NEW RADICALISM
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for later institutional changes. On the other hand, they do have
various fragmentary conceptions of what a "new society" ought to
be
in
the context of both the possibilities and the dangers of cyber–
nation.
The one political manifestation of this kind of radicalism has
been the Freedom Democratic Party, which is largely a creation of
SNCC. (In basic ways, Students for a Democratic Society and the
Northern Student Movement are northern parallels of SNCC.) The
first test of the radical integrity of the Freedom Democratic Party
took place at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.
As
the FDP refused to accept a compromise-two special at-large seats
offered by the Convention-it found itself opposed by the hierarchy
of civil rights leaders, some themselves former radicals. When one of
the latter, Bayard Rustin, urged the FDP to be "politically mature"
and take the two seats, the answer was a radically different definition
of political maturity from the one Rustin offered. And I expect that
if
this politics-by-the-poor approach proves viable, that decision will
be seen in retrospect to have been one of the watersheds of the new
radicalism.
In their role as pragmatists, these radicals, northern and southern,
look with skepticism at the coalition being urged by civil rights
leaders like Rustin and Martin Luther King. They know the need
for a broader alliance by which the white and black poor can join with
elements of organized labor, with liberals and with the churches.
But they see hardly any evidence that the other parts of this putative
coalition are ready at this time to move beyond meliorism. Organized
labor, to a great extent, has become fiercely self-protective. The
pervasive trend in new contracts
is
protection through attrition of
already-organized labor against the threat of cybernation. Labor's
demands for higher minimum wages and higher social security
benefits, moreover, are irrelevant for those who have no jobs and no
prospects of jobs. Nor do the liberals or the churches seem fully to
realize not only that the War on Poverty is inadequately financed
and narrow in scope, but that it cannot succeed in terms of the
present definition of "work" and the still sacred link between the
traditional definition of production and income.
It is here that the new radicalism, as a political and economic
movement, differs from much of the American radicalism that has
