New Styles In "Leftism"

...B) Ideologues, Negro 1) Black nationalism...

...But for the sake of argu ment let us accept a version of this theory: let us grant what is certainly a bit more plausible, that a full or stable democratic society cannot be established in a country ridden by economic primitivism, illiteracy, disease, cultural disunion, etc...

...Consequently—the logic of this argument moves inexorably—there is nothing left for American Negroes but the separatism of the Muslims...

...A state which always knows the will of the people before it asks them...

...To this lucid analysis I would only add a word concerning the desire of Negroes "to enjoy the fruits of American society as it now exists...

...forcing him to develop some specialized dexterity at the cost of a world of productive impulses...

...to the death...

...In figures like Isaac Deutscher and Paul Sweezey we find the true intellectual progenitors of at least part of the "new leftism...

...but they fail to see that such leaders of the underdeveloped countries, who in their eyes represent spontaneity and anarchic freedom, are themselves—perhaps unavoidably —infused with the same mania for industrial production...

...You want to organize the poor...

...There are innumerable strands in the Western tradition, and our task is to nourish those which encourage dignity and freedom...

...Bayard Rustin says: "The labor movement, despite its obvious faults, has been the largest single organized force in this country pushing for progressive social legislation...

...But though the Mao regime has kept the loyalty of a small group of students, most of the "new leftists" seem to find it too grim and repressive...

...The more shapeless, the more promiscuously absorptive, the more psychologically and morally slack the society becomes, the more must candidates for rebellion seek out extreme postures which will enable them to "act out" their distance from a society that seems intent upon a maliciously benevolent assimilation...

...To be unconcerned with the dispute in the late 'twenties over the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee or the differences between Lenin and Luxemburg on the "national question"—well and good...

...Primarily the party of nationalism, led by men who are dedicated, uprooted, semi-educated and ruthless...

...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...

...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...

...But simply to proclaim this estrangement can be a way of preserving it...

...but how is this supposed to have occasioned, or how is it supposed to justify, the suppression of democratic rights (including, and especially, those of all other left-wing tendencies) in Cuba...

...Establishment...

...revolution," and for the sake of the argument accept this formulation...

...What the people who talk about integration vs...

...But some of the issues hotly debated in the 'thirties do remain burning problems: in fact, it should be said for the antiStalinist left of the past several decades that it anticipated, in its own somewhat constricted way, a number of the problems (especially, the nature of Stalinism) which have since been widely debated by political scientists, sociologists, indeed, by all people concerned with politics...

...The formidable sterility of his speech, so impressive in its relation to a deep personal suffering, touched something in their hearts...

...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...

...their "alienation" was prompted not by Bohemian wilfullness but by a loyalty to Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, or to an induced vision of pre-industrial society which, by a twist of history, came pretty much to resemble Liberty, Fraternity, Equality...

...He is proud to be estranged from white society...

...The term has become impossibly loose (like those other handy tags, "the Establishment" and "the Power Structure...

...in his fantasies of an international race war in which the whites will be slaughtered, Jones speaks for a contemporary sensibility...

...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...

...Certain editors of DISSENT have indicated an interest in writing on aspects of the subject where they disagree with one or another of these articles...

...Sweezey's Monthly Review is the main spokesman in this country for the view that authoritarianism is inherent or necessary in the socalled socialist countries...

...So that for all its humor and charm, the style of the "new leftist" tends to become a rigid anti-style, dependent for its survival on the enemy it is supposed to panic...

...If totalitarianism is a sign, then it is not confined to the West...

...The labor movement is mired in its own fat...

...A state in which the philosophers and writers always say the same as the generals and ministers, but always after them...

...The peasantry contributes men and blood for an anti-colonial war...

...but since when has that mattered to socialists...

...Some of them display a tendency to regard political— and perhaps all of—life as a Hemingwayesque contest, in courage and rectitude...

...but so do we...

...and it is they who will form the basis of a new movement, beyond the pale of Establishment politics...

...Their response is an inevitable consequence of over-organizing the propaganda resources of a modern state...

...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...

...He speaks at that center of revolutionary upsurge, the Village Vanguard...

...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...

...but it is not...

...This outlook is visible along limited portions of the political scene...

...2) To the younger radicals it seems clear that a good many of the radicals of the 'thirties have grown tired, or dropped out, or in some instances, sold out...

...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...

...Consider the case of Cuba...

...But not only the whites, also the Negroes...

...and what is still more im portant, they reflect one's fundamental moral values...

...This is a real and very impressive strength, but with it there goes a significant weakness: the lack of clear-cut ideas, sometimes even a feeling that it is wrong—or even "middle class"—to think systematically, and as a corollary, the absence of a social channel or agency through which to act...

...Writing in December 1964 the MR editors declared with satisfaction that "there could be no question of the moral ascendency of Peking over Moscow in the underdeveloped world...

...But my conviction is that this kind of "new leftism" is not a matter of organized political tendencies, at least not yet, and that there is no organization, certainly none of any importance, which expresses the kind of "new leftism" I am here discussing...

...but upon this single axiom, this conviction wrung from the tragedy of our age, politics must rest...

...Participation without choice is a burlesque of democracy...

...2) True Believers...

...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...

...Well, some students...

...3) Authoritarian Leftists...

...If he cannot change it, then at least he can outrage it...

...Like children subjected to forced feeding, they regurgitate almost automatically...

...And I think that the liberals see him as one of their own, albeit a Dropout...

...few, if any, positive forces in society that might stir people into action...

...Indeed, it acts as a training school for experienced, gifted, courageous people who have learned how to lead, how to sacrifice, how to work, but have no place in which to enlarge upon their gifts...

...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...

...Not being a pacifist, I believe there may be times when violence is unavoidable...

...An aside: I think it is a totalitarian invasion of privacy for a political or social movement to concern itself with the frequency its adherents or anyone else engage in sexual relations...

...Meanwhile, there is truth in Harold Rosenberg's remark that The sentiment of diminution of personality ["alienation"] is an historical hypothesis upon which writers have constructed a set of literary conventions by this time richly equipped with theatrical machinery and symbolic allusions...

