Society
I
One of the most intense and most disturbing arguments on the Left in the late sixties has been over the possibilities of modern man creating a decent society. The New Left has put the question this way: Can a socialist revolution be made by Western men, or along with them, or apart from them, or only against them? The real question is: Is there any hope for us? Radicals of the sixties have forced this question to the surface in every advanced industrial country. It has taken on a special urgency in the USA.
The responses of the American New Left have been shaky and ambiguous; they have exposed the cracks and strains at its foundations. On the one hand, the most vital impulse of New Left activity has always been populist, driven by a characteristically American faith in everyday people, a faith that, for all the inequities in American society and the oppressive acts of the American government internationally, the American people themselves are still a source of decency and hope. This is the faith that has inspired the continuing drive for participatory democracy and community control. On the New Left itself this faith has clashed with a darker view of “the people.”
The main left-wing idea of “the people” is formulated most systematically by Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. “‘The people,’” Marcuse argues there, “previously the ferment of social change, have ‘moved up’ to become the ferment of social cohesion.” Thus, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment … The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations.” The people within our society identify themselves totally, singlemindedly, with its ruling aims and values; between them and it falls no shadow. This is why it is legitimate to call them “one-dimensional.” Now it is obvious that people like these will be unable, by either inclination or insight, to liberate either their slaves or themselves. If hope for human freedom and happiness depended on these one-dimensional men, it would be a lost cause. But this is not the whole story. For, according to Marcuse, even in America, there is more to the human race than is dreamt of in their dimension:
underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; [they feel] … the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game, and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game … The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact that marks the beginning of the end of a period.1
The American people, and the peoples they control, may yet become free; but the liberating force will have to come, somehow, from outside, that is, outside the American system.
It is clear, however, that Marcuse was using the word “outside” in a complex metaphorical way. He did not mean to deny that there could be fruitful contradictions “inside” the American system. His one example of radical action (immediately following the long passage quoted above) involves the civil rights movement: a movement which, when the book appeared in 1964, included whites as well as blacks, middle-class as much as lower-class people, students from the most prestigious universities alongside “the unemployed and the unemployable.” In other words, large groups within the American system could, if they tried, get into the revolutionary “outside.” One-dimensional men might yet discover—or create—new dimensions in themselves. Of course, once we grant the complexity of Marcuse’s idea here, new problems arise. If it is really possible for a great many “insiders” to join the “outside” forces, without giving up their positions within the system, we might wonder whether the inside–outside dualism is a helpful way of talking about social reality. Marcuse himself, in his next work, An Essay on Liberation (1968), tacitly abandoned this dualistic scheme; but other men, with flatter minds, have kept it alive.
If we move forward from 1964 to 1969, and examine the first Weatherman manifesto, which came out of the great split in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), we will find some of the same words, but in what seems like a different world. Marcuse’s language and general scheme are retained: a people that is internally monolithic is opposed by radical forces from “outside.” But the Marcusean sociology has been transformed into a Manichaean cosmology. The Weathermen take the idea of “outside” force with a crude, grim literalism: The basic opposition is one of geography. “America” is condemned, root and branch, as an “oppressor nation” whose sole source of support is the life and labor of “the peoples of the world.”2 The American oppressors include not only the rich, the owners of wealth and property, the bourgeoisie, but “virtually all of the white working class,” blue- and white-collar alike, who enjoy small “privileges but very real ones, which give them an edge of vested interests and tie them to the imperialists.” The Weathermen judge all white Americans and find them wanting, totally lacking in human potential. It is wrong, they say, for radicals to concentrate on the “internal development of class struggle in this country,” wrong to work for better conditions in shops and factories and hospitals, wrong to fight to “reform [the schools] so that they can serve the people,” for this kind of action diverts Americans from the central issue: “Imperialism is always the issue.” The role American radicalism can play is thus radically restricted:
the vanguard of the “American Revolution”—that is, the section of the people who are in the forefront of the struggle, and whose class interests and needs define the terms and tasks of the revolution—is the workers and oppressed peoples of the colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America … The Vietnamese (and the Uruguayans and the Rhodesians) and the blacks and the Third World peoples in this country will continue to set the terms for class struggle in America.
The only Americans for whom there is any hope turn out not really to be Americans at all: “Black people,” the statement says, “are part of the Third World and part of the international revolutionary vanguard.”
Although the Weatherpeople write off all white Americans with apparent impartiality, they are especially scornful toward the group from which most of them themselves have come: the literate, educated, white-collar men and women of American metropolitan areas and university towns. This group is not easily defined. Some sociologists classify it as “new middle-class,” some put it into the “new working class,” some say it spans both. What everyone agrees, however, and what is important for my point, is that there is something distinctively “modern” about the group, something endemic to societies that are “advanced,” highly “developed”—therefore I will refer to this group as “modern men,” as “us.” The Weatherpeople take great pains to disaffiliate themselves from us. When they learned “to reject the ideal career of the professional,” it did not occur to them to try to create their own career models, or to connect themselves with radical traditions within their own country, their own culture, their own class. What they did was to “look for leadership to the people’s war of the Vietnamese,” to “look to Mao, Che, the Panthers, the Third World, for models, for motion.” The closest the Weatherpeople are willing to come to home is “the ‘people’s culture’ of black America,” which they have learned from “Chuck Berry, Elvis, The Temptations.” It does not seem even to occur to them—they never mention the idea, not even to dismiss it—that anything further might be happening here. (The radical potential which they concede to “youth culture” seems to consist entirely in its capacity to identify with radical forces “outside.”) If they speak to us at all, it is only to give us notice that our “television set, car and wardrobe already belong … to the people of the world.” Until the repossessors arrive, the one worthy thing we can do is “support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and … keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries can share the cost, and the blacks don’t have to do the
