[lbo-talk] "There are leftists, but there is no left" Salon interview with James Weinstein

[John Adams]

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/10/30/weinstein/index.html

In These Times founder James Weinstein on the American left's "long 
detour" with communism, its current crisis, and the hope he sees in 
Howard Dean.

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By Joan Walsh

printe-mail

Oct. 30, 2003  |  Nobody would mistake left-wing scholar and publisher 
James Weinstein for Roger Ailes. But long before there was a Fox News, 
Weinstein knew that the failure of the American left to become an 
enduring force in American politics was in part a failure to compete in 
the marketplace of ideas and in the world of media -- and that back 
when the left thrived, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it 
relied on a web of local, regional and national newspapers and 
magazines. So while most of his colleagues focused on their books and 
the world of academia, he played a leading role in founding journals 
like Studies on the Left and Socialist Review, starting San Francisco's 
Modern Times bookstore and, most notably, In These Times newspaper.

I worked at In These Times in the mid-1980s, back when it called itself 
"an independent socialist newspaper" (being more honest about his 
politics than Roger Ailes, Weinstein didn't choose the motto "fair and 
balanced"). I saw the label as one of Weinstein's charming 
eccentricities -- he was determined to revive socialism's 
respectability, take it back from those who had stolen it -- but the 
paper's left-wing politics were not eccentric; it was unexpectedly 
hardheaded. That was where I lost my romance with identity politics, 
with believing that some amalgam of women, blacks, gays and other 
pissed-off people would gradually rise and transform American politics. 
The paper covered all those movements, but critically. And it backed 
efforts to work within the Democratic Party, like Jesse Jackson's 1984 
and 1988 presidential runs, discouraging the vanity and nihilism of 
third-party politics -- the impulse that ultimately turned into Ralph 
Nader's disastrous Green Party run in 2000, which gave the presidency 
to George Bush.

Weinstein knows disastrous third-party efforts firsthand -- he was a 
Communist Party member for a short time in the 1940s, and became 
briefly infamous on the left in the late 1970s for helping to confirm 
historian Ron Radosh's revisionist account of the Rosenberg case: that 
despite the left's claims that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were falsely 
accused and wrongly executed for spying for the Soviet Union, Julius 
did in fact pass information to the Soviets. (He also favorably 
reviewed Radosh's "The Rosenberg File" for In These Times.) To many on 
the left Weinstein's admission was heresy, given the history of 
redbaiting and right-wing witch hunting the left had endured in the 
1950s. But Weinstein has always reckoned clearly with the contradiction 
of that decade -- redbaiting was a disaster, but so was communism, and 
both had hurt the American left.

Weinstein retired as publisher of In These Times in 1999, though he 
still supports its work, and this year he finished his fourth book, 
"The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left." He 
calls himself a "pathological optimist," and he thinks that despite its 
"long detour" -- the Soviet experiment and the years American 
communists spent defending it -- the left can once again play a vital 
role in reforming American democracy. Salon spoke to Weinstein by phone 
from his home in Chicago.

____

Salon: Your book charts the development of an authentic, indigenous, 
vital American left -- and an American socialism -- through the 
beginning of the 20th century. Then it all came apart with World War I, 
when the left's opposition to the war was used to tar it as treasonous 
and anti-American, and there were a whole string of government efforts 
to target and dismantle it. Was that really the first time the left was 
attacked as "traitorous"? Obviously, there are echoes today.

JW: Well, it was, really. Before that, there were some movements and 
groups that were attacked as "un-American," given the prevalence of 
immigrants in their ranks. But not "anti-American" or treasonous. 
Still, the socialists gained a lot of support during the war, in fact, 
that led to the government's efforts to disrupt the party. It's hard 
for people to understand today how unpopular that war really was.

Salon: Yes, it's linked with World War II as one of the "good wars."

JW: Right, but it was very unpopular at the time, and one big factor 
was the number of German immigrants in the U.S., many of whom did 
oppose the war ...

Salon: For nationalist reasons.

