CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW LEFT IN THE SIXTIES

• New Left Lessons
• The New Left
• The Student Movement
• The Anti-War Movement
• The Weather Machine
• The Yippies
• The Black Panthers
• New Left Women's Movement
• A Few Lessons

...would you tell me please which way we should go from here? [Alice]

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. [The Cat] 1

Lewis Carroll

There are, however, two immediate problems we must overcome. History should be a vehicle for human liberation. The study of past events should be a means to understand causes, to discover roots of present 'historical trajectories, ' to ascertain different ends to which present trajectories might possibly lead, and thus to learn how to affect positively various historical possibilities. But oppressive forces often impede attempts to use history in these useful ways. On the one hand, powerful oppressive propagandists rewrite history to show their roles as always virtuous; and on the other, cynics among the oppressed as well as clever oppressors call every review of leftist errors irrefutable proof of the impossibility of effective rebellion.

Both these phenomena are now occurring.

On the one hand the United States liberal establishment is busily seeking to rewrite the history of the sixties to show that activities of the left were an obstacle to reform and especially to the rapid conclusion of the Vietnam war, and to show that the liberals themselves were from the first always opposed to this "immoral" war, and in the end responsible for forcing its "conclusion."

And on the other hand, but with similar effects, frustrated ex-activists now trying to succeed within the system view the new-left's experience as a chronicle of error, excess, ignorance, arrogance, and extremism, showing irrefutably the futility of revolutionary or even radical opposition. These folks exude cynicism and despair, and by minimizing New-Left contributions, objectively aid the liberal retelling of sixties history.

These two differing efforts to rewrite history do a horrible disservice to the honest efforts of people trying to learn from past experiences. More, they return to a semblance of moral legitimacy the previously morally undermined 'Democratic' Party and the whole system it represents, while simultaneously undercutting the historical identity and staying power of the new left, the only really humane social movement this country has seen in many, many years.

The truth of the sixties is in fact exactly the opposite of these rewrite lies. The liberals and the entire United States political establishment were never against the war: they were only, to varying extents, against losing the war and against development of too great a set of domestic problems as a result of trying to win it Thus, as Noam Chomsky methodically shows, mainstream political opposition to the war had nothing to do with moral scruples (in the entire Pentagon Papers there is not a single reference to the devastation of Vietnamese or American lives, while there are many references to economic and domestic political costs of war policies), but instead always arose only in pragmatic attempts to minimize political and economic losses that might result from the historically unparalleled Vietnamese resistance and the domestic United States resistance in the street and military barracks. 2

Further, by undermining (in parallel with Vietnamese efforts) the American myth of benevolence, wealth, dignity, and freedom for all, by causing restraints to be put on government war policies lest they arouse too much left motion here at home, and by showing the possibility of left activity even in face of extreme inexperience and repression, the new left demonstrated the vulnerability of the establishment and the potential of people's power. The whole Watergate crisis graphically reveals the extent to which even a very germinal and inexperienced movement can disrupt the powers that be. In a very few years American political complacency has been shattered. Imperialism, racism, sexism, alienation, exploitation, have become fairly well-known concepts to the United States public. The political debate has been turned around: it is no longer "Are these concepts relevant?" but rather "Just how relevant are they?" It is not "Must there be major change?" but "What kind of major change should there be?" It is no longer "The corporations and government will take care of our needs," but "How are we to 'take care' of the corporations and government?"

These major advances in political awareness plus the powerful thrust of the new left in preventing certain escalations and in eventually helping force a settlement of the war at least temporarily beneficial to the Vietnamese as well as the contribution of the new left in working for other social advances are the historical truths which must be put forward in place of the hypocritical obfuscations offered up by liberals and/or disgruntled and demoralized prior activists.

Further, lest our own highly critical views of internal left dynamics add to establishment historians' fabrications, we now give a short recounting of new-left contributions, particularly in the area of creating new revolutionary consciousness and new tools for positive revolutionary thought and action. We also try in our subsequent highly critical discussion to keep foremost our real purposes: to show the nature and magnitude of some of the difficulties that helped undermine the new left from within, and to show what real life as opposed to fantasy life in the new left was like, and thereby to motivate recognition of the need for new ideology.

NEW LEFT LESSONS

The new left was an international practice-oriented movement. It was not steeped in theory; its ideas emerged primarily from trial-and-error evaluations of its own experiences. Its most creative groups actually rebelled against old-ideology ideas, rather than analyzing and then moving from them as a basis. Nonetheless the new left eventually hammered out a rough prospectus very much in tune with (even advanced beyond) the finest formulations of their contemporary more theory-oriented comrades.

Thus the United States new left started as a reaction to racism and the Vietnam war, but in time came to represent a critique of the totality of ways modern life impinges upon human-fulfillment needs and capacities. It went from an opposition to blatant racism in the South and war in Southeast Asia to a critical revolutionary position against racism in general, imperialism in all its forms, sexism both in society and in the movement, and the whole nexus of advanced capitalist day-to-day living-working relations insofar as they breed waste, alienation, ecological decay, poverty, hierarchy, competition, and insofar as they are unable to meet almost any of peoples' collective social needs for friendship, community, identity, power, recreation, creative and spiritual fulfillment, and so on. The new left developed an awareness of the power of United States repressive mechanisms -- the state, corporation, courts, police, schools, and family -- insofar as they coerce people but also insofar as they corrupt people by imposing false and self-alienating anti-social ideas. The new left attacked the economic side of capitalism, both as it oppresses workers in factories and as it oppresses consumers in the "free" market place. But the new left also went beyond economics to additionally consider the ways modern schooling, family life, culture, and general day-to-day living inculcate oppressive modes of behavior and thereby contribute to capitalism's stunting of human potentials.

For the new left consciousness was a central aspect of concern. Whether trying to force the government to end the war, or trying to build forces for eventually overthrowing the government, the new left knew that the key problem was affecting people's thoughts, and thus their political allegiances, motivations, goals, and even behavioral capacities. The new left saw changed consciousness as a prerequisite for revolution, rather than an outcome of it.

Moreover, primarily due to women's-movement contributions, the new left became aware that the question of consciousness was a very complex affair: it didn't involve only "What side are you on?" but also "How do you feel about life and people?" and thus, "Are you able to participate humanely in revolution?" For the women's movement showed how oppressive ways of thinking and acting remain even after we turn against capitalism, and it showed how those residue characteristics could corrupt our practical effects by consigning them to self-defeat via internal sexist or authoritarian repercussions. Thus the women's movement was largely responsible for showing the left that opposition to unequal interpersonal relations and to repressive sexual or authoritarian attitudes were factors on a par in importance with opposition to imperialism and exploitation. Similarly by struggling not just for minor reforms but for the total fulfillment of Black lives -- materially, culturally, creatively, and intellectually -- the Black movement taught leftists that racism has to be fought not after a revolution but as part of the prerequisite process of creating revolution, that it has to be fought both institutionally and in people's minds, and that the goal of fighting it, like the goal of fighting sexism and all other oppressions, was not reform, but the total liberation of the human personality so that it might attain the greatest possible heights of growth and fulfillment.

Because of the dual concerns of the new left with overcoming authoritarianism and with changing oppressed consciousnesses, it developed a strikingly new style of practice.

People were to struggle collectively to overcome impediments to societal and also to personal and interpersonal change. Participation and active individual and collective initiative were crucial as the only modes that had "Energy" as well as anti-authoritarian impact. Thus the new left was concerned to oppose all hierarchical mechanisms including traditional Leninist parties, traditional teacher/student, organizer/organizee relations, and even traditional meeting styles where heavy well known orators could always dominate events. The new left struggled for rotation of all tasks (public-speaking as well as leafletting and typing), for participatory decision-making mechanisms, for non-repressive, participatory meetings, and for a new relationship between the experienced and inexperienced that recognized that each had things to learn from the other and that each had things to teach the other, and that what was desirable was everyone moving toward together.

