New Left Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The new left refers to an international movement, composed principally of students and other young people, which arose in the developed capitalist countries during the 1960s. It was “new” in contrast to the old, Communist left, which new leftists believed to have become ossified by orthodoxy and ideological dependence on the Soviet Union. New left theorists rejected both Communist orthodoxy and the antiCommunist ideology of the leaders of the capitalist bloc.

The new left was inspired by the U.S. civil rights movement, the Cuban revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Ernesto “Che” Guevára, Régis Debray, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh. In the United States, its founding moment was the Port Huron (Michigan) conference of 1962 and its eponymous statement, which proclaimed that “people have a right to participate in the making of those decisions that affect their lives.” The common element was an emphasis on politics from below, which was seen as more important than any particular formal democratic structure. The conference had been called by the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), which was refunded as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It indicated its rejection of cold war divisions by explicitly dropping SLID’s ban on communists among its members.

SDS was only one part of the U.S. new left. Another important component, the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, arose in the fall of 1964, when students who had taken part in the Mississippi freedom summer project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were barred from raising money for the civil rights movement on campus; the resulting protest convulsed the campus and raised many broader issues, most notably the call for student power.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, antiwar protests became the central theme of the new left, particularly in the United States. Campus-based activists developed the concept of university complicity with the war effort, through war-related research, on-campus recruiting by war industries, and the provision of military training to students through the Reserve Officers Training Corps. This concept led to campaigns of nonviolent resistance, sometimes culminating in building occupations, campus wide strikes, clashes with police, and massive arrests; 1968 and 1969 saw many such events.

The term new left most commonly refers to the movement of college students, most of whom were white. However, the core of the campus new left saw itself engaged in a common struggle with community activists, particularly among African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, including the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Brown Berets, and to a lesser extent with radical activists in the labor movement. New left activists also saw themselves as part of an international movement, in solidarity with student activists in France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and elsewhere, and with the national liberation movements in third world countries, most notably Vietnam. The French student-worker insurrection of May-June 1968 was a model for many in the U.S. new left.

The new left was only one part of the broader movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The latter was led by a coalition of liberals, pacifists, and the old left, and it sought to maximize participation by limiting its agenda to demands to “stop the bombing” and “negotiate now.” The new left, in contrast, supported the concept of national self-determination for Vietnam. Different phrasings—from “immediate withdrawal” to “victory for the NLF”—reflected ideological divisions within the new left but posed an alternative to the slogans of the National Mobilization Committee and the later moratorium.

New leftists tended to prefer local actions over large national marches. However, many new leftists took part in the Chicago protests against the Democratic national convention of 1968, and in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in 1968 and of George McGovern in 1972.

SDS’s quarterly national meetings were marked by lively debate and growing factionalism, which came to a head in the Chicago national convention of 1969, where the organization split in two, between supporters of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and a number of groups (notably Weatherman and the Revolutionary Youth Movement) that identified with Ho Chi Minh and the Black Panther Party. Neither faction thrived after the split, but new left activists went on to play central roles in a wide variety of movements during the following decades.

Bibliography:

Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Debray, Regis. Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. Translated by Bobbye Ortiz.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980.
Hayden,Tom. The Port Huron Statement:The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution. New York:Thunder’s Mouth, 2005.
Katsiaficas, George N. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston: South End, 1987.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York:Vintage, 1974.

This example New Left Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.