Max Elbaum: What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968?

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   Radical History Review 82 (2002) 37-64
What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968?
Max Elbaum

...1973-1976: Major Bumps in the Road

Between 1973 and 1976, all these factors [successful capitalist
maneuvers to regain the initiative; the weakness of the socialist
tradition within the U.S. working class; the widespread consensus
behind an essentially pro-imperialist version of patriotism; the
pervasive racial fault lines that, among other things, lead many
white workers to believe they have more in common with their white
exploiters than their nonwhite coworkers; and an entrenched
two-party, winner-take-all electoral arrangement that erects
tremendous structural obstacles to radicalism's ability to gain a
stable footing in the political system] began to make themselves
felt, checking the momentum of Third World Marxism.

The Energy Crisis of 1973-74, followed by the recession of 1974-75,
was central to this process. The slump was the worst since the Great
Depression; unemployment reached its highest point in thirty-five
years. But contrary to left-wing expectations, the downturn did not
produce an outpouring of worker militancy or a new wave of
radicalization. Rather, it played a role that recessions have often
played in the history of capitalism, "disciplining" the working
class, exacerbating intraclass divisions, and narrowing many workers'
vision to issues of immediate survival. Furthermore, the slump led to
massive layoffs in auto, steel, and other key industries. Those
expelled from the plants included a disproportionate share of those
workers most open to left politics, young workers and, especially,
young black workers. Most of the rank-and-file insurgencies that had
spread through various unions between 1968 and 1973 lost ground or
collapsed.

Simultaneously, a massive government/media campaign to blame the
slump on the oil-producing countries of the Middle East fueled
jingoism among broad layers of the population. While the Energy
Crisis was a product of market manipulation by the big oil
transnationals, it was convenient for the establishment to target the
Arab countries that had briefly conducted a selective oil embargo
against the United States for backing Israel in the 1973 Middle East
war and then followed the embargo by a price hike. (Iran, a supporter
of Israel, also endorsed the higher oil prices for economic reasons
and in order to obtain additional Western weapons.) Abuse was heaped
especially on "the Arabs" and "Third World radicals." This crusade
tapped into the resentment millions felt at what they believed to be
the "humiliation" of the United States' forced withdrawal from
Southeast Asia.

This propaganda offensive was not effectively countered by the broad
coalition that had opposed the war in Vietnam. The antiwar movement's
radical wing celebrated the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement and the 1975
final revolutionary victory as important blows to imperialism and
tried to get this message out. But other political actors had
protested the war mainly because "American boys" had been dying in
combat and consequently did not oppose the new casualty-free jingoist
campaign. Worse, the grip of Zionism on U.S. politics (especially on
mainstream liberalism) meant that many who in the late 1960s had been
in opposition to Washington's Vietnam adventure joined in whipping up
anti-Arab hysteria.

The toll was all the heavier because many sixties activists had been
drawn into a new liberal-led effort to reform the Democratic Party by
1973 to 1975. George McGovern's successful bid for the 1972
Democratic presidential nomination was the most visible expression of
this new initiative that tried hard to enlist white college students,
liberal feminists and, to a lesser extent, the emerging layer of
African American elected officials. Suddenly the "traditional
channels" that had seemed irreversibly closed in 1968 appeared to
reopen, and many of the constituencies Third World Marxists hoped to
reach saw opportunities here to achieve at least some of their
objectives. Especially as militant grassroots activity began to ebb
in the black freedom movement and the student movement (after more
than a decade of near continuous flow), many sixties veterans tried
to seize these opportunities without adequate consideration of their
complexities (for example, how to successfully keep an independent
power base while participating in an alliance led by
procapitalists?)....

Max Elbaum, a former member of SDS, was active in the new communist
movement in the 1970s and 1980s and was the managing editor of
Crossroads magazine in the 1990s. He is the author of Revolution in
the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (2002)....

[The full text of the article is available at
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v082/82.1elbaum.html>
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v082/82.1elbaum.pdf>
if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.]
*****

_Revolution in the Air_: <http://revolutionintheair.com/>.
--
Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>