REVIEWS
Paroni, Adele S. & Wieck, David & Brumberg, Abraham & Sexton, Patricia Cayo & Coser, Lewis
IN STALIN'S TIME: MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES IN SOVIET FICTION, by Vera S. Dunham. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. 383 pp., $16.95. I t is the central thesis of Professor...
...A special chapter is devoted to the contributors to the magazine Arguments, a little band, mostly of former Stalinists, who under the leadership of Edgar Morin and Kostas Axelos attempted between 1956 and 1965 to fuse elements of a highly critical Marxism with as diverse streams of thought as those of Heidegger, Freud, and Sartre...
...The book is in some respects exasperating because Reichert, who calls himself "something of an anarchist," wants his readers to share his enthusiasm and affection for his subjects, and he makes his wishes transparent...
...In studying the effects of Catholic schooling, for example, he sought answers to charges that Catholics schools are divisive in our society, that they are educationally inferior and impede their student's social and occupational success...
...The reader who expects to find this thesis illustrated by means of heavy verbiage, statistical tables, and other such paraphernalia of contem235 porary social science will be pleasantly surprised...
...Communal Catholics will be more educated, sophisticated, selective in their style of Catholicism...
...In the late 1820s, when employers sought to reduce the pay of millworkers, women and men together conducted "turnouts" or spontaneous and brief strikes of protest...
...It went together with a new appreciation of the humanist neo-Hegelian philosophy of the young Marx, especially after the latter's Parisian Manuscripts of 1844 had become available in French...
...Most Catholic priest are not happy in their vocations...
...Catholics are no longer disproportionately bluecollar workers...
...To Soviet readers, pop fiction is— despite its obvious cant and bizarre distortions—a reflection or part of life itself...
...Reichert thereby is able to compress into some 600 pages what would have been a multivolume anthology...
...Its material rewards were greater, and eventually they were to assume a decisive importance...
...Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press...
...yet it lived in constant fear of the latter as well...
...Not, mind you, pushing ahead for the good of the people, for the good of the party, for the good of Communism, but "to become somebody...
...He maintains that it certainly will not vanish...
...One of the deans of American Sovietology, Professor Alexander Gerschenkron of Harvard University, long ago called attention to this valuable source of information...
...Most of them vigorously agree that women need to organize and affiliate with established unions...
...he was not "to expect anything in return"—the returns were to come in the next generation, perhaps even later...
...The standard explanation is that Soviet readers prefer novels, since newspapers in their country are a crushing bore and magazines are not much better...
...Again, false...
...for this reason he sees certain atheists, who were hardly anarchists in any specific sense, as precursors of anarchism...
...This book does not go all the way, no book can...
...In the same way, Poster's loving appraisal of the later Sartre might profitably be read together with Lionel Abel's cold and sharply critical dissection in Dissent (Spring 1961...
...For the period until the 1950s, where Reichert breaks off, he provides the patient reader with a picture, more exactly a mosaic picture, of American anarchism, in its intellectual aspects though not much with respect to its practice...
...He was impressed with the high social position of many of the allies, and his respect for status and 243 wealth would override even his later hostility to the League, as long as socially prominent ally Margaret Dreier Robins was its president...
...Reichert knows that the 19th-century individualist-anarchists were not "capitalist"-anarchists, and he has a sense for the individualism of the anarchist-communists...
...Following the depression of 1837, the Female Labor Reform Association, with Sarah Bagley at its head, was formed and joined with the New England Workingmen's Association to agitate for the ten-hour day and better conditions in the mills...
...True, but it is precisely this cyclical alteration that made even the lives of the (eventual) beneficiaries of the "Big Deal" a hell of tension and insecurity...
...The young men and women who emerged out of the non-Communist resistance movement, as well as those who in the next two decades broke with Stalinism, searched for a doctrine that would link their sense of the passing of the old bourgeois order to their passionate expectations of the coming of a socialist society, as well as to their concern with personal autonomy and authenticity that had been forged in the resistance movement and among those who had ultimately succeeded in freeing themselves from Stalinist thought control...
...The first mill strike took place in 1828 in Dover, New Hampshire, where hundreds of young women paraded with banners, shot off gunpowder to protest the company's efforts to fine tardy workers, to forbid talking on the job, discharge workers for undefined "debaucheries," require church attendance, and blacklist rule-breakers...
...His thesis is that the lives, status, attitudes, and feelings of the Catholic population 239 have been so completely distorted in the national consciousness in past years that the public perceives Catholics as merely a set of stereotypes...
...Neither is it quite a "study," though he calls it that, if from a study one expects close critical evaluation of what is presented, namely, what particular American anarchists have "said and believed...
...he reminds us of Clarence Darrow's Tolstoyan anarchism...
