THE PASTORAL RETREAT OF THE NEW LEFT
Walzer, Michael
What has happened to the young men and women of the New Left? The movement is invisible these days, a specter regularly invoked only in neoconservative writings. Where have all the "kids" gone?...
...I am unsure that this view is right—or that it will be seriously tested in the near future— for the American welfare state, for all its immediate problems, still seems to be a highly expandable system...
...Or, they mobilize a relatively small group of men and women who then provide them with a kind of warrant to act on behalf of similar people in a particular neighborhood or city...
...Locked into small and mostly precarious organizations, they have learned the art of making do, and they have acquired a sense of limits...
...I am often amazed by the strength of their professional commitments...
...Once the negotiations and the litigations begin, there is little, in any case, that the tenants can do for themselves...
...There is a second pattern of survival that is more important, I think, and more revealing of contemporary American life...
...they don't expect to win big ones...
...The rules are complex, and they require interpretation...
...Somehow, the shift from organizing to advocacy has to be reversed, so that cohesive groups take shape, whose members are not only consumers of benefits but active participants, capable of mutual assistance and even of mutual restraint...
...But in principle, at least, it can be made to work...
...And a single tenant withholding rent makes as good a court case as a thousand tenants withholding rent...
...And who would pay...
...The pressure on the welfare state today, about which conservatives complain so much, doesn't derive from any significant rise in the level of entitlement but rather from an increase in the range of men and women claiming what they are already entitled to...
...Many of them are trapped by the academic depression...
...and one has only to read their articles to realize that they stand at a great distance from the politics of instant satisfaction...
...A large number of the activists of a decade ago have found their way back into politics, or at least into a subpolitics of small-scale worker and consumer organizing...
...The mediation is incomplete...
...What happens is simple enough...
...Local organizing doesn't lead in any clear way toward socialism—no more than union organizing did in the '30s (though the prospect seemed brighter then...
...I remember attending a meeting of the Newark Community Union with an SDS organizer in the mid '60s...
...The state is accessible in ways the corporation is not...
...The flames of the political left don't burn steadily in this country...
...They are, as they ought to be, a chastened group...
...The organizers are not interested in building constituencies of passive members...
...This kind of politics, like every other, is a routine...
...Then it will be the task of the organizers to explain the nature of the blockage...
...What would it cost...
...But that's not the whole story...
...not if these are widely demanded...
...Anyone trying to work with tenants, for example, quickly finds himself entangled in the rules that govern the repairs that landlords have to make and the rent that tenants can withhold...
...This is their version—it is a Protestant version—of the cure of souls...
...So long as entitlement is understood in terms of the receipt of benefits, it has inherent limits— which are, at the outside, more or less similar whatever political arrangements are established...
...The greater danger today is not to be spoken for...
...they are committed, still, to the abolition of their own ministerial roles...
...No doubt, the problems are the same today...
...Indeed, the politics of the antinuclear movement, and of the environmentalists more generally, comes closest to recapitulating the style and ideology of the early New Left (and of the early civil rights movement...
...The transformation has worked fairly well in the past, in part because individual members of groups unable to defend their interests have also been unable to claim their entitlements...
...There are political entry points, even for individuals and groups who cannot bring economic power effectively to bear...
...One only needs legal standing or the political skills necessary to make city councils, regulatory commissions, and congressional committees listen...
...And, after all, welfare bureaucrats do have an interest in the expansion and elaboration of the welfare system...
...they have achieved, as the New York Times recently reported, "a major realignment of urban political forces...
...the young are consumed...
...They want state officials, for example, to impose safety standards on corporate and entrepreneurial activities...
...And all that remains, afterward, are the ashes of political withdrawal, cultic and sectarian conversions, and personal opportunism...
...Municipal housing codes, rent control, affirmative action, NLRB regulations: all these shape the course of particular struggles, and they shape it in ways that make advocacy and legal representation as important or more important than political mobilization...
...These victories require professional and semiprofessional skills, and it is my sense, though I have only watched them from a distance, that contemporary organizers are, mostly, willing to display these skills and to reap the organizational benefits that go with them...
...It is an old American story...
