The politics of tightrope
Harrington, Michael
The article below is a slightly condensed version of a chapter from Michael Harrington's forthcoming book, to be published by the Saturday Review Press, in which he describes his political...
...We were hardly indifferent to that prospect...
...as the one white politician of stature who could communicate his passionate concern for blacks and Chicanos and the minorities, he had built up a new constituency...
...Yet, however honorable the motivation, the results were deplorable...
...So it was, for instance, that New America, the Socialist party newspaper edited, since 1968, by one of Max's closest associates, hardly reacted to the epochal struggle of the miners for internal union democracy and reacted to the brutal slaying of the rebel leader Jock Yablonski primarily by worrying that this tragedy might be used by the foes of labor...
...Comrades and friends of long standing, all of them with the shared experience of government harassment during the Joe McCarthy period, turned on one another...
...of course, the United States is involved with dictators, scoundrels, and knaves...
...the assessment of the official AFL–CIO position on Vietnam...
...Max had opposed his country's policies when that put him in conflict with the established liberal wisdom about collective security...
...I do not think that Max and his friends understood this complexity...
...Yet Shachtman was wrong...
...We had wanted to find a dramatic way to project our conviction that there could be no meaningful rights for black people, or any other minority, unless there was a planned, full-employment economy that would benefit the entire nation, the majority as well as the minorities...
...Since I thought that both labor and the peace movement were essential to a progressive coalition, I spoke out for Humphrey during the campaign...
...For us, he went on, "the Russian question" was decisive, and that obsession sometimes warped our judgment...
...We knew that Ho and his comrades had killed thousands of peasants during forced collectivization in North Vietnam during the 'S0s (a fact they themselves had confessed), and we thought the historic enmity of the Indochinese for the Chinese made it possible that there would be "Titoist" characteristics in any Communist regime in Indochina...
...Marx refused to turn morality into a shrewd adaptation to power, even when that power was accomplishing, albeit brutally, certain necessary tasks...
...French imperialism never knew how to kill the Trotskyist revolutionaries in Indochina...
...At the preparatory sessions of the White House Conference on Civil Rights in the fall of 1965, Bayard and I had worked very closely with A. Philip Randolph (Bayard's old friend and mentor...
...I had talked with the leaders of the march and then drafted a text, which Dr...
...A tough-minded thinker who had only contempt for socialist sentimentality, he would never have consoled himself with the old slogans if he thought them outworn...
...as far as I know, we still do...
...They were moved, I am convinced, by sincere considerations...
...But we were deTHE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE termined to be truly radical: to involve ourselves with the leaders elected by the American workers themselves, rather than with those imaginary figures who should have led a revolutionary proletariat that did not exist...
...Kennedy pulled his lapels against his face to ward off the cold, and trotted down the deserted avenue to shake one more hand for the day...
...But even that horror had some positive consequences...
...The vocation of a radical in America in the last portion of the 20th century is to walk a perilous tightrope...
...For a series of involved reasons the labor movement normally tends to be rather monolithic...
...The meeting rapidly became tense...
...We also turned toward new allies among the intellectuals...
...He was a vibrant man who approached his political commitment with a real passion...
...At Baltimore, the station was packed and as we moved slowly toward it along an embankment, you could look down the streets of the ghetto and see the people standing and staring...
...Moreover, there was a vocal, and regularly televised, fringe of ex hibitionists and Vietcong flag-wavers who could plausibly be dismissed as freakish, sin ister, or both...
...Marx himself had made a similar point in his writings about British imperialism in India...
...Many of them were unconcerned about the domestic political consequences of their ac tions and even contemptuous of that ma jority of Americans who supported the war...
...But, Promethean that he was, he also refused to dismiss that possibility...
...Communism played a critical role in our dispute...
...Some people drank...
...Some of us had been sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars by Harry Bridges of the West Coast Longshoremen because of our support for some rank-andfilers...
...Walter Reuther and Jack Conway, who then headed the Industrial Union Department of the AFL—CIO, started to help us...
...So it was that in the very midst of our bitter dispute in the Socialist party in the early '70s I wrote in the acknowledgment to my book Socialism that "though I have some serious disagreements with him on issues of socialist strategy, I am permanently and deeply indebted to Max Shachtman, who first introduced me to the vision of democratic Marxism and whose theory of bureaucratic collectivism is so important to my analysis...
...That change had a profound, and negative, impact on the possibilities of reform...
...he could not, I felt, win the presidency...
...if he adapts too well to the movement he hopes to inspire, he will fall into a pragmatic irrelevance...
...III One day in the mid-'60s, Max Shachtman, Irving Howe, Tom Kahn, and I were chatting at the LID office...
...In the summer of 1972, I went to a Labor for Peace meeting in St...
...Shachtman and his cothinkers brought those Johnsonian politics into our tight little world...
...He had spent a lifetime in the pacifist movement and, on the basis of couTHE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE rageous principle, he had gone to prison during World War II in opposition to what I believe was a just war...
...In Max's view, a condemnation of the Vietnam war primarily on the grounds that it was immoral was an exercise in phrasemongering...
...He could reach out to Polish American workers in Gary—and to the blacks whom they feared...
...However, sometime in the mid-'60s, Shachtman changed his mind...
...Their most characteristic form of expression was the mass demonstration, combining a crusade and a picnic...
...That was a simple enough attitude...
...Still, there was not—there is not—a single power that incarnates the socialist ideal and it is, to say the least, difficult for a man to dedicate himself to a possibility that will probably not be realized in this century, if ever...
...While Galbraith was at the podium, two "crazies" came down the aisle, stark naked, and presented him with a pig's head on a platter...
...On my side were Irving Howe, Manny Geltman, and Stanley Plastrik, editors of DISSENT who had been Shachtmanites in their youth but had broken with Max during the Korean War...
...And as Trotsky—and Shachtman—had so well understood, a thousand Stalinist speeches about the nobility of proclaimed ends did not change the real ends inherent in the totalitarian means being employed...
...Kennedy was with him...
...A lukewarm statement of preference for George McGovern against Richard Nixon was finally adopted, but not before the leading members of the majority—and particularly those whom Shachtman influenced— had made it clear that they would welcome, or accept with cheerful equanimity, a Nixon landslide...
...That, indeed, was his problem...
...In making this error, Shachtman had had to neglect a brilliant lesson in Marxism which he had himself presented to the American public...
...Second, and more important for the general reader, I am concerned to correct the mythology of the antiwar movement in which I participated...
...others chatted about politics...
...Shachtman had begun with Lenin and Trotsky...
...There were isolated figures...
