The Moral Vision of 'The New Leader'
BELL, DANIEL
THE MORAL VISION OF 'THE NEW LEADER' BY DANIEL BELL Last November 14, 500 friends of THE NEW LEADER, including many of the country's most prominent intellectuals and labor leaders, attended a...
...The old Daily Call had collapsed after the split with the Communists, and the repressions by the government had left the Socialist party shattered...
...The banner that Norman Thomas raised, in that election year, was "Socialism in Our Time...
...and Walter Mondale, U.S...
...When that failed, THE NEW LEADER appeared as a weekly, in 1924, and has maintained itself to this day, becoming a biweekly in 1961...
...When his compassion for some suffering Chinese coolies leads him to disobey the Party's orders, he is killed by his comrades...
...They are on the tombstones of those who have made large personal sacrifices to keep the journal alive—Sol Levitas, Raphael Abramovitch, Algernon Lee, Joseph Shaplen, and the thousands of others, comrades all, who came to that unique blend of idealism and responsibility which has marked its style...
...Who fights for Communism has only one of all the virtues: that he fights for Communism...
...The man immediately began to scream loudly, "Help, Police...
...Twenty years later, all six were dead...
...The other...
...Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order...
...The reason idealistic men could accept so extraordinary a commitment as Brecht proposed was their implicit belief that the world could be transformed in a flash...
...THE NEW LEADER was founded 50 years ago as a socialist newspaper...
...The capitalist system had taken off in a wild, reckless orgy of speculation, to crash spectacularly in 1929 and plunge the world into a terrible depression...
...But the world in which THE NEW LEADER emerged no longer could sustain the moral simplicities and the pious platitudes that had characterized the Socialist movement before World War I, the unchallenged belief in the inevitability of a milk-and-honey socialist Utopia...
...Yet he had no way out, so he said quietly, "All right, you can try...
...Walter Krivitsky, a general in Soviet Military Intelligence, made his way to the United States, where he died (the victim of murder or suicide) in a Washington hotel room in 1940...
...Accordingly, they embraced violence as the last violent deed that would abolish all violence...
...I noticed, to my dismay, a production of this play at Harvard last spring, and a long article in the Harvard Crimson by a member of the company approving its theme...
...For that reason I would like to set out tonight what I think is the magazine's credo, the moral vision that has sustained it for these past decades...
...signed by Lenin and Trotsky...
...After returning to New York a few years later, I became a regular columnist for a while and I have contributed intermittently since...
...Taken aback by this cold dash of realism, we withdrew to ponder an answer...
...Summary execution of prisoners and hostages continues...
...I began reading THE NEW LEADER in 1932, when, at the age of 13, I joined the Young People's Socialist League...
...The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871...
...When I joined the Yipsels in 1932, as did so many other young persons at the time, we were filled with idealistic fervor...
...Now it was Hochman who was taken aback...
...Hochman was nonplussed, but to his credit answered candidly: "Well, my young comrades, I will not tell you lies...
...They were "the proletariat...
...of David Dubinsky, who has been an equal stalwart...
...The books of Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, the painful memoirs of Evgenia Ginzberg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, are well known...
...We maintained that violence was wrong...
...We shall explain to you...
...They call for . . liberation of all arrested Socialists and nonpartisan workingmen...
...and the taking into account of "the average deficiencies of people," so that one seeks that compromise which resolves conflict with the least danger, particularly of violence, to all concerned...
...The police came and arrested him for petty larceny...
...But a great number of intellectuals were Communists, and the leading liberal magazines of the time were sympathetic to their causes...
...THE WORLD in which THE NEW LEADER came to the fore, the world of the 1930s and '40s, was one of total faiths, and in that world the journal took its stand against both fascism and communism...
...March 4. An official manifesto appeared today...
...Yet here was the ILGWU employing violence...
...but the terror had been unleashed against them...
...It is true that the ILGWU is hiring strong-arm men to beat up scabs...
...Second, to distrust those who think of politics as an apocalyptic fantasy...
...Pearl K. Bell, has been the magazine's featured literary columnist and I have been privileged to be her first reader...
...Meanwhile, we are presenting here the opening talk by Daniel Bell, who began a distinguished journalism career at THE NEW LEADER and later served as labor editor at Fortune before going on to achieve even greater distinction in the academic world—and who happily had a text...
...Since we live inevitably in a political world where the use of power is a heady drug, our problem is not only absolutist beliefs but also the character of men who seek to stand at the "wheel of history...
...Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Galliffet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels...
...Kronstadt has been attacked...
...Someone stepped forward, but, as a Yipsel is invariably wont to do, he began making a speech: "You're a scab...
...But societies are not changed in a flash, and since men invariably disagree about what they want, politics is necessarily the hard grind of patient bargaining with impatient men...
...March 3. The men of the warship Petropavlovsk have passed a resolution of sympathy with the strikers...
...What happened at Kronstadt...
...Military forces continue to flow into Petrograd...
...So, for 40 years, my life and that of THE NEW LEADER have been intertwined...
...Thousands of sailors and workers lie dead...
