Ep 393 - WITBU: The New Left Evaluated From Within, Part One

Episode 393 of RevolutionZ is Part One of a two part critical discussion of the Sixties New Left. It doesn't remember in order to praise what was done. It remembers to find flaws to correct. The content arrives like a time capsule a young me sent from 1974. 

The sixties didn’t just “happen” and then fade into nostalgia. The story of the New Left gets fought over because the stakes are still here: who gets credit, who gets blamed, and what lessons today’s movements are allowed to learn. So this episode takes a hard look at a piece of history that’s often flattened into either a liberal fairytale or a cynical cautionary tale, and argues that both those versions mislead. A useful look, instead, ought to present past history to better create future history.

To do that,  this episode presents and responds to an excerpt from the 1974 book What Is To Be Undone, which was proposed from inside the aftermath of the 1960s New Left. What did the New Left actually accomplish? The excerpt says it helped shatter U.S. political complacency, it spread concepts for understanding imperialism, racism, sexism, hierarchy, alienation, and exploitation, and it demonstrated that even an inexperienced movement can disrupt the establishment. But then the episode addresses a harder question: if so much was achieved, why did so much also fall apart? 

From consciousness raising and participatory decision-making to the student movement’s arc from Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement into escalation and fragmentation, this episode discusses how urgency slid into macho posturing, how sectarian infighting turned politics into spectacle, and how weak strategic thinking produced action without durable organization. Along with so much good came debilitating bad. The core takeaway is simple but demanding: honest self-critique is how a movement builds better theory, better vision, better strategy, and real staying power. 

Okay, but what then? Did and do people now just need to do things that we did then better and longer? Or did we then and do we now need different goals, strategy, methods, and even feelings? And if we do need different practice, does that mean we need to re-elevate classical ideologies as some now claim, or that we need to leave them further behind to find really new ideology? 

That last question guides not only this episode but a new sequence of episodes rooted in reactions to old ways and thoughts, but also driven by the need to do better today and tomorrow.

Transcript

Why Revisit The New Left;

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Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our three hundred and ninety third consecutive episode, and it goes back, back, back into the past to talk about the sixties New Left. Most of the episode, however, was conceived and written back then, literally in the waning years of the New Left experience. It is excerpted from a book I wrote that was published in 1974. The book was and is titled What Is to Be Undone, a wordplay on Lenin's famous title. This excerpt is roughly the first half of the first chapter, which was titled The New Left in the Sixties. Why the New Left in the Sixties is at the beginning of this book, What is to be undone? Well, it's because the motivation for the book was the feeling that the ideology, the theory, strategy, and tactics and methods that we were using was inadequate. And therefore that it paid or would pay to take a look at what we had been doing for those past years and to discern in particular not so much what was great about it or even good about it, but things that were lacking about it that we could therefore discern as possible outcomes of flaws or inadequacies in our theory and strategy and our ideology. I might add to the excerpted material as we go along some reactions as we proceed, but likely not often. As some motivation, back in nineteen seventy four, Noam Chomsky said about the book's commentary on the New Left that I had thought deeply about the problems of the American left, and that Mike's critical view on it is, I think, extremely valuable. He writes from the point of view of a participant as well as an observer and analyst, and from both points of view he has important things to say. He has managed to interweave his own experiences and his wide and thoughtful reading. You can decide if Noam was right or just being kind. The chapter began with a quotation from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice, would you tell me please which way we should go from here? The cat. That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. I'll add that the cat was wise. Then the chapter

History As Liberation Or Propaganda;

