The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism

Stanley Aronowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136660504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism differentiates the "Social Justice Left" from "Cultural Radicalism" and the various social movements for individual freedom. In The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism, Stanley Aronowitz asks the question, "Is there anything left of the Left?" With the rise of Newt Gingrich and his "Contract With America, " how is it that conservativism staged such a remarkable recovery after being discounted in the turbulent 1960s? Aronowitz addresses these and other burning issues of contemporary politics.

1~

When the New Left Was New

~In the quest for making sense of what often appears to be a bewildering flow of contradictory events the historian tends to search for order by means of periodization. You might say this often obsessive activity follows John Dewey's judgment that the “quest for certainty” is among the leading themes of modern science. Unhappily neither nature nor human history has been particularly obliging, at least in the twentieth century. While it is possible, say, to speak of the capitalist “stage” of development, the “epoch” of monopoly, late or organized capitalism, the “fascist” or the “New Deal” era, the age of the bourgeois or “proletarian” revolutions, these characterizations may not tell us how the various actors within these periods experience the time.

In fact, only if we regard time and space as absolute can periodization help us grasp how specific groups and individuals engaged with the period in question. While I would not want to deny the value of periodization—surely anyone who would deny or disregard the effects of transnational capitalism on the world in which we live would have to be considered somewhat naive—the issue is whether this level of description and the analysis that accompanies it is both necessary and sufficient for grasping the character of social life.

Since Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889) and Ernst Machs equally influential Science of Mechanics, the Newtonian concepts of absolute time and absolute space have been challenged and, in physics, overturned. Einstein's theory of relativity, Edmund Husserls and Martin Heidegger's explorations of phenomonology of what Husserl terms “internal” time consciousness, and Ernst Bloch's provocative notion of nonsynchrony are efforts to grasp how individuals and groups mediate and modify macro-social ideas like epoch, era, etc.¹

These writers have argued that time is a relational category. Bloch showed that in the fascist time, the lived experience of social groups was nonsynchronous, that their relation to the prevailing political order could not be explained in purely class or ethnic terms. For Bloch the category of generation helped understand why young people experienced the political system differently than their elders. Bloch argues, in effect, that people inhabit different worlds, or “nows,” even as they exist in the same moment of (absolute) time. From these suggestions, we may understand the social movement of the 1960s nonsynchronously.

My 60s did not begin until 1962. I had been living in a different Now, the worlds of the trade union movement, peace and community organizing, and reform Democratic politics. These were the “nows” of the activist late 50s, a time which saw the rise of a new Southern-based civil rights movement, a Northern struggle for black community empowerment, and a middle-class peace movement which was not unlike the nuclear disarmament campaigns of the early 80s. The civil rights movement had just entered its civil disobedience stage (lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides) but was still five years away from “black power,” despite the respected but largely ignored voice of Malcolm X. I rode to Maryland to desegregate two lunch counters on the Eastern Shore. Many of us picketed Woolworth s. For perhaps the majority on those lines—mainly college and high school students—this was their first dose of activism.

The early years of the decade remained suffused with the culture of the 1950s. Rock and roll—an urban adaptation of the rhythm and blues music of the black migration—had emerged, but Dylan was still playing acoustic guitar and the Beatles were barely visible in Tin Pan Alley. The “high” culture of the post-war era dripped with modernist sincerity and literary intensity, much of it derived from the American assimilation of French existential thought, in the first place that of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and that peculiar moralization of Marxism associated with the Partisan Review.

