Understanding the New Left - 2

It is worth pausing for a brief interlude to observe what happens when the language of revolutionary philosophy is given free reign. It replaces what they define as being an oppressive system with an alternative system that is, in its own way at least equally oppressive or more destructive of the human community.  What we will discover in this paper is the way hubris and ambition lead to an enormous misreading of the people making up our social environment.

These warriors of the New Left were content to tear down existing structures and models of leadership and replace them with their own substitutes, sincerely believing they knew best what the world needed.  They were able to do for the working class what the working class could never understand or achieve on their own.  Everyone else was blind and ignorant but they were the panacea to all the woes of the Western culture.

We will come back to this unadulterated expression of hubris when we delve more into some of the basics of Woke culture.  The message is clear.  Arrogance can only carry a movement for a short period of time before the bulk of the population wakes up to what is going on and rejects it.

The Revolution moves from textbook to the streets

The 1960s was the decade of violent revolution and where there was violence, Herbert Marcuse was to be found.  As the leader of the New Left, he ensured he was always there in the thick of things.  Never participating directly in the rough and tumble of the street wars, but always around, offering support, moral encouragement and adding the language of revolutionary fervour to keep them focussed.

He referred to the militants as the “political guerrilla force of the New Left” at a conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Guardian newspaper (New York city, 1968).  The black militant H Rap Brown was sharing the podium with him and had already declared how he was going to wage what he called a “continental liberation struggle” and was already describing his actions as a “Negro revolution” and pushed for a “guerrilla warfare in all cities”. 

And along came the Weathermen

Another radical was there as well, Bernadine Dohrn, a self-described “revolutionary communist”.  Her real claim to fame would be as the signatory to the Weathermen’s declaration of war against the USA.  That declaration began…

Communiqué #1 From The Weatherman Underground May 21, 1970 Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn. I'm going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.  All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire…and ended… The time is now. Political power grows out of a gun, a Molotov, a riot, a commune … and from the soul of the people. WEATHERMAN.

For these young revolutionaries, though, the ‘war” was progressing far too slowly to meet their yearnings even to the point of heckling him while he was speaking at a conference in Rome.    They (black rebels) were not interested in pursuing university degrees, “white man’s economic courses”.  As far as they were concerned, they could learn all they needed once they had seen “…rats, junkies, and the General Motor’s Building”.

This was an important moment, and Marcuse could sense he was losing control over these young people.  They wanted action, not more philosophy.  He went as far as warning them that they were betraying his ideas, ignoring the deeper reality.  They represented the Great Refusal taking on flesh and blood, putting a human face onto the philosophy Marcuse had been teaching them.   He had spoken of a “counterculture”.  They embodied it.

The revolution needs more deeds and fewer words

In an article in Playboy, this dislocation between Marcuse and the way the students were acting on his words was expressed in less than flattering ways…

“the campus left wants to burn libraries and he continues to defend reading, ‘riting and rithmetic’, even if it is Marxist reading, ‘riting’ and ‘rithmetic’”…

The kids thrill to phrases like ‘undermine the foundations of the system’ and ‘the liberation of instinctual needs’, while the professor would have them temper such excitement with the reading of Das Kapital in the original German. (Horowitz)

Marcuse was being warned that the mob he had encouraged to take to the streets had gone far beyond what had been intended, with the situation being likened to the chaotic mayhem of the pre-war years.  But the professor was not to be swayed, saying that if it came to taking the side of either the police who were battling for law and order or the students they were trying to arrest, he would choose the students.

1970 was a significant year for the New Left as they took up a more direct approach in the tearing down of the capitalist monster.  A group of Marxist-Leninists set up the Weather Underground Organisation that would formally declare war on the USA.  It was also the year of the Black Liberation Army, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka the Red Army Faction).  Though he kept a distance between himself and the actual violence on the streets, they are all children of his vision.  Such was the association that the FBI declared him to be a serious risk to the security of the nation, a ‘revolutionary,’ an ‘ anarchist’ and ‘the grandfather of the New Left.’ What had begun in lectures and writings was ready to take up weapons and bomb their way to freedom.

The violence is launched

June 9, 1970, was a key moment.  Fifteen sticks of dynamite were set off in the City of New York police department.  Although there were only seven people wounded, and minimal damage done to the building, it is what transpired that is significant.  The next morning the declaration from the Weathermen was received buy the Associated Press claiming responsibility for the bombing, justifying what they had done saying

“The pigs in this country are our enemies.  They build the Bank of America; kids burn it down. They outlaw grass, we build a culture of life and music.  The time is now.  Political power grows out of a gun, a Molotov cocktail, a riot, a commune…and from the soul of the people”.

They made it clear that they had lost patience with the institutions aligned with the New Left and insisted the only way forward was at the end of a gun.  All of these were acolytes of Marcuse, had studied under him, been stirred up by his rhetoric and had built their world vision from what they had learned from him.  They were grade A students, faithfully putting flesh onto the bones put in place by their professor and mentor.

The Students for a Democratic Society formed the tip of the spear.  They sought an alignment with the black militants in the USA and the liberation armies across the Third World.  Their dream was of a worldwide revolution, an end to US imperialism and constructing in its place a world with no more class distinctions.  A universal communism.  But firstly, along the way, they would need to ‘smash cops and build a new life’. 

Kill the pigs!  Bomb the cities!

