358
NAT HENTOFF
Nat Hentoff
Michael Harrington's article on the "new radicalism" seems
in many respects more like an exercise in wishful thinking than a
political analysis. The piece also reveals
his
failure to understand
the real nature of the new Left. I referred-and I assumed he did
too-to the core of the new radicalism, represented by such
grou~
as SNCC, the Northern Student Movement, Students for a
Demo–
cratic Society, a growing number of CORE workers and their putative
allies on campuses and among radical intellectuals as well as among
those of the poor who are starting to organize themselves. I'm sure
we both agree that the Progressive Labor Party, which predictably
(despite its minute numbers and influence) is given absurdly wide
coverage in national magazines, is not part of a viable new
Left
Nor are any other neo-Stalinist or pro-Mao or ideologically quasi–
totalitarian sects.
Harrington writes, "This new Leftism is youthful, disrespectful
of radical tradition, and, because of the civil rights movement, values
personal commitment and involvement highly." But the young are
not so much disrespectful of radical tradition as they are disrespectful
of those aging radicals who try to counsel and influence them in the
terms of the thirties. I have heard Irving Howe, for example, address
himself to the new Left, and I was saddened by his self-righteous
conviction that he himself had nothing to learn from
them.
It is true that the young, for the most part, have not yet thought
through a comprehensive ideology or a strategy for basic social change,
but it is also true that they quite rightly consider their situation to
be
qualitatively different from that of radicals in the thirties. For one
thing, as I tried
~o
show in my piece, the enemy is basically different
Second, these young people are not the children or the auxiliaries of
already established parties or other "adult" ideological centers. (Even
CORE, which was started and for a long time shaped by older radical–
pacifists, is rapidly developing its own indigenous young leadership.)
PLM (or, now, PLP), by contrast,
is
an offshoot of older ideologies
(at least two of its leaders are former functionaries of the Communist
