Canadian Dimension Review of The New Left
The 1960s and the New Left now seem very much in vogue. Anniversaries of four decades’ duration are celebratory and reflective. Nineteen sixty-eight’s fortieth is fast approaching.
This collection, edited by one of Canada’s leading New leftists — Montreal anarchist, activist and animating force behind our Generation and Black Rose Books, Dimitrios Roussopoulos — brings together an odd and eclectic mix of memoir and commentary. It accents the legacies of 1960s rebellious youth, and the continuities of the political dissent and oppositional challenges of that decade.
Past, Present and In-Between
Originating in a 1993 roundtable discussion on the heritage of the 1960s, some of the essays in this volume, strong and weak, seem dated by their understandable concerns with a present now almost fifteen years past. Thus, arguably the best essay (and certainly the most seriously researched) in this slim volume, Andrea Levy’s thoughtful and lengthy reflection on the international and intellectual influences of the New Left, is situated within 1990s debates with postmodernism, identity politics and the European Green movement. However intrinsically interesting and politically lively, such discussion understandably resonates a few frames out of synch with contemporary concerns.
Anthony Hyde’s wild romp through his youth as a Canadian New Leftist in the student union for Peace Action is certainly opinionated. It carries its argument of the importance of the New Left with such self-satisfied Norman Mailer-esque bravado, however, that it will fall upon the young, radical ears of today with a deafening thud. They won’t be able to hear over the din of Hyde’s sexually referenced assault on “political correctness,” his shouted animosity to liberalism of all kinds, and his loud insistence that in refusing to embrace war the New Left took its stand against violence. Many of today’s radicals might well listen to Hyde’s words and insist that they themselves are violent (and macho, and racist, and homophobic, and…).
No writing in this collection is likely to draw negative comment like Hyde’s will. Yet, his prose does capture something of the tone of a part of the 1960s, for better and for worse. In that lies a contradiction unable to be explored in a review of this length, a fracture of generational importance that should be addressed in future studies of the New Left.
International Interfaces
Little in this collection charts the rise and fall of Canada’s New Left. The one essay that attempts an overview of various national movements and developments, Katherina Haris’s “The Legacy and Lessons of the 1960s,” devotes half a page to Canada.
Short interviews with European figures like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar and Jacques Sauvageot tantalize us with the resiliency of 1968’s attractions. But there is no mistaking how much has changed as a corps of youth’s vanguard element have aged; they often voice an argument of continuity, but their words seldom ring with the insolence and insistence of forty years ago.
So, too, is it clear how different the New Left mobilizations were on two sides of the Atlantic. In Europe — especially in France, Italy and Germany — the urban earth moved as pavements buckled under the burden of general strikes and the counteroffensive of the gendarmes. In Canada and the United States, the threat of the New Left was far more contained. Jacques Martin draws comparisons and outlines the significant differences of scale that animated the uprisings at New York’s Columbia University and in the tumultuous student and working-class rebellion in France.
A Manifesto’s Meaning, A Movement’s Demise
Tom Hayden offers a useful reflection on what lay behind the students for a Democratic Society manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, which he authored in 1968. This essay is coloured as much by what has come after the 1960s as it is able to situate Hayden’s 1962 statement in the agendas of a generation that saw revolutionary possibility as clearly as it appreciated reform’s realization.
A National Secretary of SDS and a central figure in the National Mobilization committee to end the War in Vietnam, Gregory Nevala Calvert provides an accounting of what was unique in the Port Huron Statement. He lays great stress on the New Left’s attraction to values, as opposed to structures of determination. This, he claims, is what guided the New Left along paths an Old Left could not follow. The essay opens our eyes to what participatory democracy meant to Hayden and others in the early-to-mid 1960s. And yet, values need to be situated within boundaries of determination if ever they are to be both realized and revolutionary. Ironically, Calvert concludes that, “SDS failed … to match its vision and values with a satisfactory economic and political program.”
Mark Rudd outlines one part of that failure in a discussion of how SDS split apart in 1969, with its Progressive Labor Party wing and its Weatherman faction marching the movement to different — and dramatically unsuccessful — ends. It perhaps understates the resentments harboured by thousands of youth radicals towards these two tendencies for much of the remaining decades of the twentieth century.
Optimism of The Will
The collection closes with the insistence that the legacy of the 1960s lives. Natasha Kapoor strives to highlight how the ideal of participatory democracy has found its second wind in the 1990s, and into the current decade. Anti-globalization protests and challenges to institutions of governance, reaching from the Battle of Seattle in 1999 to the World Social Forums of the last seven years, represent a new transnational fusion of ethics and politics. Kapoor sees this as an extension of the values of the youth movement of the 1960s into our own times.
Roussopoulos closes the collection with a fast-paced conclusion on the political legacy of the New Left. Premising his remarks on the need for a rebirth of left politics, and the continuities that remain to be mined to the advantage of all dissidents, Roussopoulos argues especially for the importance of an emancipatory urbanism. He addresses the global city as the inevitable site of much future struggle. “We live in hopeful times, again,” writes the eternal New Leftist in ending this volume.
I, like many others, also hope. And I hope Roussopoulos is right in his assessment of the Left’s potential in our times. For, if he is wrong, hope is not all that will be lost.