In the early 1970s, in a book titled What Is To Be Undone, I took a look at the New Left movements of those times. Had our Sixties theory, strategy, tactics, methods, feelings, and choices been sufficient to our revolutionary aims? Coming out of the Sixties did we take a wrong turn that has hindered us ever since? Was the wrong turn to reject too much of what prior revolutionary ideologies had to offer? Was it instead to retain too much that they offered? Or did the Sixties even indicate a need for better thinking at all? 

Today has many new features but millions of activists angry and desiring a better world is similar. So to succeed do we need choose Classical Marxism Leninism to guide our thinking, as some current commentators urge? Or do we instead need a “revolution in the revolution”? 

Spoiler alert: What I saw as the Sixties came to its end did indeed cause me to conclude that we needed to think smarter than the dominant ideologies allowed. That feeling led me and many others as well to look closely at those preponderant ideologies—Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism. What did they actually say? Were they sufficient to our needs? Some who looked decided they were just fine. We should double down on their use. Others, myself included, decided we needed better. So this quite long article, in two parts, is what I felt, at age 24, 55 years ago, looking at what we had done.

Back then, page one, I wrote: I want to view the New Left from a highly critical perspective to show a number of rarely discussed internal weaknesses and to thereby at least partially demonstrate a need for a new New Left ideology. 

History should be a vehicle for human liberation. The study of past events should be a means to understand causes of our conditions, to discover roots of present ‘historical trajectories,’ to ascertain different ends to which present trajectories might possibly lead, and to learn how to affect positively various historical possibilities. 

The truth of the Sixties is that liberals and the entire United States political establishment were never sincerely against the war: they were only, to varying extents, against losing the war and against development of too great a set of domestic problems as a result of trying to win it. Liberal opposition always arose only in pragmatic attempts to minimize political and economic losses for themselves that might result from the historically unparalleled Vietnamese resistance and the growing domestic United States resistance in the streets and military barracks. 

In true opposition, by undermining the American myth of benevolence, wealth, dignity, and freedom for all, by forcing elites to put restraints on government war policies lest they arouse too much left organizing here at home, and by showing the possibility of effective left activity even in face of extreme inexperience and repression, the New Left demonstrated the vulnerability of the establishment and the potential of people’s power. In a very few years American political complacency was shattered. Imperialism, racism, sexism, alienation, and exploitation, became fairly well-known concepts to the United States public. 

The political debate was turned around: it was no longer “Are these concepts relevant?” but rather “Just how relevant are they?” It was not “Must there be major change?” but “What kind of major change should there be?” It was no longer “The corporations and government will take care of our needs,” but “How are we to overcome the corporations and government?”

These major advances in political awareness plus the powerful thrust of the New Left in preventing certain escalations and in eventually helping force a settlement of the war at least temporarily beneficial to the Vietnamese as well as the contribution of the New Left in working for other social advances are the historical truths which must be put forward in place of the hypocritical obfuscations offered up by liberals and/or by disgruntled and demoralized prior activists.

But that said, lest our coming highly critical views of internal left dynamics add to establishment historians’ fabrications, here is a short recounting of New Left contributions before we try to show the nature and magnitude of some of the difficulties that helped undermine the New Left from within, and to show what real life as opposed to fantasy life in the new New Left was like, and thereby to motivate recognition of the need for new ideology.

The New Left was an international practice-oriented movement. It was not steeped in theory; its ideas emerged primarily from trial-and-error evaluations of its own experiences. Its most creative groups actually rebelled against old-ideology ideas, rather than analyzing and then moving from them as a basis. Nonetheless the New Left eventually hammered out a rough prospectus very much in tune with (and even advanced beyond) the finest formulations of their contemporary more theory-oriented comrades.

Thus the United States New Left started as a reaction to racism and the Vietnam war, but in time came to represent a critique of the totality of ways modern life impinges upon human-fulfillment, needs, and capacities. It went from an opposition to blatant racism in the South and war in Southeast Asia to a critical revolutionary position against racism in general, imperialism in all its forms, sexism both in society and in the movement, and the whole nexus of advanced capitalist day-to-day living and working relations insofar as they breed waste, alienation, ecological decay, poverty, hierarchy, and anti-social competition, and insofar as they are unable to meet almost any of peoples’ collective social needs for friendship, community, identity, power, recreation, and creative and spiritual fulfillment. 