...But this notion—it was used to justify the suppression of political freedoms during the early Bolshevik years—is at the very least called into question by the experience of England and the U.S...

...The crucial question then becomes: can at least some measure of democratic rights be won or granted?—say, the right of workers to form unions or the right of dissidents within a singleparty state to form factions and express their views...

...Since Marx wrote, the term has acquired an impossible load of signification...

...C) The "new leftism" appears at a moment when the intellectual and academic worlds—and not they alone—are experiencing an intense and largely justifiable revulsion against the immediate American past...

...And so is its defense...

...It is to ignore the notable achievements that strategy has already brought...

...And if it's a revolution in the quality of American life that you want, then have not the industrial unions come closer to achieving that for millions of people than any other force in the country...

...And another consequence is to manufacture a cult out of figures like Malcolm X, who neither led nor won nor taught, and Robert Williams, the Negro leader who declared for violence and ended not with the Negroes in Selma, or at their strike in the hospitals of Westchester County, or on the picket line before the Atlanta Scripto plant (places where the kind of coalition we desire between Negro and labor was being foreshadowed), but by delivering short-wave broadcasts from Cuba...

...With this issue DISSENT opens up a discussion of the "new leftism," in which, as always in our pages, a wide range of opinion will be welcome and each person will speak for himself...

...And in turn, if you're to keep them organized, you will have to engage in coalitions...

...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...

...Right now, to be sure, the unions look pretty sluggish and drab...

...King 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...

...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...

...c) Let us go even further and grant, again for the sake of argument, that in some underdeveloped countries authoritarian regimes may be necessary for a time...

...The apologists for Castro have an obligation to show what I think cannot be shown: the alleged close causal relation between U.S...

...it refers to the quantitative transformation of fundamental institutions, more or less rapidly, to the point where the social and economic structure...

...So I would say that if some young radicals read this text and feel that some of it is relevant to them but the rest is not, I will be delighted by such a response: the more any of them feels that parts of my portrait don't apply to him, the better it is...

...but if so, precise discriminations of analysis and clear boundaries of specification would be required as to what it signifies and how it operates...

...Their devotion is beyond doubt...

...This is a social phenomenon that goes beyond our immediate subject, indeed, it cuts through the whole of society...

...but surely that is all small change...

...Here the generational conflict breaks out with strong feelings on both sides, the older people feeling threatened in whatever they have been able to salvage from past experiences, the younger people feeling the need to shake off dogma and create their own terms of action...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...As the term "Establishment" was first used in England, it had the value of describing—which is to say, delimiting—a precise social group...

...That this movement, with great creative flair, has worked out an indigenous strategy of its own...

...Yet at a certain point it turns out that the Civil Rights movement, through the intensity of its work, seems to dramatize...

...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...

...But the present rupture between the young and their elders seems especially deep...

...He is desperate— impatient with the tactics of gradualism, nonviolence and passive resistance...

...but can we be so sure of them...

...You cannot stand the deceits of official anti-Communism...

...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...

...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 he acknowledged as persuasive...

...Shock as he will, disaffiliate as he may choose, the "new leftist" discovers after a while that nothing has greatly changed...

...Does not the reality of the situation require them to enter negotiations, formally or informally, and thereby become involved in the socio-economic life of the city...

...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...

...Intellectuals...

...There is another sense in which cultural style dominates the behavior of the "new leftists...

...Let me specify a few more of the characteristic attitudes among the "new leftists": 1) An extreme, sometimes unwarranted, hostility toward liberalism...

...Jones continues, as quoted in the Voice: "Absolutely not," rapped out Jones...

...People are constantly being tested for endurance, bravery, resistance to temptation, and if found inadequate, are denounced for having "copped out...

...He searches in the limited repertoire of sensation and shock: for sick comics who will say "fuck" in nightclubs...

...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...

...But is it not really childish to talk about "the West" as if it were some indivisible whole we must either accept or reject without amendment...

...Emphasis added) Fanon wants the masses to participate, yet throughout his book the single-party state remains an unquestioned assumption...

...Right now—let's be candid—you don't have very many of the poor and we don't have much of a coalition...

...The authoritarians find political tendencies and representative men with whom to identify in the Communist world...

...But since none of these phrases will quite do, I have had to fall back upon the loose and not very accurate term, "new leftists...

...We need not approve, we can argue against that choice, but we are obliged to support their right to make it...

...But if Jones wanted change, he would speak change...

...but he will end up having to favor a great expansion of the public sector of the economy...

...Nor is this quite a new problem...

...I fail to see how the [Civil Rights] movement can be victorious in the absence of radical pro grams for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure...

...Who could have foreseen the more thorough-going ferment in the American churches of which this incident is merely a symptom...

...A recurrent stress among the young has been upon differentiation of speech, dress and appearance, by means of which a small elite can signify its special status...

...A state in which the returns of parliamentary elections are always pre dictable...

...he never posed the problems, confusions and risks of maneuver, compromise, retreat...

...Then respond by castigating everything American...

...I have my own dead to mourn for...

...The nature of Stalinism and of post-Stalinist Communism is not an abstract or esoteric matter...

...the ministers are Sunday allies...

...Furthermore, if Castro does indeed have the degree of mass support that his friends claim, one would think that the preservation of democratic liberties in Cuba would have been an enormously powerful symbol of self-confidence...

...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...

...By contrast, the radicalism of an earlier generation, though it had numerous faults, had at least this advantage: it did not have to start as if from scratch, there were available movements, parties, agencies and patterns of thought through which one could act...

...as it has come to be used in the United States, it tends to be a term of all-purpose put-down...

...Figures like Lumumba, Nasser, Sukarno, Babu and above all Castro attract them, suggesting the possibility of a politics not yet bureaucratized and rationalized...

...He proposes, instead, that "the party should be the direct expression of the masses," and adds, "Only those underdeveloped countries led by revolutionary elites who have come up from the people can today allow the entry of the masses upon the scene of history...

...A state which does not like to see its citizens read back numbers of news papers...

