LETTER
Lynn, Conrad
Editors: Having digested the current issue of DISSENT in the comparative isolation of Puerto Rico, I am moved to sum up impressions on the publication's relevance in the last two years....
...Life is still ahead for them...
...To applaud Montgomery does not suffice...
...But admirable as our techniques may be, if they do not achieve the goal desired, they inexorably spell defeat...
...over Hungary...
...You may be right, but a look at the colonial and semi-colonial regions might convince you that your resignation is not shared there...
...Editors: Having digested the current issue of DISSENT in the comparative isolation of Puerto Rico, I am moved to sum up impressions on the publication's relevance in the last two years...
...There is a difference between their support, freely given, and the support of the Soviet Labor Front, which is openly government-manipulated...
...But has this been enough...
...Admittedly, for certain categories of readers it has...
...All of us know that he will be thrown back into a cruel helotry unless the white working-class, particularly in the South, comes to the timely realization that it must ally itself with this new rebel...
...Because of the unmorality of the Communists in the last three decades, we have become solely preoccupied with means...
...These last will hardly be satiated on fare which limits itself to exposing the callousness of the Stalinists, the crocodile tears of the Krushchevites or the complacency of Main Street...
...The anonymous Negro at the bottom of the social structure is beginning to make his first tentative efforts to come to grips with his fate...
...They feel the challenge to remake society...
...Issues have been sharply delineated...
...But neitiser he nor the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions call for any working-class action against Britain and France over the invasion of Egypt, or against the United States for the brutal despoilment of Okinawa...
...Walter Reuther calls, rightly, for international working-class action to boycott the U.S.S.R...
...These questions are asked because I believe you have accepted the necessity to give critical support to the "Free iWWorld" in the current struggle, and feel that any attempt to formulate a program to remake both systems is doomed to failure...
...But there is no real effort to encourage an awakening of this consciousness...
...Possibly the finest single group of thinkers on the Anglo-American left have enabled us to know where we are, conceptually, at this stage of the power struggle...
...A lot of theoretical debris has been cleared away...
...Probably we must look to these areas for fresh leads...
...Once again this circumstance demonstrates that leadership of organized labor implicitly supports the continued domination of the colonial peoples by the "free" imperialisms...
...Yet, what has been the effect on the relatively few who are just becoming aware of society's problems—the iconoclastic college student, the Southern Negro intellectual, the Southern youth, white and black, just beginning to seek a living, the young colonial in Puerto Rico, Okinawa or Hawaii...
...But do you think that difference should make Reuther's position acceptable to the Asian and African masses...
...It is hard to imagine the alert whitecollar reader in our Northern and Western cities and suburbs not being satisfied with your performance...
...In the South of this country a deadly battle is just being joined...
Vol. 4 • April 1957 • No. 2
