by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
All this may describe the conditions under which the new political outlook appears, but it does not yet tell us anything about the specific culture, so to say, in which it thrives. Let me therefore indicate some of the political and intellectual influences acting upon the “new leftism,” by setting up two very rough categories.
Ideologues and Desperadoes
A. Ideologues, White. The disintegration of American radicalism these last few decades left a good many ideologues emotionally unemployed: people accustomed to grand theorizing who have had their theories shot out from under them; people still looking for some belated evidence that they were “right” all along; people with unexpended social energy and idealism of a sort, who desperately needed new arenas in which to function.
1. The Remains of Stalinism. The American Communist Party was broken first by McCarthyite and government persecution, and second by an inner crisis following Khrushchev’s revelations and the Hungarian revolution. Those who left out of disillusionment were heartsick people, their convictions and sometimes their lives shattered. But those who left the party or its supporting organizations because they feared government attack were often people who kept, semiprivately, their earlier convictions. Many of them had a good deal of political experience; some remained significantly placed in the network of what might be called conscience organizations. Naturally enough, they continued to keep in touch with one another, forming a kind of reserve apparatus based on common opinions, feelings, memories. As soon as some ferment began in the civil rights movement and the peace groups, these people were present, ready and eager; they needed no directives from the Communist Party to which, in any case, they no longer (or may never have) belonged; they were quite capable of working on their own as if they were working together, through a variety of groups and periodicals like the National Guardian. Organizational Stalinism declined, but a good part of its heritage remained: people who could offer political advice, raise money, write leaflets, sit patiently at meetings, put up in a pleasant New York apartment visitors from a distant state, who, by chance, had been recommended by an old friend.
2. True Believers. On the far left there remains a scatter of groups still convinced that Marxism-Leninism, in one or another version, is “correct.” What has failed them, however, is the historical motor provided by Marxist theory: the proletariat, which has not shown the “revolutionary potential” or fulfilled the “historical mission” to which it was assigned. Though the veteran Marxists cannot, for fear of shattering their whole structure of belief, give up the idea of the proletariat, they can hardly act, day by day, as if the American working class were indeed satisfying Marxist expectations or were the actual center of revolutionary ferment. Thus, in somewhat schizoid fashion, they have clung to their traditional faith in the proletariat as the revolutionary class, while in practice searching for a new embodiment of it which might provide the social energy they desire. And in the Negro movement they sometimes think to have found it.
That this movement, with great creative flair, has worked out an indigenous strategy of its own; that it has developed nonviolent resistance into an enormously powerful weapon; that the Negro clergy, in apparent disregard of Leninist formulas, plays a leading and often militant role—all this does not sit well with the old Marxists. They must therefore develop new theories, by means of which the Negroes become the vanguard of the working class or perhaps the “true” (not yet “bought-off”) working class. And, clustering around the Negro movement, they contribute a mite of wisdom here and there: scoffing at nonviolence, employing the shibboleth of “militancy” as if it were a magical device for satisfying the needs of the Negro poor, and so forth. They are experienced in “deepening the struggle,” usually other people’s struggles: which means to scorn the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. without considering that the “revolutionary” course they propose for the Negro movement could, if adopted, lead it into a cul-de-sac of isolation, exhaustion, and heroic blood. Understandably, they find allies in Negro nationalists who want not so much to deepen as to divert the struggle, and among young militants who dislike the idea that Negroes might, if successful in their struggle, come to share some of the American affluence and thus become “middle class.”
3. Authoritarian Leftists. In figures like Isaac Deutscher and Paul Sweezy we find the true intellectual progenitors of at least part of the “new leftism”; the influence they exert has been indirect, since they are not involved in immediate struggles, but it has nevertheless been there.
Sweezy’s Monthly Review is the main spokesman in this country for the view that authoritarianism is inherent or necessary in the so-called socialist countries; that what makes them “socialist” is simply the nationalization of the means of production; that democracy, while perhaps desirable in some long-range calculation, is not crucial for judging the socialist character of a society; that the claim that workers must be in a position to exercise political power if the state can in any sense be called “theirs” is a utopian fallacy. At times this technological determinism, put to the service of brutal dictatorship, has been given a more subtle reading by Sweezy, namely, that when the conditions supposedly causing the Communist dictatorship—economic backwardness and international insecurity—have been overcome, the Soviet regime would in some unspecified way democratize itself. In November 1957, after the Khrushchev revelations, Monthly Review printed a notably frank editorial:
The conditions which produced the [Soviet] dictatorship have been overcome. . . . Our theory is being put to the crucial test of practise. And so far—let us face it frankly—there is precious little evidence to confirm it. In all that has happened since Stalin’s death we can find nothing to indicate that the Communist Party or any of its competing factions, has changed in the slightest degree its view of the proper relation between the people and their leadership. . . . there is apparently no thought that the Soviet people will ever grow up enough to decide for itself who knows best and hence who should make and administer the policies which determine its fate.
And finally from Sweezy: “Forty years is too long for a dictatorship to remain temporary”—surely the understatement of the Christian Era!
