In Spite of Ourselves

No, Anthony, it doesn't get any better than this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5axlwCBXC8&feature=related

David Mamet's "Redbelt"

David Mamet was America’s best dramatist and moviemaker when he was a shmuck liberal, and remains such now that he has become a shmuck conservative. His best movie is “Redbelt,” his last. (His second best was “The Spartan,” which he made just before “Redbelt,” but this is much better.)

Every time I watch “Redbelt” I see stuff in it that maybe even Mamet didn’t notice. Here is a list.

1.       Most precious moment: “Don’t stand there.” (I’m sure Mamet intended this, I just wanted to note it.)

2.       The main character, a martial arts instructor, never objects to the essential unfairness of the blackball technique for handicapping a contestant. We all feel this unfairness intensely. But of course we all miss the point that the unfairness penalizes the unhandicapped contestant. Why?

3.       After discovering that the blackball technique has been compromised, he leaves the contest in protest. As he is exiting the arena, he encounters his female attorney in a stark scene of concrete support (Temple) columns. Actually, she has been shadowed in one of the columns, actually has been the column. When she steps forward, she is no longer a lawyer, but a goddess.

4.       She slaps his face. Why? Because he is not dead. He thinks he is protesting against the “contest” framework, but actually he has accepted it, for winning and losing are the terms of all contests. (Her slap asks, “For this I had to become mortal?”)

5.       The Greek tragic heroes died because of their hubris. Mamet has created the first such hero who wins because of his hubris.

Hiss and Hoover

Alger Hiss and J. Edgar Hoover:

American Heroes

By Tom Milstein

            When Harry Truman became President of the United States, little did he know that he had a Russian spy, Alger Hiss, looking over his shoulder as he tried to conduct the nation’s foreign policy. Hiss was only the most prominent in a long list of WASP traitors who have indulged in this nefarious activity, a few of whom were sent to prison while their less ethnically favored tools, like the Rosenbergs, went to the electric chair. Was justice was served? After serving a short term for perjury, Hiss had to spend the rest of his life selling ladies’ girdles and office stationery. You decide.

            Secretary of State Acheson raised a lot of eyebrows when he “refus[ed] to turn his back on Alger Hiss” and quoted the New Testament: “I was a Stranger and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me, I was in prison and ye came unto me."

            The Hiss case opened the floodgates to a swelling tide of revelations about Communist infiltration of the government under the auspices of FDR’s New Deal. Americans were shocked to learn how their mighty government had been turned into an agency of Stalin’s foreign policy by trusted paragons of the Establishment. An entire generation was shamed. These men were not mere careerists; they were dedicated Communist ideologues, prepared to rationalize Stalin’s bloodiest crimes on behalf of a totalitarian America.

            How could this have happened? Hiss and his comrades were not “sell-outs.” They were ideologues, sincerely committed to their utopian vision of a Communist America and a united world order. They were in no sense “premature anti-Fascists.” Those who from careerist motivations or genuine moral revulsion repudiated their previous Communist convictions, were shocked to find themselves the object of loathing by their own children who, instead of adopting their parent’s new democratic idealism, embraced Mao’s crusade to restore Stalinist purism.

            But the question of totalitarian psychology is of minor interest. The real issue is why America tolerated this red fifth column for so long. Hoover’s FBI conducted a well-publicized struggle against the Communist menace throughout this period. Even during times of apparent Soviet-American amity the Agency kept itself well-apprised of Communist activity. Few Americans were fooled by “Uncle Joe’s” smiles.

            It therefore cannot be said that the U.S. tolerated Communist subversion out of ignorance or delusion. The obvious explanation is that the government was conducting a deeply secret policy behind the backs of its own people, and that the Communist Party was a tool of this policy. The manager of this tool had to have been the FBI. Of course, Hoover didn’t keep his Party card in his bra. FDR kept it in his desk drawer.

            The secret policy on behalf of which Hoover wielded his Communist apparat is even more obvious than its mechanism: the Soviet-American alliance which eventually brought America to world power. 20^th Century history gives us all the answers we need. Without this alliance, America might well have become the world’s dominant power, but it would have taken much longer to become the world’s only dominant power.

            Nations guard their secret alliances with all the powers they command. German complicity in the Bolshevik rise to power is widely denied to this day, both in Germany and in post-Communist Russia. Americans will not accept that their government engaged in intense collaboration with Soviet Russia, except to defeat fascist Germany. Everything that appears to be collaboration is attributed to coincidence. The pattern of mutual benefit, at the expense of all other nations, is dismissed as European anti-Americanism.

Occasionally, though, a ray of truth makes its way through the blanket of disinformation. An Alger Hiss is caught red-handed transmitting State Department secrets to Soviet military intelligence. A Soviet defector falls from a hotel window while under FBI protection. Whittaker Chambers exposes the entire Soviet intelligence network and finds himself under investigation. But these leaks are rare. The real test of the system occurs when the entire “bodyguard of lies” collapses, as it did when Richard Nixon arranged the momentous confrontation between Hiss and Chambers. Then the subversive and the patriot exchange identities in full view of the people. Americans rise up in indignation. But it is they, the people, who are exposed. The charade is being conducted for their benefit, and they have been cheated out of their ignorance.

Palin vs. Obama

by Tom Milstein

June 24, 2011

The American Paradigm was intended to dispose of the remains of socialism, and
it did. True, the American Paradigm collapsed as a model when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Temporarily I thought – the same thing had happened during the American Civil
War when the Southern slavocracy capitulated. After an interregnum lasting several
years, though, a diluted slavocracy was reborn in the South’s Bourbon-Dixiecrat oligarchy,
which was taken into junior partnership by the victorious Yankees to form the
Dixiecrat-GOP alliance. My Paradigm was reborn.

But no similar partnership has emerged between the former Soviet Union and the
United States. As a result, bipolarity also failed to reemerge. Instead, the United States of
America became the “world’s only Superpower.” This condition has endured now for
over two decades. Two decades is not long enough to discredit the American Paradigm
theory – after all, the victorious North ruled America alone from 1865 until 1876, when
the Hayes-Tilden disputed Presidential election was resolved at the expense of Reconstruction.
But it raises severe doubts about the theory’s validity, doubts which could only be dispelled through a restoration of international bipolarity. No such restoration appears to be in view.

Truly, bipolarity seems the least likely thing to emerge from present-day world politics. Many thinkers have sensed the inherent instability of America’s monocracy (or “Empire,” as it has come to be commonly called). But almost all of them believe that the trend is toward “multi-polarity,” an international system featuring an uneasy equilibrium between several powerful states, or alliances of states. Thus would Bush Sr.’s incipient
“New World Order” be supplanted by a new world balance of power.

The trouble with multi-polarity is that it was tried as an international system in Europe and World War I was its result. But the historical record of monopolarity is also dubious. Imperial systems are driven by their internal dynamic toward totalitarian domination. America’s core values conflict spectacularly with despotic rule. And even if the American ethos could be squeezed into this mold, no one should expect that the result
would be durable. Such systems are not immune to Waltz’s law of the international system. The “deep structure of anarchy” would inevitably generate a competing center of Imperial power. The last great Imperial system, Rome’s, lasted only 300 years before splitting into Western Rome and Byzantium. What took 300 years in the ancient world would emerge much faster under modern conditions.

In “Marx, the Anti-Semite” I investigated a bipolar system that prevailed in the Middle East between Egypt and Babylon. Along the frictional edge of these two empires Jews had the divine good fortune but bad geopolitical judgment to found a third regime,rather insignificant in the secular annals of the time, called “Israel,” out of whose travails emerged a refined concept of monotheism, at the root of which we found the same totalitarian principle – albeit expressed in theological rather than institutional terms – that governed Egypt and Babylon.

Later, we looked at another bipolar system, called the “Cold War,” that emerged between the two great successor powers of the Second World War, America and Russia. We found in this bipolarity a remarkable parallel to that which arose on the North American continent between North and South. This parallel we developed into a theory called the American Paradigm, and used it, among other things, to analyze the politics of the Cold War.

A third bipolarity has not emerged in world politics. If it does not, the American Paradigm is destroyed. Therefore, a third bipolarity will have to emerge. It will therefore be necessary to construct this third bipolarity from out of the debris of unipolarity, or multipolarity, or whatever precedes it. West of America lies China, clearly Asia’s leading candidate for superpower status. Across the Atlantic is Germany, Europe’s natural master. If America loses its world dominion, there can be little doubt that these two states will acquire superpower status by default.

But neither of these two states is qualified for world leadership. Indeed, neither of them probably wants it. Germany, although democratic, is quite well aware of its criminal record as a nation, probably even more so than its neighbors. China must cope with the contradiction between its remarkable economic progress and its crumbling and dysfunctional internal Communist system.

And how will senescent America react to its loss of power? The answer is not a pretty one. Russia went quietly. Would the U.S.A.?

Former American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “We go to war with the army we have.” To build a new bipolarity, so must we.

The coming American Presidential election holds the key to building a new world bipolarity. The Republicans will grudgingly run Palin; the Democrats, no less grudgingly, will run Obama. Palin may win a popular victory. But her victory would tear the country apart. A wide swath of the electorate simply will not accept her. It will see in her election many unmitigated evils. But the worst one from the Eastern elite’s standpoint will be its
affect on America’s cherished alliance system, which is based on the Atlantic and emphasizes Europe over all others. Palin’s election would threaten America’s national security.

The Palin forces, on the other hand, while paying lip service to the Atlantic Alliance as the shield of Western civilization, find the George W. Bush administration’s emphasis on “Old” Europe a more comfortable posture. Palin, needless to say, finds the Pacific and Asia a much richer field for American enterprise. She will therefore be attacked as “soft on China,” whether or not she actually is. In self-defense, she will revive
the nasty Populist charge that the East Coast is dominated by a treasonous cabal of Anglophile Europe-worshippers.

Domestic political issues will be reduced to secondary status by the rising ferocity of these “foreign policy” recriminations. As they take on a life of their own, a Lincolnian Obama may resurrect himself in the eyes of broad sections of the electorate. It is not inconceivable that his campaign could win enough states to throw the result into the Electoral College. Whichever candidate wins in this arena, it is guaranteed that the other will not accept the result. Just as in 1861, and again in 1876, the Republic will start to crumble.

In 1876, America withstood the legitimacy crisis posed by an Electoral College outcome by means of a “Grand Compromise” involving the withdrawal of Federal troopsfrom the South and the end of Reconstruction. In 1865, no such compromise could be fashioned, and the Republic disintegrated. Lincoln was inaugurated President of an imaginary Union and proceeded to build a second one on the dry bones of the wrecked Constitution.

Victory in war recreated the American paradigm, this one secured by a dominant Yankee elite in partnership with a now-subordinate Southern Bourbon oligarchy. The New America resumed its march to world leadership, no longer encumbered by its stifling entanglement with domestic slavery.

In 2012, when the Republic splits once again, neither of these options will be available. There can be no war when neither side professes a program worth fighting for. But that doesn’t mean that compromise is inevitable. Too much is at stake. Foreign policy may not mean much to the people, but vital interests are involved. Thus America will find itself in the incongruous position of being ruled by elite factions which hate each other’s guts, but which cannot mobilize the passions of their respective constituencies.

“Let our errant sisters go in peace.” Our Eastern seaboard will suppose it can rule a German-dominated Europe. Toward this enterprise, it can offer Germany the political legitimacy it needs. But of course this legitimacy is not theirs to give. They will have to borrow it from Israel, which will be only too eager to supply it, for by such means Israel can bind the Atlanticists to support the Jewish state against its enemies.

As for Palin and her Western American supporters, the gravitational force of China will pull Pacific America into its long-sought Asian destiny, which, like its disowned Europe-oriented Eastern sisters, it will imagine itself capable of managing.

For both the Palin faction and its Eastern rivals the main enticement is financial. China sits engorged atop a mountain of American wealth which it cannot deploy into realms it considers politically unsafe, especially the Chinese homeland. Similarly, the European Union needs to invest its surplus capital, which it cannot entrust to the vagaries of American politics or European “PIGS.” The solution is obvious: another Grand Compromise, but this time not to preserve but to divide the American Republic. The great principle which previously united this continent, Federalism, will now sanctify its two global sections into a new bipolarity.
Both the dreams of Atlantic Union and Pacific Manifest Destiny will come to life, but not in the same bed.

Yen and Euros will pour into Pacific and Atlantic ports, in a kind of reverse Marshall Plan. A new American renaissance will be proclaimed by everybody. In repayment, America’s federal principle will be exported: the United States of Europe, and the United States of the Pacific. Realizing the goal which two World Wars could not achieve, Germany will push eastward into Russia as far as China will allow. China likewise will
achieve mastery over Asia. And it will all happen rather peacefully.

This final form of the American paradigm will someday result in a United States of the World. The American exception will then truly become the world’s rule. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will dry up and become ponds. Vespucci’s cartographic label, named after him for lack of anything better, will disappear from the maps. Sovereignty will devolve into a welter of jurisdictional boundaries.

But life will still be as vicious as The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, as sublime as Jim and Huck on the River.

A Life in Socialism

A Life in Socialism

by Tom A. Milstein

5/25/11

         

         

Chapter One

Two Undistinguished Provincials

Denver

            I had not many friendships in my youth, but the ones I did have were intense. One in particular was most influential in the formation of a political identity – Dave Rubinstein. I say “political,” but that term applies mostly to me. Dave did not eschew politics, but derived more from the non-political, cultural side of this identity.

            We met in high school in Denver in the latter part of the 1950’s. As I recall, a shared interest in two writers – Jack Kerouac and, even more embarrassingly, J.D. Salinger – brought us together, courtesy of a high school literature course. From these and similar influences, we adopted a kind of neo-Beatnik personal radicalism, mostly expressing itself in bad grades, occasional truancy, mild bohemianism, and a haughty contempt for Eisenhower America’s “deadly suburban conformity.”

            But we did make a few forays into political action. We were interested in the civil rights movement. As in many cities, this cause was led in Denver by the NAACP, a rather conservative organization. But another group in Denver was working actively to draw the NAACP into direct action in support of the Southern civil rights militants who were just then gathering national attention under the leadership of Martin Luther King. This group was a chapter of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). Numbering no more than a half-dozen members and a few more sympathizers (among whom we soon considered ourselves), this group played a key role in mobilizing an NAACP picket line in front the downtown branch of Woolworth’s, whose Southern lunch counters were still segregated.

            Dave and I marched on this picket line and so came into contact with YSA and SWP activists. Soon we were attending their meetings on a variety of subjects, mostly having to do with civil rights but also increasingly devoted to the topic of Castro’s Cuba, which they vigorously supported. We never joined either organization (nor were we asked to, as I recall). Despite their commendable role in energizing the civil rights cause in Denver, we both recoiled from the stifling atmosphere of conspiratorial secrecy and intellectual rigidity that prevailed throughout mainstream American Trotskyism. In what I would later regard as the biggest political mistake of my life, I did join one of their front organizations, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), later to become notorious for harboring Lee Harvey Oswald. I joined, not out of any special devotion to the Cuban cause, but to show “commitment,” the lack of which was arousing unfavorable suggestions of dilettantism among my SWP/YSA associates. Dave, always more cautious in such matters, wisely refrained from this folly.

            Dave and I approached high school graduation with few prospects for college enrollment other than in a state school, the best of which being the University of Colorado at Boulder (“CU”). Notwithstanding that institution’s generally undistinguished reputation, we both looked forward to attending, both because it provided an opportunity to escape parental authority, and because it nestled in the shadow of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Both of us balanced our bohemian cultural interests and radical political views with a robust love of Colorado’s outdoors. For these reasons, and not because of any academic or intellectual inclinations, we looked forward to our freshman year with real enthusiasm. Our political friends, on the other hand, saw us as the potential nucleus of a new YSA campus chapter. In this they were soon to be rudely disappointed.

Boulder

            We landed at CU’s freshman dorms in the Fall of 1961. I cannot speak for Dave, but what I found there shaped my entire life.

            Even though CU was considered a “megaversity” even in those days, it was home to only 8,000 students. The fraternity system dominated campus life, so we found plenty to rebel against. The school had the reputation of a “party school” and attracted large numbers of wealthy out-of-state students. Beyond the rather poisonous social atmosphere, however, was an animated intellectual community, led by a few serious professors (most of them stranded in the academic boondocks by an unwillingness or inability to publish) and their retinues of lively graduate assistants. Among these was an Assistant Professor of Sociology named Alex Garber.

Garber – and Shachtman

            Garber had organized a chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League (“YPSL”), the youth group of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (“SP-SDF” or “SP” for short). I think the chapter had about 15 members at that time. The politics of this group cannot be understood apart from the political history of Garber himself.

            Born in Chicago, Garber grew up in a middle-class Jewish home and initially entered college at Northwestern University in the late 1920’s, later switching to the University of Chicago, where he earned his Batchelor’s and Master’s degrees in Sociology.  He served in the Army Air Force during World War II as a meteorologist in the Pacific theater, and then earned a Ph.D at Berkeley after working for the V.A. in the Bay Area.

            As a youngster in Chicago he had joined the Young Communist League (YCL), not, he always insisted, because he was a Communist, but only to organize an anti-Stalin faction and lead it in a split to join the Shachtman-Cannon group Trotskyist group, originally called the Communist League of America (CLA), later the Workers Party of the United States. We need not explore the sectarian vicissitudes of Garber’s subsequent history as a Trotskyist, except to note that he never relinquished his fierce hostility to Stalinism, and became a dedicated acolyte of Max Shachtman, who eventually broke with the SWP and Trotsky himself.

