on the cover / By Japhet Weeks

Seeing Red

The communist revolution hasn’t failed in Humboldt County, it’s just changed to meet the times

(May 8, 2008)  It was the first time I had ever heard the words “dialectical materialism” uttered inside a doublewide trailer. It was also my first glimpse into Humboldt County’s small community of communists.

I had come to the right place. Sitting on a twin bed with his dog stretched out beside him in a sunlight-filled room in his McKinleyville home, Michael Langdon, known affectionately by his friends — and comrades — as “Commie Mike,” patiently explained the evolution of his personal politics.

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He wasn’t always a communist, he said. When he was in elementary school he attended a Young Republicans meeting, to the chagrin of his union-organizing father. But it didn’t take long for Langdon to realize that mainstream politics wasn’t his thing. In the 1970s he joined the Socialist Workers Party, which he describes as more radical than the Communist Party USA, into whose fold he later moved.

Langdon has been a card-carrying communist since the 1980s and served for the past eight years as chair of the party’s local chapter, the Humboldt Communist Alliance. He recently moved into the position of co-chair because he doesn’t have a computer, he said, or access to the Internet from his home. The revolution, it would seem, is going to be blogged.

Langdon, 54, short and stocky, looks the part of a radical. His long reddish hair, streaked white, hangs down past his shoulders. He has deeply pockmarked skin and a big nose that pokes out from a full beard. He wears glasses and gesticulates while he speaks about class struggle with a slight lisp.

The walls of his room, which doubles as his office, are covered with an eclectic mix of revolutionaries — Che, Lenin, Uncle Ho and Mao — and tasteful photos of nude women. Langdon’s own politics is equally patchwork. A registered Green, he can’t seem to recall who the communist candidate for president is this year, but guesses it’s Sam Webb, chair of the Communist Party USA. Still, it doesn’t really matter since Langdon is backing Barack Obama.

“We support any progressive candidate that will overturn the Bush reign and start coming back to more humanitarian ideals and the end to the war,” he said. “The war is a big factor with us. Most of us are all egalitarians and peaceniks.”

The “us” refers to the 10-15 registered communists in Humboldt County, according to Langdon’s figures. And though that number seems small, he insists that “right now we have an upswing of people interested in the progressive movement, the socialist movement, because the economic situation is getting harsher by the minute.” In fact “interest has peaked,” he said.

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