Of Views, Aims, and Dogmas: A Letter to my Son
Clark, Joseph
Joseph Clark was active in the left-wing student movement in the thirties and edited Communist publications. He served in a rifle company during World War II and was awarded the Silver Star. He...
...His work in the slums of Newark is what's important...
...And to go along with the deliberate falsehood of Hanoi propaganda while quoting scriptures on Radio Hanoi, as Lynd did ("Our Bible says 'You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' ") was a hypocrisy that compares with the depths to which Stalinism descended during the Nazi-Soviet pact...
...only the radical Right, which had been out to get Kerr for a long time, could and did benefit from such tactics...
...It wasn't just the ineffable, inevitable, intolerable J. Edgar Hoover who gave life to these clubs, but it was the Department of Justice itself that revived the DuBois Clubs...
...But they could be oblivious to the effects of what they said or did on many other Americans...
...New Republic, December 25, 1965...
...So, for the better part of the remaining semester we studied that war including the role of the Scheldt...
...But it is no more the work, with or without a single sentence, of "a proto-fascist ideologue" than Norman Thomas or Otto Bauer were social fascists...
...As a history major you've had to resign yourself to the existence of young and old...
...Some of us allowed nearly a quarter of a century to pass before the professor's lesson made much of an impact on us...
...How certain we were that our country and its "system" were wrong...
...In their reactions to the case of the two GIs the SDS spokesmen didn't seem to care about the impression they gave of going along gladly with a Vietcong propaganda blast...
...In his "The Mind of Clark Kerr" Draper assails that "mind" especially as it was revealed in the book Industrialism and Industrial Man, by Clark Kerr and others, published by Harvard University Press...
...I must not, for example, compare the good old thirties with the bad new sixties...
...Nor will I console myself, as Hal Draper does (New Politics, IV, 3), that it is the fate of all revolutionary efforts to fail—except the last...
...He was reporter, city editor, and foreign editor of the Daily Worker, and its correspondent in the Soviet Union 1950-53...
...He foresees a crisis for the radical movements which seems to be based solely on protest rather than on redress of grievances...
...This incident did give us an opportunity to reflect on some questions of principle...
...To be critical of the Administration for its disastrous Vietnam policies is not only justified, in my opinion, but necessary if we are to serve our country's interests...
...But what was happening in the world...
...III Recurring in much of the "New Left" writing is an echo of one of the most faithful dogmas of the "Old Left"—that little can be improved under the "system" and that the overthrow of the "establishment" is a precondition for redress of grievances...
...It was amazing how much we knew of Marx's indictment of Proudhon and how little of Proudhon's views about Marx...
...it reminds one a little of how the Socialists, who believed that socialism had to be democratic, were treated by the Communist movement...
...What is, or should be, the aim of social action...
...So this book, which Draper held up as a devastating example of Kerr's alleged closeness to "neo-fascist" views, is not at all what the ideological assault claimed it was...
...Hal Draper, one of the few representatives of the "Old Left" whom the Berkeley students in revolt would listen to, laments this lack of ideology among the students of the "New Left...
...A discussion last winter by participants in the "New Left" movements in the New Republic was useful and well written, often persuasive and thoughtful...
...I don't, of course, refer to the noteworthy and commendable association with a noble representative of the "Old Left," a man of conscience, an enemy of totalitarianism—Norman Thomas...
...Vith his essay, "The Mind of Clark Kerr," Hal Draper raised at least a transient ideological banner for the Berkeley revolt...
...The most heroic action and the smallest deed are worthwhile only if they're concerned with people, with improving their life, here on earth...
...Who am I to be different...
...UNITY AGAINST WAR is its message...
...One should learn many things from a lifetime in "movements...
...On that condition, I shall be de lighted to take part in your association—but otherwise, no...
...Quoted in The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert L. Heilbroner, Simon and Schuster...
...He feels that institutions of the New Deal, for which labor fought so long and so hard, "intended to circumscribe that power do so marginally if at all...
...Because, they explained, the U.S...
...Perhaps the "New Left" has been spared the dead hand of ideology, but that's not the way various mentors and friends of the "New Left" want it to be...
...Indeed, during the last election there were "New Leftists" who contributed quite gayly to the defeat of Brown, which had to mean the victory of Reagan...
...1 As a member of the class of '35 communicating with a member of the class of '68, there are certain canons which I must not violate...
