Comments from the left
Howe, Irving
Now that the exhilaration of glasnost is wearing off and the problems of perestroika grow acute, there is a striking change of response to Gorbachev. Wise men shake their heads. They mutter,...
...He sees perestroika not just as a strategem for rescuing a broken-down economy but as a policy reflecting major changes in Gorbachev's thought, a movement from communist orthodoxy to, perhaps, "some form of 'democratic socialism.' " Gorbachev, according to Muravchik's reading, is genuinely intent upon effecting a "revolution" in Soviet life...
...The time of large hopes is past...
...It's as if Stalinism, a terrible burden when it was powerful, would now pull us down in its death throes...
...I have by now lived through five or six shifts of social-cultural mood and opinion, and I know how febrile and unreflective these can be...
...For this, too, is part of the culture of our time...
...It's hard, of course, to answer such a question precisely, since the question isn't very precise...
...Or will it be enough that such a crack-up would prove conservative ideology to be "correct...
...Had it only been possible...
...We'll try to go a little further, in a fraternal, critical spirit...
...In the United States post-Reaganite drowsiness has succeeded Reaganite sleeping sickness...
...What was the name of that committee...
...But one thing ought to be clear: if Gorbachev falls, the result will probably be a repressive authoritarian regime yoking hard-line neo-Stalinists and zealous nationalists...
...he is certainly not the one we socialists would have chosen if we had been able to do the choosing...
...And this must be true for many others...
...As against such absurdities, the left used to say that the people (the workers) would take history into their own hands and then decide...
...In an introduction I've been writing for a paperback edition of his last book, I've improvised an imaginary dialogue about these events, such as we might have had if he'd been spared a few more months...
...It would be catastrophic for the Soviet people, for the world, and, in smaller compass, for our socialist hopes...
...Simply by troubling to read what Gorbachev has written and by the even more revolutionary expedient of taking him at his word, Muravchik has traced Gorbachev's political development in a fruitful way...
...He lived to see the start of the great events of 1989 but not the outcome...
...Gorbachev is hardly the ideal head of the Soviet Union...
...Did the firm even know where Peru is...
...Really existing socialism" my foot...
...We know that the political crises of this moment affect us, too...
...For humanity...
...What else can you expect after decades of communist indoctrination...
...only this time, it's not funny...
...A moderately leftist government had done poorly, and Vargas Llosa, sort of an ex-Trotskyist, now appeared as a Latin Thatcherite infatuated with the "free market...
...utopia lies dormant...
...Two friends are planning a collection of essays bringing together left-wing criticisms of the communist regimes, starting with the Mensheviks (Russian Social Democrats) and anarchists and ending with present-day writers...
...How excited he'd have been to witness the collapse of the communist regimes, how uneasy he might have felt about some of the subsequent developments...
...It should prove to be a valuable book, but will it change popular perceptions...
...By its very nature, the welfare state must serve as an arena for contention, one in which opposing forces strengthen or weaken social legislation...
...So here we are, a lifetime later, having again to confront the shame of child labor...
...Norman Thomas was on it...
...Another "triumph of capitalism...
...Reading Jo-Ann Mort's piece on child labor in this issue of Dissent, I drifted back in memory to the late 1920s and early 1930s, when liberal, socialist, and labor figures formed a coalition to fight child labor...
...That just about settles the matter, since Muravchik knows—indeed, it's for such knowing that the American Enterprise Institute keeps him as a resident "scholar...
...No one knows when it will get better, or if it will...
...When will we be free of this curse...
...An oddity, as it seemed, was the now-defunct De Leonist sect, whose Weekly People used to print elaborate charts of exactly how socialist societies and economies would be structured...
...For decades we democratic socialists have been making principled 300 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions criticisms of the communist party-state dictatorships, both their political monolithism and their overcentralized economies...
...As if to show he was absolutely up to date, Vargas Llosa is reported to have spent a million dollars on a U.S...
...For America...
...302 • DISSENT...
...Of course, but life doesn't usually present us with choices lacking in pain...
...Is it then perverse to say that this might be a pretty good time to reassert socialist convictions—not ideologies, not rigid programs, not exhortations, but the animating values that have inspired the socialist idea...
...Among intellectuals there has been a major shift rightward...
...With the fall of the communist dictatorships we had a moment of exhilaration...
...But never mind: skip the moral, read the story...
...I suspect that in Eastern Europe, now that the excitement of liberation is dying down, there will flourish moods of skepticism, disenchantment, even cynicism...
...A painful choice...
...By this I mean the shared expectations and anxieties among people who think about "the state of the world...
...A Cool Million The gifted novelist Mario Vargas Llosa recently decided to run for president of Peru...
...Missing Mike The months pass...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 301 Comments and Opinions The Return of a Blight It's (16_0 vu all over again, as Yogi Berra used to say...
...Why do so many conservative ideologues remind one of old Stalinists...
...We know that much intellectual work remains to be done if the socialist idea is to take on a fresh energy...
...For how long...
...Moods of the Moment What is the dominant mood of the moment...
...The fight to abolish child labor seemed won when it was banned in the mid-thirties, but clearly such fights are never quite won...
