> ***** FPIF Special Report
> November 2003
>
> Sorrows of Empire
> By Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers has an interesting interview in the new book by Christian Appy, "Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, " on the Vietnam War. For all of Chalmers moving leftwards from his days as a CIA consultant from the period just after the Chinese Revolution ("Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, " from the early 50's is still read by China scholars) and his polemicizing against liberal doves and New Left cadre during the Vietnam War, he is still scathing about New Leftists and Old Left campus Maoists during the Vietnam War and their trashing of the norms of university life that so enraged Eugene, "Put Them (Staughton Lynd and New Left Anti-WAr Caucus of AHA in '69) Down!, " Genovese.
This is G o o g l e's cache of http://lists.village.virginia.edu/listservs/sixties-l/sep.22.94. G o o g l e's cache Sender: Jesse Lemisch <LEMJJ at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> Subject: Lasch I'm glad that Robert Strassfeld has picked up this discussion. He makes some good arguments that I'm happy to agree with, and he gives us a hilarious look inside the Great Marxist History Department at Rochester in its heyday.
I think our remaining disagreement is a potentially fruitful one. He notes Lasch's reliance on Marxist work and says, "it is a peculiar variety of Reagan- ite who would situate his defense of family in an attack on modern capitalism." Allow me to rephrase this: can a Marxist hold to socially conservative views? I think that there is abundant evidence of this combination, especially among American Marxist historians. This helps to explain why the New Left was not Marxist. I often found myself at odds with American Marxist historians on issues of hierarchy, "excellence," authority, feminism. Naomi Weisstein and I were eased out of what James Ridgeway called "The James Weinstein Mass Socialist Party"(1968), in which Lasch and Genovese were influential, because we sought in a party document to define a utopia which would come to term with differences of power, and we had the temerity to see economics as only one of many forms of power. They were uncomfortable with gender and expecially our critique of imagined "excellence" and meritocracy.
1969 was the great year of the radical caucus in the American Historical Association: we ran Staughton Lynd for President, and Genovese delivered his famous oration, saying of us, "We must put them down, we must put them down hard,
we must put them down once and for all." But there had been a radical caucus
at the AHA in 1968. In fact there had been two radical caucuses. (I wrtoe about
all this in the Newsletter of the Radical Historians Caucus a few years ago.) In addition to the reconizably New Left gathering dominated by left graduate students, there was another thing which in the taillist style of the day also called itself a radical caucus. (People should also note that the journal which was the only product of the James Weinstein Mass Socialist Party was named at first, somewhat oportunistically, Socialist Revolution.) I was the only person who spoke at both radical caucuses. Lasch and Genovese spoke for this group. The latter gave a "stick-with-me-and-you'll-go-places" speech, proposing a taking of power, particularly in journals, and he would see that we got pub- lished. (This model later produced Marxist Perspectives). I said that it was precisely such old boys' clubs that many of us opposed.
The Geneovese story is familiar: he has been writing for National Review for 25 years and is, in his social views to the right of Edmund Burke. (That's the point of his recent piece in Dissent.) And soon, at your favorite neighbor- hood bookstore, his latest adoration of the "organic society" of the old South.
This is not Lasch's story, although he did stick with Genovese longer than he shold have, and certainly those pieces by the two of them in the New York Review of Books in 68 and 69 attacking student radicals and Staughton Lynd were really terrible. But overall, Lasch avoided the kind of excesses I've mentioned . On the other hand I think it is fair to say that his views were socially con- servative. I must disagree with Strassfeld about the Tikkun piece by Lasch that I mentioned earlier. I think Lasch's views on gay marriage are simply homophob- ic. His attack on "narcissism" couldn't be a more direct attack on feminism.
I think that others will be able to see ways in which some American Marxists have been quite at home with hierarchy, order, and conservative social notions. What does this have to do with Reagan? Obviously Marxists get there by
their own route. But future social historians looking back on the eighties and nineties are going to have to deal with the attack on feminism, and the quest for family values in Lasch and Tikkun, and they won't be able to avoid seeing some kind of fit with the right-wing ideas of the time. (Again, see also the previously cited pieces by Barbara Ehrenreich and myself on Tikkun and Michael Lerner; also see recent pieces critical of Lerner's "Politics of Meaning" by Todd Gitlin in Jewish Currents and, I believe, an issue back in Tikkun.)
I hope I haven't confused readers with this somewhat meandering presentation.
The point has been to suggest that it's possible to be both a Marxist and a
conservative.
Jesse Lemisch
-- Michael Pugliese