Savio’s usual reply to remarks about left-wing influence in the F.S.M. was the statement that its Executive Committee, consisting of fifty members, included only four “revolutionary Socialists”—a figure he arrived at by adding the two representatives of the Young Socialist Alliance to the two from the DuBois Club. Savio now acknowledges that the figure was irrelevant, since membership in an organization with a revolutionary ideology was no measure of tactical radicalism within the F.S.M.; moreover, it was so far from encompassing all those who considered themselves revolutionary Socialists that he was later approached by a number of people who wanted to know why they had been left out of the count. The Berkeley campus has organizations representing just about all forms of Socialist ideology, and it is possible to hear references to people who are “rather fond of the Togliatti deviation” or are “hung up on democratic centralism.” But student radicalism at Berkeley cannot be interpreted as if it were composed of the kind of disciplined ideological warring factions that dominated the radicalism of the thirties. It is believed in some quarters that the organizations themselves are less disciplined and less ideological than those of the past. What is far more important is that the tone of student radicalism at Berkeley is set not by the old ideological groups but by people whose approach is sufficiently different from that of the thirties that they have come to think of themselves as embracing a New Radicalism. New Radicals don’t ordinarily use the term, but they constantly stress that they have a new approach to radical politics—and it was this approach that dominated the Steering Committee of the Free Speech Movement. Most F.S.M. leaders make no attempt to disguise their deep alienation from American society, but they regard allegiance to any specific alternative as utopian, divisive, immobilizing, and—perhaps most significant—not their “style.” The word “style” is widely used among the New Radicals—most of whom are indeed admirers of Fidel Castro, often because of his style—and in giving reasons for their avoidance of the old radical organizations they are as likely to cite distaste for the style of their jargon and theoretical debate as disgust with the futility of what Savio has called “spending hours trying to invent a motto that makes you different from other sects.” While part of this preference for dissociation is undoubtedly a desire to avoid tarnished labels, the New Radicals consciously avoid in their own activities the automatic condemnation of Communists—“pathological anti-Stalinism,” in their phrase—that has come to characterize the non-Communist left in the United States during the Cold War, and they count it as one of the accomplishments of the F.S.M. that the DuBois Club could be represented on the Steering Committee without any more objection than was made.
In place of ideology, the New Radicals tend to rely on action. “The word ‘existential’ is used a lot,” Jack Weinberg told me. Weinberg, who is twenty-four, is a full-time unpaid activist; he wears a droopy mustache and work clothes, and in the pictures taken during his imprisonment in The Police Car he somehow managed to resemble both Sacco and Vanzetti. “You could call it an affirmation of self,” he went on. “Just because we can’t see what the end might be doesn’t mean we’re going to sit here. It’s a matter of screaming. We have to justify everything in terms of the act itself. The trouble with being ideologically oriented is that it’s immobilizing; you have to justify all kinds of things in terms of the ideology. We’re really problem-oriented. Utopia is too far away to worry about. F.S.M. had a limited goal, but look what happened. Look at the effect it could have on educational policy and student activism across the country. Who could have planned that?”
Although Savio is considered the most moralistic of the New Radicals, all of them explain their conclusion that America is “sick” or “evil” at least partly in moral terms—emphasizing that American society is not what it claims to be, that it engages in sham and hypocrisy, that those in control are not concerned with “telling it like it is” (a phrase borrowed from the S.N.C.C. workers in Mississippi). The New Radicals ordinarily share the views of the far left on foreign affairs, but more orthodox leftists are sometimes dismayed to find Savio and Weissman, for instance, apparently more concerned with the idea that the American government is being hypocritical about why it is fighting in Vietnam than with the idea that the United States is engaging in an “imperialistic colonial war.” Suzanne Goldberg, a graduate student in philosophy from New York, who is a member of the F.S.M. Steering Committee, has explained this moral tone by saying, “It’s really a strange kind of naïveté. What we learned in grammar school about democracy and freedom nobody takes seriously, but we do. We really believe it. It’s impossible to grapple with the problem of the structure of the whole world, but you try to do something about the immediate things you see that bother you and are within your reach.”
