New Left icons from "the Sixties": Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse

I try to be careful about getting carried away with 10-year anniversaries of historical events. But they are hard to resist sometimes.

This, of course, the 50th anniversary of 1968, the year that has become emblematic of "the Sixties."

Angela Davis was one of the icons of the Sixties in the US. The reliably staid Britannica has a brief sketch of her career, including:

The daughter of Alabama schoolteachers, Davis studied at home and abroad (1961–67) before becoming a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, under the Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse. Because of her political opinions and despite an excellent record as an instructor at the university’s Los Angeles campus, the California Board of Regents in 1970 refused to renew her appointment as lecturer in philosophy. In 1991, however, Davis became a professor in the field of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1995, amid much controversy, she was appointed a presidential chair. She became professor emerita in 2008.

Her initial fame came when she went underground in 1970 to evade conspiracy charges over Jonathan Jackson's escape from a courtroom. " Arrested in New York City in October 1970, she was returned to California to face charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy; she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury."

Her professor Herbert Marcuse also became one of the enduring icons of the Sixties, as well. In a 2004 collection of essays on him, Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb, eds.) her contirubiton, "Marcuse's Legacies," provides this recollections of the '60s:

Despite my chronic critiques of nostalgia as an inadequate substitute for historical memory, I want to ask you to permit me to engage in what I would like to think of as a bit of productive nostalgia. Because I do long for the days of interminable philosophical discussions about such subjects as the historical agents of revolution, when the participants in such discussions might be students and professors, as well as organic intellectuals who were workers and organizers. Marcuse’s interventions as a public intellectual helped to stimulate such discussions. Did the working class still have a revolutionary potential? What role could students play? I imagine that I am nostalgic today because so few people seem to believe that anybody has any revolutionary potential left. [my emphasis]

It's an interesting glimpse into a vital moment in time in New Left history.

Somewhat ironically, Angela Davis was famous figure of the New Left. But she was also part of the Soviet-line Communist Party, which was an emblematic institution of the "Old Left." She was the party's Vice Presidential candidate in 1980.

A cultural footnote on that campaign slogan, "People Before Profits." The fictional character J.R. Ewing on the series Dallas used it subsequently as his slogan on a political campaign he ran. An ironic slogan since the J.R. character was anything but left-leaning.

Davis also studied in Germany with Marcuse's Frankfurt School colleague, Theodor Adorno:

At this point in my remarks I would like to make some comments about my own development. I have often publicly expressed my gratitude to Herbert Marcuse for teaching me that I did not have to choose between a career as an academic and a political vocation that entailed making interventions around concrete social issues. In Frankfurt, when I was studying with Adorno, he discouraged me from seeking to discover ways of linking my seemingly discrepant interests in philosophy and social activism. After the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, I felt very much drawn back to this country (the US). During one of my last meetings with him (students were extremely fortunate if we managed to get one meeting over the course of our studies with a professor like Adorno), he suggested that my desire to work directly in the radical movements of that period was akin to a media studies scholar deciding to become a radio technician.

During what we now call the Summer of Love, Davis attended a conference in London at which Marcuse "spoke pointedly about the hippies, identifying the more politically radical formations among them – the Diggers and the Provos – as uniting sexual, moral, and political rebellion, as encouraging new sensibilities, as exhibiting 'a non-aggressive form of life: a demonstration of an aggressive non-aggressiveness which achieves, at least potentially, the demonstration of qualitatively different values, a transvaluation of values'.”

For anyone who has read - or tried to read - some of Marcuse's work, this observation is likely to draw a smile:

Today, it seems inconceivable that crowds of people at a political rally would be willing to enthusiastically applaud a philosopher trained in the classical tradition, who might just as easily evoke Kant and Hegel as Marx, Fanon, or Dutschke. It seems inconceivable that people did not complain when this philosopher compelled them to think deeply – and even philosophically – in order to engage with ideas he proposed in the context of a public rally. The lesson I draw from these reminiscences is that we need to recapture the ability to communicate across divides that are designed to keep people apart. At the same time we need to substitute a nostalgic attitude toward Marcuse with one that takes seriously his work as a philosopher and as a public intellectual.

The sixties: Tom Wolfe and "Radical Chic" (2)

Jason Epstein reviewed Tom Wolfe's little tract Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) in Journal du Voyeur New York Review of Books 12/17/1970 (link behind subscription).

He gave this account of the background to Leonard Bernstein's fundraiser for the Panther 21, which I discussed in a previous post:

Sometime in December, [wrioter Murray] Kempton, at the suggestion of the Panthers' lawyers, asked some well-connected and respectable friends who have a town house on the East Side whether they would arrange an evening at home to raise money for the Panthers' defense. Not only were the defendants desperately poor, but Kempton felt it important that their situation be publicized; for, as he wrote at the time, "If they cannot be saved from being tried as strangers, they have no chance to be tried fairly at all." Liberal New Yorkers are quick to respond to such appeals, especially where civil liberties appear to be in jeopardy. Furthermore, the Panthers had by this time gained a certain interest—not to say glamour—as the authentic voice of black misery and rage. One tended to hear in their violent language and the shallow Marxism that accompanied it not the sound of revolution but the cry of pain. What liberals found most interesting and hopeful about the Panthers were their efforts to supply dignity and political direction to black street people. Their talk of violent revolution, their identification with third world political leaders, and even the weapons they carried seemed, by contrast, largely rhetoric and theater.

