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Fred Newman and his Critics
There was a time – in
the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s – when a viable, vibrant
Left existed in the United States. Seething with sectarian antagonisms,
the Left during those decades nevertheless possessed a social
vision, organization, and broad-based support from one end of
the country to the other – in the trade unions and in the
black community, among urban intellectuals and artists, Appalachian
coal miners, sharecroppers in the Deep South and small farmers
in the Midwest.
Fred Newman, first schooled in the airless confines of the machine
shop and later in the rigorous environment of analytic philosophy,
but not in the ways of the Left, first came to know it in the
early ’70s. By then, however, this “old” American
progressivism had long been so compromised and outmaneuvered
that it was barely breathing.
As for the New Left, it too had already fallen on hard times.
In 1974 Newman accused this self-styled “Movement” of
being, at best, the embodiment of naïve liberalism.
In “BEWARE of the Movement” Newman took pains to
distinguish between the New Left – “this large, amorphous
group of groups” and the “traditional” Communist
Left. He would subsequently have harsh things to say about the
traditionalists, although they would be said with some sadness
and with respect for their earlier role in American political
life. But just as he wanted nothing to do with what he took to
be the pseudo-left movement, he rejected the moribund old Left
as a model. He made no secret of his desire to create something
new, what he sometimes refers to as a postmodern form of Marxism,
without knowing in advance what that might be or how to go about
doing it.
Within the left system of belief, this is Fred Newman’s
original sin – hubris. The leitmotif of the anti-Newman
critique – nearly all of which originated from the left
side of the political spectrum, some of which has spilled over
into the pages of the ultra-right New York Post – is that,
despite appearances, he isn’t a “real” leftist.
To this charge, Newman would likely plead guilty, insofar as “real” leftist
means having direct genealogical ties to either the “old” or “new” Left,
or an attachment to their modernist mainframes. What’s
more, the custom-made political, therapeutic and cultural products
that he began designing in the late ’60s have become increasingly
successful and competitive in the mainstream marketplace, fueling
antagonism from numerous corners of the left/liberal universe.
As
Dr. Kenneth Gergen, the Mustin Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore
College and the best known of American postmodernists,
suggested in his “Foreword” to Lois Holzman’s
anthology of essays by and about Newman, Performing Psychology
(Routledge, 1999), Newman is challenging the self-evident truths
that are the bricks and mortar of modernist life and thought.
Gergen writes of Newman’s “concerted attempt to explore
new potentials – new ways of understanding knowledge, methodology,
and conceptual work on the one hand, and the place of the psychologist
within historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic context
on the other. These explorations have also been accompanied by
a singular willingness to take risks – to move from talk
about ideals and alternatives to precedent-breaking action.”
Newman’s controversiality has been especially linked to
his efforts to create an alternative to psychology (an anti-psychology)
from the earliest days of his public activism. Yet Newman’s
detractors never note the thoughtful consideration with which
his “brand” of postmodern therapy – social
therapy – is discussed and debated in the ever-widening
international circles of postmodern psychology. For the detractors,
indeed, there is no such thing as postmodern psychology or a
meaningful challenge to the boundaries enforced by traditional
psychology. [See “New York TV Journalists Shocked by Newman’s
Postmodernism.”]
Newman is not a trained psychologist. Yet Routledge, among the
most prestigious academic presses in the world, saw fit to publish
the Newman/Holzman contribution to the postmodern dialogue in
psychology, as articulated in the first and third installments
of their anti-epistemology trilogy, Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary
Scientist (1993) and The End of Knowing (1997). The second work
in that series, Unscientific Psychology (1996) bears the similarly
regarded Praeger imprint. Routledge is also the publisher of
Performing Psychology (1999).
Newman’s work and the wealth of responses to it by a broad
spectrum of people – leading figures in psychology, academia,
business and the theatre, the people whose lives have been touched
by social therapy and the programs of the All Stars Project,
the audiences for his plays at the Castillo Theatre, grassroots
activists in the independent political movement and the dozens
of political figures from across the ideological spectrum, including
elected officials with whom he has “done business” over
the years – are waiting to be examined. Newman’s
critics, however, never pursue any of this. Instead, they surround
him with allegations of cultism [New
York Times], “shadow
empires” [NY Post], inappropriate and/or unethical
connections between politics and psychology, and anti-Semitism.
The Origins of the Cult Charge
More than 30 years ago, in November of 1977 an “exposé” of
Fred Newman and the small group of community organizers associated
with him appeared in Heights and Valley News, an alternative
newspaper that ordinarily covered tenant issues in the neighborhood
of Columbia University. The author of “West Side ‘Therapy
Cult’ Conceals Its True Aims” was Dennis King, a
left-winger active in the Progressive Labor Party, one of the
many left splinter groups that proliferated in the 1970s. King,
who would subsequently seek to make a name for himself as a specialist
in political cults, was personally acquainted with Newman and
several of his colleagues, but abruptly turned against them in
the wake of a fizzled romance with a woman in Newman’s
close circles.
King did not say what he took to be the “true aims” of
Newman and his colleagues in the 1977 piece, but the “cult” label
became an ongoing refrain. That year The Public Eye, a pamphlet
published irregularly by the National Lawyers Guild, allied with
the Communist Party USA, ran an article in which Newman was identified
as one of several “cult leaders” gaining ground within
the American Left.
