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A political movement originating in the United States in the 1960s, especially among college students, marked by advocacy of radical changes in government, politics, and society.
NewLeftist New Leftist n.Generic term encompassing diverse challenges to the doctrines, methods of organization, and styles of leadership of the ‘old’ left.
The new left emerged from the disintegration of Soviet hegemony over the international communist movement after 1956; the East European revolts, Soviet response to them and the repercussions this had within individual communist parties, and the challenges made by Trotskyist and Maoist parties to Soviet ideological control. The Cuban Revolution of 1959, and anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia suggested to some that there were different strategies of revolution and that other social groups, apart from the industrial proletariat, could be the agents of revolutionary change. Students, women, black power groups, and anti-Vietnam War activists in Europe and the United States mobilized, and claimed the support of peasants and ‘lumpenproletariat’ in the Third World. The apogee of the new left was witnessed 1968 in the May ‘events’ in Paris, and its nadir in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the end of ‘socialism with a human face’ there.
The new left's emphasis upon spontaneity left it vulnerable to fragmentation and an eclectic set of groups each with distinct agendas. However it left its mark on feminism, green parties, Eurocommunism, and a renaissance in intellectual thought on the left (see Guevara, Marcuse, and Gramsci) as well as renewed interest in Marx's views on alienation and the state.
— Geraldine Lievesley
The New Left was a term applied to a generation of Americans who came of age in the 1960s and were radicalized by social injustices, the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam. The New Left was made up largely of college students. The first major group to embody its principles was Students for a Democratic Society (sds), which was formed in Michigan in 1962. Its Port Huron Statement attacked social injustice and the values of the so-called Affluent Society. The New Left grew in 1964 with the onset of the free-speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley, which was a protest against restrictions on student involvement in political demonstrations on campus. It also won followers by denouncing American involvement in Vietnam and deploring the failure of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs to eradicate poverty.
The New Left was prominent in countless university demonstrations, the best known of which took place at Columbia University in 1968, Harvard University in 1969, and Kent State University in 1970, when the National Guard killed four students after being called out to stop antiwar protests. The New Left was also active in the counterculture of the 1960s.
See also Chicago Seven; Hoffman, Abbie; Kent State Incident; Students for a Democratic Society.
A radical movement of the 1960s and 1970s. New Leftists opposed the military-industrial complex and involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War; they urged more public attention to conditions of black people and the poor. New Leftists were less theoretical than communists and generally did not admire the Soviet Union. But many of them were interested in Maoism, and they spoke strongly for “participatory democracy.” (See sit-ins.)
The New Left is a term used in different countries to describe left-wing
movements that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. They differed from earlier leftist movements that had been more oriented towards
The confused response of the Communist Party of the USA and the Communist Party of Great Britain to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 created a crisis of confidence in party decision making. Independent Marxist intellectuals began to develop a more individualistic approach to leftist politics, which was opposed to the perceived bureaucratic and inflexible politics of the pre-war leftist parties. In Western Europe, these new developments occurred both inside and outside social democratic and Communist parties, contributing toward the development of eurocommunism. The New Left in the U.S. was primarily based on college campuses. The New Left in the United Kingdom emerged through the links between dissenting Communist Party intellectuals and campus groups.
As a result of Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, many left the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) for various Trotskyist groupings or the Labour Party.
The British New Left concentrated on the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament and global justice. Some within the British New Left joined the
International Socialists, which later became
The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson established a dissenting journal within the CPGB
called Reasoner. Once expelled from the party, he began publishing the New
Reasoner from 1957. In 1960, this journal merged with the Universities and Left
Review to form the New Left Review. These journals attempted to
synthesise a theoretical position of a revisionist, humanist,
As the campus orientation of the American New Left became clear in the mid to late 1960s, the student sections of the British New Left began taking action in these areas. The London School of Economics became a key site of British student militancy (Hoch and Schoenbach, 1969). The influence of the May 1968 events in France were also felt strongly throughout the British New Left. The politics of the British New Left can be contrasted with Solidarity, UK, which continued to focus primarily on industrial issues.
