Tom
Nathan Newman wrote:
> >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