Our Generation began life as Our Generation Against Nuclear War, and was the theoretical journal of the Canadian peace movement. The magazine was edited—nurtured, cajoled, muscled, and otherwise kept alive—by a remarkable radical, Dimitrios Roussopoulos. Dimitri asked me to speak at a meeting he organized at Canadian Socialist Studies Conference in the fall of 1993; it was to be on the legacy of the new left, and I was to come on as a new leftist might. This effusion is the result. Many in the audience got a kick out of it, though a satisfactory number of Strident Feminists walked out as I talked.
THE LEGACY OF THE NEW LEFT by Anthony Hyde  You’ve asked me to say a few words about ‘the legacy’ of the New Left — which is to say, the time of my youth — and of course I must begin by noting how discouraging, even distressing, such an assignment must be. For ‘legacy’ clearly implies conclusion, termination, the dispersal of assets — and worse. Of course I’m aware that time has passed. My capacity for brandy has undoubtedly diminished and some mornings I do feel, attempting to arise, as if I had one foot in the grave. But apparently it’s even worse than I’d thought. It seems that I’m speaking to you, like some New Age Spirit, from the other side of the Great Divide.
And perhaps my first task is to face up to this disturbing truth with you. Even if my corporeal presence testifies to some last spark of life, it’s clearly a fluke. I’m a hopeless anachronism — indeed, that’s why I may be useful. I can testify about a lost time and place, a vanished culture, like an ancient Seminole chief discovered up some ultimate Florida swamp by a go-ahead real-estate man. Brought back to civilization, he must now pass his final years surrounded by graduate students with their whirring tape-recorders, busy notebooks and all those questions for their theses. And of course it’s impossible. Obligatorily, the theses will be written, but really no one will understand a word I say. The gulf is too wide. Almost no one today shares my experience, my traditions, my thoughts, my beliefs, my myths — above all, my feelings.
Let me note a few of those beliefs, just to indicate how hopeless true comprehension must be.
I believe in liberation. As in liberation movement, as in Liberation Magazine. As in sexual liberation. As in fucking. As, in my case, fucking women. Fucking, screwing, balling, making love not war — call it what you will; but if you don’t get that right, you won’t get anything right, for that’s where everything must begin. Let me recall to mind the words of a fine old chant:
*What what what what * *What what what what * *Whatta ya gonna do * *After the orgy I wanta make friends * *After the orgy… I wanta be your friend * *I wanta be your friend * *I wanta be your friend * *After the orgy ends I wanta be your friend * *I wanta be your friend * *I wanta be your friend * *I wanta be your friend * *I wanta be your friend * *After the orgy ends I wanta be your friend I be your friend I wanta be your friend What are you going to do * *After the orgy I wanna read Blake with you * *After the orgy I wanna eat something too * *After the orgy I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal * *After we pet and ball I hope that won’t be all * *I wanta be your pal.. *
and so on and so on and so on… Such sentiments — drawn from Tuli Kupferberg and The Fugs, nineteen sixty whatever-the-hell-it-was — can be called mindless, but I fear I still share them today. Men and women are to fuck and the Feminist Thought Police should trade in their pussies for Bibles and bluestockings and admit who and what they really are.
And this gets worse, I’m afraid. Not only do I believe in Liberation and Free Love, but I still believe in Free Thought and Free Speech.
Free Speech. FSM. You see how difficult this is…. Those initials will mean little to you but they still mean a great deal to me. The Free Speech Movement, Berkeley, the fall of 1964. A great deal started there, with the idea that the university should be the home of free speech and free thought, including political speech and political thought. And I still believe it. Of course, today, very few academics and students believe in free speech, otherwise they couldn’t be in universities, for in the United States at least 300 universities and colleges have promulgated Codes on ‘word crimes’ dictating what people can say. I will quote from one which is particularly poignant to me because it is in force at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor — which is where all the first SDS people came from. Like most, this code outlaws any utterance:
...based on race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orienta- tion, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam era status that has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment for academic pursuits, employment, housing or participa- tion in a university activity.
