The New York Review of Books

Radicalism is again becoming chic in the intellectual world, a fate not even its worst enemies could suppose it to deserve. This is not, to be sure, the radicalism of desperate Negroes and disaffected youth which, for all its political failings, is at least grounded in urgent experience. No; the “radicalism” now arising in the intellectual world is in quality and content as crude, fashion-driven, smugly moralistic, and supremely verbal as was the turn to conservatism in the Fifties. It is a “radicalism” of posture, gesture, and frisson. It is a “radicalism” of a vicarious and thereby corrupt apocalyptic fantasy: to make an omelette you need not only break eggs, you need a strong dash of black blood. It is a “radicalism” of the attic and the playground: old souvenirs dusted off, creaky limbs pressed to swing baby swing.

One decade anti-Marxism and end-of-ideology are in; next, Black Power and peasant revolution. Lemming-like, the “herd of independent minds” rushes after the latest thing. The New York Review, preparing the cadres for the streets, prints a cover diagram of a Molotov cocktail. Guerrilla squadrons will be formed as soon as midterms are graded: will they assemble at the Paris Review ball? And now, after nearly twenty years of planful circumspection, appears Philip Rahv [NYR, October 12] offering Michael Harrington and myself Little Lessons in Leninism. A delicious spectacle for the theater of the absurd: Rip Van Winkle wakes up and fancies himself at the Smolny Institute.

1.) About one thing Rahv is clear: he has no faith in “the messianic revolutionary role of the proletariat,” or in any of the proposed ersatz proletariats (hippies, Negroes, poor, etc.). For the present at least, he sees no class capable of realizing the Marxist goal of social revolution. So far, so good. But to say all this is tacitly to answer a question he has posed to me: for it is to suggest that bourgeois society now seems capable of avoiding the more cataclysmic of the economic crises that have afflicted it in the past.

Thereby Rahv cedes the ground from which he might assault me for lacking “revolutionary” politics. For the truth is that he has none either. He has summoned memories of revolutionary sentiments; he hopes to convince the young they are in the presence of a veteran of 1905; but in reality he accepts pretty much the same limitations for US politics as those that arouse his scorn when attacking me.

Now if all this is true; and if one remains a principled opponent of the society; and if one also believes that major social changes are needed now, what follows? We can fall back on anarcho-utopianism, the community of the good in the crevices of evil—something neither Rahv nor I accept. Or:

(a) We can advance proposals to mobilize people in behalf of urgent social needs, what I have called “coalition politics” to “extend the welfare state,” while trying also to educate for a politics that would “transcend” the welfare state;

(b)We can engage in long-range social criticism and theorizing to perform what Rahv, quoting Hegel, calls “the labor of the negative.”

Between (a) and (b) there is in principle no conflict, though clashes of stress and priority are possible. I would opt for both, and like to think I have been so engaged for some years. But Rahv expresses contempt for (a)—it is “conciliatory” and lacks “deep social content.”

Let’s translate “extend the welfare state” into a concrete politics. We are living through a tremendous crisis; in shorthand: the crisis of the American cities. To “extend the welfare state” means to struggle for that massive allocation of social resources which can alone cope with this crisis. Concretely: decent jobs for Negroes, tearing down slums, altering patterns of education, starting large-scale public works, building hospitals, schools, and new cities. Such a program can only be realized through major political battles and, as a preliminary, ending the Vietnam war. What strikes Rahv as “conciliatory” about this I fail to see; why it should fail to excite intellectuals whose middleclass snobbism is linked with half-remembered Marxist phrases, I see all too well.

How can such a program be achieved? No pat answer; “coalition politics” is a paradigm, not a step-by-step tactics. In the US there is no radical party of significance, nor is there likely soon to be. But there are major social forces—unions, Negroes, churches, peace groups, students, intellectuals—which recognize, with varying urgency, the need for largescale social advance. This means struggle: at the polls, in Democratic primaries, through strikes, in the streets, all the agencies and avenues of a democratic society. And this strategy is genuinely radical because it speaks to the needs of millions; because it offers the possibility of mobilizing large segments of the population; and because it does not demand, as a preliminary certificate of purity, belief in “the labor of the negative.” It may well be that as long as the Vietnam war continues, the possibility of such a coalition nationally is small; if so, that means the possibility of satisfying our immediate needs is also small.

BUT LIMITED coalitions remain possible and urgent. If the Meany-type unions campaign, as they have, for a two-dollar minimum wage, I cooperate with them. When they support the war, I part company. If Reuther proposes, as he has, an end to bombing North Vietnam, I will work with him for that end. When he endorses LBJ for reelection, I go my own way. All this is ABC, something the radical movement, even in its most sectarian moments, has always understood—that is, until Rahv and Oglesby, aflutter for their virtue, warned us that there are dangers of being “co-opted” by Reform Democrats. But dear friends: you who doubt your capacity to withstand the lures (such as they are) of Reform Democrats, you are going to make a revolution?

