On and On and On and On….

Which is better, New US Left or Old US Left? Bit of a pointless question, in light of the fact that what America considers ‘left’ is, by international standards, pretty right-wing and at best gradualist in tendency. So the spirited yet essentially empty discussion going on over at the News Blog re a blogspat between Max Sawickyand Steve Gilliard is being conducted somewhat in the manner of two bald men fighting over a comb.

The argument goes like this (and I’m paraphrasing madly): Max said the New Internet Left is just a money sucker for the Democrats, and Steve replied that Marxism is boring, Marx is irrelevant and the Old Left were a bunch of a hippie nutters who were dangerous with it, who set back the left’s cause for generations, and who should just shut up and let the New Blogging Vanguard get on with it.

But both fail to lift their eyes above the American horizon, both fail to notice that the Left is an international phenomenon and neither acknowledge that the use of modern technology as a tool for political organisation is not confined to middle-class reformist Americans. (I get the impression that in their heart of hearts they think the ‘free’ market will sort it all out if only the Dems can get elected. Then things can go on as normal and they won’t have to change their comfortable lifestyles at all. Change the system? Why… that’s crazy revolutionary talk!)

Both Gilliard and Sawicki seem to have internalised the reformist view that US voters just need to get rid of Bush, fiddle round the edges a bit and everything’ll be fine and dandy and politics can go on as usual.

Regular commenter Lower Manhattanite takes them both to task for the paucity of their arguments , using his own family’s history of left activism to illustrate the dispute’s futility when it comes to actual real world politicking. (Though I do wish he’d get his own blog, then I wouldn’t have to post this whole series of comments -but then they do deserve to be all together in one place.)

Hol’ on…lemme…unnnnh!–get these kevlar hip boots on so I can wade in properly here…unnnnh! Okay. Let’s just “splash!” see here…

There are a million reasons why I shouldn’t take a superheated back-and-forth like this personally, but dammit, I do–and the reasons I do take it so personally are fairly f*cking compelling to me, so screw it, let’s git dooooooowwwwwwnnn.

I’m a touch older than Steve, but a child of the same generation. Bluntly, no one in my family will hold public office for quite a few years due to the activity–and in some cases, hyperactivity of family members one generation older than mine–those aforementioned “DFHs” (“Dirty F*cking Hippies”). They marched. They protested. They organized. And yeah, some of ’em were down with people who blew sh*t up. Two family members did time for their involvement in EXTREME sh*t back in the day. And that information was kept from us kids, that next generation, for years because they didn’t want any of us emulating them, and secondly, out of shame over the damage it wrought on our family.

Damage? We were placed under government surveillance. Phones bugged. My father hired a family friend to check our phones–a real Gene Hackman/”The Conversation”-type. And he hit a motherlode. Every phone at Dad’s restaurant–bugged. Our home phones–bugged. Pay phones outside the restaurant–bugged. IRS audits in consecutive years. Audits even involving me, a ten year old signpainter making a little money here and there doing signs for a few local shops. Two other family members who suddenly found themselves the victims of a vendetta by their bosses at the Government jobs they would soon be fired from. Mystery vandalism–low level (shop window breaking), and high (delivery trucks set ablaze). It got so that we had to very much lay low as far as any activism, and how we spoke about activism to people—even changed the magazines we subscribed to. Dad wouldn’t talk to certain people on the phone anymore–he’d go to the amusement park to meet ’em. Open air, lotsa noise–that kinda sh*t. My family was well acquainted with the “New Left”. We were part of it. It was enervating, uplifting and many good things. My folks came from the Jim Crow south, and went through hell there.

Many of ’em weren’t of a “wait and see/tortoise = good, hare = bad” mindset. I remember the heated discussions of the time all too well…and remember the palpable fear and nationwide trepidation over a possible, actual “revolution” of some sort occurring in the U.S. That fear/hope (depending on who you were) was real.

That so-called “New Left” was an important thing. What’s ironic is that Sawicky’s tone nowadays towards his heirs is nearly identical to the tone of the Whitney Young/A. Philip Randolph school of progressive thought when it came to the “New Civil Rights Movement” that superceded them.

“What have you done?”

“How dare you just go forward without acknowledging what we’ve done?”

“You’re not real progressives, you’re just bomb-tossers”.

“Respect mah authori-taaaah!”

A great many entrenched, “slow-cook” progressives took a real dim view of the folks Max lionizes, and now Max has seen that same affliction infect his own thinking. No one from a previous generation seems to see their heirs as doing as much, or being as true, or being as serious as they were about “the cause”. Nope. It’s always easy to toss out a b*tchy, venomous generaliztion like:

“The “Internet Left” is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.”

Read it again, and bask in its mean-spirited silliness.