...some remained significantly placed in the network of what might be called conscience-organizations...

...Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy...

...A society in which one person is unhappy because he says what he thinks, and another happy because he does not say what is in his mind...

...Neither of these demonstrations had a precise objective, neither had any way of measuring achievement, accumulating allies, registering victory...

...Those boys were just artifacts, artifacts, man...

...If, for example, you think Martin Luther King or Bayard Rustin was wrong in regard to certain tactical matters...

...But we do insist that in regard to a few crucial issues, above all, those regarding totalitarian movements and societies, there should be no ambiguity, no evasiveness...

...policy became unjustifiably hostile toward the Castro regime at an early point in its history...

...Alienation is not some metaphysical equivalent of the bubonic plague which constitutes an irrevocable doom...

...has lately come to dominate popular literature and feeling...

...a sharply divergent one by Staughton Lynd appears on p. 324...

...By contrast, the more reflective among the younger radicals, such as some leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, have made a serious effort to develop their intellectual and political views...

...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...

...In 1957, at the height of the Polish ferment, the young philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote a brief article entitled "What Is Socialism...

...To "advise" the Negro movement to adopt a policy encouraging or sanctioning violence, to sneer at Martin Luther King for his principled refusal of violence, is to take upon oneself a heavy responsibility—and if, as usually happens, taken lightly, it becomes sheer irresponsibility...

...And they carry this authoritarian bias into their consideration of the "third world," where they praise those rulers who choke off whatever weak impulses there may be toward democratic life...

...But the price they must pay for this choice is a considerable quantity of inner adaptation to the prevalent norms: for there is a limit to the social duplicity that anyone can sustain...

...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...

...He deprecates the working class: in the Western countries it has been bought off, and in the underdeveloped nations it constitutes a tiny "aristocracy...

...It is to evade the hard truth expressed by the Rev...

...Now, to a notable extent, all this has changed since and through the Civil Rights movement—but not changed as much as may seem...

...Like the regular Americans they wish so hard not to be, yet, through wishing, so very much are, they believe that the past is mere dust and ashes and that they can start afresh, immaculately...

...If we turn to culture, then we must recognize that in the West there has just come to an end one of the greatest periods in human culture—that period of "modernism" represented by figures like Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso...

...Somewhere amid the current talk about "alienation" an important reality is being touched upon or pointed to...

...But even if this is true, which I do not believe it is, then it must be acknowledged as an unpleasant necessity, a price we are paying for historical crimes and mistakes of the past...

...The trouble with the current use of alienation as a mode of social analysis is that it explains almost everything, and thereby almost nothing...

...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...

...King's "basic goal is integration, and SNCC's is a revolution...

...They see liberalism only in its current versions, institutional, corporate and debased...

...There is room for both disagreement and cooperation...

...And in the Negro movement they seem to have found it...

...But it must also be said that there is a tendency among the "new leftists" toward much too quick a dismissal of those who may disagree with them—they are a little too fast on the draw with such terms as "fink" and "establishment...

...They are quick—and quite right—to sense that announcements of old YPSL ties can serve as a selfprotective nostalgia or even as a cloak for acquiescence in the status quo...

...A state in which there is private ownership of the means of production...

...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...

...The bourgeoisie, what there was of it, having been shattered and the working class pushed aside, what remains...

...A few old ladies in California may grow indignant, a DA occasionally arrest someone, a Village Voice reporter arrange an interview...

...And if personal freedom matters, then, for all its grave imperfections, the West remains virtually alone as a place of hope...

...and if he is to succeed in shocking them or even himself, he must keep raising the ante...

...during the Second World War...

...Can they remain exempt from it...

...the liberals are two-faced, unreliable, perhaps cowards...

...On the contrary, what we find disturbing in some of the "new leftists" is that, while barely knowing it, they tend to repeat somewhat too casually the tags of the very past they believe themselves to be transcending...

...What emerges is a curious version of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, concerning national revolts in the backward countries which, to fulfill themselves, must become social revolutions...

...if you disagree with what Rustin proposed at the Democratic national convention and what King did in Selma, then you call into question their loyalty and commitment: you may even charge them with "copping out" or "fooling with the power structure...

...Most of whatever rebellion we have had up to—and even into—the Civil Rights movement takes the form of a decision as to how to live individually within this society, rather than how to change it collectively...

...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...

...Max Lerner, not John Stuart Mill...

...pressure and the destruction of freedom in Cuba...

...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...

...There are, in addition, a few facts to be noted concerning the relationship between the radical young and those few older people who have remained radicals: 1) A generation is missing in the life of American radicalism, the generation that would now be in its mid-thirties, the generation that did not show up...

...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...

...We propose certain sorts of coalitions...

...And a word about the labor movement...

...These negatives imply a positive, and that positive is the greatest lesson of contemporary history: the unity of socialism and democracy...

...There remains, not least of all, the matter of racial prejudice, and here no judgment of the West can be too harsh— so long as we remember that even this blight is by no means confined to the West, and that the very judgments we make draw upon values nurtured by the West...

...B) Domestic Politics A division of opinion, still incipient and confused, has appeared among people in the radical, student and Civil Rights movements...

...Good...

...It consisted of a series of epigrammatic sentences describing what socialism is not (at the moment perhaps the more immediate concern), but tacitly indicating as well what socialism should be...

...I do, however, believe that through this composite portrait I am touching upon an observable reality, a noticeable trend...

...And what if they are hostile to "the"—always "thel"—party...

...the "dropout" who has been trained to the fine edge of frustration and despair...

...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...

...King, would indeed be a revolution, greater in consequence and impact than that effected by the rise of industrial unionism in the 'thirties...

...exactly the same sort of nausea exists among the young in the Communist world...

...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...

...And if so, how long do you suppose their followers will remain with them...

...They encounter teachers who, on ceremonial occasions, like to proclaim old socialist affiliations, but who really have little or no sympathy with any kind of rebelliousness today...

...We are speaking here partly of speculations, partly of hopes...

...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, etc...

