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Case File 03 of 10 · 1962-1979

Case File 03 of 10

1962-1979The long march through the institutionsThe theory becomes a strategy, and the strategy gets a name

A man with long dark hair speaks into a table microphone, his mouth open mid-word and one hand raised in front of his chest.
Rudi Dutschke lecturing at the Katholieke Hogeschool in Tilburg, the Netherlands, on 12 February 1976, nine years after he gave the strategy its name.Credit: Photo: Hans Peters for Anefo, 12 February 1976. Nationaal Archief, The Hague · CC0 1.0 public domain dedication

In 1962 members of Students for a Democratic Society gathered at a United Auto Workers camp in Port Huron, Michigan, to define their program. What they wrote was not modest. It called for the "resources and means of production" to be placed under "democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation."1 The following year their convention adopted America and the New Era, the document with "The New Insurgency" in it.

In 1966 Tom Hayden, who had drafted Port Huron, described a mechanism already at work. The insurgency would spread through the professions as students graduated and entered them. They did not have to seize the institutions. They had only to grow up and go to work.

The same year, the Radical Education Project, a branch of SDS, published more explicit instructions. It began with the problem:

"The greatest moral and political challenge facing leftists is how both to live in America, to work in the institutions which provide income and status, and yet to change America."

Its answer was to build a durable presence inside American institutions. Building a real left, the document explained, "requires striking roots in the professions, among university faculties, in the arts and in many of the 'mass organizations' like churches, unions, etc." Its governing principle was blunt: "There is no politically neutral activity."2

Together, Hayden's essay and the Radical Education Project document described the strategy without relying on imported European theory. Only afterward did Gramsci supply a vocabulary for it.

In 1967, Eugene Genovese, an American historian inside the movement's own circle, reviewed the first book about Gramsci published outside Italy. Writing in the movement's journal, he singled out one word: hegemony. He used it to explain something American radicals had already named for themselves.3

The sequence matters. Americans had developed the strategy before the European theory arrived. The Europeans did not hand them a plan. They gave them a vocabulary for a plan the Americans had already made.

The strategy still had no name. The name came from Berlin, in the summer of 1967.

In July, Herbert Marcuse traveled to West Berlin for a four-day gathering organized by the German SDS. He lectured on the end of utopia and the place of violence within the opposition. Rudi Dutschke, one of the German movement's leading figures, wrote a long article for the occasion titled, in part, "On the Visit of Herbert Marcuse." Thirty thousand copies circulated on the morning the gathering opened.4

A few weeks earlier, Dutschke had given the strategy its name: the long march through the institutions. It answered a practical question. How could a small radical minority become a majority?

Instead of founding a party and chasing 51 percent of the vote, he would enter existing parties and institutions and change them from within. Asked whether this amounted to reformism, Dutschke agreed, with a qualification. It was "system-abolishing reformism."5

Five years later Marcuse introduced the phrase into English and credited Dutschke by name. He defined it as working against institutions while working within them. The long march meant "not simply by 'boring from within,'" but by doing the work well: learning to teach, to program, and to use the mass media, while building counterinstitutions alongside the established ones.6

That last part makes the program hard to answer. Marcuse expected participants to become capable teachers, programmers, and media workers. Exposure alone will not discredit work done well.

The alliance between the two men outlasted the decade. In the summer of 1979, Marcuse lay dying in a Frankfurt hospital and asked to see Dutschke, who drove there at once. Marcuse died that July. Dutschke died on Christmas Eve, from the lasting effects of the bullets fired into his head eleven years earlier.7

The strategy outlived them both.

Sources

Every quotation was read in the document it comes from. Where editions differ, the edition consulted is named.

  1. Full citationStudents for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron Statement, 1962. Read in Teodori, document 5.1, and in Howard Brick and Gregory Parker, eds., A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, 2015. Movement source. ↩
  2. Full citationRadical Education Project, "An Introduction and an Invitation," 1966, in Teodori. The Radical Education Project was a branch of SDS. Movement source. ↩
  3. Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian CommunismStanford University Press, StanfordBookAcademicGeneral academic
    Full citationEugene Genovese, "On Antonio Gramsci," Studies on the Left 7 (1967), a review of John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, Stanford University Press, 1967, the first book on Gramsci published outside Italy. Studies on the Left, founded at the University of Wisconsin in 1959, is described by Isaac Gottesman in The Critical Turn in Education as the first major theoretical journal of the New Left in the United States; Genovese sat in its editorial circle alongside Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd. The category the Americans had already named was corporate liberalism, from Carl Oglesby's antiwar speech of 1965. Movement source. ↩
  4. Full citationMarcuse's Berlin visit, a four-day event organised by the German SDS beginning 12 July 1967, is described in Douglas Kellner's editorial introduction to The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 3. The article is Rudi Dutschke and Gaston Salvatore, "Zum Verhältnis von Organisation und Emanzipationsbewegung. Zum Besuch Herbert Marcuses," Oberbaum-Blatt, 12 July 1967, recorded with its print run in Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, Wir hatten ein barbarisch schönes Leben, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2015. Read in the German original; translation mine. Movement source. ↩
  5. Full citationGretchen Dutschke-Klotz, Wir hatten ein barbarisch schönes Leben, on the first use of the phrase shortly after the June days of 1967, on "systemabschaffender Reformismus," and on the double strategy that set illegality alongside the long march. She adds that what Dutschke meant by illegality had little to do with what the Red Army Faction later did, and that qualification belongs on the record. Read in the German original; translations mine. This is the author's widow writing in his defence and quoting his diaries and letters throughout, which is why the concession is treated as strong evidence. Movement source. ↩
  6. Full citationHerbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Beacon Press, 1972. Marcuse names Dutschke in the text; the description of him as Marcuse's student appears in later editors' glosses rather than in Marcuse's own words, and is not repeated here. Movement source. ↩
  7. Full citationGretchen Dutschke-Klotz, Wir hatten ein barbarisch schönes Leben, on Marcuse's collapse and hospitalisation in Frankfurt in June 1979, Dutschke's journey to see him, the telephone call from Peter Marcuse and his reply, Marcuse's death on 29 July 1979 and Dutschke's on 24 December 1979. Read in the German original; translation mine. Movement source. ↩

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The long march through the institutions (1962-1979) · The Long Insurgency