The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism

233 Pages·2012·5.378 MB·English

by  Stanley Aronowitz

The Death and Rebirth
American Radicalism
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The Death and Rebirth
of American Radicalism
~STANLEY ARONOWITZ
Published in 1996 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
This edition published 2012 by Routledge:
Routledge Routledge
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New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon OXI4 4RN
Copyright © 1996 by Routledge
All rights reserved, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now
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from the publisher.
contents-
Preface vii
Introduction
The Death of the Left I
1 When the New Left Was New 19
2 The New Left
An Analysis 57
3 The Situation of the Left in the United States 91
4 Against the Liberal State
ACT-UP and the Emergence of Postmodern Politics 125
5 Toward a Politics of Alternatives
Part One 145
6 Toward a Politics of Alternatives
Part Two 169
Notes 199
Index 211
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preface-
~ American radicalism has never enjoyed anything like success, at least in
conventional political terms. Yet, from time to time—the first decade of the
twentieth century, the Depression era and the 1960s—radicals played important
roles in popular movements for economic and cultural reform and were able to
occupy significant territories of the imagination. The Old Left socialists and
communists were prone to explain away their failure to build a powerful mass
radical movement, even as they took pride in their achievements in building
resistance to government and corporate attacks against individual and group
rights to organize and speak freely. Echoing an idea proposed early in this cen-
tury by Werner Sombart, Aileen Kraditor has recently argued—forcefully I
think—that radicals have been stymied by the vigor of U.S. capitalism, not
repression, capitalist propaganda, business 's control over the means of informa-
tion, or the internecine wars to which American radical organizations have
become habituated.1 She concludes that workers—the subject/object of the
radical imagination until the 1960s and beyond—knew about the radicals and
their solutions but chose to act as if capitalism, for practical purposes, remained
the context within which their aspirations would be contained. They joined
unions, voted Democrat, Republican, and even Socialist and occasionally
participated in militant strikes and social movements. But they decisively
rejected the revolu-tionary solutions offered by the left.
Some thirty-five years before Kraditor published her book, Dwight
Macdonald, a prominent radical journalist, wrote a long essay on the failure of
radicalism in the United States in Politics, then one of the most influential non-
communist magazines of the independent left. He began The Root is Man with
this quote from Leon Trotsky: "The second world war has begun. It attests
incontrovertibly to the fact that society can no longer live on the basis of capi-
talism. Thereby it subjects the proletariat to a new and perhaps decisive test."
Trotsky proceeds to conjecture that the war would "provoke a proletarian
revolution" not only in the defeated countries as it had following World War
One, but in the Soviet Union as well. If, despite the carnage of the war and the
demonstrated crisis of the system, the revolution does not occur, he ruefully
admitted ("if however it is conceded the present war will not provoke a revolu-
tion but the decline of the proletariat"), then there remains the possibility that
democracy will deteriorate and a totalitarian regime may rise. Under these con-
ditions, he concludes, "if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of
VIII ~ Preface
fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else
would remain except openly to recognize that the Socialist program based on the
internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a Utopia."2
The rest of the essay opposes a frankly Utopian, individualistic, and human-
istic radicalism to Marxism's reliance on the contradictions of History.
Macdonald's "new radicalism" is unabashedly critical, or at least frank about
the chance that the working class may choose to affiliate with the revolution-
ary aims of the left. His starting point is not History but the self, its subjectiv-
ity. He is content to oppose the prevailing Order whether the "masses" want
to or not. More than any other document of the post-war independent left, The
Root Is Man forecasts the actuality of the most radical section of the New Left
of the 1960s. While in the wake of the Cold War Macdonald felt compelled to
"choose the West," his radicalism remained undiminished.
My own critique of Marxism, The Crisis in Historical Materialism, dealt
with the theoretical issues and some of the historical failures of the socialist and
communist movements, but was not especially concerned with the specificity of
the American radical legacy. I had long rejected explanations for the weakness of
this legacy that pointed to McCarthyism and other instances of political repres-
sion; nor was I particularly persuaded by the argument that the split in the
Socialist Party after the Bolshevik Revolution mortally wounded the left. Finally,
that the American Communist Party, by far the largest and most influential rad-
ical organization of the 1930s, "never thought of thinking of itself at all" and
remained until the breakup of the Soviet Union a loyal supplicant of Moscow (in
Macdonald and Sidney Hook's terms "The American branch office of the GPU"
[predecessor to the KGB]) did not impress me as a sufficient reason for the party's
demise after 1956. In fact, I believe the Moscow tie helped the Communists
more than it hurt them.
I read Macdonald's long essay in 1982 and decided to address some of the
questions he raised. Having been a political activist in the New Left of the 1960s
and 1970s, but, like Aileen Kraditor, coming from the Old Left as well, I was
concerned to find out what, if any, were the future possibilities for the left. In
1983 I published a two part answer to Macdonald in Socialist Review which,
in retrospect, seems overly optimistic about the chances for radical revival as a
result of the merger of the New American Movement, a New Left remnant of
which I was a leader, and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a
fairly large, but nonactivist collection of letterhead names and rank and file
socialist sympathizers. In 1993,1 wrote a ten year retrospective of that experi-
ence and described prospects for a Next Left for the same journal.
This book resumes my own quest. I have drawn some new conclusions, but
most important I am persuaded that Macdonald is right: to be a radical does not
in the first place require a historical estimate that capitalism will collapse. What it
requires is the elementary belief that even if the answers remain somewhat elusive,
Preface ~ Ix
the prevailing system of political, economic and cultural power, late or advanced
global capitalism, is opposed to individual freedom and happiness.
The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism incorporates a small por-
tion of the 1993 essay in chapter three. Chapter one, in somewhat different form,
appeared in 60s Without Apology, edited by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson,
Fredric Jameson and myself (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), and a portion
of chapter four appeared in Social Postmodernism, edited by Steven Seidman
and Linda Nicholson (Blackwell, 1995). The introduction and chapters two, five,
and six appear here for the first time.
As usual my intellectual and personal debts remain large. Ellen Willis read the
entire manuscript and made important suggestions, especially in the last two
chapters; Jonathan Cutler and Mike Roberts read substantial portions and gave
criticism and feedback; Nona Willis-Aronowitz performed vital bibliographical
research; David Staples and Mike Roberts were my research assistants for chap-
ter two and David Trend and the Socialist Review collective edited the section
of "The Situation of the American Left" incorporated into chapter three. Eric
Zinner, my editor at Routledge, was instrumental in making some sense of a
once unwieldy manuscript, but I take sole responsibility for the results.