...It requires authenticity, a challenge to the self, or, as some young people like to say, an "existential" decision...

...Can one seriously suppose they will be exempt from such "temptations...

...Disagreements of this kind are fraternal, and can be tested patiently in experience...

...Certainly he knows, or should know, that the authority which in fact pertains is not the authority of race...

...The article was banned by the Gomulka regime but copies reached Western periodicals...

...And thereby they would cut off the resurgent American radicalism from what is, or should be, one of its sustaining sources: the tradition that has yielded us a heritage of civil freedoms, disinterested speculation, humane tolerance...

...Yet at the very same time most of the "new leftists" have identified not with the "revisionists" in Poland or Djilas in Yugoslavia —or even Tito...

...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...

...If improving the life of the workers is to count, then the West can say something in its own behalf...

...Even more than wrong, these intellectuals seem to me snobbish...

...Still, two leaders named David MacDonald and James Carey have just been toppled by membership votes (and when something like that happens to a trade union leader in Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria or Zanzibar, please let me know...

...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 succeed, must begin to find allies within the white community...

...But about some larger aspects of its problem we can speak...

...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...

...I don't notice James Baldwin or LeRoi Jones taking vows of poverty...

...In November 1957, after the Khrushchev revelations, Monthly Review printed a notably frank editorial: The conditions which produced the [Soviet] dictatorship have been overcome...

...Where then does that leave us...

...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...

...All through the 'fifties and 'sixties disaffiliation was a central impulse, in the beatnik style or the more sedate Salinger way, but disaffiliation nevertheless, both as a signal of nausea and a tacit recognition of impotence...

...Let me therefore indicate some of the political and intellectual influences acting upon the "new leftism," by setting up two very rough categories: 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...

...Let me amend this somewhat...

...in his orgies of verbal violence committed, to be sure, not in Selma, Alabama, but Sheridan Square, New York...

...It is neither a substitute for thought, nor a dissolvent of human will, nor even a roadblock in the way of useful work...

...Nor are they interested in distinguishing among kinds of anti-Communism, whether of the right or left...

...But those who left the party or its supporting organizations because they feared government attack were often people who kept, semi-privately, their earlier convictions...

...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...

...At first it seemed as if the Civil Rights movement would provide such a channel...

...It may seem to lump together problems, ideas and moods that should be kept distinct...

...for the sake of exposition I will make it seem more precise and structured than it really is...

...can no longer be said to be the same...

...In England it refers to a caste of intellectuals with an Oxbridge education, closely related in values to the ruling class, and setting the cultural standards which largely dominate both the London literary world and the two leading universities...

...There are "revolutionaries" who deride this choice...

...but beyond that, the frequency of your encounters, like the quality of your orgasms, is no one's business but your own...

...Who, 25 or 30 years ago, could have foreseen that Catholic priests and nuns would be marching into Montgomery...

...You have been raised to give credit to every American power move, no matter how reactionary or cynical...

...they needed no directives from the CP to which, in any case, they no longer (or may never have) belonged...

...I leave aside the fact that twentieth-century history indicates a high rate of failure in previous efforts of this kind...

...The "go it alone" tendency in the Civil Rights movement starts from a recognition that the obstacles to success are enormous...

...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...

...Then respond with a rejection equally blatant...

...that democracy, while perhaps desirable in some long-range calculation, is not crucial for judging the socialist character of a society...

...If the Civil Rights movement succeeds, may it not also enter such a phase...

...2) An impatience with the problems that concerned an older generation of radicals...

...I say, recognition of impotence, because movements that are powerful, groups that are self-confident, do not opt out of society: they live and work within society in order to transform it...

...We are all groping to find a way out of our difficulties...

...The "new leftists," searching for an ideology by which to rationalize their sentiments, can now find exactly what they need in a remarkable book recently translated from the French, The Wretched of the Earth...

...B) These problems are exacerbated by an educational system that often seems inherently schizoid...

...As it happens, our friends in the Communist world are not in power...

...revolution don't see is that to achieve integration, even in the limited terms presumably favored by Dr...

...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...

...what it signifies is the society's failure to transmit with sufficient force its values to the young, or perhaps more accurately, that the best of the young take the proclaimed values of their elders with a seriousness which leads them to be appalled by their violation in practice...

...He seeks to substitute for a stagnant history his own desire and sacrifice...

...I deliberately say "attitude" rather than "analysis," for while there can be a great many legitimate differences of analytic stress and nuance among democratic socialists in discussing the totalitarian society, morally there should be only a candid and sustained opposition to it...

...At times this technological determinism, put to the service of brutal dictatorship, has been given a more subtle reading by Sweezey: 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...

...They are experienced in "deepening the struggle," usually other people's struggles: which means to scorn the leadership of Dr...

...What remains is a strategy of lonely assault, which must necessarily lead to shock tactics and desperation...

...And soon the "new leftist" must recognize that even he has not been greatly transformed...

...4) An unconsidered enmity toward something vaguely called the Establishment...

...there remains only the detail of who is going to make it...

...He tends to think of style as 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, etc., 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...

...For obviously an estimate which sees major reforms as unlikely makes a traditional revolutionary overthrow seem still more unlikely...

...For Negroes should have just as much right to suburban pleasures as anyone else...

...The young Negro who would demonstrate his way into the labor market may be motivated by a thoroughly bourgeois ambition...

...To which we shall return...

...The poor need to be organized, and more power to those who try...

...They know the repertoire of sensationalism quite as well as the "new leftist...

...He recognizes the dangers of a preening dictator and has harsh things to say against the Nkrumah type...

...No, the questions I would raise have to do not with failure but success...

...But to envisage some global apocalypse that will end in the destruction of the West, is a sad fantasy, a token of surrender before the struggles of the moment...

...Consider this remarkable fact: In the past decade there have occurred major changes in the Communist world, and many of the intellectuals in Russia and eastern Europe have reexamined their assumptions, often coming to the conclusion, masked only by the need for caution, that democratic values are primary in any serious effort at socialist reconstruction...

...but avoiding history, they know very little about the elements of the liberal tradition which should remain valuable for any democratic socialist...

