Side by Side

Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years

Mark W. Weber, Stephen H. Paschen

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612778747
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

"This is a wonderful mix of biography, history, and political reflection. Having 'accompanied' the Lynds since 1961, when they lived and taught at Spelman, a black women's college in Atlanta, they have consistently helped empower generations of activists through their Quaker brand of participatory democracy. Their legacy is a spirit more powerful than a party." —Tom Hayden

Alice and Staughton Lynd have devoted their lives to the struggle for social justice. Carl Mirra began the history of the Lynds with his biography, Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970 (The Kent State University Press, 2010). Side by Side picks up the Lynds' story as they move to Youngstown, Ohio, to begin a new chapter in their lives.

Throughout their narrative, authors Mark Weber and Stephen Paschen examine the idea of accompaniment, a form of political activism that differs from the traditional strategies used by labor and community organizers. Rather than moving from fight to fight, the Lynds lived within the community in need, helping steelworkers and residents cope with the devastating closures of the major steel mills in Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley. Working with clergy, laborers, and civic leaders, Staughton Lynd advanced the idea of a worker-community-owned steel mill that would provide employment for some of the thousands of workers whose jobs had been lost. The dramatic if unsuccessful attempt to launch a cooperatively owned manufacturing enterprise was the first of a number of efforts by the Lynds to put their knowledge and experience at the service of those who have no voice.

Quakers Alice and Staughton Lynd worked in Central America and Israel, where they championed the rights of Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank. They took up the cause of prisoners' rights following the April 1993 Lucasville, Ohio, prison uprising—the longest such rebellion in American history—working to improve the living conditions of the five inmates who were convicted of leading the rebellion. Together with Jules Lobel of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Lynds filed suit on behalf of death row inmates who were kept in solitary confinement in Ohio's prisons. Their lawsuit contributed to a landmark decision that improved living conditions for inmates in solitary confinement and established that prisoners have due process rights that have to be observed before they can be sent to solitary confinement.

Through its exploration of the Lynds and their practice of accompaniment, Side by Side makes an important contribution to the study of social justice and grassroots activism.

Chapter One

BURNHAM’S DILEMMA

“It took me years to solve Burnham’s dilemma.”

STAUGHTON LYND

The Vanguard Party

On 22 March 2012, one of the authors traveled with Alice and Staughton Lynd to a labor educator’s conference in Pittsburgh. In the car, the author told Staughton that he thought Staughton’s efforts to solve the dilemma posed by James Burnham in his 1940 book, The Managerial Revolution, were the key to understanding his attraction to participatory democracy in the 1960s and 1970s and later, after the move to Ohio, his belief in accompaniment. Staughton responded: “Yes, there you have it.” Riding in the back seat, Alice responded: “Yes, but that does not explain my belief in accompaniment.” Not surprisingly, two lifelong companions in various struggles took the same journey but followed different paths. In this chapter, we will deal with Staughton’s journey to accompaniment, addressing the somewhat different journey that Alice made in the next.

In his book What Is to Be Done? Lenin wrote of the need for the revolutionary party in Russia to become a disciplined cadre of insurrectionists who would carry the message to workers and peasants in Tsarist Russia and then make decisions for and act in the name of these workers and peasants. Lenin became convinced that workers, if left to their own devices, would rise only to a trade union level of consciousness and would rarely make the decisive step toward revolutionary activity unless given guidance from a dedicated elite who had developed the needed revolutionary perspective and discipline. One of Lenin’s great critics in the debate over the capability of workers to make a revolution by themselves was Rosa Luxemburg. Although she addressed this issue in several of her writings, the most accessible of these can be found in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks edited by Mary-Alice Waters and published by Pathfinder Press in 1970. In general, Luxemburg felt that Lenin’s position on what was called “the organizational problem” would result in the general suppression of democracy within Russian Social Democracy. Many, including Staughton Lynd, believe that she was correct and that this was a problem inherent in the nature of a vanguard party.

Waclaw Machajski

Another more sociological—and more cynical—critique of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism emerged. One of the earliest and one of the most obscure advocates of this view was the Russian revolutionary theorist Jan Waclaw Machajski (1866–1926).¹ Machajski was born in 1866 in the small town of Busk in that part of Poland controlled by the Russian Empire. According to Paul Avrich in his classic study, The Russian Anarchists, Machajski initially adopted, as a young student, a political philosophy blending socialism and Polish nationalism before abandoning this view for classical Marxism. In 1892, Machajski was arrested for trying to smuggle revolutionary literature from Switzerland into the Russian Empire. Sentenced to exile in Siberia, he remained there for twelve years, until his escape in 1903. During his exile, Machajski subjected Marxism to intensive scrutiny and came to the controversial conclusion that the socialist revolutionary movement was led by a “new class” of radical intellectuals who controlled the workers’ movement by means of their superior education.²

In fragments of his book The Intellectual Worker that appeared in The Making of Society, edited by V. F. Calverton, Machajski asserted that just as the means of production was the capital of the capitalist class, so education was the invisible capital of the new emerging class of revolutionary intellectuals.³ This capital called education would enable the intellectual to write and speak with persuasion and thus to dominate the unsophisticated manual workers who did not know how to express their grievances against the capitalist system.

