REVIEWS
Stipanovich, Joseph & Kusnet, David & Clecak, Peter & Plastrik, Stanley & Geltman, Emanuel
GATES OF EDEN: AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE SIXTIES, by Morris Dickstein. New York: Basic Books. 300 pp. $11.95 A brief advertisement for "A New Magazine for the 70s" features a cropped photograph...
...it alone will assure that the Constituent Assembly will be convened and carry forth its revolutionary work...
...Fried has not attempted a full-scale inquiry into all of McCarthy's antics and the fear they generated...
...Locating the genuinely important changes in the sensibilities of individuals rather than in the transformation of institutions, Dickstein fashions his eccentric cultural history largely out of literary materials on the supposition that particular texts, carefully selected and skillfully analyzed, "can shed light on the larger Text," which is to say, on the whole culture...
...It's a welcome antidote to the accepted view, summed up by the ex-liberal political operative Ken Auletta in New York Magazine, that the city was bankrupted by "a noble experiment in local socialism and income redistribution...
...New York: W. W. Norton & Co...
...Con Ed has earned its guaranteed rate of profit by building more generating capacity than it ever needed and then charging consumers the highest electric rates in the nation...
...Dickstein remains strongly attracted to this reading of postwar American experience, but with a happy complication: born a moment too soon, in 1940...
...an attack, not on the Provisional Government, but on the soviets...
...And, despite the obligatory rhetoric about the need to attract new jobs to the city, job-creating housing construction, neighborhood rehabilitation, and industrial park projects have all been eliminated...
...The author gives us the full range of Bolshevik political opinion, including major disagreements within the party—disagreements he analyzes dispassionately and in remarkably non polemical fashion...
...His first conclusion concerns the nature of the Bolshevik party and its evolution in the eight months between the February and October revolutions...
...my formative experiences bridged both the fifties and the sixties, and I never felt wholly comfortable in either world, though both were passionately important to me in their turn...
...others...
...The '70s emerge as a period of waiting, a decade that hasn't happened: the watchword is survival...
...This seems the most poignant moment of the October revolution...
...It should be noted, for those who have forgotten, that this was the year John F. Kennedy ran against Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts...
...In contrast, California paid $28.510 billion in federal taxes—but received $35.838 billion in federal spending...
...A Magazine for the Rest of Us," for the veterans of "the generation that got back in touch with our world, in the most basic ways...
...It also may liberate individuals from the just claims of the past, bindingthem to an essentially illiberal view of culture and politics, and to a trivial view of self...
...prudent David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank underwrote the bond issues...
...In our view the all-powerful authority over the Russian land is the Congress of Soviets...
...a middle or "high" phase (1965-68...
...The isolation caused by conformity in Communist society is more deadening than the isolation to be found in the camps...
...Still, it is wise to remember old lessons that the political and cultural radicals of the '60s illustrated...
...This vague vision yields several kinds of political failure: impotence in relation to the larger society, accompanied by the withdrawal of disaffected minorities into small, antidemocratic sects, and/or dissolution of temporary communities into mere anarchy...
...In this nostalgic view, political currents virtually disappear into cultural ones: the 'S0s are remembered as a time of almost cowardly personal withdrawal from all public spheres...
...In the process, neither culture nor politics fares very well...
...The Bolshevik moderates had, of course, long sounded a warning note against a unilateral seizure of power by their party...
...Elsewhere, though McCarthy hopped around on speechifying errands for Republican candidates, he appears to have had little effect on the outcome, according to Fried's painstaking reconstruction of each contest...
...Mihajlov, however, does not condemn socialism because of the aberration of communism...
...That Lenin's tight, highly disciplined and monolithic party was ready to seize power when the opportunity arose, according to this author, is sheer myth—and he proceeds to demonstrate that the Bolshevik party grew in 1917 precisely because it was relatively open, relatively democratic in practice, and far more sensitive to the wishes of the Petrograd masses than its rivals...
...Most of the individuals who engaged the '60s directly have been able to move beyond the ideological and cultural wreckage of the time...
...The armed forces of the Bolsheviks, centering their attack upon the Winter Palace, will take possession of the city...
...Familiar sequences are noticed, but no theoretical connections emerge...
...What engaged our interest more was the descent of all-too-many in the literary-academic liberal-left into what Irving Howe then labeled the "Age of Conformity" in a much-talked-about Partisan Review article, a theme that had also been put forward in the very first issue of Dissent...
...Violent means would deny the need for spiritual regeneration and the perpetrators would find themselves repeating the errors of the revolutionary socialists...
...Dickstein lapses into silence on this matter...
...Soon the Bolsheviks under Lenin's whiplike leadership and with the backing of Trotsky, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, will emerge as the dominant force...
...When Lodge"—and again I quote from Fried —"allegedly asked the Democratic governor, Paul Dever, about homestate reaction to his colleague [McCarthy], Dever had replied that `your people don't like him, but unfortunatley mine [the Boston Irish] do...
...McCarthy's rantings, and they were hardly more than that, were benign compared with the Palmer episode...
...The socialist order is acceptable to Mihajlov if it is conceived only as a more justly organized society in the socioeconomic sphere for then there would be no need (for socialists) to negate the ontological reality of the spiritual sphere...
...This self-denial of will and the anguish that follows result in the acceptance by the individual of external, impersonal forces con trolling his life...
...So was capital punishment at the front and from now on there was to be full freedom for political activity within the army...
...The armed conflict, which Trotsky had just said "is not in our plans," will be unleashed and the Provisional Government will cease to exist...
...The political dimension follows: "We put our stamp upon the world by fighting against Viet Nam, by working in the Peace Corps...
...There is a major distinction, not fully appreciated by Dickstein, between desiring to enter the gates of Eden and planning a break-in...
...Had Fried reached further back in history, he surely would have recorded the fear of Com munism exemplified by the Palmer raids that followed upon the First World War...
...Also immediately, all repressive measures against workingclass organizations were revoked...
...Truman prevailed on Millard E. Tydings, an impeccably conservative Maryland senator, to head a commission to investigate McCarthy's charges...
...In contrast to the academic guardians of the emasculated cultural modernism of the '50s, the experimental young people of the '60s (the only ones who count for Dickstein) attempted to live out the spirit of total opposition...
...Socialism need not be "heaven on earth," and it need not represent the fulfillment of all of man's aspirations...
...The "Men Against McCarthy" were mostly in the Democratic party, and they included one woman (Republican), Margaret Chase Smith, who with six fellow Republicans issued a "Declaration of Conscience...
...The result is confusion, failure and frustration...
...Dickstein observes that "during the sixties both poetry and theory made a pact with the devil and descended into the street, following Marx's admonition to change the world, not merely to interpret it...
