REVIEWS

...he only mentions relating education to work, expanding adult education, and preserving the right of individuals to more than one job...

...He is able to do this because he rigorously examines the record, allowing no preconceptions or prejudices, dogmas or ideologies to interfere with the writing of history as it happened...

...Dahrendorf refuses to look for a credal base (such as democratic socialism) to unite his general political public...

...His contribution is a succession of points that can be read either as partial solutions or as defense mechanisms against admitting how bad the prospects are...

...The prophetic warning of Rosa Luxemburg, written in prison in 1918, had come to tragic fulfillment...

...From whence come our standards...

...Moscow told the American Communists: "Tasks, bold struggle against war, no credits, fire against bourgeois dictatorship of own country, ruthlessly expose Social Democracy which has joined camp of reaction...

...The heart of the Duclos article was a criticism of Earl Browder, for having "declared, in effect, that at Teheran capitalism and socialism had begun to find means of peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the framework of one and the same world...

...He fears that interest groups convert representatives into delegates, and he desperately desires the creation of a "general political public," to put sectionalism in its place...

...Thus one may question whether Rosenblatt has taken an accurate gauge of the consciousness of the writers who had matured during the years Martin Luther King and Malcolm X assumed black leadership...

...rather he will attempt to show how these terms conform to a peculiarly cyclical vision of experience that, presumably, all black writers possess...

...In April 1918, Lenin still maintains that the soviets are organs of workers' democracy...

...This is an understandable goal, a kind of pale embodiment of the "general will," but it is vitiated by overtones of the classical liberal myth of the independent, atomized individual...

...In order to cope with the problems of the day, the general public will have to be different from that of the past, general and organized at the same time, a public of individuals, but not of individuals alone...

...Interestingly, Rosenblatt does not deal with Wright's "Fire and Cloud" from the same collection of stories, whose ending suggests an even greater optimism...

...The point he explores most fully is the rigid division of life into compartments for education, work, and leisure...

...His potential constituency consists of well-meaning individuals who don't identify with their agencies or corporations, "unorthodox leaders," and "the revolt of the individual...

...To the extent that the book is based on such evidence it is useful and interesting...

...Moreover, the works he discusses at any length were by and large written before the 1960s by authors who were born before 1930 (William Melvin Kelley and Claude Brown being the principal exceptions...

...black heroes, despite strong efforts of resistance, become mirrors themselves and do not exist without the life outside them...

...Whatever happened to the soviets under which, as Lenin described them, "the masses themselves determine" how and when elections are held "and with complete freedom of recall of elected officials...

...The soviets became facts of history by the action of masses of Russian working people...

...Another idea, that citizens should donate a year to social service, is aborted because Dahrendorf cannot conceive of a libertarian way of organizing this service...

...This perception of black American reality, rooted as it is in the basically unchanging circumstances of social and cultural racism, precludes black authors from sharing the white American writers' preoccupation with formal experimentation and shifting philosophical viewpoints...

...But even at that early date Lenin is mainly occupied with the practical tasks of getting a desolated economy back in operation...

...A sudden slide into apocalypse at the end reveals how anxious he really is: "The first test of our ability to cope will come soon, probably in the two years immediately ahead...

...The Mensheviks quickly embraced the soviets and actively participated in forming the St...

...He does not deal, however, with getting education and leisure into work...

...His heroism then frequently turns on his perception of the irony of American dreams (especially if one is black) and the futility of his situation...

...The hard facts of AfroAmerican life are quite enough to cope with, thank you—hence, where white heroes may be radical "innocents" acquiring experiences of evil in their own good time, the black protagonist cannot long afford this luxury if he wishes to keep his head above water...

...The subject shifts constantly and is arbitrarily limited...

...What does the revolution demand now...

...But by the time Browder's overworked chauffeur had received the message at the end of September (and a second one in October), the Communist International was publishing articles all over the world in favor of stopping the war against Hitler, against military conscription, and for directing major fire against bourgeois democracy...

...Translated from the German by Ruth Hein...

...Despite all the ugly aspects of Moscow's use of its secret police in Spain, the war against POUM, the execution of "deserters," it is unjust to denigrate the Communist youth who fought gallantly against Spanish fascism...

...And when "cycles" are applicable, as in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, or in Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, Rosenblatt does shed light...

...9.50...

...Question: Why is the Communist party like the Brooklyn Bridge...

...Jaffe writes that the two highest American officers of the BOOKS 411 Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Robert Merriman, commander, and Dave Doran, political commissar, had been "shot one sunrise without trial by order of the well-known sadist, Andre Marty...