In the United States, the "New Left" was the name loosely associated with liberal, sometimes radical, political movements that
took place during the 1960s, primarily among college students. The origin of the name can be traced to an open letter written in
1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills
entitled Letter to the New Left. Mills argued for a new leftist ideology,
moving away from the traditional ("Old Left") focus on
The New Left opposed the prevailing authority structures in society, which it termed "The Establishment," and those who rejected this authority became known as "anti-Establishment." The New Left did not seek to recruit industrial workers, but rather concentrated on a social activist approach to organization. Many in the New Left were convinced that they could be the source for a better kind of social revolution.
Most New Left thinkers in the U.S., to varying degrees, were influenced by the Vietnam war and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like the British New Left, they also believed that the Secret Speech drew attention to problems with the Soviet Union, but unlike the British New Left, they did not turn to Trotskyism or social democracy as a result. Much of the U.S. New Left argued that since the Soviet Union could no longer be considered the world center for proletarian revolution, new revolutionary Communist thinkers had to be substituted in its place — Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro were identified as key contributors to this new framework.
Other elements of the U.S. New Left were anarchist and looked to libertarian socialist traditions of American radicalism, and
investigated the
The U.S. New Left both influenced and drew inspiration from black radicalism, particularly the Black Power movement and the more explicitly left-wing Black Panther Party. The Panthers in turn influenced other similar militant groups, like the Young Lords, the Brown Berets and the American Indian Movement.
The organization that really came to symbolize the core of the New Left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1962 Tom Hayden wrote its founding document, the Port Huron Statement, which issued a call for "participatory democracy" based on nonviolent civil disobedience. The SDS marshaled anti-war, pro-civil rights and free speech concerns on campuses, and managed to bring together liberals and more revolutionary leftists. The SDS became the leading organization of the antiwar movement on college campuses during the Vietnam War, and during the course of the war became increasingly militant. As opposition to the war grew stronger, the SDS became a nationally prominent political organization, but opposing the war became an overriding concern that overshadowed many of the original issues that had inspired SDS.
In 1968 and 1969, as its radicalism reached a fever pitch, the SDS began to split under the strain of internal dissension and increasing turns toward Maoism. In this vein, along with adherents known as the New Communist Movement, some extremist terrorist splinter factions also emerged, such as the Weather Underground Organization.
The Prague Spring was legitimised by the Czech government as a reformist movement to
revitalise Czechoslovak socialism. The 1968 events in the Czech Republic were driven
forward by industrial
The driving force of near-revolution in France in May 1968 were students inspired by the ideas of the Situationist International, which in turn had been inspired by Socialisme ou Barbarie. Both of these French groups placed an emphasis on cultural production as a form of production. Unlike the New Left, the sphere of culture was not unrelated to productivity.
While the Autonomia in Italy have been called New Left, it is more appropriate to see them as a unique response to the failure of the Italian PCI and PSI to deal with the new Italian industrial working class in the 1950s. The Autonomia was a result of traditional, industrially oriented, communism retheorising its ideology and methods. Unlike most of the New Left, Autonomia had a strong blue-collar arm, active in regularly occupying factories.
The Provos were a Dutch counter-cultural movement of mostly young people with anarchist influences.
As many of those who supported the New Left in the 1960s are now in charge of the kinds of institutions they once opposed, conservative opponents argue that their assumptions - which are sometimes described as politically correct multiculturalism - are now the establishment orthodoxy. In what has been described as the culture wars and science wars, conservative critics of this orthodoxy such as Allan Bloom and Roger Scruton assert that New Left radical egalitarianism is motivated by anti-Western nihilism.
For a discussion on the rise and fall of the 60s movement in Canada, USA and Germany see: Levitt. C (1984) Children of Privilege. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario.
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Political Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| History Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Read more |
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