-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Jordan Carroll Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 12:43 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] New New Left?
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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Not all of this will hold, either of the New Left of the '60s or the current Occupations. And your working makes the Black Bloc loom larger than (except in the fevered fantasies of those who hate it) it is. It's just an element and far from the most important element.
But you (and Mailer) have hold of some important fundamentals. "Spontaneous," the word, always confuses any discourse which uses it without care. Nothing except perhaps a scream, of pain or ecstasy, is actually spontaneous. Also, "exploratory" is probably better than "experimental"; "exploratory cuts off stupid quibbles. And at some point the movement has to theorize itself. Theory is crucial; it's just that detached theorists suffer from the disease of thinking they can theorize what the future should be.
Carrol