PARTISAN REVIEW
397
nothing from existing socletles. But for many radicals it is an in–
authentic position, requiring a will to reject all one's political knowl–
edge and experience.
I am also not talking about the old complaints concerning the
New Left's lack of a theory or a program - which Susan Sontag
is very much aware of. These are disingenuous too, in that it is the
program and not the lack of one that is found objectionable. Nor
has the solicitude for theory provided any new theories, or any
solution to modern problems. I am convinced that only an anti–
theoretical, antihistorical, non-Marxist, unstructured movement like
that of the youth today could have cre.ated a new left force in the
West. The fact is that the Left was paralyzed by Stalinism; and
anti-Stalinists, some of whom became "anti-Communists," were frozen
into the role of oppositionists. Apparently, a new movement could
resolve the old dilemmas only by overrunning them, like a
flood
that
disregards the old barriers. And the fact that the New Left has no
fixed system strikes me as one of its promising traits, for it indicates
the kind of open, transitional and unpredictable movement that has
some chance of maturing and spreading across national boundaries,
into the Communist countries as well as the West. Only its paternal
critics seem to know exactly where youth is going.
Still,
if
we can go by the past, it is unlikely that those militants
who disdain radical history and theory
will
be able to escape some of
the old predicaments. For antiideologists have usually been concealed
ideologists; and political empiricism is itself an ideology, full of
hidden assumptions. Thus the black militants and the white radicals
who attack Israel as an "agent of imperialism" are merely parroting
Marxist slogans out of context. The recent statements by Stokely
Carmichael, supporting the Arabs against the Jews, are particularly
reminiscent of Stalinist manipulations, in the way they
try
to connect
Russian and Arab interests with those of the blacks in America.
If
Nasser can be said to represent a humane, socialist force, then
we must reconsider what is meant by socialism. An analagous,
though more complex phenomenon, is the recent seizure of univer–
sities. For, however sympathetic one might be with the aims of the
students, it must be said that their strategy often looks like a parody
of Lenin's and Trotsky's blueprints for the seizure of power.
As
the
Czechs pointed out, when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia they
