Norman Kelley: Harold Cruse and the untimely demise of the American left.

From the Fairfield Weekly on 5/26/2005 [MORE]
By Norman Kelley
Norman Kelley is the author of The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics.  email:  kelleynd @aol.com 

With the passing on March 25 of Harold Cruse, one has to take note of the post­civil rights black intelligentsia and ask, "What has it developed in the last 40 years?" Interestingly, not much of anything except a great deal of attitude in the works of Cornel West, bell hooks and Michael Eric "Why I Love Black Women" Dyson.

Cruse, however, was a true public intellectual not a market intellectual, like the current crop of usual suspects. He wrote for popular periodicals and some left-of-center journals. His greatest claim to fame, in my view, was his seminal 1967 book,  The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual , the most searing indictment of the black intelligentsia.

 In short, Cruse argued, the black intelligentsia is incapable of having original ideas and perspectives as they pertain to the African-American situation in America. Believing in equal opportunity, Cruse also scorched and burned the Neo-African cultural movement and its questionable embrace of Afrocentrism and Kwanzaa, neither of which has led to anything noteworthy beyond greeting cards and various forms of Afro-kitsch.

 Cruse was an original thinker and non-academic who pissed off everyone in the 1960s (though after his book came out, Cruse was given a professorship at the University of Michigan, despite having no advanced degrees). He saw the Black Power movement as all slogan and no program, much like today's hip-hop politics: attitude but no ideas or programmatic approach. He was very critical of Jewish intellectuals, and he was especially critical of Marxism, which he saw as preventing black radicals and intellectuals from developing their own original ideas and perspective based on the unique historical experience of blacks: They came to America as forced immigrants, as slaves.

 The conundrum of black America is that today's so-called black public intellectuals have produced no meaningful thought or analyses since Cruse's groundbreaking book. Meanwhile, the most wretched of the Earth, black urban youth, have produced the most dynamic art form of the past 40 years, namely hip-hop.

 Cruse argued that any movement toward black autonomy had to be based on a unification of economics, politics and culture. Left black intellectuals have no autonomous cultural theory that doesn't derive from Marxism, crypto-Marxism (Frankfurt School) or cultural studies. Cruse thought that black intellectuals had too often uncritically accepted Marxism as an intellectual crutch and didn't do enough to figure out things on their own. Today one can see how the remnant of such thinking has affected the left in general, and especially the academic left.

 A good example is the Global Left Dialogue/2005 Left Forum, held this past April at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The forum came and went, leaving no discernable impression. I received a notice about it in the mail and looked at the lineup of speakers: Stanley Aronowitz, Amy Goodman, Manning Marable. All the usual suspects, I thought.

 The panels and workshops were even less impressive. There was nothing that dealt with substantive issues regarding building political organizations, dealing with grassroots economic development; nor was an invitation extended to progressive members of faith-based institutions (i.e., churches). Instead, grasping onto a global theme, the left attempted to make itself appear more meaningful than it really is.

 The left intellectuals' lack of concern for bread-and-butter issues may well explain why the conservatives are taking American society back to the 19th century, for the simple reason that the American left has ceased to matter in the lives and concerns of most Americans. Today the left is mostly made up of a reasonably comfortable, middle- and upper-middle class of activists and intellectualsnot the working class.

 This is truly a radical departure, for some form of the left spectrum has always existed in American society and was often on the cutting edge of social change. Go back and look at episodes of American social and political history and you will find abolitionists, populists, advocates for women's rights, labor crusaders, civil rights workers, etc., all trying to better the lives of ordinary Americans. These progressivesmostly white and middle class, but also workers, blacks and womenwere organically rooted in the issues, the problems and the peoples of their communities and times.

 Today's left doesn't appear to be interested in the problems of ordinary people. Instead, panels at the Left Forum"Why Americans Fall for the Ownership Society"seemed to mock them as suckers. Once upon a time, the left had an economic agenda, so why does it not now address the real concerns of most working Americans?

 While preparing a presentation for a journalism class I was invited to, I came across a possible explanation, one that Todd Gitlin had written in  The Whole World is Watching :

 "While in other countries New Left movements succeeded in developing institutions of post-student radicalism, notably political parties which established adult roles for New Left leaders, the American Left failed to develop those sustaining institutions and roles."

 The New Left, of which the present-day Amorphous Left is a child, either went into the academy, the Democratic Party or blew itself up, as it did in the Weather Underground, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society.

 Attempts were made to establish parties or panels centered on "new politics" activists who had gone into local government, but nothing was sustained programmatically by the same generation that made civil rights and ending the war in Vietnam their generation's issues.

 The Democratic Party itself has increasingly been trying to out-GOP the Republicans. A new crew inside the party, the National Security Democrats, which surely includes Joe Lieberman, the most conservative Dem of them all, thinks it's OK to blow up the world to make it safer for America. Making matters worse, it was Bill Clinton who told Tony Blair to be Bush's "best friend. Be the guy he turns to," as reported in the  New Yorker .

 I'm of the belief that the movement to the academy may well have been the most significant disaster that has affected the American left. In reality, there is no left but merely left-of-center sentiment that can do two things well: hold demonstrations or convocations, and call George W. Bush names. By their very nature Americans are anti-intellectual, and the left's retreat into the academy didn't help its position, which had been weakened by the 1970s. Today, the American left is the weakest of the lefts in the world. Unlike the right, it has noto borrow from the military"unity cohesion," and certainly no "social discipline" to propose a common vision and work it through. It can't do this because it has never sustained a long-term institutional process or a significant role in American politics beyond protesting or social-movement politics.

 The academic left has produced a lot of theories and justifications for studying cultural politics and cultural studies, but it has successfully removed itself from the concerns of most Americans. On a pragmatic level, it can't even get a foothold in the doors of most Americans' minds, because it doesn't deal with the issues that most Americans are concerned about: jobs, education, health care.

 Meanwhile, the conservatives, who are not interested in theory, have been consistently organizing themselves and honing their message to the American people. The right understands propaganda, understands how get people upset over gays, abortion and Terri Schiavoall while forging economic policies that exclusively benefit the plutocracy.

 The likes of a Harold Cruse are clearly needed, if the left is to have any chance of getting its act together.

 Last month's Left Forum offered a panel on "Hip Hop Politics Today," which itself showed how black politics has become meaningless. There is a conventional wisdom that "hip-hop culture" exists as an axis to develop black politics. This is putting the cart before the horseit is predicated on the notion that a so-called "progressive" music can be used to organize young people. This flies in the face of a sociological reality: Music merely reflects the mood of a people or a generation. But today it merely reflects the marketing of black people's cultureand especially the social dysfunction of today's black urban bantustans. In other words, if the people are not ready to struggle, then the music itself won'tcan'treflect that.

 It's questionable if today's black youths are willing to struggle. It seems most are ready to bling-bling, which is understandable, since the black left didn't leave them much to build on. The "hip-hop politics" of today's black youth are what "Black Power" was to those of the 1960sin the absence of any substantial political infrastructure or ideas, it doesn't amount to anything.

 A good example of the emptiness of present-day hip-hop was found in a March  New York Daily News  article that reported how McDonald's was cultivating rappers to pimp its hamburgers. Said one product-placement tracker, "Hip hop isn't just a music movement, but a global youth movement that has created such power over the last few years, it's now driving all of youth culture."

 This drive, however, is toward material consumption, not political engagement. This is where we are in America.