The Movement The Bemused Left

THE NATIONAL news media inform us that the student left is in shambles; that it is fragmenting and dying. Columnists report that students have repudiated radicalism. Buildings will no longer be taken over, burned, or bombed; and students are going back to studying, partying, or campaigning, isolating a few crazies bent on anarchy. Part of this is true: organizationally, the student left is fragmenting. This does not mean that it is dying.

Campus-oriented radical activity is declining because radicals feel they have exhausted their tactics. Reliance on confrontation tactics to mobilize students led to sophisticated counter-measures by the universities. Here, the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities eliminated radical leadership, prevented suspended and expelled radicals from organizing on campus, and deterred takeover-bust-strike theatre. At the same time reliance on confrontation led to a dependence on it.

Campus confrontation isolated students from the rest of the country, and by its manipulative method alienated a mass of students from what was seen as a radical elite. The alternative, building a mass base of support, was agonizingly slow. Do you sink to the lowest common denominator of consensus in building a base of support? If not, how long can you spend developing support for a radical objective? Partly because the life of a student is only four years and partly because of adventurism, impatient radicals without a mass base of support eagerly chose confrontations. Building seizures were effective radicalizing experiences that produced at least one college generation of radicals and stimulated radical activity in high schools, but the methods used prompted a repressive response from university administrations that evicted radical leadership from the campuses. The group that had developed expertise in organizing and running the movement was separated from its constituency.

Cultural revolutionaries created new problems. The "revolutionary life-style" nurtured by Yippies infused chaos, freakiness, drugs, violence, and music into the movement. Its heroes, male musicians and male radicals, energized a growing revolutionary virility cult. With cultural revolutionaries in the movement, how much chaos would it now tolerate? The Chicago 7 trial epitomized this conflict between the discipline of Tom Hayden, and the theatrics of Jerry Rubin.

THERE had always been a tension in the civil rights movement about racism. At the time that white Northerners chastised white Southerners for racism, the proximity of whites and blacks in the movement made white Northerners uneasy about their own racism. When Stokely Carmichael kicked whites out of SNCC the conflict was repressed; whites and blacks no longer worked together. Soon after the separatism drive the civil rights movement fragmented. When the student anti-war movement arose, racism was apparently forgotten by whites. A new moral purity, ignoring residual guilt about racism, launched the mass education phase of the anti-war movement.

After the Vietnam issue expanded to a primitive revolutionary consciousness, a new tension emerged within radical groups. Women demanded an end to their brutalization in the male-dominated movement. They were tired of doing the shitwork and subordinating themselves to the avaricious egos of male movement heavies: By expressing the sexism of male radicals and their egoistic drives for leadership, the women's movement eroded the moral purity of the new revolutionary consciousness. Rather than immediately confront these realities, male radicals were eager to accept a separatism drive on the part of women.

Men wanted to be men. They wanted to be the cultural heroes and wanted to continue the sexual revolution which meant impersonal, free access to women. They wanted to hold the dope and dole it out to their women, keeping the much-too-heavy drugs for themselves. At TDA, women running the demonstration asked everyone not to trash. Some men retorted, "No mother-fuckin" woman is going to tell us when we can trash or not." So they threw the bricks and scurried back to protect their women. But women's affinity groups didn't need protection, or the shit which trashers were bringing down on everybody. Zap. Who were the Chicago 7? Seven white middle-class males who had driven to leadership in various segments of the movement. Who was doing the trashing at TDA? Mostly white middle-class males.

Soon, everything started caving in. How did radicals relate to the Panthers? What about monogamous sexual relations? What about tightass relations between men? Everybody wanted to take it to a higher level, but revolutionary consciousness was only a few years old. Panthers wanted radicals to pick up the gun, but objectively and subjectively most weren't there yet. A few went on and bombed CFIAs, but the rest waited for fascism, watching the Weathermen's demise.

The fragmentation of the organized student left seems to be pointing toward a period of inactivity. Unless another Cambodia-style crisis breaks out, it is doubtful that groups other than the Panthers will be able to mobilize radical activity. But the time can be used to define a cohesive program. Collectives and study groups can form to attack the problems that fragmented the student left: elitism, adventurism, sexim, and racism. Eventually collectives will have to move away from student centers and penetrate communities. Some working collectives have already formed.

The greatest danger is that radicals see the fragmentation of the student left as an end of radicalism and declare a new "end of ideology." The left can reach a higher level of activity only by beginning now to regroup and draw on new energies for the future.