The Crisis of the Left: in Search of Ideology
Lens, Sidney
The Crisis of the Left: In Search of Ideology SIDNEY LENS Radicalism in America is not credible. The unbelievability of radicalism is apparent from the disarray within its own ranks. Since...
...Americans for Democratic Action, made up in con siderable measure of former socialists, listed as their first postwar objective "effective American mobiliza tion for the security of the free world against Com munism...
...History, it was said, moves by a process of birth, growth, and decay from one system of social organization to another—from primitive communism to chattel slavery, to feudalism, capitalism, and finally socialism...
...They did not affiliate with the Old Left because they were equally repelled by the anti-communism of the Socialist Party and the Stalinism of the Communist Party, neither of which appeared to be a vehicle for humanistic radicalism...
...Had the scenario played itself out as Marx and Engels had projected, the transition to socialism would have been much less painful...
...The Marxist movement of the 1930s may have been no larger than the radical constituency three decades later—it may have been smaller, it is difficult to say— but the Marxist theory of revolution, whether interpreted along Communist, Trotskyist, or other Left-wing lines, possessed credibility...
...Whether Uncle Sam can continue this artificial respiration indefinitely is a question we must look at more closely...
...The past century is notable for a long cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, in which counterrevolution was victorious until 1917...
...Nor does the Left tell us why a wholesale terror against millions of people was possible in a socialist country which claims to be the workers' fatherland...
...Having studied Das Kapital, the Leftists knew how capital was formed in capitalist countries, but not how it would be formed during the socialist transformation of countries that were overwhelmingly rural and where native capitalism was either infantile, immature, or nonexistent...
...It should have been possible to forecast the evolution from laissez-faire capitalism to controlled capitalism, and the temporary stabilization of the system through the application of Keynesian economic measures...
...Few of the new organizations have displayed great staying powei and none are free of internal dissension and crisis...
...But Marxism, in addition to being an analysis of nature and society, legated to future Marxists a method for applying this analysis to their own times...
...Suppose there had been a Vietnam in Brazil, or a half-dozen Vietnams going on simultaneously...
...But in their day-to-day militancy they either had no time or no inclination to explain the very causes for their own birth as a New Left...
...really a viable force and is equally ineffective as a salesman for revolution...
...The Old Left, in the Soviet Union as well as in America, not only failed to anticipate this development but had few answers for the problems it was destined to bring in its wake...
...3. That even if revolution were necessary it would be futile...
...As Gil Green observes in his The New Radicalism, "Leaders come and leaders go in endless procession...
...Copyright © 1974 by Sidney Lens...
...To meet them most of the revolutionary countries had to impose strict national discipline, and in doing so appeared to the world not only as impotent bunglers, unable to solve the material problems of their citizenry, but as totalitarian to boot...
...They stopped talking about the need for "state ownership of the means of production" and urged instead "free enterprise coupled with govern ment responsibility for full employment and rising living standards...
...This is the first of two articles adapted from his new book, "The Promise and Pitfalls of Revolution," to be published in April by the United Church Press...
...Many others simply engage in day-to-day activity, such as electoral politics, consumerism, or antiwar work, without concern for ideology...
...Heilbroner assesses "the limits of capitalism" within the framework of capitalism, as if we were living in a vacuum and were confined to such tasks as producing ten million more automobiles this year to add to the hundred million already on the road, or to fattening unemployment compensation so that it runs for fifty-two weeks instead of twenty-six...
...Their central assumption is that the ideology will come automatically, in due course, if you are active enough in the streets...
...Its members, like those of the New Left, are as sensitive, intelligent, and devoted a force as one can find in this society...
...And say what one would about Stalin's authoritarianism, there was no unemployment in Soviet Russia, and the statistics of economic progress under the first five-year plans were sensational—especially when compared to industrial decline in the West...
...If we turn from the static to the dynamic, from a national focus to one that emphasizes the international interplay of social systems, the durability of capitalism no longer seems so assured...
...The Old Left, which pivots around the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Partyj has enjoyed a modest resurgence in the last few years...
...These are potentials that can't be run through a computer, yet it is evident they can drastically affect the future of America or Britain or Germany —or all of them collectively...
...The second set of experiences for which Marxism was unprepared was the resiliency of capitalism—the revitalization of its economy and the unprecedentedly high living standards it has brought to a considerable majority of its people...