...It is impossible to do justice to the scholarly detail presented within the limited frame the author has chosen...
...Hence, whether the party would have the will to follow Lenin's increasingly urgent drive to take power remained "very much an open question...
...An appreciation of the ill effects of conformity is heightened in people in the Communist countries, according to Mihajlov, because they are imprisoned in an ultimate sense...
...Previously, the moderate Mensheviks and SRs had pulled out of the Congress, later to be followed by the MenshevikInternationalists (Martov) and the Left SRs, which left the Bolshevik faction in full command...
...Aided by hindsight and numerous secondary sources (some of them cited, others not), Dickstein thus achieves only a mere balance, a deceptive surface that conceals a flawed vision of postwar American culture and politics...
...Consider, as an example, his summary statement concerning the '50s, which are characterized as on balance a "ruminative, private, morally austere and self-conscious, apolitical" time: "the literature and politics of the period are one," Dickstein asserts...
...They were written after he had finished an earlier fouryear prison term that he served in the late 1960s...
...When the limits of various human activities are not respected, the aesthetic discipline of art collapses and the moral discipline of politics weakens...
...There is a vast literature on McCarthy and the "ism" he contributed to the shorthand of politics...
...III NEWFIELD AND DUBRUL do not deny that a generation of New York City politicians converted municipal finances into a virtual Ponzi scheme, under which steadily increasing volumes of debt issues were paid off, not with tax revenues, but with the sale of still more bonds...
...The General's coattails proved a more useful bit of cloth than McCarthy's shabby "shirt...
...Any selection of texts is subjective...
...Arrogance and selfconfidence, with both of which Benton was amply supplied, may also serve the good guys...
...These essays are unified by the central theme of the spiritual renaissance that Mihajlov sees occurring in Eastern Europe and his interpretation of the meaning of that movement...
...Toward the end of this exhaustive study, Mr...
...The copywriter then rehearses a familiar litany of achievements: "We rediscovered ourselves...
...Many elements had joined together to form an essentially romantic notion of the revolution, not the least Trotsky's classic History, John Reed's passionate Ten Days that Shook the World, Eisenstein's great film October (the original version, not the shamefully truncated one with Trotsky excised that now circulates on public television...
...Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York State from 1959 until 1973, approved the legislation under which New York City was first authorized to sell bonds in anticipation of estimated future tax revenues...
...Rabinowitch has written a brilliant, convincing, and exciting book...
...To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out...
...made no such impact...
...Hence the Bolshevik organization in 1917 was one of "lively debate and spirited give-and-take...
...Recalling the ethos of the New Left in the prologue, Dickstein speaks of the hopeful and affecting vision that animated the sixties at its best, before the travesty of Manson and Altamont, the Weathermen and the SLA...
...I had no need of it, and took no notice...
...If New York City was victimized at the federal level by the conservative coalition of Nixon Republicans and Southern Democrats, then the city's voters have no one to blame but their own elected representatives for the equally disastrous misuse of public funds at the local level...
...walkouts by the opposition Menshevik and SR factions will leave the Bolsheviks in control and, in essence, power will fall exclusively into their hands...
...New York: Columbia University Press...
...Above all, the Constituent Assembly now was to decide democratically on Russia's future form of governance...
...The party's tactical course in those days centered around the forthcoming Congress of Soviets...
...393 pp...
...they need merely cite the plight of New York City as evidence for the failure of welfare liberalism...
...Moreover, Rockefeller created the neverending list of special state authorities that issued "moral obligation" bonds—bond issues that did not have to be approved by the voters in statewide referenda, but for which the State Legislature accepted the "moral obligation" to appropriate the necessary funds to pay off the bonds...
...Vonnegut...
...Indeed, the split consciousness allows Dickstein to have everything his way: he represents himself as the hero of his own cultural history...
...Mission, Kansas: Sheed, Andrews & McMeel...
...There was no hint of any single party's monopoly or seizure of power...
...The Russian working class, they stated, could not by itself complete the revolution...
...IN 1917 THE INFLUX of tens of thousands of new members necessarily led to a considerable weakening of Lenin's prior concept of the party as a closed movement of professional revolutionaries...
...When an obscure delegate cries out, "You are anticipating the will of the Second Congress of Soviets," Trotsky retorts: "The will of the Second Congress of Soviets has already been predetermined by the fact of the workers' and soldiers' uprising...
...This camp joined with us during the Kornilov affair [an attempted monarchist coup] and brought us victory...
...Following the New York example, state and local governments are "solving" their real or imagined budget crises by cutting back services for the needy, offering special benefits for private businesses, and firing public employees or freezing their pay...
...Fuel bills increased, the use of electricity declined, consumers delayed in paying their bills, and the utility was short of cash...
...The Petrograd workers who poured into the party were not interested in that kind of existence...
...It was Lenin who, over a period of several weeks, alternately cajoled, pressured, and threatened his colleagues, and who, by force of argument and personal authority, ultimately succeeded in turning a majority of the Central Committee toward an insurrectionary course Few modern historical episodes better illustrate the sometimes decisive role of an individual in historical events...
...McCarthy came out of nowhere politically...
...With the promise of a lively exploration of current alternatives, the reader is urged to subscribe: "After all, there's no sense in living the '70s alone...
...The "moderate" Bolshevik Kamenev expressed these views in a general statement stressing the role of the soviets as "the mortar binding all fundamentally democratic forces...
...One writer after another is introduced, celebrated as a prophet or examplar of the new sensibility, and then demolished in at most a few pages...
...The party was in a fluid state...
...No, here no compromise is possible...
...Yet Richard Fried finds "little direct evidence of advance planning or coordination underpinning this counterattack...
...It will ally with us again more than once...
...the transfer of power into the hands of revolutionary workers, peasants, and soldiers...
...Along the way, he indirectly takes issue with some revisionist historians who see McCarthyism principally as an extension of Trumanism...
...The Abuse of Power tells the sorry tale of New York's finances once again, but makes clear that there were other participants in the scheme besides Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abraham Beame...
...We must realize that there was an extensive evolution in Lenin's own position...
...Later when...
...Two instances should do here...
...Dylan...
...Call it Romantic socialism: the Romantic vision of the redemption of the self, the libertarian socialist dream of a community of redeemed selves in the real world...
...And it comes not a moment too soon...
...The ability or lack thereof to overcome this spirit of violence will decide, in Mihajlov's view, the future for all men...
...We found our own literature, with a tough cosmic, comic vision...
...As it became clear that the Bolsheviks, despite the opposition of a substantial minority among their leaders, were intent upon mobilizing their forces, not simply to defend the Congress of Soviets but rather to seize power in advance through an uprising, the ranks of the Left were thrown into turmoil and confusion...
