REVIEWS
Schneewind, J.B. & Rodney, Lester & Rabinowitch, Alexander & Hoffmann, Stanley & Kennedy, Randall & Bluestone, Barry
A DANGEROUS PLACE, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with Suzanne Weaver. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown. 297 pp. $12.50. This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan's account of his brief and stormy period of...
...It is, rather, the key determinant in the distribution of property...
...The necessary inducements...
...Despite a lack of detailed evidence, there is much to recommend Lindblom's case, though I believe he makes one serious error in theoretical analysis...
...Why...
...Knowledge, not volition, guides society, or so it is claimed...
...I merely wish to make it clear that his cowardice should not be taken for courage...
...Because the laws governing sex are biological, not divine, and point toward "a more liberal sexual morality...
...The author tells us that the captives "listened to all this raving madness and were not permitted to close their eyes until dawn...
...How did the victims themselves rationalize what was happening...
...This is sensible, although perhaps we didn't need sociobiology to lead us to see it...
...Recalling the period when the war drew to an end, Esther Markish writes: "Could we ever imagine then that the victory over Nazi Germany was to usher in the most terrible period of our lives...
...Wilson's insufficient attentiveness to traditional patterns of racial discrimination is most apparent in his discussion of blacks and the unions...
...But then we learn that aggression is not a clear category...
...If he has lashed back a few times at his critics, he's also tried to make it clear that sociobiology doesn't have the horrid consequences attributed to it by Science for the People...
...First, he constantly overestimated the importance of the UN in world affairs...
...They blundered into power, divided, fighting against each other, and until the final moments Lenin had only an occasional role in what happened...
...We do not know how much sociobiology claims to explain in genetic and biological terms, and how much it leaves to the traditional social sciences...
...With the wisdom of hindsight, what seems certain is that, for liberals, the collapse of the Czarist political system came at the worst possible time...
...Hardcover, $15.95...
...It has now hardened into untestable dogma...
...A second point of view regarding the seizure of power among Bolsheviks in the fall of 1917 was that of national and local leaders on the spot who, like Trotsky, fully shared Lenin's fundamental assumptions regarding the necessity and feasibility of an early socialist revolution in Russia but were skeptical of successfully mobilizing the masses behind "the immediate bayonet charge" envisioned by Lenin...
...He and his supporters skidaddled off the political stage protesting that they were not really leaving, merely regrouping strength for the final climactic battle—a battle which was never fought...
...Nor is he wrong when he points out that many of the supporters of the resolution are violators of human rights...
...I do not reproach Ehrenburg a posteriori...
...For Lindblom, neither Model nor Model 2 looks particularly defensible...
...and that this calculation failed because Moynihan took his job so seriously and made such a splash that the tactical sideshow threatened to destroy the main strategy...
...For by proclaiming, in effect, that whoever was not with us was against us, and therefore an enemy of free government, he was acting out a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...He does not fully comprehend how much his argument depends on the existence of corporate monopoly...
...But amidst all the variety there are some basic "behaviors" into which all of us are programmed...
...The stifling growth of communist bureaucracy, the documented cases of incredible inefficiency, and the abuse of civil rights all draw his condemnation...
...is an oasis of freedom surrounded by totalitarians whom Moscow controls, how bleak is our situation...
...xii + 260 pp...
...The point is not that the authors' claim is necessarily incorrect but that their neglect of critical distinctions prevents them from pursuing an investigation that might have convincingly clarified the issue...
...Evolution has left us with "innate censors and motivators...
...or to Czech Communists in 1968 painting swastikas on Soviet tanks, here is a book that meshes with these tragedies...
...Salisbury's treatment of the events of 1917 illustrate his book's strengths as well as its weaknesses...
...It shelters individual capitalists and workers from a Hobbesian economic war...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press...
...Among the diversities thus perpetuated through sex by evolution are the differences between men and women...
...Wilson also made a number of wideranging suggestions about the implications of his "new synthesis" for our understanding of human nature and of morality, religion, and "the humanities...
...and if only the pure and the good were worthy of being our allies, we would have to shed many of our clients...
...Later, in a comment that gets at the heart of the October revolution in Petrograd as Salisbury perceives it, Salisbury adds that "only a handful of 253 Petrograd citizens knew or cared what was going on...
...In their chapter "Learning Without Earning," its authors criticize the "belief that blacks are more likely to be unemployed because they are not 'qualified' for jobs in the American economy and, in particular, not `qualified' for those jobs resulting from changing technology...
...But important class divisions have existed since at least the turn of the century, and discussions of this fact and its implications long predate Wilson's findings...
...He seems impressed with the possibility of scientifically arriving at "correct" solutions for at least some social problems...
...We can conjecture that, in the absence of monopoly, a free market would prevail and the power of business executives "as public officials in the market system" would be greatly diminished...
...He writes that Angola meant the beginning of "recolonization" (he blames Kissinger for having tried to deal with that crisis through a combination of covert action and attempted bargaining with Moscow...
...In November 1976 he was elected Senator of New York...
...he even suggests that an obscure Indian resolution had led to the October 1973 war in the Middle East...
...Thus, a more accurate, if less catchy, description of contemporary black experience is not "the declining significance of race" but, as Wilson titles one of his subchapters, "the changing context of racial strife...
...It also appeals to frustrated Wilsonians, who believe that America's mission is the promotion of democratic ideals and human rights abroad...
...Until such time as we deliberately alter our genes, we must live with "the hard biological substructure" we have inherited...
...The trouble with Newman et al...
...There is a strange masochism in this view (as there is in that of Moynihan's allies on the Committee on the Present Danger, who believe that we are already paralyzed by the vulnerability of our land-based missiles in the 1980s...
...Moynihan speaks the language of both: "we are the most powerful culture in the world, I felt...
...Cultures have "amplified" these genecarried differences into universal male dominance...
...Hardly a popular uprising...
...He thinks of himself as a scientist, not as a popular prophet...
...And he gets even with those who had opposed either him or his views in a series of thumbnail sketches, some of which are close to character assassinations...
...So they fail to see that sociobiology will soon explain religion, including dogmatic secular ideologies...
...Esther Markish is one whose sense of outrage at evil has never dulled...
...What is inherited is the outcome of an enormously long evolutionary process, which has functioned to preserve neither species nor individuals, but genes...
...But, unlike some biographers of prominent husbands, she never tries to blink his political obtuseness and make of him what he was not...
...At least two objections can be raised to Wilson's position...
...Fear and guilt feelings have brought the establishment to its knees, and the same failure of nerve marks the Carter administration—only labor is still upright...
...Markish went and opened it...
...when the aspirations of ever-growing numbers of factory workers were untempered by significant economic and social gains...
...After all, if Wilson is correct, then he, like the rest of us, must have a hunter-gatherer brain whose oldest strata dictate his moral feelings...
...TWO DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT points of view from that of Lenin emerged during continuing, wideranging debates over the seizure of power among Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd in the fall of 1917...
...Intellectuals have sought a variety of other substitutes for religion...
...If all those who have nondemocratic regimes were our foes, we would be in far more serious trouble than we are...
...To the contrary, the soviets were contrasted more and more positively with the Provisional Government and viewed as genuinely democratic institutions of popular self-rule...
...The Bolsheviks were spared a possibly decisive defeat because the party had been so structured and organized that major policy matters (including directives from Lenin) were as a matter of course freely debated and voted upon, with significant impact from factions holding widely varying opinions and from all levels of the party hierarchy...
...Neither can serve as a substitute for "correct" analysis...
...With a comprehensive theory of social change, it follows that there is a "correct" line...
...Then, in time-honored fashion, Lenin's "bulldog tenacity, skill in argument, and passionate conviction" overwhelmed his colleagues...
...A more crucial point, however, is that only in the wake of the government's direct attack on the left was an armed uprising along Lenin's lines feasible...
...offer exhortations to continued protest...
...In a truly competitive world, where there would be no barriers to entry in either capital or labor markets, consumer sovereignty would reign, property would be more evenly distributed, and workers would have substantially greater access to capital...
...Wilson's critical discussion of middle-class oriented civil-rights and affirmative-action politics is far more enlightening than the undifferentiated applause Newman et al...
...The inescapable conclusion is that "the fundamental bases of the urban crisis are not amenable to urban political solutions"—not a happy prospect for ambitious, city-based black politicians...
...Just in time...
...Wilson is not asserting "single-track" genetic determinism...
...First, he draws an unreal distinction between economic and sociopolitical sectors, for while they are in some sense discrete, they are also intimately interrelated...
...Was this a painful final comment on his own life...
...He would point to the limited possibility of a concerted investment "strike...
...And not only Markish...
...This is because he believes in salvation through "will"—the very stance that made us leap into the Vietnam fire...
...His account of these turbulent months, comprising roughly a third of the book, is fuller and more balanced on developments leading to the collapse of the Czarist regime than it is on the subsequent deepening of Russia's political and social crisis and on the emergence of Bolshevism as a potent political force...