Further, the new left emphasized finding methods suitable to raising consciousness both inside and outside the movement. The new left thus adopted a politics of exemplary actions, teach-ins, consciousness-raising groups, criticism/self-criticism, and liberated personal lifestyles. Thus there was a preoccupation with leadership modes that would foster rather than stifle group political participation and initiative.

The new left also 'discovered' the importance of an alternative vision and tried both to outline one and to embody its values in daily practice. It took a total approach to revolution and liberation and functioned creatively both in analyzing social relations and in trying to alter them (even though as we'll soon see there were a great many instances in which its successes were very limited). There were obviously many grave problems, yet the fact that in a very short time the new left discovered and even began solving the key political tasks of our time -- creation of a goal-prefiguring practice, development of an anti-authoritarian organizational form, development of effective consciousness-raising tactics, and development of a theory and practice that could simultaneously promote the autonomous development of women's, Black, worker, youth, and community movements, while also providing a total framework within which they would all fit together and function together collectively, with the whole even more than the simple allied sum of the parts -- is a remarkable indication of modern revolutionary potentials. For the new left's promise to be fully met, activists need only synthesize its experience lessons with those of critical analyses of other historical struggle experiences, form a new collective ideology, and embark on a new new-left political activism even more informed, self-conscious, and effective than that of the sixties. A first modest step in such a direction is a critical look at the actual internal dynamics, beliefs, and contributions of the new left as a whole and then of each of its major component movements.

THE NEW LEFT

In response to Kennedy rhetoric, material changes in wealth, growths of knowledge, Black activism, and the specter of an overseas war, American youth began coming together politically in the early and mid sixties.

They looked towards old left groups for ideological guidance. They learned about classes, the state, and revolutionary organization, but they also learned, in the words of Carl Oglesby, that the old left provides only an "almost carrion bird politics" wherein "distant and above it all the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of the predestined dinner. Capitalism weakens, layoffs and inflation converge, a rash of strikes - the bird moves in. But not so fast, the government also moves. A different money policy, stepped up federal spending, a public works project, selective repression of the militants -- the bird resumes its higher orbit." 3

Youth wanted more dynamism and insight than the seemingly stodgy old left had to offer. We were disenchanted with conditions of war, racism, and general cultural sterility: we moved toward direct action as our new multi-purpose tactic. It promised greater successes, it was more exciting, it suited everyone's feelings of urgency, and it suited people's personal desires to "fight now."

Black movements became militant and other leftists rapidly followed suit. Even street gangs adopted political slogans: the rhetoric of revolution spread through the land. People were "rising up angry." It was initially very conscious and serious, as well as militant. At least the first wave of activists thought long and hard about making left commitments and yet even with people's careful approaches the leftward flow continually grew. Drop out of mainstream America. Drop into either the growing youth culture or into a more active political movement. This was the message sweeping the big cities, causing much soul-searching, and a remarkable amount of active, very concerned motion.

By and large the new left had its finest hours in its earliest days. Then it was struggling in humble, honest ways, it was trying to affect the world and itself, it emphasized participation, patience, and hard work. Weaknesses were still only latent. The left wanted to communicate, and it took itself seriously enough to think carefully about everything it contemplated doing. 4

But things became more complex as time went on. Under pressures of repression, cooptation, and competition, the movement joined a kind of revolutionary rat race. It started adopting ideas instead of developing and fully understanding them. There was rush and urgency; instead of acting creatively, the movement reverted to old ways that came more easily. Internal weaknesses (e.g., authoritarianism and hierarchy) were fostered by external conditions (e.g., repression and press sensationalism); and as conditions got tougher, bad internal movement dynamics just kept getting worse.

The old class president became the new movement leader, and the old quiet sensitive person went almost totally mum. What was to be a new way of life began looking just like the old. There was a growth of ego insecurity. The left was attacked and in self-defense regrettably became defined in terms of opposition to almost everything American. It was unsure of itself but it acted cocksure. It couldn't really answer criticisms; it didn't reply when people asked how it would do things differently. It was pushed to extremism. It went from opposing McNamara's thinking to opposing almost all thought, and from a healthy distaste of bureaucracy to an abhorrence of almost all organization. It took genuinely creative intuitions about American disciplinary methods and turned them into a hatred for almost all discipline, even including self-discipline. It took a new critique of alienated work and bloated it into a new inability to do work of any kind. And perhaps most importantly, to defend itself while it was still young, it defined itself as morally superior, and turned an initially healthy critical stance into a more and more blindly arrogant one.

Of course, different people did these things to differing degrees, but the overall dynamics were such that the trends were very pronounced in the movement as a whole. In almost all cases the movement failed to break down false polarities, and instead merely chose new sides for itself. Instead of work, it took play; instead of mind, body; instead of discipline, chaos; instead of allegiance, hatred; and instead of passivity, arrogance. We didn't synthesize -- we were largely as extremist as the people we opposed. We were as subjectivist. We were motivated at least in part by the same self-defeating habits of polarization, competition, authoritarianism, and self-defense. We were ignorant and overly defensive about our own weaknesses. We didn't really admit to them and so, of course, we didn't even come close to fully overcoming them. We opposed the main oppressions of United States life but not, at least until too late, the subtler ones that were already at work within our own activities.

There were people who saw these many problems at the time but they were generally outside of or peripheral to the left. When they pointed up our weaknesses it was to demoralize and not improve us. Their intention was to get us to be good citizens and not good revolutionaries. We were very unsure of ourselves, very defensive, but also very headstrong. If people told us we were authoritarian, or insensitive, or ignorant, or overly brash, in defense we had to scream back that we were not, and that we were going to go on being radical no matter what anyone said. We had to convince ourselves. We couldn't sift the wheat from the chaff in their criticisms, precisely because we were unable to admit that anything they were suggesting might be at all true. We couldn't admit to weakness and we were certainly unable to admit to criticisms leveled by our enemies. We couldn't admit that there was anything that they could tell us because that would severely threaten our need to believe that it was we who were to tell them.

We screamed back at our detractors lest we be drawn back towards them. No one was able to break through our defenses until it was largely too late.

If a liberal newswriter said our sloppiness was disaffecting potential allies, we said it was untrue and roughed up our jeans a little more. A healthy rebellion against capitalist clothing requirements and especially against clothing as a mechanism of status, slowly became an irrational preoccupation with a new kind of uniform. If another commentator or parent said our language or militance or attacks on certain institutions were incomprehensible and self-detrimental, we didn't explain ourselves clearly, or slightly alter our styles so that we might communicate better, but instead merely intensified our assault on "bourgeois sensibilities," oblivious to our actual consciousness-raising effects.

No one could be a really true revolutionary and also a sharp critic of our styles, ideas, tactics, etc. etc. And even if many individuals were not guilty of this extremism, new left activism as a whole made it appear as if everyone was.

To understand the involved processes more fully we must look at the new left's separate parts in greater detail.

THE STUDENT MOVEMENT

The student movement started at Berkeley. Ex-civil righters accustomed to southern struggles took a look at their own school and at their own situations. They saw racism, war ties, and bureaucracy. They felt alienated and had the confidence to express their anger. The ensuing free-speech movement was a catalyst to students all over the country.

Soon the criticizers developed more clarity: "The schools are socializing agents. They are like computers. They are part of and program us to become part of the whole American system. They hurt us and they support the war. They make us into businessmen's slaves and they do weapons research."

Campus movements united to change schools and fight against the war. People became seriously involved in on-going deeply consuming activities. There were sanctuaries for AWOL G.l.s, teach-ins, rallies, meetings, and occasional militant confrontations over related campus based demands -- End War Research, No More War Recruiters, and so on. The process was initially driven by concern, spirit, and solidarity. People studied their schools, America, and imperialism. They moved progressively further and further left in analysis and were then, all of a sudden revolutionaries wanting to overthrow the whole system. Calm seriousness diminished as macho-seriousness enlarged. There was deep trouble on the horizon.