...About the problems of the underdeveloped countries, among the most thorny of our time, it is impossible even to begin to speak with any fullness here...

...and sometimes they are profoundly irresponsible, in that their true interest is not in helping to reach the goals chosen by the American Negroes, but is rather a social conflagration which would satisfy their apocalyptic yearnings even if meanwhile the Negroes were drowned in blood...

...It is, at times, a strategy of exclusion in a still more troubling sense: it reduces differences of opinion to grades of moral rectitude...

...But Fanon is not taken in by his own propaganda...

...To nationalize an economy without enlarging democratic freedoms is to create a new kind of social exploitation...

...Wilkins, Young, Powell, King, Farmer...

...The liberals...

...or the stress has been upon moral self-regeneration, a kind of Emersonianism with shock treatment...

...Point by point his is an upside down version of the most genteel, middle-class, liberal position...

...And it is to dismiss the striking moral advantage that nonviolence has yielded the Negro movement, as well as the turmoil, anxiety and pain—perhaps even fundamental reconsideration—it has caused among whites in the North and the South...

...It speaks for the spirit, yet increasingly becomes an appendage of a spirit-squashing system...

...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...

...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...

...They weren't real...

...These are hardly burning problems of the moment...

...If they want to assuage their leaking consciences, that's their business...

...The goods and services that, with enough pressure, the "power structure" can be made to provide, the poor need, want and deserve...

...Naturally enough, they continued to keep in touch with one another, forming a kind of reserve apparatus based on common opinions, feelings, memories...

...Clearly, the vast majority of whites are in the grip of the Establishment...

...Perhaps if we all try to restrain—not deny—our emotions, we can agree upon certain essentials...

...But meanwhile they neglect to notice, or do not care, that totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorship can set in even before a society has become fully modernized...

...It may well be true that U.S...

...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...

...He articulates with notable power the views of those nationalist-revolutionaries in the underdeveloped countries who are contemptuous of their native bourgeois leadership, who see their revolution being pushed beyond national limits and into their own social structure, who do not wish to merge with or become subservient to the Communists yet have no strong objection in principle to Communist methods and values...

...If we are serious in our wish to affect American political life, we must learn to see the reality as it is...

...One issue has been posed simply but conveniently by a Village Voice reporter, Jack Newfield, who writes that Dr...

...In rejecting the older generations, however, the young sometimes betray the conditioning mark of the very American culture they are so quick to denounce: for ours is a culture that celebrates youthfulness as if it were a moral good in its own right...

...the term revolutionary as I am using it, does not connote violence...

...To say that the urban middle class has become jaded and can no longer be shocked, is not quite correct...

...its own insufficiency...

...The relations of power remain as before, the Man still hovers over the scene, the "power structure" is unshaken...

...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 verbal violence...

...well, almost...

...no one can seriously engage in politics without clearly and publicly defining his attitude toward it...

...He is fed up with white promises...

...The intelligent young know that if they keep out of trouble, accept academic drudgery and preserve a respectable "image," they can hope for successful careers, even if not personal gratification...

...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...

...A few remarks: a) Between the suppression of democratic rights and the justification or excuse the "new leftists" offer for such suppression there is often a very large distance, sometimes a complete lack of connection...

...And that they could understand...

...Much should be said about the positive aspects of youthful radicalism, as in part I have said in an essay, "Berkeley and Beyond" in the May 1, 1965 New Republic...

...The radicals of the 'thirties certainly had their share of Bohemianism, but their politics were not nearly so interwoven with and dependent upon tokens of style as is today's radicalism...

...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...

...and no one of moral awareness can fail to be profoundly moved by the outpouring of idealism and the readiness to face danger which characterizes the vanguard of this movement...

...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...

...D) Generational clashes are recurrent in our society, perhaps in any society...

...None of us has any certain answer or magic formula by which to overcome the painful isolation of the radical movement: if there were such a thing, someone would by now have discovered it...

...For if a richer socio-economic development is a prerequisite of democracy, it must also be remembered that such democratic rights, as they enable the emergence of autonomous social groups, are also needed for socio-economic development...

...As the term is currently employed, however, it is difficult to know who, besides those merrily using it as a thunderbolt of opprobrium, is not in the Establishment...

...A) The society we live in fails to elicit the idealism of the more rebellious and generous young...

...They tend to look for their new heroes and models among the leaders of underdeveloped countries...

...We identify with the "revisionists," those political maranoes who, forced to employ Communist jargon, yet spoke out for a socialism democratic in character and distinct from both Communism and capitalism...

...if they see no significant difference between, say, Norman Thomas and Paul Sweezey such as would require them to regard Thomas as a comrade and Sweezey as an opponent—then the sad truth is that they have not at all left behind them the old disputes, but on the contrary, are still completely in their grip, though perhaps without being quite aware of what is happening to them...

...That is true, but not enough...

...At this point I hear a voice crying out: "No, not just a vanguard of the desperate...

...One view is expressed below by Irving Howe...

...And finally from Sweezey: "forty years is too long for a dictatorship to remain temporary"—surely the understatement of the Christian Era...

...And a last introductory word: there are other trends among the radical young which, no matter whether one agrees with them entirely or not, merit discussion and an exchange of ideas...

...But some problems remain...

...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...

...It sees no forces within the society that could provide a new social dynamic...

...It is rather a spewing-out of distasteful matter—in the course of which other values, such as the possibility of learning from the traumas and tragedies of recent history, may also be spewed-out...

...But what matters in this context is not so much the problems themselves as the attitudes, reflecting a deeper political-moral bias, which the "new leftists" take toward such countries...

...He is absolutely right, the point cannot be made too often...

...Can it, however, be broken down...

...Let me suggest a very limited comparison...

...it is the powerlessness deriving from human failure to act...

...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...

...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...

...Establishment...

...And it makes more difficult the moral double-bookkeeping of the 'thirties, whereby in the name of a sanctified movement or unquestioned ideology, scoundrels and fools could be exalted as "leaders" and detestable conduct exonerated...

...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...

