Ep 394 The New Left Evaluated From Within Part 2

Episode 394 of RevolutionZ continues the evaluation of the New Left from within begun last episode. This time the focus is the Anti war movement, Weatherman, the Yippees, the Black movement, and the womens movement. The fastest way to break a movement is to let “being technically right” replace getting stronger. Starting with the Vietnam War antiwar movement we ask a painful question: how did a cause with massive public support still end up with thin commitment, divisive splits, and a core that felt unreachable?

We talk about the double-bind that shows up in so many protest movements that make opposition easy enough to attract crowds, but make real participation depend on an expanding list of correct positions. That “credentials” culture can turn organizing into a status system that leaves most people peripheral between demonstrations and sets everyone up for demoralization when the standard becomes “did we win now?” We also dig into why the "raise domestic-costs" strategy made sense, and how drama, manipulation, and weak political education kept it from building durable power.

From there, we move through Weatherman and the lure of extremist identity, to the Yippies’ early creativity and later hardening, the Black Panthers’ extraordinary early contributions and how authoritarianism and macho militarism hurt their further development, and the women’s movement’s historic breakthroughs alongside the reappearance of hierarchy under pressure. The through-line is practical: if we want lasting effective organizations, we need empathy, realistic metrics of progress, a culture of participation, and especially a shared ideology that helps people deal with their baggage and current conditions and that propels learning instead of burning out.

Transcript

Setting Up Part Two

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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 fourth consecutive episode, and it again, like last time, talks about the sixties new left, but this time it's part two. Most of the episode was conceived and written back in the early nineteen seventies, literally in the waning years of the New Left experience. It is excerpted from a book that I wrote published in nineteen seventy four. The book was and is titled What is to be undone, a wordplay on Lenin's famous title. This excerpt is roughly the second half of the first chapter, which was titled The New Left in the Sixties.

The Antiwar Movement Takes Shape

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We start this time with the then anti war movement. The anti war movement developed in parallel with the campus movement, each affected, enlarged, and defined by the other. In the beginning, people became involved mostly because they saw that the war was a highness crime adversely affecting millions of people. Draft card movements and turn ins, teach-ins and marches were all deeply moving, involving affairs. During its earliest days, becoming a member of the anti war movement was a really difficult existential choice, involving much serious thinking and risk. Joining generally reflected deep changes of political consciousness. There was a continual push toward expressing beliefs in action, but the steps were difficult. At its birth, the movement had both solidarity and patience, but its immediate popularity and growth, which should have been a great boon, proved otherwise. I interject. It's probably worth noting that at its beginning it was tiny. It was, you know, someone who was against the war speaking in someone else's living room. That went on for quite a while. I'm talking about the time when it was getting moving, when it was really unfolding as a growing opposition to the war. Anyway, the uh chapter continues. With time, joining demonstrations, handing out leaflets, and calling oneself an anti war activist became less and less difficult, and regrettably, their effects upon people's beliefs and commitments also diminished. The movement size grew, but the solidarity, understanding, and commitment of each member declined. This, however, wasn't the whole story.

Growth That Weakens Commitment

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Alongside the good, there were really two bad trends at work, usually in opposition to one another, and to what would have been the good trend of a simultaneously growing and strengthening movement. On the one hand, movement activists made it as easy as possible for people to oppose the war by appealing to the most universal sentiments and avoiding many political issues. But on the other hand, they made it very difficult for people to be actively against the war because they made significant participation depend upon espousing a variety of usually out of reach beliefs. The dynamics had a kind of schizoid property that hurt the movement in a two edged way. Many, many people were driven away by the movement center's tendency to ideologically and morally isolate itself. The rest, those who were brought in, were made rather peripheral by the movement's tendency to be somewhat apolitical about its beliefs, even though continually espousing the need for politics and correct lines over and over and making them prerequisites for active membership. People marched trying to influence the powers that be, and in the process learned more and more about the war, its roots, and the forces maintaining it. Before long, a reasonable number of people knew something about imperialism, and consequently something about the entire American system. In parallel to this Enlightenment, there also developed the quote isolationist part of the double edged trend described earlier. Either one was against imperialism or one so-called anti-warism was hypocrisy. Either one was against the whole American system, or not really against the war. One supported the NLF or was not really against the war. One was against monogamy and for the Panthers and hated liberals or not really against the war in the first place. This is what one might in retrospect call the credentials or professionalization trend of the core left. The people who planned actions, wrote articles, gave speeches, and generally made the decisions. Needless to say, fewer and fewer people could keep pace with the list of necessary against and thereby stay in the more organized parts of the anti war movement. Thus they had to stay only on the edge of movement activity, and were, between major demonstrations, rather inactive and demoralized. Who knows how many others didn't do anything active because though the demand on commitment was actually lower than they'd have been willing to welcome, the demand on political verbal adherence was higher than they could possibly handle. And perhaps most ironic, for those who were in the organized movements, the list of against was usually as much a ticket to legitimacy as it was a clearly thought out or deeply felt set of operative values. For if it had been the latter, members would have succeeded in making the list a real part of their daily calculations, and further would have understood the necessity for not over demanding other people's allegiances. Antiwar politics would still have been multi-issued, but in styles speaking to people in ways they could relate to rather than in ways isolating the left. The reasons for these two edged harmful dynamics were actually quite clear to many spectators, if not to most of the participants themselves. Antiwar radicals had vested interests in growth as well as in a unique position in society. We were the action and most importantly, we had the new morality, and got our sense of importance largely from that distinction between ourselves and others. Whenever the American people responded to movement efforts and went a bit to the left, ironically, already active movement people got nervous about their identities remaining unique and made their positions more extreme and at the same time usually more unpalatable. I interject. Remember that's me writing in the early seventies. That's my impression, and that's my impression. The chapter continues. On the one hand, we honestly tried to reach folks and quote, teach them to oppose the war, but on the other hand, we struggled to remain pure, aloof, and better. This again was the complicated two edged trend. Of course, much of the movement's leftward motion also reflected honestly growing awarenesses, but such growth was regrettably hardly ever adapted to the demands of building an ever stronger and larger movement. More often, activists took their new knowledge and used it to elevate and enshrine themselves, even while also trying to draw people to big demonstrations. We adopted new attitudes and styles, for example, trashings, that often didn't reflect insight and commitment so much as an abiding desire to gain self esteem by keeping a monopoly on quote real descent and on the dissenting identity. The movement's core was largely unreachable because at a certain level of consciousness it wanted to be unique and small. The movement was on the one hand really massive demonstrations and a tremendous number of people sharing a variety of radical beliefs, and on the other hand, a very small subset of isolated masters, planners, and even shit workers precisely because the movement's every dynamic had the schizoid property of simultaneously attracting people while also keeping them only peripheral. And the fact that no one in the movement acted quite so bad as the caricature here describes, and that many acted diametrically opposite to it is basically irrelevant, for the movement had mass dynamics that averaged away the good that we did and exacerbated much of the bad. The general effect of the whole anti war movement was thus much as it would have been if all its members, instead of just some, were trying largely to set themselves apart as more moral than all other people. So despite immense forces propelling people to oppose the war, including the educational efforts of the movement itself, the core of the truly everyday active anti war movement did succeed in setting itself quite apart, much to everyone's ultimate detriment.

