NOTES FOR WHOEVER'S LEFT

...Until his fall, Liu had been the President of China, the acting chief of the party hierarchy, and one of the idolized leaders of the revolution...

...In politics, nothing is more important than win ning victories, and the Left has not won any...

...now I only want to point out how the search for an independent identity has time and again led leftist parties and sects to turn liberals into their "chief enemy," and to deny that there is any continuity at all between liberal success and radical aspiration...

...Nor are other forms of fashionable leftism likely to prove any more sustaining...

...Until the mid-'60s the Left was, at least programmatically, an integrated movement, and its goal was an integrated society...

...The question, again, is one of balance: between the need for local autonomy and participation and the need for unity and leadership at the center, where local members can't be present and have to be represented...

...Lasch calls for a "fusion of community politics and trade union politics" as the only way of making it an issue in the near future...

...When the ruling party in a single-party state permits itself no organized factions, and no organized dissent from its official line, the inevitable differences that arise, both tactical and strategic, become congealed in the personalities of the inner leadership...

...In all these battles, we can bring socialist perspectives to bear...

...But we've succeeded in quelling the paranoia...

...For me, and for many of those radicals who continue to think of themselves as political activists, socialism remains the directing vision of the future...

...Well, so have we all been chastened, and no one at this moment has a clear program...

...Some balance there has to be, between the larger society in whose running we must all share equally, and those smaller societies where we cultivate our differences...

...Nevertheless, liberals and leftists appeal to the same groups of people and share many of the same concerns—for liberty, above all...

...It's not difficult to understand the motives of the black militants who seized control at that time and turned the movement into something very different from what it had been...

...The '70s will not be different...

...Among her books are Spanish Harlem: An Anatomy of Poverty (1965), The Feminized Male: Classrooms, White Collars, and the Decline of Manliness (1969), and School Policy and Issues in a Changing Society (1971) . BRENDAN SEXTON, a veteran trade unionist who recently retired from his post as educational director of the United Automobile Workers' Union...

...Before that, we need to make a little peace among ourselves...

...Under present and foreseeable conditions, it just can't be the case that liberals are the chief enemies of the Left...

...Desperate and bitter, brutalized by drugs and police," writes Lasch, "the youth culture sinks into the underworld and [its participants] become increasingly indistinguishable from the lumpenproletariat...

...Organizational needs are very limited...

...It's not only a question of blacks and Chicanos, but of Polish Americans and Irish, Chinese, Jews, perhaps even WASPs—all caught up in a small-group nationalism, sometimes attractive, sometimes not, toward which the Left has no comprehensible position...

...wishes they had sensed the limits beyond which it became dangerous (to others as well as to themselves) . Throughout the '60s, as Lasch admits, there existed a symbiotic relation between liberals and radicals...

...While there can be no legitimate appeal to the rank and file, it often becomes necessary to eliminate the spokesman for a dissenting line with powerful potential rank-and-file support...

...Lasch's argument that it is already represented by the student movement, since students are organized where they work, seems to me radically unconvincing...

...Our practical work will focus differently, for we are in no position to choose our causes with reference only to our ideology...

...We still have to look forward to the time when our vision actually integrates our day-to-day activity...

...And it is still our hope that the modest projects presently available to us can somehow move us closer to that goal...

...Today the Left, or whatever is left of it, is deeply divided along racial and ethnic lines, and the desirable future balance of integration and separatism is painfully unclear, at least to me...

...by Jay Levin, New York Post, May 12, 1970 q COMMENTS AND OPINIONS about that later...

...It's probably not unfair to say of most of them that their opinions are all that is left of their leftism...

...If we are vital to their success, they are vital to ours...

...There are signs today of a massive withdrawal from political involvement, a spreading mood of cynicism about the possibilities of political success...

...As for the smaller societies, the Left has not yet faced the fact that there will be many of them...

...Some people— leftist dropouts—simply won't find their way...

...There were few things about which we were more certain than those two...

...Right now, it only draws us togetherhopefully— to talk about and plan for that time...

...I will have more to say William Kunstler: Amnesia and the Judas Goat "Violence never was the alternative in the movement," William Kunstler responded...

