LETTERS
The Heilbroner-Howe exchange ("The World After Communism: An Exchange Between Robert Heilbroner and Irving Howe," Fall 1990) suggests that the time has come to move the discussion of capitalism...
...Although I have read A Better World, the account by O'Neill I had in mind comes from another source...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...In any case, I find nothing wrong with criticizing Moscow News for its right-wing slant and its open admiration of WINTER • 1991 • 143 Letters Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, George Bush, and, yes, Andrei Sakharov...
...In short, scholars still need to study American communism much as they would study any other social movement...
...Direct investment by the state is another, despite Holland's assertions...
...government can foster a necessary renaissance in manufacturing: common standards and support for basic research are surely two well-taken lessons...
...Ultimately, this may also be the fairest way of comparing and evaluating existing societies, regardless of whether their political economies are capitalist or socialist...
...Furthermore, I would have had to acknowledge several other sides to the story...
...It envisioned a more just and humane social and economic order and in so doing it forced capitalism (which I find a very slippery and inadequate word at best) to mend its ways, slowly and reluctantly, to be sure, but considerably...
...Looking back on the 1930s and 1940s, I prefer Norman Thomas to Earl Browder, not to mention Joseph Stalin, and think that the United States would have been better off without a Communist party...
...the United States was a democracy imbued with broadly liberal traditions while the Soviet Union was a dictatorship with a strong authoritarian heritage...
...Editors: I never thought I would find in Dissent, which was founded by democratic anti-Stalinists, sneering references to my book A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals for its criticisms of the old pro-Soviet left...
...I say what I have said all my political life, Senator, that it is none of your goddamn business what my political affiliations are...
...Yet most communists and Popular Front liberals cannot be said to have supported Stalin's crimes because (as even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted in 1960) they didn't consider the purges crimes but fair trials yielding just results...
...Since East bloc communists controlled whole countries, and in one case a powerful and dangerous country, there was a strong incentive to discover what actually made them tick...
...In recent months I have given public lectures, radio talks, and written articles on Eastern Europe...
...Except for the promotion of black culture, the Popular Front was an intellectual disaster (see Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party...
...Historians still do not know enough to make definitive judgments about several crucial questions...
...Nor do I believe that Japanese manufacturers have flourished only because of their more stable economic climate...
...I am most sympathetic to Heilbroner's implicit confession that the recent turn of events strongly suggests, if it does not prove conclusively, that, in whatever form, Marxian socialism was based on faulty notions of human nature and a naive interpretation of history...
...In addition, both capitalism and socialism are limited conceptions, for neither can deal with all the major institutions and social processes of society...
...Managed trade is one way, certainly critical in Japan and elsewhere...
...So if Howe is correct in denying that what has collapsed in Eastern Europe was ever a socialist society, Heilbroner can still convincingly argue that the wreckage contains a substantial part of our received ideas and hopes for building a fully socialist economy...
...First, I do not say I am not a member...
...2. McLaughlin writes: "Although Parenti says he is not a member, he writes regularly for the party press...
...In this respect, O'Neill curiously resembles the worst of the New Left historians he disdains, those who think that the only thing worth knowing about Thomas Jefferson is that he held slaves...
...it is one of the better ones on the left...
...I talked to several leading members of the CPUSA...
...now it just sounds wacky...
...Looking back on the seventeenth century, I prefer William Penn to Cotton Mather, not to mention Oliver Cromwell, and think that the United States would have been better off if the colonies had been settled by more Quakers, fewer puritans, and no slaveholders whatsoever...
...and as Tocqueville pointed out, America's boundaries of class and status are more permeable and fluid, permitting a more egalitarian opportunity for upward social mobility—especially for white males—than is found in Western Europe...
...None of them, to my knowledge, called themselves capitalists...
...but where they leave us with respect to traditional socialist ambitions is uncertain...
...The exceptions do not prove the rule here...
...Editors: Irving Howe's critical comments on Robert Heilbroner's view of "the world after communism" are justified...
...4. To prove that I am the CP's "Stalinist" heavy, McLaughlin quotes extensively from one article I wrote on perestroika, criticizing Moscow News for its uncritical adoration of everything that is Western capitalist...
...They are utopian because they try simultaneously to achieve equality, community, democracy, as well as a functioning economy, and that is too much to ask of any ideal...
