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by the Old Left: into community organizing and into experiments
in
local political control. The rejection of the classic leftist obsession
with centralization opened up a number of important possibilities.
Experiments in community organizing in the ghetto in 1963 became
the basis for the Movement's emphasis upon decentralization and
community control. The New Left saw that when local citizens
struggled to control their own lives they were engaging in revolu–
tionary activity. From
this
experience, a number of tentative theories
about a "new" working class which included white collar workers,
and about the spontaneous generation of revolutionary programs
from local, radical actions, were proposed - theories which have
their analogues in the theoretical writings of the European Left today.
More significantly, perhaps, the absence of ideology meant SDS
was open to human values and humane relationships. The New Left
was thus in a perfect position to absorb and even to aggravate the
sense of alienation of a younger generation who felt a limitless hos–
tility to American culture and to the places prepared for them in it.
Committed to no one cultural style, the New Left could absorb
the rebellious, and potentially political, energy of drug culture, of
the music revolution, of movies and art. It became, in other words,
a synthesis of radical politics and bohemian culture, an enormously
creative but fragile fusion of politics and culture that appeared
shortly before World War I and temporarily in the 1930s.
The absence of theoretical thinking, however, made for dangers
which threatened the creativity of the Movement, for it led to a
political vacuum which was to be filled to some extent by the Prog–
ressive Labor Party. Serious-minded, sloganeering, PL had little
sense of the importance of the cultural revolution, of the origins
of the New Left or, indeed, of the complexities of the ties of white
radicals to the Black Movement. But Progressive Labor and the
young PL members who entered SDS brollght with them a sense of
the universality of political struggle, and demonstrated the inade–
quacy of a purely student movement. They suggested that the move–
ment seriously discuss imperialism and advanced forms of capitalism.
But in the bitter ideological debates of 1969 as PL gained power
within SDS, the regular members of SDS found themselves still badly
in
need of a theoretical foundation. The only possible answer for
them was the expulsion of PL, not on the firm ground of a rejection