Shachtman

            The nature of Shachtman’s split with Trotsky, on one level, features one of the most arcane debates ever to wrack the twisted corpus of Marxism, and on another, issues of deep and lasting significance that are with us to this very day. Shachtman attacked Trotsky’s core contention that as long as the Stalin regime maintained nationalized property in industry, no matter how corrupt, vicious or despotic it might become in other respects – and no one excelled Trotsky in exposing these “other respects” – it must still be regarded as a “worker’s state,” i.e. socialist, and defended as such against all opposition from the capitalist nations of the West.

            Against this notion, Shachtman advanced his theory of “bureaucratic collectivism.” According to this theory, Stalin’s ruling bureaucracy had established itself a new ruling class, basing its power on the State itself, and engaged in exploiting the workers of industry and the peasants of agriculture for its own aggrandizement just as ruthlessly as Marxism’s traditional foe, the bourgeoisie. It followed from this theory that true socialists owed the USSR no  more loyalty than they owed the capitalist nations. The workers of the world still had no homeland, and would not until the Stalin bureaucracy was overthrown, or until socialist revolution was victorious in the nations of the West.

            Shachtman’s theory had the effect of liberating the Marxian socialist tradition from fealty to Soviet Russia. (It also contained the seeds of Marxism’s dissolution, but we shall explore that matter later.) If Stalinist Russia was a “class society,” then it differed from those of Germany, France, England and America only in externals. The viability of the Socialist tradition could only be maintained by upholding its independence from all of these nations. Of course, this honorable position had the effect of condemning its adherents to isolation from all real power bases in the world, in or out of the labor movement. It was destined to become the esoteric wisdom of the world’s few hundred “authentic socialists,” almost all of them intellectuals, immensely proud of their immunity both to social-democratic reformist apologetics for capitalism, and to Soviet Stalinism.

            Garber enthusiastically embraced Shachtman’s theory, finding it convergent with his academic interests, particularly in Max Weber and his school of sociology. For Garber, Shachtman’s theory made it possible to synthesize socialism and sociology, and for the rest of his life he explored the implications of this synthesis, both in practical political and social theoretical terms. He brought this enthusiasm to Boulder and indoctrinated his student acolytes accordingly.

            Dave and I of course knew nothing of this when I we encountered Garber and the Boulder YPSL. All we knew about Garber was that of which the SWP activists in Denver had darkly warned us – a malevolent presence on campus bent on undermining the prospects for a genuine socialist revival among collegiate youth. However, this picture did not  square with what we actually encountered. YPSL members seemed the very opposite of wicked saboteurs. On the contrary, they seemed just as zealous in their socialism as their Denver Trotskyist rivals. But in addition to their political beliefs, they seemed vitally interested in cultural, intellectual and literary matters, in refreshing contrast to the two-dimensional drear of SWP politics.

            We soon found ourselves sufficiently enmeshed in YPSL socialism to feel obliged to “break” with the SWP. This “split” led to a rather poignant journey back to Denver, where we planned to meet with the young activist who had made our recruitment one of his major political occupations. This very nice young fellow was unfortunately not at home when we arrived. So we were left with no alternative but to affix a brief note to his apartment door wishing him farewell. Then, we stuffed every piece of political literature with which he had burdened us (most of which we never read) under this door. He later informed us that we had jammed his door closed so tightly that he found himself locked outside and had to enter via a window.

Democracy

            For a while we naively sought to promote harmony between our former comrades in Denver and our new associates in Boulder. This phase did not last long. It ran up against Garber’s implacable opposition to the “totalitarian” proclivities of unreconstructed Trotskyism. He defined socialism as indissolubly wedded to democracy. Leninist “vanguardism” was to him a profound violation of Marxian principles. In this respect he had moved beyond Shachtman’s bureaucratic collectivist theory, into the realm of the theory of totalitarianism, which more or less equated Nazi Germany with Stalinist Russia and hence rejected “Third Camp” socialism (which equated Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism and Western capitalism) as both utopian and reactionary. Garber waged a life-long unsuccessful struggle to drag Shachtman into his anti-Leninist position. But he did convince Shachtman of the errors of “Third Camp” politics and eventually swung him over to a pro-Western foreign policy stance.

            The Garber-YPSL position on democracy and socialism was very attractive. The pro-West conclusions which Garber drew from this position were much less so. As a latent forerunner of the New Left student movement (not yet born), I yearned to find some sound philosophical and ethical ground for opposing the U.S. government and the so-called Free World. But the more I tried to defend this “radical” imposture against the YPSLs and with Garber, the more such ground slipped away.

            It all came crashing down at a lecture given by Max Shachtman himself in Mackey Auditorium on the CU campus. The subject was the Russian Revolution. Shachtman’s name was unknown to the student body but the YPSL had gone all-out to publicize the event and the audience virtually filled the 2,000-seat venue. Nobody, and especially me, was prepared for what they would hear. The old radical gave a masterful survey of all aspects of that epochal 20^th Century event. He maintained his Bolshevism throughout, refusing to compromise at all with Garber’s indictment of Lenin’s vanguardism as the “inevitable” precursor of Stalin’s totalitarian machine. It was quite pleasing to watch the Garberites squirm during this part of Shachtman’s address.

            Of course the audience did not sense this disparity. All they knew was that a little old bald man with no academic credentials and a rather shady reputation had taught them more about Russian history in 90 minutes than their professors could during entire semesters. When Shachtman concluded, 2,000 previously hostile and generally right-leaning students sat in rapt silence and then burst forth with a standing ovation. After a lengthy question-and-answer period, numbers of the audience swarmed onto the stage to engage Max in dialogue. I was one of them.

            From there we retired to Garber’s home and although I don’t definitely recall, I think that evening I signed a YPSL membership application. Dave probably did too, but it cannot be said that his signature doomed him for life the way mine did me. As I’ve said, Dave always maintained a more skeptical stance about political matters than I did. In any case, at that time he was more interested in Zen Buddhism than socialism.

            Later on other socialist luminaries – Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington (actually, the only luminaries the movement possessed) – visited the Boulder campus, making just as big a stir as Max, but none of them impressed me the way Max did. All socialists took it for granted that the Russian Revolution was the decisive event of the 20^th Century, as the French Revolution was for the 19^th Century. It seemed to me that Max’s grasp of the inner dynamic of the Russian cataclysm was unparalleled, this notwithstanding his stubborn Leninism. On the Lenin question I agreed with Garber, not Shachtman, especially after listening to them furiously debate the question. In these debates, Garber always lost. He simply could not prevail, either as a debater or a historian, over Max. Garber’s skills lay in the area of social theory, and the only social theory Max knew was Marxism. Since Garber accepted the Marxist rubric as the fundament of socialism, he essentially ceded the argument to Max in advance. There was no room in Marx’s theory for the concept of totalitarianism, except as a pejorative for Hitlerism or Stalinism. In other words, the two systems, in Trotsky’s brilliant aphorism, were symmetrical but not identical phenomena.

            Despite this rather profound difference, Shachtman I think considered Alex his closest ideological ally in the socialist movement. Garber for his part believed that his challenge to Max was subtly influencing him on the level of policy if not theory. This policy influence took place in two areas – domestic and foreign. In the former area, he sought to push Shachtman away from a third party approach in the direction of a “Realignment” strategy focused on the Democratic party. In the latter, he aimed to wean Max away from “Third Camp” socialism toward a position of “critical support of the West” in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Both of these ideas will be discussed in detail later.

            Shachtman used Garber as a kind of stalking horse in the socialist movement, letting him take the considerable heat which Realignment and pro-Western politics generated in the socialist movement. Since Garber regarded himself as Shachtman’s loyal lieutenant, he accepted the role, while chafing at the considerable political discomfort it caused him. He explained to the Boulder YPSLs that Max still labored under the intellectual incubus of residual Trotskyism, and, more importantly, faced the problem of leading a disciplined caucus within the Socialist party that had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into a confrontation with the realities of American politics and a Cold War world.

            At the time, I was innocent of both the theories of Realignment theory and of a pro-West, anti-Third Camp foreign policy. I gravitated toward Alex’s views solely on the basis of his critique of Communist totalitarianism, which he argued was rooted in “the greatest revision of Marx’s ideas ever carried out” – Lenin’s vanguard theory of the role of the party. Garber denounced Lenin’s vanguardism because it destroyed the fusion of democracy with socialism that he regarded as essential to the success of both.

            I suppose this is the proper time to explain this fusion. It was explained to me as the “mother’s milk” of socialism, but I never saw it presented in written form. I’m sure it was, somewhere, since the logic is so self-apparent to the American mentality. I was once given the opportunity to present it in a conservative magazine American Spectator, edited by R. Emmett Tyrell, in an article entitled “What Is Socialism and Will It Work?” (April, 1972). Aside from that, though, I’ve not seen it presented elsewhere.

            The socialism Garber taught me was based on the simple idea that the democracy which the American and French revolutions introduced in the political sphere, needed to be extended into the economic realm. Democratic norms ought not to be confined to the government. They ought to prevail in the everyday working life of the people, from the factory workfloor all the way up to the highest suites of corporate power. The notion that property was “private” and hence immune from democratic control was both absurd and subversive. Property was no more “private” than the political power of kings and aristocrats. It depended for its existence on the social system which supported it. If the concentrated political power of monarchs could be “nationalized” by the will of the people for their own benefit, then so also could the concentrated economic power of industry and finance. This might be done piecemeal or wholesale, but so long as it was done democratically, there was no moral ground on which to oppose it. Indeed, the benefits of carrying out such a “socialization” of private economic power were no less and potentially much greater than those which justified the preceding expropriation of feudal authority.

            I don’t know where Garber got this idea, so elementary and unsophisticated in its elements, so lovely and profound in its implications. It was certainly not unknown to Marx. But it was not central to Marx’s exposition of socialism, and he gave it his typical gloss, surrounding it with layers of Germanic-Hegelian incomprehensibility. I suspect Garber got it from his educational experience at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which was then a hotbed of Progressivism, an outgrowth of America’s only original contribution to philosophy: Pragmatism. Evidence for this suspicion arose later when Garber solved a theoretical problem which had been teasing us for years: the relationship between Marx’s theory of alienation and George Herbert Mead’s theory of the social self. But more about that later.

            Wherever he got it, Garber’s democratic message certainly resonated with me. In fact, it created a  dualism in my thinking, for while it does not contradict, it certainly does not easily cohere, with classical socialist doctrine, which emanates from Europe and which reached its acme in the thought of Karl Marx. This dualism ultimately resolved itself into another, discussion of which will conclude this memoir, but while it rattled around in my head it was a real source of intellectual stimulation.

            I have always found Marx’s ideas extremely challenging. That is another way of saying that I had to struggle hard to understand them. Everything he wrote I had to read at least three times to comprehend. The struggle was usually worthwhile, for Marx was the last of the great European system-builders, not to mention the founder of modern socialism. But the discipline required to follow his thought was something for which I was not prepared. The Denver public school system (against which I harbor no grudges, for it had other virtues) did little to instill the necessary intellectual habits.

            “Democratic socialism,” on the other hand (a term which would have struck Marx as laughably, even dishonestly, redundant) always seemed to me wondrously useful. I did not have to struggle with its precepts at all. And I found that expounding it to others was much more productive than trying to bring “Marxism to the masses.” In fact, I was to become one of the Boulder YPSL’s best recruiters thanks to this line of argument. When I later moved to New York, it was the reverse; nobody wanted to hear about democracy, but potential recruits were very impressed if one could argue down an opponent’s putative Marxism. While at Boulder, however, and later in Sacramento, California, it was the democratic argument that won young people over to socialism. In those days, democracy had tremendous prestige. Nobody wanted to be against it. This democratic idealism has long since passed away, dismissed for different reasons by leftist academics and right-wing conservatives as a naïve and dangerous myth, not a living faith. Arguing for socialism based on democratic values would only deepen the disrepute of both.

            But not in my radical youth. Democracy was a revolutionary idea, both dangerous and irresistible: perfect, and not just as a polemical tool. Something told me there had to be a serious intellectual undercarriage for this marvelous weapon. One of Garber’s graduate students – John Maxwell. – showed me where to look: in the American pragmatic tradition already mentioned. I immediately began reading John Dewey, and more fruitfully, George Herbert Mead. Beyond philosophy and social psychology, though, Garber forced all of us to study American history, which he regarded as the practical testing ground on which all the theoretical problems of democracy fought themselves out. This too was original with Garber. Most socialists looked upon American history as a sideshow. The real action was in Europe, where the mass socialist parties struggled to win a world for the working class. America was regarded as a backwater of the world-historical stage. Not so, according to Garber, who delighted in plunging into obscure aspects of American social and political history – not to demonstrate the inevitability of socialism, but instead to show how a free people, unencumbered by the burden of a feudal heritage, grappled with the burden of freedom.

The Civil Rights Movement

            The greatest of these burdens was the caste system which segregated the black and white races in direct violation of the democratic promise of American life. Struggling heroically against this injustice was the embryonic civil rights movement, leadership of which had passed to Martin Luther King as a result of his role in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, having achieved victory in 1956. King was supported by the local chapter of the  NAACP, whose President was E.D. Nixon, a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, AFL-CIO. President of the Brotherhood was the legendary A. Phillip Randolph.

            Randolph had a long socialist history. He struggled unceasingly to bring the trade union movement into alignment with the cause of civil rights, clashing repeatedly with both the “business unionism” central to the old American Federation of Labor, and the conservative “single-issue” orientation of the old-line Negro movement. Aside from their ingrained distrust of each other (the AFL was riddled with white racism, and the Negro movement generally disdained trade unionism as irrelevant to their cause), both movements had been severely damaged in the 1920’s and 1930’s by Communist infiltration. Both therefore identified the call for an alliance between labor and Negroes with Communist propaganda, and Randolph’s socialist reputation only intensified their revulsion.

            In the meantime, King’s leadership of the rebellion against segregation had moved beyond bus boycotts into open confrontation with the machinery of Southern racism. Horrible scenes of brutal police attacks on peaceful demonstrators were flashed by television and newspapers to appalled national audiences. Bombings of Negro churches, Klan murders of civil rights activists, snarling police dogs set upon non-violent youth, and snarling Southern governors standing in schoolhouse doors, became staples of national news. King declared the movement’s objective to be the passage of a national Civil Rights Act which would secure above all the right to vote for all Southern citizens regardless of race. But it became apparent that the Ghandian tactic of non-violent civil disobedience, brilliant as it was in publicizing the cause, would not generate the political clout necessary to adopt such an Act.

            In Boulder, we watched these events with a feeling of helpless isolation. But under Max Shachtman’s leadership, our little movement began to acquire a certain influence in civil rights circles. Some of this was due to the long (and not always friendly) acquaintance of Shachtman and Randolph. Much more, however, arose out of the dynamic character of Bayard Rustin, a veteran civil rights activist from the North, an experienced political organizer, a dedicated believer in the necessity of a labor-Negro alliance, and above all, man on good terms with both Shachtman and Randolph. In early1963, Shachtman and Rustin conceived of the idea of a mass march by Negroes and whites on Washington, DC for “jobs and freedom.” They took this idea to Randolph, who had already sponsored marches on Washington for equal employment during World War II (against bitter Communist opposition). He gave it his enthusiastic support. After an immense organizational effort, Rustin succeeded in mounting the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963, at which King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech.

            The organization and political consequences of this event were a perfect example of Garber’s notion of American history as a laboratory of experimental democracy. Later I shall explore the results of this experiment – results which would be decisive for the next 20 years of American history. For the time being, it should be noted that the Boulder YPSL/SP was restricted by geography to the role of frustrated onlookers. One of our number, Penn Kemble, had graduated college and moved to New York, where he eventually resumed activity in the New York YPSL and helped to organize the March. I recall that my friend Dave and I spent a few days circulating leaflets in the Negro neighborhoods of Denver urging participation in the March. (I think we were the only people doing that, and certainly the only white people.) Beyond that rather minimal contribution, and of course our actual attendance at the March, our contribution was not much.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

            In October of 1962 there occurred a momentous development in US-Soviet relations that would have a profound effect on my relationship to Alex Garber. It was during this event that I first began to appreciate Garber’s importance as a theoretician of American socialism. As I look back on those several days, I suppose the respect I already felt for Garber turned into a kind of awe.

            The socialist movement was deeply influenced by the pacifist ideology of Third Camp foreign policy notions. The “peace movement” was regarded by all of us – even the pro-Western Social Democrats, even Garber – as an important “arena” of socialist activity, just as important as the labor movement or the civil rights movement. As a result, when President Kennedy announced, in his grave speech to the American people of October 22, 1962, that the Soviet Union had threatened the national security of the United States by  shipping nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba, and that he was therefore declaring a naval quarantine around the island to block any further shipments, all of us (together with most of the world), fell into paroxysms of fear, certain that Earth was doomed to a nuclear holocaust unless Kennedy relented (we took it for granted that Khrushchev wouldn’t). I recall that Dave and I seriously considered fleeing to the dubious shelter of the Rocky Mountains.

            Instead, we retreated to Garber’s house in Boulder. There we gathered with the rest of the Boulder YPSLs and our sympathizers, to listen to Alex’s impassioned discourses on why the world was not doomed. One by one, he disposed of our whining pleas for capitulation. And by “our,” I don’t just mean me. Most of the YPSLs were doubtful about the wisdom of Kennedy’s ultimatum to Khrushchev. None, as I recall, except for John Maxwell., could understand how Garber could be so confident that Kennedy would triumph.

            But confident he was. It was Khrushchev, he argued, who had provoked this confrontation, but the balance of power dictated that it would be Kennedy who would prevail.

            One has to appreciate the intellectual atmosphere of the times to grasp how outré Garber’s position seemed to us. We were all budding eggheads, and the middlebrow culture of the times (Actually, of the New York Times) was saturated with the notion of imminent nuclear apocalypse. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists kept pushing the “doomsday clock” featured on its cover closer and closer to the hour of doom. Learned intellectuals and academics discoursed on the inevitability of nuclear war between the Superpowers unless disarmament, preferably mutual, but if necessary (to save the world), unilateral, could be imposed.