...There is no special 'key' to the sensibility of the age: almost anything works if we turn it right and press it hard...
...Here, in a revealing caricature, are the chief elements of a new revisionism, a vague centering of postwar American history in the succession of decades and generations: the '60s form the centerpiece, a hopeful moment of personal, cultural, and political liberation between the sterile, repressive 'S0s and the constricted, quiescent '70s...
...Unable to connect the early hopes of the New Left with its Weatherman phase, Dickstein can only suggest lamely that the causes lay in its own frustrations, "its inability to affect policy, to elect candidates, or even to preserve its own integrity in the face of failure and backlash...
...THE ABUSE OF POWER: THE PERMANENT GOVERNEMTN AND THE FALL OF NEW YORK, by Jack Newfield and Paul Dubrul...
...From what one hears of them today, they haven't improved much...
...It is therefore a little disconcerting to read in Alexander Rabinowitch's revisionist account of Petrograd 1917 that the Winter Palace was never really "stormed," but that the collapse of resistance led, rather, to a gradual "infiltration...
...go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history...
...Since, however, this revisionist outlook is mediated through Dickstein's recollected personal experience rather than being grounded in a developed theoretical formulation, we should first examine the character and functions of the autobiographical elements...
...McCarthy was ultimately brought down in the Army hearings...
...Without a recollection of liberal values, the distinction loses its force...
...But this will not do: the intensity of the frustrations and their distinctive shapes require explanation...
...While there were indeed "Men Against McCarthy," from President Truman on down, few were prepared to tangle with him in rough-andtumble— notably Senator William Benton during his brief tenure in the Senate...
...Dickstein also ignores one important facet of the explanation by failing to identify a major source of the frustrated hopes in the New Left's commitment to enacting a peculiar vision of Eden—a romantic communism (which he cavalierly misdefines as "socialism...
...Mihajlov is pessimistic about the capacity of the West to effect its own regeneration...
...A little put out, perhaps, by having the Com munist issue preempted by an upstart, Nixon, in his own "McCarthyite" campaign against Helen Ga hagan Douglas, kept the Wisconsinite at a dis tance, limiting him to one speech in California...
...Significantly, however, it was the one 1950 campaign in which McCarthy's participation seems to have made a difference...
...it seemed to us that it would be possible to rid ourselves painlessly of this skeleton [the Kerensky coalition] by action of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets...
...The Bolsheviks, while winning in Petrograd, were a poor second in the Assembly, which met in Petrograd on January 5, 1918, refused to endorse the Bolshevik seizure of power, and was then forcibly dispersed by the Bolsheviks after one session...
...Playing on a latent and, let it be said, populist fear of subversive activity, McCarthy propelled himself to prominence with a wild invention of numbers— just that, numbers, rarely names—of alleged subversives in the State Department, over 200 in one speech, a smaller number in another when pressed to name names...
...Looking back, "this age of conformity"—skipping the backlash of '60s-activist extremism—has proved more debilitating than the firecracker explosions of McCarthyism...
...Barth...
...Such a sacrifice is an act of selfbetrayal on the part of the individual and it is destructive of self...
...New York: Viking Press...
...So, District Council 37 has prevented the imposition of total indecency upon city workers and the people who depend on them...
...Gerald Ford may have waxed righteous about New York City's jerry-built financial structures, but Newfield and Dubrul explain that the architects of New York's financial pyramid schemes were the finest Republican financeers in the land...
...Catch 22...
...q Stanley Plastrik The Russian Revolution Revisited THE BOLSHEVIKS COME TO POWER: THE REVOLUTION OF 1917 IN PETROGRAD, by Alexander Rabino witch...
...the revolution was the act of leaders working from above and behind the scenes...
...Their course seemed to us both dangerous and senseless...
...We identified with a handful of writers...
...The autobiographical cast of the hook, though ultimately ill-conceived as I shall argue in a moment, gives it a tone of authenticity that is enhanced by the author's critical sense...
...the '60s as a time of youthful romantic heroism...
...Mihajlov rejects nationalism and cultural chauvinism...
...As The Abuse of Power reveals, public officials did indeed make the decisions that bankrupted New York City, but they did so in pursuit of private priorities, not ambitious social goals...
...Since Gates of Eden is apt to become an influential text, I should like to concentrate my remarks on its defects...
...It is therefore important to reconstruct the '60s around its missing center of liberal values, especially since the volume of sentimental literature by the new revisionists grows...
...A civil war begun by the bourgeoisie against an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, against the soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies, is inconceivable...
...Wherever public employees demand a living wage, women's groups demand day-care facilities for children, poor people demand adequate health care, or working-class students demand affordable college tuitions, they run head-on into the charge of New York City's profligacy...
...The Left-SR's and the Left- or Internationalist-Mensheviks (whose spokesman was the much underrated Martov, though exhibiting great prescience, will find their warnings unheeded: "A coming-out by the workers and soldiers would be a monstrous crime...
...Although he remained a Leninist to the end, Trotsky later regretted the sharp personal break that would take place at this point between himself and Martov, leader of the Left-Mensheviks...
...Today Con Ed is again financially sound, earning an 8 percent profit for its investors, at a time when both New York State and New York City are in much shakier condition than the purveyor of the nation's highest-priced elec tricy...
...All Power to the Soviets...
...They reveal a deep confusion in Dickstein's basic attitude toward recent American culture and politics, which I think originates in a blurring of the idea of autobiography with the mere subjectivism of the '60s that he so obviously admires...
...Mihajlov pins his hopes for the realization of future change on the effectiveness of thought itself...
...On his way to Smolny, Lenin, with his traveling companion, boarded an empty trolley car run by a conductress...
...Mr...
...Not all of the potentialities unfolded fully on a larger scale, for the generation of the '60s, along with the rest of us, was spared full success in the end...
...And by confronting racism, sexism and militarism...
...Barthelme...
...The "outside" world of fear that swept beyond government personnel and agencies is hardly mentioned...
...Future elections to the Constituent Assembly, they accurately predicted, would find the Bolsheviks in a minority, behind the peasant-backed SR party.* BEFORE EXAMINING Rabinowitch's version of the seizure of power, the much-argued question of Lenin's precise relation to the October revolution must be considered...
...On the answer to that depends the fate of the West...
...Dickstein's autobiographical self-indulgence— his misunderstanding of the demands of the genre—accounts also for his eccentric vision of America: Gates of Eden concerns itself with some very important strains of American culture of the '50s and '60s, not with the whole of it, or even a part that stands for the whole, as the subtitle of the book promises...
...SOME journalists, urbanists, and bureaucrats may find much to disagree with in The Abuse of Power, whose villains include virtually every major business and political leader of the past two decades, and whose lone hero is Charles Rosen, leader of the successful rent strike at the Co-op City housing development...
