REVIEWS
Ross, George M. & Roazen, Paul & Young, James P. & Mandler, Peter & Leys, Simon
VISIONS OF EMANCIPATION: THE ITALIAN WORKERS' MOVEMENT SINCE 1945 by Joanne Barkan. New York: Praeger. 288 pp. $24.95. The dramatis personae in Joanne Barkan's analysis of the contemporary...
...Had he looked more closely, he might have observed that social democracy is historically not the "road to serfdom"—it has not even been the road to socialism...
...Strikingly, Rustin finds good things to say about practically every public-sector institution in British society, even products of the post-1964 corporatist phase, like planning agreements and the new nationalized industries...
...If so, it is difficult to explain the persistent universalism of the British welfare state, its hostility to means tests, its fre240 quent disjunctions between contributions and benefits, its nationalistic spirit...
...Though far from definitive, Rustin's book points a way forward for the left...
...As a political theorist, he prefers to assert and argue from first principles...
...Therefore he cannot imagine a socialist program that would defend liberal democratic rights, much less broaden them, nor a working class that would espouse some collectivist values under capitalism...
...however, its most momentous decision was to elect Mao a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo— the inner circle of leadership...
...By the time of the last Labour governments of 1974-79, the great partnership had degenerated into a tawdry pact for the control of inflation and unemployment: corporatism pure and simple, such as had been achieved by many nonsocialist regimes elsewhere in the world (Japan, the United States), and more successfully...
...Barkan has done a better job of explaining its consequences than anyone else writing in English...
...Even the shortterm agenda of repairing the welfare state and seeking more control of the large corporation is not easy to achieve, but it is hardly utopian to try...
...Persistently high levels of unemployment and the inability of unions to establish positions on the shop floor tipped the scales towards Italian business for more than a decade...
...107 pp...
...DUNN PAYS LITTLE ATTENTION to the actual practice of social democratic politics...
...These are difficult times for the democratic left, but not least for that reason there is much to be done...
...WITH THE "CULTURAL REVOLUTION," Maoism reached a point of murderous madness which provoked fear and revulsion even among the ruling elite of the party...
...Truffles cannot be cultivated...
...The new Labour party, Selbourne maintains, has indulged in childish fantasies of "socialism...
...If the New Left ever did abandon the British working class, For a Pluralist Socialism is a clear sign that it is rushing back...
...It is not 243 as broadly understood how Ernest Jones, one of Freud's most loyal lieutenants, also was able to work successfully with Matthias Goring...
...256 pp...
...However, on these events, he seems to be throwing a certain light which appears to be precisely the one that Peking wishes to project now...
...For this book, published under the paperback imprint of the New Left Review, also calls for "a renaissance of the alliance between the progressive intelligentsia and the organized working class," to be achieved not by discarding the concept of socialism but by reforging it...
...Rustin's reduced expectations, pluralism, respect for universalist values, and his keen sense for political feasibility nevertheless give his vision a truly contemporary tone and a powerful appeal...
...Is workingclass acceptance of social benefits simply another (though disguised) manifestation of the impulse to individual appropriation...
...it is instead a never-ending process without claim to provide definitive solutions for all problems...
...THE POLITICAL CHAOS that has ensued within the Labour party since 1979 has been bitter and unedifying...
...The "Long March" was much more than a historical episode, or a heroic feat of human resilience against crushing odds...
...Burchett then provided the American journalist with perspectives and ideas which Salisbury subsequently presented as his own...
...Each successive theory is simply, though perhaps importantly, a contribution to the ongoing political debate intended to recommend a general approach to a particular situation...
...But Rustin has a more specific (and more dubious) notion of what these new "expectations and aspirations" are...
...Once the "easiest" victories had been won, Italian labor, facing a refractory political environment, turned to an eternal trade union question...
...The dramatis personae in Joanne Barkan's analysis of the contemporary Italian workers' movement possess great subtlety and substance...
...Once having successfully reconstituted itself after Fascism, the Italian workers' movement was nearly broken again by the coming of the Cold War...
...He acknowledges the prior existence of a socialist tradition that defended individual integrity and equality, "beauty and culture," before its corruption at the hands of the utilitarians and final destruction at the hands of the utopians...
...But adaptable labor organizations began to find eager new recruits...
...Closely related is Dunn's tendency to expect too much from philosophy and not enough from democratic politics...
...Rustin pins his hopes for a participatory society on the "rise in human expectations and aspirations" of the postwar period, the demand across the social spectrum for "political self-determination, material subsistence, and social self-expression...
...In a way, Salisbury's quest for the "untold story" of the "Long March" reminds me of the famous anecdote about President Fallieres digging for truffles...
...Still, a stern eye must be cast on his proposals for putting the values to work in practice...
...The tragic problem, to Barkan, was that such policies intervened at exactly the moment when 235 "the crisis," to use a common European expression, was undercutting the socioeconomic foundation of earlier workers' successes...
...Only one of these studies has been published previously...
...they do not fit his preconceived notion of socialism as a utopian attempt to impose centralized, bureaucratic control over recalcitrant human beings to bring their behavior "briskly into line with the demands of our moral intuitions...
...Pigs, which are very fond of these gastronomic delicacies, are taken to the woods on a leash, and, with their ultrasensitive noses, they smell out the invisible truffles and indicate where to dig for them...
...They have only accepted Labour-party leadership because Labour backs them in their sectional struggle for higher wages and because it provides them, when wages prove inadequate, with a public-sector supplement in the form of welfare benefits...
...This last phrase deserved to be blazoned at the top of every page instead of the usual running heads...
...I refuse to agree that "the composite of these beliefs, actions, inactions, choices, compromises, opportunisms, improprieties, and outrages presents a peculiarly human picture, devoid of either heroes or true villains...