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began. To start this book we want to view the new left from a highly critical perspective, showing a number of rarely discussed internal weaknesses, and we want to thereby at least partially demonstrate the need for a new new left ideology. There are, however, two immediate problems we must overcome. History should be a vehicle for human liberation. The study of past events should be a means to understand causes, to discover roots of present historical trajectories, to ascertain different ends to which present trajectories might plausibly lead, and thus to learn how to affect positively various historical possibilities. But oppressive forces often impede attempts to use history in these useful ways. On the one hand, powerful oppressive propagandists rewrite history to show their roles as always virtuous, and on the other hand, critics among the oppressed as well as clever oppressors call every review of leftist errors irrefutable proof of the impossibility of effective rebellion. Both these phenomena are now occurring. Again, note, that was in nineteen seventy four, though it's also true now. So the chapter continues on the one hand, the United States liberal establishment is busily seeking to rewrite the history of the sixties to show that activities of the left were an obstacle to reform, and especially to the rapid conclusion of the Vietnam War, and to show that the liberals themselves were from the first always opposed to this immoral war, and in the end responsible for forcing its conclusion. On the other hand, but with similar effects, frustrated ex activists now trying to succeed within the system sometimes view the new left's experience as a chronicle of error, excess, ignorance, arrogance, and extremism, showing irrefutably the futility of revolutionary or even radical opposition. These folks exude cynicism and despair, and by minimizing New Left contributions, they objectively aid the liberal retelling of sixties history. These two differing efforts to rewrite history do a horrible disservice to the honest efforts of people trying to learn from past experiences. More, they return to a semblance of moral legitimacy the previously morally undermined Democratic Party and the whole system it represents, while simultaneously undercutting the historical identity and staying power of the new left, the only really humane and social movement this country has seen in many years. The truth of the sixties is in fact exactly the opposite of the rewrite laws. The liberals and the entire United States political establishment were never against the war. They were only to varying extents against losing the war and against development of too great a set of domestic problems as a result of trying to win it. Thus, as Noam Chomsky methodically shows, mainstream political opposition to the war had nothing to do with moral scruples. In the entire Pentagon Prayers there was not a single reference to the devastation of Vietnamese or even of American lives, while there are many references to economic and domestic political cost of war policies. But instead, the criticisms always arose only in pragmatic attempts to minimize political and economic losses that might result from the historically unparalleled Vietnamese resistance and the domestic United States resistance in the streets and the military barracks. Further, by undermining, in parallel with Vietnamese efforts, the American myth of benevolence, wealth, dignity, and freedom for all, by causing restraints to be put on government war policies lest they arouse too much motion here at home, and by showing the possibility of left activity even in the face of extreme inexperience and repression, the new left demonstrated the vulnerability of the establishment and the potential of people's power. The whole Watergate crisis graphically reveals the extent to which even a very germinal and inexperienced movement can disrupt the powers that be. In a very few years, American political complacency has been shattered. Imperialism, racism, sexism, alienation, and exploitation have become fairly well known concepts to the United States public. The political debate has been turned around. It is no longer quote, are these concepts relevant, but rather quote, just how relevant are they? It is not quote must there be major change, but quote, what kind of major change should there be? It is no longer quote the corporations and government will take care of our needs, but quote, how are we to take care of the corporations and government? These major advances in political awareness, plus the powerful thrust of the new left in preventing certain escalations and in eventually helping force a settlement of the war, at least temporarily beneficial to the Vietnamese, as well as the contributions of the new left in working for other social advances, are the historical truths which must be put forward in place of the hypocritical obfuscations offered up by liberals and or disgruntled and demoralized prior activists. Further, lest our own highly critical views of internal left dynamics add to establishment historians' fabrications, we now give a short recounting of new left contributions, particularly in the

What The New Left Actually Changed;

