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Left Illusions

For most of my adult and professional life, I regarded myself as a man of the left. The identification was stronger than just politics. Ever since marching in my first May Day parade down New York’s Eighth Avenue 30 years ago, I had looked on myself as a soldier in an international class-struggle that would one day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war. It was a romantic conception to be sure, but then revolution as conceived in the Marxist and socialist canons is a romantic conception; it promises the fulfillment of hopes that are as old as mankind; it posits a break with the whole burdened progress of human history—freedom from the chains that have bound master and slave, lord and peasant, capitalist and proletariat from time immemorial.

Not long after the end of the Vietnam War, I found myself unable to maintain any longer the necessary belief in the Marxist promise. Along with many other veterans of the 1960s struggles, I ceased to be politically active. It was a characteristic and somewhat unique feature of our radical generation, as distinct from previous ones, that we did not then join the conservative forces of the status quo. Instead, politics itself became suspect. We turned inward—not, I would say, out of narcissism but out of a recognition in some ways threatening to our radical ideas that failure (like success) is never a matter merely of “the objective circumstances” but has a root in the acting self.

Few of us, I think, felt at ease with the political limbo in which we found ourselves. It was as though the radicalism we shared was in some deep, perhaps unanalyzable sense a matter of character rather than of commitment. It was as though giving up the vision of fundamental change meant giving up the better part of oneself. So we continued to feel a connection to the left that was something more than sentimental, while our sense of loss led to conflicts whose appearance was sometimes less than fraternal. Such feelings, I believe, were an unspoken but significant element in the controversy over Joan Baez’s open letter to the Vietnamese, and in the Ronald Radosh-Sol Stern article on the Rosenbergs in The New Republic.¹¹

Baez had written an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam” to protest the post-peace repression in Vietnam. Even though the ad blamed the United States for its role in the war, she was denounced as a CIA agent by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda for her efforts (Radical Son pp. 302–3). Later I appeared on a television talk-show with Baez to discuss the Vietnam War. During the discussion she peremptorily dismissed my views, saying, “I don’t trust someone who’s had second thoughts.” Stern and Radosh had published an article, based on FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, suggesting that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy. There was an uproar in the left and the two of them came under vitriolic attack from their (now) ex-friends. My role in the genesis of this article and the subsequent book by Radosh and Joyce Milton (The Rosenberg File) is described in Radical Son, pp. 300–302.

Antonio Gramsci once described the revolutionary temperament as a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. For the veterans of my radical generation, the balance was tipped when we sustained what seemed like irreparable damage to our sense of historical possibility. It was not even so much the feeling that the left would not be able to change society; it was rather the sense that, in crucial ways, the left could not change itself.

Above all, the left seems trapped in its romantic vision. In spite of the defeats to its radical expectations, it is unable to summon the dispassion to look at itself critically. Despite the disasters of 20th-century revolutions, the viability of the revolutionary goals remains largely unexamined and unquestioned. Even worse, radical commitments to justice and other social values continue to be dominated by a moral and political double standard. The left’s indignation seems exclusively reserved for outrages that confirm the Marxist diagnosis of capitalist society. Thus there is protest against murder and repression in Nicaragua but not Cambodia, in Chile but not Tibet, South Africa but not Uganda, Israel but not Libya or Iraq. Political support is mustered for oppressed minorities in Western countries but not in Russia or the People’s Republic of China, while a Third World country that declares itself “Marxist” puts itself—by the very act—beyond reproach. In the same vein, almost any “liberation movement” is embraced as just that, though it may be as unmistakably atavistic and clerically fascist on first sight as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s in Iran.²²

The Nation’s Richard Falk was one of the outspoken promoters of the idea that the Ayatollah’s revolution would be a “liberation” for Iran.

This moral and political myopia is compounded by the left’s inability to accept responsibility for its own acts and commitments. Unpalatable results like the outcome of the Revolution in Russia are regarded as “irrelevant”—and dismissed—as though the left in America and elsewhere played no role in them, and as though they have had no impact on the world the left set out to change. Or they are analyzed as anomalies—and dismissed—as though there were in fact a standard of achieved revolution by which the left could have confidence in its program and in its understanding of the historical process.

Recently the shock of events in Indochina—mass murder committed by Cambodia’s Communists, the invasion and unacknowledged occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam, the invasion of Vietnam by China—has produced new and promising responses among radicals still committed to the socialist cause.³³ Paul Sweezy, the dean of America’s independent Marxists, wrote in Monthly Review this June of “a deep crisis in Marxian theory” because not one of the existing “socialist” societies behaves the way Marx and “most Marxists . . . until quite recently . . . thought they would.” Classes haven’t been eliminated; nor, he observes, is there any visible intention to eliminate them. The state, far from disappearing, has grown more powerful, and Marxist regimes “go to war not only in self-defense but to impose their will on other countries—even ones that are also assumed to be socialist.”

This was obviously wishful thinking.