...In an effort to prove itself moderate enough for this goal, the PCI, using the CGIL, enlisted the union movement's help...
...The consequences in the early 1970s for workers, unions, and the Italian economy were very great...
...New forms of working-class representation in the workplace were created—the delegati and workers' councils...
...Here her characters assess the errors of their past ways...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Salisbury took the pain to retrace the entire itinerary of the "Long March," by jeep, on horseback, and on foot...
...This tradition he normally identifies with the Victorians (Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, et al...
...It seems clear that the party-trade union relationship as evolved by the PCI and CGIL was still too partydominated, still too crypto-Leninist...
...but PCICGIL ties are clearly what she sees as the fatal contradiction at the heart of the Italian workers' movement...
...22.95...
...Though capitalist democracy is badly flawed, socialism, however, seems in substantially worse shape...
...Sweden and still less Britain as the postwar Labour government made it have little claim on "human enthusiasm or commitment...
...How could it best transfer new resources from unionism to politics in ways that would advance the cause...
...q 242 PSYCHOTHERAPY IN THE THIRD REICH: THE GORING INSTITUTE, by Geoffrey Cocks...
...Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press...
...Such institutions at least provide a base upon which socialists can build, even if corrupted by undemocratic management and exploitation for private profit...
...Selbourne has concluded that the means adopted by socialists since the war, far from diffusing these values in the working-class community, have undercut them, and so he discards "socialism" as an effective political program...
...He is centrally concerned with the affairs of the Goring Institute, led by Dr...
...The "educated professionals, white-collar workers, students and academics who provided the main social base for new left politics" are endowed with the status of "emerging strata," giving them greater prominence than they perhaps deserve...
...In consequence, the 1980s became years of plummeting union strength, new divisions between union organizations, corporatistic (as opposed to class-oriented) base-level responses, union incapacity to enlist support from a new generation of workers, rollbacks, and the like...
...344 pp...
...Maryland residents phone 301/824-7300...
...Add to these three an unwillingness to confront ideas and movements (particularly when American) that run counter to his own arguments and an unbelievably clotted, overwrought style: the result is a dismaying performance from so powerful a thinker as Dunn...
...However, a book arguing that psychoanalysis was "preserved through the departure of Jewish analysts and by the cover of the Goring name" is fatally flawed...
...This incident may provide a useful clue to help us assess Salisbury's working methods...
...While Rustin acknowledges a new "plurality of class interests," his prescriptions are aimed not at the fragmented working class but at this same group of British New Lefties with their neo-Marxist politics and alternative life-styles...
...One holds one's head in despair at the malignant irony of the Nazi conviction that "mental disorder within the master race could not be genetic or essentially organic," and that therefore applied depth psychology had a special role to play in the Third Reich...
...Instead, it has led to mixed economies with more or less advanced welfare states...
...The effects of social change in the last few decades have been multifarious and thus fragmenting...
...THESE ADJUSTMENTS CAME at the right moment, for the seamy sides of the 1950s "economic miracle" began to show...
...The author lacks any real understanding of the ethical dimensions of what he purports to be writing about...
...A new socialism can no longer be based on a single-class interest, particularly one so narrowly defined...
...But it is not at all clear what, if any, other options promised anything better...
...The ideas are there in the theories of such writers as Dahl and Nove and in the more programmatic efforts of Robert Kuttner, Michael Harrington, and many others, as well as in the growth of the flawed but interesting movement for economic democracy and workers' control...
...Another closet Tawneyite...
...In a remarkable essay on the career of Wilfred Burchett (Quadrant, August 1985), Robert Manne pointed out that one of the greatest professional successes of this notorious agent of Soviet disinformation was to have arranged for Harrison Salisbury to visit North Vietnam in 1966...
...For much of this century, Anti-Semitism in American History Edited by David A. Gerber Such diverse topics as the State Department's response to the intensification of Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s, the image of Jews on the American stage, the commercial origins of elite anti-Semitism, feminists and anti-Semitism, the American left and anti-Semitism are addressed in these fourteen studies by some of the top scholars in the field...
...The kindest way of treating passages in the book is to declare that their author is morally out to lunch...
...244 The Politics of Socialism is an amalgam of commonplace arguments dressed up as blinding revelations, caricatures of utopias, and repeated diabolus-ex-machina arguments in which the likes of Stalin lead us down the slippery slope to Soviet or Kampuchean totalitarianism...
...The Chinese Nationalist government launched a succession of campaigns against the Red areas...
...The British Labour party seemed to have achieved a balanced partnership between a mass working-class constituency and a middle-class socialist leadership...
...Are struggles for workplace control merely another form of individual appropriation, a demand for "property in the job...
...This is the worst book I have read in ages...
...Selbourne grants that health provision is "the great exception to this general rule...
...The Labour vote peaked in 1951 and has been steadily declining ever since...
...Led by the CGIL, the unions tried to bring spontaneity within their organizational purview, quite self-consciously integrating shop floor innovations into new union practices...
...Eventually the longdesired scala mobile (indexation of wage growth to inflation levels) was won...
...Yet, Mao's visionary genius and unorthodox methods, which many years later were to prove catastrophic in a time of peace, played a providential role in a time of catastrophe...
...One suspects that only in a success-oriented culture like ours could an academic study of such a situation thrive into publication without encountering the most savage criticism reviewers could marshal...
...Nonetheless this reader went away from her drama powerfully puzzled...
...A few choice quotations about Matthias Goring are in order...