...its basic elements of a feasible anti-inflation policy are known...

...These faults clearly relate to the book's form, for it is a reworked version of his Reith BBC radio lectures of late 1974...

...Dahrendorf admits that he has "no patent solution" to inflation or to limits of growth...

...But are the endings of these books so pessimistic...

...He wants workers to be more willing to accept changes in the occupational structure, but in a steady state economy that would be very unlikely without paying workers for mobility...

...this era was above all characterized by a socioeconomic syndrome consisting of growth expectations, a consumption orientation, the reliance on international prerequisites like free trade and convertibility as well as national ones like full employment and social welfare, a slightly self-conscious neglect, or perhaps the repression, of awkward matters such as pollution, or even the nuclear threat, and other features related to it...

...His satire, however, focuses exclusively on whites...

...Lenin answers: "Iron discipline during work, with absolute submission to the will of one person, the Soviet director, during work...

...NEVERTHELESS, the kind of revaluation of economic goals Dahrendorf proposes would be necessary if a steady state economy were to come into effect...

...He does, however, warn that he has not written this work merely to examine black fiction on BOOKS 407 its own terms...

...Sometimes, however, the Russians couldn't and didn't manipulate foreign Communists...

...He frequently stops his speculations because they offend against the freedom of economic man and the individualism he still sees in capitalism...

...to the apostle Thomas and later to an upside-down Jesus...

...We are discussing soviets in their original meaning, councils to effect direct democracy of the working people...

...When it departs into realms of conjecture and hearsay, it is far less useful...

...In this body the social contract might find its organized expression—an Economic and Social Council perhaps which brings organizations into a structure of general responsibility and makes it therefore impossible to ignore them and unnecessary to fight them...

...he concentrates on the blockages, and on their impact on liberty...

...324 pp...

...How did the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks originally react to the soviets...

...Lenin denounces the Socialist Revolutionists (SRs) and others who object to "the last decree on railway management, the decree which granted dictatorial (or `unlimited') power to individual directors...

...Who, one wonders, are the 20th-century white heroes who die or go nobly...

...One may indeed wonder about the mind set of those who read the Rand School pamphlet in 1919 and were converted to Lenin's views...

...How an order could have come from Marty (who, Gates notes, was not even in Spain on that fatal day...

...It would involve some extremely hard decisions: how to run down existing industries and replace them with others that conserve energy and resources...

...But is the distinction this simple...

...This is a surprising ending to what had been an effort to defend a classical liberal conception of the supremacy of representative political institutions and the economic marketplace...

...Baldwin's characters in Go Tell It On The Mountain are "islands inhabiting the island of Harlem" on the "other island of Manhattan and again these people are islands to each other...

...This is not necessarily to praise them (Reed's reputation is considerably inflated) but simply to say they exist...

...Lenin derides those socialists who see unlimited dictatorial rule as "a defection...

...Yet The New Liberty is often annoying...

...211 pp...

...Dahrendorf comes to it grudgingly, rather than accepting the pluralist argument that the creation of many organizations between the atomistic individual and the state can give individuals opportunities for expressing different parts of their personalities...

...Indeed, the war was still raging in Europe and the Far East when the Soviet Communists used an article, signed but apparently not written by Jacques Duclos of the French Communist party, to make it clear that "peaceful coexistence" was really part of the dialectics of wars and revolutions...

...Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously— at bottom, then, a clique affair—a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins...

...By denying that a class polarization exists, Dahrendorf implies that income distribution and class distribution of opportunity are not issues at all...

...As far back as 1919 the Rand School of Social Science in New York issued a pamphlet by Lenin, "The Soviets at Work...

...If I read Rosenblatt's sometimes diffuse prose correctly, the cycle expresses, in effect, the feeling that strive, believe, desire as he may, the black American survives physically, spiritually, and socially only insofar as he suppresses his natural inclinations and pretends to roles the dominant white culture demands of him...

...10.00...

...The major contribution of Jaffe's book is the documentation he provides—mainly because Browder gave him the documents—valuable to students of the history of Communism...

...Whereas the enemies of black heroes exist within history...

...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...

...405 But the content of such a policy is not Dahrendorf's immediate concern...

...The sacrifices to be made by different groups and the distribution of goods and opportunities will inevitably become conscious issues...

...New York: Horizon Press...

...Implementing part of the socialist agenda has led to "the ossification of justice," in which full employment, minimum wages, and social security make people defensive and unwilling to change...

