A Socialist Organization in U.S. Today?-Yes
Coser, Lewis & Haskell, Gordon
In his article "Sects and Sectarians" which appeared in the Autumn 1954 issue of DISSENT, Lewis Coser calls for the dissolution of all existing socialist organizations in America. The...
...Examples are taken from everywhere, apparently at random...
...Omichund,' said Mr...
...But do they really know what they are doing...
...But what in the world can that mean except to gain a more accurate, concrete insight into the workings of capitalism and Stalinism in our time, and from this to derive a more adequate program or series of policies aimed at their destruction...
...In the very broadest terms, socialists have a special and unique need to form organizations precisely because both the socialist overthrow of capitalism and the organization of the socialist society require the highest development of organized, associated human activity...
...In his article "Sects and Sectarians" which appeared in the Autumn 1954 issue of DISSENT, Lewis Coser calls for the dissolution of all existing socialist organizations in America...
...But there is none of that in Coser's piece...
...Of course, that would be, in a way, to concoct a "prescription...
...People may be swayed toward "socialist values" by a magazine...
...the latter, which was to be shown to him, contained a stipulation in his favor...
...For the Youth If no socialist organization existed, what would be the political development of every young student or worker who becomes disillusioned with capitalist society...
...they are differentiated among themselves on the basis of specific views or theories or doctrines to which most of their members subscribe with a high degree of consciousness...
...Has the American working class "ripened for an independent historic movement...
...If sects exist with a measure of historical justification for their existence, it but indicates that the working class has not yet ripened for an independent historic movement...
...Coser and his colleagues who edit DISSENT may have come, in recent years, to see much that was wrong or inadequate in the socialist youth organizations in which they won their intellectual and political spurs...
...For the Development of Socialist Ideas It is true that the small socialist propaganda group has limited possibilities of subjecting its theories and policies to the only really effective test...
...Every generation must do the best it can with conditions as it finds them...
...They are not even satisfied with "asserting values...
...The ex-socialists and those present socialists who call for an end to socialist organization do so for the opposite reason...
...Lewis Coser replies: It would be tempting to consider Gordon Haskell's article as simply another exhibit in the literature of sectarianism...
...It is a quotation from Marx which, apparently, has been found to be one of the live parts of the socialist tradition...
...Should not the intelligent man who wants to be an effective socialist shun it, and either join the Democratic Party (of course, for the purpose of warping it to socialist ends), or seek political expression in some ideologically undefined community of dissenters in the hope that out of the political uncertainty and indecision of all of them a ferment will be created in which eventually a new idea will be born...
...That is genuine sectarianism, and Marxists have recognized it as such for a long time...
...Of course there is...
...Not to recognize this would bd naive and inexcusable, particularly in Marxists whose approach should make them specially sensitive to the interplay between the material conditions and the consciousness of the movement...
...He accepted between two and three hundred thousand pounds TnOMAS BABBINGTON MACAULEY, Lord Clive...
...They are too small, harassed and isolated for that...
...In the meantime, Coser's "correct prescriptions" is a contemptuous generalization broad enough to cover every policy advocated by every socialist organization in America...
...And although he writes in the past tense, he is speaking of the present as well...
...Clive had an expedient ready...
...He had demanded that an article founding his claims should be inserted in the treaty...
...And now we also hear it from people who call themselves socialists, but who have come to the conclusion, in the midst of the witch hunt, that the socialist movement in America is really finished for the present, and that its members would do everyone concerned a favor if they would disband and disappear into the somewhat larger body of "radicals...
...His whole article makes one feel quite nostalgic, of course...
...The Socialist Labor Party's theories and politics are of a piece with their rigid, authoritarian organizational attitudes and practices...
...The Socialist Party's vague, loose reformist socialism, its tendency to adapt politically to the views of the liberal wing of American pro-capitalist thinking is reflected in the looseness of the organizational demands made on its members, in the tolerance toward pro-capitalist views among its ranks and leaders...
...That is, they are tiny...
...All they can do is to seek to make their own organization as scientific, as imbued with implacable hatred for all forms of human oppression and exploitation, as full of determination to struggle against them, and its members as capable of thinking and acting together as training, conscious effort and common experience can make them...
...But how are they to learn most efficiently and thoroughly...
...The more sophisticated reactionaries recognize that the socialist movement in this country is in a very weakened state today...