For the most part the Beats who gathered at the Cedar, the White Horse, and other bars in Greenwich Village remained enraged suburbanites, and their energy, too, was channeled into rage, despite the weariness often attributed to them. Columbia alumnus Allen Ginsberg fulminated against a society that could reduce the “best minds” of his generation to drugged impotence, and the massively oedipalized Jack Kerouac, finding no home to replace Lowell, Massachusetts, returned to his mother. Clellon Holmes produced Go! and promptly vanished into college teaching. Like so many of the literary landmarks of the late 50s, his novel turned out to be a brief candle-light rather than a sustained flame that could guide a movement. In fact, only Kerouac, Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, and San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti survived the Beat movement. Most of their comrades literally sat out the 60s; by the late 50s their rebellion had degenerated into the cynical affectation characteristic of most failed romantic politics and art.²

For most intellectuals Partisan Review was still the measure of critical thought, even though its representative figures had long since abandoned the journal and been replaced by writers like Susan Sontag, for whom the tradition spawned by Philip Rahv and William Phillips had passed and whose revival awaited the cascade of memoirs, intellectual histories, and biographies that appeared twenty-five years after what became commonplace to call the Golden Age of radical letters. For the succeeding generation, of which Sontag was surely the representative figure, preferred the high cultural aestheticism of Lionel Trilling, which had already been torn from the its original soil of revolutionary commitment, over the remnant of Marxism which still animated Rahv, Greenberg, and some other Founders. As it turned out, the 60s marked the end of PR's intellectual hegemony; a new generation of literary and political intellectuals, but not Sontag, came to spurn its High Modern disdain for popular culture.

Although PR had long since abandoned any hint of revolutionary or radical politics, 1952 marked the official end of the rebellion; in the symposium “Our Country and Our Culture” some of its leading lights declared that the U.S. environment for literary and intellectual culture had vastly improved since the war and, with some discomfit, officially ended their internal exile and cautiously joined the American celebration. That this declaration occurred at the height of the Cold War's period of political repression of dissent made the document all the more remarkable. With the exception of Norman Mailer's refusal to climb on the bandwagon of comfortable literary liberalism, the rest heaved a collective sigh of relief at having been able to come in from the cold.

The 60s proved unkind to the intellectuals grouped around PR. In a period of popular radicalism which rejected their fervent anticommunism and equally passionate hatred of popular culture, they found themselves, to their own suprise, on the right, or worse, consigned by the young to irrelevance. For Phillip Rahv, the political implications of choosing the West proved, in the long run, unacceptable, so in the early 1970s he started his own magazine, Modern Occasions, which expired with his death. Others, notably William Barrett and Sidney Hook, remained unreconstructed. But William Phillips, ever the survivor, attempted to solve the problems entailed in making peace with the Establishment (or, as in the case of Clement Greenberg, becoming part of it), by inviting younger, hipper writers such as Sontag, Marshall Berman, and Steven Marcus to provide a pole of internal dissent to the magazine's rightward drift. Meanwhile, sometime PR contributor Irving Howe ventured in the space left by the integration of the review into the conservative mainstream to inaugurate Dissent. But, while Howe and his associate Lewis Coser distanced themselves from the more vociferous anticommunists like Hook, it was not enough to prevent their own disdain of the New Left, not merely its refusal of anti-communism, but also what was, for them, its dubious cultural politics.

Before 1962, I used to hang out at the White Horse, where I gazed at Delmore Schwartz dying at his corner table, laughed at Brendan Behan's drunken tales (not realizing that he too was about to expire), and listened to the earnest conversations of the refugees of the political intelligentsia who had remained in the cities amid the general white suburban exodus of the 50s. I was part of the group of young trade union organizers, some of whom had quasiliterary pretensions. Some of us worked for a living in offices and factories. Others were organizers for the Garment Workers Union, which was then trying to revive itself by importing intense young radicals into the movement. Gus Tyler, the former leader of the revolutionary faction of the Socialist Party and now director of the union's Training Institute, knew then what labor leaders have still not learned: that rank-and-file mobilization is impossible when the members and the bureaucrats live in different worlds. Tyler's experiment, in what might be called John L. Lewisism—inviting your antagonist to participate in a Great Crusade on condition that the Other be content with glory without Power—failed under conditions of Cold War liberalism and the bureaucratic nightmare that had become the labor movement. A corps of talented and angry organizers who resembled the Beats in demeanor, but who did not write, were recent college graduates seeking a Vocation to replace the routinization of the traditional professions. But Gus Sedares, Ted Bloom, and Bob Wolk were simply unwilling to go along with the programs of top-down unionism unless the leadership permitted them to take the class struggle to the growing unorganized sector of the industry. What they failed to grasp was that accomodation had sunk deep roots into the psyche of the trade union bureaucracy, indeed that it had become a way of life, not just a set of practical measures to save a dying industry.

