We’re working on the glitches, like being able to preview and edit your posts, and other things. Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, in the 1960s, corporate liberalism had hegemony, conservatives were a minority, and the ‘new right’ was a minority within a minority. Now the conservatives are in charge, the hard right is rising, and liberalism–globalist, humanist and in between–and on the defensive.

Quite a shift in the political landscape, and by no means do I blame in all on the new left. Goodness, the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ we created is the main reason why Rumsfeld can’t double or triple the troops in Iraq, even if he wanted to.

But here’s my take on ‘vanguards,’ which both you and Gunn raise.

I think those opposed to “vanguardism” often have their own definitions of the term that are too narrow.

For instance, at any given time, I find it useful to try to figure out the proportions of advanced, middle and backward among the general population in regards to politics. The backward are those who like and defend the existing order of oppression, the middle don’t want to be bothered with politics because it doesn’t make sense in their lives and they are focused on themselves and family, and the advanced are those who see the present order as oppressive and would like to do something to change it.

This “sectoring” is fluid; any given individual can move from one to another from time to time as conditions vary. But at any given time, the advanced are a minority, although they may be a relatively large minority.

Within the advanced, moreover, there are those who are presently active and those who are waiting to do something, those who are in organizations and those who haven’t joined anything yet, and those who think just a few major reforms will do and those who think the whole system has to go.

This narrows things down a bit. If you look at the advanced who are active, in an organization and who think the whole order needs to be replaced, you have what I would call the revolutionary vanguard. Notice that I didn’t say they had to be in ONE organization, or have ONE program, or leader. At some point they might, although it’s unlikely and certainly doesn’t happen by declaration or fiat or self-assertion.

In any case, this grouping is what I would call the “natural vanguard” that shrinks or swells with the ebb and flow of class struggle and social crisis.

Now there are many organizations in the “natural vanguard.”

Does any one or any one cluster of them ever get to be “the vanguard party?”

Only if certain conditions are met, including one very practical but often ignored factor: your group gets to be a LEADER if it has FOLLOWERS.

This seems clear as day to me, but we still have dozens of groups running around claiming to be the leader, but they don’t have any followers or supporters to speak of. They have the mistaken notion that a ‘correct line’ or ‘scientific program’ is sufficient, even granting that there is such a thing.

Myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to work in groups that deal in ‘working hypotheses’ rather than ‘correct lines.’

I would say that to be the vanguard party, a group has to earn that designation by, first, winning over the vast majority of the advanced sector to chose it as their own organization and second, by then in turn winning over large numbers of the middle forces to respect and follow its course of action, at least a good part of the time.

Becoming a vanguard party in this sense is something that is done practically over time. The best examples I can think of were Vietnam and China. It simply means that masses of people recognize your group’s leadership ability, that they will want to defend and protect you against the enemy, and finally, will want to join your ranks and shape the group’s politics and future themselves.

All the other disputes about the “genuine” vanguard status being achieved by assembling varying sets of principles or ideological coda is more in tune with medieval theological disputation, rather than the kind of thinking we need today.

So there’s two kinds of opposition to vanguards. One is really aimed at dogmatism and ‘left’ sectarianism, and makes some good points. We certainly made our share of mistakes and deviations here in the past.

But there’s another kind of anti-vanguardism that does hold us back, that disparages the need of organization and, yes, leadership, (and by that I don’t mean things like ‘The Cult of Bob.) This is what Gunn is getting at, I think, and he’s right. There’s no future there. But our task certainly is to nurture and grow the ‘natural vanguard’ I describe above.

“I blow to his concrete knowledge of what went down.” should, of course, be “I *bow* to his concrete knowledge…etc.”

Too bad this blog doesn’t offer the option to re-read your message before it is posted.

Thanks for your responses. Elston’s was sufficiently delayed that I missed it until now. So let me, at least briefly, respond to both without futher delay.

Carl’s point that the splits within SDS were already percolating at a local level – and thus weren’t simply a result of leadership conflicts – sounds reasonable to me. I was only a distant observer, so I blow to his concrete knowledge of what went down.

I also agree that there was some significant analytical work done in SDS that got sidelined by Third Worldism and the temper of the times. On the other hand, we are now living with the ironic situation where the “L” word is taboo, due in part to the discrediting of Liberalism by New Left critics, since it was the liberal establishment of the JFK and LBJ administrations that got us into the Viet Nam embroiglio. [I wouldn't blame the plight of Liberalism entirely on the New Left's opposition to it, but I do get nostalgic for the days when a Liberal establishment was the worst that we had to deal with.]

As for Elston’s invitation for me to expand on the prison movement’s place in, and impact upon, the 70′s left and collective business efforts, I am, alas, not the best person to fill in the blanks. As a Bay Area resident who shopped at the local co-ops, read the UG press, and was sufficiently plugged-in to have some inkling of what was going down (e.g., Popeye Jackson, Tribal Thumb, etc.), I was marginally aware of the problems. But there are many others who were in the thick of it, who have never come forward to tell their tales. Your guess as to why this may be is as good as mine. Fear of retribution? Chagrin over shattered dreams? Not wanting to give further information to enemies of the Left? It could be any of these reasons or all of them.