...I know where we stand on the question of who should run the factories, but here I am uncertain...

...When the revolution doesn't happen, it's not easy to find one's way back to everyday politics...

...And the result is a downward spiral of frustration and retreat that gets wider and faster because reentry into the mainstream of American life, or into its cultural margins, is much easier than a leftist reorganization...

...He participated as an organizer in the formation of the CIO, and for many years worked closely with the Reuther and Woodcock leadership in the UAW...

...He now is a professor of metropolitan studies at New York University...

...Such a movement may even feed on the participants in this culture...

...Partly for this reason, the organizational structures of the New Left were 312 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS always shapeless and weak, until the sects, in response to this weakness, reverted decisively and foolishly to the Bolshevik style of democratic centralism...

...But I don't meet them, nor does anyone else, at meetings or demonstrations...

...That is certainly wrong, for leftish opinions of a more or less "new" sort are widely believed today, and even fashionable...

...That is an attractive idea, but I am hard-pressed to understand what sorts of activity may lead to or represent such a fusion...

...Irving Howe, December 1971) . The trouble is that many liberals don't want anything right now, except peace and quiet...

...You may have to take that final step," Kunstler said...

...And today the Left seems baseless, without established roots in any particular community...

...The Sextons co-authored Blue Collars and Hard Hats: The Working Class and the Future of American Politics, published this year by Random House...

...It is important to remind ourselves of that, and to remind others...

...Kunstler: Blood...

...7 myself don't think the public really believes any more that violence ever was the movement's aim, although they probably used to," Mr...

...So will others...

...But when we seriously begin to discuss its possible forms, we shall have to admit, I think, that the complete abandonment of integration by many black militants, and then by whites in their tow, was terribly wrong-headed...

...Half a year after he wrote, things look more dreary still...

...But it cannot live on them...

...The first demand has been absolutely crucial to the success of the liberals themselves: in the '30s and again in the mid' 60s, significant social reform has come when there was organized pressure from the Left— or at least, pressure (from workers and blacks) in the organization of which leftists played a major part...

...I don't want to sound like the old man who commented bitterly about sex: "It's been tried with a man and a woman, and a man and a man, and a woman and a woman, and a man and two women, and a woman and two men—and it's never quite satisfactory," But the truth is that none of these constituencies was by itself quite satisfactory...

...His is probably the best statement on the present condition of the American Left, and I shall use it as a guide, even while marking off some areas of disagreement...

...Whatever value and impetus the counter culture once had derived from the political movements with which, however tenuously, it was associated...

...We need a new organizational strategy (or strategies), and this is not likely to be developed in isolation from some sort of renewed activity...

...Tolerance and openness are the key...

...WHAT MADE THE '60s EXCITING, what made its (limited) achievements possible, was the fact that different groups on the Left shared a sense of what needed to be done...

...Their politics was not merely willful, though one Vietnam A comment on the Nixon proposals for ending the Vietnam war will be found in JosephButtinger's comprehensive study of American involvement in Vietnam...

...nor are any of its editors writing manifestos just now...

...We suffered all...

...Kunstler said...

...The two groups can go and have to go a long way together, whatever the tensions that arise in the course of their cooperation...

...It will be one of the tasks of militants trained during the past decade to build pressure on liberal politicians in the name of immediate and limited programs...

...To bring together politics and work, that is, to set a democratically run economy alongside a democratically run state —here is the core of socialist aspiration...

...A powerful political movement can create a cultureon-the-side, where distinct styles of writing, singing, dressing, and above all of talking are cultivated—as the Communist party did during the days of the Popular Front...

...Right on...

...A few radicals are left stranded on peaks of militancy, easy victims for the authorities, while life on the plain returns all too quickly to "normality...

...In both cases, these movements played a leading part in the political mobilization of masses of men and women...

...Among the issues acknowledged to be dividing the party are China's recent opposition to the self-determination of Bangladesh and support for the bloody anti-Communist repression in the Sudan...

...A harsh judgment, but probably accurate...

...To put it crudely, we have said, first, that we want something more than and, second, that we want something different from what it offers...