...Moynihan not only tends to see the Third World as much more of a monolith than it really is (and tends not to see that his tactics could have made it into one...
...To me it seems just irrelevant...
...Can we really believe that such a finely tuned tax and subsidy system could be designed effectively...
...This, he says, is a book about ideas...
...The "correct" solution cannot be known, if it exists at all...
...Sexual relations function primarily as bonding devices...
...To buttress his thesis he argues that during the past two decades a dual job market based on race has been superseded by a segmented labor market based on class, a market in which "blacks are either isolated in non-unionized, low-paying basically undesirable jobs that nobody really wants, or part of the higher paying corporate and government labor market which is protected by strong unions...
...IN THE LAST SECTION of his book, Lindblom turns to prescription...
...But the distinction between friend and alien is largely an environmental and cultural matter...
...Though these have been pointed out to Wilson, he hasn't tried to deal with them...
...allies as Turkey and Iran...
...The outfit was familiar to every Soviet citizen, for it identified the wearer as an agent of the KGB...
...The first few chapters are devoted to the tedious academic exercise of defining terms: authority, exchange, market, polyarchy, preceptoral system...
...Ten months later, when James Reston published a column, which stated that Ford and Kissinger supported Moynihan in public but deplored him in private, he resigned and returned—not for long— to Harvard...
...Now, in Israel after years of Soviet harassment, the widow of the martyred Peretz Markish has written a remarkable book...
...No doubt this same fate is befalling Charles Lindblom, professor of economics and political science at Yale and past collaborator with Robert Dahl, the foremost proponent of pluralist theory...
...He defends homosexuals, praises racial diversity, condemns war, and allows for sexual equality and social change...
...could have driven the Cubans out of Africa—is a remarkable mix of naivete and self-importance...
...He also throws around, loosely and constantly, the word "totalitarian," as a way of describing all the imperfect regimes that dare oppose us: Algeria and Tanzania, for instance...
...Shortly after his return to the U.S., early in 1975, he published his famous Commentary essay on the "U.S...
...These considerable merits notwithstanding, 252 Black Night, White Snow falls short of being the major reinterpretation of one of the most important events of modern times promised in the Introduction...
...That morning we were the huge, unreachable establishment, ignoring or deriding a passionate little minority...
...Lenin's immense historical importance in the October revolution stems from the fact that he recognized the potentialities of the prevailing situation for the extreme left and boldly oriented the Bolsheviks toward a socialist revolution at a time when few others were thinking in these terms...
...We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression...
...Liberals and radicals told him he was a racist, a sexist, and a reactionary capitalist running-dog...
...Everything in the universe, the mind included, evolved into its present condition...
...Model 2 is associated with market-oriented polyarchy—a system dominated by private control over economic matters and by elected authority over political activity...
...The entire Markish family was soon sent into Siberian exile (transported through Moscow in the famous closed van labeled "Bread...
...All well and good...
...On the contrary...
...This prescription, in an otherwise exceptional book, is not satisfactory...
...Lindblom has done a masterful job of detaching himself from romantic notions of market-induced democracy to present a wellbalanced analysis of contrasting politicaleconomies...
...Up to now transcendental goals have been provided by religious myths...
...Some contemporary behaviors barely conceal their "Pleistocene origins...
...The first is that "we have no particular place to go...
...They do when it comes to sexual pleasure...
...For it rests on a wrong analysis of world affairs and expresses an attitude that is as widespread as it is pernicious...
...Will not the corporate sector's ability to "strike" give it disproportionate power to set the taxinducement schedules as they have done all along...
...Politics, and Prosperity reveals that blacks are three times as likely as whites to die from diabetes, four times as likely to die from flu or pneumonia, eleven times as likely to die of hypertension...
...Workers, on the other hand, bring their labor to market without any special inducement from government simply because, lacking capital, workers have no other viable choice...
...Seven officials followed him in, their uniforms hidden by their civilian coats with gray karukul collars...
...Monopoly distributes political power by distributing licenses to hold various portions of the economy hostage...
...It was a difficult relationship...
...Hence "the human mind is not a...
...move, as he put it, "from apology to opposition," to fighting not only for the imperative of growth— best achieved through capitalist free enterprise— but above all for its political tradition of individual liberty...
...Can one fault her for writing in such absolutes: "The naivete of the Soviet citizen is indestructable, while the perfidy and baseness of the Soviet regime knows no limits...
...1 DON'T PROPOSE to discuss Wilson's science here...
...As if nerve and will were substitutes for policy, or for judgment...
...A reviewer who would characterize himself as an advocate of detente, who opposes the JacksonMoynihan hard line and does not believe there is, or ever was, a Soviet plot to conquer the world or even to invade the NATO countries, can sit at his typewriter in California, seek a little historical balance, welcome changes for the better in the Soviet Union, even dimly hope that the original ideals of the revolution may one day yet surface in a more peaceful world...
...ON HUMAN NATURE, by Edward O. Wilson...
...That particular capitalist form is irremediably flawed by its inherent nature...
...15.00 When a high priest of neoclassical economic theory, Tibor Scitovsky, went off to write a characteristically unneoclassical work entitled The Joyless Economy, he lamented (with a twinkle in his eye) that his colleagues felt he had gone a bit daft...
...Indeed, as many non-Americans have suspected, it is a form of jingoism: the form that sees America's superiority in America's values, and defines manifest destiny in terms of Wilson's Fourteen Points...
...Esther Markish has it firmly in focus...
...found that because of residential segregation the housing dollars of blacks are consistently less able to buy the same amenities as those of similarly situated whites...
...Protest...
...As mass anarchy expanded, Lenin, hiding out in Finland, concluded that an opportune moment for the seizure of power had arrived...
...Having relinquished its power over the market, government regards its major function as persuading businessmen to perform their tasks so as to avoid depression or other economic distress...
...It is the bearings of that theory on practical concerns...
...UN debates, especially at the General Assembly, are mostly symbolic, and Assembly alignments are often gross distortions not only of the realities of power but of political or economic alignments in the "real" world outside...
...Many mainstream black leaders are understandably suspicious of suggestions that the war against racial discrimination be shifted to a struggle against class subordination of poor people generally...
...These modest claims are sketched in nine relatively brief chapters...
...that, to undercut potential resistance, every opportunity be utilized to subvert the Provisional Government's power peacefully...
...a life functioning solely to create complex chemical molecules like some of those in my body now...
...But his response is even more dangerous, both at the level of political tactics and the level of national attitudes and emotions...
...Since constitutional rules forbid government to command an economy, it must offer benefits to businessmen in order to encourage the required performance...
...Everything still depended on the Bolsheviks playing their cards right...
...On their heads were shapkas, trimmed with the same gray karakul...
...At the end we do not know how much of sociobiology is conjecture and how much has solid scientific backing...
...Wilson suggests that the AfroAmerican experience has involved a shift from racial oppression of all blacks to class subordination for the bottom third...
...If the needs of the genes don't wholly determine morality, we need to hear far more than Wilson says about how, where, and why we are entitled to ignore them...
...The novelties in the present book are his "applications...
...In response, early on the morning of October 24, Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister, initiated steps to suppress the left...
...Ehrenburg said he constantly dreamed of Markish, and he bemoaned the terrible price he (Ehrenburg) paid for "loyalty to people, to the age, to fate...
...Short of the mythical general strike, workers have no such power...
...The reason is simple...
...But in Lindblom's opinion, this is nowhere near enough to justify modern forms of capitalism...
...This also appears to lead to the demise of democracy itself...
...Kamenev and Bolshevik leaders of his persuasion were opposed to an early socialist revolution in Russia on the most fundamental ideological as well as practical grounds...
...Other problems with significant historical implications, such as changes in the makeup and policies of the various Provisional Governments, the outlook and programs of the Menshevik and SR leadership in the Soviet, and the background and impact of such key events as the April crisis, the July days, and the Kornilov affair are also given relatively scant attention...
...Monopoly does not merely impose a "kind of tax" on market systems...
...THE AUTHORS OF Protest, Politics, and Prosperity survey how blacks have fared in job and housing markets, how their health needs have been met, and to what degree social welfare programs have added security to their lives...
...Capitalist competition inevitably leads to monopoly...
...It is clear," he writes, "that economic divisions now exist among blacks...
...Wilson's findings pose several questions that understandably make old-style black leaders extremely uncomfortable...
...348 pp...
...Therefore, Model 2 requires that mankind resort to individual preferences as the best indicator of needs and wants...
...to do so just because of these states' votes in the UN is to overreact...
...that, if possible, institutions of the Petrograd soviet and not organs of the party be employed for the government's overthrow...
...The former Ambassador celebrates his performance in the heroic mode...
...The evidence indicates that this was indeed the case...
...Yet, as Markish's widow reminds us: "To this day, many of those responsible for that crime [the murder of the Jewish cultural leaders] are at liberty...
