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Title: Community and Organization Author: Wini Breines Date: 1980 Language: en Topics: prefigurative politics, New Left, community, community organizing, horizontal organizing, SDS, participatory democracy, direct action, prefigurative politics Source: University of California Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. *Social Problems*, Vol. 27, No.4, April 1980. Notes: This article coined the term *prefigurative politics*.
Most analysts of the new left fault it for having been utopian,
antiorganizational, and even antipolitical, suggesting that these
characteristics were responsible for its failures. It is suggested in
this paper that such evaluations of the new left are biased in favor of
certain organizational and instrumental-political forms — forms the new
left rejected in the name of a communitarian and expressive-political
experiment. It is indicated that the new left was shaped by the ongoing
tension within it between a spontaneous, grassroots social movement
committed to participatory democracy and hostile to formal organization
and the perceived need for formal, even centralized, organization
capable of implementing political change. Faced with a choice between
"strategic" and "prefigurative" politics, the new left, it is argued,
chose the latter and hence chose to fail according to the established
political standards. The new left sought to avert Michels' "iron law of
oligarchy" by its refusal to transform itself into a political party and
by its insistence on remaining a social movement. The attempt to found a
new politics of participation and process, while unsuccessful, may well
prove to have been the new left's most valuable legacy.
In 1969, the major radical American student organization, Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS), split and collapsed at what seemed to be the
height of its power and promise. From late 1950s' beginnings in peace
and especially civil rights political activity, the student movement of
the 1960s grew in size and energy to become the locus and source of
opposition to inequality, militarism, the war in Vietnam and the values
of American society. SDS was the informal representative of this student
movement, its most self-conscious grouping, which debated and theorized
about organization, change and political power. Many in SDS were
concerned with developing political analyses of American society and the
potential path to the transformation of capitalist society. SDS, of
course, was not alone in this preoccupation, but was the main
organizational expression of these concerns; people with such concerns
were most clearly new leftists. In contrast, the student movement was a
more inchoate upsurge of protest and opposition by students and
ex-students, usually to the war in Vietnam and university complicity
with the war, often with little or no commitment to radical change. The
relationship between the new left and the student movement forms part of
the subject of this paper in that the difficulties facing new leftists
(often leaders) who wished to create a viable oppositional organization
were lodged not only in the larger social structure but in the ideology
of the movement itself.
This paper will not attempt to explain why SDS disintegrated in 1969 or
what "happened" to the new left and student movement. Rather it will
suggest some characteristics of the grassroots movement which were
responsible for the unique character of the new left and student
movement of the 1960s in this country. Briefly, the time span covered is
the 1960s until 1968-69 when new left politics began to polarize, as
evidenced in the split and demise of SDS in 1969. The most important
initiating and defining event for the entire period was the civil rights
movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s in the South, specifically
the sit-in movement beginning in 1960, the voter registration projects,
and the organization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), which inspired admiration, emulation and cooperation among
northern student activists. The white student movement developed slowly
in the early 1960s until the government's escalation of the war in
Vietnam in early 1965 and the explosion of the protest movement against
it which continued into the 1970s. The membership in SDS grew
fantastically during the second half of the sixties, a recipient of
antiwar sentiment, disaffection and alienation from American society.
Membership alone, however, cannot tell the whole story because it was an
informal organization which many activists never joined. Even when they
did join, it often meant neither organizational discipline nor
organizational commitment. The movement was decentralized, spontaneous
and activist, putting most of its energies into direct action:
demonstrations, teach-ins, sit-ins, sanctuaries for draft resisters, and
so forth, initiated at the local level. The growth of a youth movement
and counterculture was critical to the politics of the decade but is not
directly included in this analysis.
The new left is one of those subjects on which so much has been written
that a new contribution would seem to require special justification.
Yet, as often happens, in this case justification for a new discussion
is provided by problems in the extensive existing literature. With only
a few important exceptions (Nairn and Quatrocchi, 1968; Calvert and
Neiman, 1971; Gombin, 1975; Statera, 1975; Young, 1977), commentators
from the political right, left and center, from conservative social
scientists to Leninists, have been almost uniformly critical of the new
left. While their political standpoints diverge, most studies share the
view that the new left was a utopian, antiorganizational, even
antipolitical movement which, for these very reasons, was bound to fail.
