...1973-1976: Major Bumps in the Road
Between 1973 and 1976, all these factors [successful capitalist maneuvers to regain the initiative; the weakness of the socialist tradition within the U.S. working class; the widespread consensus behind an essentially pro-imperialist version of patriotism; the pervasive racial fault lines that, among other things, lead many white workers to believe they have more in common with their white exploiters than their nonwhite coworkers; and an entrenched two-party, winner-take-all electoral arrangement that erects tremendous structural obstacles to radicalism's ability to gain a stable footing in the political system] began to make themselves felt, checking the momentum of Third World Marxism.
The Energy Crisis of 1973-74, followed by the recession of 1974-75, was central to this process. The slump was the worst since the Great Depression; unemployment reached its highest point in thirty-five years. But contrary to left-wing expectations, the downturn did not produce an outpouring of worker militancy or a new wave of radicalization. Rather, it played a role that recessions have often played in the history of capitalism, "disciplining" the working class, exacerbating intraclass divisions, and narrowing many workers' vision to issues of immediate survival. Furthermore, the slump led to massive layoffs in auto, steel, and other key industries. Those expelled from the plants included a disproportionate share of those workers most open to left politics, young workers and, especially, young black workers. Most of the rank-and-file insurgencies that had spread through various unions between 1968 and 1973 lost ground or collapsed.
Simultaneously, a massive government/media campaign to blame the slump on the oil-producing countries of the Middle East fueled jingoism among broad layers of the population. While the Energy Crisis was a product of market manipulation by the big oil transnationals, it was convenient for the establishment to target the Arab countries that had briefly conducted a selective oil embargo against the United States for backing Israel in the 1973 Middle East war and then followed the embargo by a price hike. (Iran, a supporter of Israel, also endorsed the higher oil prices for economic reasons and in order to obtain additional Western weapons.) Abuse was heaped especially on "the Arabs" and "Third World radicals." This crusade tapped into the resentment millions felt at what they believed to be the "humiliation" of the United States' forced withdrawal from Southeast Asia.
This propaganda offensive was not effectively countered by the broad coalition that had opposed the war in Vietnam. The antiwar movement's radical wing celebrated the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement and the 1975 final revolutionary victory as important blows to imperialism and tried to get this message out. But other political actors had protested the war mainly because "American boys" had been dying in combat and consequently did not oppose the new casualty-free jingoist campaign. Worse, the grip of Zionism on U.S. politics (especially on mainstream liberalism) meant that many who in the late 1960s had been in opposition to Washington's Vietnam adventure joined in whipping up anti-Arab hysteria.
The toll was all the heavier because many sixties activists had been drawn into a new liberal-led effort to reform the Democratic Party by 1973 to 1975. George McGovern's successful bid for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination was the most visible expression of this new initiative that tried hard to enlist white college students, liberal feminists and, to a lesser extent, the emerging layer of African American elected officials. Suddenly the "traditional channels" that had seemed irreversibly closed in 1968 appeared to reopen, and many of the constituencies Third World Marxists hoped to reach saw opportunities here to achieve at least some of their objectives. Especially as militant grassroots activity began to ebb in the black freedom movement and the student movement (after more than a decade of near continuous flow), many sixties veterans tried to seize these opportunities without adequate consideration of their complexities (for example, how to successfully keep an independent power base while participating in an alliance led by procapitalists?)....
Max Elbaum, a former member of SDS, was active in the new communist movement in the 1970s and 1980s and was the managing editor of Crossroads magazine in the 1990s. He is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (2002)....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v082/82.1elbaum.html> <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v082/82.1elbaum.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] *****
_Revolution in the Air_: <http://revolutionintheair.com/>. -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>