One might suppose that if “our theory is being put to the crucial test” and “there is precious little evidence to confirm it,” honest men would proceed to look for another theory, provided, that is, they continued to believe that freedom is desirable.
A good number of years have passed since the above passage appeared in the Monthly Review, the “precious little evidence” remains precious little, and Sweezy, once apparently dismayed over the lack of democracy in Russia, has moved not to Titoism or “revisionism.” No, he has moved toward Maoist China, where presumably one does not have to worry about “the proper relation between the people and their leadership. . . .” Writing in December 1964 the Monthly Review editors declared with satisfaction that “there could be no question of the moral ascendency of Peking over Moscow in the underdeveloped world.” They agreed with the Chinese that Khrushchev’s fall was “a good thing” and they wrote further: “The Chinese possession of a nuclear potential does not increase the danger of nuclear war. Quite the contrary. The Chinese have solemnly pledged never to be the first to use nuclear weapons . . . and their revolutionary record of devotion to the cause of socialism and progress entitles them to full trust and confidence.”
The logic is clear: begin with theoretical inquiry and concern over the perpetuation of dictatorship in Russia and end with “full trust and confidence” in China, where the dictatorship is more severe.
There is an aphorism by a recent Polish writer: “The dispensing of injustice is always in the right hands.” And so is its defense.
B. Ideologues, Negro.
1. Black Nationalism. Here is a creed that speaks or appears to speak totally against compromise, against negotiating with “the white power structure,” against the falsities of white liberals, indeed, against anything but an indulgence of verb
al violence. Shortly before his tragic death Malcolm X spoke at a Trotskyist-sponsored meeting and listening to him I felt, as did others, that he was in a state of internal struggle, reaching out for an ideology he did not yet have. For the Negroes in his audience he offered the relief of articulating subterranean feelings of hatred, contempt, defiance, feelings that did not have to be held in check because there was a tacit compact that the talk about violence would remain talk. For both the Negroes and whites in the audience there was an apparent feeling that Malcolm and Malcolm alone among the Negro spokesmen was authentic because . . . well, because finally he spoke for nothing but his rage, for no proposal, no plan, no program, just a sheer outpouring of anger and pain. And that they could understand. The formidable sterility of his speech, so impressive in its relation to a deep personal suffering, touched something in their hearts. For Malcolm, intransigent in words and nihilistic in reality, never invoked the possibility or temptations of immediate struggle; he never posed the problems, confusions, and risks of maneuver, compromise, retreat. Brilliantly Malcolm spoke for a rejection so complete it transformed him into an apolitical spectator, or in the language of his admirers, a “cop-out.”
2. Caricature. If, nevertheless, there was something about Malcolm which commands our respect, that is because we know his life-struggle, his rise from the depths, his conquest of thought and speech. Leroi Jones, by contrast, stands as a burlesque double of whatever is significant in Malcolm.
In his success as both a New School lecturer and a prophet of “guerrilla warfare” in the United States; in his badgering of white liberal audiences; in his orgies of verbal violence committed, to be sure, not in Selma, Alabama, but Sheridan Square, New York; in his fantasies of an international race war in which the whites will be slaughtered, Jones speaks for a contemporary sensibility. But he speaks for it in a special way: as a distinctively American success, the pop-art guerrilla warrior.
He speaks at that center of revolutionary upsurge, the Village Vanguard. He explains that the murder of Negroes in the South does not arouse the kind of horror and indignation that the murder of white civil rights workers does. He is absolutely right; the point cannot be made too often. But Jones cannot stop there: it would be too sensible, too humane, and it would not yield pages in the Village Voice. Instead, responding to a question, “What about Goodman and Schwerner, the two white boys killed in Mississippi, don’t you care about them?” Jones said, as quoted in the Voice: “Absolutely not. Those boys were just artifacts, artifacts, man. They weren’t real. If they want to assuage their leaking consciences, that’s their business. I won’t mourn for them. I have my own dead to mourn for.”
Is this not exactly the attitude Jones had a moment earlier condemned in regard to killings in the South, but the same attitude in reverse? And is it really impossible for the human heart to mourn for both Negro and white victims? Not, to be sure, for ordinary whites, since they, we all know, are “white devils”; but at least for those who have given their lives in the struggle?
The essential point about Jones’s racist buffoonery has been made by George Dennison in a recent review of Jones’s plays:
Just as he mis-labels the victims black, he mis-labels the authority white. Certainly he knows, or should know, that the authority which in fact pertains is not the authority of race . . . but an authority of property and arms; and certainly he knows, or should know, that the life-destroying evil inheres in the nature of the authority, not in the color of those who wield it. But if Jones wanted change, he would speak change. He speaks, instead, for the greatest possible rejection, a rejection so absolute, so confined to fantasy, that it amounts to nothing more than hands-off-the-status-quo. . . . Point by point his is an upside down version of the most genteel, middle-class, liberal position. And I think that the liberals see him as one of their own, albeit a Dropout. He addresses every word to them and is confined to their systems of values because he is in the business of denying no other values but those. That spurious anger, so resonant with career, can be trusted not to upset the applecart.
