RADICALS’ DILEMMAS, HISTORIANS’ PARADOXES

by Daniel Pope

Peter Clecak, Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left: 1945-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). John P. Diggins, The American Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

Marxist intellectuals have consciously sought to make their analyses and their political activities interact dialectically, to unify theory and practice. Any effort to understand them must take this into account; their thought must be judged in its historic context, but not simply as the superstructure of a causal base.

Although neither John P. Diggins’ The American Left in the Twentieth Century nor Peter Clecak’s Radical Paradoxes explicitly states a methodological credo, both seem to grasp the necessity of synthesizing thought and actions. Yet, while Diggins provides some fresh insights into the cycle of commitment and disillusionment of some socialist thinkers, his refusal to take American radical politics seriously vitiates his understanding of the left. Clecak, despite a few lapses, keeps the Marxist ambition of praxis (and its frustrations in a society hospitable to neither radical theory nor practice) in the foreground. The result is a valid commentary on some important Marxist intellectual strategists.

Diggins’ book is the broader of the two, though hardly as broad as its title. Indeed, he ignores much in the political activities ofleftist groups. Debs rates a half-page biographical sketch, but Norman Thomas gets only a sentence and Earl Browder is missing entirely. The role of radicals in organizing the C.I.O. is handled in one paragraph. Yet we have fairly long asides on nineteenth century utopianism, on Dewey and James, among other topics.

Diggins’ brief descriptions of radical activism are careless in detail and substance. Usually, the factual mistakes a re minor: Bill Haywood was accused of murdering ex-Governor Steunenberg, not Governor Staunnerberg (p. 67); Dane1 DeLeon was, of course in the Socialist Labor Party, not the Socialist Party; George Padmore was a Trinidadian, not an American and was not even in the United States when Diggins refers to him as exemplifying Black intellectuals’ Marxism (p. 126); the May Day activities in Washington in 1971 were anything but “respectable” (p. 180); a campesino is a field worker, not a collective (p. 167). This sloppiness extends to more serious matters. Since Diggins seems to assume that affluence precluded mass working-class support for socialism, his explanations of the failures of radical movements are off-handed and unenlightening. Concluding a brief discussion of the decline of the Socialist Party, Diggins writes, “Whatever the reasons for the rise and decline of American socialism.. .,” and moves on to a more congenial topic. (p. 66)

An author is certainly entitled to write his own

book -though the publisher should not label it an “authoritative analysis.” Indeed, Diggins does have a theme, although it is stated obliquely. A lengthy introductory chapter sets up and proceeds to knock down “Popular Characteristics’’ of t h e left as inadequate definitions. Ultimately, radicalism is taken to be a set of “sensibilities and styles of thought,” (p. vi), moods of intellectual opposition, negation and generational revolt. “It has been something of a spontaneous moral stance, mercurial and sporadic, suspicious of power and distrustful of politics.” (16) O r , somewhat mystifyingly, “. . . Perhaps it is best to try to see the Left as it saw itself - as a new intellectual class with a profoundly radical view of the nature of history and reality.” (p. 23)

In one sense, Diggins may be moving in the right direction. Attempts to locate a thread of policies and beliefs linking disparate radical movements and individuals have been unconvincing, be they Staughton Lynd’s emphasis on liberty of conscience or Daniel Bell’s notion that the Left has consistently refused to accept “politics as a vocation,” in the Weberian sense. All all-encompassing definition should fuse the personal and the political dimensions, as Diggins hopes. But his definitions succeed only by excluding those aspects of radicalism which do not interest him and by grossly distorting the Left‘s self-image.

The bulk of The American Left in the Twentieth Century is devoted to chapters on the “Lyrical Left” (those grouped around The Masses before World War I), the Marxist Old Left ofthe 1930’s, and the New Left of the last decade. In each, Diggins emphasizes the process of deradicalization of leftist intellectuals. Max Eastman is made to personify the Lyrical Left, and his disenchantment with Stalinism and with the dialetic are traced with considerable acuity. The chapter on the Old Left contains a large section in which the paths rightward of academic luminaries such as Daniel Boorstin and Sidney Hook are. delineated. This is a neat summary of the post-Depression intellectual drift, but its length is not justified in a brief survey. In fact, it replaces any adequate discussion of the successes and failures, and the intellectual and personal dilemmas of the Old Left.

