>On Behalf Of Tom Lehman
> > The issue of the working class was bitterly
> > contested within the new left. Generalizations
> > on this count are baseless. The do your own
> > thing stuff is from Time magazine, not
> > history.
No, it's not history, it's constant and still present with all sorts of folks like Cockburn et al declaring it some kind of left fascism for window-smashers in Seattle to be challenged for refusing to subordinate their "do your own thing" anarchism to a common, coordinated action and mass message.
I have spent years in meetings where so-called anarchists demanded endless meetings to establish "consensus" on all actions, then when the police showed up, declared their individual right to rumble with the cops, irregardless of whatever decisions were made at meetings planning the action.
As for the late 60s, most older leftists I have talked to or personal accounts I have ever read themselves detail an endless parade of sub-groups acting out on their own, making a virtue of spontaneous defiance of any broad strategy. Some activists reacted to that chaos by going the other direction into the narrow "party-building" of sectarian groups that thrived in the 1970s. But those sectarian groups, while theoretically dedicated to coordinated action, in many ways just recreated the same destructive inter-left combat on a new, nastier level of combat.
Sure, the issue of the working class was contested-- I specifically cited the admirable work of the International Socialists, but the point was that there was an overwhelming message of contempt for "labor bureaucrats", "labor aristocracies" and theories of "new social movements" that cited the end of workers as a focus for social change. That's not from Time magazine but from New Left political leaders and allied intellectuals. Now, some of the analysis behind the rhetoric was important and needed, but the political application was largely devisive and self-defeating.
In many ways, the best results of the New Left all came from its collapse, as the more dedicated shards of the movement began organization-building in specific communities or nationally along specific issue lines. Citizen Action organizations, environmental groups and other organizations proliferated in the 70s, often achieving substantive advances. But the seeds of progressive defeat were still there, since all those individual organizing efforts were left uncoordinated, even as the New Right kept organizing a coordinated assault on all progressive achievements.
Of course, generalizations can be challenged; I was challenging the generalization that the 60s left can be considered a success or that we should be excited that activism today might be resembling that era.
-- Nathan Newman