As a practical matter, this prohibition of any meaningful speech in universities probably has little effect, for few academics actually wish to think and not one in a thousand has anything to say. But old habits, you see, die hard. I’ll object anyway. I’ll think what I want, speak as I choose. The English language belongs to me — not Judy Rebick or Michelle Landsberg, or such Bibles of the politically correct as The Globe and Mail Style Book — and it lives in my mouth. Faggot is excellent English. So is fuck. So is Revolution. So is Peace. So is Freedom. So is come, as Lenny Bruce knew. So is bread, as Lenin knew. And all of these words, uttered in public, have been known to create an “offensive environment”, indeed civil disturbance. But I’m not ashamed of any of them, nor am I ashamed of my loyalty to the tradition of their free expression.
But there you go — I’m not ashamed. Perhaps this lack of shame defines the true dimensions of the Great Divide. I don’t feel guilty. Or, to be precise, the only thing I feel guilty about is that I feel guilty at all — what guilt I do feel, I work hard to overcome.
I’m white, for example. And I don’t feel guilty about it, not in the least, because I don’t identify myself as a member of a racial tribe — I’m sufficiently secure in my own identity — and I refuse to look at others in that way. Even if they desire that I should see them otherwise, when I look at a black person all I see is a black person. Of course this means that I spend a lot of time fighting back nausea, especially when reading liberal newspapers or at dinner parties of a social democratic persuasion. In such milieux you will hear the most astounding things, locutions, for example, like women of colour. Let me tell you something. Sane, healthy people don’t talk about themselves, or other people, this way. And all they prove is that they’ve never been sufficiently close to a black woman to share a drink or a laugh, let alone squeeze her sweet black ass.
I’m also male, and I’m not guilty about that either — although clearly, as a white male, I’m supposed to be the root of all evil. Recently I received in the post something called a National Survery of Canadian Men, which asks a series of ludicrously loaded questions about men and violence and then wants me to contribute money to something called the December Fund to “help prevent men’s violence against women.” Any man who contributes to this fund is sick in the head; rather more than implicitly he is accepting responsibility for, and identifying with, the actions of a mad-man — the unfortunate who murdered a number of female undergraduates in Montreal in 1989. Well, I don’t go along. Again, I define myself as an individual human being not as sexual representative. I’ve been making love not war since 1962 and what others do with their auto- matic rifles may be my concern but it’s not my responsibility. And the proposition that there’s a culture of male violence could not be more ludicrous. Indeed, exactly the opposite is true: the ‘problem’ is the break- down of that culture. I belong to the first generation of men in this century — white, educated, North American men I might say — who refused in significant numbers to submit themselves to the inhumanity of war, who explicitly rejected values based on violent death, who insisted that you express your manliness with your cock in bed not with a gun on a battlefield, and who did not confuse the two.
Of course, both the insistence and the refusal were the product of a considerable cultural and social evolution, and it has had equally vast consequences, not least for the American military, and not least for American feminists: who, quite precisely suffering from the confusion between sex and violence my generation of men rejected, have been attempting to reverse this evolution by again tightly regulating sexual behaviour and expression in law, and, at the psychological level, by encouraging repression and guilt everywhere. But the guilt, you see, is their problem, not mine.
And lastly I’m not guilty about being a Westerner, an Anglo-Saxon, literate, a book man. I write novels for a living — complex works of the imagination dependent upon grammar, the dictionary meaning of words, and some cultural reference. I do this in a tradition, a tradition defined by white, western, supposedly repressive males, and I love them all and am ashamed of none of them, including the homosexual blacks like James Baldwin. “No man is an island intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Maine… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
If women or people outside the West cannot identify with these lines, that’s their loss, and I’m sorry — but they say what I believe and who I am, and I’m not ashamed of myself.
Well, surely I can stop there. I presume I have convincingly demonstrated my own irrelevance — so far as I’m concerned, the word ‘legacy’ pretty much sums it up. I’m dead. I’ve just been scribbling notes for my epitaph. Politically, in a world of feminists and gays, of people campaigning for tribal rights of every kind, I find myself in total isolation, and indeed am not politically active in any organized way. Who would come to my meetings? And, as you have doubtless gathered, I sure wouldn’t want to go to theirs.
But does that mean that the New Left has had no influence at all?
As I hover spectrally above the current political scene can I recognize nothing of myself? Is there no hint that I passed this way?