That it did apparently fail is taken as proof of the arguments. Such
commentaries, moreover, presuppose or sometimes state that a coherent
strategy and organization adequate to the demands of modern politics
could and should have been developed by the new left (Harrington, 1965;
O'Brien, 1971, 1972; Miles, 1973; Altbach, 1974; Unger, 1975; Weinstein,
1975). "In large measure," Lipset has written, "student and other youth
groups tend to differ from adult political organizations by their
emphasis on what Max Weber has called 'the ethic of absolute ends,' as
contrasted with 'the ethic of responsibility.'" He adds, aptly
summarizing the critical thesis, "their politics is often expressive
rather than instrumental. The New Left groups also have no clear concept
of any road to power, of a way of effecting major social change"
(Altbach and Lipset, 1969: 499,,512).
I would like to suggest that, whatever their strengths, such arguments
are based on organizational or, paraphrasing Lipset, instrumental
political biases. That is, they assume not only the efficacy but the
necessity of certain kinds of instrumental politics or certain kinds of
organization. I believe that in studies of the new left such approaches
lead to two serious problems. First, they tend to prohibit the analyst
from looking at the new left through its eyes, eyes that did not accept
certain conceptions of politics. While analysts need to do more than
this, they ought to do at least this. My goal in this paper, then, is to
approach the new left with the assumption that, when its politics was
what some would term expressive rather than instrumental, it was doing
something political. Specifically, I believe that the utopian
"antiorganizational" and "antipolitical" aspects of the new left were
among its most vital aspects and, moreover, of great interest to the
sociologist of contemporary social movements.
The second problem intrinsic to organizationally or instrumentally
biased approaches to the new left is related to the first. Such
approaches generally fail to recognize the degree to which the new left
sought to discover organizational forms and instrumental mechanisms that
could be both effective within the given political arena and consistent
with the "antipolitical" motifs of the movement. Although it may be that
any such attempt (which in Max Weber's terms would amount to a synthesis
of an ethic of responsibility with an ethic of absolute ends) is doomed
to failure, the fact remains that a substantial part of the story of the
new left was its attempt to accomplish this synthesis. The second goal
of this paper, then, is to analyze the new left's effort to grapple with
the problem of organization and instrumentality, and in so doing to fill
the substantial gap left by the bulk of the studies of the movement.
The unresolved tension, between the spontaneous grassroots social
movement committed to participatory democracy, and the intention
(necessitating organization) of achieving power or radical structural
change in the United States, was a structuring theme of the new left.
This tension and the ambivalence about organization is the axis on which
this interpretation of the new left turns. The contradictory demands of
a serious, national political organization (SDS) and the impulse towards
local, utopian and spontaneous politics were projects pulling in
conflicting directions. Furthermore, the depth and breadth of what was a
genuine grassroots social movement in the 1960s were critical because it
was precisely this complexity that presented obstacles to organizers and
leaders. There was "resistance" on the part of the disordered,
antiauthoritarian student movement to attempts at central organization
by student leaders.
I have used the term prefigurative politics to designate an essentially
antiorganizational politics characteristic of the movement, as well as
of parts of new left leadership; it may be recognized in
counter-institutions, demonstrations and the attempt to embody personal
and antihierarchical values in politics. Participatory democracy was
central to prefigurative politics. Paraphrasing the Port Huron Statement
of 1962, participatory democracy means simply the equal participation of
each individual in all of the social decisions affecting the quality and
direction of his or her life. The crux of prefigurative politics imposed
substantial tasks, the central one being to create and sustain within
the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms
that "prefigured" and embodied the desired society (Boggs, 1977-78).