...in the "Long March," we can see Mao in his creative years, still vested with the Revolutionary Mandate, gloriously opening the way towards the future, and being assisted in this immortal enterprise by a group of heroes who, today, remain the staunch pilots of China, and whose presence around Deng should vouch for the soundness and orthodoxy of the post-Maoist policies...
...Beyond being more hospitable to the women's movement—and Italian unions did better at this than any other labor movement we can think of—what would this line have looked like...
...And then what of the patients who needed treatment...
...I only wonder if it was originally delivered with a ribbon...
...The first follows from Dunn's tendency to see political messianism everywhere...
...Since then, however, the working class has both broken down economically and fragmented culturally...
...Just as students of jurisprudence have persuasively argued against the misuse of the word "law" in connection with the Third Reich, since everything "legal" was arbitrary and contrary to natural justice, so the term psychotherapy is misleading to those who want to understand what happened under Hitler...
...Given the CGIL's power over the union movement more generally, such choices were often decisive...
...The Catholic CISL seized upon the new "social" concerns of Catholics—these were the privileged years of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II—to develop innovative shop floor approaches, bargaining productivity in234 creases for a new trade union presence inside the firm...
...q THE LONG MARCH, by Harrison E. Salisbury...
...He spent months interviewing countless participants and witnesses, and sifted through an impressive quantity of documentation...
...But though this is no part of Rawls's intention, such definitive arguments are the sort most likely to preempt democratic politics...
...Instead, it should have been defending the "Rights of Man" (individual liberties, both political and economic) against the oppression of the police, the courts, the commissars, and, yes, the capitalists—for in Selbourne's view the Rights of Man have always been the worker's best defense against capitalism...
...The first is how to explain the attraction of socialism in advanced capitalist nations and the second whether socialism is "still a rational and civilizing form of political enterprise in these countries...
...But there are also moments when such subordination may help unions to overcome their own tendencies to conservative routine...
...In a democracy, no political theory can provide a once-and-for-all solution to all social problems...
...Dunn simply dismisses even the best of such systems...
...The first stage of their mass escape was catastrophic—they were repeatedly hit and beaten by the pursuing armies of Chiang Kai-shek...
...One would be inclined to say something positive about the Notes in the back of the book, which do show that the author has read with zeal selected primary sources...
...The present predicament of Deng Xiaoping and his team is that they must manage to liquidate all Maoist policies without eroding the base on which rests the legitimacy of their own power...
...His book is living disproof of Selbourne's contention that the British New Left abandoned the working class for Marxist utopias...
...Without questioning the intentions and good faith of the author, we should at least attempt to understand why, at this precise moment, the Communist authorities who had previously denied similar facilities to eminent writers working on the same subject, suddenly showed such sympathetic interest for Salisbury's project, and decided to facilitate his investigations into a crucial and ill-explored episode of their history— an episode that hitherto had remained virtually taboo, even for their own historians...
...The PCI demonstrated unusual flexibility, at least compared with most of its partis freres, in de-Stalinizing, attenuating its earlier subordination to the Soviet Union, and rethinking its hard-line workerism...
...Visions of Emancipation fills a real need...
...Breaking with traditional bread-and-butter concerns, the protests raised egalitarian notions pointing towards industrial democracy...
...But such a union might also have resisted creative party pressures, such as unquestionably came from the PCI in the later 1960s...
...Very cautiously, Barkan implies that there was a more radical line that might have worked...
...Rittmeister had compromised the "integrity" of the Goring Institute and aroused "the patriotic wrath of the institute's director...
...There are, however, points in his breathless polemic where Selbourne seems to relent...
...Distributed by Schocken...
...he joined as part of a process of professional necessity and national-cultural loyalty...
...Everything socialists seek to do in capitalist society is, in Selbourne's definitions, fatally undermined by capitalist values...
...Only a small portion of this sorry tale has hitherto been widely known...
...Actually, if the Communists had been concerned not with propaganda but with harsh truth, they could have called this episode more aptly "the Long Rout" or "the Protracted Disaster...
...The organizing capacities of older workers joined with the anger of "new workers" in the North...
...On the surface of it, this is an accurate, though vague characterization of postwar social trends...
...However, as Selbourne might point out, one could just as accurately select another set of postwar demands, identified not with the left but with the right: demands for protection from the state, unfettered individual appropriation, and a purer freedom to consume (drugs, entertainment, sexual pleasure, and so on...
...We are told that "it is difficult to gauge the degree of anti-Semitism in Goring," but that "his words and actions between 1933 and 1945 leave no doubt over his condemnatory public stance then toward Jewish influence in his profession...
...q "socialist illusion" completely...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Those it made in the later 1970s, in a rapidly changing economy, turned out to be severely debilitating...
...From Cold War weakness and division, this movement maneuvered skillfully through de-Stalinization and then to great social effervescence in the 1960s...
...Workers and unions earned important new rights of expression on the shop floor...
...What infuriates Selbourne about this New Left is not its utopianism (which he considers merely pitiable), but its desertion of the working class...
...The old politics of welfarism and trade unionism may, Rustin concedes, have been appropriate in the period of the '50s and '60s, which was Labour's "demographic moment"—a time when the organized working class represented up to 70 percent of the electorate...
...The PCI's historic compromise led to a "softening" of Italian labor at the very moment when crisis conditions demanded tough positions to protect earlier victories...
...The Catholic CISL and the Social Democratic Italian Union of Labor (UIL) split off from the CGIL at this point...
...It retains at least a fundamental cautionary value: considering the very nature of these regimes, their pervasive ability to manipulate information, and their basic view that ultimately every undertaking is political, we should as a rule subject to close scrutiny any research that was initiated and pursued with the approval and active support of the ruling bureaucracy...
...Dunn also recognizes that competition does not occur on "fair and equal terms...
...Slowly, surely, the Italian workers' movement began to rebuild...
...To achieve such a delicate and contradictory operation, a revival of the "myth of the origins" now appears particularly appropriate...
...In recent years these "utopians" have driven the Labour party to the left and imposed upon it a more genuine (but hopelessly self-deluding) vision of socialism...
...The CISL's competitive successes obliged the CGIL to take up these approaches itself in ways that made united union action possible...
...Working people, he insists, have never been interested in anything but "individual appropriation...
...Consequently he falls into a quasi-structuralism that will brook no muddling together of capitalism and socialism...
...Workers fresh from peasant poverty were ill prepared for harsh factory discipline...
...The Christian Democrats' long period of political hegemony began at this point...
...Their Cold War economic policies, premised on low wages and exports, together with autocratic business strategies, set the stage for the Italian economic miracle...
...When it was finally acknowledged that Labour could no longer deliver the goods (either in welfare services or economic growth), and the government collapsed in a wave of public-sector strikes, it was belatedly appreciated that the common fund of moral and political values that had united the former partners had also long since been drained...
...Selbourne's real villains, however, are not the utilitarians but the "socialist utopians"—by which he means the mixed bag of neo-Marxist academics, students, and public-sector workers who made up the British New Left...
...There is a Communist party (PCI) that, even reluctant observers admit, has been unusually lucid in the face of social and political change...
...Act I, which lasts from 1944 to the late 1950s, finds the collective hero paralyzed by external adversity and character flaws...
...As one reflects on World War II and the fate of Western culture, it seems to me mistaken to assert the alleged "benefit to patients as well as to the evolving profession itself...
...Old and new workers alike faced employers determined to maintain profitability at almost any cost by rapidly increasing productivity...
...But he maintains in an early citation that "as the history of the Goring Institute once again makes clear, Nazi Germany was not a perfect totalitarian order...
...In Act IV, alas, triumph fuels the characterological weaknesses of the protagonists, leading to a tragic denouement...
...Cloth, $28.00...
...At this climactic point, then, leading organizational personae were able to listen to the wisdom of the crowds...
...Dunn notes an alternative strain in socialist thought running from Eduard Bernstein to Anthony Crosland, but he is unable to keep it in focus long enough to explore its possibilities...
...In a pluralist socialism, a large body of technicians—from engineers to architects to social scientists—could find outlets for their talents in planning and policy functions now vouchsafed only to an elite of "approved" academics and civil servants...
...Subsequently, even this rather naive and simplistic narrative was withdrawn from circulation, and for many years, Chinese readers had no information on the matter besides the official propaganda sermons which held that the "Long March" had been achieved by a small brotherhood of giants who, having demonstrated in their superhuman trials that they were selfless, fearless, invincible and infallible, acquired once and for all the absolute right to rule over the Chinese nation...
...By the 1980s, befuddled by new and unfathomable circumstances, it was once again weakened and disoriented...
...And to the extent that German culture once represented some of the best in the Western tradition, the account this book gives is more ethically worrisome to me than the horror stories about the abuse of psychiatry under the Soviet regime...
...This conviction explains his curious fascination with the trotskisants of the New Left Review, who share his analysis but would foist an authoritarian "pure socialism" on an unwilling working class...
...Still, the old axiom has not become entirely obsolete...
...If we do not, it is little more than a Hayek for the '80s—more sophisticated, perhaps, because Dunn does not share Hayek's infatuation with laissez-faire and because he grudgingly, if inconsistently, concedes some of the successes of 20th-century social democratic politics...
...The oft-destructive pattern of competitive union pluralism was replaced by united action both at industrial and national levels...
...On balance, it is probably dangerous to workers for their trade unions to be overly subordinate to political parties, given the occasionally contradictory rhythms at which labor market and political lives evolve...
...n the United States, the relationship between socialists—often economic and cultural outsiders —and a more "American" working class has generally been problematic...
...Rustin's program seeks not only to defend the "universalist values of postwar social democracy" 241 but also to extend and adapt them to the Britain of the 1980s...
...DAVID SELBOURNE CALLS such a vision of extended participation a "phantasmagoria," and although he hardly fleshes out his critique, there is a grain of truth in it...
...The Communists thus won an unexpected reprieve, which subsequent developments allowed them to turn into victory twelve years later—but this is another story...
...0 n the subject of totalitarian states, it has been said that the most reliable writers essentially pertain to two categories: those who live outside and are not allowed in—and those who live inside and are not allowed out...
...Capitalist democracy emerges as the least bad of all possible worlds—a system well-adapted to the needs of a "society irritably but rationally aware of its own internal contradictions, but also irritably but rationally unconvinced of the possibility of transforming itself into a less contradictory form...
...The actual proceedings of that conference remain largely shrouded in mystery...
...Urban areas were even less prepared to welcome them...
...The complex of motives in GOring's reviewing of Nazi books and articles was, we are informed, "typically human...
...Do working people view all social benefits as second-best supplements to wages earned in the marketplace...
...This is a willful and disastrous misreading because Nove's work—especially when linked, as it can be, to Millian liberalism and the new interest in economic democracy—does indeed provide a useful foundation for a social democratic program...
...The author does not seem to recognize that the success of the Goring Institute and its part in helping the Luftwaffe and in promoting the war effort itself besmirch the whole tradition of German so-called psychotherapy...
...Arrayed around this communisant core are other forces—the Italian Confederation of Workers Unions (CISL), the Catholic union once linked to the Christian Democrats, an active women's movement, and small leftist political groups...
...now, not only was his authority restored, but he was put virtually in supreme command, both politically and militarily...
