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Activist Letters Schachtman & Socialists A footnote to R.W. Tucker’s review of Maurice Isserman’s The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (NVA, September-October ’01), in whichTucker stresses the important role Max Schachtman played in Harrington’s early thinking. Some readers may be interested in Peter Drucker’s useful study, Max Schachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the “American Century” (Humanities Press, 1994). Drucker traces Harrington’s break with Schachtman, largely due to Schachtman’s continuing support for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as an anti-Stalinist policy. Isserman touched on this in If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (U. of Illinois Press, 1993). —René Wadlow Small Is Better In his review of Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations (November-December), Bill Weinberg urges that Kohr was mistaken in assuming small nations would be peaceful and instances the horrors of violence that have erupted in Croatia and Bosnia. He could indeed have multiplied these instances, but he overlooks that the violence in every case springs not from small nationalism per se but from its suppression. He might further note the extent to which these conflicts are fueled by interference from giant states. Indeed, today it has become a major duty of peace promoters to seek to anticipate the wars that will inevitably ensue from the continued suppression of ethnic and small nation aspirations by creating a (pacifist?) authority that will impartially suggest the borders of the new mini-states that are now seeking their recognition the world over. That same impartial agency could also make detailed proposals for the peaceful transfer of power from the giants to the little ones. Weinberg’s implicit assumption that violence is an inevitable result of small- nation realization is surely absurd. In my own book Small Is Powerful, I explain just how and why, in a giant scale, the capacity of ordinary people to influence, far less control, government actions and policies is impossible. My conclusion was that mass democracy is an oxymoron, yet enormous numbers of well-intentioned and concerned people still suffer the illusion that a mass democracy is not a contradiction in terms, but that it actually works! Don’t we have the vote? Who will join the next demonstration for peace, even though we have no control whatsoever over the arms industry and the forces making for war? Yet it is people who pay for wars, suffer from wars and are killed in war, and Weinberg’s assumption—that, if nations were small enough to enable democracy to be practiced so that people really were able to control their governments, they would not choose peace—simply stands reason on its head. On a personal note, I do not think I can be accurately described as a “protégé” of Leopold Kohr’s. I came to my own conclusions about the effects of scale on democratic realities well before I met Kohr, and I was delighted on doing so to find how much in agreement we were on this new radical thinking. He subsequently helped me, along with Fritz Schumacher, Paul Goodman and Sir Herbert Read, to found Resurgence. It is inaccurate to say I later split from it. I was simply outmaneuvered and debarred from exercising my editorship by the current Gandhian editor and impelled to restart the exercise with Fourth World Review. Mysteriously, Weinberg declares some policy statements in 1992 emanated from “one of the final issues of Fourth World Review.” I can only say that we are still alive and kicking, that there has been no break in publication, that more than a third of our subscribers are in the United States, and in next September we are staging a very important “Radical Consultation” in the UK which he, and yourselves, are welcome to attend. —John Papworth Purton, Wiltshire, England Bill Weinberg responds: Recruiting
and Censorship
One such right, as Maxfield notes, is the “right to preach war.” This right allows the government to establish powerful armies, which it can use to murder and maim people it does not like. Ordinary citizens simply do not have such rights. I, for example, cannot beat up my neighbor if he irritates me, or poison my boss’s soup if he belittles me. I am also not allowed to entice or coerce more vulnerable people to do violent things on my behalf. The “Government,” however, does have this right. It can, for example, send military personnel into school districts and college campuses and impress upon young people the benefits of joining its war machine. It can, as is noted in a report by the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe, employ “aggressive” recruitment “schemes” to attract minors, promoting them primarily “amongst poor and disadvantaged communities” in the rural South and elsewhere. (See “Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe Briefing: The Use of Children by OSCE member States,” Human Dimension Seminar on Children and Armed Conflict, May 2000.) In citing the First Amendment, Maxfield would do well to follow the example of the men who wrote it, showing less concern for the Pentagon’s “rights” and more for the rights of “the people” it imposes itself upon, both within this country and all over the world. These are the people for whom the First Amendment was, or should have been, written. —Nick Trebat |
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