by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Where in the 1930s liberalism was at least in part based on mass movements, notably the trade unions, and could claim a large popular suffrage, by the 1970s it had narrowed into an electoral apparatus or “political class” getting on in years and too much at ease with itself and its received ideas. By contrast, it should in honesty be said, at least some conservatives tried to engage in programmatic thought, speculating in their newly developed think tanks on the problems and contradictions, some contingent but others perhaps fundamental, of the welfare state in a capitalist economy. (That the welfare state might have inherent contradictions was an idea that rarely, if ever, surfaced in liberal thought.) After a time, the once-magical names of Roosevelt and Kennedy lost their glamour; new generations appeared that had little interest in the past and less capacity for memory. Liberalism, once at least occasionally linked with social insurgency, now came to be identified with a troubled status quo: a government that had dragged us into an indefensible war in Vietnam and by the mid-1970s was encountering economic difficulties (stagflation, unemployment) for which it knew no remedies.
The bureaucratization of liberalism, perhaps an unavoidable cost of its success, also meant that it came increasingly to depend on the intervention of the judiciary, especially on such difficult matters as school busing; and this too contributed to the decline of its popular base. As liberalism lost its charge of innovative energy, the conservative movement appropriated many of the techniques of liberalism’s earlier, more heroic days. For what the conservatives now undertook to do, and in part succeeded in doing, was to build articulate popular constituencies.
With Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976, the disintegration of American liberalism quickened. A tradition that in the past had at least partly drawn upon social idealism and popular commitment now dwindled into the outlook of an intelligent technocrat. As the political scientists celebrated the ascendency of “pragmatism” (a term that relieves many people of the need for thinking), another triumph was in preparation, that of the ideologically aroused Reaganites.
Well, then, is liberalism “exhausted”—not for the moment but historically, finally? Is it being swept off the historical stage, as dogmatists of right and left gleefully assert? If so, the situation of the American left, precarious enough already, is far worse than we might suppose, for every lesson of American history teaches us that the left in America flourishes mostly during the times when liberalism flourishes. In any case, it is clearly probable that a collapse of liberalism will benefit the right far more than the left.
We ought to be skeptical about theories of liberalism’s “exhaustion,” if only because they bear an embarrassing resemblance to earlier, dubious theories about capitalism’s “inevitable collapse.” American liberalism at its best has a rich tradition: a worldview devoted to political freedom, pluralist ways of life, and programs for social change. This liberalism has seen bad times, but found itself again; some of its leading figures have yielded to shoddy deals, others have stood firm by first principles. In bad shape right now, it could regain cogency if it were to confront socioeconomic problems more complex, and requiring more radical answers, than those of the New Deal era. Neither success nor failure is ordained: men and women still make their history, at least some of it.
5
Criticism and more criticism—that’s the need of the moment, the need for tomorrow. Criticism of an administration that exalts greed and ignores need. Criticism of military chauvinism. Criticism of all those who, in the name of an abstract equality, would deny blacks a few steps toward equality through affirmative action. Criticism of every deal or accord with authoritarian dictatorships. And criticism of “our side” too, of the sluggishness of portions of the labor movement, of the collapse of the hopes raised by the French Socialists, of the intellectual drabness of much social democracy.
One needn’t be a socialist to engage in such criticism. On some matters, such as the environment, not being a socialist may even render the criticism more effective. But to scan our society from the perspective of democratic socialism offers at least this advantage: it enables a deep-going criticism of the imbalances of wealth and power in our corporate-dominated society, so that we can see those imbalances not as mere blemishes but as injustices built into the very structure of capitalist economy. Perhaps not an advantage in the immediate tactical sense, but very much so for serious intellectual work.
Even if the criticism is not as “fundamental” as we might like, let it be heard. Let people of determination, steady workers with some humor and no fanaticism, keep saying: “This is not what America is supposed to be, this is not how human beings should live.”
The 1990s
Two Cheers for Utopia
{1993}
WE LIVE IN A TIME of diminished expectations. It’s not exactly a time of conservative dominance, although the dominant politics in some countries is an unenthusiastic conservatism. Nor is it a time of liberal dominance, although in the United States the Clinton administration has given rise to some liberal hopes, by no means certain of realization. And it’s certainly not a time of leftist domination, even though moderate social democratic parties hold office in some European countries.
It’s tempting to compare this post–cold war moment to the postrevolutionary decades of early nineteenth-century England. But the comparison is of slight value, since what we are experiencing might better be called a postcounterrevolutionary moment. Idealistic visions, utopian hopes, desires for social renovation are all out of fashion—indeed, are regarded as dangerous illusions that set off memories of totalitarian disasters. Leftist bashing, in both newspaper editorials and learned books, is very much in. The current catchword is sobriety, which sometimes looks like a cover for depression.
This is true of the intellectual world, with the exception of a few mavericks like Günter Grass. It is also true for what remains of the European left—either solid, decent social democrats with barely a touch of fire left in them or unrepentant communists masquerading as socialists in Eastern Europe.