...The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Simon and Schuster...
...We didn't doubt that SDS leaders and members were as American as apple pie...
...Above all, Hitler was happening...
...The professor raised his head and interjected, ever so gently: "And what were the economic causes of the war between France and the other European powers in 1792...
...but I would hasten to explain that, the goals must be for the here and now...
...Draper's dots concealed Kerr's discovery that political strikes by workers, under some conditions, are not at all undesirable, as he once thought...
...Am I implying guilt by association...
...how to make the university seem smaller even as it grows larger...
...15, 1966...
...I would reverse Bernstein again and say that the movement is nothing, the goal is everything...
...all the mysticisms...
...But we could find no simple combination of factors that caused the war, let alone a single set of economic reasons...
...but I am suggesting that if you become partners in political action, if you collaborate for a common aim, if you join together for a specific purpose or goal, you must be judged by that action, by that collaboration, and by that goal...
...Replying to an invitation from Marx to join in political collaboration, Proudhon wrote: Let us by all means collaborate in trying to discover the laws of society, the way in which these laws work out, the best method to go about investigating them...
...Dear Son, Our discussion of the "New Left" started with a rather small event related to the wretched war in Vietnam...
...However, a reading of the entire passage shows that Kerr is not attacking free trade unions but the specific possibility he describes, "Communist unions" masquerading under the banner of freedom...
...Kerr lists some of the things the authors of the book "unlearned...
...The truth is that there had been many proffers of negotiations to Hanoi, one of them just about a week before this press conference...
...Why did so few of Lenin's early associates remain at his side...
...Hayden seems seriously to be suggesting that labor leaders can be true to their calling only by rejecting the "system" and bringing about its overthrow...
...Perhaps the most important lesson for some of us was that there is no final conflict and there is no final triumph...
...One of these, which exists only as three dots in Draper's rendering, describes an original conviction which Kerr found was nothing but a onceheld prejudice...
...just as it would be hard to place the conglomerate radicals of the thirties into a single category...
...It calls upon students to assemble at an N.Y.U...
...The government, as Gitlin sees it here, is very much like the old picture of an executive committee of the capitalist class...
...Surely, the style or "image" we present to the world is less important than the goal we seek...
...and you and I know some quaint young fogies in the here and now...
...Thus, Todd Gitlin, a past leader of SDS, finds that political freedom is illusory because of the "tightly-planned corporate complex" that dominates our lives...
...The "New Left" becomes pretty elusive, when you try to determine what it is and who comprises it...
...Still another question arose—could the epithet "anti-American" be applied to the "New Left...
...Here's a frayed leaflet, yellowed with age...
...he sees perils as well as advantages in the partnership of education and the federal government and argues for preservation of "the traditional freedom of higher education from excessive control...
...Of course, we made no attempt to reduce the "New Left" to a single organization, such as SDS...
...For that matter, though some of us were acquainted with Kautsky's criticism of Bernstein, how limited was our knowledge of Bernstein...
...In this connection, there was a revealing little incident at Brooklyn College...
...He broke with the Communist party in 1957...
...Words once uttered by Brecht seem to capture the early spirit and promise of the "New Left" when he sang: "Beloved is the feeling of a new beginning, a pioneer situation...
...But the sum total was a movement which, by associating itself with totalitarianism, brought harm to all the good endeavors in which it was involved, whether fighting for unemployment insurance or against Franco...
...But what I have in mind is the kind of association of the "New Left" represented by the mission to Hanoi, organized by Herbert Aptheker and joined by Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd...
...The Justice Department did just that when it ordered them to register for self-destruction under the McCarran Act, which they of course justly refused to do, this being the U.S., not Russia or Spain...
...The issue is not one of generations...
...So, perhaps the "New Left" started with an immediate advantage over the old, since it was not bound by ideology...
...An NSL spokesman was addressing the class, appealing for the strike against war, to which almost the entire student body soon responded (in April, 1934...
...let us never regard a question as closed, and even after we have exhausted our last argument, let us begin again, if necessary, with eloquence and irony...
...Perhaps one needs a Marxist approach to understand why some of these new radicals are impatient with the "middle-class" ambitions of America's poor...
...Assuredly, I must not quote Marx about history repeating itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce...
...This you gathered from his article in New Politics...
...He, and the rest of the class, knew precious little about that war, not to speak of its economic causes...
