The following passage, describing the failure of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, has a lot of relevance for our own movement:
"Ironically, just when the New Left was experiencing an unprecedented wave of support, its leading organization, SDS, which claimed almost a hundred thousand members and a million supporters, was being torn asunder by internal contradictions. Chapter meetings throughout the country degenerated into ideological squabbles as the Progressive Labor party (PL), a disciplined Old Left cadre, made a power play and tried to take over the SDS. The PL people were cultural conservatives; they wore their hair short, dressed straight, mouthed Marxist dogma, and dismissed lifestyle as a peripheral concern that diverted attention from the true working-class struggle. On repeated occasions PL castigated SDS regulars for being ‘escapist’ and ‘objectively counterrevolutionary when they spoke in favor of turning on. (Quite a few SDS members would have agreed with Arthur Kleps when he said, ‘Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes.’) PL also criticized propaganda tactics like guerrilla theater and rock bands at rallies as ‘creeping carnivalism,’ and they even claimed that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent who pushed acid on the Movement as part of an imperialist plot." (Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain)