The New Left developed an awareness of the power of United States repressive mechanisms—the state, corporation, courts, police, schools, and family—insofar as they coerce people but also insofar as they corrupt people by imposing false and self-alienating anti-social ideas. The New Left attacked the economic side of capitalism, both as it oppresses workers in factories and as it oppresses consumers in the so-called free market. But the New Left also went beyond economics to additionally consider the ways modern schooling, family life, culture, and general day-to-day living inculcate oppressive modes of behavior and thereby contribute to capitalism’s stunting of human potentials.

For the New Left, consciousness was a central aspect of concern. Whether trying to force the government to end the war or trying to build forces to eventually overthrow the government, the New Left knew that a key problem was to affect people’s thoughts, and thus their political allegiances, motivations, goals, and even behavioral capacities. The New Left saw changed consciousness as a prerequisite for revolution, rather than an outcome of it.

Moreover, primarily due to women’s-movement contributions, the New Left became aware that the question of consciousness was a very complex affair: it didn’t involve only “What side are you on?” but also “How do you feel about life and people?” and thus, “Are you able to participate humanely in revolution?” 

The women’s movement showed how oppressive ways of thinking and acting remain even after we turn against capitalism, and it showed how those residue characteristics could corrupt our practical effects by consigning them to self-defeat via internal sexist or authoritarian repercussions. Thus the women’s movement was largely responsible for showing the left that opposition to unequal interpersonal relations and to repressive sexual or authoritarian attitudes were factors on a par in importance with opposition to imperialism and exploitation. 

Similarly by struggling not just for minor reforms but for the total fulfillment of Black lives—materially, culturally, creatively, and intellectually—the Black Liberation movement taught leftists that racism has to be fought not after a revolution but as part of the prerequisite process of creating revolution, that it has to be fought both institutionally and in people’s minds, and that the goal of fighting it, like the goal of fighting sexism and all other oppressions, was not moderate, limited change, but the total liberation of the human personality so that it might attain the greatest possible heights of growth and fulfillment.

Because of the dual concerns of the New Left with overcoming authoritarianism and with changing oppressed consciousnesses, it developed a strikingly new style of practice. People were to struggle collectively to overcome impediments to societal and also to personal and interpersonal change. Participation and active individual and collective initiative were crucial as the only modes that had “energy” as well as anti-authoritarian impact. 

Thus the New Left was concerned to oppose all hierarchical mechanisms including traditional Leninist parties, traditional teacher/student, organizer/organizee relations, and even traditional meeting styles where well-known orators could always dominate events. The New Left struggled for rotation of all tasks (public-speaking as well as leafletting and typing), for participatory decision-making mechanisms, for non-repressive participatory meetings, and for a new relationship between experienced and inexperienced participants that recognized that each had things to learn from the other and that each had things to teach the other, and that what was desirable was everyone moving forward together.

Further, the New Left emphasized finding methods suitable to raising consciousness both inside and outside the movement. The New Left thus adopted a politics of exemplary actions, teach-ins, consciousness-raising groups, criticism/self-criticism, and liberated personal lifestyles. It sought leadership modes that would foster rather than stifle group political participation and initiative.

The New Left also ‘discovered’ the importance of an alternative vision and tried both to outline one and to embody its values in daily practice. It took a total approach to revolution and liberation and functioned creatively both in analyzing social relations and in trying to alter them (even though as we’ll soon see there were a great many instances in which its successes were very limited). 

There were obviously also many grave problems, yet the fact that in a very short time the New Left discovered and even began solving the key political tasks of our time—to create a goal-prefiguring practice, develop anti-authoritarian organizational forms, develop effective consciousness-raising tactics, and develop a theory and practice that could simultaneously promote the autonomous development of women’s, Black, worker, youth, and community movements while also providing a total framework within which they could all fit together and function together collectively to make the whole even more than the simple allied sum of its parts—is a remarkable indication of modern revolutionary potentials. 

