Russ Gilbert "New Left" Pamphlet collection

Biography/Profile

The term "New Left" refers to the movement that emerged in the late 1950s after the anti-Communist tenor of the McCarthy era abated. One of the best known New Left organizations, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), identified in 1962 two overarching conditions in the United States that required the movement's immediate attention:

"First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry... [and] Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb... We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution."

In addition to the two ills identified in this statement, members of the New Left embraced several causes. These causes included union democracy and workers' power on the shop floor, the rights of women in the workplace and at home, and opposition to the Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, the war provided a rallying point for activists. They drew on the Marxist-Leninist critiques furnished by several "old left" organizations, such as the International Socialists and the Spartacist League. They saw the war as an effort by the United States to subjugate the Vietnamese people who were fighting a war of national liberation against western imperialism. On the home front, the conflict in Vietnam served allegedly as a justification for the denial of services to inner-cities and the exploitation of working-class people and persons of color who bore the brunt of the fighting.