Letters
Editors: Richard Wolin's review of Past Imperfect by Tony Judt (Dissent, Summer 1993) recycles a misrepresentation of Sartre by Judt and many others. The claim is that Sartre and Les Temps...
...a perspective that Dissent has, to its credit, consistently emphasized throughout the years...
...Joy because he finally had his proof, and now we shall really see something...
...We apologize for the copyediting mistake...
...It was then that I began to find them despicable, those blackmailers...
...First, the symposium is notable for something reminiscent of the intellectual climate during the 1950s: American society, its politics, economics, and even culture as the proper and inevitable norm for everyone, everywhere, and perhaps forever...
...Someone who has worked long years for a company should be able to retire and live off the dividends of the stock that he or she has accumulated over the years...
...If we fear the return of regressive nationalism, we should cheer the progress of independent working-class groups like Russia's KAS-KOR...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Not only does it offer the labor movement hope, but it also serves as a bulwark against the new wave of government-directed repression in Russia...
...But perhaps it reveals as much by what it omits as by what its contributors say...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...Is it the position of labor that stock ownership is tainted or that by getting shares in the company employees are giving up their independence...
...An American freeze, which is translated by an outburst of witch-hunting, provokes a Russian freeze, which perhaps will be translated by intensifying arms production and increasing the number of slave laborers...
...Correction Edward Rice-Maximin (Winter 1994) is not now nor does he ever plan to be Eric...
...It is worth quoting a substantial segment of the passage in question because it presents a very different Sartre than the one demonized by many American cold warriors...
...In time, this myopia will pass, but I fear we will all have paid a heavy price for it...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Wolin tells us Sartre asked, " `Why should they embarrass us?' " because "Sartre elected to view them as an excrescence that in no way threatened the essence of communism or the Soviet system...
...Each turn of the screw here corresponds to a twist there, and both here and there, to finish, we are all both the screwers and the screwed...
...But "equivocate" is precisely what Sartre did...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...The existence of these camps might enrage us, horrify us, we might be obsessed by them, but why should it embarrass us...
...Second, for a journal that takes pride in four decades of resistance to Stalinism and a strong claim on democratic inclusiveness, there is a stunning absence of New Left or anarcho-syndicalist traditions expressed here...
...In other words, in the early 1950s, an appreciation of the nature of the camps played a negligible role in Sartre's understanding of contemporary political reality: the failures of Soviet communism, the ultimate doctrinal inadequacies of Marxism, the Stalinism of the PCF, and so forth—which is precisely the point I strove to make in my review...
...What must provoke indignation and perhaps despair is the idea that a socialist government, supported by an army of bureaucrats, could systematically have reduced men to slavery...
...Much of Eastern Europe, which yesterday threw out Stalinism's bureaucratic thugs, today is busy throwing out the International Monetary Fund's political toadies and is none too happy with the "free market" swindlers and exploiters who have taken over economic initiative from the communists...
...Allow me two brief reflections...
...Moreover, when confronted in the famous interview on the occasion of his seventieth birthday with the fact that, in retrospect, it was Lefort's position on Soviet communism, and not Sartre's, that had been historically borne out, Sartre could only offer the following pathetic response: "Today their ideas [those of Lefort et al.] may appear to be more correct than the ones I formulated in 1952, but they weren't then, because their position was a false one...
...This no one can—or does — dispute...
...We devoted an editorial to the camps, as well as several articles, which committed me entirely...
...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...
...63-5) DONALD LAZERE San Luis Obispo, Calif...
...The factory and university occupations of the 1960s and 1970s, the spectacular rise of Polish Solidarity, all the efforts at direct democracy remain alive in memory...
...First, Lazere would like to deny that Sartre "equivocated" with regard to the political import of the Soviet slave labor camps in the early fifties...
...Dissent readers may wish to keep up or simply to support KAS-KOR by subscribing to the Russian Labor Review, PO Box 8461, Berkeley, CA 94707...