...Despite their slogan, "all power to the soviets," the Bolsheviks insisted that the soviets could not be the instruments of their insurrection...

...Here is a definitive history of an institution that left a lasting mark on socialist movements...

...Born in the abortive revolution of 1905 the soviets surfaced again in the revolution that overthrew Czarism in 1917...

...But all told the cyclic theory raises more questions than it answers, and more equivocations, exceptions, and obfuscations than are worth the trouble...

...for him they were instruments by which the party controlled the working masses, rather than true forms of a workers' democracy...

...He makes general statements that go unsubstantiated...

...DOES this add up to a new liberty...

...One imaginative suggestion recognizes this: a proposal that adults should receive three years of sabbaticals for education, so that they could go to school when they want to instead of having to go to the university before starting a career...

...Anweiler shows that the problem for the Bolsheviks was their "mistrust of labor organizations that were BOOKS 409 independent of the party" and that originally there was no room in Bolshevism for the soviet idea...

...A new liberty would go on to create new rights for individuals within large organizations and to use its economic planning to create many different life-chances for individuals to choose from...

...These were transmitted by the Communist International to a secret radio receiver Browder had set up for that purpose, monitored religiously by his trusted chauffeur...

...None of the Marxist and socialist parties of Russia had foreseen these instruments of workers' power...

...Do Faulkner's Snopeses exist outside of history...

...Paradox abounds...

...Hence "the enemies 408 BOOKS of modem white heroes...

...One will not read a more perceptive account of Langston Hughes's humor than the one in this book...

...EARLY READERS of Lenin should have recognized that paradox...

...Students of Russian history and of socialist thought have an indispensable guide in Anweiler's book...

...Economic interests, of both capital and labor, are bound into obsolete expectations of growth...

...Gates immediately ran forward and took the lead...

...When victory was assured, the Soviets again cranked up the machinery geared to subverting the governments of foes and earstwhile friends...

...In making them, Dahrendorf faces the fact that it is not enough for democrats to try to extend the gains made since the war...

...Or when Rosenblatt tells us that unlike whites, black novelists do not resolve their novels' "contradictions" by abstract means, such as moral equivocation, pastoral impulse, and humor, one wonders about some of the black fiction Rosenblatt himself is discussing—as, for example, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Native Son, Banana Bottom, Simple Speaks His Mind, among others...

...They were being converted to a concept of soviets completely at variance with their original promise of direct democracy...

...Bureaucracy, he writes, forms a barrier that both citizens and leaders are unable to penetrate...

...But the historian will still have to answer the question why in the world they needed these coded cables and secret radio transmitters...

...Gates recalls the last conversation he had with Doran on the very day he disappeared...

...That flicker was snuffed out by the fusillades of rifle and machinegun fire directed at the sailors and workers of Kronstadt in 1921...

...Having an Economic and Social Council to avoid conflicts also means that class cannot be ignored...

...Perhaps if that radio message had arrived on August 24, 1939, the day after the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed, it could have been of some use to the American marionettes...

...The "evidence" Jaffe cites is a conversation he had with Earl Browder, who told Jaffe he learned about this execution when he visited Spain in 1938...

...The trouble with this view is not that it is necessarily untrue but not always true, and Rosenblatt is therefore compelled to push, shove, and stretch much of the black fiction he deals with onto the procrustean bed of his definitions...

...At the end of the book, stymied in his quest for a social force that would give substance to the general political public, these contentions cave in completely to the reality of interest groups: However distasteful the idea may seem to the classical liberal, we need a second level of organized interest which is both independent from and related to parliament...

...What makes this all the more ironic from Rosenblatt's point of view is that when he appears momentarily to forget his cycles, he can be very good indeed...

...His common sense may well underestimate people's desperation...

...Always alert to seize that link in a chain that is appropriate for the moment, Lenin sees it as the need for ruthlessly discarding democracy and asserting one-man dictatorship in every factory and railroad of the country...

...Only when this is done will we know if such a Council is a capitulation to corporatism that would perpetuate the existing structure of privilege and power, or if it is a liberating device that might force the rich and powerful to recognize others...

...By subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one...

...Social democracy is airily excluded from a simplistic comparison of socialism and capitalism...

...INEVITABLY, Rosenblatt's constant refining of his thesis about black American writing begins to distort other American works...

...Lenin and Trotsky put an end to that and laid the remnants of the soviets and soviet power to eternal 410 BOOKS rest...

...Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule...

...DAHRENDORF has a long way to go to incorporate an Economic and Social Council into his liberalism...

...it provides enormous intellectual sustenance for anyone interested in the history of socialist thought...

...What chiefly troubles me is that for the general reader, unaware of the diversity of black fiction, much of what Rosenblatt writes may sound convincing...

...I cannot think of one...

...But if one stays with it the rewards are tremendous...

...Gates describes the circumstances of the day when Doran and Merriman were lost, which indicate that it was impossible for an execution to have taken place...

...It is fitting that Kronstadt has entered into the language of radical politics, meaning that moment when a Communist can no longer tolerate the betrayal of socialist ideals...

...And when Julian Martov, the left-Menshevik leader, returned from abroad to St...

...In her pamphlet, "The Russian Revolution," she wrote: In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of the laboring masses...

...Take his solution to inflation...

...Most of the time, Dahrendorf fights a rearguard action to reassert classical economic freedom and representative democracy against the rise of organized interests and the constriction of opportunity in a stagnating economy...

...New York: Pantheon Books...

...The Kronstadt garrison had been demonstrating for a revival of soviet democracy...

...Anweiler is in an exceptionally good position to write this history, wie es eigentlich gewesen war...

...Middle-class people could conceivably improve the quality of their lives without increasing their demand for goods and services, but working people would undoubtedly require more goods...

...Nevertheless, to Dissent readers The New Liberty is useful if they find ways of dealing with the issues with which Dahrendorf here is wrestling...

...A true social contract involving not merely the unions, but all those responsible for determining prices, and incomes, and the spending of public money, is not entirely out of the question...

...Once soviets appeared in 1905, the various Russian socialist parties had to incorporate them into their political theory...

...THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, by Philip Jaffe...

...Are the enemies of Dreiser's, Hemingway's, and Fitzgerald's heroes "theoretical...

...Thus we are told that the hero of Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home," having barely managed to escape Southern lynchers, will find "other mobs" awaiting him in Chicago...

...This fusion of new soviet power and the Bolshevik insurrection proved disastrous for the soviets themselves...

...The amazing thing about this unsupported bit of gossip is that Jaffe had ample opportunity to check with John Gates, the man who succeeded Dave Doran as commissar of the Lincoln Brigade...

...after this, they were merely servants of the party and a cover-up for Bolshevik dictatorship—a role they never had contemplated, and for which they were unsuited...

...even when externalized are theoretical and abstract...

...And here is Rosenblatt on identity...

...Dahrendorf starts from a classical 19th-century notion of liberty, the independence of the atomized citizen and the economic man...

...As a matter of fact, these messages from Moscow are only whipped cream on the shortcake of Moscow manipulation of foreign Communists...

...His perspective is important: the dangers to liberty in the social transformation that is required to meet inflation and the end of easy economic growth...

...BLACK FICTION, by Roger Rosenblatt...

...Here too Dahrendorf's points are weakened because he does not look at the class structure—at the work people actually do and the ways it is enforced...

...The limits of growth, the end of cheap energy, and the social dissolution caused by inflation shake the foundations of this syndrome...

...the party-controlled military revolutionary committee carried out the seizure of power...

...Defending "moonlighting" is his response to the alienation Marx sees in the individual's confinement in a single job with a rigid work-week...

...Dahrendorf's subject is the crisis of our time, and his aim is modest: to make a contribution to public debate...

...Even though Jaffe asserts that Communists everywhere and always did the bidding of Moscow, the most significant example of a refusal to do such bidding changed the world—Mao Tse-tung made his own Communist revolution against Stalin's orders...

...Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies in 1905...

...Petersburg in 1905 the soviet struck him as the "embodiment of our concept of revolutionary self-government...

...He arrives, in fact, at the Economic and Social Council because he cannot bear to see a confrontation between the state and "mighty organizations...

...Dahrendorf will have to face two issues he is unwilling to face in The New Liberty: class and power...

...The overwhelming paradox, as Anweiler notes, is that the soviets' decline began on the very day of the Bolshevik seizure of power...

...It sketches outcomes that would save the system if only every party were to give up something...

...Roger Rosenblatt begins this book by telling us what it is not—and one is relieved to discover that it is not another study promoting (or decrying) cultural nationalism or worrying about whether or not white critics have the credentials to review Afro-American writing...

...In the comforting "dialectic" that enabled Lenin to leap from a utopian "withering away of the state" to one-man rule, Lenin spells it out: "But how can we secure a strict unity of will...