To many liberals it also appeared that the Panthers were right to claim that federal and local officials were out to destroy them. Attorney General Mitchell had begun to talk of preventive detention. Fred Hampton, the Illinois Panther leader, had been shot in his bed by a posse of Chicago police, and Bobby Seale, the national chairman, had been bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman at the Chicago conspiracy trial for having repeatedly demanded no more than his constitutional right to defend himself. Moreover, evidence of the torture and murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven—a crime with which Seale had also been charged, to which two Panthers had already confessed, and for which a third was later to be found guilty—had not yet been made public; nor had any other evidence of Panther violence been produced, including whatever evidence Hogan might have had against the New York Panthers. In any case, what was on Kempton's mind was not the guilt or innocence of the defendants but the need to raise money for their defense and to make them visible.

Thus Kempton's friends sent out their invitations. About forty people came, including Felicia Bernstein, wife of the conductor. The Panthers who addressed these guests were articulate and calm. Their problems were obviously genuine. They talked about their breakfast program for ghetto children and said nothing to suggest that they were terrorists. They did, however, insist that they were revolutionaries, an admission that did not deter Mrs. Bernstein from agreeing to arrange a similar meeting at her own house some two weeks hence. Soon thereafter she sent elegantly engraved invitations, in her name but not in her husband's, to perhaps a hundred people who might be interested in the case. Meanwhile, Charlotte Curtis, the society reporter for The New York Times, who had been in touch with Kempton on other matters, learned of his interest in the Panthers and said she would like to write a piece on their wives. Kempton thought this would be useful to the defendants and suggested that she come along to the Bernsteins' party.

Tom Wolfe was another guest whom Mrs. Bernstein had not herself invited, but who came anyway.

Epstein also sees Wolfe's posture in "Radical Chic" as his own version of Nixonian ideology:

This notion, though not the term itself, derives, according to Wolfe, from the sociological theories of [neoconservative scholars] Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer, among others. Presumably it would also describe Edna St. Vincent Millay's interest in Sacco and Vanzetti, Theodore Dreiser's in the coal miners of Harlan County, and Robert Kennedy's in Cesar Chavez.

With equal facility one might propose a theory in reply to the one that Wolfe offers: that his invidious generalization derives from resentment and envy of the rich and talented, fear of the alienated poor, and anxiety over his own precarious situation in between. It is this same resentment of effete snobs and fear of the undisciplined poor that Mr. Agnew, among others, imagines to be the main preoccupation of most Americans.

Epstein's verdict on Wolfe's sneering essay is a good one:

Unself-conscious as always, Wolfe missed what must be the heart of the matter. What he calls Radical Chic is, in fact, only the unhappy residue of the broken promises and defeated politics of the Kennedys, the still flickering desire of an impotent and aristocratic liberalism to restore citizenship to the poor—not, as Wolfe says, to "integrate" the politics of the poor with their own, but to engage the poor as citizens in the political life of the country.

Tags: black panther party, leonard bernstein, new left, sixties, tom wolfe

The sixties: Tom Wolfe and "Radical Chic"

One literary contribution to the early "culture war" narrative about the snobby elitists who supported liberal-radical-hippie causes was "Radical Chic" by Tom Wolfe, which first appeared in New York magazine June 1970, and was later published in book form in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970).

The "Radical Chic" essay was a rambling meditation and subjective report on a fund-raising event that the famous composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia held in their New York City home to benefit a group known as the Panther 21. This was a group of Black Panther Party members who were arrested in 1969 and charged with plotting to bomb several locations and to kill cops. This obituary of civil rights attorney Sanford Katz, who won the acquital for the 13 that evenutally went to trial, gives some background (Sanford M. Katz, 75, Lawyer for Defense in Panther 21 Trial, Dies New York Times 10/13/05):

Mr. Katz was known for representing unpopular defendants in politically charged cases. His most famous was set in motion in the late 1960's, when the New York Police Department planted undercover agents in the Black Panther Party. In 1969, 21 party members were indicted on charges that included conspiring to bomb various sites in New York - police stations, department stores and other public buildings - and to kill police officers.

Though only 13 defendants were eventually brought to trial, the group was known as the Panther 21. The case became a cause célèbre, moving Leonard Bernstein to hold a cocktail party for the group's legal defense in his elegant Park Avenue duplex.

The trial began on Sept. 8, 1970, and ran for eight months. On May 13, 1971, after deliberating for barely three hours, the jury acquitted the defendants on all counts. (my emphasis)

It's amazing what you can learn from reading obituaries. Seriously.

This letter from a philosophy professor expressing support for the Panther 21 was published around the same time Bernstein was holding his benefit fundraiser, Philosophers & Panthers by Kai Nielsen New York Review of Books 07/02/1970 talks about the problems in the handling of the case and said, "Unfortunately, it would appear necessary in the course of any thorough investigation to consider the possibility that this case is part of a nationwide 'police conspiracy' to destroy the Black Panther Party." Now, of course, we know that there was literally such a conspiracy, directed largely by the FBI's COINTELPRO program.

So, Bernstein was supporting raising money for a the legal defense of group of black radicals who had been arrested on charges so dubious that all of them who went on trial were later acquited, and were being effectively denied bail and reportedly mistreated in custody. "In jail they have been the victims of gross brutality," Nielsen wrote. In other words, Bernstein was neither alone nor irrational in his desire to see that these men received a fair trial.

