The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  The key to the demythologization of the New York intellectuals is documenting the hybridity of the group’s formation. Its unique tradition in politics and culture coalesced in the early and mid-1930s when a spectrum of revolutionary and communist intellectuals forged a critique of the official pro-Soviet movement on Marxist grounds. Many of the leading individuals were secular and internationalist Jews; the greater part of their cultural tastes could be characterized as “modernism with attitude”; and Leon Trotsky inspired several of the ideological positions. That said, it should be noted that there was from the outset a noticeable presence of non-Jews (James T. Farrell), nonmodernists (Max Eastman), and non-Trotskyists (V. F. Calverton).

  The indispensable glue was not any single cultural or ethnic identity but a fusion at the core of uncompromising anticapitalism and anti-Stalinism. To be sure, there existed, in addition to a modicum of non-Leninists, an overlap with a variety of Trotskyist organizations. Yet the control of the publications through which writers originally found expression—the post-1937 Partisan Review, Modern Monthly, and Marxist Quarterly—was firmly in the hands of their mostly unaffiliated editors.

  Though they shared a common ideology, the group that would become the New York intellectuals was a breed unto itself. It was also a movement of many voices, one interlaced with various elements, crystallizing around associations and friendships, a web of communities and political affiliations. It certainly wasn’t a membership group, and to determine who actually “belongs,” and in what manner, requires astute detective skills. Moreover, several of those who had organizational affiliations with communism or Trotskyism later made a wild grab for plausible deniability. Nothing about this history can be taken at face value because memories of political battles from past years can distort.

  It was only following a profound crisis during World War II that “the New York intellectuals” came into their own as an influential force in United States culture. Although there was no official announcement, revolutionary politics were banned and anticapitalism much attenuated. What had been an admirable resistance to Stalinism through a revolutionary socialist alternative had mostly transmogrified into the new species of liberal anticommunism. The heart of their political existence was editing a half dozen journals, which after 1953 included the Anglo-American Encounter, and holding occasional public forums (some of which relied on nontransparent CIA funding). In the background were salons and social circles as well as connections to publishing houses and a growing academic presence at institutions such as Columbia, New York University, and Brandeis. Mainly due to the group’s base in Manhattan, the ethnic composition remained disproportionately secular Jewish, and the modernism championed was less edgy in the new atmosphere of the 1950s when “Kafka was the Rage.”14

  V. THE TROTSKYIST NEXT DOOR

  The weight of the view that the logical and necessary end point of the journey of the Marxist anti-Stalinists was Cold War liberalism has long suffocated the understanding of the legacy. When I approached the subject in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was as if near-unconscious mental maps had been put in place, commanding how one sees and instantly interprets this past. How could one erase the simplicity of these old associations and orderings, replacing them with new and more sophisticated ones? How could one smash the warped lenses through which people had been made to see an experience that still had some relevance to their lives? To understand the era before the 1950s, what I thought was missing was not a polemic but a fully imagined immersive amplitude. It was necessary to take readers back through the actual debates that had shaped this milieu as well as to the organizational activities in which many had participated. To be sure, I knew that there were those for whom the details of all this might not be a compelling stay-up-all-night read; that was one reason why I changed strategy in the final section of the book and simply made my case about “The Bitter Fruits of Anticommunism.”

  Then there was the difficulty of explaining Trotskyism, which looked to be the most animus-attracting political movement of our time. Trotskyism certainly had its share of Looney Tunes idolaters of “the Old Man” and tin-pot dictators of cult-like groups with delusions of grandeur, but these were a relatively small blemish on his extraordinary life and brilliant body of writing—not to mention the record of some remarkable political activities by admirers around the world who had authentic credentials as working-class leaders and creative scholars. Regrettably, Trotskyism was also a magnet for scorn from people (conservatives, liberals, radicals) who had never studied its theories or understood its history, or who had been indoctrinated with prejudice based on false information. There was the need to carefully document the complicated relationships of the intellectuals under scrutiny to Trotskyist ideas and movements; but a bigger problem was my own role in the book as narrator and appraiser.