While Machajski remained obscure, he did have one disciple, Max Nacht (1881–1973). Nacht, who wrote under the name Max Nomad, was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire but emigrated to the United States, where he wrote a series of cynical critiques of revolutionary figures, notably in Rebels and Renegades (New York, 1932) and Aspects of Revolt (New York, 1959). Several times in his works, Nacht wrote that the relationship between the radical intellectual and the worker parallels that “between the rider and his horse.” However, others wrote about this relationship with less cynicism and more insight.

James Burnham

When former socialist James Burnham (1905–1987) wrote The Managerial Revolution (1940), he provoked a storm of criticism from the Left in the United States. While the Italian Marxist Bruno Rizzi (1901–1977) had anticipated many of Burnham’s arguments in his book, The Bureaucratisation of the World, it is clear that Burnham did not know of Rizzi’s writings when he wrote The Managerial Revolution.⁴ A native of Chicago, Burnham attended Princeton and Oxford before helping to organize the American Workers Party in 1933. By the mid-1930s, Burnham was a comrade of Max Schachtman both in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later, after a split in the Workers Party. Burnham and Schachtman split with Leon Trotsky over the class nature of the Soviet Union (USSR) after the Russo-Finnish War in 1939. To orthodox Trotskyists, the USSR was a “deformed workers state” but still socialist in structure. Burnham and Schachtman disagreed, claiming that the USSR had ceased to have a socialist character and was simply a “bureaucratic collectivist” state.

Bureaucratic collectivism was the cornerstone of the analysis of the newly formed Workers Party founded by Schachtman and Burnham. Schachtman’s essays on this subject appeared in book form in The Bureaucratic Revolution (1962). However, Burnham was already traveling a road that led him away from socialism altogether. In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that certain bureaucratic tendencies existed in fascism, Stalinism, and New Deal collectivism. A new class of “managers,” he asserted, had risen to guide these various forms of collectivism in the USSR, Italy, Germany, and the United States. Over his lifetime, Burnham’s intellectual and political journey took him from the revolutionary socialism of Leon Trotsky to postwar conservatism. He became a regular contributor to the United States’ leading conservative magazine, William F. Buckley’s National Review, in which Burnham wrote a regular column called “The Third World War.” In 1964, he wrote a cold war book with the dramatic title Suicide of the West.

Robert Michels and E. P. Thompson

Another analyst of the bureaucratic tendencies of political organizations was German sociologist Robert Michels (1876–1936), who made his own political journey from the left wing of the SPD, from which he resigned in 1907, to the Italian Fascist Party of the 1920s. In 1911, Michels published Political Parties (1911), the classic study of the growth of bureaucracy in Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and in its affiliated trade unions. Michels asserted that political parties and unions tend to grow by attracting to their respective banners supporters and followers who were not part of the original founding generation. Whereas members of the founding generation displayed idealism, selfless commitment, and revolutionary fervor, later recruits attracted by the growth of the SPD saw the party as much in terms of personal advancement as of ideological commitment. Michels also argued that party and union leaders tended to identify as much with the interests and needs of the ruling bureaucracy as with those of the rank-and-file membership. The leaders in many unions fear independent rank-and-file activism outside of the control of the ruling cadre.

In the writings of E. P. Thompson, especially the concept of warrens, Lynd found a possible strategic solution to Burnham’s dilemma. In his essay, “Edward Thompson’s Warrens,” Lynd describes the problem that Burnham’s analysis created for him at a very young age. “The problem of the transition from capitalism to socialism has nagged at and puzzled me all of my adult life,” Lynd wrote. “Burnham argued that the bourgeois revolution occurred only after a long period during which bourgeois institutions had been built within feudal society. The position of the proletariat within capitalist society, he contended, was altogether different. The proletariat has no way to begin to create socialist economic institutions within capitalism. Hence, he concluded, there would be no socialist revolution.”⁵ Lynd wrestled with this dilemma—“Burnham’s dilemma,” he called it—for more than fifty years and found, we believe, two partial responses.