There are, of course, many reasons for this mood indigo, only a few years after the enthusiasm raised by the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia and the Gorbachev reforms in the former Soviet Union. But in this comment I want to focus on only one reason: the aftermath, or perhaps more accurately, the aftertaste of the collapse of communism.
Some years ago Theodore Draper made a remark in conversation that has stuck in my mind: the central experience of the twentieth century, he said, was communism, like it or hate it. To be sure, there was fascism and the end of colonialism, but fascism could be seen as essentially a ghastly reaction to the rise of radicalism and the end of colonialism as an all-but-inevitable cluster of events. In its years of influence and power, communism seized upon the imagination of millions of people throughout the world. Communist parties were powerful in most of the major European countries; a bit later, they appropriated the heritage of anticolonialism in Asian and African countries; and even in the United States, where the Communist party was never a major force, it has been reliably estimated that nearly a million people passed through the Stalinist milieu (not the party) between, say, 1920 and 1950.
Declaring itself the legatee of humanism and the bearer of good news, communism inspired thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of workers, students, intellectuals, to feats of devotion and, sometimes, heroism. Seldom have so many good people sacrificed themselves for so bad a cause. There were of course careerists, hacks, and thugs in the communist movement; but for many ordinary people “the movement” burned with flames of hope. Those of us who were long-time anti-Stalinists, enclosed in our little groups and sects, found it hard to acknowledge the idealism—twisted, distorted, corrupted yet idealism nonetheless—that went into the communist movement. To be sure, in the East European countries the communist dictatorships attracted a large share of careerists (the kinds of people who in the United States might have been Republican officeholders). But there, too, the communis
ts gained the support of decent, misguided followers. When the anti-Stalinist groups won over a handful of people from the Communist parties, it was almost always people who were intellectually and psychologically exhausted, their fanaticism burned out and their intellectual energies diminished.
The communist movement destroyed entire generations. The sheer waste of human resources, of the energies that might have been available for social renovation, is incalculable. With many rank-and-file militants, the sequel has been silence. With a good many former communist leaders, the sequel has been an ugly form of nationalism—as in Yugoslavia, where the leaders of both Serbia and Croatia are former prominent communists.
The results of this great historical disaster are staggering. Even those of us in the United States, insulated by our native mythologies, who were never tempted by Communism, are experiencing the consequences. New generations, new energies do not arrive overnight. There has first to be an interval of weariness, disillusionment, “pragmatism”—and diminished expectations.
You can see the signs of this exhaustion if you pick up any of the leading intellectual journals. Some are sour (usually edited by ex-radicals) and others are timid (usually edited by quasiliberals). Some subsist by mocking the hopes of their youth. Others avoid any long-range expectations or desires. Still others narrow their focus of concern to the daily routines of politics, sometimes saying useful things, though not much more.
What I’ve been saying here holds, I’m afraid, for large segments of the European social democracy. Let me be clear: if I lived in any of the major European countries, I would belong to or support the social democratic party. I might be critical, I might tilt a little toward whatever left wing it had. But I would be part of it.
Yet the truth is that, except in one or two countries, social democracy today has become a decent and honorable party that (rhetoric apart—and that even less and less) does not really aspire to move beyond the status quo. Little of the spirit of socialism remains in these parties. That much said, it’s only fair to add that this isn’t entirely their fault. For one thing, the constituencies of these parties, the people who vote for them, also share in their spiritual hesitation, their intellectual skepticism and bewilderment. It’s not as if “the masses” are pressing the social democrats for a more radical outlook. Nor is it as if there were a clear socialist idea or vision that the parties reject. For the truth—as every Dissent reader learns from every issue we publish, perhaps to excess—is that the socialist idea is as precarious as the ideas of the conservatives and liberals, though the latter have the advantage of being at ease with the existing social and political order, while the social democrats presumably desire some change. The difficulty of formulating an attractive program is far more serious for the social democrats than for their opponents. Devoted to decency and democracy—no small matters—the social democrats cannot evoke the idealism and selflessness of the socialist yesterday. The memories of yesterday grow dimmer; one of the last to embody these was Willy Brandt, and now he is gone.
So there really is no point in the old-style leftist denunciation of social democracy. What we can and should criticize the social democrats for is not that they have failed to come up with the “answers”; it is for having largely abandoned the questions.
Well, we Dissenters, the handful of us, try to hold fast to the vision of social transformation, even as we have dropped many of the traditional proposals for how to reach it. Some of us call this belief socialism, out of a wish for historical continuity or for lack of a better label. It’s not that we’re smarter than most European social democrats; not at all. Our advantage, if that’s what it is, consists in the fact that we are distant from power and therefore able or, indeed, driven to think in terms of long-range possibilities, the revival of the democratic left in what may turn out to be the not-very-near future. Of course we also respond to immediate issues, so that Dissent carries articles about taxes, health care, budget crises, and so on. But even if, at a given moment, the immediate issues loom large, at least some of us want to think in terms of long-range options. We want, that is, to avoid the provincialism of the immediate.
