The Worker Student Alliance (WSA) in the United States was the section of Students for a Democratic Society led by the Progressive Labor Party . The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the working class , like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on and off the campuses. In practice, that usually meant students enrolled in school would get jobs as cafeteria hands and other manual labor jobs at those schools.
101-508: The WSA explicitly rejected the rest of the New Left 's insistence that it would be various combinations of 'progressive' nationalism and popular rebellion that would jump-start the revolution; rather, the WSA said the catalyst would be organized workers in various industries and the service sector , and that students could best help spread and deepen workers' class consciousness by really being among
202-455: A mass arrest . Shortly after 2 a.m. on December 4, 1964, police cordoned off the building, and at 3:30 a.m. began the arrest. Close to 800 students were arrested, most of whom were transported about 25 miles by bus to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin . They were released on their own recognizance after a few hours. About a month later, the university brought charges against the students who organized
303-503: A building at Stockholm University . However, all of these protests were shut down by police authorities without achieving their goals, which caused the influence of the student movement to lapse in the 1970s. In Australia, the New Left was engaged in debates concerning the legitimacy of heterodox economics and political economy in tertiary education. This culminated in the establishment of an independent department of political economy at
404-540: A common program for economic change. The leadership commitment was sustained barely two years. With no early sign in the neighborhoods of an interracial movement that would "collectivize economic decision making and democratize and decentralize every economic, political, and social institution in America", many SDS organizers were readily induced by the escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam to abandon their storefront offices, and heed
505-652: A conference at New York University in November 1973. The CAR eventually expanded to several other countries and added "International" to its name to become InCAR, but InCAR was in many respects another "mass organization" led and directed by the PLP, with separate publications and staff, but always with a goal of winning InCAR members to support PLP. By 1996, this strategy was too much to maintain, and PLP elected to pursue pure and open communist activity again, using only its own party as an organizational structure. This article about
606-599: A famous speech: ... But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be — have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings! ... There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon
707-542: 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 , Angela McRobbie , 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
808-555: A political organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . New Left 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
909-415: A shift from traditional leftism, toward the values of the counterculture , and emphasized an international perspective on the movement. According to David Burner, C. Wright Mills claimed that the proletariat (collectively the working-class referencing Marxism) were no longer the revolutionary force; the new agents of revolutionary change were young intellectuals around the world. A student protest called
1010-624: The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, including nominating their own candidate, " Lyndon Pigasus Pig " (an actual pig), was also widely publicized in the media at this time. In Cambridge, hippies congregated each Sunday for a large "be-in" at Cambridge Park with swarms of drummers and those beginning the Women's Movement. In the United States the hippie movement started to be seen as part of
1111-557: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement . To this day, the Movement's legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, influencing some political views and values of college students and the general public. In 1958, activist students organized SLATE , a campus political party meaning a "slate" of candidates running on the same level –a same "slate." The students created SLATE to promote
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#17328511920261212-582: The Beat Generation and mimicked some of the current values of the British Mod scene . Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock , embraced the sexual revolution , and some used drugs such as cannabis , LSD , and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness . The Yippies , who were seen as an offshoot of the hippie movements parodying as a political party, came to national attention during their celebration of
1313-594: The Black Power movement as the new opposition to capitalism. In a speech to the University of California, 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
1414-626: The Cultural Revolution ) in response to the current situation. The so-called Chinese New Left differs greatly from the Western New Left and is difficult to define clearly. Under the one-party dictatorship, no "faction" in China can make political waves, so some scholars doubt the existence of a genuine New Left in China. The New Left in Japan began by occupying college campuses for several years in
1515-524: The Free Speech Movement took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, 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 this scope at the time, students insisted that the university administration lift
