Ideology: What Is It, Why Have It?

By Michael Albert

July 2, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Grave of Karl Marx at the Highgate Cemetery in London (Image by Paasikivi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Most of this article was conceived and written back in the early 1970s. It is excerpted from a book published in 1974. The book was and is titled What Is To Be Undone, a word play on Lenin’s famous title. The article may feel a bit academic, something some philosophy class might conceivably address. And since I can’t go on forever, it may also feel like it lacks sufficient examples along the way. But there is reason in the method. 

I want to look at classical ideologies in an effort to discern flaws that we need to escape. I will be looking at them from the vantage I had in 1972-1973 which was when some people think leftists took a wrong turn away from classical ideologies. But did we? Well, that was when I, for one, got serious about trying to think about new ideology. So the core writing in this article is partly a communique from then, partly a time capsule message from then. I will however interject some more current takes on the material at times, as we proceed. 

But still, why talk about ideology in general, much less abstractly? Well, it is to get on the same page, or at least to know what page we are all on, as we start to get into more specific assessments. And it is also to get some idea of what kinds of assessments and what kind of approach to take. 

This excerpted chapter started with an offset quotation from the then very popular historian of science, Thomas Kuhn:

“What a person sees depends upon both what he looks at and also what her previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’.” 

Then the chapter proceeded: Wanting to get beyond “confusion,” we want to present and then assess Classical Marxism Leninism to develop insights for improving it to fit our own modern contexts. But what in Marxism Leninism should we focus on? What aspects of the whole should we emphasize? In what order should we discuss those aspects? Can we give our study of Marxism Leninism or any proposed ideology an initial thrust to help organize the whole effort? For that matter, in a prior sense, can we even motivate studying classical ideology by arriving at a clear understanding of how theories are generally developed and judged?

I wrote back then that we base our approach on a general store of scientific training and an extension of Thomas Kuhn’s analyses of similar issues because those analyses seem the most accepted, the most suited to our ends, and the most correct of any available.

Kuhn says the natural sciences [like physics, chemistry, biology, and so on] move forward by way of alternating evolutionary and then revolutionary periods. During evolutionary development a widely held collection of thoughts, methods, beliefs, and so on, are advanced in accord with their own internally determined dictates. In contrast, during revolutionary development the same “consciousness collection,” or, as Kuhn calls it, the same paradigm, is contested and finally negated and replaced due to developments extending beyond its own previous focus.

In the evolutionary period we have what Kuhn calls normal science. The generally accepted paradigm is applied to ever greater numbers of phenomena. Scientists improve, verify, enlarge, and adapt it by constant reapplications. Essentially, in Kuhn’s words, they engage in “puzzle solving.” They try to fit the world to their paradigm’s categories and dynamic expectations. They guide their efforts according to their paradigm’s dictates. They approach problems because their paradigm orients them to do so and because it says they can succeed in finding solutions. Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, their enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. But during the evolutionary period, as the many new problems to which any paradigm gives rise are being sorted out and solved, some prove intractable. Others, also intractable, are discovered accidentally, outside the realms toward which the paradigm actually pushes its practitioners. Eventually there is an accumulation of problems which practitioners find important and troubling, but which are seen as unimportant within the context of their paradigm and are in any case unsolvable by it.

At that point, many practitioners simply put the problems aside (and often don’t even notice them in the first place) due to their normal-science faith in their well-tested beliefs. Other practitioners, however, can’t help but see the importance of the problems and they begin to try to alter their paradigms as normal science reaches what Kuhn calls a state of “crisis activity.”

Crisis resolution comes by way of supercession of old paradigms by new ones. The scientist who saw reality in terms of one set of beliefs, concepts, and methods before such resolution sees it by a different set after. Practitioners’ world views alter. But the debate between old and new during transition is typically extremely impassioned and confused. Each side approaches issues differently. What one side says is important evidence in favor of its paradigm is felt irrelevant by the other and vice versa. Nonetheless, there is a gradual transition to a new paradigm and then to a new normal science. 

I interject, my reaction to the problems of the Sixties back then (and still) was to feel that our ways of thinking, evaluating and doing were insufficient to ward off problems that severely hurt our efforts. As a result, I felt we needed a new paradigm or ideology. I thought the way to decide if that feeling was valid was to critically consider paradigms that were then available. Another option would have been to just double down with one of them, as some did, or to decide we didn’t need shared views and strategy at all, with some others. Instead, I and some like me, opted for a critical evaluation, and thus emerged What Is To Be Undone. 

In moving from the hard to the social sciences, details alter but nonetheless Kuhn’s model remains at least roughly applicable. Thus regarding “revolution-aiding science” meant to understand the world in order to to change it,  so that paradigm equaled ideology; ideology equaled theory, strategy, and practice; and classical ideology equaled Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, or Maoism.

The chapter continued: There are three questions to answer to apply Kuhn’s model to our subject. First, what is the purpose of a revolutionary paradigm and of each of its parts? Second what are the parts in more detail, including potential roots of their strengths and weaknesses? And third, how do the parts interrelate to form a whole and what are the whole’s specific dynamics? For any ideology, do they work for us, or fail us?

A physics paradigm of the kind Kuhn centers his studies on informs its holders about the real physical world and gives them ways of understanding and affecting it. It guides their endeavors by giving methods and directions of concern. 

Similarly a “revolution-aiding” paradigm, or an ideology, informs its holders about the socio-political-economic world, gives them ways to understand and affect that world, and guides their efforts by providing methods and areas of concern.

Yet even though each type paradigm seems to do pretty much the same things for its practitioners, the ultimate purposes of the two types of paradigm—natural science and social “revolution-aiding”—are somewhat skewed from one another. With a physics paradigm the ultimate emphasis is on knowledge. With a “revolution-aiding” paradigm the ultimate emphasis is on change.

For both the physicist and the social revolutionary, knowledge and activity are to serve each other. Each must provide guidelines and ways of improving the other. And yet in the last analysis, the physicist does experiments to further knowledge; while the revolutionary uses knowledge to further experiments, which is to say struggle.

There is a critical inversion of theory/practice priorities and it is this that complicates a Kuhnian analysis of socio-political paradigm development, and that must be recognized to answer the question, “What is the purpose of a revolutionary paradigm?” and to get at the more detailed analysis of the purposes of revolutionary theory, strategy, and practice.

Normal science in the revolutionary context is the process by which, for example, Marxist Leninists, Anarchists or Maoists pursue studies of the world and engage in practice in accord with their ideology’s dictates. Thus each group sees things somewhat differently from the others, employs somewhat different priorities, and so on, but at least when functioning normally, each moves steadily and calmly forward in self-consistent ways.

Like for the hard scientist functioning normally, day-to-day normal revolutionary practice encounters few surprises and is essentially a puzzle solving (and doing) dynamic that occurs very much in expected and preordained ways. Crisis revolutionary practice is, on the other hand, the process by which contending paradigms or ideologies struggle with one another and with non-revolutionary alternatives for social dominance. They debate each others’ suppositions, and even more than with the hard sciences (because of the extra involved interests) the debate is a tortuous and even violent one in which no side gives much credence to the formulations of any other. Resolution would be the success of any one revolutionary paradigm in gaining nearly full domination over all the others.

For the purposes of this exploration, however, we begin by asserting such a resolution, with Clasical Marxism Leninism as a core around which normal activities proceed. Later, after dealing with Classical Marxism Leninism as if it were the only ideological possibility, we admit the existence of Anarchism, Maoism, and some contemporary neo-Marxist views and consider them too.

Thus for the moment our available revolutionary paradigm is Classical Marxism Leninism. And we [or at least I, in the early 1970s, and now too] feel a definite crisis. The “anomalous problems” to which it denies importance, and, in any case does not help us solve related concerns, revolve around usability, racism, sexism, authority, socialization dynamics, the relationships between consciousness and general day-to-day activity, the dynamics between social and movement relations and people’s consciousnesses needs, and feelings, the nature of bureaucracy, the ability of people to understand local situations and analyze local tactics, and to settle on what we seek, or vision. It is a substantial list. Our critical study thus feels justified by the state of crisis we perceive in Classical Marxism Leninism’s abilities to handle today’s crucial revolutionary problems.

I interject, this was as I saw the problems existed coming out of the Sixties, when, remember, one current 2026 interpretation of the emerging situation is that we activists made the mistake of getting tricked, coerced, or enticed into jettisoning too many Classical insights. It is that view that I am currently assessing even as, back in the early 1970s, I was as well.

The chapter continues: A good result of our study would be either a recognition of how the Classical paradigm can finally solve our problems or of why it can’t and how an altered new paradigm might be able to. How then should we proceed with our critical study? In what order should we approach the body of Classical Marxist Leninist thought? What should we emphasize and what should we only gloss over? 

To answer requires a better understanding of the internal relations of any revolutionary paradigm’s three component parts: theory, strategy, and practice. Such an understanding will tell us how to study each part with an eye toward most readily discovering from where the whole’s weaknesses derive.

So, first, what are theories, how are they constructed and used, what are the loci of their strengths and weaknesses, and how might they be studied most effectively, especially when one is looking to assess and perhaps overthrow them and their whole parent paradigm?

Theories are collections of ideas that people use to understand the realities they encounter. Theories have one part which describes the elements of reality and another part which talks about how those elements interact, where the later allows predictions concerning what the elements will do in varying situations. Leave out or get an important element wrong, and you will miss its effects which might be crucial.

Social theories refer to realities of people and institutions, but are necessarily abstract: they do not focus on everything in their reference systems but only on those parts considered important. Thus ‘what is important’ and included in discussion, and ‘what is unimportant’ and abstracted out, become crucial questions in social theorizing. 

As Paul Sweezy—who was, I interject, a central figure of the Marxist Monthly Review Press back then—wrote:

“The legitimate purpose of abstraction in social science is never to get away from the real world but rather to isolate certain aspects of the real world for intensive investigation. When, therefore, we say that we are operating at a high level of abstraction we mean that we are dealing with a relatively small number of aspects of reality; we emphatically do not mean that those aspects with which we are dealing are not capable of historical investigation and factual illustration.”

Thus we have our first guideline for theory construction: for clarity, conciseness, and useability one must abstract out all that is unimportant; but for correctness and wholeness one must include all that is important. One must abstract away the unessential while making sure not to eliminate from consideration anything essential.

This raises a problem. How does one determine what is essential before having a theory which explains the whole? The wise way around this problem is caution and a flexible willingness to reformulate one’s views over and over as one’s insights grow more and more complete. The subjective and obviously flawed way around the problem is to determine what is important on the basis of self-interested speculations, and to then bend everything to suit that first determination rather than vice versa.

For example: a factory owner runs his enterprise according to a certain social economic theory of business. The business produces well, profits continually rise, his business life goes according to plan, and he is reasonably content with the whole situation. He barely notices his factory’s effects on his employees’ lives, or on their families, or on the ecology, or on its consumers. His theory obscures all that, effectively removing it all from his awareness [except to the extent any of it threatens his profits]. As a result others bear the costs of his profit-taking while he goes unaware of all that occurs outside the abstractions of his business-school theories of life. 

Then his workers strike and he alters his views somewhat by including references to salaries in his calculations. Not the effect on his workers but only on his profits and his ability to keep collecting them. Then consumers protest and ecologists clamor and again he adapts his theories precisely to the extent to which effects on his profit and power gain his attention.

The lesson of our capitalist’s behavior is relatively clear. Social theories are often rooted in self-interested desires. Beyond that they are often blind but nonetheless their users typically convince themselves their theories are not narrow but complete. They get away with this self-interested self-deception precisely because their theory’s narrowness obligingly hides from view, in a sense behind its own absent elements.

Narrow theories often nonetheless seem complete because they are logically sound regarding the elements they include, and force their practitioners to overlook what they don’t include by steering their attentions away from the ensuing flawed results. Narrow theories appear good to their believers because they are perceived through self-created blinders especially adapted to block out all that is flawed.