...To have proven their contention, Newman et al...
...They don't when it comes to the question of sexual equality...
...A swing in favor of the Bolsheviks took place in early September 1917, primarily because of widespread hunger for peace...
...The first was represented by Leo Kamenev...
...Drastic pronouncements lead to commonplace moral judgments...
...Dorothy Newman et al...
...in early March, he appointed Moynihan to the UN job (which Moynihan had declined in 1970, at the time of Cambodia...
...But lost in the melange of sometimes contradictory firsthand observations and scattered impressions is a meaningful sense of more complex political developments and social processes, which greatly affected the way things turned out...
...More directly, he says that "human behavior is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact...
...Esther Markish seems to credit him with sincerity in his denial of complicity in the arrest of Markish and other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee...
...The purpose of maneuver and offensive is to win, or, at least, to limit damage...
...But then," she continues, "perhaps he did not want to...
...According to Wilson it includes defense as well as conquest of territory, struggle for dominance in a social group, sexual aggression (not further defined), "acts of hostility by which weaning is terminated," catching prey, defending oneself against attack, and "moralistic and disciplinary aggression to enforce the rules of society...
...I took the elevator to the eighth floor and turned my attention to the real world...
...This reviewer's reading of the available evidence, however, departs from Salisbury's view in several important respects...
...The book's weakness as a serious work of historical scholarship also stems from its author's overdependence on a numerically large but substantively limited body of memoirs as a source of information, to the neglect of published documents and daily newspapers, and emphasis on the entertaining and dramatic, often at the expense of systematic analysis...
...SIGNIFICANTLY, neither Protest, Politics, and Pro.sperit.i nor The Declining Significance of Race advance much in the way of programmatic suggestions...
...But, she says: "Ehrenburg was too intelligent not to understand the shameful role of shirmach (thieves' decoy) that had been assigned to him during the period of the pogrom...
...What he does claim, though, is that since such conflicts have shifted from the economic sector to the sociopolitical realm they "do not play as great a role in determining the life chances of individual black Americans as in the previous periods of overt economic racial oppression...
...see the stubborn persistence of white racism as the basic problem...
...Her own brother Shura, in a Siberian prison on a preposterous frameup, his teeth knocked out, kidneys bruised, and head scarred from beatings, cried out defiantly, "Long live Stalin...
...It may well be that there does exist a significant difference between the medical treatments that otherwise equal white and black dollars can buy, a difference rooted in racial discrimination of a kind that exists in housing...
...Sex among mammals is not "designed" solely for reproduction...
...But he also describes his role as having put an end to the long period of containment, "when American values had appeared secondary in importance to American power...
...and the internal vices of its opponents...
...Paper, $2.25...
...For those who peculiarly throb to the drama of Sakharov shouting at the tormentors of Ginzburg's mother outside the Moscow courthouse—"Hear a member of the Academy...
...LINDBLOM SEES modern business executives as public officials in the market system...
...but to act as if the UN were the main arena of world affairs —to believe, for instance, that a Security Council resolution introduced by the U.S...
...It explains most of our present values...
...The book's shortcomings in this respect appear to derive in part from the natural difficulty contemporary Western liberal writers in general have in viewing Lenin and Bolshevism with detachment...
...Presumably, it is endowed with the capacity to coax society toward a harmonious solution to the problems of production, allocation, and distribution...
...The evolutionary epic, with the mind as hero, will definitely not provide "an alternative form of organized formal religion...
...This is the ultimate outcome of business monopolies over production, bank monopolies over finance capital, and trade unions over jobs...
...in opposition," which described the appearance of a new "party," the Third World, in world politics, ascribed its socialist rhetoric to the influence of the London School of Economics, and proposed that the U.S...
...Accordingly it condemns masturbation and extramarital sexuality...
...and, most important, when the chances for liberals to deal forthrightly with the country's ills were severely circumscribed by their commitment to the broadly unpopular, ultimately disastrous war effort...
...Kerensky and his Government were not crushed by the steel power of valiant revolutionaries...
...More to the point, Wilson complains that the push for affirmative action, like the civil rights movement, advances the interests of the black middle class while paying insufficient attention to the economic problems of poor blacks...
...Whether or not the exact words went through my mind, I did think that these people seemed to feel they had a just cause...
...It was one of those odd moments in my time as a Communist when the usual feeling of being part of a passionate little minority either ignored or derided was turned on its head...
...They suggest that technological unemployment is a mere ruse, an excuse not to hire blacks...
...And Moynihan, not so exceptionally, had been naive enough to believe that he had been given full freedom and a major piece of the action...
...Heredity determines much of the equipment of each biological individual...
...Given the close correspondence between this goal and the public Bolshevik program, and the fact that the Bolshevik party was then the only major political party not discredited by support for the Provisional Government or the war effort, the odds were good that the party would eventually claim at least a considerable share of national power...
...Specific data are cited (not always accurately) to prove, or perhaps just to illustrate, what admittedly turn out to be conjectures...
...Sometimes they lump the two together as if they are synonymous...
...His own position on Vietnam is singularly obscure: he says he opposed the war, but reserves some of his sharpest attacks for its critics...
...convinced there had been a fascist takeover in Moscow...
...Wilson's earlier book, Sociobiology, was a 241 massive compendium of facts about animal behavior, organized around the genetic theory of population biology...
...He was in harmony or dissension only with himself...
...I heard the shuffling of many feet in the vestibule...
...WILSON'S CENTRAL IDEA, put very crudely, is this...
...None of this, however, should be taken as an argument for competitive enterprise...
...I was bothered but not disturbed...
...On the other hand, Wilson minimizes too much the continuing power of white racism...
...The Communists loathe being reminded of the fascist nature of their regime," she writes...
...Yet, like many newspaper people, I have a good memory...
...Well, says he, we cannot "banish" the "learning rules of violent aggression," which we have inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors...
...In the present volume he has become cautious...
...I disagree...
...And he would ridicule the idea that business molds public opinion...
...Yet, their own evidence indicates that protest along traditional civil-rights lines is of limited effectiveness against barriers rooted in class inequities...
...They found too that substantially higher percentages of black applicants for mortgage loans are rejected than are white applicants on the same financial level...
...Only at this point, just hours before the scheduled opening of the Congress of Soviets, did the military insurrection that Lenin had been demanding for well over a month actually begin...
...But to use the UN as an instrument of ideological warfare is to do precisely what Moynihan rightly accuses the Soviets and the Third World of doing: it is to misuse the UN...
...Yet even as the ultimately successful coup was being organized, Lenin's followers were in complete disarray and reluctant to act decisively...
...Still, the fact remains that the plight of the black poor must be seen in a class as well as a racial perspective, for, as Wilson writes, "the situation of marginality and redundancy created by the modern industrial society deleteriously affects all the poor, regardless of race...
...15.95 The great virtue of Harrison Salisbury's most recent book, his eighth on Russian subjects in a lifetime of thinking and writing about the Soviet Union, is its high literary quality...
...Moynihan had been a very quiet ambassador in Indira Gandhi's India...
...The other important thing to be said about the arguments of the right Bolsheviks is that many of their pre-October warnings, regarding the wishfulness of counting on significant aid from revolutionary workers abroad and the enormous 254 problems that would inevitably arise if power were seized and if an attempt were made to build socialism in backward Russia alone, appear in retrospect to have been quite perspicacious...
...If the settlement of accounts is usually brutal or contemptuous (Moynihan rarely attributes sound motives or good faith to his adversaries), it is muffled and inconclusive in the case of Kissinger...
...The chapter on sex displays another aspect of Wilson's lack of clarity...
...Then the power of religion as "an external source of morality" will vanish, and the choice of values will be unavoidable...
...Many of Lindblom's colleagues must feel that his latest book is too uncritical of leftist ideology and much too critical of capitalist practice...
...The argument has been made that the belated violence of October 24-25 was of crucial historical importance because, by compelling the main body of Mensheviks and SRs to withdraw from the Second Congress of Soviets, it prevented the creation of a socialist coalition government in which moderate socialists might have had a strong voice...
...But the fact that there is a "slight biological component" to culturally elaborated role differences does not compel us to favor male dominance...
...you are not people, you are fascists...
...Many important features of black and white relations in America are not captured," he complains, "when the issue is defined as majority versus minority...
...and that, for broadest possible support, the formal replacement of the government be linked with and legitimized by the decisions of a national Congress of Soviets...
...External conditions allow only some individuals to survive and reproduce...
...While they do show that blacks, as a group, lag behind whites in medical attention, they fail to prove that this inequality is a result of racial as opposed to class discrimination...
...But it was clear that the demonstrators were hurling their question as an accusation toward the nine-story building that housed the Communist party, the Daily Worker, and the Morning Freheit...
...Markish appeared in the study, already dressed in his coat, scarf and hat...
