Remember that Simpsons episode where Kent Bronckman thinks the world has been taken over and says “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords”. Well, that’s how I feel about the late great Pete Seeger’s relationship with Communism. To deny that Seeger was a Communist who supported the Soviet Union at least until he quit in 1950.
Now, I have little time for Communism as practised by the USSR and China (Vietnam? Not so much, any country based on barter and communes works better with Communism) but hindsight is 20/20, still Seeger was in fact a communist and a willing dupe of Stalinism and a regime than made the Nazi’s look like amateurs when it came to mass murder. The rest of the world is still catching up.
It doesn’t bother me that much, it was a long time ago, but it bothers when I am being spoon fed the Springsteenization of Seeger as a blue collar worker: that simplifies where his allegiances were. If politics are a pendulum, we have seen how a capitalism democracy soon devolves into a monopoly, so before you go off the deep end about a situation Seeger had limited insight into, remember the Great Depression, remember what happened to capitalism then.
So, OK, I’ve got nothing against Seeger and while I am not the fan of his polit folkism, I don’t actively dislike it either. When I have seen him on stage, several times now and the last time in 2012, I never bought into Seeger the friendly Grandpa. There was always a glint in his eye, a testiness, and a strength that had grown brittle and yet still existed and now he is dead I buy even less what he became or what he seemed to appear to represent because I feel that Seeger in the first full rush of youth, the man who wanted to hammer this country, was closer to his essence. It was the man seen whole.
To be a communist is a young man’s game. Even more than a democracy you need to believe in a common good and sharing that is completely at odds with human nature. Even Jesus Christ gave up on poverty by the time he hit his 30s, in Mark 14:7 Christ noted “For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not alway.” As for Marx, he gave every tin pot tyrant an out the day he wrote there could be a transitional stage between the old and communism when totalitarianism is acceptable. Much like the imminent return of Jesus, the time span is open to interpretation.
You would think Seeger might have noticed that but to be a communist is it to make a very certain decision about how people and living really is and while it was the definition of a dystopia to believe in a very American way or a very great equality is to almost necessarily embrace it. To put it in another: a simple but good man does not do what Seeger did and the claiming of his uniform decency when we know what the truth was, he was a complicated guy who was willing to accept sacrifices for the rise of communism and supported the USSR period end of sentence, is yet another lie in the Bruce Springsteenization of a folk icon.