by Alan M Wald
On the other hand, simplistic formulae about “choosing sides” or abstractions admonishing one to be for the working class or for unions or for women’s liberation or for socialism do not solve the problem any better than a naive call to be “independent and uncommitted.” As we have seen, deradicalizing intellectuals can delude themselves: a Sidney Hook, for example, can claim that he has never been an apostate from Marxism, only a genuine democratic socialist who has gone “beyond Marxism.” It should never be forgotten that the professed aims of individuals, parties, groups, unions, and other organizations can be negated by their actual conduct.
It is also tragic but true that highly committed intellectuals who bind their fates to a particular Marxist party for many decades can become prisoners of that party should it veer off its original course by misleadership or the vicissitudes of history. Similarly, intellectuals who connect themselves to certain currents in the trade unions can become trapped in a false course should those currents undergo a bureaucratic transformation. I have argued, for example, that Irving Howe’s variant of social democracy influenced him to forge links with counterinstitutions that were insufficiently “counter”; thus they deformed as much as they preserved his once revolutionary socialist consciousness. Howe began by attempting to win liberals to socialism and ended by becoming a political liberal with socialist ideals. Social democrats such as Howe and Harvey Swados may well be admirable individuals, but they have drifted far from and taken positions directly contradicting their original goals.
One must conclude, then, that intellectuals who make conscious political commitments cannot proceed according to abstract formulae that simply enjoin one to be “pro-union” or “pro-socialist.” Their conscious choices must be informed by a certain degree of political acuity based on real experience, and the precise form of their commitment must be subject to a control—to a checking mechanism, a “critical consciousness,” which is that element of autonomy that still functions within the limitations of socially determined existence.
Marxist intellectuals require a means of expressing an appropriate stance, one based on a knowledge of past experience—a stance that represents an alternative to the Julian Benda-inspired advocacy of an “uncommitted and determinedly independent witness.” But it must be one that also avoids merely advocating intellectuals to “take sides”—although, to be sure, there are moments when intellectuals should rather quickly take sides, especially when those sides are clearly defined. The most appropriate stance would be one that is dialectical, that expresses the problematic aspects of both a willed commitment to a cause, a class, or a movement, and the retention of a critical consciousness—a “partisan but objective” stance, as it were. Perhaps the formulation “independence within a committed position” best expresses the tension that often marks the linkage of a self-reflexive consciousness with a willed commitment to a cause.
Radicalization and deradicalization have repeatedly occurred among Marxist intellectuals since the 1930s, although primarily during the early and late years of the Great Depression, the postwar era, and the 1960s. Certain patterns are now apparent. In the period of radicalization, Marxism, despite its defects, appears as the most useful analytical tool for interpreting the historical process and determining a course of action; the industrial working class appears strategically located as the central agent in the restructuring of capitalist society; and usually some recent upheaval in the economically underdeveloped world appears to be making remarkable social advances. In the period of deradicalization, the intellectuals in crisis invariably declare a “crisis of Marxism”; they disparage the capacities of the working class; and they declare that they have been “betrayed” by revolutions that have failed to achieve a normative version of “socialism.” Given this history, intellectuals whose Marxism depends on a view of socialism as a steady, forward-moving process that can be achieved largely by urging adherence to a particular political party find themselves repeating this historical pattern, not learning from it. There is simply no panacea for solving the difficulties involved in sustaining during unpropitious times the four major components of Marxist political practice: a rigorously internationalist perspective; an uncompromising revolutionary vision of social transformation; activist affiliation with authentic counterinstitutions; and a determination to view the world from the standpoint of the oppressed groups in society.13
A veteran socialist once remarked to me that he thought it was harder to be an active Marxist in the 1980s than it was during the Great Depression because the left-wing movement has experienced so many disappointments in the last fifty years. After devoting considerable time to studying the checkered history of a segment of the Marxist intelligentsia in the United States, I would like to suggest that this observation needs to be balanced with the recognition that in the 1980s we have the distinct advantage of knowing far more about the problems and possibilities of fundamental social change than did our radical predecessors.
The advance of radical scholarship has brought to our attention a wide body of material unavailable to earlier generations. We can study the writings of the young Marx, the work of the Western Marxists, the acute analyses of heresiarchs of official Communism such as Trotsky and Bukharin, biographies and autobiographies of all sorts of American radicals—workers and intellectuals of both sexes, of all colors, and of many ethnic backgrounds. We can now look back over the seventy years that have elapsed since the Russian Revolution and assess for ourselves the meaning of various debates and the validity of policies, positions, and attitudes. We need to integrate this sort of theoretical consciousness about political strategy with careful empirical research into the experience of the previous generation of Marxists. In that way we will be able to advance the recovery of our radical heritage, to correct the political amnesia that has marred our legacy, and to redeem the promise of socialist intellectuals first augured in the writings of Marx and Engels.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AW Alan Wald
BL Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. (Lewis Corey Papers, F. W. Dupee Papers, and Benjamin Stolberg Papers)
CPVP Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. (James T. Farrell Papers)
HIL Hoover Institute Library, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. (Herbert Solow Papers and Bertram D. Wolfe Papers)
HL Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (Leon Trotsky Papers)
LL Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind. (John Dewey Papers and Max Eastman Papers)
LSH Library of Social History, New York, N.Y. (James P. Cannon Papers)
MS Museum of Social Science, Paris, France (Alfred Rosmer Papers)
OL University of Oregon Library, Eugene, Ore. (Robert Cantwell Papers and James Hancock Rorty Papers)
TL Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, N.Y. (American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers and Max Shachtman Papers)
UMA University of Massachusetts Library, Amherst, Mass. (Harvey Swados Papers)
WHS State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (Albert Goldman Papers)
YL Yale University library, New Haven, Conn. (Dwight Macdonald Papers)
Letters and documents not identified by a library or collection are in the possession of Alan Wald.
INTRODUCTION
1. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 25.
2. Toward an American Revolutionary Labor Movement: A Statement of Programmatic Orientation by the American Workers Party (New York: Published by the Provisional Organizing Committee of the American Workers Party, 1934), pp. 23–24.
3. Sidney Hook, “Why I Am a Communist: Communism without Dogmas, a Reply by Sidney Hook,” Modern Monthly 8, no. 3 (April 1934): 165.
4. “Speakers Will Bare Hearst’s Labor Record,” New Militant 1, no. 8 (2 February 1935): 1, and “Mass Meeting Calls Hearst Labor Enemy,” ibid. 1, no. 9 (9 February 1935): 1. See
also Sidney Hook to AW, 4 February 1985.
5. Sidney Hook, Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No (New York: John Day, 1953), pp. 127 and 210.
6. Melvin J. Lasky to AW, 2 December 1982.
7. See the discussion of anticommunist ideology in Alan Wolfe’s essay, “The Irony of Anti-Communism,” in Socialist Register 1984: The Uses of Anti-Communism, ed. Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, pp. 214–29 (London: Merlin Press, 1984).
8. Letter to the Editor from Sidney Hook and Arnold Beichman, New York Times Book Review, 25 March 1984, p. 26.
9. Clement Greenberg, “The Late Thirties in New York,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 230.
10. Miliband, Saville, and Liebman, eds., Socialist Register 1984: The Uses of Anti-Communism, p. 1.
11. Some of these points were suggested in a letter from Ernest Erber to AW, 18 May 1984.
12. Some of the more helpful scholarly studies are Bert Cochran, “Intellectuals and the Cold War,” in Adlai Stevenson: Patrician among Politicians (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), pp. 343–98; John Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); James B. Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York: Wiley, 1968); David Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American Quarterly 27 (May 1975): 133–51; Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 61–114; S. A. Longstaff, “The New York Family,” Queen’s Quarterly 83 (Winter 1976): 108–29; and Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
The following is a partial list of the many books on individual figures: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Keith Opdahl, The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967); William L. O’Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York: Oxford, 1978); Edgar Branch, James T. Farrell (New York: Twayne, 1971); Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept: A Revealing Portrait of Mary McCarthy (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967); Stephen J. Whitfield, A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984); James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); William Chace, Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980); Leonard Kriegel, Edmund Wilson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971); Carolyn Geduld, Bernard Wolfe (New York: Twayne, 1972).
13. Lionel Abel, The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: Norton, 1984); William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Daniel Bell, “First Love and Early Sorrows,” Partisan Review 47, no. 4 (1981): 293–98; Leslie Fiedler, “Bergen Street: 1933,” Being Busted (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), pp. 11–28; Albert Halper, Good-Bye Union Square (New York: Quadrangle, 1970); Michael Harrington, Fragments of the Century: A Social Autobiography (New York: Dutton, 1973); Sidney Hook, “Breaking with the Communists—a Memoir,” Commentary 77, no. 2 (February 1984): 47–53; Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); Irving Kristol, “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” New York Times Magazine, 23 January 1977, pp. 42–43, 50–51, 54—57; George Novack, “My Philosophical Itinerary: An Autobiographical Foreword,” Polemics in Marxist Philosophy (New York: Monad, 1978), pp. 11–37; William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983); Harry Roskolenko, When I Was Last on Cherry Street (New York: Stein and Day, 1965); Diana Trilling, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia,” in Speaking of Literature and Society, ed. Diana Trilling, pp. 411–29 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); Lionel Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger (New York: Avon, 1966), pp. 311–33; Bernard Wolfe, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer (New York: Doubleday, 1972).
