Thirty-five years of Dissent

...Q: But didn't Isaac Deutscher, the Marxist with whom you had some sharp quarrels, see better than Arendt, Lowenthal, and the rest...

...But it is not a democracy either...

...With his stress on economic determinism, Deutscher lent a certain aura of necessity to Stalinism...

...There are signs of a modest economic linkage between Eastern and Western Europe...

...What the theorists of totalitarianism offered us was not so much a complete understanding— how could they?—as a remarkably vivid description and evocation of a novel experience that had shattered the modern world...

...One totalitarian monster destroyed, another takes its place...

...As for the free-lance radicals, they wanted a home where they could discuss and write...

...But the ideological consequences are, for the time being, not so good...

...So when we do have a left in this country, it tends to run toward moralistic extremes and then, as in the late sixties, to self-destruct...

...Or at least, it grew on us...

...It's a regulated conflict for influence and power...

...Q: Sorry, that won't do...

...How did it feel in the 1950s to be attacking McCarthyism at a time when a lot of others were taking cover...

...A: I'm in no hurry to paste a label on glasnostperestroika, having had more than my share of embarrassments over premature categorizations...

...If our flame springs high, then good...

...The keenest analysts of totalitarianism—Hannah Arendt, Richard Lowenthal, Franz Neumann— naturally focused on whatever seemed novel in the totalitarian upsurge: terror as an integral part of their movement and their exercise of power...

...We believe they undermine democracy...

...The capacity and aliveness of one political tendency is measured in relation to another...

...A: Few things have entirely positive consequences...

...Politics isn't a zero-sum game, at least democratic politics isn't...

...There is a beginning of withdrawal by the big powers from small countries they've occupied or "liberated...

...Q: But didn't you pay a price for this...

...So think: Did you start Dissent in order to move away from orthodox Marxism or did you move away because you had started Dissent...

...There is a visible winding down of the cold war...

...That others are in trouble hardly makes your situation better...

...There was repression and intimidation...

...Still, it would be silly to deny that Marxism has left its mark on all of us, as it has on most reflective people...

...But not fascism...

...Still, what chance did European voices of intelligence and reason have during the decades between wars...

...There was an implicit assumption that totalitarian society had achieved a mode of stasis, which, in a sense, meant an end to history...

...Q: Now wait a minute, you're being just a little too casual about Marxism...

...Q: But wait, I've heard old-timers speak about those days as if fascism were only a step away...

...In the age of mass media, shifts of attitude occur much more quickly and unexpectedly than in the past...

...The neocons are rapidly going into eclipse now that Reagan's gone...

...Q: OK, let's get back to the time when you started...

...It would be a striking mistake," he wrote, "to treat totalitarianism metaphysically as a state of society's utter immobility, or of history's absolute freezing, which exclude any political movement in the form of action from below or reform from above...

...All to the good...

...Is the consequence of Gorbachev's policies entirely positive...

...And as some of us get older or sick or tired, there's a whole new generation of talented and devoted people coming along...

...the choice before humanity could not be reduced to capitalism or socialism...

...In any case, consider the other main political trends, liberalism and conservatism: Are they in such great shape...

...On the other side, thousands of people freezing in the streets...

...You don't really suppose you're the first to fire such questions...

...I think these events are astonishing and offer hope...

...Still, right now the bourgeois democracies look pretty good when compared to the faltering communist system, and in consequence the idea of capitalism has taken on a sheen of attractiveness among people in both East and West such as it hasn't had for a long time...

...Nice of Vic to say a good word for us (considering the press we get in his magazine the Nation), but I suspect that behind it all is his desire to advance a somewhat melodramatic view of the 1950s, and therefore he casts a pleasant glow over the opponents of McCarthy...

...SPRING • 1989 • 135 Comments and Opinions But if you look at the decades since World War II there have been some very good intervals for the socialist movement, especially in England, Germany, and Scandinavia...

...we can look forward to a moment when a socialist left in Europe and elsewhere doesn't have to carry the burden of being (mis)identified with communism...

