LETTERS
Editor: George Lichtheim is to be commended for bringing to the attention of your readers certain aspectsof the problem of socialism and anti-Semitism ("Socialism and the Jews," DISSENT,...
...In the meantime I have a few suggestions for him: a) that he should read Tsuzuki's biography of Eleanor Marx, if he wants to get the hang of this particular subject, instead of relying (as he seems to be doing) on the grotesque rubbish about Marx produced by Mr...
...Yet the question persists: Why have so many Jews flocked to this stained secular banner when all— I repeat all—the leaders of all the varieties of collectivism whether you call it socialism, communism, anarchism, syndicalism, Fabianism, Menshevism, bolshevism, international socialism, or National Socialism have called for the elimination of the Jews or of Judaism or the Jewish spirit...
...After all, I am sure some of Mr...
...every one of them...
...It is undoubtedly true that many professors do spend hours teaching their assistants and editing and rewriting students' dissertations...
...And further, is recognition always distributed through "power, statesmanship, bargaining, and occupational mobility...
...Although Mr...
...Yet, forall his effort, his "remarks," as he calls them, fall largely into the category of the literature of apologetics on the subject...
...Our answer depends on our estimate of the incidence of such usurpation...
...Lichtheim is of course correct in pointing to SaintSimon and Fourier as the originators of the socialist doctrine...
...Laundry workers, steelworkers, garbage collectors, or what have you...
...If the colleagues themselves operate as described in the essay, then the social control will not operate in the direction indicated by Mrs...
...Let me say that there are no "hypothetical" cases in my article...
...The principal investigator who is destinedto be the conventional author serves as a mediator between technicians and professional writers...
...Thisis so even though the principal investigator has not written a line or is incapable of writing aline...
...Does merit, or specific contribution, have nothing to do with it at all...
...All the rest is exegesis...
...there are always consultants, ghostly and non-ghostly, who can make whatever we find sound academically respectable and dignified...
...GEORGE DcHn EIM Replies: I hope to be able at a later stage to expand my essay into a short book...
...It even happens—and I know of such cases just as Mr...
...Like all distortions, and all kitsch, this diatribe takes off from something real...
...Here is the way he puts it: "That a particular form of socialist anti-Semitism arose in 19th-century Europe may have been due to transitory factors which are no longer operative...
...Coser writes her own reports...
...In general .. t the possibility of scandal serves to guarantee authorship...
...It was full-bodied and full-throated, andthe gutturals came out in such gutter terms as "kike," and "sheeny," and "nigger," especially when referring to that "Jewish nigger," Lassalle...
...Such unethical behavior is, however, exceptional, although Mr...
...This means that even where the main research is conducted by a handful of people, there are, indeed, ambiguities about authorship...
...and asserts quantities such as "the principal investigator" (her Italics...
...Bensman's paper is neither...
...But they do not go far enough in explaining the depths of anguish which the Jews felt when they found that the best men of the Enlightenment, men like Voltaire and Diderot and d'Holbach in France and Fichte in Germany, had marked them for contempt, although it can be said for Voltaire the he counseled against "burning the Jews...
...Protocol requires that he be sole or principal author of the final report...
...Fourier was intent on showing that the Jewish businessman was JudasIscariot incarnate, and that throughout the ageshe has had only one impulse, one desire, and thatwas to bankrupt honest, God-fearing, French merchants...
...Has none of them ever been calledin •to give useful counsel to worthwhile research ventures...
...He has subordinates do the work for him, but he is "expected" to make it appear "as ifhe did the work...
...Mr...
...But does this entitle Mr...
...I would like to see in DISSENT a serious analysis of the structure of research, of its norms and values, its legitimate as well as not so legitimate practices...
...In doing so she neglects such qualifying phrases from the text as...
...Since recognition must be somewhat distributed, "this problem is resolved by power, by statesmanship, by bargaining, and by occupational mobility...
...Any Soviet bureaucrat with only a smattering of reading in the international socialist literature can easily find refuge in the Masters...
...In the social sciences...
...Here we may as wellagree with Sartre that all anti-Semitism leads to the death of the Jews...
...who can estimate who is capable and who is not...
...Now all varieties of socialism sucked from the common teat provided by the utopian anti-Semitesin France (Fourier and Company), which nourished the racial theories of Diihring and the "scientific" anti-Semitism of Marx and Engels...
...That they are, is, of course, nonsense...
...It is possible for quasi-illiterates to become authors...
...Actually, what is most disquieting about the Lichtheim piece is that it gives the impression that early French socialist anti-Semitism was ephe meral and did not embrace too large a movement...
...Are they never taught anything, do they never learn, never write their ownpapers with their own names on them...