...It is impossible to say that one is against war and still talk of defending one's country from invaders," the pamphlet went on, explaining that it is the system —capitalism—that causes war...
...Though, at its outset, and in its earlier period, the "New Left" has been fairly free of dogmatism, apostles of a new religion may yet drown "the movement" in the familiar seas of ideology...
...There's a continuity of politics and protest that cannot, should not be avoided...
...Nor dare I recall the adage about those who refuse to learn from the mistakes of the past being doomed to repeat them...
...it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures...
...Goodness knows these goals were far from attainment at Berkeley, and Kerr erred when he failed to intervene immediately and decisively to rescind the ban on setting up tables, raising funds, making speeches and social action on the sidewalk area in front of the Berkeley campus...
...countervailing forces don't seem to exist in this reminiscent description of a society that exists partly in reality and to a considerable extent in vivid ideological imagination...
...Their rationalization, that if the worst racists were elected it would be easier to expose them, was a reversion to the old "revolutionary" belief of "the worse, the better...
...He criticizes the subtle discounting of the teaching process and neglect of educational policy from the undergraduate point of view...
...Only in America, only at a time of the greatest strength and power that any nation has ever attained on earth (and beyond), could lunacy of this quaint caliber convert our country into a theater of the absurd...
...Gitlin deprecates labor unions because they "bargain for incremental dollars and cents...
...Indeed they did pioneer: those brave young men and women, Negro and white, from North and South, who sought to break down the barriers of Jim Crow...
...SLID was about to learn a lesson: that unity with the Communists brought with it a propensity for synthesis on a "higher level"—a Communist level...
...As you recall, a message was quickly sent to the two GIs by the staff leaders of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) hailing their statements...
...Why did so few of Marx's friends remain his political comrades...
...When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels...
...Organizations were very much politically oriented in those days (1934...
...You will already have noted and smiled with some shadow of compassion at the tendency of middle-aged commentators about the "New Left" to be critical of other middle-aged commentators about the "New Left...
...Where Draper had dots, Kerr wrote: "The political strike, as it exists under colonialism, may not only be inherent in the situation, but the only effective manner of attaining some transfer of power to the indigenous population...
...Making liberalism a target at Berkeley was hardly helpful to the effort to remedy the justified grievances of many students...
...We once sang in derision about the "pie in the sky" which the preacher promised...
...Can one look at one side of the coin and ignore the other...
...Let us welcome, let us encourage all the protests...
...1I One of the things that did bother some of us when Marxist ideology seemed to be the `open sesame" to a new and better world was the history of all the socialist thinkers and fighters who had fallen from grace...
...that was when they took a position to flout the draft, only to discover, after they did consult their members, that the leaders' views had been repudiated...
...and later, those who protested the inequities of the draft which discriminated against the poor...
...On a previous occasion they had also been indifferent to the sentiments of their members...
...The same crisis, I imagine," Hayden writes, "has withered past movements and led radicals, such as the current labor leadership, into sorry marriages with the system they once tried to overthrow...
...The essence is not "new" or "old" Left, but policies and politics, with younger people among those who had bad politics in the thirties and older folks who might have admirable policies today...
...He visited with the Bolsheviks, coming as a friend and a socialist him self...
...At a press conference in Hanoi, all three, Hayden, Lynd, and Aptheker, said they had learned the answer to the question: why weren't the Communists negotiating with the U.S...
...How many radicals, for a promise of "pie in the sky," have sacrificed the very people in whose name they spoke...
...In every generation this dogmatism, about which Proudhon had warned, continued to plague the Left...
...Wasn't modern war "fought for the conquest of new markets, for economic expansion," in the words of the NSL pamphlet...
...Russell was struck by the] elaborate and dogmatic beliefs in the mind of the Communist, which may be true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to be true with any certainty...
...Why then, since the untrammeled mind and the pioneer situation are so rewarding, do the spokesmen for the "New Left" associate themselves, sometimes ideologically, often organizationally, with maneuvers and stratagems of that part of the "Old Left" which was responsible for importing totalitarian attitudes into left-wing politics...
...Draper's handling of the liberals is strangely reminiscent...
...But to associate oneself with the Communist cause in Vietnam is as wrong and unjustified and harmful as any political stand can possibly be...
...The SANE spokesman, at least in this incident, was very much concerned that it should not be utilized by those who are opposed to peace in Vietnam...
