now.”)16
There were interesting efforts to bridge the traditional left and what some were now calling the “new social movements,” including the journal Socialist Revolution (founded in 1970, renamed Socialist Review in 1978, folded in 2006) and the multi-issue New American Movement (founded in 1971), which merged with another left formation in 1982 to create Democratic Socialists of America, but none of these had wide impact or electrified a large following. That part of the left that called itself “the left” too often preferred to stay stubbornly unreconstructed, particularly in regard to gender. Well into the new millennium, many institutions of the socialist left, from conferences to publishing houses, remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, lagging far behind mainstream society. This dramatic underrepresentation of women—over decades in which women organizers, and the theory and practice of identity politics, were steadily reshaping much of the radical activist landscape—only served to give an anachronistic feel to certain segments of the socialist left and limit their relevance to movements on the ground. There was a nice irony in the fact that the biggest revival for socialist ideas after the sixties came through the Occupy movement of 2011, whose organizing practices were profoundly shaped by feminism and anarchism: political traditions are, after all, often renewed from the outside.17
And indeed, the closer one looks at the more radical of the “single-issue” movements of the early 1970s onward, the less single-minded or narrow they appear. Some or even many of the people who attended a given movement’s mass rallies or marches might be interested only in the issue at hand, but the core organizers invariably had a broader vision and critique. Anti-nuclear activists, for instance, weren’t simply concerned with the health and safety risks posed by nuclear power plants; they viewed the push toward nuclear power as an outgrowth of a toxic ideology of “progress” and “growth”—one which the traditional left too often shared. The committed organizers who most shaped the new wave of movements tended, moreover, to migrate from one movement to the next, creating deep political, tactical, and strategic continuities between what superficially appeared as disconnected issue-oriented campaigns.
The charges of narrowness and fragmentation were lodged most frequently against the identity-based movements. But during this same period, some were laying the foundation for a new critical approach to structures of power, one that focused heavily on the relations between different systems of domination and in the process fundamentally challenged older views of what was “universal” and what was “particular.” The group most often credited with coining the phrase “identity politics,” the Boston-based black lesbian and feminist Combahee River Collective (founded in 1974) paved the way. The collective was anchored by the writer and activist Barbara Smith, whose work throughout the 1980s as publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press would be enormously influential, and her twin sister Beverly, a public health specialist who had been part of the early staff of Ms. magazine. It also included acclaimed poets Audre Lorde and Cheryl Clarke within its shifting membership, as well as the writer and political activist Chirlane McCray, who became the first lady of New York City in 2014. The Smith sisters had both been active in CORE in Cleveland during the 1960s, and the civil rights movement had a deep influence on both their theoretical and organizing work. “I always say that’s the movement that shaped my politics, because it was the first movement I was involved in, but also because of the values of the civil rights movement, particularly the nonviolence,” Barbara Smith recalled in a 2016 interview. That embrace of the civil rights tradition was one factor that set her and her collaborators apart from many black nationalist contemporaries in the seventies; gender politics divided them even more dramatically. “Black women were supposed to walk seven steps behind and have babies for the nation,” Smith explained. “I’m not saying that everybody who was a black nationalist had those reductive, misogynistic views of women, but there was enough that it definitely affected people like me.”18
Combahee tackled an array of local organizing projects that involved questions of race, gender, and sexuality, such as mobilizing support for Kenneth Edelin, a black doctor who was charged and convicted of manslaughter after performing a legal abortion, and defending Ella Mae Ellison, a black woman who was falsely convicted of first-degree murder of a police officer. They organized a major feminist response to a series of murders of black women in Boston that had been largely ignored by authorities and the mainstream media. Some black community leaders—male leaders—had viewed the murders in strictly racial terms and suggested that women should protect themselves by only going out accompanied by male companions. “It’s true that the victims were all Black and that Black people have always been targets of racist violence in this society, but they were also all women,” explained a pamphlet that the Combahee Collective produced about the murders. “Our sisters died because they were women just as surely as they died because they were Black.” The pamphlet, originally entitled “Six Black Women, Why Did They Die?” offered self-protection tips and lists of both organizing projects and resources for support, and went into printing after printing as the number of murders grew; according to Barbara Smith, who drafted the initial text, the collective distributed some 40,000 copies.19
It was the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 manifesto, though, that had the greatest and most lasting political impact. “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” the Combahee River Collective statement read. “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” This analysis offered a profound shift in perspective. Rather than viewing those, like black lesbians, who simultaneously experienced multiple forms of oppression as representing a narrow constituency, as classic interest-group politics might do, the collective argued that their unique vantage point gave them a broader, deeper, and more nuanced view of the complex workings of power and domination. This vision of identity was rooted in a socialist-feminist framework: “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses,” the Collective wrote, with the manifesto first appearing in a collection entitled Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.” This influence, all too rarely acknowledged, provided the liveliest and most consequential legacy of the socialist tradition in this period. The women of color feminism created by the Combahee River Collective and others in the late 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for what would later be termed intersectionality, a focus on the ways systems of power and domination combine and overlap that has been a defining influence on the Movement for Black Lives and the activism of the Millennial generation more broadly.20
Combahee River Collective leaflet, circa 1979 (designer: Urban Planning Aid; courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives)
But while the charges of narrowness and fragmentation lodged against identity politics rather missed the point, there was undoubtedly a general tendency toward localism, introspection, and small-scale organizing throughout this period of contraction and restructuring. With all the focus on community-based projects and institution-building, large mobilizations with large ambitions were few. There was great pragmatism in this shift but a sense of resignation as well—a recognition that acting on a scale larger than the local had become very difficult indeed. Rudy Perkins, an activist with the Clamshell Alliance and later the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, remembers reading in an anarchist journal of the time a “lovely little poem drawing an analogy of tidal pools on the beach, that the wave had receded and now all that was left was little bits of active life in little pools scattered around. And that’s how it felt.” It was a far cry from the revolutionary dreams of just a few years before. But in some of those little pools Perkins spoke of, activists would experiment—with varying degrees of success—with
