THE NEW LEFT-AND THE OLD
Lens, Sidney
The New Left—and the Old by SIDNEY LENS Tn april of last year, when the Students for a Democratic Society had mobilized 25,000 young people from around the country for a demonstration in...
...An early position statement of SDS which began with the sentence, "As democrats we are in basic opposition to the Communist system," was deleted a year or so ago...
...Subsequent events, such as last October's nation-wide demonstrations called by NCC, and the burgeoning anti-war activity of the Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley and a comparable ad hoc committee in New York, suggest that there may be more durability to the New Left than was at first thought...
...The New Left intended to build its "participatory democracy" within the framework of the manipulative society...
...It is this difference between the old and the new which identifies the New Left and gives it its character...
...What is more certain is that because of its break with the past, its shedding of the legacy of the Old Left, the New Left has opened a new chapter in the history of American radicalism...
...The semantic disparity between the generations is more than a matter of style...
...military action that results in death and devastation...
...Its true goal, however, is power for the underprivileged...
...The New Left seems to the Old Left, and to much of the liberal movement, to be somehow "unreal," a bewildered force without moorings, internationalist without international ties, revolutionary without a revolutionary party...
...But when he transferred to the University of Chicago two years later he became interested in radicalism...
...This deletion brought rebuke not only from those fundamentally critical of the New Left but from staunch friends like Hal Draper, one of the editors of New Politics, a leftist journal...
...They are not moral monsters...
...The son entered a small college in 1957 at the early age of sixteen, with no radicalism or even consistent liberalism in his background...
...Since the New Left does not accept the American definition, or practice, of democracy, it is not so horrified as are some Old Leftists over the one-party systems in the new revolutionary countries...
...They bitterly assail American foreign policy, yet they seldom use the common Old Left term "imperialist...
...But they seek no permanent coalition with them, and they do not see the solution to America's ills either through them or through permeation of the liberal section of the power elite...
...They are personable, pleasant to talk with, bright, fresh, spirited...
...It also serves as a deterrent to building an open movement for change in this country...
...They call for a total reconstruction of the current society, yet they have no blueprint of the world they want to build...
...The Socialist Party, whose Presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, won nearly a million votes in 1932, and which seemed destined to make immense progress during the depression, was already staggering by 1936...
...Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes," says Carl Oglesby...
...Tom Hayden and history professor Staughton Lynd of Yale, who at thirty-six is probably the most popular "old man" of the New Left, say this on the subject: "We refuse to be anti-Communist...
...Consider the case of Clark Kissinger, former national secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society, and one of the important leaders and theoreticians of the New Left movement...
...Since the New Left leaders begin with the thesis that the United States is playing an anti-revolutionary role abroad, they do not give the same weight to the deficiencies of the new countries that Irving Howe, representing the Old Left, does...
...Is this New Left the advance guard of a major movement that may reshape America...
...Instead, our young men and women display a disenchantment even more serious than that of the 1930's...
...Of all the political acts I committed that year it was the least meaningful...
...McCarthyism was in this sense an effect, rather than a cause...
...The party began to fragment in one factional outburst after another so that by the time of Pearl Harbor, in 1941, it was only a shell of its potentially revolutionary promise...
...Everywhere American reality conflicts with our values: To our assertion of the dignity of individuals, of the values of love, honesty, reason, and equality, America responds with war, manipulation, and the selfish concentration of wealth...
...In twelve counties where Negroes form a majority or near majority of the population, SNCC is setting up workshops to study local government...
...Kissinger, with many other of the new radicals, turned his energies to a variety of specific, ad hoc protest campaigns...
...the New Left often speaks in fresh terms that express just as strong opposition to the status quo but which tend contrarily to disarm its critics...
...The Old Left feels it must deal with the New Left, but mainly to coddle it and swing it back to, or up toward, "reason," which means in the direction of the Old Left tenets...
...He felt deceived, he says, by an American society which talked in platitudes and published impressive statistics concerning its accomplishments but was incapable of solving the great and pressing problems of civil rights, poverty, and foreign policy...
