The New Communist Movement Revisited: An Interview with Max Elbaum
Mat Callahan: First of all, I wanted to congratulate you on the republication of the book.1 It was originally published in 2002, is that correct?
Max Elbaum: That's right.
Callahan: Verso decided to bring it out again this year.
Elbaum: Yes. I think they saw the radicalization that's underway and thought that there might be a new audience for looking at this history.
They decided to kick off a ‘68 series that would address some of the issues in the minds of the young people who are being radicalized now.
Callahan: I suppose that's one perhaps secondary question but of course the last couple of years have seen many commemorations, 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution last year, 200th anniversary of Marx's birthday this year and so on. I wondered whether this was somehow part of that.
Elbaum: Sure. My partner and I decided to go to what used to be called Leningrad and is now Saint Petersburg on the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. That was an interesting trip in and of itself but probably for another discussion.
Callahan: Right. I want to get right into some of the controversial points that your book raises. For example, yours is one of a very small number that deal with the subject of the New Communist Movement, let alone the particular organizations and struggles they led. Do you know why this has been so neglected?
Elbaum: I think there's a few reasons. First, although the movement was extremely important in terms of the proportion who turned to radicalism, it was relatively short lived as a strong political tendency. I think that's one reason. Another is that a lot of the people who went through it for various reasons, some of which have to do with reestablishing their lives in other ways and the level of anti-Communism in US society, were reluctant to write about the experience.
I think that now, there's a new generation of Left thinkers and scholars. I suspect there will be more on the New Communist Movement. I was hoping that my book would spark more writing about it. There's a couple of memoirs that I know are in process.
Callahan: On the other hand, there are other groups, as you well know, that have been featured a great deal over the last 40 years of commemorative writing. The hippies, the Black Panthers, of course, Weatherman, but these have been disproportionately represented. They have come, in the popular mind, to represent that period of the ‘60s. I mean, it's not like the period has not been written about. But only certain, specific groups have been focused on.
Elbaum: The New Communist Movement reached its height in the ‘70s although it came out of the ‘60s so it's not exactly the same in that respect but I think there's also another reason. The image of the outlaw individual taking a stand against the government, that's sort of a common trope in US culture. When workers get together and collectively protest for their rights, that's a little bit beyond the pale of the mainstream ideology of the country. The media pays tremendous attention to the sort of outlaw imagery and of course, when there's violence, that adds to the media attention, either real or imagined. The New Communist Movement and similar Marxist groups were interested in collective mass action by people who were mainly working class, not exclusively, but mainly workers. That's a touchier subject for mainstream and even liberal mainstream historiography. I think that's part of the reason that the Communist or workers organizing sector has gotten less attention than groups that engaged in symbolic actions and groups that engaged in kind of cultural actions and things that happened more in the ‘60s than in the ‘70s.
Callahan: That's an important aspect of the answer, for sure, but you actually go into some detail in the book about what you identify as the key moment in SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, when the split took place between the revolutionary youth movement comprised of two parts, RYM 1 and RYM 2, and PL [Progressive Labor Party]. I would daresay there’s little written about that beyond references in histories focused on SDS and the student movement in general, and even less on the distinction between RYM 1 and RYM 2. But even in those instances where the split with PL is mentioned, the emphasis is on Weatherman. That seems to me like a key moment when Weatherman, in particular, suddenly comes to the fore but the impression I'm left with, reading popular histories (and repeated accounts in mainstream media, of course) was that Weatherman was the largest, most influential faction of SDS as opposed to RYM 2. Quite the opposite was the case according to your account.
Elbaum: The Weather people were very good at getting a lot of publicity and I think they're fun to write about. It plays into the notions in the mainstream about what Leftism is, which is that it's disruptive, violent, not majoritarian in orientation. There are a combination of factors at work here. The people who went into the working class organizing were interested in keeping a somewhat lower profile mostly for good reasons. I can't explain all the reasons why many of the people who participated in working-class organizing didn't write about it more in years since. There's a lot of people who are more or less my age, who are well positioned within working-class movements, within the labor movement and the struggles in communities of color. I do suspect that there's going to be a spate of writing about it as we go forward. I'm not sure why more people haven't written about that experience, which is very rich.
Callahan: I want to come back to this question because it has other dimensions to explore. But you just raised something that I think is also worth pursuing a bit further. I mean, for a lot of younger people who might be reading this interview, I think even the distinction between the Old Left and the New Left isn't that clear. When you talk about working-class organizing, one could get the impression from reading the words, New Left, that the term meant students as opposed to workers. The Old Left was workers and the New Left was students. I'm being crass and oversimplifying but the point is that lot of people don't even know that the New Communist Movement was directed towards working-class organizing and was, at the same time, a product of the New Left.
Elbaum: Yes. That's absolutely true. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to address exactly that kind of question. When I decided to write the book it was the 1990s and I was encountering a new generation of radicals who had been radicalized by the first Gulf War and by some of the other struggles of the early ‘90s. They knew something about the Black Panthers, they knew something about the Communist Party, some of them knew something about the Trotskyist movement, which had been written about a great deal. The only ones who really knew about the New Communist Movement were the ones whose parents had been involved in it. Even they didn't have a very systematic understanding of it.
There was a missing page in the history and a skewed view of late ‘60s radicalism and what people did in the ‘70s. I looked around for someone who was in the academic world, I contacted various people to see if anybody was working on a book about the New Communist Movement. I didn't find anybody and because I had been somewhat of a “pack rat” myself, I had a lot of materials and I knew a lot of different people in all the different groups. So, having been in the ‘60s movements and being friends with people in the student movement who then went into all the different New Communist groups I decided to try my hand at it myself. It seems to have worked out.
Callahan: Yes, your book plays a crucial role at this point because it really is almost alone. In that regard, I have to mention two others that are, to my knowledge, the only other books that touch on the subject. One is Heavy Radicals by Aaron Leonard and Connor Gallagher and the second is a recent book the same authors published called A Threat of the First Magnitude which is about the FBI and its infiltration in various organizations. They're the only people besides you who have written book-length treatments of the New Communist Movement. It’s mentioned in interviews with other people, so it's not absolutely unique, but as far as giving it the historical stature it deserves in terms of its scope and size there’s a dearth, to say the least. I think this is one of the points that will surprise a lot of people who are unfamiliar with your work or with the period, which goes from ‘68 to ‘73, although some groups continued on into the ‘80s. In any case, the size and influence of this movement was considerable. It certainly was not a marginal nonentity. Can you speak to that in terms of the actual size and influence of the New Communist Movement? What were the manifestations of its size and influence?
Elbaum: Roughly, during the years that you mentioned, it was predominant, taking the most initiative of any political tendency within the US Left. It attracted a plurality type of constituency but plurality that spoke in terms of the revolutionary politics of the late ‘60s. For example, the largest, independent, radical newspaper at the time, The National Guardian, identified with New Communist Movement politics. There were somewhere between 10 and 20,000 people who considered themselves essential players in that movement. The critics of that trend acknowledged it in the early ‘80s when, for example, the International Socialists, which was from a different trend, wrote a summation of the ‘70s. They said that the New Communist Movement had been the dominant force within the Left. Stanley Aronowitz, who also had a different point of view, a prominent Left historian and activist himself, wrote that during the 1970s a combination of Marxism and Leninism, tinged with some kinds of nationalism, was the hegemonic discourse of black radicalism. People from the New Communist Movement were involved in all the key struggles in the early ‘70s and into the ‘70s and ‘80s, organizing in caucuses and workplaces leading some of the key struggles around anti-imperialist work, solidarity with the Philippines, solidarity with Chile, solidarity with the late stages of the Vietnam War.
For figures like Amiri Baraka, who became a leading figure in the New Communist Movement, it was the strongest pole within the US Left for a decade or so.
Callahan: Can you comment more specifically on a couple of other dimensions, for example Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the GI movement. What was the role of the New Communist Movement in that?
Elbaum: Vietnam Vets Against the War was formed in ‘67. It grew to a very large organization, 10-20,000 members. Its most prominent call to action was I think Operation Dewey Canyon Three, in ‘71 or ‘72, where they led a march to Arlington Cemetery2. They threw their medals at the steps of the White House. Many of the people within Vietnam Vets Against the War either had been or became recruited to a number of the trends within the New Communist Movement. Later, New Communist Movement groups didn't play a particularly good role as Vietnam Vets Against the War fragmented, but for a period, their people were anchors of that organization. That was also true of the African Liberation Support Committee, which had the largest demonstrations in support of the liberation movements in South Africa, Southern Africa, Mozambique, Angola in the early ‘70s. It was true of a number of those kinds of organizations that had a mass base within the working class and communities of color at the time.