Wolfe doesn't give his readers any of this background in his own voice. After pages of jive talk about how strange it was to see Black Panthers in leather jackets at a party with respectable wealthy white people, he puts what factual account he gives into the introductory speech of attorney Leon Quat, after spending a page or two ridiculing Quat.

And if you cut through Wolfe's sneering society-column chit-chat, you see that Bernstein and his guests actually engaged in a fairly spirited dialogue, challenging the lead Black Panther speaker, Don Cox, on a number of points.

But not everyone was happy about the notion of wealthy benefactors raising money to help black radicals get a fair trial when faced with very dubious charges. The Times obituary quoted above mentioned Berstein's fund-raiser. But it did not mention how the editorial board of the Times had held Bernstein up to ridicule in an editorial which Wolfe quotes as follows:

Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. [For whom, of course, the New York Times editorial board felt qualified to speak.-Bruce] This so-called party, with its confusion of Mao-Marxist ideology and Fascist para-militarism, is fully entitled to protection of its members' constitutional rights. It was to make sure that those rights are not abridged by persecution masquerading as law-enforcement that a committe of distinguished citizens has recently been formed.

In contrast, the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstine, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memeory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed through the nation yesterday.

Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.

Short version: wealthy white people should not help African-American radicals raise funds or generate publicity to ensure a fair trial for those accused on thin evidence.

Demonstration in support of the Panther 21, New York 1969

Now that he was safely dead, the New York Times was holding King up as a saint of proper conduct on the part of African-Americans. But three years before, when King was still alive and gave his Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam War, the same Times editorialized that King was screwing up the civil rights movement by coming out against the war and his "recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis". The respectable Life magazine called King's 1967 speech "a demagogic slander that sounded like script for Radio Hanoi". It was only death that made Martin Luther King ultra-respectable to the white Establishment.

Daniel Moynihan, later a Democratic Senator from New York but also a counselor of Richard Nixon's in 1970, also used the Bernsteins' fund-raiser for the Panther 21 as an example of how those who Nixon considered his enemies in what soon came to be known as Moynihan's "benign neglect" memo:

In it Moynihan had presented [Bernstein] and Felicia and their "party" as Exhibit A of the way black revolutionaries like the Panthers had become "culture heroes" of the Beautiful People. Couldn't you just see Nixon sitting in the Oval Room and clucking and fuming and muttering things like "rich snob bums" as he read: "You perhaps did not note on the society page of yesterday's Times that Mrs. Leonard Bernstein gave a cocktail party Wednesday to raise money for the Panthers. Mrs. W. Vincent Astor was among the guests. Mrs. Peter Duchin, 'the rich blond wife of the orchestra leader,' was thrilled. 'I've never met a Panther,' she said. 'This is a first for me.

On February 29 [1970] someone leaked the damned memo to the damned New York Times, and that did it. Now [Bernstein] was invested, installed, inaugurated, instituted, transmogrified as Mr. Parlour Panther for all time. The part about their "cocktail party" was right in the same paragraph with the phrase "benign neglect." And it didn't particularly help the situation that Mrs. Astor got off a rapid letter to the Times informing them that she was not at the "party." She received an invitation, like all sorts of other people, she supposed, but, in fact, she had not gone. Thanks a lot, Brooke Astor.

If Wolfe is to be believed, this negative publicity put an immediate damper on what he called Radical Chic among wealthy New Yorkers. Though since he's more focused in the essay on spinning pretty, smug phrases, it's kind of hard to tell. He doesn't even make it clear what Bernstein's own reaction was. Wolfe tries to leave the impression that Bernstein backed off his support for the Panther 21's legal defense. But he quotes Bernstein as saying that the fund-raising meeting's purpose was to defend civil liberties:

"If we deny these Black Panthers their democratic rights because their philosophy is unacceptable to us, then we are denying our own democracy." He now made it clear that he was opposed to their philosophy, however. "It is not easy to discern a consistent political philosophy among the Black Panthers, but it is reasonably clear that they are advocating violence against their fellow citizens, the downfall of Israel, the support of Al Fatah and other similarly dangerous and ill-conceived pursuits. To all of these concepts I am vigorously opposed and will fight against them as hard as I can."

For a civil libertarian, this doesn't sound like backing off to me. That quote just shows Bernstein saying that even though there are aspects of the Panthers' conduct with which he disagrees, even hates, he still sees a larger significance in what was happening to the Panther 21.

Author Tom Wolfe

Wolfe's essay provides a look at how the notion that wealthy liberals were an elite who favored liberal and even radical viewpoints that were hostile to the needs of those regular people for whom Chris Matthews loves to speak was cooked up in "the sixties". The same script that has seemingly become part of the Republican Party's political DNA. After all, when you're running the government and foreign policy blatantly for the benefit of Halliburton and oil giants and turned over much of writing the laws directly to business lobbies, you need some way to make your Party look like the defender of regular folks.

"Radical Chic" is a political tract disguised as light-hearted style and society-page reporting. The real point of the essay is to ridicule the radicals of the day and especially "respectable" people who might find anything about them to support. Wolfe adopts what is apparently meant to be the tone of a wealthy New York socialite to ramble about topics like the need to have white servants at events where the Black Panthers are featured. "So the current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants."