...Being unable to get any news, let alone getting answers to questions about the Hanoi regime, didn't deter the troika from lending themselves to propaganda broadcasts on Radio Hanoi...
...That brings to mind so many alumni of the "Old Left" who remember the furniture we brought back into homes from which the unemployed had been evicted and the demonstrations for unemployment insurance and our participation in the organization of the CIO unions, and who say, those are the things that count...
...Can those who did ever sneer at dollars and cents won at the bargaining table or through strikes...
...These will continue regardless of any of their own absurdities because there is a much greater absurdity which conspires to perpetuate the worst aspects of both the old and the new Left...
...Fascism and Communism are the awful examples of such ideology...
...It's sometimes easier to talk about "participatory democracy" than to practice it...
...But it was Kerr's ideas which evoked the furious indictment by Draper...
...That's how we felt in the youth movement of the thirties, just as the young people of the "New Left" could revel in their pioneer situation...
...So we learned that each generation has its share of conflict and to some extent its triumph...
...I make reference to the old and the new Right, to J. Edgar Hoover, to the Smith and McCarran Acts, to the failure of both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to put the FBI under the law and the Constitution...
...The speaker became slightly flustered...
...Russell added:] This habit of militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters is one from which, since the Renaissance, the world has been gradually emerging, into that temper of constructive and fruitful skep ticism which constitutes the scientific outlook...
...At a press conference staged by the Communists in Cam bodia, with the GIs still in the hands of their captors, the prisoners were quoted as saying that they would return to the U.S...
...congealed doctrine has been upheld much in the same manner as revelation in theology...
...Hundreds of young people decided to join these DuBois Clubs just to opose the revival of McCarthyism...
...Lynd and others in the magazine Liberation have managed to synthesize "pacifism" with support of regimes which have made a philosophy of violence as the midwife of progress...
...You read Kerr's chapter and however you appraise it, it's surely a defense of democratic values...
...Then I would affirm that one issue, one quality of life, one aspect of social organization precedes all others: democracy...
...Certainly, much that was done was good and most of it with the best of intentions...
...When he projects a five-point program in the same article, there's little of overthrow and the goals are meaningful, such as rent control, apartment repairs, and coalitions to effect reforms...
...NSL was Communist-led, SLID Socialist-led...
...So let's put it this way—here are a few things one participant in the student and youth movement of the thirties learned from sometimes joyous, sometimes bitter experiences, and how these seem (to him) relevant to what is happening in the sixties...
...Indeed, the Communists had them coming and going, at intervals, depending on whether Stalin was allied with Hitler or not at the particular moment...
...Student speakers represented the two sponsors of the meeting, the National Student League and the Student League for Industrial Democracy...
...With respect to Vietnam we agreed the goal was rather plain —peace...
...but much of it exemplified an attitude which boils down to what Bayard Rustin justly calls a "no win" policy...
...I applaud with all my heart your idea of bringing to light all the varieties of opinion...
...In other words, whether you agree with Kerr or not that political strikes are justified, he is explaining that he once had a prejudice against political strikes, but his research taught him that under certain conditions— for example, under colonialism—the workers may have no alternative to political strikes, in order to win freedom...
...it happened, as so many of the best things did, in Professor Jesse D. Clarkson's history class...
...but, for God's sake, after we have demolished all the dogmatisms a priori, let us not of all things attempt in our turn to instill another kind of doctrine into the people...
...and fanatically defended systems of belief have been used to inflict merciless injustice, endless suffering and bloodletting...
...That there hasn't been a louder outcry against such a deplorable imitation of Communist and fascist states, may be a sign that McCarthyism might be revived, in this Vietnam war situation...
...But before I take on some fellow members of my generation, a glance at the past...
...Two GIs, captured by the Vietcong, were being released in tribute to the "American peace movement...
...He was conscious of the rather elementary principle that Americans must be persuaded to support a policy we were advocating for America—in this case a policy seeking negotiations to end the war...
...To what extent ideology can be an impediment to thought was discovered in Moscow in 1920 by Bertrand Russell (himself a formidable thinker except when the tag-ends of ideology seized him in his nineties...
...I mention all this by way of quoting a pertinent and prophetic letter from Proudhon to Marx...
...auditorium to hear your old man and Joe Lash and Joe Starobin and Professor James Burnham demolish the war-makers...