...I shall then take occasion to deal in passing with some standard misconceptions on the subject, including those that Mr...
...And "The conventional author . . . can eliminate recommendations or evidence" (the implication being that he indeed does) and "is expected to censor copy...
...Heine, who knew Marx betterthan all of us, once said, "Marx saw in the Jew only the dog with dog's thoughts, and not theman with human feelings...
...Lichtheim's observations are cogent enough—so far as they go...
...But is all research based on these crooked practices...
...He is a sensitive writer when he writes on matters other than his own colleagues...
...it draws a unified picture of something that in fact is very complex...
...The point of difference is the extent to which it is "exceptional...
...Why does he not use in this case the analytical distinctions he is capable of...
...more typically .. , most cases...
...And any current effort to explain Soviet anti-Semitism as an aberration from the original doctrine is sheer nonsense...
...But very often a senior man, and the maincontributor to a paper or a project, will put his name last only because he does not need senior authorship for his already established reputation and wants to give his student a break...
...Much much more can be written about the problem of socialist anti-Semitism, but limitations of space, I am afraid, will not permit it at this time...
...He is somewhat remiss, however, in not pointing out that the very word "socialism" was coined by the notorious Pierre Leroux whomLichtheim reincarnates into a "Christian socialist...
...Leroux's anti-Semitism and that of the SaintSimonians who held identical views with regard to the "Jewish spirit," ultimately served to supplyMarx with a similar contempt for that "spirit," and yet there are those who find all kinds of excuses for Marx writing what he did—and it was notsome "private jokes about Lassalle," or some "public sneers about Jewish finanicers," as Lichtheim suggests...
...I have in the past 20 years been able to observe personally, time and time again, each and every type of action described in the article...
...And I may add: to women...
...Bensman does...
...Yes, "the filthiest of all races," they called them, and not in someprivate jest either...
...Bensman is correct in assuming that it happens more oftento graduate students...
...And that was not yet the time for burning...
...He implies, of course, that they are right in seeing themselves that way...
...All very paradoxical, but that is what the real world (as distinct from the private demonology of the ideologist) is really like...
...Having concluded his voluminous findings, Szajkowski adds the following troublesome post script: In quoting only the antisemitic pronouncements of the French socialists, the writer may be suspected of having ignored the pro-Jewish statements...
...Why did Jews—so many of them—flock to the banner of their revilement...
...Coser argues "social control emanates from colleagues...
...He will then discover that Marx's notorious utterances (which no sensible person today is going to defend) were only a pale reflex of what he had learned from Hess...
...In many places it isassumed that a department head automaticallytakes senior authorship...
...attached to universities (all of them...
...Come, come: more exploited than migrant agricultural workers...
...But in order to check my personal observation, I have, by use of the methods of interviewing described in my book Dollars and Sense, checked my observations with an uncountable number of ghost writers, editorial specialists, researchers, project directors, publishers, grant-givers, and scores of expert infomants...
...Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X was edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs, and was published by Broadside Press...
...In order to allay any such suspicion, the writer wishes to say explicitly that his efforts to find sympathetic references to the Jews in the French socialist literature, from Saint-Simon to the date of Drumont'S first appearance, have been futile...
...Bensman does—that a research director publishes his assistant's writing under his own name...
...Geltman, Leroux'sspiritual descendants included Peguy, who fought for Dreyfus, and those French Christian Democrats who helped Jews at considerable risk to themselves during the German Occupation...
...Or you might want to publish a witty satire, highlighting the conflicts and ambiguities...
...writings...
...The fact that many graduate students see themselves as the most exploited class in America is, it seems to me, hardly open to doubt...
...Yet, it is true that the distribution of recognition gives riseto much discontent, often justified, on the part of those who believe, rightly or wrongly, that theyhad a greater part in a project than they weregiven credit for...
...I submit that he engages here in monumental distortions...
...Coser...
...Whichonly proves that nothing anyone writes ever reallygoes to waste, since ideas do have consequences— for good or bad...
...The more so since he poses the problemof a permanent stain which has flecked the banner of international socialism from its very beginnings...
...As principal investigators, we will then ask other principal investigators if they attach their names to works of their juniors...
...Mr...
...Healso knows that "consultants are brought in to rescue a phase of a floundering study...
...I think Lichtheim does your readers a disservice by suggesting thatthe discoverer of the "passions of the human soul" was intent on attacking capitalists in general, and since Jews, in large part, were engaged in trade, they were singled out almost as if by accident, like the looting of a shopkeeper's store inHarlem which so often happens to belong to amember of the "tribe of reptiles," as Plekhanovcalled them...
...On the otherhand, it may also reflect a problem permanentenough to warrant some consideration...
