ustxtxb_obs_1961_11_24_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

for social change in the United States,” he said. Until peace becomes a concern of the civil rights and trade union movements, he said, the cause is “in for a very bad time.” The work of the American right-wingwhich Harrington believes is stronger now than it was during *McCarthy’s primemakes the peace movement even more difficult to sustain, he said. The peace movement must be conceived to include “all people who are in favor of negotiating” so that it may include pacifists, unilateralists, and those who favor “unilateral initiative,” first steps toward relieving international tensions. Speaking of negotiations, Harrington said, “The reactionaries have drawn the line right there, and we need everybody on that firing line.” Harrington said the majority opinion among American socialists holds that ‘Cuba has become more and more “dictatorial” and that communists are gaining more and more control over policy in the Castro government. “Cuba is developing a communist dictatorship,” he said. He added that one responsible agency in this development was the U. S. government, both because of its pro-Batista policies before Castro came to power and its hardening hostility toward Castro when he began nationalizing U. S. interests in Cuba. Harrington favors negotiations with Castro and an end to the boycott of that country but expressed fear that another U. S. invasion may be in the making. Anti-Red Revolt What Harrington calls “the anticommunist revolt within communism” is taking the form of a Marxist humanism and has, he says, become manifest in Poland, Hungary, West Germany, and France. Citing C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, Harrington suggested that in a society where true decision-making occurs not in elections but by accommodations among the top government, military, and business leaders, “you could have a totalitarian government with elections.” “The socialist movement is the one movement that understands that the bureaucratic concentration of power is the number one problem of all modern societies,” Harrington said. It is proceeding as “a method and a system of values and not as a blueprint.” It believes it wrong to say that nationalization of production would produce the reign of freedom: “No socialist in his right mind would buy that now.” Socialism can be expressed adequately now by such men as Erich Fromm, who approaches it from the viewpoint of personal alienation in the mass society, but, said Harrington, he is still con’, vinced that socialism “is the rich est tradition in existence for the confrontation, of social problems. Not that the Socialist Party is the anointed instrument of the American future.” Harrington said he was pleasantly surprised during his visits to Houston and Austin. “If the rest of the country had the kind of liberal-radical consciousness that I’ve found in Texas, I’d be more optimistic. The liberals and radicals in Texas understand the need for political realignment better than any in the United States,” he said. R. D. DON’T EMBARRASS ME with new ideas, my mind’s made up! O.K.But if you’ve outgrown orthodoxy, send $1 for 3-month Trial Membership, or $5 for a year, to The American Humanist Association, Dept. TO-1, Yellow Springs, Ohio. `Golden Rule’ Skipper Recruits for Pacifism Socialist Editor Peeling Off Old Dogma AUSTIN American socialists have given up the traditional socialist dogma that nationalizing basic industries is the first and necessary requirement for a socialist society. This leads to the question, what is meant now by socialism? American socialism is becoming a movement of radical humaniSm. The American socialist party has become a pragmatic organization, dogmaless but way out on questions of human values versus the free enterprise system. When questioned as to socialism’s claim to distinctiveness in this situation, Michael Harrington of New York said here that” the Socialist Party still lays claim to the socialist tradition as the best basis for political thinking and added that political action on behalf of radical human values has a validity of its own kind. Harrington is editor of the socialists’ New York newspaper, “New America.” He has been touring the country trying to raise subscriptions for the financially ailing paper and memberships for the socialist party. As he has been writing in New America, Harrington finds in the early Karl Marx assertions of a humanist system of values. Since these cannot be reconciled with the totalitarian state, Harrington * says, the early Marx is carefully omitted from Russian-approved collections of his writings. Harrington spoke to a_ small gathering of Austin socialists and guests near the University campus. His remarks had little to do with the kinds of questions historically associated with socialismcapital accumulation, exploitation of labor, socializing industry. To the contrary, he spoke mostly of civil rights, the peace movement, “public housing in a human way,” human values that can compass the changing forms of a swiftly evolving technological society in an endangered world. In Harrington’s opinion, the socialist movement in Europe has lost its dynamism, its elan; socialism there “has been redefined in welfare state terms.” European socialists, he said, have lost “the image of a classless society.” He is not himself at all sure that there will ever be such a society, Harrington said, but he is devoted, and believes the American socialist movement is devoted, to the impulses behind the image of such a society”progress, egalitarianism, and the radical re-structuring of social relationships.” Willie Brandt, leader of the West German socialists, is not at all interested in “the transformation of the West German society.” He is “an excellent man for giving milk to kiddies and building housing projects for workers,” Harrington said, but American socialists are now seeking after “ideas at a deeper level.” ‘Basic Structure’ The question, he said, is “how to deal with basic structures” to assist in “the humanization of human life.” “The socialist party is the only clear carrier of the idea of the democratic allocation of resources. Nationally we try to coordinate people around more immediate goals. One problem we feel with liberalism is that liberalism does not have a sense of the radical character of the problems confronting us.” Socialists realize, Harrington said, that their old dogmatism will not do, and that “it is not enough to say, ‘Television viewers of the world, Unite.’ ” They are trying to crystallize a democratic left and to become its focus. Skeptics who expected the civil rights movement among Southern students to fizzle out have now realized that “The students are becoming more radical and more activist,” Harrington said while speaking of the work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He called attention to “an extraordinarily radical development of the voter registration program.” This program has led to racial beatings and one racial murder in Mississippi recently. The civil rights movement in the North, Harrington said, now suffers from an organizational problem: the NAACP is moderate and legalistic, CORE is “too white” really to lead the Negroes. A serious “Negro nationalism” movement has been taken up by such Negro intellectuals as James Baldwin who believes that “white liberalism is pallid and slow.” Society in the North is “not obviously racist but is in fact racist,” Harrington said. Race riots were narrowly averted last summer in New York; the basic cause of. the tension was a long tradition of police brutality toward Negroes. The integration of Rainbow Beach in Chicago has been difficult because “It tends to raise the sexual fear that’s behind so much racism.” In New Haven, Harrington continued, Negro dwellers in slums through which businessmen must drive to and from their offices have begun sitting out in the middle of the streets, “just to advertise that they’re living in a crummy slum.” This has been called the “sit-out.” The American labor movement, Harrington said, “is not going to be the hottest center of American dynamism.” He spoke with disgust of the national AFL-CIO executive committee’s condemnation of A. Philip Randolph, the Negro labor and integration leader, and U. S. labor’s failure to commit men and resources to the job of unionizing farm workers, which he said would be a cinch if the AFL-CIO would take on the job. “The peace movement remains sadly the least effective movement City, State Send $5.10 to : THE TEXAS OBSERVER 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas W.N.,NsW. , AUSTIN Albert Bigelow, a handsome Nordic fellow, was captain of an American destroyer in World War II. He saw not only live Japanese machine gunned in the water; he saw his fellows machinegun the floating dead. In the islands he saw people selling mason jars full of human teeth. When the word was flashed to Captain Bigelow that the war had been ended by an atomic bomb, he really began, he says, to wonder. “The bomb at Hiroshima was totally unnecessary,” he told a seminar sponsored in Austin by the American Friends Service Committee. “We dropped the bomb on Nagasaki simply because we only had two bombs, and this was nothing but an experiment. How was this different from the experiments in German concentration camps? War depersonalizes dehumanizes.” When the United States decided to place off limits a huge area of the Pacific for some atomic tests, Captain Bigelow and three others, supported by many of like mind, outfitted “The Golden Rule” and sailed for the testing grounds. They ran into the worst Pacific coast storm in 20 years, and “it was a near thing,” but they survived it. Nine hundred miles from California, one of the crew became chronically seasick. To save him from dehydration they turned back. VETTING OUT AGAIN, they seas by radio. NBC carried their message to the nation; wire services, to the world. The Atomic Energy Commission began to understand the import of their voyage more urgently and, using a law promulgated by the executive branch, hailed them into court when they stopped at Honolulu for water and supplies. They sailed off twice in civil disobedience and twice were apprehended by the Coast Guard and taken back to the judge in Honolulu. Bigelow served ‘eighty days in the Honolulu jail. ‘Letters to him flooded into the jail from all over the world, he said. As a name he became world known. Now he is touring the country for the Quakers, drumming up hostility to nuclear war. He is a happy man. His excitement with his message, with his own part in the “moral adventures” he recounts, seems sometimes to bubble up from his throat, forcing him to smile. “There’s going to be peace on this earth, with or without people. We’d like to have it with people,” he told the Austin seminar. He advocates a movement religious in spirit which takes no account of practicality and effectiveness. “Why aren’t you parading against war like ten thousand students in Italy?” he asked the University of Texas students at the seminar. The human gift is autonomy of action, and to pass this gift to another is to abdicate what it is to be human, he said. He called civil defense “civil defeat the end of despair.” He quoted Albert Schweitzer’s thought that no one who has heard a mother sob by the “coffin of her dead child can think nuclear war is possible. “We must bring about a change in our beloved country by a kind of moral ju-jitsu,” he declared. “Who is to say that it is not our cowardice to love that is causing it not to work?” He believes the idea of graduated reciprocation in tension reduction would work and thought for a starter the U. S. might close down the germ warfare lab at Fort Dedrick, iMd., and convert it into a world health center. In the alternative, he said, the U. S. has nearly 1,000 bases abroad, many of them “sitting ducks,” and could without military risk shut down some of them and expect reciprocation from the Russians. He told of some of the protests going on in the Western world: the work of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy; the Cornmittee for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, and Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100, whose demontrations resulted in 805 arrests; the Fellowship of Reconciliation, for religious pacifists; the War Resisters’ League, for religiously skeptical opponents of war; the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom \(“Call it W-I-L and you’ll be right in the Service Committee, Church World Service, and other churches. HE TOLD’ of the peace walk from San Francisco to Moscow and of the ocean voyage protesting the recent Russian bomb tests by Dr. Earl Reynolds, an anthropologist, and his family, who were turned back politely when they approached within ten miles ; of a Russian port. Last year more than 2,000 persons disobeyed the New York state law requiring citizens to take shelter during an air raid alert. “There is a blanket on the news now,” he said. *”The climbing on the tailfin of a Polaris sub as it was being launchedthe Las Vegas vigilsthe vigils at Cape Canaveral-it’s invariably squashed in the news if it can be. It’s downgraded in the news. “We are going to have to become eloquent,” said Captain Bigelow. R. D. THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 Nov. 24, 1961 BRAINPOWER IS OUR MOST VITAL RESOURCE! You can’t .dig education out of the earth. There’s only one place where business and industry can get the educated men and women so vitally needed for future progress. That’s from our eelleges and universities. Today these institutions are doing their “bestto meet the need. But they face a crisis. The demand for brains is increasing fast, and so is the pressure of college applications. More money must be raised each year to expand bring faculty salaries up to an adequate standard provide a sound education for the young people who need and deserve it. Ass practical business meas