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area of creating new revolutionary consciousness and new tools for positive revolutionary thought and action. We also try, in our subsequent highly critical discussion, to keep foremost our real purpose, to show the nature and magnitude of some of the difficulties that helped undermine the New Left from within, and to show what real life as opposed to fantasy life in the New Left was like, and thereby to motivate recognition of the need for new ideology. The New Left was an international practice oriented movement. It was not steeped in theory, its ideas emerged primarily from trial and error evaluations of its own experiences. Its most creative groups actually rebelled against old ideology ideas, rather than analyzing and then moving from them as a basis. Nonetheless, the new left eventually hammered out a rough prospectus very much in tune with and even advanced beyond the finest formulations of their contemporary, more theory oriented comrades. Thus, the United States New Left started as a reaction to racism and the Vietnam War, but in time it came to represent a critique of the totality of ways modern life impinges upon human fulfillment needs and capacities. It went from an opposition to blatant racism in the South and war in Southeast Asia to a critical revolutionary position against racism in general, imperialism in all its forms, sexism both in society and in the movement, and the whole nexus of advanced capitalist day to day living working relations insofar as they breed waste, alienation, ecological decay, poverty, hierarchy, and competition, and insofar as they are unable to meet almost any of people's collective social needs for friendship, community, identity, power, recreation, creative and spiritual fulfillment, and so on. The New Left developed an awareness of the power of the United States repressive mechanisms, the state, corporation, courts, police, schools, and family, insofar as they coerce people, but also insofar as they corrupt people by imposing false and self alienating antisocial ideas. The New Left attacked the economic side of capitalism, both as it oppresses workers in factories and as it oppresses consumers in the so-called free marketplace. But the New Left also went beyond economics to additionally consider the ways modern schooling, family life, culture, and general day-to-day living inculcate oppressive modes of behavior, and thereby contribute to capitalism's stunting of human potentials. For the New Left, consciousness was a central aspect of concern. Whether trying to force the government to end the war or trying to build forces for eventually overthrowing the government, the New Left knew that the key problem was affecting people's thoughts, and thus their political allegiances, their motivations, goals, and even behavioral capacities. The New Left saw change consciousness as a prerequisite for revolution rather than an outcome of it. Moreover, primarily due to women's movement contributions, the New Left became aware that the question of consciousness was a very complex affair. It didn't involve only, quote, what side are you on, but also, quote, how do you feel about life and people? And thus, quote, are you able to participate humanely in revolution? For the women's movement showed how oppressive ways of thinking and acting remain even after we turn against capitalism, and it showed how those residue characteristics could corrupt our practical efforts by consigning them to self defeat via internal sexist or authoritarian repercussions. Thus the women's movement was largely responsible for showing the left that opposition to unequal interpersonal relations and to repressive sexual or authoritarian attitudes were factors on a par in importance with opposition to imperialism and exploitation. Similarly, by struggling not just for minor reforms, but for the total fulfillment of black lives, materially, culturally, creatively, and intellectually, the black movement taught leftists that racism has to be fought not after a revolution, but as a part of the prerequisite process of creating revolution, that it has to be fought both institutionally and in people's minds, and that the goal of fighting it, like the goal of fighting sexism and all other oppressions, was not reform, but the total liberation of the human personality, so that it might attain the greatest possible heights of growth and fulfillment. Because of the dual concerns of the new left, with overcoming authoritarianism and with changing oppressed consciousnesses, it developed a strikingly new style of practice. People were to struggle collectively to overcome impediments to societal and also to personal and interpersonal change. Participation, an active individual, and collective initiative were crucial as the only modes that had sufficient energy as well as anti authoritarian impact. Thus, the New Left was concerned to oppose all hierarchical mechanisms, including traditional Leninist parties, traditional teacher student, organizer organize relations, and even traditional meeting styles, where heavy, well known orators could always dominate events. The New Left struggled for rotation of all tasks, public speaking as well as

Consciousness Before Revolution;

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leafleting and typing, for participatory decision making mechanisms, for non repressive participatory meetings, and for a new relationship between the experienced and inexperienced that recognized that each had things to learn from the other, and that each had things to teach the other, and that what was desirable for everyone was everyone moving forward together. Further, the New Left emphasized finding methods suitable to raising consciousness, both inside and outside the movement. The New Left thus adopted a politics of exemplary actions, teach ins, consciousness raising groups, criticism self-criticism, and liberated lifestyles. Thus there was a preoccupation with leadership modes that would foster rather than stifle group political participation and initiative. The new left also, quote, discovered the importance of an alternative vision and tried both to outline one and to embody its attitude its values in daily practice. It took a total approach to revolution and liberation and functioned creatively both in analyzing social relations and in trying to alter them, even though, as we'll soon see, there were a great many instances in which its successes were very limited. There were also obviously many grave problems, yet the fact that in a very short time the new left discovered and even began solving the key political tasks of our time, creation of a goal prefiguring practice, development of an anti authoritarian organizational form, development of effective consciousness raising tactics, and development of a theory and practice that could simultaneously promote the autonomous development of women's black worker, youth, and community movements, while also providing a total framework within which they would all fit together and function together collectively, with the whole even more than the simple allied sum of its parts, is a remarkable indication of remark of modern revolutionary potentials. For the new left's promise to be fully met, activists need only synthesize its lessons with those of critical analyses of other historical struggle experiences, form a new collective ideology, and embark on a new new left political activism even more informed, self conscious, and effective than that of the sixties. A first modest step in such a direction is a critical look at the actual internal dynamics, beliefs, and contributions of the new left as a whole, and then of each of its major component movements. I should interject here. There is a sense in which what I just described, the virtues, let's call it, or the positive attributes of the new left can be misleading. It was part of the upsurge of the sixties. It was not the whole of it. And we'll see that as we go along. I guess what went on then when I wrote this book was I was describing the part I liked, to be honest. Continuing, in response to Kennedy rhetoric, material changes in wealth, growths of knowledge, black activism, and the specter of an overseas war, American youth began coming together politically in the early and mid sixties. They looked towards old left groups for ideological balance. They learned about class, the state, and revolutionary organization, but they also learned, in the words of Carl Oglesby, that the old left provides only an almost carrion bird politics, wherein quote, distant and above it all, the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of the predestined dinner. Capitalism weakens, layoffs and inflation converge, a rush of strikes, the bird moves in. But not so fast. The government also moves, a different money policy, stepped up federal spending, a public works project, selective repression of the militants. The bird resumes its higher orbit. Youth wanted more dynamism and insight than the seemingly stodgy old left had to offer. We were disenchanted with conditions of war, racism, and general cultural sterility. We moved toward direct action as our new multipurpose tactic. It promised greater successes, it was more exciting, it suited everyone's feelings of urgency, and it suited people's personal desires to quote fight now. Black movements became militant, and other leftists rapidly followed suit. Even street gangs adopted political slogans. The rhetoric of revolution spread through the land. People were quote rising up angry. It was initially very conscious and serious, as well as militant. At least the first wave of activists thought long and hard about making left commitments, and yet even with people's careful approaches, the leftward flow continually grew. Drop out of mainstream America, drop into either the growing youth culture or into a more active political movement. This was the message sweeping the big cities, causing much soul searching and a remarkable amount of active, very concerned motion. By and large, the new left had its finest hours in its earliest days. Then it was struggling in humble, honest ways. It was trying to affect the world and itself. It emphasized participation, patience, and hard work. Weaknesses were still only latent. The left wanted to communicate, and it took itself seriously enough to think carefully about everything it contemplated doing. But things became more complex as time went on. Under pressure of repression, co optation, and competition, the movement joined a kind of revolutionary rat race. It started adopting ideas instead of developing and fully understanding them. There was rush and urgency. Instead of acting creatively, the movement reverted to old ways that came more easily. Internal weaknesses, for example, authoritarianism and hierarchy, were fostered by external conditions, for example, repression and prush sensationalism. And as conditions got tougher, bad internal movement dynamics just kept getting worse. The old class president became the new movement leader, and the old quiet, sensitive person went almost totally silent. What was to be a new way of life began looking just like the old. There was a growth of ego insecurity. The left was attacked and in self defense, regrettably, became defined in terms of opposition to almost everything American. It was unsure of itself, but it acted cocksure. It