...Some of the understandably outraged foes of the abomination in Vietnam have depicted a simple battle between the forces of peace and justice on one side and the war criminals and their political accomplices on the other...
...But in the last analysis he had decided that he would, reluctantly perhaps, back American power in that country because it provided a shield behind which a democratic revolution might organize itself...
...I don't remember how Shachtman got on the subject, but he began to talk about the Trotskyist attitude toward Communism in the '30s...
...Yet even then, I did not think he could win...
...In 1928, he became a Trotskyist and braved the libels—and physical assaults— of his former comrades...
...There was a point at which, after taking into account all of the extenuating historical circumstances, one had to say of America's role in Vietnam what Marx had said of the British role in India: it was wrong and barbarous...
...The last five years of the decade were in short an era of bad feeling in American life...
...The 1960s were a schizophrenic decade...
...Shortly after I resigned, Max Shacht man, to whom I am so profoundly indebted despite our differences, died...
...He had come from the relatively conservative milieu of the New York Building Trades, had been a central figure in making the AFL–CIO more political, more concerned with planned social investments...
...ANOTHER SOURCE of Max Shachtman's attitude had to do with the domestic consequences of the war...
...In the peace movement one did indeed encounter an emotional, simplistic revulsion against the war that ignored all of the difficult and complex questions it posed...
...Unions tend to be monosocial (like a parish church...
...So it was that when Hubert Humphrey emerged as the only real alternative to Richard Nixon in 1968, all of us backed him...
...This is nonsense...
...I decided to violate the principle of de mortuis, nil nisi bonum, for two reasons...
...No one who traveled on the funeral train from New York to Washington will ever forget the emotion of that day...
...Kennedy, it seemed to me, would rally the most effective opposition to the MICHAEL HARRINGTON war...
...One night I spoke at a rally at the Palace Theatre for Paul O'Dwyer, the MICHAEL HARRINGTON McCarthy partisan who had won the Democratic nomination for senator...
...Shachtman, I am sure, agreed with me that we never should have gone into Indochina in support of the French in the first place...
...So people began to notice the existence, not simply of workers, but of a social class with institutions and attitudes of its own...
...Taken together, these traits form a strong natural bent in established unions toward the "one-party" system...
...Martin King made the other, the right, decision...
...It made Americans more sensitive to the best proposals that Kennedy had put forward and thereby was a major factor in the legislative victories of Lyndon Johnson...
...The antiwarriors had a tremendous potential for good, some powerful tendencies toward self-righteousness, and periodically collapsed into inaction...
...Perhaps Vietnam forced him to come to a conclusion he hated: that his previous hope for a "third camp" independent of both capitalism and Communism was an illusion...
...That was not written in their sectarian scenarios...
...Throughout the 1940s, he was both a conscience and a luminous intellect for the movement...
...But in Hungary in 1956, where there was a working-class socialist revolution, we had not advocated armed American intervention against the Soviet imperialist attack, since that would probably have led to World War III, a calamity much greater than totalitarian dictatorship...
...the evaluation of the new social strata that formed the basis of the peace movement...
...For it was labor, and labor almost alone, which very nearly made Hubert Humphrey president in 1968...
...Our despots tend to be corrupt and inefficient...
...By 1972, the Shachtman group had become remarkably Lovestonite...
...The Vietnam-induced inflation wiped out wage gains and labor had to engage in bitter struggles just to maintain a living standard it thought was already won...
...Ethel Kennedy and Edward Kennedy walked the length of that train and shook hands with every person on it...
...Our knowledge of that grim history made it impossible for us to believe that Ho was simply a gentle, lovable "uncle...
...I had scheduled a lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis long before the Indiana primary became the first battle ground for Kennedy and McCarthy...
...There was thus a profoundly elitist tendency in the movement, and Shachtman and his friends were able to denounce it as dilettant ish and collegiate...
...Politics was the decor of their personal drama, and if they were genuinely horrified by the war in Vietnam, their own psyches still came first...
...Then, in the mid-'60s, there was another reason for militance from below in the unions...
...Not at all...
...Therefore, even if a socialist revolution that sought to make men the masters of their own destiny might have to use force, it could not possibly reach its goal by the systematic use of deceit within the working class...
...In the first phase of American involvement in 1965, it was taken for granted among our socialist cadre that we were against Lyndon Johnson's intervention...
...Louis...
...Many radicals would, I am sure, say that it all goes to prove that when a socialist mixes in capitalist politics, he is selling out and has taken the first step down a slippery slope that leads to conservatism...
...I had risked jail as a conscientious objector during the Korean War...
...But in their derisive comparison of this movement with the trade unionists, my com rades failed to notice two of its historic aspects...
...The "end of ideology" theorists of the late '50s and early '60s had argued that the Gross National Product had become so large, it was no longer necessary for antagonistic classes to struggle over its distribution...
...O'Dwyer had not yet made his endorsement of Humphrey and there was quite a bit of baiting of the Vice President...
...It is certainly true, as Glazer says, that there were difficulties in the social programs that had nothing to do with the war...
...We had followed, or been involved with, too many fights in the labor movement to be ignorant of the dangers to socialist principles in making alliances with the trade union bureaucracy...
...As the brother of the slain President, Robert Kennedy had touched millions...
...so did some brilliant younger academics like S. M. Miller and Herbert Gans...
...We had opposed French colonialism in Indochina after World War II, even though we were perfectly aware that the national liberation movement had been taken over by the Communists...
...Then, in 1966, the escalations became even more massive and the first open signs of disagreement appeared among our socialist cadre...
...In other words, the 1972 landslide for Nixon meant that the conservative vote had increased by only 4 percent as compared to 1968...
...There was a convergence of economic self-interest for the white working class and the impoverished minorities, since both stood to gain from full employment achieved through planned social investments...
...Of course, he said, the war is horrible and the killing should be stopped as soon as possible...
...We began by broadening our contacts with the labor movements...
...It was intolerable to tell a hungry family in an urban ghetto that, before it could enjoy a decent meal, it must wait upon the success of an antiwar movement primarily composed of the well-fed...
...So when Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy right after the New Hampshire primary, I decided to support him...
...Ironically, some conservative Republicans were taken in by this talk (which reinforced their deepest misconceptions) and they insisted in the Landrum-Griffin law of 1959 195 that the rank and file be given the legal right to overrule their union leaders...
...The '60s, we thought, were going to be a time of renewed reform, the first such period since the New Deal...
...so was the astronaut John Glenn...
...There was much fantasy in this since the working class to which the New Leftists referred—they saw it as far to the Left of the union leadership, incipiently radical, proletarians according to the rubric of the Communist Manifesto— did not exist...
...As well he might have been...