A truly sad statement when you consider that the old “New Left” actually did some incredibly good things, like drag the “go along to git along” progressives to take harder, more principled stands on issues. Even a strong, but pragmatic progressive leader like Dr. King you will notice, found himself moving ever leftward (especially after the murder of his counterbalance on the left in Malcolm X) thanks in large part to the pressure from the “New Left”.

The “New Left’s” pushing is what gave birth to the Great Society, Head Start, Student Loans, Affirmative Action, et.al. And it deserves huge credit for that–that threat of a so-called revolution brought a lot of people to heel, and got ’em to do some things they would have never in their wildest dreams have given on. But for all it’s good, that “New Left” that Sawicky sings Hosannas for sh*t the bed in ways that wound us to this day. That statement about a “brainless vacuum cleaner” is so telling as to be almost laughable. Especially when you think for a moment and recall how splintered, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off, rudderless and whackdoodle the “New Left” could be.

It was so daft at times, that it was easily co-opted, infiltrated and rent asunder from within by the evil aspects of government it fought so hard against. And the people that said government truly set out to destroy weren’t the useful idiots who they (the Govt.) fostered in an attempt to keep the movement looking like a can of Planters mixed nuts–it was the f*cking do-ers. The do-ers were the ones who got f*cking wasted. Goofballs like Farrakhan (a family friend) were allowed to live, spouting off on Motherships and the like.

Malcolm X’s life ebbed away on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom, his head cradled by an FBI mole in his organization, not long after he began to step away from the nutty aspects of the NOI and began to speak real truth to power about who was really doing what to f*ck over all people in the world.

The government let Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver rattle on, long after they’d run out of cool sh*t to say and simply started stitching together polysyllabic words just to sound smart. Then infiltrated the group and got drugs in the mix, which Huey and Eldridge consumed more than their fair share of, addling them further, sounding that much more crazy, and then the group itself became in large parts, angry n*ggers with guns, bad rhetoric and dope. Mission accomplished.

But strangely, the Panther they went out and assassinated was Fred Hampton, in Chicago, who wasn’t an angry n*gger with a gun, bad rhetoric and dope. He was a community organizer–who stuck with the feeding and education of the young, and was in the process of political organizing with the South Side’s gangs. About to move them from wanton violence to political action when he was murdered in another infiltration-aided government action.
cont.

They let the biggest mouths, spouting the wildest sh*t go on and on, and cut down the people who were actually on the verge of doing some meaningful sh*t. (Yes, you too, Dr. King). And a lot of those big, flapping, crazy-*ss mouths belonged to many of the heroes of that vaunted “New Left”. So they were in effect, very much a double edged sword–capable of moving the debate to good places, but then, capable of sending it careening off to the inconsequentialness of Whackdoodleville, USA. So Sawicky’s kooky “The ‘Internet Left’ is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.” rings oddly ironic when you realize from whence he sprang, what he’s championing here, and the real history he ignores.

Not to mention the present he ignores as well. This internet “Left” he seems to so dislike is about quite a bit more than a donations funnel to the DNC…and he knows that. You know he knows that, but that belittling is a way to marginalize its potential…much the way his heroes marginalized away a lot of their potential–a sad tragedy mask he through transference puts on the next generation. The Netroots/Internet Left is directly challenging big, oppressive business (Wal-Mart) and it’s anti-progressive policies. It’s battling the media in ways Sawicky’s folks could only dream of (KSFO/Spocko, ABC/Disney’s “Path to 9-11”, Fox News, The WaPo, The Times’ Judith Miller, etc.). It can alter the news cycle (Saddam’s hanging), drive stories (Haditha), change the course of political campaigns (“Macaca”)–all things that unfortunately, were insanely harder to do in Sawicky’s halcyon years because of technological limitations. The “Internet Left” did a sh*tload of heavy lifting in this past election cycle–which seems to p*ss Max off to no end for some reason. They also did an awful lot to sway public opinion on this war–a war Sawicky deliberately misstates said Left’s level of opposition to in singling out the pragmatic thinking that was espoused in explaining it’s illegality, while leaving out the over-arching “NO!” to this war the Netroots/Internet Left screamed about based on the conflict’s rank immorality and wrongness in the face on 9-11. It’s not Max’s fault that the level of communication available to his compatriots at the time consisted of land-line phones and the U.S. Mail. Sh*t was tougher back then. Harder to organize.

There were no blogs where a dude or dude-ette could espouse whatever, get feedback from across the globe, link to like-minded dudes and dude-ettes and create a super-network of people who could move on a dime, bomb with e-mails, pool monies, and drive batsh*t their enemies with floods of activity. Max has become an ersatz Grandpa Simpson, going on about how back when he was a kid in school, “he had to walk twenty miles in the snow, and we didn’t even have feet to walk with because we’d just climbed out of the primordial ooze, so there, ya whippersnappers!”