...When Schultz refused and pointed to the futility of such an action, Goring branded him a defeatist and continued to badger him about it...
...There are pages full of wisdom about women in the work force and the Italian women's movement...
...Rather than ignoring, or trying to shoot it, the unions decided to "ride the tiger...
...in the end socialism is paralyzed "far more by its massive intellectual failures and its queasy honesty than by any diminution in the repulsiveness of capitalist society...
...Consequently Rustin, too, rummages around in pre-1951 Labour-party history, attempting to discover what bound different classes and interests together in a common vision of socialism: It is important now to recapture and renew the positive foundations of the earlier programs of reform and reconstruction, since if there is a popular basis for radical social programs in Britain it is likely to have some continuities with that experience...
...Thus he laments the absence of a socialist equivalent to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls...
...What we have then is no success story but the tale of a collapse of Western civilization...
...Henceforth employers pursued what Barker describes as "Cold War in the factories," using militant anticommunism to their advantage...
...In 1933 and 1934 GOring made Mein Kampf required reading for all "psychotherapists...
...THE ENGLISH EXPRESSION "LONG MARCH," WhiCh is conventionally used to designate the retreat of the Communist forces from their Jiangxi base to a more remote shelter in northern Shaanxi (October 1934–October 1935), has a certain quality of understatement that rings well and catches the imagination...
...With hindsight, we can see that this partnership was short-lived...
...Matthias Goring, pretty much to the exclusion of old-line psychiatrists...
...London and New York: Oxford University Press...
...The notion of a "German psychotherapy" is, I think, on all fours with the concept of an "Aryan" physics...
...Do people consider that mansions are held as rightfully as cottages...
...as he wrote to his son, he felt that it was far more useful to have these things printed under Salisbury's signature in the New York Times...
...As Judith Shapiro put it accurately (in a review of Salisbury's book...
...In turn, the Chinese populace was invited to accept without a murmur that their perpetual leaders should now enjoy all the perquisites and privileges of a new ruling class, whereas they themselves should imitate the shining examples of the "Long March" and cultivate in everyday life the virtues of selfsacrifice, heroism, and asceticism...
...Here, in well-written and well-researched form, is social history nourished by empathy for people, events, and organizations...
...Thus, in an earlier book, Dunn dismissed John Stuart Mill as merely "hapless," though Mill provides an important starting point for anyone concerned with the peaceful transition from liberalism to socialism...
...In a truly pluralist socialism, higher education for all and at all ages could make everyone a technician of some sort...
...As Chiang Kai-shek was already poised to deliver the coup de grace, the Communists were saved in the nick of time by the Japanese aggression, which made it morally impossible for Chinese to continue to fight Chinese: the pressure of public opinion and of patriotic emotion culminated in an army mutiny and forced Chiang to agree to a truce...
...Building on well-established popular denials of market logic (denials that Selbourne claims do not exist), Rustin would recast some of the welfare state's paternalistic character in a language of rights better suited to today's self-assertive and demanding citizenry: a statutory right to work, a right to higher education, and more democratic rights in the form of proportional representation and administrative power devolved to Britain's regions...
...But from the perspective of Ronald Reagan's America it can only be said that we are in need of more such "failures...
...and the inability of the left to make any breakthroughs all combined to create a dangerous environment for Italian workers...
...but the socialist inspiration remains...
...In the short run, unions voluntarily accepted wage controls, granted employers new power over labor mobility, and carefully limited concessions to Italy's women's movement...
...The question the "historic compromise" tried to answer was one any labor movement in similar circumstances would have to face...
...In the end, they were left with no alternative: they had to break free in one desperate move, and run for their lives...
...Zunyi Conference, January 1935...
...After he has made some formal bows in the obligatory direction of morality, the author states: "To treat Jews or to protest the Nazi dictum was to risk not only personal destruction but also destruction of the profession and practice of psychotherapy itself...
...Housing, health care, education, transport, and other public services were substandard or lacking...
...Whatever the ineptitude or perspicacity of the PCI's strategic choices (and Barkan presents examples of both), they were almost always too easily adopted by the CGIL because of party domination...
...The more clearly we come to see the nature of capitalist ownership, he argues, the less plausible it seems as a claim to material goods...
...Italy's paroxysm of social protest, which Barkan recounts economically and elegantly, was different from those in other Western societies because it was primarily a working class explosion, a genuine "resurgence of class conflict...
...20.95...
...Some of this misery and confusion is evident in David Selbourne's polemic against "socialist illusion...
...Because he elides the discrete phenomena of postwar social change, he appears still to believe that "objective" forces favor the advent of his participatory, pluralistic socialism...
...0 THE POLITICS OF SOCIALISM, by John Dunn...
...For reasons that are chilling in terms of the history of Western culture, earlier philosophic ideas, and in particular a Romantic tradition in German psychology, could be made use of by the Nazi regime...
...If we take Dunn's attack on capitalism seriously, his book is a cry of despair...
...For a period there were huge increases in trade union power...
...Beginning in the "hot autumn" of 1969, rank-and-file actions took new forms...
...The "historic compromise" proved to be a risky undertaking, and one that ultimately failed...
...In this light, it is easy to understand why the 50th anniversary of the completion of the "Long March" was celebrated with such pomp in China last year...
...For decades the only account that was available to the Chinese public was a Chinese translation of the very sketchy and starry-eyed report which Edgar Snow had concocted forty years ago from a few interviews with Mao and other leaders in Yan'an...
...The author does not understand that the Nazi regime destroyed psychotherapy as it should be known...
...The curtain falls, therefore, on scenes of devastation...
...The collaborative activities of Carl G. Jung, although early on condemned by a Swiss colleague as well as by Wilhelm Reich, have been weighed and assessed...