...That might provide a basis for the industrialization of the country under the leadership of a new, totalitarian class...
...IN ALL of this, Shachtman and his cothinkers could plausibly claim that they were being utterly Marxist in lining up more and more uncritically with George Meany...
...That, in a popular form, became the philosophy of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society...
...we were in touch with I. W. Abel, the new president of the Steelworkers, and with Lane Kirkland, then George Meany's right-hand man and now the secretary-treasurer of the AFL–CIO...
...After I finished the first draft of this essay, Max Shachtman died...
...What conclusion does one draw from this sad history...
...Leon Blum's adviser Lucien Laurat was another...
...In 1939, Max audaciously broke with Leon Trotsky...
...We had, after all, spoken and demonstrated against American support of the French in Indochina in 1953 and 1954...
...their membership in the first generation trained by mass higher education, their participation in what Galbraith dubbed "the educational-scientific estate" often inclined them to be programmatic in politics and open to the proposals for planned social investments that come from the Left...
...196 Therefore there were class institutions, the trade unions, and class political organizations like COPE and the other organizations for mobilizing the labor vote...
...It was indeed true, as Rustin and Keyserling and others argued, that America was rich enough to afford both guns and butter...
...I disagree...
...I will, therefore, try to speak truthfully of the dead, not to denigrate Shachtman's memory, but to respect it in the only way I know...
...As we emerged from the tunnel on the New Jersey side of the river, we saw the first of that seemingly endless line of people who were to stand alongside the track in grieving respect...
...Trotsky had refused to accept Max's thesis that the Soviet bureaucracy represented a new class...
...That stratum was based upon small property, and therefore feared the bourgeoisie, which threatened to crush its small-scale competitors, as well as the working class, which talked of the abolition of private property altogether...
...Perhaps I can personalize that ethical complexity of the '60s by talking of good and decent cornMICHAEL HARRINGTON rades, Max Shachtman among them, many of whom had proved their dedication in clashes more bitter than I have ever known, and who, in the name of excellent principles, were fundamentally wrong...
...He wrote, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfulling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a utopia...
...I could go on and on, describing the internal contradictions of that peace movement, but my ambivalent response should now be clear enough...
...The more complex issues concerned one's assessment of the relationship between guns and butter and the tactics that followed from it...
...The result was a remarkable corroboration of the theory that there is a politically conscious working class in America...
...It was a point of pride with us that we did not look to the working class as it should be, i.e., as we wanted it to be, but as it actually was...
...Our anti-Communism did not, as some revisionist historians have argued, relentlessly push us into support of the reactionaries that were backed by the United States...
...He told me with a sort of hurt disbelief how a peace activist in San Francisco had spit in his face and called him a fascist...
...Instead, they invented a new radical sin: they had become right-wing sectarians...
...Max Shachtman could, and did, point to such incidents as proof of the rightness of his contemptuous dismissal of the entire McCarthy movement...
...When he died, I wondered if I should not give up working on an assessment that would have to be critical of his final years...
...There is, however, a personal problem in my treating the breakup of our socialist cadre as a symbolic moment of the 1960s...
...The spirit of the capital was buoyant, hopeful, looking toward reform...
...As a result, not a few radicals forgot a rather crucial point: that Marxists were always determined to win the petty bourgeoisie to the cause of the revolution...
...The American intervention in Vietnam amounted to an undeclared, presidential war...
...In California, I reported to Frank Mankiewicz at the Ambassador Hotel and was immediately dispatched for several days of duty at cocktail parties and colleges around the state...
...They had, after all, maintained extremely unpopular ideas in the face of government harassment...
...But because we were small and unburdened by power, we were able to dispute those issues with that passionate scholasticism we had inherited from the Marxist tradition...
...I put the matter with such arrogance because it is important to understand how Max Shachtman and his friends concluded that educated and affluent thinkers are so blinded by class prejudice that they cannot be trusted on any issue, including Vietnam...
...Kennedy thanked me and then Goodwin added, "He said he couldn't back Rockefeller because he won't spend $150 billion on the cities...
...So when I heard Joe Rauh present the case for an independent candidacy at a Negotiations Now meeting in Washington, I was not really persuaded...
...The reactionaries, particularly if they had massive aid, recruited people for the Communist banner by making Communism seem the legitimate expression of a mass desire for national freedom and social justice...
...For a while it was possible to think that Third World neutralism might play that role, and the Hungarian and Polish Octobers of 1956 were both under the aegis of revolutionaries who wanted to push forward from Stalinism to socialism, not backward to capitalism...
...I agreed...
...Nothing could ever diminish my affection and admiration for Bayard...
...Then in the course of our evolution during the late '50s and the '60s, we had developed ties with a broad range of unionists, with Meanyites as well as Reutherites...
...I defended Kennedy against the charge of being too conservative at a luxurious Beverly Hills home...
...The contradictions of the peace movement were painfully obvious to me as I shuttled from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back...
...But I was not at all hopeful of success and quite critical of the middle-class character of the campaign...
...He regarded British brutality on the subcontinent as the unwitting instrument of THE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE historic change in that it broke the reactionary, institutionalized torpor of Indian life— but at the same time, he condemned the British actions as barbaric and opposed them by trying to find revolutionary alternatives...
...The landslide of 1964 had elected the most liberal Congress within a generation...
...In this, what separated me and my socialist cothinkers from the McCarthy activists was precisely our class analysis of American politics...
...After all they were proving their loyalty to the working class as it existed (they identified the working class with the AFL–CIO and the AFL–CIO with Meany) . Meany, I thought, had made enormous strides in his social thinking and played a progressive role within the unions...
...The middle-class activists in the peace movement often ignored these very practical considerations within the United States just as they did not bother their heads with the political complexities of American withdrawal from Indochina...
...Bayard Rustin was, of course, with us and he was still working closely with Martin Luther King, Jr...
...And he was right to charge that some idealistic antiwar activists were operating on a righteous indignation that is no substitute for politics...
...During and after these events we socialists debated a critical question: what social forces are there that can be brought together in a majority coalition which will offer a progressive alternative to the likes of Nixon...
...At the same time, his work with King, his leadership in the 1963 March on Washington, and his imaginative and tireless activity on behalf of an alliance between black and white working people had finally given him a chance to influence the struggle against poverty...
...he and his followers ended up with Jay Lovestone...
...sometimes a veteran standing at salute...
...Trotsky had quite convincingly argued that means and ends cannot be separated, that the means become the end...
...It even tore apart that socialist microcosm in which I had lived for almost 15 years before the escalations of 1965...
...Those of us who learned from him did not simply receive a gift of theory, of abstract ideas interspersed with the ritual citations from Marx and Engels...