Callahan: Another dimension is the regional aspect. One of the points you make in the book is that there were certain parts of the United States that at different times had concentrations, for example the San Francisco Bay Area, where you live now. Can you comment on that?
Elbaum: The New Communist Movement grew out of ‘60s activism. Its initial strong areas tended to be close to those that had been prominent in 1960s activism but not only in the student movement; it was also in movements coming out of communities of color. In Los Angeles and in the southwest, the Chicano movement was very vital and a key part. Some of the groups that went into the New Communist Movement were there. California in the Bay Area had been, since Berkeley in ‘64, a main place of student movement but also, as you've written about, a general ferment of a cultural and political nature. That was the birthplace of three or four of the main New Communist groups, especially the early pacesetters, the Revolutionary Union, which started in the Bay Area. New York City was a stronghold. There were a lot of people in the south coming out of the Black Freedom movement from the youth organization of Black Unity, the student organization of Black Unity, the Malcolm X University. There was a concentration in Nashville.
Then a lot of people from the New Communist Movement, because they were oriented to the working class, many of them relocated if they had been students of all backgrounds, to areas where they thought the working class was concentrated. People moved to West Virginia and worked in the coal mines. People went to all the big industrial cities that later were de-industrialized. Detroit was a stronghold of some of the New Communist Movement groups, especially coming out of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Revolutionary Union Movement formed in ‘67. That's covered in the book Detroit I Do Mind Dying. There was a lot of regional variation. If the groups weren't able to unite, it was because there were political and sociological differences but they all considered themselves part of the common trend for a number of years.
Callahan: There's another aspect of this we should touch on before getting into that question of unity, and failure to find unity, which is: what role did China play? We've talked about different factors and regions in the United States but then there's also different countries in the world. We're talking about Old Left, New Left, New Communist Movement versus the CPUSA or other forms. A lot of this comes down to China versus the Soviet Union.
Elbaum: On the Old Left, New Left, let me approach it this way. The Old Left, the spur for that was the Russian revolution and then the Depression in the 1930s. That gave rise to the shape of the kind of radicalism that's identified with the Communist Party, which is that it was centered around support for the Soviet Union and World War II and its role in supporting national liberation movements at that stage and supporting its existence against counter-revolutionary efforts of the capitalist group and very strongly identified with the trade union movement, which was the center of gravity of struggles in the 1930s. In the 1960s, although one can certainly argue that everything that happened was related to the capitalist and class structure in the United States and in the Empire, the main struggles in the 1960s that drove things forward were the anti-racist struggle, the civil rights struggle, Black Power and the struggle against the Vietnam War. The main influences within people who were radicalized in that period had to do with anti-racism and anti-Empire or imperialism. The forces that were the most identified and seemed to be on the front lines with those struggles were the forces in the global south that, at the time, we called the Third World who were fighting against Western domination and white supremacy.
There was a strong identification with the Third World revolutionary movements that were led by the Left. That was China, Vietnam, it was the radical movement, the Left-led national liberation movements in Latin America, in the Middle East, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and across Africa including the fights against Portuguese colonialism and against South Africa, apartheid and so on. Within that Third World constellation, the Chinese Communist party was the most aggressive about putting forward a comprehensive international view and trying to get different forces to identify with this ideology in ways that the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Africans didn't tend to do. There was hostility between the Soviet Union and China. China. The Chinese Revolution was a big inspiration for people, the idea, especially during the Cultural Revolution, that there was a more democratic and bottom-up kind of view of socialism than what was identified as Soviet socialism. In general, there was a lot of identification with the Third World liberation movements and with China that dominated within the late ‘60s radicalism.