The notion of community is integrally connected with prefigurative
politics. The new left sought community as it sought to unite the public
and private spheres of life. Community echoes not only certain currents
of historical leftism, but a long sociological tradition as well.[1] A
definition derives from several sources: by community I mean the more
direct, more total and more personal network of relationships than the
formal, abstract and instrumental relationships characterizing state and
society. "Community is founded on [man] conceived in his wholeness
rather than in one or another of the roles, taken separately, that he
may hold in a social order" (Nisbet, 1966: 47-48; also see Stein, 1964;
Williams, 1976; Hearn, 1978). In saying that the new left sought
community I refer not only to the desire to create a sense of wholeness
and communication in social relationships, but to the effort to create
noncapitalist and communitarian institutions that embodied such
relationships (for example, counter-institutions). Prefigurative
politics attempted to develop the seeds of liberation and the new
society (prior to and in the process of revolution) through notions of
participatory democracy grounded in counter-institutions; this meant
building community.[2]
Prefigurative politics in the new left and in the movement meant that
certain organizational forms were precluded or controversial since they
undercut the antihierarchical and direct nature of prefigurative
politics. For example, to the extent that the new left embraced the
concept of community, it faced great difficulty when events compelled it
to develop formal organization in order to function in the customary
political arena. This forced the new left into the dilemma of being
unable or unwilling to create hierarchical organization which would
undermine, from participants' point of view, the values and processes of
prefigurative politics. This does not mean that the new left was
apolitical.[3] First, the new left's central impulse toward community
was precisely its political content. Second, within and alongside the
new left's prefigurative impulse was what I have called strategic
politics — committed to building organization in order to achieve power
so that structural changes in the political, economic and social orders
might be achieved. Organization-building and strategic thinking were
central to strategic politics. In these terms, then, this analysis
suggests a conflict between strategic and prefigurative politics
demonstrating the uniqueness and significance of the latter. But it is
incumbent to stress that both strategic and prefigurative politics were
constitutive of the movement. The new left's relationship to power is
the central issue.
Many in the leadership of SDS believed strongly in the importance of
forging a strong left student organization as a means to political
change.[4] The movement, on the other hand, was a locally-based,
spontaneous outpouring of opposition to the war in Vietnam around the
country; its existence did not depend on strategy or formal
organization. New left organizations were based on the movement; they
did not create it. As a SNCC member remarked of the civil rights
movement, "No one really needed an 'organization' because we then had a
movement" (Zinn, 1965: 36). The nameless activists of the movement
formed the less articulate "other"; they were the organizers'
constituency. The fact is that those who wanted to change America by
organizing this movement were unsuccessful. Although there were many
contributing factors, referred to below, those having to do with the
ideology and self-conscious politics of the student movement most
concern us. Suffice it to say here, the "organization vs. movement"
tension was not based on differing material interests between the
leadership and the "membership"; the only obvious difference was that
when members became part of the leadership they usually became more
committed to organization. However, even this was not true across the
board because there were always some leaders who were ambivalent about
centralized organization.
This opposition to organization was the essence of student movement
politics. Prefigurative politics was hostile to bureaucracy, hierarchy
and leadership, and it took form as a revulsion against large-scale
centralized and inhuman institutions; its most acute concern was to
avoid duplication of the hierarchical and manipulative relationships
characteristic of society. The meaning of prefigurative politics found
summary expression in some of the oft-repeated keywords of the movement:
community, equality, participatory democracy. It was a profoundly
antiorganizational impulse. It is my conviction that the new left chose
not to be strategic; it chose to fail according to traditional political
standards and definitions. That was part of its point. Activists opted
for prefigurative politics not because they were ignorant, unconcerned
or unaware of organizational issues, and not because they were unable to
be disciplined. The process, the means, the participation and the
dialogue were as important as the goal.
To say that the dominant current in a social movement "chose" a politics
raises many questions. It implies a "free" choice, unconstrained by
sociological and structural factors such as the class base and material
interests of the protestors, the effects of state and police repression,
the media, and the electoral political system itself. There is no
question that the appeal and force of prefigurative politics was a
structured choice, but to reduce it, as have so many analysts, to
material factors alone devalues the uniqueness and contributions of new
left consciousness and politics. To say it differently, in spite of the
fact that student movement politics may possibly be accounted for by
such factors as bourgeois backgrounds, future position in the social
structure, the peculiarities of student life, or repression, there was a
central theme and content that was conscious, voluntary and political:
loathing and suspicion of bureaucratic, hierarchical and undemocratic
organization.
