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p How did the New Left and its ideologists see the new, free world born of negation of the world of total repression? The majority of the New Left expressed critical attitudes to real socialism since, from their point of view, " Stalinist bureaucracy" had led Soviet society to deviate from the socialist “ideal”, and today, given the global power of corporate capitalism, "the development of socialism thus continues to be deflected from its original goals, and the competitive coexistence with the West generates values and aspirations for which the American standard of living serves as a model”.  [207•* 

p It should be mentioned, that the vast majority of the radical Left is ill-acquainted with the real state of affairs in the socialist countries and the tone of their criticism is shaped to a large extent by general principles of the radical negative approach to existing societies.

p While "Marx treated the question of communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of the development of, say, a new biological variety, once he knew that it had originated in such and such a way and was changing in such and such a definite direction”,  [207•**  Marcuse and other members of the New Left approach socialism not as historians and sociologists, but as philosophers and moralists, thinking in polarised categories of “good” and “evil”, or as sore-tried travellers, seeking for an oasis of absolute 208 freedom in the desert of alienation, or rather as one and the other simultaneously. In their assessment of existing socialist societies and in their theorising with regard to " genuine socialism" they start out from postulates of "negative dialectics" and the principle of the "Great Refusal", laying one-sided emphasis on socialist society’s break with previous stages of social history  [208•*  and overlooking (deliberately or unconsciously) the fact that socialism in its concrete form not only makes a break with previous history but at the same time inevitably appears as its continuation, growing up out of it and in many of its characteristics shaped by it; and also the fact that the so-called “deviation” from socialism emerges on closer examination to be none other than the influence of non-proletarian strata or Utopian illusions which their ideologists would impart to the revolution.

p As a result of this approach the “genuineness” of socialism is measured by the radical Left in terms of the degree to which the socialist society in question contrasts with developed capitalist society, and socialist endeavours and trends are presented as the very opposite of the endeavours and trends existing in capitalist society, for the latter is “one-dimensional”.

p What are the positive views of the new world held by the New Left? Perhaps Carl Landauer was right when he maintained that the New Left not only rejects both capitalism and socialism but at the same time has "neither a utopia, nor a philosophy of determinism.”  [208•** 

p Landauer goes on to explain his conclusion in the following words: "A utopia on which such action can be based must be more than a simple listing of the author’s preferences in ethics. An effort must be made to figure out how the elements of the desired society can be fitted together, how they would complement each other, and how they would enable man to cope with the requirements of life.”  [208•*** 

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p In actual fact among the New Left and its ideologists we do not find completed projects for a new society, which might appear as an all-embracing system of inter-coordinated ideals and which might provide a comprehensive and full idea of its institutions and values. The radical Left of today has not elaborated independent and original social Utopias in the style of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, or Edward Bellamy, that is projects for Utopia which would include not only clear outlines, but also all the details of the society to come, and which only remained to be implemented like some divine ordinance.

p There were of course reasons for this. As history shows, mass Utopian movements in the early stages of their development seldom bring forth independent plans for Utopia. Most of the rank-and-file members of such movements have, of course, their own—sometimes disparate—conceptions of the “happy” society, of “perfect” principles for human living. Yet these conceptions for a start do not so much stem from the nature of the given protest movement, but rather are incorporated into it by its immediate participants, whose consciousness had taken shape spontaneously on a basis of existing social Utopias, popular legends and myths of a "golden age". Only later, when the need arises to rationalise motives and spontaneously evolved conceptions of goals for the movement that has erupted, when the movement enters the stage of self-cognition, the experience it has gleaned is then crystallised in new Utopias, myths and legends.

p The movement of the New Left was no exception in this respect. Young intellectuals and students who perhaps for the-first time in their lives had embarked on the path of revolt and who were intoxicated with their contacts with living social reality had little time for the elaboration of detailed plans for utopia. Moreover, the spiritual mentors of the New Left, more experienced in politics and philosophy deliberately and wisely abided by the principle that the elaboration of such plans should be rejected. This was not only because, like the rank-and-file members of the movement, they did not envisage very clearly "the genuinely humane society" but also for purely theoretical reasons. Once again the influence of the old existentialist approach made itself felt: directing the attention of the insurgent mass to acting 210 without reflection, the ideological mentors of the New Left regarded theoretical reflection as a brake on living sociopolitical practice, a fettering of liberty, and as an obstacle on the path to spontaneous self-expression that engenders initiative. In addition the principles of "negative dialectics", that fills the role of methodological imperative, demanded— as far as possible—that their followers should refrain from constructing Utopias. Marcuse goes on to explain this standpoint saying that the demand for a "concrete alternative" is senseless, if the aim in view is a system of definite institutions and relations which would be institutions and relations of a new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop through suffering and mistakes, as does the new society. If a concrete conception of the alternative could already be formulated today it would not be a concrete conception, Marcuse goes on to say, the opportunities of a new society are sufficiently “abstract”, i.e., removed from the existing world and are so incompatible with it as not to be visible to this world’s eyes.  [210•* 

