There is not much point in trying to compare, especially for me since I don't have much of a grip on what's going on now, except thru EPI's work with the Living Wage and Sweatshop movements. In re: what's happening now on campuses, I'm about 20 years out of date. I can explain the source of my hunches.
When I went back to grad school in 1981 I was struck by the contrast. Coming to Rutgers orientation day in 1967, there was an array of booths set up by different left student groups. There was SANE, a local radical group, SDS, and a couple of others. Coming to U of Md in 81', there was an array of Christian fundamentalist groups on display but no lefts to be seen. A table on world hunger.
There was a CISPES group on campus at U/Md but that was pretty much it. I went to one event by the generic left student group that did not impress. They got their keynote speaker from downtown (D.C.), some guy who claimed to be a nuclear physicist and sounded like a perfect idiot.
NN continues to conflate anti-bureaucrat with anti-worker, using the highly ungeneralizable example of Cockburn. And he sez labor-oriented activists of the 60's (which ended in about 1973) saw workers abstractly and in ultimatist terms, rather than being sensitive to bread and butter issues. Utter nonsense. Some approached workers on bread-and-butter terms, others w/a marxist message, but the key difference is that these people WENT OFF CAMPUS. They did not remain in the comfortable social confines of student activism.
I think the radicalism of the 60's compared to today makes some of you young'uns uncomfortable. You magnify the aberrant and negative aspects, of which there were many, discount the positive, and sound like a reincarnation of the YPSL.
I would also hazard the guess that another difference is that the 60's lefts thought in terms of a change of life, not how to manage their progressive concerns in a practical way. There was the expectation, however foolish, of some actual break in history, of an imminent conjuncture with extraordinary possibilities. It was the greatest thing that almost happened. This helps to explain why we talk about it ad nauseum.
mbs
The GenXers I meant were just young activists who resented the hell out of baby boomers always bemoaning the "lack of activism" by young people, while ignoring both the real activism happening and the changed economic pressures of sky-high tuition, debt and other realities facing many young activists, especially activists of color. When I was at Berkeley, I was always amazed at some of the leaders of the affirmative action movement, many of them young women of color working 20 hours plus per week plus spending time taking care of family problems, all the while fighting to keep their university from declaring them unfit to be admitted. While Max can argue for the seriousness of many New Left activists (and they were), there is an understandable resentment, even contempt by many young activists towards a movement that seemed able to drop out of the workforce for years and not expect to be completely screwed economically.
While not all young activists are hard-core union advocates, you almost never hear the contempt a Cockburn or others do for union leaders looking out for the wage interests of their members. There is an environmental consciousness among most younger activists without the antiworkerist attitudes that often laced New Left rhetoric. Even the "serious" activists Max highlights took workers seriously mostly for their abstract role as the engine of revolution, not for their more limited but vital-for-members role of protecting their wages in the here-and-now.
I was amazed during the 90s as strikes came in the Bay Area how supportive young activists were of union actions that they had barely been exposed to. I remember walking one picketline with a staff member friend of the local Hotel/Restaurant Employees union where there were a large number of latino high school activists walking the line. We joked that, unlike older activists, these young folks didn't know unions weren't supposed to be fighting militant battles. This was a commentary on the lameness of many unions over the years, but it was also a commentary on the anti-union attitudes of a lot of older activists who assumed unions weren't worth the trouble, while these younger latino kids "didn't know any better" and were out here fighting with the unions.
-- Nathan Newman