...Not only have both terms long ago become buzzwords, but even when they are used as concepts, there are so many types of, and variations in, each that too many words have to be expended to identify which variety of each is being discussed...
...What has survived of the extravagant and utopian hopes of Marxian socialism is a "socialized capitalism," which is, after all, not a bad bargain...
...The United States does poorly with respect to the first two, but it still enables a larger proportion of the working class to go to college than any other society, even if that is only one criterion for judging educational equality...
...To Ribuffo, who seems to believe that supporting the crimes of Stalin was a small thing compared to being anticommunist, this must make them red-baiters of the worst sort...
...For Heilbroner, on the contrary, this last consideration is plainly central...
...a lively book I sometimes assign to my students, O'Neill presents Lillian Hellman, a self-righteous and unappealing figure to be sure, as the representative "Stalinist" intellectual, trivializes her appearance before congressional investigators, and minimizes the impact of McCarthyism in general...
...Communist party (Dissent, Spring 1990), Neil McLaughlin makes some statements about me that need to be corrected...
...In one of those remarkable cold war paradoxes, scholars of American communism stuck to clichés even after many of their counterparts studying Soviet and Eastern European communism began to abandon them...
...The real test is whether, stripped of the illusion that there is a saving Marxist ideology, we can sustain the fight for those reforms that, in large part, we owe to the challenge posed, for the last century, by the vigor and tenacity with which millions of people pursued under the guise of Marxism the Enlightenment dream of a heaven on earth...
...This is not the time (though Dissent certainly is an appropriate place) for a full discussion of revisionist interpretations of American communism...
...Yet the state-led components of Japanese industrial policy are discounted, managed trade is dismissed, and we are left with "patient capital" as the answer to competitiveness...
...Some socialist dreamers and apologists have made similar claims, and some theorists have tried to develop conceptions of socialism that are truly comprehensive...
...One of Franklin Roosevelt's aides recalled that Roosevelt said to him: "We are trying to do many of the same things that the Russians are doing but in a way consistent with our tradition...
...What was the mix of doubt, deliberate deception, and self-deception...
...Communists are changing all over the world...
...The ability of people in different societies to afford and choose the goods they prefer has not received much attention, so that, for example, today's young people may not even know that not so long ago one could still tell a person's class background by the type of clothing he or she wore, even off the job...
...How did communist chicanery differ from Democratic and Republican chicanery...
...Perhaps O'Neill would have been happier if I had said these things in the review...
...Even the efforts to reform the Soviet model along regulated market socialist lines remained (until the very end) within the traditional framework of "conscious control" and public ownership, where they converged at key points with proposed models for a democratic socialist "third way...
...This is, after all, just 140 • DISSENT Letters what the Founding Fathers strove to accomplish...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Although several decades of polemics among intellectuals have obscured the point, Stalin did not arrange the Nazi-Soviet Pact because Lillian Hellman signed a petition endorsing his regime...
...Why that obvious difference should preclude criticism of the red scare has always eluded me...
...Political equality is one, and in this respect the European welfare states are not always as good as they look, for formal equality of the one person—one vote variety is accompanied by a sociopolitical structure in which elites and experts, including intellectuals, dominate politically and socially in a way they do not do in the United States...
...That almost applies to authors when they see their 142 • DISSENT Letters book reviewed...
...Today, America's working class has the right—and the upper class, the virtual obligation—to wear "middle class" clothing, even if the quality of that clothing remains a function of income and wealth...
...The conservatives may also have depressed our optimism and thus our ability to think positively about egalitarian ideas and policies...
...Parenti's speech was a thinly veiled attack on the Gorbachev reforms...
...but certainly the success of American capitalism—not to mention Japan's—is partially explained by the important role government has played both in funding risky innovations and regulating competition and monopoly...
...and yet Heilbroner's position is, in a limited but important sense, also correct...
...Unfortunately, one inconsistency is named FANUC, and another is named Yamazaki...
...That criticism is crude reductionism of my argument...
...What is of interest to Dissent readers is the politics that he articulates in public debate...
...There are important ways the U.S...
...And both rebelled against MITI's attempts to rationalize the machine tool industry...
...Taking together Howe's insistence on the link between socialism and democracy and Heilbroner's reconsideration of the links between socialism, planning, and public ownership, we have a pretty good measure of the scope of the task before us...
...It seems to me that both miss important points...