For the New Left’s promise to be fully met, did activists need only synthesize its lessons with those of critical analyses of other historical struggle experiences, settle on a new collective ideology, and embark on a new New Left political activism even more informed, self-conscious, and effective than that of the Sixties? A first modest step in such a direction would be a critical look at the actual internal dynamics, beliefs, and contributions of the New Left as a whole and then of each of its major component movements.

In response to Kennedy rhetoric, material changes in wealth, growths of knowledge, Black activism, and the specter of an overseas war, American youth began coming together politically in the early and mid sixties.

They looked towards old left groups for ideological guidance. They learned about classes, the state, and revolutionary organization, but they also learned, in the words of Carl Oglesby, that the old left provides only an “almost carrion bird politics” wherein “distant and above it all the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of the predestined dinner. Capitalism weakens, layoffs and inflation converge, a rash of strikes—the bird moves in. But not so fast, the government also moves. A different money policy, stepped up federal spending, a public works project, selective repression of the militants—the bird resumes its higher orbit.” 

Youth wanted more dynamism and insight than the seemingly stodgy old left had to offer. We were disenchanted with conditions of war, racism, and general cultural sterility. We moved toward direct action as our new multi-purpose tactic. It promised greater successes, it was more exciting, it suited everyone’s feelings of urgency, and it suited people’s personal desires to “fight now.”

Black movements became militant and other leftists rapidly followed suit. Even street gangs adopted political slogans: the rhetoric of revolution spread through the land. People were “rising up angry.” It was initially very conscious and serious, as well as militant. At least the first wave of activists thought long and hard about making left commitments and yet even with people’s careful approaches the leftward flow continually grew. “Drop out of mainstream America. Drop into either the growing youth culture or into a more active political movement.” This was the message sweeping the big cities, causing much soul-searching and a remarkable amount of active, very concerned motion.

By and large the New Left had its finest hours in its earliest days. Then it was struggling in humble, honest ways, it was trying to affect the world and itself, it emphasized participation, patience, and hard work. Weaknesses were still only latent. The left wanted to communicate, and it took itself seriously enough to think carefully about everything it contemplated doing. 

But things became more complex as time went on. Under pressures of repression, cooptation, and competition, the movement joined a kind of revolutionary rat race. It started adopting ideas instead of developing and fully understanding them. There was rush and urgency; instead of acting creatively, the movement reverted to old ways that came more easily. Internal weaknesses (e.g., authoritarianism and hierarchy) were fostered by external conditions (e.g., repression and press sensationalism); and as conditions got tougher, harmful internal movement dynamics just kept getting worse.

The old class president became the new movement leader, and the old quiet sensitive person went almost totally mum. What was to be a new way of life began looking just like the old. There was a growth of ego insecurity. The left was attacked and in self-defense regrettably became defined in terms of opposition to almost everything American. It was unsure of itself but it acted cocksure. It couldn’t really answer criticisms; it didn’t reply when people asked how it would do things differently. It was pushed to extremism. It went from opposing McNamara’s thinking to opposing almost all thought, and from a healthy distaste of bureaucracy to an abhorrence of almost all organization. It took genuinely creative intuitions about American disciplinary methods and turned them into a hatred for almost all discipline, even including self-discipline. It took a new critique of alienated work and bloated it into a new inability to do work of any kind. And perhaps most importantly, to defend itself while it was still young, it defined itself as morally superior, and turned an initially healthy critical stance into a more and more blindly arrogant one.

Of course, different people did these things to differing degrees, but the overall dynamics were such that the trends were very pronounced in the movement as a whole. In almost all cases the movement failed to break down false polarities, and instead merely chose new sides for itself. Instead of work, it took play; instead of mind, body; instead of discipline, chaos; instead of allegiance, hatred; and instead of passivity, arrogance. We didn’t synthesize—we were largely as extremist as the people we opposed. We were as subjectivist. We were motivated at least in part by the same self-defeating habits of polarization, competition, authoritarianism, and self-defense. We were ignorant and overly defensive about our own weaknesses. We didn’t really admit to them and so, of course, we didn’t even come close to fully overcoming them. We opposed the main oppressions of United States life but not, at least until too late, the subtler ones that were already at work within our own activities.

