NEW RADICALISM
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Party, and that is one of the reasons for the Progressive Labor Party's
rigid irrelevance).
Third, because of the strength of their commitment and because
of the existential force of the experience of working in the ghettos,
the youth feel secure enough to be unafraid of "take-over" by manipu–
lators from totalitarian groups. Accordingly, they are disrespectful of
what to them seems the hysteria of those older radicals who tried to
"purify" the Students for a Democratic Society's April 17 March
on Washington to protest the Administration's Vietnam policy. The
young knew they could protect the content of their protest against
infiltration by fellow travelers of one kind or another, and they
succeeded. Most of the active young are not ingenuous about the
dangers of take-over, but they are convinced that they are at the
very least as able as their elders to guard against manipulation and
that those elders are spending far too much time and energy drawing
frightened parallels between the radicalism of today and that of their
own youth.
Harrington goes on to say that this is "probably the first serious
Left in the last century which has ignored, or even rejected, the
organized workers." But who has ignored whom? So far most of the
prescriptions for a broad coalition which includes labor have been
far too vague to make sense to the young. And the failure of the
unions to protest our appalling adventures in Vietnam and the
Dominican Republic hardly gives the new Left confidence in organized
labor as an ally. George Meany refers to critics of American policy
in
Vietnam as "intellectual jitterbugs and nitwits" ; and David
Dubinsky of the ILGWU takes exactly the same line. Walter Reuther,
whom the coalitionists regard as a more flexible possible ally than
Meany or Dubinsky, is silent.
Domestically, Harrington finds hope in the rising militancy
of such unions as the American Federation of Teachers and the
social workers' Local 371 in New York. A few other unions, like
Local 1199 in New York which has been organizing hospital workers
and other groups, are aware of the need for fundamental social
change. But on the whole, organized labor is concerned with pro–
tecting its own. It has done far too little about organizing the marginal
workers and the underemployed. And nothing about the unemployed.
Harrington says, "the unions have the beginnings of a program
