The Higher the Hair the Closer to God
By Peter • Jul 17th, 2007 • Category: U.S. Politics and IssuesAnyone’s who’s been following the ludicrous and depressing Presidential primary spectacle knows that we’ve had to endure a lot of silly news stories about hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen hair.
Now, I don’t care how much John Edwards or Mitt Romney paid for their haircuts. In my socialist utopia, we would all get $400 haircuts. As Big Bill Haywood supposedly said, “nothing’s too good for the working class”. But this is a good opportunity for some serious political reflection: which socialists had the best and worst hair?
DSA founder Michael Harrington kept up an impressive mane right up to the end of his life. He could have used a haircut, though:
What about the Senate’s only self-avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders?
Hmm, a little…unkempt. No $400 haircuts there, that’s for sure.
Of course, Karl Marx was a rather hirsute fellow. But those 20th Century Communists who claimed to follow his example were an increasingly clean cut bunch, as can be seen from an image my Communist friends used to call “the history of shaving”:
Just another reason not to be a Communist, I guess. Trotsky, on the other hand, is always a contender, for sheer volume and for a certain exuberant unruliness:
Less well known, but just as impressive, is the Italian Communist Party theorist Antonio Gramsci:
And let’s not make this a total sausage party. Check out Rosa Luxemburg:
The floor is open for nominations. Who have I left out?
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Peter is Doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Former co-chair of YDS and veteran of the University of Chicago chapter.
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Are you sure it was Bill Haywood who said “nothing’s too good for the working class”? I was told it was Mary “Mother” Bloor of the CPUSA who first used that phrase.
Anyway, Che Guevara’s hair wasn’t bad at all:
http://marxsite.com/images/che1.jpg
It’s probably apocryphal. I’ve heard that phrase attributed to everyone from Rudolf Rocker to Aneurin Bevan to Christopher Hitchens. I liked Haywood the best so I gave it (”supposedly”) to him. In any case, the sentiment is a lovely one.
Nice piece, Peter! We socialists definitely need some humor now and then to cheer us up.
And I do think that was a Haywood quote, but it is possible he was not the first to say it.
Sausage party? Gross.
West? Jesus?
I’m not sure which was funnier, the Hair reference or that wonderful picture of Trotsky.