That’s why in almost every issue of Dissent you’ll find one or two articles about “market socialism” or allied topics. Some of our readers, I suspect, quietly skip past these articles. That’s OK, as long as they see why we print them. Often enough, these articles are provisional, a little abstract, and inclined to disagreements with one another. They don’t necessarily paint a picture of an actual future—who can? But they are efforts to indicate possibilities of renewal. They provide materials for developments some of us will never live to see. They are, if you please, sketches of utopia.
That word “utopia” has come into disrepute. In much intellectual discussion it tends to be used as a term of dismissal. And, of course, there are versions of utopia—based on force or terror or the will of a self-appointed “vanguard”—that are abhorrent. We have had enough of these.
But there are other utopias. There is the democratic utopianism that runs like a bright thread through American intellectual life—call it Emersonianism, call it republicanism, call it whatever you like. There is the utopia of community and egalitarianism.
In an essay Lewis Coser and I wrote some forty years ago in the second issue of Dissent, we quoted a passage from Ernst Cassirer that still speaks to our condition:
A Utopia is not a portrait of the real world, of the actual political or social order. It exists at no moment of time and at no point in space; it is a “nowhere.” But just such a conception of a nowhere has stood the test and proved its strength in the development of the modern world. It follows from the nature and character of ethical thought that it can never condescend to the “given.” The ethical world is never given; it is forever in the making.
In the sense that Cassirer speaks of it, utopianism is a necessity of the moral imagination. It doesn’t necessarily entail a particular politics; it doesn’t ensure wisdom about current affairs. What it does provide is a guiding perspective, a belief or hope for the future, an understanding that nothing is more mistaken than the common notion that what exists today will continue to exist tomorrow. This kind of utopianism is really another way of appreciating the variety and surprise that history makes possible—possible, nothing more. It is a testimony to the resourcefulness that humanity now and then displays (together with other, far less attractive characteristics). It is a claim for the value of desire, the practicality of yearning—as against the deadliness of acquiescing in the “given” simply because it is here.
With all due modesty, I think this version of utopianism speaks for us. So, to friend and foe, at a moment when the embers of utopianism seem very low, I’d say: You want to call us utopians? That’s fine with me.
The Road Leads Far Away: Review of A Surplus of Memory
{1993}
THIS UNFORGETTABLE BOOK contains the memoirs of Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which took place exactly fifty years ago this April. Zuckerman, who used the pseudonym “Antek” in the underground, was among the handful of Jewish fighters who survived the rebellion. After the war he settled in Israel, and in the early 1970s he dictated his memoirs while living in the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in the Galilee. He died in 1981 at the age of 66. His memoirs have now been translated and edited, superbly, by Barbara Harshav, who provides almost all the auxiliary information a reader might need. (The one thing missing is a map of Warsaw and its environs.)
A Surplus of Memory is an essential testimony. Zuckerman lacks the literary skills of Nadezhda Mandelstam, but his memoirs can stand together with Hope Against Hope as revelations of what it meant to live and to die in the totalitarian age. Zuckerman speaks plainly, without verbal flourish or the wanton rhetoric that has disfigured some writings about the Holocaust. He sometimes gets his chronology entangled, he sometimes repeats himself, and he sometimes refers to people and movements with which, despite the editor’s excellent annot
ations, an American reader is not likely to be familiar. No matter. His memoirs hold one relentlessly. The dryness of his voice as he recalls terrible events comes to seem a sign of moral strength.
To supplement Zuckerman, I turned to Yisroel Gutman’s The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943, a first-rate historical narrative that was published by Indiana University Press a few years ago. Because Gutman was able to use both German and Polish sources, his work has a completeness that Zuckerman cannot claim. If you have strong nerves, read the two together. Even if you don’t have strong nerves . . .
When the Polish army collapsed before the Nazi attack in 1939, the Jews of Poland found themselves in a state of disarray and fear. Whoever could, fled. But the majority of Jews, who could not flee, hoped to survive—iberlebn in Yiddish—the Nazi occupation in the ways that Jews had survived in previous wars, through a mixture of submission and dogged persistence, and by trying to exploit the differences among the conquerors, specifically, between the S.S., intent above all upon exterminating Jews, and the Wehrmacht, intent primarily upon military victory. This latter strategy was effective only in a few instances, since most of the time the German army knuckled under to the S.S.
Neither the Polish Jews nor anyone else had any idea of what lay ahead. Historical precedents were of little use, and often they were completely misleading. When word began to filter through in later months about mass executions of Jews near Vilna and Chelmno, the messengers, according to Gutman, reported that “not a single person believed their stories about the outright exterminations.” In any case, added some Warsaw Jews, such things simply could not happen in their city.
Though previously a well-organized community with strong secular parties, the Polish Jews were unable to develop a sustained strategy for resisting the Nazi occupation. Probably there was no strategy that could cope with terror on such an unprecedented scale. The mainstream Jewish organizations collapsed or tried to maintain themselves as a skeletal underground (which in practice often came to much the same thing). For a time the Jüdenrat, imposed by the Nazis, tried to act as a buffer, but all too soon it became primarily a vehicle for transmitting Nazi orders to the Jews. Half-starved, sometimes wholly starved, the masses of Jews were helpless.