            In New York, Berkeley, Chicago, and everywhere else our organization had chapters, our comrades were racing to join anti-war demonstrations. It seemed bizarrely out of place for us in Boulder to be supporting the U.S. against the interests of the world. But that’s what Alex Garber was doing. We sat listening, and doubting. How could he be so damn sure?

            Never at a loss for words on any topic, Garber patiently explained “the logic of the situation.” World politics was based on a “balance of terror” between the two Superpowers. Neither of them had an interest in blowing up the world. Each maintained a nuclear arsenal for one sole purpose: to deter the other. Khrushchev had sinned against this holy writ only because he thought he could get away with it. He sought thereby to upset the balance in Russia’s favor. But he had misread Kennedy’s will. Kennedy had called his bluff. Therefore, Khrushchev would back down. The Cold War could not be won by either side through direct military force. Kennedy’s strategy was exactly appropriate. He did not seek to back the USSR into a corner, but only to return to the status quo ante. The consequences of retreat would be unpleasant for Russia, but not fatal, except possibly for Khrushchev. Russia would therefore back down. It was Kennedy who was defending the peace of the world, not the so-called peace movement.

            Day by day as the crisis unfolded, we listened to Garber interpret events. At first, his point of view seemed freakishly optimistic. But as the harrowing days wore on, we found ourselves unable to deny the rationality of his argument. Events were confirming it, each step of the way. So we rejected his premise, rationality itself. Nobody could understand a chaotic world, we ranted.

            Now he had us! To deny the susceptibility of the world to rational analysis, to reject the very principle of a “logic of the situation,” was to attack the legitimacy of reason itself, thereby undermining all possibility of reasonable action in the world. Where did that leave democracy? Where did it leave socialism? Were we being asked to lay down our very minds on the altar of peace? This truly was “peace at any price.” And the result of that would very likely be war.

            Finally, on October 28, 1962, Soviet ships bearing missiles headed for Cuba turned around without confronting American warships and headed back to the USSR. On October 29, it was announced that an agreement had been reached to bring about the removal of all Soviet missiles and bombers from the island. Various other provisions were included of a face-saving nature for the Soviets (insufficient, it would turn out, to save Khrushchev, who would soon be removed from power). The crisis was over. The Soviet Union had been humiliated, just as Garber predicted. It was, he modestly declared, nothing less than the triumph of reason over “chaos.”

            We peaceniks were flabbergasted, and life in the Boulder YPSL was never the same after. An entire cohort of “democratic socialists” had been weaned off pacifist Third Camp baloney and started on a diet of Cold War steak and potatoes. I began reading seriously a manuscript which John Maxwell had kept shoving in our faces, his dissection of pacifist ideology based on Weber’s brilliant essay, “Politics as a Vocation.” From it I learned the cruel logic of global bipolarity. In any confrontation between two great powers, one of which was totalitarian, the “logic of the situation” dictated that an independent peace movement would inexorably be driven to become the foreign policy tool of the totalitarian power. This logic of appeasement stemmed from the simple fact that no independent peace movement would be tolerated outside of a democracy. The pacifists knew this from their own harsh experience with totalitarian repression. They not only knew it, they rejoiced in it. For as Weber quoted, “The Christian does rightly, and leaves the consequences with the Lord.” In other words, the type of peace that would result from unilateral disarmament would offer an opportunity to all “men of good will” to suffer for the good; such suffering was the highest type of moral perfection available to us, and therefore ought to be welcomed, not shunned. Weber characterized the fundamental message of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as the “ethic of intentions,” as contrasted to the “ethic of responsibility.” The latter ought to rule in the realm of politics; the former, applied to political life, could only result in hell on Earth.

            John took this argument a step further. It was precisely hell on Earth that the pacifists intended to create, for the Sermon on the Mount was more than just an alternative “ethic.” Neither Jesus nor the pacifists wanted to create a peaceful world. “Turn the other cheek” was not based on brotherly love, it was based on a profound and total rejection of the world. Nothing but the worldly hell which such conduct would generate could convince mankind to embrace the spiritual glory of the next world. Pacifists used “peace” as a slogan, not a goal. The disastrous results of their ministry were not an unfortunate side effect, but antinomian goal.

            This was strong stuff indeed. But it acquired a deep resonance for me after the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Besides discrediting pacifism, it raised interesting questions about Weber himself. Weber could never bring himself to utter such a blasphemous critique of Christianity’s Gnosticism, notwithstanding the depth of his sociology of religion. Reading Maxwell’s essay, so indebted to Weber and yet so implicitly critical of his querulous ambivalence, supplied a certain critical distance toward the great man’s thought that would serve me well in the future, when the time came to deal with his characterization of Judaism as a “fossil religion.”

Tippecanoe and Goldwater Too

            The YPSL’s only real ideological opposition on campus came from the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, and the College Young Republican organization. They often tried to “red-bait” us, but couldn’t make the charge stick, since our anti-Communism was notorious. But when they tried to defend capitalism and denounce socialism in the many theaters of political debate that had opened up as the school student body reacted to the presence of an active socialist organization in its ranks, they found themselves outclassed, as it were. Fraternity bull-sessions were no match for the serious political training and education YPSL recruits received.

            Then they hit upon the idea that they thought would make their bones. We had brought Max Shachtman to the campus; they would bring Senator Barry Goldwater, icon of the Republican Right and serious candidate for the GOP nomination for President of the United States.

            The campus liberals were terrified. All our intemperate socialist advocacy had succeeded in accomplishing was to bring a plague of fascism to Boulder’s island of tolerance. We on the other hand got the scent of blood in our nostrils. We regarded Goldwater as a marginal crackpot whose dream of overthrowing the New Deal was the political equivalent of smallpox. We immediately called our New York comrades and ordered the printing of a thousand large gold lapel buttons emblazoned with the legend, “GOLDWATER IN 1864.” Then we began strategizing about how best to greet the good Senator. His supporters made our work easy. Unlike our mass meetings, which were always open to the public on a first come, first seated basis, the Goldwater speech was originally declared to be “by invitation only,” to “prevent YPSL disruption.” This announcement was greeted by a cry of outrage, so the organizers retreated: only the orchestra seats would be reserved for members of the YAF, the Young Republicans, and their invited guests. Two rows in the very front were to be held for us, the YPSLs, who were deemed more in need of Goldwater’s message than anyone else. We graciously declined this honor and suggested instead that the first two rows be set aside for the exclusive use of little old ladies in tennis shoes.

            The two weeks leading up to Goldwater’s appearance were spent in earnest attempts to acquaint the campus community with the substance of his ideas. We did not emphasize his foreign policy notions, some of which we privately agreed with. We stressed instead his  oft-stated desire to abolish social security, eliminate the income tax, his opposition to civil rights legislation, and his piquant refusal to disavow the John Birch Society, which believed Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. The one thing we did not do was consider disrupting the meeting. Democratic norms must be respected; Goldwater had as much right to speak on campus as we did. The American tradition of robust political debate allowed us some latitude in manifesting our disagreement with Goldwater through rude questioning after the speech and even limited heckling during it. Beyond this we did not go.

            But we did prepare a large banner which we unfurled from the balcony when Goldwater concluded. It read, “Tippecanoe and Goldwater Too,” and made the national news. It also turned the Senator’s face deep red.

            Many months later, when Goldwater indeed won the GOP presidential nomination and gave his infamous “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice” acceptance speech, Garber predicted electoral disaster for the Republican party nationwide, statewide, and locally. He urged Colorado liberal Democrats to run for office, assuring them that Goldwater’s repulsive coattails would push them to victory. None listened. They were all convinced that fascism was on the march. LBJ’s wonderful November 1964 victory proved otherwise.

JFK, RIP.

            I was strolling across the CU Quadrangle on November 23, 1963, when someone with a transistor radio mentioned to me that President Kennedy had been shot at in Dallas, Texas. I quickly made my way to the offices of the Colorado Daily, the campus newspaper, located in the student union building, which I knew had a United Press teletype. I came upon a scene of absolute chaos. The first thing I heard were 5 distinct bells from the ticker, the signal for news of the utmost importance: the President had indeed been shot, and was being rushed to the hospital. Soon 5 more bells: the President was dead.

            Again we YPSLs gathered in Garber’s living room to follow the news on TV. It was hard to keep our bearings amid the sequence of incredible events, first that the President was dead, second that Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as America’s next President, third that the assassin had been captured and identified as a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and finally Oswald’s assassination by Jack Ruby at the Dallas police station on live television.

            I must confess to feeling queasy about Oswald’s FPCC connection, on account of my own former membership in that organization. Several months earlier I had written to its national headquarters in New York severing my membership, and received back from its chairman a scathing attack on my “State Department socialism.” I still have that letter. Nevertheless, concern for my own skin unworthily competed for attention with the more important events of that week, especially since I seemed to be the object of some mockery from my fellow YPSLs.

            Garber came to my rescue, although certainly not intentionally. He reminded us of the Marxist position on political assassinations, which was that they changed nothing. (He reinforced this stance with his insistence that in a country like America, they were moral abominations as well, since they represented an attempt to murder democracy.) But he also began immediately to raise questions about the political biography of Oswald, who had been further identified as a turncoat U.S. Marine who had lived for some years in the U.S.S.R., before returning to the U.S. He did not question Oswald’s role as the shooter, but long experience in the radical movement had imbued him with a deep appreciation of the role of agent provocateurs, “double agents.” If ever there was a candidate for that role, it was the weasely Lee Harvey Oswald. I never lost this suspicion. Years later, I continued to harp on this subject, prompting Norman Podhoretz, who had run a few articles in Commentary questioning some aspects of the assassination, to tell me an anecdote of an experience he had at a White House ball. While dancing with his wife, he brushed against UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg (or perhaps he was then still a Supreme Court Justice), who was dancing with his own wife. Without missing a step, Goldberg whispered that it would be Norman’s own best interest not to run any more such articles. I asked Podhoretz what he said in response: “Nothing, but I took the hint.” Some hint, I thought.

            Although socialists are obliged to believe that assassinations don’t change anything, I’ve always thought that Kennedy’s assassination marked the end of an era in American history. I don’t harp on the subject anymore, but it seems clear that this attempt to murder American democracy in some sense succeeded. As we say about 9-11, everything changed after November 23.

Extremism

            Garber was fixated on the subject of extremism. It was his life’s mission to establish democratic socialism as a legitimate force in American life, and correspondingly, to maintain Communism’s illegitimacy. He often quoted a French socialist (whose name I’ve forgotten) that Communism was not “left-wing,” but “East-wing.”

            He identified two pools of extremism in American politics: the Radical Right, and the Communists. The former had emerged in the late 1950s and was analyzed by such social scientists as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Bell in particular was perturbed by such doctrinaire organizations as the John Birch Society, for they upset his proclamation of “The End of Ideology” in a book of the same name published in 1960. Hofstadter located the impetus for ultra-rightist extremism in what he called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). His psychological approach, although based on sound historical research, did not appeal to us. Bell and Lipset’s sociological approach did. It emphasized “status politics” (as opposed to “class politics”), rooted in the profound demographic and political shifts brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and the New Deal. According to them, these shifts had resulted in a dispossession of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the uncontested dominant ethnic strata of American society.

            There were obvious problems with this theory. Birchism’s predecessor, McCarthyism, included in its social base large numbers of ethnic Catholics, and in fact targeted the East Coast WASP elite, especially the “striped-pants cookie-pushers of the State Department,” a cabal which it claimed had “sold out” Eastern Europe and Chiang Kai-shek’s China to the Communists. The John Birch Society adopted much of this ideology, but its membership was devoid of ethnic minorities and consisted mainly of middle-American (not elite) WASPs. Moreover, it identified the New Deal as a stealthy Communist plot to adulterate the purity of American capitalism with socialist welfarism – a doctrine not at all appealing to the ethnic minorities which had supported McCarthy while remaining enthusiastic beneficiaries and supporters of the welfare state and trade unionism, as in fact McCarthy was. The famous Birch formula – Liberalism = Socialism = Communism – condemned them (in those days) to frustrated isolation in American life.

            Uneasy as Bell may have felt over the re-emergence of ideology in American politics, by associating it with what he regarded as a declining social phenomenon (WASP hegemony), and with such lost causes as Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, and Taft Republicanism, he seems to have sustained his confidence in the overall validity of his “end of ideology” theory. We democratic socialists accepted his relegation of the Radical Right to America’s historical backwater, even though we could not accept his end of ideology thesis. We were ourselves “ideologists,” after all – socialist ideologists. But Bell too called himself a “socialist in economics,” and if the contradiction didn’t bother him, we saw no reason to let it bother us.

            On the other hand, the decline of the John Birch Society was followed by disturbing signs of a new extremism in the American landscape, this time not of the Right but of the Left. And this one was by no means confined to the miniscule proportions of the Radical Right, eventually growing into a genuine student movement with millions of supporters, and leaving behind a “Counterculture” whose effects profoundly altered the American way of life.

            The first obscure rumblings of this incipient “New Left” made themselves known to us in the “Hippie” phenomenon. The YPSL unsuccessfully competed with Hippieism for the attention of rebellious students. After a few years in the early ‘60s of remarkable membership growth on the Boulder campus, we now found it very difficult to recruit. We didn’t exactly oppose pot, sex and LSD, but as respectable Social Democrats we couldn’t very well embrace them either. The hippies, for their part, didn’t oppose us, especially when we threw parties and denounced capitalism, but considered joining an organization and reading books an affront to their individuality.

            Garber especially took a very jaundiced view of the Hippies. One of the worst pejoratives in his ample vocabulary was “kook.” Hippies were kooks. He warned of their pernicious influence in American life and mocked them mercilessly. Some of the older YPSLs noticed the difference between Hippies and their forerunners, the Beatniks, the latter a superior breed, because at least they tried to produce something (even if only bad poetry and silly novels), whereas the Hippies seemed to consider it sufficient to lie around getting stoned.

            We consoled ourselves that the Hippie eruption could not survive more than a few seasons. It might interfere with our recruiting, but it did not injure our premier political status. The Hippies were deeply apolitical. We were the true radicals. Or so we thought.

The Great Society and Vietnam

            Lyndon Johnson replaced the New Frontier with his own program – “the Great Society” – with Civil Rights as its keystone.

            The Great Society began with Johnson declaring that passage of a powerful Civil Rights Act would be the greatest memorial American could render to its fallen President. He then set forth a program of social legislation aimed at recapturing the spirit of the New Deal. He called this the War On Poverty. Although neither Johnson nor his liberal Democratic supporters articulated the connection between Civil Rights and the War On Poverty, this connection was apparent, not only in his legislative agenda, but in a perspective on American politics called “Realignment.” Democratic socialists, and academics influenced by democratic socialism, were among the leading formulators of this theory.

            Shachtman and Rustin were at the crossroads between Realignment theory and action with their “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The demand for jobs was key. Without jobs, the demand for civil rights was hollow, as the freed slaves of the ante-bellum South found out when their Abolitionist supporters failed to support the economic analog to Emancipation, “40 Acres and a Mule.” Jobs were the equivalent of “40 acres” in an industrialized economy. A jobs program for the unemployed would lead to full-employment, with profound consequences for capitalism in the world’s powerhouse economy.

            Jobs and full employment have long been a fundamental part of the socialist program. Marx’s analysis of capitalism treats the labor-power of workers as just another marketable commodity, whose price is determined by the law of supply and demand. When unemployment is high, competition for jobs drives down the cost of wages and weakens the ability of workers to maintain their standard of living above subsistence levels. Trade unionism, strikes, and collective bargaining don’t work when unemployment levels are high. Unemployment levels among Negroes have traditionally been high, and employers  became adept in manipulating job-hungry minorities against each other, as well as against organized workers, in the labor market. In this fashion, the race-based caste system in America reinforced the class-based capitalist economic system. For this reason, “Black and White, Unite and Fight” became the organizing slogan of the CIO’s campaign to extend trade unionism from the craft trades to the industrial workers in the 1930’s and ‘40s. In this sense, “Black and White, Unite and Fight” found a new expression in the “Jobs and Freedom” demands of the March on Washington.

            Johnson’s War On Poverty did not put its emphasis on jobs. Instead, it regarded poverty as the cause, not the effect, of unemployment, and defined poverty as a social disease, to be treated therapeutically by middle-class professionals through extensive educational programs aimed at healing broken family structures, teaching work discipline, drafting large numbers of often-unprepared and unmotivated minority students into higher education, and sponsoring community “outreach” aimed at encouraging neighborhood “empowerment” in local community control schemes. The availability of jobs was not disregarded, but was given a distinctly secondary priority in abolishing American poverty. The net effect of this therapeutic approach was to increase the number of jobs available to thousands of middle-class liberal arts semi-professionals being graduated by the country’s ever-expanding higher education institutions, who neither wanted nor were suited for jobs in private enterprise. But very few real jobs were created for the “clients” of these “Hull House” projects, whose bureaucratic sponsors scoffed at the notion that the industrial factory’s well-paying union employment offered anything other than “dead-end” jobs.

            Garber did not take a Marxist view of the Civil Rights Movement’s potential. He did not delude himself that the War On Poverty’s “social worker” approach could actually work, but neither did he accept Shachtman and Rustin’s “Eurocentric” belief that full employment had much chance of success on American shores. Instead, he argued that it was the Civil Rights movement itself that posed the real danger to American capitalism.

Civil Rights vs. Capitalism

            Garber argued that the distinguishing features of American democracy – the real essence of “American Exceptionalism” – had been identified by John C. Calhoun, “The Philosopher of the Confederacy” (1782-1850). Calhoun was a great opponent of majority rule. He contended that the Founding Fathers had created a Constitution whose main purpose was to frustrate majority rule through the institutionalization of what he called the rule of “the concurrent majority,” which was simply majority rule, but with minority veto rights. In other words, the majority’s right to govern must always be curbed by empowering any significant minority with the right to block and obstruct. Government must never be majoritarian, it must be consensual, i.e. virtually unanimous. Examples of this intention were legion: recognition of geography rather than mere population as a principle of legislative apportionment, the division of powers which set the government at loggerheads with itself, lifetime tenure for the federal judiciary, state’s rights, etc.