The answer, despite my current irrelevance, is yes: the New Left has had its influence, an influence now so completely integrated into current political theory and practice that we no longer recognize it for what it is, or was. And perhaps we are even inclined to devalue this influence for precisely that reason; since we can assume it, why worry about it at all? Indeed, seen from the perspective of the present — though that is a qualification I want you to bear in mind — the legacy of the New Left is not difficult to understand, or even especially controversial. It really consists in a redefinition of politics, of what the word comprehends. This redefinition took place along three lines. First, the subject matter of politics, the issues and questions the word could legitimately include. Second, the definition of legitimate political actors — who could participate in the political process. And thirdly, how politics should be conducted — the legitimate modalities of political action.
Let me take these points in order.
When I first began doing politics it was very narrowly defined, restricted to the ‘issues’ of elections and the political parties, and was equally expected to stay within the narrow bounds of the formal political process. lime and again, as a young person, you would raise a question, which you considered political, only to have it dismissed; that’s moral or spiritual or psychological, your elders would say, not suitable for political discussion at all.
And, coming in the other direction, the inclusion of political themes outside of their accepted sphere would invariably incur suspicion. That was controversial. That was trouble-making. So playwrights and novelists who attempted to deal with political themes would find their work scorned and ignored, and even men of the cloth — timidly raising the question of “peace” from their pulpits — would meet a stony reception from their congregations. Why can’t he stick to the Bible? Why does he want to go stirring up trouble?
Remember, this was the Age of Conformity. You talked about baseball and hairdos, and you certainly didn’t read Lady Chatterly’s Lover — it couldn’t be legally published. It was a time, wrote C.Wright Mills, “in which issues are blurred and debate muted,” in which “the sickness of complacency has prevailed, the bipartisan banality flourished,” when even intellectuals indulged in “a celebration of apathy.” Now we attacked all this — and we attacked from a number of directions. First, and crucially — for this was the lychpin of the whole system — we attacked the stasis of the Cold War. Happily, younger people will probably not recall how cold that war was, but I can assure you that the epithet was accurate enough. Everything was frozen. A brutal totalitarianism abroad was used to justify a stultifying domestic oppression. Dissent was not quite treason, but it certainly called forth official suspicion, and any questioning of the status quo was seen as offering aid and comfort to the enemy. To think or act, you had to step outside this system — which is what James M. Minifie was trying to do with a book like Peacemaker or Powdermonkey. But if neutrality was a hopeless proposition for Canada — the Poland of the Nuclear Age — it was the particular contribution of the early peace movement to discover a small moral patch to stand on, then expand it politically. Bertrand Russell, the Committee of One Hundred, organs like the* Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,* and in Canada groups like the CUCND, opened the debate simply by insisting that there had to be some alternative to the MAD status quo — the status quo, that is, of Mutual Assured Destruction. That was a vital step. Once the possibility of an alternative was admitted, defining it established a political agenda for the first time in many years.
But we also attacked in the realm of ideas itself — and this was particularly important, given that so many of us were students. We attacked a concatenation of notions whose total effect was to make political thought impossible: “the end of ideology,” “value-free social science,” a strict division of “experts” and disciplines — intellectual approaches that assumed what they sought, a total integration with the status quo. With C.Wright Mills and Karl Mannheim in our pockets, we worked for an integrated social science which proclaimed and openly debated its values, and attacked the “end of ideology” for what it was — a highly ideological notion bought and paid for by the CIA.
Lastly, as important as anything else, we were ourselves. We were young. We wanted to lead political lives and so we wanted the contents of our lives to be political — in the words of the Port Huron Statment, we wanted “private problems to be public issues.” Educational questions, moral questions, sexual questions — these, we insisted, were political questions as well. Sometimes, in discussing the New Left, writers will claim that it was as much a cultural movement as political, but that misses the point: we sought conceptions of culture and politics that were broad enough to include each other.
Well — how much of this has stuck? Surely a good deal. The accepted definition of politics has enormously expanded — think of today’s sexual politics for example — and political questions can be presented and debated in a wide variety of forums, even in Hollywood films — even, God help us, on Oscar night.
The second term of the New Left’s redefinition of politics concerned who could legitimately take part in the political process. It’s fascinating, looking back at that time, to see how concerned we were with the question of elites. We read The Power Elite of course, but some of us even read Pareto and many pored over all those ‘community’ and ‘stratification’ studies that were done in the thirties, forties and fifties — by the Lynds, Lloyd Warner, and so forth.