...I could not look out the window very often, because every time I did, I began to cry...
...We were 189 really more passionately concerned about a switch in political line in Russia than about the great battles taking place in our own country...
...Socialism was reduced to the immediate demands of the American labor movement...
...If he went with the antiwar militants, his own personal career would hardly suffer...
...In fact, I underestimated the strength of these new forces...
...their despots, honest and murderously effective...
...With an activist president of New Deal inclinations, that provided the setting for the most hopeful period of reform since Franklin Roosevelt...
...Before I left on that date, I had called Arthur Schlesinger to tell him that I wanted to work for Kennedy, and at a press conference before my speech I had stated my preference for Kennedy on local television...
...Shriver's phone rang incessantly as federal bureaucrats, laborites, religious leaders, blacks, intellectuals, and just about everyone else tried to get into the new MICHAEL HARRINGTON act...
...Lyndon Johnson himself corroborated my analysis...
...There was, I thought—and think—substance in this line of reasoning...
...After his break with Marxism, Lovestone became an associate and adviser of David Dubinsky and then of George Meany...
...T. S. Eliot once said that the greatest treason "was to do the right thing for the wrong reason...
...One incident in that Washington demonstration bore upon the future...
...But it was Max who developed this insight in the most disciplined theoretical fashion and who thereby, in some of the darkest days Marxism has ever known, upheld the honor of socialism's most profound intellectual tradition...
...Moreover, the young people attracted to the peace movement were hardly shopkeepers, present or future, though they were an intermediate and ambiguous stratum...
...Shachtman launched into a Marxist attack on pacifism and the moralistic approach to politics...
...but then taking risks is a normal hazard for any serious leftist...
...Inside the train, it was like many Irish wakes I have known...
...It is fascinating to note that the AFL—CIO and Jay Lovestone shared our point of view on this question...
...All this was done—and I am serious about my paradox, shocking as it is— with the best socialist will in the world...
...The DISSENT editors and I were not motivated by pacifist absolutism or sentimentality...
...Moreover, we said that working in a factory, or behind the wheel of a truck, was a qualitatively different experience from life in the executive suite or even at the bank teller's window...
...While the McCarthy forces were acting ambiguously during the 1968 campaign, the unions were behaving with an exemplary commitment...
...By overreacting against moralizing in the peace movement, he had come perilously close to eliminating morality from the socialist vision altogether...
...It was a period when the victory of fascism and the defeat of socialism drove many to despair and passivity...
...The estimate of the peace movement and the new social strata upon which it was based did too...
...It was a remarkably candid admission...
...Shachtman and his friends did not see these things...
...Since their organizations were not built upon the imperious necessities of making a living, they were episodic, subject to great fits of enthusiasm and depression...
...and he must bring that vision into contact with the actual movement fighting, not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even bread...
...In the process, many sons and daughters of the upper middle class began to argue for alliance of workers and students...
...That night, after I had finished at Butler, I went to a restaurant to meet Dick Goodwin, whom I had known since the antipoverty task force of 1964...
...Conceived as a practical guide for policy-makers, the Budget was, however, unveiled in the period of escalating war...
...In Russia, Max argued, there was a new form of class society, neither capitalist nor socialist...
...Convinced that Johnson and his policy had to be challenged in the primaries, I was sure that the effort would fail...
...I thought not, and feel that history has proved my case...
...Shachtman had rightly helped us realize that, under American circumstances in the '60s, we could only transform unconscionable arrangements of power by making contact with them...
...I simply found it impossible to pretend any solidarity with people who, in the name of "Marxism," were helping Richard Nixon...
...The United States made memorable contributions to the victory of Mao by supporting Chiang, to Castro by backing Batista, and to the creation of a bureaucratic collectivist state in North Vietnam by aiding French colonialism and Bao Dai...
...Some did so with enthusiasm because they essentially shared Meany's support of the Johnson administration, including its Vietnam policy...
...Even in Spain and Greece, even in South Vietnam, there is more of a possibility that the underground opposition will survive as an organized force than in Russia, China, or North Vietnam...
...As editor of the Socialist party newspaper, New America, I had argued against Kennedy's increases in troop strength in 1961 and 1962 on the grounds that reactionary anti-Communists, no matter how great the military aid they received, could never become an alternative to Communists who had won the leadership of a popular movement for national libera tion...
...IV The antiwar activists of the '60s were overwhelmingly white and middle-class...
...Indeed, he had been one of the few Americans who had said that quite MICHAEL HARRINGTON clearly when our indirect intervention began in 1946 and 1947...
...They could not be bought for money—only for love...
...wrong because it meant ignoring one agony in order to deal with another...
...Therefore it was utterly self-defeating, among other things, to support an Emperor Bao Dai or a Diem as a lesser evil to the Communists, since the Bao Dais, Diems, and the corrupt ruling classes they led were a prime source of Communist strength...
...For them, Humphrey's labor support was a mark against him...
...In the following months, Bayard Rustin and Leon Keyserling labored to come up with a finished document, and they won endorsements for it from a wide spectrum of trade union and civil rights leaders...
...so it was that they increasingly alienated themselves from the American peace movement until they stood outside it, as bitter critics...
...Because of this equivocating, "petty bourgeois" was put down in the radical lexicon as one of the most vicious epithets one could hurl at a socialist opponent...
...Then we talked seriously, primarily about why so many New York reformers hated Kennedy, a phenomenon that troubled and puzzled him...
...It had been founded in 1905 by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Harry Laidler, and was closely associated with Norman Thomas in the 1920s and '30s...
...When ShachtTHE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE man broke with Trotsky in 1939, he still held to the basic Trotskyist premise that there was a mass alternative to both Stalinism and capitalism...
...He had, after all, been a functionary in pacifist organizations for years...
...But if socialism had become problematic and Stalinism was on the march in Indochina, who then would effectively fight for democracy...
...As a result, black militancy was frustrated and turned to nationalism and separatism, while youthful idealism grew so alienated that many students became confrontationists and a few followed an insane logic all the way to terrorism...
...But that did not for a moment change the fact that Meany and the Federation were the most powerful and committed forces fighting for national health insurance, full employment, tax reform, pub 188 lic housing, and all the rest of the social investments crucial to a Freedom Budget...
...In that case, what distinguished Shachtman's refusal to oppose the war from that of Hubert Humphrey and other liberals who were the decent agents of calamity...
...And, in any case, he holds that there was a rise in social spending, most notably in the billions that went into Medicare and Medicaid...
...The peasants who soldiered in the great capitalist revolutions of the 17th to the 19th centuries had, after all, died valiantly to bring their bourgeois enemies to power...
