The American Forum
Muste, A. J.
I think it is altogether appropriate, and to me welcome, that Irving Howe has stated his views on "American Forum" frankly, openly and without equivocation. It is doubly welcome that he also...
...It is doubly welcome that he also writes "without rancor" and without ruling people like Sid Lens and myself out of the circle of his friends...
...for the C.P...
...Would this rehabilitate the C.P...
...And I am quite certain that many, perhaps, most of the con temporary American youth, are quite as much bored by old type attacks on Stalinism as they are by attempts to foist some form of Stalinism on them...
...On the other hand, I doubt if the existing groups can be wished out of existence or that after they and their members have been decently or indecent ly buried for a while, a shiny new movement with no contact with or knowl edge of the past will somehow emerge...
...Those who perpetrated it would thereby expel themselves from the discussion...
...IT Is SUGGESTED that there must be proof that Communists have "genuinely repudiated the totalitarian system" before one can appropriately take any of them in on a project in communication...
...views and theories might be continuously open to criticism by Irving Howe et al...
...If it be suggested that this is a tactical, and essentially dishonest, maneuver, the answer is that the refusal to discuss or meet issues frankly in open debate would immediately expose the maneuver...
...I am sure the discussion is going to go on despite anything any of us may do or decline to do...
...is certainly not something to dismiss cavalierly...
...I suspect the very fact that we so vehemently denounce the splinters and their members means they cannot be simply ignored...
...But "American Forum" is not a united front of people with an agreedupon program...
...In attempting to set up some simple structure so that the discussion may involve others than people like ourselves who edit and write articles for magazines and get down to something more useful than an occasional mass meeting where exponents of various tendencies repeat their well-known views and throw a few loaded questions at each other, the Forum has taken two members or "leaders" of the C.P...
...I think it is altogether appropriate, and to me welcome, that Irving Howe has stated his views on "American Forum" frankly, openly and without equivocation...
...It seems to me political development is more continuous and organic than that...
...What is the attitude toward "totalitarianism" of C.P...
...Finally, I, too, believe that the material for a viable socialist movement will have to come essentially from youth who have not been involved in the bitter fights of the past...
...leaders could not rightfully be admitted to a movement for united action or "socialist regroupment" is my present, as it has been my past, position...
...As for the Communists, thousands of the youth, students, workers murdered by Kadar and the Kremlin were themselves Communists, were they not...
...This was done pursuant to a policy of "non-exclusion" under which Communists would have their views subjected to the severest criticism and could remain in "American Forum" only on that condition...
...In other words, they seem to me to proceed for practical purposes on the assumption that nothing to speak of has happened since the death of Stalin...
...This aspect of the situation seems to me to deserve much more thought than I think has been given it by anti-Communist intellectuals...
...organ...
...That this condition might be fulfilled, Irving Howe and other DISSENT Editors, as the former points out in his article, were invited to come on the National Committee...
...Whatever that issue may be precisely and regardless of what happens to American Forum, I feel confident that the controversy is fundamentally a good thing and was probably necessary, in any case unavoidable as part of the process of discussion involving all elements which has to take place, as those who do not accept the status quo seek to determine where they are and where they want to go...
...That C.P...
...I have said repeatedly that I do not believe any of the existing parties or groups-splinters every one of them-can form the es sential core of a socialist movement of tomorrow...
...But in view of the continued ferment in these countries and in many of the Communist parties-Mao's revision of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, e.g., as reported by Harrison E. Salisbury in the N. Y. Times of May 19, 1957-it seems to me a basic political error, likely to have tragic consequences, to assume that we are dealing with the same situation as in 1925, 1935, or 1945...
...leaders who take part in a discussion project in which C.P...
...It was and is a matter of regret to that Committee that they declined...
...I do not pretend to know just what has happened and whenever I have spoken on the matter I have laid down conditions, obviously not yet met, which would have to be met if a Soviet regime were to be entitled to the designation "democratic socialist...
...As for Communists in the "American Forum," the Daily Worker printed articles and letters which denounced the suppression and military action in Hungary...
...That it could have been thought of as serving that purpose by people who were eager to have such persons as Irving Howe and Norman Thomas join the project or that, with people like that active in it, it could have been distorted to serve such an end seems to me absurd...
...on a National Committee of some forty members...
...Convention resisted attempts to force the recantation or dismissal of leaders who had permitted these criticisms to be published in a C.P...
...I don't believe tying two or more of the splinters together will accomplish anything, either...
...The nub of the criticism of "American Forum" is this...
...The possibility that with too narrow a base such a project as "American Forum" might be distorted into a "respectable cover" etc...
...That "American Forum" should receive the attention it has-quite out of line with the size of the undertaking or the number of persons involved in itand that it should be so seriously criticized seems to show that some sort of "nerve" has been touched, a crucial issue laid bare...
...The majority in the C.P...
...Now it seems to me that at this point a good many critics of "American Forum" think of the Communist world today and the Communist movement as a solid monolith and of all Communists as cast in the precise mold of Kadar or Stalin...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
