Does the Project of the Left Have a Future?

Abstract

These days, I am not always sure what the correct line is on child rearing or daytime TV, much less the shape of things to come of the American or world body politic. So it is with certain trepidation that I take up here the question of the renewal of the Left. At one time, I was deeply involved in the effort to create socialist movement in this country. In particular, I was one of the architects of the 1980 merger between the New American Movement-a spin-off from the breakup of Students for Democratic Society (SDS)-and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that produced Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which, for better or worse, is still the largest explicitly socialist organization in the United States. It was, however, the relative failure of DSA-or at least what I perceived as its relative failure (since what we had in mind in making the merger was creating what Stanley Aronowitz called at the time a small mass party