14. New York Times Book Review, 17 February 1974, p. 1.
15. Representative works of this school are Paul Buhle, “Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question,” Radical History Review, no. 23 (Spring 1980): 9–36; Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Great Depression (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983). For a critical response to some of these writings, see Alan M. Wald, “Remembering the Answers,” Nation 233, no. 22 (26 December 1981): 708–11; “Writers Congresses and the C. P.,” ibid. 234, no. 9 (6 March 1982): 258; and “C. P. Ups and Downs,” ibid. 234, no. 23 (12 June 1982): 728–31.
16. See, for example, Terry A. Cooney’s “Cosmopolitan Values and the Identification of Reaction: Partisan Review in the 1930s,” Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (December 1981): 580–98, which depicts the political trajectory of the magazine’s editors as evolving from pro-Communism prior to 1936 to “anti-Stalinism” after 1937, without clearly explaining that the specific content of their “anti-Stalinism” went through marked changes as well.
17. O’Neill, A Better World, pp. 75–97.
18. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, pp. 76–83.
19. James Atlas, “The Changing World of the New York Intellectuals,” New York Times Magazine, 25 August 1985, p. 22.
20. Alexander Bloom, “The New York Intellectuals: The Formation of the Community” (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1979), pp. 1–13. See also the critique of Prodigal Sons by AW in American-Jewish History 76, no. 1 (September 1986): 86–90.
21. James Burnham and Max Shachtman, “Intellectuals in Retreat,” New International 5, no. 1 (January 1939): 3–21. Among those said to be “known to a considerable public” as “the Trotskyist intellectuals” are Sidney Hook, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, and James T. Farrell.
22. Daniel Aaron, “The Treachery of Recollection: The Inner and Outer History,” Carleton Miscellany 6, no. 3 (Summer 1965): 15.
23. Dwight Macdonald, “The Burnhamian Revolution,” Partisan Review 9, no. 1 (January–February 1942): 77.
24. Floyd Dell to Max Eastman, 12 November 1953, Eastman Papers, LL. See also David Peck’s documentation of the way recent memoirs and anthologies from the 1930s have been altered to accord with later judgments: “‘The Orgy of Apology’: The Recent Revaluation of Literature of the Thirties,” Science and Society 32, no. 4 (Fall 1968): 371–82.
25. Emanuel Geltman expressed the view in a May 1981 interview in New York City that the Trotskyists suppressed Jewish identity, and Leslie Fiedler stated in a May 1981 interview in Buffalo that he “cheered” German victories when he was a young Trotskyist at the outset of World War II. However, Peter Seidman’s Socialists and the Fight against Anti-Semitism (New York: Pathfinder, 1973) contains substantial documentation of Trotskyist activities against anti-Semitism in the 1930s. See also Irving Howe’s comments on the records of Trotsky in the 1930s and the Workers Party in the 1940s vis-à-vis “the Jewish question,” in Commentary 76, no. 3 (September 1983): 4–6.
26. Sidney Hook, “Remembering Whittaker Chambers,” Encounter 46, no. 1 (January 1976): 78–89; Sidney Hook and Diana Trilling, “Remembering Whittaker Chambers: An Exchange between Diana Trilling and Sidney Hook,” Encounter 46, no. 6 (June 1976): 94–96.
27. Socialism in Our Time (New York: Thomas and Nelson Independent Committee, 1936), p. 29.
28. W. Phelps, “Class-ical Culture,” Communist 7, no. 1 (January 1933): 93–96.
29. This information was provided in a 29 January 1974 letter from James T. Farrell to AW, and it was confirmed in a 4 February 1985 lett
er from Sidney Hook to AW. Notice of Rahv’s expulsion from the Communist Party appears in Daily Worker, 19 October 1937, p. 2.
30. Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 44.
31. Dwight Macdonald to Leon Trotsky, 23 August 1937, HL. See also Philip Rahv to Leon Trotsky, 1 March 1938, HL.
32. In the 4 February 1939 issue of Socialist Appeal, Phillips is listed on page four as speaking in a series at the Marxist School that featured leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in conjunction with the Partisan Review.
33. Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 51.
34. “Politics and Partisan Review,” Partisan Review 4, no. 3 (February 1938): 62.
35. Barrett, The Truants, pp. 156–57.
36. A contemporary exposition and defense of Trotsky’s concept is Michael Löwy’s The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (London: Verso, 1981).
37. Barrett, The Truants, p. 85.
38. Ibid., p. 210.
39. Michiko Kakutani, “An Inside ‘Outsider’ Recalls Postwar Intellectuals,” New York Times, 24 May 1982, p. C3.