Sedares was frustrated in his efforts to push the sclerotic ILGWU towards a militant, aggressive organizing campaign, but he found an alternative outlet for his remarkable talents. He scandalized the old socialists who dominated the union not by mobilizing the rank and file, for the concept of an active membership had long since disappeared from the unions lexicon, but by organizing his fellow staffers into the first Federation of Union Representatives (FOUR). Sedares argued that if the union had lost its vision of class struggle, let alone that of a new society, it could at least pay its cadre a decent wage, provide good benefits and tolerable working conditions. Today, the “union within a union” idea has gripped the masses of tired trade union functionaries. The staffs of many international unions have organized for collective bargaining. Of course, the Garment Workers remained an open shop. As far as their staff representatives were concerned, the house David Dubinsky built adhered to the principle of self-sacrifice.

The Training Institute is disbanded but an important truth survives it: that unions cannot hope to become a major force in American life until they attract the most dedicated among young radicals and transform themselves into democratic organizations. On the other hand, it may be argued that the new social movements emerging in the 60s were defined by their departure (in a double sense) from what C. Wright Mills called the Labor Metaphysic. The generation of the 50s still saw the labor movement as the lightning rod of global social transformation; their hopes were framed within the heroic visions of the struggle against capital, by the romantic idea of the self-emancipation of the toilers. Although the student movement of the time retained some reverence for the labor movement's potential might, most had few illusions about the trade union leadership.

The McCarthy era, the obvious deterioration of the labor movement's militancy, and the advent of consumer society failed to daunt the small band of radicals who downed gallons of beer every Friday at the White Horse. How appropriate it was that they should jostle in that packed room with the Beats and the veterans of an already eclipsed literary radicalism, a literary radicalism which had not been destroyed by the anti-Soviet denouement of the 30s alone. Its final resting place, of course, turned out to be the graveyard known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journal Encounter, if it wasn't Commentary or the Partisan Review of the 50s. Max Eastman, perhaps the greatest of all radical journalists and editors, ended up writing for the ultraconservative Reader's Digest. James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution, resigned from the PR board, which despite its own anticommunism was not prepared for his unapologetic defense of Senator McCarthy.

There were exceptions to the rightward drift, some attempts to keep a distance from the Irving Kristols and the Sidney Hooks and other people for whom Stalin's betrayal had proved once and for all the superiority of liberal democracy over any possible revolutionary socialism. Norman Mailer, a participant in the 1952 symposium, maintained his distance from the ex-radical intellectuals. He remained for at least two more decades a critic of American state policy and a sympathizer of the young. There was also the small group around Dissent, which had been founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, and the even smaller group following New Politics, Phylis and Julius Jacobson's attempt to preserve an independent left socialist presence in intellectual life.

From one perspective, Howe's position resembled that of the emerging conservative/liberal majority among the formerly radical intellectuals. He concurred with the prevailing judgment that however egregiously awful capitalism remained, Stalinism and, by extension, Eastern Europe and China represented a worse alternative. Nonetheless, Howe retained his faith that democratic socialism could provide a “margin of hope” that we could overcome the antinomies of liberal exploitation and totalitarianism, even as most of his peers lost faith altogether in the visions of an organized left.