Callahan: Yet, the split between China and the Soviet Union, has not actually been discussed very much in most of the literature I've read about the ‘60s. I'm speaking of the ‘60s in the broad sense. The spelling “Sixties,” not 1960s, 1970s, meaning the whole “epoch” between 1960 and 1980. You could call the Sixties that 20-year period. The Sino-Soviet split was a major geopolitical event and yet a lot of people, certainly in our generation were only vaguely aware of it, or only to the extent it was reported in mainstream media. At the same time, we were very much affected by it in terms of the lines that were drawn on the streets between the CPUSA or supporters of the Soviet Union or, for example, in San Francisco's Chinatown, between supporters of Red China vs. the Kuomintang.
Elbaum: Yes. At the time, things looked simpler to young radicals like us than they look now. I mean, the main event at the time, we were focused on the Vietnam War for obvious reasons. It was brought into every home on television. If we hadn't been to Vietnam ourselves we knew people who were in Vietnam. The United States had half a million troops in Vietnam at its height. It was a riveting issue of the day. China and the Soviet Union, but China in particular, presented itself as the most loyal supporter of Vietnam, and of the Third World in general, rising up. Meanwhile in 1968 the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the “socialism with a human face” reform movement there at the same time as the 1968 protests hit the Democratic Convention. Most of the New Left and most of the people turning toward Marxism in the New Left put those things together and said, "Well look, China is on the side of the Third World revolutionary movements. It's part of the Third World revolutionary movements. There's the Soviet Union acting in pretty much the way that imperial powers act. It crushes neighboring countries, it invades a country that it doesn't like."
There was a strong identification with the Chinese position as opposed to the Soviet position. Now it turns out in retrospect and even at the time, it was more complex than that. The Vietnamese Party was opposed to the Sino-Soviet split. It thought that both the Chinese and the Soviets were making mistakes and felt that unity could have been and should have been established if those parties had been willing to cooperate. The Cubans had a similar point of view.
I think the revolutionaries of the late ‘60s tended to underestimate what the nuclear arms race was all about and the US nuclear superiority and what a threat that posed and how that affected Soviet polic – not that the Soviets responded in the correct way but that it was a factor that we didn't take into account in some of the differences that we perceived between the Soviet Union and China. As time went on, people who began a lot of the revolutionary movements, and New Communist Movement in particular, had to reassess whether our early support for China had perhaps been a little one-sided.
It became a very complex thing and it's still debated within the Left. Of course, it doesn't have the same significance that it did at the time because the whole global geography and global politics has changed. The Soviet Union no longer exists, the Chinese leadership is certainly of a different character than it was during the Maoist period. These are mainly debates of important historical interest and they explain a lot why certain people, ourselves, worked the way we did but I'm not sure they're the key issues going forward for the next generation which faces a very different global landscape.
Callahan: Right. Except for something you mentioned earlier, which is the youthfulness of the main body of the New Communist Movement and its, perhaps, lack of historical perspective. In other words, that could carry over to any generation, right? If you lack a historical perspective then you don't necessarily appreciate what the actual issues are that are going on beneath the surface and then you end up in an ahistorical, polarized good guys / bad guys situation. It seems to me that part of what you're talking about is that there were apparent reasons – the examples you already mentioned – why a certain segment of America's rebellious youth would side with China against the Soviet Union but on the other hand, there's also an element of ignorance, to be kind, or arrogance, to be more self-critical, concerning what our elders might have taught us, not to mention questions of theory.
Elbaum: We were; there were a lot of things we didn't know and we didn't know we didn't know them! We were arrogant about the previous generation. I think that that's one factor in the conflict that existed between, broadly speaking, the New Left and the Old Left. Of course, the Old Left brought its problems to that as well. My take is that the current issues, the current inter-generational issues tend to be somewhat better. They're not quite as conflictive as they were between the ‘60s generation and the ‘30s generation. Some of that's got to do with the fact of the cultural revolution, we're not quite as distant culturally from the people who are 30, 40 years younger than us than the cultural distance between the New Left and the Old Left; in terms of the sexual revolution, the roles of music, fashion, technology and so on. I think there's certainly a gap but it's not the chasm that it was in the 1960s.