1616-614: The House Committee on Un-American Activities meeting in San Francisco in 1960 had included an iconic scene as protesters were literally washed down the steps inside the Rotunda of San Francisco City Hall with fire hoses. The anti-Communist film Operation Abolition depicted this scene and became an organizing tool for the protesters. The 20th anniversary reunion of the FSM was held during
1717-558: The Hungarian rising and threw the first sputniks into space.... A generation nourished on 1984 and Animal Farm , which enters politics at the extreme point of disillusion where the middle-aged begin to get out. The young people... are enthusiastic enough. But their enthusiasm is not for the Party, or the Movement, or the established Political Leaders. They do not mean to give their enthusiasm cheaply away to any routine machine. They expect
1818-715: The International Marxist Group . The politics of the British New Left can be contrasted with Solidarity , which continued to focus primarily on industrial issues. Another significant figure in the British New Left was Stuart Hall , a black cultural theorist in Britain. He was the founding editor of the New Left Review in 1960. The New Left Review, in an obituary following Hall's death in February 2014, wrote: "His exemplary investigations came close to inventing
1919-598: 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 as The New Reasoner in the summer of 1957. Thompson was especially important in bringing
2020-594: The New Communist Movement , some extremist illegal factions also emerged, such as the Weather Underground organization. The SDS suffered the difficulty of wanting to change the world while "freeing life in the here and now". This caused confusion between short-term and long-term goals. The sudden growth due to the successful rallies against the Vietnam War meant there were more people wanting action to end
2121-676: 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 . The origins of the New Left have been traced to several factors. Prominently, the confused response of the Communist Party of
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#17328511920262222-581: The New Left Review popularised the Frankfurt School , Antonio Gramsci , Louis Althusser , and other forms of Marxism. Other periodicals like Socialist Register , started in 1964, and Radical Philosophy , started in 1972, have also 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
2323-484: The Port Huron Statement , which issued a call for "participatory democracy" based on non-violent civil disobedience. This was the idea that individual citizens could help make "those social decisions determining the quality and direction" of their lives. The SDS marshaled antiwar, pro-civil rights and free speech concerns on campuses, and brought together liberals and more revolutionary leftists. The SDS became
2424-579: The Situationist International reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most significant texts of the situationist movement, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem . The expressed writing and political theory of these texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly influential in shaping
2525-576: The University of Sydney . The Workers' Party ( Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) is considered the main organization to emerge from the New Left in Brazil. According to Manuel Larrabure, "rather than taking the path of the old Latin American left, in the form of the guerrilla movement, or the Stalinist party", PT decided to try something new, while being aided by CUT and other social movements. Its challenge
2626-625: The Young Lords , the Brown Berets and the American Indian Movement . Students immersed themselves into poor communities building up support with the locals. The New Left sought to be a broad based, grass roots movement. The Vietnam War conducted by liberal President Lyndon B. Johnson was a special target across the worldwide New Left. Johnson and his top officials became unwelcome on American campuses. The anti-war movement escalated
2727-610: The sit-in , resulting in an even larger student protest that all but shut down the university. After much disturbance, the University officials slowly backed down. By January 3, 1965, the new acting chancellor, Martin Meyerson (who had replaced the previous resigned Edward Strong ), established provisional rules for political activity on the Berkeley campus. He designated the Sproul Hall steps an open discussion area during certain hours of
2828-533: The "New Left" which was associated with anti-war college campus protest movements. The organization that really came to symbolize the core of the New Left in the United States was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). By 1962, the SDS had emerged as the most important of the new campus radical groups; soon it would be regarded as virtually synonymous with the "New Left". In 1962, Tom Hayden wrote its founding document,
2929-568: The "new left", first among dissenting Communist Party intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom , and later alongside campus radicalism in the United States and in the Western Bloc . The term nouvelle gauche was already current in France in the 1950s. It was associated with France Observateur , and its editor Claude Bourdet , who attempted to form a third position, between
3030-750: The 1960s, culminating in the 1968–69 Japanese university protests . After 1970, they splintered into several freedom fighter groups including the United Red Army and the Japanese Red Army . They also developed the political ideology of Anti-Japaneseism . The New Left in Latin America can be loosely defined as the collection of political parties , radical grassroots social movements (such as indigenous movements, student movements , mobilizations of landless rural workers, afro-descendent organizations and feminist movements), guerilla organizations (such as
