LETTERS
Editors: I am replying to the fund-raising letter that I received today. Dissent is probably one of only a few causes that I support without reservation but I lack the means with which to back...
...One other very important reference in the book is to Morris Winchevsky who has been called the "grandfather" of Yiddish socialist literature, a respected figure in the American Jewish socialist movement, but active in the London movement before reaching the United States...
...Loyalty to one's family is admirable, wherever they reside...
...Indeed, many democratic socialists believe that the military is less solicitous of the true interests of the poor than those bourgeois draft protesters who do not wish to be used as canon fodder at the Strait of Hormuz...
...98, pp...
...q Reviewing Apocalypse Now Editors: I was rather surprised to see Francis Coppola's production Apocalypse Now excoriated so misguidedly by David Bromwich in your pages (Spring 1980) as I thought it was one of the most intelligent and imaginative films of recent years...
...Abel's almost fatalistic attitude toward current problems...
...But in the midst of this, Coppola cuts to a stationary low-level shot of the village school being evacuated...
...There host governments were stunned at the difficulty of inducing workers' and their families' return, and in all cases (but Switzerland) terminated guestworker programs...
...However, he has not hidden from the reality of the war as the generals at headquarters did with their high altitude bombing strikes and bureaucratic jargon...
...J. QUINN BRISBEN Chicago, Ill...
...For many the military is the only available path of upward mobility...
...One form of attack on Marxist professors is the hypocritical critique from the left used by Parkin in counterposing Marxists "in the service of the working-class movement" with those "in the service of the university...
...According to Kapp, it was known that "she told Max Beer she was the only member of her family to be "drawn to the Jewish people...
...lest we never grasp American political culture...
...It is important to correctly analyze the reasons for the influx in order to devise appropriate remedies...
...q No Fascism Ahead Editors: Lionel Abet, in his piece in your Fall 1980 issue on Lyndon LaRouche ("Our First Serious Fascist...
...What matters, as economists know, are rates and trends, and here Cornell's Vernon Briggs has hit the nail: "Actually the precise number [of documented workers residing in this country] is irrelevant if one concedes—as everyone familiar with this issue does— that the number of people involved is substantial and that the direction of change is toward annual increases...
...This is clearest where legal migration is concerned...
...He records that: Eleanor ran up to me in great haste...
...of the'80s are going to duplicate those of Weimar, it seems implausible to suggest, as Abel does, that LaRouche might gain power in the coming decade as a result of the (prospective) failure of American foreign and domestic policy...
...What," he asks, "are the real causes of inflation...
...My main effort was to suggest that however we weigh them...
...It may have been for generations past, but what data supports that claim now...
...The author expressing one view, J. Gross has recently published an outstanding book on the Polish Society under German Occupation (1933-44), yet this does not make him an expert on Church and democracy in Poland after World War II...
...Dissent is probably one of only a few causes that I support without reservation but I lack the means with which to back up my ideological support...
...for I fear they may be both pervasive and indicative of the prevailing naiveté of some democratic socialists...
...Generated as it is out of multiple and reinforcing causes, illegal immigration is much more sizable and for the future will continue on a larger scale than people like Piore realize, and it will not be controlled by single remedies alone such as the labor market reform he correctly advises...
...No doubt, many elements went into forming Eleanor's Jewish consciousness and sensitivity, not least of them her socialist convictions and hatred of all oppression and exploitation...
...Gitlin...
...His article is a series of interpretations that repeatedly try to force this expansive and ambivalent film into a strait jacket of simplistic ideology...
...government cannot convince anyone that it is sweet and fitting to die for the Seven Sisters oil monopoly...
...for a complex set of reasons...
...1st, the more glad, that my Father was Jew...
...Chapel Hill, N.C...
...Coppola never lets the viewer sit back complacently but constantly confronts him...
...culture via close military or political ties (as in Taiwan, Korea, Iran), the inviting cultural pluralism within American society where relatives and kinsmen are already well established, and rumors of lax enforcement —that is, all the factors setting up "chains of immigration" with enormous momentum...