...Credit where credit is due...

...American liberalism has almost nothing to say about the terrible problem of the underclass...

...The recent developments in the Soviet Union are the most important, indeed remarkable, since the Second World War...

...What were you hoping to achieve with Dissent...

...The immediate political-strategic effects of Gorbachev's policies are good...

...A: It felt fine...

...Q: That's all...

...Let Gorbachev achieve even a few economic successes and people might suddenly discover some merit even in the Soviet system...

...I'm not saying all the troubles of the left were caused by Stalinism—only that a great many were...

...Q: Yes, but how does this affect your hopes for a socialist revival...

...A: You won't think me evasive if I say yes and no...

...I'd say this: Since we had to respond to events every three months, we began to realize that as a politics Marxism just wasn't holding up...

...that the social democratic parties, even when still strong electorally, have mainly a symbolic or verbal relation to the original socialist commitment...

...Let's wait and see...

...But somehow we stuck it out and the magazine grew...

...About this we socialists may not have the last word either, but at least we point to the urgency of the problem...

...One of the damaging realities of the past few decades has been the virtual concord (a pact across ideology) by which the conservative right and the pro-Stalinist "left" jointly identify the Soviet dictatorship with "socialism...

...How, in terms of political theory, would you characterize his regime...

...In those years, as we took in the meaning of the Holocaust, as the Stalin regime consolidated its power in Eastern Europe, and as the possibility of communist victories in France and Italy seemed quite real, it was only natural that a mood of depression should sweep across us...

...On other things, we point, so to say, beyond liberalism...

...A: Hard to say...

...So I've done just what I said should not be done...

...A: Very eloquent...

...A: Fair enough, or almost fair...

...We believe the current economic relationships of power are bad...

...Q: So you really want to tell me that in this rather cynical time you people propose to continue...

...American liberals, fearful of being smeared with the "S" word, hesitate to challenge even conceptually the existing property relations...

...American liberalism is all but helpless before the growth of multinational corporate power, the increasing tendency of modern society toward international economic concentration, and the consequent extent to which vast corporate units dominate political life...

...In which a Founding Editor of Dissent Submits to an Imaginary Interviewer, Answering Questions He Likes to Hear—and Some He Would as Soon Not Q: How do you explain that Dissent has survive for so long...

...ideology as the mental equivalent of terror...

...In general, I'd say that this century has been a time of violence, extremism, authoritarian delusions...

...We have, as Lew Coser writes in this issue, finally gotten out of the era in which the Communist parties of Europe represented a significant force...

...And although we didn't join the anti-Marxist stampede of those SPRING • 1989 • 133 Comments and Opinion...

...permanent mobilization" in the struggle against "enemies" real and imagined...

...Those of us who came out of the Marxist milieu wanted to break from sect life completely, which also led in a few years to a gradual abandonment of Marxism as a system, something that may be regarded as an intellectual equivalent of sect life...

...We believe there can be more humane social arrangements, more democratic and equitable modes of structuring an economy...

...Important strides forward were taken toward strengthening the welfare state, a modification of capitalism that, while not yet socialism, has significantly improved the lives of millions of people...

...And the costs are still being measured...

...it just seemed like an elementary obligation...

...but there are good and serious people within them, for whom socialism remains a significant option...

...The working class was not the lever of revolutionary change...

...On the one hand, Drexel Burnham and all those goniffs on Wall Street—the obscene displays of greed, the replays of the Robber Barons, the reckless and mindless speculations...

...A: Who can be sure...

...On some things we have answers close to those of the liberals and we cooperate with them...

...Remember: Millions of good people were burned out, disenchanted, destroyed by Stalinism—whole generations...

...Organizations were breaking up, morale was low...

...that even lifelong socialists have difficulty in providing a clear, simple description of what they want, that .. . A: I get it...

...Even the Communists, harassed as they were, remained a legal party and issued a legal press...

...But we don't only dream utopian dreams, we also engage with current problems...