...and we can ask the juniors and ghost writers (if we can raise them) if they function as ghosts, and if the rewards are ghostly or manifest...
...Whether colleagues are willing and able to control usurpation of authorship is an open question...
...Moreover, I focused primarily upon research organizations doing large-scale research both within and without universities...
...But Mr...
...I have no doubt whatever that Mrs...
...Bensman does not ask questions, he knows...
...On the contrary...
...DISSENT, July– August 1968) can best be described as kitsch criticism, on three counts: it purports to be something it isn't...
...Obviously, this sample is not representative of all universities or all departments within them...
...For Malcolm...
...Mrs...
...However, the gist of her critique is that what I report is true...
...This story of Judas Iscariot, with its lunatic economics and socialist Jew-hatred, so attracted Frederick Engels that he had it translatedinto German from which it was translated into Russian by the early Bolsheviks in the "glorious" days of the October Revolution...
...How sad, indeed...
...This inquiry covered more than a dozen universities which specialize in large-scale research...
...Nor was all this venom directed against "Jewishfinanciers," but against the poorest of the poorJews in Poland whom Marx and Engels characterized as "the filthiest of all races...
...ThankGod they do, but let me continue asking: are all consultants always brought in only if a study is floundering...
...Of course, some of Mr...
...Italics mine...
...Editor: George Lichtheim is to be commended for bringing to the attention of your readers certain aspectsof the problem of socialism and anti-Semitism ("Socialism and the Jews," DISSENT, July—August 1968...
...Of course, the Orthodox and the Zionists have forgiven Hess, the repentant sinner, but that is no reason why the truth about these matters should continue to be buried in learned works and academic periodicals, while the general public is fed the sort of stuff about socialist anti-Semitism that conservatives delight in reproducing for their own purposes when it suits them...
...Bensman provides us with a picture of the researcher, especially the principal investigator of research (every one of them...
...Bensman...
...see Silberner's biography of Hess, p. 130...
...Not one kind word for the Jews in all the literature of early French socialismand it was from there, I repeat, the doctrine spread aound the world...
...And if a number of people do escape such control and violate some canons of competence or decency, we cantake it in our stride...
...Yet this appears to have little to do with large-scale research in university research institutes—the subject of my essay...
...c) he should ask someone to translate for his benefit Moses Hess's remarks on the "Moloch" character Jehovah (in his early...
...Bensman'sfavorite expression...
...b) he should read Silberner's essay on Lassalle if he wants to find out what "Jewish anti-Semitism" and self-hatred among that generation of Jewish intellectuals was really like...
...Some will even accept second authorships...
...Max Geltman reproduces on the basis of what he has found (or thinks he has found) in Silberner...
...One is tempted to ask the question once posed to a psychoanalyst: "But Doctor, is thezeppelin only a phallic symbol...
...JOSEPH BENSMAN Replies: Rose Laub Coser, in attempting to "quantify" my essay "Who Writes What in the Bureaucratic University," intersperses in her summary of it such questions as "all of them...
...And are there never any professors and project directors who spend hours in informal sessions teachingtheir assistants, or days on end editing and often rewriting their students' dissertations (so that theymay appear less illiterate, to use Mr...
...So that when Lichtheimmentions Bakunin, pointing out his revilement of the Jews, and pointing to the Narodnaya Volya which demanded that Czar, Jew, and noble be attacked, he again misses the point which may be embodied in the query: Why did Jewish boys LETTERS "leave the heder," as the historians report, to join the movement of the People's Will to hand out leaflets calling on the peasants to kill Jews—along with the Czar and the nobles...
...such unethical behavior is, however, exceptional...
...For the inept also deserve to be protected, as long as those who are able and decent receive recognition and help distribute it by and large where it belongs...
...Now thereason why early socialism which Marx and Engels borrowed from the French "Utopians" and their later "scientific socialism" which they borrowed from Proudhon was kneedeep in the mire of anti-Semitism requires little equivocation to explain it...
...as a con man, who "knows where the money is," "knows how to lay his hands on grants," and is a "capable and sometimes supersalesman...
...And all the teachings of all the varieties of socialism require an assault on the class enemy, the capitalist, and he is always identified in the sacred literature of socialism, until well into the twentieth century, as the Jew, as Judas Iscariot, the thieving, lying, bankrupting, international Jew whom Fourier ("I find him most attractive," wrote Engels to Marx) fixed upon the movement...
...The facts are that the socialist movement— utopian and scientific—was rooted in a common tradition of Jew-hatred which explains the seeming distortions of the doctrine when practiced in Soviet Russia...
...Is it not also a means of transportation...
...Just how many, and where...
