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p In the history of many movements of social protest that grew up on a non-proletarian basis two more or less distinct trends emerge (although on occasions they overlap)—the one concentrating on culture and enlightenment and the other on radical politics. The predominance of one or the other determines the overall orientation of protest movements at each particular stage, the social aims of their participants and the predominant type of militant consciousness. At the same time it should be noted that concentration on the fundamental transformation of existing patterns of civilisation (the establishment) usually comes to the fore and becomes the all-important factor when the vanguard of the protest movement starts to see social reality as something plastic, subject to the will of the active individual. On the other hand those who press for cultural change and enlightenment, for the formation of new values within the framework of the establishment, the creation of a new culture and the education of a "new man" are usually to the fore when radical political movements and intellectual self-criticism are in the ascendant or clearly on the decline, and when social reality proves itself still “solid” and the individual aspiring after radical change is insufficiently prepared for its immediate implementation.

p It was in the context of these two approaches that the New Left movement developed.  [10•* 

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p The New Left has never and nowhere constituted an integral and homogeneous group in the social, ideological, or organisational sense, and this means it is extremely difficult to define.  [11•*  Nevertheless at all stages of the movement it has embraced fairly influential groups that have served to determine its overall ideological and political tendencies, and which performed the representative function in the confrontation of the New Left with four main sociopolitical forces which shaped the ideological and political climate in the capitalist world of the sixties: the technocrats whose social position was taking increasingly firm root; right radicals who have become particularly active in recent years; the liberal bourgeoisie which has lost a good deal of ground in comparison with the last century but still enjoys influence among those strata of the population which cling hard to the old order; and finally the communists.

p The history of the New Left can be traced back to the late fifties when in a number of European countries small groups came into being. Consisting for the main part of students and certain academics specialising in the humanities. These groups came out with outspoken criticism of the bourgeois establishment, and set themselves the task of finding the correct moral diagnosis for the state of contemporary society, evolving a new revolutionary theory relevant to the needs of the modern age, and stirring society’s consciousness.

p These aims, concentrating on questions of culture and enlightenment, found a theoretical spokesman in C. Wright Mills, author of the "Letter to the New Left": he was one of the few eminent Western sociologists who appreciated the liberating potential inherent in the emergent movement and in practical terms became one of its first ideologists.

p “We have frequently been told by an assorted variety of dead-end people that the meanings of Left and of Right are now liquidated, by history and reason," wrote Mills. "I think we should answer them in some such way as this:

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p “The Right, among other things, means—what are you doing, celebrating society as it is, a going concern. Left means, or ought to mean, just the opposite. It means: structural criticism and reportage and theories of society, which at some point or another are focussed politically as demands and programmes. These criticisms, demands, theories, programmes are guided morally by the humanist and secular ideals of Western civilisation—above all, reason and freedom and justice. To be “Left” means to connect up cultural with political criticism, and both with demands and programmes.”  [12•* 

p Yet members of the “Left” in the fifties and sixties still underlined the qualitative differences dividing them (in both the theoretical and political sense) not only from the “Right”, but also from the "Old Left"  [12•**  trying to dissociate themselves from both: by the Old Left they meant Social Democrats and Communists as parties that had been “integrated” into the system of state-monopoly capitalism and lost their sense of time and with it their "revolutionary spirit”.

p Lacking any mass support and torn by inner contradictions the European New Left movements of the late fifties failed to progress beyond the debating society stage and fulfil the 13 functions they had assigned themselves. Their promises to elaborate a modern revolutionary theory as an alternative to that of the Old Left proved an empty claim, and their emotional revolt of a moral nature against the establishment met with no broad public support or backing from mass protest movements from “below”, and was coped with by the existing system with no trouble at all.

p Soon afterwards, however, the situation began to change as a result, first and foremost, of the growing involvement of the non-proletarian masses, particularly the student body, in the struggle against the dominant social structures in the advanced capitalist countries. This led to the emergence of a mass base for protest which the New Left could appeal to and attempt to win over. At the beginning of the sixties these processes were to be observed above all in the United States, soon to become the centre of the New Left movement, which developed there on a wider scale than it ever had in Europe, the more so because the ground had to a certain extent been prepared as far as ideological and cultural attitudes were concerned, by the activity of the beatniks.

p The beatniks were by no stretch of the imagination just another new Bohemia as they were presented by the popular press and the advertising world: they constituted a highly contradictory social phenomenon. There is no doubt that many of them sincerely rejected the practices that dominated capitalist society and the falsehood and hypocrisy of the bourgeois way of life.  [13•*  Lawrence Lipton compares the critical position of the beatniks with that of the radical Left in the thirties. Yet the beatniks were not radicals: they had no clearly defined programmes, and their protest against “squares” was often passive in character, degenerating into mere escapism or isolationism. Yet despite all that the 14 beatniks exerted an undeniable influence on subsequent generations of young rebels in the United States and elsewhere. They were the first people in the post-war world to uphold and try to implement the anarchistic principle of the rejection of stable organisation that became an essential part of the New Left’s practical activity; they were the first to declare war on the consumer psychology"  [14•*  and come out with open criticism of the conformist spirit dominating postwar America. Finally it was the beatniks who, while not adhering to any systematic theory, adopted a number of existentialist and religious-cum-philosophical teachings from the East (in particular Zen Buddhism) that later were to become part of the New Left’s ideological arsenal.

