Two excerpts from the new essay in For Workers'' Power From Part One: THE RELEVANCE OF JONESTOWN "We''re gonna die for the revolution. We''re gonna die to expose this racist and fascist society. It''s good to die in this great revolutionary suicide." The words uttered by two young men in Jonestown (Guyana) a few minutes before they, together with hundreds of others, poisoned themselves were reported in the Los Angeles Times (November 26, 1978) bTwo Excerpts from the new essayy Charles Garry of San Eranctsco, attorney for the Peoples Temple. Garry was no critic of this particular cult. He was the trendy leftist lawyer who, referring to the Guyana commune, had written in the Peoples Forum, journal of the Temple: "I have seen Paradise." For those who think that socialism is about life and reason (and not about giving cyanide to babies. whether in Paradise or elsewhere) the events of last November are deeply disturbing.

Let''s not quibble about how many died. The latest reports put it at 921 (912 in the Jonestown commune, 5 at Port Kaituma airport, and 4 in the Peoples Temple in Georgetown). Or about the complicities (both in the USA and in Guyana) which led 900 American "socialists" to this particular part of the South American rain forest. Or about the relations of the Jonestown commune with Soviet Russia (to whose Embassy in Georgetown two survivors sought to hand over a vast amount of money). On all these matters a lot more information will come to light in the months to come. What is of concern to us as libertarians is how the monstrosity of Jonestown, where people were drugged and beaten, brainwashed and forced to indulge in slave labour, sexually manipulated and annihilated as individuals, ever came to be associated with the name of socialism. Jim Jones'' own 19 year old son, Stephen, said of his father after the mass suicide: "I now see him as a fascist." It would he easy to forget it all, as most of the "left" doubtlessly will, or to sweep it all aside as some trivial or insignificant event: a lot of religious nuts bumping themselves off in some far away jungle.

But this isn''t good enough. Nor is it enough to comment, as did Socialist Worker (Dec. 2, 1978) that the tragic end of those who followed Jim Jones was "a reminder of the irrationality and ultimate hopelessness of religious forms of protest." Or to blame "the oppressiveness, brutality and mindless profiteering of the society from which they fled." All this is true. But what it needed is to relate these truths to the specifically "socialist" content of the Jonestown rhetoric and to the "socialist" support which the Temple movement mobilised, from Angela Davis to the self-proclaimed "socialist" government of Guyana. We also need to relate all this to many phenomena and tendencies we see daily in the socialist movement around us. We mean the systematic cult of leadership, the manipulation of information, the abdication of critical judgment, the substitution of rhetoric for argument and of slogans for the serious discussion of complex issues.

We mean the belief in "activity" at any cost--with little questioning as to its content--the mythologising and the voluntarism, the intimidation of dissidents, the almost universal application of double standards, the systematic generation of paranoia and the retreat, on a very wide front indeed, from rationality in general. The Jim Jones story bears so many similarities to what we see around us that it is worth telling in some detail. Not out of any necrophiliac concern but as an elementary gesture of socialist sanitation. We hope this will help some of those who find themselves bewildered (or trapped) by their experiences in the unreal world of various marxist sects. [.] From Part Two: WHAT DO SECTS PROVIDE? Throughout history religious or political faiths have exercised great influence. They have moved armies and motivated people to build both cathedrals and concentration camps. Their success had had very little to do with whether they were true or not.

The fact that thousands (or millions) believed in them made of them real historical and social forces. Religious or political faiths (and the Jonestown events show that the boundaries may be hard to define) have several things in common. They can provide, for the emotionally or materially deprived, the lonely, the rejected (or--less often--the culturally alienated or intellectually confused) the security of human contact, the satisfaction of an activity that seems socially useful, and the self-generating warmth of knowing all the answers, i.e. of a closed system of beliefs. These beliefs diminish, in those who hold them, the awareness of "failure" or of rejection--or the feeling of being useless. They are potent analgesics. And they offer positive objectives, either through instant political solutions in this world, or through solutions in the hereafter (pie in the sky).

In a society which either callously disregards (or just bureaucratically forgets) the very existence of thousands of its citizens, claims to make existence meaningful evoke an echo. Sects (i.e. groups based on cults) may come to fill an enormous vacuum in people''s lives. Most people are much happier in a situation where they are needed, wanted and accepted for what they are, not condemned and looked down upon for not being what they are not. We all like to act in a manner that is rational and that fulfils both one''s own needs and those of others. The tragedy is that political and religious sects may convert these positive human attributes into their opposites: manipulation and authoritarian dogmatism on the part of the leaders, submission and the abdication of critical faculties on the part of the led. SECTS IN HISTORY Historically, cults and sects have usually flourished at times of social crisis, when old value systems were collapsing and new ones had not yet asserted themselves.

They usually start as small groups which break off from the conventional consensus and espouse very different views of the real, the possible and the moral. They have attracted very diverse followings and achieved very variable results. Christianity started as a religion of slaves. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn shows how, many centuries later, "the people for whom (the Medieval Millennium) had most appeal were neither peasants, firmly integrated into the life of the village, nor artisans integrated into their guilds. The belief in the Millennium drew its strength from a population living on the margin of society." The New England Puritans conformed at one time to the norms of a harsh age by imprisoning and torturing their own dissidents. They later became respectable. So did the Mormon followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Marxism arose as a theory that would liberate a proletariat that had "nothing to lose but its chains," and has ended up imposing chains on the proletariat. The followers of the Peoples Temple (mainly poor blacks and alienated young whites) have made history by inaugurating the "mass revolutionary suicide." Cults can clearly mature into mainstream institutions. Or disintegrate into jungle horror stories. A detailed analysis of cults would require an analysis of their rhetoric and ideology, and of the culture matrices in which they are embedded. The present appeal of cults is related to the major upheaval of our times. This is not primarily economic. Referring to the Jonestown events an American sociologist has written: "The US consensus of values has broken down.

There is, in some respects, an undermined authority in philosophy and theology. There is the demise of metaphysics. there is no "rock in a weary land" that gives people something certain to hold onto. So people reach out and grab at anything: an idea or an organisation. When traditional answers seem inadequate people are ripe for cults that promise prescriptions for a better life. Most cults offer three benefits: ultimate meaning, a strong sense of community and rewards either in this world or the next. When those prescriptions are linked to the authoritarian style of a charismatic leader you have an extremely powerful antidote to the cultural malaise of what sociologists call anomie (rootlessness, aimlessness). (Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1978.

) Specific ingredients to disaffection from established society had welled up in the 1960''s and early 1970''s. There had been the expansion of an unpopular war in South East Asia, massive upheavals over civil rights and a profound crisis of values in response to the unusual combination of unprecedented affluence on the one hand, and potential thermonuclear holocaust on the other. Revolutionary socialists--the whole axis of their propaganda vitiated by their erroneous analyses of capitalism and their distorted vision of socialism--had proved quite unable to make any lasting impact.