Throughout the years in question the decentralization and grassroots
nature of the movement informed the ideology of participants. Around the
country activists acted and functioned politically with little regard
for what the SDS National Office or specific leaders suggested ought to
be done. The genuine ambivalence about leadership, and about
representatives speaking on behalf of the group, derived in part from
activists' sense of their own autonomy and self-direction. It was on the
local level that they operated, often taking it upon themselves to
generate and execute political projects. The fact that self-directed
political activity sprung up all over, that mass insurgency often spread
in spite of the lack of organizers and leaders, that a "thousand flowers
bloomed" during the sixties, reinforced antiorganizational ideology.
There seemed no need for centralized organization when local
organization and political activity mobilized itself. Of course, that is
a debatable assumption and depends on how goals were defined. Very
briefly, because often goals were nonmaterial and political, and not
economic (an end to the war in Vietnam being the most obvious) — and
because often they were, in fact, qualitative and moral — organizational
leverage was not persuasively strategic and rational. Disruption, the
threat of moral and political resistance, was as effective as an
economic strategy would be in a labor struggle.[5]
It is impossible to study the new left and ignore the work of Robert
Michels. His Political Parties, the classic statement of the
degeneration of a democratic organization into an oligarchic structure,
seems almost to have been internalized by the antiorganizational
currents in the student movement. Students often rejected representative
democracy in favor of direct democracy, refusing to have representatives
in negotiations with authorities because they were suspicious of formal
organizational delegation. They rejected centralized and permanent
structure as well. Michels analyzed the attempt of the German working
class to "... secure a sufficiently vast and solid organization in order
to triumph over the organization of the state ..." which resulted in
their party "... acquiring a vigorous centralization of its own, based
upon the same cardinal principles of authority and discipline which
characterize the organization of the state" (Michels, 1962: 335). In the
student movement of the 1960s, the distance between leaders and
participants, and between national officers and membership, was
vigorously solved by eliminating leaders, office functions, the division
of labor, centralized decision making and formal democracy. All the
oligarchic tendencies towards elitism, bureaucracy, rigidity and
conservatism of which Michels warned — when he suggested that "... the
mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure,
induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the
respective position of the leaders and the led" — were criticized in SDS
and the student movement (Michels, 1962: 70). Most of the requirements
of organization were perceived as undermining the values of the movement
and were rejected.
Michels warned that "... from a means, organization becomes an end"
(Michels, 1962: 338); the student movement was wary of bureaucracy,
leadership, and representation because each appeared to preclude
participation and autonomous democratic decision making. Each of the
factors about which activists were suspicious found an historical
precursor in Michels. The concern about the growing power of leadership
at the expense of membership participation, for example, although not
arrived at through experience in a large socialist party (nor even
knowledge of that experience) nevertheless was extracted and created by
experience in the mammoth bureaucracies of advanced capitalist society
and was similar to Michels' conclusions. Yet Michels stated
unequivocally that "Democracy is unconceivable without organization,"
that organization is the weapon of the weak against the strong and is
absolutely essential for political struggle of the masses (Michels,
1962: 61). In essence this was rejected by new left antiorganizationists
whose paramount concern was democracy and participation.
It is worth raising the issue of whether the expanding grassroots
movement, characterized by dedication to democracy, could have found
adequate organizational expression. The tension and dilemma between
organization and the movement was debated by SDS members and others,
most of whom were dubious about the ability of any national organization
to democratically capture and represent the movement in all its
diversity. In contrast, much of the sociological literature on social
movements assumes that in order to be successful, leadership, structure,
division of labor, specific goals and hierarchy in some combination are
required (Useem, 1975). Drawing on both Weber's "routinization of
charisma" and Michels' "iron law of oligarchy," Gusfield (1968: 448)
pointed out that while a semipermanent organizational structure is often
essential to the achievement of movement goals, this organizational
structure often sets in motion forces that defeat the very ideals that
gave birth to the social movement; and literature within the Marxist,
specifically Leninist, tradition routinely considers the party as the
self-evident representative of the working class.
