Remembrance of Things Past (Is Curly Jewish, by PaulJacobs)

...With the revival of radical politics in America today, this problem of Communism will not leave us alone, regardless of our wishes...

...They opposed bureaucratic administrative measures to expel unions on two grounds: that this method did not permit the union membership itself to assert its democratic rights...

...On the positive side...

...Well, that's his privilege...

...So it should be clear that Jacobs in 1965 looking critically at his role in the labor movement during the post-war years is talking primarily about his own experience...

...Yet it will be of interest to many people whose concern with Jacobs as a man is limited, and it will have public consequences...

...He does not dwell very much on the cynicism and disillusionment—the twin effects of these flip-flops—which infected a whole generation of liberals and radicals who found themselves unwitting victims of these changes in policy which were imposed from the outside on the movements in which they participated...

...We had none of the illusions of the liberal concerning the nature of the Communist party, but we were just as adamantly opposed to the party's suppression by the government as were the Communists themselves...

...And Jacobs succumbs to this danger repeatedly...

...All too many liberals and radicals, and especially young ones, refuse to distinguish between political attack and police repression...

...And there are millions of radicals and non-radicals who have had to come to terms (or have avoided coming to terms) with what it means to be Jewish in America...

...I personally found the book a fascinating stimulus—and foil—to an examination of my own motives, conscious and otherwise, down through the years...

...Paul Jacobs seems to be promising us another book in which he will try to learn more about himself...

...Not that Jacobs fails to mention the great public events which moved him and those who shared his ideological assumptions...

...Jacobs has, of course, no obligation to describe the content of the ideas which preoccupied the Trotskyists of his day (from his own account, he joined the Trotskyist movement when he was fifteen or sixteen, and severed organizational ties with it at the ripe old age of twenty-two...

...Paul Jacobs has written an intensely personal autobiography...

...But even in the earlier sections which describe his life as a radical, he appears to feel little need to describe the political content of his radicalism, or to convey a real sense of the world in which it had meaning— even if not quite the meaning with which its participants invested it...

...accurate political characterization and "red baiting...

...The dilemma of radicals opposed to the Communist party was an agonizing one...

...Jacobs' failure to describe his own political evolution may lead to a misunderstanding of the position of left democratic socialists in the struggle which Ied to the expulsion of Communistcontrolled unions from the CIO...

...Throughout the book he is trying to tell the reader how he felt about whatever he was doing during his youth as an American radical—or at least what he now thinks were the reasons for what he did...

...The one way in which government harassment and persecution of Communists, real and alleged, has helped the Communist movement has been to give it a kind of immunity from open confrontation and attack by political opponents...

...One consequence of such control would be that they would be subjected to abrupt policy changes based not on changing political circum stances here, but on the latest turns in Russian or Chinese foreign policy...

...In the last sentence of Is Curly Jewish...

...Jacobs' analysis of the psychological role of his Jewishness is a running theme throughout the book...

...But why should socialists, radicals, even liberals, combat Communist influence and control of unions, civil rights organizations, peace groups, etc...

...rejection of cooperation with a totalitarian movement and "knuckling under to McCarthyism...

...Unless- they are able to define their relationships to world Communism, and to the various groups of its American exponents, they are in for more self-inflicted trouble than many of their leaders and members can imagine...

...But why should he then describe his book as "a political selfportait" and leave his readers in the dark about the content of his politics —or even what that content meant to him, except in psychological terms...

...he is not recording the experience of the democratic, anti-Stalinist left at the time, despite the fact that his general political outlook is in accord with it...

...At times, Jacobs' short-hand treatment of political ideas can be positively harmful...

...I suspect that he believed, and still believes, that in addition to his "anger" and his "job" there were good political reasons for his actions...

...They charged that the top bureaucracy in the CIO was reluctant to stimulate and support rank-and-file oppositions to Communist union leaderships because it didn't want the ranks to get in the habit of opposing bureaucratic machines in general...

...As they say, it's a free country...

...He also describes the frustrations of maintaining a civil libertarian position while engaging in a bitter ideological and organizational struggle with the Communists...

...Jacobs describes the inhibitions under which Trotskyists and other radicals fought Communist influence in the labor movement, and in public life in general...