            Calhoun’s doctrine justified the South’s invocation of interposition, nullification, and eventually, secession, the principle which triggered the Civil War. He did not spend much time defending slavery (the institution which the principle of the concurrent majority was purposed to protect), but rather in exploring and elaborating its legal infrastructure, especially the Constitution, which he venerated as slavery’s great bulwark.  (The Abolitionist newspaper The Liberator declared on its masthead that the U.S. Constitution was a “pact with Devil and an agreement with Hell,” was in full agreement with Calhoun in this respect). But it did not die with the death of slavery in the Civil War. Even after the institution which Calhoun sought to protect with his doctrine of the concurrent majority had been dismantled, Calhoun’s ghost continued to haunt politics, guarding capitalism’s holy of holies, private property, from majoritarian (“mob”) encroachments.

             

            Garber argued that the Civil Rights Revolution posed an existential threat not just to the  American caste system, but to its capitalist system. By overthrowing segregation, Southern Negroes would gain the vote for the first time since Reconstruction. The political party basis for minority veto rights in American politics, the Dixiecrat-GOP Alliance, would thus be disrupted. Defeating this Alliance, which had ruled Congress for decades, would replace the rule of the concurrent majority with real majority rule – true democracy. That meant turning political democracy into social democracy, bringing substance to capitalism’s worst nightmare – bourgeois private property devoured by the bourgeois democratic political institutions which capitalism created.

            The attentive reader may already have detected that according to the Garber perspective, the Civil Rights Movement needed no Marxian “vanguard” guiding it to economic utopia. Freedom was enough. Jobs would come, but not because of the vanguard inspiration of socialist intellectuals. Social democracy was inherent in American democracy, in the same sense that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was inherent in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Garber never stated this proposition openly (I don’t know if he even entertained it privately). But it was certainly implied in his theory of party realignment brought about by the Civil Rights revolution, and this implication was surely not lost on the Leninoids in the Socialist Party. It was enough to cause Garber’s star to remain in the dim outer reaches of the Shachtman universe. In effect, he argued that American Exceptionalism would go on marginalizing the socialists just as a century before it had marginalized the Abolitionists.

Vietnam

            Not content with depriving his fellow socialists of their rice bowls (no vanguard role meant no heroic careers), Garber’s theorizing had a second implication of much weightier significance: if the success of the Negro movement truly carried such revolutionary consequences, a counterrevolutionary reaction was inevitable. In some sense, he foresaw this counterrevolution. When the Vietnam War escalated, he casually informed his bewildered flock in Boulder that the prospects for a Social Democratic breakthrough in American politics had been set back by “at least a generation.” But he didn’t explain why. He dismissed the “guns vs. butter” argument contemptuously. The U.S. “oozed wealth out of every pore,” and could easily afford to finance the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam. If the reason was not economic, then it had to be political. The Vietnam War raised a foreign policy issue that posed a mortal danger to the Social Democratic movement in American politics.

            The forward momentum of the Social Democratic revolution in American politics depended on what we called “the liberal-labor-minorities coalition.” The whole purpose of the realignment strategy was to bring this coalition, the electoral backbone of the Democratic party, into ascendancy over the Dixiecrats in the party. And the Civil Rights revolution had achieved this; “the coalition” now ruled the Democrats, as evidenced by Johnson’s War on Poverty.

            But the coalition’s seams were vulnerable, especially the one between the middle class liberals who served as public spokesmen and political leaders in Democratic party politics, and the labor and minority elements who made up its mass base. New Deal liberals never fully accepted the anti-Communist consensus, and were deeply affected by the prevailing peace movement influence on American foreign policy. In other words, foreign policy was always a “wedge issue” in the coalition.

            We in Boulder received our first inkling of just how effective this “wedge” would become when the Hippie phenomenon, instead of withering away like its Beatnik predecessor, exploded into a full-scale student movement. The reason for this explosion lies in something now almost forgotten: Universal Military Training, i.e., the Draft.

            The Draft was initially created by FDR to expand military service to cover all eligible male youth in order to fight World War II. After that war, it fell into abeyance until the Cold War, and the Korean War in particular, led to its revival. After Korea, it was maintained as an obligation on all young American males. But in the absence of an actual war, it functioned as a two-year service requirement carrying the risk, not the actuality, of combat. And it was riddled with exceptions which made various forms of legal evasion available to wide segments of the middle and upper classes. The two most common were service in the National Guard, which reduced the active duty requirement to 6 months, and full-time college attendance, which carried deferments up to the age of 26 (after which young men were no longer called). Marriage with children also excluded one from call-up.

            No one looked forward to being drafted, but few resisted. Several of my older YPSL comrades, who had already met their military requirement, treated us younger socialists to lurid tales of basic training and thoroughly enjoyed our resulting discomfort. Nevertheless, military service was seen as part of the price of being a free American. This all changed as escalation of the Vietnam War caused draft calls to rapidly expand. Now being drafted carried with it the prospect of combat. The possibilities for evasion became fewer. National Guard service offered no “automatic out” since Guard units were mobilized for actual service in Vietnam, and the 6-month active duty requirement was lengthened, in many cases for “the duration.”

            I was on campus as the realization gradually dawned on my University of Colorado fellow students that graduation (or “dropping out”) carried a very real military fate. The impact of this realization has been consistently minimized in most accounts of the period, which seek to portray the anti-war generation has heroes of “the resistance” rather than draft-dodgers. These accounts are prevarications. The waves of anxiety that swept through college populations were palpable. The cultural problem was to translate these collective panic attacks into something other than what they actually were – flop-sweat. The Hippies had a ready answer: “Hell no, we won’t go.” But the Hippies were apolitical. Beyond “disaffiliation,” which meant scurrying into the anonymity of communes or crossing the border to Canada, the Hippies had no answers. The Vietnam War escalation transformed the Hippie phenomenon into a genuine student movement, with a political program based on illegitimating the war and the “American Empire” which was supposedly perpetrating it.

            The more the media brought the war into our “living rooms” – or rather, into our dorm TV rooms – the more students discovered just how corrupt and evil “Amerika” was. This new mentality was inimical to Social Democratic values. The more it prevailed, the more we YPSLs found ourselves relegated to the sidelines. We struggled mightily to dredge up some magical political formula whereby our anti-Communist stance in foreign policy could be reconciled to the growing student unrest. It was an impossible task. Our national leadership developed something called “Negotiations Now,” with a National Board of prominent anti-Communist liberals and pacifists, opposed to unilateral withdrawal, or to any other course leading to the military victory of either side. It gained zero influence. Everyone sensed that Communist North Vietnam would settle for nothing less than total victory. Therefore the only way the war could end was for the United States to accept defeat. John Maxwell’s paper on pacifism would thus receive a mournful vindication.

            My final years at Boulder were therefore unhappy. Not only did our YPSL chapter fall into decline and even disrepute, increasingly outflanked on the left by a student movement we could not support, but Alex Garber began to realize that he would not be awarded tenure, and would have to leave CU for an academic post elsewhere. We all knew that without Alex we could not survive politically. Facing graduation in 1965, I felt strongly that he had a lot more to teach me about socialism and sociology. So soon after Garber received his appointment to the faculty of Sacramento State College in California, I followed him there as a graduate student.

           

Chapter Two

Thinking For Myself

Sacramento

            It was a fruitful choice, certainly for me but I think also for him. Two intellectual breakthroughs awaited, both of which have already been alluded to: one dealing with the relationship between Karl Marx’s notion of alienation, and George Herbert Mead’s concept of socialization and the emergence of the social self; the other with the problem of the so-called end of ideology, and the emergence of the New Left. We also succeeded in building a small chapter of the YPSL, but it met with the same political difficulties that the Boulder chapter did.

Marx and Mead

            Garber had long taught both Mead on the social self, and Marx’s theory of alienation, with great enthusiasm and intellectual depth. But he did not connect them. I get the credit for insisting that there had to be a connection. I nagged Garber to distraction about this, until finally – perhaps just to put an end to my pestering – he made that connection. On the one hand we had from Marx a description of the consequences on the individual personality of economic exploitation. That’s all the theory of alienation really amounts to, when stripped of its Young Hegelian trappings (an enterprise which contemporary academic Marxism seems bent on reversing). Mead on the other hand supplied sociology with an explanation of the social origins of the human personality, by describing its emergence through a series of stages from infancy through adulthood, not as the unfolding of an inbuilt “human nature” (in the manner of psychology), but through the medium of socialization, a process whereby the miracle of individual self-consciousness blossomed as the child learned increasingly to “take the attitude of the other toward oneself.”

            One day, after a long night spent in fruitless wrangling between the two of us trying to thrash out this problem, Garber excitedly called me. He had had his Eureka moment: “Tom, come over immediately. I know what the connection is!”

            I blearily drove over to his house. He had had these Eureka moments before. It would be my thankless task to shoot his latest revelation full of holes. Settling down amid the previous night’s acrid cigar and cigarette fumes and warmed-over stale coffee, I prepared to do my duty. Without even waiting for me to take my first swallow, Garber hit me with it: “Alienation is de-socialization!”

            My first thought was, it can’t be that simple. My second, I’m ashamed to say, was pure jealousy. He had done it. Instead of the brilliant young graduate student using the tired old professor as his sounding board, the reverse had happened. I was both mortified and electrified. After all, it was my hobby-horse, not his. I had incessantly harped on the necessity for a connection, even when Garber made quite clear his desire to move on to other subjects. And my reward for this badger-like persistence was to see the breakthrough discovery made by “the tired old professor”!

            But he was right. “Alienation is de-socialization” was exactly the right formulation. Garber had found the point of contact between two entirely separate thought-streams, European Marxism and American Pragmatism. Cheated though I might feel, there was no denying that the credit belonged to Alex. The process of socialization described by Mead, when reversed, would logically lead to a decomposition of the personality, regressing back through the stages he so carefully delineated, that paralleled step by step the “symptoms” of alienation poignantly described by Marx in the Grundrisse.

            The sad aftermath of this episode is that I could never bring myself to do my disciple’s duty to Alex. 23-year-olds can be callow. I should have buckled down to the academic task of assembling the texts and organizing the research, so that Garber could flesh out his new concept in academically respectable terms. It would have made both of our reputations, him as the author, and me as the apprentice. The intellectual atmosphere of the times was certainly favorable. Marxian thought still had great cachet in the culture. Sociology was struggling for a way of bridging Mead’s thought onto the Marx-Weber history-oriented pinnacle of the discipline. For his part, Garber never encouraged me along these lines. Perhaps he did not find the topic as stimulating as I did. Maybe he felt he had bigger fish to fry. Maybe it sufficed just to get me out of his Marx-Mead hair, which it did. Whatever his reasons, mine were unworthier, and now that the cultural atmosphere has moved beyond, or descended below, this level, and sociology has collapsed as a discipline, no audience remains to appreciate its significance. As my old friend Dave Rubinstein, likes to say (Look Homeward, Angel), “Lost, lost.”

China

            Garber in any case did have other fish to fry, and they were foreign policy fish. In Boulder he had begun a three-part series dealing with the role of U.S.-China relations in causing the Vietnam War. These essays were published in the Socialist Party publication New America, in 1964-65. He looked at the circumstances which had led to the escalation of the Vietnam War. He began this examination not as an academic exercise but primarily out of concern for its effect on politics in the United States. He knew that the liberal-labor-minorities coalition which had emerged during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and which had been re-energized by the Civil Rights Movement, was destabilized by foreign policy issues, particularly as they pertained to the problem of international Communism.

            Communism profoundly divided this coalition. Some of its constituents, particularly organized labor, were adamantly opposed to Communism, while others, especially among its liberal leadership, either from pacifist motives, or because they were Soviet sympathizers, or for other reasons, dissented from the Cold War consensus which defined American foreign policy in the postwar era.

            Although Garber considered himself an anti-Communist and heartily endorsed America’s leading role against the totalitarian threat which Communism posed, he accepted that the chances of this point of view prevailing in the domestic coalition for social change were slim. Indeed, because Vietnam elevated the issue of Communism above domestic policy considerations like full employment, racial integration, and further extension of the welfare state, he foresaw not just the disintegration of the coalition for social change, but even the rollback of the progressive achievements of the New Deal itself, at the time thought by everyone to be irreversible.

            In this respect, Garber interpreted the Vietnam war as a reactionary event. On the other hand, he could not, as a principled anti-Communist, accept the victory of Communism in Vietnam, even as a “necessary evil.” Therefore he sought some programmatic formula which would allow this circle to be squared. In this task, of course, he failed: Communism triumphed in Vietnam, the coalition shattered, and all the reactionary domestic consequences which he feared came to pass.

            On the other hand, Communism triumphed in Vietnam without producing the “domino effect” which supporters of the war had predicted. The nations of Southeast Asia did not topple. The international balance of power between East and West remained intact. A principal goal of the war was to maintain this balance, and not just to promote democracy in Vietnam, however worthy that latter objective might be. And it was maintained, despite the humiliating circumstances of America’s withdrawal. How could this be?

            The interesting thing about this outcome is that it too was foreseen by Garber. Or rather, not foreseen, but actually advocated. For in the course of trying to “square the circle” of a fragmenting proto-socialist coalition in American politics, Garber carried out an analysis of the causes of the Vietnam war, and created a program for the United States, which actually did “square the circle” – not of domestic politics, but of foreign policy. That program was successful. But instead of becoming the foreign policy of the coalition, as Garber hoped, it was unveiled to an astonished world as the secret foreign policy of the Nixon Administration. And instead of becoming the means of welding back together a fragmented Liberal-Labor-Minorities coalition in American politics, it became the means whereby America was able to avoid, not defeat, but the consequences of defeat in Vietnam. Indeed, it became much more than that. Eventually, it played a big part in the downfall of the Soviet Union and the victory of the West in the Cold War.

            This program is of course the U.S.-China rapprochement. Garber certainly never claimed credit for supplying this idea to the Nixon Administration. But Nixon hatched this policy in secret, whereas Garber set forth a reasoned analysis by which to justify it, in advance of its public adoption by the U.S. government. For that achievement, he certainly does deserve a full measure of credit. So far as I am aware, no other scholar predicted this development.

            Garber based his analysis of the causes of the Vietnam war on two main sources: the concept of polycentrism, and a book by Harold Isaacs, first published in 1947, entitled No Peace for Asia.

            The concept of polycentrism was initially put forward by the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti in 1956, as a claim for greater independence by states and parties within the international Communist movement. It manifested the gradual process of destalinization that followed Stalin’s death. Polycentrism was immediately subjected to a fierce attack by the French Communist Roger Garaudy, thought to be acting on behalf of the Soviet leadership. The debate intermittently continued until 1961, when further open discussion of the notion was proscribed on the grounds that it would lead to “factionalism” within the world Communist movement.

            As presented by the Communists, polycentrism was an argument for greater latitude in strategy and tactics by the various national Communist movements (or states), based on the different conditions each of them faced. But the idea was taken over by Western scholars of Communism known as “Sovietologists” when Survey magazine published a special edition devoted to the topic in 1962, edited by Walter Laquer and Leopold Labedz. In their hands, polycentrism came to stand for an objective process of decentralization and fragmentation in the world Communist movement. It signified a loss of control by the Soviet Union of the movement, not so much caused by the death of Stalin and subsequent destalinization campaign inside the U.S.S.R. (Chinese and Yugoslav dissent from Russian domination preceded these events), as accelerated by it.

            Eventually, polycentrism came to be identified with the phenomenon of “national communism,” which emphasized and concretized nationalism as its fundamental motor force. With this refinement, polycentrism became a revolutionary idea in the field of Western Sovietology, which previously had been dominated by a model of monolithic Russian imperial domination of the world Communist movement. This monolithic model  stemmed from Sovietology’s dedication to the ideal-type of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism was held to be incompatible with any pluralism within the Communist movement; hence polycentrism’s adoption by at least some of the Sovietologists suggested an abandonment, or at least revision, of the totalitarian ideal-type for understanding Communism’s structure and function in the world. As such, it was almost as controversial in the Western world as it was among the Communists themselves. Many anti-Communists, both inside and outside the ranks of the scholarly Sovietologists, were reluctant to give up the pure ideal-type of totalitarianism. They claimed that polycentrism was either illusory, trivial – or even a sinister strategic deception perpetrated by the Communist elite to mislead the West.

            Those who accepted the validity of polycentrism as an accurate description of real internal stresses in the world Communist movement soon realized that a different strategic concept flowed from it, one based on exploiting these stresses so as to further weaken the movement’s totalitarian structure. Since nationalism appeared to be the most powerful agency promoting polycentrism, such a strategic concept would naturally focus on reinforcing nationalism in the Communist bloc. That meant adjusting Cold War policies to allow for Western encouragement of assertions of national independence by Communist countries. The two most prominent such assertions were the Yugoslav and the Chinese. Of these, Western policymakers had already recognized the importance of supporting Tito in his struggle sustain national independence of Moscow, even though he continued to maintain a totalitarian internal system.

            That left China. And this is where Garber’s use of polycentrism took a novel turn. For notwithstanding the obvious enmity between the two Communist giants, Red China was totally “off-limits” to American foreign policy. In fact, in most quarters, Left and Right, Mao’s China was seen as a greater threat to Western civilization and the peace of the world than Soviet Russia. The “polycentrists” among the Sovietologists recognized the authenticity of the Sino-Soviet rift and hence of Chinese “national communism”; but they mostly refrained from drawing any policy conclusions from this recognition. If they did, it was to express a kind of grudging sympathy for the more “moderate” Russians against the “maniacal” Maoists. Understandable, given the often freakish propaganda (and conduct) of the Red Chinese, but not very strategic, to Garber’s way of thinking.