...The New Left may be the beginning of an important movement in the development of a new type of American democracy...
...But in the process of decline the Old Left also lost its credibility...
...This was demonstrated by New Left leaders during the 1964 elections...
...Yet there were thousands of disaffected young people, concerned and uneasy, eagerly seeking a political haven but finding none available...
...it is a road traveled by many members of the New Left...
...All of this has been brought home to the sensitive student through the campaigns for civil rights, civil liberties, and peace, each of which indicates to him that American society has not become more human—despite its greater affluence—but only impersonal in its inhumanity...
...The Old Left did not decline, as is popularly believed, because it was subjected to McCarthyist harassment...
...Communist Party SIDNEY LENS, writer, labor leader, and world traveler, has long been a student of left movements...
...Our nation attempts throughout the world to guard by force the order of power relations in which established American interests are respected and achieved...
...The two organizations that could be designated as purebred New Left were its largest contingents: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had evolved originally as the youth arm of the tepidly socialist League for Industrial Democracy but which had changed character decisively after promulgating its 1962 "Port Huron Statement" that sharply defined its disagreements and disillusionments with society, if less clearly its goals...
...Is sustained by "a crude, unqualified anti-Americanism...
...It hoped to build—for the poor, the alienated, the exploited, the unrepresented—a bastion of power within the old society and thereby at some future date come out with a new participatory society...
...The New Left is not unconcerned about ideology or theory, but believes that it will never be able to formulate an adequate philosophy unless it does things—and continues to organize for power...
...Tom Hayden, an organizer for an SDS community union in Newark, New Jersey, and one of those who drew up the Port Huron Statement, denies that the United States "is a healthy country, with a few isolated ailments...
...The objectives of the New Left, however ill-defined, and its techniques, however strange to the Old Left, can be understood only against the background of the history of radical movements...
...They did not resign from their fathers' society...
...The capitalist class in the United States fraudulently speaks of freedom, dignity, democracy, but seeks to dominate the world by the use of military terror...
...American Communism tailored its strategy to that measure, and consequently found itself isolated and in retreat...
...The postwar world, it turned out, was not a resounding echo of the prewar world...
...the anti-Communists do not have that confidence...
...They never have...
...The candidate, said Carmichael, is irrelevant...
...They oppose the war in Vietnam and its escalation, but they do not call for a unilateral American withdrawal, and they are as critical of Vietcong "terror" as of U.S...
...Criticism ranges from that of unreconstructed militants who feel that organizations such as SDS are not radical at all, to that of Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, who consider that the New Left has not absorbed the lessons of the past two decades...
...Where the Old Left thought of itself and acted as a force apart from the prevailing social order, the New Left thinks of itself as integral to American society...
...The beatnik, like Kissinger and his like-minded contemporaries, also reacted with "anger" ¦—but it was an undirected anger...
...How old were Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton when they were making a revolution in 1776...
...They functioned in pragmatic ad hoc groups, composed of not only radicals but liberals, moderates, and conservatives, working to win civil rights, abolish HUAC, secure free speech at the universities, but with none of these actions backed by a cohesive political ideology as was characteristic of the Old Left...
...they work with Reuther and his unions, with ADA and its membership...
...If the whittling of the Old Left had been merely a numerical decimation, it might have recovered...
...Think of the men," urges SDS president Carl Oglesby, "who now engineer that [Vietnam] war . . . Bundy, Mc-Namara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself...
...The two most vocal critics, Irving Howe, editor of Dissent, and Michael Harrington, author of The Other America and a member of the Socialist Party, see an unresolv-able contradiction between the espousal of true democracy by the younger radicals and a host of other characteristics they manifest...
...The shift in style evidences not merely a desire for exchange of ideas rather than slogans, but something of greater import: a recognition of a set of problems different from those faced by the radicals of the generation of three decades ago...
...It was a false estimate of the future, a narrow and outmoded Marxist projection of the American economy, which doomed the Old Left and created the vacuum which the New Left now tries to fill...