  How was I to communicate my multilayered assessment that some aspects of Trotsky’s legacy were necessary, others dangerous, and still others above my pay grade to explain? Playing coy or being mysterious was not an option; from the outset, I had decided that I wasn’t going to collaborate in the familiar fiction of claiming that I—or anyone—could be completely unbiased in carrying out this type of project. I definitely wanted to make a contribution to the revolutionary socialist side of the scales of history, and said so, but this did not translate into writing a cheerleading book for “Trotskyism.”

  Today, I haven’t politically strayed from the method used in this book or the convictions behind it, although I hope my understanding has advanced. When the facts change, one must respond, and in the 1960s through the 1980s I was unquestionably too caught up in a limited paradigm: the hope that traditional working-class movements, based in trade unions and guided by experienced socialist parties, had a future as the ballast for massive social movements in the last two decades of the late twentieth century. This kind of classical Marxist thinking prepared me well for the continuing growth in inequality in the United States, with special hardships for people of color, and a persistence of Western imperialist interventions under a variety of pretexts. But nothing I read or heard equipped me to anticipate the nonviolent transformation of the Soviet Union and China into such ruthless capitalist systems, the improbable election of a liberal African American president in 2008, the extraordinary success of the right to same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ movement, the popularity and impact of Occupy-type actions, and the stunning acceptance of a socialist contender for the Democratic Party nominee in 2016.

  I won’t deny the residual presence of an inner “Old Bolshevik” that still stirs my thinking about the concrete utopia of working-class collective emancipation and the need to organize earnestly to advance that aim. But orthodox varieties of Trotskyism were something I never found attractive; I never promoted these by name in my writing, even when endorsing portions of Trotskyism’s historical critiques, or the current political strategies of some organizations regarding nationalism and self-determination, united-front coalition building, transitional demands, and so on. Nonetheless, I respected many of the older generation of Trotskyist activists from various factions as admirable, and read with approval the writings of European neo-Trotskyists such as Ernest Mandel, Michael Löwy, Catherine Samary, Tariq Ali, and Terry Eagleton (and, later, Enzo Traverso and Daniel Bensaïd). I found that I could learn a great deal from Trotskyism’s abstract doctrinal schemes, even as I was never certain as to what was truly an objective description of reality, especially in regard to big questions such as the Popular Front, the Soviet Union, and the meaning of World War II. Out of power, Trotsky seemed a giant; in power, I had many questions.15

  Frankly, while it looked appropriate to indicate my conclusions about disputes among the New York intellectuals where I could, I really didn’t see myself as a vociferous fog-lifter, except in perhaps one area: the conviction that romanticized accounts of the past were contrary to Marxist principle. In my project of retrieval, I set out to discover what had been forgotten, and I was not about to fl
inch from whatever I found. I was forty-one years old when the book was published, and well aware that history could be a bummer. In fact, I suspected that it might well be that the uncomfortable truths would matter the most.

  No one writes a book free of factual and interpretative errors, not to mention goofed-up footnotes or typos. I was probably something of an over-eager tour guide—one with too much to say and not sufficient lingering over certain features of the landscape. But in one area I badly misjudged: my assiduousness in documenting Trotskyist associations of many intellectuals who turned right ended up fueling the fairy tale that there is a momentous connection between Trotskyist ideas and the movement of neoconservatism. The relatively new neoconservative phenomenon was actually an outgrowth of the antiradical backlash among Democrats in the 1960s, but, at the very moment The New York Intellectuals was published, neoconservatism was en route to genuine national influence in Republican administrations, and scare stories about conspiratorial infiltrators were attractive among its rivals. Should I have known better and devoted more time to debunking this fable that significant political features of neoconservatism grew out of Trotskyism? It didn’t strike me as necessary inasmuch as the careful scholarship to that time, and most of it since, has been consistent in depicting the ideas of neoconservatism as an outgrowth of varieties of Cold War anticommunism—which had captured a number ex-Trotskyists (as well as ex-Communists) even as it was surely not their invention. But I was naïve about the power of journalistic memes, which became even worse as Internet culture arose and took over intellectual life.

