Introduction

Thomas J. Adams and Cedric Johnson

In 2025, there is little doubt to most onlookers that global forces that seek to profit from exploitation, inequality, authoritarianism, genocide, and ecological catastrophe grow stronger by the day. How did we get here? How we begin to answer this question, at the first order of analysis, hinges on a critical epistemological distinction vis-à-vis causation. Do we start from some version of an idea that capitalism has changed (“hyper-neoliberalism?” “authoritarian capitalism?”)? That it has been supplanted altogether by techno-feudalism? That a ruling class axis centered in New York, Davos, London, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C. has lost their commitment to democracy? That nations founded on the basis of territorial expansion and the expulsion of populations have come to the conclusion that endless proxy wars, ethnic cleansing, and mass slaughter are now acceptable methods? That petro-oligarchs in Houston and Dallas, Riyadh and Dubai are backtracking in their desire for ecological sustainability? For much critical scholarship and political thought on our current morass, the conclusion—explicit and implicit—is that causation lies with a transformed ruling class and its decent into barbarism along with structural shifts in accumulation and the very nature of capitalism.

On the other hand, we might start from the thoroughly materialist position that causation lies with the defeat and melting away of effective and meaningful opposition to these tendencies. That capital has not gotten more rapacious and exploitative of people and the environment, the ruling class has not gotten more authoritarian, and colonial states have not gotten more genocidal, but rather they are merely demonstrating their propositional truths. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” Frederick Douglass once argued. If we take Douglass’s words as ontological statement rather than T-shirt slogan, then at any level of strategic analysis the first task lies with understanding the indolence of our opposition.

In developing such an analysis, we could do much worse than return to a moment in 1977. That year a group of activists and scholars—including philosopher Andrew Feenberg, physician and former political prisoner Howard Levy, literary scholar Jennifer Jordan, Black Studies pioneers Harold Cruse and James Turner, and political scientists Alex Willingham, Adolph Reed, Earl Picard, Mack H. Jones, and Preston Smith, among others—gathered at Howard University. As active participants in a variety of the struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, they explicitly understood themselves to be meeting in the context of defeat and at a moment when opposition had ceased to be effective. Their purpose was, as Reed puts it in the discussion below, “to regroup and figure out what had happened through strategically driven debates aimed at charting new directions.”

Nearly fifty years after the conference, this strikes a discordant and sadly quaint note. The clear-headed understanding of their context, the charge to dialectically analyze how they got there and to do so with the purpose of mapping a more strategic and effective future politics—these are not impulses one would generally associate with contemporary politics or scholarship. Rather, the contemporary scene is largely defined by the celebration of protest for its own sake, oppositionality as identity and brand, fanciful prognostication and wishful thinking, aversion to the sober evaluation of context and the balance of political forces, and a deep antipathy to sequential strategy. A capacious understanding of Douglass’s notion of endurance would not be an apt descriptor of contemporary left and oppositional politics.

Feenberg, Levy, Reed, and Smith, as well as that conference’s other participants and the contributors to the resulting 1986 volume of essays, Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, were attempting to take stock of the defeat of the oppositional politics that has come under the general moniker of “the sixties.” One thing that emerges in that book’s diverse essays as well as in the discussion between Feenberg, Levy, Reed, and Smith below is that in the time since the clock struck midnight on January 1, 1970, the condensation of legends, plastic saints, conspiracy theories, just-so stories, marketing campaigns, and origin myths that lives under that moniker has only grown more soggy and humid. Scholarship and popular memory has far too often taken on the role of hagiography or sought a pure and true 1960s spirit, “uncaptured” by elites and reflective of real, authentic radicalism. Rather than being critically analyzed as key nodes of causation in the defeat of an effective egalitarian politics and the subsequent turn toward reaction—as the contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture do, befitting the seriousness with which they took their charge as both scholars and political actors—the worst tendencies of sixties-era social movements are now almost religiously worshipped in nominally left organizing and thought. While the pervasive and default impulse of witness-bearing as the main subject of politics—a posture that definitionally puts self-actualization ahead of strategy—may have its longer term origins in the Second Great Awakening and later the “New Radicalism” and consumerist mind-cure of the early twentieth century, its more direct and immediate precursor lies in the self-liberation as revolution mantra of so much of the 1960s and 1970s.

Evoking Russell Jacoby’s 1975 study, Social Amnesia, Reed writes in the introduction to the 1986 volume, “To the social amnesiacs past and present appear as discontinuous, and thus practically irrelevant to each other, or the past flounces around as a Mardi-Gras image: this week’s banalities adorned by replicas of obsolete artifacts; in either case only a reified present seems to organize life.”

Nearly five decades later, the condition that Jacoby diagnosed and that Reed and his fellow contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture sought to counter has only become more hegemonic in American—and indeed Western—intellectual, political, and cultural life. On the one hand, we are inundated with assertions of world-historic novelty. From technologies like so-called AI to the political transformations attendant with the onset of Donald Trump’s second administration to a host of more mundane cultural catechisms like the ubiquity of the abbreviation GOAT in sports and pop culture discourse, our world is evermore defined by a tendency toward self-understanding grounded in discontinuity and historical exceptionalism. As the ubiquitous protest goes, “This Is Not Normal.”

On the other side of the same coin, when the past does break through to the present it appears as ontology-by-analogy. Slavery becomes the same as Jim Crow, which becomes the same as mass-incarceration. Gentrification is just (settler) colonialism in new clothes, while extraction unites imperialism, slavery, industrialization, and environmental degradation into a singular historic event. Martin Niemöller’s 1946 lines become the omnipresent interpretive lens by which history ceases to rhyme or even repeat itself but rather melts away in its entirety. And even as broader swaths of workers face dispossession and uncertainty, exploitation mostly recedes into the hidden abode of production, except when such abuse happens in concert with forms of discrimination legible to liberalism. Every election, protest, new social media platform, chip capacity, and consumption habit is a world-historic transformation, and yet everything remains the same. In this sense, then, the contemporary left’s defenestration and retreat into idealist fantasy appears as but a broader data point in the ongoing abstraction of the social and ever more complete triumph of commodity relations. But of course, that is precisely the dialectical point. It is defeat, retreat, and the inability to reconstitute a meaningful and effective opposition that begat such transformations and their attendant brutalities.

It is also why both the discussion between Feenberg, Levy, Reed, and Smith below and the contributions to the broader volume, which we expect to re-release in the coming year to coincide with its fortieth anniversary, are so important. Collectively they diagnose at a particularly early stage so many of the malignancies that lie at the first order of understanding how we arrived at our current impasse. Yet while often brilliant, their prescience is not necessarily the result of some rarefied intellectual skill or political acumen. Rather, it is the result of precisely those qualities their conversation and volume exhibit that are sorely lacking in our current moment—their deep attention to history, their sober recognition of context, their eschewal of magical thinking, their dogged materialism, and their commitment to strategic debate all in service of reconstituting an egalitarian opposition worthy of the name. And it is those qualities and practices that are sorely missing in our contemporary world and make the discussion below and the wider volume just as important today, if not more so.

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Let’s start at the beginning and discuss the 1977 conference at Howard University that would give birth to the book, Race, Politics, and Culture. How did that conference come about? What were some of the motives and hopes for organizing a critical conference on the sixties? What were some of the highlights of the conference sessions and deliberations?

Adolph Reed, Jr.: Preston [Smith] and others may have a clearer recollection than I, but as I recall, he and I, along with some others who participated in the conference, had been talking for a while about the state of the “movement”—both the post-Black Power black radicalism Cedric years later dissected in his Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics and in which we were enmeshed and what I at least still refused to qualify as the “white” left. Perhaps the immediate source of what became the Howard University conference and then the book was that in the early to mid-1970s the principal expressions of black radicalism—the avowedly oppositionist tendencies that clustered around the anti-imperialist African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) and the Pan-Africanist, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and cultural nationalist “ideological” camps within it, as well as groups like the Black Panther Party, Black Workers Congress, and League of Revolutionary Black Workers—and the “revolutionary” tendencies that came out of the New Left were beset by quite similar limitations. Chief among those limitations seemed to be a flight from concreteness and into a largely performative politics of ideological purification that often seemed more catechistic than analytical. That is, in both somewhat overlapping domains, being revolutionary had come to mean committing to what was in effect a millenarian faith and an extramural political practice that reduced to proselytizing one’s particular sect to prepare for, in the instructive line of the Last Poets’ admonition, “When the Revolution Comes” and an intra-movement practice centered on schismatic struggle.

In that environment, a node of at least aspirationally anti-capitalist critique of black politics took shape in and around the Atlanta University political science department, no doubt encouraged and sharpened by the simultaneous racial transition in local politics and consolidation of “black politics” as a class phenomenon. (Four of the participants at the conference—Mack Jones, Earl Picard, Alex Willingham, and myself—were affiliated with the AU political science department. Earl and I, especially Earl, also were involved in a grad student-run social theory journal we called Endarch, in which he, I, and Alex published critiques of and within post-Black Power radical intellectual activity and political practice. Among the most important of them was what would be Alex’s contribution to RPC and another piece, “California Dreaming: Eldridge Cleaver’s Epithet to the Activism of the Sixties,” that he did in 1976, prompted partly by Cleaver’s penitent return from Europe. It’s an aside, of course, but Cedric, whom I met when he was working on his dissertation, was the first person to focus on this period in a politically serious, scholarly, and non-hagiographical way. I could surmise how he came to his sophisticated historical perspective on the period, given both that he was working with two professors with intimate connections to that political moment, both of whom, incidentally, had been my colleagues and one my officemate at Howard, and that he’d grown up in a household and circumstances similar to my son, his peer, and had in some ways lived within that political environment intuitively. However, I don’t think I’ve ever known and am curious exactly what drew him to this specific political moment, not least because, comrades and I quipped over the years in response to academic discussions of the left or black politics in the seventies, that it seemed to be an open question whether a black radical politics exists if there are no white people around to observe it.) Being able to observe the dynamics of class consolidation at the everyday level—down to what impact having a black city council representative can have on middle-class families’, friends’, and neighbors’ access to mundane perks of government—in Atlanta certainly helped to ground a concrete perspective on the dynamic, and persistence of the going expressions of black radicalism underscored the contradictions of that escapist practice.

A comparably important element in the AU political science intellectual environment was Alex’s encounter of Judith Stein’s groundbreaking Winter 1974/75 Science & Society article, “‘Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others’: The Political Economy of Racism in the United States.” Especially as we were living through and trying to interpret the class dynamics reshaping black politics before our eyes, Stein’s work was important not only as a means to help understand the post-Reconstruction era within history and through historical materialist social relations; it also provided an important conceptual guide for making sense of that politics through which we were living.

The other ingredient that fed into organizing the conference and then the book is that some of us had encountered Frankfurt School Marxism and the “Western Marxist” or “cultural Marxist” tradition. For me, that encounter had come through discovering first Karl Korsch’s critical work and then Lukács’s at a point when I was trying to find a critical guide to praxis that succumbed to neither the romantic idealism of New Left radicalism nor the mechanistic idealism of what I described as scientistic “magic” Marxism. The contrast between the procrustean taxonomies that radicals tortured the social world to fit it into and the complexity and open-endedness of that world and the dynamic and concrete social relations that drove it was so striking that it seemed a clear indication of the inadequacy of those idealisms for grounding left political critique and practice. Another inducement to engage with the Frankfurt School tradition was concern to develop an epistemological critique of social science positivism.

Anyway, those concerns had led to following journals like Telos, New German Critique, Salmagundi, and others, like Radical America, that, while not devoted to critical theory, featured work by people who were grappling with the same project of examining the dynamics of American capitalism’s material reproduction through the cultural domain. So, Preston and I thought it could be productive to bring together scholars and activists operating out of a similar critical Marxist sensibility to reflect together on what had happened to the left, how to make sense of what we nearly all agreed was a deep failure, and possible strategies for reorienting a serious and grounded left practice. The chair of the political science department, Marguerite Ross Barnett, who did not share our politics, supported the idea of such a conference intellectually and helped secure university funding for it.

Preston Smith: I don’t remember many details about organizing the conference or the conference sessions and deliberations. However, what I do recall is the political context at Howard University and in the country immediately preceding the conference.

In Fall 1976, I returned to Howard University after spending a year in Chicago working for the Institute of Positive Education (IPE) and Third World Press (TWP) on the South Side. I had met Haki Madhubuti, the editor/publisher of TWP and executive director of IPE, in 1973–1974 while he was a visiting professor at Howard in my second year at the university. After having searched in vain for political engagement during my first year at Howard, I was introduced to cultural nationalism through Haki’s writings and those of Maulana Ron Karenga, head of the U.S. organization.

I remember what the appeal of cultural nationalism was to me at the time. I was well aware, even as a politically naive high schooler in Massachusetts, that police repression of black power radicals like the Black Panthers made joining them equally daring and dangerous. In contrast, by becoming a cultural foot soldier for the black nation, I was asked only to substitute an African name for my slave name, become a vegetarian, and learn the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles of Blackness. I was told, and I believed at the time, that if I simply rejected my lower-middle-class Negro culture and adopted Kawaida, a clunky amalgam of Akan culture and Swahili language, I would be in the vanguard of black people working to build black economic and cultural institutions as the path to black liberation in inveterate racist America.

As I recall, by the time I landed on campus in fall 1972, the lines of political debate had shifted from cultural versus revolutionary nationalism to any kind of black nationalism versus Marxism. By this time, the Black Panthers were in the process of eschewing their revolutionary posturing and moved to contesting for elected political office on a social democratic platform. Black nationalists like Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller) and Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) had adopted a Marxist and Pan-Africanist ideology. The two-line struggle on Howard’s campus was reflected, among other venues, in the undergraduate Political Science Society of which Michael Epsy, future congressman and Agricultural Secretary in the Clinton administration, was the president, and I, a Haki-trained cultural nationalist, was the vice-president. I realize now that the debate on campus, like many academic debates then and since, was limited to an exchange of views that did not engage at all with the concrete livelihoods of black residents in the neighborhoods right on the border of the campus.

After spending a year on the South Side of Chicago building a black press and independent school, I began to wonder how our actions would confront the material conditions of most Black Chicagoans. Towards the end of my stint in Chicago, I came across an article that helped to crystallize my dissatisfaction with the black nationalist movement. The article, which was making the rounds in Chicago’s black nationalist circles, was a critique of black Marxists like Fuller and Baraka. It was written by someone I had never heard of, Adolph Reed, and it appeared in the journal Endarch, which had been started by political science graduate students at Atlanta University.

Anderson Thompson and Conrad Worrill, both prominent black nationalists based at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, had circulated the article as an example of a black nationalist critique of black Marxism. Needless to say, I was amused to find out, upon reading the article, that the critique had been written not from the perspective of a black nationalist but from the perspective of a Marxist who felt these black Marxists rehearsed the ideology in inconsequential debates, instead of using its methods to analyze black people’s situation in a U.S. capitalist political economy. It was my first intellectual encounter with Marxian ideas and analysis. In black nationalist circles, Karl Marx was dismissed as “just another white boy.” As far as I knew, no one had actually read Marx in those circles.

Once I returned to Howard I discovered, to my surprise, that Adolph had been hired in the political science department as an assistant professor. I took his classes and began working with him on organizing the conference. For me, the conference embodied two important and novel orientations that have governed my intellectual and political life. The first was comparative since there were parallels in the devolution of black radicalism and the New Left politics. The conference and the subsequent book project showed how both radical insurgencies eventually suffered from a politics of performative posturing, an emphasis on individualist expression and identity, and an ultimate tone deafness that left them unable to effectively build a popular constituency that would support a left political alternative. The second orientation was a critical stance toward sixties’ activism that sought to analyze its shortcomings rather than simply celebrate its successes. Former radicals, their biographers, and scholars of the Black Radical Tradition have chosen to create an academic canon that commemorates the boldness, daring, and bravery of black activists. In the process they have resuscitated a flawed political approach without engaging in the bracing self-criticism that might have produced lessons on how to respond more effectively in moments when ordinary people are poised to act on their profound dissatisfaction and are ready for an alternative political approach that addresses their material needs. Ultimately, the hope was that the conference would lead to the development of a more effective praxis in building an independent working-class politics.

Where were you all politically, intellectually, and professionally as this book was taking shape? How did you first become involved in the book project? What did you hope to accomplish with your contribution?

Andrew Feenberg: I was teaching in the Philosophy Department of San Diego State University, while still maintaining relations with the University of California, San Diego where I did my doctoral work. I was already an activist in college. I was present at the first anti-war march on Washington in 1965 and participated in the May Events in Paris in 1968. I was involved in the explosive growth of the movement in the seventies, but by the time of the Howard conference the movement was imploding. I had reached the end of a long period of political activism which seemed to me to have finally failed. San Diego had a small left which ought to have worked together, but it proved impossible to develop an activist group open to all the various leftists in the region despite the goodwill of many on the scene. We were beset by conflicts between those who demanded personal transformation, those who wanted to spread socialist ideas, and those who formed closed ideological cliques. I was seriously disappointed and set out to try to figure out the reasons for our failure. The invitation to participate in the conference helped me put down my thoughts. At this point I did not have much hope politically, but I was anxious to find colleagues with whom to share ideas.

Adolph: The book project was stalled for several years mainly because I was a nobody and had difficulty stirring interest from publishers. Also, I was naive enough about dealing with publishers that I hesitated longer than I should have in nudging about delays. Two trade presses each sat on the manuscript for a year. In each case the editor who had expressed interest in the project left the press, and the manuscript sat orphaned on a bookshelf until I pressed the issue, at which point each press rejected the project. So, the book didn’t see the light of day until nine years after the Howard conference.

Instructively, left presses did not show an interest either. In fact, Stanley Aronowitz let me know that Michael Albert was just starting up South End Press, and he felt confident that Albert would be interested in the project. Quite the contrary, Albert not only rejected it but sent a scolding letter indicating that they were actively courting black authors and believed that publishing a critical book like this as a first black-related title would undermine the press’s efforts to sign black authors. Monthly Review Press, as I recall, had a similar reaction.

When I joined the Howard faculty in 1976, I already had begun distancing myself from association with ALSC and the broader New Communist movement, which had turned inward into a cycle of ritualized purification and purging itself nearly out of existence. (Others, e.g., Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che [2002], may date the New Communist tendency in differing ways. I date it from late 1974/early 1975 when the Revolutionary Union, which was a Maoist split from SDS, began traveling around the country holding meetings supposedly initiating broadly ecumenical discussions toward creation of a New Communist Party. I attended one of those meetings in Atlanta, anticipating optimistically perhaps a two-year process and then, because I hadn’t been born under a toadstool, realized that it was all a sectarian scam when Avakian et al. announced the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party a few months later.)

In 1978, I returned to Atlanta and to the second of my three stints in Atlanta city government in Maynard Jackson’s second term as mayor. I went on the academic job market in 1980. During that period, in addition to finishing my dissertation, which was a study of Du Bois’s political thought and an effort to instantiate a historical materialist approach to the study of black political thought from the standpoint of the study of the history of ideologies, and coaching my son’s Little League baseball team, I mainly focused politically on trying to develop a class- and political economy-based critique of really existing black politics. I was basically done with the millenarian left tendencies and worked in Barry Commoner’s Citizens’ Party presidential campaign in 1980, which provided a lasting practical lesson on the inadequacies of third-party politics, as well as of how what was still years away from being described as “identity politics” can function in a variety of more or less dramatic and sleazy ways to undercut the solidarities necessary to generate a popular political movement as effectively as any police action.

Then, once it became clear that Reagan’s presidency was not going to be like Nixon’s but was grounded on pursuit of a truly revanchist agenda, I decided to try to find common cause with the left wing of the Democrats because there was no transformative left in the society with any political capacity. Before the end of the decade, however, underclass ideology had paved the way to a bipartisan neoliberal consensus, in part through black political elites’ embrace of a narrative that defined inequality as a racial/cultural phenomenon disconnected from class and political economy and assigned upper-status blacks special responsibility for guiding moral rehabilitation of the benighted black urban underclass.

Howard Levy: The article by myself and Rhonda Kotelchuk was first published in the Bulletin of the HealthPolicy Advisory Center (Health/PAC) in 1975. I was a part of the Health/PAC collective which we hoped was aligned with community groups challenging various medical institutions, though our audience was largely health care professionals and related students. I was also involved at the time with the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), which was supporting the GI anti-Vietnam War movement.

Few retrospectives on the sixties combine such keen conjunctural analyses that understand the New Left’s emergence and unraveling within the discrete context of the consumer society and managerial capitalism. Why has it been so difficult for us then and now to speak directly to these complex origins and limitations of the New Left?

Howard: What’s so strange about it was that there had been a plethora of literature critiquing bureaucratic deadening of society along with its consumerist domination. Books going back to the fifties by writers like Vance Packard, David Reisman, and C. Wright Mills were for a general audience, and although they avoided directly dealing with class, they were unstinting in their critique of the way people experienced daily life (Mills came much closer to defining who had power and why). By the early sixties, class was implied in the writings of Michael Harrington, but other efforts by people like Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinsky injected a more confusing notion of what it meant to be a radical.

Adolph: One reason is the same as why fish don’t recognize that they’re swimming in water. So much of the nominal left that came out of that period was and remains trapped within and persists in defining itself through the precepts of consumer society and managerial capitalism that neither its veterans, political legatees, nor scholars who study it can perceive the conjuncture that shaped and constrained it as a totality. This is the essence of the political dilettantism that shows up, e.g., in fetishization of “youth” and “generations”—both the direct product of the advertising industry—as meaningful categories of political agency, inability to conceptualize politics as strategic activity or to recognize the difference between mobilizing and organizing, and reduction of political imagination to the electoral realm or performative projects like protest demonstrations.

In line with Howard’s reference to postwar critiques of “bureaucratic deadening of society along with its consumerist domination,” flagging the mid-1950s mass culture/popular culture debate can also help shine some light on what happened. The debate to some extent mapped onto the Old Left/New Left debate, as those who were critical of it saw mass culture as the product of capitalism’s cultural reproduction as debased ideology. Proponents of the popular culture idea insisted that it was autonomous and democratic, even potentially radical, and accused the other side of “elitism” or even snobbery.

That debate also ran parallel to efforts by Riesman, Mills, Dwight MacDonald, and others to ground a non-communist (“anti-Stalinist” was an alternative for those who wanted to avoid the appearance of association with Cold War anticommunism), non-Marxist left. On reflection, it’s striking to consider the extent to which postwar social science and its popularizers set out to render capitalist class dynamics invisible. Several years ago, I reread the Port Huron Statement, the SDS manifesto, for the first time in decades. I was surprised at how confidently the statement’s authors proceeded from the premises of affluent society ideology and embraced age and generation as key fault lines in American politics. In retrospect, perhaps the most insidious term of the New Left was “new.” I don’t think it was quite so clear to me fifty years ago as it is now, but for all that it accomplished, the important and progressive stamp it left on the society—the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, and more—New Left sensibility, critique, and practice were more the unhappy consciousness of postwar mass consumerist capitalism than the harbinger of a break beyond it. I think Todd Gitlin’s “The Whole World Is Watching!”: The Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left, published after our conference but before the book, is a very important study from the standpoint of examining the New Left’s contradictions and its at-best symbiotic relationship with what I’ve described as the corporate newsfotainment industry and its logic of newsworthiness.

It is worth noting in this regard the basis for another difference between our critique and those who have objected that we were dismissive of the victories that the New Left had won or even disrespectful of the leftists themselves. I’m curious how other of the comrades think, but I eventually came to understand that our camps talked past each other, and they at least couldn’t hear our critique because we did not share a common project. We assumed that we were engaging within a left that had been defeated and shared a concern to regroup and figure out what had happened through strategically driven debates aimed at charting new directions. I may be misremembering and would appreciate others’ recollections, but I don’t believe we thought to take special care to celebrate the left’s accomplishments because we all considered ourselves part of it. Perhaps others figured it out before I did, but for the other side—and I know this is tendentious—the point was to celebrate an identity they’d won for themselves: the left was already becoming an identity position or a subculture or taste community (market share?), not a project of social transformation.

Andrew: The main difficulty was the unfamiliar context of a society structured around cultural control rather than class struggle. What Marcuse called the “one-dimensional society” was a new creature without precedent. For the first time a capitalist society had brought the largest fraction of the working population into the “system,” in both an ideological and, more importantly, practical sense. The media and the consumer products they hawked loomed over everything and made it seem as though dystopia had captured the consciousness of the population. Marxists at the time were unable to understand why Mao’s little red book didn’t hit the spot with the workers who were more interested in sports and buying a new car. Meanwhile, other radicals hoped that the “youth” or the “counterculture” would make the revolution. The struggle became increasingly involuted and sectarian as the radicals failed to exploit the ambiguities and failures of the system to develop a popular following. The “people” were a myth while the actual people were treated as enemies.

In many ways, the New Left helped to birth the styles of identity politics that are now dominant, especially in academic and activist corners, and many chapters in Race, Politics, and Culture take aim at the internal contradictions and problems of Black Power, hippie counterculture, and the politics of self-actualization. Some recent treatments of the sixties by Peniel Joseph, Olufemi Taiwo, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, and Asad Haider mistakenly imagine some halcyon moment of organicist identity politics, represented by the Panthers or the Combahee River Collective, which they conclude were co-opted and corrupted by elites.

Looking back at the last four decades of political and social history, how did we end up here in a society where it is much easier to mobilize around various aggrieved subject positions than mobilizing around broad class interests? What accounts for the power and allure of identity in contemporary American politics?

Andrew: Maybe the question should be put backward: why is the working class uninterested in socialism? If socialism had a significant political role in American society, identity would be joined to solidarity rather than splitting off in fragmented movements, each with its own complaints. Identity is not the problem, although its exaggerations are a source of conflict on the left. The working-class movement of old was also an identity movement of sorts. Workers were called to understand themselves as the true creators of capital, capable of restructuring the society in new and better ways. It is this identity that is missing now. It seems unlikely that it could return on a large scale so long as the system is able to function effectively. Let’s see what happens as climate change presents a new kind of challenge capital seems uninterested in dealing with.

Howard: I think from the beginning how people felt about themselves—their personal moral integrity—set the stage for presenting issues in terms of identity. Of course this became more specific as sundry identitarian groups emerged. Many of us entered left politics via two great moral crusades—the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. But when these issues were no longer relevant, a much wider array of issues would be called upon to maintain the moral character of the movement. It didn’t help that the labor movement was also collapsing, and it was uncommon for activists to know little about that movement’s courageous history.

Adolph: Assertion of a prelapsarian black radicalism stems from a combination of political dilettantism and wish fulfillment. For example, Joseph accuses Cedric, Dean Robinson, Jerry Watts, and me of being too negative in our assessments of Black Power politics because we focus on its central role in consolidation of a new black political class. Instead, his account avoids similar critical assessment only by leaping from the early-1970s costume party phase of Black Power radicalism to hip-hop cultural expression of the late 1980s without consideration of institutional black politics or changing political-economic environment at all. It was instructive, or should have been, that Joseph’s sleight-of-hand in shifting his interpretive focal point from politics as pursuit and exercise of institutional power to politics as expression in popular culture was successful. Joseph reflected a tendency that represented black radicalism as expressive and performative rather than programmatic and that naturalized black ethnic interest-group pluralism unproblematically as the “black political agenda.”

In the mid-1990s, as that “black politics” was consolidating as an element of Democratic neoliberalism, political scientist Michael Dawson in Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics attempted to demonstrate that, despite the substantial economic stratification among black Americans since 1965, commitment to the “racial agenda”—up and down the political-economic ladder—continues to override other political inclinations among black people. Dawson’s argument is flawed in many ways. However, most telling in this regard is that, like Joseph and others, he simply posits the “black agenda” as given. He defends doing so with a sleight-of-hand, invoking a premise of 1950s modernization theory that as economic and educational differentiation increases within a population, political differentiation should as well. He finds a supposed anomaly: that black fealty to the racial agenda actually increases with income and education. Rather than consider that a takeaway could be that what he defines as the black agenda is an upper-class agenda, he contends that this finding demonstrates that that premise of modernization theory does not apply to blacks. Instead, he contends, nodding toward the formalist idiocies of rational choice theory, that a “black utility heuristic” decrees that because of the central priority of race/racism in all blacks’ lives, it is more reasonable and efficient for a black individual without regard to social location to follow the lead of those who articulate the racial agenda than to invest time and effort in trying to form their own positions. Never does he address who crafted the racial agenda but treats it as simply given for the race.

In their elevation of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) to the status of a “halcyon moment of organicist identity politics,” Haider, Yamahtta-Taylor, and Táíwo all demonstrate no better than very superficial understanding of post-Voting Rights black political development. In the first place, the CRC was never more than a glorified book club, and moreover, it was unknown outside a tiny, nominally radical discourse community of artists and academics before 1977, when a dozen or so participants issued a statement in the name of the group and by which point Black Power radicalism had already been displaced by or absorbed into the new black ethnic pluralist politics anchored in the Democratic Party and the political economy of race relations administration.

In another instance of the fish not recognizing that they’re swimming in water phenomenon, the CRC was “rediscovered” in the late 1980s as having been the font of an authentic—“feminist, lesbian, socialist”—black radicalism in the context of institutionalization of black studies and women’s studies on elite college campuses and competition for standing and budgets. With respect to the CRC, Haider, Yamahtta-Taylor, and Táíwo, following their predecessors in the 1980s, simply invented claims about a basically non-existent entity in the past in service to advancing the material interests and standing of people pursuing very current ambitions.

Whether or not the misrepresentation is naive or intentional, the upshot is propagating a much more generally counterproductive misunderstanding of both the sixties and seventies—only think of George C. Wolfe’s film Rustin and John Ridley’s Shirley—and a much worse sense of the relation between past and present.

Both those execrably shallow films and the disgracefully unhistorical characterizations of post-Black Power radicalism Haider et al. propounded also mark downstream sequelae of the turn I mention in my response to Q3: inquiry into black radicalism before the end of the 1970s already was on the road to becoming more the equivalent of the project of an Old-Timers’ Committee of a Great Black People’s Hall of Fame than a practice associated with a program of examining the past and its relation to the present, much less of social transformation. And here we are five decades later.

The book predates the emergence of neoliberalism as a category of analysis and way of characterizing the broad reordering of society in line with capitalist interests, but numerous chapters are squarely addressed to the tide of privatization and imperiled New Deal coalition. Essays by Timothy Luke, Joel Kovel, David Gross, and Reed all provide prescient assessments of this emerging pro-market context and the expanded role particular institutions like the family, culture, and community would come to play in the nascent processes of privatization and devolution that defined American governing from the late seventies onwards. In what ways is the book an opening salvo against neoliberalism as much as it is an epitaph on the sixties? What lessons should we draw from the book now?

Andrew: It should be noted that there was no mystery about the role of neoliberalism in the context in the late seventies. The only thing missing was the word “neoliberal.” Marcuse, for example, called it the “preventive counter-revolution,” emphasizing the reactionary struggle against both the New Left and labor. Post-war culture reached into the material base in the sense that vast numbers of Americans were able to improve their standard of living. This resulted in a cultural consensus that emerged in the 1950s and 60s around the media and consumerism. This set the stage for the revolt against a conformist lifestyle based on private possessions, which played a major role in the New Left. Today we see the results of the breakdown of that post-war culture with increasing inequality and poverty. Left struggles against inequality have to some extent replaced the cultural themes of the New Left, but the dynamics of struggle are similar, and similar sectarian movements continue to fragment the movement. There are those who hope for a return to a labor-based socialist party, but I think that is unlikely for the foreseeable future, although the labor movement may turn to the left. The principal lessons we can learn from studying the New Left are the importance of cultural struggle, the danger of sectarianism, and the need for genuine outreach.

Adolph: Well, that’s a really interesting question. Of course, I don’t believe we can claim prescience, though I’ll defer to Timothy Luke if he would. I doubt that any of us had a sense of what those various elements we examined were going to add up to. But, as you indicate, we did see market logic advancing around us. That was one way we had recognized the defeat. I guess it does make sense to see RPC as an opening salvo against what would become neoliberalism and that does point to the organic connections between neoliberalism and not only the defeats of the sixties but also the terms on which the victories were won and consolidated institutionally and ideologically. From that perspective, I suppose I’d say the most important lessons the book has to offer for our time have to do with how we got here, how our contributions examined complex dynamics including political relationships that were simultaneously relatively autonomous and shaped by and within capitalist political economy, and how all that was articulated in the domains of race, politics, and culture.

David Gross’s and Andrew Feenberg’s respective and equally brilliant examinations of New Left implosion, as well as Rhonda Kotelchuk and Howard Levy’s analysis of the rise and fall of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, should be read again as cautionary tales. Yet so many contemporary activists continue to look over their shoulders historically, measuring their success by the yardstick of the New Left and mimicking the rhetoric, gestures, performance, and deeds of sixties radicals.

In the months since Israel launched a second Nakba and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, social media has been flooded with black and white videos of Stokely Carmichael, pull quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., and all manner of memes with Third Worldist flourishes. At one point, there was even an AI fabrication of a Malcolm X speech circulating on Instagram and TikTok where he expressed support for Palestine, but the deep fake was outed where anachronistic phrases like “African American” and “occupation” appear.

What do you make of the persistence of the imagery and rhetoric of the sixties among contemporary movement subcultures? What do these contemporary struggles from Occupy Wall Street and anti-eviction campaigns to Black Lives Matter and mobilizations against the Gaza genocide get right or wrong about sixties counterculture and popular protests of that time?

Howard: Big question, and I’m going to stick mostly with Israel-Gaza. The students and especially the Palestinians among them got it right. And the larger pro-Palestine movement is welcome. Third Worldism is always a danger since it may deflect attention from the root responsibility at home. And even when the attention is aimed at the homefront, some peace groups have found it hard to directly demand Biden stop funding Israel for fear of domestic harm to the Democratic Party. Or blame is shifted from the State of Israel to one bad person—Netanyahu. Finally, I find it incredible that the same peace movement has found it nearly impossible to effectively oppose the proxy war in Ukraine. Turning back to an earlier comment, I think this is because framing Gaza-Israel as a moral cause is much easier than the geopolitical analysis needed to address Ukraine.

Adolph: Yes, those certainly are three brilliant examinations. I still recall how clarifying and exhilarating it was to read each for the first time and to draw from and teach them since. Of course, I agree with Howard that both the popular protest against the IDF’s slaughter in Gaza and the broader pro-Palestinian movement are more than welcome, and their persistence is a pleasant surprise, particularly in light of how shaky the nominal U.S. left has been on international issues in recent decades. I share his concern about Third Worldism as well; as he points out, the simplistic moralism on which it rests undercuts making sense of the geostrategic forces at play in American imperialist interventionism or of the class and other contradictions at work in the societies the U.S. targets at any point.

After revolutionary insurgencies were crushed and dissipated in Latin America and elsewhere, as Steve Striffler points out in Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights, the internationalist solidarity left in this country retreated to human rights support work in the 1980s, particularly vis-á-vis Latin America because of the Central American wars. Especially because it is detached from critique of global capitalism and forces struggling against it, human rights solidarity activism often slides into a moralistic strain that goes back to the Vietnam War and is at least evocative of Noble Peasant ideology. This became ever clearer with the Alter-Globalization Movement and its romanticization of indigeneity. Ultimately racialist and anti-modernist discourses of cultural authenticity increasingly grounded political judgment and set up naive, nominal leftists to support Potemkin, left-in-form, right-in-essence insurgencies like the various color revolutions, Arab Spring, Euromaidan uprising, and U.S. actions against the duly elected government of Venezuela. Marcie Smith examines closely how the U.S. regime change apparatus appropriated the international peace movement’s modus operandi and distinctive tactics.1

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations’ packaging of imperialist adventurism as “humanitarian” disarmed many in an internationalist left lacking the rudder of anti-capitalism and historical understanding. The Balkans campaigns underscored that problem. In that context, promiscuous application of the charge of genocide, as Mahmood Mamdani showed in Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, further reinforced the counterproductive moralism through a discourse of righteous urgency that equates calls for debate, analysis, and caution with complicity.​​ (The strategic use of the genocide charge stands out especially now in the face of resistance to apply it to Gaza, where it’s difficult to imagine a more accurate label for Israel’s behavior.) Tellingly, Mamdani noted that the Darfur hoax also gave Americans a war to oppose without running afoul of U.S. foreign policy, even as the American state was ravaging the Middle East.

There is a continuity between this sort of internationalist politics and the evolution of the domestic left. Dilettantism and fixation on performative action—protest for the sake of bearing witness—have displaced structural critique directed toward social transformation on both planes. As I argue in both in my chapter in RPC and much more recently—“Revolution as ‘National Liberation’ and the Origins of Neoliberal Antiracism,” Socialist Register (2017)—in the case of black American politics, Third Worldism has obscured the class character of Black Power and post-Black Power radicalism through precisely the kind of appropriations we’ve already discussed here. Election of big-city black mayors or formation of Community Development Corporations did not in any way equate with overthrowing colonial domination, much less transformation from capitalism. Representing them as equivalent served only to treat shared racial classification as being the same as a coherent political program and in yet another domain substitute culture for material social relations—that is, to perpetrate another form of what Barbara Jeanne and the late Karen E. Fields call “racecraft” (in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life). Interestingly, the most powerful critique of the Third Worldist “black colony” thesis at the time—“The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical Critique and Alternative Formulation,” Review of Black Political Economy (1973)—was crafted by marxoid economist Donald J. Harris, father of Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.

All that said, I don’t think it’s exactly that the imagery and rhetoric of the sixties’ subcultures have persisted, though the still shots and footage have. It’s nearer the mark perhaps to say they’ve been serially reinvented to evoke a sense of connection to earlier moments of political insurgency. In that sense, resort to those associations is talismanic or a sleight-of-hand suggesting that the later expressions rest on the same sort of popular base the former supposedly had. And the sleight-of-hand may even be self-delusion. Reflecting again on Wolfe’s bizarre characterization of Rustin and the March on Washington and Ridley’s of Shirley Chisholm, as well as the more general extent to which examination of black American political history has been reduced to finding individuals to celebrate, and the moralizing, performative pathologies of those political subcultures like OWS, BLM, and others get wrong about left tendencies in the sixties is less the problem than what they get wrong about their own realities or what they won’t acknowledge about their own realities, mainly that their actual project is to enlist the insurgent politics of the 1960s into validation of our era’s capitalist triumphalism.

Andrew: I must preface my remarks by confessing that I have lived outside the U.S. much of the time for twenty years. I am certainly out of date and have missed the many internal squabbles of the left. With that in mind, I will hazard my thoughts on lessons for a left that has now has a chance to return from years of irrelevance.

If we assume that the U.S. will not become a fascist state—a real prospect given Trump’s reelection and Republican gains in Congress—then the left has a chance to influence the development of the society as it confronts major challenges. The Democratic Party has adopted Bernie Sanders’s policies on many domestic issues. We are closer to a social democratic consensus than ever before. In this context, the issue of economic inequality will become ever more salient. At the same time, immigration has given racism a new lease on life. Climate change will make it ever more salient.

Social movements have drawn on the New Left for ideas and images because that is our heritage as leftists. Some of the main issues of the day are directly related to that heritage: for example, race, gender and the environment. Those issues cohabit now with a new militancy of labor that has a socialist coloration, if I may call it that. This is quite different from the situation in the sixties and seventies when labor was not concerned with inequality and supported the war in Vietnam.

Can these issues converge? Perhaps not in the form of a party but at least in solidarity. The convergence can succeed if the lessons of the collapse of the New Left are heeded. All the problems of the New Left are still present and will again lead to sectarianism and decline if not blocked. Activists must be able to challenge sectarian tendencies and call out attempts to substitute morality for politics. The culture of the left must include the ability to critique its own tendency to involution. The New Left started out with generous ideas and a willingness to approach ordinary people. That part of the heritage is still valid, but it ended up with fantasies of revolution and moralistic attacks on those same people it needed to accomplish its goals. That part of the heritage stands as a lesson.

One definitive aspect of the collection is how well so many of the contributions extend and refine Frankfurt School analyses of the culture industry and its implications for the making and unmaking of the New Left. Of course, today the giant “opinion-making” media institutions persist, but the explosive growth of social media has given a sense of leveling and popular democratic expression, even though corporate oligopoly is still a fact. What do you think about these changes in mass media and popular culture?

Andrew: To be frank, the Frankfurt School’s ideas about the media belong to the era of radio and television broadcasting. It was possible then to control communication from a corporate center, and this made widespread consensus possible. The consensus politics of the fifties is long gone. The New Left, with help from the Frankfurt School, did it in, and now social media have given its opposite—dissensus—a technological base. The corporate oligarchs are doing their best to navigate the flow with algorithms and, in billionaire Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’s case, direct interventions into the discourse. Foreign entities are also active. But this is very far from the situation in the past, both for good and bad. On the one hand, there is no corporate control of online discourse, so the left has a chance to voice its views on a large scale. On the other hand, the lack of control enables fascist and racist speech to proliferate.

Many commentators would like to blame social media for this, but I think the issue is far more complicated. Fascism and racism have always appealed to some Americans, but now we discover the existence of something new: public indifference to the signs of fascism and racism. This is the effect of the Trump phenomenon. There is no need to hide since a huge slice of the public has shown itself to be completely insensitive to the danger.

Some argue that this is an effect of the neoliberal assault on the New Deal compromise. That may be part of the issue, but it seems to have deep sources in the history of the U.S. and more recently in the Republican Party and Fox News. This new public indifference was not created by social media, although the right uses the media effectively to enlarge its base. Again, the issues are quite different from what they were in the fifties. We are not living in a “one-dimensional society” in which a “great refusal” responds to a hopeless situation. Much more nuanced responses make sense now, for example, voting for candidates who reject fascism and racism.

Howard: I’m certainly dependent upon the internet for much of the information I need to understand world events. But I’m not adept at interactive use of social networks. Maybe that’s an age thing. On the other hand, alternative media, largely print, was widely available in the sixties if one chose to look for it (for me, radio, like Pacifica’s WBAI, was important in those years). I’m also not sure how far we’ve gone to undermine MSM’s ability to provide sedating platforms for mass entertainment. David Gross’s article deals with this nicely.

Adolph: A decade or more ago, I learned the term “kayfabe,” which is a term of art in professional wrestling. It’s the circumstance that everyone involved in the performance—wrestlers, promoters, fans—knows on some level that the entire enterprise is staged and to some extent fake but that colluding to treat it as though it were not is too great a source of satisfaction to give up. It makes for a sort of reactionary populist appropriation of Brechtian theater. For a variety of reasons, mainly accessible through that Frankfurt School-influenced critique of the culture industry, this has become a dominant strain in U.S. political conflict and social life more generally. The argument that reactionary leveling is democratizing and egalitarian has accompanied mass consumption ideology just as degradation of work has accompanied its flip side, Taylorization and deskilling. And each new assault on autonomy comes with grand proclamations of the new egalitarian vistas it will open. That was certainly the deeper truth of the popular culture side of the mass culture debate. In 1971, I attended a federally sponsored conference on cable television that dangled shining promises of how liberatory cable TV was going to be for rural or isolated communities, minorities, its vast potential for democratic participation and self-determination. Twenty years later we got the same promises about the internet, then later Facebook, Instagram, and eventually TikTok. All these are technical fixes that also continue a tendency, dating back to the late nineteenth century, to hope for some way to resolve capitalism’s contradictions without confronting them as such or challenging ruling class power directly.

As the boundaries between kayfabe and actual become increasingly difficult to sort out, it becomes ever more difficult to distinguish performative activism as an occupational category within the broad professional-managerial strata from serious political challenge.

Many on the left were galvanized and inspired by the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. That period saw the overnight expansion of the Democratic Socialists of America and a level of mainstream discussion of socialism that had not happened since the sixties. And yet the campaign was defeated by the Democratic Party establishment. What are your thoughts on the Sanders campaign, especially given his common roots in sixties social struggles? Was the campaign an anomaly or evidence of shifting terrain in U.S. politics?

Adolph: Well, I worked pretty intensely in both campaigns. Of course, the overnight expansion of DSA followed the first Sanders campaign. I remember learning of it from a friend who had been a DSA member for some years before Sanders ran. My first reaction was to urge caution in the exuberance because it made me recall the “prairie” flood into SDS; within less than two years, the organization was dead.

From my perspective, the Sanders campaigns were very clever responses to the problem that there is no left with political capacity. I can’t say whether Sanders thought he could win the nomination either time. I know there were those of us committed to supporting the campaign who did not believe he could win the nomination, but his candidacies might have been able, especially with union support, to kickstart organizing issue campaigns around items on his platform, e.g., Medicare For All, Free Public Higher Education, or others. The hope was that this organizing could extend beyond elections and would amount to using the device of a campaign for the Democratic nomination to stimulate social movement organizing.

I mistakenly believed that if Sanders had simply gone back to the Senate in 2016, some of that work would have begun organically, particularly with the seven unions that had endorsed him and created the Labor for Bernie group, with which I worked. I was wrong. Although it demonstrated that many voters would support a New Deal sort of agenda, his effort didn’t take root in 2016. The momentum of the nomination campaign didn’t carry over beyond the election. Unfortunately, unions and other forces that backed Sanders snapped back into the grooves of their familiar electoralist practice, though some did experience success with issue-based rather than candidate-based election campaigns.

It was good that he ran again because in 2020 it seemed that in some areas of the country, Sanders forces were at least on the verge of nestling in organically, but COVID undercut those efforts. Sanders could do only what he could do, and the decades of reduction of insurgent politics to electoralism and performance, especially among young nominal radicals, had generated a left politics that fit within neoliberalism’s horizons. And, as it would turn out, although DSA attracted many Sandersistas because Bernie had made the word “socialism” cool, many, if not most, also took to the organization’s fundamentally electoralist understanding of politics. Thus, entities like Justice Democrats move so easily in the same orbit as DSA, and I know from personal experience, e.g., as post-2016 DSA strategists have occasionally engaged Mark Dudzic and me because of our experience with the Labor Party in the 1990s and early 2000s to discuss approaches to building a New Left political party, that they seem all but incapable of thinking outside the realm of election logic and rules—typical liberal search for gimmicks to obviate tedious organizing for base-building. Again, that problem is much more an expression of the realities that would have led Sanders to pursue the approach he did rather than of a misjudgment or miscalculation on his part.

Howard: Not my strong point. I supported, though I had many criticisms of, Sanders but have had no contact with DSA. I’ve long thought it amazing that in the U.S. it’s been about a century since we’ve had a meaningful party of the people—beggars not being choosy, I’d settle for almost any version of Socialist, Labor, or Social Democratic, despite the obvious difficulties of fielding a third party candidate in the U.S. Of course, I’m suggesting the need to establish a party that goes very far beyond just running a national candidate now and then.

Adolph: There were, though, a couple of things—in addition to some of Sanders’s forays into foreign policy (which reminded us that he is a social democrat after all)—the campaign did that I did not like and thought would be counterproductive. Although, considering the speed with which campaigns must extinguish fires, I can understand why they moved in this way, in 2015 the opportunism the campaign brain trust displayed in responding to neoliberal antiracists’ attacks by hiring Symone Sanders as a public face I feared would backfire. There was no placating those elements, which were fundamentally opposed to the entire Sanders initiative and to any version of a class-solidaristic politics. In 2020, fortunately, he was steadfast in resisting attempts for practically the entire duration of his campaign and even from insiders to pressure or cajole him to embrace some construction of reparations and to forsake broad, working-class appeals for racial brokerage politics.

The other frustration is more pertinent here. I never liked the “political revolution” construct precisely because it encourages a view that all that’s necessary is to elect the proper people for us to be able to win the social-democratic reforms people desire. That wasn’t true in 1944 or 1964, and it’s certainly not true in 2024.

Andrew: The Bernie situation is paradoxical. He was defeated as a candidate, but he won the policy wars. Biden was always a very centrist democrat, but his domestic policy in the last few years is very much influenced by Sanders. The democratic party has shifted to the left, as the Republicans remind us. Of course, this is not something Sanders “did” to the party. A new generation and new challenges required new ideas, and Sanders was willing, as the party apparatus was not, to offer progressive proposals back then. In response to your question, I would say this is a significant shift, but the reaction is also moving fast to upend it. We will soon know which trend is successful.

We can’t have this conversation now without broaching the question of fascism, which was, if not defeated, at least unpopular at the time of this book’s publication. What are your thoughts on the current state of the left and right in the U.S., the Trump phenomenon, and the prospects of building the kind of popular, working class-centered left politics you all summoned in 1986?

Howard: I don’t know about “building … [a] popular, working-class centered left politics.” See previous question. But having spent a few years in the military in the South and in prison, I had come across lots of fascists in the mid-sixties (see Kathleen Belew’s book, Bring the War Home). But there’s little doubt that there is a bad storm brewing, and in my opinion, the Democratic Party is part of the problem and certainly not the solution.

Adolph: I certainly agree with Howard that that nasty, fascist-hooligan/SA strain has been out there in American politics longer than any of us has been alive. Those with connections to what started being called the Old Left (bringing to mind an Ipana toothpaste ad campaign) in the 1960s know there’s no capitalism without such elements. It’s only the Golden Age mythology, itself partly a prop of Cold War imperialism intended to sell the idea that the U.S. had transcended class conflict, that underwrote the fantasy anyway.

I recently re-read Adam Przeworski’s Capitalism and Social Democracy and was struck by a couple of pithy observations that would not have been read with the same ominous implications when the book appeared in 1985: “Capitalists … cannot represent themselves as a class under democratic conditions,” and “The crisis of Keynesianism is a crisis of democratic capitalism.” Stir into the mix that what we summarize as neoliberalism marks a decades-long regime of what Damien Cahill in The End of Laissez-faire?: On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism and Colin Crouch in Post-Democracy and The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism describe as steady de-democratization, and it’s reasonable to wonder whether the regressive redistribution that is capitalism’s stock-in-trade in principle has reached a point at which it may be no longer possible, desirable, or necessary to deliver enough material goods and security to enough of the overall population to legitimize it as a democratic social order. (I have elsewhere described neoliberalism as capitalism that has eliminated effective working-class opposition.) In such a context, I’ve argued, we could be approaching or even have reached the equivalent of a T-intersection, at which there are only two directions available—one toward fascism, the other toward something more like social democracy.

It’s critically important for us to consider that we may well be at that point and act strategically in line with that likelihood.

Sophisticated Marxists of a sort may argue whether the authoritarian tendencies that confront us qualify as fascist and sometimes contend that ruling classes back fascist or authoritarian movements only when they’re threatened from below. My response to the second objection is that it’s no more than another illustration of idealism dressed up as science; a ruling class, when powerful enough to impose an authoritarian order without costs that seem too great, can do it simply because they can. My response to the first objection is that it’s pointless dilettantism that has become linked to the smartest person in the room leftism.

Andrew: If Kamala Harris had won, many of our assumptions about American politics may have been overturned. It seems likely in that event that the diminishing minority that wants a fascist regime will find far fewer supporters in the future. The Democratic Party might have fulfilled some significant aspects of the left agenda. That is a situation that should strengthen left ideas throughout the society. The anomaly of a social democratic polity in which business and the media are run by a few oligarchs, many of whom are reactionary, will become increasingly visible. The left needs to figure out how to challenge them since it is unlikely that the Democratic Party will take them on. That could be the popular basis of a socialist movement. Whether the American working class can again become central to the left, as it was in the 1930s, is another question. The American working class may be ready to discuss socialist ideas as never before, but I do not think the path to socialism lies in struggles among leftists over priorities. Every radical initiative is worthwhile, regardless of its relationship to labor. We need an organic convergence of struggles, not a fight for hegemony on the left. That was what killed the New Left.

If your 2024 self could say something to your younger self toiling away on your essay for Race, Politics and Culture, what would that be?

Andrew: I’d say spend a bit more time at the beginning of the essay on the accomplishments of the New Left, especially in its early phase when we conversed gently with all sorts of people and gradually changed the temper of the society. My essay assumed that everyone was familiar with those days from our own experience as radicals, but today it is far from obvious and needs to be said. I fear that the contemporary left will end up talking to itself and fighting over ideology, thinking that was the lesson of the New Left.

Adolph: One thing I would definitely say to my younger self is to stop spending time, following behind Habermas, trying to figure out an objective difference between cultural expressions that are organically occurring and those that are supposedly strategically deployed. That is not a meaningful distinction.

Howard: I didn’t remember until I reread the essay that we did lightly touch upon the limitation of our own work at Health/PAC. While much of this very early analysis—the creation of a massive Health Care Empire—came to pass, in retrospect I think we gave far too much credence to the efforts of the movement to challenge the Empire’s trajectory. We could and should have been more critical of the Left’s founding principles. Paradoxically, this would have opened the path to a deeper critique of the health industry. A much longer discussion would be needed to present and lay out this assertion to give it any chance of being understood. This isn’t the place for it.