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New Left

Overview

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 liberal 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.

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. The movement fell into decline following the end of the Vietnam War, in part as the result of a covert U.S. government campaign to mobilize the CIA's CHAOS and FBI's COINTELPRO to exacerbate existing divisions within the movement's most prominent groups, such as Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party. This campaign culminated in the 1969 assassination of BPP Chairman Fred Hampton by Chicago Police, in a predawn raid planned in coordination with the FBI and the Cook County State's Attorney.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Claims are advanced in the name of justice, and resisted in the name of tradition and prescriptive right. Each side honestly believes that it deserves to triumph, because two theories of society exist side by side in our thought, and men choose, unconsciously, the theory which fits their case. Because the battle is long and arduous all general theory is gradually forgotten; in the end, nothing remains but…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
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The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics.
Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
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And such an education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing economic situation. In the degree in which men have an active concern in the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. In what is termed politics, democratic social organization makes…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
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New Left

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