...This is true both of groups without social or economic strength, like tenants or hospital workers or secretaries, and also of groups without clear socioeconomic identities, like people driving a particular make of car or living along the banks of a polluted river or working in the service sector of the economy...
...Imagine a world where tenants successfully insist upon the minimal safety and amenity standards required by contemporary housing codes, where service workers of all sorts organize and defend their interests as effectively as teamsters and steelworkers, where women must be paid as well as men, where high safety standards are imposed on car manufacturers and power companies, where neighborhood alliances demand and receive equal services and equal protection in short, where people get what they are "entitled" to: Is it possible...
...they employ VISTA volunteers...
...But theirs is a serious intellectual discipline...
...Nevertheless, it is an intriguing view...
...Their "historical task" it's not quite what their ideology tells them—is to expand the reach of the welfare state, to make the state effective at the local level, in detail, and for everyone...
...Equally often, it will be useful to go to court...
...the organizer, resolutely self-effacing, placed himself in the back row...
...But there is an easy response: clients are at least men and women for whom someone speaks...
...And the politics of these groups is clearly reformist...
...Their own commitment is made in the teeth of their knowledge, with considerable sophistication, and they meet the difficulties, I think, with more grace and less hypocrisy than their predecessors...
...Then organizing as an activity passes over into pure advocacy, like the work of the Nader groups: cooperating with some officials, fighting with others, seeking general publicity (rather than speaking to a particular constituency), going to court...
...Many of them are simply burnt out, exhausted (long ago) by sectarian infighting, corrupted by the revolutionary visions, lost in the ruble of the counter-culture...
...For the unorganized and the unorganizable, and commonly at 409 local levels of government, it hardly works at all...
...Victories are possible, but these are always, as I have said, small victories, and the work is demanding, difficult, frustrating...
...They flare up...
...BUT IT IS NECESSARY, at the same time, to think about something very different...
...The good society will not be a republic of clients whose relation to the res publica, the public thing, is simply that they appropriate its resources under fair distributive principles...
...Moreover, it is not obvious that the victories add up...
...This is the New Left in pastoral retreat...
...They have not done very well among welfare recipients, tenants of public housing projects, unemployed men and women...
...The organizers aspire to be representatives of the unrepresented, but they are also, inevitably, bureaucrats without offices...
...they don't create self-determining men and women...
...And so, by and large, are the issues with which they deal...
...There is, then, a certain tension between political education and participatory democracy...
...Social conflict in the U.S...
...When activists act on behalf of the unorganized and the unorganizable, they are always, explicitly or implicitly, asking the authorities to do the same thing...
...408 'III t is one of the purposes of the welfare state to transform struggles over group interests into litigation over individual entitlements...
...there is interesting work to do...
...the leadership they provide is hesitant and uncertain...
...411...
...it is not in any simple sense oppositionist...
...they have trade-union connections...
...Insofar as local people learn organizational skills and come to understand the uses of militancy (and there has been a lot of learning in the last decade), other sorts of problems arise...
...they still hope to teach the men and women they organize the skills necessary for a politics of self-assertion and the knowledge necessary for a radical understanding of social structure...
...So people organize to resist its power, and the welfare state is created to mediate the struggle...
...Some of them are trapped too, at least for the moment, by the rather scholastic Marxism, Francophile or Germanic, which they first discovered in their flight from the Leninist orthodoxy of 1969 and 1970...
...They insist upon the full meaning and the serious enforcement of the welfare and regulatory codes...
...It will sometimes be useful to organize a demonstration at a city council meeting...
...Certainly, their current activities fail to realize what seemed to be the major opportunities of the '60s...
...It won't be satisfactory because such a state would indeed be "overloaded," and because its beneficiaries are not likely to sustain for long the parts of democratic citizens...
...The organizers I have been describing, along with the lawyers who join in their work, are agents of entitlement, acting on behalf of the members of powerless or dispersed social groups...
...They are not narodniks anymore, and yet the impulse is the same: to begin locally, to work in neighborhoods...
...And action on behalf of others, once revolutionary adventures have been foresworn, imposes a new pattern of political work...