...I refused and still refuse...
...Indeed, his analysis proves the opposite...
...Gitlin gives a sympathetic antiwar view of the helicopter attack...
...But he felt that with 65 British delegates, he would have little chance of speaking...
...Hanging bodies are visible every few yards and in one scene Kurtz drops the decapitated head of one of the ship's crew in Willard's lap...
...After all, if they were good Marxists they would be away on "the barricades" not in the university, while bad Marxists are obviously not needed in the university either...
...The oil companies, though seen as raking unfair levels of profit, are primarily seen as Gulf, Esso Mobil, individualized places where our uncles work and where our mothers buy their gas, and the sponsors for our favorite television programs...
...But readers must surely see that there is no compelling logic in his odd assumption that enforcement efforts are ineffectual in managing the problem until secondary markets are reformed...
...Albert Glotzer New York City 128...
...vital interests...
...Here I am in complete agreement...
...LOUIS F. COOPER Washington, D.C...
...territorial boundaries until American ecological and economic decline solves the immigration problem by ending the attractiveness of our nation...
...Peacetime draft registration is an almost certain prescription to increase irresponsible military activity—not a good idea in a nuclear age...
...I can't imagine why...
...And if the government has the bodies, it will eventually use them...
...All of these problems have been responded to differently within recent years, and we no longer feel that there is any particular viewpoint especially qualified to address them...
...The contribution by L. Kolakowski is similarly misleading, since it takes the same position...
...Perhaps your readers will be better served if next time Dissent invites some other, more genuine specialists to speak on Church and Democracy in Poland...
...How can it be brought down...
...This authority on Marxism, Church and Democracy, one of the revisionists who to use his words, attacked "the Communist tyranny and the Leninist doctrine," was also one of the most overzealous intellectual leaders and engineers of the Party policy aimed at destruction of religion and of the moral values defended by the Church...
...There is reason to believe that Marx would not have been flattered by the reference...
...But surely some approaches to these problems make more sense than others, and in many cases the more promising ones have yet to be tried...
...I suggested that, in the vastly changed circumstances of today and tomorrow, we end our historic faith in the immigration process, on a mass scale, as a way of solving problems...
...The U.S...
...I am glad that Mr...
...As for the film's attitude toward Kurtz, it takes a lot of death to glut some appetites, and I do not believe Coppola and Milius looked on their "nightmare of death" with the same eyes or the same heart as Mr...
...He then understood that the only way to fight this war was as the enemy does, without pity...
...A close look at the most "spectacular" sequence in this spectacle, the helicopter attack on the Vietcong village, will dispel the notion that the film is propaganda...
...I am also disturbed by Mr...
...This doesn't appear to add up to a U.S...
...This requires population control, and the time to begin is now...
...Parkin's critique of Althusser and Poulantzas is useful but says nothing that has not already been said by such Marxist writers as E. P. Thompson (in The Poverty of Theory...
...The airborne cameras put the viewer right in the middle of the assault force...
...On October 21, 1890, on her return from Germany, she found an invitation from Jewish workers to speak to them and replied: "I shall be very glad to speak at the meeting of Novbr...
...And unless one accepts the extremely dubious assumption that conditions in the U.S...
...is a typical product of the new intellectual stratum of professional Marxists...
...Winchevsky hoped to speak at the congress about the new unionized Jewish workers to a gathering that did not believe very strongly that there was such a thing as a Jewish worker...
...and few persons would "volunteer" for options open to the poor today or in the past...
...retreat before the Communist push" is threatening to "become a rout" Yet the Soviet attempt to crush the Afghan rebels continues to be unsuccessful...
...He writes, for instance: "It took three decades for the secular intelligentsia of Poland to discover the Catholic Church as its ally in the quest for political freedom and social justice...
...Piore eloquently noted the debt we surely owe to all of humanity, upon whose shoulders any civilization in some sense stands...
