Michael Lerner

Reflections on NAM1 Michael Lerner Rabbi Michael Lerner was one of the founding members of the New American Movement (NAM). His 1972 essay, “The New American Move- ment: A Way to Overcome the Mistakes of the Past,” co-written with the NAM National Organizing Committee, summarized the founding principles of the organization which had held its first national meeting in October 1971 and its founding convention in Davenport, Iowa in November of that same year. “The New American Movement” was published two months later in the January-February 1972 Socialist Revolution, one of the New Left’s most widely-read theoretical journals. The 1972 article was both a criticism of the directions the New Left had taken to that point in time and a coherent proposal for developing NAM as the organization that could help bring into being a popular socialist movement in the U.S. For me and most of the people I knew in Berkeley in the mid- and late-’60s, the most significant experience of our lives so far was our participation in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was a social change movement filled with hope, vision for a new world, courage, and solidarity. We were drawn to its ethic of caring for each other, that ran totally counter to the “looking-out-for-number-one” common sense of the culture into which we had been socialized. Its destruction in 1969 created a huge problem for social change activists in their twenties. SDS had grown from a few hundred people in 1961 to become the primary vehicle for local antiwar activists to connect with each other, share ideas and experiences, and strate- gize together. By 1969, it had a membership of close to 100,000. Watching competing factions tear the organization apart at its June 1969 convention was a heartbreaking experience for me and many others. How could people become so deeply attached to their ide- ologies that they would be willing to destroy the unity of the largest antiwar organization just a few months after Richard Nixon, the country’s most dangerous warmonger, had taken office? How could the faction that “won” and took over the national office, the Revo- lutionary Youth Movement I (also known as “the Weathermen”), sub- sequently dissolve SDS and destroy all its membership records so no one could ever reconstruct the organization? Supposedly this was done on the grounds that this information might fall into the hands of the police—but so what? We weren’t doing anything illegal. But that was the Weathermen’s complaint—that to be truly antiracist and pro-Vietnamese, we should have been engaged in illegal acts of WORKS AND DAYS 55/56: Vol. 28, 2010 36 WORKS AND DAYS struggle against the war. Towards this end, they turned the public image of the antiwar movement—super-democratic, Martin-Luther- King-Jr.-styled, nonviolent (“all we are saying is give peace a chance”)—into a violence-cheering and hateful group of people who were determined to tear down American society Malcolm-X-style: “by any means necessary.” For tens of thousands of SDSers, the very way that the movement had fallen apart seemed to confirm the contradictory worldview that had dominated SDS at least until late 1967—that to be truly democratic, we didn’t really need a national organization; that the trans- formation of our country would have to come “from below” as a spontaneous upsurge of “the people”; that we ourselves were of questionable legitimacy since we were “students” who had the privilege to go to universities and hence couldn’t really understand or represent “the most oppressed” (poor people, blacks, Vietnamese, the people of the Third World) whose oppression had “taught them a wisdom that we couldn’t possibly have living lives of privilege”; that our greatest fear ought to be the tendency of local leaders of our organization to amass “too much power” for themselves and hence stymie “real democratic procedure,” either because they themselves were power-hungry-egotists, members of some socialist sect group, or even worse, the Communist Party U.S.A. It was not unusual for people who had been active in the local SDS chapter for a year to be referred to as “the old leadership” and put down for that reason while the newest person to arrive at an SDS meeting was seen as more authentic and hence listened to with greater authority. The greatest authority was to be given to high school students who were “ready” (if only we could spend more time organizing them), to blacks (who on rare occasions might show up at a meeting, or whose local chapter of the Black Panther Party con- tained all kinds of wisdom if we could only listen to them), or to the people of the Third World. No wonder, then, that for the bulk of local activists, the emer- gence of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the two factions of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM I and RYM II) felt irrelevant. They were the manifestation of precisely what was hated, and their subsequent destruction of SDS was further proof to local activists that national organization was irrelevant or destructive and that leadership, particularly male leadership, was inherently suspect. In fact, from 1968 onward, antileadership thinking had taken that turn as well, given the increased presence of militant feminists in the movement. I had been chair of the Berkeley chapter of SDS from 1966-68 and was as much part of the problem as anyone else. Eschewing all forms of ideology, I became a leader of what was sometimes called “the action faction,” the group that was concerned with overcoming the tendency of SDS to turn into an intellectual debate club. I was an organizer of sit-ins against the CIA and ROTC, that sought to recruit on campus in 1966, and the Stop the Draft Week in 1967 when thousands of us marched day after day in attempts to close down the Oakland Induction Center of the U.S. Army. I turned in my draft card at “Vietnam Commencement” (as did hundreds of others—we sent Lerner 37 them back to our local draft boards with the message “Hell no, we won’t go”), and I was one of the organizers of the People’s Park demonstrations in 1969. Later, I was also an “unindicted co-con- spirator,” according to the charges eventually brought by the Alameda County District Attorney who went on to become Ronald Reagan’s attorney general. I felt no allegiance to the national SDS, not recognizing until Nixon was elected and the attack on the antiwar movement became more nationally coordinated through COIN- TELPRO, how very important it would have been to have a national organization. Originally, as a part of the superdemocracy crew in SDS, I was one of many for whom the idea of a nationwide hierarchical political organization had no appeal. I was a graduate student in philosophy, and my ideas were very important to me. I didn’t want to lose my au- tonomy in some organization that had “Stalinist” tendencies to top- down control. But I soon realized the problem with ultrademocracy: it quickly yielded to manipulation and nondemocratic practices. I watched as my roommate Jerry Rubin manipulated SDS when some of the members questioned the teach-in on Black Power that Jerry and I were organizing in 1966. When people raised objections, Jerry would get up at the meeting and say, “This is too important to decide without real consultation—let’s break down into small groups so that everyone’s voice can be heard.” The small groups would go on and on, and by the time anyone tried to reconvene the meetings, it felt undemocratic to make any decisions because so many people had gone back to their apartments to go to sleep. Week after week, Jerry would champion full democratic process to those who were critical of the teach-in, while we who were organizing the event went right ahead until it was too late to stop it. On other occasions, I would watch as people would demand consensus, and the meetings would go on for hours. Finally, only those who were incapable of getting bored would be left, and they, the small handful of the debate-in- toxicated not-so-activist-activists, would make decisions. It would have been quite different had everyone been able to stay up. But as it worked out, the insistence on ultrademocracy guaranteed processes that were in fact less democratic. It was hard to miss the fact that an organization that was transfixed by democracy felt at times incapable of taking decisive action and turned out to be democratic in form but not in substance. It didn’t really reflect what the majority of the people in our constituency of progressive students would want. No wonder, then, that there was this love/hate relationship with “democratic process.” On the one hand, we all hated the phony kinds of democracy that prevailed in the larger American society that gave us choices between two pro- business and pro-war political parties. On the other hand, we wanted to end the war and not just sit around talking about process and how to do it right and most democratically. I came to understand that some forms of democratic process might not ultimately represent the constituency. Meantime, I also learned that some kinds of vanguard actions (e.g., nonviolent civil disobedience) can inspire a constituency that wants to express itself but does not want to be bothered with the details of when and how to perform that civil disobedience.

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