...But unless there is an organization they can join, that is the end of it for them...
...However feeble such organizations may be at present, however isolated, the reactionaries have a healthy respect for their potential ability to arouse and help organize the masses, The less sophisticated or the more demagogic believe, or claim to believe, that revolutions are made by tiny handfuls of dedicated people who band together in a conspiracy to "foment" and "infiltrate" their way to power...
...But if such movements had not existed in organized form, would they ever have become socialists in the first place...
...if the American labor movement must really depend on this handful as an ideological catalyst, it is in bad shape indeed...
...It condemns all such policies, the good with the bad, the fruitful with the sterile, the "real" with the sectarian by a condescending phrase, without the author having to come to grips with any single one of them concretely...
...Rallying Ground of Today, Seedbed For Tomorrow The idea contained in the above caption has been frozen and caricatured by the Socialist Labor Party in particular (and in a slightly different form by the Socialist Workers Party) in their sublime belief that the workers will one day turn to them for the sole reason that they have kept their "banners unsullied and uncompromised...
...Of course, it would be ridiculous to argue that organization itself assures socialists of a scientific approach...
...they are sects...
...As long as the conservative and reactionary mood in the country condemns all of the socialist organizations, regardless of the concrete program or characteristic behaviour of any one of them, to the life of educational-propaganda groups, they will have to wrestle with the specific distortions in their political and organizational conceptions and behaviour which are induced by these circumstances...
...The truth is that Haskell dwells in a kind of limbo suspended between a run-of-the-mill sectarian and a new kind of justification for socialist organization...
...But bemoaning the hard times in which we live is hardly a fruitful or even a dignified activity for socialists...
...Young people are perhaps prone to making more mistakes than their elders...
...Since neither Coser nor the editors of DISSENT have chosen to deal with any particular socialist organization in specific terms, my defense has been general too...
...The traits Coser discusses are, apparently, equally to be observed in religious and political groupings ranging from vast institutions like the Catholic church to Lenin's underground party in Czarist Russia, to the small socialist organizations in America today...
...But Haskell pulls back at this point, he doesn't really mean it...
...If he somehow eluded that fate, but continued to develop his opposition to capitalist society, finding no group of people who agreed with his criticisms (let alone people who have worked out a systematic criticism of their own), he would either sink back into political apathy, or decide after a while that there must be something radically wrong with himself and seek the services of an analyst...
...But when the working class reaches maturity, all sects become a reactionary phenomenon...
...No socialist organization has any guarantee that it will be the pole around which the left wing of the future mass socialist or labor party will crystallize...
...All the more honor to those socialists, workers and intellectuals, leaders and rank and filers, who seek to maintain the school for the youth, the workshop of ideas, the rallying point of today and the seedbed for tomorrow...
...Of course, the motives which animate these would-be liquidators of socialist organization in America are dissimilar, and only a dabbler in sociological typology or a scoundrel might try to make them appear identical...
...It would be tempting but it wouldn't do the article justice...
...It might be an interesting topic for concrete investigation...
...This new justification might, for want of a better word, be called the Progressive Education approach to socialism...
...Should the socialist movement continue to exist in organized form in America...
...If some of the socialist organizations in America today have the sectarian characteristics ascribed to them by Coser, others are almost or completely free of them...
...In the former Omichund's name was not mentioned...
...As a member of the Independent Socialist League, I naturally believe that my organization is superior to the others in the field not only in its politics but in the other aspects of socialist organization discussed...
...Aren't they presumptuous, callow and ignorant of all the difficulties and obstacles which confront socialists today...
...An index of our times is that this cry for liquidation is also raised from a section of the "left," and has become a standard theme among the ex-socialists who would rather have no living organism to remind them, and more important, their employers and the authorities, of their past...
...If some of the readers of DISSENT may think the American working class fits Marx's description, Coser at least does not...
...Their socialism can have no real relationship to their lives as social and political people...
...All radical sects are today an obstacle to the development of a socialist movement in America...
...We almost blush to write it...
...But even today, how are groups and individuals (not masses) to be won to the ideas and the struggle for socialism...
...But this assertion about the Debsians, which only aroused our curiosity, is followed by a quotation which actually defies belief...
...Clive then turned...
...Of course, socialists have no guarantees...
