A Revival Of Radicalism?

...Goodman, or the New Left Review in Britain, and sometimes also DisSENT and Commentary, the German utopian radicalism of the 1840s seems to have come to life again, with one significant difference: that with most of the American new radicals, concepts derived from clinical psychology have replaced the concepts of Hegelian metaphysics...

...That a radical article on a particular subject in the larger magazines can have value, it would be silly to deny...

...What was troubling was the fact that an intellectual socialist journal, such as would simply have been taken for granted in any free European country, occasioned such venom and rage, as if somehow a deviation from the standard Cold War sentiments were a scandal, even a kind of treason...

...More and more people say this too...

...they often appreciate the work DISSENT has done...

...It seems probable that we will not soon plunge into a nuclear war through the deliberate choice of one or both of the major powers...

...In the early fifties you could see mention of this fact only in the left-wing press, but now it finds steady confirmation in a variety of places, including a long and excellent piece by Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker...

...but we believe that an essential function of a journal like DISSENT, even as it engages in radical criticism and analysis of current affairs, is to keep returning to the fundamental need for, and problems of, socialist thought...

...Hence, DISSENT...

...He has a number of important disagreements with the editors of DISSENT, yet he shares with us a belief in the need for a political community of the left and for a coherent, larger view of social problems which puts issues into an historical and political context, rather than confining them to journalistic exposes...

...When Macdonald believed in the possibility or need for such a radical community (by which, incidentally, I mean a loose grouping that is not quite a political movement but may help prepare the grounds for such a movement), he edited Politics...

...There is, in America, as it appears to an English academic visitor, a self-conscious radical intelligentsia with a recognized role and license: that of the popular moralist criticizing the American way of life...

...In the sense that I am here using the term, Paul Goodman remains a political man, Dwight Macdonald does not...

...And because we believe that one of our essential tasks is to nurture the point of view of the democratic left as a coherent intellectual tendency, because we wish to exert an influence, no matter how modest at the moment, as a political group or community, we believe that we must do more than write an article here or there: we must express our views, develop our outlook, discuss our differences, in an organized fashion...

...This means that new kinds of problems, not accessible to rigid Cold War politics, keep presenting themselves...

...A good many intellectuals formerly of the left were engaged in a flight to conservatism which proved as ungainly as it was premature...

...Commentary, once the center of the more embittered, sophisticated antiradicalism, is these days a new magazine, receptive to a wide range of opinion, including that of writers on the democratic left...

...and they are interested as to the role it can now play...

...Ten years ago, to be sure, this was hard—though not impossible: Partisan Review continued to print some radical pieces...

...Is poverty still a major problem in the United States...

...Though it remains necessary to keep sharply in mind the distinction between democratic and totalitarian values, recent developments make it less and less useful to enforce a blackandwhite division in world politics...

...but that it does very much toward reorienting people to a fundamental shift in political thought, it would be hazardous to affirm...

...It was exactly this diversionary role of a freely speculative and morally concerned intelligentsia which aroused Karl Marx's destructive rages...

...Paul Goodman humorously remarks that he is treated by the present American authorities as a jester, and is urged in Washington to keep up his cries of dissent, as some useful contribution to the social whole...

...In this respect, he shares with DISSENT a common purpose, and that is one reason he frequently appears in our pages...

...ning to revive...

...Is there a problem of power in the United States, a concentration of resources and decisionmaking which undercuts the formal claims of democracy...

...I don't say this in order, at the moment, to attack Macdonald...

...It exposes many unpleasant facts which, until recently, were being discussed by radicals almost exclusively...

...A decade ago radical writers could appear almost nowhere else...

...How are we to explain so notable a shift in the intellectual climate...

...The ideological (or as it sometimes masked itself, the anti-ideological) zealousness that characterized a good part of the intellectual world in the early fifties was bound to exhaust itself...

...ill That many people disagreed with DISSENT was not troubling: who could object to anything so natural...

...A decade ago the mere mention of this fact led to charges that we were clinging to "old-fashioned Marxist cliches," but now it is being discussed among people who do not even think of themselves as socialists...