...Human nature is so composed that equality, nonviolence, and the ultimate freedom of anarchy are unattainable by any community of mortals...
...The Crisis of the Left: In Search of Ideology SIDNEY LENS Radicalism in America is not credible...
...Admittedly, Marx himself, living in another epoch before the maturing of trade unions and before the full outlines of imperialism became apparent, could not have drawn a blueprint of the latter stages of capitalism—of Keynesianism, the military-industrial complex, and the present struggle between socialism and capitalism worldwide...
...Once we have arrived at that redefinition, we can proceed to outline a radical strategy—an American strategy—that is credible...
...And Vietnam is a small country, of little strategic significance, far away...
...The science of revolu tion was supposed to have helped radicals avoid these pitfalls...
...Finally, as the balance between capitalism and socialism is altered, the socialist world is destined to move more rapidly toward its original humanistic ideal —in fact, it has already taken quite a few steps in that direction...
...Where the bourgeois economists had posited an unending and persevering expansion of the capitalist economy, the Marxists had described not only its limitations but its inexorable trend toward chaos...
...There will always be inequality...
...Some have identified their radicalism with the counterculture and, like the pre-1972 Yippie, Jerry Rubin, seem to believe that if you poke enough fun at capitalism it will fall apart...
...It behooves the Left today to redefine its position on these subjects, just as it behooved Einstein to redefine the physics of Isaac Newton...
...The arguments against revolution in the last two or three decades, however, seem more persuasive to the average citizen...
...all, including the Soviet Union, have liberalized internally far more than the West gives them credit for...
...Since the disintegration of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the last years of the Johnson Administration, there has been no polarizing agent in the radical movement...
...It has dimmed the beacon and reinforced three oft-heard arguments against the need for revolution: 1. That it has not worked, or has worked poorly, as witness the results in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and Eastern Europe...
...The Old Left in the 1930s did not have to contend with such arguments...
...In fact, the Manifesto dealt almost exclusively with the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat...
...Capitalism was supposed to sink in the ebb tide of depression and war...
...After a half century we are still living in the midst of a vast ongoing conflict, which on the one side manifests itself as a permanent revolution against capitalism and its vassal systems, feudalism and tribalism, and on the other side as a permanent war against revolution...
...Though Marx, Lenin, and other Leftist leaders denied that this process was inevitable—since it required leadership and guidance by a "vanguard"—there was nonetheless a flavor of inevitability to their doctrine that the disenchanted and dispossessed could latch onto with enthusiasm...
...for hosts of sensitive young people, revolution was the only alternative and Marxism the only feasible insight into the process of revolution...
...Neither fascism nor a full-scale depression has appeared on the horizon...
...How could anyone defend the virtues of capitalism at a time when its bounty was hunger and disintegration...
...Reuther, an ex-Socialist, was far from the most ex treme...
...it hasn't...
...Britain, America, France, et al had the capital, the technological know-how, the educational standards, the infrastructure to shift from one system to another with a minimum of hardship...
...Some are now followers of Mao Tse-tung or Fidel Castro or Che Guevara or Kim II Sung of North Korea...
...The beatnik re» signed from his parents' "degraded" and "hypocritical" world to do his own thing...
...At the opposite pole was the emergence a decade after the war of the young middle-class radical, first as a beatnik, then as a political animal...
...In the revulsion against old ideologies they turned their backs on ideology per se...
...But each new revolutionary nation (Vietnam is an exception) has an easier time of it...
...The cover of Walter Reuther's pam phlet A Total Peace Offensive described it as a plan "to stop Communist aggression...
...All this assumes, however, that other factors will remain the same—that Japan, for instance, will not revalue its currency by ten per cent, that the Common Market nations will not impose a heavy tax on U.S...
...The post-World War II prediction by Eugene Dennis, general secretary of the Communist Party, that we were on the brink of "the next cyclical economic crisis" which would "enormously accentuate the dangers of fascism in the United States," has proven premature by a few decades at least...
...The system seemed to be neither patchable nor reformable...
...The Left doesn't really say...
...Despite burgeoning prosperity, there was in America a pervasive malaise, a malaise stimulated by the nuclear bomb, the "little" wars in Korea and Vietnam, the interventions in Lebanon and the Dominican Republic, the feeling of insignificance and alienation, unfulfilled dreams of equality, especially on the part of blacks, and mundane worries about taxes, law and order, and safety in the streets...