...Second, we never fight in behalf of oil monopolies...
...Let us not dispute estimates of illegals, where Piore is not flatly wrong, but merely consistently guessing on the low side...
...Let us turn to the important matter of causation, where one of Piore's insights fails to take on proper significance because of the narrowness of his perspective...
...MICHAEL H. GITLIN Brooklyn, N.Y...
...The sheer thrill of the scene remains but it is laced with sympathy for the victims of the attack and distaste for the Americans who are involved so mad Colonel Kilgore can watch a few of his men go surfing...
...Many poor youths today prefer enlisting to hanging around ghetto street corners...
...He forgets only one touch: the beautiful village woman, dressed in a flowing white gown, who deposits in the downed helicopter what looks like a basket of eggs but is really a basket of grenades, and blows up the helpless soldiers within...
...Forget it, even during the height of the Vietnam war protests, the black urban riots, and the counterculture movement, the U.S...
...It is intellectually bankrupt, though perhaps understandable, to continue to welcome massive and virtually uncontrolled immigration into the U.S...
...Coppola was banking on liberals to pick out the antiwar film from all that tangle, and call him one of their own...
...The importance of the omissions arises from the rather common knowledge that Marx, the "founder of scientific socialism," held some of the most drearily malevolent notions of Jews, their social role, and sad history...
...admits about 400,000 immigrants annually" when the official figures have for several years been half again as high, and in 1980 will apparently be twice as high...
...and U.S...
...I would hope that this kind of red-baiting sophistry is far from the intentions of anyone writing for Dissent, but that is the way Parkin has stated his case...
...As the film makes clear Kurtz's final 125 opinion is that nuclear bombs should be dropped on Vietnam...
...In 1893, when Winchevsky was a British delegate to the Socialist International congress in Zurich, it happened that he traveled to it in the same railway compartment with Eleanor and her husband, Edward Aveling...
...they are not met any longer by the invitation engraved on the lady in the harbor to endlessly send us the poor of the earth...
...I argue, as do all other students of the matter known to me, that the nation must do both at once—obviously...
...Obviously, standing armies are the enemies of freedom and friends of social reaction...
...For some unknown reason Bromwich seems to think that the film supports Kurtz's war against the Vietcong...
...Whence comes this naivete, that nobody will fight...
...OTIS L. GRAHAM, JR...
...Michnik in his book describes him as one who "recognized religion as one of the few guarantees of culture and norms among 126 human beings," adding that he did so...
...armed forces were not understaffed while keeping 500,000 men in Vietnam...
...Parkin even uses Wright's work in his article, yet he still concludes that "this [Althusserian] science...
...The majority of soldiers of any class must conform out of necessity...
...In the great Zurich street parade of the Congress, Winchevsky was not sure where he belonged and he was not sought out by the organizers...
...In his own camp Kurtz has made a beginning...
...This of a film which exposes America's involvement in the Vietnamese War as a thing of the cruelest sort for the Vietnamese and the American soldiers...
...I side with those who argue that the research on which the "temporary" theory of illegal immigration rests is flawed, and invite your readers to study the European experience with guest workers...
...First he underestimates the problem, then proposes a single-policy remedy and doubts its effectiveness, and then tells us with admirable candor that he is one of 127 those who will resist restriction because he wants (perhaps) to get the rest of his extended family into the country...
...Two assertions should however be challenged...
...He disputes my estimates of the size of the illegal population in the U.S., and while controversy is inevitable in this complex and obscure area, Piore underestimates the numbers at every point...
...Refugees aside, where special circumstances often account for a massive uprooting, illegal aliens come to the U.S...
...Eleanor was introduced to a Russian woman, Zinaida Vengerova, by her socialist friend Stepniak...
...Forcing the middle class to share the military servitude of the poor might increase multiclass political protest, but only at the cost of increasing the total sum of human misery, which is already high enough...
...The scene begins with dozens of helicopters taking off...