...in his badgering of white liberal audiences...

...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...

...A state whose neighbors curse geography...

...Rustin...

...Quite the contrary...

...Shortly before his tragic murder 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...

...To epater le bourgeois—in this case, perhaps, to epater le pere—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 hair-do's...

...And I think it is a gross error—the kind of deep-seated conservatism that often alloys ultra-radicalism—to say that everything in the major sectors of American society is static, sated, "Establishment...

...Establishment...

...The Chinese have solemnly pledged never to be the first to use nuclear weapons...

...Eight years have passed since the above passage appeared in Monthly Review, the "precious little evidence" remains precious little, and Sweezey, once apparently dismayed over the lack of democracy in Russia, has moved not to Titoism or "revisionism...

...would have won him greater support at home and certainly in other Latin American countries...

...A) Cultural Style The "new leftist" appears, at times, as a figure embodying a style of speech, dress, work and culture...

...There is a new radical mood in limited sectors of American society: on the campus, in sections of the Civil Rights movement...

...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...

...But then, a little later, it rolls over like a happy puppy on its back, moaning "Oh baby, epater 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, epater me again, baby...

...A society in which a person lives better because he does not think at all...

...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...

...2) Caricature...

...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...

...Anyone who compares the files of radical journals of the 'thirties with those of DISSENT this past decade can see for himself how large our own break from Marxist scholasticism and polemic has been...

...Such methods, born of desperation, could only cut off the dedicated minority of Civil Rights activists from their white allies and much more important, from the mass of Negroes...

...Imagine a campaign to organize the poor in a large city, undertaken by young people who will have no truck with the Establishment...

...but at least for those who have given their lives in the struggle...

...that what makes them "socialist" is simply the nationalization of the means of production...

...That spurious anger, so resonant with career, can be trusted not to upset the applecart...

...Here are a few sentences: Socialism is not A society in which a person who has committed a crime sits at home waiting for the police...

...Every such effort, big or small, deserves the approval and support of socialists and liberals...

...5) An equally unreflective belief in "the decline of the West"— apparently without the knowledge that, more seriously held, this belief has itself been deeply ingrained in Western thought, frequently in the thought of reactionaries opposed to modern rationality, democracy and sensibility...

...indeed, it is an essential element of a totalitarian or authoritarian society, for it means that the masses act out a charade of involvement without the reality of decision...

...Instead, responding to a question, "What about Goodman and Schwerner, the two white boys killed in Mississippi, don't you care about them...

...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...

...What is left, then, is a handful...

...Its author, Frantz Fanon, is a Negro from Martinique who became active in the Algerian revolution...

...An essential part of such a coalition ought to be drawn from the poor you propose to organize...

...I propose to describe a political style or outlook before it has become hardened into an ideology or the property of an organization...

...the influence they exert has been indirect, since they are not involved in immediate struggles, but it has nevertheless been there...

...The immediate consequence of such talk is a withdrawal from the on-going struggles...

...Precisely as it has turned away from the more extreme and terroristic version of totalitarianism, so have they begun to find it unsatisfactory as a model: too Victorian, even "bourgeois...

...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 mutual dependency requires that each shock, to provide the pleasures of indignation, must be a little stronger (like a larger dose...

...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 churches...

...In his success as both a New School lecturer and prophet of "guerrilla warfare" in the U.S...

...Then respond as if the talk about Communist totalitarianism were simply irrelevant or a bogey to frighten infants...

...Fanon tries to locate a new source of revolutionary energy: the peasants who, he says, "have nothing to lose and everything to gain...

...Here, of course, our failure is very much in evidence too: a failure that should prompt us to speak with modesty, simply as people who have tried, and in their trying perhaps have learned something...

...There is an aphorism by a recent Polish writer: "The dispensing of injustice is always in the right hands...

...As soon as some ferment began a few years ago in the Civil Rights movement and the peace groups, these people were present, ready and eager...

...6) A crude, unqualified anti-Americanism, drawing from every possible source, even if one contradicts another: the aristocratic bias of Eliot and Ortega, Communist propaganda, the speculations of Tocqueville, the ressentiment of post-war Europe, etc...

...So that if some "new leftists" say that all the older radicals are equally acceptable or equally distasteful or equally inconsequential in their eyes...

...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...

...This kind of young Negro militant, though not of course interested in any kind of individual terrorism, acts out of social motives somewhat like those of the late 19th century Russian terrorists, who also tried to substitute their intransigent will for the sluggishness of history...

...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...

...For that matter, why should they...

...Those who left out of disillusionment were heart-sick people, their convictions and sometimes their lives shattered...

...And the paradox is that they often sincerely regard themselves as committed to politics—but a politics that asserts so unmodulated and total a dismissal of society, while also departing from Marxist expectations of social revolution, that little is left to them but the glory or burden of maintaining a distinct personal style...

...The issue of totalitarianism is neither academic nor merely historical...

...A state whose government defines its citizens' rights, but whose citizens do not define the government's rights...

...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...

...Let me therefore stress as strongly as I can that I am not talking about all or the majority of the American young and not-so-young who have * This text consists of a somewhat condensed and edited version of a lecture given at a New York DISSENT forum in April 1965...

...a kind of complicity is set up between the outraged and/or amused urban middle class and the rebels of sensation...

...7) An increasing identification with that sector of the "third world" in which "radical" nationalism and Communist authoritarianism merge...

...What will the uncompromising, anti-Establishment leaders of the poor do now...

...they should be in a position just as much as the whites to choose the middle class style of life...

...For this disturbing minority I have no simple name: sometimes it looks like kamikaze radicalism, sometimes like white Malcolmism, sometimes like black Maoism...

...The result is an inordinate difficulty in communication between the young radicals and those unfortunate enough to have reached—or, God help us, even gone beyond—the age of forty...

...they are under extreme pressure and their courage is constantly being tested...

...I won't mourn for them...

...There may in time appear a new kind of "dropout"—the "dropout" trained by and profoundly attached to the Civil Rights movement who yet feels that it does not, and by its very nature cannot, come to grips with the central problems of modern society...

