Radical Americans; 2; What's New on the Left

The following program is a presentation of National Educational Television. The second in a series on the malcontent political minority, both left and right. The new radicalism to the degree that it is a definable entity, and it may not be, is largely confined to the campus and a minority segment of the civil rights movement and a scatter of old-time, ideological advisers. It has not succeeded in penetrating any major social group, thus far it doesn't seem terribly interested in doing that, and this respect that is very different from the radicalism of earlier generations. It's more a mood and an idea, for my own point of view, a strange mixture of the very attractive and the somewhat disturbing.

I think it's most impressive in that it springs from genuine moral feeling, a release of outrage in regard to social wrongs that warrant outrage. There's a tendency to repeat phrases like power, structure, and especially establishment. Not a lot of phrase, it's rather hard to know what is meant, except that it doesn't include the person who is using it. From the nation's capital to the deep south to California, there is a noisy, often quarrelsome group in the land. They are the so-called new left. They are angry about a lot of things. It's a youthful movement in an old American tradition, sparked by civil rights for the Negro in the south, fanned by the disenfranchised poor in the north. It has burned fiercely over the issue of the war in Vietnam. Most Americans find these youths obnoxious, but they are also a conscience.

Who are they? And what are they saying? What's new on the left? This man recently made worldwide headlines with a trip to North Vietnam. Professor at Yale, radical philosopher of the new left, Stoten Lind. One of the general things, which I think the new left as a whole is concerned about, is the centralization of decision-making and the sense on the part of Negroes, young people, residents of ghettos that somehow they don't have much share in the decisions which affect their daily lives, whether it be a decision to start a war in Vietnam or to run a local anti-pomperty program. I mean, there are great numbers of students at every university, particularly the more intelligent and sensitive of them. Who begin to ask questions about the world they're living in, because reality, regardless of how it comes, does slink through.

I mean, even a person who reads the Daily News, after a while begins to ask himself questions about, for example, what's going on in the United States? What is the United States doing in the world? Why are there guerrilla movements? Why are there revolutionary movements in Vietnam, the Congo, South America? What are American troops doing in Santa Domingo? They ask questions about these things, but these questions are never answered. You're told over and over again that you're not qualified, no matter who you are or what you do, you're not qualified to make any decisions about your life. So you accept what I call a fascism of the majority. That is, whatever the leaders say, will follow. There are private governments in America that have to be brought under the control of the people in the country. The Chase Manhattan Bank, the first national city bank of New York, those two are governments. Big business, the government, that whole thing is run by very few people. The major decisions about life and death in this country are made by very few people. The problem is that the majority of the white people seem to accept that, that benevolent dictatorship.

I don't mean for a moment to say that the problem of centralized decision making is merely the result of the actions of a particular president. I think it has much more to do with the concentration of power generally in American society, not just in government, but also in private industry. Concentration of power means that the few make decisions for the many, the so-called power structure, the establishment that Irving Howe jokingly referred to. These few, the new left, feels make all the wrong decisions, like war, and they have organized to oppose these decisions. One of the two most important groups on the new left, students for a democratic society, SDS, 3000 members on campuses across the country, at a debate at Harvard University, Paul Booth of SDS. The whole history of our war in Vietnam, that we started off, we really started off by eating the French, we had two and a half million dollars, and then it didn't work for them,

and then we put in DM, that was kind of diplomacy, and then we backed up DM by secret police training squads from Michigan State University, and that didn't seem to contain things. Then we started sending in advisors, and it got worse, and then we sent in advisors, and we had the advisors fly the helicopters, and that didn't seem to do any good, so we sent in some more, and then we sent in a whole army, and then we decided the army wasn't doing it, so we started a wholesale bombing, B-52 is flying 25,000 feet of altitude, just dropping bombs, which will tend to kill Viet Cong if they happen to be in the way. A few dozen students on the Stanford University campus in California collected blood to send to North Vietnam, one of them, Anatole Anton. The name of our committee is a committee for medical aid to the victims of U.S. bombing. It's predicated on the notion that the U.S. is simply waging a strategically, calculatedly

wrong war in Vietnam. Instrumental in the Berkeley peace marches were up to 14,000 people protested the war in Vietnam, professional organizer Jerry Rubin. But the main point that we all share about this war is that it is immoral and brutal, but also invisible, in that the American people have many psychological protections against understanding exactly what's going on over there. Just to mention a few, it's the distance of Vietnam, people do not see the atrocities as they see the atrocities that take place in the South. Second of all, it's a war against brown people, and I believe that an America brown life is not as valued as much as a white life. And third, the entire communist question that we are killing communists and that we're putting a communist government, excuse almost anything the government can do in the name of anti-communism. Brute force, I mean it really seems to me that Johnson is relies on brute force to achieve