All of this can apply to leftists as well as to capitalists. When revolutionists use a narrow theory they too can be expected to create partially counter-productive programs that ignore certain relevant aspects of the total spectrum of effects of their implementation. Narrow-minded revolutionists function [in that respect] very similarly to narrow-minded capitalists. They too blunder on in their mistakes, blind to the realities around them, precisely because their theories so constrain their perceptions.

I have to interject: reading this, I suspect I had lurking in my mind even back then what would shortly later become and remain a central focus of mine, that the classical ideology included distorted class concepts that ignored and obscured the existence of a third class between labor and capital…or perhaps I stumbled onto that recognition later because of a prior awareness of the kinds of flaw an ideology might have. 

Either way, the chapter from What Is To Be Undone continued: Theories can therefore be weak in at least two different ways. First, they can have inaccurate or incomplete descriptions of important realities. They include some but not all important elements. Second, they can have incorrect understandings of the ways important realities interact. They see some but not all implications of choices they confront.

Thus social theory must correspond to social reality as closely as possible and all its lacks of correspondence must be well understood by its practitioners. Its positive assertions and its abstractions must be equally justified. To construct a social theory we should try to organize our efforts in light of these insights. In criticizing a theory we can profitably do the same. 

We will set out descriptions of Classical Marxism Leninism’s views of social reality and of social interactions. We will examine the relations between its theory and its practitioners, and we will take into account the accuracy and justification for its abstractions of all types.

But just understanding, even in rather deep complexity, is never quite enough; one wants also to affect. Marxist Leninists with goals and general theoretic understandings form more or less detailed plans of action or strategy. To have a full plan for analyzing the Marxist Leninist paradigm we must also know how we should approach its strategic aspects.

Strategies guide us toward desired goals. How well do they derive from theory, do they get us where we wish to go, and do they minimize ‘expenses’ and side complications? These are criteria for judging strategies and they are certainly easy enough to apply, at least if one is an objective and well informed evaluator rather than a biased or ill-informed participant in a specific set of events.

The communist, for example, feels that the capitalist’s approach to transportation problems is idiotic precisely because it creates even larger problems for working people than those it was ostensibly aiming to solve. The communist thinks that capitalist strategy is poor and would at least in some cases explain it by saying that capitalist theory is self-interestedly narrow. 

On the other side of the coin, the capitalist says that communist strategy is ridiculous because even if it does solve a few social inadequacies it does so at too great a cost in never-to-be-regained lost human freedoms, but he means lost profits. Here too the smart capitalist would probably find the roots of the purported problem in self-interestedly narrow authoritarian theory rather than in the incompetence of the theory’s practitioners.

Strategies move from vagueness to preciseness as their practitioners learn ever more about the properties of systems on which they are working, goals they are seeking, and tools they are using. Strategy emerges from theory. The more comprehensive the theory, the more potentially precise the strategy. The more incomplete the theory, the more vague the strategy and greater the need for constant enhancement.

So analyzing strategies is essentially a problem of seeing whether they really do fit the environs they are applied to and aim consistently at the goals they are supposedly seeking. The problem exists in translating an understanding of a theory’s strengths and weaknesses to the level of its compatible and thus similarly powerful or afflicted strategy.

What about tactics and practice? Practice is a favorite word of leftists, usually used in reference to the activities of people trying to change their environments and in turn being changed by those environments. Tactics, another often used word, are well defined ways of practicing that occur over and over whenever roughly the same conditions arise. So there are military tactics, race car driving tactics, medical tactics, business tactics, production line tactics, literary tactics, and revolutionary tactics. Most practice is simply the application of variations of available tactics in concrete situations.

Tactics are chosen because of the ways they fulfill strategic dictates. When there is no strategy, tactics become guesswork and practice becomes problematic and thus ineffectual. Strategy affects tactics and vice versa. Strategy allows a rational choice of tactics, and knowledge of available tactics allows formulation of the most economical strategies. 

Consider two military strategists. Confronted with obstacles and a goal, an effective strategist knows available tactics and has a theory for understanding the whole situation and the varying effects that different chosen acts would have upon it. The ineffective one does not. 

The effective one forms a strategy based on a complete understanding of all important factors and begins implementing it and thus moving toward likely success. The ineffective one perhaps forms a plan that depends on tactics that aren’t even available options, or whose effects are misunderstood, or perhaps forms no plan at all, merely blundering ahead in redundancy and error.

Good strategy uses whatever is available to accomplish as much as possible. Knowledge of tactical options and their likely outcomes provides a foundation for creating powerful strategy and good strategy in turn provides general criteria for deciding what tactics to actually use in what sequences.

But even when a practitioner has highly accurate theory, good knowledge of tactics, and good strategic sense, things are unlikely to occur exactly as planned, if not because of error, then certainly because real practice often leads to unforeseen developments which then demand changes in theory or strategy.

The militarist comes up against an unforeseen situation in the field and alters strategy, or someone discovers new forms of weaponry and that leads to an enrichment of military theory. Or similarly for the doctor, revolutionist, or whoever.

In general, social theories are incomplete and depend on descriptions of very complicated ‘objects’. They must constantly adapt to accord with new experiences and insights discovered through on-going normal practice. Only then can they approach correctness and provide a basis for ever enriched strategy.

In summary, strategy provides criteria for choosing tactics. Practice is the means for implementing and correcting theory and strategy. Theory provides the framework within which strategy and tactics function, a means for anticipating their various possible effects, and a means for understanding what goals are realistic for any whole situation.

Revolutionaries are usually concerned with changing the whole natures of their societies. In their work they want the smallest possible margin for error, and especially for the repetition of error. They thus require that the flow from theory to strategy to practice and back include effective corrective mechanisms.

Ideally the revolutionist functions with a good social theory and a broad flexible strategy for change. He or she develops a full understanding of as many tactics as possible, (strikes, boycotts, parliamentary electoral tactics, ways of organizing and communicating, civil disobedience, marches, sabotage, styles of behavior and living, etc.) and of the ways their use affects various relevant situations, and then engages in self-conscious practice. Ideally the revolutionist learns more and more about tactics while constantly refining strategy and theory to make them more accurate and richer in content.

So, good revolutionary theory, strategy, and practice, or good revolutionary ideology and practice is a totality which is always incomplete but constantly going forward, each aspect providing the criteria for the worth and growth of the others. 

Theory provides world view. Long term strategy provides guidelines for activity. In conjunction with a goal—what we seek—theory and strategy together compose a revolutionary paradigm which guides revolutionary thought, analysis, planning, and action.

To minimize errors and dogmatism such consciousness must be self-correcting and growth-oriented. It must not stagnate. It must alter to fit changing realities rather than to merely rationalize changing realities in order to preserve itself. It must be rational verifiable rather than irrational ‘religious’.

Though a revolutionary ideology may have weaknesses, it should eliminate them over time. Indeed, good revolutionary consciousness should have a tendency toward continual re-alteration built right into its methods and especially into its strategy and associated practice.

So, what have we? Classical Marxism is a revolutionary social theory and Classical Marxism Leninism is a revolutionary ideology. Virtually all Marxist Leninist organizations I have had contact with [back then, as of 1974, and also now, still] operate as if they believe their social theory and strategy immutable, and indeed seem to get their identities and authority from that avowed permanence. 

This constitutes a dismal state of affairs, because of the stagnation involved, and still more so if the theory and strategy are actually flawed. Our purpose is to formulate Classical Marxism Leninism in as clear a manner as we can so that we might discover what parts of it are useful, what parts are not, and in what ways it might be enriched or altered. To the same ends we shall also talk about Maoism and Anarchism.

Since we already know [back then from our Sixties experiences] that [then] present consciousness needs and correlated immediate revolutionary crises revolve in part around getting new methodologies as well as new, very organic, useable understandings of racism, sexism, authority, consciousness, and motivation in general, we organize our expositions of Classical Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism in accord.

We go step by step examining those aspects that reflect most on our particular needs, to eventually build edifices in which the origin of the strengths and weaknesses with regard to our needs are clearly evident.

Finally, as an answer to our need for a ‘plan of approach’ we will first present Classical Marxist Leninist theory and Leninist strategy, and then criticize practice, strategy, and theory in sequence, with a final summary for clarification. 

In the end we hope to have some agreement about the worth of the Classical Marxist Leninist paradigm. Then after discussion of the Anarchist and Maoist alternatives we hope to have some agreement about where to jump off in either advocating an existing paradigm or constructing something new that could more effectively guide future revolutionary practice. I felt in the mid seventies that it was necessary for us to move energetically but also competently. I still feel that way. As Fidel Castro put it:

“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. It is known that the revolution will triumph in America and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpses of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job doesn’t suit a revolutionary. Each year that the liberation of America is speeded up will mean the lives of millions of children saved, millions of intelligences saved for culture, an infinite quantity of pain spared the people.”

That was how I ended that chapter of What Is To Be Undone. 

And so, where are we at in a sequence of articles about ideology that we have begun so as to address the questions: Is current left ideology fine or flawed? Does it need continued allegiance, overhaul, or replacement?

Back in the early seventies What Is To Be Undone looked at the recent practice of the new left and found lots of problems. The question arose, did we need to merely do a better job understanding and applying Marxist Leninist or Anarchist or Maoist insights while we avoided temptation or coercion that might divert us from that already available and worthy choice? Were our heads already on right? Did we, in other words, just need to do normal revolutionary pursuits better? 

Or did we need to look closely at our then existent ideologies to reveal their flaws, and revolutionize our thoughts to find new ideology? Did we need to persist with ideas from dead men’s minds firmly cemented into our own heads? Or did we need to consult our own experiences and revamp our theory, strategy, and tactics to reorient our heads?

Similarly, not then but now, do we need to turn back to classical Marxism Leninism or other old options, or do we need to develop new ideology? I hope that question is meaningful for all who read this. I hope whichever way you lean, you will want to help the work of thinking through the options.

Albert Interviewed About His Latest Book: The Wind Cries Freedom

By Michael Albert, Bridget Meehan

June 30, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image from The Wind Cries Freedom website, https://windcriesfreedom.org/

Michael Albert is interviewed here about his latest book, The Wind Cries Freedom, a fictional oral history set in the future.

Bridget: What’s in your new book? 

Michael: The Wind Cries Freedom reports on a future movement that works to win a new world. The book’s imagined future interviewer, Miguel Guevara elicits tales of the interviewees’ participation in the next American Revolution. Why did they join? What did they do? What did they feel? What did they learn?

Why does the book end when the movement wins the Presidency? Is the book ultimately about electoral politics? Is that the revolution? Is that the guiding theme and goal?

No. The book’s last chapter only marked the movement having attained state power. By that point the movement had also won massive gains throughout dwellings, neighborhoods, and institutions all over the country. The book’s closing electoral victory didn’t end the revolution much less define it, it only opened a new stage of future struggle. 

The future movement for a revolutionary participatory society, or RPS, first fought against old institutions. The oral history covers that. Then the project entered a new stage that would focuss overwhelmingly on building the new future, not fighting the old. Who knows, perhaps down the road some new future actors, channelled by me or whoever, will relay to us in our time the lessons of the later transitional stage of their struggle. 

How tricky is keeping the timeline in mind?

For me, yes, honestly, it has been, particularly stepping back and talking about it because my mindset has been to channel Miguel and the participants the participants, not imagine them, but I hope it won’t be a problem for readers. In any case, what matters is can the lessons help us?

Alright, but why did you choose a novel, and for that matter, why now?

Unhinged, despicable fascists now seek horrific change and they must be stopped. But even when we wipe the fascists away, we will still need to replace the social structures that brought them into being. So I channeled a future oral history because we not only need to block efforts of fascists or oligarchs or whatever you wish to call them to make things horrendously worse, we also need to undertake and carry to conclusion revolutionary efforts to make things vastly better than they have ever been. Even more, the way we do the former needs to aid how we do the later. 

