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ns 69 | Fall/Winter 2007
 Featuring an interview with MH Abrams, reviews of new books by Walter Benn Michaels, John McGowan, and Paul Smith, plus a special section on online criticism.
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by Victor Cohen | ns 69
Two years after the break-up of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the birth of the Weather Underground, a small group of activists formed The New American Movement (NAM). They saw that the optimism for social change that made SDS a mass movement had not vanished in a puff of acrid smoke with the end of the 1960s, and they circulated a paper throughout the summer of 1971 entitled "New American Movement: A Way to Overcome the Errors of the Past." Over the next ten years, NAM blossomed into a nationwide organization noted for its activism, theoretical sophistication, and ambition to wed the Old Left to the New. NAM saw itself as a democratic, socialist-feminist, pre-party formation, working to create a political party worthy of the name.
This was a genuine grass-roots organization. It had barely a handful of national officers, and though NAM never rivaled the size or national presence of SDS, according to the Congressional Record, by 1975 NAM qualified as "an appropriate group for law enforcement monitoring to determine the extent of its threat to internal security" (98). By the beginning of the 1980s, it had attracted the attention of Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), the most well-known socialist party of its time in the US. In 1983, after a few years of political courtship, the two groups officially merged and The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was formed. To this day, DSA remains the largest socialist party in the U.S.
Here I provide a short account of NAM's history and a description of a school it opened in Los Angeles in the 1970s, both of which form a unique link between the study of everyday life and the practice of socialism. Though cultural studies programs and practitioners often have had relationships of varying degrees with oppositional political movements, seldom do we imagine cultural studies to be an oppositional political movement per se. NAM shows an uncanny vision of cultural studies as it might have existed, if it eschewed the production of academic knowledge entirely and focused on the business of organizing for social change.
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Poetry
Fiction
Special Section: Online Criticism
Interviews
Revaluations
Surveying the Field
- The Trouble with Trouble (on Walter Benn Michael's The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality) | David R. Shumway
- Whither Socialism (on John McGowan's American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time, and Paul Smith's Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalism and Democracy) | Daniel Markowicz
- Literature, Law, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century America (on Maurice Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860, Arthur Riss' Race, Slavery,and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and Deak Nabers' Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American Literature) | Todd J. Goddard
- Do Look Back (on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's Howl) | Susanne E. Hall
- Templates, Moves, Rules of Thumb (on Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing) | Matt Hollrah and Frank Farmer
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