Between the 30s and the 60s – Murray Bookchin

“I strongly doubt if we will ever understand—and fully evaluate—the 60s without placing it against the background of another radical decade, the 30s. Having lived out both periods up to the hilt, I find that my older contemporaries as well as the younger people with whom I worked twenty years ago have seldom been able to distance themselves sufficiently from their time to draw these crucial comparisons adequately. Recent biographies by old New York socialists and communists who lived with such nostalgic exhilaration in the era climaxed by the Spanish Civil War and CIO organizing drives seem utterly estranged and uncomprehending in their attitudes toward the ‘new left’ and counterculture. By the same token, the younger people of ’68 and of New York’s Lower Eastside and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury have either romanticized the era of their elders or disdained it as completely irrelevant. None of these viewpoints and attitudes does justice to the issues that relate these two decades in a strangely symbiotic interaction. We get much closer to the truth, I think, if we recognize that the 60s are particularly significant because they tried to deal with problems that 30s’ radicalism left completely unresolved. And both decades lacked a clear consciousness of how these problems were rooted in the need to create a radical movement for the United States. Let me emphasize my remarks on the need for an American movement—a movement that could deal with uniquely American problems and function within a distinctively American context. The failure of 30s’ radicalism to meet this need played a major, if negative, role in the emergence of the “new left” and the counterculture of the 60s—this, to be sure, and the special social conditions that marked the postwar era. Ironically, neither generation fully understood the dynamics of its own development in these terms. In both decades, ‘the movement’ collapsed in large part for lack of this understanding, each generation maliciously back-biting the other, drifting in large numbers into the “system” or splintering into a variety of dogmatic sects and exotic academic conclaves that live a largely campus-bound existence. Let me start this comparison by emphasizing two features about the ‘red 30s.’ 30s’ radicalism was neither an American movement nor a movement whose ‘revolution had failed.’ The word ‘betrayal’ springs much too easily into radical accounts of a movement whose fate was already predestined by the nature of the workers’ movement as a whole. For the moment, it suffices to point out that the sizeable communist and smaller socialist parties that gave their imprint to the 30s were rooted in European immigrants who had brought thoroughly exogenous ideas of socialism and anarchism to the United States. …”
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ROAR: Celebrating the power of ideas: a tribute to Murray Bookchin
W – Murray Bookchin
1960s: Days of Rage – Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Anarchy and Organization: A Letter To The Left (1969), Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action – Nadja Millner-Larsen