This interest was entirely reasonable. We were concerned with power and were trying to understand how a small group of individuals and institutions had gained a monopoly over it. Above all, we sought clues as to how this monopoly could be broken. For the other side of the coin was equally important. This was the question of agency: which social groups could be mobilized to effect social change? There were a variety of answers — the working class of the Marxists; for C.Wright Mills, the intellectual — but all involved bringing people and groups outside the political process into it as legitimate political actors. Indeed, the first eruption of the New Left into the consciousness of mainstream America was found precisely here, in the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Rides of the Mississippi Summer. That movement was explicitly concerned with registering blacks to vote, to bringing them into the political process in at least that nominal way. But, more generally, the organizing efforts of the New Left were concerned to empower those who were dispossessed in the hope that this process would itself create change. We wanted to expand politics, in terms of both issues and actors, and then explode it.
Again, how much of this stuck? Let’s not kid ourselves; this country is still ruled by elites, whose best known representative lives on Pennsyl- vania Avenue in Washington, D.C. But it’s probably true that our elites have a little tougher time today. There are more voices heard in the room, more seats at the table. All manner of social groupings now see themselves as political, and individuals are far more likely to see themselves as political actors too.
Finally, the New Left effected an enormous change in how politics is carried on, in the modalities of political action. When we began, politics meant elections contested by political parties of virtually identical political beliefs — “ping-gong” politics, we used to say. It was a politics in which there was no room for new ideas, certainly not ours, and no room for the new political actors we wanted to thrust upon the stage. So we acted differently. At a tactical level, this was apparent at the time. Drawing on the pacifist movement — the Ghandian movement — we staged sit-ins, teach-ins, and innumerable other kinds of demonstrations. We invented a new militancy, and a new style of militancy. We put politics into the streets — and gave street people a variety of tools with which to express themselves politically. We created, through our political action, enough positive examples to show ordinary people that politics was something that they could do, that they had power and could use it. And even now, in these bleak times, you can still see a little of this. The formal political process, however phoney, has had to open up. There are fewer closed doors, more “consultations.” And authority must conduct itself with the knowledge that political pressure can come from unexpected quarters at unexpected times, in unexpected ways.
I suppose I should stop here. The New Left’s legacy, one can honestly conclude, has been modest, but definite, and after declaring our appreciation we should probably leave the whole enterprise to rest in peace; I’m certainly prepared to let others do the judging.
But there’s a problem.
As noted, I’ve been defining the New Left’s influence in terms of current, contemporary political life — looking at the New Left from this present, that’s what I see. But the present is always changing, which leads to that old truism that nothing is more alive and changeable than history — each day we see it differently. And I’m afraid, you see, that our present is soon to be altered out of all recognition. I stand by what I’ve said — but I fear it may be transitory, of only fleeting relevance.
The easiest way to explain, perhaps, is to do just the opposite of what I’ve done till now. That is, I want to note certain aspects of the New Left which can’t be found in the current scene, parts of the New Left’s legacy which remain unclaimed.
First, we don’t have to subscribe to myths about the Flower Children to see that the emotional and intellectual tenor of that period was utterly different from today. The New Left was about openness, self-exploration, discovery. Born into a self-confident time, especially economically, we were prepared, even overjoyed, to challenge every assumption we’d been given. We took a lot of drugs, read forbidden books, and fucked our brains out. We rejected violence. We rejected racial definitions and racial hatred. Looking back at that time, it seems to me that the New Left had only one dirty word — manipulation. Because, you see, we rejected guilt and “power trips” — reflections in our own thought and personal relations of the values and the world we rejected.
But how much of that has stuck? Not much. Look around you. Listen. Listen to rap music — there’s a lot to listen to. Lots of protest, certainly. Lots of anger. But not much love. Or think of contemporary, mainstream feminism, building a politics of repression around rape, stalking, abuse — anger and fear and guilt — and finding ‘solutions’ in censorship and incarceration.