Understandably, the portrait of the New Left is somewhat blurrier than the other panels in Diggins’s tryptich. While Diggins here stresses generational revolt, to his credit he treats it as a socio-historical phenomenon, not, 5 la Lewis Feuer, as recurring psychopathology. The chapter is weakest when Diggins tries to explain the decline of the New Left. Since he largely ignores New Left political activity, he merely presents a laundry-list of possible causes. At the very end, he suggests intriguingly that the counter-culture challenges the very ontology of Marxism and other Western systems of thought, and

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that the New Left will be unable to synthesize its political ambitions and its cultural attitudes. Even here, though, Diggins has missed the co-optability and the materialism which the counter-culture has manifested in practice.

Peter Clecak would agree with Diggins that “the central dilemma that has faced all these lefts. . . was the inability to find a social force that would adopt a commitment of active opposition to the existing order.” (Diggins, p. 176) However, where Diggins finds a cul de sac, Clecak perceives a maze through which Marxist intellectuals groped, albeit without ultimate success.

Clecak spins his radical paradoxes on several levels, but his analysis is predicated on a distinction which he borrows from Stanley Moore’s article, “Utopian Themes in Marx and Mao.”l There are two sides to Marxism, Clecak maintains. The first, labeled socialist, is a social scientific prediction of an end to class exploitation through revolution; the second, called communist, is a philosophical exposition of a world in which alienation is eradicated and community established. In post-World War I1 America, the apparent failures of Marx the sociologist, as evidenced by the conservatism of the American working class and the cr imes of Stalinism, led independent radical intellectuals to seek hope in the utopian side of Marxism. Concurrently, they each sought a surrogate revolutionary force to transform America.

Clecak studies four “plain Marxist” thinkers: C. Wright Mills, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Herbert Marcuse. At first, the term “plain Marxist” seems to be merely honorific; just as Mills himself introduced the term and applied it to people as divergent as Georges Sore1 and Erich Fromm, Clecak seems to define the term negatively: a plain Marxist is one who rejects sectarian orthodoxy without embracing the cold war postures of many social democrats. Upon closer analysis, the author is on firmer ground. Mills, Baran, Sweezy and Marcuse faced and tried to resolve the same kinds of problems, despite their differences in style and substance.

Clecaks approach leaves him with admiration for each of the men he studies but with increasingly harshverdicts on their work. Mills, discussed first, is praised for his ability “to cut to the center of massive problems.” (p. 62) However, his intense desire to find revolutionary potential in young, uncorrupted intellectuals led Mills to serious mistakes. Wanting to believe that small groups of committed men could make revolutionary history, he argued that cohesive, self-conscious el i tes were in command of t he counter-revolutionary “main drift.” Thus, Mills underestimated broader social forces - classes among them -and overstressed the power of ruling elites. Clecak does not stop with this valuable insight into Mills. He accuses Mills of an authoritarian streak: ‘ I . . . Rational and free men -like himself - ought to shape history democratically,” but this hope is ultimately a demand for a minority revolution, which would substitute the will of the few for the desires of the majority. (p. 66) This kind of “logical tendency” argument is unconvincing; Clecak

sacrifices an appreciation of Mills’ intellectual tenacity for a spurious consistency of theme.

One wonders why Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy are treated in separate chapters, since they were the closest of collaborators. Here, though, are valuable reviews of t he ca ree r s of two men whose international reputations belie t he i r shoddy treatment by the American academic establishment. Clecak praises Baran for his recognition of the high costs of Soviet development and his frank appraisals ofthe weakness ofthe American left, but then rejects each of Baran’s efforts to draw hope from the present. Economic growth, Clecak asserts, does not mean inevitable democratization of the U.S.S.R. Early expectations that the Cuban revolution could create a communist society proved unjustified. In a lengthy critique of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, Clecak objects to the authors’ unrelievedly harsh views of the quality of life in America and to their predictions of breakdown and revolution.