...The "point" of William Melvin Kelley's dem is not that "slavery [racism?] corrupts everyone," black and white alike, although one might wish Kelley meant this...

...Doran asked Gates to bring up the rear of the column...

...One does not want to dwell endlessly on the kinds of tortured readings Rosenblatt's thesis leads him to, but it may be instructive to cite some of these...

...Soviet efforts to undermine other societies were as old as the regime itself, but these efforts had been suspended during the early years of the war for survival...

...The record assembled by Anweiler reveals that Lenin, who was to hail the soviets as a new form of democracy, "could envisage the soviets only as controlled organizations...

...Improvement is about quality...

...He is, for example, constantly tacking on endings to works that might otherwise seem mildly upbeat...

...To work out his idea, Dahrendorf will have to examine the possibilities and limits of negotiations, which may well replace legislation as the vehicle for policy, the enforcement of the Council's results, and the economic planning that is implied in such a deviation from classical liberalism...

...Such a compromise would be much more democratic than President Ford's policy, but Dahrendorf is politically naive in assuming that it is an obvious solution blocked only by defects in the political mechanism...

...Many of his points revolve around the assertion that commonsense solutions are at hand but blocked by defects in the political mechanism...

...to a column behind Franco's lines is something Jaffe would have to explain...

...Without equivocation, by "absolute submission to the personal orders of the representatives of the Soviet rule during work...

...Anweiler sums it up: The Bolshevik insurrection, cloaked by soviet legality and nominal soviet power just before the convocation of the highest soviet organ, implied the Bolsheviks' break with soviet democracy...

...Now, these are not points that can be shrugged off easily...

...As we have seen, however, Dahrendorf has not yet faced these issues, because such an economic transformation would require the use of power to eliminate some occupations and choices, and to replace them with others...

...From that time on, not one of the survivors in the entire Brigade saw Merriman or Doran again, alive or dead...

...That the word soviet has come to denote a specific government, a given politicalgeographic entity, is quite another matter...

...how to create alternative jobs for people so that they would not have to obstruct the process or perish like the displaced workers of the industrial revolution...

...Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element...

...They will never take me alive, Doran said, and apparently they didn't...

...But it is very nearly impossible to find the one formula or aesthetic or ideology (if that is what one wants to find) into which all such experience can be fitted...

...Yet he argues for inequality as a source of diversity in society...

...Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas is likened (seriously...

...What probably happened...

...The unwillingness to bring class and power into the picture also weakens Dahrendorf's other main hope for preserving liberty while slowing inflation and the limits of growth...

...Expansion is about quantity, about organizing society in such a way that a continuing increase is possible in output and demand, income and expenditure, people's needs and the means to satisfy them...

...He rightly emphasizes individual choice among "life-chances" as essential to liberty, but he is weak on relating these life-chances to opportunities created or thwarted by society...

...And might not Big Boy find Chicago somewhat less oppressive (a small step forward) than the deep South he fled—as did his author...

...There was a flicker of political life in some local soviets between 1918 and 1921, which rejected the pattern of unanimous endorsement of whatever the party leaders put before them...

...He seems to hope that it would achieve consensus and avoid using power, which is not very likely when we consider that the growth and running-down of industries and the allocation of energy are two of the issues that brought Dahrendorf to this expedient...

...In some essential respects these leaders not only affected the ways black artists thought of themselves but also altered their perceptions of white America...

...This is not an unworthy effort, but Dahrendorf's struggles and anxieties suggest that it is futile in itself...

...But does not identity depend at least in part on how we are viewed by life outside us...

...But even if one were to grant Rosenblatt his selection of authors and works, one would have to grant him a great deal more to make these surrender to his thesis...

...He was a leader in Germany's Free Democratic party, then a commissioner of the European Economic Community, and now is director of the London School of Economics...

...Sophisticated American Communists used to tell a "joke" about themselves...

...And here is one of those unusual works of history, one that relentlessly pursues the truth...

...As a result his defeats are rarely glorious struggles with overwhelming forces but rather ignominious departures or discreet withdrawals...

...And really, do any of Rosenblatt's black characters totally accept white definitions of themselves...

...Similarly we are told that the protagonists of James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are doomed to repeat in their lives the cycles of futility and frustration each of them has already undergone...

...How does Rosenblatt know...

...As they made their way toward Loyalist lines a messenger came running to Gates with word that contact had been lost with the head of the column, including its commanders, Doran and Merriman...