...A sum of eight hundred thousand pounds sterling, in coined silver, was sent down the river . . . As to Clive, there was no limit to his acquisitions but his own moderation...
...There is only one answer...
...the author conscientiously tries the old tricks, but the machinery creaks...
...The matter-of-fact practicality of the labor movement, its insensitiveness to doctrine and idealism, led to his isolation...
...We await with curiosity Coser's evidence, for it has eluded all previous historians of the American socialist movement...
...But if this is true, of what use is a socialist organization today...
...The other principle of this organization is to be against socialist organizations...
...But what shall we begin with it here in America, as the Germans say...
...That can only be achieved through a combination of developing political consciousness and organizational experience...
...However, if the labor movement, once turned to a policy of independent militancy, finds that the slender cable composed of living, experienced, and organized socialists which connects them with the experience and knowledge of the past has been severed, its difficulties and the likelihood of its defeat will be magnified tremendously...
...Ours are admittedly the worst for the socialist movement since the early days of its formation...
...their membership is small...
...Up to this point, for example, Coser has succeeded in discussing the American socialist movement (among others) for seven pages without a single reference to the purpose for which its members believe they have formed their various organizations...
...Dogmatic sectarianism and opportunism have been the twin scourges of the socialist movement since its beginning...
...There are no longer the usual claims that his organization has the only correct line, that it is going to lead the working class to victory...
...But suddenly the article turns from the general, the "typological" which applies to no one group in particular (as the author tells us), but at the same time to all by implication, and gets more or less specific...
...But does this mean that any group of unorganized intellectuals will be able to come together one day andr serve as a rallying-ground for a renewed mass socialist movement just as well as socialists who have maintained their organization and have sought to develop socialist policy and to act on it even in the darkest days of public passivity and reaction...
...And the editors of DISSENT...
...Two treaties were drawn up, one on white paper, the other on red, the former real, the latter fictitious...
...halves...
...For he believes that in our society the socialist's "appeal found no echo, his eager offers of help no response, his idealism was derided as impracticality and hypocrisy by the very men whom he wanted to help...
...No, Haskell, really advertises his sect as a kind of night-time nursery for promising young radicals, a school for tender minds of socialist inclination where under the supervision of toughened veterans of the class struggle, they can learn by doing, in the best Deweyan tradition...
...to Mr...
...It is quite true that all socialist organizations in America today are sects...
...Historical Perspectives—Remote and Not So Remote "This British-Indian imperial symbiosis was far more than a merely governmental relationship...
...Most likely, he would be picked up by the Stalinists...
...The policies of the British viceroys were imperial policies on behalf of India, too . . . — HERBExT LUETHY, "What Western Colonialism Gave to Asia," Commentary, June 1955 How Lord Clive, founder of British India, won control of Bengal: "But how was the wary and sagacious Hindoo to be deceived...
...the old fire isn't there any more...
...Hence the never-ceasing and never-answered cry in these circles for "reevaluation," a "fresh approach," etc...
...The treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him . . . Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself...
...This is not the first time that the cry has been raised for the liquidation of what is left of the socialist movement in this country...
...Is there no relationship between the firmly Third Campist views of the Independent Socialist League, that is, its rejection of allegiance in any sense to Stalinism or capitalism, and its insistence on the concept that the workers can make progress for their emancipation only through dependence on their own democratically organized strength, and the virtual fetish for democracy which prevails throughout the ISL...
...All that we argue on this score is that for ordinary mortals an organization is far more likely to be the locus of serious, responsible theoretical work than a loose band of individuals each of whom refuses to take any responsibility for what is said by any of the others...
...They tend to have few members who are simply and naively anti-capitalist and pro-socialist...
...To the careless reader it may appear to bolster the real political interest and intention of the writer which is set down in the last two pages of the article...
...Only mummies can be thus preserved...
...He forged Admiral Watson's name .. . "Omichund came the white treaty was produced...
...If such circumstances are imposed on the socialist (or any other) movement for too long, they are bound to find a reflection in its mentality...
...I submit that to face these realities today in a meaningful way it is above all necessary once and for all to stop the mummery, to stop kidding oneself, to shed illusions about maintaining organizations that aren't organizations...
...Maybe this is all very educational, but is it really serious...
...The following is an answer as much to DISSENT'S claim to represent a superior substitute for a socialist organization in America today as it is directed against Coser's particular treatment of the subject...