...Therefore in Marx's analysis— and there is much history to corroborate it—the petty bourgeoisie vacillated, turning now toward the party of order, and even toward fascism, and then toward the party of change, and even toward socialism...
...And then Pat said, look at this train, there is a government riding on it...
...Though all of the polls told them that Humphrey did not have a chance, they mobilized the workers and challenged the Wallacites in the shops by arguing that a worker's class interest in Humphrey, i.e., in THE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE his job, was more important than any alleged racial interest in Wallace...
...Then, in 1965, came the massive escalation of the unconscionable war in Vietnam...
...Nathan Glazer, an opponent of the war, has tried to demonstrate the opposite...
...It was not a particularly fashionable thing to do among the affluent Left...
...But then no other class (with the exception of the most class-conscious group in America, the very rich) has that kind of cohesion...
...Yet they did pay a price for their commitment...
...The questions over which we fought were the same ones that preoccupied major social movements a thousand times more powerful...
...It, too, had reduced almost all of politics to the single theme of anti-Communism (and the related theme of anti-New Leftism) ; it, too, had become something of an employment agency...
...We talked for an hour or so and started walking down a chilly and empty street to 194 ward Kennedy's hotel at about 12:30 at night...
...Those of us who held Shachtman's position therefore regarded Communist movements as incipient totalitarian ruling classes...
...One of the points at issue was the relationship of means and ends and the charge made against Marxism—or at least against its Leninist variant—that it taught that any means were justified by a good end...
...At the center of our discussion was the issue of the American working class...
...In those years, Shachtman had developed the Marxist theory that Communism—Stalinism, we would have said —represented a new form of class society in which a bureaucratic class owns the state, which owns the means of production...
...He communicated the spirit of the revolutionary tradition and when he spoke, history came alive...
...Bayard had gone to federal prison for his pacifist convictions during World War II and risked his life in applying nonviolent tactics to the struggle against Jim Crow in the South...
...It was most certainly not socialism...
...Why...
...190 None of us had any illusions about the kind of government a Vietcong victory might bring...
...it, too, had turned into an adjunct of the labor establishment...
...In 1964, we were a proud cadre that had played a significant role in the civil rights movement and that now was engaged in a serious dialogue with some of the best trade unionists...
...The possible triumph of Communism in Vietnam, I said to Shachtman and his 192 friends, was therefore a lesser evil to a war which certainly could have no progressive result...
...And that can be more corrupting, for it involves a self-censorship...
...Then there is no necessity of currying favor with the leadership, of adapting programs, of speaking carefully and even deviously...
...It meant that the people would be expertly and efficiently exploited so as to produce a surplus for moder iization...
...There followed more than 40,000 American deaths, and the killing, maiming, and uprooting of millions of Vietnamese...
...and Henry Ford and Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, Jr., and moderate Dixiecrats were supposed to cooperate for the greater glory and prosperity of all...
...THE KEY to that transition, I suspect, might have been a kind of despair...
...In October 1972, I resigned my co-chairmanship of the Socialist party...
...It was Shachtman, strange to say, who persuaded me on this point...
...Benjamin Spock read that day, in which we called upon the North Vietnamese as well as the South Vietnamese to help put an end to the war...
...In the State of the Union message of January 1964, Lyndon Johnson hardly mentioned Communism or the Cold War, a fact that disconcerted some right-wingers at the time...
...as the man THE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE who wished to stop the Vietnam war, he would have won the McCarthy activists to his banner in a general election campaign...
...The ranks immediately proceeded to use these new rights to reject the contracts their leaders had negotiated for them and to demand more money and better working conditions...
...HARDLY HAD WE begun to act upon our new perspective, when the war in Vietnam began to escalate...
...Kennedy asked me if I would come to California to campaign for him...
...The nationalized means of production were not a guarantee of progressiveness, and the bureaucracy that administered them was not merely a caste that had usurped the rights of the workers...
...He was wrong because this position presumed that the social programs could succeed while the war raged...
...Now, they said, all groups could advance together...
...But, Glazer argues, it was not the war that caused these setbacks but problems inherent in the programs themselves...
...The bloody exception was, of course, the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...Waving a Vietcong flag at a demonstration or disrupting a peace rally —they never tried out their theatrics on less tolerant groups, such as the American Legion, only on the permissive Left—would certainly provoke their parents, and that was the essential liberation...
...During the first five years there were difficult struggles, but there was also a mood of hope, of possibility...
...In the process, after World War II, he placed his own people in key organizational jobs in the union and the government...
...198 to be administrative (like a governmental agency) ; to be market-oriented (like a business...
...He arrived at his conclusions about the war as an honorable man, a socialist and an idealist...
...That the very same actions might harden their fellow citizens in support of the war was of secondary importance...
...That, however, is a difficult perspective, and it is possible for a man or woman to maintain integrity and independence while serving as a staff member of a union...
...But even though we suspected that the French dictatorship would be succeeded by an Algerian dictatorship, we felt that the issue of freedom could only be posed once an independent Algeria had been created...
...Now he critically supported the same policies, which put him at odds with a growing liberal consensus based somewhat on his own previous arguments...
...It was Stalinism which formulated the proposition that anything done by the leaders of the proletariat, including the most savage attacks on the proletariat itself, is licit and even good...
...He must be true to the socialist vision of a new society and constantly develop and extend its content...
...The ideal way for socialists to relate to such a reality—in the 1950s, Max and the rest of us would have said, the only way— is as elected representatives of the rank and file...
...the question of anti-Communism...
...and both of us felt ourselves part of the democratic peace movement...
...Wrong yet understandable...
...Our effort followed from our conception of coalition politics...
...How then could a man who had resolutely fought American intervention in Indochina under both Eisenhower and Kennedy now come to a position of critical support of Johnson's qualitatively greater escalation...
...All of us agreed that we wanted hawks and doves to unite behind domestic programs...
...So the war touched every aspect of the society...
...His task is to balance vision and practicality...
...My act was also a small symbolic expression of a larger con flict, the one that pitted a section of the labor movement against the McGovern activists and their union allies (of whom, fortunately, there were a good number) in the 1972 elec tion...
...ED...
...If the radical becomes totally obsessed with the vision, he will fall off that tightrope into a righteous irrelevance...
...First of all, Shachtman was a public man who had only contempt for those who, like the Trotskyists, turn a departed leader into an icon...
...In the fall of 1965 I went to Sane's antiwar rally and listened with pride and affection as Norman Thomas told the throng at the Washington Monument that he did not want to burn the American flag but rather to cleanse it of the stains of Vietnam...
