The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's conservative establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles on a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reforms, and gender relations. The New Left differs from the traditional left in that it tended to prioritize the struggle for various forms of social justice, whereas previous movements prioritized explicitly economic goals. However, many have used the term "New Left" to describe an evolution, continuation, and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.
Some who self-identified as "New Left" rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle; however, others gravitated to their own takes on established forms of Marxism, such as the New Communist movement (which drew from Maoism) in the United States or the K-Gruppen in the German-speaking world. In the United States, the movement was associated with the anti-war college-campus protest movements, including the Free Speech Movement.
Background
The origins of the New Left have been traced to several factors. Prominently, the confused response of the Communist Party of the USA and the Communist Party of Great Britain to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 led some Marxist intellectuals to develop a more democratic approach to politics, opposed to what they saw as the centralised and authoritarian politics of the pre-World War II leftist parties. The Marxists who became disillusioned with the authoritarian nature of Communist Parties eventually formed the "new left".
Initially, the movement was composed of dissenting Communist Party intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom; later it incorporated student radicals in the United States and in the Western Bloc. The term was already current in France in the 1950s. It was associated with , and its editor Claude Bourdet, who attempted to form a third position, between the dominant Stalinist and social democratic tendencies of the left, and the two Cold War blocs. It was from this French "new left" that the "First New Left" of Britain borrowed the term.
The German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse is referred to as the "Father of the New Left". He rejected the orthodox Marxist view of the revolutionary proletariat; instead, he labeled the 1960s Black Power and student movements as the new challengers of capitalism. In a speech at UC Berkeley in 1971, Marcuse said: "I still consider the radical student movement and the Black and Brown militants as the only real opposition we have in this country." According to Leszek Kołakowski, noted critic of Marxist thought, Marcuse argued that since "all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant". He regarded the realization of man's erotic nature, or Eros, as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the utopias of Jerry Rubin and others. However, Marcuse also believed the concept of Logos, which involves one's reason, would absorb Eros over time. Prominent New Left thinker Ernst Bloch believed that socialism would prove the means for all human beings to become immortal and eventually create God. quoting Dans Prinzip Hoffnung pp. 1380–1628.
The writings of sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), who popularized the term 'New Left' in a 1960 open letter, also inspired the movement. According to biographer Daniel Geary, Mills' works such as White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956), and The Sociological Imagination (1959) had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s".
Origins in the United Kingdom As a result of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Joseph Stalin, many abandoned the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and began to rethink orthodox Marxism. Some joined various Trotskyist groupings or the Labour Party.
The Marxist historians E. P. Thompson and John Saville of the Communist Party Historians Group published a dissenting journal within the CPGB called Reasoner. Refusing to discontinue the publication at the behest of the CPGB, the two were suspended from party membership and relaunched the journal in the summer of 1957 as The New Reasoner.
Thompson was especially important in bringing the concept of a "New Left" to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1959 with a New Reasoner lead essay, in which he described
Later that year, Saville published a piece in the same journal which identified the emergence of the British New Left as a response to the increasing political irrelevance of socialists inside and outside the Labour Party during the 1950s, which he saw as being the result of a failure by the established left to come to grips with the political changes that had come to pass internationally after World War II, specifically, the economic expansion and the socio-economic legacy of the Attlee ministry:
In 1960, The New Reasoner merged with the Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review. a publication aimed at making the ideas of culturally oriented theorists available to an undergraduate reading audience. These early New Left journals attempted to forge a Marxist revisionist position of "socialist humanism", departing from orthodox Marxist theory. In a 2010 retrospective, Stuart Hall wrote, "I was troubled by the failure of orthodox Marxism to deal adequately with either 'Third World' issues of race and ethnicity, and questions of racism, or with literature and culture, which preoccupied me intellectually as an undergraduate."
During the late 1950s–early '60s period, many New Leftists were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which formed in 1957. According to Robin Blackburn, "The decline of CND by late 1961, however, deprived the New Left of much of its momentum as a movement, and uncertainties and divisions within the Board of the journal led to the transfer of the Review to a younger and less experienced group in 1962."
Under the long-standing editorial leadership of Perry Anderson, New Left Review popularised the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and other forms of Marxism. Other periodicals, such as Socialist Register, started in 1964, and Radical Philosophy, started in 1972, have been associated with the New Left, and published a range of important writings in this field.
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. The London School of Economics became a key site of British student militancy. The influence of protests against the Vietnam War and of the May 1968 events in France were also felt strongly throughout the British New Left—some responded by joining the International Socialists, which later became Socialist Workers Party, while others got involved with groups such as the International Marxist Group. The politics of the British New Left can be contrasted with Solidarity, which focused on industrial issues from a libertarian perspective.
Another significant figure in the British New Left was Stuart Hall, a black cultural theorist in Britain. He was the founding editor of New Left Review in 1960. In an obituary following his death in February 2014, Robin Blackburn wrote in New Left Review: "His exemplary investigations came close to inventing a new field of study, 'cultural studies'; in his vision, the new discipline was profoundly political in inspiration and radically interdisciplinary in character."
Numerous Black British scholars attributed their interest in cultural studies to Hall, including Paul Gilroy, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah. In the words of Indian literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Academics worldwide could not think 'Black Britain' before Stuart Hall. And in Britain the impact of Cultural Studies went beyond the confines of the academy."
Development in United States
In the United States, "New Left" was the name loosely associated with radical, Marxist political movements that arose during the 1960s, primarily among college students. At the core of these movements was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Noting the perversion of "the older Left" by "Stalinism", in their 1962 Port Huron Statement the SDS eschewed "formulas" and "closed theories". Instead they called for a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection". The New Left that developed in the following years was "a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that advocated for democracy, civil rights, and various types of university reforms, and protested against the Vietnam war".
The term "New Left" was popularised in the United States in an open letter, entitled Letter to the New Left, written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills. He argued for a revamped leftist ideology, moving away from the ("Old Left") focus on issues solely pertinent to labor (whose entrenched union leadership in the U.S. supported the Cold War and pragmatic establishment politics) into a broader set of issues such as opposing alienation, anomie, and authoritarianism. Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism toward the values of the counterculture, and he emphasized the movement's international perspective. According to David Burner, Mills claimed that the proletariat (collectively, the working class as defined by Marxism) were no longer the revolutionary force; the new agents of revolutionary change were young intellectuals around the world.
In the United States, the CIA, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded various intellectuals, cultural organizations and magazines affiliated with the New Left that championed anti-communist ideas and Western values.
A student protest called the Free Speech Movement took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of UC Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others. In protests unprecedented in scope at the time, students insisted that the university administration lift the ban on campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. On 2 December 1964 on the steps of Sproul Hall, Mario Savio delivered a speech with these famous passages:
The New Left opposed what it saw as the prevailing authority structures in society, which it termed "The Establishment", and those who rejected this authority became known as the "anti-Establishment". The New Left focused on social activists and their approach to organization, convinced that they could be the source for a better kind of social revolution.