...The rebellion of the Petropavlovsk crew is undoubtedly part of a great conspiracy to create trouble within Soviet Russia...
...By passion he did not mean the romanticism that Georg Simmel labeled "sterile excitation"—an excitation, as Weber remarked, which "plays so great a part with our intellectuals in this carnival that we decorate with the name of 'revolution.' " By passion he meant a devotion to truth, a truth that is not compromised by the principle of the second-degree lie—the ability to "speak the truth and not speak the truth...
...In a book using that same title, Leon Trotsky, as the head of the Red Army, answered Kautsky: ". . . in what way do your tactics differ from the tactics of Tsarism?, we are asked by the high priests of Liberalism and Kautskyism...
...I first contributed to it in 1938, when I was in college...
...For the Socialist movement, committed as it was to democracy, a whole new set of moral perplexities had appeared...
...Because they were fervently devoted to the cause, the six idealists sank "into the slime," "embraced the butcher" and joined the secret police, for someone had to do the "dirty jobs" of the Revolution...
...Where is Kronstadt...
...As they do so, the "control chorus"—the Party —intones: "He who fights for Communism must be able to . . . speak the truth and not speak the truth . . . to keep promises and not keep promises...
...There was an effort, briefly, to begin a new daily, The Leader, edited by Norman Thomas...
...March 18...
...Truly, there is an "eternal recurrence" of certain romantic absolutes...
...By a sense of proportion he meant the need for a "sense of distance" that prevents one from being either all things to all men (the risks of compromise and opportunism), or so committed to a cause that all means are acceptable (the risk of zealotry...
...And tell me, my young comrades, do you think a little Jewish cloak-maker can beat up a scab...
...Ignace Poretsky...
...One of the four agitators, however, cannot abide by these stern measures...
...The ILGWU went back, I think, to using strong-arm men for beating up scabs...
...In this play of great poetic power, four agitators are sent to China to carry out underground activities...
...A Bolshevik movement had arisen, tough and confident, which stridently proclaimed that only revolutionary violence and a party dictatorship could tear down the rotting structure of capitalist society...
...In a remarkable essay written toward the end of his life, the German sociologist Max Weber sought to define politics as a genuine calling...
...WHAT DID WE LEARN from all this...
...A SECOND EPISODE: In the early '30s, our chief debates were with young Communists...
...The support of the sailors, at the last moment, had been the decisive element in the Bolshevik victory...
...Those who choose morally dubious means risk corrupting the ends they seek...
...Threats against Jews are becoming audible...
...It was the very symbol of the October Revolution...
...You do not understand this, holy men...
...By responsibility he meant distrust of the vanity that leads men, especially politicians, to demagogic utterances...
...and of course Fiera Levitas, whose late husband Sol Levitas, now 13 years gone, made it the outstanding publication it is in American life...
...It was a lesson in the moral perplexities of action...
...Samuel Silverberg and other members of the Board of Directors...
...And when people insist that one single end—the "one virtue"—is so compelling as to justify any means, they will also ask individuals to sacrifice all other ends...
...Ralph Ellison, novelist and critic...
...To become propagandists for the cause, they divest themselves of their private personalities and don a set of masks to symbolize the extinction of their private selves...
...Kronstadt has fallen today...
...Joining the Socialists, John Dos Passos wrote in 1932, is like drinking near beer...
...And in the effulgent days of 1933, when the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union began its triumphant organizing, we became voluntary organizers, handing out leaflets, exhorting workers to come to meetings, leading the applause at rallies, and signing up members for the union...
...Three qualities, he said, are decisive for politics as well as for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion...
...These are the values that have guided THE NEW LEADER over these past decades...
...If there is a single work that reveals the extraordinary nature of Bolshevik faith it is Bertolt Brecht's Die Massnahme {The Measures Taken), written in 1930...
...The entries in the last section of the diary, simply labeled "Kronstadt," are instructive...
...In that moment, I lost my innocence...
...It was here that the issues were joined...
...It tells the story of six youths from a small border town in Galicia who as a group joined the Communist movement shortly after the Revolution...
...It was no longer a question of innocence...
...The following year Victor went on to the New York Post and I, at a tender age, was appointed managing editor of the paper, working with William E. Bohn, who had succeeded James Oneal...
...It means that there is no bread on the table and no milk for the children...
...Jack Rich, Max Frankle, Dr...
...The young Communists had their faith, and they were armed against all questions and resolute against all doubts...
...Since, as I have said, my life was intertwined with THE NEW LEADER, I can best illustrate these moral dilemmas not by abstract concepts but by some personal experiences...
...Many works—not necessarily literary, but records of human experience—offer answers to Brecht...
...The Moscow radio broadcast this message: " 'Just at this moment, when in America a new Republican regime is assuming the reins of government and showing inclination to take up business relations with Soviet Russia, the organization of disturbances in Kronstadt have the sole purpose of influencing the American President and changing his policy toward Russia...
...I suggest three things: First, to distrust those who claim to speak on behalf of History as though they have the patent on the future...
...For us Communists it is quite sufficient...
