offers. It offers nothing. It offers thirty or forty years of putting the Party above everything. It offers beatings. Jail. On the high levels, assassination.”
But of course that was offering a great deal. The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered. Let me tell you about another day at the Workers’ International Bookstore. The Marxist-Leninists had been out selling the People’s Voice, and now Michael Laski and three other members of the cadre were going over the proceeds, a ceremony as formal as a gathering of the Morgan partners.
“Mr. — Comrade—Simmons — what was the total income?” Michael Laski asked.
“Nine dollars and ninety-one cents.”
“Over what period of time?”
“Four hours.”
“What was the total number of papers sold?”
“Seventy-five.”
“And the average per hour?”
“Nineteen.”
“The average contribution?”
“Thirteen and a half cents.”
“The largest contribution?”
“Sixty cents.”
“The smallest?”
“Four cents.”
“It was not a very good day, Comrade Simmons. Can you explain?”
“It’s always bad the day before welfare and unemployment checks arrive.”
“Very good, Comrade Simmons.”
You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.
1967