...Q: Well, sure, it's easy for you chaps to polish your rhetoric, to say you want a society of solidarity, etc., but I don't see that you're very much nearer to reaching your ultimate goal than your movement was some decades ago...

...He was wrong in assuming that because it had a "planned economy" (it might better be called an "ill-planned economy"), the Soviet Union was certain to create the material basis 134 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions for liberalization...

...Arendt performed a real service by stressing these elements and by insisting, as had become obvious to anyone except the Marxist faithful, that totalitarianism was not merely an extension of monopoly capitalism...

...The welfare state doesn't stir the imagination of apocalypse or violent extremism, but it is part of that steady process of social transition, a sort of "long march" in and through democracy that is central to the socialist project...

...Q: One more question about the time of your founding...

...Some of your first editors had come out of Marxist groups, while others were free-lance radicals...

...A: There were Fascists, there always are...

...Still, it would be self-deceiving to say that socialism as an idea and a politics is now in great shape...

...There are sectarians of the extreme left and extreme right, more concerned with clinging to their theories than with responding to realities, who minimize the importance of these events...

...The overriding value of the theory was that it forced attention upon what was historically unprecedented in the Hitler and Stalin regimes—as against lazy theorists who kept telling us "there have always been dictatorships" and repression...

...A: What went wrong was something that goes wrong with most theories—the impulse to transform a historically limited observation, no matter how acute, into a timeless universal...

...Or I read the statistics that Mark Levinson has brought together in this issue, figures that show how in Reagan's America the rich got richer and the poor, poorer...

...But you have to distinguish between legislative thuggery and a Fascist takeover...

...The ultimate end of totalitarianism, if there was one, appeared as either world domination or apocalypse— or both...

...What made totalitarianism so powerful and frightening was precisely the embodiment of a radical new ethos of blood and terror...

...Q: Which leads of course to Gorbachev...

...Problems multiply, injustices grow more glaring—this is no time for men and women of conscience to give up...

...A: It was the Gulag that helped discredit leftist ideas, not the handful of us on the left who told the truth about the Gulag...

...Some younger people, including survivors of the New Left, still say that your harsh anti-Stalinism contributed, perhaps inadvertently, to discrediting leftist ideas these past few years...

...Tell me, do you know of any other enterprise like ours, based entirely on voluntary participation, which has lasted for thirty-five years...

...Q: A temporary phenomenon...

...It's true that for some time now we socialists have been on the defensive, but I think we've gained something thereby...

...We weren't even sure we could last beyond the first year (and now we don't seem to know how to stop— not that we want to...

...It would be feckless in a brief conversation to pretend to offer full answers...

...And the events in the Soviet Union themselves show a culture, an intelligentsia rising out of decades of enforced silence and falsehood, springing to passionate life and speaking with remarkable candor...

...the atomization of society and the destruction of social groups, movements, publics...

...As for Dissent, we're always in need of money, always searching for new contributions...

...But what is the future except a continuous flow of the present...

...The European socialist and social democratic parties sometimes thrive, sometimes flounder...

...We have firmed up our principled commitment to democracy and thereby abandoned entirely some of the more ambiguous aspects of the Marxist past...

...Today it seems the other way round: It is the crisis of the Soviet economy that has stimulated the movement to glasnost...

...A: That's a tough question, but I'll try to confront it...

...You talk as if people entirely understand their own behavior, or as if the passage of time necessarily makes them wise...

...Q: You socialists have this curious habit of always looking toward the future...

...history didn't come to an end, it just dragged on...

...A: In a sense, just to keep body and soul together...

...a time in which liberal socialists or socialist liberals aren't likely to flourish, though in Europe there have been some good intervals...

...Why should they...

...I need only walk the streets of New York to be persuaded once more that our socioeconomic system is cruel, unjust...

...136 • DISSENT...

...Q: What, then, went wrong with this theory...

...if it flickers, then we tend it so that, with patience and time, it will flare again...