...Most of all, it should have been possible to explain the course of development in such a way as to make the need for revolution seem urgent and logical to a much larger constituency than the Left now commands...
...there is a leak in the tank that needs plugging...
...In every one of these countries and areas there is a lower standard of living than in the major capitalist states and, to make matters worse, less freedom...
...In those countries where socialists have come to power, the goals of peace, prosperity, and hu manism remain unfulfilled...
...It should have been possible to spell out in advance some of the difficulties and dilemmas that socialism would face in its initial stages...
...Indeed, it speaks infrequently these days of such ultimate objectives as the nationalization of industry or the dictatorship of the proletariat, and when it does it leaves the great mass of Americans cold and indifferent...
...And despite quantitative successes—those that can be measured by a computer—capitalism has been in retreat, on the defensive...
...The third set of experiences which bedevils the Left, new and old, has been the evolution of the socialist system itself...
...It was not really necessary, they said...
...The myths that capitalism provides the better life and that socialism can only survive through totalitarianism can be sustained only if the problems of America or Germany or Italy are looked at in isolation...
...In fact, that was what happened in the 1930s, when Marxian socialism impressed millions as a viable answer to the crisis of the Great Depression...
...In the course of our reinterpretation of recent history it should become evident where the science of revolution needs updating...
...The minions of the establishment sounded naive against the predictions of Marxists about depression and decline...
...That ongoing contest contributed to the emergence of Stalinism in the Soviet Union—Stalinism, in other words, was not merely the outgrowth of Stalin's personality or conditions within Russia but of outside pressures applied by the advanced powers in the course of their permanent war against revolution...
...Some, such as Yugoslavia, have made considerable progress toward a humanistic socialism...
...But it is not Sidney Lens, a Chicago-based writer and labor leader, has long been active in peace and radical movements...
...It was not the inner strength of the free enterprise system which saved it, but measures of an emergency and artificial nature...
...it could brush them aside...
...The gross national product of the United - States had shrunk from $103 billion to $56 billion at its nadir...
...The first was a sudden swing to the right on the part of many radicals and former radicals...
...Marxian socialism differed from the teachings of the prophets and from the teachings of Utopian socialists in that it professed to be a science of revolution, based on appraisal of fact, not the weaving of hopes...
...It was quite another matter for Russia, China, India, Cuba, Guinea, or Egypt, where all these factors were lacking and where the problems, therefore, were monumental...
...There will always be class struggles...
...It escaped catastrophe by adopting a patchwork of Keynesian measures and by using the reserves of the one nation that still had a sufficient quantity, the United States, temporarily to stabilize a ship that was near capsizing...
...It also assumes that there will be no social revolution in Brazil, Spain, Italy, South Africa, the Philippines, or Thailand...
...The first was an outburst of five or six dozen revolu tions in underdeveloped countries around the periphery of capitalism...
...Thus, revolution as an idea whose time had come seemed vividly real not only to esoteric layers of the population but to vast sectors in the society...
...Such gibberish on the eve of a shocking slump made Marxism all the more credible...
...Since the 1930s three sets of experiences have in truded against the Marxist formulation of history...
...The scenario of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto appeared to be unfolding exactly as outlined...
...On the contrary, the capitalist economy has been so buoyant, despite readjustments from war to peace and despite five recessions, that many people, including many former radicals, have concluded the magic of Keynesianism, with its compensatory spending and deficit financing, has worked its wonders and reduced the theories of Marx and Lenin to historical curiosities...
...But at least equally important is the fact that the Left has no answers to troubling questions...
...Marxism could be put in simple terms so that even the least theoretical of people could see—tatter still, feel—its logic...
...The experience on both sides of the Cold War, there fore, has befogged revolutionary ideology...
...In the April issue, he will detail his proposal for "Revolution in Stages...
...The focus is on a compartmentalized United States—its institutional structure, its entrenched corporate system, its leaders, its resources, its politics, its apparent impregnability...
...Beginning with the Russian Revolution, however, the conflict between revolution and counterrevolution became less one-sided, and after World War II the balance definitely tipped toward the former...
...investments or initiate a major trade war, that Israel and the Arab states will not resume hostilities or that if they do the hostilities will remain localized...
