LETTERS
In his interesting discussion on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (DISSENT, May-June 1966) Lewis Coser expresses the hope that Fanon's "destructive vision" may lead Western men to...
...Recently, Drew Pearson pointed out how Meany's general counsel, Tom Harris, objected to a SNCC proposal to give the Attorney General the power to remove prosecutions from state to federal courts when civil rights workers were not protected...
...10003...
...Vast numbers of peasants are wretched, hungry, ignorant, superstitious, "petty bourgeois," etc., etc...
...Now, for his 80th birthday, July 23, 1966, we have decided to establish a scholarship fund in his name for the benefit of the children of Spanish Republican exiles...
...Is it indeed true that the major significance of life for most of us lies in being "subjects of the historic process...
...It is tantalizing to reflect on what might have happened if Senator Goldwater had campaigned on a GAI platform, a proper enough speculation since Professor Friedman served as senior economic adviser to the Republican candidate in 1964...
...Meany's approval, compounded his "ethical and democratic practices" by putting these men on a blacklist...
...In this thought the peasant is forever seen as an object...
...In fact, references to the wretchedness of the peasants of Africa, Asia and Latin America have become part of the stock rhetoric of both "end of ideology" technocrats and the "new radicals...
...Is Mr...
...Johnson a memorandum called The Triple Revolution...
...Tom Hayden, in his "The Politics of 'The Movement,'" DISSENT, JanuaryFebruary 1966, states, "There is usually no question about the [union] leaders primary loyalty to the 'national interest' as defined by the Administration, even though they always believe their judgments are independently made...
...even though they are listening essentially to their own inner frustrations and hopes, he will no doubt choose the latter...
...The populist idealizer is just as bent on denying the peasant's complex humanity, on seeing him wholly as social type as is the bigotted modernizer...
...Since when has Mr...
...Not that the idea of a guaranteed annual income was novel when the Ad Hoc Committee recommended it...
...It is not meant to suggest that the concrete economic, demographic or social problems of agrarian society can be solved by establishing a sense of common humanity with peasants...
...He is an object to Mao Tse-tung and even to Fanon...
...Through the Salvador de Madariaga Fund we hope to raise $10,000 in order to give grants to many more students, including a few who are especially gifted and should go on to college...
...Did Meany rush to the aid of the Teamsters' president when the McClellan Committee was making hash out of the entire labor movement by utilizing Hoffa as the scapegoat, the purpose being to bring on antiunion legislation...
...80 E. 11th St...
...I am aware that the very raising of this question immediately exposes one to the charge of indulging in rural idylls, of idealizing peasant life or, perhaps, even of supporting Fanon's view of the peasant as the preserver of innocence...
...The idea will still take some getting used to, for Americans have been raised to think that virtue and wage earning are identi cal terms...
...Meany—genuinelybeen committed to unionism...
...What union leader since Debs has defied the national interest...
...To Fanon himself, the peasant be comes the instrument of his hate and of his desire for redemption...
...The sentiment is no doubt sincerely felt by all...
...Here I refer not only to "establishment" social science but also to "radical" ideology...
...For Mao Tse-tung the primary question was in the first instance: how can we most effectively tap peasant energies for the achievement of power...
...The question is, of course, even more relevant for the articulate urban elements in the agrarian societies than it is for us...
...These small scholarships, ranging from $150 to $350, cover the cost of books, lunches, carfare and clothing...
...For the peasant must choose between the impersonal tech nicians and the Fanon-type revolutionaries who make an effort to listen...
...But the true novelty lies elsewhere, in the speed with which a radical suggestion has been adopted and given political respectability...
...Much of our social, economic and political theory is precisely bent on proving that we are as much the objects of an impersonal historic process as are peasants...
...On the contrary, Meany directed a "hands off" attitude...
...Americans, at least, elect a new president every 8 years...
...To admit that peasants are human is, of course, to deny their poster-like innocence and to recognize that they have all the potentialities of personal diversity and motivation found in other segments of human society...
...As Mr...
...The Presidential Commission helped in the task of getting rid of such withering dogmas...
...The important point is not, however, the abuse first visited on the Triple Revolutionaries and now descending on LBJ's Commissioners, but in the acceleration in acceptance of the notion by the nonradical sector of the community...
...Geltman not recall that the thread of concern of the articles which appeared in DISSENT, Autumn 1959, "The Workers and Their Unions" was with the lack of democracy in the unions...