Strategy Versus Movement Reality

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The major anti war strategy, the movement's leaders who planned activities had it, though most of the people who attended them did not, was to end the war by raising its social costs at home. The strategy was to constantly increase the number of people opposing the war while simultaneously moving already actively opposed people toward ever greater and more militant activities. It recognized that rising disenchantment, the threat of increased worker politicization, and the growing radicalization of students were all war policy costs, which wise politicians would have to include in their cost benefit calculations. The strategy was actually quite sound as far as it went. Most political hawks who turned dove indeed did so precisely because they felt that the war's domestic costs were growing too great to bear. I interject, domestic costs meaning not only the pain endured by electorates who might turn on those those political hawks, but also the growing opposition, outright opposition who didn't appreciate the hawks but were creating a situation damaging to their interests. The chapter continues. In the end, despite its overall weakness and its tendency to isolate itself, the anti war movement did help to turn the country against the war, to keep Johnson from seeking re-election, to set back the bombing for sometimes prolonged periods, to reverse attempted escalations, to prevent really massive escalations like nuclear bombing, to narrow government military and propaganda options, and to finally create conditions requiring a settlement that was at least temporarily favorable to the Vietnamese liberation forces. The movement's weakest link was not so much the strategy that guided its leaders as their incapacities to act on it wisely and the resulting inadequacies that plagued all activities. The movement couldn't deal with people in ways that would keep them going leftward. It couldn't turn growing dissent into effective organization, and it could only reach wide constituencies in the most minimal ways. It didn't create commitment so much as temporary allegiance. There was greater concern shown for quantity of effort than for quality of effect. Movement leaders frequently urged organizers to create drama and overplay the possible numbers of people attending demonstrations so as to bring everyone out. I interject, sort of like clickbait. Chapter continues. They didn't talk too much about the development of real consciousness so that people would continue to be committed between demonstrations and work toward reaching ever broader audiences. Nor did they talk enough about how to make movement work quality work, how to give people new insights into the nature of the war and the nature of America. I interject, it's not that this wasn't done at all. Please don't make me don't don't get this wrong. It's just that it wasn't done enough. The chapter continues. At its heart, the anti war movement was manipulative. It did not transmit strategic understanding to all its levels. It did not raise consciousness in irreversible ways. Most people never got to really participate in planning. What planning there was was not deeply enough conceived and was too hampered by tendencies emphasizing drama, being more moral and winning now, while ignoring questions of how the American people actually felt about the war and about the movement. Most demonstrators perceived each event as just another failure, perhaps not during the immediate excitement of the event itself, but almost inexorably in the period immediately following. Most people had no really deep feeling for progress. They saw no great changes in the state of the war. They saw no new constituencies creating strikes or other actions. And so they gravitated toward the belief that nothing was being accomplished, and movement rhetoric did more to foster these frustrations than to overcome them. Quote, if the government doesn't stop the war, we're going to stop the government, end quote. I interject. The problem with that was we weren't going to stop the government. And so if you make that your norm, if you make that your criteria of accomplishment, well, you won't have accomplished much. The chapter continues. Finally, most people had no real understanding of the immensity of the enemy, and so they had a ridiculously disproportionate set of criteria for judging themselves and their movement. Did we win rather than did we gain a little? Some people fooled themselves into believing that they were always quote winning now, and others, in some ways correctly, always felt they weren't, and eventually became demoralized and split. Only a few constantly kept a modest strategic sense of making games a bit of the time in an inexorable but slow process. And perhaps most striking, this last group did little or nothing to help the others achieve a new perspective, and in fact often gave dramatic speeches that fostered wrong approaches. For example, at a National People's Coalition for Peace and Justice Criticism Self Criticism session after the May Day actions, the criteria for analysis of the effects of the demonstration should have been did the action realign government powers a bit in our favor? Did it move immediate and distant spectators toward anti war awareness? Did it affect participants positively? And did it strengthen the movement? The answer should have been perhaps a bit, a little, yes, a little, no, maybe and no. The mood should have been self critical and maybe even a little depressed but determined. The actual mood was different. No one set out concrete criteria for judgment. Everyone implicitly used variations of the extreme did we win brand of criteria, even while many bemoaned the fact that that was the way the media were playing the whole thing. Did we shut down the city or not? There was a lot of euphoria and backpack padding. Some people convinced themselves the whole thing was a great, a victory, and other people who thought it was not so good, a defeat, didn't bother saying so for fear of being considered defeatist. PCPJ was like most other parts of the anti war movement, in that its criticism self criticism Harvey hardly ever led to real improvements. I interject, and it was, at least in my opinion, the best of the anti war movement.

