LETTERS
"New Styles" EDITOR: Irving Howe's "New Styles in 'Leftism'" DISSENT, Summer 1965] calls for critical comment. For two decades this sort of defensive anti-communism has...
...in fact, he never used it once, in any way, throughout the talk and discussion period...
...Larner says that Malcolm informed the youth "with special awe" that "Zanzibar has a real strong man," and that much of what Malcolm offered was contained in his "incantation" of the phrase "a real strong man...
...IRVING HOWE replies: Knowing Mr...
...Is he dogmatic, conspiratorial...
...Nor will it do to invoke the Deacons...
...the democratic left would include, primarily, democratic socialists...
...Maybe self-defense of the type Malcolm advocated was the last thing Southern Negroes "needed or wanted," but the Herald Tribune report of Malcolm's speech in Selma said it "clearly disturbed the people running the registration drive...
...Howe's apparent incapacity for understanding the trend and impact of events any larger in dimension than the national boundaries of the USA...
...Albee's The Zoo Story appears to be the model for Jones's Dutchman...
...It so happens that the meeting Howe •attended was recorded on tape...
...But in their praiseworthy eagerness to promote racial brotherhood, the critics have mistakenly attributed aesthetic significance to Jones's politics of beat negritude...
...Perhaps the most serious consequence of this isolation is that it threatens our solidarity...
...I have listened to the entire tape, including the lengthy question-and-answer period, and can state flatly that Malcolm made no such statement...
...It involves 'losing his cool...
...A former poet who enslaves himself as leader of the revolutionary "Negro liberation movement," Walker Vessels is defeated and—since the play is circular—reemerges in the Prologue as "an old field slave" regretting that we "stone possible lovers with heavy words we think are ideas...
...Having listened to this tape too, I find Larner's report of the meeting marred by a number of distortions...
...Also available is a tape recording of the full meeting during the Christmas holidays when Malcolm spoke to a delegation of young people from McComb, Miss., which was discussed by Jeremy Larner in the Spring 1965 DISSENT...
...But in saying this, I of course in no way wish to deprecate the latter's achievement...
...Adroitly, Jones works out the fatality...
...Why, for example, should the Communist party be put to the left of socialists and Stalinists to the left of the Communist party, as is done in Newsweek, May 24, 1965...
...Howe views US foreign policy as more or less viable, but, for some unexplained reason, directed by otherwise sensible men who frequently happen to stray into error...
...2) The idea that US foreign policy since FDR has been fundamentally sound in assumption and sincere in aim...
...A closely related problem is to determine in terms of what one group or movement is said to be to the left of another...
...Does the fact that a group or movement is dissenting from mainstream American politics qualify it for inclusion on the left...
...Hence they politicized his dramaturgy, falling into huge and hopeless irrelevance in the process...
...p...
...Some students are already in jail, and if we cannot raise at least the $44,000, then most of the remaining 750 defendants will have to go to jail until the money can be raised...
...Justifiable obscenity and violence do occur, but no scatology, in what I think is Jones's racial purgatorio...
...These three young men were officers of the campus-recognized chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), and the prosecutor has stated publicly that his prosecution, under the Indiana AntiCommunist Act, is an attempt to remove the YSA from the campus...
...Rather ironic, is this not...
...If this is to be the point of departure for rebuilding the left, that left will remain condemned to formulating policy within the limits of American standards of judgment...
...Du Boff is really being disingenuous...
...Now, bypassed by new radicals who understandably want none of this merchandise, Mr...
...King was then in jail...
...The issues raised by the Indiana Supreme Court decision make this one of the most important civil liberties cases...
...I think Bayard Rustin has something to do with the Negro movement, Michael Harrington with the anti-poverty issue, Norman Thomas with the peace struggle, and even, I might add, DISSENT itself with the struggle for democratic radicalism in an intellectual community which over the past decade had all but given up the posture of social criticism...
...Editors: Stanley Kauffman, in his putdown of Le Roi Jones, comes off the picket line of reviewing hundreds of bad Hollywood films in recent years...
...Again, no "if" invited...
...Reversing an earlier decision by a Bloomington, Indiana judge, the Indiana Supreme Court, in a 3-1 decision early this year, declared the law under which the students are indicted to be constitutional...
...For two decades this sort of defensive anti-communism has under mined the American left, which should not be encumbered by such comparative side-issues...