3131-438: The 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley . The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio . Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg , Tom Miller, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker , Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg and others. With the participation of thousands of students,
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3232-558: The 1968 spring equinox , when some 3,000 of them took over Grand Central Terminal in New York, resulting in 61 arrests. The Yippies, especially their leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin , became notorious for their theatrics, such as trying to levitate the Pentagon at the October 1967 war protest, and such slogans as "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!" Their stated intention to protest
3333-564: 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 and with the post–World War II economic expansion and the socio-economic legacy of the Attlee ministry : The most important single reason for
3434-638: The Bronx, and the 4 October Organization in Philadelphia white radicals (open in the debt they believed they owed to the SNCC and to the Black Panthers) continued to organise rent strikes, health and legal clinics, housing occupations and street protests against police brutality. While city-hall and police harassment was a factor, internal tensions ensured that these radical community-organizing efforts did not long survive
3535-570: The Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions ) and other organizations (such as trade unions, campesino leagues and human rights organizations) that comprised the left between 1959 (with the beginning of the Cuban Revolution ) and 1990 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall ). Free Speech Movement The Free Speech Movement ( FSM ) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during
3636-624: The FSM was followed by the Vietnam Day Committee , a major starting point for the anti-Vietnam war movement. For the first time, disobedience tactics of the Civil Rights Movement were brought by the Free Speech Movement to a college campus in the 1960s. Those approaches gave the students exceptional leverage to make demands of the university administrators, and build the foundation for future protests, such as those against
3737-506: The FSM, and current free speech issues. In April 2001, UC's Bancroft Library held a symposium celebrating the opening of the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive. Although not a formal FSM reunion, many FSM leaders were on the panels and other participants were in the audience. The 40th anniversary reunion, the first after Savio's death in 1996, was held in October 2004. It featured columnist Molly Ivins giving
3838-472: The Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom . The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left , and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and
3939-642: The New Left were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 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 ,
4040-551: The New Left, as were the Yippies. The U.S. New Left drew inspiration first from the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement , particularly the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and then from black radicalism, particularly the Black Power movement and the more explicitly Maoist and militant Black Panther Party . The Panthers in turn influenced other similar militant groups, like
4141-523: The Old Left's disregard for the environment in favor of preserving the jobs of union workers . Environmentalism also gave rise to various other social justice movements such as the environmental justice movement, which aims to prevent the toxification of the environment of minority and disadvantaged communities. By 1968, however, the New Left coalition began to split. The anti-war Democratic presidential nomination campaign of Kennedy and McCarthy brought
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4242-559: The RYM and the WSA kept the SDS name, but the Weatherman organization continued to hold the SDS National Office and all the SDS membership lists; thus it was able to assume effective "command" of the name and public face of SDS despite its inferior size. Nearly immediately post-conference, Weatherman led their "Days of Rage" Chicago riots of 1969 and other sporadic acts of violence — all under
4343-408: 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 years that followed 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"
4444-466: The SDS name — until 1970, when Mark Rudd and a few other Weathermen decided to close the SDS National Office and drop the SDS name. PL, however, continued to keep its SDS for several more years. Since all active SDS chapters after 1970 were SDS-WSA, the "WSA" initials were dropped. In 1974 PL's SDS voted to dissolve itself and join the Committee Against Racism which PL had helped to form at
4545-514: The U.S. New Left were anarchist and looked to libertarian socialist traditions of American radicalism , the Industrial Workers of the World and union militancy. This group coalesced around the historical journal Radical America . American Autonomist Marxism was also a child of this stream, for instance in the thought of Harry Cleaver . Murray Bookchin was also part of the anarchist stream of