...For it must be understood that all socialism from its inchoate beginnings has had this problem on its agenda...
...I would propose a large-scale study of principal investigators, ghost writers, and research workers...
...Editor: Joseph Bensman's article ("Who Writes Whatin the Bureaucratic University...
...After all, some of my best friends are ghosts...
...Bensman's best friends are principal investigators...
...Social science research has only recently reached—though not completely—the complexity of research in the nat ural sciences, with specialization, division of labor, and division of technical know-how...
...I am more trusting in my colleagues than Mr...
...Yet the one source he did not consult, at least it does not show up in his eye-disturbing numerals directing the reader to the back of the essay, is Zosa Szajkowski's extensive researches on the sub ject...
...Editor: In your May–June issue Jervis Anderson in "Black Writing: The Other Side," says of Larry Neal, "Last year he edited an anthology of poetry in memoriam of Malcolm X called Poems for Malcolm...
...Bensman does not tell us and takes care of all research in one big sweep (and of all universities at the same time), I assume that his ire is directed primarily at his colleagues in the social sciences...
...For instance, an early American socialist translation of Ludwig Feuerbach, by Engels with Marx's "Theses" appended, eliminated the nasty words "dirty Jewish" from the first Thesis...
...Certainly, when Lichtheim chides the Russians for refining some of the more gruesome passages in the works of the masters (Marx and Engels), he must be aware that all good socialists did likewise before the Bolsheviks came on the scene...
...It would take the works of dedicated Communards like Duchesne (he edited The Commune), seminal socialists like Toussenel (he influenced Marx), and socialist senators like Edmund Picard (in Belgium) to come up with the Jew as Moloch, a theme they couldn't get enough of, until that parvenu of a socialist arrived in Berlin from Vienna and started lighting up the faggots for the final destruction of the Jews and the final solution of the Jewish problem...
...In each instance the Jew was identified with the class enemy...
...Larry Neal had two poems in the anthology...
...and it uses a familiar theme that is meant to appeal to thepublic...
...I would agree with Mrs...
...Odd as it may seem to Mr...
...Coser that more definitive work should be done in this area...
...He knows that the principal investigatoris "illiterate," he knows that "In a large-scaleproject, literally dozens of people will have workedon the research...
...Perhaps we can write a proposal to attract a large grant from a government agency or foundation interested in the area...
...Robert Payne...
...I will even grant that some principal investigators do their own writing of project reports, though in most cases where I had previously suspected this, my suspicions disappeared with knowledge...
...but that...
...For what is uniqueabout the "problem" is not that "European socialism in general, and French socialism in particular [finally] shed its anti-Semitic aspects," butthat the socialist movement, all of it, "in every land," according to Professor Edmund Silbernerwho is the most distinguished of Lichtheim's authorities, was rooted in a Jew-hatred so profound as to have left its mark indelibly on its thoughtsand actions...
...My trust is not based on a belief inaltruism, but on the fact that social control ema LETTERS nates from colleagues, and that they can estimate (unlike the college president who makes appointments on the basis of publications which he knows nothing about) who is capable and who is not...
...Now anyone can find reasons for race hatred, but reason has a thousand reasons for being unreasonable...
...In the natural sciences...
...She neglects such phrases as "such an author...
...It appeared therein 1922 in Under the Banner of Marxism, the great socialist journal of culture and light...
...She then proceeds to answer her own question to her own satisfaction...
...The solid underlying factor in the equation still remains why Jews, having been rejected by socialism, want to have any truck with it at all...
...But to get back to Fourier...
...Does she deny that...
...Bensman to claim that "it is understandable why graduate students see themselves as the most exploited class in America...
...It was he who wrote these deadly words into hismanifesto of Jew-hatred: "It is quite evident, isit not, my friends, that when we speak of Jewswe mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, oflucre, the spirit of commerce, of speculation, in a word, the banker's spirit...
...She seems to be unaware of the conditional mood...
...I know of such cases as Mr...
...Incidentally, Silberner is not by any means alone in regarding Leroux as a "Christian socialist": that is exactly what he was, and to treat his (for his LETTERS time) very conventional utterances about the Jewish "spirit of lucre" as being in any way unusual or "deadly" just shows a lamentable incomprehension of the whole tone of French Catholic culture...
...We need not worry whether the project will founder...
...Being a close student of the Bible, he had read in Ecclesiastes that there is a time and place for everything...
...That, too, is part of the problem and is perhaps one of the most serious aspects of it...
...And are all graduate studentsbeing exploited all the time, and do they all see themselves that way...
...But Marx meant "dirty Jewish," and he said "dirty Jewish," much the way a southern redneck says "dirty nigger," period...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
