A Voice Still Heard

by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)

  Primarily that means the wish to shock, the wish to assault the sensibilities of a world he cannot overcome. If he cannot change it, then at least he can outrage it. He searches in the limited repertoire of sensation and shock: for sick comics who will say “fuck” in nightclubs; for drugs that will vault him beyond the perimeters of the suburbs; for varieties, perversities, and publicities of sex so as perhaps to create an inner, private revolution that will accompany—or replace?—the outer, public revolution.

  But the “new leftist” is frequently trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the very middle class he rejects, dependent upon it for his self-definition: quite as the professional anti-Communist of a few years ago was caught up with the Communist Party, which, had it not existed, he would have had to invent—as indeed at times he did invent. So that for all its humor and charm, the style of the “new leftist” tends to become a rigid antistyle, dependent for its survival on the enemy it is supposed to panic. Epater le bourgeois—in this case, perhaps épater le père—is to acquiesce in a basic assumption of at least the more sophisticated segments of the middle class: that values can be inferred from, or are resident in, the externals of dress, appearance, furnishings, and hairdos.

  Shock as he will, disaffiliate as he may choose, the “new leftist” discovers after a while that nothing has greatly changed. The relations of power remain as before, the Man still hovers over the scene, the “power structure” is unshaken. A few old ladies in California may grow indignant, a DA occasionally arrest someone, a Village Voice reporter arrange an interview; but surely that is all small change. And soon the “new leftist” must recognize that even he has not been greatly transformed. For in his personal manner he is acting out the dilemmas of a utopian community, and just as Brook Farm had to remain subject to the laws of the market despite its internal ethic of cooperation, so must he remain subject to the impress of the dominant institutions despite his desire to be totally different.

  Victimized by a lack of the historical sense, the “new leftist” does not realize that the desire to shock and create sensations has itself a long and largely disastrous history. The notion, as Meyer Schapiro has remarked, that opium is the revolution of the people has been luring powerless intellectuals and semi-intellectuals for a long time. But the damnable thing is that for an almost equally long time the more sophisticated and urban sectors of the middle class have refused to be shocked. They know the repertoire of sensationalism quite as well as the “new leftist”; and if he is to succeed in shocking them or even himself, he must keep raising the ante. The very rebel who believes himself devoted to an absolute of freedom and looks with contempt upon any mode of compromise is thereby caught up in the compulsiveness of his escalation: a compulsiveness inherently bad enough, but rendered still more difficult, and sometimes pathetic, by the fact that, alas, each year he gets a year older.

  Let me amend this somewhat. To say that the urban middle class has become jaded and can no longer be shocked is not quite correct. No; a kind of complicity is set up between the outraged and/or amused urban middle class and the rebels of sensation. Their mutual dependency requires that each shock, to provide the pleasures of indignation, must be a little stronger (like a larger dose) than the previous one. For the point is not so much that the urban middle class can no longer be shocked as that it positively yearns for and comes to depend upon the titillating assaults of its cultural enemies. So that when a new sensation (be it literary violence, sexual fashion, intellectual outrage, high-toned pornography, or sadistic denunciation) is provided by the shock troops of culture, the sophisticated middle class responds with outrage, resistance, and anger—for upon these initial responses its pleasure depends. But then, a little later, it rolls over like a happy puppy on its back, moaning, “Oh, baby, épatez me again, harder this time, tell me what a sterile impotent louse I am and how you are so tough and virile, how you’re planning to murder me, épatez me again. . . .”

  Thus a fire-eating character like LeRoi Jones becomes an adjunct of middle-class amusement and, to take an enormous leap upward in talent and seriousness, a writer like Norman Mailer becomes enmeshed with popular journalism and publicity.

  The whole problem was anticipated many years ago by Trotsky when, writing about the Russian poet Esenin, he remarked that the poet thought to frighten the bourgeoisie by making scenes but as it turned out, the bourgeoisie was delighted, it adored scenes.

  One thing alone will not delight the bourgeoisie: a decrease in income, a loss in social power, a threat to its property.

  There is another sense in which cultural style dominates the behavior of the “new leftists.” Some of them display a tendency to regard political—and perhaps all of—life as a Hemingwayesque contest in courage and rectitude. People are constantly being tested for endurance, bravery, resistance to temptation, and if found inadequate, are denounced for having “copped out.” Personal endurance thus becomes the substance of, and perhaps even a replacement for, political ideas.

  Now this can be a valid and serious way of looking at things, especially in extreme situations: which is, of course, what Hemingway had in mind. Among civil rights workers in the deep South such a vision of life reflects the ordeal they must constantly face; they are under extreme pressure and their courage is constantly being tested. Yet their situation cannot be taken as a model for the political life of the country as a whole. If one wants to do more than create a tiny group of the heroic, the tested, and the martyred, their style of work will not suffice. If one wants to build a movement in which not everyone need give “the whole of their lives,” then the suspicion and hostility such an outlook is bound to engender toward the somewhat less active and somewhat less committed can only be damaging. For in effect, if not intent, it is a strategy of exclusion, leaving no place for anyone but the vanguard of the scarred.

