[lbo-talk] New New Left?

Max Sawicky sawicky at verizon.net
Wed Nov 9 11:25:49 PST 2011


On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Jordan Carroll <jordanscarroll at gmail.com>wrote:


> Maybe it's because I'm filtering everything through my prelim reading list
> but, as I read the debates over Occupy Oakland, I keep coming back to a
> passage from *The Armies of the Night* by Norman Mailer:
>
> The New Left was drawing its aesthetic from Cuba. The revolutionary idea
> which the followers of Castro had induced from their experiences in the
> hills was that you created the revolution first and learned from it,
> learned of what your revolution might consist and where it might go out of
> the intimate truth of the way it presented itself to your experience... The
> idea behind these ideas was then obviously that the future of the
> revolution existed in the nerves and cells of the people who created it and
> lived with it, rather than the sanctity of the original idea.... The
> aesthetic of the New Left now therefore began with the notion that the
> authority could not comprehend nor contain nor finally manage to control
> any political action whose end was unknown. They could attack it, beat it,
> misrepresent it, and finally abuse it, but they could not feel a sense of
> victory because they could not understand a movement which inspired
> thousands and hundreds of thousands to march without a coordinated plan.
> The bureaucrats of the Old Left had not been alone in their adoration of
> the solid-as-brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step; no, the bureaucrats of the
> American Center, now liked it as much, and were aghast at the political
> activity which ignored it. (105)
>
> I don't think the New Left and Black Bloc anarchism are perfectly
> equivalent, but it makes me wonder how a tactic might be said to be
> experimental, open-ended, and spontaneous when it trails a long history of
> similar actions.
>
> Jordan S.C.
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>



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