REVIEWS

...When the business cycle turned bad—remember that they were organizing workers with highly substitutable skills at the margins of the economy—the membership dissolved...

...Boorstin refers to "statistical communities" and to "consumption communities," by which he means people categorized by measurements in income, age, shoe size, choice of cigarettes, etc...

...The last line of the Wobbly song which forms the title of the book, "We Shall Be All," matches the song of another movement, "We Shall Overcome...

...It is more broadly conceived than its fellows, since it ranges from the origins of the Wobblies in the Western Federation of Miners to the final days when the IWW leadership served time in the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth...

...Capitalism's faults, according to a socialist critique, are traceable to the fact that it is humanly irrational...

...Boorstin lights upon the distinction between wealth, which is private and can be secret, and "standard of living," which is public and by definition cannot be kept secret...

...The destruction of the IWW and the trials of its leadership are more cursorily reported, perhaps because the author found these chapters the most difficult to write (as I did to read...

...Records of the Military Intelligence and the Bureau of Investigation (fore runner of the FBI) and the Justice Department dealing with the IWW remain classified (some as recently as the early 1960s, by J. Edgar Hoover), and this too has handicapped the author...

...But I wish to repeat that Miliband's book is solid and important...

...Now we have a new set of conjurers, the "New Left" historians of the 1960s who have revived and revised the analytic model of Marxism...

...The main difficulty lies in his central concept, community...

...After the beginning of the war the IWW, which had just begun to have a major constituency, found itself opposed by the mentality of a nation caught up in jingoism...

...but the freedom and equality this suggests are too often empty of content within the structures of advantage and hierarchy that are typical of a capitalist system...

...There has been, instead, an unconscious ideological consensus in America within which disputes have been legalistic and/or pragmatic...

...The best essays in this sad book return to ideas set forth in Boorstin's earlier works— The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941), The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), BOOKS and The Americans (1958...

...He concludes from the different associations of the two concepts that all is well: "One man's standard of living cannot be sharply separated from that of others...

...whose spirit and pur pose fatally corrode all human relations...

...According to this position society's resources are apportionable between the public and private domains, in accordance with the demands of the principles of liberty, justice, and need...

...To provide such a reason would require analyses Milliband doesn't undertake...

...Kenneth Keniston's Young Radicals came to somewhat different, somewhat more complicated conclusions...

...He sees community everywhere, even in the very processes of rationalization that disintegrate the traditional community...

...In the first he draws the distinction between disagreement, which is intellectual, and dissent, which is emotional...

...The difficulty I have sketched operates at a level of abstraction that may seem remote from the instructive descriptions of the capitalist machinery of domination which are the chief ingredients of the book...

...If one is already a convinced socialist, one's beliefs will be considerably reinforced by Miliband's work...

...It was, of course, precisely the difference between community and society, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, that fascinated Toennies, Durkheim, Weber, and other founders of modern social theory...

...My aim is not to defend any variant of this position, but to point out that Miliband's critique is not managed in such a way as to provide a convincing reason why some form of that position is not morally tenable...

...In one or two places Miliband suggests that this irrationality may be understood as the inability of a capitalist system to provide for "genuine and urgent human needs...

...Thus, against the claim that advanced industrial societies in the West are "beyond" analysis in terms of a struggle between economically dominating and dominated classes, Miliband offers an account of the structure of those societies that makes the traditional categories of class warfare seem apt...

...their "laboring function," was detached from them and placed under the possible control of another...

...Among older radicals the IWW is that revolutionary movement which existed prior to the failures and imported ideologies characterizing the American radical scene after the Russian Revolution...

...Miliband may be prepared to argue, of course, that the two tasks cannot be performed independently, though he does not do so in the present volume...

...Perhaps Richard Nixon and Eldridge Cleaver wear the same size trousers...

...and whose maintenance is today the major obstacle to human progress...