...Howe summarizes his critique in a seven-point bill of particulars...
...Is "impatient with the problems that concerned an older generation of radicals...
...In all its activity, SDS is not thinking in terms of quick, sensational results, but in long-term objectives...
...Robert Pickus, the guiding figure of Turn Toward Peace, says that SDS, among the other New Left organizations, has its own bureaucracy and is not quite so democratic or so participatory as it claims...
...The Great Society's "consensus is hollow," he says...
...the important thing is that he is beholden to a constituency that has participated in determining the program and to which he will be responsible...
...Here the participants learn, for instance, the duties of a county sheriff...
...In an earlier day, a comparable radical force might have expressed this in language like: "Our enemy is American imperialism...
...I realized," he says, "that the kinds of things I was doing were pretty irrelevant...
...During the 1930's and until the mid-1940's it sidled up to the New Deal and thereby gained a reflected luster that partly hid its reliance on the Soviet Union...
...The New Leftists were committed to radical acts, day to day, without the support of a clearly defined radical philosophy...
...Kissinger, a mathematics major, was soon one of SDS's leaders, a salesman of "participatory democracy," a system in which every citizen has a voice in formulating the decisions which his society must make, as against "manipulative democracy," in which a few leaders decide the choices...
...These were, in a sense, hybrid organizations, for while their ideologies were tied to the Old Left, they manifested a different style: They were less doctrinaire, more oriented toward day-to-day political activity, less bound by the past, more ready to collaborate— at least with one another...
...f Increasingly identifies "with that sector of the 'third world' in which 'radical' nationalism and Communist authoritarianism merge...
...There was something called M-2-M, the May 2nd Movement, created by an adult force never heard of before, first called the Progressive Labor Movement, now called the Progressive Labor Party, both of which—incredibly—represented in varying degree the philosophy of China's Mao Tse-tung...
...The beatnik, as David McReynolds, a writer and theoretician of the radical pacifists, has so aptly explained, was characterized by a disillusioned young person who simply resigned from what he considered the fraudulent society of his middle-class father...
...f Betrays "an unconsidered enmity toward something vaguely called the Establishment...
...The Old Left believed philosophically that capitalism, its prime target, was destined to be uprooted, while the New Left has neither such a precise goal nor the certainty that even ultimately its efforts will be rewarded with success...
...Despite the "invisible poor" and other serious defects of the system, capitalism did not seem marked for early overturn...
...Ask Kissinger what he thinks of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956 and he makes clear that in his view it was a transgression of humanity— just as is the war in Vietnam...
...It is "unreal," too, because it is composed almost wholly of youth...
...Believes "unreflectively" in the "decline of the West...
...The traditional liberals are seen by the New Left as the custodians of an America where changes are, at best, superficial and often self-defeating...
...They blame the United States in large measure for the inability of developing nations to overcome such deficiencies...
...The young radicals are geared to the long pull—to stop the seventh war after Vietnam...
...Yet the New Left has so captured the attention of the nation as to merit hundreds of articles in the news media, and to initiate a broad range of speculation about its future role in our society...
...In the latter view the New Left tends to be unrealistically anti-America, to identify uncritically with totalitarians, and to take a naive approach toward Communism...
...It sees them as part of a revolutionary development with all the weaknesses of revolutionary developments, not dissimilar to those of the American Revolution...
...Richie Rothstein, another SDS leader, notes that the campaign against the war in Vietnam has as its goal to "stop the seventh war...
...Is it the fruition of the concern about the "alienation" from society as expressed by Erich Fromm in his Sane Society, and the dead end of socialism as detailed by British socialists in the stimulating book, Conviction, published in 1958...
...Because of all this they believe that progressive change will come about only as liberals and radicals coalesce to "permeate" the power structure of the present society...
...the menace now is nuclear incineration...
...Thus, SDS decided to colonize—and that is the only appropriate word—some of its young people in the impoverished sections of a dozen cities with the purpose of forming unions of the poor...
