Abstract
This chapter begins by situating the 1960s Left in the context of (a) the post-World War II Red Scare, (b) worldwide movements of liberation, and (c) extreme levels of state and vigilante violence that were perpetrated in response to Left activism. The New Left, despite its failure to establish a party, nonetheless had significant impact both in building opposition to US imperialism and in addressing inequalities of race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. The subsequent period was one in which New Deal era reforms came under attack while liberation movements lost the partial buffer against empire that had been provided by the Soviet Bloc. With the advance of neoliberal globalization, however, protest movements re-emerged, going beyond earlier single-issue campaigns to target global power structures.
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Notes
- 1.
Hans Aage, “The Triumph of Capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe and Its Western Apologetics,” Socialism and Democracy, 19:2 (July 2005), 38.
- 2.
See George Katsiaficas, The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oakland, CA: PM Presss, 2018).
- 3.
John McDermott, “On the Origins of the Present World in the Defeat of ‘the 60s,’” Socialism and Democracy, 11:2 (Fall 1997). See also Barbara Epstein, “The Marginality of the American Left: The Legacy of the 1960s,” in Leo Panitch, ed., Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Socialist Register 1997 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).
- 4.
See Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
- 5.
Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 [1990]).
- 6.
See Jeff Gottlieb and Jeff Cohen, “Was Fred Hampton Executed?” The Nation, December 25, 1976, and Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).
- 7.
See especially, on the Puerto Rican community, Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
- 8.
Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
- 9.
See David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).
- 10.
On the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother (and 1968 presidential candidate) Robert F. Kennedy, see Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, 494–586, 610–613. See also William F. Pepper, The Plot to Kill King (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), and Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2018).
- 11.
In Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
- 12.
Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986); Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016).
- 13.
See David Gilbert, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
- 14.
On the broad involvement of students at non-elite universities, see Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
- 15.
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 579.
- 16.
Such as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers (secret history of the US role in Vietnam), and Philip Agee, who broke new ground with the explosive revelations of his Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Stonehill, 1975).
- 17.
I followed one such case which resulted in a Federal Court ruling in favor of the prisoners, in Indianapolis in April 1977. A related development was the emergence of prison-based degree programs following the suppression of the 1971 Attica uprising (as described in the Deep Dish TV documentary, The Last Graduation [1997]).
- 18.
See the review essays collected by Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff in The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, 3 vols. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982; Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984, 1986).
- 19.
As Daniel Singer wrote, from Paris, “The European protesters looking ahead are joining hands with America’s new left.” Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1971), 328.
- 20.
Andrew Levison, The Working-Class Majority (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1974).
- 21.
See Serafino Romualdi, Presidents and Peons; Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967).
- 22.
As documented especially by Charles Kernaghan and his Labor Committee in Support of Worker and Human Rights. See continuing coverage in the monthly bulletin, Labor Notes.
- 23.
Dan Georgakas, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998).
- 24.
See Victor Wallis, Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2019), 82–86.
- 25.
The Center’s ability to combine these approaches reflects the career and the thinking of its director, Eric Mann, whose work in the ’60s and early ’70s spanned community, antiracist, antiwar, student, and prisoner-support organizing, and who subsequently brought this accumulated experience into the industrial workplace. See his book on “transformative organizing,” Playbook for Progressives (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).
- 26.
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003); Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
- 27.
See Robert W. McChesney, Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Media Criticism (New York: New Press, 2004).
- 28.
See Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World (London & New York: Verso, 1997).
- 29.
R.C. Lewontin, “The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian,” Monthly Review 50:3 (July/August 1998).
- 30.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
- 31.
See Noam Chomsky, “Power in the Global Arena,” New Left Review, no. 230 (July/August 1998), 21ff; David Moberg, “8 Terrible Things about the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” In These Times, December 16, 2015; and, on the World Trade Organization (WTO), https://www.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/the-three-sisters-and-other-institutions/the-world-trade-organization.html.
- 32.
See Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism (London & Washington: Cassell, 1997); Norman Solomon, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999).
- 33.
William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 382f. See also Lawrence C. Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia (Boston: South End Press, 1995); Ken Silverstein, “America’s Private Gulag,” in Daniel Burton-Rose et al. (eds.), The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998), 156–63.
- 34.
See Victor Wallis, “Socialism Under Siege,” and the ensuing exchange with Ronald Aronson, Monthly Review 47:8 and 48:5 (January and October, 1996).
- 35.
Victor Wallis, Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism (Toronto: Political Animal Press, 2018), ch. 6.
- 36.
Greider, One World, Ready or Not, 232ff; John Bellamy Foster, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
- 37.
A valuable introduction to the social security issue is Richard B. DuBoff, “Government and Social Insurance: A View from the Left,” Monthly Review 47:5 (October, 1995).
- 38.
The Harris Poll’s “Confidence Index,” set at 100 for 1966, averaged 57 for the 1970s, 51 for the 1980s, and 48 for the 1990s. The Harris Poll, 3 February 1999.
- 39.
Jeffrey M. Jones, for Gallup (Sept. 30, 2016), https://news.gallup.com/poll/195920/americans-desire-third-party-persists-election-year.aspx.
- 40.
The fluid boundary between progressive and reactionary expressions of such alienation is explored in Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: From Bacon’s Rebellion to the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).
- 41.
See Michel Moore’s 2017 film, Fahrenheit 11/9.
- 42.
See Norman Solomon, “Joe Biden Proves That There’s Nothing Moderate About ‘Moderates’,” Truthdig (online), August 1, 2019.
- 43.
The historic link between periods of reduced immigration and those of increased opportunity for African Americans is pointed out in Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 185. See also Aviva Chomsky, “They Take Our Jobs”: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018).
- 44.
Tyree Scott, “Black Workers and the Global Economy,” Socialism and Democracy, 12:1/2 (1998), 209.
- 45.
Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (eds.), Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
- 46.
As of late 2019, it appears that Sara Nelson (International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA) may bring a stance more independent of the Democrats into AFL-CIO leadership.
- 47.
“The Black Radical Congress, 1998,” special issue of The Black Scholar 28:3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998), 46.
- 48.
See Robin D.G. Kelley, “Identity Politics and Class Struggle,” New Politics, no. 22 (Winter 1997), and Wallis, Red-Green Revolution, ch. 8 (on intersectionality).
- 49.
See Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2002), and Dan Berger, ed., The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
- 50.
See David Reynolds, Democracy Unbound: Progressive Challenges to the Two-Party System (Boston: South End Press, 1997).
- 51.
For an overview, see Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (London: Verso, 2019), ch. 8.
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Wallis, V. (2020). The US Left of the 1960s and Its Legacy. In: Socialist Practice. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_9
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