Demoralization After Cambodia

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The culmination of all these various dynamics seems to have come with the Cambodia invasion. Students did everything they felt they could, and very few other people seemed to them to do much of anything. Anti war people fell into the belief that the situation was quite hopeless. They alone didn't have the power to win, and no one else was making time to join them. And besides, now there were risks. You could be jailed or even killed. In the absence of solidarity and an understanding of real accomplishments, the chief emotion became fear. Anger and determination diminished and passivity increased. The movement was neither a fruitful nor fun place to be, at least for the great bulk of its people who weren't central, didn't travel, and didn't contribute many ideas for strategy. The movement was debilitating because it made people act competitive, arrogant, sneaky, and aloof in ways, and besides, it just didn't seem to pay off. Repression was becoming a very real and serious factor. It was more and more difficult for people to keep active faith as they began to feel their daily behavior was becoming more and more oppressive. Life became alienated, success seemed impossible, and most of the movement's attempts at good dynamics were replaced by extreme versions of the bad ways people had been taught to act in the society at large. I interject. Many who were around in those days will remember the movement differently, because they will remember the part they were in and their activity. I do that too. I remember the excitement, the energy, the seeming success, etc. But the issue isn't us. The issue is the rest of the population. And the rest of the population was not moved in the ways that we hoped, and more, many of us drifted away. It's just the way it was. It's undeniable. The chapter continues. In essence, the same dynamics hit the anti war movement that hit the student movement. People's identities became tied up in their own righteousness and in subjective myths about the Vietnamese, themselves, and the enemy. People began fighting with each other because the enemy was too powerful, and at the same time, people lost their abilities to be humble, sensitive, participatory, and patient. People went to the farm, gravitated back to school, became sectarian hangers on, or in a few cases, usually because of advantages, knowledge, many friendships, experience, and some kind of steady income allowing full-time participation hung in. The latter are now, again, remember this is in 1974, struggling with the sectarians for leadership of the remnants of the organized anti war movement. If they can succeed and also overcome past inadequacies, perhaps they will be able to help develop a movement that could force discontinuation of American support for two, really develop an anti imperialist awareness and presence, and ensure that when the history of the sixties is told, it gives a correct perspective to the roles of both the lift and the liberal United States establishment. I interject, not to say build an ongoing apparatus that could prevent future words wars. Chapter continues The anti war movement succeeded because it had a patently clear cause and because it had energy, goodwill, and at least at the beginning much solidarity and attractiveness. It was thus able to create an effective counterforce to United States imperialist designs, materially aid the Vietnamese cause, lift the level of United States political awareness, and demonstrate the possibility of effective United States leftist action. I interject. Those are big accomplishments. One could write articles and books about those, but that isn't my agenda here. The chapter continues. It fails, however, because it was authoritarian, because it refused to educate itself clearly about what it was doing and why it was doing it, because it refused to study the feelings and beliefs of the American people, because its members had weaknesses which were fostered and not countered, and because its members also had immense ego problems. It failed because having not asked the right questions about itself or about the American people, it was unable to formulate good programs. Thus, the present That is 1974 again. Absence of effective, relatively large, ongoing anti-imperialist organizations. Note, that is also after 1974. The anti war movement had essentially the same leaders, the same structures, the same constituencies, and the same faults as the student movement, addressed in part one. While students and middle class people suffered considerably for ensuring imperfect dynamics, the Vietnamese, all third world people, and America's blacks and bo and poor bore the greatest long run burdens of all temporary inac inadequacies of the left.