  On what basis can there be a claim that “Trotskyism” was a big influence on neoconservatism? “Influence” is a vague term if there ever was one. Nonetheless, any argument beyond noting that neoconservative leaders and ranks included several people who had passed through—and then broken with—factions of Trotskyism a quarter of a century earlier breaches multiple norms of scholarly discourse. The case that neoconservatism is in some senses a species of Trotskyism is founded on an elementary confusion between a causal factor and simply the presence of individuals in the 1970s who had repudiated certain ideas by the end of World War II. Instead of offering up a sharply reasoned and carefully documented argument about the deradicalization of a generation that might be useful, we see a triumph of branding, a surreal exercise in alternate history.

  As The New York Intellectuals detailed, the handful of neoconservatives who were once diversely associated with Trotskyism decades earlier came to disagree with every one of their previous views, except perhaps the belief in their own absolute rectitude. Even in regard to Stalinism, they had reversed course by World War II or shortly after to conclude—with their new allies—that the answer was not a democratic and socialist revolutionary transformation but Western economic power and military might. It was out of elements of this revised orientation, shared by other Cold War anticommunists, that the neoconservative outlook would spring. The present-day journalists who market op-eds and articles with this assertion of a direct Trotskyist-neoconservative bridge are taking the totality of a person’s experience and passing it through a sieve to isolate a supposedly incriminating facet and connect dots inappropriately. As has been documented in studies neglected by the mainstream, the case is being made through inaccurate identifications and innuendos—pretty bad cherry-picking that takes the story out of serious intellectual history.16 It is a fool’s errand to attempt to understand neoconservatism by looking at Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1930) instead of the various fearmongering reactions to radicalism, such as Whitaker Chambers’s Witness (1952).

  VI. REFRAMING THE CONTEXT

  Since I always believed that Marxists could make better use of their time than accusing others of betrayal, why did I write this book? In reality, I was not at all concerned with refighting the political wars of fifty years ago, but with collecting and analyzing facts about the fate of a politicocultural blend that had inspired me as I encountered it in the pages of the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Marxist Quarterly, New International, and Politics. This research led to my recognition that I needed to reframe the context; the story had to begin candidly at the beginning, rather than be subject to the restructuring of experiences to make them line up with one of the familiar endings in the Cold War, the 1960s, or the 1980s. It now seems more significant than I realized at the time that the first Partisan Review writer I interviewed was the delightful F. W. Dupee. He had retired to Carmel, California, in the early 1970s, while I was writing a dissertation in the University of California, Berkeley, English department on James T. Farrell in the 1930s and 1940s. Dupee had reradicalized in the 1960s, when practically all the founding editors had cycled back to the left—Dwight Macdonald (whom I had met in the late 1960s when he came to teach a class at Antioch College), Mary McCarthy, and Philip Rahv. Irving Howe was judged by some of them as little more than a State Department socialist. Commentary magazine, it is now hard to believe, had also moved significantly left and joined the radical movement; and Norman Podoretz was one of the first to condemn the Vietnam War and call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.17 So I originally intended to work on an upbeat project, an affirmation of a vibrant usable past. The glitch was my obsession with evidenced-based scholarship, which had been encouraged by my collaboration with a working-class Trotskyist autodidact, George Breitman. Through a synthesis of various types of material, what I ultimately found myself weaving together turned out to be far more challenging and convoluted than I had expected as the 1970s became the 1980s. Thus the book could have been better described as a meditation on what might be called “The Age of Deradicalization.”