Early Strengths Then Drift And Extremism;

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couldn't really answer criticisms. It didn't reply when people asked how would it do things differently? It was pushed to a case. Extremism. It went from opposing McNamara's thinking to opposing almost all thought, and from a healthy distaste of bureaucracy to an abhorrence of almost all organization. It took genuinely creative intuitions about American disciplinary methods and turned them into a hatred for almost all discipline, including self discipline. It took a new critique of alienated work and bloated it into a new inability to do work of any kind, and perhaps most importantly, to defend itself while it was still young. It defined itself as morally superior. It turned an initially healthy, critical stance into a more and more blindly arrogant one. Of course, different people did these things to differing degrees, but the overall dynamics were such that the trends were very pronounced in the movement as a whole. In almost all cases, the movement failed to break down false polarities, and instead merely chose new sides for itself. Instead of work it took play, instead of mind, body, instead of discipline, chaos, instead of allegiance, hatred, and instead of passivity, arrogance. We didn't synthesize sufficiently. We were largely as extremist as the people we opposed. We were as subjectivist. We were motivated at least in part by the same self defeating habits of polarization, competition, authoritarianism, and self defense. We were ignorant and overly defensive about our weaknesses. We didn't really admit to them, and so of course we didn't even come close to fully overcoming them. We opposed the main oppressions of United States life, but not, at least until too late, the subtler ones that were already at work within our own activities. I should interject. It may sound like a bleak picture. Remember, this community of people, this new left, was fighting against the Behemoth, the United States government and its centralized power. But as much as it was accomplishing, as courageous as it was, as sensitive as it was to the ills of reality, it still had faults. There were problems, and those problems go a long ways to explaining why we don't live in a revolutionized society having begun in the sixties and then continued. Chapter continues There were people who saw those many problems at the time, but they were generally outside of or peripheral to the left. When they pointed up our weaknesses, it was to demoralize and not improve us. Their intention was to get us to be good citizens and not good revolutionaries. We were very unsure of ourselves, very defensive, but also very headstrong. If people told us we were authoritarian or insensitive or ignorant or overly brash, in defense we had to scream back that we were not, that we were going to go on being radical no matter what they said, no matter what anyone said. We had to convince ourselves. We couldn't sift the wheat from the chaff and the criticisms, precisely because we were unable to admit that anything they were suggesting might be at all true. We couldn't admit to weakness, and we were certainly unable to admit to criticisms labeled by our enemies. We couldn't admit that there was anything that they could tell us because that would severely threaten our need to believe that it was we who were to tell them. We screamed back at our detractors lest we be drawn back toward them. No one was able to break through our defenses until it was largely too late. If a liberal journalist said our sloppiness was disaffecting potential allies, we said it was untrue and roughed up our genes a little more. A healthy rebellion against capitalist clothing requirements, and especially against clothing as a mechanism of status slowly became an irrational preoccupation with a new kind of uniform. If another commentator or parent said our language or militants or attacks on certain institutions were incomprehensible and self detrimental, we didn't explain ourselves clearly or slightly alter our styles so that we might communicate better, but instead we merely intensified our assault on quote bourgeois sensibilities, oblivious to our actual conscious stunting effects. No one could be a really true evolutionary and also a sharp critic of our styles, ideas, tactics, etc. And even if many individuals were not guilty of this extremism, this sectarianism, New Left activism as a whole made it appear to the outside as if everyone was. To understand the involved processes more fully, we must look at the New Left's separate parts in greater detail.