There were people who saw these many problems at the time but they were generally outside of or peripheral to the left. When they pointed up our weaknesses it was to demoralize and not improve us. Their intention was to get us to be good citizens and not good revolutionaries. We were very unsure of ourselves, very defensive, but also very headstrong. If people told us we were authoritarian, insensitive, ignorant, or overly brash, in defense we had to scream back that we were not, and that we were going to go on being radical no matter what anyone said. We had to convince ourselves. We couldn’t sift the wheat from the chaff in their criticisms, precisely because we were unable to admit that anything they were suggesting might be at all true. We couldn’t admit to weakness and we were certainly unable to admit to criticisms leveled by our enemies. We couldn’t admit that there was anything that they could tell us because to do that would severely threaten our need to believe that it was we who were to tell them. We screamed back at our detractors lest we be drawn back towards them. No one was able to break through our defenses until it was largely too late.

If a liberal journalist said our sloppiness was disaffecting potential allies, we said it was untrue and roughed up our jeans a little more. A healthy rebellion against capitalist clothing requirements and especially against clothing as a mechanism of status, slowly became an irrational preoccupation with a new kind of uniform. If another commentator or parent said our language or militance or attacks on certain institutions were incomprehensible and self-detrimental, we didn’t explain ourselves clearly, or slightly alter our styles so that we might communicate better, but instead merely intensified our assault on “bourgeois sensibilities,” oblivious to our actual consciousness-stunting effects. No one could be a really true revolutionary and also a sharp critic of our styles, ideas, and tactics. And even if many individuals were not guilty of this defensive extremism, New Left activism as a whole made it appear as if everyone was.

To understand the involved processes more fully we must look at the New Left’s separate parts in greater detail. First, the student movement.

The student movement started at Berkeley. Ex-civil righters accustomed to southern struggles took a look at their own school and their own situations. They saw racism, war ties, and bureaucracy. They felt alienated and had the confidence to express their anger. The ensuing free-speech movement was a catalyst to students all over the country.

Soon the criticizers developed more clarity: “The schools are socializing agents. They are like computers. They are part of and program us to become part of the whole American system. They hurt us and they support the war. They make us into businessmen’s slaves and they do weapons research.”

Campus movements united to change schools and fight against the war. People became seriously involved in on-going deeply consuming activities. There were sanctuaries for AWOL G.l.s, teach-ins, rallies, meetings, and occasional militant confrontations over related campus based demands—End War Research, No More War Recruiters, and so on. The process was initially driven by concern, spirit, and solidarity. Students studied their schools, America, and imperialism. They moved progressively further and further left in analysis and were then, all of a sudden revolutionaries wanting to overthrow the whole system. Calm seriousness diminished as macho-seriousness enlarged. There was deep trouble on the horizon.

Students involved themselves in campus movements usually in gut response to social pressures, deep moral feelings, and movement organizing efforts. They recognized their schools’ and country’s inadequacies and joined with whomever seemed most committed to overcoming them. Very few recruits were consciously strategic. They didn’t have really good reasons for the whys and hows of their actions. They were in no position to understand effects of their actions on others or for that matter on themselves either.

People either went in and then out of the movement because their understanding remained foggy, or stayed in, simply attaching themselves to a new identity-related ideology, or bore their ignorances passively. In some cases they struggled to work things out for themselves. There was little collective give and take; people who had no strategic understandings were not effectively helped by their supposed leaders; they were instead indoctrinated, used, or expelled. Further, the in-and-outers couldn’t help the leaders overcome their particular deficiencies, including their arrogance, defensiveness, sectarianism, out-of-touchness, immaturity, and overall blindness to the effects of much of what they were doing. [Please remember, this was written by a deeply involved participant about three years out of college who was still centrally enmeshed in Sixties activism.]

Skills were not effectively spread and elitism was not effectively countered. One group had sensitivity but little initiative; another the reverse. Of course the whole spectrum was much broader than this, but more often than not societal dynamics so polarized events that each individual might as well have been at one of the two extremes anyway.

