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DAVID CAUTE
Mr. Howe's generation, of course, has undergone certain experiences
which leave a scar. Isolated, and chewing the cud of bitter memories
for too long, they have developed conceptual cramp. Their contem–
poraries in Europe-and here I include England-have been more
fortunate. The intellectuals of the New Left in England include both
graduate students and mature Communists who quit the Party after
1956 and who were prepared to reexamine theoretically their premises,
rather than pass from one tight-lipped sect to another. In France, as in
England, these students know about Hegel and Marx, Weber and
Gramsci, Trotsky and Bukharin, Malraux and Silone. They have some
sense of history. They have a keener regard for Sartre, or Althusser or
even Russell, than for Antoine, Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. The Alder–
marston marches were conspicuous for their happy flowing together
of the generations; if the fathers and mothers in mackintoshes and
sensible shoes were uneasy about the beards and guitars of the young,
the disagreement was purely tactical. This fundamental community of
aims saved the children from iconoclasm and the parents from a de–
hydrating nostalgia for old wars fought and lost.
In making this contrast between Europe and America, I am not
denying that Mr. Howe is always interesting and often brilliant. To
read
him
is to be rewarded. As a political commentator he is humane,
sensible, self-examining and apparently anxious not to wall himself off
in a small cell of virtue and revealed truth. Fully aware that the
European Social Democrats eventually became what they had once as–
pired to change, he sets down his general program for immediate
action without ambiguity or equivocation.
As a practical man, Mr. Howe is committed to the coalition ap–
proach, to an empirical working alliance of labor, Negroes, liberals,
Church groups and students striving for the perpetual extension of an
open-ended welfare state. This vision implies not only an increase of
distributive benefits but also an extension of participatory democracy.
His ends are as cautious and pragmatic as his means: in the economic
sphere, the abolition of private property in the basic industries meets
most, if not all, of his requirements. The trend is clear, the dangers
obvious. Even if we hold in check certain quasi-automatic reflexes, the
flow of damning labels which objectify this position as petit bourgeois
and revisionist, we can hardly tum a blind eye to the lessons of recent
Social Democratic history, lessons written not in blood but in water. It
is fine for Mr. Howe to champion Crossman against Crosland, but it
would be instructive, also, to consider what Wilson has made of them