Why Criticism Couldn’t Get Through;

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First, here, this episode, we consider the student movement. The student movement started at Berkeley. Ex civil writers accustomed to Southern struggles took a look at their own school and their own situations. They saw racism, war ties, and bureaucracy. They felt alienated and had the confidence to express their anger. The ensuing free speech movement was a catalyst to students all over the country. Soon the criticizers developed more clarity. Quote The schools are socializing agents. They are like computers. They are part of and program us to become part of the whole American system. They hurt us and they support the war. They make us into businessmen's slaves and they do weapons research. Campus movements united to change schools and fight against the war. People became seriously involved in ongoing deeply consuming activities. There were sanctuaries for AWL GRs, teach-ins, rallies, meetings, and occasional militant confrontations over related campus based demands, end war research, no more war recruiters, and so on. The process was initially driven by concern, spirit, and solidarity. People studied their schools, America, and imperialism. They moved progressively further and further left in analysis and were then, all of a sudden, revolutionaries, wanting to overthrow the whole system. Calm seriousness diminished as macho seriousness enlarged. There was deep trouble on the horizon. Students involved themselves in campus movements, usually in gut response to social pressures, deep moral feelings, and movement organizing efforts. They recognized their schools and countries' inadequacies and joined with whomever seemed most committed to overcoming them. Very few recruits were consciously strategic. They didn't have really good reasons for the whys and hows of their action. They were in no position to understand the effects of their action on others, or for that matter, on themselves either. People either went in and then out of the movement because their understanding remained foggy, or they stayed in, simply attaching themselves to a new identity related ideology, or bore their ignorances passively. In some cases they struggled to work things out for themselves. There was little collective give and take. People who had no strategic understandings were not effectively helped by their supposed leaders. They were instead indoctrinated, used, or expelled. Further, the in and outers couldn't help the leaders overcome their particular deficiencies, including their arrogance, defensiveness, sectarianism, out of touchness, immaturity, and overall blindness to the effects of much of what they were doing. I interject. Remember, this is written by me about three years out of college and still centrally enmeshed in sixties activism. I was one of those leaders needing help, it would appear. I can hear some people reacting to what I'm saying or what they're hearing, and feeling like you're being too harsh. It wasn't all that bad. It wasn't all that hell, I was better, think someone hearing this. The issue isn't what was each individual person in the new left doing or like. The issue is what did the new left communicate to all those who weren't in it? The chapter continues. Skills were not effectively spread and elitism was not effectively countered. One group had sensitivity, but little initiative, another the reverse. Of course, the whole spectrum was much broader than this, but more often than not, societal dynamics so polarized events that each individual may as well have been at one of the two extremes anyway. Perhaps the most incongruous of events occurred when Marxist Leninist student sects confused, alienated, and attacked people under the guise of quote, giving ideological leadership. As sectarian groups vied for position, they wasted people's time and drained people's energies. They dominated people's capacities for initiative, and crusting all efforts in their own stodgy formulas. Worse, perhaps, their bad ways played to bad latent traits in almost everyone who tried dealing with them. Thus people trying to eliminate Leninist infantile sectarianism were also instead sidetracked into their own potentials for sectarianism. You could argue with the Progressive Labor Party only so long before developing Progressive Labor Party like traits. The resulting internacine conflicts did more harm than good. The Leninists attacked and baited. Everyone else attacked and baited back until their behavior became rather habitual. New people were never too impressed when they saw so called revolutionaries fighting one another to the exclusion of seriously dealing with real issues. And when they saw infighting go to the level of violent confrontations, they naturally began to wonder how radicals differed from the establishment they opposed. The dynamics had more to do with pathological ego defense than with fighting for real revolutionary gains. The left became a kind of spectacle, and most students looked on with mixtures of awe, fear, disdain, skepticism, and sometimes a little naive jealousy

