The Young Radicals: A Symposium

...The Cuban invasion indeed inspires "marked pessimism" in me, to put it mildly, and the recent antics of Rostow, Schlesinger and company at Punta del Este seem to indicate how little has been learned since then...

...We know that "indigenous" Communist organizations are determined to extinguish national independence and extend the borders of the Communist empire...

...The first thing to do is to say to the native revolutionaries that we are on their side and to prove it...

...there is genuine doubt that we will...

...the student demonstration in Washington this February centered around a series of concrete, hard-headed proposals for stabilizing the arms race and reducing some of the obvious immediate risks of war, and I hope that this trend will continue...

...2...

...Israel's efforts to extend worker's control in Histadrut-owned factories should remind us of the range of unexplored possibilities for democratizing the work experience...

...Nobody, after all, has a vested interest in nuclear war...

...4...

...What I am arguing is that nuclear war can be avoided without radical changes in the social structures of the major powers...

...If the nuclear powers had the will to disarm they could easily take the first steps now, but a lot of detailed research must be done before we will know how to approach a situation of total nuclear disarmament, and how to deal with the new problems such a situation will create...

...Ancien regime, however, is a bit strong...

...First, a complex of values related to the ideal of a democratic community of free and equal individuals...

...About all that theorists of the power elite and the war economy have established is that there are important American institutions which have a vested interest in perpetuating a strategy and a level of armaments which make the risk of total war intolerably great...

...These values are by no means the exclusive property of the radical tradition, obviously, but they have received a distinctive formulation at the hands of the prophets of democratic socialism—see, for example, Professor Tawney's Equality...

...To shift the terms of analysis in this way, of course, raises questions about the ability of the classic socialist program to alleviate "alienation," but I doubt that these questions are as paralyzing as they have been made out to be...

...These conceptions, democratic radicals in our century have shown, are equally potent in giving the lie to the ideology of totalitarian regimes which have appropriated the language of the socialist tradition to support new and more terrible forms of exploitation and tyranny...

...On questions of this sort the President appears a dismal composite of the worst traits of Woodrow Wilson and T. R., and at a time when idealistic bravado and brash militarism were never more dangerous...

...it should be heartening to the radical who cares more about the fate of the world than he does about his analytical virility...

...Democratic radicals have enough to worry about without conjuring up preposterous horribles...

...I doubt that America will have the wisdom and tolerance to pursue such a policy...

...The distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes is of the essence here...

...To find a way of rejecting the offer is infinitely more important than anything else we can do...

...But they aren't...

...maybe...

...SANE, Turn Towards Peace, and the recent series of more or less spontaneous marches and protests all deserve support, though they will have only marginal effect until they talk sense about specific means to the end they espouse...

...To explain America's role in the world in terms of the contradictions of a capitalist economy is utterly fantastic, and the heroic reformulation of the theory which is required to extend it to the phenomenon of Soviet imperialism is so great that nothing of the theory remains...

...We still have a stable constitutional system based on the freedom of the individual, and it will take more than McCarthy, HUAC and the Birchers to convince me there is anything like the serious "fascist" threat some of my acquaintances speak of...

...The precise weight I give to the competing values within this tradition is my own—I am somewhat more drawn to cultural pluralism, somewhat more doubtful about the implications of a "common culture" than William Morris, Tawney, and Raymond Williams, for instance—but this is a difference of emphasis, not of principle...

...I could generate more enthusiasm about these matters if I felt that they were the chief political issues of our time...

...The organization has a more far-reaching program now, but hardly one of overwhelming intellectual power and political appeal...

...I would surrender none of these...

...Unlike some of my contemporaries, apparently, I think that nuclear disarmament is a very tough issue...

...Finally, our predecessors outlined a rough program, suggesting a variety of means by which to democratize the economy, abolish class distinctions, and humanize society...

...Are we still on their side when they seize newspapers, put their critics in jail, vote with the Communist bloc in the UN...

...SANE, for instance, began as an anti-testing organization, and it was hard-pressed to find something to recommend when the test ban seemed within grasp...

...There has been marked progress in this direction in recent years...

...The beneficent deity of some of our ancestors, History, now offers us an apocalypse without the consolations of religion...

...Might not nuclear disarmament require a drastic increase in America's conventional armaments...

...But surely "authoritarian" techniques of social control will be widely applied in these countries, and we will have to adjust our expectations to political realities unknown in twentieth century Western democracies...

...The individual freedoms enjoyed by the citizen of the modern democratic state are the product of painful, halting evolution...

...I think that a series of basic institutional changes are necessary to improve the quality of American life, but at least we are free to recommend changes and to say no to what is intolerable...

...Perhaps, by our standards, we are entering a long age of barbarism...

...With the material assistance and moral support of the United States, it is possible that the development of the new societies can be accomplished without the total mobilization of the entire population under a totalitarian party and the obliteration of all sources of resistance to the regime...

