(8) Political programs and their limits

RJ: Is it the case that you don't have a system to offer, as you did when you were recruiting for the Communist Party, or that you feel like you know what should happen in the world but back off from telling people?

AO: The structure, the political program, that can get us to the next phase of history doesn't exist yet, if you ask me. We're going to have to learn, discover, nurture something that is different. The overwhelming majority of people, including some historians, think there are only two alternatives in human life in the modern era -- capitalism and socialism, as we have known them. I don't buy that. That's not the end of the script. Neither one are the end of history.

Marxism had a very profound effect worldwide, a lot of it positive, but it finally got calcified and died a very painful death. Not only did it damage itself, with the Communist parties, but it even made the word socialism a little bit muddy. Now, we're in a situation in which socialism, as he projected it, is gone, and capitalism is not dying an immediate death but is eroding. Is this the end of history? I don't believe that. I believe that it's a period in which there will rise and grow ideologies which are totally foreign to those of us who came up on the traditional left. I don't have labels, but I know that history does not tolerate vacuums. Capitalism certainly is not adequate to conditions today, although it takes some arguing to convince people, because too many people are still getting goodies out of it. But I think in your lifetime you'll see that kind of change.

RJ: When you look around the world, where do you see the best prospects for the future?

AO: What's happening in Latin America, the move to the left, looks genuine and promising. There's been a certain globalization of anti-imperialist forces. I welcome them. I'm happy about them, but I do not think this is the answer. I don't expect that at all, because I've learned in my life that most radicals and revolutionaries are much better people before the revolution than after, and some of those virtues come from not being in power -- they just lack the opportunity to be real bastards. So, these developments are very good, but to engage in wishful thinking is ridiculous politically.

RJ: So Hugo Chavez [the leftist president of Venezuela] is not the messiah?

AO: He's more than not the messiah -- he also seems to be a pretentious fucker. I've had concrete experience with this kind of thing, when I went to work in 1985 in Nicaragua, on a project to build a village for about 30 or 40 campesino families that had formed a cooperative, an agricultural cooperative. A lot of people in the Sandinista leadership knew about the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades, and I got invited to dinner with people like [Sandinista leader Daniel] Ortega and the other big shits. It apparently was for them a treat because they could talk with an organic piece of history and all that. What did I learn about them? Nothing that surprised me very much. On one hand, nobody had ever tried as much as they did to do something substantive for the people. They did take some steps to introduce health care, which was totally absent, and education, and a few other such things. And they had run great risks, of imprisonment, torture, death. But after they seized power, they took over the nice air-conditioned homes of the guys they had kicked out. Their children went to special schools. They shopped in special stores that were set up on the Soviet model. The corruption was evident. And at dinner with Ortega and his lieutenants, we ate the finest of food -- I mean, fine food, the best of wines, smoked the best of cigars, served by a waiter, and the cook was from Guatemala and so on and so forth. At least I had the pleasure of telling them off.

RJ: You told them off that night?

AO: Oh yea. I told them what a bunch of fuckers they were. And they had to sit still for it, because I'm this living part of the history they think is marvelous and so forth. So they had to put up with me. But I've had a number of experiences in my life with people who are honestly dedicated to the movement, who risked their life for it, who suffered all kinds of horrible personal deprivations and unpleasantness, but who became very different people when they had power. Power changes people.

I know it's a little bit true in my own life. I was a son of a bitch at the height of my Communist life. I really was -- mean-spirited, sometimes cruel. I helped expel people from the Young Communist League and from the party because we determined their thinking was anti-party. I did those things, on a small scale, because I didn't have much power. If I'd have had more power, I'd have been more of an abomination.

Part 9 - The endless haul

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