I am a little intimidated by what I've gotten myself into. I had thought that if ten folks were interested, it would be worth my time - but there are just over seventy of you that have signed up. Now I'm really nervous. One or two of you are my age, but some of you are in high school. A note that came in early this week from Brian included ". . . I just started high school about a month ago" - this underlines some of the problem of "understanding and being understood."

About which I'll say more in a moment. First, I had said I'd list websites that were of value - Micah sent me a couple of anarchist sites which for the moment I've lost, but I would list the web site of the AJ Muste Memorial Institute: http://www.ajmuste.org

The Institute puts out a series of $1 pamphlets and I'd like to recommend several as good background (and great bargains). You won't find a cheaper edition of Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience. Rosa Luxemburg's "Letters from Prison" written during World War I are a collector's item that the Institute brought back into print. Aldous Huxley's essay on "Science, Liberty, and Peace" suggests some of the ways technology could liberate rather than enslave us. Martin Luther King Jr. issued some radical statements gathered in one pamphlet. Some of you are clearly interested in at least some of the things I've written and for my views on nonviolence, the Institute recently issued: The Philosophy of Nonviolence. Joe DeNeen, a young member of the Socialist Party in Michigan, has gathered a number of the pieces I've written over the years on a website he has set up: [This link is now dead; no indication of whether the files were removed or simply deleted. -Editor]

One important source of information is the regular collection of news items put out by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism - this is called: Portside, meaning, in nautical parlance, "the left side." You subscribe to this site by writing: portside-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Let me go back to the problem of communicating not only across lines of race, and class, and culture but also of age.

I was born in October of 1929, a couple of days before the stock market crashed. The world I grew up in was tinged by those memories (my mother mixing oleomargarine with a packet of color to make it look like butter). When I became a young radical the First World War (called at the time simply "The Great War" - no one thought there would ever be another one) had ended only ten years before I was born. The echoes of that horror were very close - far closer than the Indochina War which ended in 1975, over a quarter of a century ago, long before Ben or Brian were born. Socialism didn't seem to impossible - the Labour Party won the British general elections in 1945, stunning America. (When parliament assembled after the election, the Labour MP's rose to sing "The Workers Flag"). The Socialist parties in Western Europe and Asia were powerful. American politics was perhaps as far "left" then as it is far "right" today.

When I started Jr. High School the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor (which hit home to my family, as my mother had a sister who lived in Honolulu); my father was soon off to India in the army air corps to fight in the Pacific area. The Soviet Union was our great ally. And while the groups I worked with in college were strongly anti-Soviet, we didn't see the world as divided between capitalism and communism, but rather a future which had to chose between socialism and communism. (And also, in a world which had just seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it would be a choice for the first time in history between life or death for the human race.)

As a young members of the Socialist Party when we said "socialism in our time" we meant it, we believed it.

If, however, you were born twenty years later, in 1949, you grew up with memories of the Cold War, of McCarthyism, of blacklists, of Stalin. You were born the same year as China saw Mao and the Communist Party take power. If you were a young radical the biggest, more hopeful thing in your life was the Civil Rights movement which started in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955.

But the "American Left" had shrunk. The Socialist and Communist parties were small and growing smaller. There was a "New Left." (Maurice Isserman did an excellent book on this, which I can't find - I am not even sure of the title. If someone getting this remembers the title, let me know and I'll list it next time. And if someone borrowed it, please return it!).

One thing that would have happened, whether you were close to the Communist Party or the Socialist Party, was that in 1953 Stalin died, and three years later, at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khruschev, then the Soviet leader, made a secret speech denouncing the "cult of personality" and listing the crimes of Stalin. This meant two things. One was that it suggested it might be possible for the Communist world to "reform from within," the other was a body blow to the kind of cult atmosphere throughout the Communist world in which Stalin had been a kind of Pope, and Moscow a kind of Rome. (By the early 1960's, when China broke openly with Moscow, the period of "Communism with a single center" was ended.)

Let's leap ahead once more, thirty years, to assume you were born in 1979. You are now just 23 years old. The Soviet Union is a memory, having gone out of existence in 1991. The Indochina War was over before you were born. The huge revolution of the American Civil Rights movement is so long ago you may not believe that as late as 1960 almost all of the South was segregated, that blacks had to move to the back of the bus or train. You have never seen a strong socialist movement in the United States. Russia has gone capitalist, and so, it seems, has China. Even Cuba has had to adopt a "dual economy" (one in which the dollar is in common use) to survive. The British Labour Party is in power but headed by a nasty little man named Tony Blair who seems more in love with US policy than the interests of British workers.

If you are in this group, born 20 to 25 years ago, socialism surely must seem utopian. A "vision thing," not a real movement. Certainly not at all the kind of "reality" it was for those of us who are 70 or over, who grew up with a faith in the Communist Party (shattered by events) or the Socialist Party (modified, at least, by events).