...In Dissent I would hope that it could be the subject of serious discussion, not the occasion for cheap shots...
...His important earlier work has helped us to understand the dimensions and characteristics of that labor market, and though he has a stronger sense of its unattractiveness to native workers than other scholars find acceptable, he makes valuable and pointed policy suggestions for upgrading as much of that sector as possible in wages and working conditions...
...No doubt, much of the current opposition to registra124 tion is based on self-interested class prejudice...
...I fail to see that Parkin's own writing is more accessible than that of Wright or Thompson, but then the double standard for Marxists is nothing new in academia...
...the Soviet economy is suffering from a severe agricultural shortage...
...He reduces the film not only to propaganda but to prowar propaganda which criticizes the Americans for fighting with the "two burdens of a liberal state, conscience and technology...
...The expectation of the battle to come along with the vicarious sensation of flying combine with Coppola's quick editing and Wagnerian soundtrack to excite the audience and get them ready for the kind of climactic visceral experience that helped make "Star Wars" such a huge popular success...
...I am taxed, in his response, with having underestimated the difficulty of devising and enforcing a fair but decidedly restrictionist immigration policy...
...Immigrants come, legally and illegally, for a cluster of reasons, including long-term exposure to U.S...
...London: Merlin Press, 1978), M. H. Best and W. E. Connolly (in "Politics and Subjects: The Limits of Structural Marxism," Socialilst Review, Nov.-Dec...
...Abel's view that "LaRouche and his followers have some prospects" for seizing political power in the '80s...
...75-100), and E. O. Wright ("Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies," New Left Review, no...
...if not, not...
...defense spending, in both conventional and nuclear areas, continues to rise...
...172-80...
...Obviously, all the Marx children knew of his views for they were familiar with his writings and heard oral expressions of them in the close-knit family circle...
...military "defenses are down" and that the U.S...
...Alien admissions under immigrant status, plus refugees, was 601,442 in FY 1978 and will approximate 800,000 in FY 1980...
...Although the poor will still have to do most of the dying, a government has no trouble getting volunteers from all social classes when it can convince its citizens that their vital interests are in danger...
...JERRY WATTS REPLIES: The letter of J. Quinn Brisben does not merit a response for it is not an argument but a series of non-sequitur assertions...
...And if the army is given a choice between training middle-class persons or lower-class persons in special skills that might later lead to good civilian jobs, it will naturally choose those with the highest level of preexistent skills, and the poor will lose out...
...Finally, I must again reject the claim that the army is an upward-mobility mechanism...
...The key speech is Kurtz's, about what he could have done with the right cadres: once, he inoculated all the children in a village to protect them from disease, and found the next day that the Vietcong in revenge had hacked off every arm his medicine had touched...
...And how are we to deal with the Soviet Union, and how with the nations of the Third World...
...First of all, we should forget the nonsensical belief that the United States government cannot convince anyone that it is "sweet and fitting to die for the Seven Sisters oil monopoly...
...During the Dreyfus affair, Eleanor declared, "I am a Jewess...
...The film does not hold up Kurtz's eschewal of American technology and his lack of conscience as an example of what American policy should have been...
...They are now, for the most part, instructors and assistant professors without tenure and few are having an easy time of it in this period of budget cutbacks and conservatism...
...So that one moral of the episode is, How innocent is any "innocent villager...
...She was the only one of Marx's children to do so...
...She placed me next to herself with Will Thorne [a fellow unionist] on one side and Edward on the other...
...I had hoped that the immigration discussion would not be closed by tropistic charges that restrictionists are the authors of suffering, but opened for a searching debate over whether and how accepted moral positions need to be adjusted in the light of changed circumstances...
...If this is your argument, then perhaps you'll find some creative insights toward a solution by realizing that black unemployment was not a problem until after slavery...
...It is enough to correct the error on annual legal immigrants, to note that Piore consistently takes a position on the extreme, minimalist end of the complex "numbers" debate, and that his (and Wayne Cornelius's) position that a large proportion of illegals intend to and will return is in hot dispute by other scholars...