...Many Western scholars, politicians, and popular spokesmen have condemned Soviet communism because of its obsession with power, but such condemnations have been included in general indictments of socialism...
...When the attainment of power becomes the primary goal of any revolutionary movement, discipline becomes paramount, individual responsibility is again sacrificed, and the pursuit of social and economic justice gets lost in the process...
...Dickstein's mannerist consciousness thus creates a sanitized and curiously aloof view of the '60s: the most distasteful political and cultural forms and consequences of radical individualism are glazed over, as in the treatment of Mailer's notes on violence in "The White Negro...
...Basic tasks set forth for the new government included confiscation of manorial lands without compensation, and their transfer to peasant committees was put into effect in advance of any scheduling of a first session of the already convoked Constituent Assembly (all parties and tendencies agreed on this measure...
...not an unfamiliar phenomenon...
...By 1951, the White House had concluded that the "be quiet and he will go away" approach had failed...
...David Shine, will find only incidental references to them here...
...Given the climate of the time, there were those who were afraid to subscribe, preferring to get their copies "anonymously" at newsstands, even as the heat of the McCarthy era slipped into the tepid waters of Ike's ineffable syntax...
...But the students, the poor, the colored population, all those in whom Marcuse believes, are more or less infected by the spirit of violence, which means the totalitarian spirit...
...14.95...
...The names that did turn up (Lattimore, Service, for example) had already received their share of investigatory accusation, and they had their defenders in high office, such as Dean Acheson...
...The idea of acting out a utopian vision of communism had its counterpart in the determination of many young people (as well as a fair number of older people) to express a debased version of modernism...
...This is a fundamentally fresh view of Lenin, his role, and his party...
...However suitable for an examination of other intellectuals who share his parochialisms, Dickstein's attitude blinds him to the larger currents in American society and culture, not to mention their nuances: the conflicts of the '60s, he writes, "unmasked another Old Regime whose convenient symbol was Eisenhower, whose substance was the increasingly decayed and irrelevant traditions of rural or small-town America...
...Truman, at first, dismissed McCarthy as a hollow threat—"the greatest asset the Kremlin has"—but by 1950 he came to realize that McCarthy was more than a passing nuisance...
...Fried finds a more prevalent Republican view attributed to Senator John W. Bricker: "Joe, you're a dirty son of a bitch, but there are times when you've got to have a son of a bitch around, and this is one of them...
...Similarly, the '60s are carved into three cultural-political slices --an early phase (the hopeful Kennedy-.Johnson years...
...Because it is politically impossible to bring off, a voluntary community of fully realized equals turns out to be a cruel illusion...
...A DIVIDED CONSCIOUSNESS permits Dickstein a final evasion...
...The point I wish to make, and it is mine, not Mr...
...One must realize that not until August 31 did the Bolshevik faction in the Petrograd soviet (which, of course, now had become the most powerful soviet) receive the vote of a clear majority of deputies present—and it was a majority based upon the deputies' response to the moderate Bolshevik proposals presented by Kamenev...
...In fairness, New York City's bizarre financial policies should be viewed as an orthodox Republican scheme to line bankers' pockets—not as a Democratic program to throw money at the poor...
...Grass...
...In this projected soviet democratic government, all socialist groups would work together (the Kronstadt soviet was noted for the harmony of its internal political relationships...
...The city fails to collect an estimated $570.8 million a year in real estate taxes from the landlords, and loses an additional $300 million from sales taxes collected by merchants but never turned over to the tax collector...
...Ike kept McCarthy at arm's length, but the Senator crept into campaigns here and there, wherever he could make a speech, with mixed results at best...
...degenerated into unabashed conservatism...
...the Petrograd masses, to the extent that they supported the Bolsheviks in the overthrow of the Provisional Government, did so not out of any sympathy for strictly Bolshevik rule but because they believed the revolution and the Congress to be in imminent danger...
...Some of its notable exemplars, Howe's targets then and now, are still with us, except that "conformity" has, sadly (predictably...
...204 pp...
...McCarthy did not electioneer for Lodge, and Kennedy projected something less than a profile in courage by not speaking out against McCarthy...
...Without this social matrix, the personal dimensions of the vision turn sour...
...Inferences about a culture as diverse as ours tend to be highly speculative and usually inflated...
...The Abuse of Power is filled with anecdotes, statistics, and accounts of events that have not been reported elsewhere...
...But this is also an explicitly ideological work, designed to refute the conven tional wisdom that has been offered by everyone from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, to Time and Newsweek...
...This spiritual renaissance is evidenced by the writings and activities of such intellectual dissidents as Sakharov, Ginzberg, Syniaysky, and others in the Soviet Union as well as many others who are less well-known to the West (like Mihajlov himself) who live in the smaller Communist countries of Eastern Europe...
...when "dissent" graduated to "resistance"), and a late, "Weatherman" phase, when everything fell apart...
...THE BOTTOM FELL OUT of the market for New York City bonds only after the major New York banks, led by David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, sold approximately $2.3 billion of the city's securities, as they emptied out their portfolios between the summer of 1974 and March 1975...
...The audience upon which a rich culture depends loses its bearings as standards of excellence sag, disciplined learning falls into disfavor, and the delicate webs of reason, history, and tradition begin to come apart...
...He argues: The will for absolute power is the fundamental inner force of communism...
...He provides no serious theoretical treatment of the nature of the political economy of American capitalism, which knits together the postwar decades, and no extended account of discontinuities in the economy, education, and the occupational structure...
...As the authors themselves acknowledge, District Council 37 has "survived" under Gotbaum's resilient leadership, and, as with the State of Israel, mere survival has been no mean achievement...
...This is not ; simply one side of a complex period, as Dickstein would have it: it is one central pattern of a manycentered period...
...On being ignored by Paul Goodman at a seminar in the early '60s, Dickstein admits that his "bright-young-man's ego was bruised...
...Nervous about its effects, Dickstein nevertheless does not show that this fragmentary view of modernism dissolves important tensions into a muddled activism, destroying the boundaries between imagination and reason, aesthetics and ethics, art and politics...
...Tom Dewey's defeat in 1948 had emboldened conservative Republicans to use any means by which they could mount an attack on the Truman administration...
...The spiritual renaissance in Eastern Europe must become international in scope to meet the international challenges of decadent affluence and totalitarianism...
...Mihajlov places heavy stress on a concept of conformity, the "sacrifice of the individual (who represents the future) to society (which represents the present...
...During the entire week when many on the faculty [among them, Dickstein] were working to conciliate the situation and keep the police from being called, what was going on was nonstop education...