...xii + 415 pp...
...A sturdy lass to her lover: "Tell me, do you have a sacred dream...
...247 pp...
...Even though most of the structuralists claimed to belong to the left, one cannot help but feel that they reflect the progressive disillusionment of many French intellectuals with the possibilities of a decisive transformation of French society by socialist 238 forces...
...Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press...
...The intelligentsia—the true intelligentsia, that is—had been decimated by Stalin (read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs), and while its old spirit of independent thinking and political defiance has recently begun to reassert itself, this merely makes it an even more unreliable partner for the Soviet elite...
...q PARTISANS OF FREEDOM: A STUDY IN AMERICAN ANARCHISM, by William 0. Reichert...
...For example, he overlooks the uneven quality of the writing in Arguments, which contained some worthwhile work but also a good deal of tout Paris fashionable cleverness and radical chic...
...It was, therefore, to the vast "new legion of productive engineers, organizers, administrators, and managers" that the Soviet leadership turned for support...
...15.95...
...There were quite a number of modish celebrity intellectuals among the authors he discusses, and these should have been clearly distinguished from the serious thinkers...
...The Research shows otherwise...
...Until radical feminists rediscovered Emma Goldman, the anarchism that "reappeared" in the 1960s had little consciousness of an American anarchist past...
...Central planning and the overriding superiority of heavy industry were now the order of the day, and so the official critics let loose upon the playwright, 236 whose "crime" was simply lack of omniscience...
...It may well be, I think it is, that Reichert sees something in his mosaic that I am unable to see, and this would also account for some judgments and appraisals that strike me as odd...
...Up to that time the French, in their intellectual provincialism, held fast to the Cartesian tradition and kept their distance from what appeared to them the speculative excesses of post-Kantian German idealism...
...The challenge left us by our foremothers is to discover patterns of meanings in their lives and to comprehend, through analysis and synthesis, what events sat' to them and to us...
...New York: Random House / Vintage Books...
...this is a topic that calls for (at least) the insights of a Camus...
...Some of these thinkers indeed made important contributions, but to claim that they inaugurated a "major intellectual revolution, a second Enlightment," seems to me exaggerated...
...237 It all began with the discovery and reception of Hegel's thought in France over a hundred years after the death of the master...
...It is this development that Poster has attempted to depict...
...So voluminous is this material, and the documents yet untapped, that the unmet challenge is to synthesize it and disclose its hidden meanings...
...It was only natural, then, that the two fused to produce the social class that is by now the very backbone of the Soviet system...
...There is a marvelous chapter on women (family and sex are not to be sneezed at, as long as the Plan is fulfilled), another on recalcitrant academics (who unlike managers and engineers must not be overly preoccupied with their welfare and personal concerns...
...From the regime's point of view, literature has always had to serve patently didactic purposes...
...to be dignified (read: arrogant) vis-a-vis the workers and docile toward their superiors...
...I have a certain small place in that book...
...Psychological testing does not show them deficient in their capacity for intimacy...
...After the strike, the AFL declared that WTUL women were "not qualified to organize," irreligious, and under IWW influence...
...Such hidden structures as myths, kinship, and desire operated unconsciously and hence were removed from deliberate control...
...But the continuity was perpetuated in the writings of Paul Goodman, who had firsthand acquaintance with the older traditions...
...Most Catholics have not even been aware of this discrimination, which, Greeley maintains, has prevented the Catholic intelligentsia from attaining prestige positions in our society...
...In a decided overreaction to the "soft" subject-centered humanism of their predecessors, the structuralists presented a "hard," object-centered, structural analysis...
...Well, how can I explain it to you...
...They enter the dramas that unfold in its pages with curiosity and passion, tend to identify themselves with or be repelled by its characters, to recognize its values, aspirations, and problems, to discuss them in their homes and to vent their opinions (with surprising candor) in letters to editors, authors, and critics...
...The factual information provided, although probably more reliable than in a standard history-as-errors-copied, is not as reliable as I would like it to be...
...Yet, as Dunham demonstrates, this is only part of the answer...
...He does not define what the broader tradition is241 that would have been a different project...
...But the old certainties and the received wisdom of the French rationalistic tradition crumbled during the ordeal of defeat and resistance...
...Now we must start, as they say, pushing ahead to become somebody...
...The peasantry never entered into the calculations of any Bolshevik leaders, from Lenin on, except as a constituency to be lied to and exploited, and it remains as downtrodden today as it was 50 or 60 years ago...
...Its strength is in its coverage of women in the textile and apparel industries and in its attention to the activities of black women in the labor market...
...The fact that male workers and unionists have often had an ambivalent attitude about the competition of low-wage women workers does not cause them to despair of unionism...