...Did this mean, to use American radicalism's most favored curse, that Max and his followers had "sold out...
...He called it bureaucratic collectivism...
...I met Robert Kennedy only once, but the moment was poignant...
...We thought that the ranks of the labor movement were going to be radicalized...
...Over the next four years, our internal debate was to touch upon some of the crucial political themes of the decade: the relationship between war and morality...
...That was, and is, no small accomplishment...
...of course, the bombing should be stopped...
...I think Bayard made the wrong decision: he subordinated his antiwar convictions to what he became convinced were the imperatives of domestic coalition politics...
...Suddenly an aging black man ran up and said, "You're Robert Kennedy, aren't you...
...A fanatical anti-Communist —he opposed Nixon's rapprochement with Peking—he played a conspiratorial role, in association with American intelligence, in the world labor movement...
...And indeed, if one were asked to choose in the abstract between the reactionary policies of bourgeois democratic America and those of totalitarian Communism, the former is infinitely preferable—i.e., much less destructive of freedom and human dignity...
...The article below is a slightly condensed version of a chapter from Michael Harrington's forthcoming book, to be published by the Saturday Review Press, in which he describes his political experiences over the last few decades...
...An exchange between Schachtman and Leo Trotsky during their dispute in the late '30s should illuminate this question...
...Even though it was becoming clear that we were reaching out to the working people —that the Chicanos knew Kennedy as the one senator who had supported their union in its most difficult hours and had come to break bread with Cesar Chavez when he ended a fast—I still thought we were going to lose...
...And it could stave off the consequences of its own politics in South Vietnam only by "saving" the people there through a cruel, indecisive war that murdered them by the tens of thousands and rendered them homeless by the millions...
...And Herman Benson, one of our best people, had already begun to become the most articulate champion of union democracy in America...
...On the basis of 1968 they assumed that labor was a nearmajority in the United States and they could therefore afford to indulge their opposition to the "New Politics" constituency of McCarthy, Kennedy, and McGovern...
...By 1970, we no longer existed as a group...
...He became a Communist militant, youth leader, and Daily Worker editor in the early 1920s when the CP was being hounded by all the forces of law and order...
...But if these socially privileged antiwarriors saw only the moral issue of Vietnam and ignored its other aspects, Shachtman and his associates turned that error upside down...
...Could one separate the struggle for the Freedom Budget from the issue of the war...
...One of the crucial questions in my analysis is how Shachtman, a life-long Marxist, could have come to temporize over, and give de facto support to, the most senseless war in the history of this nation...
...Concessions from the North Vietnamese as well as from the South Vietnamese...
...It was held at a Teamster auditorium and there were leaders from the Auto Workers, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, from the State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Butcher Workmen, the West Coast Longshoremen, and other major unions...
...If, I thought, we accepted his methodology, then our socialist heritage was nothing more than a sophisticated rationale for tactics that politicians, blissfully unaware of the dialectic, had been practicing for years...
...Shachtman and his associates saw only the negatives in all of this...
...For it was in this period that the alienation of the young intensified because of American policy in Indochina, and Vietcong flag-wavers began to appear in the ranks of the peace movement...
...morality became a sophisticated adaptation to tactical necessity, the socialist function of prophecy...
...Then—and I am not sure how explicit we became about this on that particular evening, but it was basic to everything we said—there was a tendency in Shachtman's approach to reduce Marxism to a kind of pragmatism which put aside ideals...
...We had, thank God, left that proud isolation in which we had waited for a messianic revolutionary rising that was never to come...
...We proposed to revitalize it...
...Shachtman was a major figure in the intellectual history of Marxism even though his name and reputation were unknown outside the world of American socialism...
...they tried to ignore the war and to concentrate on domestic questions, on which all of us still agreed...
...However much I might disagree with him on an issue, he remains the bravest man I have ever known, and certainly one of the most dedicated and committed militants...
...It was also to play a role in the discussions within our socialist world...
...That hardly meant that I rejoiced at the possibility of a Communist state in the South...
...If one wants an illuminating analogy to understand the young people who became involved in the peace movement in the '60s, Marx's concept of the petty-bourgeois helps...
...But to say that Bayard was wrong in his choice is hardly to condemn him...
...Now I think otherwise...
...As Gus Tyler put it quite succintly in his Labor Revolution...
...My wife's sitting back in the car and she wants to meet you...
...We realized that he was both a genuine, and very effective, leader of masses—and a product of Stalinism...
...For us, it was a major factor in his favor...
...All that is, in a sense, ancient history...
...And Johnson did not ask for taxes to finance his military policies— which was his own tacit admission that the nation was unwilling to vote for both guns and butter...
...We were perfectly aware that most Left theorists had written off Meany and his friends as conservatives and that some even regarded Reuther as too moderate...
...The man most trapped in this argument was Bayard Rustin...
...Goodwin then suggested that we had a perfect team and that Kennedy could go around the state with Glenn, one of his more conservative supporters, on one side and me on the other...
...It was typical of the implacable revolutionary that, even though Trotsky could imagine the failure of socialism, he could not for a moment think of giving up the struggle for the oppressed...
...It was an unhappy moment for me personally since it meant breaking with comrades with whom I had worked for 20 years...
...Since the Administration was always glimpsing light at the end of the tunnel, the assumption was that one could soon get on with the domestic programs if only the antiwar hotheads would refrain from destroying the 1964 election...
...In the '50s, we developed this essentially accurate—and at that time, lonely—analysis of the working class somewhat romantically...
...It is a precarious life and, alas, I think that some of my good comrades have fallen off that tightrope...
...In the last years of that decade—and of Trotsky's life—Shachtman had come into conflict with his mentor...
...Both Bayard Rustin and I were sponsors of the march...
...In fact, the crazies, like the ultra-Lefts in SDS, had been sullen and disappointed when peace became a serious issue through the McCarthy and Kennedy candidacies...
...q THE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE...
...First, the antiwar young were right: Vietnam was not only an immoral conflict, MICHAEL HARRINGTON it was counterproductive from all points of view, including that of progressive anti-Communism...
...It was love of justice in America which led Bayard to ignore monstrous injustice in Indochina...
...But they had remained principled critics of American society throughout the 'S0s—and defenders of the civil rights of Communists...
...They employed a Bolshevik style and a purist Marxism in order to side with the forces of the Center and to the Right of the labor movement and to ignore the appearance of a new mass constituency with leftist inclinations...
...When I said that everyone should vote for Humphrey I was not booed, but there was a shock of disbelief in the audience...
...For years, most intellectuals and scholars in this country were wrong about the working class, and we—those in our socialist cadre who opposed the war as well as those who did not—were right...