The current dimensions of the left’s intellectual crisis are more readily grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had illusions about existing “socialisms” and has no attachment, intellectual or visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky’s intellectual integrity and moral courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.⁴⁴ Yet in a manner that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its political stance, Chomsky refuses to devote his tenacious intelligence to a systematic scrutiny of “socialist” regimes or even anti-Western regimes of the Third World.

Chomsky’s extreme adverse reaction to this reference, which is described in Radical Son (he wrote me two six-page single-spaced, vituperative and personally abusive letters in response), caused me to begin a reassessment of his character. For my second thoughts on Chomsky, see the articles in Volume Two of this series, Progressives.

Thus, in a passage from his new book Language and Responsibility, Chomsky criticizes the absence of socialist journalists in the mass media and comments: “In a sense, we have over here the ‘mirror image’ of the Soviet Union, where all the people who write in Pravda represent the position they call ‘socialism’—in fact, a certain variety of highly authoritarian state socialism.” Chomsky attributes this conformity to “ideological homogeneity” among the U.S. intelligentsia and to the fact that the mass media are capitalist institutions. Chomsky then offers examples of press conformity in connection with the Vietnam War and concludes: “It is notable that despite the extensive and well-known record of Government lies during the period of the Vietnam War, the press, with fair consistency, remained remarkably obedient, and quite willing to accept the Government’s assumptions, framework of thinking, and interpretation of what was happening.”

The questions I find myself asking, when I read these words just now, are: By what standard does Chomsky judge the obedience of the American press remarkable? Is there a national press that is not obedient in the sense described? Does Chomsky mean that the American press was remarkably more obedient to its government during the Vietnam War than other national presses would have been in similar circumstances? Looking back at those events from the present historical juncture, one would be inclined to say exactly the reverse. Not only did the American press provide much of the documentation on which the antiwar movement’s indictment of the American war effort was based—including the My Lai atrocities—but in defiance of its government and at the risk of prosecution for espionage and treason, it published the classified documents known as the “Pentagon Papers,” which provided a good deal of the tangible record of official lies to which Chomsky refers.⁵⁵

Chomsky ignored this obvious criticism and went on to elaborate the same preposterous thesis in his most famous book, Manufactured Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman.

This is not to say that Chomsky’s characterization of press subservience is wrong but rather to put the criticism in perspective. Within the framework of ideological conformity and institutional obedience that Chomsky rightly deplores, a body of dissent developed during the 1960s which has continued to influence the conduct of America foreign policy and the structure of international relations in the present decade. Who would have thought ten years ago that the anti-American revolution in Iran, the linchpin of America’s imperial interests in the Middle East, would not trigger an immediate American military intervention? Who would have believed that the 25,000 military “advisors” in Africa’s civil conflicts in the 1970s would be Cubans rather than Americans?

Consider, too, for a moment, Chomsky’s misleading comparison of the Soviet and American presses as “mirror images.” In fact, the ignorance imposed on the Soviet public by government-controlled media and official censorship is mind-boggling by Western standards. At a bare minimum, the information necessary to carry on a public debate over government policies in areas such as foreign policy and defense is not available to the Soviet citizen (who would be forbidden to use it, if it were). Censorship is carried to such an extreme that the Soviet citizen may be uninformed about such noncontroversial threats to his wellbeing as natural disasters, man-made catastrophes or even military provocations by the United States. When Washington mined Haiphong Harbor and dared Russian vessels to challenge the blockade, a crisis—compared at the time to the 1962 confrontation over Cuban missiles—ensued. For twenty days during this crisis, the Soviet people were not informed that the mining had taken place. (The purpose of the blackout was to allow the Soviet leadership to capitulate to the American threat without domestic consequences.)

Why bring this up? Why dwell on the negative features of the Soviet system (or of other Communist states) which in any case are widely reported in the American media? What is the relevance? These are questions the apologists of the left raise when they are confronted by the Soviet case. Unfortunately, the consequences of ignoring the flaws of practical Communism are far-ranging and real. To begin with, the credibility of the left’s critique is gravely undermined. Chomsky’s article is a good example. The American press does not look inordinately servile when compared with its real-world counterparts—and especially its socialist opposites. Only when measured against its own standards and the ideals of a democratic society does it seem so. Yet it is Chomsky who raises the Soviet comparison, precisely because the United States and the Soviet Union are in an adversary relationship—a political fact of prime importance that the left often prefers to ignore, when it suits their purposes—and he does so in a misleading way. The result is that his argument is vitiated, or at least seriously weakened, for anyone who has not internalized the special expectations of the left that a future socialist press would be really independent, critical and accurate.

Latent in Chomsky’s critique is a comforting illusion: namely, that the left’s failure to sustain itself as a political force with a radical alternative social vision is due to the absence of socialist journalists in the capitalist media, rather than to its own deficiencies—the failure of the left’s ideals in practice; its moral inconsistency; its inability to formulate and fight for realistic programs; in short, the fact that it cannot command moral and political authority among its constituencies.