All I know is that there is a significant hole in our understanding of one route the Left took in trying to forge alternative institutions. From my subjective perspective, the implosion of the food co-ops and distributors was the final blow to countercultural dreams.

You list a good number of other cooperative business efforts with which I am unfamiliar, but it sounds like study of them would certainly be worthwhile.

As for the need to build a vanguard, it will take a considerable amount of persuading to convince me that a vanguard is the answer. My own reaction to the M-L vanguardist sectarian frenzy of the 70′s was to consider both anarchism and democratic socialism as less authoritarian alternatives. Both of those approaches have problems that could be discussed at another time, but neither of them has failed on as collosal a scale as M-L vanguardism (and here I am thinking of the whole totalitarian spin-out of Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, et al, not to mention Mao and China.)

On the various efforts at worker ownership and coops: As you point out, there has been a variety of efforts to create collectively-run businesses. I’m actually not familiar at all with the link with the prison movement—perhaps you could expand on that particular aspect. Those businesses and collective-run businesses that trace their lineage to the student movement of the 60s are generally very small marginal operations (of course there are some exceptions like probably the Berkeley Food Coop) that have benefited their immediate members, but had very little impact politically or otherwise on the larger political discussion. In my home town, we have a pretty sophisticated worker coop that has direct roots back to the late 60s—but the leaders are very much part of the romantic and superficial culture that we are critiquing—finding it easy to work in a traditional (but I’m sure moral) way during the day, and then having different politics at night. There’s still a discomfort with scale, and often an ultra egalitarianism that limits the social and economic impact. In Northern Italy, the revolutionary movement—the Italian Communist Party—promoted the development of coops on a large scale that now profoundly influence the regional economy in positive ways. A section of the left in the Basque region in Spain gave rise to the Mondragon cooperative network that now employs some 65,000 people and is the cutting edge of the Spanish industrial economy as well as a dominant force in the retail economy that has blocked the entry of Wal-Mart.

Others not from the revolutionary left in the US have been active in promoting worker ownership, ESOPs, and cooperatives over the years and there still are some efforts underway that have some promise including the Cooperative Home Healthcare business in NYC that employs some 500+ people (women of color—principally) and is modeled after the Mondragon experience in Spain. There’s the Industrial Cooperative Association in Cambridge, MA that still promotes employee ownership. There’s the Ohio Employee Ownership Center in Kent, Ohio that has a big network of employee owned companies. And there are others. These initiatives are mixed in their political/professional commitments. Some of these organizations and individuals began focused on the pure cooperative model driven in the first instinct by utopian values—if it’s pristine, everyone will embrace it. When this didn’t happen, they became slightly cynical about the picture and the potential to transform society, and focused on their own personal life style supported by consulting fees. On the other hand, other of these organizations and individuals are still committed to a bigger vision and project; are making a significant contribution to the practice, analysis, and theories of transforming at least the economy; and would definitely be interested in a bigger socialist project based on economic democracy. The revolutionary left should definitely learn more about these networks and organizations and get to know their leaders and their work.

I think this whole area of work needs to be understood as a major part of a comprehensive strategy going forward. The practical and theoretical significance of workers owning and managing the means of production in particular companies as a major part of the transition to, and an essential part of a socialist society should be owned by today’s revolutionary left and not ceded to the utopians (the alternative cooperatives) or the ESOPers. Schwiekart has made quite a contribution in this regard. We should be looking again at Soviet history and understand more fully the quality and implication of Bukharin’s work and not allowing the Third International to represent the only revolutionary trend of the Soviet era. It’s worth looking again at Yugoslavia and, more interestingly, the evolution and impact of the Italian Communist Party. And, of course, we should be digging into the complex Chinese domestic experience as well as their efforts in the global market place.

Feminism, the gay liberation movement, etc.: Another good point. They represented a dramatic extension of the democratic movement in ways that were critically important for society and the left internally as well as externally. But I think the analytical, theoretical, and practical flabbiness of the 60s left leadership defensively dismissed the challenges as well as opportunities that these trends offered and further narrowed their own focus as they (the left) became smaller and more marginal. Meanwhile those movements became focused only on their democratic rights creating the core of “identity” politics that further fragmented the social movement and abandoned any effort to seek and a fundamental transformation of society economically as well as socially.

We still need to build a vanguard: Finally, you are also right about the lack of true leadership qualities of the 60s left. I was a little liberal—not wanting to be too harsh. But because of the damage the 60s left did to the reputation and prestige of Marxist leadership among the American people, it is essential to defend the notion of a true vanguard that earns recognition because of its demonstrated capacity not its hollow proclamations.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments!

In the year before, for instance, I traveled to dozens of campuses where Black students taking militant action, demanding open admissions for minorities and Black Students, had split many of the chapters at the base, especially where PL was involved. PL and their WSA grouping in SDS opposed many of these Black demands as ‘nationalist’ and ‘reactionary.’ I was at one situation at Brooklyn college when the PL grouping in the chapter threatened to cross the Black student picket lines, and the rest of us lined up and said, ‘You’ll have to go through us first.’