I mention that socialism may seem utopian because what I want to explore now is the issue of utopia, its good points and bad points. Long before Karl Marx and the Industrial Revolution, Sir Thomas More wrote a novel titled "Utopia." It was a new word, derived from a Greek word meaning "good place" and another Greek word which meant "no place." It was meant to conjure up a vision of an ideal society. The concept of "Utopia" gained real force with the Industrial Revolution when it seemed possible to serve all human needs and yet the workers lived in the most terrible of conditions. Here, under early capitalism, was abundance of goods flowing from the newly constructed factories - along with a population afflicted with unemployment, and a lack of the most basic kinds of medical care or social amenities. (Again, read Charles Dickens' novels.)

There was a strong revival of "utopianism" among the early socialists. It may be useful to list some of the various kinds of "socialisms" which emerged with the Industrial Revolution. Utopian socialism is one, and I'll came back to it in a moment. Christian socialism is another. Non-Christians or nonbelievers might call themselves Ethical socialists. With the publication of Marx and Engels "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848 (and this document is really required reading for those trying to grasp the origins of modern socialism) the term "Scientific Socialism" or "Marxism" springs into use. Much later, after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the term now often used - "Marxist-Leninist" - comes into use. (I'd note that one may well be a Marxist of sorts, as I consider myself to be, and not accept the term "Marxist-Leninist" - that we'll get to much later.)

There was a general agreement among these different kinds of socialists that the people who worked for a living should be the ones who made the decisions about the work, and should be the ones sharing the output. That is, bluntly put, they should own the factories, should "control the means of production." It didn't matter much whether you were utopian, Christian, or "scientific," the idea that great concentrations of capital should remain in private hands, or that economic forces needed by all of society - such as natural resources - should be privately owned was a scandal.

The positive side of utopia is that it does give us a yardstick by which to measure "where we are now." If you are hungry and want to have a really good meal, and drive along the road and find yourself at a McDonald's, then you are at the wrong place. (Unless you've a strange idea of a "good meal"). You want a decent restaurant because that was in your mind when you started driving. (Or, in Manhattan, walking.)

So, if by socialism you mean a society where people are both free to express themselves and also free of hunger, and you wind up in East Germany in 1955, you know at once that isn't the kind of socialism you want. It helps to have some idea of what you are looking for before you try to find it. Or as Oscar Wilde wrote: "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias." Or Anatole France: "Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who trace the lines of the first city . . . Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future."

THE PROBLEM WITH UTOPIA

Utopian socialists didn't feel you needed to "organize" for socialism - it was enough to draw the map, to outline the glory of the future, and people would be drawn to it. The catch is, life doesn't work that way. And it doesn't work that way for two reasons. One is simple human inertia - a force so powerful and so obvious many of us overlook it. People - and societies - tend to continue doing what they are already doing, no matter how dangerous that may be, until some crisis forces a change in behavior. We know - all of you getting this - that the United States MUST adopt a new energy policy, that we should outlaw SUV's, improve Amtrak, modernize mass transit, and raise the tax on gasoline - as well as exploring solar energy, wind energy, etc. BECAUSE IN THE RELATIVELY NEAR FUTURE OIL AND COAL WILL RUN OUT.

Yet no one is doing anything about this. One reason we may end up in a war with Iraq is because the people running the United States find it easier to go to war than think about alternatives to oil.

And this is the second reason - not only do all of us suffer from inertia, but some of us make huge profits from a bad situation. Los Angeles used to have a good system of mass transit - about 70 years ago. The auto industry helped buy up the tracks and let the system run down so that people would shift to cars. Not because this was a good idea, but because it was a profitable idea. The street cars in Los Angeles were inexpensive to maintain, they generated little profit - but cars meant huge profits, as did the construction of freeways.

Reasonable people (and a lot of people are reasonable) know that we would have less world violence if the manufacture and shipment of conventional weapons (guns, tanks, military aircraft, artillery, land mines, etc.) was simply banned. But those reasonable people don't have a lobby - the arms industry does.

This even applies to us as individuals. Back in the early 1970's I had clearly become an alcoholic. Friends and family tried to talk to me about this. I denied I had any problem, or needed to make any changes. It was not until my drinking was so out of control that it caused me more pain than I ever imagined, that I got help. The same is true with smoking - all of us knows perfectly well that smoking isn't healthy, that it will shorten our lives, etc. etc. Yet I tried dozens of times to give up and failed until one day I read Edgar Snow's remarkable book "Red Star Over China" about the Communist Revolution there. In that book, the chief general under Mao, a brilliant and courageous man, was able to break his opium habit because of his conversion to "Marxist/Leninist thought." I felt, as someone more influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, that I had to prove I could stop smoking and I finally did. (I'm not sure this proves anything ideologically - but it sure took me decades to give up smoking.)