A snide interview with Jarvis Tyner

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, July 12, 2002
Letting the Capitalists Eat Crow
By CLYDE HABERMAN

ADMITTEDLY, it was a softball question ? a big, fat, juicy pitch just
hanging there, waiting to be hit out of the park. Jarvis Tyner obliged.

So, Mr. Tyner, here we are in one of the most miserable periods that
American business has endured in quite some time. What do you think about
all this?

Jarvis Tyner smiled. "Well," he said, "we told you so."

Of course, a Communist might be expected to say something like that.
Perhaps it should have been mentioned right off the bat that Mr. Tyner is
the executive vice chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A.

Is there any greater joy for a heart that pounds to the beat of a hammer
attached to a sickle than the sight of capitalists resorting to a form of
corporate hara-kiri? All that is required is to stand aside and watch. Not
interfering while your enemy commits suicide is a time-honored precept.

Thanks to the shenanigans of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the rest, the Dow
Jones industrial average has fallen further in the last three months than
it did in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Think about it. The
boardroom brethren have walloped the stock market harder than Osama bin
Laden did.

That's what you get for putting your faith in capitalists, Mr. Tyner said,
taking a break in the first-floor canteen of the party's headquarters
building on West 23rd Street.

"The growing corruption of big business is a sign of its inability to
generate profits honestly anymore," he said. "People were left out in the
cold. But capitalism always functioned that way. It's just gotten worse.
We've got a society that's run on greed. And they've got their guys in the
White House now."

>From a communist perspective then, might these scandals be considered a
gift from ? you'll pardon the expression ? God?

"We're in the mix," Mr. Tyner said. "We're growing because we're in the mix."

As he sees it, young people are embracing radicalism in a way that echoes
the 1930's and 60's. "Look at the antiglobalization movement," he said. The
Young Communist League has attracted new members, he added. And here and
there around the country, from western Pennsylvania to the People's
Republic of Berkeley, a few comrades have been elected to town councils and
local boards.

Let's not get carried away, though.

Maybe, as Mr. Tyner says, the party has begun to recover a bit from "the
impact of '91," which is how he refers to the collapse of the Soviet Union
11 years ago. But it isn't as if hordes are rushing to 23rd Street to join
the struggle to help workers lose their chains. Given all the layoffs these
days, chains are more likely to lose their workers.


A SYMBOL of the party's continuing troubles is its bookstore, the Unity
Book Center, on the ground floor of the headquarters. It went dark a few
weeks ago for lack of customers. Like everyone else in this city, the
Communists came to realize that "you can't compete with Barnes & Noble."
The store will be moved to a smaller space on the third floor of the
eight-story building.

"We're going to try ? what do you call it? ? e-commerce with the
bookstore," Mr. Tyner said. "We might even have a sale now and then." He
smiled again. "Did you ever see a sale sign in our window?"

No indeed. But then, all kinds of orthodoxies are crumbling. For instance,
the party wants to turn a profit by finding someone to rent the old bookstore.

Sounds suspiciously like Communists relying on capitalist tools, no? "We'd
be foolish not to," Mr. Tyner said. "Here we are, sitting on this property
in a prime area."

"It costs a lot of money to run this building," he said. And after all, the
party can get by for just so long on bequeathals that it says it has
received from 1930's- and 40's-era radicals, who are dying at an inevitably
faster rate. "This place," Mr. Tyner said, "is their heart."

Not that money is everything. "The main thing that builds the party," he
said, returning to Topic A of the moment, "is the failure of capitalism."

He caught some of the president's speech the other day, the one in which
Mr. Bush promised a crackdown on corporate wrongdoers. Mr. Tyner waved his
hand dismissively. "He's playing softball with the big guys," he said.
"He's running with the big dogs, and he's not going to hurt them."

Well, as was noted earlier, what else would you expect from a Communist?
But isn't it funny that Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, have
been saying pretty much the same thing?



Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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