4646-404: The US in 1961–62, and worked extensively with the American SDS ( Students for a Democratic Society ), introduced the theories of the American New Left and supported the call for "direct action" and civil disobedience . The theory as expounded by Dutschke in relation to protests against the Vietnam War, which soon dominated the agenda, was that "systematic, limited and controlled confrontations with
4747-400: 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-war leftist parties. Those Communists who became disillusioned with the Communist Parties due to their authoritarian character eventually formed
4848-451: The University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings! ... There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to
4949-570: The Vietnam War, whereas the original New Left had wanted to focus on critical reflection. In the end, it was the anti-war sentiment that dominated the SDS. Stung by the criticism that they were "high on analysis, low on action", and in "the year of the 'discovery of poverty ' " (in 1963 Michael Harrington 's book The Other America "was the rage"), the SDS launched the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). Conceived by Tom Hayden as forestalling "white backlash", community-organizing initiatives would unite Black, Brown, and White workers around
5050-454: The Vietnam War. The Free Speech Movement had long-lasting effects at the Berkeley campus and was a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement in the 1960s. It was seen as the beginning of the famous student activism that existed on the campus in the 1960s, and continues to a lesser degree today. There was a substantial voter backlash against the individuals involved in the Free Speech Movement. Ronald Reagan won an unexpected victory in
5151-403: The Weathermen blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village brownstone trying to make a bomb out of a stick of dynamite and an alarm clock. Port Huron Statement participant Jack Newfield wrote in 1971 that "in its Weathermen, Panther and Yippee incarnations, [the New Left] seems anti-democratic, terroristic, dogmatic, stoned on rhetoric and badly disconnected from everyday reality". In contrast,
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#17328511920265252-419: The academic debate between "New Left" and " liberal " in the 1990s, both of which are common ideological labels in the Chinese mainland context. In this context, the term "New Left" is often used to describe a faction that focuses on the continued widening of the urban-rural gap in the post-Deng Xiaoping era and calls for a critical re-evaluation of the legacy of the Mao era (including the Great Leap Forward and
5353-472: The annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, followed later in the week by the customary rally in Sproul Plaza and panels on civil liberties issues. A Sunday meeting was a more private event, primarily a gathering for the veterans of the movement, in remembrance of Savio and of a close FSM ally, professor Reginald Zelnik, who had died in an accident in May. Today, Sproul Hall and the surrounding Sproul Plaza are active locations for protests and marches, as well as
5454-415: The anti-war call to return to campus. In some of ERAP projects, such as the JOIN ("Jobs or Income Now") project in uptown Chicago, SDSers were replaced by white working-class activists (some bitterly conscious that their poor backgrounds had limited their acceptance within "the Movement"). In community unions such JOIN and its successors in Chicago, the Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry, White Lightening in
5555-407: The ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom . In particular, on 2 December 1964 on the steps of Sproul Hall , Mario Savio gave a famous speech: "But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be—have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean—Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of
5656-403: The car. The car was used as a speaker's podium and a continuous public discussion was held, which continued until the charges against Weinberg were dropped. On December 2, between 1,500 and 4,000 students went into Sproul Hall as a last resort in order to re-open negotiations with the administration on the subject of restrictions on political speech and action on campus. Among other grievances
5757-401: The central issue of the New Left into the mainstream liberal establishment. The 1972 nomination of George McGovern further highlighted the new influence of Liberal protest movements within the Democratic establishment. Increasingly, feminist and gay rights groups became important parts of the Democratic coalition, thus satisfying many of the same constituencies that were previously unserved by
5858-415: 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 a generation which never looked upon the Soviet Union as a weak but heroic Workers' State; but rather as the nation of the Great Purges and Stalingrad , of Stalin's Byzantine Birthday and of Khrushchev's Secret Speech ; as the vast military and industrial power which repressed
5959-412: The day and permitted information tables. This applied to the entire student political spectrum, not just the liberal elements that drove the Free Speech Movement. Most outsiders, however, identified the Free Speech Movement as a movement of the Left. Students and others opposed to U.S. foreign policy did indeed increase their visibility on campus following the FSM's initial victory. In the spring of 1965,
6060-414: 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 an orthodox Marxist view of the revolutionary proletariat; instead, Marcuse considered the student movements and