his will. The Dominican Republic situation with seemed to me was full of ways of working the thing out, but the instant reaction is a military one. Our country is really a mobilized country, and I think that we should expect that the next outbreak will also be met by a military response, wherever it is. The press well distorted the purposes of our movement, and it seems to me that in many respects the American public tends to follow the attitudes that the mass media feed them, and it seems to me that this accounts for a good deal of the strong hostility that our movement met. I had hoped that after the demonstrations, people would say it's very healthy that there's debate, and let's have more debate, and then Johnson's reaction was, I can't see how Americans can work against their country's national interests, as if he's the only

person who defines national interests. So unfortunately, outside of the fact that we were labeled as traitors, beatniks, unpatriotic, and beyond that, the demonstrations about a very good effect in making Vietnam an issue. On the surface, the issue is war, but the real issue is more complex. The real issue is participation in the democratic process. The new left argues that if all the disenfranchised, students, poor, negroes, dark skin minorities, if all the disenfranchised in this country had a voice in decisions, this country would not be at war in Vietnam, and they would change things at home. The Bible for the new left is a book, The Other America. It spells out what is wrong with this country. Author Michael Harrington describes the intent of his book. Well, the thesis had a couple of dimensions. Number one, that poverty had for a series of reasons become invisible. In the sense that the old poverty, prior to the suburbs, prior to the change in city life,

had been just across the tracks, and everybody knew about it. But now, the middle class had been taking off to the suburbs, surrounding the city by a zoning code, which kept the poor in. That middle class children literally didn't know what the poor existed and never saw it. They never met them in their public schools out in the suburbs. That the housewives never saw them, and that if the businessmen, or the kind who happened to have an office in the central city, that he would whizz down a super highway, and he wouldn't see them either. And the super highway was usually built on the ruins of a tenement area where they had renewed it, quote unquote, but not built housing for the site dwellers. So the first of all, the poverty had become invisible. Secondly, that behind this invisible wall, there was an other America. And my argument at the time was it could reasonably be computed at between 20 and 25 percent of the American people.

Thirdly, I made the argument that it constituted in a sense a subculture or a series of subculture, a way of life, that poor people, for example, have more neurosis and psychosis, more mental disease, that the widely believed proposition that the rich out in suburbia, suffering spiritual anguish, and the poor are leading simple, noble lives, is just a lot of nonsense that there is a copious documentation to show that the poor are much more psychologically disturbed and much more spiritually miserable than anybody else. So I said that what was therefore needed, given this invisible world, containing 20 to 25 percent of the American people, and spiritually and psychologically as well as materially depressed, that what therefore was needed was a comprehensive program that instead of putting a nice school in the middle of a lousy slum, and the slum would then so to speak overrun the school with its values, and officiate 90 percent of what you're doing in the school,

that what we had to do was build entire new neighborhoods, which there would be integrated decent housing, decent schools, decent job opportunities. Editor of the St. magazine, Socialist Radical Irving Howe. So the new left tends to place its hope first upon itself, that is upon students, though it's more intelligent spokesman realize what the likely fate in terms of social absorption and assimilation of our students is going to be in a few years, and secondly upon the underclass, that is to say, the unstructured poor beneath the hierarchical structure of the society, the underclass however has notoriously been hard to organize in all modern societies, and the new left faces the problem, none of so much of the difficulty of organizing the underclass, but what it will do if it does succeed in organizing it in local communities, where the likely result of such organization would be, that such groups would find their

way into the structure of society, sharing in its benefits and values, both good and bad values, becoming so to say part of the internal arrangement and struggle for the vision of the spoils. Newark, New Jersey, the poor and the black are pushing to get in. The election kind of gives the pointing out that he is the, he will probably be the first Negro mayor of a major American city, Newark being a city which has 53% Negro population. And this in itself is a huge make up. Students for a democratic society, SDS, it has campus organizations, it is also active in community development. SDS and several other neighborhood groups want a Negro candidate for mayor. The disenfranchised are seeking political power.

I'd like to just comment just for a moment on an article that was in the New York Times on December the 9th, which talks of another group similar to ours being formed in Chicago of groups similar to ours. So I think this is going to be the beginning of a national movement of this sort. And most of the organizations that I see here consist of clergy, labor people, civil rights groups and peace groups and various other groups similar to that participating in our movement. The New Left is a movement of action, not ideology. Stoughton Lynn. The characteristic New Left later is one who acts and who is followed after he acts. Thus Bob Moses goes more or less by himself to McCone, Mississippi in the fall of 1961. And three years later there are so and so many thousands of youngsters who have followed him there.

