FREEWHEELING ON EMPTY: MUSIC, MAOISM AND THE NEW LEFT
BY MICHAEL MCCLELLAND
Given the histories at the modern observer’s disposal, it would appear, from a rough survey, that popular music emerged fully-formed in a single year: 1969. A lazy sketch based on hearsay might arrive at a similar origin date for contemporary politics. Indeed, this year witnessed the arrival of what Frankfurt School theorist and musicologist Theodor Adorno regarded as “actionism” — mere action for action’s sake — a tendency manifested in his very own classroom, when, on 6 August, bare-chested female student protesters staged a protest-performance to interrupt one of Adorno's lectures. Accusing him of intellectualism-for-intellectualism's sake, they chanted "Adorno as an institution is dead!" while mockingly pouring rose petals on his head. Two days later, halfway across the world, completely different circumstances transpired. Followers of Charles Manson, a friend of The Beach Boys'; Dennis Wilson, began terrorising the home of Hollywood star Sharon Tate, culminating in her murder. Unrelated, again, was the mass of 400,000 attendees who descended upon Bethel, New York, for a festival called Woodstock. That year, again? 1969.
Long before all this, before action was “actionism”, before rock ‘n’ roll was “rock”, there was history. Folkniks like Alan Lomax and Harry Smith made it; or, at least, they secured it by producing field recordings and compilations—an effort to time-seal the fading remnants of American people’s culture right when industrial society all but threatened to destroy it. Musicians like Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill, likewise, had been among the first to make a serious practice of recording these traditional songs, either in their notebooks or on vinyl records. By this time, another outcome of the industrial revolution—socialism—was becoming electrified, like the telegraph poles, street lamps, and power lines that had recently sprung up across the American continent. New generations of workers who had recently found themselves transplanted to the smoggy cities were participating in a loud, energetic, and disruptive social upheaval known as "industrial unionism".
Yet, as the twentieth century advanced and the possibility of world socialist revolution receded, the newly-developing mass entertainment industries (phonograph record distributors; radio broadcasters; magazine sellers) mined the language of popular culture in order to sell their wares. To know what was 'hip' was assumed to fit snugly alongside knowing the most authentic and pressing concerns of one's time.
It was understandable. By the 1930s, late industrialisation and capitalist society's great wars and depressions had spurred its inverse image in the minds of its subjects. A yearning for the past became rooted in terms which privileged the pure and the immediate. Even though being "authentic" did not always mean living traditionally, it always entailed living without illusions. Those who used the word as ammunition almost always, in some way or another, aimed their rifles at modern society. Or, rather, what had become of it.
This recrudescence, which appeared slightly romantic to some, meant a disillusionment with the way industrial society had come together, taking on increasingly abstract forms in its expression. It competed with the avant-garde, grafting its ideas onto the latter's proponents, producing the long march of conceptualism, performance, and further abstractions from the 'real' that characterised postmodernism.
By the early post-war era, universities replaced the parties of socialist movement as the breeding ground for intellectuals. It was in the 1960s that universities saw unprecedented enrolments, and institutions like art schools trained the booming youth movement on the avant-garde ideas of old. The university was for New Left student activists what Parisian coffeehouses were for Enlightenment philosophers and radicals two centuries before.
As Bob Dylan self-consciously joked in a song recorded for his self-titled debut album: "I first heard this [song] from Rick Von Schmidt. He lives in Cambridge. Rick's a blues guitar player. I met him one day in the green pastures of... Harvard University." As a matter of fact, Dylan, with his wordplay, prototyped 'high' status rock 'n' roll's eventual synthesis of the wry dandy and the bemused academic, where wit was programmed to masquerade as humour.
But the university was not the only place where intellectuals were born. Inner-city bars hosted musical groups made of those who had gorged themselves on Harry Smith's compilations, and it was in these venues where these fertile minds met a previous generation of intellectuals, and thus the beatniks met the folkniks.
Somewhere in the middle between each group, there were oddities like the Lower East Side bands like The Fugs who acted as ambassadors of the soon-to-be 'counter-culture'. With a rickety-sounding guitar and a harmonica that was played wonkily, they accompanied the Yiddish folk poem ‘Bulbes’; they collaborated with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; they covered William Blake. Their song ‘Kill For Peace’ eviscerated the Vietnam war; they sang about sex and drugs; they jeered at the 'straight' world with a lunacy that Frank Zappa would later only vie for.