...We call up images of Joe Hill, Leadville, and the dark mills of Lawrence— images that resonate to our sometimes adolescent impulse to identify with a morally pure loser, a loser uncontaminated by the dilemmas and choices of victory and, unlike the AFL of then and the AFL–CIO of now, untainted by the differential exploitation of other workers...

...In the beginning, the workers and the communities in which they lived were allies, but in the protracted struggles between the union and the colonizing corporations a wedge was driven between the miners and the emerging small-business and white-collar classes...

...whereas what is likely, given the "pervasive sense of unfulfilled individual and collective possibilities [which] penetrates and corrodes the climate of every advanced capitalist society," is the taking up of the "authoritarian option" by the establishment...

...For even when the intentions of the establishment are humane, the fact that efforts at reform are attempted within the categories of thought, BOOKS attitudes, and behavior characteristic of private enterprise ultimately frustrates or side-tracks them...

...My main difficulty with the argument concerns two aspects in which it is incomplete...

...Keniston indicates that various kinds of people are called to radicalism for a great variety of reasons, some of them related to the institutional arrangements within which radicals and other Americans live...

...John H. Gagnon Remembering the Wobblies WE SHALL BE ALL: A HISTORY OF THE IWW, by Melvin Dubofsky...

...THIS BOOK MAKES CLEAR that the IWW did not always miss chances or show bad tactical judgment...

...It was the intrusion of large American mining corporations into the economically underdeveloped western states that drove these trade union Populists first to socialism and then to the proto-anarcho-syndicalism that characterized the ideology (but not the actions) of the IWW...

...Except for this lapse Professor Dubofsky sticks to the record as he finds it and his historical interpretations are generally of a high order and completely sensible...

...It was beset by internal bickering and caught up in the red scares of the late teens and early twenties...

...This part is also best documented...

...The IWW theorists missed what most naive economic Marxists have also missed: that a central requirement of change is to gain control of the apparatus of government...

...Dubofsky is perhaps best in his treatment of the origins of the IWW in its precursor, the Western Federation of Miners...

...Whether or not the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, the crab of Clio continues to scuttle back and forth in what the least pessimistic of us hope is a progressive series of zigzags...

...For example, the alternative involves at least "the appropriation into the public domain of the largest part of society's resources": Opponents of capitalism believe it to be a system whose very nature nowadays makes im possible the optimum utilisation of resources for rational human ends...

...In its original form the WFM shared the traditional aims of American business unionism, focusing on bread-and-butter issues within the capitalist system...

...While the physical conditions may appear the same (and it is not at all clear that there is much in common between the barrios of Puerto Rico in 1960 and the lumbercamps of the American West in 1905) , the larger historical situation and the differing origins of the people under consideration preclude so facile an application...

...Again and again the miners and their allies in the local communities resisted the corporations, only to be subdued by the capacity of the corporations to call in the power of central governments...

...Another reason the book falls off at the end is that the records of the IWW were seized as part of the persecution of the leadership and then destroyed by the federal courts...

...His final prognosis is gloomily consistent with his high estimate of the degree of entrenchment of capitalist enterprise, namely, that any realization of the "socialist alternative" in advanced Western societies is simply unlikely in the foreseeable future...

...Miliband, it is important to note, is not a conspiracy theorist...

...The economic material is rudimentary, as is the discussion of the political structure of the government and the reasons for its nearly total submission to the industrialists...

...I recommend these studies to anyone who wants to deal with something more than a self-made straw man...

...b) in major part they constitute a theory of persons, or what classical theorists called a theory of "the nature of man...

...Each person is part of everyone else's standard of living...

...Subsequently the IWW went through a tragic decline...

...Allen Guftmann Historian's Decline THE DECLINE OF RADICALISM: REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA TODAY, by Daniel J. Boorstin...

...The initial confusions lead to more complicated forms of nonsense...

...This was the dominant intellectual style, and Boorstin was one of its most extreme and popular advocates...