Because of this approach, the New Radicals often engage in a kind of ad-hoc activism directed at specific problems whose solutions are no more than the stated goals of American democracy—free speech, the right to vote, the right to fair employment and housing. Obviously, it is in the field of civil rights that the most inconsistency is to be found between what the American structure says it is and what it is, and often the New Radicals work in Mississippi with S.N.C.C., as Savio did last summer, or work with some of the more radical CORE chapters or with ad-hoc committees on such projects as rent strikes and sit-ins over hiring policy, or organizing ghetto communities. Since they take the position of demanding only what society claims to be giving in the first place, they tend to be contemptuous of gradualism or of compromise in negotiations. “We ask for what we should get, not for what we could get,” Miss Goldberg says. Their techniques are often extra-legal, and they save their ultimate contempt for people who express agreement with their goals but not with their methods. “ ‘Liberal’ is a dirty word here,” Weinberg told me. “Liberalism is a trap. It’s the impotence of having principles that make you opposed to something and other principles that keep you from doing anything about it.” New Radicals ordinarily have little faith that anything can be accomplished by the “Liberal Establishment.” Any mention of the American Communist Party is usually greeted with the scornful remark that the Party backed Lyndon Johnson in the last election, and the same kind of criticism is made of the DuBois Club—which, one of its members admitted to me half apologetically, “does believe in cooperation with non-Socialist groups.” At Berkeley, where a number of the students are the children of Communists and other radicals of the thirties—they are often called “red-diaper babies”—a conversation about a member of the DuBois Club sometimes sounds like the sort of conversation that is held at other state universities about people who felt compelled to join Sigma Chi because of a family tradition. The one organization whose style seems to be almost universally respected among the New Radicals is S.N.C.C.; its project in Mississippi is admired for its moral tone, for its patient organizing of impoverished Negroes, for its activism, and for its frequent refusal to accept the advice of liberals.
One evening, I asked Savio for a description of the New Radicalism, and he said, “Certain words are more useful. Maybe they’re a bit too theatrical. Words like ‘moral protest,’ ‘existential revolt,’ ‘alienation’—as opposed to ‘class conflict’ or ‘forces of proletarian revolution.’ We’re talking about the same objective reality, but it’s a question of being more tentative. I don’t know if all our problems would vanish if we had a state monopoly on production and distribution. I don’t have a Utopia in mind. I know it has to be a good deal more egalitarian than it is now. Maybe the classic Marxist models and the classic Adam Smith models don’t apply anymore. There are a lot of people who have enough to eat who are incredibly resentful, because their lives are meaningless. They’re psychologically dispossessed. There’s a feeling that they have nothing to do; the bureaucracy runs itself. Why are we so alienated? I would say for three reasons: depersonalization, hypocrisy, and the unearned privilege that comes with great wealth. The country’s forms aren’t so bad, if we would take them seriously, if som
ebody were willing to say the Emperor had no clothes. The worst thing about the society is that it lies to itself. Look at the last election. The two subjects that were not issues in the campaign were Vietnam and civil rights. What’s the choice? What can you do in a situation like that? Oh, add to the good words ‘anti-bureaucratic tendency.’ American radicals are traditionally anarchistic, and that tendency is very strong here.”
People here who try to define the New Radicalism in traditional terms usually say it resembles anarcho-syndicalism more than anything else, since it is characterized by a belief that laws and regulations have to be justified and by a dislike for centralized bureaucracy. The ideological radical who has been closest to the radical student leaders at Berkeley is Hal Draper, a long-time Socialist editor, in his fifties, who now works in the university library. Draper’s Independent Socialist Club, according to its statement of principles, stands for “a Socialist policy which is completely independent of and opposed to both of the reactionary systems of exploitation of man by man which now divide the world: capitalism and Communism.” In discussions with the New Radicals, Draper often argues that however much they insist on avoiding labels, their views amount to what in any other country would be called Left-Wing Socialism. But although Weinberg belonged for a time to Draper’s Independent Socialist Club (it has many members in common with CORE), and although Weissman has said that Draper’s ideas come closer to making sense to him than those of any other ideologist, the New Radicals insist that programs and theories cannot express their style, and they deny that this leaves them with nothing but negativism. “I think the student activist movement does offer new ideas,” I was told by Martin Roysher, a polite, articulate, scholarly-looking sophomore from southern California, who transferred to Berkeley from Princeton because he wanted more political activity. “When the structure is challenged, the response may not often be exactly what we want, but it’s helpful. Take the wide range of student demonstrations—sit-ins, rent strikes, organizing the communities. They definitely bring about changes in the power structure. It doesn’t take the students very long to realize that the structure is pretty corrupt when it has to bring in the cops.”