The fact that the folk movement congealed with the New Left at this time was not surprising. The former took inspiration from the populism and socialism of its turn-of-the-twentieth-century predecessors. It was through this political turn of the sixties folk movement, however, that it began to turn away from the past and towards the future. As politics, it lost sight of the crisis that industrial capitalism posed for freedom and instead locked onto individual, specific symptoms.
It was during this moment of transition when the many strands of the counter-culture became one. It became 'square' to be a backwards folknik, as rock 'n' roll attained to the status of 'in'. This was less a negation of folk's romanticism and more its fulfilment. Rock 'n' roll, wrote rock critic Joe Carducci, was “folk music that stood and walked”, and the moment folk ditched socialism seemed to be the moment when it dropped its crutches.
Rock 'n' roll was a kind of folk that embraced all things modern; in crude terms, it substituted the collective for the individual. Hatred of the boss became hatred of the Man; hatred of the Man became hatred of Dad, and whereas Freud saw the oedipus complex as a pathology that afflicted most people and yet evidenced the possibility of the healthy patient's integration with society, the culture industry allowed for its mass sale as plain and simple ‘rebellion’. In other words, resisting authority, a thing draft-card-burners were itching to do (with good reason) became a pastime. Populism became the ‘popular’ and the fetishisation thereof, eventually becoming coded in musical terms merely as ‘pop’.
What was lost, other than syllables? Rebellion, in the context of mass consumer culture, no longer meant mutiny or insurrection like those attempts led by folk hero John Brown who gave his life in a failed attempt to free slaves. Nor that of the Russian sailors on board the Potemkin who refused to serve the Tsar in 1905 and prefigured that country’s revolution. Rather, rebellion, for the New Left, became a synonym for freedom. It was as a consequence of this reversal of motivations and goals that the Baby Boomers forged their self-identification as a cultural form in negative terms, meaning they framed their self-understanding in opposition to an inert gas they called the ‘Establishment’. Disorganised bunch that they were, for many Boomers, merely being ‘groovy’ was quite enough. But things took a serious turn when President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to escalate the Vietnam War in 1965.
The anti-war activists wanted to ‘bring the war home’; the idea being, in short, that America’s conquests abroad were the outgrowth of oppression at home: racism, sexism, and other -isms yet to be named. The point, as young activists saw it, was to reveal America for what it was.
Of the emerging generation of radicals, students were the most active. Columbia University’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) made regular organising trips up to Harlem. However, much more welcome in Black neighbourhoods were the Black Panthers and other radical groups already springing up there to galvanise communities into action against police violence. They wore berets, identifying with Third World guerillas who forged bloody skirmishes against their colonial oppressors from empires that were then starting to shrink.
To the white students, Black-led groups like the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee were seductive. First, their experiences validated the SDS mantra that ‘oppression abroad is oppression at home’. Second, they were committed. Instead of lapping up the outlaw fantasies of films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) then entrancing white audiences, the Panthers flocked to The Battle of Algiers (1966), a sympathetic portrayal of anti-French colonial Algerian revolutionaries. Out of this shared fascination in revolutionary struggles with their black counterparts, white student radicals found justification for multiracial revolutionary struggle in the theory of a Chinese Communist revolutionary whose texts were then entering into wide international circulation. His name was Mao Zedong.
Looking up to their Black peers, more and more white youths got their hands on texts like the Little Red Book, Mao’s handbook of aphorisms. Its egalitarian politics, with quotes like "women hold up half the sky", spoke to nascent movements like the then-called Women’s Liberation struggle, whose adherents were galvanised under the quasi-Maoist slogan of "the personal is political". The Little Red Book was designed less as a theoretical manual than as a complement to action. For the impatient revolutionary, its short passages were easily digestible, just like the two-minute pop/rock singles American youths were nurtured on. Mao, who preached the notion of “correct ideas” or “correct politics”, fared well in Western popularity compared with his counterparts in the Soviet Union, who suffered an international loss in confidence after Premier Nikita Kruschev came out and denounced Stalin in a 1956 "secret speech". In a time when Mao's Cultural Revolution had not yet further divided the party-conscious Left abroad, Maoism was regarded as the seductive alternative to Stalinism and the complicated legacy the latter had wrought.