...For the right to make love to whomever you wish, of whatever sex you choose, in whatever posture you prefer, I will fight...

...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...

...Precisely this choice made possible their boldness and strength, precisely this "lack of roots" gave them their speculative power...

...And so far—let us face it frankly—there is precious little evidence to confirm it...

...Perhaps...

...No...

...Personal endurance thus becomes the substance of, and perhaps even a replacement for, political ideas...

...Radicalism is not a quantity...

...What happens next...

...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...

...the views one holds concerning these questions deter mine a large part of one's political conduct...

...extreme postures which will safeguard them from the allure of everything they reject...

...Personal style: that seems to me a key...

...The form I have felt obliged to use here—a composite portrait of the sort of "new leftist" who seems to me open to criticism—also creates some difficulties...

...Yet their situation cannot be taken as a model for the political life of the country as a whole...

...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...

...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...

...3) Desperadoes, white...

...Abernathy: "The whites have the guns...

...The individual's emptiness and inability to act have become an irrefrangible cliche, untiringly supported by an immense phalanx of latecomers to modernism...

...Pat Brown, not George Norris...

...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...

...that it has developed nonviolent resistaiice into an enormously powerful weapon...

...If economics is a criterion, then we must acknowledge, Marxist predictions aside, that there has been an astonishing recovery in Western Europe...

...Yet as a matter of general policy and upon a nation-wide level, the Negro movement has chosen nonviolence: rightly, wisely and heroically...

...It invokes the traditions of freedom, yet processes students to bureaucratic cut...

...Certain of the writings produced by spokesmen for Students for a Democratic Society, for example, deserve a fraternal scrutiny which I do not even attempt here, since I am dealing with something else, another problem...

...4) Desperadoes, Negro...

...For the "new leftists," as I have here delimited them, liberalism means Clark Kerr, not John Dewey...

...The great value of the present rebelliousness is that it requires a personal decision, not merely as to what one shall do but also as to what one shall be...

...He sold out to it...

...being a man of the twentieth century, I believe that a recognition of its necessity must come only after the most prolonged consideration, as an utterly last resort...

...that the unstructured, atomized and often demoralized "underclass" has been the most resistant to organization...

...To preserve democracy as a political mode without extending it into every crevice of social and economic life is to make it increasingly sterile, formal, ceremonial...

...There may now be in the process of formation, for the first time, such an intellectual caste...

...Who is prepared to maintain that Sukarno's suppres sion of the Indonesian Socialists and other dissident parties helps solve that country's economic or growth problems...

...Many people are sick unto death of the whole structure of feeling—that mixture of chauvinism, hysteria and demagogy—which was created during the Cold War years...

...Primarily that means the wish to shock, the wish to assault the sensibilities of a world he cannot overcome...

...Is there an Establishment in this, or any cognate, sense in the United States...

...The party rules, increasingly an independent force above the weakened classes...

...But the society not only undercuts the possibilities of constructive participation, it also makes very difficult a coherent and thought-out political opposition...

...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...

...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...

...It is too poor, too weak, too diffuse to remain or become the leading social force in a newly-liberated country...

...but an authority of property and arms...

...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...

...on the contrary, it is the merest beginning...

...Yet we should be clear in our minds that such a response is not at all the same as a commitment to Communism, even though it may lend itself to obvious exploitation...

...people with unexpended social energy and idealism of a sort, who desperately needed new arenas in which to function...

...You are weary of Sidney Hook's messages in the New York Times Magazine...

...And the consequences may be similar: the best cadres exhausted in isolation and defeat...

...Malcolm declared that he would go, not unarmed, to Mississippi, if the Negroes there would ask him to come: a condition that could only leave him safely North, since the last thing the Negroes of Mississippi needed or wanted was Malcolm's military aid...

...The small minority that does rebel tends to adopt a stance that seems to be political, sometimes even ideological, but often turns out to be an effort to assert a personal style...

...After all, history need not repeat itself, and perhaps this time the effort will succeed...

...and their revolutionary record of devotion to the cause of socialism and progress entitles them to full trust and confidence...

...Brilliantly Malcolm spoke for a rejection so complete it transformed him into an apolitical spectator, or in the language his admirers are more inclined to use than I am, a pure "cop-out...

...They have been drawn to charismatic figures like Lumumba and Castro out of a distaste for the mania of industrial production which the Soviet Union shares with the United States...

...When they turn to politics, they have little concern for precise or complex thought...

...Yet there is a segment or fringe among the newly-blossoming young radicals that causes one disturbance—and not simply because they have ideas different from persons like myself, who neither expect nor desire that younger generations of radicals should repeat our thoughts or our words...

...Our theory is being put to the crucial test of practise...

...Splendid...

...There are situations in which Negroes will choose to defend themselves by arms against terrorist assault, as in the Louisiana town where they have formed a club of "Elders" which patrols the streets peaceably but with the clear intent of retaliation in case of attack...

...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...

...On the far left there remain a scatter of groups still convinced that Marxism-Leninism, in one or another version, is "correct...

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

...and would have significantly disarmed his opponents in the United States...

...In this manifestation, the notion of the void has lost its critical edge and is thoroughly reactionary...

...To an inexperienced eye, this may suggest a division between the more and less radical...

...A state which considers itself solidly socialist because it has liquidated private ownership of the means of production...

...And do you suppose that the struggles of only a few decades ago to organize unions were any the less difficult, bloody and heroic than those in the South today...

...What seems the static quality of the trade unions may be a phase of rest between the enormous achievements of the past forty years and possible achievements of the future...

...A state which wants all its citizens to have the same opinions in phi losophy, foreign policy, economics, literature and ethics...

...as their heroism is beyond praise...

...A few years ago the "new leftists" were likely to be drawn to Communist China, which then seemed bolder than Khrushchev's Russia...

...What however, has really happened in countries like Algeria...

...For Malcolm, intransigent in words and nihilistic in reality, never invoked the possibility or temptations of immediate struggle...

...But Jones cannot stop there: it would be too sensible, too humane, and it would not yield pages in the Village Voice...