...In short, the term "New Left" is improperly applied to a new working class that is now more likely to be attracted to right-wing populism or to retreat from politics altogether, as Selbourne suggests...
...This wretched handful of survivors was in such a state of exhaustion that it could have been annihilated with one blow...
...It grew more costly to continue low-wage, "bash the workers" strategies...
...As early as the mid-'50s, such cultural commentators as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams warned of a breakdown in working-class values, making the constituency less amenable to control by the elite...
...This incapacity to see the value or potential of social democratic reform is rooted, I think, in Dunn's deep hostility to the liberal political tradition and to socialism as a logical development of what is best in that tradition...
...in front of the president and of the cameras of the press, the ground was duly dug, and within minutes an enormous truffle appeared: it had a tricolor ribbon tied around it...
...A member of the Goring Institute, John Rittmeister, was arrested by the Gestapo (in late 1942) and accused of being part of an espionage plot that fed information to the Russians...
...368 pages $29.95 Order toll free 800/638-3030...
...and that the German practitioners of their craft owed an obligation to their patients, to humanity at large, and to the patients in countries that the Nazis assaulted...
...they grow underground on the roots of wild oaks...
...The answer to the first is, as Dunn admits, not very original...
...ultimately blockade tactics proved successful, and the Communists found themselves progressively strangled in the tightening noose set by the encircling forces of the government...
...Rustin also evinces pre-1951 influences in his realization that socialism is (or can be) for everyone, and not only for the working class and its "objective" allies...
...Joanne Barkan will forgive us if we review it in such terms...
...Its political theory, Dunn claims, is a combination of "evasion, debility, and insight," its economic presumptions are "increasingly indefensible," and its politics in light of this fact is merely "frivolous...
...What about pensions, unemployment benefits—and public-sector employment...
...The faltering of the economic miracle deepened workers' grievances, while increasing union strength sharply cut the maneuverability of government and employers...
...All of us should be wary of the implications of any system of ideas that aims to "harmonize" the individual and the dominant social order...
...But, unlike Selbourne, Rustin looks to the public sector as the champion of "universalist values" in the war against capitalist individualism...
...While deriding utopianism, Dunn rather inconsistently seems to long for "knockdown" philosophical arguments...
...Changing relationships between Italy and the international economy and, within Italy, between larger and smaller industry...
...Here we have a tragic scenario of Shakespearean proportions...
...If so, it is hard to understand why state pensions, the National Health Service, and (to take one example) municipalworks departments have survived competition from private insurance and enterprise...
...Behind the anger and the rhetoric, one hears a muffled call for a reknitting of the old partnership on the basis of "yesterday's" values: fellowship, mutual aid, dignity, equality of status, the development of individual capacities...
...Similar things can be said of the PCI's labor ally, the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL...
...Its central conceptual flaw can be detected in the title...
...One bit of light emerges from the text to reassure us that there was a solitary sanity of resistance to Hitler's tyranny...
...John Dunn's peculiar book purports to address two problems...
...MICHAEL RUSTIN HAS COME to quite different conclusions as to the utility of socialism...
...Given his strictures on the practical (as well as ethical) failures of corporatism, he needed to be tougher on himself in assessing the administrative feasibility of his schemes...
...This partnership was seen at its best in the 1945-51 Labour governments, which appeared to be delivering long-awaited goods and services to the working class while widely diffusing the social democratic values cherished by the middleclass elite...
...It actually took another ten years before his absolute authority was officially ratified by a party congress— Seventh Congress, 1945—but total indifference for all legal forms was always a characteristic feature of Maoism...
...Nor are most people aware of Freud's authoritarian leanings in the last decade of his life...
...Dunn ignores these materials...
...That they were less than successful in this pursuit of basic social reforms (more equitable spending between North and South, investment control generally, and more expansive social services) took little away from the originality of their efforts...
...The dilemma of reaching sensible compromise between trade unions and party politics far transcends specific cases of Communist-union bonds, of course...
...Barkan's plot reaches for its dramatic peak beginning in 1968-1969...
...The Great Crowd Scenes of the later 1960s were being prepared...
...A union better anchored in strictly labor-market concerns might have been able to resist party pressures...
...Act III consists of Triumph and Transcendence, with the lead characters' earlier self-examinations and changes bearing fruit...
...Until the 1960s, he argues, the sham was sustained by "socialist utilitarians"— moderate politicians of the Clem Attlee or Tony Crosland stripe—who fed working-class lusts for material gain by means of trade-union power and the welfare state, and cynically called it socialism...
...Perhaps taking no risks at all and hunkering down to protect what they had 236 already won might have been a better choice for the Italian unions...
...The theory developed in Mill's Principles of Political Economy suggests exactly the sort of institutional structure that would go far to meet Dunn's criticisms of socialist political economy...
...However, to say that he saved the situation would be an exaggeration...
...Faced with annihilation, the party leadership convened an emergency 237 meeting that was to remain a historic turning point, as it marked the true beginning of Mao's power...
...London and New York: Verso...
...This principle should present particular relevance in a case such as Harrison Salisbury's, since his book, which deals with a highly sensitive and timely issue of party history, was made possible only thanks to the special and direct cooperation of the Chinese leadership...
...The failure of the centerleft coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists of the mid-1960s meant that needed reform did not come...
...For instance, Rustin criticizes liberal decentralism for its bias toward "those with the greater participatory resources and skills," yet his own ultraparticipatory society is let off rather easily on this score...
...Nove's book is precisely what the title suggests and what Dunn contends does not exist—a politically responsible, economically sophisticated discussion of how a democratic socialist regime might work...
...The CGIL, now less a political tool and more a trade union, was better able to respond to the changing environment...