p This deliberate rejection of the construction of social Utopias could perhaps be credited to the ideologists of the radical Left, since they warned against idle fantasy and in this respect linked up with the traditional Marxist approach to the future.  [210•**  Of course, the concrete social alternative, as was pointed out earlier, cannot take shape outside the confines of living socio-political practice and be simply “ discovered” as something that the speculative gaze of the imaginative consciousness perceives all of a sudden and as a distinct whole. Yet refraining from this construction of Utopias the ideologists of the New Left started out from principles different from those of the Marxists—and, to be precise, from principles of "negative dialectics"—basing their ideas on an arbitrary break in the social-cum-temporal 211 continuum which in the final analysis makes Utopians of them as well.

p The fact of the matter is that however resolutely rankand-file members of the protest movement and their ideological mentors refrained from conjuring up Utopias, they were still subject to the urge to look into tomorrow, an urge that is quite natural for both the ordinary and the theoretical consciousness, and in their case, of course, definite conceptions of the future had already taken shape. Yet their imagination was not orientated to that society which really grows up out of the existing one, not to the ideal (and in this narrow sense “Utopian”) society, construed by reason for future generations and shining forth with the cold light of perfection, but to a “free” and “happy” society in which the New Left itself would like to live—and live today.  [211•* 

p The distinctive note in the way in which the rank and file of the radical Left expressed its conceptions of the “happy” society consisted in its attributing priority to immediate action as opposed to theory: it embodied these conceptions above all in the very real practice of protest, in forms of its own behaviour through which it wished to demonstrate not only its opposition to the establishment but also its own vision of free society and free man. In any case among a certain section of the New Left there clearly emerged a tendency to create within existing bourgeois society a parallel “island” world with its principles, norms, language, symbols, goals which not only were not linked with the principles, norms, etc., of the existing world, but which would appear as the very opposite.

p The most consistent people in this respect were probably the Hippies, before they too came to be corrupted and were made the object of commercial advertising and profiteering. The Hippies did not simply avoid the existing world of 212 repression and consumerism, they ran away into a “ Wonderland” that they themselves had created, a different land where there was no coercion and subordination, no cult of money and consumption, a land in which sensibility was free to come into its own. Admittedly the Hippies did not lay claim to the title of "new revolutionaries", and strictly speaking bore no direct relation to the New Left. Yet in their attitudes and behaviour these two groups come very close to one another. After all many members of the New Left also made spontaneous attempts to set up—albeit temporarily— islands of the future in the present.  [212•* 

p Experiments to create “islands” of the future world hidden away in the crevices of the disintegrating monolith of “ integrated” society in themselves, of course, appeared far from promising when viewed in the broad perspective of radical social transformation of capitalist society as an all-embracing system and provided far from firm ground for revolutionary hopes.  [212•**  But the root of the practical Utopianism adhered to by the experimentors of the Radical Left should be looked for elsewhere: if the future rises up out of the present and does so not all of a sudden, then why not try today to start looking into the future which appeals to us? But here the question of our understanding of the links between the future and the present, and between the present and the past, has to be answered. Here lies the rub, and it is here that the Utopianism of the New Left comes clearly to the fore. Attempting through the actual practice of protest to formulate “non-repressive” institutions and relations, the New Left (or 213 at least its leaders) acted—to some extent subconsciously and to some extent deliberately—in the spirit of methodological principles proclaimed by the ideologists of the radical Left, principles which sharply reduced the effectiveness of social experiments undertaken by participants in the protest movement, if not doomed them to complete failure. These principles included total negation of the present; preoccupation with Utopianism as the vital imperative; identification of means and ends; preoccupation with spontaneity as the only non-repressive form of productive social creativity. This was precisely what Marcuse concentrated on, when he maintained that the creation of free society "implies rejection of those policies of reconstruction, no matter how revolutionary, which are bound to perpetuate (or to introduce) the pattern of the unfree societies and their needs”.  [213•*  Marcuse goes on to maintain that what must be created is "different human needs and the different human relationship in working for the satisfaction of these needs.... And this end must indeed appear in the means to attain it, that is to say, in the strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one. If the socialist relationships of production are to be a new way of life, a new form of life, then their existential quality must show forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their realisation”.  [213•** 

p “Anticipated and demonstrated".. .. But that which the experimental Utopias of the radical Left “demonstrated” were not so much “anticipations” of the future or discoveries of new social horizons, as a negative reaction to the present. Claims to show the world what tomorrow would be like proved untenable, for the “happy” world was not the world of the future, but an anti-world. If these pictures of an anti-world could influence a specific—rather narrow— sector of society, like some shock therapy, then for the broad masses directly involved in the process of material production and tightly trapped in the routine of every-day life, the experiments of the radical Left did not open up any “ escaperoute” into the future.