...One of the cruel aspects of our own time is that so many malevolent acts are committed in the name of History, on the premise that History will judge—as if men could forfeit the need, here and now, to say what is right or wrong...
...In a panic, the Yipsel turned and ran, inexplicably grabbing the bag the scab had been clutching...
...Who are you...
...that the ILGWU is hiring gangsters to beat up scabs...
...We Socialists were taunted for our mildness...
...For the past three years, my wife...
...Third, to understand the interdependence of means and ends...
...The Communists insisted that only armed insurrection and revolutionary terror could win the day for socialism...
...They declare the Kron-stadt sailors guilty of mutiny and the demand for free Soviets a counterrevolutionary conspiracy...
...Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO...
...The means used must be proportionate to the ends we seek...
...Four individuals, each associated with the NL in different ways for different periods of time, were bonored that evening: Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard...
...The next morning, an assistant manager of the union took us to a building on West 35th Street, and when a scab came down, clutching a paper bag to his coat, the ILGer said...
...But one unjustly neglected volume provides a shattering sense of that time: Elizabeth Poret-sky's Our Own People...
...afterward, they were themselves arrested and either shot in the cellars of the Lubiyanka or driven to commit suicide...
...ALTHOUG I am in my early middle age, I find to my surprise that I have had a longer association with THE NEW LEADER than most of the persons in this room, with the exception of Ben Josephson, that modest but extraordinarily successful builder of socialist institutions who, more than any other individual, has kept the magazine going for more than three decades...
...The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat...
...using the name Ignance Reiss, was tracked down and fatally shot by the Soviet secret police in Switzerland in 1937...
...Kronstadt, after all, was not just a naval base...
...The issue had been debated sharply a decade before...
...Once having surrendered that quest, the search for political absolutes and total faith, we can make no guarantees but only live in peril, in "fear and trembling," seeking to realize the recurrent values of justice and fairness, yet knowing that no one standard can ever be the absolute judgment...
...Four had become top officials in the NKVD, where they were in charge of the trials of the Old Bolsheviks...
...If, finally, you could change the world What task would you be too good for...
...Our plans for presenting all their addresses in this issue were foiled by the absence of actual texts and, yes, a faulty tape recorder, but we still have hopes of eventually publishing their remarks in a commemorative supplement...
...you're taking the bread from a worker's table, the milk from a worker's child...
...I discussed this answer with a cousin of mine, a Russian anarchist who had lived through the Revolution, and instead of giving me a direct reply she handed me a book, The Bolshevik Myth...
...freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labor...
...Then one of us spoke up, "Well, if there is dirty work to be done, we will do it...
...My moral innocence returned...
...It is the diary of Alexander Berkman, the anarchist who shot Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike, served 14 years in prison and then, with Emma Goldman, was deported to Russia...
...Then we heard a disquieting piece of news that resulted in a delegation of young organizers going to see Julius Hochman, the manager of the Dress Joint Board, and asking him bluntly: "Is it true, Comrade Hochman...
...they would answer...
...These values persist...
...This voice will continue...
...1 occupied that position for four years, until 1945, when I left to go to the University of Chicago...
...I would shout in trembling fury...
...The control chorus agrees with the cadre's action and, in a famous verse, absolves them of guilt: What baseness would you not commit To root out baseness...
...In passionate indignation I turned up at debates with members of the Young Communist League...
...They are ingrained in its pages...
...I became a staff writer in 1940, when Victor Riesel was the managing editor...
...But you have to understand, my young comrades, that a strike is a serious thing in a worker's life...
...In the milieu in which THE NEW LEADER lived, there was never a problem about fascism...
...We must—to use John Dewey's phrase, for so much of this is his ethic—surrender the "quest for certainty...
...Two, being abroad, broke with the Party...
...he opted for a stiffer drink, until 1937, in Spain...
...I was working summers and afternoons in the garment industry as a "pusher"—I hasten to add, given the vicissitudes of argot, that a "pusher" then literally pushed a small truck filled with dresses...
...Do you grasp this distinction...
...The city is on the verge of panic...
...Let me cite a few, briefly: "February 28, 1921...
...Sink down in the slime Embrace the butcher But change the world: it needs it...
...those who claim the end justifies the means often find that the means have become ends in themselves...
...Senator from Minnesota...
...THE MORAL VISION OF 'THE NEW LEADER' BY DANIEL BELL Last November 14, 500 friends of THE NEW LEADER, including many of the country's most prominent intellectuals and labor leaders, attended a dinner at the New York Hilton marking the 50th Anniversary of the magazine...
...an understanding of the consequences of one's actions...
...March 5. Trotsky has issued an official ultimatum decreeing that 'Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately submit...
...Strikers' proclamations have appeared...
...Go, quickly, give a knyock...
...Trotsky has sent another demand to Kronstadt to surrender, the order containing the threat: 'I'll shoot you like pheasants.' "March 7. It is 6 p.m...
...In 1919, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Karl Kautsky, Marx's literary executor and the outstanding theoretician of German Social Democracy, had written an essay, "Terrorism and Communism," in which he had attacked the use of violence by the Bolsheviks...
...March 17...
Vol. 56 • December 1973 • No. 25
