The Young Radicals: A Symposium
Lynd, Staughton
A few hundred years from now (if there are any human beings left), historians will look back on the time we live in and call it the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. I believe...
...When I attempt to raise questions of morality with Soviet visitors, they shoot back the question, "Why are you arming West Germany...
...I have also been asked to comment on "the left-nationalist and revolutionary regimes which seem to be building an inhumane socialism...
...Almost without exception, the new state constitutions instituted annual elections as the cornerstone of democratic government, and most, of course, also included a Bill of Rights...
...All over the world mankind is rising from its knees...
...cent letter in the Atlanta Inquirer, written by a poor Negro domestic worker and addressed to the city's middle-class Negro leadership, spoke of "your integration struggle...
...Last winter, Richard Gibson in the Times and several imitators elsewhere asserted that the question of democracy in Cuba closely resembled the practice of the American Revolution, since no national election in America was held for thirteen years, i.e., from 1776 to 1789...
...But the quality has slipped away from latter-day American socialists...
...The choice facing modern nations is not, capitalism or socialism?, but, a humane or an inhumane socialism...
...At this point the new radicalism makes its appeal...
...Now, this is nonsense...
...Apart from the great economic depression which would ensue if America stopped spending on defense...
...I take this to mean Ghana and Indonesia as well as Cuba and the Soviet Union...
...There were no national elections until 1789 because there was no directly elected national government...
...from the standpoint of the Establishment, academic freedom, white and Negro washing their hands in the same sink, trade unionism, and socialism, are all parts of one pervasive subversion...
...At the same time, I regard socialism as a mere apparatus rather than an apocalyptic consummation...
...Looking back, it is easy to see that Catholic Thomas More and Puritan John Lilburne, the "reactionary" and the "progressive," were in some sense fighting the same battle, unconsciously laboring together to keep open the possibility that English capitalist society would be a humane and liberal society...
...It will have to be done by the creative actions of human beings...
...For one thing, it appears impossibly far off in our seemingly stable and prosperous society...
...Whether a given society which possesses this socialist apparatus will be a humane society is quite another question...
...The welfare state provides minimum material standards for enough workers to blunt the cutting edge of the old economic grievances...
...apart from the life-stifling and late-Roman-Empire atmosphere of our society, which twists and frustrates all simple constructive impulses—apart from these considerations, the spread of socialist economic planning throughout the world is going to produce more and more panic and hysteria in America...
...I do not believe we should muffle criticism of overseas revolutions, but in some sense I feel we have to earn, the right to criticize by working harder to check the international counter-revolutionary activities of our own government...
...There is no inherent contradiction between this mood and socialism: on the contrary...
...It is, as I see it, a question which depends not on historical forces, but on human activity, on ourselves...
...Every reform directed toward a more liberal condition must take on the whole Southern Establishment...
...In the new nations, moreover, a rich and varied experimentation is emerging in just that mingling of Marxist and ethical traditions so needed in America...
...Wt must be prepared to seek out comrades who differ from us in many things, but share an intangible devotion to a social atmosphere worthy of human beings...
...And who can deny today that America's role all over the world is to arm and finance the forces resisting basic social change...
...I consider myselt a radical in that I applaud the coming of socialism, and seek to assist rather than to resist it...
...Yet I personally feel the strongest sort of kinship with the revolutionary upheavals of the non-Western world...
...Debs spoke in this tone in defying imprisonment during the First World War...
...We must begin right now to defend those elemental human values, those commonly-agreed-on simple decencies, against fascism, just as elsewhere in the world they are being defended against socialist bureaucracies...
...But what the new radicalism offers is the infinitely precious possibility of each individual taking some definite step in the present moment toward worthwhile human ends...
...In my view, therefore, the Marxist and pacifist currents in present American radicalism must recognize their need for each other, and join hands...
...In the process of transition from capitalism to socialism in America, there will never be a time when legality, freedom of inquiry, and mere kindness, will be irrelevant...
...A few hundred years from now (if there are any human beings left), historians will look back on the time we live in and call it the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism...