Weatherman And The Lure Of Extremes

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Next, consider the Weatherman. The Weatherman movement was a kind of aberration that developed in the days when third world heroes seemed actually godlike. If something is wrong, fight it, since quote, this country sucks, kick ass. Weatherman was an aberration, and yet it was also the logical extension of the sixties. If the weather machine was moved by pathology, it was also moved by a most impressive commitment to fight injustice to whatever extent conditions demanded that the sixties produced. In many ways, its practice embodied the logical extension of the whole new left. Weatherman had an ideology and its members functioned consistently within it. They recognized some of their middle class upbringing weaknesses and tried to correct them. The main problem was that they were one sidedly extremist about all that they did. Their strategy was based on the premise that most Americans are too tied up in their relative advantages to be willing to take revolutionary risks. In light of the way Weatherman approached people, those expectations were quite self fulfilling. To gain weather praise, one essentially had to admit to being a white honky pig who was repentant and willing to give all for the welfare of the third world, and then act like a guerrilla facsimile of John Wayne. Weather people saw themselves as a kind of Viet Cong front functioning within the United States. They were the NLF, except of course that they had little of the NLF's integrity, experience, discipline, patience, or preparedness, and certainly little of their dignity or empathy for other people's perspectives. Whether people believed in the raise the cost approach, but felt effective mass militancy was quite impossible. They wanted a small red army, and though damned just about everyone, they felt they and a few others could work alongside the third world masses. They favored violence and even sometimes terrorism, figuring it would attract those few with guts, and at the same time raised domestic costs and put everyone on notice as to what was coming. Their vision of a revolution was a blazing tank. Their early attacks on working class kids, high schools, other movement groups, street gangs, and occasionally police stations, Razi centers, or university fraternities showed just how far astray from rationality they would eventually deviate. One had only to hear the upper middle class, authoritarian, leather jacketed leaders singing praises to the therapeutic values of violence to learn the weather machine's chief lesson. Certain kinds of quote uncritical, even if rebellious thinking, can pervert one to such extents that the resulting actions can be more a people's problem than even the actions of official authorities. Regrettably, to teach us this common sense but important piece of wisdom, the Weather People took many very severe beatings and scared or alienated away a great many potential leftists as well. When general activism levels slowed, weather people got somewhat more sophisticated and revolved their strategies around the idea of exemplary action, though still with a heavy emphasis on the inability of most people to respond positively. Essentially this was a useful rationale for doing whatever one wanted, coupled with an excuse for why it didn't work, all worked out before the fact. The exemplary action idea always gained sway among the more persevering parts of any epoch's left movements. The idea was that bombings or events of a militant kind could detonate favorable feelings in many who saw them. People could learn how possible it was to fight the behemoth. They would see that there were some people who had good values and also guts, and who intimated a better way of life. The thought was a step forward in some respects, but even in those respects only a small one. Weather people were just too out of touch to know what would push people to the left and what would push to the right. Certainly bombing bathrooms didn't impress too many people with weather abilities to smash the state. And emulating a toughed up James Dean didn't impress many others with weather potentials for living well or creating a better world. Indeed, most people took away the impression that weather people were a collection of maniacs who had lost all track of their own relations to reality and who were tripping on a fantasy about their own importance. That image, though slightly unfair, was by no means completely off base. For the weather machine at its worst was the guy who got up in the middle of a meeting and gave a long dramatic rap worshiping the therapeutic effects of unrestrained violence, or the woman who got up and attacked all men for their pig natures in attempts not to educate but to score points. Or the militants who hurled a petty rock at a demonstration and then beat a hasty retreat, while others who didn't really know what was going on got trampled or caught by the police. It was a heavy dude on the run from imaginary police pursuit, hiding out at one's house, creeping around, not talking to anyone, except to say that he was the Viet Cong, and then slipping out in the morning and eventually getting busted for ripping off underwear. At its worst, the weather machine was a band of tufts who on one day were acultural, anti hippie, tight asses, and on the next, after some central committee decided on a new path, became the Kazoo marching band carrying chains instead of batons. When the weather people were at their best and succeeding beyond even their own expectations with a bombing or a fight or a school disturbance, their main effect was to make people hate them and the left. The Weather People, at the cost of a few bathrooms, gave the government ample reason to extend its oppressive apparatuses in almost all its major cities. This was unquestionably a dubious achievement, even if it had been accompanied by a significant growth of the left, which of course it wasn't. The Weather People had the same identity problems and the same tendencies toward extremism as everyone else, but as they made quite clear, they also had more guts for carrying their errors all the way through to their logical ends. They saw revolution and repression around every door. They bounced from one side of each false dichotomy to the other, never once finding the solid revolutionary ground in the middle. Many weather people were society's best trained, most confident, most educated, and initially most sensitive youth. But the dynamics they encountered and created were overwhelming. They rebelled against society's discipline, but made that rebellion a fetish even in their own organizations. They rightly discovered that a fear of violence could be debilitating, but they pushed on to worship violence as virtuous behavior, which should be pushed out in almost all circumstances. They screamed about America's gross mechismo and then became crudely macho violent themselves. They decided that monogamy had weaknesses, moved on to decide that it was totally wrong, and then created a kind of tribal dynamic that forced people into a self-destructive brand of sexist polygamy. The weather machine's extreme living tactics convinced many that even justifiable attempts at altering lifestyles were recklessly worthless. And finally, weather militants and weather hostility pushed the machine further and further away from the rest of the left, until they lived in a kind of self-created, paranoid, guerrilla dream world that had little relation to the ongoing realities of American life. Except for the fact that as weather behavior became more extreme, they were indeed isolated and repression did grow until their dreams became self fulfilling nightmares. The waste of talent, emotion, and life that was weatherman's result is a crime for which everyone in the new left is partially responsible. The human race in its poverty, this is a quote, has unquestionably one really effective weapon laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution, these can lift at a colossal humbug, push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against this assault of laughter, nothing can stand. The weather people were not totally alone in a willingness to take things to an extreme and camp on the fringes of reality.

