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NAT HENTOFF
with the power potential of the poor,
is
also
so central to the new
radicalism. And in
this
sense, there
is
an optimism among some of the
young radicals which, I expect, strikes their elders as pitifully in–
genuous. They do believe that through democratic processes a different
order of men-many of them coming from and responsible to new
centers of power--can be elected to state and federal ' legislatures.
In addition, some agree with Paul Goodman that a significant de–
centralization could be achieved and that a redefinition of work
is possible. Obviously a high degree of centralization
is
essential
to the planning of the national economy-from budget allocations for
the public sector to new forms of nationally interrelated employment
centers. But decentralization can be possible in many parts of the
public sector-education, recreation and the establishment of new
vocations in various areas of social work for those who used to be
clients.
So far, much of this attempt to set up alternatives to a tech–
nological society totally managed by an elitist oligarchy-no matter
what democratic facade of democracy would remain-sounds and
is
only utopian. The really hip new radicals know
this.
They would
agree with an older radical who told a leading "utopian" writer one
night:
"If
you're going to be radical, you've got to be tougher.
You've got to
know
much more." Therefore, out of the still small
cadres of new radicals
will
have to come a wide range of experts
on political organization who will have no patience with such
easy '
and meaningless rhetoric as, for example, "the white power structure."
Their job
will
be to find out where the power does indeed lie and
how it
is
interconnected in specific cities and neighborhoods. They
will
also have to learn methods for countering that power. Others
will
have to become specialists in education; in the vastly undeveloped
field of assuring and expanding the legal rights of the poor in their
contacts with welfare, housing and other instrumentalities of the
present bureaucracy; and specialists, who go far beyond what Saul
Alinsky has so far discovered, in the dynamics of moving the poor
to find and sustain their own leadership.
To these radicals, the rage-without-program of a LeRoi Jones,
when he speaks polemically, may be momentarily therapeutic, but
is
of
little use in any effort to change society. Nor
is
the preaching of
James Baldwin any longer much help. The Negroes among the kind