Students involved themselves in campus movements usually in gut response to social pressures, deep moral feelings, and movement organizing efforts. They recognized their schools' and country's inadequacies and joined with whomever seemed most committed to overcoming them. Very few recruits were consciously strategic. They didn't have really good reasons for the whys and hows of their actions. They were in no position to understand effects of their actions on others or for that matter on themselves either.

People either went in and then out of the movement because their understanding remained foggy, or stayed in, simply attaching themselves to a new identity related ideology, or bore their ignorances passively. In some cases they struggled to work things out for themselves. There was little collective give and take; people who had no strategic understandings were not effectively helped by their supposed leaders'; they were instead indoctrinated, used, or expelled. Further, the in-and-outers couldn't help the leaders overcome their particular deficiencies, including their arrogance, defensiveness, sectarianism, out-of-touchness, immaturity, and overall blindness to the effects of much of what they were doing. Skills were not effectively spread and elitism was not effectively countered. One group had sensitivity but little initiative; another the reverse. Of course the whole spectrum was much broader than this, but more often than not societal dynamics so polarized events that each individual might as well have been at one of the two extremes anyway.

Perhaps the most incongruous events occurred when Marxist Leninist student sects confused, alienated, and attacked people under the guise of "giving ideological leadership." As sectarian groups vied for position, they wasted people's time, and drained people's energies. They dominated people's capacities for initiative, encrusting all efforts in their own stodgy formulas. Worst perhaps, their bad ways played to bad latent traits in almost everyone who tried dealing with them.

Thus people trying to eliminate Leninist infantile sectarianism were often instead sidetracked into their own potentials for sectarianism. You could argue with the Progressive Labor Party only so long before developing Progressive Labor Party-like traits. The resulting internecine conflicts did more harm than good. The Leninists attacked and baited, everyone else attacked and baited back, until the behavior became rather habitual. New people were never too impressed when they saw so-called revolutionaries fighting one another to the exclusion of seriously dealing with real issues -- and when they saw in-fighting go to the level of violent confrontations they naturally began to wonder how radicals differed from the establishment they opposed. The dynamics had more to do with pathological ego-defense than with fighting for real revolutionary gains.

The left became a kind of spectacle and most students looked on with mixtures of awe, fear, disdain, skepticism, and sometimes a little naive jealousy or just plain wonderment. The movement became a kind of caricature of itself. Its members didn't understand why some people joined while others didn't, and indeed the question, despite its obvious centrality, was hardly ever even raised. Movement people didn't understand what forces worked in their favor and what forces were hindrances. Though strategies were espoused, none could be organically related to the but many others (problems concerning sex, psychological passivity, school itself, needs for real community, etc.) weren't even properly understood. That people had some difficulties adopting or even recognizing radical ideas was not fully understood. When trying to communicate through leaflets, there was no accepted method for deciding what should go in and how it should be written. When trying to decide on program, there was no real method for figuring what was important and what tactics were best suited to student states of mind. When trying to figure how militant to be, there was no understanding of why more or why less and of how one or the other would affect future possibilities. If it had had these awarenesses the student movement might have made itself more palatable to other students and citizens at large. It wouldn't have constantly pushed beyond what people were ready to do and it would have created on-going mechanisms for preserving short run gains more effectively than was actually done. When the crucial choice came between highly escalating campus militancy, or staying less militant but constructing well-founded unions that could at a later date take far more people more solidly to the left, the latter approach would have won out instead of the former. 5

The student movement went from interrupting the 'free speech' of the Rostows to interrupting and fighting each other, precisely because we never developed a full understanding of what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what its effects on others and on us were likely to be. We were afraid of cooptation but we didn't really understand it. Paul Potter expresses the situation as it was:

The tyranny of liberation is believing that the reality of our needs can overcome what this society has done to us. That is not only wrong it is arrogant. It is one of our most impotent conceits. Regardless of what we say about the power of the military and the corporations, we seem to be incapable of believing that the society that crushed our parents could crush us in the same way. We assume that we will do better than they. (We deny that they could ever have been like us.) What we cannot comprehend is that our parents too might have had images of liberation once. 6

The first student strategy was largely reformist, that is, agitation by arguing that certain aspects (courses, ROTC, war research, Black admissions policies, etc.) of the university are irrelevant or worse; organization of demonstrations and strikes to change those aspects; agreement to help plan new ways the school could function more relevantly; and termination of demonstrations when those new ways are adopted. The essence was to make home a nicer place. The protagonists usually wanted grading reform, living reform, course alterations, or the development of Black or radical studies programs, and all these things were fought for, not because they fit into some larger scheme, but because they seemed immediately justified.

The second strategy was somewhat more revolutionary: "The universities are complicit in many of society's larger evils. They are partially responsible for society's injustices." Students were organized around university complicity in the war, imperialism, racism, etc. Demonstrations were held aimed specifically at ending complicity and escalated to whatever extents necessary. Termination of demonstrations came only when the fully desired results were accomplished. Essentially it was a "clean up your back yard" strategy which, it was hoped, would simultaneously force others (workers etc.) to police their yards too and would bring closer the day when students could join them in that effort.

Still the strategy was mostly aimed at just getting rid of obvious evils. Practitioners were not so concerned with the effects of their actions on other people as they were with the effects on the institutions they were attacking. They were not so concerned with developing organization or mass support as with achieving concrete successes spurred by large demonstrations. They didn't want commitment, they wanted immediate victories. They had very few answers for people who said they were polarizing the country to the detriment of their own goals except to say that what they were doing was right and that it therefore had to be done. People were usually motivated by the belief that they could have short-run successes and thereby eliminate a certain amount of evil from the world. The strategy began buckling when people began realizing just how much power was needed for even the smallest change. It died when a Princeton University movement got a war research building eliminated the campus was gerrymandered so that the institution was no longer on it. The building remained, the function was still served, everything was the same except the campus boundary. Though struggle continued the irony was felt in Princeton and elsewhere. A new strategy was needed.

Serious leftists saw these various results and became more 'political.' They foreswore the old approach entirely: they didn't try to alter it, they just got rid of it. They didn't try to improve on past ways, they just jumped on a newer, supposedly more revolutionary third-strategy bandwagon with the same relatively blind commitment they'd had for the last one. Of course not everyone was the caricature this suggests: some understood strategic possibilities more and those who rushed ahead were considerably affected by the seeming urgencies of the moment, but the overall dynamic was such that everyone might as well have been motivated by nothing but the desire to push ahead as quickly as possible lest dynamics get somehow bogged down. People's good motivations were largely submerged in their individual and collective deficiencies. The student movement constantly viewed itself as right and moral, and therein cut itself off from improvement.

The third campus strategy was in some ways more enlightened than its two predecessors. It said that campus activism could be a catalyst for changing American political realities. It reasoned that by wrecking schools, closing them, or fighting over them, we could greatly escalate the level of national political discussion. We could create motion that would push everyone further and further left. It was a politics of example and disruption, a politics of motion -- disrupt old ways and dispense new ones, and change will come simultaneously. Different people with this view of how the left could expand had different ways of actually doing things. Some used 'drama', manipulation, and people's desires to cleanse the campuses; others tried to explain their strategy and motivate people through an understanding of long run potential. The people of the first persuasion created most campus motion and in time almost all leaders' succumbed to using their methods, frequently without even fully understanding what it was they were doing. Thus the Seattle Liberation Front created a whole lot of very temporary "motion/energy" in Seattle with a politics of macho/noise, confrontation, and myth; and Mayday eventually tried to follow suit on a national scale with its supposedly self-propelling dramatic predictions of "hundreds of thousands" "converging" on Washington and "shutting it down." The more modest but politically better-conceived programs of countless local community and student groups got lost in the shuffle. That the dramatic approach could create only a lot of baseless motion but no real on-going solid organization, commitment, solidarity, or consciousness was overlooked in the "rush of joy" caused by the large numbers it could indeed sometimes call forth (or at least not scare away).