Yippies Humor Then Hardening

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Youth culture, San Francisco, rock, drugs, and new colorful lifestyles with loose mores were all part of a super political attempt at revolution. The initial strategy was quite ingenious. American lifestyles have pain, alienation, and obvious inconsistency. American institutions are inhumane and the culture is plastic. People want love, self esteem, and involvement, but are forced to settle for debilitating substitutes. The youth culture would carve out an existence for itself based on humane loving values and thus be irresistible. It would spoof and confront all that was bad and do it entertainingly. It would reach people through their hearts and their funny bones, rather than trying to outcompute the American computer or outfight the American army. The youth culture would pull out the plug of the first and flower power the second to death. Yippieism initially had a good understanding of American consciousness, a good feel for some ways to reach it, and tremendously invigorating energy to sustain the whole effort. The Yippies contributed humor and creativity to the new left. They awakened a national awareness of the ills of alienation, commercialism, authoritarianism, and competition. The Yippies were products of the land they hated, and their own bad traits were overlooked, and were thus eventually able to subvert the good that they were doing. I should interject. The Yippies were, I guess you could say, the political left edge of the hippie movement, which was much, much larger. The Yippie movement was politically committed and involved. So the Yippie lifestyle, which shared much with the hippie lifestyle, offered many new ways, but it also only refurbished a few of the old ones. Competitiveness and liberalism were both diminished. Freedom was emphasized. Honesty was a high virtue, and believing in things that help people rather than in things that hurt people was the primary admission ticket. Life became more colorful, light and fun, and especially for men, Yippie Styles overcame a number of competitive habits that had previously forced alienation upon people. But women were still largely supposed to serve men, if anything, in more grotesque caricatures than even before. For now there had to be colorful clothes and liberated smiles and free sex, along with an adoring deference for the still male god. Women were allowed only in a lower echelon of participation, as quote are women. The continuation and even elaboration of sexism in Yippy Dum was one of its chief weaknesses. As the going got tough, that one bad trait helped resurrect a great many others until Yippie originality was finally inundated by the Americanisms inside the Yippies. As with all other strategic attempts, when repression and co optation became tough, approaches were polarized more and more toward old ways of doing things. As soon as the Yippie identity was threatened, a jocularly critical approach was replaced by a haughty put on superiority, and the trend continued in every area. Yippies began joining the weather peep with weather people. Violence was wholeheartedly adopted. The more sensitive hippies dropped out of the dropout. Outlaw styles of rationality, toughness, and dirtiness began flourishing. Disease and drugs took a heavy toll. The whole affair ended in a rather dismal mess. Haig Ashbury moved from being the result of an effort to create a place that could teach people new ways to being a youth slum that could only attract the most hopelessly disaffected. A group of people originally into sharing everything became so destructively critical that they could hardly share anything with anybody. The only tastes that mattered were their own, and they too became more and more irrational. A group that was going to ride people's funny bones to their consciousness was in the end considered arrogant, elitist, sexist, self-centered, divorced from reality, and often just totally obnoxious. Here again it was partly because people were much too headstrong. Yippies were unable to develop flexible identities and methods. They couldn't simultaneously balance criticisms from outside, accepting the wise and ignoring the badly motivated, and they couldn't aim their communication to where people actually were at. The Yippies were therefore not confident or wise enough to pursue their intuitions in the face of establishment repression and co optation, or in the face of leftist baits urging them on toward heavier positions. The Yippies didn't have and couldn't give each other enough humble self-confidence. For all their insight, they didn't know enough about themselves or America. They underestimated their enemies, and they didn't have any real methods for improving their own deficiencies. Although the make them laugh approach could never really have eliminated all the colossal humbugs and all the colossal powers behind those. As a partial element in an overall process, it could have been much more effective than it finally was. Perhaps most contributory to their decline, the initial Yippie disposition toward quote happy tactics didn't stem from conscious respect for traditional American lifestyles or for traditional Americans. In the beginning, most Yippi Yippies had intuitively humanistic aspirations, but very little understanding of why the American people act as they generally do. In the beginning, Yippies had enthusiastic faith in people generally, and when there was no pressure to defend their new styles, they evinced no hostility toward the jumbled ways in which normal people were trying to deal with their own problems. But as time went on, the Yippies were forced to distance themselves more and more from the mainstream so as to have clear, strong identities. They inevitably became more disdainful of everyone else. They never developed a solid understanding of other people's motivations, and so under pressure they became intolerant of them. They grew to like themselves and no one else, and they really had few other options. They didn't have enough awareness to retain self-respect while at the same time also respecting the contradictory attitudes of other Americans. As a result, Yippie efforts to talk to others became constrained and patronizing. They were no longer trusting guides. They became arrogant, sloppy critics who had less and less to offer. The Yippy ideology and behavior threatened mainstream America's identity while having few redeeming traits, and so the Yippies gradually became a favorite target for abuse and even violence. The Yippies rejected patriotism, the police, Puritan sexuality, the work and success ethic, consumerism, education, and the assumed goodness of the American social order, continually more and more strenuously and with less and less sensitivity, as well as with diminishing abilities to offer any attractive alternatives. They pulled the rug out from under people's self-images without offering any ways for people to otherwise stand erect. What solutions they offered were totally unworkable for most Americans, and in the end, even for themselves. They were critical in sectarian rather than in loving ways, and it worsened with time. They did not speak in ways people could understand and then act upon. The Yippies started by trying to build a new way of living based upon communal love. They ended by telling kids that the only way they could become revolutionaries was to kill their parents. Recruitment lagged.