And damned if that kinda talk isn’t just as sad as it is ridiculous. Because what he fails, and yes…to a degree Steve fails to realize is that this is all part of a continuum. A bunch of people from that “New Left” would eventually wind up in political office. Carl Stokes, Julian Bond, Shirley Chisholm, Jerry Brown, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Clinton, Bella Abzug, Liz Holtzman, even a Black Panther like Bobby Rush in Chicago–and the f*cking list goes on, with people who came from that group and then ascended to political power. Some of…okay, a lot of those folks would eventually sell out. But a bunch of ’em got in the system and worked as best they could from within, to make things better. They really did. And again, things like HeadStart, Student Loans, Affirmative Action and so on had a lot to do with those people getting close to–if not actually pulling the levers of power. Which is why for me, Steve’s statement: “The “Internet Left” has done more in three years than any of the groups you hail as heroes from the 1960’s did in 10 years.” is a kinda over the top in this discussion. I consider the “NetRoots/Internet Left” a direct descendant from the best parts of that continuum–not some totally different thing from it. What makes us “different” are the ways we can organize, where direct action from a large group of people is easier to do nowadays and the need for a charismatic leader to head that charge is lessened. The targets are the same. Crooked business. Bigotry. Misuse of the military. Biased media. Those things were ridiculously hard to fight then, and hard to fight now, but in the grand scheme of things, we have a better chance to force change now thanks to increase communication and access to (favorite phrase of the “New Left”, still applicable now) “the powers that be”.

Offshoots of the positive aspects of said “New Left” laid the groundwork for what we do now. Branches of a tree, tributaries of a large river, dontchaknow? Parts of that old “New Left” did some great sh*t…sh*t we’re grateful for. But it doesn’t mean we’ve gotta fellate the idiot elements of that group, too—and in not fellating them, we just shouldn’t toss the whole crew onto the burning shell of a riot-torched store circa 1968. Nor should Sawicky channel Grandpa Simpson again with lame, angry and jealous “you whippersnapper”-speak. He should acknowledge what this new generation of activists is trying to do—with some serious success, and perhaps impart a little more wisdom drawn from his folks’ successes and failures instead of just screaming kids off his lawn.

Sorry for going on like this, but it just hits f*cking home for me. As stated before, I have family that did time thanks to being down with the SDS, Panthers and BLA. We caught hell for it. As a coda, I remember the day the Rodney King riots broke out. Folks all over the city were let go from work early as businesses closed in fear of riot-driven destruction. I got home just in time to receive a call from the radio station I worked for to come in for a special “let’s try to keep a lid on this town by putting some level-headed Black folks on the air” broadcast. I sat down to have a stiff drink when my phone rang.

“Hello?”, I said.

“Yeah, what’s up.”
“M_____? (My radio co-worker’s name)

“Yeah. Whasssup? You goin’ to the station?”

“Yep.”

“So what’d you call me for? You need a ride?”

“Um. You called me.”

“No I didn’t. My phone just rang. You called me.”

“Uh…I was sittin’ here having a drink. I didn’t call you. I was thinking about it.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Ohhh-kay”, he said knowingly. “I’ll uh…talk to you at the station.’

When I got off the phone, I knew what’d happened. I was still under surveillance, considering who the station I was working for, I wasn’t surprised. But I was surprised by whoever was listening screwing up so badly in their surveillance that they exposed it by connecting two parties they were listening to—but had yet to actually speak. I found myself, a generation removed contacting my own surveillance expert to check for bugging. Describing what happened, and with some cursory checking, he confirmed my suspicions, but of course, thanks to technological advances, could not remove said surveillance. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. Damn.

— LowerManhattanite #

It’s all very well dismissing each other as not representing the real left. As I said, the left is international and it’s way bigger than any number of bloggers, no matter how hubristic they are about their importance in the scheme of things. They think that what they and their associated like-minded Democratic bloggers are doing iputs them in the vanguard of political change, whereas in pushing the Democratic party they’re actually just propping up the status quo.

The US’ corner of the internet isn’t the be-all and end-all of left organising. The so called ‘netroots’ aren’t even Left- rather they’re the force of reaction against neoconservatism, expressed through an as yet unregulated medium. The sentiment’s anti-Bush, not anticapitalist, reformist not revolutionary and therefore not really ‘left’ at all.

This pontificating about who’s left and who’s not when is really all about defending generational turf with both represenatives of their respective generations are being wilfully blind to the bigger globalpicture.

It’s clear that US style economic policy being imposed worldwide is not working but both Steve and Max would be apperently happy with more of the same, albeit with a few tweaks here and there.

This isn’t good enough for the rest of us. We want real worldwide political change and intergenerational, internecine Democrat squabbles get us no further forward.

Like LM said. many people have and are still putting their lives, families and livelihoods on the line for their principles – did they and are they doing it just so a couple of overprivileged American ‘leftists’ can engage in territorial disputes and pissing contests?