New Left - United States New Left

United States New Left

Many New Left thinkers in the U.S. were influenced by the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like the British New Left, they recognized problems in the communism of the Soviet Union, but unlike the British New Left, they did not turn to Trotskyism or social democracy. 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."

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 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 the New Left, as were the Yippies.

The U.S. New Left drew inspiration 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. The New Left was also inspired by SNCC, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. 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 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.

It could be argued that the New Left's most successful legacy was the rebirth of feminism. As the leaders of the New Left were largely white men, women reacted to the lack of progressive gender politics with their own social intellectual movement. Ultimately though the New Left disintegrated, largely because members of the SDS dissatisfied with the pace of change, incorporated violent tendencies towards social transformation. After 1969, the New Left degenerated into radicals and moderate factions, and that same year, 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 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.

The New Left was also marked by the invention of the modern environmentalist movement, which clashed with 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.