The Young Radicals: A Symposium

...This may sound self-serving...

...When I was asked to summarize in a few pages my general reaction to this symposium I assumed that this would be an easy task...

...they argue that if one opposes the criminal, stupid and disastrous invasion of the Bay of Pigs one need therefore defend Castro...

...Wolff all this is neither radicalism nor politics...

...The socialists of the thirties are by no means dead, and it would be presumptuous to contend that the radicals of Hagan's generation know only what they have learned from them...

...Even if America were wholly responsible, which it is not, for the rise of Castro, why does this exempt him from radical criticism...

...When the world seems to make as little sense as it does today it is only to be expected that man try to hang on to that immediate core of existence which seems directly apprehensible and controllable...

...Some years ago, I pleaded in these pages ("What Is to Be Done...

...This I find rather distasteful...

...Staughton Lynd is currently teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he has been active in the fight against segregation and in an effort to organize a peace movement...

...Was he wholly uninfluenced by Norman Thomas' moral appeal...

...But this does not make sense...

...I feel the crying need to enlarge the sphere of political radicalism so as to include many areas of human experience which a previous generation of radicals had left untouched...

...We fail of our obligations as radicals if we refrain from attacking with all the vigor we can muster any tendencies toward totalitarianism which may appear in these new nations...

...This is fine, but why then not throw out the old muck altogether...

...He recently visited Monroe County, North Carolina, and wrote a piece for Commentary on the Negro leader Robert Williams which provoked considerable controversy...

...America is responsible, the argument seems to run, for the conditions which made the rise of Castroism inevitable...

...And democratic self-righteousness in regard to them may, as Stephan Thernstrom argues, be wholly misplaced...

...Let me try nevertheless to set down a few reactions...

...is whether there will be a nuclear war...

...Let me try to be more specific...

...Nasser with Tito...

...Yet, such an attitude may also lead to an extreme limitation of the sense of the politically possible and to an almost willful insulation from the varieties of historical experience...

...He believes that we live in the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (the caps are his...

...Perhaps it derives not from a theory, as did the old, but from a wide arc of individual responses to a common mood...

...I find it parochial to argue that because we are Americans we must restrict ourselves to the clearing up of the mess on our own doorsteps...

...Certain of these responses, though by no means all, seem to me so self-centered that they almost blanket out the sense that politics also concerns something "out there...

...The trouble with him, however, is that he has read the wrong history books...

...In the thirties most radicals were riding the bus of history...

...To Marx the root was man, to Wolff, "the only issue...

...but once a totalitarian regime is in power there will be a long night...

...I can directly experience only a tiny fragment of the wide arc of human possibilities...

...Some of these writers simply don't seem to care enough for democracy...

...It is almost self-evident that the "new nations" will not suddenly blossom out in the near future with full-blown parliamentary democracies...

...But a little bit of history would help here too...

...Mr...

...They seem, in addition, to be given to undifferentiated, almost visceral responses...

...Among the most obnoxious characteristics of the old radicalism was certainly its infatuation with History, the presumption to know its course, and the fallacious sense of power that came from this "knowledge...

...But they speak as if there were no history either, and that is no good at all...

...But this is not so at all...

...But now radicals seem to be heading toward an opposite fallacy...

...Did the "left" novelists and poets of the thirties have no influence in sharpening his moral sensibilities...

...one is either with it or one isn't...

...no one can be more glad than I am that a number of major intellectuals have in the recent past become active in such organizations as the Committee on Correspondence, SANE and the like...

...He published a review-essay of Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in the New Republic and has also appeared previously in DtssENT...

...The struggle for the integration of Negroes is precisely as political as was the struggle for a measure of integration of the working class into society, and this latter struggle was—Marx's theory to the contrary notwithstanding— what radicalism was mainly about throughout the 19th century...

...Roger Hagan is the editor of the Committee of Correspondence Newsletter...

...This is a wholly understandable reaction...

...He is currently a graduate student in the history of American civilization at Harvard...

...Her present home is in Austin, Texas...

...Wolff argues in a historical vacuum about what is or is not political...

...What a disastrous restriction...