...One can readily believe this, for it is in the nature of the Communist movement that it creates moral dilemmas for everyone who comes in contact with it—except for its know-nothing supporters and know-nothing enemies...

...What public consequences can we anticipate from the way in which he treats at least one of his subjects: his participation in the struggle between the Communists and their opponents in the labor movement and the Jewish community during the late forties and early fifties...

...But since books have political as well as personal meaning, I can't help but feel that if such exercises are to be shared at all, they are best reserved for gatherings of intimate friends in the presence of good whiskey...

...the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties are exploited in the interests of the world Communist movement (or movements) and the governments which control them, rather than being pursued in the interest of the constituencies of these movements and of the transformation of American society in the direction of greater equality and democracy...

...But if Jacobs intended his book to be instructive to the new generation of young radicals, or to those who never participated in the kind of political life he describes, he has fallen short of his goal...

...Toward the end, it dominates the other themes to the point of excluding a statement of his current political views or attitudes...

...Our position was made even more difficult because it was virtually impossible to explain to the great mass of liberals how we could fight the Communist party inside the unions at the same time that we fought against its suppression by the government...

...Throughout that fight, it should be stressed, both the Trotskyists and socialists opposed these expulsions...

...He has no greater obligation to tell us how or why his views changed or what they are today...

...He tells us a lot about what he and others did in their struggles against the Communists, with particular emphasis on what he wishes he hadn't then felt compelled to do...

...The basic result of Communist control is that the purposes of the movements in question are distorted to meet the needs of Russian or Chinese foreign policy...

...Jacobs tells us that he was often troubled by things he did and said, and even more by the political views of people he found himself allied with in those struggles...

...It has again become acute in the civil rights and peace movements...

...Widespread Communist influence and control of the social movements of our time would constitute a disaster...

...One of the side effects of what we might call the institutionalization of McCarthyism has been to make such basic and necessary distinctions even more difficult to grasp for a new generation of liberals and radicals...

...Jacobs helped prepare the charges against Harry Bridges which led to the expulsion of the West Coast Longshoremen from the CIO...

...If such readers are inclined to self-analysis, it will give them a standard of candor and insight by which to measure how consciously they themselves have acted in their public lives...

...This book seems to me more an act of personal catharsis than one which pursues a public purpose...

...Jacobs describes the sport Trotskyists were able to make of the flip-flops in the Communist party line...

...His statement at the outset that this is "not really an autobiography" may be taken as a striking illustration of one of his recurring themes: the gap between our conscious intentions and the inner drives which shape and often distort them...

...But Jacobs and his friends felt differently: Even though I considered him (a Communist soldier) an enemy of the workers and of socialism, I wasn't a strong supporter of the American government either, and so I could not "turn him in" to what I still believed were the institutions of capitalist repression...

...Opposition to reactionary aspects of American foreign policy is transformed into support of Russian foreign policy...

...The socialists supported Reuther's fight in the United Automobile Workers which led to the defeat of the Communist faction in that union in open, democratic battle—and held it up as a model to the whole labor movement...

...He prefers to talk about the "ex-radicals and the radicals without an ideology whose opposition to the Communists was based on their past enmity to them...

...There are a few thousand people in America who, like Jacobs, went through the Trotskyist movement, or who have been involved, from a radical or liberal standpoint, in the struggle against Communist influence in public life...

...But Jacobs doesn't discuss the politics of radical opposition to Communism in these terms...

...This kind of description runs the danger of presenting an ideological happy hunting ground for those who, through naivete or worse, attack any opposition to Communism as an equivalent of or aid to McCarthyism...

...But these events, as well as the ideas he had about them, appear more as references than descriptions...

...But he leaves those of us who are concerned with radical politics in America today with a bit of a problem...

...Thus, I wish Jacobs well in his further explorations...

...Jacobs puts it down to "anger at the way in which Communists had betrayed our ideals, and partly be cause it was our job to do so...

...American Communists had no compunction about "turning in" their radical opponents to employers and government agencies (as their colleagues in Europe had no compunction about turning such opponents over to the Gestapo...

...But one danger of the auto-analytic mood is that the writer can easily slip over into belittling the social causes for which he fought in the course of trying to unearth the unconscious reasons for his actions...

...Nor is this a problem the passage of time has left behind us...

...and that it left the workers in the expelled unions to the mercies of their Communist leaderships...