...Across the country there exists today an extraordinary network of schools, day-care centers, food cooperatives, tenants' unions, consumer organizations, neighborhood alliances, locally run newspapers, union organizing committees (aimed mostly at service and clerical workers), women's groups, and so on...
...I am not sure how that reversal might be effected, but it is important that there be people at work not only at the center of the welfare state but also, so to speak, in the parishes...
...Hence the role of organizers and advocates...
...It may even be the case that no alternative (socialist) state could actually give people everything they are entitled to...
...they are not burnt out or mad in the streets...
...They talk about "base-building" or"softening the turf"—for they are literally in retreat, waiting for some new upsurge of leftist activity, a national movement to which they might deliver their clients and constituents...
...The "outside" is, to be sure, far away...
...I want to try to explain why that is so and how the roles into which these old / new activists have fallen are both very important and very constraining...
...Welfare politics remains the most important politics today, and no serious activism can avoid the, patterns it imposes: advocacy and 410 administration, individual entitlements, and bureaucratic interventions...
...A mong the old/ new activists, there existsI Va certain view of their work that incorporates, or might incorporate, much of my own argument...
...few of them are 407 willing to take on leadership positions...
...So the organizers outside the government are likely to find collaborators inside...
...Though their political line is populist in character, focused on landlords, utility companies, and corporations, their practical activity quickly brings them into a complex adversarial relationship with public officials...
...Except for some union work, the new organizers don't reach into the black community at all...
...Perhaps this is so...
...It represents both a surrender of millenarian politics and a stubborn recommitment to the Good Old Cause.* *In writing this brief essay, I have benefited a great deal from conversations with various organizers, new and "old," and most particularly from the work of a group of students involved in community organizing, two of whom have written the critical response that follows...
...But the day-to-day difficulties of organizing have more to do with time and competence than with policy...
...And theirs is not, by any means, a "poor people's movement...
...In the universities, for example, where the New Left began: today old New Leftists constitute a significant intellectual current among younger faculty members (with little influence, ironically, among undergraduates...
...They have moved from revolution now...
...The politics of entitlement "overloads" the welfare system, and the system simply cannot deliver the benefits its rules and regulations promise...
...They need to win the small victories...
...to good works, and this movement is also a return, though everything is different now, to some of the original projects of the New Left...
...To deny that it is possible is to suggest that the contemporary welfare state requires a large underclass, not only or most importantly of poor people, but more generally of unorganized, passive, and inarticulate people...
...At some point, it is hardly necessary to organize at all...
...But even these groups, whose members defend the proposition that small is beautiful, regularly appeal to the state to assert and enlarge its powers...
...It works well for the wellorganized, especially for highly cohesive national constituencies...
...They win victories as often by negotiation as by political or legal confrontation: small victories, to be sure, and often after a long and entangled bargaining process in which they are unable to involve the local people they have organized...
...its success depends upon one small victory after another—getting a new playground, forcing acceptance of an affirmative action program, stopping a hike in utility rates, winning an NLRB election in a hospital or office...
...T 11 he peculiar difficulties of participatory democracy as an organizing strategy were much discussed in the'60s and are well known today, certainly to contemporary organizers...
...Taken together, the local groups represent a new kind of interest or pressure politics, or a radical extension of the old kind, and some of them are already incorporated into the institutional structures of the welfare state...
...The rest sit and wait, while the organizers and the lawyers do their work...
...They know one another, keep in touch, and are guided by an ideology that has a familiar ring to anyone old enought to remember the early 1960s...
...Local people" presided...
...Their values are the same too...
...They represent claims to which public officials are not yet responsive, but to which they are, in principle at least, committed to respond...
...There is even some room for direct action, as in the sit-ins at nuclear plant sites organized by groups like the Clamshell Alliance of New England...
...today has few direct forms...
...In their late twenties or early thirties now, these middle-class militants have found a place for themselves closer to home than some of the places they experimented with in the early days of SDS community organizing...
...I have called their relation to government officials adversarial...
...Members take a firmer hold, insist on a voice in shaping policy, and reveal in their political positions some of the immediate effects of inequality and its accompanying resentments...
...Hence at some point the demands will be blocked...
...Organizing and advocacy in the contemporary welfare state create clients, first of all for the organizers and the advocates, and then for the state...
