LETTERS
More on Orwell Editors: Gordon Beadle, in "Orwell and the Neoconservatives" (Dissent, Winter 1984), has disposed of the neoconservative attempt to "steal" the Orwell who wrote throughout his...
...What then is to be made of his response to Stephen Soiffer's challenge to Howe's position on Central America...
...46), those two classes formed only 15 percent of the nonfarm population...
...He came down on the side of the utopians...
...IRVING HOWE Replies: If David Katz will extend his researches as far back as the Summer 1983 Dissent, he will find there, under my by-line, a strong condemnation of the "government in El Salvador that tolerates (or fails to suppress) the terrorism of its own army...
...There are genuine democrats in El Salvador, but they are being mercilessly squeezed by fanatics and extremists on both sides...
...First of all, there is enormous resistance to reducing work time...
...When I did address the question Eckstein has posed, my conclusion was very different from the one he alleges...
...fourteen of the largest German cities and demonstrates that in most of them the vote for the Nazi [party] varied with the class level of the district, with the wealthiest districts giving it the strongest support...
...Richard F HAMILTON Montreal, Canada GEORGE ECKSTEIN Replies: If my review of the Hamilton book came to misunderstand Hamilton's basic thesis, I am not alone...
...The most serious of these is his misrepresentation of my basic thesis...
...Given that some NSDAP votes came out of the "mixed" districts (those with both workers and lower-middle-class populations), it is difficult to see how he came to the conclusion that "upper-middle-class predominance in the Nazi vote" is my thesis...
...The very title of the book makes a reader expect that it will deal with the distribution of the total vote for Hitler among the various segments of the population...
...q Editors: George Eckstein's review of my book Who Voted for Hitler...
...I took some pains to make this point clear, even inserting a diagram to illustrate these very different implications...
...Even if they had voted 100 percent for the NSDAP, they would still not have formed "the bulk of" the Nazi vote at a time when that party took 37.3 percent of the total...
...When work time ran to ten hours a day or more, its reduction became a moral cause, a necessity for allowing the spirit to develop and family life to thrive...
...Reducing the eight-hour day merely is a proposition in economic policy...
...Or one could ask: What percentage of support for Hitler's party came from a given class...
...The book's paragraph (p...
...Since Howe himself apparently has yet to come to such an appreciation, and instead has seen fit to condemn both sides, one may legitimately ask what and whose purposes are thereby being served...
...I suspect that no one can...
...In my hypothetical figures (p...
...In Berlin, for example, I report that "almost half of [the city's] NSDAP vote came from the nine working-class districts of the city...
...A table showing class and party choice can, of course, be percentaged in several ways, depending on the question at issue...
...His argument, however, might have been stronger, had his focus on jobs not been blurred by proposals to reduce work time...
...Indeed, the tragedy of our century is that so many people (in the First, the Second, and the Third World) have thought they were "fighting and dying for socialism" when in fact they were in the service of a party dictatorship...
...I doubt that it is feasible to redistribute them from gains in real income to increased leisure...
...If after a guerrilla victory the dominant political tone were set by the Social Democrat Ungo, who heads its political branch abroad, there might be some hope...
...The stupefying resort to "Marxist-Leninist" ideology and rhetoric, the use of terrorist methods against factional opponents, and the strange interrelations between "left" and "right" elites in El Salvador were exhaustively documented by Gabriel Zaid in the Winter 1982 Dissent...
...Even the jacket blurb reads: "Challenging the traditional belief that Hitler's supporters were largely from the lower middle class, this book examines data from...
...To the upper classes Hitler looked for other contributions: financial and newspaper support, and government contacts—a fact Hamilton deals with in excellent detail...
...Reading, a little while back, through the excellent biography of Orwell by Bernard Crick, I came across the following paragraph: That January of 1946 Orwell wrote a full-page review for The Manchester Evening News of a group of books on socialism...
...That is the causal question, the question inherent in 50 years of comment on the subject...
...q 255...
...The Nazi party needed, was oriented to gain, and received an overwhelming number of votes...
...If he wants a statement that the right has been responsible for most of the political murders, I hereby make it...
...in your Summer 1983 issue) is filled with sloppy and careless errors...
...If the American left is to preserve its international credibility, as well as its self-respect, it must forthrightly identify with those seeking an end to imperialist domination and oligarchical exploitation...
...Kuttner's initial focus on jobs is right...
...But employers would still seek to save the extra cost arising from paying the same wage for less work by installing equipment that would help avoid hiring additional workers...
...He asked whether the old ideas of "human brotherhood" involving hopes to abolish "war, crime, disease, poverty and overwork" were being abandoned for "a new kind of caste society in which we surrender our individual rights in return for economic security...
...But there isn't much political or economic clout in merely being in favor of it...
...45) that deals with the "causal" and "compositional" question is rather obscure...
...It must, in short, accommodate its liberal inhibitions and obsessive anti-Stalinism to the admittedly distasteful realities of Third World class struggle...
...On the one hand, Howe condemns the Salvadoran revolutionaries for their alleged "authoritarianism" and resort to "terrorist" methods...
