Dissent’s Sixtieth
Dissent’s Sixtieth
The following remarks were delivered at Dissent’s sixtieth anniversary celebration on October 24, 2013.
In the summer of 1956, I had just graduated from Brandeis University; Judy and I were living in a tiny apartment on top of a noisy bar in Waltham, Massachusetts; I was going each day to Harvard’s Reserve Library to read back copies of the Daily Worker—research for Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s history (I don’t have to tell you that it was a critical history) of the American Communist Party. Sometime that summer, Irving asked me to write an article for Dissent about the response of the CPUSA to Khrushchev’s famous speech.
He made my day, that day, and I guess he made a significant part of the rest of my life. I wrote that piece, and about a hundred others over the years, and there will probably be a few more. So it’s not quite time to say goodbye, but it is time to say thank you—to people who are here and to some who are not here with us this night.
Irving and Lew, Stanley Plastrik, Manny Geltman, and Bernie Rosenberg—that was Dissent for me in those early years; they were joined soon by Michael Harrington. There were others, of course, but those six were the core group; they had fled the Trotskyite (Shachmanite) sects and were in search of, or, better, they were beginning to create, a new democratic left. I didn’t realize until after Irving’s death in 1993, when the burden of the magazine fell on Mitchell Cohen and me, how central Simone Plastrik was to that core, to the strength of its commitments and to the survival (the ongoingness) of the magazine. As Mitchell and I formed our own core group, Maxine Phillips succeeded Simone and became our center, our indispensible comrade. Mark Levinson has been book editor for several decades, still going strong, joined in recent years by David Marcus. I can’t list all the others, the editorial broad and executive committee members and the writers, too, from all over the world, who worked with Mitchell, Mark, Maxine, and me over the years—many of you are here—who came to meetings, wrote articles, argued over what we needed to say and do, helped raise money, came to more meetings, told us what we were doing wrong and, more occasionally, what we were doing right. Four of those colleagues and comrades should be here but died in the last year: Pat Sexton, Horst Brand, Murray Hausknecht, and Marshall Berman. I am also mourning the death only a few days ago of Norman Geras, an English leftist, always close to Dissent. Michael Kazin became co-editor a few years ago, and his many strengths made it possible for me to step back, as I needed to do. With Maxine, Michael and I have recruited a wonderful staff of younger writers and editors—Nick Serpe, Sarah Leonard, and Tim Barker. Grace Goldfarb worked very hard and very skillfully organizing this event and will continue to work for the magazine, raising the money we need to keep going; I hope that your contacts with her will be continuous and productive.
This is the time to thank Barney Frank, Leon Wieseltier, and Charlie (C. K.) Williams—I go back a long way with Barney and Leon; Charlie is a more recent discovery; I now intend to live long enough to read all this poems. Our co-hosts Randi Weingarten and Jules Bernstein made this event possible and also made it a success—Jules and I were kids together at Brandeis and sixty years later, we are old guys together.
Sixty years is also the length of time that I have known and loved Judith Borodovko Walzer: we came together in the year that Dissent was founded. She is my closest comrade and smartest critic. My children and grandchildren, almost all of them, are here tonight, Dissenters and future Dissenters. One of my daughters has more than one reason to be here, for she is a loyal member of the UFT. In fact, if you have been reading Dissent in the last few years, you will know that when teachers are under attack, we are all members of the UFT.
I am grateful to all these people and to all of you. After sixty years, the principles that the first Dissenters affirmed are still our principles. Our shared commitments have survived severe internal disagreements. Together we have sustained a political fellowship, without the splits and faction fights that are so common on the left.
These are our commitments: we believe in the possibility of—not perfect justice, not the messianic kingdom, not even a classless society—but what Irving called “a world more attractive”—more attractive than the one we live in: a better place, a more egalitarian society. We continue the work of generations of socialists, social democrats, and trade unionists who have fought for redistributions of wealth and power—and also for a fully human equality, an equality that goes, so to speak, all the way down. I have always thought that our egalitarianism is best described in negative terms: a “better place” is a place where there is no more bowing and scraping, no more fearful trembling in the presence of the rich and powerful, no more arrogance, no more deference, no more high-and-mightiness, no more masters, no more slaves.
Democracy is simply the political version of this equality, and so we are radical democrats and fierce critics of every form of authoritarianism, of every vanguard dictatorship, of every maximal leader and strutting general, even those who call themselves leftists, and of every zealot who claims to rule in the name of God. There is no decent left, and little chance of decency at all, without democracy.
We are committed to self-government in the economy, too. We made our peace with the market long ago, but not with the “free” market, not with capitalist oligarchy and radical inequality, not with tyranny in factories, shops, and schools; not with unemployment and poverty. It is still true, as in ancient times, that the rich grind the faces of the poor. So this is the simplest description of our politics: we are against grinding. We stand with the poor, not simply to help them, as if we could be their benefactors, but to help them help themselves—for that’s what equality requires. Remember the maxim with which some of us grew up: “The liberation of the working class can only be the work of the working class itself.” That’s true, too, of every other liberation.
We are opponents of terrorism, even when it calls itself revolutionary, and of all the apologists for terrorism. The defense of innocent lives, at home and abroad, is a central left value; it is the most basic form of solidarity and internationalism. And for that reason we supported the use of force to stop mass murder in places like Rwanda and Darfur—and dissented from the indifference of most of the world. Here is a biblical injunction that even left-wing atheists can make their own: “Do not stand by the blood of your neighbor.” But we oppose, as democrats and socialists always have or should have, wars of aggression and conquest, wars for natural resources, colonial wars—and we oppose revolutionary wars too, even those that derive in some way from the ideas of one of our distant progenitors, Leon Trotsky: the Red Army marching on Warsaw to bring communism to Poland, the American army marching on Bagdad to bring democracy to Iraq. These are unjust wars; communism and democracy must be sought by other means.
The struggle for equality is also a struggle for inclusion: a social democratic state must give equal rights to all its citizens—rights to speak, assemble, vote, and organize—and equal opportunity to those same citizens—to participate in all the activities of our common life. Think of the state as an enclosed community, with excluded groups knocking at the gates, demanding entry: Jews and blacks and women, immigrants and political refugees, gays and lesbians, disabled people. Some of us are already inside, some of us not so. But we are all of us on the side of the excluded, not (again) to help them into the community but to help them make their own way in, achieve their membership and our democracy at the same time. The democratic state must be the work of all those who mean to live in it.
Now imagine that we are actually living there, in a better place, in a world more attractive—as, one day, I do believe, we will be. And then we will look around and see that forms of injustice persist, and oppression too, and high-and-mightiness, and we will think that there must be a world a little more attractive, a better, better place. Whatever victories we win, there will still be room for, and there will still be need for, a magazine called Dissent.
Michael Walzer is co-editor emeritus of Dissent.