There's also, I think, a little more humility, at least in some parts of us older people. We have our opinions but I think a higher percentage of people having been on the other side of the generational divide maybe are a little more appreciative of the fact that a new generation will reinvent the Left in its own way, they will make their own mistakes, we can offer some perspective and some lessons but it's pointless to try and shove anything down anyone's throat even if we were correct about things, which often we were not. There's been a strong influence of some of the different cultural changes, influence of indigenous culture, the whole idea of respect for the earth, respect for one's elders. I think that's a little more prominent in the next generation. I'm a little more hopeful. There's generational tension but I don't think it's as severe as it was in the ‘30s - ‘60s conflict. I think there are more prospects for a healthier relationship between the different Left generations.
Callahan: One of the important themes that you highlight in your book and seems to be reemerging today within a larger constellation of questions is the question of party-building or of building a vanguard organization to lead the struggle. Why didn't the New Communist Movement groups come together? For example, you mentioned the Revolutionary Union, you mentioned October League, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a variety of different organizations at one time or another attempted to unite. Why were they unsuccessful in building a larger, more inclusive, party?
Elbaum: I think there's a number of reasons and this gets to your point about questions reemerging generation after generation in different forms. One key reason is that, in general, we assumed the revolution was a lot closer than it turned out to be. There was a lot of thinking that the 1960s was our dress rehearsal for revolution, the way the 1905 revolution was considered the dress rehearsal for the 1917 in Russia. There was a sense that preparing a vanguard organization, a vanguard party was essential because the next round of struggle, of mass struggle, was going to be even further to the Left than in the 1960s and might put a pre-revolutionary situation on the agenda. When you think the revolution is pretty close, there are very high stakes in certain theoretical and political issues. What, under other circumstances, can be minor differences that can be hashed out over years, may come to the fore in an even more pressing way when you think that revolutionary change is imminent. I think our sense of proportion was off.
There were certain differences of opinion that could have easily coexisted within a party if one thought that one was entering a long period of defensive struggle against what would be a backlash against the gains of the 1960s at home and abroad that couldn't coexist if you felt that the revolution or mass upsurges, huge mass upsurges, were coming soon. We missed a sense of proportion on that. That was connected to our mis-assessment of the historical moment.
There's also the fact that all these groups were very determined and all the different groups did develop at least a small base within the working class. We weren't connected to a large social base with institutional expressions numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even into the millions and when you're connected to that kind of social base, there's more of a pressure for unity and accountability. If you're a group of 1000 or 2000 members with a base of 10,000 perhaps, you can pretty much be on your own. There's no consequences for not uniting with another group that has the same number or is roughly the same size because you're not entrenched, enmeshed in a huge working-class movement the way, say, the Italian Communist Party was at the time. That also meant that the pressure for unity didn't come with both the positives and the consequences of being connected to that kind of large social base and institutional strength.
Then there was the fact that we were of course influenced by the international Left at the time. There was a certain model of what the vanguard party was that we tended to look toward, it was quasi-military because the struggles going on in the Third World were largely military. They tended to be highly centralized. There was an idea of orthodoxy, adhering to the true face of seemingly omniscient Marxism-Leninism. When you have that kind of model, it's pretty tough to unite people with diverse views. I think all those factors played into it and our movement had a lot of vitality and people were, in all the groups, sincere. We bumped up against some of those problems, some of which we could have solved, certainly better than we did, but there were certain limitations given the conditions in the United States, the state of the working class movement generally and the picture of the international Left and the models that we had to work with.
Callahan: Well, there is another element here which I'd like you to speak to. You don't actually talk about it very much in the book but it is an issue. That's the role of the FBI and the United States government, in terms of its infiltration. It's relatively well-known in the case of the Panthers and AIM [American Indian Movement] with COINTELPRO; a lot has been written about that. But as Leonard and Gallagher write in Heavy Radicals and in A Threat of the First Magnitude, the FBI considered the Revolutionary Communist Party [previously the RU] the main threat and they were infiltrating informants into the highest ranks of these organizations over a fairly long period of time, including apparently this guy D.H. Wright, who was an RU leader and likely an FBI informant. Wright was the liaison person between all the organizations that were trying to build a party. Do you think that played a significant role or is that more or less a sideshow?