...Efforts to explain these activities in ideological terms or to fit them into a world-historical framework, however, did not work: no position won wide acceptance or proved even minimally persuasive...

...I still meet people of all kinds (and in surprising places) whose views are "far to the Left" of those commonly found in DissENT...

...Our most important work is still theoretical...

...In the New Left fall...

...But the principles that relate specifically to racial cooperation are newly in doubt...

...It is clear that any sort of sustained leftist activity is going to be extremely difficult...

...Nor was their quality encouraging for the future of socialist fusion...

...For the moment, of course, leadership is not the problem...

...But sectarian discipline is as inappropriate to any political movement that hopes to be democratic as is New Left amorphousness...

...Perhaps it is presumptuous for those of us who were often sharply critical of the New Left to address ourselves now to its scattered and disorganized followers...

...And we may be able to make peace with at least some of the ethnic militants, though not on just any terms...

...There has been no significant activity at all, nothing but a few ritual efforts by leftover cadres unable to command any serious response from the ranks...

...I have in mind the sort of thing suggested some months ago in a DISSENT article appropriately titled "What Do We Want Now...

...So far as organization and activity go, they have been radically disillusioned by the ugliness of the last few years, chastened by failure—even when it wasn't their own...

...You may ultimately be bathed in blood...

...We will learn to do all the things the property owners fear," said William Kunstler...

...Kunstler Agrees Left Is Less Militant," by Ben Franklin, New York Times, February 21, 1972 q "You must learn to fight in the streets, learn to revolt, learn to shoot guns...

...Without identifying Lin Piao by name, but in contexts where the association is clear, official Chinese sources have variously attacked "leftwing deviationists" and "people who are trying to undermine the unity of the party and the army, and the army and the government, and are opposing themselves to the party line," and also persons "who are having illegal relations with foreign countries," a clear implication of treason—presumably in connection with the Soviet Union...

...1. At the center of uncertainty is the problem of relations with the liberal world...

...A characteristic and significant aspect of Liu's fall, which is apparently repeating itself in the case of Lin, was that he was never permitted to articulate his political defense...

...My own sense, as I have already indicated, is that the place the Left, is most likely to find support is among liberals—old-time civil rights and peace activists, mostly middle-class, and middle and lower-level people in trade union and black organizations...

...On the other hand, it has to be admitted that such liberal-left efforts as the McCarthy campaign were organized at least partly in response to pressure from the far Left (though also in response to the widespread demand for an alternative to the compulsions of far Left politics...

...Yet look what has happened: the country has been turned around on the Vietnam war (though the war has not yet been ended...

...In the first place, students don't work, that is, don't earn a living, which makes a great deal of difference...

...She now is a professor of sociology and education at New York University...

...Deprived of that connection, it is literally valueless, with no substantive political or moral content, with decreasing power to attract the young, and readily susceptible, as we have begun to see, to an almost infinite debasement...

...The discipline of the university is not at all like that of the economy: students are not an oppressed class (few of them could ever have believed that, nor does Lasch), and if many of them are apprentice technicians and professionals, it has to be said that their apprenticeship is more like a moratorium on, than an initiation into, routine economic activity...

...A victory is an achievement that gets credited to somebody, that some movement or party claims as its own, on the basis of which it advertises itself, recruits new members, even seeks a share of political power...

...One has the uneasy sense that as an organized force the New Left of the '60s has simply disappeared, leaving behind a small number of embittered terrorists and a few isolated and impotent sects...

...3. Participatory democracy has not, to put it mildly, lived up to the expectations raised by its spokesmen...

...Ten years of militancy and upheaval have left virtually no institutional residue: no ongoing organizations, no coherent or nationally recognized cadres of leaders and spokesmen, no respected New Left journals, no public network to keep radicals in touch, no established or prototypical way to be and keep on being a radical...

...We rose and fell together-1968 was a crucial year for both of us—and there are lessons in that fact that I will try to draw out later on...

...The Left is face-to-face with pluralism—a notion savagely repudiated only a few years ago...

...The leadership struggle over these issues is in a sense a continuation of the struggle which took place in the vortex of the Cultural Revolution, whose most significant victim was Liu Shao-chi...