...they fought it from within...
...The menace then was unemployment, economic chaos...
...a movement loosely called the New Left...
...The abolition of severe depression and the flowering of world revolution seemingly should have ushered in an era of near-utopia for the new generation...
...SNCC, for example, is active daily in fighting for civil rights, and, in the last year or so, against the war in Vietnam...
...But since he considers himself part of American society, rather than an outsider, he felt it necessary to engage in what, for him, was a minor activity of that society—namely, voting for one of the two candidates with a chance to win...
...the other not so human at all...
...Kissinger does not believe that Johnson carries America toward "participatory democracy" to any significant extent...
...It no longer carried a message that left-leaning Americans could read and make sense from...
...American Communism had envisioned a postwar world wracked by severe economic depression, a world moving steadily toward reaction or even Fascism...
...The real question was how to get and use power...
...It is important to remember this, because if government repression had indeed been the cause of the collapse of the Old Left, there would probably have been a revival in the 1950's and 1960's with tens of thousands of new radicals rallying to the leftist standard...
...Manifests "a vicarious indulgence in violence, often merely theoretic and thereby all the more irresponsible...
...Reoriented by Keynes, capitalism did not spawn depressions of the 1930's type, nor did McCarthyism of the 1950's lead inexorably to Fascism...
...They criticize the anti-poverty program and other facets of the Great Society, but they argue that these are promising beginnings which should be encouraged and developed...
...Kissinger said: "Sure, I voted for Johnson and would do it again in similar circumstances...
...SNCC (Snick, as it has been nick-named) has no membership roster but has influenced many tens of thousands of Negroes in the South and has carried a staff of about 200 paid organizers and 250 full-time volunteers...
...Some New Leftists, like Clark Kissinger, cast a ballot for President Johnson...
...But significantly, this was not a major issue for either of them...
...Yet the younger radicals refuse to lay emphasis on what they consider to be an outmoded rehash of the past...
...The Old Left, he felt, had been corrupted by perverting those very values which had given meaning to the movement...
...The new radicals speak of being "anti-establishment" rather than "anti-capitalist...
...Yet the Old Left, however firm in its convictions, approached its tasks with an inferiority complex, as if it were tilting at windmills, while the New Left, however vague its ends, shows a great degree of self-confidence...
...We have confidence that movements can be built which are too strong to be 'used...
...To the New Left anti-Communism is part of the fraud perpetrated by the generation which spawned them and left them the legacy of the cold war and the arms race...
...It does not necessarily endorse them, but it refuses to castigate Castro, Nasser, and others as irremediable dictators...
...This image of the road to change, mechanically carried over from the 1930's, did not fit the 1950's...
...The pathways of the Old Left seemed to lead to a dead end, so the leftists of a new generation began to bulldoze their own road...
...For example, this is the opening paragraph of a pamphlet by Lee Webb, former national secretary of SDS, and Paul Booth, present national secretary: "We face America the Leviathan...
...They are all honorable men...
...He has contributed to numerous publications and among his books are "Left, Right, and Center," "The Futile Crusade," and, just published, "Radicalism in America...
...These leaders of the New Left have no illusions about Communism—as Howe and Harrington imply—nor about anti-Communism...
...Compared with the 80,000 members of the U.S...
...The style of the new radicals tends to alienate these Old Leftists who have not yet broken from the tenets and the terms of their generation, while the true radicalism of the New Left discourages some Old Leftists, like Howe and Harrington, who now see a potential to American society they did not see ten or fifteen years ago...
...participation in the world revolution —that will pass into limbo once Negroes begin to register in large numbers for elections and the war in Vietnam comes to an end...
...It is only the poets who make them lovely...
...The public, at least that segment that, is aware of the New Left and is good-humored, sees these SDS and SNCC leaders as personable, basically good "boys" having their last fling as collegians—engaging in a sort of political panty raid...
...others, like Richard Flacks, refused to do so...
...Could anyone seriously believe that American streets would soon hum with the sound of marching blackshirts or brownshirts, beating unionists, killing Jews, lynching Negroes...