...FOR A PLURALIST SOCIALISM, by Michael Rustin...
...The way Jung's ideas could be used to suit Nazi purposes is unfortunately only part of a much wider picture...
...Dunn offers guidance for socialist politics under such conditions...
...Such arguments had genuine force in the days of the Popular Front, but they have little bearing on the thinking of Western socialists today...
...There were, in my opinion, no "major strides" in any features of this story...
...But Selbourne's insistence on the overwhelming primacy of "individual appropriation" will not so much enrage his readers (as he obviously intends) as puzzle them...
...The original term "Chang Zheng," however, is somewhat less modest—"the Long Expedition of Conquest" would probably be a more accurate rendition...
...The author believes that psychotherapy existed in Hitler's Germany...
...Short of seizing the Quirinal Palace (and perhaps the Vatican as well), notwithstanding the youthful enthusiasm of a small menagerie of gauchiste grouplets advocating a bloodbath of terrorist stupidity—how could the left make conservative Italy move...
...Dunn goes beyond misjudgment in his surprisingly unscholarly misuse of Alec Nove's Economics of Feasible Socialism...
...In the early 1930s, the Chinese Communist party, which was then led by a series of Moscow's alumni, had established a fledgling "Soviet Republic" in the backwoods of Jiangxi province...
...He is fascinated by the degree of alleged professional institutionalization that so-called psychotherapists achieved under Hitler...
...And here she may well be right...
...In fact, the postwar West has gone both ways at once...
...Paper, $7.95...
...326 pp...
...Wages went up...
...Families and lives were shockingly disrupted...
...This president of the French Third Republic, while on an official visit to the Perigord region, was invited by an over-zealous prefect to witness the operation of truffle-gathering, which is the most remarkable industry of that particular area...
...a new wave of technological change...
...q 245...
...Ignoring this, Dunn cites Nove's severe and well-taken critique of Soviet economics and generalizes it into an assault on the economic plausibility of socialism tout court...
...In this view politics is anything but utopian...
...though also with Tawney and, in one unguarded moment, with "yesterday's Labour Party...
...Are popular conceptions of property right unalloyed by considerations of justice or proportion...
...His tactical initiatives were sometimes reckless and costly, but always imaginative and inspired: what was even more important, he revived the moral energies of the rank and file, he injected hope and meaning even into defeat, and a sense of purpose into what had until then been a blind and demoralizing retreat...
...Rustin regrets the degradation of the socialist ideal into materialism, the "increasing sectionalism" pasted over by corporatist decision-making, and the cheap pact struck between middle-class utilitarians and trade-union leaders...
...Whether posed in PCI-CGIL terms, or in a number of other permutations (British Labour Party-TUC, AFL-CIO-Democrats) it has not been easy to resolve...
...Rustin offers much that is valuable and attractive to those who have never been on the left at all, and he sketches out the terms of a new partnership between socialists and working people, evoking the spirit of the 1940s with the vocabulary of the 1980s...
...Rustin acknowledges this fact by lowering his expectations, occasionally granting a plurality of interests and values, referring to regional differences, and cautiously advocating coalition between liberals and socialists...
...Readers will find Visions of Emancipation an engaged left book, but still better, a left book without the slightest sectarian axe to grind...
...Because of its successes, however, the movement faced complex new choices...
...Mao had previously been pushed aside from the government of the Jiangxi Soviet...
...Mill's proposals for an egalitarian, market-oriented system of cooperatives operated under the control of the workers is very much in line with programs advocated by such theorists as Robert Dahl...
...Participation" is the byword...
...new Italian managerial strategies...
...Selbourne, a political theorist at Ruskin College, the labor movement's Oxford outpost, rejects the whole postwar partnership between socialists and workers as a sham...
...On the trade union front, Cold War politicization—the use of the CGIL as a transmission belt by the Communists and the manipulation of anticommunism by the Church, Christian Democrats, employers, and the United States—quickly led to organizational division...
...Indeed, at a moment when the party system was paralyzed, the unions, led by CGIL, began to think of becoming quasi-parties themselves, trying to wield their new bargaining power not only with business, but with the state...
...The fact that the "Long March" was disastrous in an immediate and practical sense—the Chinese Communist party never came so close to total destruction—does not detract from its political significance, which was, and remains, momentous...
...In fact, the worst was still to come—new battles, and even more grueling struggles against natural obstacles...
...The author thinks that Goring's party membership "carried a certain degree of sincerity and conviction...
...It was not just because the Italian left was dominated by a strong Communist party that this choice presented itself...
...for the Chinese Communists, it is truly a "myth of the origins"—and this, in turn, explains their long reluctance to allow it to be thoroughly investigated and assessed by scholars and historians...
...Dunn's argument relies heavily on straw men and simply fails to consider significant parts of the theory and practice of recent Western socialism...
...Despite massive left electoral and union victories, the deeply entrenched Christian Democratic political caste in Italy, with conservative Italy well arrayed behind it, simply refused to budge...
...He takes the "Workers' Plan movement" as a model for industrial democracy, but he admits that the movement has so far been confined to high-tech workers with unusual bargaining strength and technical expertise...
...419 pp...
...And the volume concludes with a number of fascinating recorded interviews with Turinese workers...
...The very fact that Salisbury himself does not really answer this riddle, but simply marvels at his journalistic good luck, should further stimulate our critical awareness...
...Do trade unions exist solely to secure the maximum wage for their members...
...His work is generally meticulous and painstaking, sometimes to the point of tediousness...
...Underlying these strained arguments are two further failures...
...Barkan's second act begins in the depths of the late 1950s...