...On the contrary, for intellectuals, the largest constituency except FBI agents interested in American communism, reconsideration might have meant the loss of polemical straw men and the surrender of venerable grudges...
...In comparison to Europe, America remains less centralized, which enhances some kinds of equality and reduces some others...
...In fact, from what I hear, things are changing in the CP...
...He charges the communists with "supporting the crimes of Stalin" and says that those crimes were far worse than McCarthyism.These rhetorical trumps frequently do serve to end discussion—precisely at WINTER • 1991 • 141 Letters the point where it should begin...
...Some communists and Popular Front liberals knew Stalin was a monster and lied to protect the Soviet Union...
...In American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960...
...McLaughlin treats my unwillingness to accept the imaginary figures as something deplorable...
...Stalinism may have collapsed but I suppose some things never change...
...Enough already...
...But if it does not correct the fundamental disregard for capital, to borrow Henry Kaufman's phrase, that is the government's most powerful intervention in the economy, then no conceivable combination of patch work will redress America's industrial decline...
...I am left wondering how Parenti could assert, "McLaughlin has talked to no one," unless he asked the wrong people...
...McCarthyism was small stuff compared to Stalin's purges...
...What O'Neill calls "sneering references" to his work still seem to me fair paraphrases...
...From what I gather, I differ on a number of issues from the "most orthodox...
...and fourth, equality is also a partial synonym for another goal, fairness, which is of high priority when resources are scarce...
...What he doesn't mention is that my article is from the Guardian, an independent radical weekly with no connection to the CP...
...Among those demonologists one would certainly have to include Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, for no magazine criticized the communists and their intellectual apologists more witheringly than Dissent...
...Isn't that still our problem no matter what we call our economic or political systems...
...Not unless the latest American high has dulled our senses...
...In 1965 MITI agreed that FANUC should focus on building controllers...
...In my review I focused on those elements of the Japanese case that deserve renewed interest here...
...Last spring I heard Parenti speak on "Marxism: Continuity and Change, 1917-1990" at the CPUSA headquarters in Manhattan...
...The reasons for this discrepancy are easy to find...
...Has anyone ever read Sakharov on Vietnam, the arms race, and so on...
...q Editors: In his ill-informed article on developments in the U.S...
...And all the more so, no doubt, because we have learned that American Stalinists had these wonderful commitments to the labor movement and racial equality...
...The German tool industry does not have to restrict imports to retain its market share of machine tools...
...To be sure, capitalist apologists and dreamers sometimes claim that the "free market" will eventually take care of virtually all social problems, but this is ideology in the pejorative sense of the term...
...Are Sakharov and Moscow News editor Yakovlev above criticism because they are anticommunist...
...Perhaps the best and fairest way to deal with this issue is to ask people in various countries to make priority choices, to decide which kinds of equality they value most...
...For this purpose it may be useful to place a moratorium on comparing socialisms and capitalisms and instead to try to compare existing societies by the extent to which they have achieved and are moving toward various kinds of equality...
...Neither firm owes its success to a Japanese government agency that made direct investments, as Baldwin would have Washington do now...
...Third, egalitarian conceptions have always been part of socialism and, to a lesser extent, of capitalism...
...What did they have to answer for—and receive credit for...
...During the 1970s, MITI provided research and development subsidies to the industry and reduced tariffs on standard machine tools while maintaining those on controlled tools...
...144 • DISSENT...
...Wrong...
...Equality is more often assessed in terms of the distribution of basic public services, notably housing, health, and education...
...On the contrary, I believe the state intervenes every day and in a myriad of ways, and I explicitly say as much in my book...
...My interest is not in ideals but in ways of improving existing societies...
...Certainly some readers of Dissent believe that they learned all they need to know about communist chicanery half a century ago...
...Second, one article in the People's Daily World in the last year hardly makes me a regular contributor...
...I propose equality because, for this discussion, it has at least four virtues...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...In murky fashion O'Neill makes the two standard arguments that are supposed to end all discussions of American communism...
...That and the widespread realization that any acceptable modern society must develop instrumentalities to prevent or at least control the exploitive tendencies of its members...
...If Holland believes my review overstated his emphasis on monetary policy and antipathy toward more direct forms of state intervention, his letter gives no reason to think I misread him...
...By 1971 FANUC had over 80 percent of the Japanese control unit market...
