Well, I'm not gonna defend the editors in this instance, this statement that I found weak, or as kids Luke's say, "hella' weak."All the nationalist, dare I say Popular Frontism in this, "We can only write prospectively: how should we respond to this barbaric act?, " should be polemicized against, though I'd prefer from positions not mired in Leninist or pacifist illusions and unexamined assumptions.So, instead of me, doing a line by line critique or defense (who am I, Joanne Barkan?), just a little background on the Dissentniks.
First off, the journal founded in 1954, by Howe and Coser, Geltman and others from the Shactmanite and Partisan Review mileus, was supported financially by Joseph Buttinger, an Austrian Socialist exile from when the Nazis took over there in '34 after heroic resistance by armed workers militias. (Not all socdems are weanies.)Buttinger's wife, btw, Muriel Gardner, was the real model for , "Julia, " the book and movie with Jane Fonda and a then Trotskyist Healyite, Vanessa Redgrave. Another, btw, which figures in both this detailing of Dissentnik politics and a famous episode in history of SDS, is that a memorial meeting held in Madison Square Garden for the martyed workers in Austria, was assaulted physically by Stalinist goons of the CPUSA, which had not yet dropped the, "Social Fascist, " line of the perfidiousness of the socdems, twins of fascist reaction, indeed worse since they bred parliamentary cretinist illusions among the proles.Tom Hayden and other SDS'ers, when the parent organization, the League for Industrial Democracy, got the privilege of Manny Geltman, if memory serves, lifting up his shirt and shouting at Hayden about the scars he still had 30 yrs. later from the CPUSA's version of the LaRoucheite, "Operation Mop-Up."
Anyway, the origins of the journal lie in the desire of the editors to articulate a set of political and moral positions, informed by their mostly Trotskyist pasts but, seeing the increasing sterility of a Leninist positioning in the USA, but horrified at the moves of some of the Partisan Review left-liberals (like Max Eastman or CIA consultant, ex-Trot, James Burnham, towards unqualified McCarthyism/Trumanism) towards, what was called, The American Celebration, in it's optimistic, liberal version, or in it's pessimistic, neo-existentialist, Niebuhrian guise, a "TINA, " for the Cold War.For those, that jump all over, Irving Howe, look at from that period, his blast, "This Age of Conformity, " at his fellow Partisan Review confreres, in the 1952 symposium, "Our Country and Our Culture," in which all these ex-marxists, with the exception of C.Wright Mills, Norman Mailer, and Richard Chase, gave apologetics for their increasing adhesion to liberal and neo-conservative positions. Mailer, who had been active in the Popular Frontist, Progressive Party in '48, but was coming under the influence of a French Trot, Jean Malaquais (see, his early 50's novel, Barbary Shore), and had spoken at the Waldorf Peace conference that was one of the last gasps of the Pop Front in the early days of the Cold War, had a debate with Dwight Macdonald, in the mid-50's, at some place like New York's Town Hall, on the topic of, "Should We Choose the West?" Mailer went West, Dwight said he couldn't and wouldn't choose between two Empires, one supposedly democratic, the other supposedly, the homeland of socialism.
Since, I could go on at greater length but, have gasp, another 205 e-mails to scan through, I'll leave it there for now. . Just as with other journals I've read pretty regularily since the late 70's, from Monthly Review, New Left Review, The Nation, TNR, NACLA, ATC, Socialist Review until it turned way too pomo for my taste (in the 70's and 80's no magazine of the US left was better at great issues that had a mix of analysis, history, strategy and tactics and polemic), I don't unreservedly support it's editorial consensus. But, can't think of any other journal with the exception of NLR, that has been sharper at (obessively) detailing the moral and political cul de sac represented by uncritical solidarity with "anti-imperialist" national liberation movements or the more off the wall pov's represented in the latter periods of the New Left.
Almost forget this point. One of the Dissent editors, Joseph Clark, who died in the 80's, and had been a writer for the CPUSA's, Daily Worker, in its heydey, had a daughter, Judith, who joined the Weather Underground. Doubtless, this was on the mind of whichever editors drafted this statement, even if subsonsciously.
And, James I always read, 'er, L(ibertarian) M(arxism) (in homage to the council communist journal of the 40's by Mattick, Sr. and Korsch?), but, the lowpoint of LM was the infamous questioning of the Omarska camp in Bosnia.Not that y'all should have been bankrupted by a political error! Sure, critique, Humanitarian Imperialism, like Peter Gowan or Michel Feher, but, what the "liberals" here, Nathan, Leo, Pugliese, Max, all share I'd have a strong hunch, is a youth where the crimes of the US Empire (plus domestic racism) fueled our original radicalization, whether it was Vietnam or Nicaragua or El Salvador. (Indeed, a few of my pals and I in, '83 after Reagan invaded Grenada, tried our damndest to find a US flag to burn. Finally found one near the campus bookstore at UCSC, as I'm halfway up the flagpole, the campus fuzz drive up and say, "Mighty patriotic thing you're trying to do there boys!" Heh. Michael Pugliese, not Joey Johnson of the RCP. http://www.esquilax.com/flag/johnson.html