The whole essay is full of such sarcastic-sneering observations. Here is one paragraph that gives a good flavor of the tone Wolfe strikes in this essay:

Shoot-outs, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Vietcong—somehow it all runs together in the head with the whole thing of how beautiful they are. Sharp as a blade. The Panther women—there are three or four of them on hand, wives of the Panther 21 defendants, and they are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they'd stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows exactly what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because "the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes." God knows the Panther women don't spend thirty minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners ... And here they are, right in front of you, trucking on into the Bernsteins' Chinese yellow duplex, amid the sconces, silver bowls full of white and lavender anemones, and uniformed servants serving drinks and Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts -

After years of having our leading politcal pundits treat us to their Deep Thoughts about Al Gore's suits, Hillary Clinton's cleavage, John Edwards haircut and now Barack Obama's lapel pins, this kind of style reporting has since been assimilated into mainstream political commentary. At least in 1970, it was taken to be a literary essay that was based on some actual event.

But, like our Big Pundits today, Wolfe for the most part doesn't give us direct quotes from individuals who attented Bernstein's fundraiser about what they actually thought. Was anyone but the writer himself obsessing about whether female Black Panthers were "shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners". Did he ask any of the female Panthers themselves if they used eyeliner or false eyelashes? Or was he too afraid they would sock him if he asked such a dumb question?

But if you actually wanted to know something about the political meaning or legal significance of the Panther 21 case, or even about Leonard Bernstein's political outlook, you wouldn't know very much after reading this essay.

Tags: black panther party, leonard bernstein, new left, sixties, tom wolfe

The sixties: liberals vs the left

Some of the polemics over Obama and Clinton have tried to cast Obama in the role of the "new politics" activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period is so crucial to the ideology of the "culture war" that Republicans especially and the media drones keep referencing current politics back to that time. But it's a sloppy comparison. I have high hopes that Obama could wind up leading a dramatic reform movement, even though he approched his political career as more of a conciliatory moderate. Happily, he seems to be taking serious account of the fact that today's authoriarian Republican Party has no use for any kind of conciliatory political strategy.

But it's hard for me to cast Hillary Clinton in the role of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 or 1972. And if Obama turns into the leader of a Bobby Kennedy type coalition, it will be because he recognizes the possibilities in the mood of the public and the Democratic base, not because he's approached politics that way so far. On health care and economic issues, Obama seems to be more conservative that Clinton. He had a more emphatically anti-Iraq War position than Clinton. But he's not only joined the Republican chorus that Democrats aren't respectful enough to religious people - although his recent "pastor problems" may have convinced him that dog won't hunt for him. He's even made rhetorical gestures toward the Republicans Social Security privitization scam! In organizational terms, his campaign has some resemblances to McGovern's in 1972 in tapping underutilized sources of funds (direct mail to small contributors then, the Internet now) and in building political networks more independent of the established Party structures. But ideologically and even demographically, comparing the current Party divisions over Obama and Clinton to the 1972 situation that has embedded itself in the minds of the "culture war" ideologists doesn't seem to be a very helpful viewpoint in understanding it.

But we're already entering a period when some people who have criticized the Bush administration for various problems, especially the spectacularly ill-advised invasion of Iraq, are finding Obama even less to their liking than the Republicans' Bush-on-steroids candidate John McCain. The "paleo-conservatives" like Pat Buchanan who have applied isolationist criticisms against Bush's foreign policy will, if Buchanan himself is any measure, find the Democratic Presidential candidate far more distressing than McCain. And since come next January there's at least a chance we'll have a Democratic administration inheriting two overt wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and less overt ones in Somalia and Pakistan, it doesn't hurt to think about reasons that democratic reformists and the Democratic base may have to find real differences with a liberal Democratic administration. The "sixties" experience can at least serve as a reminder.

One of the challenging things about the politics of the 1960s is that the civil rights and Black Power movements, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the New Left in its various manifestations were to a large extent directed against Democratic Party liberalism.

Liberalism means something different in the United States than in most countries. The classical liberals of the nineteenth century and their most direct ideological descendants, like the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Germany today, advocated constitutional government, civil liberties, and minimal regulation of business activity. Something like American Libertarians.

American "liberalism" in the sense we know it today is pro-labor and believes in affirmative government action on social and economic problems. That labeling happened in America in the wake of the First World War. Reformists had called themselves Populists and Progressives in the preceding decades, because "liberalism" was understood in the classical sense. But after the war and the collapse of a distinct Progressive movement, then pro-labor, pro-affirmative-government reformers began to use the label "liberal" in a new way to distinguish themselves from the Progressives and also from the scary Bolsheviks who had taken over in Russia. That fear also had led the Wilson administration to promote a Red Scare ("red" meant Communist then, not Republican), and it wasn't overly scrupulous in respecting civil liberties in going after scary radicals. So there was also an urgent need to emphasize the "liberal" virtues of the rule of law and human rights at the time.

In terms of the left/liberal distinctions in the 1960s in the US, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made a wide-ranging commentary on the issues that were highlighted in conflicts between the New Left and Democratic liberals in The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Vilence in America (1969).