...The industrial militancy of the late '60s and early '70s, aimed as much against Labour as against Conservative governments, suggested that Labour voters had radically different priorities from Labour cabinet members...
...Some of Rustin's critique of the postwar Labour party parallels Selbourne's...
...paper, $8.95...
...after all, when the remnants of the "Long March" finally settled in a barren and desolate corner of North Shaanxi, they were a mere 4,000 out of the 86,000 who had evacuated the Jiangxi base twelve months earlier...
...When the PCI and CGIL took pro-Soviet positions after 1947, an extended period of political isolation and labor-market exclusion ensued...
...Burchett, of course, knew better than to complain about what could have been considered a case of "benign plagiarism...
...Here Barkan as playwright is gentle but firm...
...If anyone could sell left-wing rather than right-wing populism to the new working class, Rustin could...
...What he finally unearthed looks in some respects very much like the real thing...
...At what was to be a critical turning point, the Communists thus imposed a politically-inspired and demobilizing self-effacement on the unions...
...The author writes that Goring "did not join the Nazi party in order to exercise his anti-Semitism...
...If indeed the author is correct in claiming that what he calls psychotherapy, in any shape or form, flourished under Hitler, and had its roots in pre-Nazi Germany and its continuity in the post-World War II Germanys, then Germany as a country and culture stands indicted anew...
...BEYOND THIS LIES THE PCI's choice of "historic compromise...
...q AGAINST SOCIALIST ILLUSION, by David Selbourne...
...Do people generally prefer benefits conferred by the private sector...
...Almost at the outset of the book the author informs us that "psychotherapists at the Goring Institute, of course, were not permitted to treat Jews...
...With Mao in charge, the Communist retreat was not at the end of its tribulations...
...Freud's attitude toward Austrian politics in the 1930s was heartbreaking to his politically idealistic followers...
...And as the economic condition of the majority becomes "more confused and unstable," it is increasingly difficult for a representative democratic state to defend the power of the owners...
...t I) UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS 239 however, Britain has provided an alluring counterexample...
...IT IS ALWAYS SALUTARY to be reminded of the place of liberty in the pantheon of socialist values, especially when the reminder exhibits such a genuine passion for the rights of the "ordinary" individual, oppressed by concentrations of power...
...Migration of labor from the underdeveloped South to Northern factories accentuated Italy's dismal imbalance and created new problems in the North...
...The presidential party was invited to follow an old, experienced pig that took them straight to the foot of the nearest tree...
...However, the timely publication of Salisbury's book and the very nature of its message seem to match so closely the tune of these celebra238 tions that one cannot refrain from a certain feeling of uneasiness...
...He assures us that New Left intellectuals are much more practical and accessible than the Old Left (for instance, the Fabian) sort, but he admits that their chief successes have been theoretical, and that "this theoretical utility is still distinct from its restricted normative purchase in everyday political debate...
...New York: Schocken...
...Despite the merits of her analysis, Barkan is too quick to accept New Left criticism of organized labor as strategic wisdom...
...Cloth, $29.95...
...In recent years, however, some changes have been taking place, particularly regarding China: now, to some extent, serious scholars and journalists can carry their researches into the field, whereas a number of Chinese intellectuals are able to visit Western countries...
...But in place of the political theorist's assertion that the working class has always cared only for individual appropriation, Rustin the sociologist substitutes an analysis of what the working class wanted then and what it does want now...
...Selbourne seems to believe that capitalism has successfully implanted its values in all its victims...
...The movement answered this question incorrectly, essentially because of the PCI's disregard for the movement's autonomy...
...Italian students caught the protest contagion...
...In Rustin's view, people want more democracy, a larger welfare state, guaranteed employment, and "broader social rights to education, health, cultural access, and so on"—all demands that he identifies with the New Left and other social movements of the '60s...
...But he has not shaken off To Letter Writers • Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...He has gathered an amount of information that will certainly remain a useful reference for future historians...
...Only when describing the link between the Goring Institute, headed by a cousin of Hermann Goring, and the SS, does Cocks comment: "To the extent that this history should include a degree of moral judgment, it must be said that these activities involved a higher degree of culpability in their contributions to Nazi projects...
...The concept of totalitarianism may no longer have the respectability that it had in the late 1950s, but I cannot imagine anybody in the field ever having tried to prove "perfection" in how Hitler's Germany illustrated the type of system called totalitarianism...
...On the charge of high treason Rittmeister was executed in 1943...
...Barkan is careful to avoid the brutal analytical condemnations that many would use to characterize this...
...To simplify Barkan's analysis unduly, the biggest mistake came when the PCI adopted its strategy of "historic compromise," its effort to bargain its greatly increased electoral strength for coparticipation in government with the Christian Democrats...
...There are a few ambiguities in Barkan's masterly plot and character development...
...Thus he misses the significance of Bernstein's perhaps overstated maxim that the movement is everything, the goal nothing...
...Bessie/ Harper & Row...
...They all contribute significantly to our understanding of a complex subject whose roots extend deep into civilization's millennial past...
...Harrison Salisbury went bravely into the woods and dug earnestly for facts...
...Barkan has used the library well, but the book bespeaks a vitality beyond the academic...
...The last act of Barkan's mise-en-scene reviews the terrible consequences of the PCI's mistaken choices for the Italian workers' movement...
...FLAWS IN A TRAGIC HERO'S character become clear only in the light of subsequent events...
...His relationship with his own deputy, Schultz, deteriorated to the point of rupture early in 1945 with Gtiring's insistence that they, as those in charge of a psychotherapeutic institute, serve as psychological advisers to the last German units defending Berlin against the Russian invaders...
...We can, then, expect that socialism will be with us as a potential alternative for a long time to come...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