...In the social sciences, the accent was on consensus, shared experience, and "an end of ideology...

...You are my environment...

...Some memberships are obviously more important than others...

...But for Boorstin, it is enough to categorize radicals as barbarians, "apathetes" who feel apart from others...

...He concludes that we are, indeed, one people: "We are held to other men, not only by a few iron bonds, but by countless gossamer webs tying together the trivia of our lives every day...

...The hostility of the government between 1905 and 1915 to trade unionism in BOOKS general, and during the First World War to the class internationalism of the IWW in particular, created conditions under which it had no chances...

...Miliband is perhaps most Marxist and most interesting at this point in his account...

...When the IWW emerged out of the ruins of WFM, a revolutionary ideology was enunciated that never really characterized the activities of the IWW...

...Boorstin devotes two essays to the problem of radicalism in American society...

...But it is Miliband's further argument, and the most important feature of his general line of thought, that the critical resources of socialism still provide the best understanding of the workings of contemporary capitalist societies...

...He touches on these matters, of course...

...Miliband occasionally denigrates "weak reformism" within capitalist societies, and he speaks of the inadequacy of attempts to "humanize" those societies...

...Nowadays that framework may countenance the protection of civil rights and "open" competition for jobs and status...

...If one is sympathetic to socialism but not yet convinced, one will be, I think, very much moved by Miliband's work to seek to understand the view of persons that underlies it...

...whose inherent char acter is one of compulsion, domination and parasitical appropriation...

...Bourgeois politicians and governments view the system in precisely opposite terms—as most closely congruent with "human nature," as uniquely capable of combining efficiency, wel fare and freedom, as the best means of releasing human initiative and energy in socially bene ficent directions, and as providing the necessary and only possible basis for a satisfactory social order...

...Whatever the difference between these views, the point is that the socialist critique rests on an account of human nature that is useful only so far as it can be explained and justified...

...Although he urges readers not to remain "imprisoned in an oldfashioned vocabulary," the semantic anarchy of his essays ought to be an object lesson for historians scornful of conceptualizations...

...These days the battles between those who have and those who have not may be conducted by representatives of "interests" who "bargain" within the limits of the "national interest," but in fact the capitalist framework rigs all encounters in favor of those who are within the complex political-military-business-educational establishment which directs and serves private enterprise...

...Miliband describes in valuable detail the resources and techniques of pressure that the dominant capitalist establishment commands in the double process of maintaining itself and eroding opposition from the Left...

...The book is a solid contribution, it does honor to the history of men and women who could not win then, but who offer us moral models for our own actions today...

...There are those of the New Left (perhaps a majority) who do not even remember their informal name, but remember or not, they employ much the same rhetoric...

...Perhaps what is needed is more context and more generalizing, but this may only be a sociologist's bias...

...By now one is, or ought to be, thoroughly exasperated by Boorstin's carelessness...

...The pluralist view that a modem society is internally a net work of interest groups, which sometimes collide and sometimes cooperate but cannot individually dominate each other, is rejected by Miliband as a "resolute escape from reality...

...Enchanted by this type of community, Boorstin needn't ask if the harmonic interdependence of man and man is ever exploitive, if some go hungry because others consume on a vast scale...

...Each of its attempts to improve the lot of the workers was met by savage repression...

...These, I suppose, could be variants of this mixed position...

...And, as frustration sets in, the natural reaction of the establishment to the increased demands of people tantalized by prospects of greater and more widespread well-being is a tightening of the controls on opposition and dissent—a move, perfectly understandable in the circumstances, toward what Miliband calls "conservative authoritarianism...

...Now, in the absence of a firm justificatory account of the assumptions about persons underlying the socialist critique and recommendations, the possibility of a certain "mixed" position emerges, I believe, pretty nearly untouched by Miliband's critical work...

...557 pp...

