Fables from Aptheker

...and who became enough of a socialist to say that if he had to choose, he would prefer communism with all its evils to the then present state of society...

...tion thither...

...who at the risk of his own professional reputation and career took on Carlyle, the Colonial Office, and British public opinion by denouncing and prosecuting the popular Governor Edward Eyre for his evil practices in Jamaica...

...What he does instead is talk about achievements in a variety of realms other than freedom, such as the Soviet Union's "effective opposition to racism and colonialism [vide Hungary, Czechoslovakia, African students in the U.S.S.R., and the Jews], and its indispensable support of the struggle for peace" [vide the Middle East...

...Aptheker says of Jefferson that to understand him it is necessary to remember that when the Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal it meant some men, not all, not for example slaves...

...for though theirpeople have very few slaves themselves yetthey had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others...

...Such bits of froth, along with the nonsense that "Then there will be forged a communist society in which the fullest freedom of selfexpression in all the spheres of human activity, and none colliding with the others' self-expression [my italics], will exist," rendered further reading unnecessary...

...Or that Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia explained that these passages had been struck out in complaisance to South Carolinaand Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who onthe contrary still wished to continue it...

...Surely a self-proclaimed Marxist who quotes extensively from the first volume of Capital might be expected to have found there Marx's observation that "It would be very wrong to class [Mill] with the herd of vulgar economic apologists...

...Whatever Aptheker's competence on the American Negro, he is clearly not a serious historian, nor yet even a novice in political and social theory...

...who supported labor unions, denied that it is just for any class to be other than a laboring class or for the lower classes to be dependent on the upper classes, and who insisted that, "given education and just laws, the poorer class would be as competent as any other class...

...Over the years, to be sure, the contemplation of such exercises has furnished decreasing pleasure...

...When we turn from the "bourgeois" thinkers to Aptheker's own thoughts on freedom, we move not only to new fancies but to a familiar recitation of old formulae...

...But no one can tell from Aptheker's account what every student of English history knows: that the enemy Milton actually confronted was his own, or rather Cromwell's, Parliament...

...who fought throughout his life for equality of educational opportunity and for the equality of the sexes...

...Two related points remain to be noted about this remarkable survey of freedom in history...

...Feudalism and the Reformation, indeed...

...One of these had been attacked before that Parliament as "a wicked book...

...Accordingly, he says of Milton that his Areopagitica "was a contribution to the debates in an England in civil war," and that the point of this essay was to argue against feudalism and in favor of the Reformation...

...and that Milton's marital difficulties had led him to publish, without license, several pamphlets on divorce...

...that this Parliament had renewed an old order forbidding unlicensed printing...

...New York: International Publishers...

...For all of them, he insists, class considerations were decisive in their definitions of freedom, and those definitions can only be understood in terms of their situations in history...

...In his original draft of the Declaration Jefferson had included a paragraph attacking the English king for having waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life andliberty in the persons of a distant people whonever offended him, captivating and carryingthem into slavery in another hemisphere, orto incur miserable death in their transportaBusiness Correspondence All letters concerning subscriptions, back issues, bundle orders, missing copies, etc...

...who recognized rights "only as existing in persons," not in property or things...

...etc...

...No more curious set of absurdities could be propounded of a man who in his personal conduct and teachings defied middle-class ways and morality...

...The latter portion of this statement is correct, but again no one can learn from Aptheker's account what is a first lesson for every student of the period: that this limitation of the principle of equality occurred despite Jefferson, not because of him...

...Neither in a long quotation he employs from Harold Laski nor in his own subsequent remarks does he include a single statement concerning the advance of human freedom in that "socialist" country...

...He considers BOOKS primarily "the three pre-eminent English speaking libertarians: John Milton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Stuart Mill...

...THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM, AND REVOLUTION, by Herbert Aptheker...

...Milton had been named in another action as a violator of the licensing law...

...should please be addressed, not to the editor, but to Business Manager, Dissent...

...WITH CAVALIER INDIFFERENCE to the wholesale assault conservatives have leveled against Mill throughout the last century, Aptheker joins the chorus of the authoritarian left, saying that Mill, a scion of the upper middleclass, favored employers over workers, that he was an elitist and a colonialist, and that he detested equality...

...EVERY ONCE in a while I seek a bit of comic relief from the burdens of our Kafkaesque world...

...BOOKS One is that Aptheker keeps mistaking the genetic fallacy for an argument...

...He then talks at length, and in what he thinks are Marxist terms, of the conditions and elements of class revolutions— as if these had any relevance to the American scene...

...OurNorthern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures...

...and the Areopagitica, in the form of a speech to that Parliament, had been his reply...

...Aptheker opens his volume with a 20-page survey of "Freedom in History...

...he thinks he can refute a position not by dealing with its merits but by attacking the alleged source from which it derives...

...Herbert Aptheker's recent book is a case in point...

...He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attemptto prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, determining to keep open a marketwhere MEN should be bought and sold...

...for as the older theoreticians have died or defected their successors have rarely displayed the wit, analytic power, and massive even if unrefined learning characteristic of the breed...

...To rebut the view that mass revolutions are obsolete, Aptheker pretends that those who hold this view do not mean it to apply only to advanced industrial societies and that the Chinese, Cuban, and Egyptian revolutions were mass revolutions that disprove the thesis...

...One unfailing source has been, not the gyrations of so-called Communist parties and governments (which have provided moments of sorrow and anger), but the intellectual acrobatics of Communist "theoreticians...

...The other is the same disingenuous shifting of ground when he opposes to these so-called apologists for bourgeois freedom the glorious reality of the Soviet Union...