Further most of the third group's leaders were competitive men with plenty of charisma but extremely arrogant, oppressive, and macho styles. Though the idea of catalyzing responses in new sectors was rather good, the new left never really took the trouble to seriously consider what kinds of activities had good effects and what kinds had bad. The implicit rapidly adopted supposition was that anything directed against the establishment would have provocative and thus good effects on the masses who viewed it. The feeling was that though working people might not like all the specific tactics chosen they would still be inevitably pushed to the left by the tactics' net effects. Of course this proposition was partially true, but to a greater extent it was a rationalization for the inability to even consider doing things that would be simultaneously radical, liked by the workers, and constructive of the movement's infrastructure and size. There were countless arguments in which claims were made that though of course the workers hated us, they were also moving leftward, and that removing the barriers between the two groups would become easier and easier as that motion progressed. The barriers nevertheless are still quite real and of course the motion never became a stampede. In fact some of what the student left did actually pushed the workers to the right and much of it (crazy lifestyles, peculiar appearances, and opposition to free speech, etc.) gave false impressions of what being radical is all about and thereby laid seeds of cynicism that are still impeding constructive possibilities. Finally student left-politics never successfully took into account the need for tactics and organizing efforts to create on-going institutional strengths which act as the basis and give the necessary continuity for later continuation of efforts aimed at creating a united United States left.

Further and as a kind of extension of inadequately addressing other sectors of the population, and insufficiently organizing even the student sector, the student movement actually created the conditions necessary for its own repression. It escalated militancy while cutting itself off from main supporting elements. It was too busy, too revolutionary, and too near to winning to really notice the actual phenomena around it, to actually notice what was good and what was bad about even its own activities. The overall strategy for students to exert an exemplary influence upon the rest of the country was actually quite sound. What was lacking was the ability to apply that awareness. Students' attitudes were not always the most progressive, and even when they were progressive their abilities to transmit them were largely lacking. The tactics, styles, and overall insensitive attitudes towards other people's values were especially detrimental. The student movement never developed adequate criteria for its own activities. It hardly ever had good, carefully though-out reasons for its efforts. In a real sense it was ignorant and cut off from realizing that fact by identity problems. The best arguments were never best because they were sound or because they fit widely accepted well tested criteria of value but because they were elegant, or super radical, or fashionable, or in some other way self-serving.

The grounds for anyone now judging the student movement are roughly:

To what extent did the student movement realign society's forces to benefit the oppressed?

To what extent did it alter non-students consciousnesses in ways favorable to future revolutionary efforts?

To what extent did it forge students into on-going movements that could continue struggling for change?

It fulfilled our above outlined judgement criteria only partially and in some cases even partially negatively. It did affect social consciousness, often positively, but sometimes negatively; but it did not create on-going movement organizations. There is no way to tell if it could have done better if it had had a more encompassing perspective and a more maturely self-critical style -- but it is certainly not heretical , excessively defeatist, of unjustifiably self-effacing to think that it might have. Indeed, such speculation is rather liberating, precisely because it allows us to be properly self-critical and to hope for a better student and new left movement in the future. The conditions fostering the student movement were not transitory, the internal deficiencies (and repression) that drove it to destruction and that temporarily soured students on any further efforts were and are largely transitory and therefore subject to future positive alterations.

But the student movement was only one of many parts of recent United States activism. To understand the whole more fully we must also investigate its other aspects.

THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

The anti-war movement developed in parallel with the campus movement. Each affected, enlarged, and defined the other. In the beginning people became involved mostly because they saw that the war was a heinous crime adversely affecting millions of people. Draft-card movements and turn-ins, teach-ins, and marches were all deeply moving, involving affairs. During its earliest days becoming a member of the movement was a really difficult existential event involving much serious thinking and risk. Joining generally reflected deep changes of political consciousness. There was a continual push toward expressing beliefs in action, but the steps were difficult. At its birth the movement had both solidarity and patience but its immediate popularity and growth, which should have been a great boon, proved otherwise.

With time, joining demonstrations, handing out leaflets, and calling oneself an anti-war activist became less and less difficult, and regrettably their effects upon peoples' beliefs and commitments also diminished. The movement's size grew but the solidarity, understand , and commitment of each member declined.

This, however, wasn't the whole story; there were really two bad trends at work, usually in opposition to one another, and to what would have been the good trend of a simultaneously growing and strengthening movement.

On the one hand movement activists made it as easy as possible for people to oppose the war by appealing to the most universal sentiments and avoiding many political issues; but on the other, they made it very difficult for people to be actively against the war because they made significant participation depend upon espousal of a variety of usually out of reach beliefs.

The dynamics had a schizoid property that hurt the movement in a two-edged way. Many, many people were driven away by the movement center's tendency to ideologically and morally isolate itself; the rest, those who were brought in, were made rather peripheral by the movement's tendency to be somewhat a-political about its beliefs even though continually espousing the need for politics and correct lines over and over and making them prerequisites for active membership.

People marched, trying to influence the powers that be and in the process learned more and more about the war, its roots, and the forces maintaining it. Before long a reasonable number of people knew something about imperialism and consequently something about the entire American system. In parallel to the enlightenment there also developed the "isolationist" part of the double edged trend described above.

Either one was against imperialism or one's so-called anti-warism was hypocrisy ; either one was against the whole American system or not really against the war at all. One supported the NLF or was not really against the war at all; one was against monogamy, and for the Panthers and hated liberals or not really against the war in the first place. This is what one might in retrospect call the credentials or professionalization trend of the core left, the people who planned actions, wrote articles, gave speeches, and generally made the decisions. Needless to say fewer and fewer people could keep pace with the list of necessary againsts and thereby stay in the more organized parts of the anti-war movement. They thus had to stay only on the edge of movement activity and were, between major demonstrations, rather inactive and demoralized. Who knows how many others didn't do anything active because though the demand on commitment was actually lower than they'd have been willing to welcome, the demand on political, verbal adherence was higher than they could possibly handle. And, perhaps most ironic, for those who were in the organized movement the list of "againsts" was usually as much a ticket to legitimacy as it was a clearly thought out or deeply felt set of operative values. For if it had been the latter, members would have succeeded in making the list a real part of their daily calculations, and further, would have understood the necessity for not over-demanding other people's allegiances. Anti-war politics would still have been multi-issued but in styles speaking to people in ways they could relate to rather than in ways isolating the left.

The reasons for these two-edged harmful dynamics were actually quite clear to many spectators if not to the participants themselves. Anti-war radicals had vested interests in growth as well as in a unique position in society -- we were the action and, most importantly, we had the new morality and got our sense of importance largely from that distinction between ourselves and others. Whenever the American people responded to movement efforts and went a bit to the left, ironically already active movement people got nervous about their identities and made their positions more extreme and at the same time usually more unpalatable. On the one hand, we honestly tried to reach folks and "teach" them to oppose the war, but on the other we struggled to remain pure, aloof, and better. This again was the complicated two-edged trend.

Of course much of the movement's leftward motion also reflected honestly growing awarenesses, but such growth was regrettably hardly ever adapted to the demands of building an ever stronger larger movement. More often activists took their new knowledge and used it to isolate and enshrine themselves even while also trying to draw people to big demonstrations. We adopted new attitudes and styles (trashings, etc .) that often didn't reflect insight and commitment so much as an abiding desire to gain self esteem by keeping a monopoly on "real dissent" and on the dissenting identity. The movement's core was largely unreachable because at a certain level of consciousness it wanted to be unique and small. The movement was on the one hand really massive demonstrations and a tremendous number of people sharing a variety of radical beliefs, and on the other, a very small subset of isolated masters, planners, and shitworkers, precisely because the movement's every dynamic had the schizoid property of simultaneously attracting people while also keeping them only peripheral. And the fact that no one in the movement acted quite so bad as the caricature here described and that many acted diametrically opposite to it, is basically irrelevant -- for the movement had mass dynamics that averaged away the good we did and exacerbated much of the bad. The general effect of the whole anti-war movement was thus much as it would have been if all its members, instead of just some, were trying largely to set themselves apart as more moral than all other people. So despite immense forces propelling people to oppose the war including the educational efforts of the movement itself, the core of the truly everyday active anti-war movement did succeed in setting itself quite apart, much to everyone's ultimate detriment.