In the New Left, the emotional structure was utterly different from this. Which had a crucial intellectual corollary. For the New Left, ideas were never received; they were always heuristic, exploratory, subject to revision. Others had the Book of the Month. We had the Book of the Week — Goodman, Ellul, Adorno, Marcuse, Gorz, Laing, Althusser. New Left intellectuals would chew through a couple generations of German intellectuals during the spring, then take on the French over the summer. Ideas were exciting, but they were never ‘right’ and they always led on to others. The hallmark of a New Left political meeting was somebody, probably Judy Pocock, saying, “Yes, but are you sure that’s the right question?” Questions, you see, interested us more than answers. We treasured doubt. We were all too familiar with certainty — for that’s what oppressed us. To the New Left, the idea of “political correctness” would have been inconceivable, and inconceivably boring.
But now, again, certainty reigns. On the left — or what passes for it — everything is known. There are no questions. The line is laid down. Thought is used to exclude, to label, to determine loyalty: Communism has failed but Stalinism is triumphant — the accused, by definition, is always guilty. As Doris Lessing has pointed out:
The phrase Political Correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance… habits of mind have been absorbed without even knowing it. It troubles me that Political Correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.
Amongst militant liberals, the ‘end of ideology’ has returned, now under the guise of ‘rights,’ which is just another attempt to deny politics, in this case by carrying it into the ‘neutral’ realm of judicial decision. At both the emotional and intellectual levels, then, the openness of the New Left has been lost, abandoned.
And there is a very important consequence of this loss. Prepared to question every assumption in our own lives, we were therefore prepared to question the fundamental assumptions of society. That is, we believed in revolution. We had the will — the commitment — to be revolutionary.
You can laugh at that, given what was achieved, but the will, that commitment, was important in and of itself. We did not seek reform. We did not petition or lobby for this law or that, this programme or that, because we assumed that nothing could satisfy our wants but the overturning of all laws and all programmes. That status quo had nothing to offer. We sought revolution; politely, basic social change — or, as we some- times put it, the transvaluation of values. We were not interested in the problems of blacks or poor people, in a sense even of peace, in a reformist sense; we believed, rather, that mobilizing people around those questions could lead to a wider mobilization — that one could move from those particular problems to the general problem.
Again there was a corollary to this, or an assumption. We assumed that what opposed us, society, was both coherent and comprehensible. And we tried to understand it. Like Woody Allen, we were always ‘in analysis.’
By and large, naturally, we failed. For most of the history of the New Left we were so unsure of our understanding that we simply labelled what oppressed us as ‘the system.’ But our failure to understand that ‘system,’ though important, was not anywhere near as important as the assumption on which our attempt at understanding was predicated. Indeed, to believe that the world is coherent and comprehensible is to possess one of the most dangerous and empowering ideas of all. It even gave us power — for one thing, the power to have a strategy, to join with others. If the ‘system’ had a unity, then so did those who opposed it — black people and poor people and people dying in Vietnam had something in common with me; and I didn’t feel guilty for them or because of them, I had the freedom to feel sorrow.
Now, of course, it’s all different; here is one part of the New Left’s legacy you won’t find anywhere. There’s no commitment to fundamental change or to much of anything else. All thought is fragmentary — and its intention, in any case, is not to understand the world but prove and advertise “political correctness.” And the problem is not simply this lack of analysis — worse, no one seems to feel that lack. And at the level of political action this incoherence and fragmentation is perfectly reflected in a banal, divided, reformist politics — feminists, gays, ecologists — which is, with little difficulty, absorbed by ‘the system.’
Lastly — at the heart of ‘the system’ — is the state. The New Left’s attitude toward the state, to be historically correct, was ambiguous, but fundamentally reflected the anarchist tradition. This was true about the New Left’s attitude toward power in general and you could see it reflected in our organizations, meetings, activities. When it came to running things, we had an expression, “Let’s ad hoc it along.” The idea of being part of an ‘umbrella organisation’ — for women, Indians, or anything else — would have struck us as bizarre. We sought alternatives to conventional arrangements of power and you could see that reflected in the youth culture of which we were a part — the commune movement, for example. We had an ‘authority problem’ and were proud of it.
But again, you see, this is all changed. Deprived of the vision and connection to history a movement provides, the left has lapsed happily into a purely social democratic politics. Half the political groups you see — elaborately organized, most of them — are funded by the state and their real business is engaging in a ‘dialogue’ with the bureaucracy. The question of agency has long since been settled by today’s political formations — the state, the state: the state is the answer and has all the answers.
But now, you see, I’ve gotten where I wanted to go. Because what we are seeing today is a degradation of the state — a degradation, I believe, that will only accelerate in the future. And this rug will pull the rug out from under the political present we share — and from which we look back upon the New Left.