...PAULINE T. SHARIT Castro Valley, Calif.[] "The Academicizing of Marxism" Editors: I am dismayed by Frank Parkin's blanket denunciation of Marxist academics in the Spring 1980 issue of Dissent ("The Academicizing of Marxism," pp...
...and the journal's aggressiveness and doctrinairism were detested by all Polish intellectuals who struggled to retain their integrity under the humiliating conditions...
...But I formulated a moral position raised somewhat higher than concern for family, composed of concern for a sustainable national future for all of us and our children and their children...
...How can a reputable scholar tell your readers that "the U.S...
...asserts that U.S...
...He was editor-in-chief of Argumenty, a Party journal established to fight and destroy Catholicism in Poland...
...We have many moral obligations, to self, family, group, nation, planetary humanity, perhaps planetary ecology...
...I did, however, find missing from the review any reference to the many pages dealing with Eleanor's Jewishness...
...But it is important not to fashion an integrated policy response to illegal immigration built only upon economists' advice...
...There is no Seven Sisters Oil Monopoly in the eyes of the domestic populace...
...This analysis is inspired by the book by Adam Michnik, The Church, the Left, the Dialogue (published in Polish in Paris by Kultura, 1977), who makes exactly the same mistake...
...Finally, I am surprised by Mr...
...They were feelings deep enough to permit her to express demonstratively convictions in sharp conflict with the bitter anti-Jewish writings of her brilliant father...
...I am a 100 percent disabled veteran and seem to be constantly losing ground in my attempt to provide for my two teenaged sons on a disability pension...
...He finds the film a "mindless spectacle tailored to a public tired of thinking...
...3-41...
...Only now does the battle begin...
...It] is akin to my blood," and Vengerova adds...
...Vengerova was in London studying early English literature and became friendly with Eleanor...
...We Jews must stick together," she said...
...But I profoundly doubt the old and unexamined view that the way to acknowledge that obligation is to maintain open borders at U.S...
...Bromwich also misinterprets the Kurtz character and the meaning of the conclusion...
...STEPHEN E. BARTON Berkeley, Calif...
...When the populace is convinced that our vital interests were threatened as in the current Iranian-Afghanistan Middle East crisis, the President was able to institute a pre-draft registration movement that was so overwhelmingly successful as to leave the least idealistic pacifist stunned...
...With best regards and congratulations on your excellent work for the past 26 years, ADAM PODGORECKI Ottawa, Canada q The New Immigration Editors Professor Michael Piore's response ("Another View on Migrant Workers" to my article on immigration ("The New Immigration"), both in the Summer 1980 Dissent, indicates how difficult it is to induce intelligent people to face a new set of conditions with fresh thinking...
...They both indicate that a number of exCommunists have recently learned how to take advantage of the power of the Catholic Church in Poland, without mentioning those numerous intellectuals who have long supported the Church's patriotic and democratic mission, independently of their religious beliefs...
...Thus, it was delightful to read how Eleanor Marx, actively involved in the early socialist and trade-union movement in England, deeply touched by the economic and social oppression of thousands of Jewish immigrants in London, proclaimed her solidarity with "her people...
...Abel's discussion of LaRouche's pernicious opinions makes it clear that LaRouche is a genuine fascist...
...0 Church & State in Poland Editors: I was surprised by your publication of "Two Views on Church and Democracy in Poland" (Summer 1980...
...The new generation of American Marxist intellectuals did not simply "rise on the crest of the wave of university expansion in the 1960s" as Parkin would have it...
...Major push factors, population pressures, and economic hardship are brushed aside by Piore but are of course part of the explanation for contemporary migration...
...Standing armies have always been recruited from the most powerless classes of society...
...This, in spite of the fact that Kurtz's camp is a nightmare of death...
...White middleclass soldiers may be marginally more likely to protest absurdities and atrocities than black lower-class soldiers, but this is no sane argument for the draft...
