The Little Red Book for Children - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/opinion/communism-for-kids-scan...

https://nyti.ms/2sbWrJw

The Opinion Pages The Little Red Book for Children Jacob Blumenfeld

RED CENTURY MAY 28, 2017

BERLIN — To the dismay of parents everywhere, the MIT Press recently published a little red and white book titled “Communism for Kids.” It teaches children how to run gulags, imitate genocidal dictators, praise Satan and pretty much destroy Western civilization — all for a reasonable price of $12.95. The author proudly endorses , Joseph Stalin, Bernie Sanders, Mao, Fidel Castro and millions of other communists who murdered 80 billion people, all the while surreptitiously spreading Jewish, queer and anti-American values to the next generation of freedom- seeking youngsters. At least, that’s more or less the story according to Breitbart, , American Conservative, , The Daily Signal, , , Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder, The Blaze, Pamela Geller, The Christian Truther, The Washington Free Beacon and . Not to mention the tens of thousands of tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos and Amazon reviews that virulently concur.

There’s only one small problem: None of it is true.

Anyone who reads beyond the scandalous title will immediately recognize that the book is a critique of the history of communism. But it is an immanent critique, one that begins by accepting the premises of what it seeks to criticize.

Unlike the army of sock puppet reviewers, I know this because I actually read the book. In fact, I had to read it many times because, along with Sophie Lewis, I

1 von 5 21.06.17, 16:29 The Little Red Book for Children - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/opinion/communism-for-kids-scan...

translated the book from German into English. The author is Bini Adamczak, a Berlin-based scholar who has written extensively on the communist history of the Soviet Union and its many tragedies. The idea behind the book is that one can speak truthfully and poignantly about the political philosophy and economic history of capitalism and communism in much simpler language than that of economists, political scientists and policy experts.

To do so, Ms. Adamczak tells a tale of peasants surviving the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a story about workers adapting to the market demands of capitalist productivity and a parable about different, failed attempts by proletarians and unemployed people to improve their social and economic conditions through collective organizing. Scary stuff, I know. Although the narrative is full of suffering, defeat and failure, the real scandal of the book lies in its optimism, its hope that another world is still possible in the womb of the old. More outrageous, such hope cannot be decreed from above by politicians, leaders or businesspeople, but only created from below by people struggling together for a fair, dignified and free way of life.

Long before the Soviet Union crushed all political tendencies that favored a more libertarian form of socialism, the name for that way of life free from the misery of wage labor was called communism. In the philosophical epilogue to her book, Ms. Adamczak explicitly confronts the problem of how to speak about communism after a century of disasters committed in its name. As she makes abundantly clear, it’s not easy.

And yet, that doesn’t let us off the hook. The only way to truly understand the failures of communism is to take seriously the motivations, desires and ideals of those who advocated it. But to do that, one must first understand capitalism.

This is where it gets very confusing for most critics of communism, because Karl Marx himself praised the productivity, efficiency and power of the market economy. If only we can harness the energy of capitalism without its exploitative effects, many communists pondered, then surely we can create a better society for all. Or: If only the workers could own the factories themselves, then surely we could unleash the productive force of society. Or rather: If only we had economic experts to better

2 von 5 21.06.17, 16:29 The Little Red Book for Children - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/opinion/communism-for-kids-scan...

manage the market, then surely we could satisfy the needs of all. Or even: If only more machines took care of our labor, then surely all our problems would be solved .

Alas, the history of communism is littered with failed attempts by communists to be better at capitalism than the capitalists themselves. As Ms. Adamczak argues, this is because most communist criticisms of capitalism take one idealized aspect of capitalist society and pit it against the others, unwittingly perpetuating the framework communism sets out to abolish. This recipe for disaster recurs throughout history, and the only way to stop it is for everyone to learn about the unsuccessful attempts at revolution, so as not to repeat those mistakes in their current struggles. Hence, “Communism for Kids.”

In the vast sea of hogwash that flooded the conservative mediasphere after the book appeared in English, the same talking-point detritus floated to the surface over and over again: The book indoctrinates children with propaganda; it promotes an evil ideology that led to the death of millions; it is published by a prestigious university that should have known better; it is hypocritical, because it costs money; and it is fundamentally anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-family (and by implication, it’s foreign, Jewish and queer). One reviewer even called it the “most dangerous book on economics ever written for kids.”

One hundred percent of these criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of the title, a basic denial of the fact that all commodities cost money in capitalism and a misconceived view of how academic publishing functions. None of this concerns the book’s actual content.

That didn’t stop the internet swarm, the proper expression of digital communication today, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it. Ms. Adamczak’s original German edition was just called “Communism: A Little Story About How Everything Could Be Different.” In fact, it’s not a children’s book at all, but a book written for everyone in a language that, for the most part, children, too, could understand. The title we chose for the American edition was an elegant way to convey this aspect of the book. There is no propaganda, no brainwashing and no rose-tinted stories of happy-go-lucky communist do-gooders tricking kids into drinking the Marxist Kool-Aid.

3 von 5 21.06.17, 16:29 The Little Red Book for Children - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/opinion/communism-for-kids-scan...

When the book first appeared in Germany, which was over a decade ago, there was no such rage. So what is it about the word “communism” that frightens Americans so much from left to right? Did the Red Scare ever end? I think, rather, that in America the fear of the word “communism” is tied to a fear of the word “capitalism,” another no-go word in polite discourse. It’s easy to talk about markets, industry, the middle class, job creators, lean start-ups, globalization and the gig economy, but to identify our entire society as capitalist and to call our economic system capitalism is to hint at the possibility of an alternative organization of life. And that is dangerous, un-American, perhaps even communist .

Naming the problem may be the first step toward curing the illness, but it doesn’t yet tell us how to proceed. For that, we need ideas, experiments and dreams. Is it wise to dream about utopia while living in the dystopia of the present?

The German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, known for his negative stance toward the world after the experience of Auschwitz, notoriously proclaimed: “There is no right life in the wrong one.” This is usually interpreted to mean that no ethical shifts of individual lifestyle can fix the social problems that systematically result from the political and economic structure of society. Individuals act within predetermined social roles, with little sway over the content of their lives except for a choice of character mask. The real agents of society are not people but things, commodities whose song and dance on the market we must all closely observe and abide by, on pain of starvation, homelessness and death. Adorno’s bleak message was not intended for his contemporaries, but for the future — that is, for our present, so that we may understand how the past failures of revolution destroyed any concrete possibility of hope for another way of life.

There’s another reading of Adorno’s remark. We may not be able to live a wrong life rightly, but we can stop living wrongly altogether. To do that requires a depth of social imagination, the courage of collective struggle and a wellspring of political desire that seems all but evaporated in the present moment. “Communism for Kids” is not a message in a bottle to some imagined future audience; it is rather a collection of broken shards from lost futures still jammed in the present. It is a cry from behind the curtain of history to rectify the injustices of the past by attending to the suffering of the present. I suggest we pay attention.

4 von 5 21.06.17, 16:29 The Little Red Book for Children - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/opinion/communism-for-kids-scan...

Jacob Blumenfeld, a writer and translator, is a researcher in philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

© 2017 The New York Times Company

5 von 5 21.06.17, 16:29