A Voice Still Heard

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

  Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent

  {1979}

  TO BE A SOCIALIST IN EUROPE means to belong to a movement commonly accepted as part of democratic political life, a contender in the battle of interest and idea. To be a socialist in America means to exist precariously on the margin of our politics, as critic, gadfly, and reformer, struggling constantly for a bit of space. Lonely and beleaguered as it may be, this position of the American socialist has, nevertheless, an advantage: it forces one to the discomforts of self-critical reflection. And that, sometimes fruitfully and sometimes not, has been a central concern of Dissent, the democratic socialist quarterly which, as I write early in 1979, has reached its twenty-fifth anniversary (notable for any “little magazine,” all the more so for one holding unpopular views). You will find in this book a representative sample of the best work that has appeared in Dissent this past quarter of a century, though not, of course, a systematic exposition of the democratic socialist point of view. But rather than discuss the merits or failings of one or another article—the reader can do that perfectly well, unaided—I would like in this introduction to say a few words about the historical context in which our work has occurred.

  The story of the left in America is one of high initial hopes, followed by considerable if not major achievements, and ending with painful, even disastrous collapse. Why this recurrent rhythm, enacted now three times in the last seventy-five years?

  The first and strongest upsurge of the American left occurred as Debsian socialism, starting before the First World War. Of all the radical movements we’ve had, this was the most “American.” It was the least ideologically “pure,” the most inclined to speak in a vocabulary—evangelistic, folksy, shrewd, idealistic—that ordinary Americans might respond to. By 1912 this loosely strung Socialist Party had over 100,000 members; had elected some 1,200 public officials; and was sponsoring 300 periodicals, one of which, the erratic Appeal to Reason, had a circulation of three quarters of a million. While not yet a force capable of seriously challenging the major parties, the Socialist Party of that era was genuinely rooted in native experience, blessed in Eugene Victor Debs with a leader of high sincerity and eloquence, able to command a respectable minority of delegates at AFL conventions, and increasingly winning support among intellectuals. This was a real movement, not a petrified sect. Internally, it was extremely heterogeneous, as all American parties tend to be. There were municipal reformers and social democrats on its right; anti-political syndicalists and Marxist theoreticians on its left. There were Midwestern populists, called socialists mainly by courtesy. There were Christian Socialists, for whom socialism meant a latter-day version of Jesus’s word. What prompted thousands of ordinary Americans to become socialists was an impulse to moral generosity, a readiness to stake their hopes on some goal other than personal success. It was an impulse that drew its strength from an uncomplicated belief in freedom and fraternity; or to use an almost obsolete word, goodness.

  Today, of course, it is hard not to feel that this socialism contained too large a quota of innocence, too great a readiness to let spirit do the work of mind. For the vision of the future which most early American socialists held was remarkably unproblematic—in an odd way, it took over the optimism of the early Emersonian, indeed, the whole American individualist tradition, and transported it to new communal ends. Part of the success experienced by Debsian socialism was probably due to precisely this link to native modes of feeling; its collapse toward the end of the First World War may also, however, have been due to the fact that this native tradition did not prepare it for the toughness that an oppositional party has to cultivate, especially one that, like the Socialists, opposed American participation in the war. The party disintegrated under the blows of government attack and war hysteria; also, because its growing left wing was lured to the nascent Communist movement after the Russian Revolution.

  More than a decade would go by before a new resurgence could begin in the early 1930s, smaller in scope than Debsian socialism but with somewhat greater intellectual sophistication. A successor to Debs appeared: Norman Thomas, selfless, energetic, intelligent, a superb speaker. Thousands of young people flocked into the movement, shaken by the Depression, convinced there was no choice for America but fundamental social transformation. The party had a footing in the trade unions, among such gifted figures as the Reuther brothers, Walter and Victor, and it won the allegiance of an influential circle of intellectuals. It was marked by a spirit of liveliness and openness. But again the pressures of historical circumstance undid this burgeoning movement—especially as they presented themselves in the form of difficult new problems American socialists were not yet prepared to solve. These problems have, in fact, been major concerns of all contemporary political thought: first, how to respond to the “welfare state” introduced through Roosevelt’s New Deal and, second, what to make of the terrifying new phenomenon of Stalinist totalitarianism.

  At the right pole of the Socialist Party in the thirties was clustered a group of old-timers, mostly veterans of the Jewish garment unions, who saw the New Deal as a partial embodiment of their hopes. What mattered for them was immediate social reform, not a shadowy dream of “complete” transformation. But for the party’s younger and more militant people, who soon won over Norman Thomas, the New Deal, though some of its particular measures were desirable, represented a patchwork meant to salvage a sick and unjust system. Roosevelt’s reforms, they pointed out, had not really ended unemployment or changed the basic situation of the worker in capitalist society. It was a dispute that seemed beyond compromise. The older trade unionists knew that the New Deal had brought crucial improvements: there was now the opportunity to strengthen unions and improve the conditions of millions of people. The left-wing socialists, hardening into a semi-Leninist ideology, were responding not just to American conditions—indeed, to American conditions least of all. They were trying to maintain an international perspective at a time when it seemed that social breakdown cut across national lines. They felt they were living through the apocalypse of international capitalism—had not the Depression, the rise of fascism, the collapse of bourgeois democracy in Europe provided sufficient evidence? Capitalism, they said, could not be reformed nor peaceably changed; social revolution (ill-defined, vaguely invoked) was the way out. Whatever pertinence this outlook may have had in a Europe overcome by fascism, it had precious little in America even during the Depression years, a country in which the democratic tradition remained very strong.