...Much of it was rascally anti-Semitic, repeating the worst cliches of Christian anti-Semitism...
...He not only avoids hard thinking, he avoids plain facts, which astonishes one who (like myself) has always respected his scholarship...
...This is obviously not the case in the U.S...
...More than that, with the juxtaposition of the moving aerial shots from the helicopters and the static eye-level shot of the village the viewer is suddenly placed in the position of the villagers who can only move as fast as their legs can take them...
...She quotes Eleanor, who was by then fluent in English, French, German, and Norwegian (she translated Ibsen plays), as saying: "My linguistic acquisition is Yiddish...
...As if the politically silenced majority of the Polish secular intelligentsia did not exist at all, as if its conscious recognition of the role of the Church were of no consequence...
...Piore's special expertise leads him to focus upon one of the pull factors, the existence within the U.S...
...It was Eleanor who took the information that Winchevsky represented eight trade unions with 600 Jewish proletarians and spoke in the Congress and conveying it "in German, French and English to great applause...
...after 1968, during his stay in England and the U.S.A...
...You have so enriched my life this past year in those other more valuable areas that I hope this small check will be of some help and I also enclose a check to extend my subscription for two more years...
...q The Draft and the Poor Editors: I am replying to "The Draft and the Poor," by Jerry Watts, in your Fall 1980 issue...
...Drop the bomb—exterminate them all...
...We fight in behalf of U.S...
...which uses "arcane language" in order to "secure its newly won respectability...
...economy of a secondary, lower-tier labor market...
...1979, pp...
...They developed out of the student movement and participation in struggles against racism, the war in Vietnam, sexism, etc...
...This speech summarizes everything Willard has learned on his own journey, and the film wants us to take it very seriously indeed...
...It was in this vein that John Roche, former White House intellectual-in-residence, assailed Bertell Oilman, who had just been refused appointment at the University of Maryland, because he was a "soft" Marxist, unlike the hard-hitting revolutionary Marx about whom he, Roche, was teaching his students and for whom he professed the greatest respect...
...Here at Berkeley Michael Reich, the only Marxist in the economics department, has so far been unable to win support for tenure from his department and I have just heard that Fred Block has been denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania despite support from his department...
...Again, we must ask socialists, if the key to black unemployment should be a de facto mercenary military...
...Piore has offered Dissent's readers a good example of how the thicket of difficulties is composed...
...The viewer now realizes that the target of the attack is a village with a school, children, homes...
...Soldiers in the ranks do not decide policy...
...But we need not snarl your readers in "the numbers game...
...they obey orders and are summarily punished for questioning these orders...
...DAVID BROMWICH Replies: The "weird trip," the imperialist romance, and the record of the horrors of war: Apocalypse Now contains all three elements, with a result that seemed to me not ambivalent but confused...
...I even deliver lectures in Yiddish...
...In some cases that may give one a stake in a porous, unenforced immigration policy...
...No doubt, he means here the so-called party intelligentsia...
...retreat before the Communist push...
...q On Eleanor Marx Editors: The review of Yvonne Kapp's fascinating two-volume biography Eleanor Marx by Rosen and Ratner gives sufficient reasons why the study of the youngest of Karl Marx's three daughters should be widely read...
...The relation between Marxist intellectuals in the university and the working class is a serious problem, just as it is for Marxist intellectuals who work in party or union bureaucracies or asjournalists...
...All my writing on the topic confesses the technical, emotional, and intellectual difficulty of the issue...
...I tremble when self-proclaimed socialists write as if it does not matter what types of tasks blacks do in order to remedy their unemployment problems...
...Eleanor explained to me that she was active among Jewish working women in Whitechapel, and that in the interests of socialist propaganda it was more sensible for her to learn Yiddish than to wait for the ignorant masses of immigrants from Eastern Europe to become Anglicised...
Vol. 28 • January 1981 • No. 1