...His understanding and appreciation of Goodman's vision and its obvious relevance to the problems that plague us in the nineties is an important contribution to any meaningful contemporary dialogue...
...He claims "no `antipathy' to state intervention...
...Some early books on the American party, notably those by Howe and Coser, Theodore Draper, and Daniel Aaron, remain valuable...
...Baldwin, not shield it from the competition...
...3. McLaughlin again: "Parenti played the role of ideological `hit man' for orthodoxy, or `bad cop' to Gus Hall's `good cop.' " Wrong...
...Defending this position, they were self-righteous, oblivious to evidence, and often vicious...
...The real problem is the unchanging nature of all the anticommunists and redbashers, both the ones found in the White House and the ones who write for Dissent...
...And clearly he is "appalled," not only by the recent memoirs of excommunists and Popular Front liberals but also by historians who find anything of value in those books...
...In the process of challenging my reading of his book, Holland repeats the essential error I see in his analysis...
...More equality is usually conceived first in economic terms, and the degree of equality of wealth and income distribution is surely of primary importance...
...What was the rank-and-file attitude toward Moscow...
...q Editors: There is an old press agent adage that goes, "I don't care what they say, just make sure they spell my client's name right...
...Patient capital is pivotal, and managed trade is a sorry substitute...
...Nor did I ever expect, in the same review (Leo Ribuffo's "McCarthyism Re-revisited," Summer 1990), to see other historians praised for having "removed the Communist party from the realm of demonology and stressed rank-and-file commitments to the labor movement and racial equality...
...Second, it can be compared across many institutions, so that it lends itself to a degree of comprehensiveness...
...For an across-the-board comparison of societies, noneWINTER • 1991 • 139 Letters conomic equalities are just as relevant...
...I cited two of the best historians, Maurice Isserman and Mark Naison, neither of whom I know personally...
...Racial, ethnic, religious, and gender equalities must not be ignored, and the total list of desirable equalities may be so long that not all can be pursued simultaneously...
...This letter is not a treatise on equality, and I therefore omit discussing the shortcomings of complete equality...
...Nor did they count for much in the scheme of things...
...In sum, discussion of American communism has been governed less by a serious effort to understand past events, hard as that is, than by an inner dialectic of animosity unfolding since the 1930s...
...In the meantime he might consider a moratorium on his own sneering references...
...By and large, however, until revisionists like Isserman and Naison began to publish in the early 1970s, American communists appeared in scholarly accounts as a mass of hacks, misfits, dupes, and paranoids...
...So much so that all talk of "actually existing socialism" is treacherously misplaced before it begins: "no democracy, no socialism...
...I share Holland's concern for patient capital...
...In his review of When the Machine Stopped, Marc Baldwin seriously distorts my views on industrial policy...
...In former days Professor O'Neill's letter might have sounded ominous...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Mikhail Gorbachev has made the same request, and now the process of investigation is underway in the USSR...
...Equality has not received much attention of late, in part because the conservative domination of the political debate has forced liberals and the left to concentrate on documenting the increasing amount of economic inequality...
...It stressed the solidarity of all peoples (workers of the world, first, to be sure) and thus voiced what Wyndham Lewis, speaking of the American Revolution, called "radical universalism...
...The European welfare states are way ahead of us with respect to health, housing, and equality in elementary and high school public education, but many of their citizens grumble, like ours, about overbureaucratization, which is in part an effect of inequalities between service suppliers and service users, a problem no one has yet solved...
...unsubsidized, economies exist...
...I do not myself see the utility of trying to salvage some form of socialism by trying to make precise distinctions between tyrannical distortions of Marxism and "true" or "pure" Marxism/socialism...
...6. McLaughlin writes: "The massive upheavals throughout Eastern Europe have silenced Parenti...
...more radical steps to secure a measure of enterprise independence from state bureaucracy and politics are required...
...To take a specific example, the Communist party in the United States in the 1930s led the fight for racial justice, the fight against fascism, the struggle for the rights of workers and, to a somewhat lesser degree, perhaps, the rights of women...
...So now Baldwin and others have developed a variant on the original "big MITI" theory, one that tries to show that major inconsistencies are in fact proof of MITI's actual constancy...
...Blacks live better in the United States than in South Africa, and women enjoy greater freedom here than in Saudi Arabia...