...Less than a month later, the New York State legislature approved a $500 million bail-out for Con Ed, in the form of an agreement to use public funds to pay for the construction of two new Con Ed power plants...
...But the method clearly is hazardous...
...Builders demolished hundreds of small businesses in Lower and MidManhattan to make way for high-rise buildings, including the state-financed "World Trade Center," creating a glut of unrented office space...
...The political and literary fathers—Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Lewis Feuer, Nathan Glazer, Saul Bellow, Philip Rahv, and Irving Howe—wrote the opening round of generally harsh assessments of the '60s...
...On first reading, Dickstein recalls being enthralled by the prospect of better orgasms "while the qualified homage to violence a few lines earlier...
...An unholy alliance of builders, architects, lawyers, politicians, insurance com panies, and nursing-home operators systematically bilked the social programs—from Medicaid, to day care, to subsidized housing—whose excessive costs are generally perceived as having pushed New York City toward bankruptcy...
...He saw in it indeed signs of wavering, if not a downright betrayal of the revolutionary cause itself, as his denunciations of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other leading proponents of "moderate Bolshevik" views testify...
...Pynchon...
...More than a pardonable shorthand, such pretension and insensitivity inform the imaginative center of the book, predisposing Dickstein to denigrate the '50s, celebrate the '60s, and lament much of the '70s...
...MEN AGAINST MCCARTHY, by Richard M. Fried...
...Discovering the larger intellectual world of New York after a childhood spent in orthodox Jewish surroundings, Dickstein entered Columbia in 1957, where he came under the spell of Lionel Trilling: "What probably has marked me more than anything," he observes, "was that I came to consciousness between the generations...
...So wrote Zinoviev in the Bolshevik press...
...Various permutations of debased modernism and romantic visions of psychedelic individualism and communism do not represent the only paths toward barbarism: others have lost their way in the confusing social and ideological terrain of postwar America...
...insisted on transfer of power to the soviets or creation of a revolutionary government responsible to the soviet, often coupling such demands with a call for another national Congress of Soviets...
...10.95...
...Fried compresses a definition of McCarthyism into "semantic violence...
...Newfield and Dubrul focus on the interests and institutions that profited during the heady years when New York City sold $13 billion in debt issues interests and institutions that still are doing very well, thank you, while counseling their fellow citizens on the virtues of sacrifice...
...in all spheres of spiritual life, every force of Communist fictionalism is directed not toward making people think in a Communist way but toward making them not think at all...
...In its coverage of Con Edison, just as with its reporting on the banks, the New York Times accepted coroprate claims at face value and never published an in-depth report on the utility's miraculous recovery...
...The Beatles...
...The dictionary consensus defines it as reckless accusation of pro-Communist activity unsupported by proof or, more generally, as the employment of unfair investigative procedures, especially against government employees...
...But this moderation, which Lenin's opponents said was a mere ruse, quickly ended, to be replaced by the final, abrupt demand that power be seized immediately in the name of the soviets...
...There is much to admire in this bold undertaking...
...But had it...
...BECAUSE OUR LANGUAGE has embraced the word "McCarthyism," it is worth recalling that the whole McCarthyite affair peaked and declined within a brief few years, 1950 to 1954, which is not to say that the damage of fear was not real enough, whether in government, in factories, or—and very visibly—in the media...
...There is no question that this echoed the views of the Petrograd masses, just as there is no visible intent here of staging an insurrection before the Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly were scheduled to meet...
...If the New York City crisis did not exist, American capitalism would have had to create it...
...Let's concentrate all our energies on preparations for the Congress of Soviets," the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks declared...
...Convene Regional Congresses Immediately...
...Prepare for the Congress of Soviets on October 20...
...Dickstein illustrates the paths of the new sensibility against the background of the'S0s through fleeting analyses of the fiction of Said Bellov, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, and through chapters on the New Journalism (Tom Wolfe, Mailer again), Black writers (from Richard Wright to Eldridge ('leaver), the "Age of Rock," and the recent experimental fiction of Donald Barthelme and Rudolph Wurlitzer...
...To a large and surprising extent, Mihajlov's entire analysis depends upon the potential of the West to find its bearings and avoid the pitfalls of the totalitarian experience...
...Another major private institution, Con Ed, was in difficult financial straits (although the utility was still making money) during the aftermath of the Arab oil boycott in early 1974...
...Those of us who were raised on that version of the Russian Revolution symbolized in the storming of the Petrograd Winter Palace and the dramatic gesture of Antonov-Ovseenko, he of the broadbrimmed, black felt hat, as he bursts into the room where Kerensky's ministers are seated and, with a gesture of his arm, sweeps them all into the "dustbin of history"—we will never forget the impact this conception of the revolution had upon us...
...And discipline is precisely what Dickstein—or anyone else who relies on the method of inferring cultural patterns from a critical discussion of literary texts—needs...
...Whatever the drama of popular recollection, Fried devotes relatively little space to McCarthy's antagonist, lawyer John Welch...
...The nature of Mihajlov's spiritual renaissance now becomes more apparent...
...Dickstein works on a broad canvas, ordering a wealth of detail into a clear image of the polarities of recent American culture...
...Fried's thesis that the Republicans, even those few who had little taste for McCarthy's methods, saw in his sweeping irrespon sibility an opportunity to belabor the Democrats...
...Only the creation of a broadly representative, exclusively socialist government by the Congress of Soviets, which is what they believed the Bolsheviks stood for [emphasis added—S...
...Here is Dickstein on education at occupied Columbia: What the policeman failed to understand was the different forms education can take...
...P.], appeared to offer the hope of insuring that there would not be a return to the hated ways of the old regime, of avoiding death at the front and achieving a better life, and of putting a quick end to Russia's participation in the war...
...By any definition McCarthyism existed long before the Senator from Wisconsin appeared on the scene, and continues in one form or another...
...The Left SR Boris Kamkov declared at an SR gathering...
...Among the proposals that were to be brought before the Assembly was workers' control over industrial production, nationalization of key industries, and a special proposal for a universal democratic peace...
...Like any chain-letter scheme, the budget scam had to end one day—and the day of reckoning came soon after the bankers began dumping tons of the city's paper on the market...
...If we take the Kronstadt soviet as typical of the political evolution of the thousands of workers', peasants', soldiers' and sailors' district soviets throughout the land, in late August and early September 1917 the demands of this vanguard soviet were still strikingly moderate and democratic: "a decisive rupture with the capitalists...
...But then, with time, under the impact of the horrors of Stalinism—and with a new view of Lenin, single-handedly and by the force of his magnetic personality and powerful mind forcing through the revolution against his own party's backsliders—a new view emerged, presenting the revolution as a Blanquist coup d'Itat engineered by a conspiratorial handful at whose head stood Lenin, master of the "hardline" strategy...