The American Communist Party had broken apart following the post-Stalin crisis within the world communist movement, a crisis which had become acute with Khrushchev's famous report to the twentieth Soviet Party Congress in 1956 which skimmed the surface of Stalin's crimes, but was a bombshell nevertheless. Most young radicals, however, were relatively unaffected by this development since the American CP had virtually gone underground in the 50s on the assumption that the political repression at the time was a dress rehearsal for fascism. Some, including myself, had been sympathetic to the party but remained troubled by its ideological conservatism and strategic caution. We were moved by the internal party debates and the concomitant slowly leaking information about Stalin's crimes, and were taken aback by the clear errors of the party's left. Our desire for some kind of radical affiliation was considerable, but it made no sense to join the decimated CP then, especially since the “right wing”—which had called for a democratic renovation of the party—was already on the way out. Its leaders, among them Joseph Clark, Albert Blumberg, and especially George Blake Charney, whose proposals for radical revision of doctrine as well as political form outraged the orthodox, and dozens of others were poised (like former Daily Worker foreign editor Clark) to take union staff jobs, accept academic appointments (like Philosopher Blumberg, who prior his long years as a party functionary had been one of the bright lights of the movement known as logical positivism) or, more typically, disappear into private life.

In the wake of the disintegration of the CP, radical pacifist A.J. Muste started a forum to explore the possibility of a new left-wing political formation. Several evenings in 1957 and 1958, I journeyed across the Hudson River to hear leftists from various Trotskyist sects, so-called “right-wing” CP leaders and Muste debate prospects for a “new” left. They discussed the necessity of independence from the Soviet Union and the United States of unremitting commitment to democratic rights under socialist rule, of renewed efforts to revitalize the labor movement on the basis of rank-and-file militancy, of a strong intervention into the burgeoning peace movement, which had shown considerable strength since Adlai Stevenson's adoption of the nuclear test ban plank in his losing 1956 campaign.

Once the alliance between William Z. Foster's conservative faction and General Secretary Eugene Dennis's “centrist” group had foreclosed any hope of renovating the Communist Party along democratic lines, there began a debate among democratic socialists regarding possible affiliation with the reform-minded minority Communists. Muste's effort failed because his guiding assumption, that there existed the political will among the large contingent of disaffected Communists to start over, proved overly optimistic. Most of them were intellectuals with few new ideas rather than political organizers with a series of practical tasks. But even the organizers among them were simply burned out, especially in a political environment that was poisoned by the past.

At the same time, in 1959, the Socialist-influenced League for Industrial Democracy (LID) decided that the moment had arrived to resuscitate its nearly moribund student group and invited the University of Michigan chapter to take charge of this task. It was symptomatic of the times that the concept of “industrial democracy” had lost entirely its meaning as a unifying slogan. The leaders of the student division of LID, Al Haber and Tom Hayden, insisted, accordingly, that the name of the organizations student affiliate be changed to Students for a Democratic Society. Haber and Hayden shared the political perspective of LID'S chairman, Michael Harrington—for a political realignment of the progressive forces in a new political bloc—but abhorred the more conservative position, especially the militant anticommunism, of most of its board members. I first met Harrington at the White Horse during his neo-Trotskyist period, when he was better known for his literary criticism than the political writings. He was ideologically closer to Jacobson's New Politics than to the more staid Dissent in that he considered himself a revolutionary democratic socialist who believed in the formation of a labor party built around a strong labor-civil rights alliance. He supported the broad “third camp” position of his organization, the Independent Socialist League, rather than the pro-Western line of Dissent.

As a trade unionist and Democratic Party activist influenced by the old Popular Front politics, I debated Harrington and other Trotskyists in the early 60s precisely on the issue that was to mark the break between SDS and the Harrington-Howe wing of the socialist movement a few years later: I argued that working people and trade unionists had no choice but to seek change within the Democratic Party, that the multiplicity of movements to reform party procedures and platforms which had arisen out of the anticorruption, peace, and civil rights movements of the late 50s prefigured the chance for a new alliance that could at least mount an effective challenge to the most conservative wing of the party. Harrington at the time took the classic third-party position that noncommunist socialists have adopted since the turn of the century. Later in the decade Harrington changed his mind, but then found that there were new radicals who had picked up where he and Howe h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction The Death of the Left
• 1 When the New Left Was New
• 2 The New Left An Analysis
• 3 The Situation of the Left in the United States
• 4 Against the Liberal State ACT-UP and the Emergence of Postmodern Politics
• 5 Toward a Politics of Alternatives Part One
• 6 Toward a Politics of Alternatives Part Two
• Notes
• Index