Most attractive of all to campus radicals were the bits in Mao's Little Red Book where Mao emphasised the importance of revolutionaries having a counter-ideological programme: “We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.”
By the mid-1960s, the platform of ideological warfare was not unlike rock ‘n’ roll in one important regard. That is, rock ‘n’ roll had by that time cemented its status as a serial mind-changer among teens. Because the likes of Dylan and the Beatles were credited with reimagining the pop/rock album in 1965 as a form, its new quasi-literary status for the keenest critics began to earn its place alongside emerging favourites like Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Ginsberg’s Howl. Listening to rock ‘n’ roll didn’t just make one feel rebellious; it made one feel important. Moreover, it made one feel right.
Attitude was everything, for rock 'n' roll's devotees. And while today's critics find it all too easy to write off rock ‘n’ roll as white society's perverse attempt to commodify the slave songs of old, such understandings miss an opportunity to recognise rock 'n' roll as a symptom of a historical crisis. That is, if rock 'n' roll epitomised postwar youth culture in concrete, musical terms, it must be recognised that it simultaneously expressed the demands of that generation, which is to say their self-understanding. By this measure, one can seek out other objectifications of the self-understanding of the baby boomer 'counter-culture'. One might look for their political equivalents, such as in the organisational outgrowths of the Baby Boomer Left.
While it must be stated clearly that the Boomer veneration of Third World politics was directly inherited from Maoism, nor should it be missed that such political activity impatiently scratched the same itch as rock ‘n’ roll. For instance, at the 1969 convention, with nearly two thousand in attandance, the SDS split down the middle between its Maoist “workerist” caucus and that which championed the “struggle for the oppressed”. Denunciations turned into recriminations, recriminations turned into fistfights, but the “oppressed” camp carried the vote home with help from their fiery leader Bernadine Dohrn, who condemned her factional rivals as “objectively” racist. The SDS broke down into irrepairable shards; its now-solidified factions included an ultra-militant group who named themselves the Weathermen after Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. To a fringe portion of under-25 radicals, Weatherman communiqués appeared just as cryptic and inviting as Dylan's rock-poetry. Instead of guitars, however, the Weathermen wielded home-made explosives. They made their revolutionary intentions known in their self-published book Prairie Fire, a proto-zine of sorts, titled after Mao’s quip that “a single spark can start a prairie fire”. For the Weathermen, the spark was literal: with dynamite stolen from quarries, they took to blowing up perceived symbols of American imperialism (e.g., a cop monument, a Pentagon bathroom, a bank) in the hopes that such activities would spark the next and final revolution.
But the Revolution never came. When a failed bomb-making effort blew up a Manhattan townhouse and killed two Weathermen, Diana Oughton and Terry Robins, the rest of the guerillas went into hiding. The FBI bumped the group to the top of their ‘most wanted’ list, and the outlook turned grim for the erstwhile SDSers. (Weatherman Kathy Boudin’s parents, who were members of New York’s old-school liberal elite as well as the landlords of the now-rubbled apartment, were not impressed.) In need of a PR overhaul, the Weathermen changed their name to signal a shift of tone. Just like how Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship, the Weathermen became the Weather Underground. In doing so, these one-time student radicals officiated the change from the counter-culture into the underground.
As alien as white, middle-class domestic terrorism might seem from our post-9/11 vantage point, the introduction of homemade explosives into the New Left appeared radical. However, this was not to last. It was like the emergence of the synthesizer, which, appearing on Beatles and Pink Floyd records, caused quite a stir, but within fifteen years became so commonplace as to provoke only boredom. As author Bryan Burroughs comments in his account of the Weatherman era, Days of Rage, in the 1970s, “bombs basically functioned as exploding press releases. The sheer number of attacks led to a grudging public resignation. . . . The public, by and large, dismissed the radical underground as a lunatic fringe, and in time that’s what it became.” But that didn’t stop the Weather Underground, who from undisclosed motels across the United States delivered cryptic proclamations on xeroxed sheets that looked more like one-page fanzines than revolutionary manifestos.
Bombs and communiqués alike allowed the New Left’s Maoist guerillas to signal their seriousness to the public as much to their own members; they served as a way of reminding themselves why they had sacrificed their twenties, and indeed what would become their entire lives, for the revolutionary cause. It was as soon as the bombings were at their most frequent that Weatherman ‘criticism self-criticism’ sessions were at their most intense; these practices, imported equally from Chinese Maoism as from Women's Liberation 'consciousness raising' sessions, became a vital means of ensuring cultlike discipline within their ranks.