...and they are more likely than Protestants to be members of the middle class (taking into account race, region of the country, and urbanism...
...He seems to be in love with existential Marxism of the French variety, and hence shows a lack of critical distance when it comes to its evaluation...
...A deal, "big" or small, is usually transacted between two equal partners, each of whom has something substantial to offer to the other...
...What the book makes unmistakably clear is that the process of embourgeoisement had indeed started in the late '30s, and that it now reigns supreme...
...Still, with Gompers's agreement, the National Women's Trade Union League was founded at the AFL convention of 1903 and it set out to persuade women to join unions and unions to accept them...
...The famous clartt francaise gave way to a new philosophical language, often degenerating into a jargon that mixed German ponderousness with French esprit, if not, sometimes, hot air...
...Reichert has a conception of anarchism that allows him to see "individualism" and "communism" as specific emphases within a broader tradition...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...His inspiration was to be the glorious future...
...But the book is, for a merit, a non"academic" book by an academically employed person (a political scientist...
...He is an outspoken critic of Catholic leadership in its failure to respond to the crisis of conscience endured by many Catholics which was precipitated by the encyclical, and warns that prospects for the future of the institutional church in America are not encouraging...
...7.95...
...Paris had its share of French McLuhans...
...Later the League reluctantly obeyed AFL orders to withdraw from the strike...
...Gompers opposed such government activity...
...Thus, from the beginning, the French Hegel-renaissance involved a pronouncedly left-wing interpretation of Hegel...
...Greeley is concerned here primarily with Catholic people, not with the church as an institution...
...Their antihumanist objectivism aimed at displacing humanity from the center of reality...
...We were now witness to various characteristically French attempts to revitalize Marxist philosophical reflections, partly through a return to Hegel, and to reinterpret Marxism in tune with other philosophical traditions such as phenomenology, existentialism, and, somewhat later, structuralism...
...Nor, to my knowledge, has anyone dealt so perceptively with the function of popular literature in the U.S.S.R...
...6.95 (paper...
...It also recommended, however, that unions take in women who were already employed and set up separate locals for them...
...Reichert wants his people to speak for themselves and by and large they do...
...In 1886, the New Jersey Commissioner of Labor stated: "Since the girls have joined the Knights of Labor here they make the same wages as men...
...Gompers's support for the WTUL vacillated...
...q WE WERE THERE: THE STORY OF WORKING WOMEN IN AMERICA, by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer...
...Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, on the other hand, is given six pages and gay workers three...
...He is entitled to his thesis, for the philosophical roots of anarchism are not clear...
...AMERICA'S IMMIGRANT WOMEN: THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NATION FROM 1609 TO THE PRESENT, by Cecyle S. Neidle...
...Enriching, enlightening, and controversial, The American Catholic indeed is a powerful consciousnessraiser that can benefit readers of all persuasions...
...Celibacy makes it impossible for them to develop a capacity for openness, intimacy, and sympathy with human frailty...
...Reichert fortifies this thesis by stressing the prominence of atheism in anarchist theories, so that "free thought," a strong American (and European) tradition, becomes the broader meaning of anarchism...
...Poster falls short more seriously when it comes to the assessment of the ideas he lucidly expounds...
...stylistically, the book needed an editor badly...
...A third book, America's Immigrant Women, by Cecyle S. Neidle, describes the immigrants' "contribution to the development of a nation from 1609 to the present...
...Unfortunately Poster chose, as he says, "not to deviate very far . . . from the traditional methodological boundaries [of intellectual history...
...In a brilliant chapter, Dunham traces the survival of traditional Russian meshchanstvo—despised by such Bolshevik bards as Vladimir Mayakovsky—and the emergence of a new form under Stalin, when "striving for material goods became an obligation and this imperative became functional," that is to say, when "the profit motif became the basis of Stalin's state capitalism...
...It does not bring us into the contemporary work force or modern unionism...
...280 pp...
...The WTUL, for instance, is covered in two pages and these make only the most condemnatory comments about the AFL...
...With the immigrant movements he tries his best, but the information was simply out of reach...
...to the latter Reichert has access, to the former not...
...A few thousand students may have felt that way, but it is a distortion to equate them with all of France...
...This is a view that may well have been held by the participants and their contemporaries, but it can hardly be seriously sustained ten years later...
...Greeley demonstrates each of these assumptions to be false...
...He has drawn liberally from his previous works and added fascinating, fresh information to flesh out what might well be called the "compleat Catholic of the 1970s...
...His book is a lucidly written and conscientiously documented guide for those who have been perplexed by the somewhat bewildering profusion of French Marxist and proto-Marxist philosophical currents in the postwar period...
...312 pp...
...Events and accounts are one thing, the meaning of history is quite another...
