The Tradition of Dissent

...But to what precise degree is American foreign policy a reflex of American domestic structure...

...I had begun this introduction as an analysis of the relationship between DISSENT and the times which the articles in this volume both depict and reflect...

...In the East, the hopes of October, 1917, had been destroyed by Stalinist totalitarianism...

...For one of the by-products of the rejection of the "finished programs" and talmudic verities of the old faith was to make the magazine productively parochial...

...Here, the autobiographical fragments of this introduction come full circle...

...Man is not necessarily condemned to inequality and subordination, either in the welfare state or under bureaucratic totalitarianism...

...And if my own view of the universe is more complex than the one I used to urge at the DISSENT conferences, it is animated by the same spirit...

...Under such circumstances, it was possible to incant the old truths although they no longer applied (they did, however, still sound intransigent and pure, which was their attraction for me at that time), or to strike out in search of a new relevance...

...the discontinuities created when McCarthyism all but wiped out the radical youth movement...

...Here, I suspect, is DISSENT's intellectual frontier for the second half of the sixties...

...The democratization of concentrated economic, social, and political power is the only hope for the achievement of Western humanist ideals, and this holds true under both capitalism and Communism...

...But internationally, from 1914 to this very moment, the Left has essentially failed to develop a political program equal to its ideals and relevant to the world at the same time...

...It seems to me that one of the most significant failures of American democratic socialists has been with regard to foreign policy...

...For, as often happens, a profound change in attitudes was debated in symbolic terms...

...It is not that DISSENT and the rest of us failed to protest this or that outrage, from the glorification of Syngman Rhee to that of General Ky...

...Inside of America the problem is no longer one of becoming aware of our injustices, but rather of doing something about them other than making speeches, commissioning studies, writing books, and passing inadequate laws...

...And those who, like DISSENT, maintained a principled defense of the rights of Communists kept up their attack on domestic injustice...

...I did not choose this approach in order to be a laudator Arius acti and I hope that I am not pretentiously investing my own experience with large socio-symbolic significance...

...They, too, might realize that it is wrong to confuse a tough-minded and empirical willingness to face the society as it is with a lack of principle...

...Indeed, I find such thoughtful essays even more subversive than the most intransigent slogan...

...Most of the young activists do not think of the magazine as belonging to their generation and movement, and more than one young militant would describe it as irrelevant, old-fogeyish, establishmentarian, or whatever the fashionable put-down might be...

...Under such circumstances, the socialist vocation becomes much more complex and nagging, with such seemingly petty issues of social technique as the undramatic stuff of revolution...

...It is easy enough to join the proper picket line, and the most unimaginative radical can be prepared for almost all eventualities by making an all purpose sign, "Hands Off the — — — — Revolution" (it has the virtue of applying to both Communist and anti-Communist suppressions...

...But in the intervening years, the question of means has become much more crucial—and problematic...

...But in a sense, the years between Korea and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the sixties had an ambiguous effect...

...Whatever the sociological and psychological explanation, it seemed obvious to me in 1954 that Irving Howe and company were hell-bent for liberalism, a fate worse than death...

...And in general, those who said that Communists had— because they were conspirators or accomplices in subversion, or whatever— forfeited their democratic rights to be hired as teachers or to apologize for totalitarianism without fear of reprisal, also began to affirm that America was a fine society with only vestigal social problems...

...In particular, there was a hard-headed, and quite right, refusal of most of the facile slogans about the "Third World...

...In Western Europe, Social Democracy had begun to accept the welfare state as a substitute for socialism...

...It is just that a brief account of my own experience with the magazine might help in a small way to give a perspective on its role and importance for the democratic Left...

...It is obvious that I do not bring up this reminiscence in order to document that cruel untruth which the middle class loves so well: that a twenty-year-old cares about poverty and injustice but a thirty-year-old does not...

...In the old days, reaction was decently straightforward...

...and the equation of radicalism with Communism, which so menaced civil liberties within the United States, was projected on a global scale with a devastating effect upon the nation's foreign policy...

...It was no longer possible, so to speak, to live off the European socialist inheritance...

...Must there be a thoroughgoing transformation of the society at home before there can be genuine support for a democratic revolution abroad...

...And yet, so much of what the new radicals have discovered in a blinding moment of insight comes to them in part, whether they know it or not, as a free gift from the older generation around DISSENT...

...So it was that the magazine published a ranging series of analyses of the American power structure (including some notable contributions by C. Wright Mills...

...More or less inevitably, this led to a consideration of the revival of American radicalism in the sixties, and one more essay on the gap between the generations of the Left began to emerge...

...But now there are corporate Keynesians, anti-egalitarian planners, millionaire welfareists...

...At the same time, the question of civil liberties had an extraordinary depth and range...

...And the socialists and Trotskyists, although free of such a dependence on a distant, totalitarian oracle, were also obsessed by international events...

...Quite the contrary, DISSENT, as this collection amply demonstrates, has maintained a basically critical stance toward the American and world status quo for more than a decade...

...My first reaction to the magazine—it was the period when it was founded—was that the editors were selling out...

...Perhaps it is inevitable that young people come to the radical movement with the fervor of cathechumens and always believe that the veterans of past struggles are tired and going soft...

...There were not a great many proclaimed Communists clamoring for the right to teach, and even the infamous Smith Act persecutions affected a much smaller group than the Palmer Raids of the Twenties...

...and Leon Trotsky constantly taught his American followers that the international perspective came first...