...The simplest targets are things not to do, of course—resumption of testing, a crash program for civil defense, etc.—and I fear that the beguiling simplicity of these negatives has captivated too many well-meaning souls...

...I retain a modicum of stubborn faith that we'll "muddle through" somehow...

...We believe in the basic values of the Western liberal and socialist traditions, which means that we cannot regard the freedom and dignity of the individual as merely part of the "superstructure," natural fruits of industrialization to be plucked after the "real" job of economic development has been accomplished...

...I'm not suggesting that we indulge in the vicious verbal mumbo-jumbo of those who call repression "freedom" when it appears to be "progressive," but I am saying that we must be prepared to stomach a lot before we declare our total opposition to a young revolution and consign it to the Communist bloc...

...The new Administration is a little better on disarmament than the last one, despite all the nonsense about civil defense...

...But many of the ugliest and most frustrating features of American life today are demonstrably the product of our present social and economic arrangements, and I think that a change in these arrangements will significantly modify them...

...Under socialism," man won't be ten feet tall...

...Hard" conceptions like "exploitation" and "ruling class" remain useful in appraising the Soviet system, but for the advanced capitalist countries we need to turn more to theories of "alienation" and "mass society...

...Nothing is being "done" domestically, but the social structure is at least still loose enough to allow things to "happen"—the progress achieved by the American Negro in the past two decades, for instance, is certainly nothing to sneer at...

...1.) The radical tradition has left us three things worth preserving...

...The Demon Television will not necessarily vanish, nor will dope addiction, Billy Graham, or the Reader's Digest...

...The radical sociology, I believe, still provides the most useful point of departure for analyzing contemporary society, although we need to do more actual departing than our predecessors found necessary...

...The best we can hope for, I fear, is the economic and social development of the new societies will be carried on in ways that will only limit rather than extinguish Western democratic impulses...

...But we do not have all the answers for the young revolutions, and the ritualistic invocation of India, Venezuela, and the Alliance for Progress will not suffice...

...The radical intellectual tradition is almost entirely irrelevant to the problem of nuclear war...

...recall the breath-taking Germanic complacency of Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism and the insularity of the Fabians...

...The concepts of radical sociology—"class," the "state," "the means of production," "ideology,"—were first developed in order to attack nineteenth-century capitalist society, and were used to expose the contradiction between liberal capitalist rhetoric and the actuality of coercive, exploitative social relations...

...The President appears to lean toward the Army—Navy rather than the Air Force nuclear strategy, though he refuses to clarify the issue for the public...

...But in both the U.S...

...Young radicals should be marching and passing out leaflets, but their first duty is to acquire intellectual expertise in this field...

...The scales are very delicately poised, and even modest "pressure group" political activity may serve as a stabilizing influence...

...We are skeptical of those who speak blithely of "skipping a stage" as if it were a matter of merely expelling the foreigner, building a few factories, and watching the NNP climb...

...The great issue, of course, is whether there will continue to be issues and men to debate them in the future...

...Even if we could dissolve the Pentagon and the AEC with the wave of a wand, the problem of negotiating an agreement with the Russians and working out an inspection scheme remains...

...5...

...It is not impossible that Western individualism was the product of historically unique circumstances, and that the "freedom" which will emerge in the new societies will take very different forms...

...The democratic radical should offer no self-righteous simplicities in answer...

...There have been exciting gains from recent socialist experiments in England, Norway, and Sweden...

...I don't expect it from the Kennedy Administration, and I don't see much hope for anything better for a long time to come...

...America has no business at all in helping the French to murder in North Africa or the Portuguese in Angola...

...there are counterpressures as well...

...I think we must give our allegiance and support to any left nationalist revolutions in an underdeveloped country so long as there is any hope of the emergence of a non-totalitarian regime...

...Our foreign policy is better in a lot of little ways, if not in any big ways...

...In any case, we won't progress very far so long as the only intellectuals who work full-time on the problems of disarmament are captive intellectuals...

...I'm inclined to think so...

...Social democrats have never had anything very interesting to say about the roots of international conflict...

...The theory of imperialism is at least directed at the great problem of the age, but I don't think that it's a very useful theory...

...Somewhat similar pressures operate within the Communist world, of course...

...This means that immediate political action is possible and necessary, that on this issue we can do more than merely wait and DISSENT...

...A report with the title Reaching 1975 was published not long ago...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...3...

...This state of affairs is dismaying to the ideologue...

...The unpleasant fact is that the industrialization of the West involved coercion on a massive scale, even though much of it was masked by the seemingly impartial laws of the market...

...Even the leaders of "the military-industrial complex" shy away at the brink, and, at least in America it is possible publicly to attack the militarists and to campaign for a more sensible nuclear policy...

...Second, a sociology of power which provides the basis for a realistic critique of modern industrial society...