What Happened Too Fast To Learn

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I interject. As I read my feelings and thoughts about elements of the new left from fifty five years ago, I notice one important missing observation. It all happened very, very fast. We went from apolitical to political, and from political to revolutionary in a virtual eye blink, not over years and decades. That surely had impact. But what I was noticing more was the absence of views about what exists or what we wanted or how we would work to get it that were able to protect us against the kinds of flaws that we suffered. What I felt as a need was for insights, perspectives, methods suitable to our own circumstances and for guiding our choices. I wasn't alone in that desire. Many looked hard for such views in the lives and writings of past revolutionaries, in their choices, their actions, their methods. Some thought they found what would be needed. I didn't feel that. Some became adherents of various stances from the past. I looked there too, but I wondered, what knew did we need? What did we have to undo in order to arrive at revolutionary commitments that suited our current and future circumstances, assets and debits and hopes. That's what led to the book What is to be undone? At any rate, the chapter continued. The Yippie experience teaches mostly the same lessons as the weather one. The dynamics of rebellion are risky. The sole criterion of value can't be only the idea of winning or losing now. Without humble self confidence and patience, leftists are often likely to become their own worst enemies, hated as well by the people they are trying to reach. Without methods for understanding what one is doing and why, what its effects are on all concern, one's activities are probably going to do as much harm as good. Without real understanding and empathy, communication is impossible. Creativity and love of self is simply not enough. The enemy is too big to be brought down by a group of clever comedians. But the Yippie experience is also taught many people much about social interaction and about the importance of dealing with interpersonal dynamics effectively. It taught the importance of confronting the totality of American life, including its cultural, sexual, artistic, and spiritual sterility. But it especially taught that even as youth, we were not as incorruptible as we would have liked to think.

Panthers Strategy Programs And Isolation

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Next, the New Left Black Movement was in many ways the core element of sixties activism. Beginning with the participatory student nonviolent coordinating committee, SNCC, and extending through various nationalist groups to the avowedly revolutionary Black Panthers, the Black Left was the most militant, most politically experienced, and most forcefully opposed. Its contributions in helping reawaken black political awareness, advancing consciousness of racism, forging new black goals and identities, and aiding the Vietnamese through anti war activity, especially within the army itself, were immense. Its chief teachings are again the viability of radical activism, the centrality of racism to all United States political possibilities, and the need for revolution if United States blacks are to ever fully achieve liberated existences. To have accomplished so much in so few years, despite the quote legal police murders of over a hundred activists, and despite imprisonment of hundreds more, armed invasions of offices, immense police infiltration programs, is a remarkable testimony to the power of an organized opposition force. Nonetheless, as with all other new left groups, frequent successes were accompanied by many failures, and at least sometimes the reasons for failure were internal rather than police imposed. In this section, we discuss only the Black Panthers as they were the best organized and most avowedly revolutionary of all of the various black organizations. And I interject also because they came at a not right away, not right at the outset, and were more subject to the ills that this essay is really trying to unearth. The chapter continued. The Panthers started with an empathy for the people and for their own plight that was much deeper than any comparable views held by white groups. They understood why oppressed blacks frequently act in self-defeating ways, and even had some grudging respect for all kinds of survival tactics. They dealt with the problems of being baited by racists and therein developed strong racial self-images. The early Panthers were aware enough so that no pressure would make them become racist, either against whites or against their own people. They understood the nature of racist tendencies and where they came from and were able to control them. The early Panthers knew that racism against whites was a dead end and were able to incorporate the awareness into their own behaviors. They also had significant roots in the black ghetto, and thus a real feeling for the day-to-day needs of their people. Their ten point program was one of the few concrete political programs espoused by any part of the United States new left, and itself makes clear many of the injustices the black movement opposed and brought into public awareness. One, we want freedom, we want power to determine the destiny of our black community. Two, we want full employment for our people. Three, we want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community. four, we want decent housing fit for shelter for human beings. Five, we want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our rule in the present day society. six, we want all black men to be exempt from the military service. Seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. eight, we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails. nine, we want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States. ten, we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. As our major political objective, a United Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony, in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny. But the Panthers didn't have so powerful a grasp of insights concerning nor the capacities to deal with the ills of sexism and authoritarianism, and therein, as we will see, lay the roots of much of their weakness. The Panthers chose a series of tactics that were in some sense schizoid. Quote, we'll increase our support with serve the people programs and newspapers, but also by showing how tough we are and how well we can deal with the man. During their early days when they chose to go to the California State House armed with rifles, they sealed their ultimate fate. For though they had the self awareness around race necessary to ward off bad racist tendencies, they could not do the same with their macho and sexist tendencies. The line was direct was a direct one from the glorious State House show to eventual isolation in small armed camps daily attacked by the police. The Panthers formed authoritarian organizations and thus fostered all the bell tendencies that hierarchical societies inevitably give to their citizens. The organizations became more and more authoritarian, and the leaders lost touch with reality, tripping out on their own inflated visions of their self importance. As latent, aggressive, hostile attitudes poured forth unchecked, they had to be rationalized and incorporated into the whole panther ideology. The panther image grew inextricably entwined with militants, toughness and courage. They grew more and more isolated. Their worship of revolutionary suicide was only slightly less ridiculous than the Yippee plan for parenticide. With isolation and militants became inevitable repression. There was no great defensive upsurge because there was no great empathy for a group that seemed bent only on violence. The image of Eldrich Cleaver strutting through Congress with John Stennis' head on a platter did not overly entrance this country's black population. The Panther understanding of the need to build a base in the ghetto was offset by members' inabilities to effectively organize and to stave off their own tendencies toward Marquismo. The Panthers went the same way every other group of the sixties had gone, wonderful beginnings through bad times, to polarizing defensive tactics and self images, to severe inner strife, arrogance, and external obscurity. They were stronger and had better intuitions than white groups, but their enemies were also better armed and more eager to repress. The final responsibility for the deaths of many black panthers and the incarceration of countless others rests first with the state and society. The immediate responsibility rests with a strategy that lost track of itself and got caught up in self indulgent rationalization.