...His proposal of a "negative income tax," as the best means of administering a guaranteed income, is likely to be adopted when this now-legitimate topic of public debate comes before Congress...
...Let me stress that this should not be construed as a plea for the preservation of peasant society...
...What is most questionable is whether the urban masses necessarily possess the presumed opposing qualities...
...The very fact that the choice seems to lie between regarding the peasant as a sheer embodiment of mindless backwardness ("the man with the hoe') or as the embodiment of unsullied innocence and pure revolutionary violence, is itself evidence of that sociological tyranny which insists that the peasant's human complexity is completely obliterated by his role as peasant...
...We hope you will contribute...
...A commission of industrialists, economists, and others appointed by the President has recommended a guaranteed annual income...
...Geltman aware that Mr...
...This document consists of an analysis of three concurrent phenomena—the revolutions in weaponry, race, and cybernation —and suggests that an annual income be constitutionally guaranteed as one means of coping with the widening unemployment that the Ad Hoc Committee saw resulting from the replacement of workers by the new technology...
...Oh yes, John L., during W. W. II—John L. was really a union leader committed to his union at that time...
...Union presidents almost all serve until health forbids or death intervenes...
...An American can possibly, hopefully do a little about the totalitarian American unions, but an American can do almost nothing about Chinese, Cuban, Russian or North Vietnamese unions...
...For, on the whole, these people are completely dominated by notions derived from Western ideology and social thought...
...Now compassion is easily come by...
...Meany...
...Coser cogently points out, however, in many parts of the world the peasant and the rural village will be with us for some time to come and the question remains whether urban men can learn to approach peasants as human beings or whether one can prove one's humanitarrian credentials only by regarding them as subhuman...
...If there is a candidate for the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, where he is Honorary President, Madariaga has asked that $1000 be given as a special fellowship...
...Did he rush to the aid of the Typographical Union strike in San Francisco...
...In 1961, Salvador de Madariaga—historian and journalist, scholar and diplomat of world renown, one of the great humanitarians and fighters for freedom of our time—honored Spanish Refugee Aid by accepting, together with Pablo Casals, the honorary chairmanship of this organization...
...There is no need whatsoever to idealize peasant life...
...subway workers in the 1966 strike...
...The AFL-CIO president did not support the two peace marches nor the 200,000-strong Civil Rights March on Washington...
...Geltman read the recent issue of Union Democracy in Action which describes how the bureaucrats of the Musician's Union manage to hold "democratic elections...
...The achievement of a sense of fraternity and lack of condescension is, however, an infinitely less attainable goal, given the fundamental premises of much modern social thought...
...In his interesting discussion on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (DISSENT, May-June 1966) Lewis Coser expresses the hope that Fanon's "destructive vision" may lead Western men to compassion, to a sense of fraternity and a lack of condescension towards the downtrodden...
...He is the object of compassion, of research, even of revolutionary manipulation...
...The question remains—do our premises make it possible for us to think of peasants as fellow human beings...
...the unions stand as a guarantee of democracy...
...Cultural lag, like everything else, appears to be subject to the forces of exponential change...
...To what extent are all of us in the cities "subjects of the historic process...
...A very considerable uproar ensued...
...Meany and the AFL-CIO are not ours, and we shall "reduce ourselves to pulling ineffectiveness" if we direct any energy at all toward coalition with Meany and his status quo politics...
...The Peace Movement and the Civil Rights Movement has been doing very well without Mr...
...The peasants" Marx asserts "cannot represent themselves, they must be represented...
...If peasants are not people with whom one talks and to whom one listens (even in exasperation), then neither we nor the intellectuals and technocrats of "developing" countries can possibly think of them as brothers...
...Ad Hoc Committee were pictured as ignoramuses, comsymps, or dreamers...
...That a group of such conventional political and economic hue should make so audacious a proposal is an arresting development...
...It simply represents an endorsement of Mr...
...Derision and contempt flowed from editorial writers and economists, ironically including one or two of the members of the Presidential Commission...
...I know that the plea for a sense of fraternity is not a program and might well be dismissed as vague...
...And secondly, how can we use them to realize Chinese grandeur and my own vision of the good so ciety...
...Did Meany rush to the aid of the N.Y...
...Members of the • The Triple Revolution and Guaranteed Income...
...But one does not talk to him...
...It is quite true that hordes of peasants are themselves turning their backs on village life and in the end the peasant as a social type may disappear...
...In each case the line of reasoning leading to recommendation of a guaranteed income was different...
