New York subway scene. Two women. The one with Swedish braids and wearing an army jacket is cradling an umbrella and two flags. One looks like the flag of Yemen, and the other is probably Palestinian. The other woman rests three printed yellow and black poster signs on the floor. One reads “Stand with Palestine. End the Occupation Now” and bears the logo of the “Party for Socialism and Liberation.” She has a bullhorn on her lap. Both women are consulting their cell phones. They seem pretty happy, and I take it they are fresh from a protest event and are checking to see if they made the news.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) explains on its website that it “believes that the only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society.” It is a splinter of the Workers World Party, from which it split in 2004. It is straightforwardly a communist party that adheres to “democratic socialism.” That means its members hew to party discipline and are “duly bound to defend and carry out” the party’s decisions publicly.
PLM swims into view for me as one of the bodies funded by Neville Roy Singham, an operative of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who is active in New York City. Singham is based in Shanghai and is said to have contributed upwards of $20 million to various radical causes, mostly through the “Justice and Education Fund.” Singham, I am told, provided much of the funding for the protests that tore through Columbia University last Spring. Another of his radical charities is the ANSWER coalition (“Act Now to Stop War and End Racism”), whose protest signs are printed in the same color and font as the PSL signs—no real brand differentiation.
I snapped this photograph mostly because I was caught by the glowing innocence of the young women as they took a break from advocating tyranny and promoting, I suppose, anti-Semitism. What I first took for naiveté, however, resolved into something darker. Are they knowingly agents of CCP subversion? I have recently been re-reading Whitaker Chambers’s memoir, Witness, in which he retraces his years in the American Communist Party and then as part of a Washington-based Soviet spy apparatus. He eventually broke free and later still testified to Congress about what he knew. But in the early days of his communist infatuation, he did his part in protests. Indeed, he met his future wife on the frontlines of one of those protests.
Chambers’ days of communist activism were in the 1920s and 1930s, a century ago—yet the scene today feels eerily familiar. Like many young activists today—perhaps even these two women—Chambers was once a student at Columbia University, where he, too, was swept up in the ideological fervor of his time. The difference is that, back then, the protests were fueled by the utopian promises of Soviet communism; today, they are driven by a new set of global actors, including the CCP, which funds much of the agitation on campuses like Columbia—a century of idiocy, recycled through fresh faces and slogans.
I hope these two women will also one day break free from the monster that has engulfed them. But of course, we live in a time when college students and recent graduates, in strong numbers, endorse much of what PSL calls for.
Photo by Peter Wood
Mr. Wood, a trained Anthropologist, violates nearly every anthropolgical code in this diatribe. First he is an outsider, he is not part of these groups he is talking about, nor really has any interest in engaging them other than scrolling at the website of some political group they may or may not be affiliated with. Secondly he takes photos of them, without their permission and publishes them publicly online – a considerable ethical violation – considering the power dynamic a white older male of his priveledge has over two young females in our society. He engages in voyeuristic conjectures, reminiscent of the colonizing, exoticizing gaze, a practice that has largely been condemned and jettisoned by today’s anthropology community. I suppose, like his interpretation of these two activists, he himself is carrying out an old agenda…
says an old white man fully ensnaired in his own version of Make America Paranoid Again heresay, redbaiting, neo-McCarthyism. I hope that he will adhere to his own advice and “one day break free from the [capitalist, jingoist, US imperialist, genocide-funding] monster that has engulfed [him]. But of course, we live in a time when college students and recent graduates [don’t give a damn what white-fragile old farts have to say?]