Women’s Movement Gains And Internal Hierarchy

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Next, the New Left's women's movement went essentially the same roots as the male led elements. Myths had it that women would be able to avoid competitive strife because of the types of oppression to which they'd been subject, their longstanding low position in society, and their gut understanding of machismo's harmfulness. Ostensibly, since women were arising in defiance of commit competitive machismo, their movements wouldn't have to worry about succumbing to those particular dynamics. In fact, this belief was a great error. Every group in the United States has potential for every kind of oppressor oppressed behavior rooted in United States history and institutions. Everyone raised here has to one degree or another been affected by surrounding environments, and thereby picked up countless bad traits, some of which dominate behaviors, some of which are only subtly active, and many of which most often only lie dormant, waiting opportunities to emerge. The difference between one United States group's identity and any other's is that for each good and bad traits occur in different combinations, and in connection with different sets of emotional feelings and needs. Women are thus generally oppressed and reticent in company of men until they understand their oppression and start opposing it. Once that occurs, however, the situation alters drastically, and so do behaviors. When women began rebelling in the mid sixties, they developed fine intuitions about the nature of American female relations, about what a woman's movement could include, and about what it could do. The first activists had tremendous empathy with their sisters' needs and emotions, and tremendous enthusiasm due to their new self images and imminent liberation. They had participatory, non competitive, anti authoritarian aims. But at the same time, their respect for other non movement women's efforts to survive through capitulation was none too great, and their defensiveness concerning things male related was still quite strong. Initially, women formed consciousness raising groups for understanding their own oppressions and the circumstances of the society in which they lived. They used very effective militant means to confront movement men about machismo, sexism, and competitiveness. They successfully rediscovered the heritage of United States feminist activism and began hammering out a new type of aware, strong female personality. But at the same time there were growing problems of male attacks and difficulties of movement growth. The early activists reached middle class women effectively enough, but had neither the time nor the experience to think effectively enough about reaching working class women. Women's group discussions became highly self-centered. In time there were external attacks from movement men, ridiculing feminism, even assaulting women, and always calling on them to spend their time more effectively. Instead of challenging our leadership, follow it. Under these attacks, left women strengthened their identities regrettably by tying them ever more completely into the most radical conceptions they could formulate. Movement women lost touch with non movement women who didn't think as they did, and had no patience for any men, even for those who were really trying to understand, but had not quite made it yet. Movement women simply refused to recognize their own tendencies toward the kind of behavior they hated in their male counterparts. They didn't admit they would often manipulate meetings, degrade opponents, compete amongst themselves, and generally create some the same bad kinds of dynamics that men create when they hold themselves to be superior. Inside the movement, dominant women began developing oppressor roles, and reticent women began gravitating toward more passive ones. By and large, the new oppressors determined the movement's public image, precisely because they were its most energetic members. Hierarchy began to rule. Movement women were unable to develop firm enough understandings of their own backgrounds and their own weaknesses and strengths. They were unable to create flexible identities. They couldn't be careful and patient about developing new modes of actions and the urgency to rush their efforts. They worried about being oppressive and spent countless hours discussing it, but didn't fully understand all its potentials for occurring, and had, like the rest of the new left, no tools for effectively warding it off. They didn't formulate programs in an unhurried, objective way, and in time that omission cost them severely. They espoused heavy handed criticisms of monogamy and then had to act on those criticisms to their own detriments. They glorified lesbianism and found themselves pushed hard by lesbians who had views different from those of many other women in the movement. The developing dissensions caused many problems and disaffected many potential adherents. The movement had no tools for adequately understanding the tremendous rush of new situations which pressed on it. It developed hierarchies of womanliness which gave some people distinct powers over other people. There were the ins, the partials, and the outs. Like the members of all other new left groups, women were unable to perceive their identities independent from immediate actions. They were unable to act in accord with their ideologies' own dictates. Under assault by society and the male part of the movement, women activists took the same road as all their male counter compatriots. They began getting their self images from believing in their own worths as compared to other people's weaknesses. Who was the purest liberationist? Who was the best? Leaders and followers emerged. The leaders were implicitly regarded as better than the followers, and ipso facto had more privileges, and the followers in the movement were similarly better than everyone else outside it. Everyone could see, feel, but do almost nothing about these dynamics because they were too deeply rooted and alternatives did not exist. Women's groups began planning demonstrations, meetings, and newspapers that lacked sensitivity and organization and almost always contained competitive dynamics. And yet even with its various weaknesses, the new left women's movement unleashed a tremendous force in the United States. It helped many people develop understandings of the dynamics of sexism and authority too, and of what men and women could and someday would be like. It gave countless women new understandings of their histories and present lives and new goals for their future efforts. It brought people into motion, but regrettably, it was a motion that didn't yet incorporate enough of the critical anti authoritarian, anti sexist lessons on which it was premised. The new left women's movement quote ended in a kind of disorganized frustration with only the non revolutionary elements maintaining significant organizational strengths. Nevertheless, overall, women's political awareness was still on the rise, and the potential for truly effective, anti sexist, revolutionary, organized feminist left seemed great. I interject, and again, it all happened so fast, under such pressure, with so much energy, but not enough clarity, too few ideas and methods suited to the circumstances, potentials, but also pitfalls. Of course, many individuals did better than the averaged out whole, but it was the overall averaged out whole that mattered most to what emerged beyond the new left for students, anti war, anti racist yippy, and feminist organizing. The chapter goes on.

