It is clear, however, that Marcuse was using the word “outside” in a complex metaphorical way. He did not mean to deny that there could be fruitful contradictions “inside” the American system. His one example of radical action (immediately following the long passage quoted above) involves the civil rights movement: a movement which, when the book appeared in 1964, included whites as well as blacks, middle-class as much as lower-class people, students from the most prestigious universities alongside “the unemployed and the unemployable.” In other words, large groups within the American system could, if they tried, get into the revolutionary “outside.” One-dimensional men might yet discover—or create—new dimensions in themselves. Of course, once we grant the complexity of Marcuse’s idea here, new problems arise. If it is really possible for a great many “insiders” to join the “outside” forces, without giving up their positions within the system, we might wonder whether the inside–outside dualism is a helpful way of talking about social reality. Marcuse himself, in his next work, An Essay on Liberation (1968), tacitly abandoned this dualistic scheme; but other men, with flatter minds, have kept it alive.
If we move forward from 1964 to 1969, and examine the first Weatherman manifesto, which came out of the great split in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), we will find some of the same words, but in what seems like a different world. Marcuse’s language and general scheme are retained: a people that is internally monolithic is opposed by radical forces from “outside.” But the Marcusean sociology has been transformed into a Manichaean cosmology. The Weathermen take the idea of “outside” force with a crude, grim literalism: The basic opposition is one of geography. “America” is condemned, root and branch, as an “oppressor nation” whose sole source of support is the life and labor of “the peoples of the world.”2 The American oppressors include not only the rich, the owners of wealth and property, the bourgeoisie, but “virtually all of the white working class,” blue- and white-collar alike, who enjoy small “privileges but very real ones, which give them an edge of vested interests and tie them to the imperialists.” The Weathermen judge all white Americans and find them wanting, totally lacking in human potential. It is wrong, they say, for radicals to concentrate on the “internal development of class struggle in this country,” wrong to work for better conditions in shops and factories and hospitals, wrong to fight to “reform [the schools] so that they can serve the people,” for this kind of action diverts Americans from the central issue: “Imperialism is always the issue.” The role American radicalism can play is thus radically restricted:
the vanguard of the “American Revolution”—that is, the section of the people who are in the forefront of the struggle, and whose class interests and needs define the terms and tasks of the revolution—is the workers and oppressed peoples of the colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America … The Vietnamese (and the Uruguayans and the Rhodesians) and the blacks and the Third World peoples in this country will continue to set the terms for class struggle in America.
The only Americans for whom there is any hope turn out not really to be Americans at all: “Black people,” the statement says, “are part of the Third World and part of the international revolutionary vanguard.”
Although the Weatherpeople write off all white Americans with apparent impartiality, they are especially scornful toward the group from which most of them themselves have come: the literate, educated, white-collar men and women of American metropolitan areas and university towns. This group is not easily defined. Some sociologists classify it as “new middle-class,” some put it into the “new working class,” some say it spans both. What everyone agrees, however, and what is important for my point, is that there is something distinctively “modern” about the group, something endemic to societies that are “advanced,” highly “developed”—therefore I will refer to this group as “modern men,” as “us.” The Weatherpeople take great pains to disaffiliate themselves from us. When they learned “to reject the ideal career of the professional,” it did not occur to them to try to create their own career models, or to connect themselves with radical traditions within their own country, their own culture, their own class. What they did was to “look for leadership to the people’s war of the Vietnamese,” to “look to Mao, Che, the Panthers, the Third World, for models, for motion.” The closest the Weatherpeople are willing to come to home is “the ‘people’s culture’ of black America,” which they have learned from “Chuck Berry, Elvis, The Temptations.” It does not seem even to occur to them—they never mention the idea, not even to dismiss it—that anything further might be happening here. (The radical potential which they concede to “youth culture” seems to consist entirely in its capacity to identify with radical forces “outside.”) If they speak to us at all, it is only to give us notice that our “television set, car and wardrobe already belong … to the people of the world.” Until the repossessors arrive, the one worthy thing we can do is “support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and … keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries can share the cost, and the blacks don’t have to do the whole thing alone.” In other words, we can serve as a sort of Fifth Column for the Third World, but not for ourselves—since we’re not worth saving. Our role, our historic mission, is to be overcome someday.
When the great day comes, none of us will get to share in its fruits. Liberation for the world will mean only repression for us. According to the late Ted Gold, after American imperialism is defeated abroad, “an agency of the peoples of the world” will be set up to run the American economy and society, presumably to give our television sets, cars, and clothes back to their rightful owners. Africans, Peruvians, Vietnamese will move in and take over—making every John Bircher’s worst dreams come true. Indeed, said Gold, in his last published words before his tragic death, “if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.” Americans are so innately, irreparably, radically evil, that “it will take fascism”—the twentieth century’s realest vision of hell on earth—to give us our just deserts. And the handwriting on our palace walls is just as clear as the words over the gate of the Inferno: All of us must abandon all hope for ourselves.
When the Weatherpeople burst on the scene in the summer of 1969, their manifesto stirred a storm of bitter invective on the left. What seemed most outrageous about them—even more than the terrorist tactics they were to develop a few months later—was their overwrought self-hatred, at once personal, racial, and cultural. Critics with a sense of irony were quick to pick up echoes of that old reliable “liberal guilt.” But there were greater ironies which no one was ready to confront. This guilt trip, sick as it was, struck a deeper chord in a great many radicals’ sensibilities than they cared to admit. For the Weatherpeople were only working out, to its absurdly logical conclusion, that idea of the American people as “one-dimensional,” which most American radicals had accepted uncritically for years. By taking it seriously—dead seriously—the Weatherpeople made it plain to all of us how cruel, how antihuman an idea it was. But none of us on the Left had a clear alternative. If the mass of the American people, if “modern men” as a class, were not one–dimensionally evil, exactly what were they—or, rather, what were we? Everyone was embarrassed because no one could say. Hence, the critiques of the Weathermen, as illuminating as they are, all have a curiously hollow ring. There is an emptiness at the center, where an idea should be. What’s missing is a theory of the American people—and more, a theory of “modern” people, of the men and women whom highly developed societies create; a theory of the tensions and contradictions in the life we live, of our strengths and limitations, of our hidden capacities and potentialities.
To try to fill this vacuum, we must go back to the beginning of the modern age. For the peculiar emptiness that afflicts the New Left is close to the very center of the life and experience of “modern man” as such. Ever since the first modern societies began to take on a distinctive form, and people like us emerged in their midst, one of our deepest drives has been to get outside ourselves. So much of the paraphernalia of the sixties—from beads to psychedelic drugs to sentimental idealizations of the “Third World”—expresses an archetypical modern impulse: a desperate longing for any world, any culture, any life but our own. This impulse has made the life of modern men and women strangely paradoxical, maybe even absurd, at its core. On the one hand, it has enlarged