6161-445: The economics of capitalism in the 1950s, and our vision of a socialist society has changed hardly at all since the days of Keir Hardie . Certainly a minority has begun to recognise our deficiencies in the most recent years, and there is no doubt that the seeds which have already been sown will bring an increasing harvest as we move along the sixties. But we still have a long way to go, and there are far too many timeless militants for whom
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#17328511920266262-412: The fall of 1966 and was elected Governor . He then directed the UC Board of Regents to dismiss UC President Clark Kerr because of the perception that he had been too soft on the protesters. The FBI kept secret files on Kerr and Savio, and subjected their lives and careers to interference under COINTELPRO . Reagan had gained political traction by campaigning on a platform that promised to "clean up
6363-479: The first week of October, 1984, to considerable media attention. A rally in Sproul Plaza featured FSM veterans Mario Savio, who ended a long self-imposed silence, Jack Weinberg, and Jackie Goldberg. The week continued with a series of panels open to the public on the movement and its impact. The 30th anniversary reunion, held during the first weekend of December 1994, was also a public event, with another Sproul Plaza rally featuring Savio, Weinberg, Goldberg, panels on
6464-408: The gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. At midnight, Alameda County deputy district attorney Edwin Meese III telephoned Governor Edmund Brown Sr. , asking for authority to proceed with
6565-494: The ideas behind the May 1968 student and worker strikes and demonstrations in France ; quotes, phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and graffiti throughout France during the unrest. Another West Berlin manifestation of a new left was Kommune 1 or K1, the first politically motivated commune in Germany. It was created on 12 January 1967, in West Berlin and finally dissolved in November 1969. During its entire existence, Kommune 1
6666-419: The impact of Cultural Studies went beyond the confines of the academy." In the United States, the "New Left" was the name loosely associated with radical, Marxist political movements that took place during the 1960s, primarily among college students. At the core of this was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Noting the perversion of "the older Left" by "Stalinism", in their 1962 Port Huron Statement
6767-434: The leading organization of the anti-war movement on college campuses during the Vietnam War . As the war escalated the membership of the SDS also increased greatly as more people were willing to scrutinise political decisions in moral terms. During the course of the war, the people became increasingly militant . As opposition to the war grew stronger, the SDS became a nationally prominent political organization, with opposing
6868-495: The main intent after lifting Berkeley's loyalty oath was to build on the legacy of C. Wright Mills . On September 14, 1964, Dean Katherine Towle announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues would be "strictly enforced." On October 1, 1964, former graduate student Jack Weinberg
6969-424: The mainstream parties. This institutionalization took away all but the most radical members of the New Left. The remaining radical core of the SDS, dissatisfied with the pace of change, incorporated violent tendencies towards social transformation. After 1969, the Weathermen , a surviving faction of SDS, attempted to launch a guerrilla war in an incident known as the " Days of Rage ". Finally, in 1970 three members of
7070-446: The mess in Berkeley". In the minds of those involved in the backlash, a wide variety of protests, concerned citizens, and activists were lumped together. Furthermore, television news and documentary filmmaking had made it possible to photograph and broadcast moving images of protest activity. Much of this media is available today as part of the permanent collection of the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, including iconic photographs of
7171-485: 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 within the British New Left joined the International Socialists , which later became Socialist Workers Party , while others became involved with groups such as
7272-506: The miserable performance of the Left in this past decade is the simple fact of its intellectual collapse in the face of full employment and the welfare state at home, and of a new world situation abroad. The Left in domestic matters has produced nothing of substance to offset the most important book of the decade – Crosland's "The Future of Socialism" – a brilliant restatement of Fabian ideas in contemporary terms. We have made no sustained critique of
7373-515: The mixture is the same as before. In 1960, The New Reasoner merged with the Universities and Left Review to form the New Left Review . These journals attempted to synthesise a theoretical position of a Marxist revisionism , humanist , socialist Marxism, departing from orthodox Marxist theory. This publishing effort made the ideas of culturally oriented theorists available to an undergraduate reading audience. In this early period, many on
7474-482: The more moderate groups associated with the New Left increasingly became central players in the Democratic Party and thus in mainstream American politics. The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The Beats adopted the term hip , and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of
7575-630: The movement's influences stated, "The New Left, again, refused the self-discipline of explicit programmatic statement until too late—until, that is, the Marxist–Leninist sects filled the vacuum with dogmas, with clarity on the cheap." Isserman (2001) reports that the New Left "came to use the word ' liberal ' as a political epithet". Historian Richard Ellis (1998) says that the SDS's search for their own identity "increasingly meant rejecting, even demonizing, liberalism". As Wolfe (2010) notes, "no one hated liberals more than leftists". Other elements of
