Beyond Arms
Dellinger, Michael Albert and David
BOOKS Beyond Arms BEYOND SURVIVAL: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE DISARMAMENT MOVEMENT edited by Michael Albert and David Dellinger South End Press. 365 pp. $8 paperback. Organizers of the massive...
...In Beyond Survival, editors Michael Albert and David Dellinger, assisted by seven well-known figures in the antiwar spectrum, have put together a political rationale for the claim that other social and international issues are intrinsically interlinked with disarmament...
...Beyond Survival falls short on one issue...
...Beyond Survival pokes its nose into a host of issues surrounding the arms race...
...Dellinger, a leader of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, begins the book with an introductory chapter, "The Bread Is Rising," in which he urges us not to "lose sight of the overall context," which encompasses sexism, racism, and interventionism...
...Albert follows with a survey of the personal failings and immaturity that he claims bedeviled the movement of the 1960s...
...Sidney Lens (Sidney Lens's recent books include "The Bomb" and "The Maginot Line Syndrome...
...He is Senior Editor of The Progressive...
...Along with the Cockburn-Ridgeway essay, the most rewarding chapters in Beyond Survival are a topnotch analysis of the "many paths to war" by author Holly Sklar...
...Other chapters include Leslie Cagan, a leading figure in the Mobilization for Survival, on feminism...
...The writing and thinking in these essays are uneven, but overall the collection is a most worthwhile project, particularly for those in the nuclear freeze movement who share the illusion that once a new President proclaims a freeze, we shall have arrived at the threshold of the glory days...
...Organizers of the massive antiwar demonstration held in New York City on June 12, 1982, were sharply divided over whether to confine the action to a simple expression of opposition to the nuclear arms race or to include such issues as racism, intervention in Central America, and other concerns that some believed were peripheral to the main purpose...
...writers Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway on the economic impact of the arms race, and Paula Rayman, a sociologist at Brandeis University, on the need to involve American workers in the disarmament crusade...
...I think a book which takes us halfway down the trail of tactics and strategy should have gone further...
...If you choose to include six or eight of the major failings of capitalism as part of the bill of particulars for disarmament, should the antiwar movement also pose the issue of socialism as one of the items integral to the subject, particularly since most of the contributors, and certainly Dellinger, consider themselves socialists...
...Jack O'Dell, international representative of PUSH, on racism...
...In time, the dispute was resolved, mostly in favor of those who wanted to expand the issue...
...a solid essay by the invariably solid Noam Chomsky on the tie-in between American intervention and the overall arms question, and Dellinger's incisive probe of the ideological issue that under-girds the arms race, anticommunism...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
