The Last Page
Barkan, Joanne
I AM AN immigrant to Dissent- land from the shores of the New Left. Although I've had my naturalization papers since 1986, my nontraditional background got me this Last Page assignment. For the...
...Someone asked how the magazine could increase the number of women writers...
...And now...
...This didn't inspire many of us to read Dissent...
...Most Dissenters don't miss the socialist ideal...
...For the magazine's forty-fifth anniversary, the editors asked me to describe how Dissent looked when I first stepped off the boat...
...The language had a more American ring—less Marxism and fewer European political formulations...
...But wasn't democracy our thing, too...
...We lost Irving and other socialists of his kind...
...Now we ponder the prospects of the welfare state in a globalized economy...
...Yet one NAMer—an older exCommunist—went through stacks of the magazine during the merger negotiations...
...We put out a fine left magazine (with more young and women writers), but it has lost much of its idiosyncratic socialist flavor...
...Someone else called out, "Do you mean affirmative action...
...My extraction: After generic antiwar and student protests, I spent the 1970s looking, mostly in Italy, for the Third Way—an alternative to both Leninism and social democracy that would be revolutionary, democratic, and socialist...
...The NAM immigrant regrets the loss...
...I sensed less alienation from American society, less anger...
...How did the Dissent board look to a person of NAM descent...
...Socialism has always been the name of my desire...
...Pretty old, very male, professionally homogeneous (many academics), and politically heterogeneous (socialists, social democrats, liberals, a few heading farther to the right...
...Then I discovered the New American Movement (NAM), whose members were reading Gramsci and digging in for a long war of position...
...I, like most NAMers, saw Dissent politically as the extension of DSA's "right-wing social democratic" faction...
...The step from this appreciation to visiting a Dissent editorial board meeting in 1985 required no ideological effort...
...Passion for the socialist ideal, determination to explore every difficulty openly, curiosity about the actual institutions despite the near hopelessness of the project—Howe's politics looked very fine to me...
...No surprise...
...imperialism, too obsessed with old battles against Stalinism, inadequately sensitive to the sufferings of Palestinians, indifferent to environmental issues, out to lunch on feminism, and "bad on Vietnam...
...NAMers suspected Dissent of the same failings as Harrington's group: too wedded to the Democratic Party, too soft on U.S...
...And how does it look now to someone of my extraction...
...I bumbled around like an outsider...
...JOANNE BARKAN 128 DISSENT / Winter 1999...
...only the shadow of a democratic socialist movement outlived it...
...Sure, I condemned their unwillingness to make a definitive break with the Soviet Union, but their muddled social democratic politics masquerading as the Third Way bothered me more...
...I remember his reaction: "Their thing is democracy...
...Just set yourself a goal for every issue," I piped up, "for example, one-third women...
...Howe looked grim...
...Irving Howe—DSA vice chair and Dissent editor—was the concept made flesh...
...Dissent wasn't even a blip on the radar screen until after NAM and Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), in 1982...
...I clearly didn't know the native lingo...
...NAMers wouldn't touch social democracy...
...By 1984, I had become deeply pessimistic about the democratic socialist project, given capital's power to strike—so pessimistic that I found an unexpected political soul mate on the DSA speaking circuit—Irving Howe...
...In 1983, I heard that some Dissenters wanted to run an article (presumably semipositive) on the Italian Communist Party, but anticommunist Howe still balked...
...I had been writing critically about the Italian Communists for years...
...Equally attractive, the organization embraced feminism and enforced a 50-percentwomen rule for leadership and all committees...
...Communism collapsed...
...they identify with other left traditions...
...This made no sense in my political language...
...What more could anyone ask...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
