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I know that you take very seriously the idea of continuity throughout the history of American radicalism. When we talk about radical continuity, it seems to me we're talking about how deeply the memory and traditions of our radical past have stretched into the present, in such a way as to, consciously or not, inspire and educate current efforts for social change. It's certainly the case that radical continuity is visible in certain places. Take, for instance, the anti-war protests earlier this year: not only did they draw heavily on the experiences of the sixties in terms of organization and symbols, but many of the participants were veterans of those earlier struggles. But it's also the case-and it seems most visible in the labor movement-that older traditions of militancy, solidarity, and class-consciousness, embodied by organizations such as the IWW, the Socialist Party, and the early CIO, have left a much weaker pull on the present. How strong and how important is radical continuity for us, and what parts of our radical past do you see as most important to draw on for lessons and for inspiration today?
Continuity offers a difficult question with no easy answer, for a reason persistent in US radical activity: demographic transformation. What does the history of the fundamentally Euro-American labor movement mean for African Americans (when not excluded outright, nearly always relegated to its lower rungs), or to newer Latino and Asian immigrants? It remains to be established because we aren't now seeing the moments of solidarity that recall the best of the legacies.
On the other hand, there is much current interest in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), for the best reasons. It was at once egalitarian, bohemian, completely rebellious, and made its influence felt more through songs and slogans, heroes and martyrs, than organizational strength. Joe Hill is now better remembered than the thuggish-racist George Meany (let alone successor Lane Kirkland, his name unknown to an estimated 97 percent of the AFL-CIO members who he ruled). My urging of Wobbly legacies now is prompted by the pervasive sense that if strikes can be won and unions rebuilt, let alone a wider social movement created, Wobbly-like solidarity with the new immigrants is the most crucial factor.
Nearly all the particular struggles of the 1960s, as well, seem to be fading into memory except for civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. This is fascinating because the current, standard liberal (and conservative) treatment of the era, from opinion columns to television mini-series, has affirmed a "safe" interpretation of civil rights as a call for meritocracy, rather than a "freedom movement" with a broader cause; opposition to the war, especially the impolite opposition in demonstrations, is viewed as inherently excessive, irrational and anti-American. Even those who improbably claim a part in the antiwar legacy, from Robert McNamara to the older intellectuals around /Dissent/ magazine who blistered campus activists with attacks throughout the period, seem determined to make a similar distinction. Some protest, strictly acceptable to (say) the Americans for Democratic Action, is proper; the unguarded action of young people like the whole New Left was improper and, in the words of a recent /New York Times /reviewer, "almost as bad" as the US invaders of Vietnam!
"Black Power," like the Black/Jewish conflict used by demagogues on both sides (far more successfully by neoliberal and neoconservative Jewish elites, of course), has now been refracted by the Latino surge, whose diversity makes even "Chicano" seem a word from a long time ago. Lamentably, "feminist" is a word that not many young women want to hear-attaching it, as they seem to do, to the Glass Ceiling rather than social transformation-and "gay" or "lesbian" has become more lifestyle, albeit including an important appeal for tolerance, than political message. "Homocons" and black conservatives are the most heavily promoted political figures of the Right, and likely to remain so, along with hawk-liberals like Jean Bethke Elshtain, and the handful of erstwhile New Leftists who have, since the 1970s, become boosters for a sweeping global military crusade. /Left Hook/ readers may want to troll the Website of First of the Month to see how bizarre the craving for militarization has become in some quarters, and what strange claims are made upon the 1960s to justify it. Then again, most of this sounds pretty much like the Congress of Cultural Freedom intellectuals, during the 1950s, enthusing at the military coup in Guatemala and adamantly refuting charges that African Americans weren't receiving fair trials in the South. They, too, claimed to be defending democracy against totalitarianism-and making a good living for themselves in the process.
What remains from older struggles may be best symbolized in the timeless struggle against Empire and imperial militarization of life everywhere, in the name of planetary survival, egalitarianism, and real human freedom (not just "civic society," the 1990s favorite recipe for the unhindered accumulation of capital). This is not so far, after all, from the older visions of socialists, communists, feminists, etc., well articulated by Woody Guthrie in bygone days, Tony Kushner now. It's no surprise to read savage attacks on /Angels in America/, very much in the old /Commentary/Partisan Review/ fashion, in the pages of the /New Republic/ or /New York Review of Books/: they firmly believe that they own culture, and the perceive accurately that Kushner's popularity and critical acclaim is dangerous to that claim. Even the specifics echo the rage at Arthur Miller, and the ravings of Robert Warshow against Carl Foreman's biting social commentary in High Noon, or again, Pauline Kael's endless attack on leftwing films from /Salt of the Earth/ to anything at all directed by Martin Ritt. She (and they) didn't need to see a film or play to hate it; they only had to look at the credits to smell subversion, invariably described as bad aesthetics.
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