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both. Delicate nuances of emphasis and proposal are notoriously vul–
nerable to the process of coalition and practical compromise which Mr.
Howe embraces. One senses that his brilliant demolitions of Kennedy
and Stevenson carry more conviction than his essay on Trotsky largely
because American liberals and Social Democrats are now operating on
the opposite faces of a single coin. And this coin is wearing thin.
It
is not for me to play host to Mr. Howe in Harlem or in Amite
County. Even so, Mr. Newfield has a point. Dismissing LeRoi Jones's
behavior as "racist buffoonery," Mr. Howe goes on to endorse George
Dennison's verdict of the Negro playwright: "Just as he mis-labels the
victims
black,
he mis-labels the authority
white."
Were he less of an
ignorant buffoon, Jones would evidently appreciate that "the life-destroy–
ing evil inheres in the nature of the authority, not in the color of those
who wield it." This authority is one "of property and arms." Brilliant
as this leap into dialectical space may be, it unfortunately remains one
which middle-class white Socialists are better equipped to make than
are the Negroes of Amite County, Harlem, Watts, Chicago, North
London, South Africa, Angola and Southern Rhodesia. Mr. Howe has
read Frantz Fanon and not liked him much; but Fanon did at least
show that the white liberal mind and imagination have a long journey
to make.
Mr. Howe compares young Negro desperadoes in contemporary
America to the late nineteenth-century Russian terrorists "who also
tried to substitute their intransigent will for the sluggishness of history."
There is, perhaps, a difference: the Narodniks were committed to the
peasants, whereas the Negroes are committed to themselves.
In
the
present century, Russian, Chinese, Yugoslav, Cuban and Vietnamese
peasants and workers, also committed to themselves, have revealed a
poor respect for the sluggishness of history, and with surprising results
for the slug. Slave peoples create unexpected gods, but I doubt whether
Fabius will ever figure among them.
To this Mr. Howe has a forceful answer, reiterated throughout this
volume, particularly in "Leon Trotsky: The Costs of History," "Isaac
Deutscher: Freedom and the Ash Can of History," "Communism Now"
and "Authoritarians of the Left." The answer is implicit in the titles.
With regard to violent revolution, Stalinism and the one-party state, he
has forgotten nothing and forgiven little. Behind Fanon, Lumumba and
Castro he sees lurking famous ghosts. Fanon's suggested system for an
emerging society he condemns as one in which "the masses of the people
act out a charade of involvement but are denied the reality of decision."