Most people will probably lament that, indeed struggle against it — against all the coming cuts. Because most people, I suspect, are dependents of the state in one way or another. Moreover, likely believe in it. Believe in the state as a kind of conscience, a controller, a regulator of capitalism. In addition, find it difficult to believe that this degradation is necessary — will try to see it as a thunderous question of ideology.
But I disagree, on all counts.
In my irrelevance, I see the state rather differently. It makes me think of cattle prods and missiles and jails — not pensions and SSHRC grants. No doubt anachronistically, I still see ‘the system’ as a system — and the state is integral to it; not tacked on; not a conscience, or a source of rationality: but the centre of direction and control. Moreover, I understand that the modern state, absorbing 40%-50% of total output was created by and for war. Expressions like ‘the warfare state’ are redundancies; war is merely what states do. As one of my favourite Canadian actors put it in a recent outrageous film, “The organizing principle for any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.” So true. And the modern state has developed in this century precisely because this century has been a Hundred Years War. This war has had many different names, many different fronts, but its all been the same war, and the modern state was developed to fight it. This principle — war — and its expression — the state — have given the politics of the past century its peculiar unity. Alternating back and forth, left and right have really had the same goal. The right has directed its attentions to building the economic and strategic base of the Warfare State, while the left has put forward the claims of the Home Front, the comforts necessary to maintain social control. But it’s been the same effort. The Warfare State and the Welfare State are one and the same, merely seen from different points of view.
Without doubt the war the modern state has fought has been a terrible war and this horror — and the moral judgements it elicits — tend to make us forget an essential point: our Hundred Years War has been entirely rational. It’s been fought to determine who will control the Industrial Revolution, which is conceivably the greatest revolution in the history of man; who will control it, what political arrangements will govern it, how it will be spread throughout the world. To put this another way: the modern state has evolved to meet a particular historical need. But we usually forget this, or deny it. Children, growing up, always assume that their own circumstances apply to everyone else and my generation, growing up after the Second War, has assumed that the continuously expanding state has been both inevitable and eternal. But that’s not true. The modern state has evolved at a particular historical moment to serve a particular historical purpose — and now that moment and that purpose are passing.
I hasten to say that I don’t believe the war to be over; but its terms of engagement have now dramatically changed. To discuss those changes would carry me beyond the purpose of these remarks, but two points should be noted. First: capital, excluded for decades from Eastern Europe, Russia, Asiatic Russia, and the Chinese mainland is now free to move as it has never been before. And it will move, and it will move as it always moves — toward the highest rate of return. People like Jacques Delors who still believe that capital can be restricted in its movements dwell in a phantasy world — which is to say, the past. Second: labour will also become global. The state can no longer erect barriers against global labour competition. ‘Communism’ died in the Soviet Union and it has taken ‘socialism’ with it; economies dependent upon state sponsorship are ultimately doomed — despite the ravings of Pat Buchanan and Audrey Macglauchlin.
Of course, Karl Marx, if he was alive today, would view these developments with equanimity. He never believed for one second that peasants were going to bring about socialism, and the globalization of capital and labour would be, to him, an inevitable step as capitalism moved towards its apotheosis and final negation. But it’s hard for us to be so sanguine. What are the consequences of these great changes for Canada? What will happen to the old ‘developed’ world? How can it compete, carrying the burden of the welfare and warfare machines on its back?
In the final analysis, nothing we can do will change the main trends; there’s no doubt of our decline; it’s their turn now. But as we struggle to deal with these new realities, it seems to me that much of this struggle will revolve round the state. In my own part of the world, Ontario, about 25% of manufacturing jobs have been lost in recent years while government employment has remained virtually constant. Can such a situation persist? I doubt it. But of course the state will fight to maintain its power and the overall battle will change the face of society. How? I don’t know. But I fear the worst, and the worst will likely be fearful. Still, that’s not my point here. Because, regardless of how frightful it is, some will chose to resist. And I suspect that such people, looking about for clues, will see a New Left rather different from the one we see today. They may truly be compelled to reinvent the world; the transvaluation of values we talked about may become a pressing necessity. And some of our notions — our attitudes, our stance, our particular attempt to think and feel through the world — may be a help. If it is, the New Left will have found its true heirs.