368
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
to the extent that there are these new ideas which you attribute
18
the new radicalism, they are by no means the property or creatim
of the younger generation. Indeed, if you took the trouble to chcd,
you would find that these programmatic innovations are, in
a1m(ll
every case, the work of "former radicals." I labor this point not simply
because I want to set the historical record straight, but because
it
reveals that the real difference between the old and new Lefts
is
nU
in their analysis of their proposals so much as in style, mood
and
tactic. (Incidentally, it also makes me think that perhaps my radical–
ism is not so former, nor yours so new.)
What are these nonprogrammatic, tactical differences that divide
the new radicals from the old? Your description corroborates
my
thesis that the best and worst in the young comes from their search
for a new proletariat. In theory, you, and many of them, admit
the
need for a coalition of forces; in practice, you say you have found
,lit
force, the poor.
For example, you write that the new radicals "realize-as
a
number of older, retired radicals do not-that class cleavage in
tim
country is deepening."
If
this means that there is poverty
in
the
affluent society or that the poor, unlike the organized workers, do not
share even the major benefits of the welfare state, or that one
result
of the intersection of cybernation and the baby boom is a "growth
potential" for poverty, then you and I agree. (Every one of these
points, by the way, was documented by "former radicals" in the
fifties and early sixties in journals like
Dissent.)
But if you mean-as I
suspect you do-that class consciousness and solidarity are developing
among the poor, that is quite another matter.
Let me be very explicit. One is heartened by every tendency
of
the poor to organize themselves and to rebel, and the attempts
of
some of the new radicals, who have gone into the slums and shared
the daily life of those imprisoned there, to speed
this
process are mon:
heartening still. But this does not prove that "the steadily
growing
ranks of the speechless" are finding a voice.
As
I've been saying,
poverty can drive people either to protest or to passivity. In
the
widely publicized Philadelphia election for a community action coun–
cil, only 2.7 percent of eligible voters went to the polls (13,500 out
of 500,000). This hardly supports the thesis of the growth of
consciow,
political
class cleavage between the poor and the rest of society.
