The label and when it began
“New Left” was a name used in several countries from the late 1950s, and the movements that carried it were not the same everywhere. What they shared was a wish to find a radical politics that was neither Soviet-style communism nor the cautious reform politics of the postwar Western establishment. By 1967 the term was widely used by participants and journalists alike, but its ideas had been taking shape for a decade.
The phrase became prominent in Britain around 1960, when journals associated with young socialists merged to form the New Left Review. In the United States, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published an open “Letter to the New Left” in 1960, addressed to the younger generation and arguing that the working class was no longer the only possible agent of change.
The break of 1956
Two events in 1956 pushed many left-wing intellectuals away from existing parties. In February, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced some of Stalin’s crimes in a closed speech that soon became widely known. In the autumn, Soviet troops crushed the uprising in Hungary, and Britain and France invaded Egypt over the Suez Canal. Together they discredited, for many, both Soviet communism and Western imperial policy, and left a space for a socialism outside the Communist parties. In Britain, writers such as E. P. Thompson and Stuart Hall were part of this break.
C. Wright Mills
Mills, a professor at Columbia University who died in 1962, gave young American radicals much of their vocabulary. In White Collar (1951) he described a modern workforce of salaried employees. In The Power Elite (1956) he argued that decisions of national importance were made by a small group in the corporate, military and political worlds. His point that ordinary citizens had little real say in the system became a theme of the early New Left’s critique, and echoes of it appear in the language of participatory democracy used by the American students who founded Students for a Democratic Society.
The Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse
The Frankfurt School refers to scholars linked to the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in the 1920s, including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Many left Germany after 1933 and several worked in the United States before returning. They combined Marxist ideas with psychology and cultural analysis, studying how mass media and consumer society could win consent without force.
Herbert Marcuse, who taught in the United States, brought these ideas to students. Eros and Civilization (1955) discussed whether modern society imposed more repression than it needed. One-Dimensional Man (1964) argued that advanced industrial societies absorbed dissent and encouraged people to want what the system could provide. His essay on “repressive tolerance” (1965) controversially claimed that tolerance in an unequal society could protect the status quo. Marcuse gained a large audience among students in the late 1960s, and he lectured in West Berlin in 1967, where he was heard by students already involved in protest. He himself said he was a critic and teacher rather than the leader of any movement.
Related ideas appeared in France, where Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) described a world in which images mediated social life. Its readers were among the radicals active in 1968.
Frantz Fanon and the Third World
Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria and joined the Algerian independence struggle, died in December 1961. His book The Wretched of the Earth (1961), with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that colonised peoples had both the right and the need to break with colonial rule, and discussed the role of violence. It had a strong influence on anticolonial movements and, afterwards, on Black radicals in the United States, who applied some of its ideas to Black communities there. The Black Power debate, and parts of the Black Panther Party’s outlook, is often linked to such reading, although the degree of influence is argued over.
More broadly, victories of anticolonial movements, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Vietnamese resistance to the United States made the “Third World” seem to many young radicals a better source of hope than either superpower. Some, particularly in the later 1960s, were drawn to Maoism, partly through accounts of the Cultural Revolution in China that were often idealised and are now seen as inaccurate.
Two critiques at once
The New Left rejected two orthodoxies. One was Soviet-style Marxism, with its single party, censorship and bureaucracy. The other was what critics called liberal consensus: the belief, widespread in the 1950s United States, that postwar prosperity and mild reform had solved the main problems, summed up in the phrase “the end of ideology”. New Left writers replied that poverty, racism, militarism and alienation remained, and that formal democracy did not guarantee real control over one’s life.
This position had weaknesses. Rejecting both camps left the New Left without an obvious model of an alternative society, and some groups later turned to older Marxist and Leninist ideas anyway. Still, the combination helps explain why student radicals in 1967 could condemn the Vietnam War, American racism and Soviet repression in the same breath.
From ideas to movements
Intellectual origins did not make a movement by themselves. They needed a mass of students, a war to oppose and a civil rights struggle to learn from. When those arrived in the mid-1960s, the ideas of Mills, Marcuse, Fanon and others supplied arguments, and the New Left politics that followed varied widely by country.