...And later, "If you don't feel you're qualified to do it, we have some brothers who will slip in, as I said earlier, and help train you and show you how to equip yourself and let you know how to deal with the man who deals with you...
...Isn't that the usual way with Kauffman and others, in the Hollywood reviewing dodge...
...What if one agrees with Mr...
...Howe dons the pro prietary mantle of statesman of the left, to warn against seduction by the far left...
...By this criterion Young Americans for Freedom and the John Birch Society might be put on the left...
...Howe, even though its blanket salvos against "US imperialism" may often surpass the limits of logic and fact...
...Nothing about "if" invited...
...He hinted that he did have a program, but that to announce it publicly would be to reveal plans to "the enemy...
...But Malcolm did not meant any such phrase...
...Very briefly, the totalitarian left would include the Communist party and its various offshoots (the Progressive Labor party, the Socialist Workers party, and so on...
...At any rate, this reporter was present on at least one other occasion when Malcolm expressed his admiration for Nkrumah, Nasser, and Babu in pretty much the same terms...
...On LeRoi Jones Editors: Before LeRoi Jones was ever branded a "pop-art guerrilla warrior" shooting off his mouth in "orgies of verbal violence" (Irving Howe, DISSENT, Summer '65) or denounced as a careerist and faker (Stanley Kauffmann, DISSENT, Spring '65...
...Breitman to be an honest man and not having had the opportunity to listen to the tape of Malcolm's speech, I am prepared to accept his correction...
...Is it asking too much for care to be exercised with facts and quotations...
...Does Mr...
...And the spread of the Deacons for Defense and Justice into Mississippi indicates that Howe is not speaking for all Mississippi Negroes...
...before George Dennison had accused him of "demagogy" (Commentary, February, '65) and even before Robert Brustein had called Jones's The Slave and The Toilet "two karate blows" "inspired primarily by race hatred" (New Republic, January 23, '65)—much before all of this vituperation smashed down upon him, the worst enemy of LeRoi Jones, the serious poet and playwright, was LeRoi Jones, the prophet of worldwide Watts...
...The admission price to Sproul Hall was not money but conscience, and we must not allow those who cannot pay to be jailed for their commitment...
...Berkeley Appeal Editors: The Berkeley defendants are in serious trouble...
...The American Negro, almost like his South African counterpart, must stay "buttoned-up"—or kill—or die...
...it does not, as Malcolm did, talk violence and practice abstentionism...
...ly-minded, or in "open or covert support of communist powers...
...And that these philosophies are, in fact, repeatedly and cogently refuted in the play itself ought to be too obvious to deserve mention, were it not for the critics, who, like Dennison, perversely mishear the overriding metaphor of racial warfare as an invitation to chaos...
...Malcolm X Editors: Irving Howe seeks, in the Summer 1965 DISSENT, to add to the legend of Malcolm X as "cop-out," which was fabricated (by Bayard Rustin, among others) because Malcolm was advocating and searching for methods not acceptable to the leaders of the traditional civil rights organizations...
...As for Trotskyists like Mr...
...Characteristically, the overarching questions of our century to which a wide variety of American radicals now address themselves—revolution, nationalism, the decline of colonialism (not the "decline of the west"), the clamor for above-subsistence economic progress—are treated here only so far as they can be fitted into the equation of political shiftings internal to the US...
...Then, in the question period, he said, "I'm going down to Mississippi myself, I've been invited to go on down there, and Alabama and some of those other places, and you know—I just don't see nonviolence...
...Without this publicity, we have been unable to make an effective appeal for funds...
...We went into Sproul Hall as a group...
...His soon to be published novel: The System of Dante's Hell (Grove...
...go to Mississippi, or any place else, to help our people get regis tered to vote, we intend to go prepared" (to resist violence...
...In a world that is basically irrational, the most legitimate relationship to it is nonparticipation"— Jones, Blues People...
...Approached in their own terms, I believe, his plays admit of no such interpretation...
...I am afraid that the "far left" understands this better than Mr...
...Michael Walzer's comment (DISSENT, Spring 1965) on Howe's thoughts on Viet Nam nail down this point with a precision needing no elaboration: "perhaps it is time we granted the intelligence of the men in Washington and began to argue about their purposes...