...Ribuffo knows this because I quote at length from Howe and Coser's famous essay "Authoritarians of the Left," in which they attacked Monthly Review for upholding "the radicalism of the blackjack...
...What has been lost is the simpleminded faith in the power of reason or "science" (as in "scientific socialism," which is, after all, what Marx claimed he was establishing) to produce, in a relatively short time, a utopian order, with the realization that such "rationalizing techniques" can only be implemented by coercive force...
...I thus believe that we misstate the real situation when we say that capitalism has "won" and socialism has "lost...
...Not only was the communist record on civil liberties atrocious from an ethical perspective, but it also helped set legal precedents for suppression of the left during the subsequent red scare...
...Considering that I graduated from the university where he teaches and know several of his colleagues, he could have discovered my views simply by asking around instead of doing something onerous, like going to the library...
...In 1976, MITI spent $60 million on an eight-year flexible manufacturing system project, in which FANUC was the only controller company represented...
...That attempt—or at least the intent—was consistent with the definitions of full socialism advanced by both its proponents and its critics from well before 1917 until well after...
...But how do we get there...
...But not when a critic misrepresents the contents...
...Wrong twice...
...Holland's reading of FANUC's history is curious...
...I tried to show that the relationship between Japanese manufacturers and Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is far more complex than any simple conspiracy...
...The image is of some coordinated effort between me and the leadership of the CP...
...Instead of discussing politics, Parenti resorts to name calling...
...Most important, though American communists and their allies had "much to answer for," as O'Neill says in American High, neither they nor the nation as a whole deserved the Smith Act, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security...
...The entire Japanese system is neither desirable nor possible in the United States...
...If such questions could be asked and answered, each country could, in an ideal world, proceed to move first toward those equalities on which democratically achieved agreement can be reached...
...Even so, I probably could not have passed his muster because my critical judgments lack the requisite bitterness...
...Parenti's relationship to the CPUSA is a matter for his own conscience...
...He adds that despite my "silence," "the party retains a Stalinist style," as if I am one of the generators of a "Stalinist style" —whatever that is supposed to be...
...If O'Neill really thinks that they present the communist position on labor and race as unambiguously "wonderful," then he should re-read their books...
...This apparent paradox springs from the fact that each focuses precisely on what is parenthetical in the other's discussion of socialism...
...Editors: Taylor Stoehr's piece on Paul Goodman and Growing Up Absurd (Fall 1990) was simply marvelous...
...Unfortunately, as von Mises and Hayek indeed recognized long before their socialist adversaries, it is just not enough to place democratic organs above the planners and passive markets below...
...Parenti and I disagree about real political issues...
...In his letter as in his book, Holland offers no specific guidance beyond identifying the problem of volatile capital markets...
...If it were true that FANUC received no direct state investment it would hardly disprove the value of such strategies...
...they deserve all the retrospective abuse O'Neill wants to heap on them...
...I haven't exchanged two words with Gus Hall or any other party leader about glasnost and perestroika or any related subject—although I would welcome the opportunity to do so...
...Literally parenthetical is the matter of what is meant—if it was not what was practiced under communism— by socialist planning and ownership...
...The former dominates the world market for machine-computer controls, and the latter is the biggest machine tool builder in the world...
...I wish I had time to contribute more to that publication...
...A related type of equality is in the distribution and consumption of goods and services...
...5. I stand on my request that some systematic determination be made regarding the number of Stalin's victims—rather than bandying about imaginary figures for fifty years...
...and the need to distinguish between equalities of treatment, opportunity, and results, as well as their effects...
...I would like to comment on the exchange between Robert Heilbroner and Irving Howe...
...The Heilbroner-Howe exchange ("The World After Communism: An Exchange Between Robert Heilbroner and Irving Howe," Fall 1990) suggests that the time has come to move the discussion of capitalism versus socialism to different and more productive themes...
...O'Neill's characterization of my interpretation of American communism leaps from non sequitur to non sequitur...
...So is the degree of wage and salary equality in the workplace, and one reason sometimes given for the Japanese economic success is that the top executives of big Japanese corporations earn only five to six times more than the most poorly paid worker, while in the United States that ratio can reach twenty-five...
...1. McLaughlin writes that my politics "are indistinguishable from the most orthodox in the CP...
...he seems nostalgic for the days when no one could write about communism or anticommunism without first warding off suspicions of closet Stalinism...