...In part this is due to the improved economic situation...
...Why then has it been able to stabilize itself, or at least give the appearance of stability...
...New organizations and ad hoc committees proliferate, but they are here today and gone tomorrow...
...America would look very much different, economically, politically, and socially...
...millions had not had a job for years...
...It is more adept at criticizing that which is—capitalism, imperialism—than at describing how that-which-is can be cast aside...
...It is too soon, admittedly, to expect "prosperity," but such occurrences as the So viet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the crimes of Stalinism—now admitted by the Soviet lead ership itself—and the lingering authoritarian spirit are depressing reminders that while there is a promise to revolution there are also pitfalls...
...With all its faults capitalism has provided its citizens with higher material benefits than socialism, and—equally or more important—with democratic rights beyond anything known in the Communist or Third World societies...
...With that scientific method it should have been possible to predict when, where, and how the socialist revolutions would take place, just as the science of physics predicted the explosive potential of nuclear fission...
...This was not the sequence that Marx and Engels had postulated in their Communist Man ifesto of 1848, which assumed that the expected revolu tion would come first to the most advanced nations...
...In my opinion, it was because his insights into die character of classes, the class struggle, the nature of the state, and the significance of countervailing power were inadequate...
...One need only recall the impact of Vietnam on the United States—inflation, unemployment, further undermining of the dollar, balance of payments deficits, internal dissension, wage and price controls...
...Without $1.3 trillion spent by the United States on militarism since World War II or the approximately $150 billion on foreign aid, not only would the counterrevolution have collapsed long ago, but the advanced capitalist states themselves would have been immersed in revolution...
...The Soviet Union, as the first socialist nation, experienced more hardship in resisting the capitalist powers than any other socialist state...
...Why did Marx fail to predict the locus of the present revolutionary upsurge...
...as far as the eye could see into the future there was barren desert...
...This failure to predict the sequence of revolution proved to be a major miscalculation of Marxism, and it raised certain doubts about some of its theoretical assumptions...
...Once we move to macroanalysis and to a dynamic interpretation of history, those conventional wisdoms are less convincing...
...Each system is progressive in its early stages, but there is an inherent contradiction between its mode of production and relations of production which—beginning with chattel slavery and moving through capitalism— polarizes wealth and power, exacerbates the struggle between the upper and lower classes, and finally leads to revolution...
...That conflict has its ups and downs, each swing affecting not only international relationships but the internal development of the various capitalist and socialist countries...
...The woods were full of such ex-radicals as Jay Lovestone, former general secretary of the Communist Party, who were either working in or with the Central Intelligence Agency or writing books and tracts against "Communist treason...
...He misjudged the resiliency of capitalism and of course was unable to anticipate all the problems of socialism...
...In the bitter 1930s, with one quarter of the working class unemployed and one quarter working part time, this thesis seemed unassailable...
...The failure to provide cogent answers to such questions has had three interesting results...
...The third force affected by the confusion of the Left was the public at large...
...Other new radicals, recoiling from the lack of humanism in American society, formed ad hoc groups to challenge the House Committee on Un-American Activities, demonstrated for free speech at the universities, went south to join Martin Luther King's crusade for civil rights, adhered to the small antiwar movement then beginning to form around the Gandhian pacifist, A. J. Muste...
...There will always be wars...
...It was a malaise that was insufficiently cultivated counter "some disaster that would throw open the gates to a radical reconstruction of society...
...Quite obviously they have failed to do so with any degree of cogency...
...Thrice in the last six decades its fate hung in the balance—after World War I, during the Great Depression, and after World War II...
...2. That revolution is really unnecessary...
...Or suppose there had been a Vietnam-type war in China back in 1948-1949, in which Washington had similarly intervened with planes and troops...
...The poorhouse is vanishing from among us...
...In the wake of revelations after World War II about Stalin's crimes, and in the euphoria of a prosperity that seemed permanent, many an ex-Socialist or ex-Communist turned 180 degrees to the anti-Communist credo of the military-industrial complex...
...But their radicalism, too, lacks credibility...
...Something obviously has gone awry...
...Just before the Great Depression that began in October 1929, President Herbert Hoover stolidly contended that "we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land...
...The new radicals have fragmented politically as well as organizationally...
Vol. 38 • March 1974 • No. 3