...The Stones...
...Such passages are not merely embarrassing...
...Within these limits it is thorough beyond complaint...
...He sees in the Soviet dissidents and their brethren in Eastern Europe the potential for transforming the rigid Communist system into a humane socialist system which allows free spiritual growth and maximizes the realization of socioeconomic justice...
...Rabinowitch rejects the views of Masaryk ("The October Revolution was anything but a popular movement...
...And it creates the surface impression of a balanced, judicious view...
...John DeLury of the sanitation workers' union and Albert Shanker of the teachers' union are portrayed in the Times as brokers for special interest groups, which indeed they are, but Charles Luce of Con Ed and David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan are allowed to parade through the news pages as representatives of the broader public interest, which they most certainly are not...
...The two most serious lapses occur in the sketchy treatment of the sensibility of the New Left and in the discussions of the cultural modernism of the '60s...
...At the same time we believed that if this were done in another way, say by means of the seizure of power in Petrograd before the congress, this might appear to be adventurist—as the seizure of power, not by the soviets, but by one political party...
...Aware of these limitations, Dickstein nevertheless is given to reckless exuberance...
...Yet, as I remember it, there were no heroes among us...
...If we do, I believe that the task will demand, among other things, a renewal of halfforgotten liberal values and habits of mind that Dickstein—and a majority of the writers he admires most—fails to bring into clear and steady focus...
...These individuals are linked, according to Mihajlov, by a spiritual bond of common striving and experience and by the physical bond of the samizdat—the legendary underground publishing system operated by these dissidents throughout Eastern Europe...
...It is self-destructive in that conformity requires the individual to give up responsibility for his acts in exchange for the material satisfactions of employment and social acceptance...
...As a perspective on culture, the romantic vision may inspire brilliant texts, but it also yields less sanguine results to the extent that it infects the larger Text...
...In capsule, it is Mr...
...Innovative Nelson Rockefeller devised New York's paper economy...
...While they followed party line in deploring the Administration's "complacency to the threat of Communism here and abroad," they reproved Republican colleagues (unnamed) for "the selfish exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance," objecting to the Senate becoming a "forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity...
...As the author convincingly demonstrates, from the February revolution onward, the danger of dissension within the Bolshevik party was quite strong...
...bourgeois parties (Kadets, etc...
...q Joseph Stipanovich Free Dissidents UNDERGROUND NOTES, by Mihajlo Mihajlov...
...Had he followed his own counsel, Dickstein might have registered greater success in keeping the "autobiographical impulse under control" by sticking to the texts: for this sort of critical performance itself simultaneously reveals and controls the author's voice...
...Fried has written a book, not a TV script...
...It is within the labor camps, in fact, that spiritual bonds are forged anew, through the regeneration of responsibility within each individual who has been stripped of all illusions in the course of his experience...
...In the end, Lenin's insistence, supported by very few of the top Bolsheviks, that the risks of such a course were outweighed by the need to create at once an exclusively Bolshevik regime would carry the day...
...Rabinowitch feels that this action played directly into Lenin's hands, "paving the way for the creation of a government which had never been publicly broached before—that is, an exclusively Bolshevik regime...
...Because society itself is a prison, the removal of the individual from society does not result in further isolation...
...While stressing the deep link between the party's revolutionary tactics and the Petrograd masses, Rabinowitch attacks the notion that, thanks to Bolshevik unity, discipline, and, above all, to Lenin's revolutionary leadership, the revolution was "inevitable...
...Dickstein, however, seems at ease with what he delivers, noting in the preface that he has "slighted cultural phenomena" for which he feels "little affinity, as well as others that were more conservative than innovative, and therefore tell us little about cultural change...
...There is considerable rhetorical charm, after all, in using the critical weapons of the literary and political fathers to vindicate the sensibilities, and by implication the actions, of the sons and daughters...
...A compound of autobiography and cultural history, Gates of Eden attempts to trace the main patterns of "sensibility, attitude and awareness" that define American culture of the 'S0s and '60s...
...Nor have we yet moved onto a clear space...
...However unfashionable these categories may seem just now, they need to be dealt with in any consideration of the frustrations of the New Left—especially its more or less rapid deliquescence into dogmatism and violence...
...Esteemed by his colleagues, secure in his conservatism, and presumably a shoo-in for reelection that year, he was defeated by John Butler in a campaign so blatantly foul and dishonest (it included a faked composite photo, given wide circulation, showing Tydings standing with Earl Browder) that it led to a Senate probe, which eventually dribbled away into a minor embarrassment for Butler...
...I, for one, quarrel with Newfield's and Dubrul's glib declaration that the municipal employees' union leader Victor Gotbaum has allowed "the business elite running New York City [to] effectively run his union...
...Going beyond mere celebration of the '60s as a time of liberation from the aesthetic, moral, political, and social detritus of the past, Dickstein attempts to bring the revisionist view to critical life by subdividing the postwar decades and pursuinga balanced appraisal of the literature and social criticism of each period...
...Fried's, though I find support in the evidence he has assembled, is that if fewer people had run scared, if more people had thumbed their noses at McCarthy and his little band of bandits, if more people had had the political and moral sense (sense, it hardly required much courage) not to hide from improbable concentration camps that were simply not in the cards then —if, iif we would have been spared McCarthy's outrages sooner, and others as well...
...Yet, for a brief time, their demagogic impudence could create havoc in government agencies...
...In a rare example of the domino theory in action, the default of the most ambitious of Rockefeller's special authorities—the Urban Development Corporation—triggered the dumping of New York City bonds, which, in turn, set off the "fiscal crisis...
...and careful William Simon was among the more energetic of the bond salesmen during the "go-go" '60s, when New York paper, like other dubious stocks and bonds, found a ready market among investors...
...He also rejects the use of violence...
...By now the army's General Staff had been purged...
...The 1952 campaign was, in many ways, a reprise of the 1950 elections—plus Eisenhower...
...To which the weary Martov shouted his response: "Then we'll leave...
...Rabinowitch sums up Lenin's effect upon the evolution of events: Looking back over the period between the Kornilov affair and the decision of October 10 [to seize power] one can say that, as in April, chief responsibility for this drastic transformation in the outlook of the party's top hierarchy belongs to Lenin...
...More important is his conclusion that goes to the heart of the nature of the October revolution itself...
...Thus, for example, the'50s are not recast simply as an era of repression and cultural conformity but also as a time of ferment: in the latter half of the decade...
...would not necessarily lead to civil war: "Only the immediate transfer of all power to the soviets would make civil war in Russia impossible...