...By the time Hal gets through working over the liberals of the sixties, they are shredded as completely as Proudhon at the hands of Marx, Kautsky or Bernstein at the mercy of Lenin, Martov by Trotsky...
...to fight for peace...
...And the "Shapes of Democracy total" will be determined in never-ending struggle and effort...
...But still, despite these echoes, I wouldn't be fair if I didn't note that in addition to the old dogmatism there is a freshness and "revisionism" that the more orthodox "Old Left" would never have tolerated...
...Muddy, poorly written, far from profound—these are criticisms that can be leveled with justice at Kerr's book...
...It seems to me that a reading of the texts involved, specifically Draper and Kerr, tells us far more about what happens to the mind of a Marxist ideologue than it does about the mind of a college president-pragmatist...
...Perhaps it was useful, after all, for us "Old Leftists" to have experienced the depression...
...Permanent revolution" may indeed have a far more profound meaning than the doctrinaire definition given to it by both Marx and Trotsky, who saw it as the continuation of the "bourgeois democratic" revolution into the "proletarian revolution...
...Above all, why did Stalin butcher his associates...
...The tactics of some of the youthful militants in Alabama who refused to support liberal candidates was a classic example of the dogmatic sacrifice of the present generation to some future millennium...
...let us condemn all the exclusions...
...Take the resurrection of the YCL—AYD in a new reincarnation, the DuBois Clubs...
...Thus, Gitlin suggests, for example, that "the great corporations should, somehow, be made responsible to workers and consumers...
...A. reading of Kerr's book may or may not evoke agreement—I found much to disagree with—but the "proto-fascist" bit is as accurate as the social fascist appelation for David Dubinsky...
...We also ruminated on how little regard some leaders seem to evince for the wishes of their members...
...You read Draper and in his mind, the mind of Kerr is at the very threshold of fascism...
...Were the SDS spokesmen demonstrating their courage and independence while the SANE spokesman was being cautious, seeking respectability and cocking an eye to the establishment...
...or, maybe people just underestimate what an aroused public can do to restore sanity...
...You may not have realized how serious I was when I said I'mn expert above all in one respect—I know about the failure of movements...
...But to support Hanoi's position, one which has consistently opposed negotiations, and to bear false witness in behalf of a totalitarian regime is hardly a service to peace...
...Gitlin also is contemptuous of the pluralism of our society and, there again, perhaps those of us who have experienced totalitarianism in other lands, or felt its hot breath when McCarthyism was riding high in our own land, can better appreciate the difference between a democratic-pluralistic society (with all its shortcomings) and a dictatorial social order...
...By adding a single sentence," Draper writes, "Kerr's book would become the work of a proto-fascist ideologue...
...We can assay the role of ideology in one of the saddest uses to which it is put—as a means of analyzing the thought of an adversary...
...Perhaps the saddest lesson we learned was that the greatest failures were just those revolutions that succeeded...
...The professor soon moved as far to the Left as the political spectrum permitted, only to repair equally far to the Right, and with equal fervor...
...This brought forth a furious tirade from Hoover who informed the world that his political snooping on campus was authorized by the Department of Justice...
...Many of the young radicals who have gone "to the people" are themselves from comfortable, middle-class, sometimes even upper-class, homes...
...Still, the message of the leaflet sounds admirable: "to establish a basis for united struggle against war and retrenchment in education and for equal rights for Negro students...
...By contrast, a spokesman for SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) expressed regret about the apparent duress and brain washing attending the event...
...had never asked them to negotiate...
...It struck me that the SDS leaders acted suspiciously like an "elite" with sweeping disregard for how their members might feel about all this...
...One of the oddities of the new apostles of ideology in the "New Left" is that they often assume a pacifist coloration while supporting such obvious advocates of force and violence as Nkrumah and Sukarno (when they still had power) and Castro and Ho Chi Minh...
...I have in mind the administration of Wesleyan College which rejected the arrogant demand of our night-clubbing top-cop, J. Edgar Hoover, for a list of the members of the campus SDS...
...And here's a 32-page pamphlet of the National Student League, issued in March, 1935...
...Ideologies in our time have tended to function as dogmas...
...They were charging specifically that the U. S. government had not made any proposals to the government of North Vietnam...
...To many radicals of the thirties, however, there was much confusion about what way the Yanks were coming...