Okay, but why an oral history? Why a novel?

I always try to convey insights and inspiration that can bear upon accomplishing immediate but also beyond that, massive fundamental change. To my way of thinking, that is the primary task of writing in our time. Aid now and aid future. But you also ask, I think, why suddenly choose fiction when you have no fiction writing experience.

It is a good question and it vexed me. Many people, including myself, write about overcoming various obstacles including not just fascism, but current perverted democracy, rapacious economy, capitalist hypocrisy, vile misogyny, hateful racism, and murderous imperialism, all topped off by suicidal ecological insanity. And many people, including myself, point to the political power of the state, the dominance of corporate centers of economic power, the pervasiveness of patriarchal norms and habits, the tenacity of racial hierarchy, as well as defenders of the existing order who repress and subvert whatever threatens their dominance. 

On the other hand, not so many people write remotely as much about obstacles that we have within us that also impede our efforts. About obstacles embedded in the diverse forms of personal baggage we all carry in our personalities and habits due to living within the insane embrace of patriarchal families, schools that channel passivity, work that stifles efficacy, and a world that demands obedience, and due to the effects of all that imposed baggage on the horizons of our thoughts and aspirations. 

So? Why is that relevant to the choice to employ fiction?

Well, I wanted to have people like us and like those all around us relay their experiences of becoming radical and then revolutionary. What inspired them? What did they personally feel? What did they then do? How did it unfold? And most of all what lessons did they learn that might help our own efforts in our own times? I wanted effective future revolutionaries to personally communicate with us.

But second, you asked why now? Well, why not now is one answer. Every delay in attaining a new world is more lives lost and tarnished by this world. But another answer is because, if not now, when? Each delay tends to strengthen the thought that there is no better future. Delay provokes more delay. And a third answer is, if not now, then fascist trends will likely make the task far more difficult in the future. Indeed fascism’s essential purpose all around the world is to restructure relations so that dissent and resistance much less positive fundamental change are put off forever.

Well, then, what do you think are the main obstacles to winning? You have often written about vision, what to fight for, but in this book while that is present, there is a whole lot more about what to fight against and especially how to fight effectively. So what are the main obstacles to overcome?

That is the big question. Which is why The Wind Cries Freedom is so damn long. But in a nutshell, to my eyes, what I actually think may be the biggest obstacle to our winning is not the power of the state, or the mesmerizing capacity of media, but our own doubts and harmful habits which impede hope and vision and instead impose cynicism and fear. 

And that is why The Wind Cries Freedom not only addresses the technical and social possibility of a vastly better world, and not only addresses strategic and organizational ways to proceed, but also addresses interpersonal debates and differences, and personal fears, feelings, and finally personal hurdles, motivations, aspirations, and inspirations. 

Guevara’s interviewees want to make real the possibility, likelihood, and even inevitability of winning if we can transcend our own histories. That is the belief that fueled the choice of an oral history, albeit fictional, instead of yet another less personal and solely analytical account.

What do you hope the book accomplishes? What do you worry might instead occur?

My hope is that The Wind Cries Freedom doesn’t become a kind of academic prop much less some kind of operating manual, but, instead that it becomes a positive pole, a sort of chime of freedom that helps open options and inspire choices, and that if it doesn’t itself do all that, then that it at least provokes discovery by others of critical insights that can do all that. 

My fear for it, instead, is that it is effectively born dead, not because its substance or the sentiments of its actors are shown insufficient or misleading, but because it doesn’t reach its audience. It simply isn’t read and assessed. Many friends have told me that the idea of future revolutionaries telling their experiences is great. How can people now, they reason, who face Trump, who see the urgent need for fundamental change away from what gave us Trump, but who doubt that such change is even possible, or can be win, not hope that such a book will ease or even erase those doubts? So they tell me that the time is right for the book, the style is right for the task, and so surely people will give it a try. It will resonate and generate discussion, debate, and desire.

I hope the people telling me that are right. But the power of long-nurtured cynicism can’t be ignored. The power of hopelessness. The power of a sentiment like “been there, done that, so no thanks,” is real. Indeed, I think cynicism, hopelessness, and impatience are examples of the baggage-based obstacles I mentioned earlier. This book is meant to address how to overcome those factors that exist in our own activism. But that suggests a weird kind of complication. Does one have to have read the book, or something similar, to want to read the book? I hope not. I hope instead that it will be enough to have witnessed Trump and actors like him elsewhere and to have endured what led to him; that it will be enough to have witnessed or been part of MAGA or MAGA’s international variants and felt their impact and shortcomings as a response to the horrors of business as usual; that it will be enough to have fought against ICE and other anti immigrant projects around the world and against war; and to have known injustice in its many various forms to motivate enough desire for shared vision, shared strategy, shared methods, and shared mutual respect for people to give this oral history a chance. I guess we will see.

And for those not yet ready to give it a look, there is a book page with description, early testimonials, the table of contents, even a playlist to go with the book, and more, to consult before deciding to read it or not.

You can see Michael’s book page and buy The Wind Cries Freedom from here.

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Michael Albert

Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.

 

The New Left in the Sixties, Part One

By Michael Albert

June 16, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by White House Photograph Office/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

In the early 1970s, in a book titled What Is To Be Undone, I took a look at the New Left movements of those times. Had our Sixties theory, strategy, tactics, methods, feelings, and choices been sufficient to our revolutionary aims? Coming out of the Sixties did we take a wrong turn that has hindered us ever since? Was the wrong turn to reject too much of what prior revolutionary ideologies had to offer? Was it instead to retain too much that they offered? Or did the Sixties even indicate a need for better thinking at all? 

Today has many new features but millions of activists angry and desiring a better world is similar. So to succeed do we need choose Classical Marxism Leninism to guide our thinking, as some current commentators urge? Or do we instead need a “revolution in the revolution”? 

Spoiler alert: What I saw as the Sixties came to its end did indeed cause me to conclude that we needed to think smarter than the dominant ideologies allowed. That feeling led me and many others as well to look closely at those preponderant ideologies—Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism. What did they actually say? Were they sufficient to our needs? Some who looked decided they were just fine. We should double down on their use. Others, myself included, decided we needed better. So this quite long article, in two parts, is what I felt, at age 24, 55 years ago, looking at what we had done.

Back then, page one, I wrote: I want to view the New Left from a highly critical perspective to show a number of rarely discussed internal weaknesses and to thereby at least partially demonstrate a need for a new New Left ideology. 

History should be a vehicle for human liberation. The study of past events should be a means to understand causes of our conditions, to discover roots of present ‘historical trajectories,’ to ascertain different ends to which present trajectories might possibly lead, and to learn how to affect positively various historical possibilities. 

The truth of the Sixties is that liberals and the entire United States political establishment were never sincerely against the war: they were only, to varying extents, against losing the war and against development of too great a set of domestic problems as a result of trying to win it. Liberal opposition always arose only in pragmatic attempts to minimize political and economic losses for themselves that might result from the historically unparalleled Vietnamese resistance and the growing domestic United States resistance in the streets and military barracks. 

In true opposition, by undermining the American myth of benevolence, wealth, dignity, and freedom for all, by forcing elites to put restraints on government war policies lest they arouse too much left organizing here at home, and by showing the possibility of effective left activity even in face of extreme inexperience and repression, the New Left demonstrated the vulnerability of the establishment and the potential of people’s power. In a very few years American political complacency was shattered. Imperialism, racism, sexism, alienation, and exploitation, became fairly well-known concepts to the United States public. 

The political debate was turned around: it was no longer “Are these concepts relevant?” but rather “Just how relevant are they?” It was not “Must there be major change?” but “What kind of major change should there be?” It was no longer “The corporations and government will take care of our needs,” but “How are we to overcome the corporations and government?”

These major advances in political awareness plus the powerful thrust of the New Left in preventing certain escalations and in eventually helping force a settlement of the war at least temporarily beneficial to the Vietnamese as well as the contribution of the New Left in working for other social advances are the historical truths which must be put forward in place of the hypocritical obfuscations offered up by liberals and/or by disgruntled and demoralized prior activists.

But that said, lest our coming highly critical views of internal left dynamics add to establishment historians’ fabrications, here is a short recounting of New Left contributions before we try to show the nature and magnitude of some of the difficulties that helped undermine the New Left from within, and to show what real life as opposed to fantasy life in the new New Left was like, and thereby to motivate recognition of the need for new ideology.

The New Left was an international practice-oriented movement. It was not steeped in theory; its ideas emerged primarily from trial-and-error evaluations of its own experiences. Its most creative groups actually rebelled against old-ideology ideas, rather than analyzing and then moving from them as a basis. Nonetheless the New Left eventually hammered out a rough prospectus very much in tune with (and even advanced beyond) the finest formulations of their contemporary more theory-oriented comrades.

Thus the United States New Left started as a reaction to racism and the Vietnam war, but in time came to represent a critique of the totality of ways modern life impinges upon human-fulfillment, needs, and capacities. It went from an opposition to blatant racism in the South and war in Southeast Asia to a critical revolutionary position against racism in general, imperialism in all its forms, sexism both in society and in the movement, and the whole nexus of advanced capitalist day-to-day living and working relations insofar as they breed waste, alienation, ecological decay, poverty, hierarchy, and anti-social competition, and insofar as they are unable to meet almost any of peoples’ collective social needs for friendship, community, identity, power, recreation, and creative and spiritual fulfillment. 

The New Left developed an awareness of the power of United States repressive mechanisms—the state, corporation, courts, police, schools, and family—insofar as they coerce people but also insofar as they corrupt people by imposing false and self-alienating anti-social ideas. The New Left attacked the economic side of capitalism, both as it oppresses workers in factories and as it oppresses consumers in the so-called free market. But the New Left also went beyond economics to additionally consider the ways modern schooling, family life, culture, and general day-to-day living inculcate oppressive modes of behavior and thereby contribute to capitalism’s stunting of human potentials.

For the New Left, consciousness was a central aspect of concern. Whether trying to force the government to end the war or trying to build forces to eventually overthrow the government, the New Left knew that a key problem was to affect people’s thoughts, and thus their political allegiances, motivations, goals, and even behavioral capacities. The New Left saw changed consciousness as a prerequisite for revolution, rather than an outcome of it.

Moreover, primarily due to women’s-movement contributions, the New Left became aware that the question of consciousness was a very complex affair: it didn’t involve only “What side are you on?” but also “How do you feel about life and people?” and thus, “Are you able to participate humanely in revolution?” 

The women’s movement showed how oppressive ways of thinking and acting remain even after we turn against capitalism, and it showed how those residue characteristics could corrupt our practical effects by consigning them to self-defeat via internal sexist or authoritarian repercussions. Thus the women’s movement was largely responsible for showing the left that opposition to unequal interpersonal relations and to repressive sexual or authoritarian attitudes were factors on a par in importance with opposition to imperialism and exploitation. 

Similarly by struggling not just for minor reforms but for the total fulfillment of Black lives—materially, culturally, creatively, and intellectually—the Black Liberation movement taught leftists that racism has to be fought not after a revolution but as part of the prerequisite process of creating revolution, that it has to be fought both institutionally and in people’s minds, and that the goal of fighting it, like the goal of fighting sexism and all other oppressions, was not moderate, limited change, but the total liberation of the human personality so that it might attain the greatest possible heights of growth and fulfillment.

Because of the dual concerns of the New Left with overcoming authoritarianism and with changing oppressed consciousnesses, it developed a strikingly new style of practice. People were to struggle collectively to overcome impediments to societal and also to personal and interpersonal change. Participation and active individual and collective initiative were crucial as the only modes that had “energy” as well as anti-authoritarian impact. 

Thus the New Left was concerned to oppose all hierarchical mechanisms including traditional Leninist parties, traditional teacher/student, organizer/organizee relations, and even traditional meeting styles where well-known orators could always dominate events. The New Left struggled for rotation of all tasks (public-speaking as well as leafletting and typing), for participatory decision-making mechanisms, for non-repressive participatory meetings, and for a new relationship between experienced and inexperienced participants that recognized that each had things to learn from the other and that each had things to teach the other, and that what was desirable was everyone moving forward together.

