New Left - Historical Origins

Historical Origins

The seeds of the New Left were planted in the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", and the subsequent Hungarian Revolution of 1956, confused the Communist Party of the USA, the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the Japanese Communist Party, none of whom were able to present a unified response. Young Marxist intellectuals, seeing the failure of their political organizations, began 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 Communism due to its authoritarian character eventually formed the "new left", first among dissenting Communist Party intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom, and later alongside campus radicalism in the US and elsewhere. The term "nouvelle gauche" was already current in France in the 50s, associated with France Observateur, and its editor Claude Bourdet, who attempted to form a third position, between 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 term "New Left" was popularised in an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–62) entitled Letter to the New Left. Mills argued for a new leftist ideology, moving away from the traditional "labor metaphysic", towards issues such as opposing alienation, anomie, and authoritarianism. Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism, toward the values of the counter-culture, and emphasized an international perspective on the movement. According to David Burner, C Wright Mills claimed that the proletariat were no longer the revolutionary force; the new agent of revolutionary change were young intellectuals around the world.

In Britain, the journal New Left Review was founded in 1960, representing a theoretical synthesis of a revisionist, humanist, and 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 the New Left were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 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."