C. Desperadoes, White. In effect, I have already described this group, so let me here confine myself to a few remarks about one of its central battle cries, “alienation.”
The trouble with the recurrent use of alienation as a mode of social analysis is that it includes almost everything, and thereby explains almost nothing. The term has become impossibly loose (like those other handy tags, “the establishment” and “the power structure”). As used by Marx, alienation had a rather precise reference: it pointed to the condition of the worker in the capitalist productive process, a condition in which “the worker’s deed becomes an alien power . . . forcing him to develop some specialized dexterity at the cost of a world of productive impulses.” This kind of analysis focuses upon the place of the proletarian within the social structure, and not upon the sediment of malaise among those outside it.
Since Marx wrote, the term has acquired an impossible load of signification. During most of the bourgeois era, the European intellectuals grew increasingly estranged from the social community because the very ideals that had animated the bourgeois revolution were now being violated by bourgeois society; their “alienation” was prompted not by bohemian willfulness but by a loyalty to Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, or to an induced vision of preindustrial society which, by a twist of history, came pretty much to resemble Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Just as it was the triumph of capitalism which largely caused this sense of estrangement, so it was the expansion of capitalism which allowed the intellectuals enough freedom to release it. During the greater part of the bourgeois era, intellectuals preferred alienation from the community to alienation from themselves. Precisely this choice made possible their boldness and strength, precisely this “lack of roots” gave them their speculative power.
By now the term “alienation” frequently carries with it a curious reversal of moral and emotional stress. For where intellectuals had once used it as a banner of pride and self-assertion, today it tends to become a complaint, a token of self-pity, a rationale for a degree of estrangement from the society which connotes not an active rebellion against—nor even any active relation to—it, but, rather, a justification for marginality and withdrawal.
Somewhere amid the current talk about “alienation” an important reality is being touched upon or pointed to. There is, in our society, a profound estrangement from the sources of selfhood, the possibilities of human growth and social cohesion. But simply to proclaim this estrangement can be a way of preserving it. Alienation is not some metaphysical equivalent of the bubonic plague, which constitutes an irrevocable doom; it is the powerlessness deriving from human failure to act. It is neither a substitute for thought, nor a dissolvent of human will, nor even a roadblock in the way of useful work. To enter into the society which in part causes this estrangement and by establishing bonds with other men to transform the society is one way of partially overcoming alienation. Each time the civil rights movement brings previously mute Negroes into active political life, each time a trade union extends its power of decision within a factory, the boundaries of alienation are shrunk.
D. Desperadoes, Negro. A new kind of young Negro militant has appeared in the last few years, and he is a figure far more authentic and impressive than any of those I have thus far mentioned. He is fed up with white promises. He is proud to be estranged from white society. He has strong, if vague, “nationalist” inclinations. He is desperate—impatient with the tactics of gradualism, nonviolence, and passive resistance. He sees few, if any, allies upon whom he can count; few, if any, positive forces in society that might stir people into action. In effect, he decides that he must “go it alone,” scornful of the white liberal and labor groups, as well as of those Negro leaders who choose to work with them. He seeks to substitute for a stagnant history his own desire and sacrifice.
Let me suggest a very limited comparison. This kind of young Negro militant, though not of course interested in
any kind of individual terrorism, acts out of social and psychological motives somewhat like those of the late-nineteenth-century Russian terrorists, who also tried to substitute their intransigent will for the sluggishness of history. And the consequences will perhaps be similar; the best cadres exhausted in isolation and defeat.
Such a response may well be the inevitable result of an abrupt and painful coming-to-awareness on the part of young Negro militants who had previously suppressed their suffering simply in order to survive but now feel somewhat freer to release it. Their devotion is beyond doubt, as their heroism is beyond praise; yet what I’m here tempted to call kamikaze radicalism, or what Bayard Rustin calls the “no win” outlook, can become self-defeating in political life.
The “New Leftist”—A Sketch
We can now venture a portrait of the new leftist, not as one or another individual but as a composite type—with all the qualifications I stated at the outset.
A. Cultural Style. The “new leftist” appears, at times, as a figure embodying a style of speech, dress, work, and culture. Often, especially if white, the son of the middle class—and sometimes the son of middle-class parents nursing radical memories—he asserts his rebellion against the deceit and hollowness of American society. Very good; there is plenty to rebel against. But in the course of his rebellion he tends to reject not merely the middle-class ethos but a good many other things he too hastily associates with it: the intellectual heritage of the West, the tradition of liberalism at its most serious, the commitment to democracy as an indispensable part of civilized life. He tends to make style into the very substance of his revolt, and while he may, on one side of himself, engage in valuable activities in behalf of civil rights, student freedom, and so on, he nevertheless tacitly accepts the “givenness” of American society, has little hope or expectation of changing it, and thereby, in effect, settles for a mode of personal differentiation.