Further, the New Left emphasized finding methods suitable to raising consciousness both inside and outside the movement. The New Left thus adopted a politics of exemplary actions, teach-ins, consciousness-raising groups, criticism/self-criticism, and liberated personal lifestyles. It sought leadership modes that would foster rather than stifle group political participation and initiative.

The New Left also ‘discovered’ the importance of an alternative vision and tried both to outline one and to embody its values in daily practice. It took a total approach to revolution and liberation and functioned creatively both in analyzing social relations and in trying to alter them (even though as we’ll soon see there were a great many instances in which its successes were very limited). 

There were obviously also many grave problems, yet the fact that in a very short time the New Left discovered and even began solving the key political tasks of our time—to create a goal-prefiguring practice, develop anti-authoritarian organizational forms, develop effective consciousness-raising tactics, and develop a theory and practice that could simultaneously promote the autonomous development of women’s, Black, worker, youth, and community movements while also providing a total framework within which they could all fit together and function together collectively to make the whole even more than the simple allied sum of its parts—is a remarkable indication of modern revolutionary potentials. 

For the New Left’s promise to be fully met, did activists need only synthesize its lessons with those of critical analyses of other historical struggle experiences, settle on a new collective ideology, and embark on a new New Left political activism even more informed, self-conscious, and effective than that of the Sixties? A first modest step in such a direction would be a critical look at the actual internal dynamics, beliefs, and contributions of the New Left as a whole and then of each of its major component movements.

In response to Kennedy rhetoric, material changes in wealth, growths of knowledge, Black activism, and the specter of an overseas war, American youth began coming together politically in the early and mid sixties.

They looked towards old left groups for ideological guidance. They learned about classes, the state, and revolutionary organization, but they also learned, in the words of Carl Oglesby, that the old left provides only an “almost carrion bird politics” wherein “distant and above it all the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of the predestined dinner. Capitalism weakens, layoffs and inflation converge, a rash of strikes—the bird moves in. But not so fast, the government also moves. A different money policy, stepped up federal spending, a public works project, selective repression of the militants—the bird resumes its higher orbit.” 

Youth wanted more dynamism and insight than the seemingly stodgy old left had to offer. We were disenchanted with conditions of war, racism, and general cultural sterility. We moved toward direct action as our new multi-purpose tactic. It promised greater successes, it was more exciting, it suited everyone’s feelings of urgency, and it suited people’s personal desires to “fight now.”

Black movements became militant and other leftists rapidly followed suit. Even street gangs adopted political slogans: the rhetoric of revolution spread through the land. People were “rising up angry.” It was initially very conscious and serious, as well as militant. At least the first wave of activists thought long and hard about making left commitments and yet even with people’s careful approaches the leftward flow continually grew. “Drop out of mainstream America. Drop into either the growing youth culture or into a more active political movement.” This was the message sweeping the big cities, causing much soul-searching and a remarkable amount of active, very concerned motion.

By and large the New Left had its finest hours in its earliest days. Then it was struggling in humble, honest ways, it was trying to affect the world and itself, it emphasized participation, patience, and hard work. Weaknesses were still only latent. The left wanted to communicate, and it took itself seriously enough to think carefully about everything it contemplated doing. 

But things became more complex as time went on. Under pressures of repression, cooptation, and competition, the movement joined a kind of revolutionary rat race. It started adopting ideas instead of developing and fully understanding them. There was rush and urgency; instead of acting creatively, the movement reverted to old ways that came more easily. Internal weaknesses (e.g., authoritarianism and hierarchy) were fostered by external conditions (e.g., repression and press sensationalism); and as conditions got tougher, harmful internal movement dynamics just kept getting worse.

The old class president became the new movement leader, and the old quiet sensitive person went almost totally mum. What was to be a new way of life began looking just like the old. There was a growth of ego insecurity. The left was attacked and in self-defense regrettably became defined in terms of opposition to almost everything American. It was unsure of itself but it acted cocksure. It couldn’t really answer criticisms; it didn’t reply when people asked how it would do things differently. It was pushed to extremism. It went from opposing McNamara’s thinking to opposing almost all thought, and from a healthy distaste of bureaucracy to an abhorrence of almost all organization. It took genuinely creative intuitions about American disciplinary methods and turned them into a hatred for almost all discipline, even including self-discipline. It took a new critique of alienated work and bloated it into a new inability to do work of any kind. And perhaps most importantly, to defend itself while it was still young, it defined itself as morally superior, and turned an initially healthy critical stance into a more and more blindly arrogant one.

Of course, different people did these things to differing degrees, but the overall dynamics were such that the trends were very pronounced in the movement as a whole. In almost all cases the movement failed to break down false polarities, and instead merely chose new sides for itself. Instead of work, it took play; instead of mind, body; instead of discipline, chaos; instead of allegiance, hatred; and instead of passivity, arrogance. We didn’t synthesize—we were largely as extremist as the people we opposed. We were as subjectivist. We were motivated at least in part by the same self-defeating habits of polarization, competition, authoritarianism, and self-defense. We were ignorant and overly defensive about our own weaknesses. We didn’t really admit to them and so, of course, we didn’t even come close to fully overcoming them. We opposed the main oppressions of United States life but not, at least until too late, the subtler ones that were already at work within our own activities.

There were people who saw these many problems at the time but they were generally outside of or peripheral to the left. When they pointed up our weaknesses it was to demoralize and not improve us. Their intention was to get us to be good citizens and not good revolutionaries. We were very unsure of ourselves, very defensive, but also very headstrong. If people told us we were authoritarian, insensitive, ignorant, or overly brash, in defense we had to scream back that we were not, and that we were going to go on being radical no matter what anyone said. We had to convince ourselves. We couldn’t sift the wheat from the chaff in their criticisms, precisely because we were unable to admit that anything they were suggesting might be at all true. We couldn’t admit to weakness and we were certainly unable to admit to criticisms leveled by our enemies. We couldn’t admit that there was anything that they could tell us because to do that would severely threaten our need to believe that it was we who were to tell them. We screamed back at our detractors lest we be drawn back towards them. No one was able to break through our defenses until it was largely too late.

If a liberal journalist said our sloppiness was disaffecting potential allies, we said it was untrue and roughed up our jeans a little more. A healthy rebellion against capitalist clothing requirements and especially against clothing as a mechanism of status, slowly became an irrational preoccupation with a new kind of uniform. If another commentator or parent said our language or militance or attacks on certain institutions were incomprehensible and self-detrimental, we didn’t explain ourselves clearly, or slightly alter our styles so that we might communicate better, but instead merely intensified our assault on “bourgeois sensibilities,” oblivious to our actual consciousness-stunting effects. No one could be a really true revolutionary and also a sharp critic of our styles, ideas, and tactics. And even if many individuals were not guilty of this defensive extremism, New Left activism as a whole made it appear as if everyone was.

To understand the involved processes more fully we must look at the New Left’s separate parts in greater detail. First, the student movement.

The student movement started at Berkeley. Ex-civil righters accustomed to southern struggles took a look at their own school and their own situations. They saw racism, war ties, and bureaucracy. They felt alienated and had the confidence to express their anger. The ensuing free-speech movement was a catalyst to students all over the country.

Soon the criticizers developed more clarity: “The schools are socializing agents. They are like computers. They are part of and program us to become part of the whole American system. They hurt us and they support the war. They make us into businessmen’s slaves and they do weapons research.”

Campus movements united to change schools and fight against the war. People became seriously involved in on-going deeply consuming activities. There were sanctuaries for AWOL G.l.s, teach-ins, rallies, meetings, and occasional militant confrontations over related campus based demands—End War Research, No More War Recruiters, and so on. The process was initially driven by concern, spirit, and solidarity. Students studied their schools, America, and imperialism. They moved progressively further and further left in analysis and were then, all of a sudden revolutionaries wanting to overthrow the whole system. Calm seriousness diminished as macho-seriousness enlarged. There was deep trouble on the horizon.

Students involved themselves in campus movements usually in gut response to social pressures, deep moral feelings, and movement organizing efforts. They recognized their schools’ and country’s inadequacies and joined with whomever seemed most committed to overcoming them. Very few recruits were consciously strategic. They didn’t have really good reasons for the whys and hows of their actions. They were in no position to understand effects of their actions on others or for that matter on themselves either.

People either went in and then out of the movement because their understanding remained foggy, or stayed in, simply attaching themselves to a new identity-related ideology, or bore their ignorances passively. In some cases they struggled to work things out for themselves. There was little collective give and take; people who had no strategic understandings were not effectively helped by their supposed leaders; they were instead indoctrinated, used, or expelled. Further, the in-and-outers couldn’t help the leaders overcome their particular deficiencies, including their arrogance, defensiveness, sectarianism, out-of-touchness, immaturity, and overall blindness to the effects of much of what they were doing. [Please remember, this was written by a deeply involved participant about three years out of college who was still centrally enmeshed in Sixties activism.]

Skills were not effectively spread and elitism was not effectively countered. One group had sensitivity but little initiative; another the reverse. Of course the whole spectrum was much broader than this, but more often than not societal dynamics so polarized events that each individual might as well have been at one of the two extremes anyway.

Perhaps the most incongruous events occurred when Marxist Leninist student sects confused, alienated, and attacked people under the guise of “giving ideological leadership.” As sectarian groups vied for position, they wasted people’s time, and drained people’s energies. They dominated people’s capacities for initiative, encrusting all efforts in their own stodgy formulas. Worst perhaps, their bad ways played to bad latent traits in almost everyone who tried dealing with them.

Thus people trying to eliminate Leninist infantile sectarianism were often instead sidetracked into their own potentials for sectarianism. You could argue with the Progressive Labor Party only so long before developing Progressive Labor Party-like traits. The resulting internecine conflicts did more harm than good. The Leninists attacked and baited, everyone else attacked and baited back, until the behavior became rather habitual. 

New people were never too impressed when they saw so-called revolutionaries fighting one another to the exclusion of seriously dealing with real issues—and when they saw in-fighting go to the level of violent confrontations they naturally began to wonder how radicals differed from the establishment they opposed. The dynamics had more to do with pathological ego-defense than with fighting for real revolutionary gains.

The left became a kind of spectacle and most students looked on with mixtures of awe, fear, disdain, skepticism, and sometimes a little naive jealousy or just plain wonderment. The movement became a kind of caricature of itself. Its members didn’t understand why some people joined while others didn’t, and indeed the question, despite its obvious centrality, was hardly ever even raised. 

Movement people didn’t understand what forces worked in their favor and what forces were hindrances. Though strategies were espoused, problems concerning sex, psychological passivity, school itself, and needs for real community weren’t even properly understood. That people had some difficulties adopting or even recognizing radical ideas was not fully understood. 

When trying to communicate through leaflets, there was no accepted method for deciding what should go in and how it should be written. When trying to decide on program, there was no real method for figuring what was important and what tactics were best suited to student states of mind. When trying to figure how militant to be, there was no understanding of why more or why less was better and of how one or the other would affect future possibilities. 

If it had had better awarenesses the student movement might have made itself more palatable to other students and citizens at large. It wouldn’t have constantly pushed beyond what people were ready to do and it would have created on-going mechanisms for preserving short run gains more effectively than was actually done. 

When the crucial choice came between highly escalating campus militancy, or staying less militant but constructing well-founded unions that could at a later date take far more people far more solidly to the left, the latter approach would have won out instead of the former. 