In this way, a good part of the split had already taken place at the base, and when the Convention rolled around, it was putting icing on the cake, so to speak.

But, yes, ‘the national collective,’ united around the original ‘Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement’ paper by Mike Klonsky and others, was the organized force fighting PL’s line. The differences within it, between the nascent Weatherman and RYM2, were submerged. Once the split with PL took place, those differences erupted around two ensuing papers that gave each group its name.

I think the first split had to happen. But the second? To this day, I don’t know for sure. Had we been wiser, more patient or more experienced, perhaps not. But the issues here, too, were clear enough, and RYM2 and others offered a good critique of the WU on the spot, as opposed to others who commented years or decades later.

But when all is said and done, we all had our weaknesses, many of which Gunn points out above.

One thing I’ve done, however, is to revisit some of the intellectual work we started in the New Left, particularly our ‘Praxis Axis’ project. I’ve looked back over the ‘Port Authority Statement’, my own ‘Multiversity’ new working class analysis, and other stuff we had started on the impact of technology, cybernation and the market. Not to mention our original core value of participatory democracy.

It’s fascinating how much of this holds up even today, and how cutting edge it was, in its way, at the time. We weren’t mature enough to persist, especially when a hundred US cities were in revolt or flames, and the blood of a million Vietnamese was being spilled, and shifted our focus to the third world for leadership, with both good and bad results.

In any case, I’ve come full circle, after a long detour, back to some of our original theoretical concerns–a good bunch of us avoiding the POMO cul-de-sac–and are looking to the future. In fact, this site is one part of the project.

Welcome aboard…

I’ll say upfront that I don’t agree with all of Elston Gunn’s points, but welcome the chance to think some of these things through. What struck me in reading your article was those things that *weren’t* mentioned.

For instance, in discussing the “implosion” of SDS, you attribute it to the “split” between Weatherman and RYMII, but my reading of the implosion is that it was occasioned by the Progressive Labor Party’s effort, as a disciplined sectarian entity, to influence SDS to follow PL’s program. The split was fundamentally between PL, on the one hand, and the national SDS leadership (including both leaders of Weatherman and RYMII), on the other hand, with the majority of on-campus SDS members left out in the cold. [That Weatherman and RYMII then went their own ways is almost a footnote, in that SDS was already, by then, kaput.]

It strikes me as important to include PL in the picture, as the phenomenon of sectarian parties trying to steer the direction of larger inclusive organizations through manipulative or covert means is still present today in the anti-war movement and beyond.

Elsewhere, you complain: “Ceding the market to capital went hand-in-hand with ceding issues of management—whether in a business or a not-for-profit organization—to capitalist traditions of directive non-participatory management. These tendencies, rather than the creation of an effective democratic and participatory culture within the workplace, dominate the movement world.”

Yet this ignores efforts, particularly in the mid-’70s, of creating collectively-run alternative institutions such as the food co-ops and produce distributors, particularly in the Bay Area and Minnesota. We have yet to see any summing up of how that noble effort went astray. Why? Because the apparent cause of its unraveling is entertwined with the still embarrassing relationship between the left of that era and the prison movement, which resulted in supposedly radical ex-cons getting a toehold within the fledgling institutions and importing prison gang conflicts into that vulnerable environment.

This deserves discussion.

Your article also fails to mention another major factor in the disintegration of the old “New Left”: the rise of radical feminism, particularly in response to sexism in the New Left itself. Similarly, there is no mention of the rise of the gay liberation movement, which occurred around this same time. Both of these movements on the left redefined oppressor/oppressed relationships away from the economic and political emphasis of the New Left (and its successor M-L party formations) to analyses which saw fundamental conflicts in the areas of gender and sexual orientation. For better or worse, this multiplicity of new self-defined minorities shifted the left’s emphasis from one of a large single umbrella (i.e., Us (students, workers, 3rd world) versus the ruling class) to a coalition of smaller umbrellas (people of color, women, gays, etc.) each with differently defined enemies.

I’m not saying that this never should have happened. I’m simply pointing out that it was part of changes in the left landscape, and needs to be addressed in any analysis of what went wrong.

Further, while you speak of “the reemergence of a deep and on-going anti-intellectualism within the U.S. left,” (in reference to much of the sloganeering and superficial polemicizing that went on), you fail to mention the fate of most of the actual serious intellectuals on the left: their disappearance into the Academy, embrace of postmodernist and cultural “theory”, and descent into irrelevance. Russell Jacoby’s _The Last Intellectuals_ is relevant here.

Finally, while you seem to wish to rescue “the vanguard” and “strong leadership” from the disrepute into which they fell, you seem to feel that that disrepute was undeserved or unjust. However, I’d suggest that they fell out of favor because the various self-appointed vanguards (each of whom felt that there should be only one vanguard of the working class and that *they* should be that vanguard) couldn’t lead their way out of a paper sack, and presumed to offer a solution (mind-numbing Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and goals) that almost no one wanted.

Let me close by saying that I welcome the effort to formulate a vision of market socialism and to further sharpen the critique of Capitalism. I do think, however, that the attempt to analyze the failures of the ’60s and ’70s left needs to address all the aspects of its decline.