...The political resolutions adopted from time to time were not the property of any single party but the work of Bolsheviks, Left SRs (Social Revolutionaries), and Left- or Internationalist-Mensheviks...
...The students were completely existential revolutionaries, learning the whole gamut of political strategies and possibilities as they went along...
...Once these guiding notions are mislaid, the possibilities of genuine spiritual consolation diminish, as do the uneven chances of realizing democratic socialism in this essentially conservative culture...
...Perhaps, but the reader must be prepared to accept Dickstein's revisionist perspective and his misguided Hegelian premise of cultural coherence: otherwise the inferences about Jewish guilt and expiation extracted from compressed readings of Malamud and Bellow do not work...
...In an apparent effort to create panic, Con Ed skipped a dividend that would have cost only $28 million, and so plunged the market for utility stocks into chaos...
...Benton did go down to defeat, but to a Republican who had made no more than grudging use of McCarthy, relying more on Irish support and Ike's pull...
...But the Jewish novel works especially well...
...Later, in the Columbia uprising, he catches a "glimpse of what education can become when linked to practice, at the very moment when the enthusiasm of the New Left was about to dissolve into the mindless dogmatism and violence of the Weathermen...
...428 pp...
...366 pp...
...But, and this is the point, there were also those who felt we had undertaken some extraordinarily courageous feat in publishing a socialist magazine at a time of "palpable" repression...
...Readers who retain a memory of that unsavory pair of "investigators," lawyer Roy M. Cohn and Pvt...
...But since it is impossible to have power over the spiritual world, communism makes every effort to destroy spiritual life, to replace it with a fictitious one over which it has power and which itself serves as the instrument of enslavement...
...Mr...
...People who have not experienced this regeneration, whether they live in a Communist or capitalist state, "do not understand the most important questions facing man (such as sin, slavery, suffering, freedom, and death) and hence live as though they are in a dream...
...The problem is not that the media have deliberately falsified their coverage of the fiscal crisis but that private interests have escaped the close scrutiny routinely applied to public officials or to representatives of working people and the poor...
...His publication of the essays reprinted in this volume was responsible for his present incarceration...
...Insofar as it ignores the importance of moral economy, this idea of romantic communism produces personality disorientation, loneliness, and spiritual hunger rather than a full disclosure of individual powers...
...His political study of revolutionary events in Petrograd and Russia from the summer of 1917 to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October is based on impressive original research using the Russian sources, including minutes, protocols, and ac counts of meetings of the Petrograd district soviets and other institutions whose activities were hitherto unknown, at least to a non-Russian audience...
...Even while Gerald Ford was delivering sermons about New York's spendthrift ways, New York State paid $39.007 billion in federal taxes in 1975, but received only $24.269 billion in federal spending...
...We simply cannot lose sight of the fact that between us and the bourgeoisie there is an enormous third camp, that of the petty bourgeoisie...
...he experienced the '60s not as an innocent but as a man with a divided consciousness, an elder brother caught between intellectual fathers and rebellious children...
...Dickstein contends, shoots of the new sensibility appear in the "prophetic" writings of such figures as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, C. Wright Mills, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Richard Chase, and Paul Goodman...
...Despite occasional lapses...
...As this is written, Gotbaum has almost single-handedly resisted the bankers' effort to attain a permanent veto power over the city budget, and the municipal employees' union pension funds have become the city's preeminent banker...
...it became clear to those of us working in factories and barracks that the Bolsheviks were mobilizing their forces not simply to defend the government established by the congress [of Soviets], but rather to seize power in advance of the congress...
...The banks enriched themselves by selling the extraordinary volume of tax-exempt city debt issues, or keeping them in their own vaults and then dumping the securities on the market—after their own losses on the ill-fated Real Estate Development trusts, shaky Third World governments, Nelson Rockefeller's insolvent Urban Investment Corporation, and other dubious loans forced them to reexamine their own portfolios...
...Nursing-home operators, among them the ineffable Bernard Bergman, ripped off an estimated $300 million in Medicaid funds in just one year, while profiting from the misery of the elderly...
...Genuine experiment degenerates into mere novelty, and cultural life turns into spectacle...
...This spirit, which justified an uncritical rejection of the entire present order of things, complemented the utopian vision of the future...
...11.95 A brief advertisement for "A New Magazine for the 70s" features a cropped photograph of a crowd of young people...
...I should like to add my own: a pipsqueak menace allowed to balloon into a frightening assault on civil liberties by timidity and indecision inside and outside of government circles...
...Now the dispersed survivors of the heroic generation, having failed to make history conform to their largest desires, begin to write it in the form of memoirs, novels, and more or less formal accounts...
...the strategy and tactics" they employed...
...Distancing his romantic subject through a classic, critical lens, he avoids a sustained interrogation of the revisionist paradigm...
...The book, then, is concerned almost exclusively with "McCarthyism [as] preeminently a weapon deployed by Republicans to end the Democratic hegemony...
...The population slept peacefully," Trotsky will declare before the soviet, "and did not know that at this time one power was replaced by another...
...Lenin will make his dramatic appearance in the hall and announce "the construction of a proletarian socialist state...
...Slaughterhouse Five...
...The essays reflect, even in translation, the thoughtful analysis and the trenchant prose that have provoked the ire of the Yugoslav authorities...
...Some called for the creation of a government representing workers, soldiers, and peasants...
...THE PROJECT of creating cultural history from an analysis of "key" texts may yield satisfying results...
...The permanent government is bipartisan, enrolling Democrat-Liberals and RepublicanConservatives, "reformers" and regulars, in the business arrangements that determine who obtains lucrative public contracts, Medicaid dollars, and state and city Mitchell-Lama loans to build heavily subsidized "middle-income" housing that only the wealthy can afford...
...Later, of course, these same banks made more money from issues of special Municipal Assistance Corporation securities—at sky-high interest rates—and then dictated the reorganization of New York City finances on their own terms...
...Rabinowitch recounts the story of how Lenin, raging at the party's hesitations and in defiance of the party's instructions to remain in hiding, donned a disguise and emerged from hiding to go to the Smolny Institute in order to spur on the party leadership...
...Music opened us up, and took off...
...he writes decently...
...but for the time being it is closer to the bourgeoisie than to [the Bolsheviks...
...The Wagners, Lindsays, and Beames come and go, but, in Newfield's apt phrase, the "permanent government" of politicians, bankers, real estate investors, builders, corporate leaders, and well-connected lawyers mismanages the city's affairs year after year...
...This subjective impulse may liberate individuals from the pppressive claims of history, tradition, and society, exempting them from disciplined moral, aesthetic, and political canons of taste and judgment...
...q Emanuel Geltman Of Mice or Men...
...our worries were more pragmatic, as they still are: would we raise the money, get enough good articles, attract enough readers...