...It seems almost a matter of chance that just about every socialist organization in existence in this country is referred to (not really discussed), if only by the device of quoting some sentence from the writings of one of its leaders...
...But such nostalgia is finally only a shield behind which to protect oneself from the frightening aspects of present day realities...
...And I suspect that nostalgia is perhaps the single strongest element that keeps organizations such as Haskell's together...
...THOMAS BABBINGTON MACAULEY, Lord Clive...
...That is the question raised by Lewis Coser in the last two pages of his article in the Autumn 1954 issue of DISSENT...
...Instead of a cause which can command their emotional and intellectual allegiance, it can hardly become more than a vague philosophy which demands no effort on their part, which leaves undisturbed the course of their personal and professional lives...
...and he would not be satisfied unless he saw it with his own eyes...
...Many of them have not yet reached the stage of serenely contemplating the evils of the world, and, in their impetuous youthful folly, want to strike a blow against them...
...To put it more accurately, because they have lost their former confidence not so much in this or that specific socialist grouping, but in the possibility of any socialist program or socialist analysis making headway against the non-socialist stream of American social and political thought and action...
...And when such moans get rationalized into an argument, the borderline between the demoralized partisan of socialism and its enemy can easily be crossed...
...Yet, as against a group of unorganized individuals who have no more responsibility to each other than to any significant stratum of society, the members of the small socialist organization have an enormous methodological advantage...
...The whole thing reminds one of High School mock democracy, complete with two party systems, caucuses, elections, parliamentary procedure—but no political reality...
...That is a very fine quotation, and it should be read every day by those devoted but misguided socialist sectarians who continue to maintain their closed, purist sects in countries like Britain and France and Germany where the working class has long since formed its own socialist political organizations...
...Once they find they have inquired sufficiently into the "needs, desires, wishes" of their fellow men, one of them may actually get down to write an article in which he seeks to fulfill one of the main purposes announced by the magazine when it began: "to help reestablish socialist thought and values...
...Is there no relationship between the theory of the Socialist Workers Party that Stalinist Russia is a degenerated workers' state, and that the Stalinist movements are degenerated but genuine working class movements and its own highly bureaucratic internal regime...
...They want the socialist organizations to dissolve not because they fear their strength, but because they are convinced that these groups are doomed to helplessness...
...But another difficulty arose...
...Were it not for this explicit statement, the whole of the rest would appear to be a particularly pointless and and exercise in sociological trait-description...
...By sheltering their members from the shock of political disenchantment organizations such as Haskell's create a trained incapacity to come to terms with political realities and a trained flight from these realities...
...What function, then, can they fulfill which cannot be fulfilled as well if not better by individual socialist intellectuals...
...Once socialists cease concerning themselves with policy (even if they are aware that their policy may never get off the printed page) they have definitely left the realm in which socialist theory can be said to have any relation to social action...
...It reads as follows: "The development of socialist sects and the development of a genuine labor movement have at all times been in inverse ratio...
...Away with them...
...spoke to him kindly, advised him to make a pilgrimage to one of the great temples of India, in the hope that change of scene might restore his health . . "The shower of wealth now fell copiously on the (East India) Company and its servants...
...The socialism of the future will need neither the councillors nor the alumnae of radical nurseries, it needs independent and autonomous minds...
...The living idea of socialism cannot be kept in an antiseptic storehouse in anticipation of The Day when it can again be taken out into the open air...
...I am afraid that, as Gorge Orwell once said, the political imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity...
...Hard as it may be to believe, they want to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism and human freedom and dignity, and what may seem even more flabbergasting, they actually think the job can be done...
...In their place, let us have the "new generation of radicals who, like those who built the Debsian Socialist Party, go out into the world of their fellowmen and inquire after their needs, desires, wishes, not men who in their cloistered virtue know the correct prescriptions...
...And by that very act, they will have crossed the thin line which borders the scientific approach in politics, and entered the area in which theoretical free wheeling, in which the grand generalization completely cut loose from concrete reality, have their field day...
...Why the elaborate preparation...
...It stands at the end of Coser's proclamation of anathema against all existing socialist sects with no further explanation than that he knows of no better way to end his article...
...His technique might be termed that of the anialgani interruptus...
...Has it reached even the kind of political "maturity" which we find in social democratic movements of Europe and Asia, where the working class is massed in parties which are organizationally independent of the bourgeois parties and at least give lip-service to the program (as well as the ideal) of socialism...