The major anti-war strategy (the movement's leaders who planned activities had it, though most of the people who attended them did not) was to end the war by raising its social costs at home. The strategy was to constantly increase the number of people opposing the war while simultaneously moving already actively opposed people toward ever greater and more militant activities. It recognized that rising disenchantment, the threat of increased worker politicization, and the growing radicalization of students, were all war policy costs which wise politicians would have to include in their cost-benefit calculations. The strategy was actually quite sound as far as it went. Most political hawks who turned dove indeed did so precisely because they felt that the war's domestic costs were growing too great to bear. In the end, despite its overall weaknesses and its tendency to isolate itself, the anti-war movement did thus help to turn the country against the war, to keep Johnson from seeking reelection, to set back the bombing for sometimes prolonged periods, to reverse attempted escalations, to prevent really massive escalations like nuclear bombing, to narrow government, military, and propaganda options, and to finally create conditions requiring a settlement at least temporarily favorable to the Vietnamese liberation forces.

The movement's weakest link was not so much the strategy that guided its leaders as their incapacities to act on it wisely and the resulting inadequacies that plagued all activities. The movement couldn't deal with people in ways that would keep them going leftward. It couldn't turn growing dissent into effective organization and it could only reach wide constituencies in the most minimal ways. It didn't create commitment so much as temporary allegiance. There was greater concern shown for quantity of effect than for quality of effect. Movement leaders frequently urged organizers to create drama and overplay the possible numbers of people attending demonstrations so as to bring everyone out. They didn't talk too much about the development of real consciousness so that people would continue to be committed between demonstrations and work toward reaching ever broader audiences. Nor did they talk enough about how to make movement work quality work, how to give people new insights into the nature of the war and the nature of America.

At its heart the anti-war movement was manipulative. It did not transmit strategic understanding to all its levels. It did not raise consciousness in irreversible ways. Most people never got to really participate in planning. What planning there was, was not deeply enough conceived, and was too hampered by tendencies emphasizing drama, being more moral, and winning now, while ignoring questions of how the American people actually felt about the war and about the movement. Most demonstrators perceived each event as just another failure, perhaps not during the immediate excitement of the event itself, but almost inexorably in the period immediately following. Most people had no really deep feeling for process - they saw no great changes in the state of the war, they saw no new constituencies creating strikes or other such actions, and so they gravitated toward the belief that nothing was being accomplished, and movement rhetoric did more to foster these frustrations than to overcome them. ("If the government doesn't stop the war; we're going to stop the government.") Finally most people had no real understanding of the immensity of the enemy and so they had a ridiculously disproportionate set of criteria for judging themselves and their movement. Did we win, rather than did we gain a little?

Some people fooled themselves into believing that they were always 'winning now' and others, in some ways correctly, always felt they weren't, and eventually became demoralized and split. Only a few constantly kept a modest strategic sense of making gains a bit at a time in an inexorable but very slow process. And, perhaps most striking, this last group did little or nothing to help the others achieve a new perspective, and in fact often gave dramatic speeches that fostered wrong approaches.

For example, at a national People's Coalition for Peace and Justice criticism self-criticism session after the Mayday actions, the criteria for analysis of the effects of the demonstration should have been did the action realign government powers a bit in our favor; did it move immediate and distant spectators toward anti-war awarenesses; did it affect participants positively; and did it strengthen the movement? The answers should have been: perhaps a bit; a little yes, a little no; maybe; and no. The mood should have been self-critical and rather 'depressed' but determined. The actual mood was different. No one set out concrete criteria for judgement. Everyone implicitly used variations of the extreme 'did we win' brand, even while many bemoaned the fact that that was the way the media were playing the whole thing: did we shut down the city or not? There was a lot of euphoria and backpatting. Some people convinced themselves the whole thing was great (a victory) and other people who thought it was not so good (a defeat) didn't bother saying so for fear of being considered defeatist. PCPJ was like most other parts of the anti-war movement in that its criticism/self-criticism hardly ever led to real improvements.

The culmination of all these various dynamics seems to have come with the Cambodia invasion. Students did everything they felt they could and very few other people seemed to them to do much of anything. Anti-war people fell into the belief that the situation was quite hopeless -- they alone didn't have the power to win and no one else was making time to join them. And besides, now there were risks. You could be jailed or even killed. In the absence of solidarity and an understanding of real accomplishments, the chief emotion became fear. Anger and determination diminished and passivity increased. The movement was neither a fruitful nor fun place to be -- at least for the great bulk of its people who weren't central, didn't travel, and didn't contribute many ideas for strategy. The movement was debilitating because it made people act in competitive, arrogant, sneaky, and aloof ways, and besides it just didn't seem to pay off. Repression was becoming a real factor too. It was more and more difficult for people to keep active faith as they began to feel their daily behavior was becoming more and more oppressive. Life became alienated, success seemed impossible, and most of the movement's attempts at good dynamics were replaced by extreme versions of the bad ways people had been taught to act in the society at large.

In essence the same dynamics hit the anti-war movement that hit the student movement. People's identities became tied up in their own righteousness and in subjective myths about the Vietnamese, themselves, and the enemy. People began fighting with each other because the enemy was too powerful, and at the same time people lost their abilities to be humble, sensitive, participatory, and patient. People went to the farm, gravitated back to the school, became sectarian hangers-on, or in a few cases, usually because of advantages, knowledge, many friendships, experience, and some kind of steady income allowing full time participation, hung in. The latter are now struggling with the sectarians for leadership of the remnants of the organized anti-war movement. If they can succeed and overcome past inadequacies perhaps they will yet be able to help develop a movement that could force discontinuation of American support for Thieu, really develop an anti-imperialist awareness and presence, and insure that when the history of the sixties is told, it gives a correct perspective to the roles of both the left and the liberal United States establishment.

The anti-war movement succeeded because it had a patently clear cause and because it had energy, good will, and at least at the beginning, much solidarity and attractiveness. It was thus able to create an effective counter-force to United States imperialist designs, materially aid the Vietnamese cause, lift the level of United States political awareness, and demonstrate the possibility of effective United States leftist action. It failed, however, because it was authoritarian, because it refused to educate itself clearly about what it was doing and why it was doing it, because it refused to study the feelings and beliefs of the American people, because its members had weaknesses which were fostered and not countered, and because its members also had immense ego-problems. It failed because, having not asked the right questions about itself or about the American people, it was unable to formulate good programs. Thus the present absence of effective, relatively large on-going anti-imperialist organizations. The anti-war movement had essentially the same leaders, the same structures, the same constituencies and the same faults as the student movement. While students and middle-class people suffered considerably for ensuing imperfect dynamics, the Vietnamese, all third-world people, and America's Blacks and poor bore the greatest long-run burdens of all temporary inadequacies of the left.

THE WEATHER MACHINE

The Weatherman movement was a kind of aberration that developed in the days when third-world heroes seemed actually godlike. If something is wrong, fight it; since "the country sucks, kick ass." Weatherman was an aberration and yet it was also a logical extension of the sixties. If the Weathermachine was moved by pathology, it was also moved by the most impressive commitment to fight injustice, to whatever extent conditions demanded, that the sixties produced. In many ways its practice embodied the logical extension of the whole new left. 7

Weatherman had an ideology and its members functioned consistently within it. They recognized some of their middle-class upbringing weaknesses and tried to correct them. The main problem was that they were one-sidedly extremist about all they did.

