Jonestown: in the name of socialism

 Peoples Temple was a church founded in 1954 in Indianapolis by a man named Jim Jones. In the mid-1960s the church moved to California. In 1974 it leased land in the rainforest of Guyana, near the northern coast of South America, for an agricultural settlement that came to be known as Jonestown. It was there, in November 1978, that over 900 people were poisoned or otherwise killed  – an act that Jones glorified as ‘revolutionary suicide’ but more closely resembled a massacre. 

Although Peoples Temple had the trappings of a Christian church, the doctrine preached by Jones combined Christian and Oriental religious beliefs with political ideas taken from the American Communist Party. Jones claimed to be a reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and Lenin. Other heroes of Jones were Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung. Everything that Jones did from his late teens onward was done in the name of socialism and communism.

Survivors of Peoples Temple have kept in touch and built a partly online community of remembrance. Many have written about and tried to make sense of an ambiguous experience. A key role in this community is played by the Jonestown Institute, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. The institute maintains a richly informative website and publishes an annual report. Both are open to contributions from anyone with something to say about Peoples Temple, regardless of political, religious, or philosophical viewpoint.

Here was an opportunity to offer members of this community a new perspective on Peoples Temple. I submitted four articles to the Jonestown Institute. They are listed with links on the page assigned to me on the institute’s website. They will also appear in the next annual Jonestown Report, scheduled for publication around November 1.

My first article, Jim Jones: an attempt at psychic-political analysis, focuses on Jones as an individual. I suggest that Stalinism, as a system of domination supposedly aimed at ending domination, was well suited to psychic needs rooted in the severe neglect he suffered in early childhood. 

The next article, Peoples Temple and socialism, questions the widely held assumptions that Jones was a socialist and Peoples Temple a socialist movement. I analyze Jonestown as a peculiar kind of class society and conclude that genuine socialism is impossible without democracy. 

The third article argues that even within a highly authoritarian structure there may exist islands of autonomy.

The last article — Was Jonestown sustainable? — argues that the whole project of establishing such a large and permanent agricultural settlement in the middle of the rainforest may have been ecologically unsustainable. 

Stephen Shenfield

Jonestown: in the name of socialism - World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)