JW: Some of them. But not all of them. Of course, the German socialists 
-- who were particularly powerful in Wisconsin, especially Milwaukee -- 
were totally anti-Kaiser. They didn't oppose the war because they 
supported the Kaiser.

Salon: But they were smeared that way.

JW: Yes. Then later, with the rise of the Soviet Union, the left was 
considered "anti-American" because it was seen -- the Communist Party, 
at least -- as supporting an enemy that was supposed to be very 
powerful and threatening, but that was basically weak and desperately 
trying to catch up with American capitalism's level of 
industrialization.

Salon: But you've always been very honest about the fact that the 
American Communist Party was supporting the Soviet Union, which was our 
enemy, and how that support completely disfigured the American left, 
with ramifications to this day. In fact, reading the book I found 
myself going back and forth between feeling like the left has been 
destroyed by the government -- looking at World War I, the Red Scare, 
the Palmer Act, McCarthyism, through COINTELPRO in the '60s -- and the 
notion that the left has destroyed itself. Thanks to its romance with 
the C.P. and the Soviet Union in the '40s and '50s, and then with 
violence in the '60s. Where do you come down on that question?

JW: Look, I wrote this book to make clear that, as you say, there was 
an American left, an American socialism, and through the first 20 years 
of the 20th century, it was growing and important. Much of what it 
advocated for we take for granted today. Especially after the New Deal 
-- Social Security, workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, the 
eight-hour workday, the 40-hour week, minimum-wage laws -- the ideas of 
the left became mainstream ideas. But they started out as totally 
marginal. You also have to understand, the left was in every aspect of 
American society back then: Two-thirds of the original members of the 
NAACP were socialists. The first people who got arrested for advocating 
birth control -- Margaret Sanger, etc. -- were socialists. Many trade 
unionists were socialists. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, the 
children of the ruling class, was a vigorous organization. It had 
become an important aspect of every part of American life, and its 
programs addressed the problems of the emerging gigantic corporations 
-- it was an attempt to stabilize the system, which meant to humanize 
it.

So as time went on, and especially in the New Deal, the ideas that had 
originally been totally marginal became the property of the mainstream 
of American political discourse, and meanwhile socialists had nothing 
new to say, because the Russian Revolution had thrown the whole 
movement backward. What came to mean "socialism" after the Russian 
Revolution was this incredibly backward, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial 
society whose main goal was to catch up with the west. I mean, in my 
book I show how the Russian city of Magnitogorsk became the model of a 
socialist city, but it replicated Gary, Ind. -- everything radiated out 
from the steel mill! -- which was probably the worst failed American 
city. I mean, they had no idea what socialism was. It was a terrible 
throwback, the use of slave labor, the absence of any kind of political 
democracy. And yet the communists, who really were at the time the most 
vital force in the American left, were defending it.

Salon: Yeah, but that goes back to my question: Was the left destroyed 
or did it destroy itself? I mean, the party channeled that vitality 
toward defending this failed system -- which offered no democracy plus 
a lower standard of living. Great idea, sign me up.

JW: Right. And coming out of World War II, you had American society 
going through tremendous changes, and you had corporate rulers worried 
we might fall back into the Great Depression. Their answer was partly 
the Cold War, and partly consumerism -- we go from a society built on 
self-abnegation and saving money to a society where everybody moves to 
the suburbs, everybody has two cars, everybody needs their own 
washer/dryer -- but the left had no answers. There was really very 
little in the way of an attempt to make sense of it.

Salon: In fact you had this odd break after the bitter infighting 
around communism and McCarthyism -- and then came the New Left. And I'm 
struck, in the book, by what you say the New Left had in common with 
the way the Communist Party worked -- that the emphasis on identity 
politics seemed borrowed from Popular Front-ism (when communists 
advised members to work through existing organizations to try to move 
them left). In both cases, there was no focus on cross-issue politics, 
on class, there was no overarching ideology -- the communists because 
they didn't want to be honest about what it was; the New Left because 
it really didn't have one. And they were both dead ends.