In what could be seen as a stereotypical liberal framing, he compares the New Left to what he call the New Right, by which he apparently means the George Wallace movement, with its fury against the elites and a heavy dose of racism and authoritarianism:

In particular, the New Left and the New Right are agreed in their condemnation of the central institutions of American power, whether real (the national government), semi-mythical (the Establishment) or mythical (the power elite) [the latter being the title of C. Wright Mills' most influential book]. However much they detest each other, the two extremisms have common methods and common targets. "The real enemy of the radical left in America," writes the New Left Washington Free Press, "is and always has been liberalism." Karl Hess, who as Senator Goldwater's speech writer in 1964 reputedly wrote that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," recently said, "I take my stand with the anti-authoritarians, and so does the New Left. ... This is one of the reasons I find many of the statements and actions of SDS very satisfying."

It is a happy symbiosis. George Wallace needs Tom Hayden and Eldridge Cleaver; Tom Hayden and Eldridge Cleaver need George Wallace. As Hayden put it in Chicago in August 1968, "America is reaching a point of bankruptcy and decay so complete that only military tools can protect the political institutions. ... As reform has failed, the reliance on police power has become more visible. . . . Our victory lies in progressively demystifying a false democracy, showing the organized violence underneath reformism and manipulation." This is exactly what Wallace requires for his followers; and Wallace's promise to save law and order by stationing paratroopers twelve feet apart on every block is exactly what Hayden and Cleaver require for their followers. Thus New Left and New Right verify each other's claims and witness each other's pretensions. For all their vast differences in values and objectives they end as tacit partners in a common assault on civility and democracy. (my emphasis)

SDS and antiwar leader Tom Hayden seems to have really been bugging Schlesinger at the time he wrote that book.

What makes that a stereotypical liberal framing is that it present the liberal viewpoint, which he is applying there, as defending bedrock American values against the midguided forces of barbarism on the far left and the far right.

The problem is, that construction relies on rhetorical abstractions. The Wallace movement that he called the "new" Right was what the Southern Democrats were from, oh, the end of the Civil War to the 1960s. Wallace in non-racial policies was more liberal than many of his fellow Southern Democrats.

The New Left in the US was directing its criticism against liberalism, or "corporate liberalism" which is probably a better name for it. That was in no small part due to the fact there was a liberal Democratic President in the 1960s who was prosecuting the Vietnam War.

Schlesinger distinguishes between the "new politics" ativists, those antiwar and reform-minded activists who backed Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and the "New Left". That's a meaningful distinction. But it wasn't clear-cut, either. "New politics" activists often had some background in the civil-rights or studewnt movements. And their priority concerns around civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War were similar.

Schlesinger, a close associate of Bobby Kennedy, was sympathetic to the "new politics" activists but was anxious to distinguish himself from groups like the Black Panthers or the SDS with explicitly revolutionary goals. And that in itself was fair enough. Schlesinger was not a revolutionary. And, of course, neither was Bobby Kennedy.

But the mirror-image equivalence he draws between New Left and New Right was unrealistic, particularly on the issue of violence. However reckless some of the talk about violence from left militant groups may have been, it also came out of years of seeing nonviolent protests being met with violence: in the South, on college campuses, in antiwar demonstrations. The resonance of the Black Panthers' slogan of armed self-defense with so many in urban ghettos was due to real experiences of chronic police misbehavior by nearly all-white police forces in their communities.

The Wallace movement, on the other hand, represented a harsher and more authoritarian version of that institutionalized violence on the national level. But it didn't represent anything "new" in the Deep South. Wallace represented the kind of repression and violence that had been the "establishment", the dominant practice of government, in the segregated South.

Sure, any groups that stand outside the mainstream can be equated in some of the mechanics of their movement, e.g., trying to get third parties on the ballot. But the content of the politics of the movements Schlesinger was calling "New Left" and "New Right" is essential to any meaningful description of them.

And even if he defined the New Left as being in his eyes a totalitarian movement in its goals, or maybe "objectively" a totalitarian movement as Marxists and neocons might put it, it's still pretty basic that the real existing New Left movement in 1968-9 was a radical-democratic movement. The Wallace movement was antidemocratic and authoritarian. The New Left were looking for more active forms of "participatory democracy". The Wallace movement defended the segregationist version of "states rights" so that the local shurffs would have maximum discretion in dealing with uppity Negroes. Sure, there are levels of abstraction where those differences would not look so great. But they would have to be stratospheric levels of abstraction.

The New Left did not succeed in creating a permanent, distinctive political force in American politics. In Europe, the Green Parties can reasonably be seen as a long-term instutitional successor to the New Left. Though, I might add, so far as I'm aware none of them has declared their parties to be officially guided by the philosophies of Franz Fanon or Herbert Marcuse.

In the US, the two major parties of the 1960s have not been displaced. The Republican Party has become essentially what the George Wallce movement was in 1968. Let's be fair to Wallace, though. I don't believe he ever officially and openly endorsed torture as the present-day Republican Party does.

There was no comparable takeover of the Democratic Party by the New Left. And the actual influence of ideas that could be considered distinctively New Left is very diffuse, though by no means without lasting influence in some ways. Considering that Barack Obama's politics appear to be distinctly more conservative than Bobby Kennedy's, I think it's safe to say that the Democratic Party has not been taken over by followers of Franz Fanon, either.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, new left, tom hayden

The sixties: Political perspective of the New Left of the 1960s

Sociologist C. Wright Mills

The New Left was a term that covered a diverse group of organizations and movements. Broadly speaking, the New Left refers to the popular reform movements of the 1960s, particularly the civil rights and antiwar movements. In organizational terms, the New Left would be generally understood to include the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Black Panther Party, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later Student National Coordinating Committee), and a variety of smaller groups and grouplets that grew out of the popular movements of those days, from the Freedom Rides to campus occupations like that at Columbia in 1968.