...That was one of the reasons why Ho Chi Minh murdered the Trotskyist revolutionaries as soon as he had the opportunity...
...V Robert Kennedy might have united the quarreling factions of the Democratic party behind his candidacy in 1968...
...This crucial failure involved the issue of "guns or butter...
...But the hopes and possibilities he foresaw for black Americans, and others among the poor and deprived, would be ended...
...So our differences were significant, not because they were unique or even original, but because they theorized and wrote large the policy conflicts that swirled about us...
...By the fall of 1965 a nervous Lyndon Johnson was scanning the guest list at the White House preconference meetings on Civil Rights to see which of his guests had also endorsed Sane's demonstration against his war policies...
...But there were other tendencies in the movement, too, Walter Reuther being the most obvious case in point...
...So it was that Shachtman and his followers always saw much more of a democratic opposition in Vietnam than anyone else...
...When, for example, we had supported the Algerian nationalists against the French, we were quite critical of the National Liberation Front and understood that it was an unstable coalition of bourgeois MICHAEL HARRINGTON politicians, Communists, Trotskyists, local chiefs, etc...
...But with his death, the potential Democratic coalition disintegrated and as a result Richard Nixon was twice elected president of the United States...
...the Model Cities program was never taken seriously, and so on...
...Yet it was not as simple as Max—and I —had thought...
...This was an extreme case of a malaise to be found among a fair number in the new peace constituency: the idea that "doing one's own thing" was somehow truly radical...
...At the same time, the New Left was reaching the high point of its influence on campus and turning from a nonideological radicalism to a vulgar Marxism mixed with more than a little of middle-class petulance...
...Yet we opposed the French until their expulsion in 1954 and the American policy of support to the Diem regime after that...
...knots of nuns and schoolchildren...
...In posing the choice in that way, Shachtman seemed to forget one of his own most profound insights: abstract comparison between bourgeois democracy and totalitarian Communism cannot be transposed into a Vietnamese context precisely because American power in such a situation is not an alternative, but an incitement, to Communism...
...No one group—not the unions, not the poor, not the intellectuals or the middle-class liberals and radicals— could transform American society on its own...
...But even though we understood the risks, we felt that a righteous iso lation from the real labor movement was even worse than the dangers we were chancing...
...We were particularly conscious of that fact because there had been a thriving, mass Trotskyist movement in that country in the '30s, and it had bested the Stalinists in open political competition on several occasions...
...The class struggle was over...
...Yet he was not a ponderous man at all, but a person who often laughed until he cried...
...From In Defense of Marxism...
...But when an individual, or a group, takes on the role of being ideologists and political spokesmen for a labor leadership, then they must submerge their differences, at least in public, and follow the official line at every point...
...Ironically, they had differed with him then because they thought that he too nearly equated the evils in capitalist democracy and Communist totalitarianism, refusing to see the superiority of the former over the latter...
...That decent Communists would unwittingly serve an oppressor of the working class was a similarly cruel irony...
...we expected that a bureaucratic collectivist state would result in the South if the Communists prevailed...
...They often do not have the stability, the stubborn commitment to action of the trade unionsists, which is born out of the struggle for daily bread...
...But that practicality had led some of our comrades, Max among them, to a pragmatism about the most important moral issue of the decade...
...yet the education they had received made them particularly adept at registering voters, canvasing, and other traditional political arts...
...Others, like myself, did so because we understood that Humphrey, despite all his associations with American policy in Southeast Asia, was infinitely preferable to Richard Nixon...
...he might be able to build a mass coalition...
...My God," Kennedy replied with a smile, "you didn't say that I would, did you...
...Shachtman suggested the name of a "Freedom Budget" and, with the brilliant help of Leon Keyserling, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Truman, a preliminary draft was prepared for Randolph...
...Now that Shachtman was sympathetic to Johnson's policy, the DISSENT editors were hostile to it...
...And second, the new strata of issueoriented and college-educated young people who provided the mass base for this movement were, and are, extremely important to the creation of a new majority for social change in this country...
...Much more than McCarthy, he could speak to the blacks and the working people...
...It meant that his commitment to full employment, his racial policies, his Supreme Court nominations would be infinitely better than Nixon's and that his foreign policy would not be worse...
...At the Los Angeles campus of California State I spoke at a rally with Cesar Chavez, that luminous apostle of nonviolence among the migrant workers, and John Lewis, one of the first leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Adam Yarmolinsky, Frank Mankiewicz, and I were talking—all of us had been together on the Shriver antipoverty task force—and Pat said that, by God, all we really do well is to bury our dead...
...But even then, it understated the problem somewhat by focusing exclusively on the '30s...
...Why...
...That their militants were often committed and brave only compounded the tragedy...
...Moreover, I felt—as I had learned so well from Shachtman in the Joe McCarthy days, when it was the liberal wisdom to regard Communism as seamlessly monolithic —that life would go on in Indochina even after a Communist victory and that the class character of Communism would eventually provoke a new resistance there...
...The sorrowing faces along the way were a mirror in which I saw my own feelings...
...Moreover—and on this point we followed an old socialist tradition—we believed that foreign oppression would only postpone the day of reckoning between the indigenous Left and Right...
...Irving Howe and several members of the editorial board Of DISSENT joined the LID Board...
...Yet our seemingly sectarian history may well help to illuminate some of the great public debates of the period...
...When Eugene McCarthy announced for the presidency, I supported him in an article in Commentary and with some speeches...
...We had made a political analysis of America's self-defeating policy of aligning itself with reactionary anti-Communists (more on that point in a moment...
...These are bitter things to say but, to insist on yet another paradox, they are uttered in sadness, not in anger, with affectionate memory of the not-so-distant past...
...So all of his past would predispose him to join with the peace activists...
...Joe Rauh, one of the most decent men in American politics and the lawyer to the insurgent miners, was heartsick about that article in New America...
...At another rally, at Manhattan Center, veterans of the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns did speak out for Humphrey —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith among them...
...That he was also tragically mistaken does not change those facts...
...II In 1964 and 1965 it seemed to us socialists that political realignment in America was about to come true...
...They could not abide the prospect of a successful, mainstream movement that would win real workers and blacks to the cause of peace and social change...
...The Russian Revolution, Shachtman said against Trotsky, had been expropriated...
...Their parents' backTHE POLITICS OF TIGHTROPE ground, which was middle-class, and their economic future as professionals or technicians often disposed them to look down on working people...
...But there were other, more hopeful moments in that brief California swing...
...He concedes that various social programs were either cut back or did not grow during the time of escalation: the Office of Economic Opportunity had expected to increase its budget from $1.5 billion to $3.5 billion in 1965 but received only $1.75 billion...
