J
efIrey Herf
RELIVING THE SIXTIES
The new left and the "sixties" has become an academic topic.
In
the process, the underlying sentiments of sixties radicalism have not van–
ished, though the expression of those sentiments has been modulated.
In
place of "off the pig," "blow your mind," and "smash Amerika"[sic], have
come Foucault, deconstruction, and post-Marxism.
In
the process, the texture
of the years can get lost in theoretical pretention or sentimentalism. The
virtue of the th ree books on the sixties discussed here lies in bringing back
the texts and words of the time without relying heavily on the theoretical
filters of the present. They also tell us something about what those broadly
sympathetic to the political mood of the sixties have and have not learned.
Maurice Isserman's
If I Had a Hammer(
seeks the historical roots
of the sixties new left in the remnants of the old left. While it will not come as
news to readers of
Partisan Review,
Isserman argues a too often neglected
point:
Not only were the 'dark ages' of the 1950s less dark and static than I
had supposed, but the 'renaissance' of the 1960s . . . was also 'less
bright and less sudden' than I had previously supposed.... Historians
are naturally attracted
to
periods in which the movements they study
are at the peak of their influence (take, for example, the research into
the Communist Party's history during the Second World War); but
there is much more to be learned by studying these movements at
their nadir. In defeat, the partisans of a political movement may re–
veal aspects of their thought, as well as capacities for reflection and
change, that would have remained obscured in more propitious times.
Isserman examines the political reflections of the defeated left of the
1930s and 1940s during the 1950s, of ex-Communists, Schachtmanites, the
editors of
Dissent,
and radical pacifists who "provided a political language"
with which the sixties left could "make sense of their own discontents and
desires." He discusses the failed efforts of dissidents in the Communist Party
to take over the Party after Khrushchev's secret speech at the Twentieth
Party Congress. Two years after the Khrushchev speech, Party member–
ship had shrunk to five thousand. Isserman estimates the total number of
all
excommunists in the United States in the mid-1950s as in the hundreds of
thousands. T his "party of excommunists," he believes, "were the most influ–
ential adult radical group in the 1960s," providing a personal bond and an
I
If I Had a Hammer .
..
The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left.
By Maurice
Isserman. Basic Books. $18.95.