In The Annals (382) March 1969 special issue on Protest in the Sixties, the prominent leftist historian Staughton Lynd contributed an article called "The New Left". His article focuses on the intellectual aspects of New Left in the United States. Which is more than a small paradox, since a distinct characteristic of the American New Left was its eclecticism and orientation toward action, often with an overt scorn of theorizing. The European New Left had a more coherent theoretical framework because European democracies had a strong left tradition in the divergent forms of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties. But part of the reason a general term like New Left became a useful term for these movements is that in the US and elsewhere, there were no distinct parties identified with these activist tendencies established themselves as significant electoral forces, although there were smaller parties and sects like the Weather Underground and the Revolutionary Communist Party that emerged from the movement that was known as the New Left in the US.

Lynd uses a quotation from historian Howard Zinn to illustrate the action-oriented, theory-skeptical sensibility of New Left activists:

There has been much talk about a Christian-Marxist dialogue, but if such a dialogue is to be useful perhaps it should begin with the idea that God is dead and Marx is dead, but Yossarian [a character in Joseph Heller's antiwar novel Catch-22] lives - which is only a way of saying: let's not spend our time arguing whether God exists or what Marx really meant, because while we argue, the world moves, while we publish, others perish, and the best use of our energy is to resist those who would send us - after so many missions of murder - on still one more.

Despite this skepticism, or just general ignorance, of theoretical constructs, the New Left did have plenty of ideas, including Martin Luther King's Christian/Ghandian pacifism and black nationalism. Lynd uses Howard Zinn and radical sociologist C. Wright Mills to illustrate the anti-authoritarian, activist, radical-democratic orientation of the New Left groups. Lynd says, "Mills was the theorist who most influenced early SDS". And, "Zinn was the only white person to be elected an adviser by the early SNCC". Lynd also found an "existential" element in New Left thinking, which he defines as "the knowledge that the consequences of action can never be fully predicted". In fact, he claims that "is the single most characteristic element in the thought-world of the New Left."

He mentions various other thinkers who had influence on or at least strong affinities with the New Left, including historian William Appleman Williams, gay writer Paul Goodman and psychologist Erich Fromm. He also mentions the Freudian-Marxist Herbert Marcuse as being particularly representative of New Left thinking, at least to the extent that such an eclectic movement can be represented by a particular body of theory or a single book:

The single, most comprehensive, scholarly statement supporting the New Left analysis of corporate liberalism is undoubtedly Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse's pessimistic thesis in this influential work is that contemporary industrial society "seems to be capable of containing social change," indeed, that traditional forms of protest are "perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty."

That concept of "corporate liberalism" is an important one. As Lynd describes it with particular reference to SDS, the New Left saw their main opponent as corporate liberalism, which at the time was perceived to be the dominant Establishment thinking in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. That wasn't as unrealistic as it may seem today, after 40 years of the Age of Cheney. In 1964, Barry Goldwater's brand of militant conservatism was bitterly contested within the Republican Party, and lost in the general election by a landslide to a liberal Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson. Lynd's terms of analysis are different from those used by the talking heads on Meet the Press, but he makes a valuable observation about the New Left perspective on the power of corporate liberalism:

The [New Left] theorists of corporate liberalism believed their main enemy to be, not the reactionary Right, but the liberal Center. Their attitude may be compared to that of the German Communist party in the early 1930's, which directed more hostility toward its Social Democratic competitor than toward the Nazis. American New Left theory made the implicit assumption that capitalism in the United States would not turn to overt authoritarianism. It overlooked the possibility that the very success of the New Left in unmasking corporate liberalism, the very growth of a serious internal opposition, would change the character of the situation and force upon the governing class a felt need for more rigorous controls. The young radicals' assessment of the American reality has been, in this sense, not too negative but too hopeful. (my emphasis)

Tags: 1968, herbert marcuse, howard zinn, new left, sixties, staughton lynd

Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

The following is a review that I wrote in October 2000, several years before my blogging days began, of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. I'm presenting it here as it stood in 2000 with no current editing:

One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse (Beacon Press; Boston; 1964)

Student revolutionaries in Paris in 1968 scrawled "Marx-Mao-Marcuse" as graffiti on the walls. The American philosophy professor Herbert Marcuse, a German immigrant who was part of the "Frankfurt School" of social research, became famous as a leading theorist of the "New Left" in the 1960s.

Previously he had developed a solid if controversial academic reputation in America as the author of an introductory text on the 19th-century German philosopher Hegel and a book applying Freudian theoretical concepts to social criticism. He had been one of the Marxist social scientists Bill Donovan brought into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, and during the Eisenhower years published a critical study on the Soviet Union. With a famous essay on "Repressive Tolerance" and his book One-Dimensional Man, he became more widely known as a political theorist with a provocative analysis of modern society.

