The Ancient Greeks had a legend about a king of Corinth who answered to the name Sisyphos. This character became one of the notorious sinners of his age because he insulted Pluto, the god of Hades, and because he spread a story about a certain amour of the chief god, himself, Zeus. Sisyphos was condemned to spend eternity trying to roll a boulder up a hill. Whenever he came near the top, the boulder got away from him, rolled down the hill, and he would have to begin all over. The word, sisyphean, is now preserved in the language to denote a type of labor that is endless and fruitless.
Socialists, in observing the strategy and tactics of reformers and self-styled revolutionaries, today, are reminded of the legend of Sisyphos. Take the case of the college radicals. All over the country and throughout much of the world, the kids are seizing campus buildings, marching, striking, distributing flaming handbills, holding mass meetings, keeping things in a continual uproar. They provide grist for the press, TV, and radio and many sleepless nights, no doubt, for the college administrators. Just what else they really hope to accomplish is difficult to imagine.
They have discovered the deep involvement of the universities with the Government in the bloody business of war — especially in the Vietnam War, which they did not approve. They seem determined to force the universities to turn over a new leaf, to get down to the business of education for which they are supposedly designed. What they have not discovered is the obvious fact that universities must reflect the attitudes and purposes of the capitalist class; that the great institutions of learning are but extensions or subsidiaries of the huge industries that finance them. And they have not discovered another important fact. Recognition of the direct connection between capitalism and war, and between capitalism and mass poverty is not enough to eliminate such ills prior to the outright abolition of capitalism, itself.
But the angry and impatient students do not have time for such a philosophy. You socialists, they tell us, are talking about a world of the distant future. There is an immediate problem or two. There are people being killed in Vietnam and there are many millions, even in America, suffering every day from poverty, from high rents, from high food prices, from high streetcar fares and from high cost of living, generally. Who has time to listen to socialist utopianism? They give us a disgusted sneer or shrug of the shoulders and are off to their sisyphean labors.
Like all analogies, however, this one is not entirely fitting. Old Sisyphos couldn’t help himself, nor could anyone else inform him of a theory that could save him from his bleak future. In the mythology of Ancient Greece, all was foreordained and one’s fate could not be circumvented. It was mapped out by the gods of the Pantheon. But what is it that prevents the college radicals and radicals, generally, from ceasing their useless labor? Are they, too, condemned by some supernatural power to endless and fruitless struggle against the effects of capitalism? We doubt that many, if any of them could be influenced that way by any of the current crop of religions. One would think that kids who are clever enough to get into and through college should have the understanding that capitalism is but operating normally. That warfare, poverty, slums — and the rats, bedbugs and cockroaches that go with slums as a grim bonus — are all intrinsic to capitalism.
Why, then, do they continue to try to make capitalism operate uncapitalistically? Why do they reject the idea of organizing now to abolish capitalism, to introduce a social system wherein such evils as they decry could not exist? Were it possible to improve conditions for all rather than for a minority through reform rather than revolution It would all be understandable. Have the student radicals been brainwashed by the propaganda of the very institutions they rebel against? Do they see themselves as future leaders and saviors of society? It's high time they tried socialism and forgot their radical reformist tactics.
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