JEFFREY HERF
249
Without a sense of the old left's history, the new left came to recapitulate
some of the worst excesses of its predecessors. Mired in the old arguments
of the 1930s, the older generation of the new left - Howe, Walzer,
Harrington - clashed with Tom Hayden and others. What then should the
new left have learned from the old left?
... the need for a patient, long-term approach to building movements;
an emphasis upon the value of winning small victories as part of a
strategy preparing the way for larger ones; a willingness to work with
others with differing viewpoints around limited goals; a commitment
to internal political education; an understanding of the need for a
representative organizational structure that holds leaders responsible
to their own constituents rather than to the priorities established by
the media; an appreciation of the value and fragility of civil liberties;
and a sense of historical irony that would allow its adherents to keep
both victories and defeats in perspective.
As
its inheritance from the
Old Left, the New Left took to heart those lessons that in the short run
allowed it to grow spectacularly, but not the lessons that in the long run
might have allowed it to survive fruitfully.
If one confines the term
new left
to Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), then Isserman's conclusion is a commonplace. SDS did grow quickly
and easily and self-destructed even more rapidly. The restriction is surely
too narrow. The Institute for Policy Studies, the Jesse Jackson campaign, and
the Rainbow Coalition are good examples ofjust the kind of strategy Isser–
man says the new left failed to learn.
In
The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through
1968,2 David Caute
presents a revolutionary calendar of what he calls "the most turbulent [year]
since the end ofWorld War II." The tour stops in Belgium, the United States,
Britain, France, West Germany, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and
Japan, with special visits to Columbia University, the Free University in
Berlin, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and with the American orga–
nization Black Power. Everything is here: the Bertrand Russell War Crimes
Tribunal, a quotation or two from Eldridge Cleaver, Daniel Cohn-Bendit,
Allen Ginsberg, and the more exotic ventures to Prague and Tokyo.
The tone echoes the spirit of those times. The war in Vietnam was
"worse than a blunder, it was a crime." The "innovative ideas ofthe new left
- frequently, thought not invariably, expressed with clarity and sophistication
- constitute a treasury whose present dilapidation impoverishes us." Caute
recovers many slogans and quotations from the counterculture as well as the
new left's vision of "a world undivided by race, class or gender." The
2
The Year ofthe Barricades: AJ ourney through
1968. By
David Caute. Harper and Row.
$24.95.