In a dramatic break with these political assumptions — a break which
entailed redefining "success" to include the means, as well as the goal
— SDS leaders asked how democracy could function in a movement of 10,000
or 100,000 persons. Few felt confident that it could. For many activists
the spontaneous and contagious oppositional movement could not be
captured in organization. The "tool" or "weapon" of organization, other
than for short-lived mobilization, impaired participatory democracy so
central to new left politics. They considered the movement in all its
ramifications to be an accurate expression of the politics of revolt
around the nation. On the one hand, a leader in the "strategic" camp had
charged that SDS seemed more the "result of motion" than the cause. SDS
recruited members neither to a political position nor to an
organization, and as a result became what its members, always changing,
were. This, from the strategic point of view, was ridiculous; what was
the point of having an organization at all if it was not to provide
leadership and education and an attempt to achieve power? On the other
hand, a letter in New Left Notes, the SDS weekly newspaper, had said,
"SDS is and should be a movement..." and "the form of SDS should
reflect, not determine, its content." That content, the membership, was
varied, vital, spirited and in motion. How could an organization capture
that?
There is no question that the assessment by activists, of whether a
centralized and national organization could have represented the student
movement, was colored by both their strong suspicion of organization and
the enormous excitement, sense of upheaval and potential power which
characterized the student movement of the 1960s. The
institutionalization of the student movement into a powerful
organization was simply not designated a central task. Apparently most
new leftists and activists believed that political and social
transformation, as well as the end of the war in Vietnam, could come
about without a hierarchical national organization, or they were
unwilling to risk "oligarchic" results. Implicit in the argument of this
paper is the assumption that new leftists and movement activists,
accepted criticisms to the contrary, did not simply ignore the problem
because of naive psychological problems or middle-class backgrounds. For
many this was a political choice — not to create permanent organization.
An evaluation of the "correctness" of their position on this critical
issue is beyond the parameters of this paper. It was mentioned earlier
that the context and rationale for this reappraisal of the new left
derived from the existing literature about the new left — literature
which has been almost uniformly critical particularly on the grounds of
organizational failure. Many lessons have been drawn from the history
and sociology of the new left, the most prevalent being that
oranizational failure meant new left and student movement failure. I
suspect that conclusion is inadequate. New leftists' most important
contribution was their sensitivity to a critical political issue. They
certainly did not solve the problem, but perhaps alone in recent
American history they consciously and purposively raised it and
attempted solutions.
Theirs was a challenge to Michels and all the preceding social movements
that had resulted in organization at the expense of democratic and
direct participation. Furthermore it seems a fair proposition that
organization could not have "saved" the student movement or the new
left. One lesson may be simply that organization neither creates nor
substitutes for a movement. When it does, there is evidence that it
becomes either undemocratic (with Bolshevism being the classic example)
or electorally inclined and integrated into the system (e.g., in this
country, the late nineteenth and twentieth-century agrarian revolts of
the Farmers' Alliance developed into the Populist Party; see Schwartz,
1976). If the new left as a whole had merely rejected organization or
strategy or instrumentality, as many commentators have insisted, then
the story would not be of particular interest to many. But the new
left's intense and finally unsuccessful effort to devise forms of social
and political organization capable of effecting major, radical,
structural changes in American society, which at the same time would
nurture a grassroots social movement committed to participatory
democracy and community, has bearing on both past and future movements
in the West.
The affinity of this interpretation of the new left to the analysis of
poor people's movements in America by Piven and Cloward (1977) will be
apparent to those who know their work. I would like to suggest the
relevance of their work for this interpretation of the new left and,
using their analysis, speculate briefly on insights it yields into
understanding the student movement of the 1960s. Piven and Cloward
propose that, due to the structure of the electoral-representative
system, protest and mass insurgency are the only alternatives open to
poor people seeking redress of their grievances. When conditions make it
possible for poor people to collectively act out their defiance, the
unavailability of resources makes disruption their only political
alternative. Furthermore, it is often politically strategic for the poor
to disrupt institutional life since historically they have achieved more
this way than through building their own ultimately bureaucratic
organizations.