The student movement went from interrupting the ‘free speech’ of the Rostows to interrupting and fighting each other, precisely because we never developed a full understanding of what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what its effects on others and on us were likely to be. We were afraid of cooptation but we didn’t really understand it. Paul Potter expresses the situation as it was:

“The tyranny of liberation is believing that the reality of our needs can overcome what this society has done to us. That is not only wrong it is arrogant. It is one of our most impotent conceits. Regardless of what we say about the power of the military and the corporations, we seem to be incapable of believing that the society that crushed our parents could crush us in the same way. We assume that we will do better than they. We deny that they could ever have been like us. What we cannot comprehend is that our parents too might have had images of liberation once.” 

In essence we did not recognize that we were fallible and so of course we did little to guard against that fallibility. By the time we began realizing that we had bad traits and that they were hurting our efforts, it was already too late. We were fragmenting. The initial hope, energy, and enthusiasm were spent. Criticism/self-criticism was introduced as a palliative. The dictum rapidly became: rule self, rule others, and by all means don’t mess with any of the really threatening problems.

The first student strategy was largely reformist, that is, argue that certain aspects (courses, ROTC, war research, Black admissions policies, etc.) of the university were irrelevant or worse; organize demonstrations and strikes to change those aspects; agree to help plan new ways the school could function more relevantly; and terminate demonstrations when those new ways were adopted. 

The essence was to make home a nicer place. The protagonists usually wanted grading reform, living reform, course alterations, or the development of Black or radical studies programs, and all these things were fought for, not because they fit into some larger scheme, but because they were immediately justified.

The second strategy was somewhat more revolutionary: “The universities are complicit in many of society’s larger evils. They are partially responsible for society’s injustices.” Students organized around university complicity in the war, imperialism, racism, etc. Demonstrations aimed specifically at ending complicity and escalated to whatever extents necessary. Termination of demonstrations came only when the fully desired results were accomplished. Essentially it was still a “clean up your back yard” strategy but it was hoped it would simultaneously force others (workers etc.) to police their yards too and would bring closer the day when students could join them in that effort.

Still the strategy was mostly aimed at just getting rid of obvious immediate evils. Practitioners were not so concerned with the effects of their actions on other people as they were with the effects on the institutions they were attacking. They were not so concerned with developing organization or mass support as with achieving concrete gains spurred by large demonstrations. They didn’t want commitment, they wanted immediate victories. 

They had very few answers for people who said they were polarizing the country to the detriment of their own goals except to say that what they were doing was right and that it therefore had to be done. People were usually motivated by the belief that they could have short-run successes and thereby eliminate a certain amount of evil from the world. The strategy began buckling when people began realizing just how much power was needed for even the smallest change. It died when a Princeton University movement got a war research building eliminated but the campus was gerrymandered so that the institution was no longer on it. The building remained, the function was still served, everything was the same except the campus boundary. Though struggle continued the irony was felt in Princeton and elsewhere. A new strategy was needed.

Serious leftists saw these various results and became more ‘political.’ They foreswore the old approach entirely: they didn’t try to alter it, they just got rid of it. They didn’t try to improve on past ways, they just jumped on a newer, supposedly more revolutionary third-strategy bandwagon with the same relatively blind commitment they’d had for the last one. Of course not everyone was the caricature this suggests: some understood strategic possibilities more and those who rushed ahead were considerably affected by the seeming urgencies of the moment, but the overall dynamic was such that everyone might as well have been motivated by nothing but the desire to push ahead as quickly as possible lest dynamics get somehow bogged down. Some people’s more informed motivations were largely submerged in their individual and collective deficiencies. The student movement constantly viewed itself as right and moral, and therein cut itself off from improvement.

But the third campus strategy was in some ways more enlightened than its two predecessors. It said that campus activism could be a catalyst for changing American political realities. It reasoned that by wrecking schools, closing them, or fighting over them, we could greatly escalate the level of national political discussion. We could create motion that would push everyone further and further left. It was a politics of example and disruption, a politics of motion—disrupt old ways and urge new ones, and change will come simultaneously. 

Different people with this view of how the left could expand had different ways of actually doing things. Some used ‘drama’, manipulation, and people’s desires to cleanse the campuses; others tried to explain their strategy and motivate people through an understanding of long-run potential. The people of the first persuasion created most campus motion and in time almost all leaders’ succumbed to using their methods, frequently without even fully understanding what it was they were doing. Thus the Seattle Liberation Front created a whole lot of very temporary “motion/energy” in Seattle with a politics of macho noise, confrontation, and myth; and Mayday eventually tried to follow suit on a national scale with its supposedly self-propelling dramatic predictions of “hundreds of thousands” “converging” on Washington and “shutting it down.” 

More modest but politically better-conceived programs of countless local community and student groups got lost in the shuffle. That the dramatic approach could create only a lot of baseless motion but no real on-going solid organization, commitment, solidarity, or consciousness was overlooked in the “rush of joy” caused by the large numbers it could indeed sometimes call forth (or at least not scare away).

Further most of the third group’s leaders were competitive men with plenty of charisma but extremely arrogant, oppressive, and macho styles. Though the idea of catalyzing responses in new sectors was rather good, the New Left never really took the trouble to seriously consider what kinds of activities had good effects and what kinds had bad. The implicit rapidly adopted supposition was that anything directed against the establishment would have provocative and thus good effects on the masses who viewed it. The feeling was that though working people might not like all the specific tactics chosen they would still be inevitably pushed to the left by the tactics’ net effects. 

Of course this proposition was partially true, but to a greater extent it was a rationalization for the inability to even consider doing things that would be simultaneously radical, liked by workers, and constructive of the movement’s infrastructure and size. There were countless arguments in which claims were made that though of course the workers hated us, they were also moving leftward, and that removing the barriers between the two groups would become easier and easier as that motion progressed. The barriers nevertheless are still quite real [writen, again, in the early 70s] and of course the motion never became a stampede. In fact some of what the student left did actually pushed the workers to the right and much of it (wild lifestyles, peculiar appearances, and opposition to free speech, etc.) gave false impressions of what being radical is all about and thereby laid seeds of cynicism that are still impeding constructive possibilities. 

Finally student left-politics never successfully took into account the need for tactics and organizing efforts to create on-going institutional strengths which act as the basis and give the necessary continuity for later continuation of efforts aimed at creating a united United States left.

Further and as a kind of extension of inadequately addressing other sectors of the population, and insufficiently organizing even the student sector, the student movement actually created the conditions necessary for its own repression. It escalated militancy while cutting itself off from main supporting elements. It was too busy, too revolutionary, and too near to winning to really notice the actual phenomena around it, to actually notice what was good and what was bad about even its own activities. 

The overall strategy for students to exert an exemplary influence upon the rest of the country was actually quite sound. What was lacking was the ability to apply that awareness. Students’ attitudes were not always the most progressive, and even when they were progressive their abilities to transmit them were largely lacking. The tactics, styles, and overall insensitive attitudes towards other people’s values were especially detrimental. The student movement never developed adequate criteria for its own activities. It hardly ever had good, carefully thought-out reasons for its efforts. In a real sense it was ignorant and cut off from realizing that fact by identity problems. The best arguments were never best because they were sound or because they fit widely accepted well tested criteria of value but because they were elegant, or super radical, or fashionable, or in some other way self-serving.

The grounds for anyone now [in 1974] judging the student movement are roughly:

To what extent did the student movement realign society’s forces to benefit the oppressed?

To what extent did it alter non-students consciousnesses in ways favorable to future revolutionary efforts?

To what extent did it forge students into on-going movements that could continue struggling for change?

The student movement and indeed the entire New Left put to shame all other political parties, organizations, and ideologies in the United States by showing their complicity in the war, racism, and other forms of oppression and their incompetence in dealing with these problems. Indeed the New Left is the only real left that the United States of the past few years offers up for critical evaluation. Nonetheless once its great importance for breaking the hegemony of the Democratic Party and other “liberal” organizations over left politics and for contributing new methods to on-going struggles against imperialism and other injustices is admitted, there is simply no way to deny that the student movement also in many ways failed.

It fulfilled our above outlined judgement criteria only partially and in some cases even partially negatively. It did affect social consciousness, often positively, but sometimes negatively; but it did not create on-going movement organizations. There is no way to tell if it could have done better if it had had a more encompassing perspective and a more maturely self-critical style—but it is certainly not heretical, excessively defeatist, or unjustifiably self-effacing to think that it might have. Indeed, such speculation is rather liberating, precisely because it allows us to be properly self-critical and to hope for a better student and New Left movement in the future. The conditions fostering the student movement were not transitory, the internal deficiencies (and repression) that drove it to destruction and that temporarily soured students on any further efforts were and are largely transitory and therefore subject to future positive alterations.

So ended the discussion of the student movement part of the New Left that I wrote in the early seventies and that 54 years later I offer now. In reaction to the above and before continuing to other sides of Sixties activism, did we then need new ideology? After all, what is an ideology for if not to guide effective practice and prevent ineffective practice. If the movements of those times fell short of desires, and they did, and more so, if they did not persist and get steadily better, and they didn’t, then either nothing better was possible or there were failings that could have been corrected. Some deduced the former stopped us. I believed and also thought it essential to demonstrate that the latter stopped us. But, was a search for deep failures of guiding ideology that I attempted back then still relevant now? 

Put differently, do we now need to double down on the validity and power of the then existent and now still available classical ideologies? Was it correct that the classical ideologies didn’t then or later mislead us, but rather that we succumbed then and later to the pressures of repression, the confusions of academic rigamarole, and the allure of wealth and power? Or, alternatively, was the intuition that fueled my asking, What Is To Be Undone, correct? Did we need new theory, vision, and strategy not found in dead men’s minds?

The New Left In the Sixties, Part Two

By Michael Albert

June 19, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Back in the early 1970s, for a book titled What Is To Be Undone, I looked from deep within the Sixties but at a moment near its end, at the New Left movements of those times. I sought to discern flaws that needed to be transcended. I wondered was our mindset—our theory, strategy, and tactics—and were our methods, feelings, and choices sufficient to our revolutionary aims? Or, if they weren’t, why weren’t they and what could we do about it? 

Part One addressed the New Left students movement. Part Two, expands the focus to the New Left anti war movement, Weatherman, Black Liberation, and Women’s Liberation. It again seeks problems to overcome, not virtues to celebrate. 

The Sixties anti-war movement developed in parallel with the campus movement. Each affected, enlarged, and defined by the other. In the beginning people became involved mostly because they saw that the war was a heinous crime adversely affecting millions of people. Draft-card turn-ins, teach-ins, and marches were all deeply moving, involving affairs. 

During its earliest days becoming a member of the anti-war movement was a difficult almost existential choice requiring much serious thinking and risk. Joining often reflected or foreshadowed deep changes of political consciousness. We felt a continual push to express beliefs in action, but the steps were difficult. At its birth the movement had both solidarity and patience but its immediate popularity and growth, which should have been a great boon, proved problematic.

With time, joining demonstrations, handing out leaflets, and calling oneself an anti-war activist became less and less difficult, but regrettably their effects upon peoples’ beliefs and commitments also diminished. The movement’s size grew but the solidarity, understanding, and commitment of each member declined.

This, however, wasn’t the whole story; there were two bad trends at work, usually in opposition to one another and to what would have been good trends for a simultaneously growing and strengthening movement.

On the one hand movement activists made it as easy as possible for people to oppose the war by appealing to the most universal sentiments and avoiding many political issues; but on the other, they made it very difficult for people to stay actively against the war because they made significant participation depend upon espousal of a variety of often out of reach beliefs.

The dynamics had a schizoid property that hurt the movement in a two-edged way. Many people were driven away by the movement center’s tendency to ideologically and morally isolate itself; the rest, those who were brought in, were made rather peripheral by the movement’s tendency to be somewhat a-political about its beliefs even though continually espousing the need for making espousing correct lines a prerequisite for active membership.