...Some form of BOOKS contrast between these ideal types of organization underlies every significant interpretation of the transition from traditional to modem social systems...

...He is concerned with avoiding accusations of deliberate intentions to dominate and manipulate...

...That is, it does violence —in ways that are the theorist's burden to make clear—to the nature of persons...

...Chicago: Quadrangle Books...

...As with most concepts invented to explain a consciousness arising from specific historical conditions, it is unwise to project it back in time...

...It is worth noting that Marx, at any rate in the 1844 Manuscripts, had a different, more metaphysical view, according to which the fault in the operations of the institution of private property was that they affected men in such a way that their "essence," viz...

...It will be a comfort to think that the militants heaving Molotov cocktails and the cops dropping teargas canisters are all consumers of Coca-Cola and therefore members of a "consumption community...

...In any case, even if democratic pluralism fails to describe society accurately, this would not be sufficient to conclude that the description involved in socialist criticism is accurate...

...RALPH MILIBAND, of the London School of Economics, has prepared a careful defense of a socialist critique of "advanced capitalist society...

...This book by Melvin Dubofsky, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, is one of a number of recent works dealing with the IWW...

...For the less talented among them, Boorstin, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Bell form a kind of negative reference group, representatives of a theory not worth the tribute of refutation...

...But membership in a set (in the mathematical sense) is not ipso facto a form of community...

...This failure was to characterize all industrial unionism in the United States until the trade union movement was able to enlist the help or at least the neutrality of the federal government...

...The deportation of some 2,000 miners from Bisbee, Arizona, a town owned and controlled by the Phelps Dodge Company, was the most outstanding of such reprisals...

...When the business cycle was on the rise, the IWW actively organized and maintained its power to engage in protracted battles...

...4.95...

...New York: Random House...

...Miliband's efforts to show this are probably convincing on the whole, though they may risk indicting democratic pluralism for something it does not attempt...

...Boorstin grants, or at least implies, that some aspects of "community" are more important (i.e., "iron bonds"), but he rambles on as if differences in race, religion, sex, and class can be equated with those in eye color or choice of whiskey...

...The first part of the book is perhaps most satisfying, both as objective history and a picture of the early successes of the IWW...

...Unlike those television versions of the American West (perhaps we need a revision of white history as well) which present the beginning of metal extraction as a confluence of gold, burros, bearded old men and gunfighters, Dubofsky points out that the miners of the American West had a tradition of trade union experience, a common language and ethnic origins, and represented a skilled-trade orientation...

...But Boorstin will have none of this...

...Democratic pluralists often make it seem that they are attempting the latter rather than the former task...

...The concept of consensus, allegedly useless as an instrument of knowledge, is relegated by the new dogmatists to the shabby arsenal of presidential rhetoric...

...Disagreements in logic and mathematics can perhaps be entirely intellectual and dispassionate, but it is hardly possible in the world of political action to disagree about means and ends without becoming emotionally involved...

...When a man feels that a policy is criminally wrong and that the executors of that policy have insulated themselves from all disagreements, he is liable to fall short of the civic ideal of sweet reasonableness...

...It is because men feel deeply that rationality is indispensable, but Boorstin's sotto voce pieties in defense of the status quo are an evasion of the real problems...

...This passage itself suggests why the assumptions of socialism are important, and why a lack of systematic discussion of them is a matter for concern: (a) ultimately these presuppositions are the basis of the critique of capitalist society as well as the recommended alternative...

...A few quarrels...

...The difficulty with this compensatory turn, or return, is that the historian who subtly and learnedly reinterpreted our past in the first two volumes of The Americans has become something of a clown in this present collection of essays loosely related to the theme of radicalism...

...In the 1950s, Americanists of various disciplines seemed anxious to isolate the "distinctively American" in our national experiences and to emphasize continuities of ideas and institutions...

...GIVEN BOORSTIN'S CHEERFUL DISCOVERY Of numberless quantified forms of "community," the existence of alienated minorities can be explained only in pathologicalterms...