...In France it's having a revival, partly because the French intellectuals, avant gardists all, are never more than fifty years behind everyone else...

...Once a great movement experiences such traumas, it takes a long time before it can regain clarity of thought and confidence...

...We have a far more sophisticated sense of what socioeconomic change means and how difficult and lengthy the process is likely to be...

...A: Yes...

...A few old-fashioned Marxists, their imaginations strained by analogies with Europe, started "going underground...

...Insofar as a few on the left and many on the right further the notion that Soviet society is "socialist," the result is clearly a major shift among both intellectuals and the general public toward favoring a "free-market" or procapitalist outlook...

...It was a rotten time— ugly...

...We continue to suffer the repercussions of the failures and disasters of our century...

...A: True grit...

...On this our old friend and antagonist was right...

...Now, in retrospect and bearing in mind the recent Gorbachev changes, do you think the theories of totalitarianism advanced in the 1950s, theories you more or less subscribed to, were correct...

...It isn't...

...A: Again, no and yes...

...And how much help are these labels...

...but really, we had no sense of doing anything especially notable...

...Soon the flaws in this approach became clear: Terror can't be maintained indefinitely...

...I've written a book on this, Michael Harrington has just completed an important book on the same theme, and there's the classic study of Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism...

...Q: Still, you can hardly deny that socialism as an idea is, these days, in some disarray...

...Let there be a major recession in the West and ideological sentiments could change radically...

...As for America, there's something about our culture—a strong inclination toward simplistic postures of rectitude and moralizing that come down from Protestantism and through the Emersonian tradition...

...But there's good news too...

...Or I read about those splendid women in the Black Sash movement of South Africa who go out into the streets to fight apartheid, or I talk with my friends of Peace Now in Israel: Why, our difficulties here are trivial by comparison...

...As long as people accept that, naturally they won't want socialism...

...Things were very rough on the left...

...Let's say it's a bureaucratic collectivist society in a state of extreme crisis, with strong tendencies toward a modernization that entail an as-yet-unsettled quantity of partial democratization...

...These have value in themselves yet also militate against a politics of reform...

...When I read the collection of Soviet press excerpts that Josephine Woll put together in our last issue, I found myself exhilarated...

...In your younger years some of you were Trotskyists or other sorts of antiStalinist leftists...

...Q: Let's turn to something else, maybe almost as touchy...

...A: Well, wait...

...Q: In a book about the McCarthy period Victor Navasky praises Dissent for its intransigent opposition to McCarthyism—I almost get the impression that you fellows did something heroic in those days...

...the vexing problem of Stalinism could not be usefully approached through traditional Marxist categories...

...To have lived to the time when Orwell's 1984 is published in the Soviet Union, when people there write about Koestler's Darkness at Noon—you think, maybe the struggle of the anti-Stalinist left wasn't wasted, after all...

...A: Also the generosity of a few friends and the self-taxation of our editors...

...But in America liberalism is in bad shape, not only as a movement but also as a current of thought...

...Liberalism...

...How do you explain the fact that whichever way the political wind blows it seems always to blow past you folks—that is, both during the turns to the right and the turns to the left...

...I'd just add that those who say the Soviet Union is going back to capitalism are foolish, though no more so than those who still call it socialist...

...In some Eastern European countries there are intellectuals who, rather naively, celebrate the "free market" without recognizing sufficiently that (a) it has really been constrained in the West by many governmental and social interventions and (b) there are grave disadvantages, ranging from unemployment to environmental devastation, that result from "freemarket" economies...

...they hardly have the animating fire of earlier days...

...In the 1950s the Dissent group was, naturally enough, concerned with the matter of totalitarianism...

...Incidentally, one can see some signs of this in even the "leftist" pages of the British journal New Left Review: pleasing signs of heresy...

...years, we could no longer cling to Marxism as a unified system that supposedly coped with all the major problems of politics and society...

...and the Marxist theory of crisis had, at the least, to be modified...

...But we must grant that Deutscher was correct in stressing the inescapability of historical change...