            At the most fundamental geopolitical level, the Soviet Union was a superpower and China was but a developing nation, if even that. Only the Soviets had the raw military and industrial power to challenge America, the world’s other superpower. The Chinese, no matter how hysterical their propaganda and vast their population resources, were puny by every other measure of national strength. The only scale in which they weighed heavily was within the Communist bloc. In every other respect, the Russians counted for vastly more. The Russian Bear was clearly the West’s primary enemy. Therefore, Garber asked, why are we not doing for the Chinese what we have already been doing for Tito’s Yugoslavia?

            At this stage, Garber invoked the second of his two main sources, Harold Isaacs’ prescient work No Peace for Asia, first published soon after World War II (1947), and then again in a revised edition in 1967. Isaacs had followed politics in Southeast Asia, including China, for many years, first from a Trotskist perspective (Garber too started as a Trotskyist before becoming a democratic socialist), and later as a recognized “Asia hand.” The specific insight Garber drew from this book was that the Vietnam war was not just an expression of internal forces in Vietnam, although these of course played a part, but also of the unsettled and turbulent character of conditions in Asia generally. In other words, the balance of power which had arisen between America and Russia after World War II extended only to Europe. So Asia’s postwar history was a history of hot wars – in Korea, the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam, and many other venues. What distinguished conflict in Asia from that in Europe, the other great theater of East-West rivalry, was that Asian wars were not “cold.”

            Garber took from Isaacs the notion that the basic reason for this instability in Asia was that the inability of the United States to reach a modus vivendi with Communist China. Such a modus vivendi with Russia was implied in Kennan’s famous doctrine of Containment, which by rejecting the ultra-Right’s demand for “rollback” of the Iron Curtain, implicitly recognized the legitimacy of the Communist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Containment denied Soviet Communism any right to expand beyond its existing borders – hence the Cold War – but it accepted ground rules for the conflict in Europe which prevented it from escalating into hot war. Garber joined with Isaacs in concluding therefore that the key to pacifying conflicts such as the Vietnam war lay in creating such a modus vivendi with China, Asia’s regional superpower. Only through such an arrangement could an Asian balance of power be established, and only through such a balance could the postwar era of “no peace for Asia” be ended.

            Garber therefore argued that no solution to the Vietnam War which failed to deal with Asia’s endemic instability was possible. The war could not be won “on the ground” because the United States could not match the combined strength of Vietnamese and Chinese manpower (and their totalitarian willingness to absorb vast losses) without escalating to levels unacceptable to the American public. But it also could not be lost without endangering America’s strategic position throughout Asia – the “domino effect.” The solution to this conundrum was to “leave the ground” and ascend to the level of diplomacy in international politics. Polycentrism in the world Communist movement made such an ascent feasible; Isaacs’ “no peace for Asia” thesis pointed out the direction which diplomacy must take.

            There were many nuances and details to Garber’s analysis which we need not develop here – for example, his acknowledgement that America’s willingness to confront Communism’s expansionism in Vietnam, although futile as an “end game,” was nevertheless a critical prelude to diplomacy, by forcefully setting limits to that expansionism, just as it had in Korea. Suffice it to say that Garber gave up hope for “victory” in Vietnam (just as President Truman rejected General McArthur’s demand for victory in the Korean War) in return for the construction of a balance of power in Asia comparable to the one which had kept the peace in Europe, however uneasily.

            Looking beyond the Asian theater, Garber advocated a U.S.-China rapprochement as a means of further deepening the rift between Russia and China and thus eventually weakening the power of international Communism, and the Soviet Union in particular. He invoked the great German sociologist Georg Simmel’s analysis of small group dynamics. Simmel had noted that in any group of three actors, power always fell to the one in a position to play the other two off against each other. With a certain risqué glee, Garber called on America to assume the role of “Lucky Pierre” vis-à-vis Russia and China. In that situation, Russian diplomacy would be turned into a bedroom farce – except that what this farce portended for the Soviets, the threat of a two-front war, was not comical in the least.

            Garber’s call for rapprochement with China as a basis for ending the Vietnam War fell on deaf ears. Even in his own socialist movement, it was rejected as unrealistic. America had escalated the war primarily to deter Chinese Communist expansion, which it viewed as the real ogre behind the Vietnamese Communist throne. How could Garber expect a China-obsessed America to change direction so radically, even assuming that such a change might produce a desirable effect? Among the broader public, opposition was more virulent. Anyone who advocated diplomatic contact with the Red Chinese was smeared as a Communist dupe or worse. This opposition was fueled by a potent force in American politics known as the “China Lobby.”

            The China Lobby was an extremely well-financed collection of constituencies originally created during World War II to support Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist government in China. Driven off the mainland by the Communist revolution in 1949, Chiang had been reduced to occupying Taiwan (Formosa), where he was drenched with American military and financial aid in support of his forlorn dream of returning to power on the mainland. Much of this financial aid returned to the United States for distribution to various ultra-Right groups willing to lobby for war with the Red Chinese. This Lobby, more than any other single force, defeated all calls for normalization of US-China relations.

            The Soviet Union’s image as a more “moderate” Communist state as against Red China’s “extremism,” a line which had some appeal to Liberal intellectuals, also militated against the notion of an opening to Red China. In effect, Garber found himself fighting a “two-front war.” However appealing as a theoretical proposition, buttressed by polycentric Sovietology and Isaacs’ masterly Asian journalism, the proposition of an opening to China could not gain traction as a solution to the problem which Garber had originally hoped to solve: a new foreign policy orientation for the disintegrating domestic coalition for progressive social change in America.

            But the idea of rapprochement with China was obviously alive in the secret precincts of the American foreign policy establishment. It burst upon a shocked world when the “ping-pong diplomacy” of 1971 culminated in Henry Kissinger’s trip to Peking, which set the stage for President Nixon’s even more astounding visit to China in 1972. Garber and his acolytes drew some recognition in their small milieu for having predicted these events, but by then it was far too late for that recognition to have any influence on reunifying a domestic political coalition which had ceased to exist.

            U.S.-China rapprochement allowed the Nixon Administration to end the Vietnam War on very unfavorable terms without, however, generating the domino effect throughout Southeast Asia which otherwise would have ensued. Eventually, it produced the predicted stresses on the world Communist bloc that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a tremendous success for American foreign policy, having beneficial consequences for which many fathers claimed credit, as successes usually do. Among these was not Garber himself, for he had nothing to do with its conceptualization by those who actually carried it out. All he did was to analyze the circumstances which made it advisable, even mandatory, and to advocate it to a largely deaf audience. In terms of his motivation for conducting this analysis, he was not the father of success, but a voice in the wilderness. The welfare state, coalition politics, the labor movement, the hope for a Social Democratic America – all these things, to which Garber had dedicated his life, were dead or dying by the time he himself died, in 1984.

            I don’t know how Alex responded to the lack of appropriate reaction within our socialist movement to his magnum opus on U.S.-China relations. He cannot have been pleased. I personally considered it an extension of our foreign policy education that began with his treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since at this time there were very few socialists who were prepared to publicly acknowledge how right he had been – even within our own ranks, among people who and long since ceased to be “Third Camp” or “peaceniks” – his available audience was pitifully small. At any rate, I had grown much more interested in the domestic fruit of America’s foreign policy crisis – the New Left student movement.

From Radical Right to New Left

            Since Garber had pulled the theoretical ground out from under me on the Mead-Marx question, I turned to another sociological conundrum. The rise of the New Left put a definite end to Bell’s “End of Ideology” thesis. The New Left was a genuine ideological movement and had to be addressed as such. Our confidence that its predecessors, the Hippies and their Counterculture, would “wither away,” was clearly misplaced. Instead they had mutated into a real ideological force. But there still remained Bell and Lipset’s fascinating analysis of the roots of that earlier ideological movement, the Radical Right. Was that too discredited? The notion of the Radical Right as an expression of “status politics,” rooted in democratic America’s gradual dispossession of the WASPs from their previous elite status in the country’s ethnic hierarchy, seemed too juicy to abandon. Perhaps ethnicity could bear another squeeze.

            It had occurred to me that the New Left, especially in its early phases, bore an eerie resemblance to the Radical Right, both ideologically and sociologically. Both were obviously extremist phenomena. Each embraced conspiracy theories of American politics, which they depicted as dominated by shadowy elites with hidden agendas, one aimed at delivering the country over to Communist totalitarianism through internal subversion, the other to “liberal corporate fascism.” Both hated the New Deal passionately. Both disavowed the everyday give-and-take of democratic politics in favor of “underground” cults, although the New Left soon adopted an open program of “confrontation politics” whose violent potential only occasionally materialized in the Radical Right. Most suggestively, each placed heavy emphasis on an ethic of radical individualism. This ethic, so honored in the American cultural tradition, drew directly from New England Puritanism. Whether by refusing to pay one’s income tax, or by burning one’s draft card, both movements burned with individual self-righteousness and proudly asserted the claims of individual conscience over those of the community and particularly, of the democratic state.

            While pondering these parallels, I experienced a flash of insight that hit me with the force of a revelation. It suddenly seemed possible that these similarities, particularly those which partook of the American Protestant tradition, might actually reflect a common sociological root: the dispossession of the WASPs.

            The New Left, in its early phases, had its strongest base in the Ivy League colleges which had historically incubated America’s WASP elite – schools like Tufts, Antioch, Princeton and Yale. The New York Times, in its fawning coverage of the movement, often remarked on this connection by way of celebrating how disaffected the youth of America’s “best and brightest” had become. Their rebellion was depicted and legitimated as continuing the lustrous American tradition of Protestant dissent against the unjust acts of a perfidious government, extending even to violent acts of anti-Americanism. The prep-school origins and prominent family connections of movement leaders was always admiringly cited. The names of Thoreau, Emerson, and even John Brown were frequently invoked.

            Militating against this stress on the WASP ethnicity of the early New Left was the indisputable presence of large numbers of Jewish youth in the movement. But their participation did not contradict the thesis. Jewish participation consisted of two components. One was the “red-diaper baby” phenomenon. These were the offspring of parents who had been members or fellow-travelers of the Communist Party, and who were really not rebelling at all, but rather carrying their parents’ suppressed pro-Communist politics back into political action after their “long nightmare of McCarthyism.” The other strand sprang from upwardly-mobile Jewish families, to whom identification with elite WASPs represented the highest form of assimilation. These families had long since abandoned the traditional Judaism of their parents and grandparents. Their children’s untrammeled entry into elite schools that had formerly barred them on anti-Semitic quota grounds represented one of their proudest postwar achievements. An Ivy League degree for them constituted a passport to full Americanization. Ivy League schools possessed this “certifying” authority not so much on grounds of academic as of ethnic excellence. Of course, WASPs were seen as not being “ethnic” at all, but as authentic Americans. But that was part of their assimilative magnetism.

            As the New Left epidemic spread beyond Ivy League and other elite schools, it of course lost its uniquely WASP demographic. But it did not lose its avant-garde Protestant cultural flavor until on the verge of disintegrating, a direct result of bitter internal conflict that broke out between Maoist and anti-Maoist factions within the movement. The Maoists stood for disciplined Chinese Stalinism and had no patience for the individualistic excesses of the earlier New Left generation. Rather than allow their movement to fall into Maoist hands, the anti-Maoists steered the core organization of the New Left – Students for a Democratic Society, or “SDS” – onto a lunatic course of underground bomb-making, bank robberies, and prison escape adventures. Thus criminalized, the New Left lost its original ethnic character. But it left behind a radicalized Counterculture vastly strengthened and more influential than ever before.

            We Social Democrats had been arguing for some time that the New Left was a reactionary rather than a revolutionary movement. We based this argument on the obvious support which conservatism in general and the Republican party in particular reaped from its actions. We tried to strip away from the movement the false leftist veneer which its Red Diaper contingent noisily provided, by emphasizing the totalitarian, rather than socialist, content of Communist ideology.

            By demonstrating that the New Left shared the same roots in WASP resentment as earlier revanchist movements like the Klan, Prohibition, and the John Birch Society, I thought to reinforce this critique. It would certainly undermine the overweening self-confidence of New Left ideologues to discover that their revolutionary altruism (“Serve the people!”) masked an corrosive fear of status deprivation. Red diaper babies could defend themselves against exposé by donning the Stalinoid armor that was their family heritage – “red-bating, McCarthyism!” etc. But the egos of America’s elite WASP college youth were much more fragile. Their very hysteria revealed intense inner doubt, partly innate in Calvinism’s principled refusal to award certainty of grace even to its most dedicated acolytes, but mostly due to the harsh fact of WASP dispossession by Jewish, Irish, Negro and other ethnic groups. As these “newcomer” populations bubbled to the top of the American melting pot, WASPs who had presided over America’s citadels of business, scientific, cultural and religious eminence, beaten at their own game as it were, lost their sense of chosenness and their proprietary claim to American domination. They could react to this frightening development with angry political extremism, but they could not psychologically withstand the revelation that their radicalism masked a grubby ethnic struggle for power.

            Socialists are of course trained to think in class rather than ethnic terms. Ethnicity is a status category. Status issues have traditionally been disdained by Marxian sociology. For my critique of the New Left to have an impact, it first had to gain an audience among my fellow socialists. If democratic socialists added to their existing arguments against New Left political extremism this ethnic dimension, it could easily spread beyond our limited circles and into the wider arena of political debate, where it could function as a kind of ideological virus, disabling WASP crackpots and vaccinating their potential disciples.

            But the democratic socialist milieu offered no such audience. I was told again and again that “Americans don’t think in those terms.” Any mention of WASPs made my comrades very nervous. Ethnicity was off-limits as a concept, almost the way race had been in America generally before the Civil Rights movement. The only receptivity I encountered was among a few New York Jews like Norman Podhoretz, who had fought his own ethnic battles as a rising intellectual, which he details in his book Making It. They circulated my idea almost covertly in broader Jewish circles, where it did damage New Left inroads among Jewish collegiate youth, many of whom were using New Leftism as a means of “passing.” Some of them, like Arthur Waskow, then made miraculous conversions from ersatz Protestant extremists to ersatz Jewish radicals, often with comical results that need not be gone into here.

            My WASP theory of the New Left was thus effectively quarantined by my own movement. I was still too young to be discouraged by the resulting isolation, and kept beating my new ideological hobbyhorse. Not even Garber’s lukewarm response was enough to deter me. But eventually I had to set this idea aside, convinced though I was of its merit, and go on to other things. Its net effect was to heighten my intellectual self-confidence, and diminish my respect for Marxian stereotypes.

           

Chapter Three

Go East…

New York Beginnings

            In late 1967, in response to urgings which Garber had received from Penn Kemble, who was  trying to rebuild the Young People’s Socialist League, I relocated from Sacramento to New York. Penn thought I could be useful to him in this effort. I’m afraid he found me a big disappointment, as I did him. I was “top-heavy,” in the words of some of his colleagues, meaning too intellectual, and lacking in organizational skills (where he got the idea I possessed such skills I do not know, certainly not from Alex). I had long known Penn to be a driven bully, notwithstanding his literary and other talents. Somewhere during his sojourn between Boulder and New York (he had tried and given up careers as a writer and a filmmaker, and then spent 8 months “in Boston” (doing nobody knew what) where he had acquired substantial administrative skills. The New York comrades accorded him a high degree of deference, which was unusual given their cliquish fear of outsiders and Woody Allen neuroticism.

            My first big project in New York was to help draft a constitutive document for the refounding of the YPSL. After several weeks of intense labor, our working group, which included Penn, had produced several thousand words setting forth our understanding of Democratic Socialism in detailed language, and including at its strategic core the theory and practice of Realignment and “coalition politics.” It was modestly entitled “Socialist Theory and American Reality.” It will not by any means enter the annals of socialism as a literary landmark. It was wordy, windy, and not a little pompous. But it did serve the YPSL as our basic platform for a few years and so filled a necessary purpose.

            The Shachtman group in the Socialist Party, of which I was a member, called itself “the Caucus.” It was struggling mightily to take control of the SP, against a doughty but inept and ideologically disparate group of Norman Thomasites, Labor Party advocates (as against our emphasis on realignment, i.e. working for socialism in and through the Democratic Party), pacifists, and old-time socialist cranks. It is a testimony to the high degree of suspicion in which Max Shachtman was held (even in his own caucus he was privately called by some “the Prince of Darkness”), and to our own sectarian inefficiencies, that it took so long for us to win out over this decrepitude. But win we eventually did.

            Penn’s effort to rebuild the YPSL was part of this struggle. Whoever could claim that they were bringing “the youth” into the socialist movement would have a decisive advantage in the factional battle. But in the context of the late 1960’s, inducing “the youth” to adopt our politics was easier said than done. The fact that we managed to maintain even the appearance of a “new YPSL,” without being swamped by the New Left politics which dominated the student movement, was accomplishment enough. But it was a mixed victory, almost Pyrrhic in character, for it was won largely through deceptive compromises of our own principles.

            The Caucus made full use of Max’s bottomless arsenal of Leninist tactics. Penn and his henchmen were especially ruthless devotèes of this muddy art. Notwithstanding our fierce anti-Communism, we created a front group called “Negotiations Now,” the purpose of which was to dissemble our private support of the Vietnam War behind a screen of hype calling for a negotiated settlement in which neither side could claim victory. Fat chance of that! We used this front group to shield ourselves from the charge that we supported the war (which most of us privately did). Max and Penn argued that without such deviousness we could not survive, much less rebuild the socialist movement. The problem was that it worked. Numbers of young people joined the YPSL thinking that it was part of the anti-war movement. Even Michael Harrington, who was then the most prominent leader of socialism in America, sheltered behind Negotiations Now (until his real anti-war friends made things too hot for him). Mike was the figure most attractive to new members of the YPSL.

