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Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal

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Breines borrows her subtitle from Marcuse's description of people who rejected the dominant mores of Western society's middle class. Minorities, students, free thinkers, and others "who could not or would not share in the coercive consumerism and conformism of late capitalist society" (p. xv) stand at the center of this study of the New Left movement. Breines explores the political means by which these groups attempted to create alternatives to the institutions they rejected. Necessary to such an exploration is a political interpretation of activities and ideas which, on the surface, conventionally appear as "apolitical" or "unpolitical." The author supports her approach with precedents set in the works of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill; unlike her predecessors, however, Breines focuses on the movement's leadership rather than the rank and file. Relying on activists' and observers' memoirs, organizational leaflets, underground papers, and her own memory, Breines's analysis draws from cultural history, social history, and sociological theories of organization.

Implicit in her study is a search for why the New Left failed to spawn a coherent, united coalition which might have furthered shared social aims. The "problems and experiments" of the New Left, she writes, are relevant to any impulse to make "democratic change in America" (p. xii). In her search she sees conflict between two sides of the New Left: 1) political strategists (whom Todd Gitlin and others have called the "Old Guard") and 2) an anti-hierarchical, seemingly anti-organizational element which opposed the New Left's strategic politics. Gitlin referred to this faction as the "second generation"; several scholars have concurred with Gitlin that the latter faction set an undisciplined, destructive course which led to wide public disapproval of the New Left. Breines, however, links the latter impulse to an early civil rights ethos--"prefigurative politics"--and thus places it at the fountainhead of New Left consciousness. At the heart of her story she argues that, contrary to the conventional interpretation of this impulse, the "wariness of hierarchy and centralized organization" cannot be easily dismissed as the work of anti-intellectual anarchists. Prefigurative politics lent itself to a "deeper, subjective political meaning" than did the rules of strategic power brokering. It descended from the Civil Rights Movement's aim to create "the beloved community"--i.e., to allow the social reform organization to become a microcosm of the ideal society. Breines reads this community-oriented philosophy in the formation of such New Left counter-institutions as the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), which sought to organize the poor and unemployed in northern cities. Thus, for Breines, anti-hierarchical leadership did not preclude thoughtful, conscious attempts at organization; rather, they posited social reform which focused more immediately on political means than on political ends. Moreover, for a prefigurative political activist, a just society required that the means not be divorced from the ends: sanity and justice could be achieved in both.