Almost every active radical or liberal is in practice committed to a version of coalition politics. (Even Oglesby, so alert to the threat of liberal sellout, fancies a coalition—with the Far Right! A lovely vision: Oglesby and Buckley, Spock and Goldwater campaigning together against them federal bureaucrats.)

Item: Dwight Macdonald has joined a drop-LBJ group in the Democratic Party. Will Rahv urge him to leave, in order to escape the danger of being coopted by Theodore Weiss?

Item:Carl Stokes, a Negro liberal, has won the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Cleveland. Would Rahv interrupt his “labor of the negative” for a few minutes to support Stokes?

Item: Senator McGovern, outspoken dove, comes up for reelection. Would Rahv advise the South Dakota New Left to refrain from supporting him out of fear of being “swallowed” by the Establishment?

Item: Suppose in Massachusetts Stuart Hughes runs as a peace candidate in the Democratic primaries. Will Rahv say: “I agree with you on the war, but you really can’t expect me to get mixed up with this sort of social democratic conciliationism….”

Now if Rahv replies that in such instances he would indeed favor participation, he accepts some version of “coalition politics”—and what then is he grumbling about? But if he would not so participate, his leftist reincarnation comes to no more than a cover for an all-too-familiar quietism.

Ah, thunders Rahv, but people will not die to “extend the welfare state,” forgetting that not all of us share his heroic temper. And he forgets something still more important: many people have died to “extend the welfare state,” many have died for union recognition, civil rights, labor demands, social welfare. In any case, it’s hardly an argument against a program for social renovation that it fails to ignite Rahv’s appetite for ideological melodrama. Far better that people fight and live for what they need than talk about dying for it!

THIS WILL NOT yet be socialism? Then the few of us holding a socialist perspective will have to continue speaking for a vision of society which reforms within the present order may not by themselves yield. Our involvement in the struggle for such reforms might, however, help people to see the need for going beyond them. And if not, it remains our duty, precisely as socialists, to throw ourselves into the struggle for the reforms millions of people need now.

The “labor of the negative”? By all means, but with two cautions: 1) a theoretic criticism neglecting the living urgencies of men can only end as ultimatistic, elitist, and manipulative: check the history of US radicalism for examples. 2) Much of what now passes for social criticism is anti-intellectual, primitive, nihilistic. The idiocy that in the US liberalism is the main enemy and that we should press for a polarization into extreme Right and extreme Left (who would triumph in such an event?)—all this indicates the need for sharp discriminations concerning criticism, lest the “labor of the negative” degenerate into the “negation of labor.”

But Rahv is not alarmed. He preaches the value of “activism” as “a school of politics.” Suppose, then, we assume the recent New Politics Chicago convention was a graduation from this school: what did the students learn? The vulgarities of black nationalism; the descent into maneuvers that would make Reform Democrats look like babes by comparison; the notion that ghetto riots are to be applauded as a training school for revolution; the denunciation of “imperialist Israel”—some school! some politics!

2.) Rahv lists reactionary US policies in Latin America, Vietnam, and Greece, and, to smash “reformist” heresies of Harrington and myself, asks whether “these are all mere accidents and mistakes perhaps.” Accidents and mistakes are not to be discounted—consider how many have occurred in the countries Rahv so delicately describes as “a kind of socialism.” There is an overdeterminism which sees everything—a given act and its possible opposite, anything the US does abroad and anything it fails to do—as evidence for a fixed thesis about imperialism, so that there is no way either of validating or refuting it. Still, I’d say: no, US foreign policy in Latin America, Vietnam, and Greece is not the consequence merely of mistake and accident; there are deep-rooted causes in our social arrangements for such reactionary policies. But the key question for anyone wishing to affect US foreign policy—e.g., anyone wishing to get the bombing of North Vietnam stopped somewhat before the outbreak of a US revolution—is whether its reactionary components can be changed, whether there may not be conflicting pressures at work, and whether democratic politics can lead to a more humane and intelligent policy.

Let me quote Conor Cruise O’Brien, a writer closer to Rahv than to myself, about US power in the world today:

…granted the existence and extension of the power, it can be used with greater or less responsibility and good sense. It is inevitable that this country should have predominant influence in the Caribbean; it is not inevitable that it should send its troops to the Dominican Republic. It is inevitable that this country should have influence in Asia; it is not inevitable that it should send its Army to fight there…. Capitalist governments, like others, can learn by their mistakes and are especially apt to learn to avoid doing what their adversaries tell them they must inevitably do.