Even though the Weathermen had alienated themselves from more explicitly Maoist student left factions when they split from the SDS in 1969, 'criticism self-criticism' was one Chinese revolutionary technique that they upheld. Whether or not it was effective, it left psychological scars on participants. Ex-Weathermen recall these ‘struggle sessions’, as they were known, as involving members scrutinising their revolutionary peers at point-blank range over the question of their loyalty to the cause. Sexual dalliances were exposed to the group; armchair psychoanalysis was deployed to bring perceived oedipal dramas to light; language was policed; financial indiscretions were exposed.
A similar campaign among the guerillas-in-hiding was called ‘Smash Monogamy’. Not only was free love the Baby Boomers' prescribed treatment for society’s ills, it was officially mandated within Weatherman ranks as the correct way to free one’s mind of internalised misogyny and homophobia. In other words, group sex and partner-swapping became rules that were enforced to test commitments. Would they give their body to the Revolution? As Mark Rudd in his Weatherman memoir, Underground, recounts, “[This] was the most notorious Weatherman period—more group sex, LSD acid tests, orgiastic rock music, violent street actions, [...] constant criticism, self-criticism sessions [and more] orgies to prove our revolutionary love for each other”. Author Susan Braudy, on a similar note, writes in her Weatherman history Family Circle, “When women compared notes about sleeping with [Weatherman David Gilbert], they found [...] that after sex Gilbert became unwilling to take a woman’s opinions seriously in any argument or conversation. The women accused him of using the act of sex as a kind of intellectual ‘scoring.’” Among the most radical factions on the New Left, to be bourgeois was not just a sin of action, but a sin of ideas. This willingness to judge peers on the basis of appearances led to accusations without evidence, just as these created a perception of equivalence between qualitatively different crimes. For instance, whether or not an accused individual came from an explicitly bourgeois socioeconomic background, if that person was judged to possess patriarchal attitudes, it was taken for granted that it came from inner bourgeois sympathies. "Kill the cop in your head", went one slogan of the time. While the heterosexual and male members of the Weathermen were presumed guilty from the get-go, female members sometimes received the hardest interpersonal lashings for being seen as traitors to their revolutionary sisters.
This is all to say that far and away from traditional Marxism’s precise delineation between the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society per se, many Weathermen regarded anything that could be considered selfish or bigoted as bourgeois. Bryan Burroughs quotes an ex-Weatherman who “remembers visiting Bill Ayers and opening the refrigerator to find a stick of butter. ‘Butter!’ he exclaims today. ‘I couldn’t afford a piece of bread, and they had butter!’”. To a certain extent, some elements of this inner turmoil appear less the consequence of Weatherman politics and more the byproduct of living among an outfit of ideological puritans—or, perhaps, the natural result of sharing too much time and space with other young people; anyone who has spent their twenties in shared accommodation with other twenty-somethings might feel a pang of discomfort at this familiarity.
So too, for that matter, might those who have spent weeks at a time with other twenty-somethings in a tour van. Ayers' butter fiasco would remind readers of a tale in the Black Flag chapter of Michael Azefrad's hit rock tome Our Band Could Be Your Life, where the author quotes singer Henry Rollins's recollection that “there were some droughts [...] where you were eating a Snickers bar and you’d walk in and someone would say, ‘Where’d you get that?’ [...] You go, ‘Well, I bought it.’ ‘ Where’d you get the money to get that?’ ‘ Uh, OK, I took a dollar out of a cash order.’ That’s how broke we were.” Azerrad notes that Rollins’s mother would sometimes send him twenty dollars, which he would use to splurge on a pint of milk and a cookie from a 7-Eleven. “I’d say, ‘Well, I’m going out for a walk,’ [...] go over there and find a place to hide and eat it and make sure the crumbs were off my face.”
There are numerous obvious dissimilarities between a touring band and a gang of urban guerillas on the run from the FBI. What is striking, however, are the resemblances between the Weather Underground and Black Flag as groups who both travelled in what they called the 'underground', albeit in different lanes and at different times, but nonetheless for converging reasons.