...But so could be "strong reformism" and even "welfarism...

...Finally, when political "neutrality" is claimed for business leaders, civil servants and "technocrats," even members of the judiciary, it is again Miliband's point that the context operates to support a bias in the professional activities of such men in favor of capitalist enterprise...

...Central premises of this position (which admits of many variations) are that a morally tenable BOOKS system is one that meets moral criteria efficiently and that it is not logically absurd to suppose that a system operating in part according to recognizably capitalist principles can meet these criteria...

...This seems indeed a large contribution...

...Boorstin's second contribution to a critique of radicalism is an attack on the "new barbarism...

...THE CASE MILIBAND BUILDS against democratic pluralism, as he construes that theory, is a solid and important one, even though many of its parts are familiar and some tediously repeated...

...He refers to purchasers of Mustangs and to chewers of Doublemint gum as members of "consumption communities...

...Fortunately, the most talented of radical historians—Eugene Genovese, N. Gordon Levin, Stephan Thernstromhave sought to incorporate rather than to dismiss whatever is to be learned from the scholars of the 1950s...

...The Russian Revolution offered a new revolutionary style to replace native Populist anarchism and many of the Wobblies moved into the Communist party, eventually viewing their IWW origins as part of an undisciplined anarchism...

...One is the nearly gratuitous inclusion of the concept of the "culture of poverty" as popularized by Oscar Lewis...

...TEMPORA MUTANT," remarked the Roman analysts of social change, to which we can add not only our Amen but also our uncomfortable awareness of the rapidity of change in analyses of change...

...All the more reason, one might suppose, to turn to Boorstin's Decline of Radicalism for tonic reminders of national accomplishment...

...Theirs is a mindless, obsessive quest for power...

...THE WOBBLIES (IWW) stand for modern American radicals as a mythic memory of a virtuous past...

...12.50...

...The main burden of this defense is to show that the theory of "democratic pluralism," which Miliband associates variously with Galbraith, Dahl, and Aron, is inadequate as a characterization of modem capitalist society...

...There is a difference between showing what a society's structures are and exhibiting how apparently new trends in a period of change may come to dominate its social life...

...141 pp...

...The point seems to me crucial, for in the end the reason for anyone's being intellectually persuaded that capitalism is wrong and socialism right lies in the acceptability of that account of human nature...

...Miliband never makes plain either what the socialist alternative is or, more important, what it presupposes...

...The most important element was •the role of the state and federal governments, the "slugging agents of the capitalist classes...

...There are times when one would wish a slightly wider perspective with more information about the external environment of the IWW...

...He insists that reasoned disagreement is a necessary part of the democratic process, while dissent is irrational, emotional, to be avoided...

...In contrast to the radicals of the 1930s, who sought significance, had programs, and formed "communities," the radicals of today are pampered, infantile egomaniacs: "They [radicals] abandon the quest for meaning, for fear it might entangle their thoughts and feelings with those of others, and they plunge into `Direct Action' for fear that second thoughts might deny themthis satisfaction to their ego...

...c) how one interprets them will finally determine, I think, the strength of one's commitment to socialism...

...Conspiracy theory is too often "crude and sentimental demonology" which pushes attention away from those structural features of a social system that must be changed if class domination is to be avoided...

...Among historians, a name to conjure with was Daniel J. Boorstin, whose Genius of American Politics argued that Americans have always accepted certain basic values as "given" and, therefore, seldom had to bother with political ideas...

...While its ideology was revolutionary, direct action, and anticontract (not doing business with bosses through agreements), its failure to maintain a stable membership was clearly the result of external economic conditions and the hostility of the federal government rather than a lack of organizing capital...

...Having found ourselves caught in the assorted ills to which our technological society is heir, we are not likely to be in a mood to celebrate eventhose aspects of American experience that deserve celebration...