JW: I love the story I use in my book about [leading antiwar activist] 
Jerry Rubin, because it encapsulates what the problem was. Here you had 
this great antiwar movement, where most people who got involved were in 
it because they wanted to end the war, but when someone suggested they 
might actually end the war, Jerry Rubin panicked: "What would happen to 
the movement?" he wanted to know. His private belief was that this was 
some kind of revolutionary moment and that it couldn't just "succeed." 
But this was true of a lot of people in SNCC [the Students' Nonviolent 
Coordinating Committee], the environmental movement.

Salon:  I think it's true to this day. I think a lot of people on the 
left who get involved in single-issue movements -- antipoverty 
movements, welfare organizing, labor, education reform -- have this 
nihilistic belief that they can't really solve the problems they're 
purporting to address, because "the system" is so corrupt it won't let 
them. If they did their jobs as advocates successfully, the issues 
would go away and they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

JW: Yes, there's some of that, and even worse than that is every one of 
these movements begins to operate not as part of a coherent left, as it 
did in the early 1900s. All these movements existed, but they were all 
held together by common goals and principles of the socialists who were 
the dominant force on the left at that time. Today, they all become 
like any other lobby group, and they become more and more narrow ...

Salon: And there's a zero sum approach, where if Latinos get some, 
blacks get less, if women get better jobs, men have to lose.

JW: And yet, the left still has this approach to politics where they 
talk about coalitions as laundry lists of organizations and groups 
whose basic approach is really divisive.

Salon: There's no vision of a common good.

JW: Right. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, it 
should have been possible to put that whole period behind us and start 
thinking: Now, what's a left that works in this country? What is the 
potential in the United States for the kind of society that would let 
us all lead humane, comfortable, secure, creative lives? But it's not 
happening.

Salon: Anywhere?

JW: Nowhere!

Salon: Well, you've always been a comparative realist on the left, and 
negative about the potential for third parties, given our "winner take 
all" system. In These Times sponsored a lot of debate over the Nader 
campaign, but I know you were very critical of it yourself.

JW: I was very critical, but of course we were open to our readers' 
opinions and we had a lot of readers who just loved Ralph Nader. And it 
isn't even a question of Ralph Nader. Right now Nader is working with 
Dennis Kucinich, who's running in the Democratic Party.

Salon: Which is what you think he should be doing?

JW: Well, not necessarily. Look, I've been criticized for saying 
everybody should rush and join the Democratic Party. That's not what 
I'm saying. I think there might be congressional districts where you 
can do something different. I think there are congressional districts 
where the left should run somebody in Republican primaries. My real 
model is the Non-Partisan League, which was in neither party, but which 
got control of all of North Dakota with allies in both parties, because 
it utilized an open primary system. Whereas the Socialist Party, which 
had the same exact platform, never elected anybody except in a couple 
of districts.

Salon: But the problem with the Green Party is that it doesn't tend to 
run in Republican districts or challenge Republicans. It looks for 
places where it's got some strength -- which tend to be places that 
elect Democrats. So they go up against Democrats.

JW: And they split the left.

Salon: But supporting Kucinich is a step in the right direction.

JW: Yes. I mean, Kucinich isn't going anywhere. That's not the point. 
The point is that Kucinich is doing in the Democratic Party something 
that's analogous to what Nader did -- he's getting some large crowds, 
he got 10,000 people in Minneapolis, and they're hearing his ideas and 
they're getting excited. I think he's bringing people into the process. 
And then when he's forced out, they have the option of hooking up with 
someone else because he's doing it within the Democratic Party 
framework.

Salon: You talk about Ralph Reed in the book -- he's your role model, 
right? But seriously, he goes from Christian Coalition head to take 
over the Georgia Republican Party and takes down Sen. Max Cleland. The 
Christian right has a lot of discipline that the left just seems to 
lack.

JW: They've done very well. They still don't represent more than 15 to 
17 percent of the voters. But because they operate intelligently, 
unlike the left, they have tremendous influence.

Salon: So you're supporting Howard Dean this year.