Student Movement Origins At Berkeley;

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or just plain wonderment. The movement became a kind of caricature of itself. Its members didn't understand why some people joined while others didn't. And indeed, the question, despite its obvious centrality, was hardly ever even raised. Movement people didn't understand what forces worked in their favor and what forces were hindrances. Though strategies were espoused, problems concerning sex, psychological passivity, school itself, and needs for real community weren't even properly understood. That people had some difficulties adopting or even recognizing radical ideas was not fully understood. When trying to communicate through leaflets, there was no accepted model for deciding what should go in and how it should be written. When trying to decide on program, there was no real method for figuring out what was important and what tactics were best suited to students' states of mind. When trying to figure out how militant to be, there was no understanding of why more or why less was better, and of how one or the other would affect future possibilities. If it had had these awarenesses, the student movement might have made itself more palatable to other students and citizens at large. It wouldn't have constantly pushed beyond what people were ready to do, and it would have created ongoing mechanisms for preserving short run gains more effectively than was actually done. When the crucial choice came between highly escalating campus militancy or staying less militant but constructing well founded unions that could at a later date take far more people far more solidly to the left, the latter approach would have won out instead of the former. The student movement went from interrupting the free speech of the Rastaus to interrupting and fighting each other, precisely because we never developed a full understanding of what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what its effect on others and on us were likely to be. We were afraid of co optation, but we didn't really understand it. Paul Potter expresses the situation as it was. I interject. He expresses because when I wrote this he had just done so. Remember, it's nineteen seventy four. Quote The tyranny of liberation is believing that the reality of our needs can overcome what this society has done to us. That is not only wrong, it is arrogant. It is one of our most important conceits. Regardless of what we say about the power of the military and the corporations, we seem to be incapable of believing that the strategy that crushed our parents could crush us in the same way. We assume that we will do better than they. We deny that they could have ever been like us. What we cannot comprehend is that our parents too might have had images of liberation once. In essence, we did not recognize that we were fallible, and so of course we did little to guard against that fallibility. By the time we began realizing that we had bad traits and that they were hurting our efforts, it was already too late. We were fragmenting. The initial hope, energy, and enthusiasm were spent. Criticism self criticism was introduced as a palliative. The dictum rapidly became rule self, rule others, and by all means don't mess with any of the really threatening problems. The first student strategy was largely reformist, that is, agitation by arguing that certain aspects, courses, Razi, war research, black admissions policies, etc. of the university were irrelevant or worse, organization of demonstration and strikes to change those aspects, agreement to help plan new ways the school could function more relevantly, and termination of demonstrations when those new ways were adopted. The essence was to make our home a nicer place. The protagonists usually wanted grading reform, living reform, course alterations, or the development of black or radical studies programs, and all these things were fought for not because they fit into some larger scheme, but because they seemed immediately justified. The second strategy was somewhat more revolutionary. Quote, the universities are complicit in many of society's larger evils. They are partially responsible for society's injustices, end quote. Students were organized around university complicity in the war, imperialism, racism, etc. Demonstrations were held aimed specifically at ending complicity and escalated to whatever extents necessary. Termination of demonstrations came only when the fully desired results were accomplished, or I should add, interjecting, the students in the effort were effectively repressed and demoralized. Essentially it was a quote, clean up your backyard strategy, which it was hoped would simultaneously force others, workers and others, to police their yards too, and would bring closer the day when students could join them in that effort. Still, the strategy was mostly aimed at just getting rid of obvious evils. Practitioners were not so concerned with the effects of their actions on other people as they were with the effects on the institutions they were attacking. They were not so concerned with developing

Recruitment Without Strategy And Skill Sharing;