The cult charge is identified by some as a postmodern version
of what was once known as red-baiting. Ironically, it is left
and liberal critics who frequently make use of the cult charge;
it resurfaces at regular intervals, usually around the time of
political campaigns and elections in which Newman – and
African American independent Lenora Fulani, a Newman protégée – are
involved.
Newman’s role, via the New York Independence Party, in
electing Mayor Michael Bloomberg and defeating his two prominent
Democratic liberal opponents – Mark Green in 2001 and Fernando
Ferrer in 2005 – fueled the antagonisms of the left-liberal
establishment toward him. As a result, the polemical constructs
originating in the left sectarianism of the 1970s – including
the cult charge – have been grafted onto the press releases
of present-day senior Democratic Party elected officials intent
upon discrediting Newman and the institutions that are becoming
their competition, most notably, the independent political movement.
The Anti-Semitism Charge
George Soros recently wrote in an essay about AIPAC in the New
York Review of Books, “The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably
successful in suppressing criticism…Anybody who dares to
dissent may be subjected to a campaign of personal vilification.” Newman
has been a sometime critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
More provocatively, however, his focus has been on how the suburbanization
of the working class Jewish community in America, and the simultaneous
betrayal of working class, poor and unassimilated Jews, were
linked to the popularization of Zionism. Not surprisingly, he
has been a periodic target for “personal vilification” within
Jewish political circles.
Left Sectarianism Redux
The network of Newman detractors includes several former members
of the International Workers Party (IWP), which was founded in
1974 with Newman as its chairman and which later went out of
existence, yielding in its place a core collective of socialists.
This collective shared a common commitment to building and developing
multiple tactics in the fields of psychology, culture, business,
education and politics. The dissenters’ split with Newman
occurred in the wake of the “Perot revolution” of
1992, as they bitterly opposed forming electoral alliances between
white independents radicalized by Ross Perot’s first presidential
campaign and Fulani’s base in poor communities of color.
They subsequently became promoters of the cult charge against
him.
The Last Left Polemic
Anyone who has ever been in or around an unhappy household would
recognize the atmosphere of unforgiving hostility that has frequently
prevailed within the Left, even during periods when it was relatively
successful. Left publications have always filled their pages
with polemic, the political version of the bitter quarrels between
people who, regardless of whether they’re related by blood
or marriage, resent one another’s very existence. The vitriolic
attacks on Newman are not an anomaly but are very much how it’s
done in this tradition. Indeed, one of Newman’s quarrels
with the New Left was that it did nothing else. What is notable
about the anti-Newman diatribes, frequently so venomous that
they border on incoherence, is that they sometimes show up on
the editorial pages of the New York Times [Times
Op Ed in October 2005].
Why is Newman so controversial? In part because of his and the
collective’s success. No other contemporary American revolutionary
can lay claim to his portfolio: deep roots in the emergent independent
political movement, which includes being the “boss” of
the independent party that elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg; a
location in postmodern psychology as a clinician and highly regarded
theoretician; an inner city youth development program he founded
that has garnered over $50 million in broad-based financial support
from a cross-section of prominent corporate and Wall Street business
leaders and their companies; a body of avant-garde theatrical
work that has helped to redefine American political theatre;
and a core collective of deeply committed activists who co-create
with him the varied enterprises of his conglomerate. Newman’s
success has created his share of enemies.
Newman’s controversiality can best be understood in the
context of the progressive movement’s failures over the
course of the 20th century.
As a progressive, Newman would say he must be counted among the
Left’s failures. Unlike them, however, he has steadfastly
resisted the conservative wave that engulfed America for more
than a generation. Like a small but sturdy raft, the development
community that the collective has been constructing for nearly
four decades has managed to stay afloat when, tragically, much
else built by leftists in this country has been destroyed, defeated,
or taken over and remade to serve other interests and purposes.
In a sane world, progressives would rejoice that one of their
own survives – moreover, that someone who shares their
values has the philosophical sophistication, organizing ability,
and perseverance not only to survive but to flourish in a climate
that has been inhospitable to progressivism.
Yet the circle of Newman detractors, far from rejoicing, appear
instead to be driven by a mix of resentment, rage and sheer bewilderment
that he and his colleagues are reaching new levels of political,
cultural, intellectual and financial success and relevance.
But Newman was never one of their own. Forty years after leaving
his career as an academic philosopher in the seemingly quixotic
pursuit of a dream – community, democracy, development – Newman
remains unapologetic. His critique of modernism – including
the variety employed by the Left – takes the form of activity;
it is not an analysis of what there is (modernist conceptions
and categories being of little use in critiquing modernism),
but the doing/creating of something new. That is, his critique
is developmental rather than static, performatory rather than
cognitive, positive rather than negative, active rather than
passive.
Ian Parker, managing editor of the Annual Review of Critical
Psychology and a member of the Psychology faculty at Manchester
Metropolitan University in England, recently summarized the basic
pattern of attacks on Newman:
“Every few years there is a new wave of allegations and
panic about Fred and Co., and every time the panic draws sections
of the Left into alliances with those who seek to use psychology
against politics, and then, of course, this kind of alliance
ends up using psychology as a form of politics to discredit all
of the Left.”
Sadly, since the international Left has been so discredited by
its failures, Parker’s fears have already been realized.
Meanwhile, Newman’s success – and controversy – continue
to grow. |
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