THE NEW RADICALISM : ROUND IV
PR's debate an the New Radicalism was opened in the
Winter
1965
issue. Earlier contributions were by Michael Harring–
ton, Nat Hentoll, Irving Howe, Stephen Rousseas, and Bayard
Rustin.
Norm Fruchter
1. Most of the people whose work has occasioned all the
recent publicity about "the new radicalism" probably read what is
written about them, but are not much affected. Their imperatives for
change were not significantly shaped by their reading of this country's
official or literary radicals. Some of them .are probably writing about
what has shaped their experience and led them to reject, at least tem–
porarily, the roles and careers their university education has projected
for an uncertain and taxing activism in Negro and poor white com–
munities, but the bulk of this country's official radicals will probably
not read what the new organizers have to say about themselves. This
situation, of limited, mostly one-way communication between official
radicals, and a small hut growing number of ex-students, results in
meta-debates common in
PRo
Your contributors are not speaking to
the people whose work has caused the debate, but are exercising their
credentials as official radicals, and are defining (yet again) their
political and economic analyses, and their choice of alternatives, for
that amorphous, quasi-radical quasi-liberal literate community which
is their real audience.
1
2. The trouble is that your contributors' real audience, the liter–
ate community which is concerned, responsible and subscribes to
innumerable journals, has never managed to make itself relevant to
1 These first notes were written, and prepared for publication, before Bayard
Rustin's article appeared. None of the characterizations of literary radicalism are
relevant to him; he has consistently worked to make his positions obvious to all
of us.