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organization or mass support as with achieving concrete successes spurred by large demonstrations. They didn't want commitment, they wanted immediate victories. They had very few answers for people who said they were polarizing the country to the detriment of their own goals, except to say that what they were doing was right and that therefore it had to be done. People were usually motivated by the belief that they could have short run successes and thereby eliminate a certain amount of evil from the world. The strategy began buckling when people began realizing just how much power was needed for even the smallest change. It pretty much died when a Princeton University movement got a war research building eliminated, but the campus was gerrymandered so that the institution was no longer on it. The building remained, the function was still served, everything was the same except the campus boundary. Though the struggle continued, the irony was felt in Princeton and elsewhere. A new strategy was needed. Serious leftists saw these various results and became more political. They forswore the old ideology enti entirely. They didn't try to alter it, they just got rid of it. They didn't try to improve on past ways, they just jumped on a newer, supposedly more revolutionary third strategy bandwagon, with the same relatively blind commitment they'd had for the last one. Of course not everyone was the caricature this suggests. Some understood strategic possibilities more, and those who rushed ahead were considerably affected by the seeming urgencies of the moment. But the overall dynamic was such that everyone might as well have been motivated by nothing more than the desire to push ahead as quickly as possible, lest dynamics get somehow bogged down. People's good motivations were largely submerged in their individual and collective deficiencies. The student movement constantly viewed itself as right and moral and therein cut itself off from improvement. The third campus strategy was in some ways more enlightened than its two predecessors. It said that campus activism could be a catalyst for changing American political realities. It reasoned that by wrecking schools, closing them, or fighting over them, we could greatly escalate the level of national political discussion. We could create motion that would push everyone further and further left. It was a politics of example and disruption, a politics of motion, disrupt old ways and dispense new ones, and change will come simultaneously. Different people, with this view of how the left could expand, had different ways of actually doing things. Some used drama, manipulation, and people's desires to cleanse the campuses. Others tried to explain their strategy and motivate people through an understanding of long run potential. The people in the first persuasion created most campus motion, and in time almost all leaders succumbed to using their methods, frequently without even fully understanding what it was they were doing. Thus the Seattle Liberation Front created a whole lot of very temporary motion energy in Seattle with a politics of macho noise, confrontation and myth. And Mayday eventually tried to follow suit on a national scale, with its supposedly self-propelling dramatic predictions of hundreds of thousands converging on Washington and quote shutting it down. The more modest but politically better conceived programs of countless local community and student groups got lost in the shuffle. That the dramatic approach could create only a lot of baseless motion with no real ongoing solid organization, commitment, solidarity, or consciousness was overlooked in the quote rush of joy caused by the large numbers it could indeed sometimes call forth, or at least not scare away. Further, most of the third group's leaders were competitive men with plenty of charisma, but extremely arrogant, progress oppressive, and macho styles. Though the idea of catalyzing responses in new set new sectors was rather good, the new left nearly really never really took the trouble to seriously consider what kinds of activities had good effects and what kinds had bad. The implicit, rapidly adopted supposition was that anything directed against the establishment would have provocative and less good effects on the masses who viewed it. The feeling was that though working people might not like all the specific tactics chosen, they would still be inevitably pushed to the left by the tactics net effects. Of course, this proposition was partially true, but to a greater extent it was a rationalization for the inability to even consider doing things that would be simultaneously radical, liked by the workers, and constructive of the movement's infrastructure and size. There were countless arguments in which claims were made that though of course the workers hated us, they were also moving leftward, and that removing the barriers

Sectarian Infighting And Movement Caricature;

