Taking Issue with Lemisch's Article

To the Editors:

IN HIS REVIEW OF OUR SOCIALIST SCHOLARS CONFERENCE PANEL on "The Dominant Ideology: Power and Vulnerability" (New Politics, Winter 1997), Jesse Lemisch says that he "grew increasingly uncomfortable" with the drift of Richard Cloward's and my remarks, which showed "no way out." On the other hand, he was greatly uplifted by Elaine Bernard's "acute analysis" that pointed tellingly to the vulnerability of the system and the positive signs of resistance.

Lemisch was clearly unaware that there was a planned division of labor among the panelists, with Cloward and I responsible for dealing with the dominant ideology and its sources of power, Bernard the counter-ideologies and varieties of resistance. But this only dramatizes Lemisch's double-standard. As regards my and Cloward's talks, Lemisch says "what kind of analysis ignores agency and resistance, and how can analysis pretend to validity without them?" That is, one is not even allowed to spell out the characteristics and strengths of the dominant ideology without in the same remarks pointing up its weaknesses. On the other hand, Elaine Bernard, who addressed the sources of vulnerability of the dominant ideology and forms of resistance is not criticized for having failed (quite reasonably) to discuss the power of the ideology and its ability to counter resistance.

The deriding of the one set as lacking validity for ignoring the resistance, the other enthusiastically applauded as "acute analysis" despite the lack of attention to the rather potent dominant ideology, indicates that both the derision and applause are badly tarnished and lack scientific integrity. (I should mention that I thought Bernard's talk was very good, though this judgment is based on standards different from Lemisch's.) Lemisch's bias here reminds me of conservative criticisms of "liberal" media programs for an alleged lack of "balance," a standard which the critics never apply to ideologically correct programs. It also reminds me of a certain form of criticism of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, by me and Noam Chomsky; namely, that its model and illustrations, emphasizing the power of the corporate system, failed to give enough attention to the bright side, and would therefore produce discouragement and apathy. This was the minority view among activists and radicals, most of whom valued the book as contributing to their understanding and vindicating their beliefs as to the true state of affairs. I am sure Lemisch would take the minority view.

Lemisch says that "I have often been critical of a hortatory left culture that shows up in such places as left film, song, and history, and I think it's the job of left intellectuals to tell the truth, even when the truth is uninspiring." Lemisch implies that he is not a member of the hortatory left culture. But his double standard in evaluating our panel -- and his own concluding sentence, which describes "our job" as including many things, such as "to imagine and invent resistance," but does not mention "telling the truth" -- shows that Jesse Lemisch doesn't know himself. In his reply to my criticism of his remarks in the Radical History Review Newsletter (Dec. 1996), Lemisch says that "any analyst is free to focus on one side or the other...but the overall picture [and "hard radical analysis"] has to include resistance,..." But if each individual paper must include resistance, doesn't it also have to include the power of establishment forces and their ability to counter resistance to be serious "hard radical analysis"? If not, why not?

Lemisch's Reply

Contents of No. 23