  As the thirtieth anniversary edition goes to press, we may be approaching a time of broader political relevance than 1987 for many of the ideas that I tried to preserve in this book. Paradoxically, the topic of the New York intellectuals is now older, well-established, venerated, and canonical, even as it feels distinctly of this moment. And 2017 is a political conjuncture when many of the lost ideas of the New York intellectuals need to be redeemed; to know this history is to give current debates a fuller historical context, and also to acknowledge an avatar of unfulfilled promise. To me, it is quite understandable that a new generation should now look to the trajectory of this earlier generation in thinking about where intellectuals stand and how they should conduct themselves. After all, following long years of condescending neglect, the mainstream press is suddenly beginning to pay a bit more attention to what non-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals have to say. This is primarily because there has been a shift toward socialism that is unprecedented since the 1960s.

  Much of the material in The New York Intellectuals consists of heretical responses to the fact that, in the twentieth century, revolutionary movements primarily took the form of Communism. Although some younger radicals may search for pretexts to evade the troubling aspects of this pro-Soviet legacy, it is a past that will not pass as easily as they might hope. It is dangerous to circumvent rather than deepen our understanding of the Bolshevik catastrophe, not to mention the failures of social democracy. We can’t just shoot past these topics; vestiges can and will attack us. For instance, aspects of it may come back in the form of doubts about revolutionary transformation and the workability of a collectivized economy, or even the possibility of workers’ control and democracy. And there will be other reruns of the problems for the Left confronted by the New York intellectuals in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s.

  Biography, too, is a critical part of the picture. Many intellectuals were not signed-up party militants and consequently didn’t have to live out the full consequences of their arguments. What, then, do commitment and engagement mean in terms of the way one balances political and professional life, or for one’s cultural practice? How do vanguard intellectuals relate to the broader public? How does one remain in clear-eyed opposition to policies and practices of one’s own government without idealizing and romanticizing that government’s victims and
opponents? These questions suggest that there is a sense that we are still in the same age as those who started out in the 1930s, despite thought-provoking changes. Yes, the Internet and Twitter culture have upended the universe of the little magazine; intellectuals have migrated from bohemias to universities and think tanks; Soviet Communism has collapsed; and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. Yet many of the older issues generate heat.

  There is no single explanation for why the moment appears ripe for a critical reclamation of the independent Marxism fashioned and later lost. Maybe it has just taken time, and unraveling of other myths and narratives, for reality to break through antiutopian cynicism, along with the infusion of new energies. And then, too, there is Suddenly Saunders—Bernie striking a resonant chord among young people and racking up 13 million votes in the Democratic primary election of 2016. More than anything else, Saunders brought socialism back to public life and established a left pole in the country’s political terrain. To be sure, his affinities are with reform-oriented European social democracy, but his campaign was built on ideals of human equality and the dignity of working people. Many more young people today give the impression that they are out to reengage critical debates that have been brewing since the revolutionary Marxism of the 1968 era was largely abandoned. Possibly socialism will now have an impact missing for decades, although we also know that it is not unusual for the Left to episodically go from the margins to the mainstream and back again.

  What ultimately happened to most of the New York intellectuals remains a specter haunting all recollections of radicalization and deradicalization; there are warnings for those moving left as well as right. One can never rule out the possibility that, as in the 1960s, we may be rethinking a revolutionary project—the need to rebuild the destroyed community of mass social movements inflamed with humanitarian ideals and practical solutions—in a nonrevolutionary age. Events, none more than the alarming evolution of the post–Soviet Union and the Arab Spring, are often unanticipated and their consequences hard to predict. Fresh disenchantments could be in the offing, but I am not writing this new preface as a version of the famous Soviet dissidents’ salute: “a toast to the success of our hopeless cause.” We must channel whatever melancholia we have for past losses into the fruitful work of reconstruction. This project is not simply about a return to origins; it is only that not every wheel may need reinventing. A new generation must break free of mythic and ideological formulations about the past so that it can fashion its own political and ethical socialist community for the twenty-first century.