This I think is the style of leadership. But my own sense of it is that thus far through these very diffuse and informal techniques, a great deal more has been done than a number of persons working in the traditional manner of running candidates and editing magazines and making speeches were able to get accomplished in the previous generation. But SDS is doing in Newark, SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is doing in the South. Julian Bond describes SNCC. Well, it's an organization of about 200 young people, mostly young people, college and university age, young people, white and negro from all across the country who try to do several things. Number one, we try to encourage Southern Negroes to register to vote. But even more basic than that, we try to organize people in rural and the rural parts of the deep South into groups that can make use of those votes as Negroes gradually achieve the right to vote.

But we go in and live with people, live in their homes, work with the people, try to get them aroused to the point, but they lose some of their fears, we have to cut across generation of fear. And we hope someday that we will have developed across the South several what we call pockets of power that Negroes can use to gain a measure of independence and can use to force some changes in the American system to make their lives a little better. Our job, we feel, is to organize, to unorganize Negro people in the deep South into a vital political force for social and economic changes. The great many people, myself included, don't think that American society as it exists now, it's capable of absorbing Negroes, that I think that if it were, it would do so. That perhaps what needs to happen is that society, the greatest society needs to change and needs to make room for the millions of American Negroes who are trying to get inside it. And because it has not done so, I think it can't do so because of the way it's made

up. It's got to open. It's got to change. It's got to be loved in some way to make room for the hundreds of thousands of American Negroes and poor American white people who are trying to get inside. Snick and SDS, their aim is a vote for all within a democratic tradition. There are other groups on the new left not so traditional. An old radical Irving Howe is disturbed. To me the one most disturbing aspect of the new left, this is disturbing only I should stress about one sector of the new left, not the sector by and large, that's represented by young people like Paul Booth, is that a portion of its adherence has slid almost without serious consideration into support for authoritarianism abroad. There's a curious ambivalence and mixture of a passionate devotion, which seems to me admirable, to the values of a kind of townhold democracy, what is called participatory democracy at home,

and a curious tolerance for the underdeveloped and backward peoples, few of the new radicals feel any attachment to Russia. They began to find it unsatisfactory as a model. It's too victorious, too bourgeois. What attracts them is the surface of vitality, the drama of gesture. Milt Rosen, head of progressive labor. When China and Russia split over tactics, Rosen split with the Communist Party USA. He founded progressive labor, active in Harlem, with 3,000 members. And we feel that today, the Chinese Communist Party, for example, has played a historic role in fighting for the correct general application of Marxism, when it is a modern world scale. We feel that the Russian Communist Party, the Soviet Communist Party, has regressed industry God. We have no, there is no international communist movement to such.

We have no organizational commitments to any communist party around the world. But in all frankness, we have a great deal of respect and admiration for the Chinese Communist Party. The progressive labor party and its candidate, Bill Epton, myself, is running for state senator and the 35th senatorial district. We wish to discuss with you those real issues that confront the people in our community and the other candidates never talk about. We know that housing continues to deteriorate at the unemployment among the black people, of Puerto Rican people, and the white workers increases. The slum conditions get worse. Police brutality continues. And everything that we need and we demand and we never get from the Democrats and the Republicans. One other thing, Bill Epton didn't get, and that was a fair shake at the polls. Somehow election officials failed to get his name, or his lover was missing on two-thirds

of the polling machines in his district. Epton is now serving three years in prison, found guilty a trial of criminal anarchy and inciting to riot, charges arising from the Harlem riots of 1964. He is appealing this conviction. We will utilize the electoral process to whatever extent we're able to. It's very difficult. But in the final analysis, the people, the working people in this country will have to develop the willful to take political power because the ruling class will never see political power voluntarily. They'll resort to endless terror and repression in order to maintain their power. For example, how do you get it? I don't have a blueprint, but to sum it up in two words, you take it. Clustered around progressive labor is an alphabet soup of small groups, noisy, but politically insignificant. But the benchmark of the old radicalism in this country is the Communist Party USA.