Their strategy was based on the premise that most Americans are too tied up in their relative advantages to be willing to take revolutionary risks. In light of the way Weatherman approached people these expectations were rather self-fulfilling. To gain Weather-praise one essentially had to admit to being a white honky pig who was repentant and willing to give all for the welfare of the third world, and then act like a guerilla facsimile of John Wayne. Weatherpeople saw themselves as a kind of Vietcong front functioning within the United States. They were the NLF, except of course that they had little of the NLF's integrity, experience, discipline, patience, or preparedness, and certainly little of their dignity or empathy for other people's perspectives.

Weatherpeople believed in the raise-the-cost approach, but felt effective mass militancy was quite impossible. They wanted a small Red Army, and though they damned just about everyone, they felt they and a few others could work 'alongside' the third-world masses. They opted for terrorism, figuring it would attract those few with guts, and at the same time raise domestic costs and put everyone on notice as to what was coming. Their vision of revolution was a blazing tank. Their early attacks on working class kids, high schools, other movement groups, street gangs, and occasionally police stations, ROTC centers, or university fraternities showed just how far astray from rationality they would eventually deviate. One had only to hear the upper-middle-class-authoritarian leather-jacketed leaders singing praises to the therapeutic values of violence to learn the Weathermachine's chief lesson: certain kinds of 'uncritical' even if rebellious thinking can pervert one to such extents that the resulting actions can be more a 'people's problem' than even the actions of official authorities. Regrettably, to teach us this commonsense but important piece of wisdom, the Weatherpeople took many very severe beatings and scared away a great many potential leftists as well.

When general activism levels slowed, Weatherpeople got somewhat more sophisticated and revolved their strategies around the idea of exemplary action -- though still with a heavy emphasis on the inability of most people to respond positively. Essentially this was a useful rationale for doing whatever one wanted, coupled with an excuse for why it didn't work, all worked out before the fact -- the exemplary action idea always gains sway among the more persevering parts of any epoch's leftist movements. The idea was that bombings or 'events' of a militant kind could detonate favorable feelings in many who saw them. People could learn how possible it was to fight the behemoth. They would see that there were some people who had good values and guts and who intimated a better way of life.

The thought was a step toward but only a small one. Weatherpeople were just too out of touch to know what would push people to the left and what to the right. Certainly bombing bathrooms didn't impress too many people with Weather abilities to smash the state, and emulating a toughed up James Dean didn't impress many others with Weather potentials for living well or creating a better world. Indeed most people took away the impression that Weatherpeople were a collection of maniacs who had lost all track of their own relations to reality, and who were tripping on a fantasy about their own importance.

That image, though slightly unfair, was by no means completely off base. For the Weathermachine at its worst was the guy who got up in the middle of a meeting and gave a long dramatic rap worshipping the therapeutic effects of unrestrained violence, or the women who got up and attacked all men for their pig natures, in attempts not to educate but to score points, or the militant who hurled a petty rock at a demonstration and then beat a hasty retreat while others who didn't really know what was going on got trampled or caught by the police. It was a 'heavy dude' on the run from imaginary police pursuit, hiding out at one's house, creeping around, not talking to anyone except to say that he was the Vietcong slipping out in the morning and eventually getting busted for ripping off underwear. At its worst the Weathermachine was a band of toughs who on one day were a-cultural, anti-hippie, tight asses, and on the next, after some central committee decided on a new path, became the Kazoo Marching Band carrying chains instead of batons. When the Weatherpeople were at their best and succeeding beyond even their own expectations with a bombing, or a fight, or a school disturbance, their main effect was to make people hate them and the left. The Weatherpeople, at the cost of a few bathrooms, gave the government ample reason to extend its oppressive apparatuses in almost all its major cities. This was unquestionably a dubious achievement even if it had been accompanied by a significant growth on the left, which of course it wasn't.

The Weatherpeople had the same identity problems and the same tendencies toward extremism as everyone else but as they made quite clear, they also had more 'guts' for carrying their errors all the way through to their logical ends. They saw revolution and repression around every door. They bounced from one side of each false dichotomy to the other, never once finding the solid revolutionary ground in the middle.

Many Weatherpeople were society's best trained, most confident, most educated, and (initially) most sensitive youth, but the dynamics they encountered and created were overwhelming. They rebelled against society's discipline but made that rebellion a fetish even in their own organizations. They rightfully discovered that a fear of violence could be debilitating but they pushed on to worship violence as virtuous behavior which should be 'pushed out' in almost all circumstances. They screamed about America's gross machismo and then became crudely macho-violent themselves. They decided that monogamy had weaknesses, moved on to decide that it was totally wrong, and then created a kind of tribal dynamic that forced people into a self-destructive brand of sexist polygamy. The Weather living tactics convinced many that even justifiable attempts at altering life styles were recklessly worthless. And finally, Weather militance and Weather hostility pushed the machine further and further away from the rest of the left until they lived in a kind of self-created paranoiac guerilla dream world that had little relation to the on-going realities of American life -- except for the fact that as Weather behavior became more extreme, they were indeed isolated and repression did grow until their dreams became self-fulfilling nightmares. The waste of talent, emotion, and life that was Weatherman's result is a crime for which everyone in the new left is partially responsible.

THE YIPPIES

The human race in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon -- laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug -- push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. 8

The Yippies were products of the land they hated and their own bad traits were overlooked and were thus eventually able to subvert the good they were doing. The Yippie lifestyle offered many new ways but it also only refurbished a few of the old ones. Competitiveness and liberalism were both diminished, freedom was emphasized, honesty was a high virtue, and believing in things that help people rather than in things that hurt was the primary admission ticket. Life became more colorful, light, and fun, and especially for men Yippie styles overcame a number of competitive habits that had previously forced alienation upon people. But women were still largely supposed to serve men, if anything in more grotesque caricatures than ever before. For now there had to be colorful clothes and liberated smiles and free sex along with an adoring deference for the still male god. Women were allowed only in a lower echelon of participation as "our women." The continuation and even elaboration of sexism in Yippiedom was one of its chief weaknesses -- as the going got tough that one bad trait helped resurrect a great many others until Yippie originality was finally inundated by the Americanisms inside the Yippies.

As with all other strategic attempts, when repression and cooptation became tough, approaches were polarized more and more toward old ways of doing things. As soon as the Yippie identity was threatened, a jocularly critical approach was replaced by a haughty put-on superiority and the trend continued in every area. Yippies began joining with Weatherpeople, violence was wholeheartedly adopted, the more sensitive hippies dropped out of the drop-out; outlaw styles of anti-rationality, toughness, and dirtiness began flourishing. Disease and drugs took a heavy toll. The whole affair ended in a rather dismal mess. Haight Ashbury moved from being the result of an effort to create a place that could teach people new ways, to being a youth slum that could only attract the most hopelessly disaffected. A group of people originally into sharing everything became so destructively critical that they could hardly share anything with anybody. The only tastes that mattered were their own and they too became more and more irrational. A group that was going to ride people's funnybones to their consciousness was in the end considered arrogant, elitist, sexist, self-centered, divorced from reality, and often just totally obnoxious.