...Yet only (1) has any real merit, and even that one is subject to doubt...
...Walzer, and with the communists in the above case...
...Pity and fear are both present but the episode tends toward cornmedia, after the purgation of racial aggression in a theater of ritualized defecation...
...The judge, in his attempt to demoralize us and to dissuade us from appealing his decision, has set our bail at $440,000...
...Very well...
...But he does not have the candor, or clarity, to tell us whether he prefers another or non-"de fensive" kind of anti-communism, or per haps indifference to communism, or sup port of it...
...But even as he charged up his listeners with talk about violence, he had no programmatic content, good or bad, to offer them...
...Does it make any difference...
...He spoke at a rally in Tuskegee, and then at an other in Selma, where Rev...
...Those "generational clashes recurrent in our society," and so forth...
...It seems that once he gets around to it, Mr...
...Demagogy" means, in this context, taking the excited reaction of the audience for the textually defined intent of the author...
...Aristotelian catharsis in the john...
...What they do reveal, when placed alongside his remarks, is either a man torn in two, or a man who wears a mask...
...It is at least ques...
...Earlier he has conceded: "...I have killed for all times any creative impulse I will ever have by the depravity of my murderous philosophies...
...Or should integrationist groups which do not advocate a particular social-political philosophy be put on the left...
...The closest he came to anything like it was the remark, in his talk, "if we...
...For an American Negro like Clay, to break through noncommunicative apartheid, to expose his full negritude, involves a fatal risk...
...Malcolm did NOT say that members of his group were being trained and organized to retaliate against racist violence "if we go into Mississippi...
...Academic freedom and freedom of speech and assembly on the campus have been challenged...
...We are now being differentiated on the basis of our ability to pay...
...Du Boff does not like "defensive anti-communism...
...tionable to many radicals how relevant those standards now are...
...Of course these three streams are not fully compatible (nos...
...Once again, art and life have refused to contaminate each other...
...The dilemma is that much of the democratic left has been unable to admit that its own fate is bound up with the role of the US "in the world arena...
...For that group, whatever judgment one may make of its methods, is involved with, part of the Civil Rights Movement...
...Talking About the Left Editors: Much of the recent discussion about the New Left has been unclear as to why a particular group should be considered on the left and precisely in terms of what it may be said that one group is to the left of another...
...Howe believe that his group has had anything to do with the fact that radicalism is resurgent...
...Lula, Clay's subway murderess, is no insane whore, and least of all a White Devil...
...In The Toilet, an exciting fragment, rather than a well-made play, a white adolescent homosexual is severely beaten in a high school latrine...
...Can we afford to wait for structural reform (a dubious prospect at best) to work its change on US foreign policy before the Pentagon and our "liberal" leaders make a nuclear shambles of our planet...
...I assume that an essential qualification for inclusion on the left would be the rejection of capitalism— or, at the very least, its significant reformation—and the vision of classless society that would follow the abolition or reformation of capitalism...
...The attack of this article reminds me of the campaign waged by the right-wing against "Keynesian" economics—diffuse, uncoordinated, embellished by every diverse scrap that can be unearthed...
...3) The fear that anything less than a full-throated anti-communist foreign policy stance would play into the hands of McCarthyism...
...Concerning the second question—in terms of what is it accurate to say that one group is to the left of another?—I would suggest the scrapping altogether of the left-right spectrum and an attempt rather to distinguish three broad traditions on the left—the totalitarian left, the democratic left, and the libertarian left...
...His offer to send "brothers" to the South seemed highly conditional on Southern support which he did not expect to be immediately forthcoming...
...and so he's caught in the game of tilting at facades, because he cannot see substance...
...he is ultimately comforted by his would-be black lover...
...The critics have not understood that the political Jones has little or nothing to do with his literary alter-ego...
...thus he treats Jones like a bad Hollywood movie—complains about the script, doesn't like the melodramatics, finds the score too high-pitched and frenetic...
...IRVING HowE replies: Well, yes, I think "my" group has had something to do with whatever resurgence there is of radicalism...
...In addition, since we anticipate that the appeal might fail, we are faced with the problem of raising an additional $200,000 for our fines...
...Send a contribution to: Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students, Box 213, Cooper Station, New York, New York 10003...
...and, more seriously, she discovers that her knowledge of the Negro was merely pseudo-knowledge...