...Socialism "Buried" —Again Chagrin—that's the word for it...
...This is the price we have to pay for the widespread identification of the communist dictatorships with socialism, an identification maliciously enforced by the right and fatuously seconded by the authoritarian left...
...No one knows— probably for several years...
...Mike and I had a habit of meeting once every several weeks for freewheeling political discussion...
...Plenty of valid criticisms can be made of Gorbachev, and we'll be making some of them (we already have...
...That's why it is feckless to indulge in the kind of Gorby-bashing that has recently become fashionable...
...But the euphoria seems to have dried up and to have been followed by moods of skepticism and uneasiness...
...Reading some commentators, one gets the impression that the world can spin into a new cold war and the Soviet Union into a military junta if only that ideology is shown to be "correct...
...All that silly babble about the "end of history" gives way to a sober realization that we're probably facing something like a "return to history," that is, to all the problems that were kept suppressed (for instance, nationalism) by the totalitarian regimes...
...Perhaps so...
...Not under capitalism, not under any system that may succeed it...
...The "sale" apparently hit a snag, since the novelist was bested by an obscure rival of Japanese descent who made a more "populist" appeal to the voters...
...bless his soul, he was on all the committees...
...They mutter, with crocodile regret or burbling delight, that he won't succeed, the Soviet Union will fall apart, its nationalist passions can't be contained, its economy is beyond salvage...
...We don't know, but as soon as information reaches us, we'll pass it on...
...Many Peruvians, reflecting upon the poverty of their country, were said to be offended that Vargas Llosa, perceived now as the darling of the rich, should have spent that much money on a PR firm...
...But that doesn't make it any the less important...
...In Eastern Europe there is the beginning of a realization that, notwithstanding the rhetoric about "free markets," the immediate future could be very hard...
...In the West there is the problem of a reunited, immensely powerful Germany...
...There have in recent years been published some fine books along these lines: Alec Nove's Economics of Feasible Socialism, Michael Harrington's Socialism, Past and Future, Radoslav Selucky's Marxism, Socialism and Freedom...
...A Pleasant Surprise There are still surprises in this world, even pleasant ones...
...You can imagine how that stirred the hearts of the poor and the peasants...
...he may retain much of the old vocabulary, but he has taken over some profoundly heterodox ideas—heterodox, at least, in the context of "Marxism-Leninism...
...The rickety welfare state established through the New Deal has proved sadly vulnerable to attack...
...We even know it's not going to happen overnight...
...public relations firm that would know how to "sell" him to the Peruvian people...
...Reverting to his old style, Muravchik ends by announcing that "democratic socialism" is a "chimera...
...A not-universally-admired chap named Joshua Muravchik, best known as a cold-war polemicist nestling in a right-wing Washington think-tank, has written an excellent article about Gorbachev (the New Republic, March 5, 1990...
...If perestroika succeeds even in part, if it eases the lives of ordinary Soviet people, and if thereby a portion of Gorbachev's claim that he wishes to usher in a "democratic, humane socialism" comes to seem mildly credible, then there will be fresh political opportunities...
...Criticism...
...So one thing high on our agenda at Dissent will be a series of modest, intermittent efforts to do a little "future-painting" —without charts...
...It's being "buried" again, for about the fifth time since I got out of high school...
...Fine, but it turned out that if you didn't have a few clear ideas about what you proposed to do when history fell into your hands, you wouldn't know what to do even if it did fall into your hands...
...Now that many of these criticisms have been validated by recent events in Eastern Europe, one result is a loud cacophony that this signifies the failure of socialism...
...But if it's prudent to lower the rhetoric about, say, Lithuania's indisputable right to national independence in order to ward off a threat to Gorbachev's survival, then let the rhetoric be lowered...
...Of course...
...There was something profoundly stirring about the mobilization of people in Prague and Leipzig after decades of repression...
...This would be catastrophic...
...Did it actually come to a cool million...
...In the past, left-wing movements under Marxist influence tended to dismiss as unhistorical efforts to specify "what a socialist society would look like...
...Meanwhile, the herd of independent minds, to summon Harold Rosenberg's memorable phrase for the intellectuals, is hurtling toward the joys of the "free market," aka capitalism...
...Will that be good...
...who can say...
...And people who are serious about politics have to recognize that...
...It's a year since Mike Harrington died...
...Almost surely not...
...It's as if that part of the world is living through a historical moment at once postrevolutionary and postcounterrevolutionary, or the worst of both...
...yet hardly a day passes when I don't find myself missing him...
...A little patience, a little hard thinking, a little stubbornness of conviction: that's not a bad prescription...
...I don't mean to suggest that socialism is today in the best of health...
...And it suggests how utterly damaging is the readiness of those who use the mindless phrase "really existing socialism" to describe the communist world...
...Good for the left...
...In a democratic Soviet Union such as is promised by glasnost, new movements, social forces, and political leaders would appear, leaving Gorbachev behind...
...Still, I find myself irritated when I read articles that revel in the thought of the coming crack-up of the Gorbachev regime...
...But right now, the main thing is for perestroika to succeed, if only in part...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