Perhaps the most incongruous events occurred when Marxist Leninist student sects confused, alienated, and attacked people under the guise of “giving ideological leadership.” As sectarian groups vied for position, they wasted people’s time, and drained people’s energies. They dominated people’s capacities for initiative, encrusting all efforts in their own stodgy formulas. Worst perhaps, their bad ways played to bad latent traits in almost everyone who tried dealing with them.

Thus people trying to eliminate Leninist infantile sectarianism were often instead sidetracked into their own potentials for sectarianism. You could argue with the Progressive Labor Party only so long before developing Progressive Labor Party-like traits. The resulting internecine conflicts did more harm than good. The Leninists attacked and baited, everyone else attacked and baited back, until the behavior became rather habitual. 

New people were never too impressed when they saw so-called revolutionaries fighting one another to the exclusion of seriously dealing with real issues—and when they saw in-fighting go to the level of violent confrontations they naturally began to wonder how radicals differed from the establishment they opposed. The dynamics had more to do with pathological ego-defense than with fighting for real revolutionary gains.

The left became a kind of spectacle and most students looked on with mixtures of awe, fear, disdain, skepticism, and sometimes a little naive jealousy or just plain wonderment. The movement became a kind of caricature of itself. Its members didn’t understand why some people joined while others didn’t, and indeed the question, despite its obvious centrality, was hardly ever even raised. 

Movement people didn’t understand what forces worked in their favor and what forces were hindrances. Though strategies were espoused, problems concerning sex, psychological passivity, school itself, and needs for real community weren’t even properly understood. That people had some difficulties adopting or even recognizing radical ideas was not fully understood. 

When trying to communicate through leaflets, there was no accepted method for deciding what should go in and how it should be written. When trying to decide on program, there was no real method for figuring what was important and what tactics were best suited to student states of mind. When trying to figure how militant to be, there was no understanding of why more or why less was better and of how one or the other would affect future possibilities. 

If it had had better awarenesses the student movement might have made itself more palatable to other students and citizens at large. It wouldn’t have constantly pushed beyond what people were ready to do and it would have created on-going mechanisms for preserving short run gains more effectively than was actually done. 

When the crucial choice came between highly escalating campus militancy, or staying less militant but constructing well-founded unions that could at a later date take far more people far more solidly to the left, the latter approach would have won out instead of the former. 

The student movement went from interrupting the ‘free speech’ of the Rostows to interrupting and fighting each other, precisely because we never developed a full understanding of what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what its effects on others and on us were likely to be. We were afraid of cooptation but we didn’t really understand it. Paul Potter expresses the situation as it was:

“The tyranny of liberation is believing that the reality of our needs can overcome what this society has done to us. That is not only wrong it is arrogant. It is one of our most impotent conceits. Regardless of what we say about the power of the military and the corporations, we seem to be incapable of believing that the society that crushed our parents could crush us in the same way. We assume that we will do better than they. We deny that they could ever have been like us. What we cannot comprehend is that our parents too might have had images of liberation once.” 

In essence we did not recognize that we were fallible and so of course we did little to guard against that fallibility. By the time we began realizing that we had bad traits and that they were hurting our efforts, it was already too late. We were fragmenting. The initial hope, energy, and enthusiasm were spent. Criticism/self-criticism was introduced as a palliative. The dictum rapidly became: rule self, rule others, and by all means don’t mess with any of the really threatening problems.

The first student strategy was largely reformist, that is, argue that certain aspects (courses, ROTC, war research, Black admissions policies, etc.) of the university were irrelevant or worse; organize demonstrations and strikes to change those aspects; agree to help plan new ways the school could function more relevantly; and terminate demonstrations when those new ways were adopted. 

The essence was to make home a nicer place. The protagonists usually wanted grading reform, living reform, course alterations, or the development of Black or radical studies programs, and all these things were fought for, not because they fit into some larger scheme, but because they were immediately justified.

