Communism

Somewhere between Canada and Florida in southeastern New York State a famous mountain range rises from the Hudson Valley and slopes downward into the Allegheny Plateau. How do I know what the borders are? I lived there once and the boundary of the Catskills is flexible for its residents. “When you have two rocks for every bit of dirt, you are in the Catskills,” as the old saying goes. Why famous? Because for two hundred years or more this area has been a cultural landmark for the whole country. Rip Van Winkle slept there according to Washington Irving. The last of the Mohicans hunted deer in its heavy forests. The Hudson River School of paintings transferred the landscape to canvas. In the 1950’s and 1960’s a long line of resorts favored by wealthy New York City Jews called “The Borscht Belt” gave birth to some of America’s best stand up comediennes (see the movie Dirty Dancing). Most importantly for my baby boomer generation, Max Yasgur’s farm provided a home for 400,000 scruffy youngsters over a weekend in 1969. The event was called Woodstock after a nearby village that even today is peopled by writers, artists, sculptures, candle-makers, and other weird beings with names like Sunshine, Clover, and Ralph.

But, what drives my thoughts to the page regarding the area has little to do with recreation and art. To me, it provides an historical touchstone much better than the fall of the Berlin Wall to mark the failure of Communism. This may seem strange considering the fact that in the early 1970’s when I lived on one of those mountains Communism was having a grand old time in much of the world. Nevertheless, the doom of the theory as a workable concept of governance was clearly prophesied through my experience as an outlaw in the counterculture.  

Most standard definitions of communism include some stock phrases—a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order—and the hatred of every good, red-blooded capitalist American. Many experiments with this ideology resulted in the rise of cruel and hypocritical oligarchies. Those few, especially in Latin America, that resulted in some degree of popularity through free elections ( see Chile, Allende, Pinochet) were immediately crushed by the CIA lest their successes become public knowledge to the detriment of our great American corporations. 

On the other hand, a few burned out veterans of wars, drugs, universities, and adolescent angst in those early post-sixties days did attempt a form of communism on a much smaller scale here in this country and they felt truly that it might lead to a better way of life, or at least to more sex. I joined one such utopian experiment myself quite by accident, if you consider my homelessness an accident. Simply put, I had overstayed my welcome at the home of a college friend’s parents and didn’t have enough money to rent a new home on my own. As a consequence, I took up an invitation from another friend who was living in a ranch style house on top of a little hill we called Goose Pond Mountain. He and several other people rented the house from a retired couple who had moved to Florida. There were four bedrooms and there were men and women. Two of the men and women cohabited, which left rooms available for someone who didn’t mind the absence of privacy and was willing to eat out of a communal refrigerator that contained communal groceries. Or, at least that was the plan. Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity, according to Karl Marx.

Most of us had read Abbie Hoffman’s tome, Steal This Book, before we realized that Hoffman was simply another capitalist con man hiding his true intentions beneath a thin veneer of socialist rhetoric and we wanted to believe that morality was for bourgeois squares who had no understanding of the great quest for equality and justice that drove us. Consequently, each member of our little commune had specific amoral duties of procurement that created a harmonic balance in our home for a while. The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite. Old Karl had a thousand of these pithy sayings from which perspective we could accomplish almost any goal without guilt or regret. We supplied the food by filling a cart with every kind of expensive delicacy that could be found at the local supermarket. We chose the local market because a girl from the area partied with us frequently at the ranch and also worked the cash registers. I can’t remember how many times we loaded the car with steaks, caviar, various fresh-baked pastries, and a constant supply of Frosted Flakes for a certain member of the group who will remain nameless, but went by the call sign Mick-Dawg. The most I ever paid was two dollars and seven cents for the whole load during my weekly hunting and gathering.

One of the guys, named Phil, managed a liquor store. This became a problem for two of us who left New York as alcoholics, though we didn’t realize at the time. In that brief paradisiacal period our small circle of friends that included several regular local visitors—the legal drinking age was eighteen in New York at the time—experimented with almost every kind of expensive alcohol imaginable from Dom Perigon and Glenfiddich to gutter rot such as Mad Dog 20/20 and Early Times bourbon . The state has raised the drinking age to twenty-one since those days, and it may have had something to do with the cacaphony of widespread debauchery that rose from Goose Pond Mountain. I’m sure it retrospect it didn’t, but in those days we felt as if we were the center of the universe and believed in our own omnipotence. Therefore, influence on statewide politics would not have been beyond our capabilities. We were legendary outlaws in our own minds.

We shared it all without complaint, including rent, utility bills, tee shirts, automobiles, stem-stuffed and harsh bags of marijuana, and more than a little pure laughter. Life was joyous for about a year, maybe a little more. During the days everyone worked menial jobs around Chester, Goshen, Monroe, Middletown, or one of the other small villages in the area. Many of our weekends were spent in the New York City listening to street performers in Washington Park, drinking cheap Schafer beer at Greenwich Village pubs and discussing the counterculture revolution that lived only in our heads. Sometimes, we caught concerts at Manhattan College. Groups like Mountain, Yes, and Humble Pie frequented that venue. We fell in and out of love with each other. I fell in and out of love with most of the young women in Chester, New York, at one time or another. No one thought further than the next minute or beyond the current mantra “Do Your Own Thing.” No one paid attention to the most insightful of Mr. Marx’s observations about human nature. Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

People, any and all people, will go only so far living together without any consideration or concern for what those around them think, feel, and do. Living together involves more than self-fulfillment. It requires self-sacrifice as well. And, sacrifice is not natural to humans, but a concept that must be nurtured, cultivated, and consciously disciplined if it is to grow. We were all too young to understand that at this time in our lives. I’m sure some of us still don’t. It’s difficult, at best, to willingly forego immediate gratification for the sake of another person that you may not even like. On the other hand, doing whatever you want emotionally and only sharing the minimal material goods, with your closest neighbors, soon becomes nothing more than an empty gesture, even more so when those material goods are basically meaningless to you anyway.  As time went by, we discovered the weakness of communism was not the economics of the theory, but the fact that living together in a group is a shallow enterprise if it is only economics that binds you.

When the emptiness came, and it did it one way or another for all of us, the pain followed. We became jealous as people paired off with exclusive sexual relationships. We became petty wondering who contributed the most to our financial upkeep. We became angry when we disagreed on how best to maintain our little society and envious when someone else got a better job or a break we felt they didn’t deserve. Smaller groups formed within the larger and alliances forced a competitive tension to the once serene, if indifferent, atmosphere. We treated each other cruelly if one of us lost a job or couldn’t carry an equal burden of work for some reason. Eventually, every one of us discovered that we didn’t really like some of the people we had chosen to live with very much and, without empathy, compassion, and a feeling of responsibility for more than just oneself, no society regardless of how large or small will work forever if the individuals who form it disrespect these concepts.

As our experiment in communism collapsed without a genuine effort to live together beyond the material one we supplied, so will our current experiment in democracy I believe. But, I think Marx prophesied that as well.