The Revolutionary Loop So the no-longer-new Left trapped itself in a seamless loop: growing militancy, growing isolation, growing commitment to The Revolution, sloppier and more frantic attempts to imagine a revolutionary class, growing hatred among the competing factions with their competing imaginations, growing vulnerability to repression. Students for a Democratic Society, the movement's main organizational web, became its final battlefield. As the organization was pulled apart by cannibal factions, most of the remnants of the old New Left stood aside, demoralized, gazing in fascinated horror as sideshow theatrics became the movement's main act. How could the organization that began by echoing Albert Camus and C. Wright Mills end with one faction chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win," while members of the other waved their Little Red Books in the air and chanted "Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-tung"? The comic-book crudeness of the sloganeering at this point was self-evident to anyone with a residual hold on reality—anyone who appreciated how many enemies the movement strategy of "fighting back" was arousing, how many "sleeping dogs" were barking precisely because the movement had aroused them. The Old Guard stood dumbstruck, as if at the scene of a bloody accident. The perpetrators were not aliens. They were familiar—indeed, horrifying and enthralling, precisely because they were familiar. Several of the leading Weathermen had been visible in and around SDS for a number of years. The Weathermen were the New Left's "id," said Tom Hayden. They were "my children," said Carl Oglesby: he had taught them, inspired them, loved them. And what they caricatured was equally familiar—the politics of the late New Left.
All the versions of that politics attempted to force a revolutionary solution to a fundamental problem. If morality and eschatology agreed that there had to be a revolution, there had to be someone to make it. The New Left's torment—the torment of all radical student movements—was that relatively privileged people were fighting on behalf of the oppressed: blacks, Vietnamese, the working class. Committed to a revolution it did not have the power to bring about, the movement cast about for a link with forces that might have the power. But none did. For all the slackening in the loyalties which bound people to the social order, for all the demonstrations and dropping out and divisions among the governing forces, there was no revolutionary crisis. Yet to give up the revolutionary dream would have been to confront a situation without precedent in the history of the modern Left. The working class was conservative, more or less, the privileged were radical. What could be made of that?* Unwilling to give up the revolutionary dream, the New Left factions convinced themselves that The Revolution had already begun, and proceeded to conjure up abstract and imaginary allies: allies either nonexistent (revolutionary white youth, industrial workers) or unreliable (Black Panthers) or remote (Vietnamese, Chinese). The more abstract these hypothetical allies, the more serviceable for the revolutionary myth.
I put it this way in the summer of 1969: " … an inescapable choice presented itself: ["an inescapable choice": Todd Gitlin, "New Left: Old Traps," Ramparts, September 1969, reprinted in Jacobs, ed., Weatherman, p. 107.] Either the post-scarcity left would comprehend its own unprecedented identity as a social force, elaborate that identity into a vision and program for the campus and the youth ghettos, and use its reality as a strength from which to encounter anti-colonial and working-class energy and to devise common approaches—or it would turn from its identity, throw the vision out with the narrowness of the class base, and seek an historically pie-packaged version of revolution in which students and déclassés intellectuals are strictly appendages or tutors to the 'real' social forces. Either it would take itself seriously as a visionary force, conscious of post-scarcity potentials with revolutionary and democratic goals, or it would buy clarity on-the-cheap, taking refuge in mirror-models of the underdeveloped socialisms of Russia and the Third World. Either it would accept the awesome risk of finding new paths—or it would walk the beaten trails, pugnacious and sad. A grave choice, where the stakes are immense; but the pounding pressure of the State leaves no time for placid reflection." To get a hearing in the movement I had to speak—indeed, to think—the apocalyptic language of "post-scarcity" and "revolution." *
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