Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today.

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Far Left of Center The American Radical Left Today (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $29.95), Professor Harvey Klehr gives as one of his reasons for writing this book the fact that many of the extremist organizations he reports on camouflage their views, while on occasion "prominent individuals" confer a patina of respectability on them (as Mrs. Jimmy Carter did with regard to the People's Temple) either by associating with or praising their activities; the result being that unsuspecting individuals are drawn into their clutches. In the case of many of these groups, the only way in which ordinary citizens could happen upon them would be by falling through a manhole in one of our larger cities. Others of these organizations, however, live very much streetside existences, walking about, respectably dressed, in the full light of day. Beyond wishing to issue a caveat to the unwary, Klehr has it in mind to fill an informational niche. Though histories of radical groups have been written by such respected writers as Theodore Draper, Irving Howe, and Lewis Coser, almost no attention has been devoted to the radical Left of the 1980s-a decade that has not provided "good years for radicals in the United States or . . . in the democratic world," and in which many people have assumed their disappearance from the American scene. Klehr's message is: They're still out there,

For example: It will come as a surprise to many readers to learn that "the FBI . . . estimated that [Communist Party) membership was around 4,200 in 1975. Party sources told a reporter from one radical publication in 1983 that membership was at its highest level in years-ten thousand." Much of this growth was the direct result of an Extraordinary Party Conference held in 1982 (and deliberately modeled on a similar conference held in 1933), in the aftermath of which a thousand new members were recruited. Moreover, "In the last decade the CPUSA has made modest strides in the labor movement. One of its longtime front organizations, the Labor Research Association, has played a key role in this emergence. . . . the LRA has been able in recent years to attract leading trade unionists to its dinners and conferences"-e.g., the banquet it held in December 1982 to honor the Congressional Black Caucus, which was attended by eight hundred people including six congressmen, six New York State legislators, and three city-council members, and at which thirty unions were represented. On the foreign-policy side, the United States Peace Council (founded in 1978 as the American branch of the World Peace Council, "one of the largest and most active of Soviet front groups") has been at work, most notoriously on behalf of the nuclear-freeze movement. The WPC itself is composed of Communists and non-Communists, and has made places for several Americans on its international directorates; the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is aPresident of Honor.

Professor Klehr brings us up to date on the activities of various radical splinter groups descended from the Trotskyist and Maoist parties that flourished in a glare of publicity during the 1960s, but whose memberships now rank in the low hundreds; among these are the New Democratic Movement, the Progressive Labor Party (one of whose most notorious contemporary affiliates is the horrendous International Committee against Racism, or InCar), and the Socialist Workers Party. On the basis of Klehr's evidence, it is clear that such picturesque relics offer hood eyes on a warm day in spring. The main threat-above even that of the CPUSA-comes from what Klehr describes as the "broader, non-Communist radical Left milieu," which, "without being [composed of) Communist fronts . . . [has], at the least, friendly relations with the newly invigorated Communist Party. [It] cooperates with it, participates in united fronts with [it] and its front groups, and welcomes Communists into [its] own ranks." Within its ambiance are the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Mobilization for Survival, and, perhaps most notoriously, the National Lawyers Guild (which is a Communist front group). These groups, in essence successors-the NLG excluded-to the New Left, are potentially far more dangerous than "the Movement" of the 1960s and early '70s ever was.

Far Left of Center was written too late to include material pertinent to Jesse Jackson's dramatic bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988; however, it is sufficiently rich in data pertaining to the election of 1984 to give us full insight into the nature of his Rainbow Coalition, which, Klehr shows plainly, is the alembic that distills the contemporary American Left within a single fuming vat. With hardly an exception, from the CPUSA to CISPES, its components repose their hopes in keverend Jackson and his movement, which has succeeded to the point of persuading people who had long refused to cooperate with the national parties to accommodate I 'heir activities to "mainstream" politics. That the Democratic Party came close last year to selecting its national candidate from this cosmic umbrella group should give us all pause for thought.