People marched to influence the powers that be and in the process learned steadily more about the war, its roots, and the forces maintaining it. Before long a reasonable number of people knew something about imperialism and consequently something about the entire American system. In parallel, however, there also developed the “isolationist” part of the double edged trend described above. Either one was against imperialism or one’s so-called anti-warism was hypocrisy. One was against the whole American system or not really against the war. One supported the NLF or was not really against the war. One was against monogamy, for the Panthers, and hated liberals, or one was not really against the war. This is what one might in retrospect call the credentials or professionalization trend of the anti war movement’s core—the people who planned actions, wrote articles, gave speeches, and generally made decisions. 

Needless to say fewer and fewer people could keep pace with the list of necessary againsts and thereby stay in the more organized parts of the anti-war movement. They had to stay only on the edge of movement activity and were, between major demonstrations, rather inactive and demoralized. Who knows how many other people didn’t do anything active because though the anti war movement’s demand on commitment was actually lower than they’d have been willing to welcome, its demand on political, verbal adherence was higher than they could possibly handle?

Perhaps most ironic, for those who were in the organized movement the list of “againsts” was usually as much a ticket to legitimacy as it was a deeply felt set of operative values. For if it had been the latter, members would have succeeded in making the list a real part of their daily calculations, and further, would have understood the necessity for not over-demanding other people’s allegiances. Anti-war politics would still have been multi-issued but in styles speaking to people in ways they could relate to rather than in ways that isolated the left.

The reasons for these two-edged harmful dynamics were actually quite clear to some spectators if not to the participants themselves. Anti-war radicals had vested interests in growth as well as in having a unique position in society—we were the action and, most importantly, we had the new morality and got our sense of importance largely from that distinction between ourselves and others. Whenever the American people responded to movement efforts and went a bit to the left, ironically already active movement people got nervous about their identities remaining unique and made their positions more extreme and at the same time usually more unpalatable. 

On the one hand, we honestly tried to reach folks and “teach” them to oppose the war, but on the other hand we struggled to remain pure, aloof, and better. This again was the complicated two-edged trend.

Of course much of the movement’s leftward motion also reflected honestly growing awarenesses, but such growth was regrettably hardly ever adapted to the demands of building an ever stronger and larger movement. More often activists took their new knowledge and used it to elevate and enshrine themselves even while also trying to draw people to big demonstrations. We adopted new attitudes and styles (trashings, etc .) that often didn’t reflect insight and commitment so much as an abiding desire to gain self esteem by keeping a monopoly on “real dissent” and on the dissenting identity. 

The movement’s core was largely unreachable because at a certain level of consciousness it wanted to be unique and separate. The movement was on the one hand really massive demonstrations with a tremendous number of people sharing a variety of radical beliefs, and on the other hand, a very small subset of isolated masters, planners, and even rote workers, precisely because the movement’s every dynamic had the schizoid property of simultaneously attracting new people while also keeping most participants only peripheral. And the fact that no one in the movement acted quite so bad as the caricature here describes and that many acted diametrically opposite to that is basically irrelevant—for the movement had mass dynamics that tended to average away the good that we did and exacerbate the bad. The general effect of the whole anti-war movement was thus much as it would have been if most of its members, instead of just some, were trying largely to set themselves apart as more moral than all other people. So despite immense forces propelling ever more people to oppose the war including the educational efforts of the movement itself, the core of the truly everyday active anti-war movement did succeed in setting itself quite apart, much to everyone’s ultimate detriment.

The major anti-war strategy (the movement’s leaders who planned activities had it, though most of the people who attended them did not) was to end the war by raising its social costs at home. The strategy was to constantly increase the number of people opposing the war while simultaneously moving already actively opposed people toward ever greater and more militant activities. It recognized that rising disenchantment, the threat of increased worker politicization, and the growing radicalization of students, were all war policy costs which wise politicians would have to include in their cost-benefit calculations. The strategy was actually quite sound as far as it went. Most political hawks who turned dove indeed did so precisely because they felt that the war’s domestic costs to them were growing too great to bear. In the end, despite its overall weaknesses and its tendency to isolate itself, the anti-war movement did thus help to turn the country against the war, to keep Johnson from seeking reelection, to set back the bombing for sometimes prolonged periods, to reverse attempted escalations, to prevent really massive escalations like nuclear bombing, to narrow government, military, and propaganda options, and to finally create conditions requiring a settlement that was at least temporarily favorable for Vietnamese liberation forces.

The movement’s weakest link was not so much the strategy that guided its leaders as their incapacities to act on that strategy wisely and the resulting inadequacies that plagued all activities. So, looking to discern weaknesses, the movement didn’t deal with people in ways that would keep them going leftward. It didn’t turn growing dissent into effective organization and it could only reach wide constituencies in the most minimal ways. It didn’t create commitment so much as temporary allegiance. There was greater concern shown for quantity of effect than for quality of effect. Movement leaders frequently urged organizers to create drama and overplay the possible numbers of people attending demonstrations so as to bring everyone out. They didn’t talk too much about the development of real consciousness so that people would continue to be committed between demonstrations and work toward reaching ever broader audiences. Nor did they talk enough about how to make movement work quality work, how to give people new lasting insights into the nature of the war and the nature of America.

At its heart the anti-war movement was in a sense manipulative. It did not transmit strategic understanding to all its levels. It did not raise consciousness in irreversible ways. Most people never got to really participate in planning. What planning there was, was not deeply enough conceived and was hampered by tendencies to emphasize drama, being more moral, and winning now, while ignoring questions of how the American people actually felt about the war and about the movement. 

Most demonstrators perceived each event as just another failure, perhaps not during the immediate excitement of the event itself, but almost inexorably in the period immediately following. Most people had no really deep feeling for process—they saw no great changes in the state of the war, they saw no new constituencies creating strikes or other such actions, and so they gravitated toward the belief that nothing was being accomplished, and movement rhetoric often did more to foster these frustrations than to overcome them. (“If the government doesn’t stop the war; we’re going to stop the government.”) Finally most people had no real understanding of the immensity of the enemy and so they had a ridiculously disproportionate set of criteria for judging themselves and their movement. Did we win yet, rather than did we gain some on the road to eventually winning?

Some people fooled themselves into believing that they were always ‘winning now’ and others, in some ways correctly, always felt they weren’t, and eventually became demoralized and split. Only a few constantly kept a modest strategic sense of making gains a bit at a time in an inexorable but slow process. And, perhaps most striking, this last group did little or nothing to help the others achieve a new perspective, and in fact often gave dramatic speeches that fostered wrong approaches.

For example, at a national People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice criticism self-criticism session after the Mayday actions, the criteria for analysis of the effects of the demonstration should have been did the action realign government powers a bit in our favor; did it move immediate and distant spectators toward anti-war awarenesses; did it affect participants positively; and did it strengthen the movement? The answers should have been: perhaps a bit; a little yes, a little no; maybe; and no. The mood should have been self-critical but determined. The actual mood was different. 

No one set out concrete criteria for judgement. Everyone implicitly used variations of the extreme ‘did we win’ norm, even while many bemoaned the fact that that was the way the media were playing the whole thing: did we shut down the city or not? There was a lot of euphoria and back-patting. Some people convinced themselves the whole thing was great (a victory) and other people who thought it was not so good (a defeat) didn’t bother saying so for fear of being considered defeatist. PCPJ was like most other parts of the anti-war movement in that its criticism/self-criticism hardly ever led to lasting improvements.

The culmination of all these various dynamics seems to have come with the Cambodia invasion. Students did everything they felt they could and very few other people seemed to them to do much of anything. Anti-war people fell into the belief that the situation was quite hopeless—they alone didn’t have the power to win and no one else was making time to join them. And besides, now there were risks. You could be jailed or even killed. 

In the absence of solidarity and an understanding of real accomplishments, the chief emotion became fear. Anger and determination diminished and passivity increased. The movement became neither a fruitful nor fun place to be—at least for the great bulk of its people who weren’t central, didn’t travel, and didn’t contribute many ideas for strategy. 

The movement was debilitating because it made people act in competitive, arrogant, sneaky, and aloof ways, and besides it didn’t seem to pay off. Repression was becoming a real factor too. It was more and more difficult for people to keep active faith as they began to feel their daily behavior was becoming more and more oppressive. Life became alienated, success seemed impossible, and most of the movement’s attempts at good dynamics were replaced by extreme versions of the bad ways people had been taught to act in the society at large.

In essence the same dynamics hit the anti-war movement as had hit the student movement. People’s identities became tied up in their own righteousness and in subjective myths about the Vietnamese, themselves, and the enemy. People began fighting with each other because the enemy was too powerful, and at the same time people lost their abilities to be humble, sensitive, participatory, and patient. People went to the farm, gravitated back to school, became sectarian hangers-on, or in a few cases, usually because of advantages, knowledge, many friendships, experience, and some kind of steady income allowing full time participation, hung in. The latter are now (again, remember, this was published in 1974) struggling with the sectarians for leadership of the remnants of the organized anti-war movement. If they can succeed and overcome past inadequacies perhaps we will yet be able to help develop a movement that could force discontinuation of American support for Thieu, really develop an anti-imperialist awareness and presence, and insure that when the history of the sixties is told, it gives a correct perspective to the roles of both the left and the liberal United States establishment.

The anti-war movement succeeded because it had a patently clear cause and because it had energy, good will, and at least at the beginning, much solidarity and attractiveness. It was thus able to create an effective counter-force to United States imperialist designs, materially aid the Vietnamese cause, lift the level of United States political awareness, and demonstrate the possibility of effective United States leftist action. It failed, however, because it was authoritarian, because it refused to educate itself clearly about what it was doing and why it was doing it, because it refused to study the feelings and beliefs of the American people, because its members had weaknesses which were fostered and not countered, and because its members also had immense ego-problems. It failed because, having not asked the right questions about itself or about the American people, it was unable to formulate good programs. 

Thus the present (that is, early 1970s) absence of effective, relatively large on-going anti-imperialist organizations. The anti-war movement had essentially the same leaders, the same structures, the same constituencies and the same faults as the student movement. While students and middle-class people suffered considerably for ensuing imperfect dynamics, the Vietnamese, all third-world people, and America’s Blacks and poor bore the greatest long-run burdens of all temporary inadequacies of the left.

Next, the Weatherman movement was a kind of aberration that developed in the days when third-world heroes seemed actually godlike. If something is wrong, fight it; Since “the country sucks, kick ass.” 7

Weatherman was an aberration and yet it was also a logical extension of the sixties. If the Weather machine was moved by pathology, it was also moved by a most impressive commitment to fight injustice to whatever extent conditions demanded, that the sixties produced. In many ways Weather’s practice embodied the logical extension of the whole new left.

Weatherman had an ideology and its members functioned consistently within it. They recognized some of their middle-class upbringing weaknesses and tried to correct them. The main problem was that they were one-sidedly extremist about all they did.

Their strategy was based on the premise that most Americans are too tied up in their relative advantages to be willing to take revolutionary risks. In light of the way Weatherman approached people these expectations were rather self-fulfilling. 

To gain Weather-praise one essentially had to admit to being a white honky pig who was repentant and willing to give all for the welfare of the third world, and to then act like a guerilla facsimile of John Wayne. Weather people saw themselves as a kind of Vietcong front within the United States. They were the NLF, except of course that they had little of the NLF’s integrity, experience, discipline, patience, or preparedness, and certainly little of their dignity or empathy for other people’s perspectives.

Weather people believed in the raise-the-cost approach, but they felt effective mass militancy was impossible. They wanted a small Red Army, and though they damned just about everyone, they felt they and a few others could work ‘alongside’ the third-world masses. They favored violence and even terrorism, figuring it would attract those few with guts, and at the same time raise domestic costs and put everyone on notice as to what was coming. Their vision of revolution was a blazing tank. Their early attacks on working class kids, high schools, other movement groups, street gangs, and occasionally police stations, ROTC centers, or university fraternities showed just how far astray from rationality they would eventually deviate.

