pamphlet In the United States, "New Left" was the name loosely associated with radical, Marxist political movements that arose during the 1960s, primarily among college students. At the core of these movements was the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Noting the perversion of "the older Left" by "Stalinism", in their 1962 Port Huron Statement the SDS eschewed "formulas" and "closed theories". Instead they called for a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection". According to David Burner, Mills claimed that the proletariat (collectively, the working class as defined by Marxism) were no longer the revolutionary force; the new agents of revolutionary change were young intellectuals around the world. A
student protest called the
Free Speech Movement took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of
UC 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 scope at the time, students insisted that the university administration lift the ban on campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to
free speech and
academic freedom. On 2 December 1964 on the steps of
Sproul Hall, Mario Savio delivered a speech with these famous passages: 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 the "
anti-Establishment". The New Left focused on
social activists and their approach to organization, convinced that they could be 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 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 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 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 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 derived from this stream, for instance, in the thought of
Harry Cleaver.
Murray Bookchin was also part of the anarchist strain in 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 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 the rhetorical heat, as violence broke out on both sides. The climax came at the
1968 Democratic National Convention. The New Left also helped set in motion the rebirth of
feminism. With sexism being rampant in certain sections of the New Left, women reacted to the lack of progressive gender politics with their own social intellectual movement. In addition, the New Left was an incubator for the modern
environmentalist movement, which clashed with the Old Left's disregard for environmental matters in favor of preserving 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.
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, the more moderate groups associated with the New Left increasingly became central players in the Democratic Party and thus in mainstream American politics.
Hippies and Yippies , leader of the countercultural protest group the Yippies 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 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 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 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 the "New Left" which was associated with anti-war college campus protest movements. In 1962,
Tom Hayden wrote its founding document, 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. in
Arlington,
Virginia, 21 October 1967. The SDS became the leading anti-war organization on college campuses during the
Vietnam War. As the war escalated, SDS membership increased greatly, with more students willing to scrutinise the nation's political decisions in moral terms, and to protest the war with heightened
militancy. As opposition to the Vietnam War grew stronger, the SDS became a nationally prominent political organization. Ending the war was its overriding concern, overshadowing many of the original issues that inspired the formation of the SDS. By 1967, the Port Huron Statement was superseded by a new call for militant 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 an increasing turn towards
Maoism. Along with adherents known as 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 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.
The New Storefront Left Stung by the criticism that they were "high on analysis, low on action", and in "the year of the 'discovery of poverty (
Michael Harrington's 1962 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 a common program for economic change. However, the ERAP leadership commitment was sustained barely two years. With no early indications in 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 induced by the escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam to abandon their storefront offices, and heed the anti-war call to return to campus. In certain ERAP projects, such as JOIN ("Jobs or Income Now") 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 as "Rising Up Angry", "Young Patriots", and JOIN in Chicago; "White Lightening" in the Bronx; and the "4 October Organization" in Philadelphia, white radicals—acknowledging the debt they believed they owed to SNCC and the Black Panthers—continued to organize 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 the '60s. == Development in Europe ==