Democracy Is in the Streets

"This is one of the best books on the New Left. It charts the ideas of the New Left through some of its most important intellectual leaders: Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby and others in Students for a Democratic Society . The New Left was a group of young radicals who started organising in the late 1950s and early 60s. They argued that the old left – that is, the communist left – had achieved certain things in the 1930s or 40s but was trapped in a dogmatic argument about the Soviet Union, pros or cons, and so was outmoded. People on the old left came of age in the Great Depression , a time of scarcity. People on the New Left went to college – which was not true of most people on the old left – and they came of age at a time of relative prosperity, when American capitalism was operating in a more egalitarian fashion than it had before in its history. So the New Left emphasised imperfections in American democracy. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It did not, at first, want to overthrow the system – at first it wanted left liberalism. The black freedom movement influenced the New Left, and the civil rights movement and racial equality were key issues for it. The Vietnam War became the second important issue, beginning in the mid-1960s when the New Left really changed. Some people began to feel a new appreciation for communism, at least as practiced by the Cubans and the Vietnamese. Some had fantasies of becoming underground guerrillas or of joining a group called The Weathermen which I was briefly a member of, unfortunately. Miller’s book charts that transition. Occupy Wall Street is a group of primarily young leftists who began, as Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] did, by making a moral critique of society, asking for enhanced democracy and relying on consensus decision-making. Eventually, SDS and the SNCC became more confrontational. Occupy Wall Street has just begun battling with police. One of my staff members just got arrested. Democracy Is in the Streets is a very good study of the evolution of a movement of young radicals from a really small group, with little influence, into a much larger group with a lot of influence on other people. Although SDS always had a hard time convincing the majority that they were on the side of average Americans. I fear that could be a problem for Occupy Wall Street as well. SDS had fewer than 2,000 members until 1965. Most of those people were active in civil rights and community organising. In 1965 SDS sponsored the first big march against the Vietnam War in [Washington] DC. That was when SDS really took off. It became an organisation with campus chapters at hundreds of colleges and even a lot of high schools around the country. It became well known because it was doing demonstrations. Sometimes students were taking over or occupying buildings, as I did when I was with SDS at Harvard."