...Lewis Loser's article on "Sects and Sectarians" is the most recent attack on the organized socialist groups in America to come from the radical side...
...On the right the cry is rising to an unprecedented crescendo, and is accompanied by very concrete governmental action designed to wipe out organized socialism in this capitalist fortress...
...Most of it is a rambling discussion of certain aspects of organized social behaviour...
...But this effort to concretize the product of socialist analysis and theory into a series of policies which socialists urge on the advanced sections of the labor movement is lumped together by Coser with the proclamation of sectarian dogmas as the activity of "men who in their cloistered virtue know the correct prescription...
...Haskell's heart isn't in it, one feels—but in that case why not cut out such stuff altogether...
...Although I will not attempt a detailed analysis of this article, it deserves to have a few things said about it...
...Unquestionably, it was one of the greatest colonizing achievements of all time and its full import will become evident perhaps only from a remoter historical perspective...
...the socialist organizations of America...
...Admiral Watson had scruples about signing the red treaty But Clive was not a man to do any thing by...
...He revived, but his mind was irreparably ruined (Clive) saw Omichund a few days later...
...Can one acquire political skills, socialist convictions and independent thinking by debating the correct line under the benevolent guidance of some of the old boys...
...His article starts with a classic amalgam: Coser discusses sects, sects are being persecuted, there are witch hunters about, ergo...
...But they also recognize that capitalism is still crisis-ridden, and feel that the bearers of the historical tradition of socialism should be eliminated now, while weak, so that they will not have to be dealt with under what may well be less auspicious circumstances (for capitalism) in the future...
...Isolated as it is by the pressure of official public opinion backed up by the official subversive lists and FBI persecution, a live socialist organization, small or large, can sharpen its theoretical equipment precisely by the method of developing a policy for every major political issue on which socialists can have a distinctive political position by virtue of their particular insight into the workings of society...
...They have to have their own publications, their own area of activity, if they are to develop themselves...
...In any event, the course every serious socialist should follow is to join the best of them and devote his energies to improving it, or at least to seek to form a better one...
...The most striking thing about the article is the disjunction between the bulk of it and its concluding two pages...
...Scrafton and said: 'It is now time to undeceive Omichund...
...Such gloomy lucubrations are the real basis of Coser's attack on the organized socialist movement...
...For young socialists it is not enough to be able to read every three months a radical magazine written by their intellectual betters...
...We are interested in this historical discovery of how Debs and his comrades built their movement...
...It lies precisely in the fact that they, as members and representa tives of an organization take on themselves the responsibility for evolving a series of policies, a "line" if you will, on the major political problems which face the world...
...Instead of being encouraged to form organizations and "play" at politics (let alone revolutionary politics) shouldn't they rather learn the virtues of humility before the great unsolved theoretical problems...
...Scrafton, 'the red treaty is a trick, you are to have nothing.' Omichund fell back into the arms of his attendants...
...In fact, if there is no organization for them, no social organism within which they can thrash out their ideas and learn by defending them against those of the Stalinist and bourgeois ideologists and their youth movements, how can they really learn to be socialists at all...
...Then why the quotation...
...Today, for instance, psychic and physical energies must be poured out by every socialist who takes himself and his cause seriously, not to make gratifying organizational and political advances, but simply to keep the movement going...
...The whole of Haskell's contribution strikes one in this way...
...The reactionaries want to destroy socialist organizations because they fear them...
...But the organizations are feeble...
...But, one may reply, the tiny socialist organizations of today are not engaged in the work of overthrowing capitalism or even in training the broad cadre of the great proletarian political movements of the future...
...He answers the question with the denunciation of all existing socialist organization, and a call for their dissolution...
...To them he contrasts those who "inquire after the needs, desires, wishes" of their fellowmen...
...that of practice...
...But Coser and the other editors of DISSENT have, it appears, sought to guarantee themselves against this possibility by forming a sect one of whose fundamental principles is a hostility to the advocacy (and hence development) of policy...
...Half-hearted, that is the word...
...After all, is there no relation between the conscious, avowed ideas, purposes and programs of socialist groups and the organizational behaviour of their members...
...But all this has to do with the relationship between the politics (the self-conscious aspect) and the behaviour and spirit of the groups involved...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