7676-542: The movement, was created in 1991 by artist Mark Brest van Kempen. It is located, appropriately, in Sproul Plaza. The monument consists of a six-inch hole in the ground filled with soil and a granite ring surrounding it. As a sort of protest autonomous zone , the granite ring bears the inscription, "This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction." The monument makes no explicit reference to
7777-586: The ordinary daily tables with free literature. Groups of political, religious and social persuasions set up tables at Sproul Plaza. The Sproul steps, now officially known as the "Mario Savio Steps", may be reserved for a speech or rally. An on-campus restaurant commemorating the event, the Mario Savio Free Speech Movement Cafe, resides in a portion of the Moffitt Undergraduate Library . The Free Speech Monument, commemorating
7878-580: The original English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley and sought to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism . On the other hand, the Yippies (the name allegedly coming from Youth International Party) employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig (" Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for president in 1968, to mock the social status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian , and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics". According to ABC News , "The group
7979-437: The people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." 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 " anti-Establishment ". The New Left focused on social activists and their approach to organization, convinced that they could be
8080-532: The politicians to do their best to trick or betray them. ... They prefer the amateur organisation and amateurish platforms of the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign to the method and manner of the left wing professional. ... They judge with the critical eyes of the first generation of the Nuclear Age. Later that year, Saville published a piece in the same journal which identified the emergence of
8181-470: The power structure" would "force the representative 'democracy' to show openly its class character, its authoritarianism, ... to expose itself as a 'dictatorship of force ' ". The awareness produced by such provocations would free people to rethink democratic theory and practice. Dutschke was also influenced by Provo , a Dutch counterculture movement in the mid-1960s that focused on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait. In France
8282-595: The protest activity by student Ron Enfield (then chief photographer for the Berkeley campus newspaper, the Daily Cal ). A reproduction of what may be considered the most recognizable and iconic photograph of the movement, a shot of suit-clad students carrying the Free Speech banner through the University's Sather Gate in Fall of 1964, now stands at the entrance to the college's Free Speech Movement Cafe . Earlier protests against
8383-491: 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 as well. Prominent New Left thinker Ernst Bloch believed that socialism would prove the means for all human beings to become immortal and eventually create God . The writings of sociologist C. Wright Mills , who popularized
8484-457: The rhetorical heat, as violence broke out on both sides. The climax came at the 1968 Democratic National Convention . The New Left also accommodated the rebirth of feminism . With sexism being rampant in various fractions of the New Left, women reacted to the lack of progressive gender politics with their own social intellectual movement. The New Left was also marked by the invention of the modern environmentalist movement, which clashed with
8585-566: The right of student groups to support off-campus issues. In the fall of 1964, student activists, some of whom had traveled with the Freedom Riders and worked to register African American voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer project, set up information tables on campus and were soliciting donations for causes connected to the Civil Rights Movement . According to existing rules at
8686-778: The rival social-democratic and communist party traditions. At the beginning of the 1960, an early grouping was Subversive Action ( Subversiven Aktion ), conceived as the German branch of the Situationist International . Associated with the charismatic East German emigre, and student of the Frankfurt School , Rudi Dutschke , it became a leasing faction within the German Socialist Students' Union ( Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund , SDS). Dutschke and his faction had an important ally in Michael Vester, SDS vice-president and international secretary. Vester, who had studied in
8787-480: The shoddy instruments of the state". ERAPers were caught in "a politics of adjustment". The European New Left appeared first in West Germany and West Berlin , which became a prototype for European student radicals. West Berlin, an Allied-occupied island within socialist East Germany to which young men from both German states had moved to avoid conscription, in particular became a center of critical dissent from
8888-536: The sixties. Kirkpatrick Sale recalls that the most dispiriting feature of the ERAP experience was that, however much they might talk at night about "transforming the system", "building alternative institutions", and "revolutionary potential", the organizers knew that their credibility on the doorstep rested on an ability to secure concessions from, and thus to develop relations with, the local power structures. Far from erecting parallel structures, projects were built "around all
