Politics & Power Quote by Albert Maltz

Self-exoneration rarely announces itself so plainly. Albert Maltz frames his 1935 embrace of Communism as a moral wager, not a career move: a bet on “mankind’s future” made by someone earnest enough to confuse historical inevitability with ethical clarity. The line is doing two jobs at once. On the surface it’s testimony about motive. Underneath it’s a preemptive defense against the Cold War caricature of the Communist as either a paid agent or a cynical opportunist.

That matters because Maltz wasn’t just any fellow traveler; he was a prominent screenwriter and one of the Hollywood Ten, punished in the late 1940s for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. Read from that later vantage, the quote is less nostalgia than rebuttal. By insisting that “millions” joined “didn’t join it for profit,” he widens his personal case into a collective alibi, shifting attention from ideology-as-treason to ideology-as-hope. The word “Certainly” is a small rhetorical cudgel: he’s not asking to be believed, he’s daring you to deny the sincerity of an entire generation radicalized by Depression-era collapse and the apparent failure of liberal capitalism.

It also reveals a tragic blindness. “Future” functions like a secular salvation story, smoothing over the messy realities of Stalinism already in motion by 1935. Maltz is admitting, without meaning to, how movements win: not by paying recruits, but by offering them an identity that feels like history’s moral high ground.