...Perhaps, however, this wide variety of response is one of the very characteristics of the new radicalism...

...T. S. Eliot once wrote somewhere: "Someone said, 'the dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they do.' Precisely, and they are that which we know...

...Is all this unimportant...

...None of them is disposed to join Castro's acclamation brigade, and most of them would probably be disposed to consider C. Wright Mills's and Waldo Frank's love affair with the Cuban dictator a bit silly...

...There is a lot of talk aboutCastro, of course, but not even one mention of the Hungarian, let alone the Spanish Revolution...

...But such a global response is precisely the wrong attitude for a radical to take...

...but does this exempt him from moral and political judgment for his actions...

...Being imprecise by definition, a mood lends itself with difficulty to analysis...

...In a number of these contributions there is an extreme curtailment of time perspective, an immersion in the here and now of immediate experience...

...He has written previously for New America...

...The new radicals now say that there is no bus...

...Larner's piece...

...Is one really to sup pose that these major events in radical history should not be allowed to help shape the political and moral sensitivities of young radicals today...

...The self-absorption and vanity with which he displays his ego would perhaps not worry me much were it not for the fact that I sense it echoed, in more modulated and muted ways, in a number of other responses...

...He voices his "support of Nkrumah, Toure, Nasser, and Castro...

...But now the chickens have come home to roost...

...In England and, to some extent, in this country, the struggle for women's suffrage was once among the central preoccupations of radicals...

...they will undoubtedly reveal pronounced authoritarian features...

...Concentration on self thus leads to a kind of self-denying ordinance which bars access to wide areas that can be reached only through mediated experience...

...She has lived in Europe and is well acquainted with radical groups on the continent, especially in Spain...

...Julian Mayfield is moved to a similarly undifferentiated response...

...This is perhaps most blatantly so in Mr...

...He recently published several articles on civil defense in The Nation, and has also written for the San Francisco journal Contact...

...Furthermore, genesis, so runs an axiom of scientific method, can never explain persistence...

...Roger Hagan says, and Jeremy Lamer echoes him in his characteristic tone, that he has "little to say to or to learn from most socialists and fellow travellers of the thirties...

...I am not sufficiently acquainted with Hagan, but I am willing to bet that much of the present thinking was indeed shaped by precisely those writers of the thirties he so summarily rejects...

...The dehumanizing of politics in our age, I said then, needed to be countered by insistence upon the fact that politics did indeed involve something "out there," but that it also involved me...

...Authoritarian regimes come and go...

...The threat of nuclear annihilation is, of course, that wholly novel event which overshadows our age, but to brush aside all the other problems which grate upon the sensibilities of decent man, the avoidable tragedies and avoidable horrors which stunt the lives of millions, with the remark that these are not political questions and hence do not concern radicals qua radicals seems to me unfortunate...

...Mr...

...Lynd fortunately goes on to argue that we must guard against the possibility of an "inhuman socialism" and he shows by this very formulation that he is ambiguous about the old Marxian certainties, that he no longer accepts the naivete of the formula: feudalism leads to capitalism, capitalism leads to socialism, i.e., the good society...

...But where were many of them in the McCarthy era when we of DISSENT, mainly, though not wholly, older radicals, were fighting the whole pack of right-turning intellectuals, when we attacked the American Celebration and the literary trumpeters of the Cold War...

...Let me end on a somewhat more personal note...

...In this age of total crisis a radicalism which refuses engagement condemns itself...

...now in the book Voices of Dissent) for a new radicalism which would do away with the profound divorce of the political and the personal from which the old radicalism had suffered...

...He seems wholly unaffected by the spate of first-rate anatomies of fascism which have been written over the last two decades...

...and, focusing on crimes of Batista or the United Fruit Company, they don't seem to visualize the trade-union leaders, the libertarian socialists, the members of Castro's original liberation movement now rotting in his prisons...

...Not only integration or economic exploitation but even mental health become political problems today...

...Maybe Hitler's character was fatally warped by childhood influences...

...I argued the need to relate concern for personal autonomy with concern for political autonomy...

...In the forties and fifties the non-Communist radicals felt that they had missed the bus...