            In order to justify the success which the Negotiations Now tactic yielded, in the YPSL and generally, we found ourselves rationalizing its underlying deception. We “Garberites” found ourselves in an extremely uncomfortable position, building an organization which claimed to share our Realignment and coalition politics perspective on domestic American politics, but increasingly vociferous in its opposition to American foreign policy, especially in Vietnam. Those of us who objected to this trend were shouted down by Penn, Carl Gershman and Josh Muravchik on the grounds that “You don’t build a movement on foreign policy.” I guess we answered (or should have) that you don’t build a movement without foreign policy. We certainly never argued that a movement could be built with foreign policy. That remarkable tactic would have to await the future collapse of our movement, when the aforementioned leaders, and many of their followers, would build, not a movement, but their careers, on just such a stepping stone.

What Was To Be Done?

            The more Vietnam became the central focus of American politics, the more I felt the need to speak out in the YPSL on behalf of the anti-totalitarianism that made up, I had been taught, exactly one-half of the democratic socialist position. Just prior to the 1970 Socialist Party convention, I decided to call Max for advice on a resolution embracing our unadulterated position on Vietnam for presentation at the convention. To my happy amazement, the “Prince of Darkness” immediately began dictating the text of a resolution over the phone. His extemporaneous eloquence was startling. It didn’t actually support the war (that would have been too straightforward and not clever enough for Max), but it might as well have. I was listed as author, and Max and a number of old-time Shachtmanites as endorsers. Of course, it did not carry, but it did enrage the Harringtonites. Had it passed, the Socialist Party would have been universally seen – even by itself – to have declared war on the anti-war movement.

            This resolution won me some accolades, undeserved since it was really written by Max. It also aroused resentment among the younger Shachtman followers in the Caucus, who felt Max had no business stirring up this kind of trouble, especially since he had previously supported the Negotiations Now compromise with Harrington, and that he certainly should not have used me as his instrument. Although part of the YPSL-SP leadership (mostly as a stand-in for Garber), I was always a pariah to its inner circle. But Max’s leadership was unassailable, so this discontent remained sub rosa for the time being.

            In 1971 I submitted this same resolution to the YPSL convention for adoption, against a centrist resolution supported by the dominant mainstream group, and a unilateral withdrawal resolution supported by the Harringtonites. In preparation for the convention, the organization had published a special edition of its discussion journal, YSR (Young Socialist Review), containing articles on subjects of controversy by many of the organization’s leading members. Mine was entitled “The New Class and its Morals,” a take-off on Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours (Get it?). It was addressed to Michael Harrington and his faction.

            In all modesty, I can state that this article revolutionized the terms of debate. Harrington later cited the failure of the Shachtman leadership to repudiate it as one of the reasons for his withdrawal from the organization. The article challenged his “new class” theory, upon which he based his critical support of the anti-war movement, the New Politics movement in the Democratic party, and the New Left. It questioned his vaunted Marxism and mocked his commitment to the labor movement. It attacked the smug moralism of his young followers in the YPSL. Most of all, it destroyed the political status quo in both the YPSL and the SP, by eliminating the middle “Negotiations Now” ground occupied by the leadership. Once again I had scored a political coup at the expense of my political status (although, as usual, I was blithely unaware of this).

            I sensed that a sea change had occurred when I arrived at the convention and found myself and my few supporters engulfed by enraged Harrington youth. Formerly they shunned me as the organization’s certified weirdo. Now they admonished me for committing heresy against Mike, whose boots I was not fit to kiss. But I knew how devastated they felt, by the tone of their criticism: I had, they declared, done irreparable harm to the strength of my own position with this article (!). I couldn’t help wondering what the hell they cared about the strength of my position, since they professed to regard it as one remove from the devil’s own. And I also couldn’t help noting a curious respect for me personally that had never before been manifest.

            Several factors made this article and its impact possible. I had just published an article in Commentary on the Black Panthers, which attracted national attention. Kissinger’s “secret” trip to Maoist China had burst into the headlines, transforming the world geopolitical situation and vindicating Garber’s foreign policy stance within the socialist movement. The New Left fell into utter disarray. Since the Harrington youth within the YPSL fed off the New Left, they too experienced cognitive dissonance which their leader could not ward off. But most of all, it was just a very good article, one of the better things I had ever written (and I alone wrote it, contrary to gossip attributing authorship to Max). It does not read well today, because it is addressed to so many narrow sectarian issues within our little movement. But at the time, it was a bombshell.

            My article was not a resolution, just a discussion piece, so it led to no concrete result. The only resolution presented to the convention that embodied our views was the Vietnam resolution previously presented to the Socialist Party convention. When it came time to vote on Vietnam, the usual three resolutions came to the floor: the pro-war resolution, the “Negotiations Now” compromise resolution, and the Harrington unilateral withdrawal resolution. When the results were announced, something amazing had happened: our resolution, embracing critical support of the war, had passed! Shock and awe!

            I had little time to savor this miracle. Max and Alex, who were attending the convention, made a beeline for me. What, they wanted to know, did I propose to do now? – as if I had the slightest idea. “Well,” I stammered, “what do you think I should do?” The statesmanlike thing, Alex counseled, would be to withdraw it in favor of the centrist, “unity-building” Negotiations Now resolution. Max sagely nodded. Alex went on to commend me for the tremendous victory we had won, but urged me to consider the folly of a socialist youth organization trying to present a pro-war face in  American politics. At this point my more youthful comrades – Kemble, Muravchik, Gershman, the entire centrist apparat of the YPSL, urged me to consider how “un-Marxist” it would be to try to build a socialist movement on foreign policy. In the interests of “coalition politics and Realignment” (our mantra), and having clearly affirmed our true anti-totalitarian principles, we must “reach out” to the Harrington kids and show them how serious we were about building socialism in America – so serious that we were prepared to subordinate our precious anti-Communist foreign policy convictions to the common cause.

            A great sucking sound enveloped the convention, heard by no one, including me. It was my personal prestige, disappearing even faster than it had appeared. Of course a movement could not be built on foreign policy. Even I knew that. And how wonderful to be congratulated by Max and Alex for my “statesmanship.” So up I stood to announce that in the interests of socialist unity, I was withdrawing my Vietnam resolution in favor of the Negotiations Now centrist resolution. Had I been suckered? You bet I had, and somehow I knew it even before I sat down. I could see it in Kemble’s smirking nods, but most painfully, in the mocking (but also disappointed) visages of the Harringtonites: so much for Milstein’s bold anti-Communism, a mere bluff when the chips were down.

            Later I tried to recapture some shred of my socialist self-respect, when McGovern, the Democratic party’s leading fellow-traveler, captured the party’s nomination for President of the United States. Max, Alex, and the entire “hard-line” leadership of the Socialist party, endorsed his candidacy, flying in the face of George Meany’s honorable refusal to enlist the American labor movement in McGovern’s pro-Soviet crusade. Sidney Hook, in an open letter (dated Sept. 20, 1972) to George McGovern, wrote:

Like George Meany, I wish that my friend and comrade in arms, Norman Thomas, were alive and running for President this fall. Unlike George Meany, I could do this with no inconsistency since I am not an upholder of the non-existent free enterprise economic system….

But, 1972 is too critical a time to afford the luxury of a gesture or not voting at all. Because I believe that the prospects of survival of our free society and of implementing the necessary social reforms on the road to a genuine welfare society will be weakened by your election, I am choosing the lesser evil. I am voting for Richard Nixon – the first time in my life I have voted for a Republican candidate for the Presidency.

           

When I demanded that the movement follow Meany and Hook, I was savagely attacked by my own comrades for “sectarianism,” of all things. George Meany could afford to stand on principle. He after all led the labor movement (the very movement we had always argued was the only foundation of social democracy). Hook had his tenured position at NYU. But who were we to vote for Nixon? I shamelessly cast that vote. I think many other Shachtmanites shamefully did the same, but only in the privacy of the voting booth. A lot of good it did me, or them.

The Knell Sounds

            Many years before, the great German economist Werner Sombart proclaimed America’s invulnerability to European socialism, predicting that it would founder on “reefs of apple pie and shoals of roast beef.” We few American socialists sought to refute Sombart by adapting our cause to the realities of our “exceptional” country with what we thought was a revolutionary strategic innovation, “Realignment.” Actually our strategy was not so innovative; the Communists had pioneered it in the Thirties when they embraced Roosevelt’s New Deal and powered their way into the Democratic party. But they had squandered everything in favor of their unshakeable devotion to Stalin’s USSR. The eruption of the Cold War soon after WW II raised a foreign policy issue that they could not reconcile with their successful role in domestic politics.

            Communism’s ignominious exit from the role of respected vanguard of the Left in American politics left a vacuum which we democratic socialists had every expectation of of being able to fill. And why not? We had their socialist critique of capitalism, their program of gradual rather than revolutionary social change, and their brilliant, “Exceptionalist” tactic of working through the Democratic party rather than mindless third-party emulation of Europe’s independent labor party model. Equally important, we had our anti-Communism, rooted in decades of heart-breaking struggle against Stalinism’s “syphilitic influence” (Trotsky’s phrase) in the labor movement, among the liberals, and in all the other key constituencies of the anti-capitalist movement. It was therefore devastating to have this marvelous conjunction of principle, doctrine, strategy and tactics blow up in our faces with the rise of the anti-war movement. “Coalition politics” became a curse-word on the left, anti-Communism was redefined as ideological dope by Senator Fulbright, and the New Deal was denounced as “corporate fascism” by many of its own liberal sponsors. The very thing that had happened to the Stalinists with the rise of the Cold War, now happened to us – a foreign policy issue arose which  we could not reconcile with our vaunted “coalition politics” model!

            In the wake of this wreckage, conclusions had to be reached and adjustments had to be made, which our little movement was not eager to face. Unfortunately, Shachtman, our one leader with the prestige necessary to implement this task, picked this moment to die of heart failure, on Nov. 4, 1972. Fortunately, his replacement – me – was eagerly waiting in the wings to pick up where Max inconsiderately left off. But it turned out that my socialist colleagues were somewhat less eager to anoint me in this new role than I was to assume it. On the contrary, as I was soon to discover, they were busily preparing to reorganize the Socialist Party and YPSL – or at least their own careers – around the principle of an anti-Communist foreign policy, all the while pretending that coalition politics was as viable as ever. Later it became clear that the spook Jay Lovestone, rather than the theoretician Tom Milstein, would inherit the mantle of Max Shachtman.

            I cannot claim to be the victim of an actual purge, but my presence and that of my few followers became more and more inconvenient to the movement’s leadership. Eventually political life became impossible for us (mainly due to a campaign led by Carl Gershman, and supported by Kahn, Kemble, Muravchik and others), so we grew beards and formed our own little splinter which we named “the Marathon Group.” Nobody paid much attention to us (except Irwin Suall, my old boss at the Anti-Defamation League, who thought we might become “dangerous”), which was understandable, since we didn’t last long. We did publish several issues of a theoretical journal called The Real World (our opponents had been telling us to join “the real world”), in which appeared several articles analyzing the American political debacle. Most of my YPSL comrades who joined in supporting the Marathon Group did so I’m sure in the hope that a socialist flame could be kept flickering in America. I was not so sanguine, and saw our group more as a vehicle for exploring why the flame had finally blown out, not just in the U.S., but throughout the world.

            In the meantime, our former comrades expelled themselves from New York and undertook a grand aliyah to Washington, D.C., where they spent the rest of their lives burrowing into that city’s gigantic foreign policy bureaucracy, with varying degrees of success. They would soon stop calling themselves socialists or even social democrats and mostly end up as irregulars in Irving Kristol’s neo-Conservative brigade. All this happened as New York itself was bottoming out in one of its periodic descents into the heart of darkness, which cast its own pall over our little Fun City enterprise. I’m afraid that in our hearts, many of us “Milsteinites” wondered if we had been “left behind”  by the foreign policy rapture which many of our former comrades now found so uplifting.

           

Chapter Four

Trilogy

The American Paradigm (April, 1976)

            The Real World was aimed at exploring in theoretical terms the reasons for socialism’s latest American imbroglio. Our declared hope was that by uncovering these reasons, we might find some basis for resurrecting the movement. But all of us agreed that we ought not make the rebirth of socialism our final purpose. It was altogether possible and even likely that the history of socialism had witnessed enough deaths and resurrections. All we really owed the movement in that case was a decent burial.

            My first attempt to answer this question appeared in April, 1976, and was entitled “Statement of Purpose,” i.e. the purpose of the Marathon Group. It should have been called “The American Paradigm.” (That title derives from T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.) It sought to prove that the events of the 20^th Century had replaced the French Revolution with American history as the proper model for understanding politics. It attributed socialism’s decline to its unwillingness to surrender a Eurocentric paradigm, from which sprang the Left-Right spectrum dominant in modern political analysis, in favor of one which derived from the history of the world’s new dominant power – America. It concluded with the rather feeble hope that the new paradigm would revitalize socialism.

            The American Paradigm was thus borne out of an attempt to critique Marxism. As such, it was written in Marxese, not English, an odd choice of language for a theory which hoped to “Americanize” socialism. In what follows, I shall endeavor to correct that error, rather than merely summarize what I wrote in The Real World. As Marx himself somewhere notes, the language of analysis should not be confused with the language of exposition.

One Government – Two Social Systems

            The American Constitution created one government out of two different social systems. Nothing like it existed anywhere in Europe. It was sui generis. Whether this political union of two dissimilar social systems was forged intentionally or from necessity is not a main concern of ours.

            The two systems were divided regionally. In the Northern states, the economic system was based on free labor, whether on farms or in industry. In the Southern states, the prevailing economy was based on plantation slavery. The interests of these two systems obviously conflicted; the American government was largely an institutional mechanism for compromising this conflict. When compromise became impossible, the government blew up, the Union fell apart, and Civil War erupted. Whether or not this grisly explosion was built into the Constitution is also not a main concern of ours.

            What is undebatable is that Europe knew nothing like it. We see this in Marx’s famous dictum, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle,” which is founded on a principle which excludes even the possibility of such a government. Of course, America’s weird union did eventually disintegrate, but only after surviving from 1787 to 1861 – 74 years. That’s a long time for an “impossible” government to endure. Why would Marx ignore this implacable historical fact?

            He ignored it for the same reason any fact gets ignored: it didn’t fit into his paradigm. According to his theory of history, the “base” determined the “superstructure.” In other words, it was the nature of society that determined the nature of the state, not the other way around. Therefore, two different economies, and the societies generated therefrom, could not possibly share the same government. Case closed!

Left vs. Right

            European history seemed to give full support to this proposition. When two different societies occupied the same nation, it was only because one was evolving out of the other. Revolution resulted. Revolution was the overthrow of the state. No state could bridge the gulf between social systems. Only revolution could do that, and revolution is the antithesis of the state. Because the French Revolution was the paradigm for all European revolutions in the 19^th Century, Marx made it the paradigm for world politics. That revolution replaced the feudal Estates-General division between “the mountain” and “the plain” (that is, between the clergy and aristocracy, the higher, and the Third Estate, the lower) with a completely arbitrary “division of the house” between more conservative bourgeois representatives, seated to the right of the chair, and more radical bourgeois elements, seated to his left, i.e. The Left vs. The Right. All political conflict now became a matter of Left vs. Right. Socialism, the new form of society evolving from within capitalism, would cause this division to turn into a stark polarization between an increasingly radicalized Left (because increasingly reliant upon the organized working class) and an increasingly reactionary Right (because increasingly frightened of that class).

North vs. South

            But in America, the categories of “left” and “right” were hopelessly entangled. The Northern working class was often seduced by the racist, anti-Yankee propaganda of the Southern Slavocracy and in fact joined with them in Jefferson’s party. The Northern bourgeoisie, for its part, took up the cudgels for the country’s most progressive cause, Abolition, properly identifying the slave system as its mortal foe. This division made it impossible for a politics based on class to emerge. As a result, all sorts of other issues, unrelated to the class politics Marx described in Europe, came to the forefront, issues based on sectionalism, ethnicity, religion, currency and banking, tariffs, and an infinite variety of crank causes from spiritualism to polygamy. Marx was baffled by this verdant politics, since he regarded America, with its absence of a feudal tradition and its powerful democratic ethos, as “ready-made” for socialism. Yet so socialistically arid was America, that when he went looking for a place to bury the 1^st International in order to protect it from an Anarchist takeover, he could find no more suitable cemetery than New York City.

            But all this establishes is that the American political model differed from Europe’s. It does not account for how it came to prevail over Europe’s.

Paradigms -- Bipolarity vs. Class Struggle

            As Kuhn discusses in his book, paradigms, even though they are theoretical constructs, do not collapse when they are “disproven.” In fact, they do not collapse at all. They are simply discarded, usually long after they cease being useful frameworks for understanding events. So the real question is not how the American Paradigm came to prevail over the European in contemporary political thought (indeed, it still hasn’t), but how America came to prevail over Europe. This is a question of practical history, not theory. It is a question of how the European century turned into the American century. I dealt with this ideologically embarrassing question at length in my second contribution to The Real World. But when I conceived of the American Paradigm, American world domination had yet to emerge. The American superpower faced a mighty rival: the Soviet superpower. The stalemated conflict between these two, called the Cold War, was what preoccupied me. It was to explain the Cold War, not American world hegemony, that I put forward the American Paradigm.

            The Cold War established a bipolar world order, based on an uneasy equilibrium between two diametrically opposed social systems, one free, and the other totalitarian. This world order had its mutually acknowledged boundary, the Iron Curtain. It had its frontier zone, the “Third World.” It even had a crude governmental framework ostensibly embracing both systems, the United Nations.

