New Left

Name and origins

The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged in the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. German-language accounts stress that, for all its internal differences, it set itself apart both from established social democracy and from the Marxism–Leninism of the Eastern European socialist states that existed until 1990. The term nouvelle gauche was already current in France in the 1950s: Claude Bourdet, editor of France Observateur, tried to form a third position between the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic tendencies and between the two Cold War blocs, and Britain's "First New Left" borrowed the term from this French usage.

The immediate trigger came in 1956. The confused response of the Communist Parties of the USA and Great Britain to Khrushchev's Secret Speech and the Hungarian Revolution led some Marxist intellectuals to seek a more democratic politics, opposed to what they saw as the centralised and authoritarian politics of the pre-war left parties. E. P. Thompson and John Saville of the Communist Party Historians Group published the dissenting journal Reasoner inside the CPGB; suspended for refusing to stop it, they relaunched it in summer 1957 as The New Reasoner. In a 1959 essay there Thompson brought the concept of a "New Left" to Britain, describing a generation that saw the Soviet Union as the nation of the Great Purges, Stalingrad and the Secret Speech, the power that had repressed the Hungarian rising. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills popularised the term in an open letter of 1960. In the same year The New Reasoner merged with Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review, with Stuart Hall as founding editor. In the late 1950s and early 1960s many New Leftists took part in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1957.

The United States: students and the anti-war movement

The organisation that came to symbolise the New Left in the United States was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Its founding document, the Port Huron Statement written by Tom Hayden in 1962, called for "participatory democracy" based on non-violent civil disobedience. SDS became the leading anti-war organisation on campuses during the Vietnam War and grew rapidly, but in 1968–1969 it split under internal dissension and a turn towards Maoism, giving rise to the New Communist Movement and to factions such as the Weather Underground.

The German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse was called the "Father of the New Left". Rejecting the orthodox Marxist view of the revolutionary proletariat, he saw the Black Power and student movements of the 1960s as the new challengers of capitalism, and in a 1971 speech at Berkeley called the radical student movement and Black and Brown militants "the only real opposition we have in this country". Women's demands also grew within the New Left student movement: papers presented at SDS meetings in 1965–1966 urged women to a path of self-discovery, and in 1967 the first women's liberation organisations formed in Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, New York and Toronto. Shulamith Firestone spoke at the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in 1967 and founded radical feminist organisations including New York Radical Women. The philosopher Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA, took part in second-wave feminism and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

West Germany, France and 1968

The European New Left appeared first in West Germany and West Berlin. In Subversive Aktion, conceived in the early 1960s as the German branch of the Situationist International, Rudi Dutschke — an East German émigré who had studied with the Frankfurt School — came to the fore, and his faction became a leading force in the Socialist German Student Union (SDS). Dutschke argued that "systematic, limited and controlled confrontations with the power structure" would force representative democracy to show its class character and authoritarianism; on 11 April 1968 he was gravely wounded by a far-right gunman. In France 1967 saw the publication of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, and phrases from situationist texts covered posters and walls during the student and worker strikes of May 1968. In the Paris May events students for a time allied with left trade unions, and the protests escalated into nationwide mass strikes. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a libertarian activist at Nanterre, was one of the movement's spokesmen. The same year occupations and strikes followed at Columbia University, in Japan and at Stockholm University, but most were shut down by the police without achieving their goals, and the influence of the student movement lapsed in the 1970s.

German-language accounts often divide the New Left into a "dogmatic" New Left, including the Maoist and Stalinist K-Gruppen and Trotskyists, and an "undogmatic" or anti-authoritarian New Left of anarchists, Spontis and Autonome. In the early 1980s many former K-Gruppen members joined the Greens alongside people from the undogmatic New Left.

Ideas and issues

The early British New Left journals sought a revisionist Marxist position of "socialist humanism". Stuart Hall recalled in 2010 that he had been troubled by the failure of orthodox Marxism to deal with "Third World" issues of race, ethnicity and racism or with literature and culture, and his work came close to founding the field of cultural studies. New Left Review under Perry Anderson's long editorship popularised the Frankfurt School, Gramsci and Althusser in the English-speaking world. In the United States the Johnson–Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya advanced Marxist humanism. In Latin America the New Left is loosely defined as the parties, indigenous, student and peasant movements and guerrilla organisations that made up the left between the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and 1990; it sought to go beyond existing Marxist–Leninist efforts at economic equality to address racial and ethnic equality, indigenous rights, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.

Relations with neighbouring currents

Some New Leftists turned away from the labour movement and the theory of class struggle, while others gravitated to established forms of Marxism, such as the Maoist-influenced New Communist Movement in the United States or the K-Gruppen in the German-speaking world. According to German accounts, parts of the New Left drew on earlier communist ideas suppressed in the Stalin era, such as Rosa Luxemburg's council democracy or Trotskyism, and its visions extended to anarchist models of society. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gorz strongly influenced the student movement of the 1960s. Where Western Marxism was above all an intellectual tradition of theorists, the New Left was a political movement embracing student, anti-war, civil rights and women's movements. Italian accounts note that ideas of the left communism of the 1920s were taken up again in the New Left of the 1960s, particularly after May 1968 in situationism and the workerist (operaismo) movements. German accounts trace the New Left's lasting influence in student representative bodies and, from the 1970s, in the new social movements.