  In retrospect (the easiest source of wisdom) one feels there might have been a more flexible socialist stand, acknowledging that the New Deal was indeed a significant step toward desirable reform yet by no means removing the need for a basic socialist critique. But such a nuanced policy was impossible to either side: the problem was still too fresh and stark for compromise, and besides, the classical socialist division between incremental reformers and strict ideologues had already set in.

  About the problem of Stalinism, the socialists of the thirties were clearer. A few did begin to flirt with “the Soviet experiment,” but most were repelled by its ghastly terrorism, its destruction of working class, indeed, all human rights. Gradually the Socialists began to develop an analysis of Stalinism as a new order of social oppression—but to that we will return a bit later.

  Vexed by these problems, the Socialists now destroyed themselves in a round of bitter factional disputes. Meanwhile, the Communist movement, with its mindless loyalty to every turn of Moscow policy and its own deeply authoritarian structure and rigid ideology, was gaining support among a growing number of young American radicals. The tragic outcome of this story is by now well known—a coarse violation of the human spirit, a terrible waste of energy and hope, which left a generation of American radicals broken and demoralized. After the Hitler-Stalin pact, and then the infamous governmental persecutions during the Cold War years, the Communist movement dwindled into an elderly sect; but the damage it had done t
o American radicalism is beyond calculation.

  There was to be one more leftist upsurge in America, that of the New Left in the sixties, passionate, ill-defined, and in the end crashing, like its predecessors, to disaster. In its first phase, the New Left seemed hopeful to us. This was a phase of populist fraternity, stressing a desire to make real the egalitarian claims of the American tradition, a non- and even anti-ideological approach to politics, and a strategy of going into local communities in order to help oppressed minorities. A major stimulant was the rising protest of American blacks in the early sixties as they began to struggle for their rights as citizens and human beings. The main New Left slogan of this moment, appealing if vague, was “participatory democracy,” a hope that democracy could be extended from the forms of representation to the substance of experience.

  Things went bad. Perhaps it was due to the desperation engendered among many young people by the Vietnam war, which they rightly saw as a political and moral outrage; perhaps to a romanticism of “revolution” arising from a naïve identification with “charismatic” leaders like Castro and Mao. But by the mid-sixties there had begun a shift from fraternal sentiment to ill-absorbed dogma, from the good-spirited shapelessness of “participatory democracy” to the bitter rigidity of “vanguard” sects, from the spirit of nonviolence to a quasi-Leninist fascination with violence. In this second phase the New Left grew in numbers, yet through the sterile authoritarianism of its now-dominant Maoist and Weathermen wings, made certain that it, too, would end up as no more than a reincarnation of the radical sects of the past.

  We had the heart-sickening sense of reliving the disasters of the past (e.g., the way some leaders of Students for a Democratic Society contrived a theory of “liberal fascism”—that the liberalism of American society is “really” fascist—which bore a fatal resemblance to the idiotic Stalinist theory of the thirties called “social fascism”—that social democrats were “really” fascists). What had begun with a bang ended with a whimper: the pathological terrorism of the Weathermen, the brutal factionalism within SDS between the Maoists and other sects, the waste (once more, once more!) of all that splendid hope and energy. Unheeded, we could do little but warn and criticize.

  The conclusions, the “lessons,” to be drawn from these experiences are obviously far more substantial than can here be put forward. But with a ruthless sort of condensation, let me list—as I see them, some of my friends contributing to this book [Twenty-five Years of Dissent: An American Tradition] may not agree—a few points:

  • The ideological baggage of Marxism, especially Marxism-Leninism, must largely be dropped if we are to have in America a socialist movement open, alive, and responsive to native feelings. “Vanguard” parties, ideological systems, sneering at “bourgeois democracy”—all this can lead only to the petrifaction of sects. Which is not, of course, to deny the possible uses of a flexible Marxism in political and historical analysis.

  • The postures of righteousness that have often marked American radicalism, sometimes deriving more from Emersonian testimony than Marxist theory, can at times stand in the way of a realistic left politics. All three of the radical upsurges of the century suffered from such postures—as, for instance, the notion that working within the Democratic Party is a form of “betrayal.” Political conditions in America make increasingly unlikely that we shall have here a mass socialist or labor party on the European model. But that does not mean that socialists cannot exert significant political influence.