...Perhaps one demurrer is in order: it seems to me that Professor Dunham rather overstates her case for the type of accommodation reached between the Soviet regime and the middle class...
...The League favored legislation the AFL opposed, including national unemployment insurance, public labor exchanges, municipal grocery stores to cut out middlemen's profits...
...both financially and educationally...
...They were (and are) largely apolitical, conformist, craving security, material comfort and social prestige, hostile to egalitarianism, and imbued with that special kind of Russian philistinism, meshchanstvo (from the word meshchaninbourgeois)— a "mentality that is vulgar, imitative, greedy, and ridden with prejudice...
...Because the vocabulary of work and of lineage is so masculine, we need to be constantly reminded that women have always been part of our "manpower resources" and that our foremothers, along with our forefathers, brought forth this new 242 nation and have been keeping it going ever since...
...The Lawrence strike, unlike the ill-fated Paterson strike (also IWW-led) was a smashing victory, not only for the women involved but for the idea of industrial unionism...
...to enrich themselves but never to lose sight of the party's ostensible goal of contentment for everyone...
...Most of them were "ordinary" women, distinguished in their own way, but not in ways most likely to catch the attention of traditional historians...
...Greeley is counting on the Catholic collectivity, however...
...The simple workers with calloused hands, selflessly building the brave new world, were replaced by the producer, the skilled technician, the engineer, or the party secretary who is wise enough to let the manager run his enterprise, however tyrannically, as long as he succeeds and pays lip service to the official cant...
...The Hegel whom the young intellectuals discovered, mainly through the lectures, commentaries, and translations of two maverick philosophers, Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite, was largely the author of the Phenomenology, rather than the later conservative interpreter of the Philosophy of Right...
...In the 1920s, individualism in any form was bitterly decried by the leaders and ideologues of the new state...
...AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT, 1825-1974: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, by Martha Jane Soltow, Mary K. Wery...
...but he has read Tom Paine (for example) and he draws out the anarchist themes in the writings of the great pariah...
...her examples show again and again that the middle class was (at least in Stalin's time) as much a victim of the regime as any other class...
...Too much of this volume is given over, however, to biographies of those immigrants who "made it" in science, medicine, music, art, business...
...In 1909 the WTUL supported the idea of a labor party in opposition to the Gompers policy of rewarding friends and punishing enemies...
...The first strike conducted by women alone' occurred not in New England mills, however, but in New York City, where in 1825 the United Tailoresses formed a union and demanded higher pay...
...He is a bully, an oaf so drunk with success as to refer to the enterprise he manages as "my plant...
...Thus, in a play cited by Dunham the villain (there is always a villain) is manager of a machinebuilding plant...
...apart from mention of one or two conspicuous individuals, it is seldom noticed in studies of America's radical past...
...and in the course of her book she fully justifies her claim that fiction can be used to illuminate important areas of Soviet reality, especially relations between the people and the regime...
...By the 1930s this was the way many anarchists were seeing it...
...They will be loyal to the collectivity, but will shrug off the teaching authority of the institutional church...
...only a minority would marry if they were free to do so...
...He projects as a positive result of the 240 institutional decline the emergence of a new type of American Catholic, "communal Catholics...
...The breadth of his conception leads him to draw into the anarchist sphere some persons whom one would not expect there...
...These new-style Catholics are quite likely to storm the barriers that keep them out of the world of the intellectual, cultural, journalistic, and administrative elite of the nation...
...This was often in sharp contrast to the attitude of the average Knight, who usually did not cooperate with the women's department very enthusiastically, if at all...
...he does particularly well by Voltairine de Cleyre...
...The author acknowledges the extreme difficulty of measuring the subtle and complex issues of moral decisionmaking, but concludes that there is a broad consensus among Americans about what is right and what is wrong...
...It would be many years, Wertheimer observes, before women found the same welcome in a labor organization...
...As between the carrot and the stick, the emergent bourgeoisie got a good part of the former...
...Its women's department received the support of the order's national officers, who tried to put it on a permanent footing, encouraged it to report at each general assembly, and made its director a general officer of the organization...
...He: "I do...
...He did interview a number of key figures, but his book reads nevertheless as if it had been written from library notes in California...
...Instead, most now work in the service sector and in clerical occupations...
...He knows that there is a fundamental and ineradicable difference between anarchists and Marxists that has to do with the status of the individual, a difference that appears in, but goes far beyond, the question of abolition of the state...
...In 1881 the Knights of Labor, an open-door organization that took in unskilled and skilled alike, extended membership to women and by 1886, 192 women's assemblies had been organized and many formerly all-male assemblies had women members...
...Now at last they are being noticed, mainly by women writers, though they also figure prominently in such basic works as World of Our Fathers...