Here again, it was partly because people were much too headstrong. Yippies were unable to develop flexible identities and methods. They couldn't simultaneously balance criticisms from outside, accepting the wise and ignoring the badly motivated, and they couldn't aim their communication to where people actually were. The Yippies were therefore not confident or wise enough to pursue their intuitions in the face of establishment repression and cooptation, or in the face of leftist baits urging them on toward heavier positions. The Yippies didn't have and couldn't give each other enough humble self-confidence. For all their insight they didn't know enough about themselves or America, they underestimated their enemies, and they didn't have any real methods for improving their own deficiencies. Although the make-them-laugh approach could never really have eliminated all the "colossal humbugs" and all the colossal powers behind those, as a partial element in an overall process it could have been much more effective than it finally was. Perhaps most contributory to their decline, the initial Yippie disposition toward 'happy tactics' didn't stem from conscious respect for traditional American lifestyles or for traditional Americans. In the beginning most Yippies had intuitively humanistic aspirations but very little understanding of why American people act as they generally do. In the beginning Yippies had enthusiastic faith in people generally, and when there was no pressure to defend their new styles, they evinced no hostility toward the 'jumbled' ways in which normal people were trying to deal with their own problems. But as time went on the Yippies were forced to distance themselves more and more from the mainstream so as to have clear, strong, identities. They inevitably became disdainful of everyone else -- they never developed a solid understanding of other people's motivations and so under pressure became intolerant of them. They grew to like themselves and no one else. And they really had few other options, they didn't have enough awareness to retain self-respect while at the same time also respecting the contradictory attitudes of other Americans. As a result Yippie efforts to talk to others became constrained and patronizing. They were no longer trusting guides. They became arrogant, sloppy critics who had less and less to offer. Yippie ideology and behavior threatened mainstream America's identity while having few redeeming traits and so the Yippies gradually became a favorite target for abuse and even violence. 9

The Yippies rejected patriotism, the police, puritan sexuality, the work and success ethic, consumerism, education, and the assumed goodness of the American social order continually more and more strenuously and with less and less sensitivity, as well as with diminishing abilities to offer any attractive alternatives. They pulled the rug out from under people's self-images without offering any ways for people to otherwise stand erect. What solutions they offered were totally unworkable for most Americans, and in the end even for themselves. They were critical in sectarian rather than in loving ways and it worsened with time. They did not speak in ways people could understand and then act upon. The Yippies started by trying to build a new way of living based upon communal love. They ended by telling kids that the only way they could become revolutionaries was to kill their parents. Recruitment lagged. 10

The Yippie experience teaches mostly the same lessons as the Weather one. The dynamics of rebellion are risky. The sole criterion of value can't be only the idea of winning or losing now. Without humble self-confidence and patience leftists are often likely to become their own worst enemies, hated as well by the people they are trying to reach. Without methods for understanding what one is doing and why, and what its effects are on all concerned, one's activities are probably going to do as much harm as good. Without real understanding and empathy, communication is impossible; creativity and love of self is simply not enough. The enemy is too big to be brought down by a group of clever comedians. But the Yippie experience also taught many people much about social interaction and about the importance of dealing with interpersonal dynamics effectively. It taught the importance of confronting the totality of American life, including its cultural, sexual, artistic, and spiritual sterility. But it especially taught that even as youth we were not as incorruptible as we would have liked to think. 11

THE BLACK PANTHERS

The new left Black movement was in many ways the core element of sixties activism. Beginning with the participatory Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and extending through various nationalist groups to the avowedly revolutionary Black Panthers, the Black left was the most militant, most politically experienced, and most forcefully opposed. Its contributions in helping reawaken Black political awarenesses, advancing consciousnesses of racism, forging new Black goals and identities, and aiding the Vietnamese through anti-war activity especially within the Army itself, were immense. Its chief teachings are again the viability of radical activism, the centrality of racism to all United States political possibilities, and the need for revolution if United States Blacks are ever to fully achieve liberated existences. To have accomplished so much in so few years, despite the "legal" police murders of over a hundred activists, and despite imprisonment of hundreds more, armed invasions of offices, and immense police infiltration programs is remarkable testimony to the power of an organized opposition force. Nonetheless, as with all other new left groups, frequent successes were accompanied by many failures, and at least sometimes the reasons for failure were internal rather than police-imposed. In this section we discuss only the Black Panthers as they were the best-organized and most avowedly revolutionary of all the various Black organizations.

The Panthers started with an empathy for their people and for their own plight that was much deeper than any comparable views held by white groups. They understood why oppressed Blacks frequently act in self-defeating ways and even had some grudging respect for all kinds of survival tactics. They dealt with the problems of being baited by racists and therein developed strong racial self-images. The Panthers were aware enough so that no pressure would make them become racist, either against whites or against their own people. They understood the nature of racist tendencies and where they came from and were able to control them. The Panthers knew that racism against whites was a dead end and were able to incorporate the awareness into their own behaviors. They also had significant roots in the Black ghetto and thus a real feeling for the day to day needs of their people. Their ten-point program was one of the few concrete political programs espoused by any part of the United States new left and itself makes clear many of the injustices the Black movement opposed and brought into public awareness:

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

4. We want decent housing fit for shelter for human beings.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

6. We want all Black men to be exempt from the military service.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.

8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

The Panthers chose a series of tactics that were in some sense schizoid -- "we'll increase our support with serve the people programs and newspapers, but also by showing how tough we are and how well we can deal with the man." During their early days when they chose to go to the California State House armed, they sealed their ultimate fate. For though they had the self-awareness around race necessary to ward off bad racist tendencies, they could not do the same with their macho and sexist tendencies.

The line was a direct one from the glorious state house 'show' to eventual isolation in small armed camps daily attacked by the police. The Panthers formed authoritarian organizations and these fostered all the bad tendencies that hierarchical societies inevitably give to their citizens. The organizations became more and more authoritarian and the leaders lost touch with reality, tripping out on their own inflated visions of their self-importance. As latent aggressive, hostile attitudes poured forth unchecked, they had to be rationalized and incorporated into the whole Panther ideology. The Panther image grew inextricably entwined with militance, toughness, and courage. They grew more and more isolated. Their worship of revolutionary suicide was only slightly less ridiculous than the Yippie plan for parenticide. With isolation and militance came inevitable repression. There was no great defensive upsurge because there was no great empathy for a group that seemed bent only on violence. The image of Eldridge Cleaver strutting through Congress with John Stennis' head on a platter did not overly entrance this country's Black population.

The Panther understanding of the need to build a base in the ghetto was offset by members' inabilities to effectively organize, and to stave off their own tendencies toward machismo. The Panthers went the same way every other group of the sixties had gone, good beginnings, through bad times, to polarizing defensive tactics and self-images, to severe inner strife, arrogance, and external obscurity. They were stronger and had better intuitions than white groups, but their enemies were also better armed and more eager to repress. The final responsibility for the deaths of many Black Panthers and the incarceration of countless others rests first with the state and society. The immediate responsibility rests with a strategy that lost track of itself and got caught up in self-indulgent rationalization.

NEW LEFT WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

The New Left Women's movement went essentially the same routes as the male led elements. Myths had it that women would be able to avoid competitive strife because of the types of oppression to which they'd been subject, their long-standing low position in society, and their gut understanding of machismo's harmfulness. Ostensibly since women were arising in a defiance of competitive machismo, their movements wouldn't have to worry about succumbing to its particular dynamics. In fact this belief was a great error. Every group in the United States has potential for every kind of oppressor/oppressed behavior. Everyone raised here has to one degree or another been affected by surrounding environments and thereby picked up countless bad traits, some of which dominate behaviors, some of which are only subtly active, and many of which most often only lie dormant awaiting opportunities to emerge. The difference between one United States group's identity and any other's is that for each, good and bad traits occur in different combinations, and in connection with different sets of emotional feelings and needs. Women are thus generally oppressed and reticent in company of men until they understand their oppression and start opposing it. Once that occurs, however, the situation alters drastically and so do behaviors.

When women began rebelling in the mid-sixties, they developed fine intuitions about the nature of American male-female relations, about what a woman's movement could include, and about what it could do. The first activists had tremendous empathy with their sisters' needs and emotions, and tremendous enthusiasm due to their new self-images and imminent liberation. They had participatory, non-competitive, anti-authoritarian aims. But at the same time their respect for other non-movement women's efforts to survive through capitulation was none too great, and their defensiveness concerning things male-related was still quite strong.