The second strategy was somewhat more revolutionary: “The universities are complicit in many of society’s larger evils. They are partially responsible for society’s injustices.” Students organized around university complicity in the war, imperialism, racism, etc. Demonstrations aimed specifically at ending complicity and escalated to whatever extents necessary. Termination of demonstrations came only when the fully desired results were accomplished. Essentially it was still a “clean up your back yard” strategy but it was hoped it would simultaneously force others (workers etc.) to police their yards too and would bring closer the day when students could join them in that effort.

Still the strategy was mostly aimed at just getting rid of obvious immediate evils. Practitioners were not so concerned with the effects of their actions on other people as they were with the effects on the institutions they were attacking. They were not so concerned with developing organization or mass support as with achieving concrete gains spurred by large demonstrations. They didn’t want commitment, they wanted immediate victories. 

They had very few answers for people who said they were polarizing the country to the detriment of their own goals except to say that what they were doing was right and that it therefore had to be done. People were usually motivated by the belief that they could have short-run successes and thereby eliminate a certain amount of evil from the world. The strategy began buckling when people began realizing just how much power was needed for even the smallest change. It died when a Princeton University movement got a war research building eliminated but the campus was gerrymandered so that the institution was no longer on it. The building remained, the function was still served, everything was the same except the campus boundary. Though struggle continued the irony was felt in Princeton and elsewhere. A new strategy was needed.

Serious leftists saw these various results and became more ‘political.’ They foreswore the old approach entirely: they didn’t try to alter it, they just got rid of it. They didn’t try to improve on past ways, they just jumped on a newer, supposedly more revolutionary third-strategy bandwagon with the same relatively blind commitment they’d had for the last one. Of course not everyone was the caricature this suggests: some understood strategic possibilities more and those who rushed ahead were considerably affected by the seeming urgencies of the moment, but the overall dynamic was such that everyone might as well have been motivated by nothing but the desire to push ahead as quickly as possible lest dynamics get somehow bogged down. Some people’s more informed motivations were largely submerged in their individual and collective deficiencies. The student movement constantly viewed itself as right and moral, and therein cut itself off from improvement.

But the third campus strategy was in some ways more enlightened than its two predecessors. It said that campus activism could be a catalyst for changing American political realities. It reasoned that by wrecking schools, closing them, or fighting over them, we could greatly escalate the level of national political discussion. We could create motion that would push everyone further and further left. It was a politics of example and disruption, a politics of motion—disrupt old ways and urge new ones, and change will come simultaneously. 

Different people with this view of how the left could expand had different ways of actually doing things. Some used ‘drama’, manipulation, and people’s desires to cleanse the campuses; others tried to explain their strategy and motivate people through an understanding of long-run potential. The people of the first persuasion created most campus motion and in time almost all leaders’ succumbed to using their methods, frequently without even fully understanding what it was they were doing. Thus the Seattle Liberation Front created a whole lot of very temporary “motion/energy” in Seattle with a politics of macho noise, confrontation, and myth; and Mayday eventually tried to follow suit on a national scale with its supposedly self-propelling dramatic predictions of “hundreds of thousands” “converging” on Washington and “shutting it down.” 

More modest but politically better-conceived programs of countless local community and student groups got lost in the shuffle. That the dramatic approach could create only a lot of baseless motion but no real on-going solid organization, commitment, solidarity, or consciousness was overlooked in the “rush of joy” caused by the large numbers it could indeed sometimes call forth (or at least not scare away).

Further most of the third group’s leaders were competitive men with plenty of charisma but extremely arrogant, oppressive, and macho styles. Though the idea of catalyzing responses in new sectors was rather good, the New Left never really took the trouble to seriously consider what kinds of activities had good effects and what kinds had bad. The implicit rapidly adopted supposition was that anything directed against the establishment would have provocative and thus good effects on the masses who viewed it. The feeling was that though working people might not like all the specific tactics chosen they would still be inevitably pushed to the left by the tactics’ net effects. 