...DAVID H. KATZ East Lansing, Michigan Who Voted for Hitler...
...It excites no fervor...
...I think it's, rather, that writers in Dissent have been critical of the authoritarian politics and methods of important segments of the guerrilla forces...
...The basic finding, for most of the cities investigated, was that support for Hitler's party increased with the social standing of the district...
...Katz's letter doesn't help at all...
...The decline of physical labor has made the eighthour day tolerable...
...This is a separate and distinct question, one best described as the compositional question...
...He pictured among those who believe in "the possibility of human progress a three-cornered struggle between Machiavellianism, bureaucracy, and Utopianism...
...One would ask: What percentage of a given class supported Hitler's party...
...247 Appreciating these difficulties is, of course, no excuse for condoning leftist brutalities if and when these occur, but it does help to place both the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan situations in perspective...
...Even that, in view of the Reagan administration's reactionary politics, has come to seem unlikely...
...What we get, instead, are elitist and patronizing comments by apologists for left authoritarianism about the "admittedly distasteful realities of Third World class struggle...
...This reduces Hamilton's great discovery to an interesting footnote...
...on the other, without explicitly acknowledging that it is the right which has been responsible for the vast majority of political murders, Howe rejects the "inference" that he equates rightist death squads with revolutionary guerrillas...
...which he saw as the Soviet way...
...Yes, such a cut could be minimized or avoided if the reduction were phased in over a period of time...
...The cynical romanticism displayed in Mr...
...My concern was with the former, the causal question, with that of the extent of support for the National Socialists found in the various classes of Germany...
...He's also right in arguing that the gains from productivity must be redistributed—only they should be redistributed to create more jobs, especially in the human services...
...In actual numbers that vote was, of course, only a fraction of the lower-middle-class Nazi vote...
...These came mainly from small towns and rural areas, and from the urban lower-middle class...
...That does not say "the bulk" of the NSDAP vote came from the upper and upper-middle classes...
...Since 1947, gross domestic product per capita—a measure of productivity—has risen about 2 percent per year, while average weekly hours have declined by a mere 0.4 percent a year (this includes the increase in voluntary part-time work...
...In other words, the preference for more goods and services has been far more powerful than any preference for more leisure...
...More on Orwell Editors: Gordon Beadle, in "Orwell and the Neoconservatives" (Dissent, Winter 1984), has disposed of the neoconservative attempt to "steal" the Orwell who wrote throughout his life as an unorthodox leftist and fought in Spain on the side of the revolutionary antiStalinist party, the POUM...
...No one has mounted a substantial challenge to Zaid's facts...
...Hitler's strongest support generally came in the "best" areas of Germany's cities...
...He might begin by considering the high level of discipline and political commitment required to sustain revolutionary momentum when opposing reactionary political gangsters who are being financed, supplied, and trained by the U.S...
...Only then will American socialists have earned the moral right to pontificate about those doing the actual fighting and dying for socialism...
...Howe will have to do better than that if he is to safeguard his (otherwise) well-earned reputation for candor and straight thinking...
...That is definitely not the case...
...The basis of socialism was humanism, it could co-exist with Christianity, but not with the belief that man is inherently a fallen creature...
...And do those "distasteful realities" extend to the murderous methods that segments of the opposition have used against one another...
...I'm all in favor of reducing work time...
...Socialists, he said, "are not obliged to believe that human society can actually be made perfect, [only] that it could be made a great deal better than it is" and that "most of the evil that men do results from the warping effects of injustice and inequality...
...compared to it that paragraph in his letter is a peak of clarity...
...What one might hope for—at most—is more modest: a measure of democracy, social reforms, especially with regard to land ownership, and control of the army by a civilian government so as to end its oppressive and terrorist activities...
...Hamilton's elaborate dissection of the voting pattern in some of the largest German cities, full of assumptions and speculations as it is bound to be, may well be correct in its conclusion that the upper and uppermiddle classes as a group, compared to the other classes, did deliver a higher percentage of Nazi voters...
...Some guerrillas in El Salvador may think they are "fighting and dying for socialism...
...To speak of "socialism" in a country as economically impoverished and politically repressed as El Salvador is a fantasy...
...But is that really what's bothering him...
...All the less so when you consider that it would entail a cut in income...
...Attempts to reverse them meet with much difficulty...
...In answer to the question of where the National Socialist (NSDAP) vote came from, Eckstein claims I set out "to prove that its bulk was cast by the upper and upper-middle classes...
...H. BRAND q El Salvador Editors: Facile logic is not what one expects from Irving Howe...
...SAMUEL HOFFENSTEIN q Jobs & Work Time Editors: Bob Kuttner's article, "Jobs," in the Winter 1984 Dissent, is well done...
...But it's far more likely that the guerrilla leaders in El Salvador would, if victorious, move toward a dictatorship Cubanstyle...
...On a theoretical plane, at least, I'd argue that reduced work time doesn't necessarily create more jobs, and may cut them—as it has in France and Belgium in recent years...
...Such preferences are deeply embodied in living habits, consumer debt, aspirations for higher living standards...
...Where have we heard that sort of talk before...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