JW: Oh yeah, I mean, I don't think he's Franklin D. Roosevelt, although 
Roosevelt ran as a conservative in 1932, but he's just head and 
shoulders above everybody else. He's the only person who can talk to an 
audience and sound like an honest person, and I think that's what 
Americans are dying for -- someone who'll listen to what they say, 
respond honestly and directly, and if he disagrees he'll say why. I've 
heard him do that -- I went to a fundraising party for him in Chicago a 
couple of months ago. The amazing thing about that was that I thought 
I'd go see a lot of my friends, and there were 500 people there and I 
didn't know a single person. This is a movement.

Salon:  What happens to it if he doesn't get the nomination?

JW: Who knows? But you know, it's not that kind of movement. It's not 
just about him. But the war is very important. He opposed the war at a 
time when it was very difficult to oppose the war, and now everybody's 
trying to half-jump on his bandwagon. And they all look like a bunch of 
fools by comparison.

Salon: What do you think of the Wesley Clark phenomenon?

JW: I think it's the Clintons' attempt, and the Democratic Leadership 
Council's attempt, to hang onto the party. I think they're afraid of 
what Dean represents -- a whole new circle of people who threaten their 
hold on the party. Plus I actually think Clark is a terrible candidate. 
Everybody thinks the Democrats need a general, but by the time the 
election comes around in a little over a year George Bush will be 
paying for Iraq, and he'll be in trouble no matter who he faces.

Salon: You think that's the issue that can bring Bush down?

JW: Well, not necessarily. The economy's in pretty bad shape, too. 
[Laughs)] But I think the war is an issue that's going to mobilize and 
energize a lot of people.

Salon: But won't it divide a lot of people? I mean, there was a big 
antiwar demonstration last weekend, but the call was "End the 
occupation now" and I can't support that -- and most Americans won't 
support that.

JW: No, we can't get out now in the sense that tomorrow morning we get 
out. Dean isn't calling for that.

Salon: No, but some people on the left are. Kucinich is, ANSWER is. I 
mean, to go back to your book, to the extent the war poses an 
opportunity for the left, it poses a huge danger, too.

JW: If there were a left, which there isn't. There is no left.

Salon: Come on, there's a left.

JW: No, there are leftists, there are little groups of leftists. But 
there's no left in the sense that there's any coherence or commonality 
...

Salon: Well, the people with the biggest mouths get defined as the left.

JW: Yes, and look, the "Get out now!" faction isn't necessarily bad, as 
long as it's in the background. It's sort of how I feel about Kucinich 
-- I'm glad he's there, he energizes people who aren't energized, and 
he provides a buffer for Democrats who know they can't slide too far to 
the right, they can't ignore the left.

Salon: Maybe I'm not as sanguine as you. I think the "Get out now," 
ANSWER people wind up getting defined as "the left" -- and the rest of 
us get smeared. When in fact there are really two lefts in this 
country. One is the optimistic one, which believes that its principles 
are in accordance with American democracy, that we're just trying to 
make America live up to its own principles. And the other is a deeply 
negative and pessimistic left, which really does seem to hate this 
country and thinks everything it stands for is wrong, that it's just a 
failed enterprise. That's the ANSWER faction, and it bothers me.

JW: Well, it's really a holdover from the whole Soviet period. But it's 
fading.

Salon: I hope so. But then, you've always been an optimist. What makes 
you optimistic lately?

JW: I was just reading an obituary for Edward Said in the London Review 
of Books, and it talked about how he was always optimistic, but 
realistic, and it quoted [the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio] 
Gramsci, you know, about needing a "pessimism of the intellect and 
optimism of the will." I mean, look at what we had in this country in 
the 1950s, and look at what we have now. Look at the status of women, 
blacks, gays. And we achieved this in decades when, except for the 
period of the New Left in the '60s, the nation was mostly controlled by 
conservatives. You hear people in different movements saying how bad 
things are, "We haven't won anything," but that's crazy. Look at gays 
-- look at television, where you have shows like "Will and Grace," or 
the gay guys who make over the straight guys. Come on, look, it's a 
different world, it's a better world, despite the fact that the 
Christian right is built on opposition to this stuff. So that's what 
makes me an optimist. It's a different country, and a much better 
country. I'm not a historical determinist, but on the other hand, the 
older I get, I'm close to it.