...Julian Mayfield is an American writer presently living in Ghana, where he is at work on a novel...

...James Burnett is a member of the National Executive Committee, Young People's Socialist League...

...Perhaps, one wonders, he considers all this "bourgeois science...

...He is currently a fellow of the Harvard— MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies...

...Castro's men fraternize with Khrushchev and Mao...

...That's where I came in...

...Robert Paul Wolff teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently working on a book on disarmament and -foreign policy...

...I was quite struck by the short memory of the contributors...

...Michael Walzer expressed this recently when he wrote: "No Utopia Without Me...

...One may sympathize with Mayfield's deploring "a lack of militancy, vision and commitment...

...He still believes that fascism came into power in order "to preserve the naked power of the capitalist class...

...At the root of it I often sense a feeling of guilt...

...But what is there in common between, say, Robert Wolff, for whom the struggle for integration, against HUAC or against capital punishment, has nothing to do with radicalism, and Jeremy Lamer who says he is a radical because as a child he found himself in a world of lies...

...But to Mr...

...In Cuba Communist agents have permeated political life on all levels so that it gradually comes to resemble that of the "People's Democracies," while in Egypt, by contrast, the most prominent domestic Communists have been in prison for years, others have mysteriously "disappeared...

...This leads me to Castro about whom a number of writers seem to share a common attitude...

...And how does he reconcile his recognition of the dangers of an inhuman socialism with his statement that "the revolutionary upsurge from Cuba to China seems to me wonderfully hopeful...

...He can put all these men into the same category presumably because all of them came to power against something which he hates, colonialism...

...He has published articles and reviews in DISSENT, Partisan Review, the New Republic and the New Leader...

...His attitude toward social psychology by Erich Fromm...

...Staughton Lynd may be exempt from my strictures about the lack of a sense of history...

...Wasn't his attitude toward Marxism partly shaped by Sidney Hook...

...The glory of the radical tradition is precisely that it has taught men to transcend such narrow definitions of the situation, that it has led to a widening of our sympathies as well as of our sense of involvement...

...He has published frequently in Commentary and is planning a book on Non-Violence in American History...

...A man who can refer to the terror, thought control, the simple denial of elementary human dignity in China—an assault against man for which I can find hardly any parallel in "capitalist" history—as "wonderfully hopeful," and yet, can talk about the need for humanizing socialism has, I submit, got his values seriously mixed up...

...His article on civil defense was featured in the last issue...

...Such mundane affairs as the fight for the eight-hour day engaged the energy of the best radical minds in Marx's generation...

...Barbara Probst Solomon wrote the fine novel The Beat of Life...

...One of the enduring characteristics of radicalism has precisely been that it refused to choose between equally distasteful alternatives, that it refused to choose between the cholera and the pest...

...maybe it is...

...Yes, we have a right to cry out that the fish stink in Washington and in Havana, in Conakry as well as in Cairo...

...And is the new radicalism viable if it operates on the level of visceral response rather than in terms of considered and informed judgment...

...In fact I have been trying for several hours to discern common themes to which I might address myself...

...Stephan Thernstrom is one of the new editors of DISSENT...

...but it needs to be said...

...Wolff wishes to restrict further the sense of politics and hence of radicalism...

...But it is essential, and here, as in much of his piece I am in full agreement with Thernstrom's distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes...

...still, one cannot but feel that Hagan and his cothinkers are a bit rash in their wholesale slaying of ancestors...

...But one cannot discuss a mood in the same manner as a theory...

...Jeremy Lamer is at work on a first novel...

...Naturally, they are inclined to be contemptuous of the older radicals, and people in, politics don't expect gratitude...

...Hence we as American radicals have no right to a critical stance...

...While one may be touched by his faith, one may yet doubt whether such a curdled radical stance has any hold on present realities...

...But some of his remarks, I fear, seem almost to plead for a kind of mindless activism, a know-nothing militancy the consequences of which I for one find somewhat frightening to contemplate...

...We are radicals because, among other things, we reject absorption into the establishment which bears the responsibility...

...Good...

...But several of them, nevertheless, seem to be disposed toward a kind of benevolent neutrality...