...ty...

...The ways in which this can now be done are surely affected by the changes I have described in the intellectual atmosphere...

...Put at its simplest and therefore (at least in this instance) most useful, the question one hears is this: If one or the other DISSENT article could appear in magazine X or Y, and if even The New Yorker is willing to publish James Baldwin's remarkable essay on Negro life in America or Dwight Macdonald's piece on poverty in America (both of which you would have been delighted to print yourselves), what reason is there for continuing a magazine like DISSENT...

...As a mood, if not a movement, radicalism is begin...

...But in relatively normal times—as distinct from the repressive atmosphere generated by McCarthyism— it should be taken for granted that there will be an overlap between the democratic socialist left and certain sectors of liberalism, both as to opinion and publication...

...Nothing suits the Sunday supplements, or Mr...

...It is necessary to distinguish between radical journalism and radical politics...

...Without pretending to a full explanation, let me list a few of the more important reasons for the change: • The Cold War has run its course of futility, at least for those who thought in terms of "total victory" for the West...

...He understood very clearly why the ruling classes would always feel safe as long as radical thought was kept in these speculative, philosophical, spiritual channels: his polemic against utopian socialism, and his argument that a movement of the Left must rest on a materialist philosophy if it is to be linked with effective political action, are suddenly worth recalling: surely there is a truth buried in that dead metaphysics...

...It bears remembering, especially in a country devoted to historical amnesia...

...Now take as a contrasting example the recent writings of Paul Goodman...

...to day many of them can publish in a wide range of journals...

...How many readers can recall the intellectual atmosphere in this country at the time DISSENT started publishing, almost a decade ago...

...And do we need a strong infusion of radical policies to stimulate a sluggish economy and a complacent population...

...and it is hard to hold to the more simple kind of anti-Communism which flourished a decade ago...

...perhaps he doesn't see the need or possibility to rebuild such a commu nity...

...We have a job to do, and with a certain amount of help from our friends and readers, we mean to do it...

...The difficulties in both the socialist position and in trying to advocate it these days, we know rather well...

...we grind our teeth (mildly) at being unable to compete financially...

...People feel a little freer to think, to talk, to speculate...

...He is a member of the intelligentsia, and dissent is what the authorities expect from an intelligentsia, as they expect battle plans from an admiral...

...The people who ask are not motivated by malice...

...but in these remarks it may be enough to indicate the basis for our continued existence and vitali...

...but nevertheless there is reason to be a little skeptical as to the uses to which radicalism, or for that matter, any kind of intellectual effort, are put in our society...

...the moral issues become less embarrassingly sharp and clear when the alleged social evils, being spiritual in their nature, cannot be precisely ascertained or measured...

...and whatever our later disagreements with him, we have always felt a genuine gratitude for the solidarity he showed us...

...As with the crude Marxism of the thirties, there has followed a period of sobering second thoughts...

...but such difficulties are of a kind that ought to stimulate us to greater effort, for they are caused by an improvement in the political climate...

...An improvement, yes...

...All of which is pleasing, for we desire neither an intellectual monopoly nor splendid isolation...

...II Inevitably, in this improved atmosphere, the question must arise as to the role of a magazine like DISSENT...

...Changes and improvements in the magazine will be forthcoming in the next few issues...

...since then he has confined himself to miscellaneous journalism...

...Luce's magazines, better than a Great Debate on the Spiritual Malaise of Our Time, in which the young literary radicals are invited to lead...

...Let me indicate a few ways of considering these questions: • It was never our goal simply to get this or the other radical article into print...

...But there is good reason to listen to the voice of an English friend, Stuart Hampshire, who has written in the New Statesman: Those who would defend the existing social and economic order have an interest, as they well know, in lifting discussion from the crude material realities of contemporary living on to a higher, more vague and spiritual plane...

...has reached a state of health which leaves little more than marginal problems to solve, and those having to do less with gross exploitation than with intangible psychological difficulties...

...Mr...

...Paul Goodman, who stood fast by his anarcho-utopian views throughout the forties and fifties and in consequence was restricted in his opportunities to publish, has recently been issuing some valuable books which are widely and seriously considered...