  • By this point in history, socialism can no longer be seen as a vision of perfection; it cannot be a surrogate for religious yearnings, though all too often, in the left-wing experiences of America, it has become that. We want to build a better world, but even a better world is not heaven on earth. Those with religious needs must try to satisfy them through religious experience.

  • Socialism must be committed, without qualification, to democracy—yes, the flawed and inadequate democracy we have today—in order to be able to bring a heightened democratic content to every department of life: political, economic, social, cultural. There can be no socialism without democracy, nor any compromise with apologists for dictatorship or authoritarianism in any shape or form.

  II

  Dissent, which started as a quarterly in winter 1954, arose out of the decomposition of the socialist movement of the thirties. Some of us rebelled against the sterility of the sects that still remained from the thirties, even as we wanted to give new life to the values that had been petrified in those sects. Others came from different places, some being independent writers and intellectuals drawn to the idea of socialism or the need for social criticism.

  When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine. But starting a magazine is also doing something: at the very least it is thinking in common. And thinking in common can have unforeseen results.

  The kind of magazine we had in mind was perhaps without precedent in the history of the American left. Though it would be devoted to democratic socialism, there would be no “party line” on political topics. Authors would not be published merely because they were counted among the faithful. The idea of socialism was itself to be treated as problematic rather than as a fixed piety. The socialist movement having reached its nadir in American life, we felt that our main task was to deal with socialism in the realm of ideas. This, to be sure, can never be enough. Yet there are moments when patience is all, and stubbornness too. And then I recall a few lines from our friend Harold Rosenberg: “The weapon of criticism is doubtless inadequate. Who on that account would choose to surrender it?”

  Even this modest goal was not easy to achieve. The early fifties were not merely afflicted with McCarthyism and repressions attendant upon the Cold War; they were also the years during which the “American Celebration,” involving a systematic reconciliation between American intellectuals and commercial society, reached its climax. A good many intellectuals were deluded by the feverish prosperity of a war-production economy into believing that all, or almost all, of our socioeconomic problems had been solved and that poverty had been effectively removed from American life. Susceptible to the genteel chauvinism of the Cold War years, they often lapsed into a mood of political complacency—sometimes apathy—in which the traditional symbols and phrases of liberalism did service for new impulses of conservatism.

  Whatever else, we of Dissent did not succumb to this mood. We kept insisting that American society, even in its flush of postwar prosperity, remained open to the most severe and fundamental criticism: some of which we tried to provide.

  For certain of our writers and readers it was this aspect of our magazine, symbolized by its title, that counted most. The idea of socialism, though it might still elicit their approval, seemed to them distant, abstract, and academic; what interested them most was analysis, reportage, polemic about American society today, eventuating in a sustained radical criticism of its claims and pretensions.

  For others among us, the idea of socialism as both problem and goal remained central. We suspected that for an indefinite time there would be no major socialist movement in America, but as intellectuals we tried to retain a long-range perspective, to live for more than the immediate moment. And we felt that for a radical criticism of American society to acquire depth and coherence it needed as an ideal norm some vision of the good—or at least of a better—society. This vision was what we meant by socialism.

  But as soon as we tried to grapple with the problems of socialist thought; to discover what in the ideology of Marxism remained significant and what had gone dead; to comprehend the failures of socialism as a world movement and to analyze the bewildering complex of moral and political problems that had come with the rise of Communist totalitarianism, the new forms of economy in the West, and the bureaucratization of the labor and socialist movements—as soon as we approached these matters it became clear that any expectation of constructing a new socialist ideology was premature, perhaps a fantasy. We had to learn to
work piecemeal, to treat socialist thought as inherently problematic, and to move pragmatically from question to question—with general theories or notions, to be sure, but without a total, world-encompassing ideology.

  Socialists, we felt, could make a contribution to intellectual and political life, precisely by projecting an image of a fraternal society in which men planned and controlled their political and economic affairs through democratic participation and in which no small group of owners, managers, or party bosses could dominate the lives of millions. But to do this, socialists had first to question their own assumptions. Necessarily, this led us to place a heavy stress upon the moral component of socialism. We opposed the status quo not merely because it had led, and might again lead, to depressions and human misery, but also because it rested upon a fundamentally unjust arrangement of social relations. It was a society that not only created material hardships for millions of people but gave rise to an ethic of inhumane competitiveness and to a psychic insecurity which in America had reached frightening proportions. And it was for similar reasons that we remained intransigent opponents of Communism.

  A second major stress in the Dissent re-examination of socialism has been upon the indispensability of democracy. Modern society, no matter what form it takes, shows an underlying tendency toward an idolatry of the state, a worship of the bureaucratic machine. All modern societies share in this drive toward transforming man into a passive object manipulable in behalf of abstract slogans, production plans, and other mystifying apparitions. The Western democracies are still far less guilty in this respect than the Communist nations; but the drift toward industrial bureaucratism seems universal. For us, therefore, the idea of socialism could retain value only if a new stress were placed on democratic participation and control. Statified or nationalized economy was not an end in itself; it could be put to desirable or despicable uses. These are the main emphases dominating the essays on socialism that open this anthology.