  It is, at times, a strategy of exclusion in a still more troubling sense: it reduces differences of opinion to grades of moral rectitude. If, for example, you think Martin Luther King or Bayard Rustin wrong in regard to certain tactical matters; if you disagree with what Rustin proposed at the Democratic national convention in 1964 and what King did in Selma, then you call into question their loyalty and commitment: you charge them with “copping out” or “fooling with the power structure.” This approach makes it impossible to build a movement and, in the long run, even to maintain a sect.

  B. Domestic Politics. A division of opinion, still incipient and confused, has appeared among people in the radical, student, and civil rights movements. There are those who, in effect, want to “go it alone,” refusing to have anything to do with “the Establishment,” and those who look forward to creating a loose coalition of Negro, labor, liberal, and church groups in order to stretch the limits of the welfare state. To an inexperienced eye, this may suggest a division between the more and less radical; but it is not. Radicalism is not a quantity.

  The “go it alone” tendency in the civil rights movement starts from a recognition that the obstacles to success are enormous. It sees no forces within the society that could provide a new social dynamic. It shares with the liberals the questionable assumption that everyone in our society, except perhaps the bottom-dog poor, is bound to it by ties of material satisfaction. The labor movement is mired in its own fat; the ministers are Sunday allies; the liberals are two-faced, unreliable, perhaps cowards. What remains is a strategy of lonely assault, which must necessarily lead to shock tactics and desperation.

  For if the above estimate of the American situation is valid, if there is so little possibility of a new social dynamism arising from or within its major social segments, then the outlook of the Black Muslims has to be acknowledged as persuasive. For obviously an estimate which sees major reforms as unlikely makes a traditional revolutionary overthrow seem still more unlikely; and the talk among irresponsibles about “guerrilla warfare in America” is mere self-indulgence since guerrilla warfare can succeed only when a large portion or a majority of th
e population is profoundly disaffected, something certainly not true in the United States. Consequently—the logic of this argument moves inexorably—there is nothing left for American Negroes but the separatism of the Muslims.

  Unless, of course, one turns to the tactic of shock, inducing such misadventures as the 1964 stall-ins at the World’s Fair or the Triborough Bridge fiasco. Neither of these demonstrations had a precise objective, neither had any way of measuring achievement, accumulating allies, registering victory. Such methods, born of desperation, could only cut off the dedicated minority of civil rights activists from their white allies and, more important, from the mass of Negroes.

  Now it is not our business to give advice to the civil rights movement on tactical issues or to rush into taking positions about its inner disputes. It is not the business of anyone except those directly engaged. But about some larger aspects of its problem we can speak.

  One issue has been posed simply but conveniently by a Village Voice reporter, Jack Newfield, who writes that Dr. King’s “basic goal is integration, and SNCC’s is a revolution.” Earlier Newfield had described this revolution as being not against capitalist society but “against Brotherhood Weeks, factories called colleges, desperation called success, and sex twice a week.”

  What the people who talk about integration vs. revolution don’t see is that to achieve integration, even in the limited terms presumably favored by Dr. King, would indeed be a revolution, greater in consequence and impact than that effected by the rise of industrial unionism in the thirties.

  Bayard Rustin puts the matter as follows:

  While most Negroes—in their hearts—unquestionably seek only to enjoy the fruits of American society as it now exists, their quest cannot objectively be satisfied within the framework of existing political and economic relations. The young Negro who would demonstrate his way into the labor market may be motivated by a thoroughly bourgeois ambition . . . but he will end up having to favor a great expansion of the public sector of the economy. . . .

  . . . the term revolutionary as I am using it, does not connote violence; it refers to the quantitative transformation of fundamental institutions, more or less rapidly, to the point where the social and economic structure . . . can no longer be said to be the same. . . . I fail to see how the [civil rights] movement can be victorious in the absence of radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy.

  To this lucid analysis I would add only a word concerning the desire of Negroes “to enjoy the fruits of American society as it now exists.” Certain intellectuals bemoan this desire because they don’t want the Negro poor integrated into a “rotten middle-class society” and thereby end up with two cars, barbecue pits, and ulcers. Even more than wrong, these intellectuals seem to me snobbish. For Negroes should have just as much right to suburban pleasures as anyone else; they should be in a position just as much as the whites to choose the middle-class style of life. We need not approve, we can argue against that choice, but we are obliged to support their right to make it. And why not? I don’t notice James Baldwin or LeRoi Jones taking vows of poverty. Nor should they. There is something a bit manipulative in the view that Negroes should be preserved from the temptations that, presumably, all the rest of us are entitled to. What’s more, the Negroes themselves are far too experienced in the ways of the world to allow themselves to be cast in the role of sacrificial ascetic.