Marcuse concentrated on criticizing the existing order of things and describing utopian possibilities in rather vague, philosophical terms. He was not given to making programmatic proposals. One may question whether his actual influence on activists of the New Left - a loose term used at that time to distinguish a wide range of (mostly) young activists, protesters and revolutionaries from pre-World War II leftists - may have been exaggerated in popular commentaries on the movement. Ironically, one of the best-known political personalities who acknowledged a direct intellectual debt to Herbert Marcuse was Angela Davis, a prominent figure in the US Communist Party, which was the pre-eminent "Old Left" bogeyman for "New Left" activists.

His actual influence was probably greater in continental Europe where Marxist ideas were more familiar in the daily political vocabulary. Marcuse, often described as a "neo-Marxist," operated from an essentially Marxist-Leninist framework in his broader perspective. He believed that capitalist society possessed basic contradictions within itself which would ultimately be resolved only by a political revolution in which the working class would establish a socialist society based on centralized state ownership of the basic elements of the economy, "the means of production," as Marx called them.

Marcuse envisioned the transformation of a socialist system also in more-or-less conventional Marxist-Leninist terms. An elite vanguard group would seize power supported by a popular revolt. They would then rule for some period of time in an authoritarian manner while taking control of the economy and re-educating the population to accept the new order.

Marcuse’s well-known One-Dimensional Man is no ringing call to class warfare. Instead it's a kind of manifesto for intellectual non-conformists. It depicts Western capitalism as a conformist nightmare, where the lives of individuals are controlled in ways both overt and insidious by largely unseen social forces that appear surprisingly benevolent but are ultimately destructive and utterly unjust. This society represses the possibility of a humane alternative order, in which "the individual would be liberated from the work world’s imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own." (p. 8)

The first section of the book consists of an analysis of social trends. The title phrase is described in the context of the pervasive intrusions of various social institutions - government, business, entertainment - into the personal privacy of the individual. Individuals have lost much of the sense of self that, in earlier stages of society, allowed them to question social institutions from a critical perspective, he argues. "There is only one dimension" of life, not a clear separation of society and self, and that single dimension is pervasive, "everywhere and in all forms." (p.11)

He proceeds to analyze long term trends in both Western capitalist and in Soviet society and how in both cases the increasing productive possibilities of the economy will create pressure for new political and social arrangements. He describes how art has lost much of its potential to create critical perspectives on society. Even the "desublimated sexuality of [Eugene] O’Neill’s alcoholics and [William] Faulkner’s savages…are part and parcel of the society in which it happens, but nowhere its negation.” (p. 77) Even language itself becomes co-opted by the administrative ethos of mass culture so that it becomes difficult to even formulate dissenting ideas into words, or to understand the contradictions in the existing order such as those expressed in a newspaper caption like, “Labor is Seeking Missile Harmony.” (p. 89, cited to the New York Times, 12/1/1960)

The next section moves to his professional field of philosophy to analyze the ways in which academic trends in philosophy and the social sciences tend to discourage broad criticisms of society. In modern society, Marcuse argues, Reason itself has been redefined and instrumentalized in such a way that it justifies a “terrifying harmony of freedom and oppression, productivity and destruction, growth and regression.” (p. 124) He argues that even theoretical scientific thought is moving more and more toward a technological orientation that tends to discourage questioning of established ideas. He focuses his philosophical guns especially on the kind of linguistic analysis associated with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which he sees as yet another reinforcement to the general conformity.

In the final section, he offers some perspectives that he believes could improve matters, i.e., lead to a freer and more just society. At the philosophical level, he considers adopting a dialectical mode of thought a necessity - not at all surprising for a Marxist specializing in Hegelian philosophy. He argues that dialectical thought reflects the actual process of history which “involves consciousness: recognition and seizure of the liberating potentialities. Thus it involves freedom.” (p. 222)

The following description of his idea of how the existing order must be challenged, which seems to contain more of Alan Ginsburg than of Karl Marx, suggest why Marcuse was seen as something of a prophet of the emergence of the hippie movement and mass student protests later in the decades:

Today, in the prosperous warfare and welfare state, the human qualities of a pacified existence seem asocial and unpatriotic - qualities such as the refusal of all toughness, togetherness, and brutality; disobedience to the tyranny of the majority; profession of fear and weakness (the most rational reaction to this society!); a sensitive intelligence sickened by that which is being perpetrated; the commitment to the feeble and ridiculed actions of protest and refusal. These expressions of humanity, too, will be marred by necessary compromise - by the need to cover oneself, to be capable of cheating the cheaters, and to live and think in spite of them. In the totalitarian society [in which he includes Western democracies], the human attitudes tend to become escapist attitudes, to follow Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Don’t wait to be hunted to hide…” (pp. 242-3)

This theme of protest and dissent, the celebration of what Marcuse calls the Great Refusal, permeates this book. One of the challenges the book presents is that this tone and theme of protest can distract the reader from the fact that he is describing quite well a number of processes of social integration that have both good and bad consequences.

And while he may formulate his arguments more provocatively than others, he was not alone in pointing out potential dangers in excessive conformity. One of the books he cites in the introduction is The Organization Man, a 1956 study by William A. Whyte, a writer for the conservative business magazine Fortune, which provided a detailed look at the cost to both companies and individuals of the kind of conformity that corporate life tends to impose on employees and their families.

As quoted above, Marcuse argues that even shocking, defiant art has lost most of its power to promote discontent with the established order. On the one hand, that reminds us that it may be worthwhile to stop to appreciate a novel or a musical piece as more than just entertainment. On the other, is it bad that William Faulkner’s works are not rejected as the product of a social degenerate because they describe unpleasant sides of people’s behavior? Isn’t this aspect of the integrative force of the market basically a good thing?

