Word: leftness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mailer calls himself a "left conservative" - left because he believes the city's problems demand radical answers, conservative because he has little faith in centralized government. Because of this, he explains deadpan, "I am running to the left and to the right of every man in the race." He is cautious about the risks of his new calling. "It's very dangerous for your soul to be a politician," he 'says, "because if you get power it can lead you to perdition faster than almost any other form of human activity...
...Call. Ditto was chopping 500 Ibs. of cotton a day in his native Texas when he was 13. He has been speaking up for the poor and the black since the day in 1961 when he left his Chicago taxi-driving job to join a school demonstration. Since then he has been arrested 18 times. He became a community organizer and marched for 155 consecutive days with Dick Gregory...
...many Communist parties. The image of Communism's being run by an alien despotism in Moscow has faded to a great extent as individual parties have become more independent. The French party for years cringed under Socialist Guy Mollet's indictment that "the Communists are not of the Left but of the East"; by asserting a moderate amount of independence, the French Communists have gained a new respectability in French political life (see page 41). The Italian party, the largest European Communist Party outside the East bloc, which is likely to share power in an Italian government sooner rather than...
...country. Outside China, Maoism commands the allegiance of only one ruling party, in Albania, and a handful of insignificant parties (including those in New Zealand, Burma, Thailand). But Maoist factions and splinter parties exist in many countries, and Mao has become a hero to the New Left...
...sociology, psychology and history have a more sophisticated view. Indeed, Marx's theory of man-as-economic-animal is regularly disproved by countless eruptions of nationalism, tribalism and just plain human cussedness that can hardly be explained through economic motives. It is a striking irony that the New Left, which often uses Marxist sticks to belabor capitalist society, tries to reach beyond Marx for spiritual values and a kind of community (neo-tribalism) that Marx, the materialist, would have considered sentimental and atavistic...