...What remains to be done is to view this "ism" in historical perspective and there is, consequently, much to be said for the restricted "focus in this essay upon the McCarthy problem as his political foes perceived it and...
...Thus, for instance, all history is replaced by fictitious history...
...q David Kusnet Who Killed New York City...
...But the New York Times played down the story of the banks' dumping New York City paper—literally burying the item on the obituary page...
...The critical component of Dickstein's sensibility happily prevents him from indulging in unrestrained admiration for his subject throughout the book, prompting him to acknowledge in the epilogue that even if liberation yields a measure of free space, the exercise of freedom "sometimes .. . involves the submission to discipline...
...This critical side of Dickstein's sensibility tempers his enthusiasm for the spontaneity of the '60s the free-wheeling, experimental spirit, the political utopianism, the attempts to move literary modernism from the closets of the academy into "the streets," as Trilling put it...
...Drawing heavily upon David Muchnik's article "Death Warrant for the Cities," which appeared in the December 1976 Dissent, Newfield and Dubrul describe how public funds followed private investment out of the northeastern industrial cities—first to the suburbs whose growth was underwritten by the post-World War 1I housing and highway programs, later to the Sunbelt of the West and Southwest, which received the bulk of federal spending during the Nixon-Ford years...
...Things were to turn out quite differently than the Petrograd masses were sure they would...
...He conversed with her about the political situation, found her dissatisfied with the lack of action and proceeded to explain to her his belief in the need to take power at once...
...No longer need the opponents of public services argue their point of view on its merits...
...Goodman] published his journal Five Years to show the world that he was not a good man but one driven and debased by sexual hungers and humiliations, I was able to guess at what happened: I simply hadn't turned him on...
...Frequently they search for their distinctive voices within the rich, nostalgic vein of revisionist sentiment that provides im aginative unity to their basic sense of the '60s, and their reading of the surrounding decades...
...Although not without substance, this generally sanguine impression strikes me as seriously misleading...
...It seemed to us that this would immediately complicate the situation and make it impossible to avoid civil war [Emphasis added— S. P...
...no one can say that there exists at the present time any organization more powerful than the soviets...
...In a written summary of their arguments against Lenin's strategy, Zinoviev and Kamenev underlined the importance of the "petty bourgeoisie" (middle class...
...Acknowledging the historic significance of Lenin's leadership, but rejecting as largely mythical the notion of the party's organizational unity and discipline, Rabinowitch proposes to emphasize the party's "internal relatively democratic, tolerant, and decentralized structure and method of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character—in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist mode...
...The permanent government and its friends profited from the unheralded decisions that bankrupted New York City...
...More often than not, dubious general claims turn out to depend upon a circular confusion of evidence: such claims conform to some dominant view of a period, qualifying, revising, and confirming it, but staying within its imaginative boundaries...
...N ew York City's financial crisis has been a tragedy for many Americans who never travel east of the Hudson River...
...And the long midnight, now entering its 60th year, will have begun...
...Those who adopt the idea of a freewheeling radical individualism in hopes of achieving a voluntary communist community of abundance prepare the way for multiple disasters...
...The revolution was the achievement of a determined group, with the Petrograd masses forming a confused and pliable backdrop to the events...
...Cuckoo's Nest...
...In this invaluable history, Jack Newfield and Paul Dubrul show that the New York City crisis is much more a product of our economic system than of liberal attempts to meddle with it...
...M ihajlo Mihajlov, the writer and student of Russian literature, is currently serving a seven-year prison term for dissemination of "hostile propaganda" in his native Yugoslavia...
...honest John Mitchell originated the concept of "moral-obligation" financing...
...Alexander Rabinowitch has reexamined these contradictory views and produced the most serious study of the October revolution to appear in many years...
...They demonstrated once again the sad implications of cramming experience into a dialectic of repression and liberation: for such a practice threatens to destroy the liberal ideas of genuine individualism, political democracy, and cultural excellence that any reasonable version of civilized existence requires...
...As The Abuse of Power reveals, that's exactly what happened...
...Astonishing though it may seem, some of the more radical leaders of the Petrograd Bolshevik committee objected strongly to the views of the "moderate" Lenin...
...The author's nostalgic attachment to canons of criticism enables him to have everything both ways...
...According to this view, the embers of literary modernism were stoked by such prophets as Mailer, Brown, and Marcuse and made the basis of a new cultural-political "praxis...
...One wishes that the author had .I, departed from his dissertational purposes long enough to pursue these polemically intriguing matters...
...and he gives us a new context for the viewpoint implicit in Trotsky's scornful response to Masaryk that, "as a matter of fact, it was the most popular massinsurrection in all history...
...I recall that when Dissent first appeared some damned it as too far to the "left," and some as too far to the "right"—much the same as now...
...Meanwhile, in the wake of the city budget cutbacks, students sit 45 in a class, municipal hospitals have been shut down, the subway fare has risen to 50¢, free tuition is a memory at City University, and working mothers have been forced to quit their jobs following the closing of public day-care centers...
...Unaccustomed as he was to rough treatment, Tydings clashed repeatedly with McCarthy but, on the evidence presented here, still did not take him seriously enough...
...Hence "my research," writes Rabinowitch, "suggests that the relative flexibility of the party, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood, had at least as much to do with the ultimate Bolshevik victory as did revolutionary discipline, organizational unity, or obedience to Lenin...
...Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden, which may be read as a critical gloss on the Mother Jones blurb, is the most ambitious cultural formulation of the revisionist outlook I know of...
...15...
...Denying Lenin's contention that a majority of the Russian people backed the Bolsheviks, they expressed the view that perhaps a majority of the workers and a "significant percentage" of the soldiers were with the Bolsheviks, "but everything else is questionable...
...Nor is there any mention of the class origins and characteristics of the '60s generation...
...and the creation of a democratic republic...
...Superimposed on this icon is the question, "What's Left of the '60sT' The answer: "MOTHER JONES, Finally...
...There is some virtue in this...
...Fried ably summarizes the investigative binge, the proliferation of loyalty probes...
...The most crucial problem that Mihajlov faced was to develop a valid critique of Communist totalitarianism...
...The Lenin of October, fiercely demanding the party's immediate seizure of power, differed considerably from the Lenin of September who, as Rabinowitch points out, had tried to reassure the moderate socialists that an end of the coalition with the *Elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in November, as scheduled...
...The biggest question is whether it is possible to come to that true freedom, democratic legality, organic order, without going through the illness of totalitarianism...
...Newfield and Dubrul have here compiled a history of the fiscal crisis that effectively debunks the corporate conservatives' myth about New York City...
...It was this "lively debate" and "spirited give-andtake" that often aroused Lenin's rage...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