Elbaum: I'd put it somewhere in between those two things. I think that the work that Leonard and others have done is excellent in bringing that to the fore. I think it's a real contribution. They were able to take what was generally understood—that the FBI and the other government agencies were going to have agents and try to repress the groups that we were in—and show how that was done. They've managed to uncover some of the details of that in ways that I think are really important. I don't think there's any question that the FBI was into doing that and certainly the RU was a target early on because it was a pace-setting group. I know that the October League was also a target and so were the other organizations in different ways. But I don't think it was a main factor. I think it was a much larger factor, relatively speaking, in terms of the Panthers but I don't think it's as important as other factors.
I wouldn't call it a sideshow but you know, there's this comment by Lenin about the guy, Malinovsky who was a Tsarist agent within what later became the Bolshevik party. Lenin said, "Well it's a problem but while he was there he did a lot of good work and it wasn't the main thing." I think it was a factor. I think it's important for people today to take those questions into account and to understand the ways we're going to be surveilled and infiltrated and it can do some real damage but I think it's not central, or I wouldn't make it the number one or number two reasons why, at least for our movement, we were unable to unite and build a stronger Left.
Callahan: To clarify, the main reason I brought it up was the question of why people couldn't unite. On the one hand, you explained very well what the conditions were that led people to adhere to very strict positions that otherwise they might have been willing to set aside in the interest of unity. On the other hand, to what extent were these differences fomented, exaggerated, made antagonistic? There was actually a tendency to unite but it was undermined. It’s not just a question of FBI informants or disruption on the part of the government but it's also a question of what kinds of ideas or illusions people bring into this movement, where you're trying to build or you're trying to unite.
Because, for example, the other dimension of the ‘60s that in a sense is the polar opposite of secrecy, covert operations, cloak and dagger stuff, can be called the “media issue.” But these are much more closely connected than we often take cognizance of. “If it appears in the paper it happened,” said Jerry Rubin. The hippies and Weatherman and many other social phenomena, all had this media presence. To what extent was that undermining the basis for unity amongst people who were following the line of organizing the working class, building a working-class movement, a revolutionary movement amongst the masses?
Elbaum: I think all those things do play a role. They're connected to a political culture where all kinds of individualistic ideas are dominant and the role of individuals is pulled out as the key motive force of history, even on the radical side, the glorification of outlaws as opposed to collective action. I mean, it's no accident that we have movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the whole sort of, individuals standing up, rebelling, kind of business. Between the media infiltration, looking at the different prominent individuals and all the things that come with that, I think it's a cultural problem or political problem or political culture. It's a combination of objective and subjective, things that are within our control and are not within our control. The only answer comes when you have a self-organized, relatively vibrant working-class movement, with its own intellectual life, collective sense of value of each person crossing different social boundaries whether it be of race, gender, sexuality, region; then you have a check on all these kind of things. You have a social force that's pressing for those who are representing the interests of that sector to be accountable to a base, to function in a more collective and grounded fashion.
When that's absent, all kinds of tendencies appear: to look for magic bullets, key individuals, to not have a sense of proportion about what issues are divisive, and what have to be settled, and which ones can just be argued over beer after the meeting. That's only partly under the Left's control. That's also a question of what happens in the society and where millions decide to go. It’s a long-standing problem. I think it's difficult to assess. I have my take, others have a different take on the relationship between broader factors over which we did not have control and what were the things that we actually could have done within the limits of our circumstances. I think all those things need to be addressed.
Callahan: That’s a good answer. I'll pose the two-part final question that may develop this further. One part is exactly what you said: where can you draw the line between what were clearly the enemy's strengths and their ability to suppress or defeat or push back, versus the mistakes and the errors of the New Communist Movement itself that could have been corrected perhaps? Which, in turn, leads to the question for the next generation of young radicals, what do you think the prospects are for learning those lessons and perhaps for some kind of new party or organization to emerge that will actually represent revolutionary politics in the United States?
Elbaum: Well, I'm ever the optimist. I think there are good prospects but I think we also face some pretty daunting obstacles. I think the question of assessing the general moment and how the Left has to position itself is probably the issue that's going to decide, more than any other single issue, how well we're going to do, especially how well the new generation is going to do. My read on things is that the Left in the United States has done the best when it's positioned itself in tandem with a much broader progressive democratic and class motion and has been able to play a key role in moving forward, moving things forward to the maximum possibility at that historical moment. In the cases of the early Marxists, the abolitionist movement and the Civil War, and the left in the 1930s and in the 1960s, those sections of the Left that grew and had the healthiest relationship were those that were able to find a spot within a much broader upsurge for racial equality, for workers rights, for an end to war, that kind of thing. To be on top of things as far as who was the main enemy at a given point and what kind of front has to be built, we're facing, in my opinion, a real consequential moment.