...Preceding his discussion of the privileged position 248 of business, he argues that "monopoly weakens responses to popular control, but it neither eliminates a response or leads to a perverse one...
...This abstract call for resolve and firmness, which 239 has a touch more of d'Annunzio in it than of Churchill, would be easier to dismiss if it did not appeal so strongly to two kinds of Americans—and if it did not show how easy it is to bring those two together...
...In an extraordinary passage, he says: "If anyone in the Department of State ever bothered to wonder why we were defeated in Vietnam, it was not likely he would think back to Picasso's dove and wonder whether the world had not been carefully prepared for our defeat, made to want it so much that we ought never to have gone near the place...
...She describes how...
...Thus it opened the way for the formation of a Soviet government completely controlled and dominated by the Bolsheviks...
...But above all it is an ego trip, and a settlement of accounts...
...IF INDEED the U.S...
...Their hesitation is reinforced by their success during the past two decades in placing racial justice near the top of the nation's domestic priorities...
...And since "solving conflict by aggression" covers defense as well as attack, and morality as well as crime, it's hard to see how else we could "solve conflict...
...He pushed into anti-American stands Third World delegates irritated by his scorn and schoolmasterish style, and he profoundly irritated some of America's allies, such as the West Europeans, who were not going to follow him on a course of collision and defeat...
...The Roman Catholic church sees sex as meant only for procreation...
...Especially memorable are Salisbury's descriptions of the execution in 1877 of Lenin's brother (the episode with which the book begins), and of the events surrounding "Bloody Sunday," which touched off the 1905 revolution...
...But now look at Wilson on sexual pleasure...
...The book is strewn with bits and chunks of information, which sometimes distract from the thread of the argument...
...But ignorance of science prevails among intellectuals, particularly among those who write for the New York Review, Commentary, Daedalus, the New Republic, the National Review, and "other literary journals...
...WILSON SOMETIMES WRITES as if there's something new and controversial in his assertion that there are inherited limits to human possibilities...
...Symbolism is not unimportant...
...This is another way, it seems to me, in which Soviet totalitarianism compares favorably with Nazi totalitarianism...
...But gratitude for the fact that dissenters and would-be emigrees are only being sent to barbaric prisons or psychiatric wards is an Alice-in-Wonderland reaction to a regime that claims moral superiority over the likes of the United States, England, France, and Holland...
...It is also a perfect recipe for despair, since the "forces of liberty" are obviously not a majority...
...Yet the large volume of charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by black workers against unions and the many court cases in this area indicate continued resistance by some parts of organized labor to the requirements of civil-rights laws and federal executive orders...
...After tremendous struggle, blacks have, as Wilson emphasizes, made significant inroads within union ranks...
...251 The Markishes were never to see or hear from their husband and father again...
...Esther Markish goes out of her way to salute some Russians, including a prison guard in Siberia, a chemist who wanted to adopt her son Simon to protect him, university examiners impressed by him who wanted to help his career ("Oh these Soviet paradoxes," she writes), and also a Ukrainian who headed the factory in the town of their exile...
...he would have preferred overt action, pure and simple: "I want to attack Russians," he told President Ford...
...For five months after his execution in August 1952, Esther got receipts for cash she sent to the authorities for him (he never got any of it...
...Global conspiracy, not political analysis, is what Moynihan offers us...
...Yet, one can hardly criticize Lindblom for not finding solutions to problems that have evaded all 249 the rest of us for so long...
...a preoccupation with race and racial conflict obscures fundamental problems that derive from the intersection of class with race...
...Wilson's claim reduces to vacuity: we are programmed to tend to do what we actually do...
...When the poet Golodny was run over by an official car on a Moscow street, and Bergelson and Kvitko were arrested, Markish sent his most prized manuscripts out of the apartment with a relative...
...It was meant to be accessible to the general reader, and it is...
...What it does suggest is that the mere abdication of production decisions to private capital produces a "rigged lopsided competition of ideas" and ultimately a contradiction of democratic theory itself...
...If it is because nothing else really can determine morality, then our options are far fewer than Wilson himself says they are...
...Moynihan's biggest battle, at the UN, was against the preposterous anti-Zionist resolution that denounced Zionism as a form of racism...
...THE DECLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE AND CHANGING INSTITUTIONS, by William Julius Wilson...
...But as a myth it will unify our inherited energies, giving us a transcendental and irrational sense of hope for the future...
...Marxism tried to provide an alternative but it failed, since it ignored biology...
...They're also naturally more aggressive and assertive...
...And again:] If German punctiliousness and methodicalness had ever superimposed itself on "socialist" bloodthirstiness, life would have been a real nightmare...
...He says that he admired and liked Kissinger...
...But what Lenin did not see was that, broad popular support for the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" notwithstanding, an immediate party-organized insurrection would have been politically suicidal...
...Its many tables and charts tell a dismal tale describing the effects of inequality: since 1948, only in four years have the lowest black unemployment rates been lower than the highest unemployment rates among whites...
...At this very point, the jingoism of embattled virtue meets the jingoism of American power...
...It is, according to him, the Russians who unwittingly destroy Lebanon, "through the Syrians and the PLO...
...It takes the form of conservative retrenchment at home, and of a new paranoia toward the outside world—a bizarre mix of an assault on government inside and a desire for displays of power and toughness abroad...
...It is good to know that sociobiology allows us to favor peace...
...This asymmetry in the pattern of capital ownership is ultimately the major institutional barrier to a fuller form of democracy...
...FOR MYSELF, The Long Return also provides an education as to what was once Soviet Yiddish culture—its theater, literature, and particularly the elan of its creative personnel...
...And while the big battles against white racism may have been won, important skirmishes continue to be fought...
...Much of human nature is the result of brain evolution over hundreds of centuries of prehistory...
...She speaks later of one old friend who, "with one foot already in the grave, indefatigably burns incense before the ikon of Lenin, as she did yesterday before the ikon of Stalin...
...It creates diversity in the bearers of genes, and hence gives genes a better 242 chance of having duplicate successors in the gene pool than they would have if there were less variety in their bearers...
...They must scream...
...as a consequence, decision-making and the party's behavior were closely attuned to rapidly changing circumstances...
...This does not mean abandoning efforts to promote human rights or one's conviction about the virtues and advantages of free government...
...New York: Basic Books...
...when the middle class, upon whom a meaningful democratic system would inevitably have to be based, was still quite small...
...The answer to it is yes," Wilson says, with apparent clarity...
...Of the belated military action against the Provisional Government, culminating in Kerensky's flight to the front and the capture of the Winter Palace late on October 25, Salisbury writes, almost nothing was planned and what did happen was often accidental...
...Even in recent years," says Newman, "when public and private insurance plans are available, two to three times as many blacks as white people get their medical care through emergency rooms or clinics...
...Who, after all, will pay for government bribes to business...
...They are the genes determining what we inherit...
...But he also, page after page, throws digs at his duplicity, at his way of undercutting rivals, at his incessant maneuvering...
...He states that his argument "is not meant to suggest that racial conflicts have disappeared or have even been substantially reduced...
...It will create, for the first time, an objective basis for the choice...
...No doubt...
...take it easy, get hold of yourself...
...Like many other man-made products, the free-enterprise system is dynamically unstable...
...Our civilization itself is to be explained, Wilson holds, primarily by the notion of"hypertrophy," by which he means "the extreme growth of pre-existing structures...
...the most publicized, most disorganized, most needless coup in political history was stumbling ahead toward its climax...
...This good guy didn't go so far as to question the guilt of the father...
...This says much...
...That purpose is, quite simply, to allow for the peaceful coexistence and cooperation of states with different regimes, levels of development, and ideologies...
...The Markishes knew this was closing in on them when the authorities shut down Der Emes Publishing House, the Yiddish printing center in Moscow...
...The second dilem240 ma is that we must choose "among the ethical premises inherent in man's biological nature...
...Were there no Russians who responded with shock, humanity, empathy...
...And Moynihan's style of attack was bound to maximize the damage (as when, at an AFL-CIO convention, he mistakenly said that Idi Amin's presiding over the Organization of African Unity was not a coincidence, or when he denounced sponsors of resolutions calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Africa and Chile— for which, incidentally, the U.S...
...The fluctuating political perceptions and aspirations of the socalled dark people (workers, peasants, sailors and soldiers at home and at the front) are insufficiently explained...
...The glimpses that Salisbury provides into the world of Russian culture during key moments and his engrossing accounts of how individual artists and writers and representatives of the aristocracy responded to revolutionary events, based on an extraordinary familiarity with a multitude of recollections and literary works, are a genuine contribution to historical literature...
...Nonetheless, the political climate remained extraordinarily fluid and highly volatile...
...When I saw them there, standing behind Markish, I screamed...
...had voted...
...He predicted that the passage of the infamous resolution, or a U.S...
...Which is good, but not enough...
