The Great Refusal:Community and Organization in the New Left, 196-1968
Breines, Wini
IN THE NEW LEFT, 1962-1968 by Wini Breines J.F. Bergin Publishers (670 Amherst Road, South Hadley, MA 01075). 204 pp. $24.95. The New Left is not faring well in retrospect. Conservatives and...
...The movement's organic development was halted in 1965 with the first antiwar demonstrations: Overnight, the movement was flooded with new participants who did not automatically share the founding generation's political experiences or assumptions...
...The New Left was always torn between its communitarian goals and its desire to be effective...
...Looking back at the 1960s from the worrisome perspective of the Reagan years, it is easy to condemn the New Left for its impractical utopianism and to show, as well, how its participatory ethos fed the hooliganism and sectarianism of its Weatherman period...
...The goal of transforming society by creating a loving community within was transformed to ending the war...
...The rationality and moderation that marked the New Left's original organizing efforts were tossed aside...
...Breines reexamines the continual attempts to find a synthesis, and in so doing, she indicates why the prefigurative project failed...
...Can these Utopian ideals be synthesized with more traditional representational and organizational structures...
...It proposed nothing less than a recasting of traditional left-wing politics into a new communitarian, participatory, and non-hierarchical mold...
...In its political theory, the New Left was self-consciously breaking ground...
...powerful legacy of the New Left...
...But the New Leftists (especially in the...
...Participatory democracy, noble in intent, often led to elitist and manipulative politics...
...Breines calls the New Left's goal "pre-figurative politics...
...It was not just internal disorder that destroyed the New Left...
...Breines traces the evolution of these ideals through the Free Speech Movement, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and SDS's community organizing projects...
...The Great Refusal would be important if only for its critique of the old New Left...
...While the movement could discuss its flaws, it lacked the ability to correct them...
...Can participatory, communitarian, and non-hierarchical politics actually effect change...
...In The Great Refusal, Wini Breines, a sociologist, feminist, and former activist in the New Left, reminds us of what was most worthwhile in the movement...
...At the same time, the parallel evolution of the hippie subculture (to which Breines doesn't pay enough attention) enveloped the movement in paranoid and apocalyptical hallucinations...
...In a modest, thoughtful, and provocative way, Breines retrieves the New Left's politics from the movement's compost pile...
...The New Left really was a new Left...
...The Vietnam war sucked the movement into an inferno of anger and upheaval...
...Losing its center, the New Left imploded on itself...
...Distrustful of organizational structure, the movement failed to pass its experience and knowledge from one activist generation to another...
...Conservatives and liberals have always been critical of it, but even the partisans of the movement, now middle-aged, are getting on its case...
...Rarely did its practice measure up to its ideals...
...The answers are by no means clear, but woe to the movement that doesn't address the questions...
...early years) were not naive romantics promoting Utopian ideas they knew could not be realized...
...But defeat alone is no criterion for judging its value...
...But what Breines calls prefigurative politics is still alive today, and the discussions that informed the New Left still go on...
...For her, this "attempt to seek 'salvation of the soul' in politics, to forge a new definition of politics in which violence, authority, and hierarchy did not reign supreme is the most...
...Marty Jezer (Marty Jezer is the author of "The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960...
...Sympathetic critics within the movement consistently pointed out the hazards of its self-proclaimed task...
...Breines's re-creation of the tensions then is relevant now...
...The contradiction was never resolved, and, in the end, the movement destroyed itself...
Vol. 47 • August 1983 • No. 8
