The Orthodox Marxism of Helen Keller
This is the first installment in a series examining various historical Marxists of greater or lesser fame. Its aim is not to be exhaustive or encyclopedic but rather offer a spotlight to stimulate further interest in these figures’ lives, thought, and contemporary legacies.
Today there may range many opinions about famed American radical, Helen Keller. She is variously hailed as an early women’s rights advocate, praised or vilified for her disability rights activism, mocked in tasteless jokes or songs, and generally uplifted by American liberalism as a gifted orator and tireless reformer. But whatever else we may remember her for, it was her orthodox Marxism that stood out to her contemporaries. And it is precisely her Marxism which is neglected today.
This is unfortunate, because she offers us a very accessible entrypoint into the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. At times, she even challenges that orthodoxy, such as with her revolutionary defeatist position on WWI (not dissimilar to Lenin’s own). Though others have no doubt written similar pieces with similar intentions, it is my humble hope that this small diary entry can contribute to a rediscovery of her Marxism, which ought to challenge us as we struggle with our own.
During the period of Keller’s committed revolutionary Marxism (perhaps dating between 1912 and 1929), she uncompromisingly advocated the political maturation and independence of the working class. She had no illusions about either the miserable depths from which the working class had to crawl its way out or their capacity to do so. She hinted as much in a 1916 interview with the New York Tribune: "Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions." And she not only looked forward to but also actively militated for the dictatorship of the proletariat. For her, only the proletariat could move human society forward by unlocking the great productivity, scientific rationality, and cultural and aesthetic wonders borne of modern society: “The time of blind struggle is drawing to a close. The forces governing the law of the survival of the fittest will continue to operate, but they will be under the conscious, intelligent control of man” (Keller 1913). One could easily envision such a statement coming from the likes of a Kautsky, Debs, Luxemburg, or even Lenin. Indeed, Helen Keller was quite at home in the Marxist milieu of her day.
Moreover, she interpreted the world and her relationship to it through a singularly focused historical lens. She believed in the socialistic fulfillment of the bourgeois promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She knew that the age of labor made modern rights and freedoms possible in the first place. Yet she also accepted that bourgeois society had become self-contradictory and had revealed the barest and highest form of historical participation hitherto experienced by humankind: the class struggle.
Keller was a deaf-blind woman. How, then, do we reconcile this commitment to the class struggle? Did her position admit of any so-called class reductionism? Does her Marxism hold water against the stringency required by contemporary intersectionalist analyses?
Here is perhaps where Keller’s orthodox Marxism could be of such value to us today. For she undoubtedly cared about women’s liberation and deaf-blind persons’ rights. But she understood these to be but fronts of the class struggle. She would not have considered them separate nor deserving of special ethical or moral consideration or grounding. Rather, the legitimacy and desirability of each flowed from its solid mooring in the as-yet unfinished bourgeois revolution, a revolution only Marxist socialism could complete. Here is an indicative passage from her 1913 article, “Why Men Need Woman Suffrage:” “Women insist on their ‘divine rights,’ ‘immutable rights,’ ‘inalienable rights.’ These phrases are not so sensible as one might wish. When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim to them.” One would be hard-pressed to find any avowed feminist making an argument like this today! The level of historical consciousness needed to make such an argument reveals the depths of her Marxism, for only the latter imparts such confidence in history as to yield an argument like this. Again, a statement like this could have been one of Zetkin’s or Luxemburg’s, such is the clarity that the era of the Second International inspired.
In this same article, Keller goes on further to argue that the degradation of women, and not only in the electoral or work settings, ends up disadvantaging all proletarians. The class, she argues, is only as strong as its weakest, most marginalized members. Thus, those male proletarians who would downplay or even actively participate in the repression of female labor unknowingly damage their own chances at success. As a side note, this is vaguely reminiscent of W.E.B. DuBois’ argument about slavery in that exploited chattel labor makes wage labor very precarious. It demonstrated the possibility of eliminating even wage labor itself for modern industrial needs and thus the potential regression of the emancipatory potential of the modern age. Again, you would be hard-pressed to find such a proletarian feminist line today. Not many argue for men’s concern in feminism along the lines of self-interest; usually today it is along the lines of ‘patriarchy,’ an anti-Marxist concept that had no place in Keller’s revolutionary proletarian Marxism.
Keller’s orthodox Marxism may have been closer to that of the Second International’s notorious radicals rather than its infamous mainstreamers. Indeed, Keller may have been so orthodox as to appreciate the dangers lurking just beyond the revolutionary optimism endorsed by the Second International. For example, by 1916 she was definitely a revolutionary defeatist, as her brilliant speech, “Strike Against War,” and interview, “Why I Became an IWW,” demonstrate. In the former, she minces no words about the untrustworthiness of the American government and the fact that it does not truly represent workers’ interests. She urges a militant opposition to the war in order to render it impossible for the capitalists to carry on with it. In the latter piece, when asked the patronizing question of whether she supports “education or revolution” in the face of WWI, she answers:
"Revolution." She answered decisively. "We can't have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now. "I am not for peace at all hazards. I regret this war, but I have never regretted the blood of the thousands spilled during the French Revolution. And the workers are learning how to stand alone. They are learning a lesson they will apply to their own good out in the trenches. Generals testify to the splendid initiative the workers in the trenches take. if [sic] they can do that for their masters you can be sure they will do that for themselves when they have taken matters into their own hands. "And don't forget workers are getting their discipline in the trenches," Miss Keller continued. "They are acquiring the will to combat. "My cause will emerge from the trenches stronger than it ever was. Under the obvious battle waging there, there is an invisible battle for the freedom of man."
Now, revolutionary defeatism was perhaps a bit easier to come by for American and Russian Marxists than their European comrades. But this does not diminish the revolutionary clarity Keller possessed about the true nature of the Bonapartist state, the relationship the workers’ movement ought to have with it, and the possibility of making good on the carnage of WWI. She even demonstrated a keen awareness of the dangers of inadvertently beefing up the state through the American war effort. In her “Letter to Morris Hillquit,” she hints that the defeat of “Kaiserism” in Europe would mean nothing if the same regime were to be set up in the US. That is, it would not be worthwhile to support the US government in the name of an abstracted, bourgeois ‘pacifism’ if in the end the only winner were that same government. As a matter of fact, the US government waxed poetic about the necessity of war to prevent the curtailment of ‘freedom’ while simultaneously attacking its domestic socialist movement viciously. Keller maintained no illusions about the state, which is why she could so easily advocate its defeat in the imperialist war.
In this respect, she stands somewhat aloof of mainstream Marxist orthodoxy, which almost to a man capitulated to the nationalistic fervor of WWI and supported the war wholesale. She would have been right at home in the Zimmerwald Conference.
Ultimately, though, her radicalism may not have been enough to have any influence on socialism during or beyond the war. She never got even as far as a Luxemburg, let alone a Lenin; as such, her Marxism was to fade into obscurity. As American Marxism changed in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Keller was perhaps unable or unwilling to keep the flame of her pre-war radicalism alive. She was certainly a fan of the October Revolution, as her 1921 article, “Help Soviet Russia,” and her 1929 article, “The Spirit of Lenin,” indicate. But her Marxism was of that peculiarly pre-war variety whose very constancy perhaps doomed it to inadequacy and ultimately oblivion.
But perhaps not - often a writer will get more poetic the less they know what they are talking about! The point of this essay has been to raise the questions anew, for they are worth delving back into. Perhaps to rediscover the crisis of the Second International through Helen Keller’s Marxism would be to equip us to deal with our own crisis of Marxism today. But perhaps not. The only way to know would be to do it.