Aside from the fact that one group was self-consciously political and another simply conceived of themselves as a fast, heavy, and perhaps subversive rock band, both groups tore their way across the United States in various rented or second-hand automobiles in service of putting on a show. Where Black Flag carted amplifiers and drum kits, it could be said that the Weather Underground toured with pipebombs. Second, both groups’ members used assumed pseudonyms. Henry Rollins, Robo, and Spot were the nom de guerres among Black Flag’s roster; forged passports and drivers licenses were littered in the Weather Underground’s trail. Third, both groups had their logo. The Weather Underground’s insignia, a jagged arrow slicing its way through a rainbow, had a hand-drawn character that would have fit right in on the back of an SST record; aesthetically speaking, it would not looked out of place next to the distinctive black bars of the Black Flag logo on any stick-and-poked tattoo seen in a midwestern mosh pit. If today's critics of groups like the Weather Underground needed evidence that such enterprises were little more than a LARP, there is ample room to appeal to similar misfits who would crop up only a generation later. Such assessments would not least of all guided by the fact that both the Weather Underground and Black Flag wore costumes. The difference was, however, that for Black Flag, and in particular, Rollins, with his bare-chest-and-gym-shorts combo, did not dress up to disguise themselves from the law; rather, they aimed to make themselves known. It was a 'punk' gesture, after all, like Television singer Richard Hell's famed home-made t-shirt that read "PLEASE KILL ME".
By their torn clothes, punks like Black Flag declared their sense of alienation from society and made themselves a walking target, if just so they could retort with a typically punk reply: "Yeah, so what?". For Kathy Boudin and her Weatherman comrades, wearing wigs, make-up, and sunglasses allowed them avoid the FBI; it was often the case that only their deployment of disguises saved them from many near misses with the authorities, allowing their clandestine infamy to last ten years.
These similarities are, mainly, coincidental. More significant, however, is that both forms of counter-cultural expression manifest the self-consciousness of oppositional attitudes held in a moment of historical crisis. Whereas the Weathermen were avowedly 'revolutionary' but unable to recognise the way in which they dressed up (either in the name Weatherman or in the more literal sense) as no less downstream from the culture industry, Black Flag were avowedly apolitical but unable to recognise the ways in which they dressed up as the Left.
Whereas Black Flag embraced punk nihilism, the Weather Underground anticipated the Revolution by acting as though it had already happened. By enacting prefigurative forms of political activity, which meant members comporting themselves with the behaviours they expected in their ideal future society, Weathermen placed themselves in progressively untenable binds. Equality between genders was slated as official doctrine; ‘sexual freedom’ was to be ‘normalised’.
In the case of Black Flag, as with the Weather Underground, members of weak constitution fled from the hardships of life in exile. This only drove the pure-minded closer together. Just as Black Flag lost dozens of members over the years to tour fatigue, many exhausted Weather Undergrounders retired from life on the lam by handing themselves over to the police. The remaining devotees, says Mark Rudd, were “true believers surrounded by a hostile world that we rejected and that rejected us in return.” Whereas Black Flag's music attained to the status of a cult classic, Rudd calls the late Weather Underground a "classic cult".
Rudd's writing has the character of a solemn Henry Rollins, whose journals written in the back of the Black Flag cargo van would eventually become the hit tour memoir Get in the Van. Whereas Rollins's solitary confinement was imagined, for Rudd's peers, it was actual: Many of the Weather Underground's remaining members who did not hand themselves in were rounded up and arrested after an infamous shootout at a botched bank robbery that took the life of a security guard. The remaining Weathermen spent decades of their lives in prison.
Such was the price they paid for combining the two essential ingredients of the rock ‘n’ roll product: authenticity and rebellion, summed up, in subcultural shorthand, as being 'radical'.
Rollins, on the other hand, continued to tour. Even after receiving a phone call from band leader Greg Ginn terminating Black Flag in August 1986, he continued to enjoy a long career in presenting himself as an anti-establishment provocateur, travelling the world in bands and speaking tours. However, he never blew up any buildings.
*
Black Flag were not Maoists, and the Weather Underground were not punks. Nonetheless, both groups turned to a peculiar treatment for what they regarded as their ailment — alienation — for which they blamed society. That is, through their strained efforts at radicalism, they concentrated so hard on transgressing the boundaries of society that they failed to recognise how much they owed it to the very logic that forms society: the question of self-transformation, of freedom. Going 'outside' society was impossible. Nor was it radical in the truest sense of the word, which means going to the root.
