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

by Wini Breines

Did New Left activists have an opportunity to start a revolution that they simply could not bring off? Was their rejection of conventional forms of political organization a fatal flaw or were the apparent weaknesses of the movement -- the lack of central authority, the distrust of politics -- actually hidden strengths? Wini Breines traces the evolution of the New Left movement through the Free Speech Movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and SDS's community organization projects. For Breines, the movement's goal of participatory decision-making, even when it was not achieved, made up for its failure to take practical and direct action. By the late 1960s, antiwar activism contributed to the decline of the New Left, as the movement was flooded with new participants who did not share the founding generation's political experiences or values. Originally published in 1982, Wini Breines's classic work now includes a new preface in which she reassesses, and for the most part affirms, her initial views of the movement. She argues that the movement remains effective in the midst of radical changes in activist movements. Breines also summarizes and evaluates the new and growing scholarship on the 1960s. Her provocative analysis of the New Left remains important today.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The four star rating is to some degree honorary, acknowledging Breines' contributions to a clear-headed understanding of the potential and problems with the New Left in the early/mid 60s. The best place to get that is probably in her review essay of the first wave of studies, "Whose New Left?," published in the Journal of American History in September 1988. It's an exemplary review essay, providing clear summaries of books by Gitlin, James Miller, Iserman and Mary King and sketching the contours of the developing historiography with a clarity that remains on point a quarter of a century later. Breines points out the problematic gender politics without getting bogged down; identifies the unresolved issues regarding the New Left's relationship with a rapidly changing African American freedom movement; and mounts a spirit defense of the "Prefigurative Politics" she sees--and I'd agree--as the New Left's lasting contribution. Community and Organization includes most of that, sometimes in less precise formulation; it was published in 1982, so the contours of the discussion were still forming. The book version suffers a bit from its disciplinary home in Sociology; clearly Breines needed to write it this way in part to get tenure. There's quite a bit of discussion of details of Marxist theory--for example the status of students in relation to "new working class theory"--that most readers will want to skim. But it still ranks with Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets as a useful, insightful engagement with the problems of participatory democracy.