The Trump administration represents the quintessence of white nationalist backlash against the gains of the 1960s. I think Bill Fletcher wrote somewhere that what pulses through the whole Trump movement is the notion of racial and imperial revenge. The notion that white America has been humiliated by darker people and poor people at home and abroad and to make America white again, make America great again, we have to kick everybody's ass. There's a huge front against the Trump motion. It has very different wings, its got all kinds of complicated political forces within it, not all of whom share the goals of the Left by a long shot, but that's where the energy is and if the rising generation of Leftists can talk itself into that motion, help lead it in the fight against the main enemy and at the same time project a vision of not just going back to what happened before Trump but taking another leap forward for American history – I personally like the way Barber puts it in the Poor People's Campaign, “for a Third Reconstruction” – the first reconstruction after the Civil War, the second in the ‘60s, and now a third. If the new generation of the Left can play a leading role in that front against the far Right and at the same time project its vision of going forward in a more democratic—economically as well as politically—society for all, then I think the Left's prospects are pretty good.3
I think a lot of people are moving in that direction. I think there are disputes on the Left about how to do that and I think there are some tendencies to, again, underestimate the obstacles we're up against and overestimate the Left's strengths at this point. That's an echo of the ‘60s but I think if the Left can get on top of that, our prospects are pretty good.
Callahan: I have to ask one other question if we've got a few more minutes here. It’s the other dimension of this whole thing which is the worldwide dimension, because obviously one of the crucial elements we've talked about is the international situation and the case of the Vietnam War or the Sino-Soviet split or the relationship between the US movements and different countries, China, Cuba and so on. What do you think are the contemporary equivalents or what is the relationship between all those potentials that you just described and what's happening in other parts of the world. In other words, it's not just Trump and the United States.
Elbaum: I think the global picture right now is the Right wing has the initiative. There's a rise of authoritarianism and various reactionary forms of nationalism or ethnic chauvinism all over the world. Eastern Europe, India, you have the Hindu nationalists trend, in the Middle East, rather than the kind of Arab socialism, revolutionary nationalism that was identified in the ‘60s, ‘70s, you have a lot of chauvinist movements of various sorts and police states. I don't think the turn in the former socialist countries is all that positive either, in terms of the kind of authoritarian states seem to be predominating now in China and in some of the other countries. I think the global picture is very difficult. We also are facing an unprecedented ecological crisis, which adds to a sense of urgency. There's a new constellation. The resistance to that is widespread. There's a massive revulsion all over the world against the predominant capitalist system but it's taking very complicated forms, and in many countries, a Right-wing form as opposed to a Left-wing form. There are some interesting developments in southern Europe, new political parties with a Left program trying to combine electoral and non-electoral work. The Latin American Left didn't get as battered over the last 30 years as other places so there's still a number of countries there where there are vibrant Lefts that are struggling.
I think the reconstruction of the Left worldwide is not going to take the same form that it did in the ‘30s and the ‘60s. I think we have a ways to go on that. I do think there are some lessons from the New Communist Movement on that front. We tended, perhaps too much, to look to other countries as models for the US Left. That was a mistake. But I think one of the positive sides of the internationalism of the New Communist Movement was understanding that people in the United States had things to learn as well as things to teach people in other countries. It wasn't a “US is the center of the world” mentality, which was a useful corrective to the kind of imperial and racial arrogance that tends to dominate US culture. I think we have to be on the lookout for promising developments in other countries. Realize we have things to learn from them and try to be part of rebuilding a global Left that can turn things around.
Footnotes
1 Elbaum, Max 2018. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, 2nd ed. London: Verso Books.
2 Operation Dewey Canyon III took place in Washington, DC, April 18–23, 1971. See “Vets’ History: Operation ‘Dewey Canyon III’” http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=1656
3 Barber, William J. and Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, 2016. The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.