...I don't mean, the liberal establishment, whatever that is, but more simply, liberal politicians and their present constituencies, from whom leftists have grown increasingly estranged (not without reason...

...He is elaborating on an old socialist theme and describing what would certainly be a central feature of the activity of an autonomous socialist movement...

...liberalism is, if anything, less self-sufficient than ever before...

...But socialism is not, unhappily, an immediate New Editors We are pleased to announce two additions to our Editorial Board: PATRICIA CAYO SEXTON, who has been a De troit auto worker, UAW chief steward at the Dodge Main Plant, and radio commentator for UAW national hookup programs...

...Nor do I want to underestimate the sense of urgency and despair that drove thousands of young Americans steadily leftward...

...Though each new social base was justified in elaborate ideological terms, none of them turned out to be the true and only social base...

...a dozen youths cried, "Right on...

...No one that I know of has a compelling vision...

...Left politics is certain to be on a fairly small scale, and we must seek support where we can find it, wherever we can find it, without ideological presuppositions...

...The press built it up...

...In both cases, the peace movement and the civil rights movement had a share in doing what got done...

...Indeed, there are principles having to do with equality, mutuality, political responsibility, and radicals should never have hesitated to apply them...

...As We Live and Breathe . , . A major purge has taken place among the leadership of the Chinese Communist party, as a result of the recent rightward shift in Chinese policy...

...Nor do I see any easy move from one choice or the other to a socialist politics...

...But it is far from true...

...What happened after they fell apart suggests dramatically enough that we are not ready for the "pleasures" of going it alone, 2. The most painful moment in the history of the '60s came when white liberals and radicals were expelled from the civil rights movement...

...I want to try to suggest some of the reasons for the uncertainty and some ways of living with it, without pretending that my suggestions have any authoritative basis in personal or collective experience...

...It would be a great mistake, nevertheless, not to try to draw lessons from the recent past or to specify, however tentatively, some ongoing difficulties...

...Today, the common commitment to issues also has disappeared...

...an open forum, above all, a place to regroup, 4. In the '60s the Left experimented with a variety of constituencies: the black and white poor, the working class, the new working class, middle-class students, the middle class itself...

...And the only organizations through which we can hope to win victories are liberal-left coalitions, such as the civil rights and peace movements were before they fell apart...

...Nor are there likely to be, it seems to me, in the near future...

...It's not that "we" (the "polite reformers") failed and "they" became radical, but that "they" became radical and then "we" failed...

...We shall be involved in difficult battles over civil liberties, unionization, civil rights, social welfare, ethnic pluralism, crime, housing, education—and, endlessly, foreign policy...

...It seems to me that in at least two of these areas—the war and the fight for the Democratic party (I'll have something to say about civil rights later) —the critical struggles came after the New Left had turned to an ultraradicalism that made its effective participation dubious or impossible...

...The liberal world is still the only possible base for leftist activity...

...See page440...

...Yet among them are future friends and allies—who have begun to make criticisms of their own—and it is important that we find a way to talk together, sooner rather than later...

...we have an ethic, a literature, a history to draw upon...

...This can be accomplished by character assassination, as in the Cultural Revolution, which completely distorted Liu's historical role (just as Stalin distorted Trotsky's) or by assassination pure and simple, .. Ramparts, March 1972 q COMMENTS AND OPINIONS I HAVE WAITED until the last to say anything about socialism...

...What is involved, or so we have been told, is an irreversible transformation in the consciousness of the young...

...All the great acquittals we have had— victory after victory in court, and not a single Black Panther convicted, for example—is showing the people that the fear of violence was just hysteria...

...The last years of sectarian in-fighting, ideological debauch, and pseudorevolutionary violence have taken a heavy toll, not only among New Left militants...

...As a result, the political struggle tends to become a struggle between leaders for the power to control the official line...

...Here I want to suggest a disagreement with Lasch, which may have implications for the future...

...Syndicalist efforts to win control of the university "workplace" ran a very poor second...

...The political scene has seldom looked more dreary"—so Christopher Lasch wrote last October in a New York Review of Books piece, "Can the Left Rise Again...