...let us show the world the example of learned and far-sighted tolerance, but simply because we are the head of the new movement, let us not set ourselves up as the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion—even though this religion be the religion of logic, the religion of reason itself...
...A crusader for opening-up higher education to the masses of youth, he expresses concern about "how to treat the individual student as a unique human being in the mass student body...
...Hal Draper, surely, knows even more of such instances than Kerr does...
...Nevertheless, there's a sobriety in all this and in Hayden too...
...Later that year the NSL merged with SLID to form the American Student Union...
...Such freedom, Kerr says, should "enlarge the horizons of equality of opportunity...
...But what a wonderful residue of common sense and stiff-necked adherence to democratic principles continue to prevail...
...The New Deal has done nothing but mobilize the nation for war," the NSL declaimed (and SLID agreed...
...After interviewing Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, Russell con cluded that: Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine...
...What's more, you can reverse that...
...conclusions, rather than hypotheses have preceded investigation...
...Was this, then, a contrast between the "New Left" on the one hand, and the "liberal apologists for the establishment" on the other...
...I choose to use ideology as something other than just a word for generalized ideas, or for programs devoted to a given purpose, or even for philosophy...
...You can read both this essay by Draper and Kerr's essay (Revolution at Berkeley, edited by Michael V. Miller and Susan Gilmore, Dell paperback), to see how ideology can obscure the vision of even the most acute intelligence...
...Later Lynd explained that, of course, he could not get the news while in Hanoi...
...NSL and SLID joined to make the Oxford Pledge a high point of the peace strikes and demonstrations: "I pledge never to support the government of the United States in any war it may undertake...
...Nor may I presume to advise today's young radicals from the disadvantage point of really ripe middle age...
...IV Of this much we can be certain, there will be a militant Left no matter what its follies...
...and those who demonstrated for banning the bomb-tests...
...and those who entered communities to help organize the most deprived, the forgotten poor...
...The rationalizations we used to explain such matters still bring a blush to your father's face...
...And, oddly enough, there will be an active continuation of that "Old Left" which was sponsored by Moscow, despite harassment and persecution...
...The pamphlet, entitled STUDENTS FIGHT WAR, condemns Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt with equal ferocity, but it devotes more space to the denunciation of Roosevelt...
...Echoes of dogma come through loud and clear in Tom Hayden's article (New Republic, Jan...
...In the same vein the "new radical" who attacked the entire social security system as a bureaucratic enemy of the poor, managed to reduce revolutionary ideology to the absurd...
...As you know," the student was saying, "wars are caused by economic factors...
...Casting about for a comparison, Draper likens Kerr to a German professor who announced in 1932 "that, in his utterly scientific opinion, the triumph of the Nazis was indeed written in the scrolls of history and must be accepted...
...Possibly the most damning passage Draper cites seems to imply that Kerr opposes free trade unions because, Kerr writes, under some conditions, "free trade unions .. . become no more than Communist unions sabotaging efforts at economic development...
...There's plenty of need for criticism of an Administration in our own capital which has dodged a forthright offer to negotiate with the Vietcong and which has persisted in bombing the north, although that clearly obstructs efforts to place effective pressures on the Communists to enter negotiations...
...For none is certitude and rectitude more complete than for those who have survived a lifetime of factional struggles in sects that have divided into smaller sects, which in turn have divided into still smaller sects, until only the one pure revolutionary flame is left to light the way to the final conflict and the final triumph...
...Can those fond memories wipe out the support of Stalin's tyranny, support which continued even when Stalin's tyranny joined in Blutbruderschaft with Hitler's tyranny...
...Then, what greater propaganda coup could have been attained by these remnants of `old leftism," Moscow style, than that derived from Richard Nixon who announced to a believing world that the DuBois Clubs represented a plot to bring disrepute upon the Boys Clubs of America...
...Similarly, with regard to the free trade unionism issue, he explains that he had a prejudice, favoring unions under any conditions, but his research uncovered instances where the principle of free trade unionism was undermined by Communist unions...
...You have, of course, shared my repugnance for that mission to Hanoi, but, you explain, that isn't what interests you about Tom Hayden, for one...
...How well we knew the anathemas Lenin had hurled at Kautsky, but how poorly versed we were in Kautsky's criticism of Lenin...
...Perhaps the main lesson I learned is that the important thing is what the people attain through any movement...
...let us have good and sincere polemics...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