...Kissinger's experience is not unique...
...Its recovery since then has been only minimal...
...Except for a handful of "older" friends, it has only vague support from the over-thirty generation...
...Our feeling is that the anti-Communist organizations, such as the trade unions, are far less democratic than the organizations, such as SNCC and SDS, which refuse to be anti-Communist...
...He was, as he puts it, "dragged along kicking and screaming" when he met and discussed politics with former Communists and with new forces such as those centered around New University Thought, a now-defunct quarterly published on the University of Chicago campus, and Studies on the Left, a neo-Marxist magazine started by a group on the University of Wisconsin campus...
...Instead it serves as the key category of abstract thought which Americans use to justify a foreign policy that often is no more sophisticated than rape...
...Furthermore, revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has not resulted in full-scale independence but has been accompanied by more subtle forms of great-power domination...
...then, discussing how those duties should be implemented to insure justice, they evolve a program and finally select a candidate for the post...
...This unreality in economic and political analysis by the Marxist Old Left, coupled with an unpopular approach to the Korean War which favored North Korea, the Khrushchev revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the suppression of popular revolution in Hungary in 1956, diminished the American Communist Party to a shadow of its former self...
...on the contrary, it was prey to that harassment because its mistaken analyses left it stranded, without defenses...
...Kissinger considers the latter to be the hallmark of existing society...
...But they are not "boys" —it takes a while to become accustomed to that—but men...
...They are all liberals...
...Instead, in his view, this is a managed society in which "those actually responsible for the Vietnam war, segregation, poverty, and university paternalism are not Birchite generals, Southern rednecks, and old-fashioned college alumni . . . [but] powerful and respectable men whose type is now dominant throughout society...
...Could anyone in the 1950's be expected seriously to believe that a Great Depression was imminent, that millions of desperate men would form organizations with a revolutionary flavor like those of the 1930's...
...So by 1957 the strident slogans of the Old Left were no longer credible...
...Kissinger's father is a surgeon, politically a moderate Republican...
...The Communist Party fared somewhat better in the Thirties and early Forties...
...DuBois Clubs of America, named after the great civil rights leader of a few generations ago who late in life became identified with the Communist Party...
...The New Left—and the Old by SIDNEY LENS Tn april of last year, when the Students for a Democratic Society had mobilized 25,000 young people from around the country for a demonstration in Washington against the war in Vietnam, the nation suddenly became aware of a new and—to many—a startling phenomenon...
...and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a radical outgrowth of the civil rights movement which had deep roots in the pacifist movement...
...Will it spread from youth to adults, from the "leftrouts," as the students proclaim themselves, to the "halfway-ins," which the labor unions have become...
...SDS's Port Huron statement, a milestone in its development, "posited democracy per se as a value, and not as a mechanism...
...He felt society was becoming more dishonest and hypocritical...
...Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president, is even sharper in his critique of contemporary liberalism...
...entry into World War II—the Communist Party gained recruits by the tens of thousands and friends by the hundreds of thousands, with strong support from many of the trade unions and a significant fraction of the intelligentsia...
...Except for the third point, "a vicarious indulgence in violence"—which does not apply to the two main organizations of the New Left—Howe's points, divested of their semantic bias, have considerable validity.' Howe, Harrington, and their followers believe that American society, with all its faults, is not hopelessly evil, and that there are many liberals, such as those in Americans for Democratic Action or the Walter Reuther wing of the labor unions, with whom the leftists should form a new power center that can change America for the better...
...They support the revolution of rising expectations, but they consider men such as Castro, the now-deposed Nkrumah, Sukarno, Nasser, and Tito as "totalitarians" and their countries as undiluted dictatorships...
...even more, it did not appear that economic troubles alone would galvanize the great mass of people into revolutionary action...
...The New Left, he says: f Shows "an extreme, sometimes unwarranted, hostility towards liberalism...
...In December 1962, searching for an organization that dealt with "power," he became a member of Students for a Democratic Society...