...Do I exaggerate in saying that for the ex-radical intellectuals there was a steady need to depreciate the menace of Senator McCarthy's hooliganism, and that what really mattered was a kind of union sacree in behalf of the Cold War...

...for then no inconvenient political measures are unambiguously indicated...

...Young people in small but significant numbers have turned to the peace movement, that complex of political tendencies united around a desire to avoid atomic destruction...

...it popularizes material which had been appearing in DISSENT and other left-wing papers, just as Harrington's excellent book does...

...I don't know, and neither does anyone else...

...but just as they do not necessarily make for a radical intellectual tendency, so they do not come to the same thing as advocating a socialist renovation of American life...

...A recent symposium about the Cold War in Partisan Review showed a notable shift away from the Establishment ideology...

...Today things are very different, and largely for the better...

...Perhaps we need to define more sharply the general perspective of DISSENT, even while preserving our tradition of individual freedom and no hard-and-fast editorial Iine...

...The piece Dwight Macdonald did for The New Yorker reviewing Michael Harrington's book The Other America is an example of superior journalism...

...The American campus seems a bit more alive than it has been for some time...

...Or that, under the tranquilizing fumes of the "American Celebration," social problems in the United States were regarded as largely solved—or, in more exalted moments (this was a favorite gambit of Arthur Schlessinger Jr., before he moved from Kierkegaard to Kennedy), as symptoms of that impulse toward evil forever lodged in the human soul...

...If, say, a Dissentish article is lost to us and appears in another magazine, this may cause us a bit of journalistic chagrin...

...112 • It is increasingly hard to maintain the notion that capitalism in the U.S...

...We remain socialists: that is, we believe in a fundamental restructuring of society, a redistribution of property and power, along democratic lines...

...but the sour hostility toward their own past, the frantic pursuit of political "novelties" that a century earlier had become the merest commonplaces of European reaction, the barely-disguised contempt for freeedom which certain exradicals displayed in their devotion to the Cold War—all this was a good deal worse than conservatism...

...He does not threaten property...

...So far one sees this mostly in intellectual circles, but if the mood deepens and the causes for its appearance persist, we can expect it to extend to larger segments of the population...

...It was a moment of retreat, even rout...

...Perhaps we should venture a little into hypothetical "programmaking"—what we would say if there were a significant socialist movement in the U.S...

...From the centers of power he can therefore be viewed with complacency, as someone who has a stimulating effect within universities, and as an orna meet of culture in a free society...

...I am merely trying to describe what it is he does in such an article...

...the inadequacies of Western power, especially in regard to such areas as Latin America, have become clear...

...David Riesman, who in the early fifties provided ingenious rationalizations for abandoning radical values, has in recent years been a leader of the Council for Correspondence, an informal organization of academic people devoted to discus• sing peaceful ways out of the nuclear impasse...

...Among prominent American intellectuals only C. Wright Mills came to our defense...

...Is the export of American corporate ideology a poor way of opposing Communism...

...Radical criticisms of one or another social evil, or of the society as a whole, have great value, no matter where they may appear...

...We should face such questions with candor and good humor...

...One wonders as to the significance of those radical pieces in some of the larger magazines: do they really have any effect upon political thought and action, or do they tend to become absorbed, sponge-like, in a culture which displays a remarkable capacity for watering all ideas...

...This truth has begun to sink into the minds even of people who had spent years learning to evade it...

...Seriously entertained, conservatism can be a respectable point of view...

...Alienation" now has a pathological, and not a metaphysical, sense, but it remains as abstract a notion as before...

...He writes for a wide range of magazines, but he writes with an eye toward a political end...

...Far from being a cause for concern, or a reason for either tendency to abdicate, this should be regarded as a desirable state of affairs...

...But by itself Macdonald's piece is simply a journalistic effort, unrelated to any concern for rebuilding a radical political community...

...Reading Mr...

...When DISSENT first appeared, it was attacked with a violence which surprised even those of us who knew we had no reason to expect popularity...