Re: From Your Friends at Dissent

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Hoover quoting Michael Kazin:
> Such phrases may hint of Marxism, but the old Rhinelander never took so static
> or simplistic a view of history. Zinn's ruling elite is a transhistorical
> entity, a virtual monolith; neither its interests nor its ideology change
> markedly from the days when its members owned slaves and wore knee-britches to
> the era of the Internet and Armani. Zinn thus sees nothing unusual in the
> election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It simply "meant that another part of the
> Establishment," albeit "more crass" than its immediate antecedents, was now in
> charge.

It might seem odd at first to see such a vicious attack on an icon of the
left, but it makes perfect sense when you stop and think about it. Dissent
Magazine has been in the front ranks of lining up the left behind the
Democratic Party ever since the 1960s radicalization. As the citation from
Mike Davis I posted the other day makes clear, Michael Harrington and
Irving Howe were instrumental in persuading erstwhile 60s radicals that
they belonged in the Democratic Party. Zinn, on the other hand, is
contemptuous of the New Deal, seeing the work of CIO rank-and-filers as
much more important than FDR. He also questions the progressive character
of WWII (his chapter is called "A People's War?), a notion that serves as a
foundation for all the apologists for intervention in Yugoslavia and Iraq,
many of whom write for Dissent (Makiya, Berman et al). As Woody Allen once
said, when you combine Dissent and Commentary you get dysentery.



Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org