The evolution of Sweezy’s viewpoint, from a restrained acceptance of Stalinism to a rejection of the U.S.S.R. as state capitalism and a perspective which places revolutionary prospects in the third world, reveals one of the paths Baran might have taken had he not died in 1964. Once again, Clecaks admiration for Sweezy’s integrity and vigor is more than counter-balanced by his objections to Sweezy’s attempts to find a place for the metahistorical, utopian dream of communism within the historical process.

As i f to drive home the folly of mixing metaphysics and social analysis, Clecak continues with chapters on Herbert Marcuse and on the New Left. Here, the tone becomes more monitory. Mills, Baran and Sweezy represent unrealized potential for realistic Marxist theory; Marcuse and the New Left betray the promise. “Marcuse finally produces a kind of fiction that he represents a social theory.” But this “devastating confusion” of myth and social analysis is morally and intellectually irresponsible. (p. 228-9) The New Left, too, “blurs vision and destroys values.” (p 246) “The intellectual and political consequences.. . w e r e . . . disastrous.” (p. 249) The Weather underground position is “frightening”; the Yippies a r e credi ted with “devastating” satire, but their fantasies of living without restraint and without conflict are ultimately costly, for they abandon hope for the creation of a mass leftist constituency.

Fittingly for one who seeks to appreciate the historical situation of radical intellectuals, Clecak concludes with “a few speculations on the future of the socialist vis ion. . . .” (p. 278) He formulates democratic socialist goals and issues a tempered call for a left-l iberal coalition to work for public ownership and decentralized planning. Clecak is well aware that his minimalist and gradualist platform suffers from its own radical paradox: the communist goal of fraternity may win only a few converts, but they a r e devoted and willing to sacrifice; the socialist goal of reducing exploitation wins the assent of many, but the dedication of few. Clecakcangive us little cause for hope that hisvision

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will find a constituency. If the plain Marxists are guilty of vainly searching for a surrogate proletariat, then Clecak is guilty of avoiding the search for an “agent of change” altogether. To set forth a program for which there is no apparent constituency is itself a form of utopianism.

with the debacle of European social democracy’s capitulation to world war, Bernstein recalled Jean Jaures’s espousal in 1907 of the general strike against war: “At that time, he seemed to me to be suffering from an idee fixe. Today I asked myself whether this phrase could not have been better

Equally, there are perils down the path Clecak recommends. He strays from his historical moorings when he emphasizes the totalitarian element of the “communist” effort to achieve community through political change. Giving up efforts to mold “new socialist man” has hardly meant political freedom in the Soviet Union. Indeed, as visionary goals were abandoned in the U.S.S.R., terror grew apace. It is well and good for Clecak to indicate potentially authoritarian patterns in the plain Marxists’ thought, but in his alarm, he overlooks the main drift of totalitariansm.

applied to my own attitude. It is not always the daring flight of imagination that leads astray; sometimes the lack of imagination is worse.. . .”%

Clecak’s call for a deliberate restriction of imagination by radicals strikes this reader a s ahistorical. If we had a surer grasp of the potentialities and limitations of earlier American radical movements, however, we would be more able to anticipate the consequences ofthe paths currently before the Left. Unfortunately, Diggins, by positing the inevitability of failure and concentrating on the waning of radical vigor, does little to help us weigh the alternatives. Clecak. desDite the narrower scorn

I -

Perhaps Edward Bernstein, of all people, spoke most eloquently in defense of the necessity of a utopian element in socialist thought. In 1916, faced

of his book, offers more to readers who wish t o comprehend the accomplishments and failures of the American left.

NOTES

1. Monthly Review, XXI (June, 1969) pp. 33-44. 2. Cited in Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1952), p. 276.

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