The Weathermen were not an isolated board of management officials governing the day-to-day activities of the revolution.  They established “collectives” in cities across the country and these were held together around a Weather Bureau.  This was all a part of their gearing up for a full-scale war, a broad-based revolution they viewed as expanding worldwide communism under the political banner of the Marxist-Leninist party seeking to dominate the world.

They associated with such luminaries as Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and the Red Guard.  Their modus operandi consisted of street protests, the occupying of buildings, vandalism, sabotage, and street battles with one early highpoint being the Day of Rage protest in Chicago. That highlight moment ended up in a full-scale riot with three hundred-plus arrests and many injuries.  The New Left was leaving an indelible mark on the enemies of the people in ways Marcuse had outlined in his writings.

There are accounts of reflections on these activities that record how members rejoiced in all they were doing in juvenile schoolboy boasts:

‘It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building’.

‘We will burn and loot and destroy’.

‘We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare’.

They even celebrated Charles Manson’s murderous spree – ‘first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them.  They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!’

Straight out of Marcuse’s writings in Eros and Civilization the Weathermen rejected all monogamous relationships.   Members were obliged to participate in self/criticism sessions that were straight from the Maoist playbook. Their sexuality was to be subject to the collective and every aspect of their lives subsumed into the Weatherman family. The discussion points used in some of their sessions are instructive: is it the duty of every good revolutionary to kill all newborn white babies? The rationale was that these babies would grow up to one day become a part of the great oppressive beast against which it was already at war.

In a report given by an undercover FBI it is possible to see just how far the philosophy espoused by Marcuse could be used to bring about anarchy and an unrelenting chaos. This is taken directly from Brufo’s book:

According to an FBI informant who infiltrated the group, the Weather Bureau leadership was already making plans for what they would do after violently overthrowing and seizing control of the state.

They would establish re-education centres in the Southwest to rehabilitate the capitalists and guard against the counter-revolution. “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate, that are die-hard capitalists?” the informant asked. “And the reply was that they would have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centres. And when I say ‘eliminate,’ I mean ‘kill’ 25 million people.”

Those young radicals were utterly disillusioned with Western society.  They could identify with none of it and used Marcuse’s teachings to justify how “counter-violence” was necessary in “the struggle for changes beyond the system.”  At this point (January 1970) the Weathermen set out for war, declaring ‘armed struggle starts when someone starts it’. Their very first communiqué sets out with great clarity the way they were thinking:

  Black people have been fighting almost alone for years.  We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution…within the next fourteen days, we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people…

Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Uruguayan leftist Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world. 

They were enacting the language of Marcuse: ‘Protests and marches do not do it.  Revolutionary violence is the only way.’  Their deeds matched their words as they kicked off a five-year campaign of violence with their rage directed at government buildings, financial institutions and military targets.

  Over a fifteen-month period they managed to carry out 4,330 bombings which left forty-three deaths.  These were carried out in the belief/hope that they would initiate a national revolution.  Taking their cue from Marcuse they waxed lyrical about socialist leaders like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, heaping praise on them as living witnesses to socialism and the liberation of the masses.  He did not object to the student slogan – Marx as the prophet, Marcuse as his interpreter and Mao as the sword’.   It was clear that it was not possible to separate the philosopher from the actions carried out by those who had internalised his thoughts and teachings. 

The violence planted the seeds of their own destruction

It comes as no surprise to find that the revolution did not happen.  All of the violence alienated the nation and drew the attention of the intelligence services down on them.  The FBI and other law agencies slowly gathered up their members, killing dozens of them, gaoling more and forcing the remainder to flee and go into hiding. 

Worst of all the philosophical bedrock on which they had built their revolt was rejected and ridiculed.  The blacks Marcuse had encouraged to join with the white elites now turned their backs on the New Left arguing that ‘the White Left was nothing more than a bankrupt political movement that subsumes its hunger for White bourgeois legitimacy behind Marxist rhetoric and intellectual lip masturbation’.  One thing he was right on was the unwillingness of the white working class to join the revolt.  They were simply uninterested in grand social changes and more concerned with a regular paycheck, the comforting trinkets of a technological world, a house, wife and children they could go home to and live in domestic bliss.

What remained of the New Left was disillusioned.  The great counter cultural revolution has killed itself off leaving its members to live in a cocoon of private liberation.  That manifested itself in the form of drug culture, quests for wisdom from the multiplication of gurus from the East, cults and dropout cultures.  Marcuse himself lost tenure at the university and was forced into early retirement.  As he sadly observed, ‘the strong libertarian, anti-authoritarian movements that originally defined the New Left have vanished in the meantime or yielded to a new group-authoritarianism.’

In the end, though, Marcuse did have one aspect of his teaching validated.  The United States of America did not have preconditions Marx had stipulated were necessary if they were to carry out the kind of cultural revolution demanded. There was no depth of political consciousness.  In the face of all of this, Marcuse maintained that the creation of a ‘democratic Communism’ was still possible.  Even more forcefully, a genuine democracy could only be realised in a Communist society. His insistence on collective ownership of the means of production, along with collective control over all planning issues remained valid.

Conclusion

Where to go from here?  The answer from Marcuse is:  the universities.

 While the actions turned out to be less physically violent, the evolving manifestations of the New Left were equally harmful to many.  It will go on to establish once again, that philosophies without something more than what the limited fragile human mind can construct are doomed to fail and, by the time it is in decline, it will have brought immense damage to many of the very people it was claiming to assist.

Bishop Michael Hough                                                                              February 2025