NEW RADICALISM
41
filiates have yoked their supposedly "subjective" response to an en–
larging critique of this society, and have set out to build opposition
movements in Negro and white ghettoes, among other places. No good;
they are now charged with elitism, subjectivism, and arrogance. Sup–
pose that some of these new activists come to Negro and white ghettoes,
not "in search of meaning," but to find out
if
it is possible to develop
and share their critique of society with people who have experienced
qualitatively different and perhaps more damaging forms of material
deprivation, social and political oppression, and those varied forms
of social and psychic detachment we call alienation. The attempt may
be misguided, even foolish; is it elitist? Many of the new activists
may well know more at this point than Rustin does about how un–
suitable poor whites and poor Negroes are to form the political
constituency the new activists are trying to build. But the answers
are not yet in, and they were certainly not obvious before the new
activists began to work. The first evidence from the larger projects
(JOIN in Chicago, NCUP in Newark) suggests both more ambiguity
and more possibility than Rustin's judgments permit. What if Rustin,
and all the sociologists who argue that the socially disruptive factors
and the ignorance of organization which supposedly characterize the
Negro community and preclude effective political organization, are
wrong, and the new activists succeed in building a small, but vocal,
radical movement? Would not that movement increase the chances
for the change Rustin's projected coalition urges? His projected
liberal-radical movement would have a smaller, more radical force
to its left-a singular alteration of the dynamics of American politics.
What Rustin and
his
colleagues refuse to understand is that the
acceptance of
Realpolitik
precludes the possibility of transcendence;
coalition politics dooms us to a reformist role within a society cur–
rently locked into an increasingly debilitating stasis. Our politics, and
the possibilities for political choice and education among our youth,
have been disastrously skewed and limited by the absence of any
radical movement or party; coalitionists should understand that the
chances for the ameliorative transformations they urge would be
increased if such a movement or party, however small, built enough
of a base to achieve national recognition.
8. My final argument may seem churlish. It is based on Rustin's
admission that the coalition he seeks to form has not yet emerged.
Why, then, must he and those he calls "others of my persuasion,"