...The immediate result, however, was disastrous for the Left—not only politically, but intellectually and morally...

...But the political forces set in motion in the '60s were extraordinarily diverse, with different histories, class compositions, political styles and goals, and it was never likely that a single or unified explanation would account for all of them or establish guidelines for their cooperation...

...Obviously, a balance of this sort existed even in SDS, which made such a fetish of primitive democracy, but few would say today that it was the right balance...

...They have lost any sense of what ought to be done and any willingness to do it...

...But these movements spurned the (admittedly incomplete) victories that could have been had, and as a result they were not able to establish an independent or stable presence in American life...

...If that were true, the New Left would be a force to reckon with, and in the very near future...

...Decisions of enormous importance were in fact taken on the initiative of relatively small groups of leaders, but not In such a way that these leaders were easily identified or, more important, held responsible for what they did...

...Kids: Right On...

...But we have no easy answers to the hard choices that we, and others, will face...

...Across the country, there is no clear social direction...

...Not that people didn't try to persuade or to be persuaded...

...But it is also certain that much support must continue to come from students, even if the immediate impact of political disillusion is most sharply felt on the campus (where political fantasy was most free and extravagant a few years ago...

...DISSENT has not triumphed either...

...What is crucial and disastrous, however, is that the Left has had no victories...

...I would argue only for a representative and responsible leadership, whatever the precise structures over which it presides...

...The second demand has to do with the identity of the Left itself...

...For the moment, we all must live with our failure to understand and profit from that relation and to take what might have been had...

...The last few years have seen a succession of racial and then ethnic self-assertions with which radicals have been utterly unable to come to grips in any serious way...

...The prevailing tendency (among many liberals too) has been to grant a kind of carte blanche to any "oppressed" group whose militants adopt a radical rhetoric, as if there were no principles by which their particular demands might be judged...

...Again, that is not an accurate picture: American life has changed a great deal during the past decade, and much of the change is the achievement of the Left, in some broad sense of that term...

...Historically, the Left has stood in a complicated double relation to the liberal world...

...The larger society, if it is ever to come into existence, still requires an integrated movement...

...Issues that had been avoided for a long time suddenly seemed unavoidable, and despite important tactical and strategic disagreements, a number of specific activities won large-scale support...

...That was merely the paranoia of the public and the press...

...p 314...

...He argues that the turn toward a more militant politics in the middle and late '60s occurred because of the failure of "polite reformism"—" the failure of the peace movement to end the cold war or to prevent Vietnam, the failure of the civil rights movement to achieve racial justice, the failure of reform Democrats to reform the Democratic Party...

...To this day, we do not know what Liu Shao-chi advocated as an alternative political program for China, and neither do the Chinese people...

...What were the results...

...310 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS There is no substitute for the commitment and discipline bred by significant action...

...We live with a new uncertainty, intellectually refreshing after all the "correct ideological positions" that have been inflicted upon us, but also politically ennervating...

...Against this, it might be said that the counter culture represents the real success of the New Left—and it requires nothing more from the liberal world than tolerance...

...That there are important discontinuities between the two cannot be doubted...

...We suffer from their weakness, as they will suffer from ours...

...And we must be frank about the extent of the failure, for it has to do not only with what happened or didn't happen in the '60s, but with our future prospects...

...Right now, "self-management," the socialism of adults, is an end without a visible means...

...Nor is it difficult to sympathize with some of those motives...

...On this point, Lasch writes with especial force, and I have little to add to what he says...

...Let me give just one example: when Chinese parents in San Francisco oppose school busing in the name of the cultural autonomy of their community, what is the right socialist or radical response...

...we readily made judgments in the terms they set...

...political issue in the United States today...

...In trying to understand what is going on, we might begin by giving up the word "racist"—at least until we have thought again about what its opposite is and what we are...

...Lasch argues forcefully that the special effort of the Left right now should be to make contact with people where they work and to relate our politics to their work (and to our own...

...And second, students were organized successfully only against the war...

...the position of black people in America has been radically transformed (though we are still far from racial justice...

...That means—where it has always been found...