What this analysis has in common with new leftism and the student
movement is disruption, or direct action, as a definition of politics,
as a way of achieving certain goals; it is a politics that requires
functioning outside the system, outside the "normal channels." Perhaps
certain goals may be achieved and political participation attained
precisely by acting outside those channels. Piven and Cloward argue
their case strategically: the poor have no other leverage but defiance
of institutional norms, and sometimes it works. It works, in any case,
more effectively than building organization.[6] The student movement and
new left, however (and before them, the civil rights movement), chose
this kind of politics not as their only resource, but because
traditional institutional politics ignored or excluded the kind of
radical goals they pursued. While poor people and students (both in
"weak institutional locations" and therefore marginal to the economic
life of the country) used massive civil disobedience and direct action
as political strategy, students (black and white) selected these
politics for ideological reasons.
A number of questions are raised. 1) Are marginal groups with few
resources and little power forced, whether or not they consider it a
political choice, into disruptive and direct action politics? 2) Is
disruption the only way for such groups to achieve redress of their
grievances or radical change? 3) Is direct action politics a way to
prevent being absorbed and coopted by the electoral-representative
system? Underlying these queries is the suggestion of Piven and Cloward
that "... main features of contemporary popular struggles are both
reflection of an institutionally determined logic, and a challenge to
that logic" (Piven and Cloward, 1978: 172). Opposition movements are
structured by the larger political system to reproduce themselves in an
electoral version, thereby absorbing and undercutting their radical
project. In lieu of this, there seems no alternative but to utilize
marginal political tactics. In so doing, disruption and direct action
become a way to achieve goals and to avoid co-optation. The
political-economic system structures protest, but protest is at the same
time a challenge to that system.
In the case of the new left there was a combination of constraints and
choice in the embracing of prefigurative politics. A central goal of the
new left was a radical revitalization and redefinition of politics in
America. "Being political" meant participation of everyone in decision
making and action, in building community — often through direct action.
It was a dedication to the means as well as the goal, and a way of
circumventing the passivity and hierarchy of electoral politics.
One of the central purposes of new left politics may be defined as the
attempt to unite private and public life, which goes back to the idea of
the polis in ancient Greece and is at heart profoundly political.[7]
But, as Alan Wolfe states:
If, following the Greeks, one conceives of politics as the common quest
of equals for the just and happy society, then in late capitalism
politics of this sort is replaced by a form of alienated politics, in
which parties and interest groups become responsible for absorbing the
common power that people possess and for using this power to rule over
the people from whom it came in the first place (Wolfe, 1977: 312).
Recent work on the state in advanced capitalism suggests that liberal
politics has become synonymous with a depoliticized notion of politics
and has triumphed over genuine democracy.[8] A managerial antipolitics,
in which the citizen is isolated and removed from any community or
notion of politics in which to participate, characterizes contemporary
American society. Wolfe's central point is that the "antipolitical needs
of liberalism" require that a participatory and politicizing democracy
be suppressed. Liberal society depoliticizes and marginalizes the
political. The breakdown of such mediating institutions as political
parties and interest groups helps to foster this universal
depoliticization. Wolfe suggests that:
Like a worker who sees the product of his labor transformed into a
commodity alienated from himself, the late capitalist citizen finds that
the source of his alienation lies in his own productive activity, in
this case the production of community rather than commodities.
Expropriation is no longer unique to the economy (Wolfe, 1977: 312).
As we have seen, Lipset accused the student movement and youth of
expressive rather than instrumental politics. Further, he suggested that
youth tend to take the values they have been taught in absolute ways and
criticize existing institutions in their light; in contrast, the ethic
of responsibility involves the necessity to compromise in order to
achieve a positive outcome (Lipset, 1969: 499). The unwillingness to
compromise one's values, the conceptual lack of a clear road to power
and a readiness to use tactics that violate the normal democratic game
may be considered, in the case of the new left, as the assertion of the
political, a rejection of depoliticization. The "ethic of absolute ends"
conflicts with the norm of depoliticization in the society.
If resistance or protest movements are forced into disruption because
they have few options, it is also possible to see disruption as a
choice, a challenge to conventional, bureaucratic politics. The new left
challenged the electorally-defined status-quo and organization-building
as a definition of politics, just as it challenged Michels and
hierarchical politics. The ease with which hegemonic institutions appear
to transform movements into formal bureaucratic institutions with
reformist (in contrast to radical) goals suggests that prefigurative
politics may be seen not only as a strategic last resort, but as a
determined attempt to avoid co-optation and oligarchic transformation as
well as the mantle of legitimacy accorded those who cooperate.