Many Berkeley people who are well acquainted with the Free Speech Movement say that the most “political”—and some say the most influential—of the F.S.M. leaders is Steve Weissman, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student from Tampa who has red hair and a pointed red beard and usually dresses in Ivy League style. Weissman told me he had considered becoming a full-time organizer for Students for a Democratic Society this semester but had decided to continue studying history instead. “I think we are arriving at a philosophy,” he said. “There aren’t many people, but it is a new voice. I think it represents the thinking of a lot more people, and thirty percent of the student body bought our style. It’s exemplified by S.N.C.C. in Mississippi; about the only other people working full time are forty or fifty Students for a Democratic Society people in the slum-organization projects. Politically, there’s a feeling that while other groups may be necessary sometimes, there’s no use celebrating coalitions. You take a direct line outside the normal arena and force the liberals to make a choice. What we’re against is consensus politics—the idea of finding out what the regents will give before you ask for it. That’s one thing. Something we’re for is certain values for the future—a kind of democratic participation, letting people have some control over their lives, the way S.N.C.C. is organizing people in the Freedom Democratic Party right at the ward level, or the way students are asking for participation in the university, or the way we’re trying to get poor people involved in the war on poverty, instead of just professors. In a way, the people we’re closest to are the Populists, or the narodniki—the intellectuals in Russia who went out and worked with the peasants. Sure, we see connections from different issues. Our values are radical. We don’t automatically accept the value of institutions, and we admit going beyond the normal American equality, because we include economic equality. We do accept the Socialist criticism of American capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we buy any particular solution.”
I asked Weissman about the charge sometimes made that many of the New Radicals have so profound a distaste for the society that the immediate goal of their action is less important to them than fomenting trouble or demonstrating the sickness of the society or, as some critics at Berkeley have asserted, attempting to undermine faith in the democratic processes.
“You’re not naïve enough not to realize that there’s a grain of truth in that,” Weissman said. “And I’m willing to grant that our alienation is deep enough so that we underrate the possibility of channels sometimes. But the conspiracy theory really comes down to Red-baiting or bed-baiting; it’s either an attempt to make people think it’s all a Communist plot or some Freudian theory that we’re all just revolting against our parents. The criticism that it’s a conspiracy would be valid only if we didn’t make any progress toward our ostensible goals, and I don’t think they can show any place where we haven’t.”
I suggested to Weissman that one reason for the conspiracy theory might be that there appears to be a gap between what one professor has called “working for liberal goals with radical methods” and changing the structure of society.
“It bothered me for a while that the end of radical politics seems to be increasing the welfare state,” Weissman said. “Breaking down of hiring-policy rights with demonstrations just means some kind of federal fair-employment agency. Well, some changes are made and we’re doing what has to be done. Maybe we’re developing constituencies; that’s more than the ideologists are doing. Maybe it means that the people are there to make a revolution if we ever decide that’s what’s needed.”
It is generally agreed at Berkeley that the membership of the ideological clubs is more than matched by the students who fall roughly into the category of New Radicals. It is the New Radicalism, rather than the old, that comes near to expressing some of the dissatisfaction felt by students who would not consider themselves radicals, and it was the New Radicalism that led to the Free Speech Movement. Some professors were disturbed by what they felt was a tone of near anti-intellectualism in the F.S.M., and this seems closely related to the New Radicals’ tendency to emphasize action at the expense of theorizing, to explain themselves in moral rather than intellectual terms, to stress political rights rather than academic disciplines, and to insist that an issue is more important than an institution. Critics of the New Radicals have said that their style works best against liberals—who have a respect for institutions and for channels, and who also have a distaste for meeting mass action with force—and it is true that liberals seem to have extraordinary difficulty in communicating with them, or, to use a phrase often heard in Berkeley, “tuning in on them.” For many observers, one of the ironies of the controversy lay in the fact that the chief villain was Clark Kerr, a man of widely praised liberal accomplishments, who had himself been given an award for liberalizing the regulations concerning free speech at the University of California, and who had himself—in a series of Godkin lectures at Harvard, later published as The Uses of the University—pointed out the elements of the modern American “multiversity” that would cause alienation and perhaps revolt among the students. But the F.S.M. leaders seemed not at all surprised to find Kerr their bitterest opponent, for without some special effort at understanding a liberal would find that many of his tenets were handicaps in dealing with the New Radicals. A liberal’s faith that wrongs can eventually be adjusted within the democratic processes is treated with contempt by people who believe the ends of channels to be tokenism or hypocrisy; the argument that a noisy free-speech controversy would serve the ends of right-wing opponents of the university is of no concern to people who have no great faith in institutions and consider such thinking the worst kind of “consensus politics.” The style of the New Radicals is not to avoid controversy by compromise but to keep a controversy going until they have won their point. In Decemb
er, Weissman told a gathering of graduate students that if Kerr had managed to carry the day at The Greek Theatre with a rousing speech, he would have taken the platform and used whatever oratory might have been necessary “to break the thing open again.” He has told me that if the university had not itself broken the thing open again the week before The Greek Theatre by its disciplinary action against four of the F.S.M. leaders, the students would have acquired a print of Un Chant d’Amour—a Genet film that had been banned as obscene from a student film series that week—set up a portable projector and loudspeaker, and shown the film on the wall of Sproul Hall.
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