BLACK POWER
47
A further obstacle facing the New Left today, Black Power ad–
vocates and otherwise, is that its Anarchist style and mood run
directly counter to prevailing tendencies in our national life, especially
the tendencies to conformity and centralization. The conformity has
been commented on too often to bear repetition, except to point out
that the young radicals' unorthodox mores (sexual, social, cultural ),
are in themselves enough to produce uneasiness and anger in the
average American. In insisting on the right of the individual to please
himself and to rely on his own judgment (whether in dress, speech,
music, sex or stimulants), SNCC and SDS may be solidly within the
American tradition - indeed may be its main stream - but this tradi–
tion is now more central to our rhetoric than to our behavior.
The Anarchist focus in SNCC and SDS on decentralization, on
participatory democracy and on community organizing, likewise runs
counter to dominant national trends. Consolidation, not dispersion, is
currently king. There are some signs that a counter-development has
begun - such as the pending decentralization of the New York City
school system - but as yet the overwhelming pattern continues to be
consolidation. Both big government and big business are getting bigger
and, more ominous still, are coming into ever closer partnership.
As
Richard
J.
Barber has recently documented, the federal government is
not only failing to block the growth of huge "conglomerate" firms by
antitrust action, but it is contributing to that growth through procure–
ment contracts and the exchange of personnel.
13
The traditional hos–
tility between business and government has rapidly drawn to a close.
Washington is no longer interested in restraining the giant cor–
porations, and the corporations have lost much of their fear of federal
intentions. The two, in happy tandem, are moving the country still
further along the road to oligopoly, militarism, economic imperial–
ism and greater privileges for tl1e already privileged. The trend is so
pronounced, and there is so little effective opposition to it, that it
begins to take on an irrevocable, even irreversible, quality.
In the face of these monoliths of national power, Black Power
in Lowndes County is pathetic by comparison. Yet while the forma–
tion of the Black Panther party in Lowndes brought out paroxysms of
13. Richard
J.
Barber, "The New Partnership: Big Government and Big
Business,"
The New Republic,
Aug. 13, 1966. But see, too, Alexander Bickel's
article in the same journal for May 20, 1967.