First, drawn to the writings of the British socialist E. P. Thompson, Lynd found in Thompson’s book Out of Apathy three useful essays on the transition from capitalism to socialism. In one of them, Thompson provides the useful metaphor of the rabbit warren. He envisions a possible future in which the capitalist society is “warrened” by thousands of democratic counterinstitutions such as cooperatives, neighborhood committees, workplace councils, and local assemblies. These would gradually create (to quote a saying of Wobbly Ralph Chaplin’s) the shape of a “new society within the shell of the old.” From this growing popular infrastructure of democratic organizations would come the new socialist society.⁶ According to Lynd’s writings, the concept of warrening the old society in order to gradually give birth to a new one was a partial answer to Burnham’s dilemma.

A second partial response to Burnham’s dilemma may perhaps be drawn from another part of Burnham’s thesis. Burnham felt that the collectivisms of the time—Stalinism, fascism, and the New Deal—signaled the rise of the bureaucratic state less by elected politicians or dictators than by managers and administrators. After the end of World War II and the defeat of fascism, the world seemed to embrace bureaucratic reform—social democracy in Western Europe and the New Frontier/Great Society in the United States. The new postwar world seemed to be dominated by large national corporations, large national labor organizations, an expanding public sector, and the growth of what conservative writer Russell Kirk called “behemoth state universities.” Accompanying this was the growth of a military-industrial complex that brought business, labor, and government together to develop a system of weapons capable of destroying the world. The Soviet Union was embarking on its own military buildup, and most of the Left was involved in choosing up sides. The Communist movement held sway over much of the Western European Left as well as over several nationalist leaders in the developing world. This was opposed by a range of anti-Communist conservative and left-liberal intellectuals, such as Sidney Hook and Norman Thomas, who joined the anti-Communist advocacy group Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in order to promote democratic ideals and to defend the United States.⁷

Dwight Macdonald and Ignazio Silone

However, another humanist-socialist Left began to coalesce in the late 1940s. It sought to steer a course separate from both superpowers and their supporters. This new political third camp influenced young Staughton Lynd; later, in one of his books, he termed it “the first New Left.”⁸ Among the spokespersons for this new left were Dwight Macdonald and Ignazio Silone. However, it is important to note that, while both men contributed to a new socialist humanism after World War II, neither ever fully embraced the kind of third camp position that we often associate with the New Left of the early 1960s. The third camp position stated that a credible socialist left should oppose both capitalism and Communism.

Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) was born and lived all of his life in New York City, although on many occasions he confessed that he never really liked living there. In his magazine, Politics (1942–1949), he invited the voices of many different men and women associated with the non-Stalinist left. His 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” is the best example of this new humanist internationalism. Macdonald was also associated with the CCF and later stated on several occasions that in the battle of the two superpowers, he “chose the West.” Nevertheless, his independent radicalism of the 1940s expressed many of the themes and values that were later elements of the New Left.⁹

Ignazio Silone (1900–1978) was born and grew up in the desolate and mountainous Abruzzo region of Italy, which became the setting for his three famous novels. He joined the Italian Socialist Party and then, when the split occurred, became a member of the Italian Communist Party, rising to membership of its central committee before his break with the party and subsequent exile. While in exile in Switzerland, he began to work on Fontamara (1930), the first of the three novels forming the Abruzzo Trilogy along with Bread and Wine (1936) and Seed Beneath the Snow (1940). While Fontamara, which chronicles the exploitation and violent suppression of the inhabitants of a remote village in southern Italy, had an impact on the antifascist consciousness of many Western intellectuals, including Alfred Kazin, Malcolm Cowley, and Irving Howe, it was Bread and Wine that most influenced the postwar independent Left, including Lynd. ¹⁰

Silone’s intellectual and political journey continued, as he moved from Communism to democratic socialism and then embraced Christianity. At least one of his novels, Bread and Wine, was partially rewritten in the postwar years in order to address the author’s new Christian worldview.

Pietro Spina

The central character of Silone’s novel Bread and Wine is the antifascist revolutionary Pietro Spina, who is on the run from Mussolini’s fascist police. Spina comes to the remote mountain region of Abruzzo and hides himself by assuming the identity of a Catholic priest, Don Paolo Spada. In the guise of the priest, Spina begins to relate to the cafoni (peasants and farmers) in a new way. Instead of exhorting them with Marxist abstractions, Spina finds himself relating to the cafoni by walking with them … by accompanying them. Their troubles become his as he counsels them and shares their burdens. However, although Silone had his character identify with the concerns and struggles of the peasantry, it is clear that he did not romanticize them. He found many of them to be harsh, cynical, and superstitious, and Bread and Wine is often seen through the lens of one man’s disillusionment with Communism. Lynd saw something else. Pietro Spina (and Silone himself) embraced socialism while rejecting the party. In Lynd’s interpretation of Bread and Wine, Silone was depicting a new way of seeking social change. Hence, for Lynd (and perhaps others), the notion of accompaniment offered politics in a new key.

There is another way to view the novel, however. Recently, some evidence has been uncovered sug...