...What white books, for example, could be more experimental, or subjective, or metaphysical, or abstract (which Rosenblatt says black books are not) than Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, William Demby's The Catacombs, William Melvin Kelley's Dunford's Travels Everywhere, or LeRoi Jones's The System of Dante's Hell...

...In Native Son black suggests safety and "whiteness is a source of terror...

...AN EXAMPLE of unsubstantiated gossip in Jaffe's book, sans documentation, relates to American Communist participation in the Spanish struggle against Franco fascism...

...The reader may at times become exhausted by the author's indefatigable search through all of the available records, starting with Russian sources...

...and while the idea of a moratorium on all price and income increases and on printing money, for say two years, may seem far-fetched at the moment, it is not an absurd idea...

...Claude Brown's racial humor, "instead of lightening or diminishing the reality of events, in fact intensifies it...

...but blacks flee, depart, or accommodate themselves to caste...

...Dahrendorf cannot dispute the facts cited by popular doomsayers but tries to reassure himself that there need not be sudden collapse or revolution...

...Perhaps we ought to leave it at that...

...By the time the radio messages arrived from Moscow the American Communists had already figured out the line, and Communists from Norway to Belgrade had gotten the word—''antifascism" was out, "the overthrow of all imperialists" was in...

...The subject of this book is the history of the rise and disappearance of soviets, in the original meaning of the term...

...It is thus "fitting" that Rufus "who made some very bad connections uses a bridge to end his life...

...He concedes that this is not a strong or reliable social force, and that these individuals are often potentially authoritarian and unwilling to make the sacrifices he anticipates...

...This, his latest book, is not one of the high points of his distinguished career...

...Surely the measure of self-knowledge each of the principals acquires is no small triumph...

...Thus Dahrendorf admits that participation is a democratic goal, but his classical liberal reaction against organized interests often leads him to want to reduce participation...

...He hovers between rejecting some of these gains to return to a simpler classical liberal parliamentarianism, or retaining these gains in a new political configuration...

...If so, which...

...He argues that history 406 BOOKS often moves by a kind of mental leap, in which perspectives are changed and past problems cease to matter...

...Introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe...

...Dahrendorf starts with the statement that postwar society is too flawed to maintain itself...

...Arna Bontemps once said that if there is a single tradition of Afro-American writing—from slave narratives to contemporary fiction—it is one that explores the various possibilities of freedom...

...THE SOVIETS: THE RUSSIAN WORKERS, PEASANTS, AND SOLDIERS COUNCILS, 1905-1921, by Oskar Anweiler...

...By a quirk of history Stalin chose the American Communist party, surely one of the least significant parties in the scheme of world revolution, as the vehicle for a signal to the world that the Soviets were ready to start the Cold War after World War II...

...But he does not deal with the powers and structure of the Council or its relations to the state...

...But further on in the paragraph we are told that "white signifies nothingness...

...Answer: Because it is suspended by cables...

...5.95 Ralf Dahrendorf, the author of Class Consciousness in Industrial Society and Society and Democracy in Germany, is an American-style academic liberal who has worked to expand democracy...

...But with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled...

...Thus his answer to the opposition between the cult of growth and zero growth is a new concept of progress as "improvement...

...Browder gave Jaffe copies of two coded messages from Moscow, spelling out the new line for American Communists after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939...

...The careful reader of this book must learn to separate fact from gossip, and when he does, he will find much valuable data...

...As examples of aspects of the quality of life that do not require expansion, Dahrendorf lists restoring old buildings, the arts, opportunities for recreation and play, and "underpasses for cars rather than for human beings...

...But does not the best humor do this...

...Ideas are rarely worked out...

...a discussion of the underdeveloped countries ignores all but those on the threshold of development...

...Although Rosenblatt does not always claim for black literature a special status apart from nonblack American writings (obviously they both share in the larger American culture), he does feel that some of the above-mentioned traits characterize it...

...None of this means, of course, that there is not an authentic black experience or that black writers do not write about that experience...

...How is Lenin going to get a transition "to higher forms of labor discipline...

...And again, we are told that the defeated nonblack heroes "die or go nobly" (Gatsby...

...Political decision-making has become complicated and deadlocked because so many interests want to participate...

...from the democratic and other principles of the Soviet rule...

...As Gates tells it in his book, The Story of an American Communist, the Abraham Lincoln column was behind enemy lines during the incident...

...In a stable or shrinking economy, taking this line and refusing to admit the reality of class means in effect to require the bulk of the sacrifices from the weakest and poorest people...