...When the quest for energy becomes its goal, when any attempt at self-criticism becomes a stigma of weakness, one ends with this paradox: an ex-liberal, a self-proclaimed champion of free government like Moynihan prefers William Safire (whose President has been disgraced and who therefore has "nothing left to conceal, little to protect") to Anthony Lewis, obsessed by the thought of the evils perpetrated under "his ideal of political leaders," the Kennedys: "he had not come to terms with this, and it had blocked the best part of him as a writer...
...in opposition...
...He is quite right in his indignation, and in his critique of ritual anti-Americanism among Third World countries, many of which depend on American aid and protection...
...give to every sort of protest activity...
...Lenin's subsequent obsession with the organization of an immediate uprising, Salisbury continues, is explained by the fact that he was a classic manic-depressive on a sharp upswing...
...Such a course might well have led to the creation of a socialist coalition government, including moderates, rather than to a government of the extreme left alone...
...The Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, another cut of cat, does not fare too well in this testimony...
...What then does he really think...
...It is not surprising, then, that the kind of human rights policy pursued by Carter gets slapped down by Moynihan, for it is neither assertive nor combative enough for his taste...
...204 pp...
...Conflict itself is seen as healthy for it can be harnessed to bring scrutiny to bear on possibly mistaken institutions and policies...
...And even when they seek to differentiate between considerations of race and class they often fail...
...The names of these Soviet writers meant nothing to me—I had no background in Yiddish culture...
...A life spent helping conscious individuals, a life spent creating art or making scientific discoveries, or just pursuing pleasure, yes...
...The next three give a condensed and untechnical outline of Wilson's particular view of sociobiology...
...Within a matter of weeks, vast numbers of ordinary Russians, dissatisfied with the meager results of the February revolution, had come to view the Provisional Government as an organ of the propertied classes, opposed to fundamental political change and uninterested in their needs...
...Perhaps that's why the linkage between his advanced scientific thinking and his conventional moral outlook seems so very unclear...
...has a right to retaliate, and should not always be condemned to the defensive...
...Though she would probably reject characterization as an ideologue, she knows how to make her political point...
...He treated the Markishes with great respect as the family of a writer, managed special kindnesses for them, and "even questioned the justice and rectitude of the sentence that had been meted out to us, saying `Do you mean to tell me that children are answerable for their father...
...But for Moynihan, the masochists are his critics (he quotes at length Kenneth Thompson's excellent demolition of his policy, but dismisses most of it as "intellectually disgraceful...
...255...
...An apologist for business would admit little evidence for Lindblom's heresies...
...others, "such as religion and class structure," show gross transmutation...
...If one could look at the episode wholly as comedy, one would conclude that it is the story of two dupes— Moynihan fooled by Kissinger, and Kissinger outmaneuvered by himself...
...Moynihan is nowhere more witty than when he compares the somewhat abrasive style of McGeorge Bundy (who "did not become Secretary of State") with Kissinger's way of disarming critics by proclaiming their "object to be his very own" and by charming them into helping him against their common enemies...
...veto of the admission of Vietnam and North Korea, would lead to Israel's expulsion...
...We don't know where science guides Wilson's moral and political judgments, and where it is merely bent to accommodate them...
...There may be new elements in Wilson's theory about the genetic basis of animal behavior, and there may be new evidence connecting our inherited limitations with those of other species...
...Still, it is encouraging that this 246 respectable academic and that successful electoral politicians like Ronald Dellums are bringing the insights of socialists into the mainstream of intellectual and political currents...
...He searches out the salient philosophical roots of societies organized by market vs...
...have demonstrated remarkable flexibility in allowing talented blacks to fill positions of prestige and influence at the same time that these systems have shown persistent rigidity in handling the problems of lower-class blacks...
...It is perhaps not surprising that Wilson says "there is no evidence that a widespread unitary aggressive instinct exists...
...Investigating the housing market, Newman et al...
...Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function...
...In the broadest outline, the view of the October revolution that emerges from Salisbury's account is this...
...Hence hunter-gatherer equipment is what we have to see us through the trials of modern civilization...
...Like the little baby teeth that in the elephant grow into tusks, "the basic social responses of the hunter-gatherers have metamorphosed from relatively modest environmental adaptations into unexpectedly elaborate, even monstrous forms in more advanced societies...
...At this point, some of the idealism gets sacrificed to the needs of battle...
...Wilson also questions the significance of highly touted gains black politicians have made, especially electoral victories in the cities...
...After all, in 1976 black high244 school graduates had higher unemployment rates than white drop-outs...
...It just presents us with an instance of the "second dilemma...
...Behind the bitchy wit and the overblown selfpraise of a man still smarting from many wounds, there is a serious issue...
...Newman et al...
...By simply predicting recession or depression if its interests are not served, the corporate sector has been able to coerce the public to take a fundamentally probusiness position even when that position is against the public's long-term self-interest...
...The evidences of biological constraint alone," Wilson remarks, "cannot prescribe an ideal course of action...
...But I doubt that even a very naive or traditional Marxist would have thought that humans could adopt the social forms of corals or ants or lions...
...They called for cooperation among all major socialist groups and the creation of a "caretaker," exclusively socialist coalition government until the establishment of a democratic republic by the Constituent Assembly...
...It tends to be much too technocratic...
...I wish more of us were as daft as he and Scitovsky...
...It attempted to show in detail that animal behavior reflects the demands made by genes under the pressures imposed by the environment, and that evolution is to be understood in these terms...
...Capital markets for the purpose of directing economic investment and democratic procedures for arriving at solutions in the political arena are unnecessary in this model...
...those organized by plan...
...But Moynihan's third error was to go on the defensive by stressing all the time the moral superiority of the U.S...
...It follows, Wilson says without further ado, that we are faced with two "dilemmas...
...For instance, in their chapter "Second-class Medicine," they declare that "how blacks are treated by the health care system is not just a function of their being poor...
...Wilson is quite sure that "this theory is in error...
...The first raises the problems...
...To both the neo-Darwinians and to the embattled Wilsonians, the national celebrators and the missionaries of American ideals, cold-war Democrats and hard-line Republicans, the last years have been frightening: defeats and a relative decline of American power abroad, the challenge of oil sheiks and Third World radicals, domestic turmoil, the disappointments of internal reform, the rise of minorities that have refused the traditional ways of individual ascent, wide abuses of executive power, inflation—all of this has led to a kind of fundamentalist reaction...
...But it appears that Lenin was one of the very few top Bolshevik leaders to whom the risks of an independent, ultraradical course were outweighed by impatience to create an exclusively leftist regime at once...
...conflict is resolved through scientific analysis...
...She lived through it all, and her testimony addresses the very questions one wants answered: What was the texture of life for the intellectual Jewish community during the Stalin Inquisition...
...They are taken off the agenda of government...
...Yet they are fundamental...
...Come now, no need to get excited," one of the officers said...
...The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature...
...The real issue was less whether to "raise the roof" against blatant assaults on common decency, than whether to do so by insulting others—at a time when America, 238 barely out of Vietnam and having not yet reversed its "tar baby" policy in Rhodesia and its soft approach to South Africa, was not exactly in the best position to lecture others...
...This is false, since among Moynihan's "totalitarians" there is a bewildering variety of regimes ranging from flawed to pure evil...
...That is what the fuss has been about...
...Academics, by contrast, scolded him severely...
...To sanction (by cuts in aid, for instance) states that actively oppose American policies may be a fine Machiavellian tactic...
...12.50 Wilson describes his much discussed new book as a speculative essay in defense of scientific materialism or "the new naturalism...
...Consequently, Model I is a model of harmony...
...The most extreme instance of hypertrophic behavior, Wilson thinks, is the gathering and sharing of knowledge...
...and knowing his boss's fondness for tricks, he always suspected that attacks on him had been inspired by Kissinger...
...However, Lenin's associates in Petrograd, because they were without exception more politically moderate than he, stubbornly resisted his entreaties for a coup until October l0 and Lenin's return to the capital...
...Like so many others (including this reviewer), Moynihan was fascinated by the dexterity, the energy, the political incisiveness of Kissinger...
...The destruction of millions of Russian peasants did not touch us directly," she writes, "and we shut our eyes to it...
...Depending far too uncritically upon the views of Bayard Rustin, Wilson speaks of the rise of organized labor during the New Deal as if it were an unambiguous boon to black workers...
...The existence of large-scale monopoly in all capitalist economies should be at the very core of Lindblom's argument...
...Not surprisingly, some of the old generals who have directed the black attack against pure-and-simple racial discrimination reject the notion that class not race is now the most important determinant of opportunity for blacks...
...It encompasses the conventional authority system based on brute force, as well as the "preceptor" system wherein government persuasion, exhortation, and education serve to develop the "new man...
...On October 21-23, using as an excuse the government's announced intention of transferring the bulk of the Petrograd garrison to the front and cloaking every move as a defensive measure against the counterrevolution, the heavily Bolshevikinfluenced Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd soviet took control of most Petrograd-based military units, in effect disarming the Provisional Government without a shot...
