Crash Course on California Seekers

Crash Course on California Seekers
by Daniel Tucker

Review: “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.L.)” originally published in The Saturday Evening Post (1967) and re-published in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)

A few years ago I interviewed someone living on a commune who described one of their biggest challenges in getting new members was that so often, the people were “seekers’ looking for something but they didnt know what. She warned that seekers can be very destructive, because they do not know what they want but they want to find it so bad they are willing to do anything to get it.

Joan Didion’s profile of Michael Laski, a sixties communist leader based in Los Angeles, is simultaneously generous and dismissive. Didion meets Laski at his leftist splinter group’s bookstore and discusses his conviction, motivation, and practical day-to-day activities such as selling the party’s newspaper. She finds identification with his “seeker” drive towards making meaning in the world, but never allows herself to inhabit the position of a person with a particular leftist vision of world transformation.

Laski was a member of the small group of people who fell deep into the trap of sectarian conflicts internal to the far left. He was the leader off the Communist Party, USA (Marxist-Leninist) which is explained in dizzying detail on the incredible online resource marxists.org this way:

The C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) was born in Los Angeles during the 1965 Watts riots out of a split in the local POC. It published a newspaper, the People's Voice and a theoretical journal, Red Flag from 1965 to 1968. In 1968, the Party underwent a split, with both successor organization's keeping the C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) name. One, under Arnold Hoffman, continued to publish the People’s Voice. The other, headed by Michael Laski, began publishing a new newspaper, The New Worker in 1969. That same year, the Laski group merged with the Proletarian Revolutionary Party in New York, led by Jonathan Leake, a former anarchist turned Maoist, who had been active in the Resurgence Youth Movement, which was founded in September 1964 as the youth section of the Anarchist Federation to which Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky belonged. Both C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)s appear to have disappeared by 1971. After the demise of the Laski C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.), the former members of the Proletarian Revolutionary Party and others reconstituted themselves as the Marxist-Leninist Party. These C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)s should not be confused with the C.P.U.S.A. (M-L) founded by the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee (M.L.O.C.) in 1978 nor with the C.P. (Marxist-Leninist) created by the October League in 1977.

She writes: “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.” “I am comfortable,” Didion wrote, “with the Michael Laski’s 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.”

She was sympathetic to his desire to make meaning, but could not buy into his political project. Didion had, after all, voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and had sympathy for the individualism, small government, and traditionalism inherent in the conservatism of the Old Right. She told Dave Eggers she was fundamentally a Libertarian, which makes sense because many Libertarians idolize Barry Goldwater. In her introduction to the book Political Fictions she wrote, “Had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter. Instead, shocked and to a curious extent personally offended by the enthusiasm with which California Republicans who had jettisoned an authentic conservative (Goldwater) were rushing to embrace Ronald Reagan, I registered as a Democrat, the first member of my family (and perhaps in my generation still the only member) to do so. That this did not involve taking a markedly different view on any issue was a novel discovery, and one that led me to view "America's two-party system" with--and this was my real introduction to American politics--a somewhat doubtful eye.”

Didion, while critical of the American poltitical system, was ultimately main-stream about the politics she engaged in and had nothing personally to do with the far left. So why did Laski talk to her?

Laski says of his interactions with Didion, "I talk to you at all only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services...And yet there's a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence."

But Laski did not properly calculate his risks. Only a year after the interview with Didion he was expelled from the party (expulsion was a popular past time of sectarian groups at the time). While the official documentation does not say anything explicitly about his interview with Didion for the Saturday Evening Post motivating his expulsion, it does suggest that he was opportunistic and represented his subjective views as official Party views. The closeness in time to the Didion interview cannot be an accident. But even poorer calculations also motivated the expulsion of Laski, he gambled the party’s entire treasury fund in Las Vegas.

Was Didion’s portrait of the sectarian left intended to function as a warning to people not to engage with these political ideas in particular, or was it a warning about getting trapped in your own world of seeking meaning at the expense of relevance?