3. Single-issue advocacy and the New Left

This is the third and final installment in my series on public perception of progressives.

Although most people in America have probably never heard of the New Left, all of us have certainly witnessed and experienced the major changes in progressive politics that it was instrumental in leading.

To give some very brief background, the New Left was a radical left-wing democratic (not Democratic) movement in the 1960s and 1970s that consisted of students, young intellectuals, and older intellectuals stumbling from the ruins of the American and British communists parties. After the USSR ordered the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and Khrushchev delivered his secret speech criticizing Stalin, many communists and sympathizers became disillusioned with the bureaucratic rigidity and authoritarianism of the USSR.

In the letter that popularized the term, “New Left” in 1960, C. Wright Mills wrote, “It is no exaggeration to say that since the end of World War II in Britain and the United States smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a very wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted.”

The New Left sought to capture, build, and direct the energy coming out of the collapse of European communism and direct it into a more humanistic, democratic form. In the same letter, C. Wright Mills wrote of his fears that political discourse was moving away from ideology and critique and towards a liberalism, whose “sophistication is one of tone rather than of ideas.” He added that, as the left-wing activists and intellectuals moved away from old-school Marxism they were abandoning any sort of coherent criticism of the capitalist system as a whole, consequently that “their power to outrage, their power to truly enlighten in a political way; their power to aid decision, even their power to clarify some situation — all that is blunted or destroyed.”

Simply put, then, the New Left advocated a more distanced relationship with old-school Marxism and with the working class, whom they no longer saw as the primary motor of social, economic, and political reform. However, what they retained from the old Communist movements was the necessity for a critique of “the system” (it sounds like a parody of the 1960s, but these are Mills’ own words, not mine), whether that system was American-style capitalism or the Eastern Bloc’s impersonal bureaucratization.

Groups like Students for a Democratic Society, many feminist organizations, and the budding environmental movement took their impetus from this basic tenet of the New Left: the working class were no longer the core of left-wing politics, but a critique of “the system” was still necessary.

Although the move from Soviet-style communism to the anti-authoritarian, democratic, rainbow-flag New Left radicalism is perfectly understandable, it quickly revealed major shortcomings.

First of all, whereas the New Left pushed a counter-culture critique of “the system,” it did not simultaneously theorize what it would do if it were to gain influence and take power. As a result, when many members of the New Left rose to positions of influence in the major cultural institutions and universities that they had so stringently attacked, they looked and felt like hypocrites. A lot of them deflated. Future radical movements should remember this and take heed: it’s not enough to just critique “power” and “the system” without developing a better model of social, economic, and political organization, because any radical movement that is organized and large enough will eventually find itself in the awkward position of having to replace (and, too often, to become) that which it critiqued.

Secondly, and perhaps most seriously, without the working class and a strong form of Marxist critique of capitalism to center them, the movements growing out of the New Left failed to develop a coherent theoretical system that could unite feminists, the LGBT community, and environmentalists, for example. And this remains a problem today: who can honestly tell me how gay rights activism is related to the environment and why the two movements ought to work together?

Finally, wouldn’t you agree with me that American politics are still very similar to the situation the New Left wanted to get out of, in which “smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a very wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted”?

If anything, the only change in this dynamic since the New Left is that there aren't even any disillusioned radicals around anymore. When the New Left’s cultural influence combined with the affluence of America and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, which for many people validated the free market, the result was the gradual fading of radical critiques of capitalism, including that of the New Left, in our political discourse. Let’s face it, manufacturing went abroad and the critique of capitalism, even a democratic, humanist critique, just doesn’t resonate as well in the suburban house of a middle class family as it did in factories. The people who favor capitalism are often the people capitalism favors.

The liberal mentality the New Left despised took hold of America as the left failed to develop an ideology to fuse the single-issue advocacy groups together.

It seems to me we’ve reached the time to reevaluate the New Left, taking from it it’s democratic tendencies and its support for civil rights, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism, and weaving these back into a strong critique of free markets’ tendency to boom and bust.

How does this relate to public perception of progressives in America? It’s very simple: poll after poll has shown that the majority of Americans support the core policies of the American left–letting taxes on the rich go back to their pre-Bush levels, creating jobs, and providing a cushion for the unemployed, for the elderly and the children living in poverty, a better health care system… And yet the American electorate is fleeing to the staunchest defenders of the free market, the contemporary “Do Nothings,” who will not enact any of the policies the American electorate wants… Why?

Without the core critique of capitalism binding us together, left-wing movements across the world were left confused and aimless after the 2008 recession. Of course we believe in more government involvement in the economy and some assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society, and of course most people agree with us, but how do we justify these policies to a country that has grown to believe the free market can do no wrong? Worse, how do left-wing leaders who’ve come to embrace capitalism justify these policies to themselves?

One way is to face the shrill calls of “socialist” and “extremist” head on, i.e. to put economic progressivism back at the core of left-wing politics, to elect leaders who are willing to make a strong case for reform/overhaul of the free market.

Sure we’re going to get labeled socialists, but if there were ever a time when the American people might reconsider socialism’s core tenets, that time is now. If we back down because we’re afraid to be associated with Marx and the critique of capitalism, we will miss a huge opportunity to address the fundamental problems of the free market that brought us to this stage. I fear we’ll never find a significant justification for massive interventions in the market, and, consequently, I fear we will end up abandoning millions (unemployment is at ~9% right now!) of people to suffer the worst excesses of the free market.

Mill’s essay at Marxists.org

http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm