[Peace-discuss] All of which I saw, part of which I was

[C. G. Estabrook]

	The Left, 1960-2010
	Downhill From Greensboro:
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Half a century ago, a new decade ushered in the rebirth of the American left and 
of those forces for radical change grievously wounded by the savage cold war 
pogroms of the Fifties. If you want to draw a line to indicate when history took 
a great leap forward, it could be February 1, 1960, when four black students 
from Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, , sat down at a 
segregated lunch counter in Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North 
Carolina. The chairs were for whites. Blacks had to stand and eat. A day later 
they returned, with 25 more students. On February 4 four white women joined them 
from a local college. By February 7, there were 54 sit-ins throughout the South 
in 15 cities in 9 states. By July 25 the store, part of a huge national chain, 
and plagued by $200,000 in lost business, threw in the towel and officially 
desegregated the lunch counter. (Last week here on our site we had a piece by 
one of the participants in that sit-in, Cecil Brown, about the new museum in 
Greensboro honoring that event, and Obama’s letter doing the same.)

Three months later, the city of Raleigh, NC, 80 miles east of Greensboro, saw 
the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), seeking 
to widen the lunch-counter demonstrations into a broad, militant movement. 
SNCC’s first field director was Bob Moses, who said that he was drawn by the 
"sullen, angry and determined look" of the protesters, qualitatively different 
from the "defensive, cringing" expression common to most photos of protesters in 
the South.

That same spring of 1960 saw the founding conference of Students for a 
Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor Michigan, the organization that later 
played a leading role in organizing the college-based component of the antiwar 
movement. In May the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was scheduled to hold 
red-baiting hearings in San Francisco. Students from the University of 
California at Berkeley crossed the Bay to jeer the hearings. They got blasted 
off the steps of City Hall by cops with power houses, but the ridicule helped 
demolish the decade-long power of HUAC.

Within four short years the Civil Rights Movement pushed Lyndon Johnson into 
signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By 1965 the first big demonstrations 
against the war were rolling into Washington. By the decade’s end there had been 
a convulsion in American life: a new reading of America’s past, an unsparing 
scrutiny of the ideology of “national security” and of Empire. The secret, 
shameful histories of the FBI and CIA were dragged into the light of day, the 
role of the universities in servicing imperial wars exposed; mutinies of 
soldiers in Vietnam a daily occurrence; consumer capitalism under daily duress 
from critics like Ralph Nader. By 1975 the gay and women’s movements were 
powerful social forces; president Nixon had been forced to resign. The left seem 
poised for an assertive role in American politics for the next quarter century.

Of course a new radical world did not spring fully formed from the void, on 
January 1, 1960. Already, in 1958 a black boycott of lunch counters in Oklahoma 
City, suggested by the 8-year old of daughter of NAACP Youth Council leader 
Clara Luper, a local high school teacher, had forced change in that city. Luper 
was greatly influenced by Rosa Parks, who famously refused to surrender her bus 
seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, starting the bus boycott 
that launched Martin Luther King’s public career.

Parks was a trained organizer who, like King, attended sessions at the 
Highlander Folk School, founded by Christian Socialists, close to the Communist 
Party, one of whom, Don West, began his career as an as a high-school agitator 
organizing demonstrations in 1915 outside cinemas featuring Griffith’s Birth of 
a Nation, a violently racist movie praising the Ku Klux Klan for protecting 
whites from black violence after the Civil War.

So there are political genealogies that must be honored – but this is not to 
occlude disasters endured by the left in the 1940s and Fifties – disasters whose 
consequences reverberate to this day. The first was the historic bargain struck 
by Roosevelt with organized labor from the late 1930s on, by which unions got 
automatic deduction of members’ dues for their treasuries sanctioned by the 
federal government, in return for witch-hunting the Trotskyist and later 
Communist left out of the labor movement.

Hugely important was Roosevelt’s ouster of the great progressive, Henry Wallace, 
from the vice presidential slot in 1944, substituting the appalling 
machine-Democrat Harry Truman who stepped into the Oval Office on Roosevelt’s 
death in 1945, and promptly dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then 
presided over the birth of the cold war and the rise of a permanently 
militarized US economy. Wallace headed the Progressive Party ticket in 1948 in a 
four way race which, with Truman’s victory, inscribed the unvarying 
Democratic-Republican either/or on the American political landscape.

By the end of the 1940s there was no powerful independent left political 
formation, an absence which continues to this day. By the mid 1950s the labor 
unions, the academies, all government establishments had been purged in the 
witch hunts –a bipartisan auto-da-fe whose most diligent red baiters included 
not only Senator Joe McCarthy but Robert Kennedy. The surviving left was mostly 
in the peace movement, notably in the Quakers. A prime issue was atmospheric 
nuclear testing, at that time dooming thousands of Americans to premature deaths 
from cancer.

In terms of organized politics the explosion of radical energy in the 1960s 
culminated in the peace candidacy of George McGovern, nominated by the Democrats 
in Miami in 1972. The response of the labor unions financing the party, and of 
the party bosses, was simply to abandon McGovern and ensure the victory of 
Nixon. Since that day the party has remained immune to radical challenge. Jimmy 
Carter , the southern Democrat installed in the White House in 1977, embraced 
neoliberalism, and easily beat off a challenge by the left’s supposed champion, 
the late Ted Kennedy. The antiwar movement which cheered America’s defeat in 
Vietnam mostly sat on its hands as Carter and his National Security aide 
Zbigniev Brzezinski ramped up military spending and led America into “the new 
cold war”, fought in Afghanistan and Central America.

Demure under the Democrat Carter, the left did organize substantial resistance 
to Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s. It also rallied to the radical 
candidacy of Jesse Jackson,  the first serious challenge of a black man for the 
presidency. Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister and political organizer who had 
been in Memphis with Martin Luther King when the latter was assassinated in 
1968. With his “Rainbow coalition” Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination in 
1984 and in 1988, with a platform that represented an anthology of progressive 
ideas from the 1960s. He attracted a large number of supporters, many of them 
from the white working class. Each time the Democratic party shrugged him aside 
and elected feeble white liberals – Mondale and Dukakis - who plummeted to 
defeat by Reagan and George Bush Sr.

The left’s rout was consummated in the Nineties by Bill Clinton who managed to 
retain fairly solid left support during his two terms, despite signing two trade 
treaties devastating to labor – in the form of the North America Free Trade 
Agreement (NAFTA )and the WTO; despite the lethal embargo against Iraq and 
NATO’s war on Yugoslavia; despite successful onslaughts on welfare programs for 
the poor and on constitutional freedoms.

Two important reminders about political phenomena peculiar to America: the first 
is the financial clout of the “non-profit” foundations, tax-exempt bodies formed 
by rich people to dispense their wealth according to political taste. Jeffrey St 
Clair and I wrote several pieces about this in our CounterPunch newsletter in 
the mid-Nineties. Much of the “progressive sector” in America owes its financial 
survival – salaries, office accommodation etc -- to the annual disbursements of 
these foundations which cease abruptly at the first manifestation of radical 
heterodoxy. In the other words most of the progressive sector is an extrusion of 
the dominant corporate world, just are the academies, similarly dependent on 
corporate endowments.

The big liberal foundations were perfectly happy with Clinton’s brand of 
neoliberalism and took swift action to tame any unwelcome radical tendencies in 
both the environmental and the women’s movements. Clinton’s drive to ratify the 
“free trade” treaty with Mexico and Canada provoked a potentially threatening 
alliance of labor unions and environmental groups. Eventually the big liberal 
foundations exerted some muscle, and major enviro groups came out for the 
Treaty. It was John Adams of the Natural Resources Defense Council who crowed, “ 
We broke the back of the environmental resistance to NAFTA.” The major funders 
of these latter groups included the Pew Charitable Trusts, a foundation set up 
in the 1940s by heirs to the Sun Oil company. By the mid-1990s Pew was giving 
the environmental movement about $20 million a year. Two other foundations, both 
derived from oil companies, gave another $20 million. The Howard Heinz Endowment 
and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, run by Teresa Heinz, Sen John Heinz's widow 
(now John Kerry's wife) has played a major role in funding a neoliberal 
environmental agenda . Also influential is the Rockefeller Family Fund, which 
oversees the Environmental Grantmakers Association, pivotal in allocating the 
swag, hence controlling the agenda. By the end of the Nineties the green 
movement – aside from small radical, underfunded grass roots groups – had become 
a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, hence of corporate America.

For its part, the women’s movement steadily devolved into a single issue affair, 
focused almost entirely on defending women’s right to abortions – under assault 
from the right. Women’s groups, many of them getting big money from liberal 
Hollywood (which devotedly supported Clinton), swerved away from larger issues 
of social justice and kept silent as Clinton destroyed safety nets for poor 
women. The gay movement, radical in the 1970s and 1980s, steadily retreated into 
campaigns for gay marriage and “hate crime laws”, the first being a profoundly 
conservative acquiescence in state-sanctioned relationships, and the second 
being an assault on free speech.

A second important reminder concerns the steady collapse of the organized 
Leninist or Trotskyite left which used to provide a training ground for young 
people who could learn the rudiments of political economy and organizational 
discipline, find suitable mates and play their role in reproducing the left, red 
diaper upon red diaper, tomorrow’s radicals, nourished on the Marxist classics. 
Somewhere in the late Eighties and early Nineties, coinciding with collapses 
further East – presumptively but not substantively a great victory for the 
Trotskyist or Maoist critiques , this genetic strain shriveled into 
insignificance. An adolescent soul not inoculated by sectarian debate, not 
enriched by the Eighteenth Brumaire and study groups of Capital, is open to any 
infection, such as 9/11 conspiracism and junk-science climate catastrophism 
substituting for analysis of political economy at the national or global level.

Thus the Bush years saw near extinction of the left’s capacity for realistic 
political analysis. Hysteria about the consummate evil of Bush and Cheney led to 
a vehement insistence that any Democrat would be qualitatively better, whether 
it be Hillary Clinton, carrying all the neoliberal baggage of the Nineties, or 
Barack Obama, whose prime money source was Wall Street. Of course black America 
– historically the most radical of all the Democratic Party’s constituencies, 
was almost unanimously behind Obama and will remain loyal to the end. Having 
easily beguiled the left in the important primary campaigns of 2008, essentially 
by dint of skin tone and uplift, Obama stepped into the Oval Office confident 
that the left would present no danger as he methodically pursues roughly the 
same agenda as Bush, catering to the requirements of the banks, the arms 
companies and the national security establishment in Washington, most notably 
the Israel lobby.

As Obama ramps up troop presence in Afghanistan, there is still no anti war 
movement, such as there was in 2002-4 during Bush’s attack on Iraq. The labor 
unions have been shrinking relentlessly in numbers and clout. Labor’s last major 
victory was the UPS strike in 1997. Its footsoldiers and its money are still 
vital for Democratic candidates – but corporate America holds the decisive 
purse-strings, from which a U.S. Supreme Court decision on January 21 has now 
removed almost all restraints.

Labor has seen its most cherished goal in recent years vanish down the plug. 
This was Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)amendments to the National Labor 
Relations Act (NLRA) that would help boost organizing and bargaining in the 
private sector. The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show why 
EFCA is necessary, if not entirely sufficient, for a union revival. As Steve 
Early wrote here last week organized labor in private industry lost 10 per cent 
of its membership in 2009 mainly in manufacturing and construction--the worst 
annual decline in the last quarter century. Obama was explicit, even in the 
campaign, in telling labor leaders that as president he would not press labor 
law reform.

For the rest of his term Obama, can press forward with the neoliberal agenda 
that has now flourished through six presidencies. He and the Democratic Party 
display insouciance towards the left’s anger. Rightly so. What have they to fear?

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02052010.html

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