Of course this proposition was partially true, but to a greater extent it was a rationalization for the inability to even consider doing things that would be simultaneously radical, liked by workers, and constructive of the movement’s infrastructure and size. There were countless arguments in which claims were made that though of course the workers hated us, they were also moving leftward, and that removing the barriers between the two groups would become easier and easier as that motion progressed. The barriers nevertheless are still quite real [writen, again, in the early 70s] and of course the motion never became a stampede. In fact some of what the student left did actually pushed the workers to the right and much of it (wild lifestyles, peculiar appearances, and opposition to free speech, etc.) gave false impressions of what being radical is all about and thereby laid seeds of cynicism that are still impeding constructive possibilities. 

Finally student left-politics never successfully took into account the need for tactics and organizing efforts to create on-going institutional strengths which act as the basis and give the necessary continuity for later continuation of efforts aimed at creating a united United States left.

Further and as a kind of extension of inadequately addressing other sectors of the population, and insufficiently organizing even the student sector, the student movement actually created the conditions necessary for its own repression. It escalated militancy while cutting itself off from main supporting elements. It was too busy, too revolutionary, and too near to winning to really notice the actual phenomena around it, to actually notice what was good and what was bad about even its own activities. 

The overall strategy for students to exert an exemplary influence upon the rest of the country was actually quite sound. What was lacking was the ability to apply that awareness. Students’ attitudes were not always the most progressive, and even when they were progressive their abilities to transmit them were largely lacking. The tactics, styles, and overall insensitive attitudes towards other people’s values were especially detrimental. The student movement never developed adequate criteria for its own activities. It hardly ever had good, carefully thought-out reasons for its efforts. In a real sense it was ignorant and cut off from realizing that fact by identity problems. The best arguments were never best because they were sound or because they fit widely accepted well tested criteria of value but because they were elegant, or super radical, or fashionable, or in some other way self-serving.

The grounds for anyone now [in 1974] judging the student movement are roughly:

To what extent did the student movement realign society’s forces to benefit the oppressed?

To what extent did it alter non-students consciousnesses in ways favorable to future revolutionary efforts?

To what extent did it forge students into on-going movements that could continue struggling for change?

The student movement and indeed the entire New Left put to shame all other political parties, organizations, and ideologies in the United States by showing their complicity in the war, racism, and other forms of oppression and their incompetence in dealing with these problems. Indeed the New Left is the only real left that the United States of the past few years offers up for critical evaluation. Nonetheless once its great importance for breaking the hegemony of the Democratic Party and other “liberal” organizations over left politics and for contributing new methods to on-going struggles against imperialism and other injustices is admitted, there is simply no way to deny that the student movement also in many ways failed.

It fulfilled our above outlined judgement criteria only partially and in some cases even partially negatively. It did affect social consciousness, often positively, but sometimes negatively; but it did not create on-going movement organizations. There is no way to tell if it could have done better if it had had a more encompassing perspective and a more maturely self-critical style—but it is certainly not heretical, excessively defeatist, or unjustifiably self-effacing to think that it might have. Indeed, such speculation is rather liberating, precisely because it allows us to be properly self-critical and to hope for a better student and New Left movement in the future. The conditions fostering the student movement were not transitory, the internal deficiencies (and repression) that drove it to destruction and that temporarily soured students on any further efforts were and are largely transitory and therefore subject to future positive alterations.

So ended the discussion of the student movement part of the New Left that I wrote in the early seventies and that 54 years later I offer now. In reaction to the above and before continuing to other sides of Sixties activism, did we then need new ideology? After all, what is an ideology for if not to guide effective practice and prevent ineffective practice. If the movements of those times fell short of desires, and they did, and more so, if they did not persist and get steadily better, and they didn’t, then either nothing better was possible or there were failings that could have been corrected. Some deduced the former stopped us. I believed and also thought it essential to demonstrate that the latter stopped us. But, was a search for deep failures of guiding ideology that I attempted back then still relevant now? 

Put differently, do we now need to double down on the validity and power of the then existent and now still available classical ideologies? Was it correct that the classical ideologies didn’t then or later mislead us, but rather that we succumbed then and later to the pressures of repression, the confusions of academic rigamarole, and the allure of wealth and power? Or, alternatively, was the intuition that fueled my asking, What Is To Be Undone, correct? Did we need new theory, vision, and strategy not found in dead men’s minds?

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