...Thus, he believes that they (not the Arabs) organized the anti-Zionist campaign...
...Whoever disagrees with his analysis and style is seen as wanting to accommodate the Soviets or as having been drained of energy: for instance, the State Department bureaucracy, the foreign policy elite demoralized by Vietnam, and even Henry Kissinger whenever he fails to support Moynihan's suggestions for grand counteroffensives on the UN battlefields: "Kissinger was exhausted and everyone else was afraid...
...Then we will have to decide which should be obeyed and which should be "curtailed or sublimated...
...actually had to accommodate, not confront, the Third World, and who was in the process of changing America's political stance and economic policies toward developing countries, may have wanted to cover his domestic flank and to conceal his retreat by having a vocal defender of America's values at the UN...
...IN HIS sophisticated book, The Declining Significance of Race, Wilson addresses what Newman et al...
...yet "I was not his inferior and I knew that also...
...The same mood prevailed in many other areas of the country and among soldiers at the front...
...largely ignore: class stratification and subordination...
...Nowhere in the vast literature on the period can one find more poignant, generally accurate depictions of the chaotic final days before Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and of the Provisional Government's last desperate hours in the Winter Palace the following October...
...When his former colleague James Q. Wilson in November 1975 (after the British ambassador to the UN had publicly denounced Moynihan's style) tried to dissuade him from resigning and told him that if he left, "the President would lose the most hopeful and popular turn in our foreign policy in a decade, possibly in a generation," Moynihan approved...
...We can only work our way around them...
...746 pp...
...But this is not what Moynihan advocates, because of his other oversimplifications and misreadings: like so many Americans in search of simple grids and in love with a devil theory of international affairs, Moynihan sees the Russians as master schemers who manipulate the whole show (he even suspects them of having inspired a rumor about his senatorial ambitions...
...And Wilson simply never shows that hard genetic constraints will prevent us from moving toward forms-of social life that any serious thinker has considered desirable...
...jump to dubious conclusions...
...The genetically determined convergence toward common basic behaviors is what Wilson means by human nature...
...But with essentially the same cast of characters, operating with the same absence of accountability, plus an apparent lingering strain of anti-Semitism, the thaw didn't last long—as the Markish family found when it tried to move to Israel...
...The book's most notable insights derive from Lindblom's careful development of two essentially different models of society...
...The chapter on aggression, for instance, opens with the question whether humans are innately aggressive...
...Monopoly plays a crucial role in capitalist society...
...The last sentence of the tribute was: "Yes, it was worth writing like that, and a life like that was worth living...
...Much work needs to be done to show how these two have sprung from "the hunter-gatherer's repertory...
...He is not hampered by modesty: "not until it was over did it turn out that we had changed the language of American foreign policy" ("I" turns to "we" in the last part of the book...
...Businessmen thus become a kind of public official and exercise what, on a broad view of their role, are public functions...
...Some of his finest pages offer an analysis of the privileged position of business, and it's here that he seems doomed to suffer from the Scitovsky syndrome...
...Perhaps the most important thing to be said about the thinking of these moderate or "right" Bolsheviks was that, in most important respects, it corresponded to mass aspirations and to the views of left Mensheviks and left SR's...
...Over time, the competition for shelter leads to the victory of some supermonopolies and these become the "public officials in the market system" that Lindblom credits with undermining democracy...
...The significant logical consequences of this for polyarchy is that a broad area of public decision-making is removed from polyarchal control...
...Chicago: University of Chicago Press...
...clean slate...
...Many of the social diseases of capitalism (e.g., extreme inequality in income, discrimination, high levels of unemployment and inflation) would be forced into partial remission...
...Wilson places schooling, for instance, in the sociopolitical sphere when obviously it also serves an important role in the economic order as a gateway to employment...
...They also declare that "stay in school" campaigns, aimed mostly at black teenagers, are misdirected ventures, subtle exercises in blaming victims when the real problem is job discrimination...
...Idealism becomes jingoistic especially when it identifies, and focuses on, a single enemy—in the current case, the Soviet Union...
...And who can be a better champion of this mood than a man who went from Kennedy to Nixon and Ford, from the attempt to promote civil rights to the politics of Commentary, and whose way of looking at the world offers an intellectually simple and emotionally rich fare to people scared by complexity, uncertainty, and the appearance of American retreat...
...First, the question of equality...
...is that they allow one important fact, the reality of ongoing racial discrimination, to occupy them entirely...
...In relative terms, technological unemployment hits blacks hardest, but in absolute terms it hurts more whites than blacks...
...When defeat is likely, especially on minor issues, it is best not to exaggerate its importance...
...BLACK NIGHT, WHITE SNOW: RUSSIA'S REVOLUTIONS 1905-1917, by Harrison E. Salisbury, Garden City, New York: Doubleday...
...One of the unfortunate results of this is that the connection between expanding popular dissatisfaction and the fluctuating situation of the Bolsehviks, in short the relationship between the revolution from below and the eventual Bolshevik success, remains obscure...
...Saying that her book has the virtue of humdrum detail does not mean it lacks literary quality and bold insights...
...By-products of these organizational structures will almost certainly be sharp contrasts in wellbeing— pockets of dire poverty, degradation of the environment, and a propensity toward corruption...
...Finally, Lindblom reverts to a notion that is rapidly becoming the new panacea among liberal economists: develop a highly discriminating mixture of financial inducements to business with government control over them...
...it is a longterm problem that cannot possibly be understood solely, or even mainly, in terms of racial discrimination...
...New York Ballantine Books...
...Second, even in terms of institutions that are wholly within the economic sector, racially motivated discrimination handicaps blacks as a group, middle- as well as lower-class...
...Hence they advocated, among other things, that the overthrow of the Provisional Government be delayed until a suitable excuse for giving battle presented itself...
...These books address a wide array of topics relating to the changing position of blacks in America...
...They decide the nation's industrial technology, the pattern of work organization, the location of industry, resource allocation, executive compensation...
...Wilson ends with a chapter on "Hope," showing how sociobiology will enable it to spring, if not eternally, at least for a few more evolutionary aeons...
...The church says it is articulating God-given natural laws...
...Sociobiology as science will be transformed into sociobiology as life force...
...Hence racial conflict, according to Wilson, has moved from the economic sector, the struggle over jobs, to the sociopolitical front, as seen in increasingly bitter contests involving access to and control of decent housing, public schools, and political power in cities...
...Many of Wilson's seemingly novel conclusions are commonplace to anyone familiar with the literature on the racial crisis...
...For most of us, Model 2 seems to be a better place to begin...
...Wilson's basic position seems to be that the needs of the genes should be dominant...
...Furthermore, although it is true that officials and opinionmakers belabor blacks' educational deficiencies while soft-pedaling job discrimination, it is also true, as the authors' own tables show, that the better educated a black becomes the better are his or her employment opportunities...
...He sees knowledge as "the ultimate emancipator" from the bonds of genetic forces, but by itself it will not "alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory...
...Kissinger, for once, had been too clever by half...
...What he has accomplished is a fresh perspective for analyzing the comparative strengths of political-economic systems...
...One day during their refusenik years, the surviving Markishes donned the yellow Star of David in the manner prescribed by Hitler...
...Our minister just wants to have a talk with your husband...
...The two heroes of this book," he tells us, "are Adam Smith and Karl Marx...
...The key strategy," he argues, "is to pay business to waive some of their privileges...
...Surely, his supporters would reply, the U.S...
...Referring to a friendly official who looked them up after their exile, she notes: The relations between the regime's victims and its agents did not always conform to official regulations or to the formulas of class struggle against "the enemies of the people...
...Unfortunately, Wilson doesn't tell us why the needs of the genes should wholly determine morality...
...I suppose it is impossible to recapture my precise reactions without coloration from today's changed angle of vision...
...IT MAY BE that readers of Salisbury's book will find this interpretation convincing...
...The linchpin of Lindblom's criticism of market society would then be gone...
...Such a system, resembling many "democratic" capitalist nations of the world, is founded on the principle that "everyone knows himself to be fallible" and that no synoptic, that is comprehensive, theory of social order exists...
...If Soviet apologists want to take comfort from this book they can find it in her view that the regime is not as bad as Hitler's...
...and it is best not to use methods that will make it more likely...
...Salisbury enlivens his narrative with eyewitness accounts and engaging colorful detail—from moving sketches of the royal family's at times surprisingly carefree days under house arrest to spritely descriptions of Petrograd night life and high-society gatherings (down to guest lists and even what some people wore...
...The main cause of the analytic fuzziness in Protest, Politics, and Prosperity stems from its authors' confusion regarding race and class...
...Are you conned or confused by a facade of civility, or do you look straight through to the horror—and scream...
...Science will soon enable us to understand them in detail...
...Retrospective reflexion is, however, not 237 Moynihan's forte: nowhere does he ask himself why Kissinger appointed him...
