Socialists at work and play.

PAUL ROBESON Jr., greying and lean, charismatic as a prophet, tries to explain the extent of Stalin's genocides to three frail audience members, men of his father's generation who've probably spent much of their lives denying "right-wing propaganda." Confidently counting off figures-"at least five to seven million in the Ukraine . . . they're just digging up the mass graves in the Baltic countries now"-he reaches totals of thirty million peacetime and 27 million wartime casualties, 73 per cent of them ethnic minorities (that's why Robeson's people won't get fooled again: they have Jesse now). The old men can't quite get it: they've given not just their lives but a good part of their critical ability to the Cause. Eventually, the group breaks up.

The Left has changed this tiny bit, I discovered at the Seventh Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, "Two Centuries of Revolution: 1789-1989," held over the March 31 weekend at CUNY's Manhattan Community College. Irving Howe brought down the house the final night with his vindication of the anti-Stalinist Left: "We have had enough of vanguard parties and arrogant Leninists." On the other hand, I overheard more about Alexander Cockburn's Nation piece scoffing at recent estimates of casualties under Stalin than about Robeson. And Nicaragua's Sandinistas sent a well-received delegation.

The conference this year was "open to all currents of socialism," we were told by Bogdan Denitch, CUNY professor, member of Dissent's editorial board, and conference "co-chair," at the opening plenary session. And yet the nightly sessions, with crowds from one to two thousand, and the more or less common jargon of the participants in my unscientific sampling of the hundred-plus workshop/panels showed real solidarity. The out-and-out Commies and the indigestible Greens aside, the Left is agreed on what's wrong with America (us) and who the good people are (them); the current difficulty, having rejected the old answer, is "what is to be done."

THE BIGGEST CHEERS were for Denitch himself, a burly white-haired intellectual with a genuinely populist manner, as he acknowledged recent contributions to Left thought but emphasized traditional allegiances; for various representatives of the Eastern Strikers ("the front line of the labor movement"); for the remarkably vigorous Michael Harrington (still glad that student protests "forced" the end of the Vietnam War, sure a new wave is in the offing); for author and wit Barbara Ehrenreich ("What we are trying to achieve as socialism is crazy and impossible, but it is also necessary, not only morally, but pragmatically, if humanity is to survive"); and for the cadaverous, energetic Daniel Singer, European correspondent for The Nation, especially when he said of Rosa Luxemburg that she was such a perfect revolutionary, "she should have been black."

Most of all, the socialists cheered every mention of Jesse Jackson ("denied the Democratic nomination by racism") and former Rainbow Coalition director Ronald Daniels, who told them (if anyone doubted it) that Jesse wants what they do: the end of "monopoly finance capitalism" and "the stubborn right-wing racist conspiracy in this country," recognition of the Third World "right to receive economic assistance," a "people's budget," and, of course, "no retreat . . . on D.C. statehood."

Why such enthusiasm for Jesse, when every other speaker sneered at today's politicians (Denitch called them "hacks")? It's not just his radicalism; as always with socialists, it's The Idea of him. The Soviet and the labormovement vanguards were the sources of salvation in the Thirties, as were student and black revolutionaries in the Sixties. But since Lenin invented the Vanguard because the People just didn't seem to be moving, and that concept hasn't exactly worked out in practice, Socialist Scholars have had to find a new source of revolutionary consciousness. So the hot thing now is the "new social movements"-women and minorities. That's where the legitimacy is, where the heaviest theoretical panels were-and it's where the prestige jobs are, as non-socialist scholars will attest.

There may still be a few covert cadres-for example, the New Alliance Party, a "Black-led, women-led, multiracial, pro-gay independent political organization," the "fourth-largest political party in America," which ran Lenora Fulani for President last year. According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a Cambridge group that monitors right-wing activity, current NAP master theoretician and psychotherapy guru Fred Newman has ties to Lyndon LaRouche. This workshop ("Lyndon LaRouche, Fred Newman, and the concept of Totalitarianism") culminated in two exchanges: 1) Berlet's branding NAP a "cult of personality" led a black woman NAPer to call him racist, unable to "follow black woman leadership," whereupon he called her a homophobe. Impasse. 2) As reported in its paper, NAP counter-charges that PRA is controlled by the two or three CIA renegades on its board-who may not really be former agents at all. Though Philip Agee was at the conference, no one managed to arrange a briefing on this. But Berlet did admit to being a liberal, which makes him a pretty suspicious character to some.

Liberals are, after all, the folks leftists love to hate: there was far more contempt for Sam Nunn-for his "national service" bill, his anti-anti-defense stance, and for trying to keep the Democratic Party in the hands of "white Southern males"-than for Ronald Reagan, who was just playing his historically mandated role. And today's sorry bunch of liberals, in the words of Mrs. Ehrenreich, aren't even acquiescing in a "proper division of labor" between Left and liberal by poking holes in conservative arguments; "it's the real leftists that have to do this," though they have much better things to do. Of course her specific complaint, that the liberals aren't countering Charles Murray on welfare and William Tucker on rent control, is particularly poignant given that twenty years ago both Murray and Tucker were liberals.

Who are the Socialist Scholars? Unsurprisingly, the Thirties, Sixties, and Nineties generations predominate. Occupationally, the later generations include professors and grad students, largely studying social movements in history, literature, sociology, or political science, at colleges from CUNY all the way to Princeton (including the gifted Michael Walzer); journalists from The Nation, New Left Review, Monthly Review, etc.; activists and intellectuals from groups such as Act-Up (on AIDS), NAP, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Union for Radical Political Economy, the Radical Philosophy Association, and on into the night. Other Socialist Scholars are lawyers, psychologists, schoolteachers.

Robert Costa teaches at Hillcrest High in Queens, New York. As one of the participants in the workshop "Teaching Socialism in U.S. Schools," he presented a few simple rules: 1) wear a coat and tie, and short hair-"The more conservative you look, the more they can't imagine you teaching anything radical"; 2) push radical implications of classical works-"The most conservative education produced some of the greatest radicals . . . Exodus is the first strike in history"; 3) use the VCR-"There's lots of radical stuff shown on public television . . . build up a tape library."

Apart from the more gruesome activists and a coterie of rather strident Brits (the New Statesman's Stewart Weir solemnly explained that the British Constitution hasn't been reformed since 1688-and it isn't even written down!), Socialist Scholars turned out to be nice people; they even laugh at themselves. At the DSA recruiting kaffeeklatsch, Mrs. Ehrenreich explained that "all my friends are socialists, my work is in socialism," without socialism "I'd be just another housewife." She proceeded to play off theDSA recruiting slogan, AN UNORGANIZED SOCIALIST IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS: another DSAer had pointed out that there are unorganized socialists; "We call them cranks." Apologizing for the inevitable organizational mishaps (crowded rooms, missing panelists, etc.) Bogdan Denitch promised that next year the conference would go off without a hitch-"You can trust that like all promises from socialists."