One had only to hear the upper-middle-class-authoritarian leather-jacketed leaders singing praises to the therapeutic values of violence to learn the Weather machine’s chief lesson: certain kinds of ‘uncritical’ even if rebellious thinking can pervert one to such extents that the resulting actions can be more a ‘people’s problem’ than even the actions of official authorities. Regrettably, to teach us this commonsense but important piece of wisdom, the Weather people took many very severe beatings and scared or alienated away a great many potential leftists. 

When general activism levels slowed, Weather people got somewhat more sophisticated and revolved their strategies around the idea of exemplary action—though still with a heavy emphasis on the inability of most people to respond positively. Essentially this was a useful rationale for doing whatever one wanted, coupled with an excuse for why it didn’t work, all worked out before the fact. 

The exemplary action idea always gains some sway among the more persevering parts of any epoch’s leftist movements. The idea was that bombings or ‘events’ of a militant kind could detonate favorable feelings in many who saw them. People could learn how possible it was to fight the behemoth. They would see that there were some people who had good values and guts and who intimated a better way of life.

That thought was in some ways a step toward, but only a small one. Weather people were just too out of touch to know what would push people to the left and what would push to the right. Certainly bombing bathrooms didn’t impress too many people with Weather abilities to smash the state, and emulating a toughed up James Dean didn’t impress many others with Weather potentials for living well or creating a better world. Indeed most people took away the impression that Weather people were a collection of maniacs who had lost all track of their own relations to reality, and who were tripping on a fantasy about their own importance.

That image, though slightly unfair, was by no means completely off base. For the Weather machine at its worst was the guy who got up in the middle of a meeting and gave a long dramatic rap worshipping the therapeutic effects of unrestrained violence, or the woman who got up and attacked all men for their pig natures, each in attempts not to educate but to score points. Or it was the militant who hurled a petty rock at a demonstration and then beat a hasty retreat while others who didn’t really know what was going on got trampled or caught by the police. It was a ‘heavy dude’ on the run from imaginary police pursuit, hiding out at one’s house, creeping around, not talking to anyone except to say that he was the Vietcong and then slipping out in the morning and eventually getting busted for ripping off underwear. 

At its worst the Weather machine was a band of toughs who on one day were a-cultural, anti-hippie, tight asses, and on the next, after some central committee decided on a new path, became a Kazoo Marching Band carrying chains instead of batons. When the Weather people were at their best and technically succeeding beyond even their own expectations with a bombing, or a fight, or a school disturbance, their main effect was to make people hate them and the left. The Weather people, at the cost of a few bathrooms, gave the government ample reason to extend its oppressive apparatuses in almost all its major cities. This was unquestionably a dubious achievement even if it had been accompanied by a significant growth on the left, which of course it wasn’t.

The Weather people had the same identity problems and the same tendencies toward extremism as everyone else but as they made quite clear, they also had more ‘guts’ for carrying their errors all the way through to their logical ends. They saw revolution and repression behind every door. They bounced from one side of each false dichotomy to the other, never once finding the solid revolutionary ground in the middle.

Yet many Weather people were society’s best trained, most confident, most educated, and (initially) most sensitive and caring youth, but the dynamics they encountered and created were overwhelming. They rebelled against society’s discipline but made that rebellion a fetish even in their own organizations. They rightfully discovered that a fear of violence could be debilitating but they pushed on to worship violence as virtuous behavior which should be ‘pushed out’ in almost all circumstances. They screamed about America’s gross machismo and then became crudely macho-violent themselves. They decided that monogamy had weaknesses, moved on to decide that it was totally wrong, and then created a kind of tribal dynamic that forced people into a self-destructive brand of sexist polygamy. 

The Weather Machine’s extreme living tactics convinced many that even justifiable attempts at altering life styles were recklessly worthless. And finally, Weather militance and Weather hostility pushed the machine further and further away from the rest of the left until they lived in a kind of self-created paranoiac guerrilla dream world that had little relation to the on-going realities of American life—except for the fact that as Weather behavior became more extreme, they were indeed isolated and repression did grow until their dreams became self-fulfilling nightmares. The waste of talent, emotion, and life that was Weatherman’s result is a crime for which everyone in the new left is partially responsible.

“The human race in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” 8

The Weather people were not totally alone in a willingness to take things to an extreme and camp on the fringes of reality. Youth culture, San Francisco, rock, drugs, and new colorful lifestyles with loose mores were all part of a supra-political attempt at revolution. The initial strategy was quite ingenious. American lifestyles have pain, alienation, and obvious inconsistency. American institutions are inhuman and the culture is plastic. People want love, self-esteem, and involvement but are forced to settle for debilitating substitutes. 

The youth culture would carve out an existence for itself based on humane, loving values and thus be irresistible. It would spoof and confront all that was bad and do it entertainingly. It would reach people through their hearts and their funny bones. Rather than trying to out compute the American computer or out fight the American army the youth culture would pull out the plug of the first and flower-power the second to death.

Yippieism initially had a good understanding of American consciousness, a good feel for some ways to reach it, and tremendously invigorating energy to sustain the whole effort. The Yippies contributed humor and creativity to the New Left. They awakened a national awareness of the ills of alienation, commercialism, authoritarianism, and competition. The Yippies were products of the land they hated and their own bad traits were overlooked and were thus eventually able to subvert the good they were doing. 

The Yippie lifestyle offered many new ways but it also only refurbished a few of the old ones. Competitiveness and liberalism were both diminished, freedom was emphasized, honesty was a high virtue, and believing in things that help people rather than in things that hurt was the primary admission ticket. Life became more colorful, light, and fun, and especially for men Yippie styles overcame a number of competitive habits that had previously forced alienation upon people. But women were still largely supposed to serve men, if anything in more grotesque caricatures than ever before. For now there had to be colorful clothes and liberated smiles and free sex along with an adoring deference for the still male god. Women were allowed only in a lower echelon of participation as “our women.” The continuation and even elaboration of sexism in Yippiedom was one of its chief weaknesses—as the going got tough that one bad trait helped resurrect a great many others until Yippie originality was finally inundated by the Americanisms inside the Yippies.

As with all other strategic attempts, when repression and cooptation became tough, approaches were polarized more and more toward old ways of doing things. As soon as the Yippie identity was threatened, a jocularly critical approach was replaced by a haughty put-on superiority and the trend continued in every area. Yippies began joining with Weather people, violence was wholeheartedly adopted, the more sensitive hippies dropped out of the drop-out; outlaw styles of anti-rationality, toughness, and dirtiness began flourishing. 

Disease and drugs took a heavy toll. The whole affair ended in a rather dismal mess. Haight Ashbury moved from being the result of an effort to create a place that could teach people new ways, to being a youth slum that could only attract the most hopelessly disaffected. A group of people originally into sharing everything became so destructively critical that they could hardly share anything with anybody. The only tastes that mattered were their own and they too became more and more irrational. A group that was going to ride people’s funny bones to their consciousness was in the end considered arrogant, elitist, sexist, self-centered, divorced from reality, and often just totally obnoxious.

Here again, it was partly because people were much too head strong. Yippies were unable to develop flexible identities and methods. They couldn’t simultaneously balance criticisms from outside, accepting the wise and ignoring the badly motivated, and they couldn’t aim their communication to where people actually were. 

The Yippies were therefore not confident or wise enough to pursue their intuitions in the face of establishment repression and cooptation, or in the face of leftist baits urging them on toward heavier positions. The Yippies didn’t have and couldn’t give each other enough humble self-confidence. For all their insight they didn’t know enough about themselves or America, they underestimated their enemies, and they didn’t have any real methods for improving their own deficiencies.

 Although the make-them-laugh approach could never really have eliminated all the “colossal humbugs” and all the colossal powers behind those, as a partial element in an overall process it could have been much more effective than it finally was. Perhaps most contributory to their decline, the initial Yippie disposition toward ‘happy tactics’ didn’t stem from conscious respect for traditional American lifestyles or for traditional Americans. 

In the beginning most Yippies had intuitively humanistic aspirations but very little understanding of why American people act as they generally do. In the beginning Yippies had enthusiastic faith in people generally, and when there was no pressure to defend their new styles, they evinced no hostility toward the ‘jumbled’ ways in which normal people were trying to deal with their own problems. But as time went on the Yippies were forced to distance themselves more and more from the mainstream so as to have clear, strong, identities. They inevitably became disdainful of everyone else—-they never developed a solid understanding of other people’s motivations and so under pressure became intolerant of them. They grew to like themselves and no one else. And they really had few other options, they didn’t have enough awareness to retain self-respect while at the same time also respecting the contradictory attitudes of other Americans. 

As a result Yippie efforts to talk to others became constrained and patronizing. They were no longer trusting guides. They became arrogant, sloppy critics who had less and less to offer. Yippie ideology and behavior threatened mainstream America’s identity while having few redeeming traits and so the Yippies gradually became a favorite target for abuse and even violence. 

The Yippies rejected patriotism, the police, puritan sexuality, the work and success ethic, consumerism, education, and the assumed goodness of the American social order continually more and more strenuously and with less and less sensitivity, as well as with diminishing abilities to offer any attractive alternatives. 

They pulled the rug out from under people’s self-images without offering any ways for people to otherwise stand erect. What solutions they offered were totally unworkable for most Americans, and in the end even for themselves. They were critical in sectarian rather than in loving ways and it worsened with time. They did not speak in ways people could understand and then act upon. The Yippies started by trying to build a new way of living based upon communal love. They ended by telling kids that the only way they could become revolutionaries was to jettison their parents. Recruitment lagged. 9

[ I interject: As I consider my feelings and thoughts about elements of the New Left published 55 years ago, I notice one important missing observation. It was all so incredibly fast. We went from apolitical to political, and from political to revolutionary in a virtual eye blink, not over years and decades. That surely had impact. But what I noticed more, was the absence of views about what exists, or what we wanted, or how we would work to get it, that could protect us against the kinds of flaws we suffered. We lacked insights, perspectives, and methods suitable to our circumstances to guide our choices. I wasn’t alone in feeling that lack. Many looked hard for such views in the lives, writings, actions, and methods of past revolutionaries. Some thought they found what would be needed and became advocates of various stances from the past. I looked there too, but I wondered, what new did we need? What did we have to undo from the past in order to arrive at revolutionary commitments that suited our circumstances, assets, debits, and hopes?]

The chapter continued: The Yippie experience teaches mostly the same lessons as the Weather one. The dynamics of rebellion are risky. The sole criterion of value can’t be only the idea of winning or losing now. Without humble self-confidence and patience leftists are often likely to become their own worst enemies, hated as well by the people they are trying to reach. Without methods for understanding what one is doing and why, and what its effects are on all concerned, one’s activities are probably going to do as much harm as good. Without real understanding and empathy, communication is impossible; creativity and love of self is simply not enough. The enemy is too big to be brought down by a group of clever comedians. 10

But the Yippie experience also taught many people much about social interaction and about the importance of dealing with interpersonal dynamics effectively. It taught the importance of confronting the totality of American life, including its cultural, sexual, artistic, and spiritual sterility. But it especially taught that even as youth, we were not as incorruptible as we would have liked to think. 11 

Next, the new left Black movement was in many ways the core element of sixties activism. Beginning with the participatory Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and extending through various nationalist groups to the avowedly revolutionary Black Panthers, the Black left was the most militant, most politically experienced, and most forcefully opposed. Its contributions in helping reawaken Black political awarenesses, advancing consciousnesses of racism, forging new Black goals and identities, and aiding the Vietnamese through anti-war activity especially within the Army itself, were immense. Its chief teachings are the viability of radical activism, the centrality of racism to all United States political possibilities, and the need for revolution if United States Blacks are ever to fully achieve liberated existences. 

To have accomplished so much in so few years, despite the “legal” police murders of over a hundred activists, and despite imprisonment of hundreds more, armed invasions of offices, and immense police infiltration programs is remarkable testimony to the power of an organized opposition force. Nonetheless, as with all other New Left groups, frequent successes were accompanied by many failures, and at least sometimes the reasons for failure were internal rather than police-imposed. In this section we discuss only the Black Panthers as they were the best-organized and most avowedly revolutionary of all the various Black organizations. 