...Genes build organisms that create further organisms containing replicas of the original genes, and these in turn create further gene-bearing organisms, and so on...
...A species that has "greater staving power," he remarks at one point, would "in a broad sense" have "the higher morality...
...Technicians in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy told him he hadn't done his homework...
...Infused with enthusiasm for a revolution that would end ghettoism and pogroms and liberate the Yiddish language to flourish freely along with the other cultures, many Soviet Jews must have stubbornly resisted "drawing conclusions...
...The ability of business to hold the economy hostage would largely disappear, leaving capitalism and democracy to coexist...
...He contends that in the wake of the civil rights movement "the economic and political systems in the U.S...
...The fuss, I think, is out of all proportion to any real implications of the theory...
...Black Night, White Snow is a voluminous, compelling narrative that should provide many enjoyable hours to devotees of powerfully written history...
...We have to decide what to do...
...He would deny the ability of business to control political campaigns through corporate funds...
...at the very time when the political power and influence of the cities are on the wane...
...THE SIGNIFICANCE of Moynihan's confrontational style is, however, much greater than is suggested by these UN battles...
...As a vision meant to inspire literature and create a center for our profoundest feelings, this seems to me not even a starter...
...It is therefore not some theoretical version of capitalism but the inevitable forms it takes in actuality that makes it an undesirable way of organizing society...
...She mentions Ehrenburg once more, not without warmth, when, aged and ill, he sent an eloquent tribute to a memorial anniversary for Markish in 1960...
...One morning more than a quarter of a century ago, when I made the familiar turn from University Place east onto 12th Street toward "the building," there were some 20 or 30 men near the entrance shouting, "Where are Feffer and Markish...
...If he had thought through and drawn conclusions from...
...even though subject to significant control, they decide what is to be produced and in what quantities: These decisions are turned over to businessmen, both small and large...
...Wilson therefore sees himself as a hard-headed antiutopian...
...Many of the more traditional Marxists" and a "still surprising proportion of anthropologists and learning theorists" think that human behavior can be "shaped into virtually any form...
...For the roots of "Red October" can in fact be found in the peculiarities of Russia's political and social development in the 19th century...
...But he never examines an alternative hypothesis—that Kissinger who by March 1975 had concluded that the U.S...
...Based on his critique of contemporary market systems as undemocratic, and communist systems as hopelessly bureaucratic and inefficient, he seeks some hybrid of the two...
...PROTEST, POLITICS, AND PROSPERITY: BLACK AMERICANS AND WHITE INSTITUTIONS, 1940-1975, by Dorothy K. Newman, William J. Kruvant, Nancy J. Amidei, Barbara L. Carter, Dawn Day, Jack S. Russell...
...But in discussing sexual equality, he takes a different line...
...The popular press touted Wilson as the latest possessor of the key to the universe...
...Both acknowledge the importance of the reforms won by the civil rights movement...
...In view of the foregoing, as well, the action of the Bolsheviks during the October days was as different from the contemporary Soviet model of an essentially highly disciplined party marching to inevitable victory at Lenin's command as it was from Salisbury's conception of the confused group of plotters, without popular support, stumbling ahead to their great adventure and blundering into power...
...Men are generally bigger, stronger, and swifter than women...
...In part because of their continuing interaction with workers and soldiers, these leaders possessed what appears to have been a more realistic appreciation than Lenin had of the limits of the party's influence and authority among the masses, and of the latter's attachment to the soviets as legitimate democratic organs in which all genuinely revolutionary groups would work to fulfill the revolution...
...The book is at its best describing the effects of inequality...
...Comments Esther Markish: "Why such high flown phraseology, why such lowdown evasiveness...
...Here the difficulties will become apparent to any reader not dazzled by the promise of a do-it-all science...
...That blacks are three times as likely to receive their medical attention in emergency rooms could be due to the fact that blacks are far more likely than whites to be poverty stricken...
...Therefore, Wilson concludes, any sexual activities—homosexual ones included—are fine, provided they strengthen the kinds of bonds that increase the chances of forwarding copies of one's genes into the future gene pool...
...Humans are nothing but physicobiological entities with brains composed of ten billion nerve cells...
...Unfortunately, the analytic power of Protest, Politics, and Prosperity, seldom rivals its descriptive vitality...
...It follows that a Model 2 society will use impersonal markets to direct economic activity and polyarchy ("rule by many") to resolve political matters...
...Experts will properly debate these 243 issues...
...403 pp...
...POLITICS AND MARKETS: THE WORLD'S POLITICALECONOMIC SYSTEMS, by Charles E. Lindblom...
...But as Esther Markish will not let us forget, over there, when the men in gray karakul collars come, people do not have that luxury...
...Yet, the directions this change can take and its final products are constrained by the genetically influenced behavioral predispositions that constituted the earlier, simpler, adaptations...
...Monopoly, he concludes, is not the opposite of competition but only a dampening of it...
...Though intrigued with the vast potentialities of such a system, Lindblom severely criticizes Model I in practice...
...People naturally wish to protect themselves from such internecine battles, and thus monopoly creeps into all aspects of social life...
...His stress on the socioeconomic gap increasingly separating the black lower class from the black middle class creates problems for 245 politicians seeking to promote a black united front...
...Let us then repent and surrender all our gold...
...Both also offer carefully documented indictments of the continuing poverty and discrimination experienced by many black Americans...
...There is some vague notion in all of this of market socialism tied to "synoptic" planning...
...Wilson has said that he was astonished by some of these reactions...
...And in 19 of those years black unemployment was over 8 percent, a rate never reached by white workers...
...His analysis, however, is weakened to the extent that he fails to note the historical sources of the debate in which he is engaged...
...Kissinger told Moynihan that the piece had made him feel that he suddenly "understood what was going on out there" and regret that he hadn't written it himself...
...and then...
...Even if mankind can avoid destroying itself by war or exhausting its resources on gadgets, the species will be left without "transcendental goals...
...Dividing the authors is their disagreement over what lies at the root of black woes...
...FROM THIS PERSPECTIVE, the October revolution in Petrograd was in large measure a genuine expression of popular forces, as much an intricate political and psychological struggle as a military operation, in which the fate of the Provisional Government, though not the character of the regime that was to replace it, was determined well before the "coup" focused upon in Black Night, White Snow...
...his entourage merely took part in that harmony or dissension...
...No matter how painful it is for me to make this admission...
...Wilson maintains, furthermore, that just as the crisis of American cities cannot be solved solely by local solutions, neither can the crisis of black America be solved by blacks alone nor even by merely attaining racial justice...
...It came at a time when, among other things, the Russian countryside seethed with discontent...
...The Russians are no longer putting bullets into the back of people's heads, a change not to be minimized, especially if you live in their orbit...
...Cicero, Illinois, and South Boston are only two of the more well-known places where northern whites have resurrected the slogans of southern segregation...
...Lindblom's book does little to prove empirically the corporate dominance in market-oriented polyarchies...
...We cling to our civil liberties if only to protect ourselves from someone else's "correct" analysis...
...This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan's account of his brief and stormy period of service as American ambassador at the United Nations in 1975-76...
...The displacement of human labor by automation is not aimed specifically at black workers...
...An official screams at them, "Lenin said that in the land of the workers gold would be used for the construction of public toilets...
...Correct" refers to the correspondence of an institution or policy to man's true physical, psychological, and social needs...
...Because of this, right Bolsheviks were often the most effective and popular party spokesmen in such institutions as the soviets...
...The idea of explaining socially meaningful action as the outcome of mechanistic causal factors is by now quite respectably ancient, and there are quite well-known difficulties with it...
...It disregards the incomedistribution issue...
...The only policy statement to emerge from Wilson's study is an unelaborated call "to attack inequality on a broad class front" in a manner that will "go beyond the limits of ethnic and racial discrimination by directly confronting the destructive features of class subordination...
...An implication of Wilson's analysis is that blacks should cease fighting new battles with old battleplans...
...Clearly, there is evidence in daily newspaper accounts of the power of the corporate sector to hold society hostage...
...If the purpose was to break the common front of the Third World and the Communists, as Kissinger, according to Moynihan, wanted to do, then Moynihan's tactics were thoroughly counterproductive...
...Never mind the intellectual contradictions and inconsistencies, or Moynihan's unawareness of the tension between human rights and the anti-Soviet imperative...
...On this matter, the left-wing critics of Wilson as well as Wilson himself have grossly exaggerated the social bearings of sociobiology...
...And it ignores Lindblom's own thesis about market-dominated polyarchies...
...There was such a despairing intensity about their question...
...Science, having caused the problem, will solve it...
...Here Wilson is arguing that biological function determines moral permissibility, and that a morality that does not follow the needs of the genes is in error...
...THE LONG RETURN, by Esther Markish...
...The basic feature of these latter struggles is that they involve white and black city-locked "have-nots," since white and black "haves" avoid the storm, protected by salaries that allow them to reside in suburbs and to send their children to private schools...