...It's a thesis Greeley returns to again and again—with research to back him up...
...I t is the central thesis of Professor Dunham's extraordinary book that toward the end of World War II the Soviet regime, weakened by a chain of devastating catastrophes, having lost its revolutionary zeal and with it the loyalty of most of its early supporters—the workers and the intelligentsia—entered into a "concordat" with the rising middle class, which was eventually to result in the abandonment of mass terror and the creation of a fundamentally stable, complacent, and — mutatis mutandis—well-functioning social order...
...The party official or the factory manager, both typical "positive heroes" of Stalinist belles-lettres and thus frequently referred to by Dunham, clearly obtained their rewards...
...The stabilized consumer society may be repulsive, but it seems to have squelched the Promethean visions that animated the preceding generation...
...In part this is because the anarchism that became selfconscious in the 1840s was individualist in emphasis, while the anarchism that dates from the 1880s, from the Chicago anarchists, was communist, syndicalist, or collectivist...
...Many of these articles are fascinating in their authenticity, but some others are rather too cryptic and too loosely tied together, and many topics of import are almost ignored...
...I find them in general far more actively prolabor than their male counterparts on the left, and at the moment far more interested in workingclass women than male writers are in the male working-class...
...Many anarchists have considered themselves "freethinkers...
...The same lack of critical distance accounts for the author's inflated estimate of the overall accomplishments of French Marxist existentialism...
...But I suspect that one would not be so inclined to an Enlightenment interpretation of anarchism if one conceived of it less as an intellectual (or, in Reichert's terms, an aesthetic) phenomenon, and more as a social phenomenon that continued, and built on, older ethical traditions...
...While the generation of Sartre based their philosophy on the self-creation of humankind through history, the structuralists pointed to forces that were not deliberately created by, yet were governing, human beings...
...It's absolutely impossible for us...
...Hidden rules, so these philosophers argued, constricted and constrained the boundaries of thought and discourse...
...The book should be regarded as a kind of anthology, consisting of paraphrase, extensive quotation, brief biographical information, and, deliberately, a minimum of interpretative comment...
...Yet, even though she occasionally describes the relationship between the two partners in almost commercial terms ("material values were laid on the bargaining table...
...Is Man Dead...
...In a chapter assessing Catholic values, 20 "moral vignettes"—examples of moral problems confronted by most adults at one time or another—are used to evaluate the moral styles of the three main religious groups in the U.S...
...You know what I mean...
...In Exeter, New Hampshire, women turned out in 1831 because employers were setting back the clocks to get extra work out of employees...
...This volume contains lengthy sections on immigrant workers, early women unionists, the WTLU, the apparel unions and Emma Goldman, and its opening chapters cover the same historic ground as do those of Wertheimer and Baxandall et al...
...His call has been heeded by a number of other distinguished specialists...
...A fantastic dream, an almost impossible one, but such that you do not wish to part with it...
...Ignoring the (then) legitimate needs of light industry, he collides with the local party secretary—the sympathetic spokesman for the rights and aspirations of the common citizen...
...AMERICA'S WORKING WOMEN: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY - 1600 TO THE PRESENT, compiled and edited by Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, Susan Reverby...
...I wanted to raise her so that she should find out about everything, about museums, theatres, books, lectures...
...Demolishing stereotypes and laying to rest false assumptions and myths about one group of Americans can be a force for raising sensibilities and reducing prejudices among all groups...
...And they were also the hapless pawns of a shifting party line...
...Analysis often replaced Praxis...
...Do you have one...
...most would marry given the chance...
...They were encouraged to achieve—but not to overachieve...
...Once the stranglehold of Cartesian thought on French intellectual life had been broken, not only Hegel and the young Marx, but Nietzsche, German phenomenology and existentialism, and finally structuralism and psychoanalysis made triumphant entries on the French intellectual scene...
...The first recorded turnout in which women participated took place in 1824 in a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, mill...
...His research shows Irish Catholics are the most successful gentile group in the U.S...
...From the founding at the AFL in 1886, however, women were technically eligible for membership, but women were excluded from apprenticeship programs leading to the skilled trades, and the extreme local autonomy in the AFL made it difficult for national leaders to prevent affiliates from discriminating against women...
...This lack of distance makes him, among other things, fail to discriminate between major thinkers such as Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, and minor litterateurs or trendy journalists...
...They walked out with the men but held their own separate meetings...
...FOR THIS detailed picture, Greeley has scrutinized all areas of Catholic life from ethnic backgrounds (encompassing Germans, Irish, Italians, French, Slays, Poles) political behavior, prejudice, changes in church and clergy, to the parochial school system, influences of the neighborhood, family structure, even moral values...
...But I feel that she gets bored with all that...
