Mike Macnair, in his Introduction to the new Cosmonaut book, Anti-Postone, draws parallels between the British and European New Left and the US New Left. In particular, he claims that Frankfurt School critical theory had a significant influence on the US New Left through Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and that C. Wright Mills’ political views were much the same as Marcuse’s. I heartily disagree. Marcuse had very little influence on the thinking of members of SDS, the main organization of the US New Left, as a perusal of the index of any history of the US New Left would quickly reveal. Nor did Mills’ and Marcuse’s philosophical, sociological, or political writings have much in common. Mills was an American pragmatist philosophically; Marcuse neo-Hegelian. Mills was a sociologist who produced influential studies of US society and politics; Marcuse produced the shallow, condescending, One Dimensional Man, a brief essay lacking any original research. Politically, Mills authored “Letter to the New Left,” Listen Yankee, and The Marxists, popular political pamphlets aimed at reviving a democratic opposition to US imperialism; Marcuse was more Freudian than Marxist.
In general, Macnair imposes a European neo-Hegelian philosophical framework on a US political movement that had little knowledge of or interest in Hegel or Frankfurt School critical theory. In doing so, he gives a misleading caricature of an important political movement and its intellectual and political content. Below is the Preface to a history of the US New Left that I wrote a few years ago. It gives a brief outline of what I see as the main intellectual and political problems at the center of US New Left history. If you would like to read further on this subject, just follow the link, You Can’t Use Weatherman to Show Which Way the Wind Blew.
Preface
[W]hat I do not quite understand about some new-left writers is why they cling so mightily to ‘the working class’ of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation.
Such a labor metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic….
…Forget Victorian Marxism, except when you need it; and read Lenin again (be careful)—Rosa Luxemburg, too.
– C. Wright Mills “Letter to the New Left” (1960)
This paper makes two claims about the history of the New Left: that SDS did not end with the breakup of the SDS National Office or with Weatherman and that SDS’s ideals and practice of participatory democracy share much in common with the political movements of classical Marxism. That the democratic ideology of the New Left is compatible in some way with Marxism is suggested by the above quotation from C. Wright Mills, but only suggested. Mills died before he had a chance to develop his ideas fully, and his meaning and intentions remained too obscure and idiosyncratic for anyone else to develop them either. For a complex set of reasons, it was Mills’ warning about Victorian Marxism and its labor metaphysic that was generally taken as his final verdict on the value of Marxism as a whole. The reference to Lenin and Luxemburg at the end of the “Letter to the New Left” remained for all intents and purposes invisible, as did Mills’ last book, The Marxists, in which he declared himself a “plain Marxist.”
I was a member of SDS from 1967-1970 and of the Revolutionary Union from 1970-1975 and from that experience arrived at my own understanding of the relationship between Marxism and democracy. Marxism’s claim to originality rested on its critique of capitalism and the necessity of socialism; but Marxism was at the same time a political movement that had inherited and assimilated the democratic principles and goals of the American and French revolutions, the most basic of which was the demand for a democratic republic based on universal and equal political representation to replace the monarchies and privileged elites of Old Regime Europe. This European political history is relevant to the United States because the U.S. Constitution is not based on equal representation either, the equal vote given to each state in the Senate regardless of population being proof enough of that. The European working class and Marxist movements confronted the problem of how to get democracy when you don’t have it for more than a century and the theories, ideologies, strategies, tactics, and organizations they created to achieve that goal have something to teach us in our own quest for a truly representative democracy in the U.S.
The puzzle at the center of the history of the New Left is why, given its commitment to democratic values, it didn’t recognize and criticize the undemocratic nature of the Constitution itself. Democratic ideals can’t be realized without democratic political institutions, yet the New Left never made this connection between its values and the constitutional structure of the government. As a consequence, the New Left’s democratic ideology remained partial and incomplete. The goal of democracy in the U.S. requires confronting the undemocratic structure of the Constitution directly and demanding national political institutions based on equal representation.
The unconventional part of this story is that I came to this conclusion by way of reading Lenin on the democratic revolution in Russia as a participant in the Marxist-Leninist New Left. I always thought that the move from the campus to the factory was an expression of SDS’s original democratic values, not their rejection, and I used the principles of democracy that I had learned in SDS to measure the value of Marxism for our situation here in the U.S. To tell that story, however, it is first necessary to dismantle the misconception that SDS ended with Weatherman. That is where this history begins.
Gil Schaeffer