8989-826: The source for a better kind of social revolution . The New Left in the United States also included anarchist, countercultural , and hippie -related radical groups such as the Yippies (who were led by Abbie Hoffman ), the Diggers , Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers , and the White Panther Party . By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art. The Diggers took their name from
9090-471: The term 'New Left' in a 1960 open letter, would also give great inspiration to the movement. Mills' biographer, Daniel Geary, writes that his writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s". 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 its orthodox Marxism . Some joined various Trotskyist groupings or
9191-515: The time, fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs. There was also a mandatory " loyalty oath " required of faculty, which had led to dismissals and ongoing controversy over academic freedom. Sol Stern , a former radical who took part in the Free Speech Movement, stated in a 2014 City Journal article that the group viewed the United States government to be racist and imperialist, and that
9292-542: The traditional left in that it tended to acknowledge 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 , although others gravitated to their own takes on established forms of Marxism, such as
9393-487: The war an overriding concern that overshadowed many of the original issues that had inspired SDS. In 1967, the old statement in Port Huron was abandoned for a new call for action, which would inevitably lead to the destruction of the SDS. In 1968 and 1969, as its radicalism reached a fever pitch, the SDS began to split under the strain of internal dissension and increasing turn towards Maoism . Along with adherents known as
9494-511: The workers themselves, rather than just using their class designation in rhetoric to appear more Marxist . The WSA faction took about 900 of the approximately 1400 representatives in the split at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago. The other 500, who had been the Revolutionary Youth Movement , left to form a myriad of other groups . SDS chapters around the country then split along these same lines, or disbanded entirely. Both
9595-795: The world, among them Jimi Hendrix , who turned up one morning in the bedroom of Kommune 1. The student activism of the New Left came to a head around the world in 1968. The May 1968 protests in France temporarily shut down the city of Paris, while the German student movement did the same in Bonn . Universities were simultaneously occupied in May in Paris, in the Columbia University protests of 1968 , and in Japanese student strikes . Shortly thereafter, Swedish students occupied
9696-433: Was infamous for its bizarre staged events that fluctuated between satire and provocation . These events served as inspiration for the " Sponti " movement and other leftist groups. In the late summer of 1968, the commune moved into a deserted factory on Stephanstraße in order to reorient. This second phase of Kommune 1 was characterized by sex, music, and drugs. All of a sudden, the commune was receiving visitors from all over
9797-862: Was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the ' Groucho Marxists '." Many of the "old school" political left either ignored or denounced them. Many New Left thinkers in the United States were influenced by the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution . Some in the U.S. New Left argued that since the Soviet Union could no longer be considered the world center for proletarian revolution, new revolutionary Communist thinkers had to be substituted in its place, such as Mao Zedong , Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro . Todd Gitlin in The Whole World Is Watching in describing
9898-539: Was popularised in the United States in an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) entitled Letter to the New Left . Mills argued for a new leftist ideology, moving away from the traditional (" Old Left ") focus on labor issues (whose entrenched leadership in the U.S. supported the Cold War and pragmatic establishment politics), into a broader focus towards issues such as opposing alienation , anomie , and authoritarianism . Mills argued for
9999-476: Was sitting at the CORE table. He refused to show his identification to the campus police and was arrested. There was a spontaneous movement of students to surround the police car in which he was to be transported. This was a form of civil disobedience that became a major part of the movement. The police car remained there for 32 hours, all while Weinberg was inside it. At one point, there may have been 3,000 students around
10100-417: Was the fact that four of their leaders were being singled out for punishment. The demonstration was orderly; students studied, watched movies, and sang folk songs. Joan Baez was there to lead in the singing, as well as lend moral support. "Freedom classes" were held by teaching assistants on one floor, and a special Channukah service took place in the main lobby. On the steps of Sproul Hall, Mario Savio gave
10201-517: Was to "combine the institutions of liberal democracy with popular participation by communities and movements". However, PT has been criticized for its "strategic alliances" with the right wing after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil . The party has distanced itself from social movements and youth organizations and for many it seems the PT's model of a new left is reaching its limits. The concept of New Left in China originates from
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