...What is most encouraging in the new literature on working women (including Barbara Garson's All the Livelong Day, Nancy Seifer's Nobody Speaks for Me, Lillian Rubin's Worlds of Pain, Louise Howe's Pink Collar Workers) is that many feminist writers have an enlightened and balanced view of labor unions...
...For a brief moment," he writes, "France tasted life beyond alienation...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press...
...The former was "yankee" in character, the latter was mainly a movement of proletarian immigrants, and its history is as yet unpublished and largely irrecoverable...
...New York: Hippocrene Books...
...and the playwright (then and to this day a faithful party hack) was doing what he thought was expected of him...
...or if one laid as much stress on anarchist concern for social justice as on concern for liberty from the state...
...His evidence shows that Catholics turn out to be liberal on issues that win elections, more dovish than hawkish and less likely to be anti-Semitic than Jews are to be antiCatholic, for instance...
...Chronicles and collections cannot do this job...
...In another novel, one student confides to his friend: You and I, brother, cannot prematurely acquire a family...
...Tracing these developments in considerable detail, Poster correctly gives pride of place to Jean Paul Sartre's intellectual trajectory, from the radical individualism and voluntarism of his early work to the attempt at developing an existential Marxism in his Critique de la raison dialectique of 1960...
...The workers have been conveniently jettisoned...
...Today only a relatively small proportion of all working women are employed in textile and apparel manufacturing...
...THE VIRTUES of the book are these...
...No wonder employers are said to be the ones who organize unions...
...q 244...
...427 pp...
...Reichert also brings to attention such relatively unknown individuals as C. L. James, a very keen thinker of whom I was barely aware, and Moses Harmon...
...Before World War II, no indigenous Marxian tradition existed in France...
...In their view, "the abolition of capitalism in itself does not guarantee, as history has shown, total human liberation...
...is the title of one of Foucault's essays...
...Despite these caveats, I recommend the book to anybody who is seriously concerned with French existential Marxism and structuralist thought...
...Much of the material will not be entirely new to followers of Greeley's prodigious scholarly and journalistic output...
...To the contrary, the Catholic-school-educated seem more supportive of racial integration and have a higher level of social consciousness than those who do not attend Catholic schools...
...This is no longer the case...
...Reichert also has some difficulty in dealing with advocacy of violence by anarchists...
...Perhaps Barbara Wertheimer will write a sequel...
...THE MAJOR PORTIONS of the book are devoted to the emergence of the synthetic existential Marxism that dominated the French intellectual scene until the middle of the '60s...
...The play was written while the country was going through one of its periodic "antimanager" campaigns...
...Their concern was with the dialectical method and, in particular, with Hegel's penetrating portrayal of the dialectic relation between Master and Slave...
...Using a mass of sociological data from surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center and others over the past 15 years, Greeley sets out to demolish the myths and set the record straight—with facts...
...He finds that the recent decline in religious practice among Catholics and the current disarray of the institutional church date not from the ecumenical reforms of Pope John's Vatican II, as other interpreters of Catholicism claim...
...Similarly, "everybody knows" that Catholics are political conservatives, hawks, and racially prejudiced...
...When she resigned, his support waned...
...The book also offers a wealth of marginal insights into Soviet life, such as the petty and vicious intrigues with which Soviet institutions are infected, or the daily hardships of Soviet family life...
...It is the most encouraging sign on the feminist scene, and if women can avoid devouring each other in factional and ideological struggles, we may get somewhere...
...4.95 (paper...
...With his penchant for crude hyperboles, Stalin called writers "engineers of human souls...
...He seeks to exhibit it, and I think he succeeds...
...These were among the earliest encounters of organized women with male unionists...
...As a result, he missed the occasion to evoke in some detail the milieu and the concrete events that surely left a major mark on these works...
...17.50...
...At the same time, they were forever caught in a vise of contradictory demands...
...Many of the craft unions in the American Federation of Labor, successor to the Knights, refused to admit women and few of them organized the unskilled jobs held by most women...
...Yet none of them, it seems to me, has done it with as much sagacity, humor, and verve as Dunham...
...He meditates.] I would like to have a talk with Comrade Stalin...
...They could have power—but were compelled to pay obeisance to the official rhetoric about "collectivism...
...It has been, in Dunham's words, "a platform from which the system justified itself," an "embodiment of the regime's considerata, a repository of its myths...
...But, it lived in a state of acute insecurity, it was subjected continuously to capricious, contradictory, brutal, and arbitrary demands...
...By scrutinizing hundreds of novels, plays, and poems, Dunham convincingly illustrates this point...
...The American anarchist tradition, which dates back to the 1840s and has earlier antecedents, has never been well interpreted...
...A socialist feminist revolution can produce this fundamental change, and in such a revolution working-class women must play a central role...