Looking back from today's vantage point, the squabbling and in-fighting of self-styled 'radical' groups, either guerilla or musical, might appear peculiar. It is every generation's blessing and curse that young people see themselves as new and different from all the generations that came before. The New Left, after all, sought to register the hypocrisy they saw in the so-called 'greatest generation' who fought the Nazis only going on to preserve the oppressive interests of capitalism. That older generation's blindness to institutionalised racism, for instance, was particularly galling for their progeny. However, in its most widely-diffused form, this inter-generational critique launched complaints only at the surface level. In the process of scrutinising society as 'sick', renegades and outlaws reversed the symptoms and the cause. On the basis of judging society superficially, politics ceased to be a matter of making vital determinations over questions of taking responsibility for the trajectory of society, becoming merely moralistic instead. In this reified paradigm, the old were regarded as wicked, ugly, and stupid; the young virtuous, beautiful, and wise. At the same time, the baby boomers' insistence on their exceptionality made them liable to rationalise their mistakes in the sublime terms of spontaneity and self-expression.
This trait was not unique to the New Left; every generation finds aesthetic means of disguising its points of convergence with the past.
It is for this reason that New Leftists did not recognise their mirror image when they recoiled at their parents. The ultimate irony, when considering the Weather Underground's relentless ‘criticism self-criticism’ sessions, lay in their total refusal to ever actually engage in the practice of critique. That is, critique in the philosophical sense of the word: to clarify the conditions of possibility for a given phenomenon to change, and thus to account for the process by which it emerged.
Music, and art generally, is one such inevitable byproduct of the underlying crisis of society; merely one of many ways in which capital reproduces itself via the activity of its subjects. So, too, are politics. In this way, even ‘rebellious’ political acts presuppose the possibility of their own conformity to a larger schema; even (supposedly) 'authentic' forms of music presuppose the potential for frauds to be ascertained.
If this were not the case, we would not see the near-universality of degraded Maoism lingering in the ethics and aesthetics of today’s "underground" musicians and artists, whose practices concretise "lifestyle politics" without it even being recognised as such. Society would not have witnessed the already regressive ‘counter-cultural’ attitude becoming further liquidated into ‘subculture’, despite every effort of these taste communities to transcend the boundaries thereof.
This account has left out the Black Panthers, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña group, and the Nation of Islam, among others too numerous to specify. Nor has it covered the many groups of the 1970s with 'Army' in their name: Black Liberation Army, the Red Army Faction, the United Red Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nor has it talked about those who thrived in the ecosystem of bands inspired by Black Flag and the touring route they helped to establish in the 1980s: the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, and many of the bands on the SST roster, let alone the entirety of British (and, for that matter, European, Australian and New Zealand) post-punk.
In summary, this has provided an American-centric account, in that modern politics has deep roots in the history of America. So has modern music. With its repetitiousness and its brevity, rock ‘n’ roll’s reception mirrored its form. Its adherants lived and died according to impossible dictates such as preponderous drug usage and a nihilistic lack of self-regard. The irony of the New Left guerilla groups is that, on average, they had a lower mortality rate than the foremost subterranean rock groups. If, as the least charitable critics allege, the rock ‘n’ roll worldview was superficial, uncritical, and miserably pessimistic, the same complaint can be extended to the legacy of the New Left, if in a less immediately recognisable way.
Indeed, one might need to judge the New Left less on its own terms and more by its aftereffects. Have we not all witnessed the fact that the old Maoist slur ‘bourgeois pig’ has become what today’s youth call ‘privileged’? Have we not noticed that ‘praxis’ has become ‘self-care’? Or that ‘criticism self-criticism’ has become ‘accountability’; ‘denunciation’ has become ‘cancellation’; ‘speaking bitterness’ has become ‘speaking one’s truth’? How new is the new, after all; is it not, as Adorno said, “the old in distress”?
If you cannot answer these questions, listen for the lingering echo of Bernadine Dohrn’s voice, still denouncing her factional enemies as “objectively” racist, as though Weathermen factional politics were any more objective than your average rock fan’s attempts to justify how good this or that Black Flag album sounds to the human ear. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind — not that you need a Weatherman to know which way it blows.