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:
- We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
- We want full employment for our people.
- We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
- We want decent housing fit for shelter for human beings.
- 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.
- We want all Black men to be exempt from the military service.
- We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
- We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
- 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.
- 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.