The blind-spot toward the Soviet Union provides a good instance of the left’s lack of political realism. The Soviet Union is one of the two predominant military powers in the world. That alone makes it a crucial subject of any contemporary political analysis that claims to be comprehensive. Radicals often seem to think that Western policy can be explained independently of Soviet behavior by reference to the imperatives of the system, the requirements of the “disaccumulation crisis,” etc. This was always a weakness in the radical perspective; but now, as a result of the continuing development of Soviet power in the last decade, it has passed a critical point and has become crippling.

During the 1950s, and even in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was significantly weaker militarily than the United States. The celebrated “missile gap” was all on the other side. Hence, whatever Soviet intentions, Washington’s influence on the dynamics of the arms race and the cold war was preponderant. This is no longer the case. The Soviet Union has now achieved nuclear parity with the United States for the first time since the onset of the atomic era. This profoundly affects, among other things, the Soviet ability to intervene in political and military conflicts outside its borders. The political pendulum has also swung in its favor. In an earlier day, John Foster Dulles used to attack the nonaligned states for “immoral” neutrality. At the recent conference of nonaligned countries in Havana, the policy of Washington’s representatives was to keep the participants neutral (i.e. not aligned with the Soviet bloc).

These changes and the trend they represent make a realistic analysis of Soviet policies crucial for any political movement. Yet in a special issue of The Nation concerned with the problem of military interventions (June 9), only one of ten articles was even partially devoted to the Soviet Union.⁶⁶ That article, by Michael Klare, employed a comparative analysis of U.S. and Soviet military forces to discount the impression that the Soviet Union is now or intends to become an interventionist power.

Another, by Gareth Porter, however, did admirably deal with Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.

Klare achieved this feat in two ways: by defining “interventionist forces” in such a restrictive manner as to exclude the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the occupation forces it maintains there; and by describing Soviet intervention in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as “aid” to “beleaguered allies”—in short, by taking a page from the apologists for American intervention. When Klare was compelled under his own ground-rules to admit that some Soviet missions had the look of interventionist forces, he quickly denied the implication, saying, “. . . but it is important to remember that the units involved are seen by Moscow as being ‘on loan’ from their normal, defensive mission, and so would be recalled the moment they were needed at home.” So, presumably, would the U.S. “advisers” that began America’s involvement in Vietnam, if they had been needed at home.

Failure to appreciate the world role of a major power—the depressing history of leftist apologias for that power aside—would be serious enough. But the Soviet Union, despite all the qualifying circumstances of its origins and development, is the country in which the revolutionary socialist solution—state ownership of the means of production—has been tested and found wanting. For this reason, far more than for the others, it requires radical attention. The point was forcefully made a few years ago by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski:

Why the problems of the real and the only existing Communism, which Leftist ideologies put aside so easily (“all right, this was done in exceptional circumstances, we won’t imitate these patterns, we will do it better” etc.), are crucial for socialist thought is because the experiences of the “new alternative society” have shown very convincingly that the only universal medicine these people have for social evils—state ownership of the means of production—is not only perfectly compatible with all disasters of the capitalist world, with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but that it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and, above all, the unrestricted role of the omnipotent bureaucracy, a concentration of power never known before in human history.

Can the left take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals? Can it begin to shed the arrogant cloak of self-righteousness that elevates it above its own history and makes it impervious to the lessons of experience?

In a previous essay, Kolakowski wrote that the left was defined by its “negation” of existing social reality. But not only this: “It is also defined by the direction of this negation, in fact by the nature of its utopia.” Today, the left’s utopia itself is in question. That is the real meaning of the crisis of Marxism. Paradoxically, the way for the left to begin to regain its utopia, to fashion a new, more adequate vision of radical commitment and radical change, is to take a firmer grip on the ground under its feet.

This article was published in the December 8, 1979 issue of The Nation as “A Radical’s Disenchantment”—a title provided by the editors. It turned out to be my farewell to the left. (See Radical Son, pp. 305–7.)

¹Baez had written an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam” to protest the post-peace repression in Vietnam. Even though the ad blamed the United States for its role in the war, she was denounced as a CIA agent by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda for her efforts (Radical Son pp. 302–3). Later I appeared on a television talk-show with Baez to discuss the Vietnam War. During the discussion she peremptorily dismissed my views, saying, “I don’t trust someone who’s had second thoughts.” Stern and Radosh had published an article, based on FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, suggesting that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy. There was an uproar in the left and the two of them came under vitriolic attack from their (now) ex-friends. My role in the genesis of this article and the subsequent book by Radosh and Joyce Milton (The Rosenberg File) is described in Radical Son, pp. 300–302.

²The Nation’s Richard Falk was one of the outspoken promoters of the idea that the Ayatollah’s revolution would be a “liberation” for Iran.

³This was obviously wishful thinking.

⁴Chomsky’s extreme adverse reaction to this reference, which is described in Radical Son (he wrote me two six-page single-spaced, vituperative and personally abusive letters in response), caused me to begin a reassessment of his character. For my second thoughts on Chomsky, see the articles in Volume Two of this series, Progressives.

⁵Chomsky ignored this obvious criticism and went on to elaborate the same preposterous thesis in his most famous book, Manufactured Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman.

⁶Another, by Gareth Porter, however, did admirably deal with Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.