...Finally, lest all this have the appearance of a eulogy, let me return to the problematic areas...

...Was the failure of the high purpose of the Alliance for Progress an "inevitable" consequence of the nature of the American social system...

...And it was, of course, the latter and liberating course which DISSENT took...

...Then there is that summary problem which has tormented radicals so much in the recent past and which is dealt with in some of the essays in this book: What of socialism itself...

...The following article was written as the Introduction to Critics and Rebels, an anthology of articles taken from the past twelve years of DissENT...

...Yet this same mood of detente which permitted a revival of social conscience and consciousness within the society (for such would never have happened under conditions of increasing Cold War) also made the enormous problems of the majority of the people of the world recede into the distance...

...On the one hand, they permitted radicals—and Negroes and eventually a majority of the society and its politicians—to rediscover and redefine domestic injustice and to begin to do a few things about it...

...For what I had regarded as "selling out" was a profoundly radical act...

...If that can be achieved, it might provide a vantage point from which the reader can hear the individual contributors speak for themselves more clearly...

...Now that political independence has more or less been realized in the colonial revolution, and the infinitely more difficult issues of economic and social development are on the agenda, the challenge is even more acute...

...and developed a social and economic understanding of the struggle for civil rights...

...In all of this, I am concerned with a sectarian internationalism, and not the real thing...

...An America which still believed in laissez faire myths (Continued on page 749) THE TRADITION OF DISSENT (continued from page 628) and acted on the basis of the realities of corporate power could not understand a colonial world in revolutionary motion...

...And there have been nationalizations which have bailed out the most backward businessmen by socializing the losses of the most run-down industries...

...Certainly the work of people like Paul Goodman, Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, Jeremy Lamer, Claude Brown, and the others included in this volume hardly gives aid and comfort to complacency...

...It occurred to me that America could do without another such analysis—there are entire books devoted to the subject—and it was this realization which impelled me toward a rather novel form for a preface, mixing politics and memoir...

...If I can return to the personal mode for a moment, there is a curious relationship between this "American" aspect of DISSENT and the radical revival of the sixties...

...And indeed, in the largest sense of the term, democratic socialization remains the essence of the socialist vision...

...explored the themes of bureaucracy and alienation long before they became a commonplace of protest rhetoric...

...By the 1950's the classic socialist dogmas had all become problematic...

...Thus, a kind of McCarthyite view of world politics emerged...

...In 1954, when I wondered if the editors of DISSENT were on the verge of betrayal, I "knew" precisely and exactly what socialism was: the democratization of the society through the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy...

...At DISSENT conferences, I was among those who lectured the editors of the magazine on the dangers of capitulating to American imperialism, of abandoning the struggle for socialist power, and so on...

...Though DISSENT kept up a running criticism of United States foreign policy, the focus of the magazine was increasingly American...

...And this liberating, democratic possibility of a new order of things in which the people actually decide their own destiny is what makes us rebels and critics...

...The Socialist party split in the mid-Thirties over a debate which essentially concerned the proper tactics for the Austrian Social Democracy in the struggle against fascism...

...Or perhaps this attitude is only an expression of the special American circumstances of the recent past: the decline and ideological confusion of the entire adult Left...

...Here, I think, is one of the major goads to the democratic Left in the coming period...

...Meanwhile we print Michael Harrington's article not merely for its intrinsic interest but also—to be candid—in the hope that it will lead our readers to pay greater attention to the matter on the preceding page.—ED...

...Critics and Rebels will be published by New American Library in the spring of 1967...

...DISSENT has not, of course, ignored such issues...

...As a result, the various nationalist and socialist movements all seemed to be the creatures of some evil conspiracy located in Moscow...

...In my own case, a great deal of the impulse to turn to the issue of poverty in the United States derived from the critique of the American celebration inaugurated by DISSENT...

...For however much intellectual humility has been imposed upon socialists in the past decade, there are certain crucial convictions that remain unaltered, and neither DISSENT nor this writer have changed their mind one whit since 1954...

...So it was that radicals in this country sometimes debated the "road to power" without noticing that the workers were out creating the CIO...

...In the Thirties, the American Communists had followed the political dictates of the Kremlin with slavish precision...

...And would it be impossibly grandpaternalistic for me to speculate, at the age of 38, that some of the angry young Leftists might follow a route similar to my own...

...It would be marvelous if revolutionary elan could, by itself, transcend the heritage of backwardness in the excolonial world, or if tribesmen and peasants could achieve the society which urban workers and intellectuals failed to create...

...Yet, there was fierce, even passionate, argument over such issues...

...And so it is that this new collection of articles from DISSENT is, if anything weighted in the direction of a confrontation with society in the United States...

...These internal wrongs in American society were usually seen in DISSENT as related to a foreign policy which included Chiang, Franco, Syngman Rhee, Bao Dai (and Diem and Ky) , Batista, Jiminez, etc., in the "free" world...

...for there is no question that the single most tragic moment in the history of socialism occurred in 1914 when the old promise of world brotherhood was shattered and the revolutionists joined their respective armies and began to kill one another...

...Indeed, the magazine has published excellent reportage and analysis in this area...

...In any case, when DISSENT broke with the facile world-views and began to confront the specific problems of a socialism in crisis, there was a creative discovery of what was wrong with America...

...Reality, however, is not so simple and DISSENT has always recognized this tragic, complex fact...

...Yet there remains a vision, and that is the distinctive thing about DISSENT...