...Public ownership of the means of production, and public economic planning, are the necessary housekeeping devices for any modern society seeking to cope with its problems...
...Perhaps we can help them most precisely by the richness and passion we can bring to creating our own synthesis...
...In answering, one has to do better than to point to those communal enterprises, such as city-planning, education, and medical care, which are hopelessly and inevitably botched in a capitalist society...
...There is no magic formula for bringing together and fusing the insights of the Marxist and pacifist traditions...
...It has no longterm goals, no historical perspectives, no considered strategy for changing society: these are its fatal defects...
...What, concretely, do the Marxist and pacifist (or "new radical") traditions have to give each other...
...Just as De Tocqueville advised his fellow-aristocrats that democracy was inevitable and that they should seek, rather than resisting, to humanize it, so we should be telling the American public that socialism can be democratic and humane, if they will make it so...
...I believe this transition is the fundamental thing going on in the world today, and that everyone must define his politics in relation to it...
...It seems to me that the morale of the .Marxist tradition in America has suffered not merely because of the inadequacy of its leadership, but also because socialism as a goal to strive for no longer has much meaning to young dissidents...
...Our own early national history was built on the three cornerstones of a neutralist foreign policy, central economic planning, and the seizure of new territory by armed force...
...The essence of fascism, I take it, is the destruction of the democratic part of "bourgeois democracy" in order to save the bourgeois: the attack on all decent, humane values associated with the rise of Western capitalism, in order to preserve the naked power of the capitalist class...
...My friend Dave Dellinger has been a stubborn and courageous advocate of non-violence for over twenty years, but he (shaken, I think, by his encounter with revolution in Cuba) now writes of the pacifist movement: "We want to be against war without having to be against the things that cause war...
...More than that, however, socialism no longer calls to mind an array of concrete conditions obviously transcending what capitalism can offer...
...We must not delude ourselves into the belief that America's permanent war economy can drift on endlessly in its present form, that the question of socialism is a real question only for other societies...
...A re * Liberation, January 1962, p. 21...
...In the South, where I now live, fascism is not an abstraction...
...Like the South on the eve of the Civil War, although prosperous and threatened by no serious internal discontent our society is nonetheless a society in crisis...
...But it has to be done...
...Basically, the revolutionary upsurge from Cuba to China seems to me wonderfully hopeful...
...How dare we as Americans sit in judgment on them...
...Just how, one is asked, would socialism differ from what we have now...
...I predict that a similar coalescing of opposing groups will take place in the North also, as more countries are "lost" to the non-capitalist world, and the Birchite hysteria mounts...
...Hence the Black Muslims cite government statistics, and the Gandhians squirm uncomfortably...
...By joining in a peace march, by risking jail in an integration struggle, one acts, not as a counter in some abstract far-flung Weltanschaung, but as a human being affirming the value of human life right now...
...Surely a larger portion of the human race feels hope for the future today than at any time in history...
...As E. H. Carr observes in his new book on history, the pessimism and sense of doom of Western historians expresses the outlook of a social class being pushed off the historical stage...
...Martin King's young followers in the South are likewise failing to examine the disproportionate unemployment among Negroes, the structural economic obstacles to the Negro's advance toward real equality...
...Surely one necessity is to be honest...
...Socialism must and will also mean a new atmosphere in human relationships, a new creativity in daily life...
...But in the states, even the extra-legal state governments created between 1774 and 1776 were elected, and every state turned as quickly as possible (often in the midst of fighting) to drafting a new constitution...
...The immediate political possibility in America is not socialism but fascism, and socialism, if it comes, is likely to come by way of resistance to fascism...
...There is virtually no communication between the people working in these two traditions...
...and I find it difficult to answer...
...It follows from the danger of fascism that the task of humanizing socialism, with which I began, becomes not at all a remote consideration postponable until "after the Revolution," but a matter of urgency...
...The price of the intellectual shallowness of the pacifist and integration movements is their failure to move off the campus and outside the middle class...
...apart from the ever-increasing danger that the arms race will tip over into nuclear holocaust...
...Yet the new radicalism suffers from an intellectual shallowness which cripples its efforts...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
