Young Dissenters
Rogin, Michael
Young Dissenters The New Left, by Phillip Abbott Luce. David McKay. 214 pp. $4.50. The New Student Left, an anthology edited by Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale. Beacon Press. 288 pp....
...Lenin faced a similar problem...
...The New Left rejects "ideologies" as the solution to the problem, but many of the students call for "utopian" thinking...
...Cultural and commercial pressures generate artificial 'needs' that, in the minds of the victims, displace more genuine human needs...
...From where, then, the sense of alternatives...
...Action and rebellion must provide values...
...Perhaps the most serious indictment of the Progressive Labor Movement is that someone so mindless could have become one of its leaders...
...there is no other way to get them...
...But the students who have been affected, and the society itself, will not soon again be the same...
...One student, disenchanted with "participatory democracy," writes, "It is no surprise that the major attacks on civil liberties in the United States have been able to enlist at least as much support from the masses as from the power elite...
...It comes, I think, from political action itself...
...But the students, as we are told again and again in this volume, live in that world...
...Traditionally radical political action involved the effort to gain objects...
...And here lies the point...
...Perhaps political action cannot sustain the burden placed upon it by the New Left...
...And the rebellion of a few by no means ends their impotence in and estrangement from the larger society...
...The road Lenin took is simply not open to the New Left, because the enveloping nature of the society makes it impossible for them to think in the abstract about such alternatives, to develop in the abstract a radical consciousness...
...4.95...
...What this generation of students has learned from the South can hardly be summarized so easily...
...They are not exempt from the corrosion that afflicts other powerless people...
...What happens when the immediate situation of the workers does not lead to the development of socialist consciousness...
...Alternatives can be conceived of only in action, when one senses that things can be different— not in repose, when one is paralyzed...
...rebellion and action create values...
...nor does it solve the problems which triggered the action itself...
...Therefore, the students insist upon participating in decisions that affect their lives, and they demand this not only for themselves but for the American people as well...
...Mario Savio writes of the bureaucratic belief that history has ended, that nothing new can happen...
...Out of these difficulties the New Left becomes embroiled in internal controversy, some echoes of which find their way into this volume...
...Different in their motives, they lost their fear of difference in a common feeling of rebellion, and in a sense of equality in banding together . . . Students discovered that a basic commitment could overcome fears of impotence, exposure, and ridicule...
...American society, for the students, is defined, in the words of one of them, by its contamination of individual consciousness: "One of the diabolical successes of this organized society is that it perverts people's notions about themselves into fantasies that perpetuate an unjust system...
...In his expose of Communist domination of the New Left, Luce exposes little more than himself...
...People have lost the sense that they can control their own lives...
...Witness the description of the transformation that occurred when the Berkeley students surrounded that police car: "The students of a large, anonymous university lost, for a moment, their feeling of being strangers to one another...
...Having come to 'play,' they stayed to defend their dignity...
...Certainly one learned from the struggle as well, but the objects of the struggle were most important...
...Reviewed by Michael Rogin Tn Phillip Abbott Luce's The New Left, the student movement has produced its first recantation...
...You are powerful because you can vote...
...Can the New Left as a whole be judged by the quality of its renegades...
...But it is not an accident that this book is at its best in its assessments of the campus and the South, which are experiences, and at its most boring on organizing the Northern poor, which is still only a conception...
...One turns with trepidation to the Oberlin-edited collection of student protest writing, The New Student Left...
...yet such Utopian alternatives are notably absent from The New Student Left...
...Without a trigger (lunch counters, free speech, Vietnam), politics cannot be created...
...What would their participation look like...
...Utopias are meant to indicate alternatives to the present order...
...In the students' world the difficulty lies precisely in conceiving the objects, much less the socialist consciousness...
...In New Left politics, action creates values, but rebellion alone is not enough...
...Rebellion and struggle are not primarily in the service of obtaining valued things...
...To the young writers in this anthology, the outside world is both determined and unreal...
...But there is an enormous obstacle...
...Hence the emphasis on the "style" of politics and the anti-ideological bias which so offends old radicals...
...perhaps it cannot sustain student radicalism...
...Participation is meant to remedy this situation, but how can one call upon the participation of people so crippled...
...Actions seem never to have consequences, and nothing is possible but role-playing, indifference, and sporadic violence...
...For Lenin consciousness had to be developed by a small and exclusive, albeit internally democratic, party...
...If you can get to the suburbs you'll be green, safe, and happy...
...This is universally so, I think, but particularly true about the poor, the unemployed, the Negroes...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
