Towards the end of a rather long drive home to my parents’ house, I turned on some of the local radio stations I’ve missed while living in another state. Tiring pretty quickly of the classic rock station I listened to at work hours each day for years, I turned the radio to NPR, where I heard Terry Gross interviewing well-known history professor Tony Judt. The talk was interesting on a mostly personal level, but Judt said something that was of political interest:
There was the residue of Marxism, which was still very much alive, kicking in the ’60s, but in the worst possible sense in that Marxists were now young people, with the exception of a few old people, who thought that, well, the West was a lost cause, liberalism was a fraud, the proletariat had disappeared. So let’s focus on blacks or colonial, minority victims or someone outside ourselves. So we never looked hard at ourselves to ask what was wrong with our own society.
Judt’s implication that Marxism is no longer “still very much alive” is demolished by the inability of anyone but Marxists to comprehend the latest capitalist crisis, and his suggestion that all of those who came to “Marxism” in the 60s abandoned the working class is invalid as a blanket statement; yet in those few lines he effectively summarizes the intellectual ghetto that was the “new left.” (“New,” mind you, only in that it traded the concrete-and-steel modernization project of Stalin for the peasant mysticism of Mao’s modernization project.) It reminds me of something Michael Zweig wrote in his book The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret:
In the 1960s even much of the radical left became estranged from the working class. No better symbol of this estrangement exists than the day in 1970 when construction workers beat up demonstrators who had gathered at New York’s City Hall to protest the war in Vietnam as it escalated into Cambodia. Images of the City Hall beatings were broadcast around the world and became emblematic of the mutual hostility supposedly between all unionized workers and all student activists. …
Much was made at the time of the reactionary worker, enemy of social progress, or, from the other side, the patriotic worker, true to the American cause, standing against the communist foe. With anticommunist leadership, the labor movement moved to the right. As class-conscious workers’ voices were silenced, the simple-minded right-wing characterization of the working class was more easily picked up by the media and came to dominate the thinking of many young sixties student radicals. They, in turn, often came to think of themselves as outside the long tradition of progressive intellectuals’ support for the working class.
The new movements of the sixties developed radical critiques [sic] of society and in their analyses often challenged capitalism itself. But, for many, the working class came to be identified as only reactionary white men. Activists in these movements, and those who developed social theories to understand and guide them, often dismissed the working class as a backward, hostile enemy, and recast politics solely in terms of race and gender. Radical politics of the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly dominated by identity politics.
Yet on the campuses, despite the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist talk, the working class tended to disappear from the map, replaced in the theories of many radical opinion leaders by a combination of race and gender. This has happened in one of two ways. Sometimes the working class has come to mean White Men. This is most often the case among those stuck with the images of workers on the construction sites of the sixties and seventies. Other times, in the triumvirate “race, class and gender,” class has come to mean “the poor,” who are in turn said to be Women and Minorities. In these formulations, white men are either irrelevant or the enemy, and white working class men are stripped of their legitimate standing among those who suffer wrongs in this capitalist society. This type of politics is a recipe for alienation and anger among white men, dividing the working class and creating needless hostility towards the justifiable demands of women and minorities.
Sometimes you’ll find Maoists who claim that in the “United $nakes of Amerikkka,” there is no proletariat. This idea — like all of Maoism — isn’t even worth consideration. But even those who admit the existence of a white proletariat can do much to distort reality, Zweig points out:
The media attack on workers has not been the work of conservative political forces alone. In a process paralleling the retreat from the working class by sixties radicals, liberal media personalities have also abandoned or stereotyped workers. The television show that most lampooned the working class in the 1970s and 1980s was produced by Norman Lear and starred Carroll O’Conner, both active and influential in liberal political circles. All in the Family’s Archie Bunker was the worker-as-reactionary-white-male, disrespecting his wife from opposing the anti-war, anti-racist ideas of his son-in-law, whom he called Meathead. Although Meathead was from a working class family, he was never presented as another way for us to think about workers. He had progressive ideas; he became a student. Archie’s buffoonery give him a certain charm, perhaps, but in the popular culture of the time he served to dismiss the working class as a serious or reasonable force.
Note that these perceptions don’t necessarily reflect reality. Zweig, through official statistics, paints a picture of the working class as heterogeneous. For instance, while the largest occupational category for white men was salaried managers, this category was also in the top ten for black men, Hispanic men, and white women. Truck driving was the #1 category for black men and #2 for white men. Zweig writes that the privileged titles usually appear higher and more often for whites, especially men, but there’s no shortage of awful jobs for white folks either.
For a wonderfully enlightening and even entertaining account and critique of the New Left, see Loren Goldner’s “Didn’t See The Same Movie: Review of Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. It’s tempting to say that Goldner’s piece is all the more worthwhile now that some buffoons have decided to reform the Students for a Democratic Society, but it seems unlikely that the new SDS will do anything to disprove Marx’s famous witticism that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