...He might profitably have borrowed a leaf from our late friend George Lichtheim, who, writing about some of the same figures in his brilliant book on French Marxism, never departed from his hard-nosed realistic skepticism even when confronted with the most appealing concoctions of the French mind...
...I can hardly think of a better introduction...
...The author provides a reliable guide to these ideas...
...The story is told by participants of the day...
...Another new volume, America's Working Women, edited by Rosalyn Baxandall et al., covers much the same historic period and material (from 1600 to the present), but it presents a compilation of original documents rather than a narrative history, and its perspective is that of women whose feminism "was an outgrowth of our participation in the civil rights and New Left movements...
...In the reappraisal of the play one should see only the continuous cyclical alteration of emphasis, not a change of policy...
...Most Catholic priests are happy in their work...
...While the existential Marxists had extolled creative energies, attempting to trace the stages through which humans make themselves, the structuralists attempted to debase the stature of the human subject, of consciousness, of the ego...
...Now we must start learning...
...He further claims that these false assumptions about Catholics have promoted a "cultural division of labor" or, more bluntly, a "sophisticated discrimination" against Catholics in this country...
...As Dunham's literary examples demonstrate, private values and personal upward mobility have not only come to predominate, not only to be accepted, but to be apotheosized...
...By the time the play was finally staged, however, the official line had changed...
...The spectacle of Soviet citizens in a crowded bus or metro train, avidly engrossed in some contemporary work of fiction, has never ceased to astonish the Western tourist...
...In his data he found "no evidence to link the Council to the decline in Catholic belief and practice, but substantial evidence linking that decline to a rejection of the church's sexual ethic and erosion of the credibility of papal leadership...
...Greeley found there is nothing in his data to support these views...
...He is markedly more critical in regard to structuralism...
...Professor Dunham writes: The regime wants the manager to be both effective and unobtrusive, strong and pliable, inventive and docile...
...But, as he firmly believes, from the other major event of Catholic life in the 1960s—Pope Paul's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the church's prohibition of artificial birth control...
...Their skills were desperately needed in a country that was not only trying to repair past ravages but to become a modern industrial state...
...Goldman's individualism is obvious but the tradition from which Sacco and Vanzetti came, although nominally anarchist-communist, had at its core a radical individualism...
...More historical context would have been helpful...
...Although Andrew Greeley has written this book to be read primarily by non-Catholics, its in-depth sociological portrait of today's Catholic will also surprise and enlighten most Catholics...
...But the final sections also take account of the emergence of structuralist thought, which has largely replaced existential Marxism in the last decade and a half...
...This is the hallmark of the new Soviet ethos that Vera Dunham so magnificently captures in her book.0 From Sartre to Althusser, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, by Mark Poster...
...THE Boot( Is studded with so many gems that one is hard put to select any for special mention...
...It is tempting to see a clean discontinuity...
...Professor Dunham is not a student of sociology but a voracious reader and interpreter of Soviet literature...
...The ideal of Soviet fiction—the perfect homo sovieticus—was one who sacrificed himself for the collective, to the detriment not only of his personal ego and values, but to that of his closest relatives as well...
...Reichert's book is not a history—he has not attempted that...
...Anarchism is an attempt at demystification of politics and ideology, as heretical Christianity, skepticism, and atheism were attempts to demystify religion and theology...
...602 pp...
...I have great difficulty in perceiving Ernst Cassirer as a 20th-century philosophical expression of the spirit from which anarchism derives...
...The function of "middlebrow fiction" to the middlebrow readers is cathartic: the regime knows, encourages, and exploits it...
...In 1834 women struck in Lowell, Massachusetts, because employers sought to reduce their pay, and though the strike ended disastrously the women reorganized and, in 1836, struck again with greater force but even less success...
...For the average reader, literature has played, in its way, an equally important role...
...While the preceding generation, forged during the resistance and the war, strove to arrange a kind of forced marriage between Kierkegaard and Marx, the structuralists, especially the Communist philosopher Althusser, developed a "theoretical antihumanism...
...For women, says Wertheimer, the Knights was nothing short of revolutionary...
...New York: Basic Books...
...there are splendid pages on workers, on social climbing, on the fusion of romantic love with the adoration of Stalin...
...They could lord it over their subordinates but were told to be attentive to their individual grievances...
...408 pp...
...It seems to me that it will be difficult for us to get along...
...The similarities of moral style among the three main denominational groups are much greater than the dissimilarities...
...Professor Dunham is not the first to use Soviet literature for insights into la vie Sovietique...
...The National Trades' Union, a loose and short-lived federation of local craft unions, voted moral support to the Lowell women but also passed resolutions opposing the employment of women in "injurious" millwork and supporting "protective" legislation...