The new left considers its 10,000 members old, funny duddies. General Secretary of the Party, Gus Hall. You can't make a revolution. You can't create one. You can't have a meeting and decide that you're going to have a socialist revolution. A revolution must rise out of the laws and developments of society. And when they reach a certain point, this force is a kind of a revolutionary up people and a change and a new system. And that we work according to these laws. We work with it. We build mass movements and struggles of the people. And it is this process that we see where socialism will come. And after once you have socialism, that's the first stage. And as you build up the technology and industry, then society will be ready for a communist society, which is a much higher form of society. One of the satellites of the Communist Party is W.E.B. Du Bois clubs, 1,000 members in campus and community groups. Like the Communist Party, they are moderate,

politically active on a local level backing liberal candidates. John Hague of Venice, California. We certainly advocate socialism. We advocate it's coming about through democratic processes that is in consistent with our democratic traditions. We hope to see socialist candidates being put forward. We would hope to see a left or socialist party coming to power through the normal democratic process. And I'm not sure that participatory democracy means something a great deal different from this. I think both SDS and Du Bois clubs and various other left groups feel that socialism is not simply a political program that we aim at extending the democratic process,

not only including everyone in the political process, as for instance, Negroes were currently excluded in the South. But we want to extend the democratic process to include the economic system. So that people would decide the people themselves, the workers, those who do the work, would decide what is to be produced and how much and how it's to be distributed and what the rewards of work are going to be. The Communist Party in our opinion is no longer a revolutionary party. They are apologists for the democratic party. They no longer advocate work as political power in this country. And then the last four presidential election campaigns in one form or another they supported the democratic party candidate.

Basically, theoretical thinking. I think that the contribution of progressive labor is zero. That is to say, the presence of a dogmatic Chinese, pro-Chinese communist sects adds absolutely nothing to the understandings of the American problems of peace or war. I might say that wrong as they are, various progressive labor people are dedicated, et cetera, et cetera, and have good emotions. And I'm not putting them down personally. But intellectual, I think it's an utterly sterile exercise in sectarian dogmatics, which has nothing to do with the world in which we live. The Communist Party, aside from the fact that I disagree profoundly with its attitudes towards totalitarianism, I think the Communist Party has probably been closer to the American political reality, and more of an understanding of it. But I don't think that it's made any great contributions, certainly not for some decades to put it mildly, in terms of thoughts, because for so long it was hobbled by the necessity to follow every twist in turn of the Moscow line.

And now that that's over somewhat, now that since 1956 there hasn't been that monolithicism in the communist world. We don't see any great contributions coming out of the communists. The Communist Party has moved in so much, I call them moderate Republicans. But they are the logic of the system, like the labor unions, also once again moderate Republicans. I don't think there's any big difference between the Communist Party and George Meeney. There's no major difference, and Roger Blah, they all say, well, we have to do it this way and you can't move too quickly, there's a slowdown. And they've moved in too much, and in some of us have set ourselves out so much that we can't get in at all. But what's going on for the new life generally, it seems to me, is a kind of meeting between two traditions from the American radical past. One is that of Marxism, not in the form of communism, but as an intellectual analysis, which impresses many or most of those

in the new left is a very powerful tool. And the other is the tradition of direct action, which people on the new left trace back not merely to the pacifist movement since World War I, but also, for example, to the abolitionists, to the rose non-payment of taxes, to the civil disobedience of Northern abolitionists in harboring fugitive slaves on the walk. And it's very difficult for these two traditions to come together because it's not simply a question of two different intellectual pictures of the world. It's on the one hand, a tradition, the Marxist tradition, which begins with an intellectual picture of the world, and is highly abstract and analytical and discursive. And on the other hand, a tradition of action, which does not begin with any kind of intellectual picture, but rather with immoral impulse

and an individual gesture. So I think that the new left, at times is, makes mistakes, gets naughty, gets far out, but by far and large, as long as the new left, and I think it's true of the bulk of the new left, continues to go into slums and face up to problems, continues to be willing to test its propositions by experience. I don't think there's anything to fear because then I think that what's good that's new in their ideas will survive, but will be properly related to actual lives of people. The people the new left has reached and influenced is great. The membership of the new left is small. Snake with 200 members has made a lasting contribution to Negro equality in the South. Students for a democratic society with 3,000 members is noisy, anti-Vietnam war, but also works with the poor in northern cities. Snake and SDS are the key groups of the new left. They ask for a reformation

rather than a revolution. The spirit of Martin Luther, rather than Karl Marx. What they are really asking is that this country renew its idealism and make it relevant to all. I feel like I'm almost a Jew but when it comes to towns like Korea there's no one more at my hand blue so love me, love me, love me. Next week on the Radical Americans the case study of a politically regressive town, Centralia, Missouri. This is NET, Vonational Educational Television Network.

I'll take you to a different country. I'll be with you. Thank you. I'll be with you. I'll be with you. I'll be with you. I'll be with you. I'll be with you.