当共产主义启发美国人
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来源：纽约时报 6park.com
作者：Vivian Gornick 6park.com
翻译：沙中浪底 6park.com
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1947年，美国共产党领导人尤金·丹尼斯在演讲 6park.com
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红色世纪：十月革命100年后，探索共产主义的历史和它留给后世的影响。 6park.com
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在1962年纽约的一个集会上，著名的自由派记者莫雷·肯普顿对着台下满满的铁杆左派说：“我认识许多共产主义者。我认识的他们不是犯罪分子，他们是积极行动者。当然后来我们有我们的分歧。尽管这个国家对你们并不友善，但它很幸运拥有你们。你们被捕、被跟踪、被窃听、你们的孩子被解雇。即便经历了这些，我仍能毫不费力地想起你们中我认识的许多人，他们依然坚强不屈、乐观英勇。”他补充说：“我向你们致敬，并希望更好的时期会来临。” 6park.com
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我的母亲是夜亦在听众中。回家后，她说：“美国很幸运有它的共产主义者。他们比其他任何人都更多地促使美国变成它宣称自己是的那个民主国家。” 6park.com
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我父母是工人阶级的社会主义者。我成长在40年代后期50年代早期，对我而言他们和他们的朋友是他们自称的“进步人士”。进步人士的群体构成很复杂，它的中心是共产党的全职组织者，外围是左翼同情者，中间则分布着各式人等，从普通党员到受人尊敬的同路者。 6park.com
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在我儿时，这样的区别对于我并不存在。那些造访我们在布朗克斯区的公寓、一同参加募资会和集会、一块儿在5月1日游行的人都是进步人士罢了。在厨房的桌子上，他们喝茶、吃黑面包和鲱鱼，谈论“事情”。尽管我听不懂他们聊的东西，但他们丰富的修辞、激烈的争论、在这滚烫奔涌的语词之河背后的炽热追求，都常常让我激动。 6park.com
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他们是那条河上的航行者，这些管道工、熨衣工、缝纫工。除了他们贫瘠有限的个人经历，他们带上旅程的还有一整套有着改革力量的抽象概念。当他们坐下论道，政治和他们一并坐下、理念和他们一并坐下，最重要的是，历史，和他们一并坐下。他们说话和思考的语境，将他们从没有名字、没有脸孔的众生中举起，让他们坚信自己有权利和责任。他们不是春生秋灭不留痕迹之辈，他们是有着自己起源神话（俄国革命）的无产阶级，他们有自己的认知图景（马克思主义）。 6park.com
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的确，成千上万的人在那年头加入了共产党，因为他们是生活艰难的工人阶级（纺织区的犹太人、西弗吉尼亚的矿工、加州的摘水果工）。但更多受过教育的中产阶级（教师、科研工作者、作家）也入了党，因为他们认为，党在道义的高处。这种道义优势通过对社会结构的热切关心和雄辞闳辨，表里兼备地提升了人们对社会不公义的关注意识。 6park.com
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大部分共产主义者从未到过党的总部、没看过中央委员会有谁，也和制定路线的会议无甚关系。但每个普通成员都知道，党的工会分子对工业工人的地位提升至关重要、党的律师在南方为黑人辩护、党的组织者与阿巴拉契亚的矿工、加利福尼亚的农场工人、匹兹堡的钢铁工人们一同生活、工作，有时甚至一同赴死。让这一切成真的是党建立的组织：国际工人兄弟会、全国黑人大会、失业者委员会。在整个大萧条和二战期间，每当新的世界性灾难出现，《工人日报》几分钟内就会一售而空。 6park.com
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今人也许会难以理解，但那阵时，共产党语境下，马克思主义视角的世界大团结在无数平凡男女心中激起一种放大了自身生命的人道主义情感。它宏大而明确。许多人不仅将自身附着在这种内在的明晰感上，还对之上瘾。不论是感情、名声还是财富，没有任何生活中的回报能与这种体验匹敌。这种寰宇一体的感觉常让共产主义者成为狂热分子，看不到警察国家的体制对于他们精神祖国的侵蚀，而即使是一个三岁小儿也能看到它在活生生地吞噬着自己。 6park.com
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当尼基塔 · 赫鲁晓夫1956年2月在苏共二十大上作出报告，揭露斯大林统治下数之不尽的恐怖时，我20岁。夜复一夜，那些在我父亲厨房的桌子旁的人或愤怒、或哭泣、或抬眼望天。我陷在年轻人特有的那种愤怒中不能自已。"说谎！"我朝他们尖叫。“谎言、背叛和谋杀，全部以社会主义之名！以社会主义之名１困惑而心碎的他们让我在等等看，这不可能是全部的真相，这压根不可能。然而这就是。 6park.com
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苏共二十大报告毁灭性地打击了全球范围内有组织的左翼运动。它公开后的几周内，这个国家就有三万人退了党。不到一年，它就被打回了1919年时的原形：美国政治光谱上的一个小派别。 6park.com
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共产党在美国约莫活跃了40年。这40年里，数十万的美国人曾是共产主义者。他们中的许多人忍受了社会的孤立，经济收支和工作事业也被搞得一片狼藉，甚至被投入监狱。除了最初的那些革命家，没有其他美国人比这两代美国人的生活更深地被政治史形塑。他们创造了历史，而历史亦会铭记他们。 6park.com
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When Communism Inspired Americans 6park.com
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At a rally in New York City in 1962, the famously liberal journalist Murray Kempton said to an audience full of old Reds: “I have known many Communists in my life. I have not known them as criminals. I knew them once as activists — and we had our quarrels. But while this country has not been kind to you, it has been fortunate in having you. You have been arrested, you have been followed, you have had your phones bugged, you have had your children fired. Throughout this, I can think of numbers of you I have known who have remained gallant and pleasant and unbroken.” He added, “I salute you and I hope for times to be better.” 6park.com
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My mother was in the audience that night and said, when she came home: “America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.” 6park.com
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My parents were working-class socialists. I grew up in the late 1940s and early ’50s thinking of them and their friends as what they themselves called “progressives.” The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers. 6park.com
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In my childhood, these distinctions did not exist for me. The people who came to our Bronx apartment or were present at the fund-raising parties we attended, the rallies we went to, and the May Day parades we marched in were all simply progressives. At the kitchen table they drank tea, ate black bread and herring, and talked “issues.” I understood nothing of what they said, but I was always excited by the richness of their rhetoric, the intensity of their arguments, the urgency and longing behind that hot river of words that came pouring ceaselessly from them. 6park.com
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They were voyagers on that river, these plumbers, pressers and sewing machine operators; and they took with them on their journey not only their own narrow, impoverished experience but also a set of abstractions with transformative powers. When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism). 6park.com
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While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice. 6park.com
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Most Communists never set foot in party headquarters, laid eyes on a Central Committee member, or were privy to policy-making sessions. But every rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of industrial labor; party lawyers defended blacks in the South; party organizers lived, worked, and sometimes died with miners in Appalachia; farm workers in California; steel workers in Pittsburgh. What made it all real were the organizations the party built: the International Workers Order, the National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councils. Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold out in minutes. 6park.com
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It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive. 6park.com
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I was 20 years old in April 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalin’s rule. Night after night the people at my father’s kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. “Lies!” I screamed at them. “Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism!” Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldn’t be the whole truth, it simply couldn’t be. But it was. 6park.com
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The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map. 6park.com
The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them — and they are in history.