New Left Thought
Committee, The Saturday Evening Club Axiological
NEW LEFT FRONT by The Saturday Evening Club Axiology Committee The new left is perhaps the most neatly packaged anarchism of all time; its thought encapsules easily in a rather small capsule....
...He might have included the students, for not only are they unemployed but with their full stomachs and free time they are his most devout disciples of violence...
...Repression of the orgasm catalyzes all this misery...
...Proletariat conformity to sexual norms exposes their revolutionary worthlessness...
...Marcuse pleonastically describes them as "outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable...
...Well that is an embarrassing question- Aside from mumbling about a society vaguely approximating an ancient garden spot believed located near Mesopotamia, Marcuse is ambiguous...
...After essentially agreeing with Mills, Goodman and Mailer, Marcuse hypothesizes his disinfecting revolution...
...Believe it or not some of the finest thinking and most advanced research in America is going on, though covertly, right in America's bedrooms...
...Marx referred to them as the Lumpenproletariat...
...Herbert Marcuse, at seventy farther removed from Mr...
...And as the present is so very ephemeral so is our's a blushingly transient culture, woefully unprepared for an ominous future...
...As a result we are a gullible people existing increasingly in a sublime present...
...C Wright Mills identified the legal and moral agents intent on repressing sex as "totalitarian Liberals", Establishment Liberals like John Galbraith whose "American Liberalism is thus ready made to sustain the conservative mood...
...A Liberal conspiracy solicitous only in maintaining power, conspires to repress citizens, causing a sick society with a syndrome of alienation, prejudice, hate and war...
...Students hold an artificial skepticism of the past reaching to the extreme of Pyrrhonism...
...In "One-Dimensional Man" Marcuse claims modern society is totalitarian, subjecting its members to "non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests...
...the universities have failed them...
...Educators have placed the major thrust of education on a synthetic and incomplete skepticism, ignorantly emphasizing this mere procedure over education's goal and neglecting the goal itself which is the perception of truth, the apprehension of conclusions...
...Thus Marcuse looks to the revolutionary ardor of those elements of society yet to be "bought off...
...naturally their anesthetized minds complacently accept the new left's hallucinogenic vision of history...
...It is not astonishing that students are beguiled by the specious theories of the new left...
...Though rarely does their heroically proclaimed savagery go beyond Mario Savio's gnawing on a policeman's leg...
...But when they arrive at more proximate motivations, the Vietnam war, poverty, civil rights (from which, incidentally, they are being rejected), their tender humanism evanesces, and in leather boots they fornicate for freedom, restrict the Bill of Rights and sabotage society's more defenseless institutions (the university...
...In apotheosizing skepticism of the past, the universities have wholly neglected criticism of the present...
...Beginning on the premise that two thousand years of western civilization has culminated in a rotten egg — a conclusion easily digested for, say, a Tibetan unfamiliar with any element of western civilization beyond the new left — the new left savant concludes this rottenness grows from "repression," especially sexual repression...
...At first a terribly generalized humanism motivates new left catechumens...
...Even in their demonstrations they follow his antecedent prescriptions for revolution by dropping out, disobeying established authority, and sabotaging the weakest (most open) institutions of western civilization...
...What sick type would listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony when he might witness the deflowering of a fourteen-year-old, and was not Colonel Beethoven on the Hapsburg payroll...
...Further the Academy rarely educates students in the art of criticizing but rather inculcates in them revealed "truths" of another's "critical mind...
...In America real intellectual freedom does not exist Paul Goodman believes, because America's agents of legal and moral authority (such old left types as Justice William Douglas) conspire to repress sex — the essence of free thought...
...You might wonder what kind of society we shall stumble about in after the revolution...
...Exalting sex as the elixir of imperfect society, Norman Mailer esoterically attests that it is the avenue to human "essence" — to identity, and is thus repressed by a power elite...
...Mailer's tempestuous orgasms and a calmer thinker for it, faults not merely our political system but our culture for conspiring to repress sexual expression...
...Even the success of capitalism translates as a conspiracy, because "vested interests have bought off the proletariat" distracting it from the revolutionary role Marx foresaw...
...They lack the tools for criticizing...
...They totally reject the system, totally commit themselves to activism, totally reject continued discussion, totally forsake the intellect and are totally antithetical to a university community...
Vol. 2 • September 1968 • No. 1