...Hence they drift, inexorably though always reluctantly, toward a kind of advocacy politics...
...We should be sympathetic, then, to the pastoral retreat of the New Left...
...The victory, when and if it comes, doesn't look much different from any other welfare benefit, delivered by authority...
...Devoted to the politics of everyday life, locally organized, many of these groups are financed with government, foundation, or church money...
...The groups they are able to form and sustain mostly involve (relatively small numbers of) better-off workers and members of the lower-to-middle middle class...
...And while the stringency of the standards is still the subject of political debate, few people would deny that officials should do that—for the sake of all of us, who are hardly able to do it for ourselves...
...They work within the system—these alienated, embittered, "radicalized" militants of the '60s—because there is no other place to work...
...And the system is constraining...
...Even in capitalist America, there are ways of growing up on the left...
...This is a reiterated pattern...
...The longed-for confrontation between a citywide tenants' union and the big holding company that owns hundreds of apartment buildings never takes place...
...the neighborhood alliances often take on a kind of "community uplift" character...
...This is the truth behind the conservative critique of welfare and regulation...
...Everywhere, it is mediated by the state...
...Some of the new consumer groups, for example, were steered away from Proposition 13 politics only by the most energetic interventions of their (leftist) staffs...
...soon he has to bring in lawyers...
...At the local level--and always in union work—organizing and advocacy go together...
...Overwhelmingly, they are concerned with consumption: housing, utilities, recreation, safety, taxes—far more than with wages, working conditions, or work itself (though the forms of their politics easily reach to questions of safety at work or discrimination in hiring...
...Soon the organizer is negotiating with city officials...
...All that they can do right now, they say, is to break down existing barriers to radical argument and political identification among the great American majority: white workers, government and corporate clerks, young professionals, women...
...They dream of a priesthood of all believers...
...Nor would it be a satisfactory outcome of contemporary struggles if the welfare state were left, at the end, as the only effective political organization or as the universal mediator of social conflict...
...Apocalypse never is the whole story...
...Selfhelp against crime, the defense of old residential areas, improvement of local services, beautification: these are their goals, to which the organizers too must stand committed...
...It is often said, however, that when the authorities agree, they turn the men and women for whom they act into helpless dependents–maternally posed, in contemporary right-wing literature, with their hands out...
...A few of them, like prison lawyers, become experts on the housing code...
...Nevertheless, their leaders, their staffs, their organizers-in-thefield are recruited, to a significant degree, from among the radicals of a decade ago, 406 many of them from the once-terrible SDS...
...This is a form of adaptation and survival, however, available only to a small number of activists in a movement that wasn't by any means scholarly or intellectual in character...
...they run successful campaigns...
...Fewer local people come forward than the organizers hope for...
...If old New Leftists turn up in law school, this is not necessarily because they are planning to sell out (at a high price), but because everywhere they turn politically, there is lawyer's work to do...
...The scale of corporate institutions and activities also imposes dependency, and of a more drastic sort, because the corporation is not even potentially subject, as the state is, to the control of its dependents...
...They are more likely to identify and represent a constituency than to mobilize its members for active struggle...
...The organizing strategies taught in schools like the Midwest Academy, the principles formally endorsed or informally defended by groups like Massachusetts Fair Share and Arkansas' ACORN are still those of participatory democracy and anticapitalism (the latter blurred these days into a kind of populist anticorporatism...
...and the participants had to sit sideways on their chairs so that they could make sure of the reactions and opinions of the real chairman of the meeting...
...the organizers can't go away...
...And yet the modern welfare state, like organized religion, seems to require that people be ministered to—represented, defended—in the face of state and corporate power...
...The ministry of the left is made necessary by the administration of the welfare system...
...Even in union organizing, where constituencies are clearly marked out and it is necessary ultimately to win a majority vote, the day-to-day activity of the organizers, and of their opponents too, is closely regulated, and crucial decisions are made by courts, commissions, and appeal boards...
...Indeed, some of them probably share the neoconservative view that the big victories are impossible...
...Swinging freely at capitalism, they find themselves in a clinch with the welfare state...
...If there is any truth to that view it's only a partial truth (to which I'll return later on...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