It is striking that most commentators, political leaders, theorists and
sociologists, from Lenin to Lipset, agree about the nature of politics
and political organization. As Weber said:
He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and others, should
not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks
of politics can only be solved by violence (Weber, 1946: 126).
Whether it is the dark image of violence or the reasonable notion of
compromise and responsibility, for these commentators politics is about
power, hierarchy, centralization and organization. I am suggesting here
that the new left broke with these convergent and "realistic" notions
and attempted to forge a new notion of politics, one informed by
insights of Weber and Michels. The significance of the new left and
student movement lay in its effort to invent a politics committed to
participatory democracy, a politics that embodied antihierarchical
values and community while simultaneously attempting to bring about
radical structural change in the United States. One way of interpreting
the decade is as an attempt to break with Weber's "iron cage" of
bureaucracy and Michels' "iron law of oligarchy," and to devise a
politics that combined the instrumental with the expressive, the
strategic with the prefigurative. The experience of the movement in the
1960s stands as a profound political confrontation with the issue of
organization in a radical, democratic movement.[9] The problems the new
left addressed were not narrow and private but large ones for any social
movement confronting the issue of democracy in its midst and in its
future. Every genuinely radical social movement must come to grips with
the conflict between grassroots self-activity and participation on the
one hand, and organizational maintenance, efficiency and strategy on the
other. The new left and student movement represented a movement in which
utopian, spontaneous and participatory politics were affirmed. It should
be recognized for the brave and significant experiment it was.
Altbach, Philip (ed.)
1974 Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis. New York:
McGraw Hill.
Altbach, Philip and S.M. Lipset (eds.)
1969 Students in Revolt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Boggs, Carl
1977-1978 "Marxism, prefigurative communism and the problem of workers'
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[1] For interesting accounts of the links and differences between the
new left of the 1960s and the traditions of anarchism and council
communism, see Gombin, 1975. On the concept of community, see Nisbet,
1966 and Stein, 1964.
[2] There is a case to be made that community refers to a set of
relationships, experiences and institutions that have been (and continue
to be) destroyed by the development of capitalism and which consequently
became relevant in the late nineteenth century and remain so to the
present (Hearn, 1975; 1978: 270 ff.). The search for and/or the struggle
to defend community (both the "sense" of community and actual community
institutions) become political in the context of the changes capitalism
has brought in the everyday life of the individual — changes
characterized by lack of control at work, school and play, impersonality
and competition in all areas of life. Community relationships in which
family networks are sometimes embedded, have often contained within them
culture and values that have enabled individuals, families and groups to
resist institutions and values destructive of their own. The desire for
connectedness, meaningful personal relationships and direct
participation and control over economic, political and social
institutions growing out of the needs of the individual, rather than out
of the instrumental needs of large-scale corporations, takes on radical
meaning in contemporary society.
[3] In contrast to this perspective, see E.J. Hobsbawm's (1965:2)
equating of "political" with "political organization," and his dismissal
of primitive and pre-industrial social movements as "pre-political."
Piven and Cloward (1977) have pointed to a number of difficulties
arising from equating "political" with organization. See also Hobsbawm's
(1978) rejoinder in his review of their book.
[4] These statements and all general statements about the politics of
SDS leadership are based on research done for my doctoral dissertation
(see Breines, 1979).
[5] See Piven and Cloward (1977) for a similar argument vis-a-vis poor
people; see below for a discussion of similarities with the analysis
presented here.
[6] For critiques of the Piven and Cloward perspective and analysis
(some of which are applicable to my interpretation) see the following:
Hobsbawm, 1978; Roach and Roach, 1978; Jenkins, 1979; Kesselman, 1979.
[7] For further elaboration of this point see Jacoby (1973, particularly
pp. 172-73) for how Marx's notion of "true democracy" is closely related
to the polis.
[8] See, for example, Jurgen Habermas (1970, 1975).
[9] Many of the insights and much of the practice of new left
prefigurative politics were inherited and espoused by the women's
liberation movement.