BIRN BAUM I LASCH
369
Vietnam. Alain Touraine has recently spoken of a new hand in cards dealt
out within the capitalist bloc. The fact that the West German standard of
living is higher than our own is an indication of what is happening . The
neo-capitalist societies, more modern than our own in many ways, have
become stronger: they can sell better goods more cheaply on the world
market. And though dollar devaluation and domestic inflation may assist
our capitalists, it won't assist the working class, whose relative position is in
decline. And by working class I also mean those who live as we professionals
do , by selling labor.
Which raises again the question of the potential of American social–
ism. The legacy of the New Left surely is not exclusively cultural-it is
mainly that, of course, but not entirely that. After all, there were millions
of people in it who developed the idea, however crudely or incoherently,
that our society is dominated by corporate capitalism, which, as it were,
industrially fabricated many of the values they abhorred. Surely, this has
not been forgotten entirely. Can these people be remobilized for a more
enduring form of political action?
Lasch:
Well, at one time I thought that since many of them were returning to
graduate school with the intention of becoming serious scholars, at least the
New Left would have some intellectual impact . And I've been enormously
impressed by the dedication of the young socialist scholars that came out of
the sixties, and with the work they've produced, although not much of that
work has so far been published. Unfortunately, the academic depression
makes it more difficult than ever for such people
to
get a foothold in
academic life. The depression is filtering out the best people and producing
yet another generation of dull, respectable, young, conformist scholars. I
still don't entirely exclude the possibility that people who received their
political training in the New Left will eventually make some impact on the
academic disciplines and the way in which issues are formulated. But there
remains the question of whether such a development would in turn have
any effect on national politics.
Birnbaum:
What you are saying is that the New Left was a social movement
that criticized affluence; it was not developed in a period of unemploy–
ment and economic crisis. After all, what we might have expected is
a rapprochement of new and older modes of left thought during periods of
recession or depression . But can one really conceive of a new working class
movement headed by leaders like Woodcock or Wurf, and the recent
insurgents in steel abandoning a Meanyite politics? The radicalization of
the working class-particularly of the young workers-the depression
should have brought has not happened. For all the talk about new
alignments in the Democratic Party, its response
to
the crisis of capitalism is