...Unfortunately, the letter comes from a professional historian, and historians should not be content to leave any aspect of our past in the realm of demonology...
...why should we...
...I doubt that I would have responded to this letter, and perhaps would have accepted it with grudging empathy, if the author were a veteran of old ideological wars reiterating arguments he or she has made for five decades...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Marxism rose to prominence primarily as a judgment against the crushing inhumanity of industrial capitalism...
...Nor would rebellion against MITI disprove the value of MITI's intervention to the company and the industry...
...When the project was finished, low interest loans were offered to companies that used the system...
...I will address three issues: O'Neill's attitude toward the red scare of the 1940s and 1950s, the recent historiography of American communism, and the way in which serious historians should approach the past...
...The task is to make American industry competitive in the world market, Mr...
...Since American Communists controlled little more than J. Edgar Hoover's imagination, there was no compelling need to go beyond caricature...
...Nonetheless, they were neither the first nor the last Americans to hold unshakable, inaccurate opinions about distant countries that conducted business in languages they did not understand...
...The lesson of the collapse of the so-called socialist societies in the Soviet orbit is that there is no quick fix on the long, slow, tortuous path to a just and peaceful world order...
...He permits himself the term "socialism" in connection with Soviet-style regimes because, at least formally, their attempt to overthrow the market and production for profit by means of state ownership and central planning was orthodox...
...Yet we wouldn't understand much about early American religion or slavery if we studied these subjects as O'Neill approaches the 1930s and 1940s, that is, by picking a side and then celebrating one-dimensional heroes and assailing onedimensional villains...
...First, greater equality seems to me a desirable goal sui generis...
...In any case, his letter criticizes the tone rather than the substance of what I said...
...Howe's response takes Heilbroner to task for his conception of socialism, but Heilbroner's otherwise fascinating analysis, notably on the predictive skill of the right, could also be questioned for not distinguishing, for example, between capitalism with and without strategic government subsidy...
...During the question and answer period, dominated by pro-Gorbachev CPers, he launched into an almost hysterical apology for the CPUSA, Stalinism, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Howe zeroes in on the authoritarianism of the communist regimes, so alien from basic socialist ideals...
...Thus it seems to me Heilbroner is right when he at least tacitly admits that Marxism had certain fatal flaws at the heart of it...
...Given the political power that capitalists usually obtain, I am not even sure if any examples of purely capitalistic, that is...
...The epithet "Stalinist" hardly describes the varied experiences of roughly a million men and women who belonged to the party as well as millions more who were Popular Front liberals...
...I have no "antipathy" to state intervention in the economy, nor should it be limited to providing a sound economic climate...
...Moreover, the success of the West European welfare states is due precisely to the role of government in ameliorating the human shortcomings of capitalism (of the kinds still existing in the United States, especially in Republican times, in Latin America, and elsewhere...
...My article in Dissent was based on a reading of recent issues of the People's Daily World and the party theoretical journal, Political Affairs (something Parenti does write for regularly...
...the dangers of treating greater equality as a mechanical, and a mechanically measured, goal...
...q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Virtually all of them, even the most conservative, were wary of the disposition of the rich and powerful to exploit the poor and weak...
...McLaughlin seems to imply as much...
...But we can at least recognize that the issues are intellectually complicated as well as emotionally compelling, and that the recent scholarship, like scholarship on most subjects, varies in quality from excellent to awful...
...Wrong...
...I am grateful to Dissent for publishing the piece...
...These steps may stop well short of laissez-faire...
...It has developed other types of sociopolitical domination...
...The real issue here is not where Parenti chooses to publish nor what political or social connections he has with the CPUSA...
...Evidently, he does believe, as I wrote, that the second red scare "harmed few Americans, many if not most of whom deserved what they got...
...McLaughlin, who hasn't talked to anyone, fantasizes about ideological cops...
...Meanwhile, numerous academics, foreign service officers, and at least four presidents had discerned significant differences among such "Stalinists" as Beria and Khrushchev, Rakosi and Kadar, Bierut and Gomulka, Gottwald and Dubcek...
...Should we therefore remain satisfied with less than full equality...
...One expects to find historical amnesia and the double standard in the Nation, but in Dissent...
...There were communist heroes and heroines as well as opportunists and thugs...
Vol. 38 • January 1991 • No. 1
