PARTISAN REVIEW
363
defense of everything in the Soviet Union. The secret, centralized,
bureaucratic party
is
simply the terminal
disease
of American radical
movements.
What remains of the New Left
is
a fractured political genera–
tion. The name of SDS
is
claimed both by PL and the minority
which expelled it. What
is
authentic about the organization
is
divided between a factionalized leadership and a membership which
is
largely uncommitted to any position, or
is,
at least for the moment,
highly skeptical. The larger Movement extends in every direction,
encompassing hundreds of activities, professional caucuses, under–
ground magazines and papers, cultural movements and political ten–
dencies. But whatever its weaknesses, SDS has been the organizing
center of the Movement for almost a decade, and its crisis belongs
to the whole New Left.
It
is far too easy to invoke the authority of
the past or sloganize the subtleties of politics to solve its problems.
The struggle for the survival of the New Left
rests
in its own tradi–
tions as well, in its spirit of experimentalism, its thirst for humane
values and
its
desire to let people control their own lives. But
it
must finally acknowledge that the time has come to tum these values
into a theory of social revolution that will expand the movement and
confound its enemies who now wait hopefully for a season of sec–
tarianism.
James Gilbert
AN ART OF VIOLENCE
By violence I intend here something quite specific and
fairly narrow - pretty much, in fact, what most people mean by
the term when they write to their Congressmen to complain about
TV programs. I am not speaking of the whole class of
art
that T.S.
Eliot points to when he speaks of Blake's "peculiarly terrifying"
hpnesty, the "unpleasantness of great poetry," the "things
which~
