New left

The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of educators, agitators and others who sought to implement a broad range of reforms on issues such as civil rights, gay rights, abortion, gender roles, and drugs, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist approach to social justice and focused mostly on labor unionization and questions of social class. Sections of the New Left rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to variants of Marxism like Maoism. In the United States, the movement was associated with the hippie movement and anti-war college-campus protest movements including the Free Speech Movement.

The origins of the New Left have been traced to several factors. Prominently, the confused response of the Communist Party of the USA and the Communist Party of Great Britain to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 led some Marxist intellectuals 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 the Communist Parties due to their 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 United States and elsewhere. The term "nouvelle gauche" was already current in France in the 1950s, 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.

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