  But let us return to “integration vs. revolution” and for the sake of the argument accept this formulation. Naturally enough—it’s an old habit—we then opt for revolution; there remains only the little detail of who is going to make it.

  Clearly, the vast majority of whites are in the grip of the Establishment. The liberals? Establishment. The churches? Establishment. The unions? Establishment. Intellectuals? Establishment.

  But not only the whites, also the Negroes. Wilkins, Young, Powell, King, Farmer? The black Establishment. Rustin? He sold out to it.

  Where then does that leave us? Well, some students . . . but can we be so sure of them? May they not in time decide to go back to graduate school, perhaps after discovering that “the people,” in refusing to heed the revolutionary missions from the campus, are a rather hopeless quantity? What is left, then, is a handful . . . and where that handful must end is in despair, exhaustion, burning themselves out in the all-too-characteristic rhythm of American radicalism, which too often has tried to compensate for its powerlessness in reality by ferocity in words.

  At this point I hear a voice crying out: “No, not just a vanguard of the desperate! We are going to organize the poor, the millions beneath the floor of society, those who have been mute and unrepresented for too long . . . and it is they who will form the basis of a new movement, beyond the pale of Establishment politics.”

  Good. The poor need to be organized, and more power to those who try. Every such effort, big or small, deserves the approval and support of socialists and liberals. But some problems remain. I leave aside the fact that twentieth-century history indicates a high rate of failure in previous efforts of this kind; that the unstructured, atomized, and often demoralized “underclass” has been the most resistant to organization. History need not always repeat itself, and perhaps this time the effort will succeed. No, the questions I would raise have to do not with failure but with success.

  Imagine a campaign to organize the poor in a large city, undertaken by young people who will have no truck with the Establishment. Through hard work and devotion, they build up a group of, let’s say, 150 people in a slum of mixed racial composition—a notable achievement. What happens next? The municipal “power structure” begins to pay some attention and decides either to smash the group as a dangerous nuisance or to lure away some of its leading members. If the local organization of the poor must now face attack, it would seem to have no choice but quickly to find some allies—in the unions, among churchmen, perhaps even in the American Jewish Congress, “establishmentarian” as all of these may seem. Suppose, however, the “power structure” decides to offer various inducements—jobs, improved housing—to some of the Negro members, and various other organizations, like the reform wing of the Democrats and certain trade unions, also enter the picture. What will the uncompromising, anti-Establishment leaders of the poor do now? Does not the reality of the situation require them to enter negotiations, formally or informally, and thereby become involved in the socioeconomic life of the city? Can they remain exempt from it? And if so, how long do you suppose their followers will stay with them? For that matter, why should they? The goods and services that, with enough pressure, the “power structure” can be made to provide, the poor need, want, and deserve. Can one seriously suppose they will be exempt from such “temptations”? There is only one way to be certain the poor will remain beyond the temptations of our society, and that is to keep them hopelessly poor.

  Nor is this quite a new problem. It was faced, in somewhat different form, years ago when revolutionists led trade unions and discovered that they had to sign agreements which in practice signified acquiescence in the bargaining arrangements between capital and labor within the confines of the status quo. Had these revolutionists, in the name of principle, refused to sign such agreements with the employers, they would have been sabotaging the functions of the union and would soon, deservedly, cease to be leaders.

  The idea of coalition or realignment politics as advanced by socialists is not a rigid formula, or a plot to deliver our souls into the hands of the Establishment. It is meant as a strategy for energizing all those forces within the society that want to move forward toward an extension of the welfare state. In some places, such a loose coalition might take the form of politics outside the established institutions, like the Freedom Democratic Party of Mississippi—though that movement, if it is to succe
ed, must begin to find allies within the white community. In other places, as in Texas, there is a coalition of labor, liberal, intellectual, and minority groups (Negro, Mexican) within the Democratic Party—and by all accounts a pretty good coalition. Can one say, as if all wisdom were bunched into our fists, that such a development should not be supported simply because it grows up within the framework of a major party?

  If we are serious in our wish to affect American political life, we must learn to see the reality as it is. We have to seek out and prod the forces that exist. And I think it is a gross error—the kind of deep-seated conservatism that often alloys ultraradicalism—to say that everything in the major sectors of American society is static, sated, “Establishment.” Who, twenty-five or thirty years ago, could have foreseen that Catholic priests and nuns would be marching into Montgomery? Who could have foreseen the thoroughgoing ferment in the American churches of which this incident is merely a symptom? Instead of scoffing at such people as civil rights “tourists,” we ought to be seeking them out and trying to get them to move a little further, up north too.

  And a word about the labor movement. Its failures, ills, and decline have been documented in great detail by American socialists—perhaps because we ourselves have not quite understood what its nature and possibilities are, preferring instead to nag away when it did not conform to our preconceptions. Right now, to be sure, the unions look pretty sluggish and drab. Still, two leaders, named David MacDonald and James Carey, have recently been toppled by membership votes (and when something like that happens to a trade-union leader in Russia, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, or Zanzibar, please let me know).