...They will not be unperturbed by the "cultural division of labor" and anti-Catholic mythology that supports and prolongs it, as working- and middle-class Catholics have been...
...In recent years, particularly under the influence of "libertarians" and "right-wing anarchists," the apparent discontinuity has come to be read, tendentiously, as a difference between two opposite kinds of anarchism, with 19th-century individualism as the forerunner of the curious and distinctively American phenomenon called "anarcho-capitalism...
...Anarchism is deeds and not just words...
...Poster's treatment of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser is less thorough than that of their predecessors, yet the main lineaments of their thought nevertheless emerge quite well...
...What is strange, though, especially for a Marxian scholar, is his neglect of the social, political, and existential context in which these ideas arose...
...What seems now a rather strange interlude in the history of postwar France becomes in Poster's romantic imagination an event almost as important as the storming of the Bastille...
...It is Soviet belles-lettres, and primarily what she calls "middlebrow fiction," a genre that can hardly be savored for its literary qualities, that constitutes the raw material for her political and sociological analysis...
...It is slightly awkward for me to recommend William 0. Reichert's Partisans of Freedom as a means toward better acquaintance with those traditions...
...For example, "everyone knows" Catholics tend to be blue-collar workers of the lower middle class, trailing Protestants in education and economic achievement...
...In fact, anti-Catholic feeling appears to be on the rise, while "Catholic antagonism to other groups is not...
...He begins by setting down some of the things "everyone knows" about Catholics...
...Would that the author, at least in his capacity of intellectual historian, had somewhat toned down his sentimental utopianism, which, even though often quite appealing, too often turns into plain woolliness...
...Not all who used Heideggerian jargon or Hegelian terminology knew what they were talking about...
...The absorbing part of this chronicle is less in its record of the work women did than in their effort to organize and their relations with organized male workers...
...The book's scope covers the time span from the early colonial period to about 1914, though it contains some final notes on the newly organized Coalition of Labor Union Women...
...Of Goodman it was true...
...All this changed abruptly after the liberation...
...A final newly published volume, American Women and the Labor Movement, 1825- 1974, by Martha Jane Soltow and Mary K. Wery, offers a fine annotated bibliography on the subject...
...Greeley devotes a chapter to the turmoil and changes in the American church...
...Poster also offers a detailed discussion of the evolution of Sartre's onetime companion and later adversary Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who moved from an extreme Hegelian historicism that led him to justify even the Moscow trials to the later relatively apolitical writings on phenomenology...
...Topics include employment, trade unions, working conditions, strikes, legislation, worker education, labor leaders, and supportive efforts such as NWTUL and CLUW...
...Participants came mainly from the clothing industries but also included reform leaders and settlement-house workers...
...Barbara Mayer Wertheimer's new book We Were There, a story of working women in America, offers us one lovingly assembled chronicle of their lives and their struggle to organize for equality and dignity...
...By reason of the same circumstance, however, I think that I can perceive the strengths and weaknesses of his work...
...Stalinist hacks dominated the scene, and the socialist movement largely subsisted on a thin gruel of traditional Marxist ideas mixed with generous infusions of Jacobin ideology and native "utopian socialist" ingredients...
...q THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC: A SOCIAL PORTRAIT, by Andrew M. Greely...
...Following the 1912 strike of Lawrence textile workers, supported by the IWW, the AFL withheld its contribution to the League...
...This concordat, or alliance—or, as she engagingly calls it, the "Big Deal"—was introduced in the years preceding Stalin's death, gained rapid momentum in its aftermath, creaked and groaned its way through the reign of the ebulliently unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev, and was finally consummated by the lacklustre leadership of Brezhnev & Co...
...Products of the more fluid, pluralistic church after Vatican II, they will be Catholic because they have seen nothing else in American society they want to be...
...Far from being an obstacle to economic success, a Catholic education seems positively to facilitate financial achievement...
...TO POSTER, the events of May 1968, the student revolt and the resultant occupation of factories in Paris and other parts of the country appear as major turning points in French history that have tested and vindicated the theories of the existential Marxists...
...and women unionists in auto, communications, state-county, and teamsters far outnumber those in the older unions...
...In one novel an engineer explains to his superior his difficulties with the woman he loves: You understand, she is a worker...
...To the extent that Catholics do differ, they are somewhat more "flexible," or less "strict," than Protestants, and rather less "flexible" and more "strict" than Jews in their approach to solving moral problems...
...Reichert builds his mosaic guided by an interpretation of anarchism as authentic heir to Enlightenment philosophy, and this is a question that I am not sure about...
...The traditional meshchanin dreamed of "sweets and pink lampshades": the typical "systemic" meshchanin is the "soulless, greedy, pompous" official who craves power...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