The New Left’s Core Strategic Failure

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The New Left was internally without a strategy. It had ego problems, it wasn't adequately self conscious, and it was immature. It judged practice by asking very narrowly either how much motion was accomplished or how much was created. There was little understanding of sustained process or of patient struggle towards growth. Hierarchies fostered people's worst traits. Competition thrived. People's politics got tied to their identities in ways leading to extreme sectarianism. There was no powerful guiding ideology that could undo all that. Practice was intuitive and generally very problematic. It made many gains, but often incurred even greater costs. The results were predictable. Morale and effectiveness declined together. Either people left the new left depressed or stayed, but usually became caricatures of what they had hoped to be. And yet even with all this, the American left of the sixties had many important successes. It was struggling against the strongest enemy any left has ever encountered, both in the state apparatus and in its cultural socialization processes. Despite the great odds, it created an effective counterforce to the Vietnam War, a growing American awareness of America's weaknesses and of the viability of protest, and an understanding within the left itself of the multiplicity of oppressions that is America, and of the complexity of the problems confronting modern revolutionaries. In this last category, perhaps most important of all, it puts sexism, racism, authoritarianism, and general interpersonal dynamics on the revolutionary agenda on equal footing with class struggle. Though at times indulgent, irresponsible, and even quote, pathological, the new left of the sixties did make honest, courageous attempts to confront the totality of America's injustices. If it failed to create a viable, lasting revolutionary movement, it did at least create some new awareness and a bedrock of experience upon which such a movement can likely soon be constructed. Again, that was in nineteen seventy four. It certainly did much more than anyone could have predicted at the time of John F. Kennedy's election, despite the sacrifice, the errors and the losses, the efforts because of the future left activity they prefigure and provide a base for were well worth it. But even our very brief presentation, remember, written in nineteen seventy four, actually in nineteen seventy two and seventy three, shows that to grow anew the left needs a new and enlarged political consciousness, which can, among other things, understand our society's institutional, cultural and ideological relationships, identify those that are truly oppressive, those that are largely neutral, and those that are potentially useful to liberation, and then understand all their various interrelations. Understand revolutionaries and all social groups with respect to how they are oppressed by, how they rebel against, acquiesce to, and even in part support their oppressions, and thus how they might be affected by changes in their environments, and most specifically by changes caused by revolutionary activities. Understand future goals and means of transition well enough to posit short term programs and strategies suitable to all local contexts and incorporative of the knowledge of the two points above. Our analysis also shows that to accomplish such ends, any new politics will have to take account of and explain racism, hierarchy, authority, and consciousness in general, and at concrete local interpersonal levels, and to explain effectively all the more traditionally addressed material politico economic relationships. The new left leads a better consciousness than it had in the sixties. What it had then intuitively it must crystallize now. What it then didn't know, it must learn now. One route to such creative ends is to build upon critical analyses of past revolutionary ideologies.

Why Ideology Matters Next

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As a first step, this is in the chapter, but it is also about the next episode. We next clarify our uses of the concepts theory, strategy, practice, and political consciousness. We provide definitions and also evaluative criteria which we go on to use throughout the rest of what is to be undone in our critical studies of classical Marxism, Leninism, anarchism, and Maoism. And so ends this excerpt from What is to be undone. Even if it made sense in the early nineteen seventies, and I admit I not only thought so then, or I wouldn't have written it, but as I read it now, I think so now too. But does it really apply now as well? Let me put the broad argument for our coming episodes. In the sixties, good people, sincerely aroused and motivated, took on society's defining relations to attain something better. While we accomplish many things, we certainly did not win a new society. Worse, we did not keep growing, keep getting smarter, keep getting stronger. A guiding ideology should facilitate all that. It should prevent decay and dissolution. So in the seventies, and now too, it makes sense to ask why didn't we win? Or more realistically, given the brief duration of those movements, why didn't our efforts persist and keep growing in following years and decades? Can we find reasons in part, perhaps in considerable part, in the thinking, the ideology, of the movements of the time and the movements that many of their committed participants turn to in coming years? Surely we should look. And contrary to what most on the left say in countering an attempt to do so, we should hope to succeed in finding faults. We should hope to find problems with roots that we can transcend. That was one path out of the sixties. Another was to seek methods and goals in the existent ideologies of past times. Next episode we think a bit about ideology per se, what it includes and what it is for. So it is still setting a stage, but necessarily so for examining classical options. And that said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.