...Curt Gans called me some time after that and told me that he and Al Lowenstein were looking for a candidate for the Dump Johnson movement...
...There was, he rightly argued, a symbiotic relationship between Stalinism in the Third World and the reactionary, militarist regimes it usually fought...
...In the '30s he led a Bukharinite sect which contained some remarkably talented people and which, in a move unprecedented in American radical history, decided at the end of the '30s that it had no future and dissolved...
...I was determined to build upon the positive...
...How, then, does one judge a man like Bayard, who did the wrong thing for the right reason...
...they refused to recognize that guns and butter, though an economic possibility, were a political-psychological impossibility...
...At Berkeley, where I spoke from the steps of Sproul Hall, there were young radicals in the crowd— perhaps the one who had spit in Kennedy's face was among them—and they catcalled as if I were speaking on behalf of a candidate of the Far Right...
...In fact, 1968 proved that labor cannot win alone, 1972 showed that the New Politics cannot win alone—while 1976 might prove that together they can carry the nation...
...But he does not take into account the change in moral and emotional priorities of the Administration, brought about by the events in Indochina...
...With the knowledge that he was imperiling, if not destroying, access to the White House, King became an outspoken critic of the war...
...An intense, brilliant man who devoted his entire being to his ideals, he was never afraid of lonely and unpopular positions when he thought them necessary...
...I wonder if something like Trotsky's logic was at work with Shachtman in the '60s...
...and everywhere, the black and the poor...
...The LID was to become a center for discussion among trade unionists, blacks, and intellectuals...
...Humphrey received 42 percent of the vote and Nixon 43 percent—but Wallace took over 13 percent, i.e., twice the proportion of Eugene Debs's best year, and four times Norman Thomas's finest showing...
...Even so, their fascination with the subject was one more factor making the society conscious that some kind of working class did exist...
...But the hard question, he continued, is the political basis on which you do those things...
...It was in reality much more complicated than that...
...In the era of the '50s, with its American celebration, we had rightly insisted that the typical worker, though not poor, was systematically deprived of enough income for a decent life...
...Therefore, Glazer concludes, Vietnam did not wreck the Great Society...
...We were, to be sure, minor and nonviolent casualties of the tragedy in Southeast Asia...
...It is self-evident that a new "minimum" program would be required—for the defense of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society...
...The position of George Meany and the AFL—CIO Executive Council on Vietnam was, I thought, wrong...
...We focused our energies on building a new League for Industrial Democracy (LID...
...In doing so, we risked our socialist souls, as I have already pointed out...
...He was, as I look back on the '60s, the man who might have changed the course of American history...
...It was, he said, at the very center of our thinking...
...In that way, these antiunionists thought, the inherent conservatism of the average worker would act as a check upon the radical tendencies of the labor bureaucrat...
...The genius of that macabre institution is to ritualize social relationships so as to distract the living from the intolerable fact of death...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON Lovestone was a major leader of American Communism who, as Bukharin's factional ally in this country, helped expel the Trotskyists and was then himself expelled by the Stalinists...
...The day of his funeral, I understood that I had been wrong...
...A coalition government...
...And indeed, among the politicians, old and new, the intellectuals and the trade unionists, the blacks and the Chicanos, there was the administration of Robert Kennedy that was never going to be...
...By the early '60s it was an aging remnant with some ideological and financial support from the needle trades' unions in New York...
...The sad climax of all this came at the meeting of the National Committee of the Socialist party in the fall of 1972...
...But was it politically possible simultaneously to give top priority to both the tragedy in Indochina and the fight for a decent America at home...
...Would it be unilateral withdrawal of American troops leading to a Communist victory...
...In the United States, the war put an end to the hopes for a "Great Society," forced the effective retirement of Johnson from the presidency, and prepared the way for the election of Richard Nixon...
...We wrongly said to ourselves that we had almost won when in fact the right-ofcenter vote (Nixon plus Wallace) was about 57 percent as against Humphrey's 42 percent...
...Although we did not know it in 1966, our high hopes for America had just been shattered in Southeast Asia...
...And even when he gave critical support to the American intervention in Vietnam—and was, in my opinion, tragically wrong—he was disregarding the comfortable leftist verities in the name of what he took to be a more difficult truth...
...They predicted the demise of Vietnam as an issue every year for six or seven years...
...The American disciple, who had never led more than a small group of radicals, thus challenged the military leader of the October Revolution, one of the most ranging theorists Marxism has ever known, and certainly its finest writer of prose...
...He yearned for a democratic—and anti-Communist—alternative to the dictators America relied upon...
...The LID, as we saw it, was to be located at the intersection of these various constituencies...
...When I went to Washington to work on the Shriver task force in February 1964, and throughout that year, the issue of poverty was glamorous...
...In my book Toward a Democratic Left, completed in the fall of 1967, I described a "new class" in the knowledge economy...
...I denounced that outcome in the peace movement at every turn, and it was not always a popular thing to say to the more fervid of the simplifiers...
...That development was to have an important effect upon the success of the antiwar effort, making it more difficult to reach the great mass of people...
...But I was as certain as any poll that Lyndon Johnson was secure in his incumbency...
...Max fought back, brilliantly, valiantly...
...and Norman Hill, also on the Board, was one of the national leaders in CORE...
...In the '30s the New International, a Trotskyist journal under his editorship, had published an exchange between Leon Trotsky and John Dewey...
...The corruption was political and ideological...
...Mike gave you a good endorsement today, Senator," Goodwin said by way of introduction...
...Ho Chi Minh did...
...If that indeed was the case, then he might have reluctantly decided—even if without the hope of socialism—that he must brave the opposition of some of his former associates and the scorn of the liberal establishment and critically back America as a lesser evil in Vietnam...
...In posing this question, I do not suggest that Max had decided that the war had been right in the first place, or that he had any sympathy for the military government in Saigon...
...186 One of the first confrontations within our group took place at a community room in Penn South, the housing development put up by the Garment Workers' Union, where Bayard and a number of our people lived...
...There were other socialist thinkers who 184 perceived aspects of this truth: Trotsky's comrade and friend Christian Rakovsky was one of them...
...The class of small property owners has not played a very important role in corporate and oligopolistic capitalism for some time now (although it certainly made a contribution to Hitler's trumph in 1933...
...All of us shared this analysis...
...Within our socialist cadre, our conceptions of the working class derived not from the events and intellectual fads of the '60s but from a more general, and solidly based, Marxian perspective...
...to be combative (like an army...
...unions, by their very nature, are easily affected by the virus of bureaucratic rule...
Vol. 20 • April 1973 • No. 2