...Establishment...

...than the previous one...

...It concerns C) Politics and Freedom The "new leftists" feel little attachment to Russia...

...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...

...But let us return to "integration vs...

...He has strong, if vague, "nationalist" inclinations...

...And a reference that includes almost everyone tells us almost nothing...

...The Negroes there seem to know what they are doing, and 1 would not in any way fault them...

...He sees few, if any, allies upon whom he can count...

...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 the population is profoundly disaffected, something certainly not true in the United States...

...I have left it pretty much in its original outline-plus-notes form...

...We identify with the people who have died for freedom, like Imre Nagy, or who rot in prison, like Djilas...

...They identify with the harder, more violent, more dictatorial segments of the Communist world...

...Certainly there is very little ardor, very little of the joy that comes from a conviction that the values of a society are good, and that it is therefore good to live by them...

...Once the war is won, it tends to disperse, relapsing into local interests and seeking individual small-scale ownership of the land...

...And why not...

...Leroi Jones, by contrast, stands as a burlesque double of whatever is significant in Malcolm...

...We have to seek out and prod the forces that exist...

...Radicals may properly and fraternally disagree about many other things...

...The whole problem was anticipated many years ago by Trotsky when, writing about the Russian poet Yessenin, 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...

...The essential point about Jones' racist buffoonery has been made by George Dennison in a recent review of Jones' plays: Just as he mis-labels the victims black, he mis-labels the authority white...

...We are going to organize the poor, the millions beneath the floor of society, those who have been mute and unrepresented for too long...

...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...

...In that case, radicals can hardly find their models in, and should certainly not become an uncritical cheering squad for, authoritarian dictators whose presence is a supposed unavoidability...

...for drugs that will vault him beyond the perimeters of the suburbs...

...Not, to be sure, for ordinary whites, since they, we all know, are "white devils...

...recently come to regard themselves as radicals...

...But he speaks for it in a special way: as a distinctively American success, the pop-art guerrilla warrior...

...There is, in our society, a profound estrangement from the sources of selfhood, the possibilities of human growth and social cohesion...

...If war is a symptom of this decline, then it holds for the East as well...

...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...

...It is to be insensitive to the fact that the nonviolent strategy has arisen from Negro experience...

...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...

...But with one major difference: Fanon assigns to the peasants and the urban declassed poor the vanguard role Trotsky had assigned to the workers...

...extreme postures which will yield security, perhaps a sense of consecration, in loneliness...

...The unions...

...b) We are all familiar with the "social context" argument: that for de mocracy to flourish there has first to be a certain level of economic de velopment, a quantity of infrastructure, and a coherent national culture...

...As usually put forward in academic and certain authoritarian-left circles, it is a crudely deterministic notion which I do not believe to be valid: for one thing, it fails to show how the suppression of even very limited political-social rights contributes, or is in fact caused by a wish, to solve these problems...

...The notion is so loose and baggy, it means little...

...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 in his public conduct with popular journalism and publicity...

...Some of the people involved in that movement show an inclination to make of their radicalism not a politics of common action, which would require the inclusion of saints, sinners and ordinary folk, but rather a gesture of moral rectitude...

...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...

...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...

...there is plenty to rebel against...

...There are traditional radical topics which no one, except the historically-minded, need trouble with...

...and within limits of space and competence, we shall be glad to print opinions from readers.— EDIT0Rs...

...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...

...It appeals to the life of the mind, yet justifies that appeal through crass utilitarianism...

...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...

...Very good...

...It is not the business of anyone except those directly engaged...

...During the greater part of the bourgeois era, intellectuals preferred alienation from the community to alienation from themselves...

...No sensible radical over the age of 30 (something of a cut-off point, I'm told) wants young people merely to rehearse his ideas, or mimic his vocabulary, or (heaven forbid...

...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...

...Naturally enough—it's an old habit—we then opt for revolution...

...The number of people who express this mood is not very large, but that it should appear at all is cause for encouragement and satisfaction...

...Among Civil Rights workers in the deep South such a vision of life reflects the ordeal they must constantly face...

...people still looking for some belated evidence that they were "right" all along...

...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...

...look back upon his dusty old articles...

...And is it really impossible for the human heart to mourn for both Negro and white victims...

...By now the term "alienation" frequently carries with it a curious reversal of moral and emotional stress...

...For in effect, if not intent, it is a strategy of exclusion, leaving no place for anyone but the vanguard of the scarred...

...Unless, of course, one turns to the tactic of shock, inducing such misadventures as the stall-ins at last year's World's Fair or the Triboro Bridge fiasco...

...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...

...they understand the sterility to which a mere "activism" can lead, in fact, the way it must sooner or later undermine the possibilities even for activity...

...The true line of division between democratic socialists and left authoritarians concerns not tactics, but basic commitments, values, the vision of what a good society should be...

...But what if the masses do not wish to "participate...

...Many of them had a good deal of political experience...

...Nor do I mean to suggest that an attack upon authoritarianism and a defense of democracy exhausts consideration of those problems...

...1) The Remains of Stalinism...

...They show a greater interest in ideological preconceptions than in the experience and needs of a living movement...

...Unfortunately, revulsion seldom encourages nuances of thought or precise discriminations of politics...

...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 "boughtoff") working class...

...Frequently, behind such rationales there is a tacit assumption that in times of national stress a people can be rallied more effectively by a dictatorship than by a democratic regime...

...3) A vicarious indulgence in violence, often merely theoretic and thereby all the more irresponsible...

...By all evidence, the hollow-man tradition has completely captured our "serious" prose [and some of our serious youth] .. Once vanguardist, this tradition...

...This approach makes it impossible to build a movement and, in the long run, even to maintain a sect...

...The black Establishment...

...Even among those who play the game and accept the social masks necessary for gaining success, there is a widespread disenchantment...

...Between the act of rebellion and the society against which it is directed, there remain, however, deeper ties than is commonly recognized...

...I don't wish to draw a hard-and-fast line between "realigners" and "go-it-aloners...

...Nor should they...