Initially women formed consciousness-raising groups for understanding their own oppressions and the circumstances of the society in which they lived. They used very effective militant ways to confront movement men about machismo, sexism, and competitiveness. They successfully 'rediscovered' the heritage of United States feminist activism and began hammering out a new type of aware, strong, female personality. But at the same time there were growing problems of male attacks and difficulties of movement growth. The early activists reached middle class women effectively enough but had neither the time nor the experience to think effectively enough about reaching working-class women. Women's group discussions became highly self-centered. In time there were external attacks from movement men ridiculing feminism, even assaulting women, and always calling on them to spend their time more effectively: instead of challenging our leadership, follow it. Under these attacks left women strengthened their identities regrettably by tying them ever more completely into the most 'radical' conceptions they could formulate. Movement women lost touch with non-movement women who didn't think as they did, and had no patience for any men, even for those who were really trying to understand, but had not quite made it yet. Movement women simply refused to recognize their own tendencies towards the kinds of behavior they hated in their male counterparts. They didn't admit they would often manipulate meetings, degrade opponents, compete amongst themselves, and generally create the same bad kinds of dynamics that men create when they hold themselves to be superior.

Inside the movement, dominant women began developing oppressor roles and reticent women began gravitating toward more passive ones. By and large the new oppressors determined the movement's public images precisely because they were its most energetic members. Hierarchy began to rule.

Movement women were unable to develop firm enough understandings of their own backgrounds and their own weaknesses and strengths. They were unable to create flexible identities. They couldn't be careful and patient about developing new modes of actions in the urgency to rush their efforts. They worried about being oppressive and spent countless hours discussing it but didn't fully understand all its potentials for occurring and had, like the rest of the new left, no tools for effectively warding it off. They didn't formulate programs in an unhurried, objective way and in time that omission cost them severely. They espoused heavy-handed criticisms of monogamy and then had to act on those criticisms to their own detriments. They glorified lesbianism and found themselves pushed hard by lesbians who had views different from those of many other women in the movement. The developing dissensions caused many problems and disaffected many potential adherents.

The movement had no tools for adequately understanding the tremendous rush of new situations which pressed upon it. It developed hierarchies of womanliness which gave some people distinct powers over other people. There were the ins, the partials, and the outs. Like the members of all other new left groups, women were unable to perceive their identities independent from immediate actions; they were unable to act in accord with their ideology's own dictates.

Under assault by society and the male part of the movement women activists took the same road as all their male compatriots. They began getting their self-images from believing in their own worths as compared to other people's weaknesses. Who is the purest liberationist? Who is the best? Leaders and followers emerged. The leaders were implicitly regarded as better than the followers and ipso-facto had more privileges, and the followers in the movement were similarly better than everyone else outside it. Everyone could see, feel, but do almost nothing about these dynamics because they were too deeply rooted. Women's groups began planning demonstrations, meetings, and newspapers that lacked sensitivity and organization and almost always contained competitive dynamics.

And yet even with its various weaknesses the new left women's movement unleashed a tremendous force in the United States. It helped many people develop understandings of the dynamics of sexism and authority and of what men and women could and someday would be like. It gave countless women new understandings of their histories and present lives, and new goals for their future efforts. It brought people into motion, but regrettably it was a motion that didn't yet incorporate enough of the critical anti-authoritarian, anti-sexist lessons on which it was premised. The New Left Women's Movement "ended" in a kind of disorganized frustration with only the non-revolutionary elements maintaining significant organizational strength. Nevertheless overall women's political awareness was still on the rise, and the potential for a truly effective, anti-sexist, revolutionary organized feminist left seemed great.

A FEW LESSONS

The new left was internally without a strategy. It had ego problems, it wasn't adequately self-conscious, and it was immature. It judged practice by asking very narrowly either how much motion was accomplished or how much was created. There was little understanding of sustained process or of patient struggle towards growth. Hierarchies fostered people's worst traits, competition thrived; people's politics got tied to their identities in ways leading to extreme sectarianism. There was no powerful guiding ideology. Practice was intuitive and generally very problematic. It made many gains but often incurred even greater costs.

The results were predictable: morale and effectiveness declined together. Either people left depressed, or stayed but usually became caricatures of what they had hoped to be. And yet even with all this the American left of the sixties had many important successes. It was struggling against the strongest enemy any left has ever encountered, both in the state apparatus and in its cultural socialization processes. Despite the great odds, it created an effective counter-force to the Vietnam war, a growing American awareness of America's weaknesses and of the viability of protest, and an understanding within the left itself of the multiplicity of oppression that is America, and of the complexity of the problems confronting modern revolutionaries. In this last category, perhaps most important of all, it put sexism, racism, authoritarianism, and general interpersonal dynamics on the revolutionary agenda on equal footing with class struggle.

Though at times indulgent, irresponsible, and even 'pathological,' the new left of the sixties did make honest courageous attempts to confront the totality of America's injustices. If it failed to create a viable revolutionary movement, it did at least create some new awareness and a bedrock of experience upon which such a movement can likely soon be constructed. It certainly did much more than anyone could have predicted at the time of John F. Kennedy's election. Despite the sacrifice, the errors, and the losses, the efforts, because of the future left activity they prefigure and provide a base for, were well worth it.

But even our very brief presentation shows that to grow anew the left needs a new and enlarged political consciousness which can among other things:

Understand our society's institutional, cultural, and ideological relationships, identify those that are truly oppressive, those that are largely neutral, and those that are potentially useful to liberation, and then understand all their various interrelations.

Understand revolutionaries and all social groups with respect to how they are oppressed by, how they rebel against, acquiesce to, and even in part support their oppressions, and thus how they might be affected by changes in their environments -- and most specifically by changes caused by revolutionary activities.

Understand future goals and means of transition well enough to posit short term programs and strategies suitable to all local contexts and incorporative of the knowledge of the two points above.

The new left needs a better consciousness than it had in the sixties. What it then knew intuitively it must crystallize now; what it then didn't know it must learn now. One route to such creative ends is to build upon critical analyses of past revolutionary ideologies. As a first step we next clarify our usage of the concepts 'theory,' 'strategy,' 'practice,' and 'political consciousness.' We provide definitions and also evaluative criteria which we go on to use throughout the rest of What Is To Be Undone in our critical studies of Classical Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism.

FOOTNOTES

1. Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland, McMillan and Co. London.

2. See Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State, and American Power and the New Mandarins, Vintage Books, New York.

3. Carl Oglesby, The New Left Reader, Grove Press, New York.

4. See the "Port Huron Statement," in The New Left: A Documentary History, edited by Massimo Teodori, Bobbs Merrill, New York.

5. In Boston the choice was perhaps somewhat more conscious than many other places. The leadership' was in effect confronted with a choice: We could proceed with a city wide anti-war struggle focused on MIT's war complicity, very militant and very anti-capitalist, or we could do the more patient job of continuing to build left support throughout the city so as to move later on a larger more together scale. We choose the former way mostly because we felt it was necessary to make a ruckus about the war that could provoke others elsewhere into doing the same. Our reasoning was understandable but quite wrong. In general we should also now point out that this whole chapter is primarily about Boston-Cambridge experiences, though the lessons, we expect, are more widely applicable.

6. Paul Potter, A Name For Ourselves, Little Brown, Boston.

7. The quoted phrase had its origin on a Boston subway on the way to a demonstration to confront a Boston University mixer -- it arose spontaneously during a rap to the "transfixed" subway riders.

8. Mark Twain in Phillip Foner, Mark Twain Social Critic, International Publishers, New York.

9. See George Harrison, "Blue Jay Way" and the whole of the album "Magical Mystery Tour" for a cultural description of roughly the same phenomena.

10. See Jerry Rubin's and Abbie Hoffman's books for the quickest rundown of the Yippie "ideology."

11. Ibid.

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