Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Seeing youth voter sites and being around youth who are radical, I wonder if some of this hostility towards Marxists of any kind is due to a fundamental disconnect with the older New Left, which leaves kids totally unable to understand the politics, the more abstract politics, unable to break into that world and therefore hostile to it.

I say this because I've yelled at anarchists on this website lately, and that doesn't feel to good; I know these people and I know that there has to be something else going on besides the usual, not really informed in any respect, critiques which are put out there.

I come to politics from a different perspective than they do because, believe it or not, I was able to basically get a hold of the New Left texts which fired up people way back when pretty damn early in my political reaching, my curiosity of trying to understand the world, and, besides this weird world of autonomism, which I didn't really understand, I assimilated a lot of the New Left into my own political worldview. So much so that I expected that when the Left came back it would pick up where the New Left left off....I was sort of allied with Herbert Marcuse and George Lukacs and their version of Marxist humanism and fully thought that when the left came back it would be their ideas which would be taken back up.

Didn't quite turn out that way.

But, whatever, and, before saying this, I absolutely hate this term, hate it, I'm more of a 'movement' person than many anarchists are.

Referring to the 'movement' is an SDS figure of speech which has been generally carried over by former New Left activists to describe their own work and the work of allied people in the community in which they're a part of.

So, although I was born after SDS had dissolved and didn't have any contact with this stuff until the mid to late nineties, yeah, I guess you could say, in a torturous and twisted way, I'm more a part of the 'movement' than most anarchists, who are much more alientated from the whole thing and can't seem to find a way in, in many cases, therefore adding to their alienation and hostility.

If we, and I use 'we' advisedly, could just reach out to them and explain about the good stuff that the Left has done since the second World War we could help them out a lot.