New Left

A diverse international movement which sought to reformulate traditional left-wing politics in the 1960s, New Left activism culminated in the widespread upheavals of 1968, "the year of the barricades," when political dissent erupted around the developed world against the backdrop of a major escalation of American activity in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The May 1968 demonstrations in France, which briefly united students and workers in a series of direct confrontations with French government authority, have acquired a near legendary status in popular historical assessments of the New Left. But it was the United States, largely because of the War in Vietnam and the struggle for black civil rights, which formed the epicenter of New Left politics throughout the decade.

Never a cohesive movement as such, the American New Left was a loose coalition of dissenting activist groups which was largely student-based, and was born out of the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s which had been led by SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). The need for a new left-leaning politics seemed particularly acute in the United States, where a combination of the postwar economic boom, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and Stalin's appropriation of Soviet politics, had convinced many that older models of Marxist class struggle were anachronistic. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 it had also become clear that moves to reform the Democratic Party into a mass left-liberal alliance had collapsed into wranglings over internal party procedures. Theyear 1962 marked the emergence of a recognizably new left-wing agenda as a small cadre of student activists, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), convened at Port Huron, Michigan. If SNCC and southern civil rights provided the major catalyst for the 1960s movement, it was SDS and its initially northern, white middle-class student constituency which became the driving force behind the first generation of the New Left.

Directly influenced by the writings of 1950s intellectuals such as Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, SDS announced itself in the formative "Port Huron Statement" of 1962, a document which developed the political and intellectual precepts of Mills' "Letter to the New Left" (1960) into a broad and influential statement about the "values" and "goals" which would come to shape the early years of the movement. The statement's author, Tom Hayden, may have preserved some of the language of radical Marxism (not least in his emphasis upon the "alienation" of life lived in the advanced capitalist West), but the document as a whole distanced itself decisively from any analysis grounded exclusively in economics or the politics of class, a kind of analysis which Mills had denounced as "the labor metaphysic." Announcing proudly that SDS would have "no sure formulas, no closed theories," the "Port Huron Statement" stressed what would become a characteristic openness of the New Left to a diverse platform of oppositional politics extending well beyond class struggle.

Hayden's thinking about alienation, and New Left thinking in general, owed more to the influence of Sartre and Camus than it did to orthodox Marxism. The antidote offered was a politics based on "participatory democracy," an activism which sought personal ful-fillment through civic participation. As an activist strategy, "participatory democracy" was most notably espoused in the ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project) of 1963-65, which sent students into the black ghettos and working class neighborhoods of nine northern cities, including Chicago, Newark, and Cleveland, and in the Northern Student Movement, which conducted literacy programs and assisted in the Harlem rent strikes of 1964-65. SDS was also instrumental in organizing a number of mass demonstrations, notably the first major protest against the Vietnam War, the April 1965 March on Washington, an event which in certain respects was to prove a watershed for New Left politics. American intervention in Vietnam had escalated dramatically in 1964, and when the United States introduced ground troops in late 1965 the ranks of SDS swelled with new members. SDS membership rose from around 1,000 in 1964 to around 4,300 in 1965, and to around 100,000 by 1969. There were also the countless thousands of non-members who participated in direct action and demonstrations across the country. In the days immediately following President Nixon's announcement of the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, more than 400 campuses were disrupted, most notoriously at Kent State University, where the National Guard killed four students, and at Jackson State in Mississippi, where two more students died.

As the stakes rose the climate became more militant, and the recruitment of so many to the campaign against the war increased the variety of dissenting positions accommodated within the New Left. Sooner or later it was inevitable that political discord would erupt within the ranks of SDS itself. When the organization was infiltrated by the Maoist PL (Progressive Labor party) in 1967, SDS was forced into a sharper definition of its own political agenda than the "Port Huron Statement" had ever intended should be the case—SDS had always been strong on what the statement called "values," but relatively short on what it termed "goals," or on practical steps which might be taken to realize those goals. Holding together so diverse a movement with so unsystematic a political program proved impossible. By the end of the decade, with a Republican once more in the White House and the War still on, SDS had split into a number of competing factions, each with a different agenda, whilst others had drifted back toward the Democratic Party. New Left activism played an important part in bringing the conflict in Vietnam to a halt. But when the war ended in 1973, the one common cause which had bound so pluralist a "movement" together had vanished. Having drifted so far from Marxist orthodoxy, most of the movement lacked the economic analysis which might have turned the Oil Crisis of 1973 to its advantage, and the New Left soon subsided with the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.

The existential flavor of early New Left thinking lent the movement a commitment to individual liberation which calls into question its "newness" as such. The specific relation between individual and society stressed in "participatory democracy" can be traced in a number of American political and intellectual traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as 1960s activist Stanley Aronowitz has put it, the "Port Huron Statement" was "remarkable for its continuity with traditional American ideas of popular self-government, egalitarian ethics, and social justice." Traditional or not, a further consequence of these commitments was the rise of a countercultural wing of the "movement" (including the hippies, and from 1967/1968 the Yippies), which would increasingly represent the face of the New Left in the second half of the decade.

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Caute, David. Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades. London, Paladin, 1988.

Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel and Daniel. Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative. London, Penguin, 1969.

DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. New York, Syracuse University Press, 1990.

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Steigerwald, David. The Sixties and the End of Modern America. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1995.