New Left Ferment
Sklar, Robert
New Left Ferment Reviewed by Robert Sklar T^he New Left is now seven years old, and Jack Newfield has written its precocious biography. Before New-field no one had made quite clear that the...
...For adults and outsiders, under such circumstances, it may take an act of faith to believe that the basic character and values of the movement can survive...
...It is a useful book, for its focus is broad and vague, and every reader will find the message of the book taking form from his own perspective...
...He makes a central point of dissociating the student movement from all forms of Marxism, not only the "Maoist" Progressive Labor Party and the Soviet-oriented W.E.B...
...Northern white students, awakening from a decade of lethargy, marched on picket lines...
...For the present era this process began February 1, 1960, when four Negro students, acting spontaneously, tried to buy a cup of coffee at a Wool-worth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina...
...During May a conference on human rights was held at Ann Arbor which laid the groundwork for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...
...but the truth is that he has a different view of history...
...This may be the fate of the New Left...
...This comes out most clearly in his handling of the "black power" issue...
...It comes out also in his sometimes harsh but more often evasive treatment of the artistic-mystic-psychedelic strand in youthful radicalism...
...Their styles and interests constantly change, sometimes with bewildering speed...
...As a political forecaster he can do no more than warn that the next two steps will carry the movement over the cliff and into the abyss...
...A Prophetic Minority is a journalist's book, a primer on the New Left for uninitiates...
...To this reviewer, who feels great sympathy with the New Left, Newfield's description of the movement is hardly a complete one, and his prognosis one I must reject...
...Within a month the sit-in movement had spread across the South...
...His logic is the familiar paradigm: If radicals take two steps forward, society eventually will take one...
...It is also, less obviously, a programmatic book, an effort to select good aspects of the movement from bad ones, to suggest limits and directions...
...Newfield's handling of much of this history is perceptive and subtle...
...Newfield has skated over the surface of the New Left...
...When the need arises, new blood with new tools comes into the shop, makes the adjustments, and the auto purrs on...
...Newfield's eye is on the mainstream...
...Even Newfield, a young man and an insider, cannot believe it...
...But Newfield is unwilling to admit that the visionary radicalism of the student movement may not be merely the means to the end he desires, but rather a way of conceiving entirely new ends for society...
...In April the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed...
...When the engine starts to sputter for them, the circle of progress will have made one complete turn...
...Newfield wants to adjust a temporarily out-of-order society, and to do it through a fermenting minority which will leaven the whole loaf...
...What is missing from A Prophetic Minority is a sense of what it means to be prophetic, and a hint of what those prophecies may be and mean...
...Before New-field no one had made quite clear that the radical young, no matter how different they may be from their peers, are still young people...
...As an historian Newfield takes pains to give the movement credit for taking a double step before the mainstream was willing to budge an inch...
...Newfield may be right in arguing that SNCC has entered into a tragic, self-destructive "kamikaze" course, but what is distressing is his unwillingness to consider "black power" as an intelligible moral and intellectual position, an evolving radical perspective on the issues of dignity and freedom for black people in Northern ghettos and in the South...
...He wants to give the New Left youth full credit for making society take one step, because in part he thinks that step has been taken, and the task for youth is over...
...Having proved their value as mechanics, the young bloods move up and pretty soon they get to sit behind the wheel...
...beneath the surface there are depths yet to be sounded...
...One might argue that Newfield is unwilling to learn the lessons of his own history...
...He views American society as if it were an auto engine that sometimes needs a tune-up or repair...
...DuBois Club—which he castigates as the Hereditary Left— but also the Socialists...
...He insists on the uniqueness of the young radicals, separating S-NCC from older civil rights groups, and SDS from various categories of radicalism...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