...But Eugene V. Debs was not only a union leader committed to his union, but a Socialist committed to a union of the world's workers...
...Only twenty...
...In a sense, the Marxist concept of alienation seems to assign somewhat more universal humanity to the peasant than the purely sociologistic view, but since this potential humanity is to be "recaptured" only with the millennium, during his stay in the kingdom of necessity the peasant may be treated as a social category pure and simple—and a social category completely devoid of all those positive urban qualities supposedly to be found in the industrial worker...
...three months before the Presidential Commission reported, an Ad Hoc Committee of 32 economists, scholars and public figures sent Mr...
...yet as we know, the objects of compassion may remain just that—objects...
...The Presidential Commission specifically denied this tendency, but said that the rising productivity and affluence of the nation warranted such a step...
...SPANISH REFUGEE AID, INC...
...We ask you to join us in our hope and our endeavor...
...We hope you will be in sympathy with our twofold purpose to help students of needy refugee families and thus to honor our chairman...
...Its novelty is attested by the immediate outpouring of outraged sentiments...
...Professor Friedman observed that the country has long since decided against starvation and abject hardship, and said that a guaranteed income will do away with the duplication of costs and effort in the present bureaucracies of welfare...
...New York, N.Y...
...Emanuel Geltman, in his "Vietnam and the Unions," DISSENT, January-February 1966, states that...
...If this is not the "cold-blooded suppression of free unions" in America, totalitarian style, then this writer does not know the meaning of totalitarianism...
...This is Madariaga's hope and ours...
...Has Mr...
...Is this less true of any substantial sector of our urban population...
...Until now it has taken years, often decades, to season a new idea and make it publicly palatable...
...The peasant may indeed have all the in-built limitations ascribed to him by Marx and others...
...At least a year before the Triple Revolution found the front pages, a guaranteed income was advocated by a doyen of political conservatism and economic respectability, Professor Milton Friedman...
...The Peace and Civil Rights Movements must look toward and hope for the building of a new type of labor movement, suited to and capable of coping with the tasks of the day—peace, civil rights, freedom from hunger, poverty and deprivation, and the lack of any semblance of democracy for over 90 million people...
...The Triple Revolution argued the relentless tendency of the new machines to unemployment and disemployment...
...However achieved, a guaranteed income makes sense in an opulent nation...
...The candidates will be chosen from among the 10,000 Spanish refugee families in France who need assistance...
...Where dichotomies such as backwardness versus modernity, rural idiocy versus urban enlightenment, being objects of the historic process versus being subjects of the historic process are taken to refer to absolute, all-inclusive and unbridgeable realities, how can one possibly attain a sense of common human condition—a sense of a common human fate and destiny...
...The cruel and harsh facts indicate that the Meanys are committed not to the true interests of labor, but to the militaryindustrial complex and their establishment, and of which they are a part, unfornately...
...Since when can an institution—a labor union—which is without internal democracy itself stand as a guardian of democracy...
...Yet the sense of common humanity may be a necessary ambience for the working-out of solutions...
...Hayes, with Mr...
...Perhaps some day these students will be able to use their skills to help rebuild a free Spain...
...Debs condemned, not apologized for, the lack of ethics and principle of the labor leaders of his day...
...One talks about him, and even where one does talk to him it is in order to fit him into one's frame of reference...
...The fathers of many of these children are dead or else ill and handicapped by years of war and exile...
...The peasant clings narrowly to his plot of land, and the industrial worker keeps his view intently fixed on his job and pay-level...
...Has Mr...
...Lewis Mumford and Erich Fromm, in books published a generation or so ago, explicitly proposed the same measure, and for most of the reasons presented by the Ad Hoc Committee...
...Geltman read the story by H. W. Benson in The Progressive, May 1959, entitled "Labor's Uncertain Trumpet" of how that great exponent of ethical practices and democracy, A. J. Hayes, President of the IAM and chairman of the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Committee in 1959, expelled rank and filers CiepleyRappaport for fighting corruption in an IAM Chicago Lodge...
...Coser's hope that a sense of fraternity can be achieved even while peasants are with us...
...Does Mr...
...In the past few years Spanish Refugee Aid has given help to an increasing number of gifted children in order to keep them in school...
...Even when they are democratically defeated in an election, somehow they still manage to "win," e.g., the IUE-Carey election fraud...
...He may feel the need for acting as a union member but he remains basically privatistic in his perspective while peasants have, as we know, often acted in concert...
Vol. 13 • July 1966 • No. 4