...If labor unions are going to help managements improve their work systems, why shouldn't they ask for a share of the ownership and, as the United Steelworkers has just done, seats on the board of directors...
...MILTON MOSKOWITZ Mill Valley, Calif...
...EDS...
...q Richard Wolin Replies: With all due respect to Donald Lazere's desire to set the record straight, I hardly think the long citation from Sartre's 1952 polemic with Camus redounds to the credit of his argument...
...302 • DISSENT...
...Above all, let us make clear that someone in the West still affirms the right to revolution—asserted by Thomas Jefferson among others—as a fundamental element of democracy...
...Yes, Camus, like you, I find these camps inadmissible, but equally inadmissible is the use which the so-called bourgeois press makes of them every day...
...For, to my way of thinking, the shame of the camps puts us all on trial—you as well as me, and all the others...
...Certainly Les Temps modernes ran articles (e.g., by Claude Lefort) as early as 1948 that were critical of the inhuman conditions in the land of "really existing socialism...
...Nor do Sartre's relativizing remarks (as cited in conclusion by Lazere) to the effect that the implacable hostility of the West bears essential responsibility for the SPRING • 1994 • 301 Letters totalitarian excesses of the Soviet system wash very well in historical retrospect...
...As Sartre scholar Ronald Aronson points out with reference to Sartre's 1952 The Communists and Peace: "Sartre's systematic justification of the PCF was undisturbed by any note of criticism...
...In conclusion, I should only like to add: one cannot afford to leave good arguments concerning the debilities of communist rule in the hands of one's ideological opponents—in this case, in the hands of cold warriors and virulent anticommunists...
...What nonsense...
...Why is it that the labor movement has always found it difficult to ask for such benefits as profit-sharing and stock ownership, as if these were Wall Street schemes that unions should shun...
...Editors: Richard Wolin's review of Past Imperfect by Tony Judt (Dissent, Summer 1993) recycles a misrepresentation of Sartre by Judt and many others...
...If we opened our mouths to protest against some extortion [by the West], they would close it for us on the hour with: "And what about the camps...
...The context in which Sartre's question appeared, however, supports no such interpretation...
...PAUL BUHLE Providence, R.I...
...The Iron Curtain is only a mirror, where each half of the world reflects the other...
...He asserts that labor "cannot be opposed to reforms that make for better systems of work," and he argues also that working people have a proper call on the profits of a company...
...Is there something anti-labor in this scenario...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Here he addresses Camus's claim that Les Temps modernes had been silent on the camps...
...q Owning It All Editors: David Brody's useful historical perspective on the labor movement ("The Future of the Labor Movement in Historical Perspective," Winter 1994) fails to raise the stakes high enough...
...Nor can one dispute the fact that, at the time, Sartre himself in no way shared this critical position...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...The only emotion which these facts aroused in him—and it pains me to say it—is joy...
...pp...
...The contributors write as if nationalization or denationalization were the only possibilities...
...Let them live again...
...But that, Camus, could not affect an anti-Communist who already believed that the Soviet Union is capable of anything...
...The sentence Wolin quotes appeared in Sartre's 1952 "Reply to Albert Camus" (translated in Situations, George Braziller, Inc., 1965) as part of the famous feud between the two resulting from Francis Jeanson's critique in Les Temps modernes of Camus's critique of Marxism in The Rebel...
...q Left Out Editors: "The Left After Forty Years" (Winter 1994) is an interesting symposium...
...The claim is that Sartre and Les Temps modernes equivocated in the face of the revelation of Russian slave labor camps in the early fifties...
...And if I am a submarine, a crypto, a shamefaced sympathizer, why is it that they hate me and not you...
...But it seems that his concept of a proper call on profits amounts to little more than a demand for higher wages...
...Have I ever retreated when it was a matter of saying what I thought of the Communist attitude...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
