on the cover / By Japhet Weeks

Seeing Red

John Meyer suggested an idea made popular by 20th century liberal political scientist Louis Hartz. “Because the United States never had a tradition of feudalism in which there were clearly delineated classes in which people were born into,” Meyer said, “Americans typically imagined themselves as classless and therefore appeals based on your position in the working class didn’t tend to connect with people in this country and didn’t tend to be successful.”

Green didn’t presume to know any details about the present state of communism in Humboldt County, although he did suggest something inherently problematic about trying to take a litmus test of Humboldt’s communist community by merely looking for Communist Party members.

“One of the problems you have to face,” he said “is that … there are so many who broke off [from the Communist Party] and became Shachtmanites or Trotskyites and Trotskyists — who disliked each other.”

Like Meyer, he interprets the fracturing of the Communist Party as a sign that it was “completely frustrated with virtually no possible way of affecting any kind of change.”

“So you talk about the Communist Party here,” he said, “maybe there is a Trostkyist Party here, I don’t know. A guy who came up to me was a Revolutionary Communist — he was a Maoist! … There may be one or two of each variety around.”

Upon leaving Michael Langdon’s doublewide, I noticed a Chinese Yin Yang symbol painted on the front door. Just moments before, Langdon had told me of his deep distrust of organized religion: “More people have been killed, suffered and tortured,” he said, “in the name of religion than any natural disaster, any force in the universe.” Still, he admitted that he was spiritual.

The communism Langdon ascribes to seems — like the symbol on his door — to embrace contradiction. In a changing world, communists like Langdon hope the revolution will bring a parliamentarian form of government; they are backing Barack Obama for president; and they are willing to laugh about their bankcards. Purists might decry all of this as blasphemy. Langdon would probably invoke that favorite word of his, “dialectical materialism,” and emphasize it with a staccato gesture of his hand: “… all things progress and evolve through conflict and contradiction,” he would say. Commie Mike is still putting his faith in Marx, but there’s a certain local flavor about his willingness to make room for dissenting voices — and maybe it says something profound about where communism in Humboldt County is headed.

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