The Panthers started with an empathy for their people and for their own plight that was much deeper than any comparable views held by white groups. They understood why oppressed Blacks frequently act in self-defeating ways and even had some grudging respect for all kinds of survival tactics. They dealt with the problems of being baited by racists and therein developed strong racial self-images. The early Panthers (which is to say SNCC, Malcolm X and more) were aware enough so that no pressure would make them become racist, either against whites or against their own people. They understood the nature of racist tendencies and where they came from and were able to control them. The early Panthers knew that racism against whites was a dead end and were able to incorporate the awareness into their own behaviors. They also had significant roots in the Black ghetto and thus a real feeling for the day to day needs of their people. Their ten-point program was one of the few concrete political programs espoused by any part of the United States new left and itself makes clear many of the injustices the Black movement opposed and brought into public awareness:

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
4. We want decent housing fit for shelter for human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from the military service.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

But the Panthers didn’t have so powerful a grasp of insights concerning—nor the capacities to deal with—the ills of sexism and authoritarianism, and therein, as we will see, lay the roots of much of their weakness.

The Panthers chose a series of tactics that were in some sense schizoid—“we’ll increase our support with serve the people programs and newspapers, but also by showing how tough we are and how well we can deal with the man.” During their early days when they chose to go to the California State House armed, they sealed their ultimate fate. For though they had the self-awareness around race necessary to ward off bad racist tendencies, they could not do the same with their macho and sexist tendencies.

The line was a direct one from the glorious state house ‘show’ to eventual isolation in small armed camps daily attacked by the police. The Panthers formed authoritarian organizations and these fostered all the bad tendencies that hierarchical societies inevitably give to their citizens. The organizations became more and more authoritarian and the leaders lost touch with reality, tripping out on their own inflated visions of their self-importance. 

As latent aggressive, hostile attitudes poured forth unchecked, they had to be rationalized and incorporated into the whole Panther ideology. The Panther image grew inextricably entwined with militance, toughness, and courage. They grew more and more isolated. Their worship of revolutionary suicide was only slightly less ridiculous than the Yippie plan for parenticide. With isolation and militance came inevitable repression. There was no great defensive upsurge because there was no great empathy for a group that seemed bent only on violence. The image of Eldridge Cleaver strutting through Congress with John Stennis’ head on a platter did not overly entrance this country’s Black population. 

The Panther understanding of the need to build a base in the ghetto was offset by members’ inabilities to effectively organize, and to stave off their own tendencies toward machismo. Overall, the Panthers went the same way every other group of the sixties had gone, wonderful beginnings, through bad times, to polarizing defensive tactics and self-images, to severe inner strife, arrogance, and external obscurity. 

They were stronger and had better intuitions than white groups, but their enemies were also better armed and more eager to repress. The final responsibility for the deaths of many Black Panthers and the incarceration of countless others rests first with the state and society. The immediate proximate responsibility rests with a strategy that lost track of itself and got caught up in self-indulgent rationalization.

Next, the New Left Women’s movement went essentially the same routes as the male led elements. Myths had it that women would be able to avoid competitive strife because of the types of oppression to which they’d been subject, their long-standing low position in society, and their gut understanding of machismo’s harmfulness. 

Ostensibly since women were arising in a defiance of competitive machismo, their movements wouldn’t have to worry about succumbing to its particular dynamics. In fact this belief was a great error. Every group in the United States has potential for every kind of oppressor/oppressed behavior. Everyone raised here has to one degree or another been affected by surrounding environments and thereby picked up countless bad traits, some of which dominate behaviors, some of which are only subtly active, and many of which most often only lie dormant awaiting opportunities to emerge. 

The difference between one United States group’s identity and any other’s is that for each, good and bad traits occur in different combinations, and in connection with different sets of emotional feelings and needs. Women are thus generally oppressed and reticent in company of men until they understand their oppression and start opposing it. Once that occurs, however, the situation alters drastically and so do behaviors.

When women began rebelling in the mid-sixties, they developed fine intuitions about the nature of American male-female relations, about what a woman’s movement could include, and about what it could do. The first activists had tremendous empathy with their sisters’ needs and emotions, and tremendous enthusiasm due to their new self-images and imminent liberation. They had participatory, non-competitive, anti-authoritarian aims. But at the same time their respect for other non-movement women’s efforts to survive through capitulation was none too great, and their defensiveness concerning things male-related was still quite strong.

Initially women formed consciousness-raising groups for understanding their own oppressions and the circumstances of the society in which they lived. They used very effective militant ways to confront movement men about machismo, sexism, and competitiveness. They successfully ‘rediscovered’ the heritage of United States feminist activism and began hammering out a new type of aware, strong, female personality. But at the same time there were growing problems of male attacks and difficulties of movement growth. 

The early activists reached middle class women effectively enough but had neither the time nor the experience to think effectively enough about reaching working-class women. Women’s group discussions became highly self-centered. In time there were external attacks from movement men ridiculing feminism, even assaulting women, and always calling on them to spend their time more effectively: “instead of challenging our leadership, follow it.” Under these attacks left women strengthened their identities regrettably by tying them ever more completely into the most ‘radical’ conceptions they could formulate. Movement women lost touch with non-movement women who didn’t think as they did. They had no patience for any men, even for those who were really trying to understand, but had not quite made it yet. 

Movement women simply refused to recognize their own tendencies towards the kinds of behavior they hated in their male counterparts. They didn’t admit they would often manipulate meetings, degrade opponents, compete amongst themselves, and generally create the same bad kinds of dynamics that men create when they hold themselves to be superior.

Inside the movement, dominant women began developing oppressor roles and reticent women began gravitating toward more passive ones. By and large the new oppressors determined the movement’s public images precisely because they were its most energetic members. Hierarchy began to rule.

Movement women were unable to develop firm enough understandings of their own backgrounds and their own weaknesses and strengths. They were unable to create flexible identities. They couldn’t be careful and patient about developing new modes of actions in the urgency to rush their efforts. They worried about being oppressive and spent countless hours discussing it but didn’t fully understand all its potentials for occurring and had, like the rest of the new left, no tools for effectively warding it off. 

They didn’t formulate programs in an unhurried, objective way and in time that omission cost them severely. They espoused heavy-handed criticisms of monogamy and then had to act on those criticisms to their own detriments. They glorified lesbianism and found themselves pushed hard by lesbians who had views different from those of many other women in the movement. The developing dissensions caused many problems and disaffected many potential adherents.

The movement had no tools for adequately understanding the tremendous rush of new situations which pressed upon it. It developed hierarchies of womanliness which gave some people distinct powers over other people. There were the ins, the partials, and the outs. Like the members of all other New Left groups, women were unable to perceive their identities independent from immediate actions; they were unable to act in accord with their ideology’s own dictates.

Under assault by society and the male part of the movement women activists took the same road as all their male compatriots. They began getting their self-images from believing in their own worths as compared to other people’s weaknesses. Who is the purest liberationist? Who is the best? Leaders and followers emerged. The leaders were implicitly regarded as better than the followers and ipso-facto had more privileges, and the followers in the movement were similarly better than everyone else outside it. Everyone could see, feel, but do almost nothing about these dynamics because they were too deeply rooted. Women’s groups began planning demonstrations, meetings, and newspapers that lacked sensitivity and organization and almost always contained competitive dynamics.

And yet even with its various weaknesses the New Left women’s movement unleashed a tremendous force in the United States. It helped many people develop understandings of the dynamics of sexism and authority and of what men and women could and someday would be like. It gave countless women new understandings of their histories and present lives, and new goals for their future efforts. It brought people into motion, but regrettably it was a motion that didn’t yet incorporate enough of the critical anti-authoritarian, anti-sexist lessons on which it was premised. 

The New Left Women’s Movement “ended” in a kind of disorganized frustration with only the non-revolutionary elements maintaining significant organizational strength. Nevertheless overall women’s political awareness was still on the rise, and the potential for a truly effective, anti-sexist, revolutionary organized feminist left seemed great.

[As I considered the experience, from deep within, in the early 1970s, to my eyes] the New left was internally without a strategy. It had ego problems, it wasn’t adequately self-conscious, and it was immature. It judged practice by asking very narrowly either how much motion was accomplished or how much was created. There was little understanding of sustained process or of patient struggle towards growth. Hierarchies fostered people’s worst traits, competition thrived; people’s politics got tied to their identities in ways leading to extreme sectarianism. There was no powerful guiding ideology. Practice was intuitive and generally very problematic. It made many gains but often incurred even greater costs.

The results were predictable: morale and effectiveness declined together. Either people left depressed, or stayed but usually became caricatures of what they had hoped to be. And yet even with all this the American left of the Sixties had many important successes. It was struggling against the strongest enemy any left has ever encountered, both in the state apparatus and in its cultural socialization processes. Despite the great odds, it created an effective counter-force to the Vietnam war, a growing American awareness of America’s weaknesses and of the viability of protest, and an understanding within the left itself of the multiplicity of oppressions that is America, and of the complexity of the problems confronting modern revolutionaries. In this last category, perhaps most important of all, it put sexism, racism, authoritarianism, and general interpersonal dynamics on the revolutionary agenda on equal footing with class struggle.

Though at times indulgent, irresponsible, and even ‘pathological,’ the new left of the sixties did make honest courageous attempts to confront the totality of America’s injustices. If it failed to create a viable lasting revolutionary movement, it did at least create some new awareness and a bedrock of experience upon which such a movement can likely soon be constructed. It certainly did much more than anyone could have predicted at the time of John F. Kennedy’s election. Despite the sacrifice, the errors, and the losses, the efforts, because of the future left activity they prefigure and provide a base for, were well worth it.

But even our very brief presentation [from 1974] shows that to grow anew the left needs a new and enlarged political consciousness which can among other things:

• Understand our society’s institutional, cultural, and ideological relationships, identify those that are truly oppressive, those that are largely neutral, and those that are potentially useful to liberation, and then understand all their various interrelations.

• Understand revolutionaries and all social groups with respect to how they are oppressed by, how they rebel against, acquiesce to, and even in part support their oppressions, and thus how they might be affected by changes in their environments—and most specifically by changes caused by revolutionary activities.

• Understand future goals and means of transition well enough to posit short term programs and strategies suitable to all local contexts and incorporative of the knowledge of the two points above.

Our analysis also shows that to accomplish such ends any new politics will have to take account of and explain racism; sexism; hierarchy; authority; and consciousness in general and at concrete local interpersonal levels; and to explain effectively all the more traditionally addressed material politico-economic relationships.

The left needs a better consciousness than it had in the Sixties. What it then knew intuitively it must crystallize now; what it then didn’t know it must learn now. 

So that ends the two-part excerpt from 1974’s What Is To Be Undone. Even if it made sense in the early 1970s—does it really apply now as well?

In the Sixties good people, sincerely aroused and motivated, took on society’s defining relations to attain something better. While arguably the best minds and hearts of our generation accomplished many things, we certainly did not win a new society. Worse, we did not keep growing, getting smarter, and getting stronger. A half century latter: Trump. Any readers who think that in my search for weaknesses I was too harsh, notice that fifty years on: Trump.

A guiding ideology should prevent decay and dissolution. So, in the Seventies, and now too, it makes sense to ask why didn’t we win, or, more realistically given the brief duration of the Sixties movements, why didn’t our efforts persist and keep growing in following years and decades? 

Can we find reasons in the ideology of the movements and that many of their committed participants turned to in coming years for why we didn’t do better? Did classical Marxism, Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism have answers we missed or we bungled so we need to return to those stances, modestly adapted, as many now suggest. Or were those stances seriously faulty? Surely we should look. And contrary to what most say on encountering an attempt to look, we should hope to succeed in finding faults. We should hope to find problems that we can transcend with new thought, actions, and, yes, new ideology. 

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Michael Albert

Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.