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between the two groups would become easier and easier as that motion progressed. The barriers, nevertheless, are still quite real, writing again in the early nineteen seventies. And of course, the motion never became a stampede. In fact, some of what the student left did actually pushed the workers to the right, and much of it, crazy lifestyles, peculiar appearances, and opposition to free speech, gave false impressions of what being radical is all about, and thereby laid seas of cynicism that are still impeding constructive possibilities. I interject, again, still in 1975. Finally, student left politics never successfully took into account the need for tactics and organizing efforts to create ongoing institutional strengths, which act as the basis and give the necessary continuity for later continuation of efforts aimed at creating a united United States left. Further, and as a kind of extension of inadequately addressing other sectors of the population and insufficiently organizing even the student sector, the student movement actually created the conditions necessary for its own repression. It escalated militancy while cutting itself off from the main supporting elements. It was too busy, too revolutionary, and too near to winning, at least in its own mind, to really notice the actual phenomena around it, to actually notice what was good and what was bad about even its own activities. The overall strategy for students to exert an exemplary influence upon the rest of the country was actually quite sound. What was lacking was the ability to apply that awareness. Students' attitudes were not always the most progressive, and even when they were progressive, their abilities to transmit them were largely lacking. The tactics, styles, and overall insensitive attitudes toward other people's values were especially detrimental. The student movement never developed adequate criteria for its own activities. It hardly ever had good, carefully thought out reasons for its efforts. In a real sense, it was ignorant and cut off from realizing that fact by its identity problems. The best arguments were never best because they were sound or because they fit widely accepted and well tested criteria of value, but because they were elegant or super radical or fashionable or in some other way self-serving. The grounds for anyone now judging the student movement, again, written in the mid seventies, are roughly to what extent did the student movement realign society's forces to benefit the oppressed? To what extent did it alter non students' consciousness in ways favorable to future revolutionary efforts? To what extent did it forge students into ongoing movements that could continue struggling for change? The student movement and indeed the entire New Left put to shame all other political parties, organizations, and ideologies in the United States by showing their complicity in the war, racism, and other forms of oppression, and their incompetence in dealing with these problems. Indeed, the New Left is the only real left that the United States of the past few years offers up for critical evaluation. Nonetheless, once its great importance for breaking the hegemony of the Democratic Party and other liberal organizations over left politics and for contributing new methods to ongoing struggles against imperialism and other injustices is admitted, there is simply no way to deny that the student movement also, in many ways, failed. It fulfilled our above outlined judgment criteria only partially, and in some cases even partially negatively. It did affect social consciousness, often positively, but sometimes negatively, but it did not create ongoing movement organizations. There is no way to tell if it could have done better if it had had a more encompassing perspective and a more maturely self critical style. But it is certainly not heretical, excessively defeatist, or unjustifiably self effacing to think that it might have. Indeed, such speculation is rather liberating, precisely because it allows us to be properly self critical and to hope for a better student and new left movement in the future. The conditions fostering the student movement were not transitory. The internal deficiencies and repression that drove it to destruction and the temporarily soured students on any further efforts were and are largely try transitory and therefore subject to future positive alterations. I interject. The point here is or the the the tone and the impan intent is to see that better was possible and that a good ideology, good ideas, good theory, good strategy could have led to better. That's what we gauge ideology by its ability to do that. And the ideologies then existent didn't do it. And that's what caused me back then, I guess when I was uh whatever I was, twenty five, to think that it would be a good idea to examine all that. In any case, the chapter continues. But the student movement was only one of many parts of United States activism. To understand the whole more fully, we must

Three Campus Strategies And Their Limits;

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also investigate its other aspects. That's it for the first part of chapter one of what is to be undone. Some will read it, some did read it, and will get angry with its authors. How could I be so critical of what we did? Such negativity, they would say, is unwarranted, degrading, defeatist. I thought then, and I think, even more so now, that to look at our experiences and discern and describe weaknesses was both warranted and all about the potential to win. Yes, we were in various respects good, or if you prefer, better than those who did not become student activists. Much better. But to suggest we were perfect, well that would be defeatist, because in that case, down the road, no one could find and overcome problems we had so as to do better than we did. There would not arise a different kind of genetically superior student who would just automatically do better than our best. And the obstacles that prevented us from doing better, they weren't going to waste away on their own. Far from it. So a better student movement would need more clarity, better methods, and that would mean transcending problems of the past, and that would mean finding the problems of the past. Next episode we will consider the anti war movement, weatherman, the Panthers, and the women's movement, all as written about in nineteen seventy three, concluding with a brief argument for why our brief survey of the sixties, why well my mindset looking at the sixties and the early seventies caused me to seek false and prominent revolutionary ideologies in the rest of the book What is to be undone? After all, what is an ideology for if not to guide effective practice and prevent ineffective practice? If the movements of those times fell short of desires, and they did, and more so if they did not persist to get steadily better in subsequent years, and they didn't, then either nothing better was possible, or there were failings that could have been corrected. Some deduced the former stopped us. I believed and also thought it essential to demonstrate that it was the latter that stopped us. But is a search for deep failures, failures of guiding ideology that was undertaken back then still relevant now? I'm curious to see. I hope you are as well. Put differently, remember the inducement I felt to examine this work, what is to be undone a half a century later was partly encountering Gabriel Rockell's nearly opposite view. So is he correct? Do we need to double down on the validity and power of the then existent and now still available classical ideology? Was it correct that the classical ideology didn't then or later mislead us, but rather that we succumbed them and later to the pressures of repression, the confusions of academic rigor morale, and the allure of wealth and power? Or instead was the intuition that fueled my asking what is to be undone correct? Did we need new theory and vision and strategy not found in dead men's minds if we were going to do much better if we were going to succeed? Hopefully by the end of next episode you will agree that to take a deep critical look at classical ideologies was back then and since a reasonable step. Of course, that will leave the question can such a look critical look have useful lessons for going forward toward new ideology, toward a new new lift? Or as Rockhill suggests, can it only yield a dialed up academicized anti anti-imperialism? To find out is why I am undertaking this new sequence of episodes. And all that said, this is Michael Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution C.