Marcuse’s analysis of the vast potential of the modern economy to meet the population’s material needs and drastically reduce the labor required seemed to many critics to largely ignore the realities of poverty, even in the most developed countries. This perspective, too, was a sign of the times. It was the year after the publication of this book that President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty in America. The problem of serious want in the midst of general prosperity was an issue at that time, recently becoming a major topic of discussion once again in the United States now only after a long economic expansion had produced prosperity exceeding even that of the 1960s.

But his focus on long-range trends makes much of his analysis still relevant. The following passage could be an Internet entrepreneur of 2000 raving about the potential of technology - except that he wouldn’t likely use the Hegelian term “reified” (which means roughly, “made into an abstract form”):

Automation, once it became the process of material production, would revolutionize the whole society. The reification of human labor power, driven to perfection, would shatter the reified form by cutting the chain that ties the individual to the machinery - the mechanism through which his own labor enslaves him. Complete automation … would open the dimension of free time as the one in which man’s private and societal existence would constitute itself. This would be the historical transcendence toward a new civilization. (p.36-7)

Marcuse’s description of postwar Western capitalism as a system which had effected “the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, [and] the collusion of Business and Labor” (p. xii) certainly had some validity. The labor movement in America was strong enough in the immediate postwar era that the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith could write of labor as a countervailing power balancing off the influence of big business. In postwar Germany, Konrad Adenauer’s conservative government successfully adopted a model of the “social market economy,” in which business and labor cooperated in a systematic way, a formal “social partnership” that endures to this day.

Both Democrats and Republicans in America shared a broad anti-Communist consensus on foreign policy. And, in 1964 when this book was first published, several years had passed since the time that the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had formally accepted Germany’s role in NATO and had declared themselves a “popular party” instead of a “class party,” formally rejecting at the same time a number of their more traditionally Marxist positions on public ownership of industry. (Supporters as well as leftist critics of the SPD could legitimately argue that such a development had taken place in practice during the Weimar Republic.)

But it’s difficult to see how 1964 could be viewed in any meaningful political sense as a time of stultifying social consensus. The civil rights movement in America was openly challenging the segregation system in the Deep South in a militant way, provoking a long-term realignment of the two major political parties. The birth control pill was already undermining the social justification for the enforced inequality of women.

The debates at that time over Vietnam and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty showed that, within the broad Cold War consensus, there were deep divisions over key policies. In retrospect, one could argue that part of the problem in Vietnam was that both Democrats and Republicans were so committed to fighting Communism that policy makers were unwilling - in practical political terms, even unable - to ask basic questions about whether the American commitment to preserving South Vietnam from the North made sense for the United States. In that sense, Marcuse was identifying a real problem with the bipartisan “general acceptance of the National Purpose.”

But Marcuse’s larger case for a radical transformation of the social order rests largely on his argument for the existence of a “stupefying” social consensus that had permeated the psychological make-up of the general public to the point that no meaningful dissent was possible. It’s a thin reed on which to hang the case for making a revolution. And it was not a politically meaningful description of the Western democracies in 1964, except at a very high level of abstraction.

In fact, a great deal of Marcuse’s broad indictment of Western capitalism is based on what could be described as essentially a linguistic trick of describing things at such a high level of abstraction that different readers could read very different and even contradictory meanings into the concepts. When he describes “contemporary industrial society” as “totalitarian,” he rhetorically blurs both economic and political distinctions between the Western democracies and the European Communist nations of that time.

To be fair, this equation of Soviet Communism and Western democracy would not have seemed quite so far-fetched in 1964 as it sounds today. Some Western observers emphasized tendencies to “convergence” between the two systems that would result in the Soviet and Western economies evolving to more similar conditions over time. In the Communist world, the Sino-Soviet split was in full swing at that time, with the Chinese leaders accusing the Soviet Union under Khrushchev of reverting back to a capitalist society. It is notable that Marcuse’s view of the socialist world in this book did not seem to be much influenced by the Sino-Soviet split, perhaps a reflection of the underestimation of its importance that affected more mainstream American observers, as well.

Time has not been kind to such positions. Marcuse’s argument that Western democracies were “totalitarian” in effectively the same way as the Soviet Union is actually a variation on the standard Soviet argument that Communism protected “economic rights” ignored in capitalist countries. Marcuse dismisses electoral choice and the freedoms of speech and the press as essentially meaningless in the “one-dimensional” society.

Even at a very high level of abstraction, it’s an arguable point. But in the practice of real people living real lives, those rights are important and meaningful. Even the former eastern European Communist Parties, such as the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS) in Germany, would have to acknowledge as much.

The enduring value of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man is its demand for critical thinking, for refusing to blandly accept the established opinions or the generally approved practices as being beyond challenge. In the age of the Internet and of dozens of TV channels delivered by cable and satellite, sorting through reams of information by critical judgment has become more important than ever. In an era of accelerating globalism when corporations still consider politicians theirs to buy, and when currency traders can cripple a nation’s economy on a whim, Marcuse’s call for individuals to reclaim their own worth in the context of seeking a more just and fulfilling social order actually seems more relevant than ever.

Bruce Miller
October 2000