            America in the period leading up to the Civil War displayed every one of these features. America’s Iron Curtain was the Mason-Dixon line. Its frontier zone, the territories west of the federated states, became a battleground – “Bleeding Kansas” – to determine which of its two realms, slavery or freedom, would prevail. Its Constitutional government proved itself time and again incapable of resolving this conflict, but only of compromising it – until compromise became impossible.

            The Cold War was essentially a geographic split – “East vs. West.” Likewise, the American Civil War also took a quasi-geographic (more precisely, a regional) form – “North vs. South.” Geography did not play a principal role in the French Revolution, however – certainly not as compared to the paramount role of class.

            The Civil War was a battle between states – hence, “The War Between the States.” The Cold War also was a conflict between states, both styling themselves democratic constitutional unions of free peoples who had already had their legitimating revolutions. The legitimacy of revolution was therefore not an issue in either the Civil War or the Cold War. Indeed, each side portrayed the other as a counterrevolutionary threat to its revolutionary ideals, necessitating military measures which were defined as essentially defensive in character.  How different from the French model, where Revolution was the very object of politics, and aggressive imperialism hailed as a glorious crusade to liberate Europe from the bondage of feudalism.

            Parallels between American history and the Cold War are numerous and do not “prove” the truth of the American Paradigm. As Kuhn repeats over and over, paradigms do not replace each other because one disproves another. New paradigms are adopted when they appear to explain more facts than the old ones they replace. I believed it self-evident that the American Paradigm explained the nature of the Cold War better than the Left-Right paradigm. I did not consider it a very radical idea (except to radicals), because it merely acknowledged a fact already generally acknowledged: that the World Wars had inaugurated a new international system based on superpower bipolarity, in place of Europe’s old multi-polar international structure. Marx’s analysis was also bipolar, but he found bipolarity in the class system of bourgeois society, not in the international system. Since the workers had no country, the nature of the international system was irrelevant to him. The only bipolarity which counted was class struggle. The bipolar international system, for which American history was the model, showed why Marx’s bipolar system, based on the French Revolution, failed. So I hoped my American Paradigm theory would be celebrated, both for sounding European socialism’s death knell, and for baptizing “the American century.”

Celebrated? Not bloody likely, comrades. But I refused to be discouraged. The American Paradigm was not the first idea I had that failed to gain the acceptance it was due. And to be truthful, I was not really surprised. For the American Paradigm contained within itself a portent of disaster that people, including me, found rather off-putting. American history culminated in a great and terrible civil war. Was this, a terrible war, to be the fate of the Soviet-American confrontation? Even America’s Abolitionists, whose incessant agitation had so much to do with pushing the Union toward conflagration, were horrified by its prospect. Many of them were also leaders in the American Peace Society and abhorred war. For this reason they opposed Lincoln’s call for armed force to restore the South to the Union. “Let our errant sister states depart in peace,” they pled. At least the Northern states would be cleansed of the slavery taint.

From Cold War to Détente: Communism and America

            Not being a pacifist, such a war did not seem to me inherently immoral, any more than the war against Nazi totalitarianism was immoral. But where in the modern world was the Union that Lincoln deemed it necessary to defend? Containment, not “liberation,” seemed to me very sensible policy under the circumstances. Furthermore, it was a manifestly successful policy. America was winning the Cold War, not losing it, especially after the realization of U.S.-China rapprochement. The American Paradigm was only meant to be an analogy, not a blueprint, and analogies are useful not only for their parallels, but for their divergences. Plunging the world into an apocalyptic conflict in order to liberate the slaves of totalitarianism was exactly the wrong lesson to be drawn from the American Paradigm.

            The American Paradigm theory needed to be turned into an argument for supporting the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, not intensifying the Cold War. This pacific effort resulted an essay with the pugnacious (and unfortunate) title “Communism, the Highest Stage of American Imperialism,” the second of my three articles in The Real World. The thesis of this article was that America and the Soviet Union had partnered in order to raise themselves to superpower status. As Europe’s two flanking powers, it was obvious who stood to lose from this partnership. It was also obvious (at least to me) that this U.S.-U.S.S.R condominium represented a global unfolding of the American Paradigm. Since its prerequisite was a new state – the Soviet Union – I began with an investigation of the Russian Revolution of 1917. But neither the American Paradigm nor the French Revolution offered any useful conceptual framework for understanding what the Russian Revolution produced. Really, the question was one of the origins of Russian totalitarianism. To answer this question, only the analysis of the great scholar Karl Wittfogel – a disciple of both Karl Marx and Max Weber – showed the way forward.

           

The Asiatic Mode of Production, Patrimonial Bureaucracy, and Oriental Despotism

            Wittfogel’s masterpiece, Oriental Despotism, brought together the two great strands in German social theory – Marx and Weber – in order to elucidate the East-West conflict. Wittfogel considered this conflict fundamental to world history. Garber had introduced us to Wittfogel’s writings back in Boulder, as one reasonable explanation of the origins of Stalinism, but we never placed great emphasis on him for a number of reasons, not least of which was the disdain in which Shachtman held him.

            Having long since left behind Shachtman’s class-based bureaucratic collectivism theory, it seemed to me high time for a reevaluation of Wittfogel. His only real competitor in the theory of totalitarianism was Hannah Arendt, and her analysis focused mainly on the rise of Naziism. Both Arendt’s and Wittfogel’s typology of totalitarianism are similar, but Wittfogel considered Soviet Stalinism, besides being historically prior, the trigger for the rise of Hitler (an assessment which Shachtman and Garber shared).

            Marx came up with the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production in order to distinguish the East from Western civilization. Wittfogel notes that it was the only one of his four famous “modes of production” to have a geographic name, the others – primitive communism, Classical Slavery, Feudal and Bourgeois – all being described sociologically. Marx juxtaposed it to European feudalism, also an agrarian economic system, in order to highlight how radically it differed from feudalism. For whereas in the East, the state was the true owner of the land, whether de jure or de facto, in Europe the land was the private property of the aristocratic ruling class, which made the states of Europe the agencies of this class. In the Orient it was the opposite: the classes did not manipulate the state, the state manipulated the classes.

Marx viewed this system as historically stagnant, unable to evolve through time, but only across space. When it reached some natural boundary it simply stopped expanding, and never developed beyond its original format of a centralized state bureaucracy superimposed on a dispersed peasantry. For this reason, until late in his life he never considered “Oriental Despotism” (his alternative term for the Asiatic Mode of Production) a threat to Western Civilization.

            Weber was a primarily a scholar, not a political theorist. His “patrimonial bureaucracy” typology refined Marx’s picture of the Eastern state, but did not fundamentally change it. But it was he who encouraged Wittfogel, a young sinologist, to reexamine Marx’s categories in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the East-West schism. This Wittfogel spent the rest of his life doing.

Wittfogel and Marx

            Wittfogel, following Marx, located the origin of Oriental Despotism in “hydraulic agriculture.” The great river valley civilizations of the ancient Near East, China and India, and Central and South America, produced vast monument-building civilizations with large populations based on artificial control of water for agrarian purposes. These civilizations grew out of state-organized irrigation systems, upon which their large-scale  farming depended, in contrast to the rainfall agriculture of Europe, Japan, and a few other locales. State-sponsored irrigation projects were thus the real engine of the Asiatic Mode of Production.

            Wittfogel accused Marx and Lenin of obscuring the connection between Oriental Despotism and their own socialist schemes for nationalization of the economy. The truth, at least where Marx is concerned, is more complicated, as we shall see. But both Marx and Wittfogel did clearly establish the relationship between the “historically premature” organization of a state bureaucracy more powerful than society to manage large-scale irrigation systems, and the gradual incarnation of that bureaucracy in an all-powerful coercive state over and above all other classes.

            Quoting mostly Russian historians (as well as Marx), Wittfogel also contended that the Mongol invasions of the 12^th Century had destroyed Russian feudalism and “Orientalized” Russian society. Even after the overthrow of the Mongols by native Russians, the kernel of Asiatic despotism endured within the husk of Western feudal forms. In Marx’s words, “The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery… forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.” Russia was thus not the most Asian of the European countries, but only the most European of the Oriental Despotisms. For this reason, Plekhanov, one of Bolshevism’s bitterest Marxian critics, warned that Lenin’s program for nationalization of the land and industry was not a prescription for socialist revolution, but for an “Asiatic Restoration” – what the Bolshevik Bukharin would later famously call the regime of “Genghis Khan with a telegraph.”

            According to Wittfogel, the Leninist climax of the Russian Revolution was therefore a tragic fulfillment of Plekhanov’s dire prediction. But instead of an “Asiatic restoration,” an historic step backward (i.e. a counterrevolution), it produced a cosmic step forward. Stalin’s Oriental Despotic appropriation of Western industrial technique yielded the new phenomenon of 20^th century totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is manifestly not a throwback but a leap forward to a new form of social organization – firmly rooted, to be sure, in its heritage of Oriental despotism, but incorporating sinister new methods for the exercise of total power, some borrowed from the resources of Western technology and others modifying the East’s indigenous autocratic tradition. The net effect was to refine and enhance, rather than reduce or abolish, the despotic synthesis of political coercion and economic exploitation upon which the Asiatic mode of production was based. And since this system embraced modern industry, not agrarian stagnation, it became a competitor for world power. Marx’s worldview was thus overthrown by a historical development which he flatly failed to anticipate.

Wittfogel defended Marx against Stalinism’s unilinear distortion of his historical theory. Marx denied that world history could be crammed into an inevitable pattern of development – “classical slavery, feudalism, capitalism” – by placing the “Asiatic mode of production” outside of this Western European schema. Marx’s historical materialism was pluralist, not monist. Oriental despotism lay outside of the Western pattern, functioned according to its own laws, and presenting a unique analytical problem to the historian. Stalinism was bound to erase this difference in order to portray its social system as “socialist” and hence part of the Western sequence. In the East and the West, Stalinist historians even went so far as to deny the existence of the Asiatic mode of production, and to disparage Marx’s use of the term – the only instance in which they dared to challenge Marx.

            Wittfogel showed that the Russian Revolution was the midwife of Soviet totalitarianism. I argued that Soviet totalitarianism was the United States’ bipolar partner in the forging of an international American Paradigm. What remained to be investigated was the fate of Marxian socialism in the wake of this paradigm, which was the project I undertook in my next and last contribution to The Real World, “Marx, the Anti-Semite.”

But before taking up “Marx, the Anti-Semite,” the logic of exposition requires mention of a review essay I wrote for a magazine called New International Review. This article was written in 1980 and appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of the publication. Even though I wrote it after the Marx piece, logically it precedes it, because it examines an aspect of the unilinear issue crucial to my critique of Marx.

            My essay reviewed two books, Wittfogel’s magnum opus, Oriental Despotism, and a masterly biographical study of Wittfogel by Gary Ulmen entitled The Science of Society. Toward an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel. Among the themes I dealt with, the most important turned out to be unilinearism – the Stalinist imposition from which Wittfogel tries to shield Marx. I discovered that the Stalinist historians were right, and Wittfogel was wrong! Even though Marx assigned Oriental Despotism its own mode of production, the “Asiatic,” outside the developmental stream of the West, he did so in such a way as to place Asia outside of history altogether. His class struggle model applied only to the development of Europe. Class struggle was the dialectical key to Europe’s transition from classical slavery to feudalism to capitalism: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” History itself is a function of this dynamic. But Oriental Despotism was ahistorical. It could develop across space, but not through time. In fact, it had no classes, because it had no private property in the means of production. The state owned the economy, either outright or de facto. Therefore, according to Marx, history – development through time, not merely across space – could only take place in the West. And the West’s development was autogenic. It depended only on its internal dialectic for its forward progress. The miracle of Western creativity and achievement derived from its own internal contradictions, which the East lacked.

            Since the East lacked history, the Stalinist historians were correct to call Marx a unilinearist. The fact that they exploited this designation in order to disguise their totalitarian system as socialist is immaterial. Marx left the door wide open to this “distortion” by denying historicity to the East. It served him right that the Soviet abomination adopted Marx as its deity. It needed him to certify its Western pedigree.

My American Paradigm modeled interaction between different societies, not classes. But I hadn’t applied it to world history until the world began to be “Americanized.” This bothered me. If Marx had been wrong to ignore societal interaction in his theory, did this error only apply to modern history? I addressed this question in my New International Review review essay.

Historians, even Marxist historians, have always puzzled over Marx’s vague accounts of the transition from classical slavery to feudalism. It is very difficult to show in what sense the feudal mode of production represented an advance over that of the Roman Empire. The only thing “progressive” about feudalism as contrasted to classical antiquity was the conquest of Europe by Christianity. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was much more demonstrably “progressive,” but another annoyance crops up: the alleged origins of capitalism in the “contradictions” of feudalism. Demonstrably, commercial capitalism originated the ancient world, long before feudalism emerged in Europe. And this annoyance leads to another: the difficulty of presenting the conflict between Europe’s barbarian tribes and the Roman state as in any sense “class struggle.”

There are many other problems with Marx’s theory of history, but the above seemed most relevant, from the standpoint of the American Paradigm, for all of them illustrate his inability to deal with societal interaction as a historical variable. Christianity for example was an Eastern religion. Its conquest of Europe can only be explained as a manifestation of Asia’s influence on the West. Capitalism did not originate in feudalism; it arose in the East and was transmitted Westward as a cultural and commercial influence. And indeed, feudalism’s vaunted freedom from despotic central authority was a direct result of the melding of Roman power with barbarian decentralization.

The real history of the West is therefore the history of hybridization, not unilinear progress. The West is no more culturally autochthonous than it is racially or linguistically pure. It certainly possessed resources for internal self-development. But much more vital have been its manifold interactions with the great civilizations of the “ahistorical” Orient, interactions Marx was at such pains to deny. In truth, there is no developmental history of the West separate from the East. It might be truer to say that the West has been the means of the East’s self-development. In any event, Marx’s Eurocentric class struggle theory of history turned his theory of scientific socialism into a component of the ideology of Europe, which I labeled “Westism.”

Marx, the Anti-Semite (May, 1979)

This article concluded my series of three inquiries into the reasons for the failure of socialism to take root in America. The first question I posed was why the coalition politics-Realignment strategy disintegrated. I found the answer to this question in something I called the American Paradigm. This explanation was then extended to cover, not just the failure of socialism in America, but also in the world. In other words, through the American Paradigm, “the American exception become the world’s rule.”

            The second article, “Communism, the Highest Stage of American Imperialism,” showed how the American Paradigm replaced the French Revolution as the world’s governing model. Both in this article, and in a subsequent review essay on Wittfogel’s work published in New International Review, the Russian revolution is identified as the “midwife” of totalitarianism’s birth in the 20^th century. Wittfogel identifies “Oriental Despotism” as the sociological root of this phenomenon. I argue that Soviet totalitarianism joins with Europe’s other flanking power, the United States, to form the world’s first international bipolarity, the Cold War, the worldwide expression of the American Paradigm’s victory over Europe.

            These essays had described the “objective” circumstances, so to speak, of socialism’s defeat. There remained to be explored the “subjective” dimension. Socialism was not alone in being overturned by the American Paradigm. Marxism too lay in ruins. Realignment politics was our attempt to adapt Marxian categories to American realities. But now the question had become, did Marxism have a future? The answer to this question could only emerge from a diagnosis of Marx’s responsibility for socialism’s failure.

            Even to raise this question was considered heresy in the socialist movement. Socialism’s faults were never to be ascribed to Marx. They should be blamed on the socialist leadership, even on the working class, and always on the viciousness of the bourgeoisie, but never on the great man himself. The matter defects in his character and personality was always off-limits. We were expected to treat Marx hagiographically, not critically. Garber in particular disdained the psychological method, rejecting its scientific claims and especially its utility in explaining historical issues.

            But one experience, dating back to Boulder, nagged at me. Dave and I were once taken aside by Garber and subjected to an odd little lecture on our identities. The gist of it was never to forget that we were Jews before we were anything, including socialists. What an incongruous message to receive from a militant atheist! It lodged like a burr under my socialist saddle. Occasionally I remembered it and tried to figure out what it meant, unsuccessfully. Only after resolving the question of Marx’s personal responsibility for socialism’s failure did I begin to grasp what Garber’s message might have (unintentionally) meant.

            Garber was not the only one sending me messages. My wife Emily had steadfastly refused to accept that socialism meant atheism, and mildly but persistently affirmed her belief, not only in God, but in Judaism. I couldn’t figure out what this meant either, until after my Marx epiphany.

Psychology

            Marx was an anti-Semite. He reviled Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. For most Marxists, the subject is an embarrassing one. Some deny that he was an anti-Semite “in the modern sense,” arguing that his hostility to Judaism was cut from the same cloth as his hostility to Christianity and religion in general. This view will not withstand a serious reading of what Marx actually had to say about Jews and Judaism. His statements have a very “modern” ring, and moreover reveal a special loathing for the Jews which transcend his critique of Christianity or for that matter of religion as such. Marx’s attitude toward Christianity was mainly sarcastic and iconoclastic. He never lost a certain saccharine empathy toward it. His daughter Eleanor reports that “Again and again I heard him say: ‘Despite everything, we can forgive Christianity much, for it has taught to love children’.” Toward religion in general he could show real poetic feeling, even when attacking it, as in the lines which precede his famous “opium of the people” dictum: “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” But never is such compassionate sensitivity to be found in his attitude toward Judaism.

            Others acknowledge the anti-Semitism, but brush it off as merely a reigning prejudice of his age. But Marx is not notable for succumbing to the reigning prejudices of his age. Why should he have acquiesced in this one? This explanation does no justice to the obsessiveness of Marx’s anti-Semitism. It appears in every field of his literary activity – his polemics, his journalism, his treatises on philosophy, economics, and politics, and above all and most vulgarly, his correspondence. It takes the form of a passion, to which he would recur in the most irrelevant contexts – his rivalry with Lasalle, for example, whom he reviled in the most defamatory and emotion-laden terms. We are dealing with more than a mere quirk, either of Marx or his times.

            Socialist anti-capitalism has been invoked as another explanation. There is a long tradition of socialist willingness to exploit the stereotypical identification of Jews with the commercial spirit (“the socialism of fools,” in August Bebel’s words), to make Jews personifications of capitalist greed, which certainly antedates Marx. Marx is represented as merely inheriting and heedlessly continuing this demagogic tradition in the propaganda of anti-capitalism. But Marx rejected the simplistic anti-capitalism of the radical tradition. He distinguished his theory of socialism from its “utopian” predecessors by its subtly-inflected critique of capitalism, which stressed capitalism’s historically progressive mission as the solvent of tradition and custom’s bonds and the organizer of colossal productive forces. Marx praised capitalism to the skies, especially when defending it against the primitive and “reactionary” attacks of “unscientific” socialism.

            Marx’s anti-capitalism is therefore no explanation of his anti-Semitism, even if he did partake in socialism’s traditional identification of Judaism with the spirit of capitalism. Such an identification would have led, logically, to an evaluation of Judaism at least as nuanced and dialectical as his critique of capitalism itself. Instead we find a striking disparity between Marx’s reckless hatred of the Jews and the thing for which he is alleged to have hated them, their capitalistic spirit. It is the same disparity we earlier noted between his attitudes toward Christianity and Judaism.

            The incongruity of Marx’s anti-Semitism, its glaring inconsistency with the general tenor of his thought, not to mention its morbid odor, has led many students of Marx to the selbstaas thesis. Marx’s anti-Semitism is to be understood primarily in terms of the psychology of the self-hating Jew. The biographical facts of Marx’s life, particularly those connected with the insincere conversion of his father to Christianity, support this thesis. The stresses of marginality which European Jews underwent in the 19^th century, only partially relieved by the conversion option, supply additional circumstantial evidence.

            The selbsthaas thesis has been strenuously resisted by most socialists, despite powerful indications that more was involved in Marx’s anti-Semitism than casual or typical prejudice, doubtless because of the difficulty of reconciling the image of Marx as a titan in the modern struggle for human liberation, with the sordid fact of a neurotically twisted character. The only alternative, though, is to swallow the great man’s bigotry. It is too big a gulp for anyone familiar with the facts of 20^th century history. So, unpleasant though it may be (and for me, it was very unpleasant), the self-hatred thesis stands as the most reasonable explanation of Marx’s anti-Semitism. It locates the source of a major stain in his thinking, obsessively clung to, in an appropriately irrational source: inner shame at being something other, something less, than a real German.

            Very well, then, self-hatred it must be. The trouble is that self-hatred has been made to serve as more than an explanation. It has been turned into a characterological carbuncle, diseased in itself, painful to contemplate, but fortunately walled off from the healthy surrounding tissues of his thought. No attention whatsoever has been paid to the possible relationship, causal or symptomatic, between his anti-Semitism and his other ideas. One can already hear the cries of the Marxists: “Marx’s anti-Semitism had no such implications! It may have been a serious character flaw, but that’s all it was.” But if it was a serious flaw (serious enough to be rooted in the perversity of self-hatred), how could it not be reflected in the rest of his thought? To treat Marx’s self-hatred merely as an embarrassment is to destroy its significance as a clue, an outcropping of hitherto unsuspected strata of meanings. It was his method to follow such clues wherever they led, no matter whose lovely intellectual castles were undermined in the pursuit. But perhaps for Marxists this rigor loses its charm when their own ideological ramparts risk being breached.

Sociology

            Anti-Semitism led Marx to exalt Western civilization and abominate Oriental despotism. It pervades his theory of history and therefore his concept of socialism. It is the blindness which caused him to view the West as a self-developing entity, governed only by its internal law of class struggle, and to disregard all examples of Eastern influence at critical junctures of the West’s development. The most important of these influences is monotheism, and it is the Jews, symbols and bearers of monotheism, whom Marx traduces.

            For Marx, such influences were impossible. The relationship between East and West was strictly one of contrasts and polar opposites. Oriental despotism was a “generalized system of state slavery,” presided over by a supreme autocrat and his bureaucracy which concentrated both economic and political power into one gargantuan administration, and which preyed upon a mass of dispersed agrarian villages, each one related to the next only by the unifying force of centralized state coercion and exploitation. This system he denoted the “Asiatic mode of production.” It did not undergo historical development (change through time) but only expanded (growth across space) until it reached its natural geographic limits. After that it assumed the aspect of a static, unchanging cosmos, “always [showing] an unchanging social infrastructure coupled with unceasing change in the persons and tribes who manage to ascribe to themselves the political superstructure.” In other words, Oriental despotism lacked all capacity for historical self-development.

            The West, on the other hand, was the self-developing civilization around which Marx built his whole theory of history. According to this theory, history was a series of stages in the development of the means of production, each one constituting a mode of production with its own characteristic division of labor, out of which grew its particular class relationships, political struggles, and cultural products. While Marx was a good deal more flexible in his portrayal of the relationship between the economic “base” and its corresponding “superstructure” than many of his “Marxist” followers, the fact is that he presented the history of the West as a unilinear process of development driven by forces originating in the economic base. Each mode of production expanded to its maximum potential, after which its inherent contradictions burst to the surface. The resulting social and political upheavals culminated in a social revolution which overthrew the old mode of production (and all the social relations based on it) and replaced it with the new and more advanced mode that had been maturing within it. From this conception stemmed Marx’s famous schema of the historical process: primitive communism (pre-history), classical slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and finally, socialism.

            Marx specifically warned against “[metamorphosing] my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread” in a letter criticizing the misapplication of his ideas to developments in Russia. But this becomingly modest posture he belied on the numerous occasions when he insisted that history itself was a feature of the West, because Oriental depotism lacked the inner dynamic of forces necessary to evolve: “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of successive invaders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”

            In other words, Marx’s theory is history’s universal key, his disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding. His qualifications do not yield the image of a world made up of two separate streams, but rather one fresh stream and one stagnant pond.

            But all of the social systems which Marx defines as stages in the historical progress of the West were profoundly affected by Oriental depotism, the system which he excluded from history. When Hellenic Greece acquired literacy, it was manifesting such influence. When Republican Rome became Imperial Rome it was an “orientalization” that reflected the Eastern social systems it was conquering. Feudalism did not grow “organically” out of the contradictions of Roman classical slavery, it was rather a synthesis of Rome and the tribalism of the invading “barbarians” who overthrew it. Capitalism may have sheltered in the interstices of decentralized feudalism, but that is not at all the same thing as developing out of its “contradictions.”

Marx did not even address these facts. He already had all the answers he needed, from his class struggle dialectic. If an answer didn’t fit this dialectic, then not even the question existed.

Monotheism

But the biggest question of all is why the supposedly self-developing West found it necessary to adopt the ideology of an Eastern religion, during its transition from “classical slavery” to feudalism. Marx went to great lengths to avoid raising this question, sometimes even seeming to argue that the real religion of the West was classical Greek philosophy (a much nicer fit with his unilinear Westism). After all, the Oriental taint of Christianity was undeniable. Its spiritual conquest of Western civilization was therefore all the more inexplicable.

Even worse from a Marxian standpoint is the content of Christian monotheism, which embodies elements of Judaism’s religious grasping, as it were, of Oriental despotism’s essential principal, its theological conceptualization, so to speak. By believing in the single God, the Jewish people realized in their heads what geopolitical circumstance kept depriving them of in practice: their own Oriental despotic empire, vastly exceeding in glory and durability that of the tangible empires of Egypt and Babylon which continually buffeted their little nation. But their autocracy was spiritual. God’s omniscience, omnipotence and eternality, worshiped not in a private cult of the elite but as the common faith of an entire people, signified the internalization by that people of what hitherto had been the exclusive property of Oriental despotism’s ruling elite, as well as its governing principle: a single center of authority, a center to which all action had to be related as so many interrelated means to one great End. Denied attainment in an actual despotic state, this principle crystallized into a monotheistic religious worldview rather than a monolithic social organization, which is to say, as the guiding principle of the universe rather than a concrete fact of social life. The means/End calculus became, so to speak, a heuristic salvational device for the Jews, just because it couldn’t become their elite’s practical administrative tool.

Thus, in Judaic monotheism, where the universal spiritual authority of God replaces the incarnate power of the deified despot, the Law (Halacha) replaces the actual bureaucratic structure of his despotic state, and History becomes His field of action, His empire. This inward ideological leap permitted the Jews to survive the periodic destruction of their state, the repeated destruction of their Temples, the occupation and governing of their promised land by unclean foreigners, the dislocations of the Diaspora, and the subversive temptations of rival belief-systems and ways of life. It allowed such disasters to be interpreted as instances of God’s just punishment of his erring people, rather than proofs of God’s defeat by superior alien gods.

But most important, it forced the Jews to regard themselves as functionaries of God. The tremendous psychic dualism which is built into monotheism, based on the gulf between Deity and self, provided powerful religious sanction for an ascetic model of conduct, for behavior strictly regulated by rational conformity to God’s written and oral law, rather than by tradition and custom. This ascetic spirit of Judaism differs sharply from the mystical, magical, or orgiastic spirit of other popular religions of Oriental despotism. In Weber’s terminology, it is based on world-rejection rather than world-flight, and stems directly from monotheism’s radical devaluation of creation in favor of the transmundane Creator in whom alone value subsists. God, unlike the gods, cannot be manipulated through appropriate ritual observance and sacrifice as a means of controlling events in this world; He alone is the Great Manipulator, and salvation consists in making oneself, as nearly as possible, His tool, a task requiring vigilant self-policing according to the dictates of His law.

The ascetic spirit of conduct and rational form of consciousness which were the latent consequences of this religion eventually disposed the Jews toward a commercial rather than agricultural way of life. Without this adaptation they would never have survived the impractical geopolitical location of their nation-state at the crossroads of two great rival empires. Judaism never sanctioned rational economic activity per se – this was to be a Protestant, and specifically a Calvinist innovation – but it encouraged a way of life and habits of thought which made it difficult for a devout Jew to practice agriculture, but which lent themselves quite readily to commerce. Thus monotheism not only helped insure the survival of the Jews as a religio-cultural entity, it also indirectly entered into their mode of production as a crucial factor in their survival as an urban commercial people.

What monotheism did for the Jews as a people, it did (in its trinitarian adulteration) for the West as a civilization. Ascendancy by the Christian sect of Judaism enabled Europe to withstand the destruction of the Imperial Roman state without regressing altogether to the tribal barbarism of its conquerors. It allowed a manorial, agricultural mode of production to emerge which was not Asiatic, preserving in significant part the cultural legacy of Roman despotism without its all-powerful state bureaucracy. It did this not by abandoning the Oriental despotic principle, but by internalizing it, as an ideology rather than a mode of statecraft. This ideology established the spiritual ideal of ascetic idealism, of renunciation of the world and self-renunciation. This ideal, self-dominion rather than dominion over others, became the unifying cultural principle integrating a welter of decentralized local powers. Trinitarian monotheism, in short, made European feudalism possible. Feudalism is therefore not the second “stage” in a unilinear sequence of Western development running from antiquity to modern times, but a hybrid synthesis of tribal barbarism’s freedom from centralized state coercion with Oriental despotism’s agrarian mode of production and elevated cultural level.

Trinitarian Christianity proves that it is possible to respect monotheism without subscribing to it. Therefore it is not Marx’s lack of belief in Judaism, but his refusal to accord it any recognition at all, which is all-important. This failure turned his theory into an ideology – the ideology of Westism. No man whose loathing of the Jews extended even to himself was about to show any respect for their religion or their role in history. Quite the contrary, he was bound to construct a world-view which by excluding them exorcized his personal demon. His anti-Semitism dramatized his inability to acknowledge the West’s debt to the East. His theory of history and his anti-Semitism are intertwined, sociologically and psychologically. The theory is not secular, as he thought, but merely pagan; not iconoclastic, but philistine; not scientific, but idolatrous. It is not a theory at all, but an ideology. Westism (to which there were many other contributors besides Marx), by celebrating the West as an autogenic miracle and shunting the Jews to the edge of history as a “pariah people” afflicted with a “fossil religion” (Weber’s terminology),  contributed its bit to European acceptance of “a world without Jews.” Westism would eventually carry the illegitimation of Judaism beyond the bounds of Christian anti-Semitism, into a realm in which final solutions would one day seem both reasonable and humane.

Conclusion

           

“Marx, the Anti-Semite” brought to an end my three-part investigation into the reasons for the failure of American socialism. It had led me far afield of my original subject, and yet back to its most primal sources. Many questions remained unanswered. Especially haunting was the matter of the outcome of the Cold War. Would this conflict be resolved peacefully, or through another World War? The American Paradigm suggested, but did not dictate, the latter. If Santayana was correct to suggest that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, then surely knowledge of the American Paradigm made it possible to avoid this terrible outcome. But except for one fellow-socialist whom I think would prefer not to be named, and who in any case did not subscribe to my theory, none of us had any presentiment of the coming peaceful downfall of the Soviet Union. That event caught me by surprise just much as the U.S.-China rapprochement had my unenlightened peers.

And it left me with a real paradox: the American Paradigm had no room in its framework for the system which would replace the Cold War. America’s international victory created a unipolar system, and unipolarity is inconceivable from the standpoint of my paradigm. The example of American history, and the reality of American power, had bequeathed upon the world a bipolar model, not the theoretical impossibility of one pole of power with no opposing force. The clear implication was that a new paradigm was needed.

I did not have it in me to devise yet another paradigm. So I devoted most of my subsequent writing to refining the American Paradigm to take into account the disruptive implications of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Much of this work resembled that of the medieval astronomers who busied themselves charting epicycles, and epicycles within epicycles, of the planetary orbits in an effort to preserve the Ptolemaic system. It was not a role I relished. Galileo’s defense of Copernicus was the role I fancied. Nevertheless, I could not abandon the American Paradigm in favor of a new model which was beyond my talents to invent.

So I returned to American history for an explanation of this disastrous post-Cold War “epicycle.” My first attempt dealt with American history after the Civil War. Many historians had noted that bipolarity had survived the South’s defeat, albeit in a modified form. Southern slavery had been defeated, but the North’s victory was only partial. The plantation system was eliminated, but a weakened version, based on agricultural share-cropping and racial segregation, endured. Upon this “tamed” version of Southern slavery, American bipolarity was recreated. The Southern Democratic party defeated Reconstruction and rejoined the Union as a junior partner of the capitalist North. These Southern Democrats formed a tacit alliance with the Republican party, and this Dixiecrat-GOP alliance became the de facto power elite of American politics. In other words, bipolarity was reborn in the crucible of Civil War, but in a new form which allowed for the untrammeled rule of capitalism in the new America.

Eureka! America would exploit its victory in the Cold War to bring about just such a world revolution in international relations. Bipolarity would reemerge through the “bourgeoisification” of the former Soviet Union. Communism in retrospect would come to be seen as Imperialism’s highest stage, not just in the sense of aiding in America’s subordination of Europe, but also as a brutal mechanism for conditioning Oriental despotism for its capitalist destiny.

But Russia’s actual “orbit” did not fit this prediction. The country was taken over by a criminal oligarchy whose power derived from extractive exploitation of natural resources. This pattern seemed to resemble quite well that of the Dixiecrat South. But therein lay the analogy’s flaw. The Dixiecrats were inducted into the American elite as junior partners, thereby recreating bipolarity. But the oligarchs of the former Soviet Union were never allowed to share world power with America, even as junior partners. Unipolarity persevered. The sole Superpower would take no partners, not even junior ones.

An even bigger question loomed. What was the role of Israel in a unipolar world? My revelation that Marx was an anti-Semite, leaving his socialism forever tainted, raised Judaism and Israel to a very uncomfortable position. It suggested, but did not delineate, a new world-historic mission for them. About Marx and socialism I knew a lot. About the sociology of Judaism I knew more than I thought. But about Judaism itself I knew nothing – and most of what I thought I knew was wrong.

Of my ignorance I was repeatedly assured by Avi Berkowitz, who had joined our group after having read “Marx, the anti-Semite,” despite my rude critique of his Orthodox rabbinical credentials. Avi found our painful evolution away from socialism rather amusing, but saw real value in the Marx critique. To his great credit, he made himself right at home among us, remarkably so because by this time not much was left of the group except for a few New York artists gathered around the figure of Tony Siani, whom I had known since Boulder. (Together with my wife Emily, it was Tony who initially encouraged me to write “Marx, the anti-Semite.”) A strong affinity developed between these artists and Avi, initially much warmer than between me and Avi. The artists found in Avi’s vast knowledge of the Jewish Biblical narrative a huge new resource for figurative painting, supplanting Western art’s traditional reliance on the Classical and Christian  Renaissance canon, embracing Modernism’s negation of that canon, but not its consequent rejection of figuration itself.

Avi also was concerned about the future of Israel in a unipolar world. But his concern grew out of his scholarly training for his Ph D. in Political Science at Columbia University. International relations theory suggested that bipolarity was one possibility within  the “deep structure” of anarchy in the international system. A bipolar balance of power in world politics made it possible for small nations like Israel to survive by playing one superpower against the other. Therefore the disappearance of bipolarity did not bode well for the small nations. Avi and I joined forces to develop his concept that “borders” was Judaism’s great contribution to international relations theory. He had made this concept his dissertation topic. The Jews had invented the territorially-bounded nation-state, and it was obvious that a unipolar world system was bound to attack national sovereignty as the world’s last great evil. Now it was apparent why Westism had embraced the cause of Palestinian anti-Zionism.

Thus ended my “life in socialism.” Avi and I, and sometimes John Bradford, Tony Siani’s artistic heir, wrote many essays on the subject of Israel’s struggle to survive in a hostile world. I have yet to provide a satisfying answer to the problem of perpetuating the American Paradigm. But I shall.