...The ofay part is that Kauffman looks good in print, when in fact he hasn't even begun to see his subject...
...On the far left remain a scatter of groups still convinced that Marxism-Leninism, in one or another version, is 'correct.'" As regards the first question—what groups should be included on the left?— I would make a rather old-hat formulation by way of an answer...
...and the libertarian left would include anarchists (who disavow not only capitalism but the state as well) and syndicalists...
...Its beliefs have comprised three general streams...
...Or does one have the valid right to believe that a pathological and war-oriented foreign policy Is the major problem with which the American left must deal...
...Perhaps the tape recorder was off at that moment...
...Lula finally kills to protect her ignorance...
...Very well: Malcolm preached contempt for the Negro movement's nonviolence regardless of whether he was invited to Mississippi or not...
...Four weeks later, early in February, Malcolm did go to Alabama...
...Howe says that he heard Malcolm declare at a meeting (Militant Labor Forum, January 7, 1965) "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 press, which aided our movement so strongly by bringing our cause before the entire nation has lost interest in our case...
...Perhaps the career of Walker Vessels (protagonist and synonym of The Slave) best exhibits Jones's own temptation and realized danger...
...I am absolutely certain that Malcolm did describe Babu of Zanzibar as "a real strong man...
...The young people cheered (Malcolm) repeatedly, and for hours afterward other speakers tried to simmer off the steam that Malcolm had generated...
...Another example of the Howe approach is displayed in DISSENT (Summer 1965, p. 363) by Jean BIoch-Michel...
...Breitman who have seized upon Malcolm as the authentic "revolutionary" Negro leader, this is an instance of ideological desperation (the search for a substitute proletariat) pushed to absurdity...
...And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats...
...it works together with CORE...
...Mr...
...Thereby they would cut off the resurgent American radicalism from what it is, or should be...
...FSM Defense Fund Box 448, Berkeley, California...
...He was also scheduled to speak at a Freedom Democratic Party rally in Jackson, Mississippi, on the weekend in February when he was assassinated...
...Many points of view are argu able, but in the present world to say that the question of communism or op position to it is a "relative side-issue" seems to me so unrealistic, so downright silly that I cannot help thinking that Mr...
...The key to this, I think, is Mr...
...New Styles" EDITOR: Irving Howe's "New Styles in 'Leftism'" DISSENT, Summer 1965] calls for critical comment...
...JEREMY LARNER replies: At his meeting with the kids from McComb, Malcolm X offered no specific political program for the civil rights movement in Mississippi...
...Facing Jail Editors: The three students who were indicted at Indiana University in May, 1963, for their ideas and activities as socialists on the campus, are still facing from one to three years in prison for their political ideas...
...Clay tells her: "You don't know anything except what's there for you to see...
...By trying to mix theater and advocacy, the critics have succeeded only in causing confusion...
...Or what does a phrase like "far left" mean, as it is used, for example, in the following statement by Irving Howe in the Summer DISSENT...
...The use of state sedition laws to prosecute individuals for their political opinions has been sanctioned...
...To describe his politics as cop-out is not to reflect on his personal courage but to note that his "militant" verbiage led to nothing—at the very moment that the Negro people, under the banner of nonviolence, were conducting mass struggles of unprecedented strength and magnificence...
...316...
...In order to appeal, ten per cent of this amount must be raised to cover the bondsman's non-refundable premium...
...if you ask us to come .....Instead, after explaining the need for self-defense against racist violence, he said, "And if you don't have enough of them down there to do it, we'll come down there and help you do it...
...I and 2 in particular clash), but within some or all three can usually be found the position of Mr...
...Your help is needed to fight this encroachment on civil liberties...
...The defendants are appealing this decision through the federal courts...
...Either Larner invented this or it is an example of the power of prejudice to make one hear what one would like to hear...
...It is important for Malcolm's ideas and tendency to be debated, and it is to be expected that Howe, Larner, Rustin and his other political opponents will attack him...
...1) The hope that basic domestic reform will ultimately have to bring about change in foreign policy...
...rather she is a White Negro (pace Mailer) who harasses Clay to "break out" ("...You're just a dirty white man") and then discovers from Clay's outburst that his necessary restraint makes her "liberation" puny...
...M. BlochMichel castigates the communists for opposing Gaston Deferre "who believes in NATO...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