...He seems (for once) to accept at face value Kissinger's profession of agreement with the themes and program of "the U.S...
...Businessmen do so when they demand investment tax credits, capital gains privileges, environmental protection exemptions, antilabor measures, and cutbacks in social services...
...It prevents new firms from entering existing markets and bars certain workers from certain occupations...
...Paper, $4.95...
...And then they started banging on the door [Esther Markish recalls...
...the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, for instance, he would either have had to commit suicide or, at the least, stop writing...
...This leads to the distrust of any intellectual elite that attempts to impose one...
...Alaine Locke, in his seminal 1925 essay "The New Negro," wrote that "if it was ever warrantable to regard the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous...
...There is also recognition of the trade-off between the privileges of business and government control, but he gives us no hint as to what an optimal level of central authority might be—the level high enough to curb activity injurious to the public domain, but low enough to encourage innovation and production...
...We are then told how the view bears on aggression, sex, altruism, and religion (and incidentally a dozen other topics...
...And this is precisely why the book, and the author, must be taken seriously...
...His nearest approach to a clear answer is this: "Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens...
...or have rigorous prerequisites that eliminate the poorly trained and educated regardless of race...
...And he is intrigued with the potentiality of building on the Yugoslav experience with workers' control...
...Lindblom argues they are whatever businessmen desire most: income and wealth, deference, prestige, influence, power, authority, and high profits...
...In the post-Stalin thaw they were officially rehabilitated and some small amends were made to surviving relatives...
...The fundamental premise of a Model I society, Lindblom argues, is not some sadistic drive to dominate mankind, despite the grossest offenses against the human spirit in most communist nations...
...What then can he mean by saying we are innately aggressive...
...Later she adds that Markish was incapable of "thinking through a political situation to the end and drawing the conclusions...
...New York: Pantheon...
...Civil Rights Commission recently found that in Cleveland black welfare recipients usually received less cash, Food Stamps, and medical benefits than whites with the same need...
...The result is perplexing...
...His cry was manic: now or never...
...Rather, proponents of Model I believe that scientific analysis and theory are conclusive in discovering the right form of organization for society...
...The world is indeed, as he puts it, a dangerous place...
...At the same time he obviously has not given up on his initial large claims...
...This makes him few friends on the doctrinaire "left," just as his critique of private 247 enterprise earns him little favor with dogmatic capitalists...
...Albeit with considerable wavering, caused largely by pressure for bolder action from Lenin, it is easy to see that, in overthrowing the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks pursued precisely the tactics urged by Trotsky and like-minded party leaders...
...Explaining why Lenin did not participate in preparations for the seizure of power in Smolny until the battle was nearly over, Salisbury speculates that, among other things, "it may have been more compatible with the state of his [Lenin's] nerves" or possibly "at the last moment he had actually fallen into another of.his fits of despondency...
...Genetic-biological needs both do and do not dictate what we ought to do, or what is permissible...
...He seems to be a moderate liberal...
...306 pp...
...SOVIET REALITY in 1978 is a little more complex than what we have learned of the worst of the terror...
...Black mothers are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white mothers, while black infants are twice as likely to die during their first year of life...
...The Bolsheviks did not seize power in one bold clandestine move...
...in Salisbury's words, "seldom had a group of plotters for power been more confused and at odds on the eve of their great adventure...
...But as Herbert Hill shows in an excellent new book, Black Labor and the American Legal System, the institutionalization of collective bargaining, when it involved segregated unions, detrimentally affected black workers by legally and formally excluding them from jobs...
...The same is true even for some of the most important aspects of Bolshevik internal and external politics, which bear upon the party's behavior and political stance...
...Second, Moynihan's preference that the UN be an instrument of and for democracies, as against the principle of universality, misreads both the origins and purpose of the UN...
...Whether Western-style liberalism ever had a chance in Russian circumstances is arguable...
...However, they can help us to define the options and to assess the price of each...
...Moynihan is correct in stating that his style and rhetoric "had spirit...
...The remainder of the book weaves this terminology into his two well-defined models, and provides an excellent critique of both communist and capitalist systems...
...Not only is the melange contradictory: each ingredient is likely to make things worse...
...The genes that have built the best survivor-reproducers are the genes whose replicas are around in the gene pool today...
...Most of us share a fundamental uncertainty about what is "correct" analysis, even though we hold some very strong beliefs...
...For the reader to whom the present volume is directed, however, what matters is not the theory inspiring Wilson's not-so-new naturalism...
...It is the convergence that is important, and the sense of frustration that underlies it...
...But his own furious response (which his British counterpart, Ivor Richard, compared to Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral) was triply unwise, however much it may have made American onlookers feel better...
...What Moynihan shows is how close Wilsonian idealism can be to jingoism...
...It will also furnish a myth that will capture the imagination, stimulate literature, and give coherence to our feelings...
...The whole enterprise aroused much interest...
...The guards laughed...
...In the wake of the Kornilov affair, the abortive rightist putsch of late August, among politically conscious workers, soldiers, and sailors in Petrograd, for example, aversion to continued political collaboration with the liberals and attraction for the immediate creation of a strong, democratic, exclusively socialist government, in which all groups in the Soviet would be represented, became nearly universal...
...The dilemma for urban blacks," Wilson declares, "is that they are gaining political influences in large urban areas...
...Model I is the archetype of a centrally directed society...
...In a system where there was neither monopoly nor a central authority guiding allocation and distribution, each worker would be in constant jeopardy of losing his livelihood to someone who offered his labor for a few cents less, and each capitalist in constant jeopardy of bankruptcy...
...They point out, correctly, that educational prerequisites for employment are sometimes more a function of general economic conditions than actual job-related requirements: when labor is short, employers relax hiring standards and when it is plentiful, tighten them...
...Was there not an unceasing lie machine in operation against the Soviet Union...
...In such a system, the intellectual elite is the political elite...
...it is good advice...
...But how does this demonstrate that inferior health care for many blacks is related to their race rather than to their class...
...would have had to compare the health services available to whites and blacks of similar class backgrounds...
...Even if a true free enterprise system could be suddenly generated that would obey all of the first-and second-order conditions of the neoclassical economic construct, its half-life would be measured in milliseconds...
...They determine not only such physical characteristics as eye color and bodily height and shape, but also— and this is Wilson's central point—our behavior...
...we must somehow get our nerve back...
...Describing the atmosphere at their Moscow apartment in the '30s, she notes that while Markish had some intimate friends, "the relationship was never unconditional, one he could not live without...
...The genes program us for a variety of responses, and the variety is elicited by the environment...
...A moment later...
...William Julius Wilson contends that now, for the first time, class rather than race is the most important factor determining the life chances of individual blacks...
...As a result, world affairs come to be described as a battle between the forces of liberty (which, in the vote on the anti-Zionism resolution, included Nicaragua and Uruguay) and those of totalitarianism (which, in the same vote, included such U.S...
...Wilson never discusses these matters explicitly...
...Markish and Feffer, of course, had been murdered, along with most other leading figures in Soviet Jewish culture...
...His knowledge can't yet have improved his own hard biological substructure...
...The U.S...
...To be sure, it tries hard, and I will come to them...
...Once we understand that it is genetic factors that make us tend to fight strangers (preach at friends, make love, try to get ahead, wean babies) we can work better for peace...
...This largely explains the hostile rebuttals to Wilson's thesis launched by Kenneth Clark, researchers for the National Urban League, and the Association of Black Sociologists...
...without a word of warning—as in a movie about Nazi Germany— trucks filled with State Security agents pulled up...
...Moynihan notes that American human rights policies today are causing difficulties for "non-Communist but equally non-democratic nations, some of which could fairly be counted American allies": after all, then, whoever is with us cannot be bad, and we should concentrate our antitotalitarian fervor mostly on our main foe...
...At the core of his view is "the evolutionary epic...
...Esther Markish tells how her father and other NEP businessmen and their relatives were beaten 250 and herded into a shakedown session (many, many years before the "late mistakes" of Stalin...
...From this valid base Newman et al...
...For his belief that sociobiology can become a life force depends on his view that forwarding copies of one's genes is a deeply stirring and exciting activity...
...It appeals to the simple nationalists, who like to boast of American power, to dismiss lesser states as irrelevant nuisances, to demand obedience from allies, and to teach "lessons" to the Soviet challenger...
...Large explanatory propositions are followed by cautious hedging...
...She perceives and respects the nature of creative genius, irksome as it can sometimes be in close contact...
...It is nonetheless pleasant and easy to read...
...Urging black children to stay in school, then, is not an evasion of responsibility...
...Almost from the start, liberal and moderate socialist leaders, allied behind the ill-fated Provisional Government, were engulfed by an unprecedented mounting political, economic, and social crisis, with which they were helpless to deal...
Vol. 26 • April 1979 • No. 2