...Now the press began to print news of a host of young organizations, some with esoteric names...
...at its peak and its many thousands of sympathizers on various issues, the forces of the New Left do not seem particularly formidable...
...A viable radicalism disappeared...
...I listened recently to Stokely Carmichael, a SNCC leader, explain one of the methods SNCC uses to win power in Alabama...
...One of the problems that bedevil SDS is what to do with the "oldsters" who have been graduated from college and are now in their mid-twenties or early thirties...
...It is a left opposition...
...Maybe, he says, "we have here two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist...
...For two decades— except for the two years during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact when the Communist Party was totally opposed to U.S...
...Could anyone visualize that union members, now making two to five dollars an hour and receiving wage increases every year despite recessions, would suddenly revive class consciousness and batter at the doors of the capitalist system...
...Where the beatnik wore a beard and lost himself in an unsatisfying form of hedonism (eventually the beatniks were assimilated into the peace and civil rights movements), Kissinger and those of similar mien were beardless, spotlessly clean (even in old clothes), and found positive outlets for their energies...
...This was the period, only a few years ago, of the "beatnik"—a social phenomenon which few Americans were willing to analyze forthrightly...
...At the same time, the New Left considers itself an integral part of America...
...This was emphasized in mid-1965 when the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCC) was born, an amorphous alliance of forces on and off college campuses whose purpose was defined in its name, and as SNCC expanded its civil rights horizons and began to speak forcefully on the Vietnam war issue...
...Ten years after World War II, capitalism, far from collapsing, was not only flourishing but was basking in a degree of affluence never before known...
...If these young men of the New Left are angry, they are not sectarian or rigid...
...They did not know where it was going with any degree of precision...
...He does not, however, include anti-Communist statements in his program just to assuage the mood of a society which he does not consider great...
...We insist that the term has lost all the specific content it once had...
...There were the W.E.B...
...Its analysis is a fantasy, its objective defies democracy, and its strategy is aspirin for a cancer...
...SDS has 3,000 to 4,000 dues-paying members and perhaps twice that many non-dues payers...
...Or it may fade with the passing of the immediate concerns of civil rights and controversial war...
...The Old Left used grating terminology in defining its hostility...
...Questions, therefore, arise...
...The New Left has an entirely different attitude toward Communism, liberals, the Establishment, and coalition...
...What attracted him to this recently-renovated group was its statement of values...
...At home the younger generation fights furiously against meaninglessness, against bigness, computerization, superficiality, manipulation, emptiness, massmanship...
...It startled even that older generation of liberals and radicals which had grown up in the Great Depression of the 1930's and which had come to believe, two decades later, that the newer generation was hopelessly lost either in conform-ism and football, or in beatnik-ism and sex...
...There was the Young Socialist Alliance, linked to the Trotskyists, and there were offshoots of Trotskyism such as Youth Against War and Fascism, and the Spartacists...
...We should be prepared," wrote Paul Booth, "to reject activities that mobilize thousands of people but that do not build new constituencies...
...I could vote for him because it was only a minor incident in my life...
...What the future holds for the new, young leftists and their indigenous radicalism is uncertain...
...But with the end of World War II, the well of recruits and sympathizers dried up...
...The New Left is the product of a discontinuity in the course of American radicalism, a break which is itself a product of the failure of the old radicals to analyze correctly the nature of American society following World War II...
...Here, by contrast, was a movement that stirred him because it reasserted those values in the strongest terms...
...Is the New Left only an ephemeron, an historical freak—responding to the civil rights crisis at home and the style of U.S...
...To many adherents of the Old Left the new radicals are an enigma...
...But I wouldn't ask anyone else to vote for him and wouldn't, and didn't, work for him...
...The writings of the late sociologist C. Wright Mills, particularly The Power Elite, had a decisive impact on young Kissinger...
...By the latter he is referring to the liberals who have managed our society in recent decades...
...Old Leftists discount such experiences...
...What motivated him was, in his words, an inchoate "anger...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