p Nor was such an escape-route opened up by the Utopian guidelines formulated by the theoreticians of the radical Left 214 which revealed their interpretation of the way “free” society should be organised and should function and which provided theoretical justification for the spontaneously evolving hopes and expectations entertained by the rank and file of the protest movement.

p What are these principles? Marcuse wrote soon after the May events of 1968 that "the concept of the primary, initial institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution”.  [214•*  But this is no more than a "prerequisite of the transformation of quantity into quality". “Quality” after all looks so much less concrete, yet it too can be made to fit the following definition: "... the development could tend toward a sensuous culture.... Production would be redirected in defiance of all the rationality of the Performance Principle; socially necessary labour would be diverted to the construction of an aesthetic rather than repressive environment, to parks and gardens rather than highways and parking lots, to the creation of areas of withdrawal  [214•**  rather than massive fun and relaxation—-  [214•***  This "would mean the ascent of the Aesthetic Principle as form of the Reality Principle. .. progress a stage of civilisation where man has learned to ask for the sake of whom or of what he organizes his society; thej stage where he checks and perhaps even halts his incessant struggle for existence on an enlarged scale, surveys what has been achieved through centuries of misery and hecatombs of victims, and decides that it is enough, and that it is time to enjoy what he has and what can be reproduced and refined with a minimum of alienated labor”.  [214•**** 

p The Marcusian schema of course expresses to a considerable extent the moods of its author pining for the Promised Land at whose shores he has not had the good fortune to drop anchor during the many decades of his searching.

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p Now we come across another schema—this time a more concrete one—for a desired future as outlined by Theodore Roszak. Refraining from conjuring up a Utopia, Roszak at the same time admits that in the precious depths of his consciousness there are born, as he believes, "more than a little Utopian brainstorming about the world. I think I see on the far side of the urban-industrial wasteland.

p “About the proper mix of handicraft labor, intermediate technologies, and necessarily heavy industry.

p “About the revitalisation of work as a self-determining, non-exploitative activity—and a means of spiritual growth.

p “About a new economics elaborated out of kinship, friendship, and co-operation.

p “About the regionalization and grass roots control of transport and mass communication.

p “About non-bureaucratized, user-developed, user- administered social services....

p “About the society-wide co-ordination of worker- controlled industries and producers’ co-operatives.

p “About credit unions and mutual insurance as an alternative to the big banks and insurance companies.

p “About de-urbanisation and the rehabilitation of rural life by way of an ecologically diversified organic home-steading.

p “About non-compulsory education through free schools, folk schools, and child-minding co-ops.”  [215•* 

p So this is what the Promised Land is like with which the Radical Left would like to make mankind happy: the liberation of man from labour and transformation of the latter into a “game”, the decentralisation of administration, the rehabilitation of sensibility—- In short, the reappearance of many of those ideals which by tradition were developed by the Utopian Socialists and anarchists. This of course is not adequate ground for maintaining that a rebirth of 19th century Utopian Socialism is taking place today. More likely is the birth of a new contemporary form of Utopian socialism, wearing the stamp of the 20th century and expressing the existential contradictions and illusions of the non- proletarian sectors of the working people, that today are involved in the world revolutionary process—illusions that 216 are closely associated with the concrete features of “ consumer” society.

p The New Left and its ideologists were of course quite well aware that political violence, even if all of a sudden it reaped success, would still not lead mankind into the free and happy world of which they dreamed. Further, the ordinary individual in developed capitalist society had, they claimed, been corrupted by society and was even “happy” in it. This raised the question as to the remoulding of the actual subject of transformations, of the creation of a "new man". The urge to mould a "new man" permeates the works of all the radical ideologists. Marcuse writes: "To educate a new man—this is what we are after now, not because precisely I came to this idea, but because the development of modern industrial society has come to the point where a new man of this type is not only possible, but necessary... .”  [216•*  Frantz Fanon calls for the creation of a "new man" as well. It is precisely with the education of the "new man" that the ideologists of the "radical Left" link the emergence of "genuine socialism”.  [216•** 

p In other words, it is important not only to turn " revolutionary violence"—outwards against the establishment, but also into the heart of the protest movement itself—to engage in intellectual self-criticism, self-education, to “squeeze” out of oneself, drop by drop the slave and, after becoming vehicles of a new consciousness, to advance from the oasis of freedom already created to tame what Roszak refers to as the urban, industrial wilderness.

The trend towards turning violence inward intensified in particular in the camp of the "New Left" at the end of the 60s and at the beginning of the 70s, when for a large section of the movement it became clear, that the tactics of 217 violent action as a form of political struggle did not lead to the desired results and was not supported by the majority of the working people. In these conditions the turning of violence against themselves, and the stress on the creation of oases of “counter-culture” as fertile soil in which to plant the "new man", become all-important in the activity of many members of the New Left.