New Left

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NEW LEFT.

The New Left is a term that describes a varied set of social movements in Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s. What they had in common was a rejection of the capitalist system, the Cold War, and Soviet Marxism. Their politics were confrontational, and entailed a public and theatrical element in which they performed their rejection of the generation in power from 1940 to 1960. Youth politics and student politics emerged as forces in their own right, at times hostile to and at other times braided together with working-class militancy. The New Left emerged as a threat to the forces of order in Germany, France, and Italy in the spring of 1968. Thereafter, radical groups continued to oppose Western imperialism and to press for changes in the educational system and in factory work and discipline. Their aim was a kind of self-management or workers' control that would decentralize power and give ordinary people a greater say in determining the conditions of their daily lives.

By the early 1970s, the force of these social movements was largely spent. Some groups spun off into terrorism. Factions emerged to carry on the armed struggle through kidnappings, robberies, and assassinations, in particular in Germany and Italy. They were ruthlessly suppressed. Other groups took the vision of 1968 and reoriented it toward the struggle for human rights and civil rights. Radical dissent continued in the Soviet bloc until the collapse of communism in 1989. In Western Europe, it contributed to the broad movements supporting a new human rights regime and European integration.

The New Left began as a dissident Marxist faction in the 1950s. Starting in 1953, when dissenters were crushed in East Berlin, and reaching a peak in the period after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, groups of Marxists either left the Communist Party or worked for its reform from within. The moribund nature of European communism was exposed fully in the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. From then on, the "old left" meant, first and foremost, Communist parties still tied to the Soviet Union.

There was another sense in which the old left was rejected in this period. It was a term meant to convey the consensus politics of social democratic parties. In Britain, the Labour Party had lost its direction after the years of reconstruction between 1945 and 1950. To radicals, it was a trade union party dedicated to making the capitalist system work more efficiently. In Germany, the Social Democrats were partners in the economic miracle, which seemed to be the limit of their expectations. French and Italian socialists were similarly imbricated in the post-1945 order. The New Left, in contrast, wanted to depart from the field of political horse trading and forge bridges with workers equally dissatisfied with their conservative trade union leadership.

The New Left was also categorically opposed to the foreign policy of European governments that either supported or acquiesced to American objectives. This opposition took two primary forms. The first was the rejection of the nuclear stalemate and its underlying theory of mutually assured destruction. The second was the championing of anti-American forces from Cuba to Vietnam.

In Britain, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament drew together many ex-communists and liberals in a loose alliance opposing the nuclear politics of Britain and the United States. Ending the deployment of nuclear weapons in Britain was one of their aims, which would lead, they hoped, to step-by-step nuclear disarmament. Similar demonstrations were held in Germany, bringing together clergymen, trade unionists, and students.

A second dimension to the anti-American character of the European New Left was its championing of radical causes challenging the United States as the free world's hegemonic power. The first of these struggles was the war for national liberation in Vietnam. Once the French had given up the fight in 1954, the Americans took over the defense of its client state, South Vietnam. As the war intensified in the mid- to late 1960s, the New Left coalesced around opposition to the war and support for Ho Chi Minh and the communist cause. On 17 March 1968, a major demonstration took place in front of the American Embassy in London's Grosvenor Square. There was a violent confrontation with police of a kind that occurred in many European cities. The politics of the streets over Vietnam took up where similar demonstrations against the French war in Algeria had left off earlier in the 1960s. Young radicals who joined the New Left offered vocal and visible solidarity with the cause of the Cuban revolution and the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation after 1967. The death of Che Guevara in Bolivia was viewed as a heroic death in the ongoing war against American capitalism. Che's profile became an icon of the New Left.

Most of these currents flowed into a set of conflicts that reached a boiling point in May through August 1968. Rudi Dutschke, leader of the New Left organization SDS, was shot three times in April 1968 by a right-wing fanatic, leading to violent confrontations in Berlin between students and police. On 2 June 1967, a student was shot to death in Berlin by an undercover agent at a demonstration against the Shah of Iran's visit to the United States. In Paris, the flashpoint was again an anti-American demonstration over Vietnam at the University of Paris campus at Nanterre. The arrest of demonstrators there led to much wider demonstrations in the center of Paris, during which university buildings were occupied. The rector then shut the university down. Student revolt mixed with industrial militancy in May 1968, and factory occupations paralleled university sit-ins. This indeed suggested a very different kind of left politics from that of the staid Communist or Socialist Parties.

The events of 1968 produced one of the core experiments of the New Left. In France it was termed autogestion, or self-management. The set of ideas was not restricted to France. In Belgium, liberation theologians and priests were actively drawn to the idea and contributed to its elaboration. So were trade unionists in Tito's Yugoslavia well before the events of 1968. The leaders of the military coup that seized power in Peru in 1968 also declared their commitment to installing forms of self-government of a similar kind. And in its first few years, the leadership of free Algeria proclaimed their support for decentralized institutional life; that brief period of freedom came to an abrupt end by the late 1960s.

There were, therefore, many variants to and sources of this set of ideas. Within this multinational array, three constituent elements stand out. The first is a commitment to the decentralization of political and social life, so that the search for a new order takes place in civil society and not in parliament or in the factory. The second is a demand for local autonomy in all places of work and public service, and the third is a vision of the replacement of the capitalist organization of consumption by cooperative institutions.

At the core of this program is the belief in the need to escape from the central state as the arbiter of the public good, and to substitute for its dirigisme more pluralistic modes of organizing the productive and creative forces of society. In this context, dirigisme meant the mindlessness of Communist lock-step thinking or the conformism of Western capitalism, which offered meaningless choices to the public every few years. Thus, national elections were a sideshow to these militants, and so were the intricacies of trade union politics. Instead of acting primarily to win pay raises, workers of all kinds were urged—in the words of one poster—to "demonstrate that workers' management of the firm is the power to do better for everyone what the capitalists did scandalously for a few."

One key element in this movement was its dynamic quality. It worked to produce an environment in which men and women could perpetually renew their commitment to those with whom they lived. It represented therefore a new social contract, based on a moral vision incompatible with the capitalist order. Echoes of anarchist thinking may be found here, though there are traces of an escape from alienation, as outlined in Karl Marx's early philosophical writings.

The dynamic element in this movement also included aspects of personal and sexual freedom that appealed to many recruits to the New Left. Springing from the Nanterre disturbances in May 1968 were many grievances, among them the limitation on the right of students to have guests of the opposite sex visit their dormitories. During the time when effective contraception became readily available, young people were not prepared to accept their professors' or their parents' rules about personal or sexual comportment. Thus, hair styles, jeans, and music symbolized this generational revolt.

What became of it? The massive hopes and exuberance of the New Left in 1968 faded rapidly in the following decade. Some of its adherents retreated into underground warfare, particularly the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy. Others, especially in Eastern Europe, weathered the harsh repression of the early 1970s and emerged to lead dissident groups that ultimately came to power. Finally, men such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the New Left in Paris in May 1968, turned toward European unification and human rights as the embodiment of their beliefs. In this form, the New Left survived until the end of the century.

See alsoMay 1968; Student Movements.