FROM THE ARCHIVES:In this Viewpoint column in 1975 Anthony Cronin discussed the rise and fall of the "New Left" which flowered in the late 1960s and withered with the US withdrawal from Vietnam, though many of its adherents went on to positions of power and influence. – JOE JOYCE
DOES ANYBODY at all now remember “the new left”? The question may disconcert and even pain those who assume that “the new left” is still in existence and that they are part of it; while others who had in fact forgotten all about it may on reflection be surprised that a phenomenon of such magnitude could have vanished in so short a space of time, even in our world; but the truth is that less than 10 years after the Paris riots and the siege of Chicago (not to mention the Prague uprising) as a worldwide movement the “new left” has in fact disappeared; and a look about the nations will confirm that it is no longer in existence even as an illusion-which, of course, is all that it may ever have been to begin with.
For those who don’t remember, or who are not of an age to do so, the new left was the collective name given to the alliance of those groups, factions, publicists and theorists who contributed to that remarkable revival of left-wing fervour and activism which occurred in the more developed countries of the world in the late 1960s.
In part anarchist, in part allegedly Marxist and in part oblivious of all terminology, it was in most places a combination of several trends and movements with spontaneous or apparently spontaneous anti-societal feeling: and it was everywhere, to use a phrase of the day, non-structuralist as well as distrustful of the institutionalised left, but still sufficiently powerful at its most potent moment, which occurred in 1968, to shake and even to topple governments.
Except for a brief while in France in that year it put no trust in organised communist parties. It liked to insist that it was anti-Stalinist as well as anti-capitalist and in being both it was often violently anti-technological: but it often used Marxist terminology and it adopted one latter-day Marxist and Freudian pundit, Herbert Marcuse, as one of its favourite sages, though it was always difficult to say how much Marx (or Marcuse for the matter of that, since he happens to be a rather opaque and difficult author, however rewarding) anybody in particular had absorbed.
The new left enjoyed during the course of its well-publicised career some notable victories, for as much as anybody or anything else it prevented Lyndon Johnson from running for another term of office in 1968, and in the same year it seemed for a while almost to be about to decide the destinies of France; but in a way it was these apparent victories which undid it; for in both France and America the parties and candidates of the right simply acquired new support as a result through the ordinary, allegedly democratic, electoral processes and the result was a stiffening of reaction in high places.
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