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