p Although the American New Left—true to the spirit of Wright Mills’ exhortations—attempted to link criticism of the dominant culture with criticism of the political system and lend their struggle a radical political character, the aims and tactics of the movement concentrated initially on matters of culture and enlightenment. Even when members of the New Left took part in wide-scale political actions conducted to the accompaniment of radical slogans they opted above all for non-violent methods,  [14•**  making their preeminent goal the stirring of society’s conscience in order to open Americans’ eyes to the crisis of the "Great Society”.

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p However, approximately in the middle of the sixties, when the students and young teaching staff in the major US universities adopted a far more uncompromising stand and the radical Left in Europe was taking on a "new lease of life", the ideas and orientation of the New Left, whose movement was then fast becoming international, underwent far-reaching change. It was no longer radical criticism of the establishment and “conscience-stirring” that were regarded as the prime objective, but direct change of the existing system, of social institutions and relations by means of active steps involving violent methods  [15•* . After starting out in most countries with a campaign to achieve corporative demands (reform of tertiary education and reorganisation of the university structure, the right of active participation in the country’s political life etc.)  [15•** , in the late sixties the New Left movement rapidly outgrew its former sectarian vision and came forward with social and political demands many of which touched upon important links in the superstructure of modern bourgeois society. The students and intellectuals in revolt learnt from their own experience how impossible it was to solve group problems within the narrow confines of the establishment. Political experience of the 1960s bore out Lenin’s assertion that to achieve their own freedom the students must engage in struggle "not .. . merely for academic (student) freedom, but for the freedom of the entire people, for political freedom”  [15•*** 

p The New Left challenged first and foremost the consumer 16 ideal, prestige consumption, the ideal of all-devouring material prosperity. The ideologists of social integration attempted to instil into others their own conviction that advanced capitalist society is in a position not only to dress and feed adequately a considerable proportion of its own citizens, but also to provide them with a definite quantity of benefits as an inalienable (but admittedly by no means gratis) extra. These would be benefits which in the recent past were associated with the prestige consumption of the "upper strata". In so doing capitalist society allegedly robbed the exploited of their grounds for “rebellion” and removed foundation for mass discontent since discontent had become the lot of isolated unfortunates. This reasoning tacitly implied that the very existence of capitalist exploitation (that is not denied by many of the advocates of social integration), the process of the dehumanisation of the individual, the alienation of masses from power and true culture, even if they lead to sporadic manifestations of discontent, would nevertheless fail to provide sufficient grounds for a revolutionary outbreak.

p The protest movements of the sixties in practical terms refuted that postulate. They demonstrated that not only material needs but also spiritual hunger, alienation from power, from free creativity and the reduction of man’s activity to unrestrained money-grubbing and the race after consumer goods, in short the unsatisfactory position of man in society, could provide the motive force for anti-capitalist protest and the nucleus round which the slogans and sociopolitical alternatives of that protest might concentrate.

p The New Left raised the question of the need to reject predominant tendencies of social development and create a new set of values and principles. In the broadest sense this implied the formation of a new existential environment for man which would not be an alien object of man’s direct or indirect influence and consequently not the object of buying and selling and prestige consumption, but instead an unalienated sphere of non-manipulated spontaneous self-realisation for the individual. In this environment technology would cease to perform any repressive or dehumanising function, and merely provide the material basis for the "technocratic society”.

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p Linked with these demands was the urge to foster the emergence of the "new man", the free creator of history and a sub-stratum of social relations, adequate to the new existential environment. This new man was envisaged as possessed of a "new sensuousness", as bared to the world around him, to the immediate content of objects unfolded to him in all the wealth of their dimensions and evaluated not in accordance with the laws of the market, but with the laws of beauty (perfection); he was to be endowed with "new consciousness", a "new psyche", that is with a new pattern of instincts that would surmount the repressive sublimation of the erotic instinct and finally be orientated towards a new type of action.

p The formation of this new existential environment and the "new man" should, according to the New Left, lead to the formation of new social relations based not on the domination-submission principle, but rather on spontaneous manifestations of "human nature”.

p It is transparently clear that the orientation of the New Left’s criticism of capitalism and the nature of the alternatives they put forward were largely determined by the level of their appreciation of the content and essence of capitalist relations; this level in its turn was to a considerable extent bound up with the fact that the vast majority of radical critics were employed in the sphere of the production, preservation and proliferation of information, in the sphere of culture. This meant that their ideas of capitalism were shaped by phenomena stemming from the character of cultural activities in the context of advanced capitalist society. The anti-humanism, bureaucratism and consumer fetishism along with other traits of bourgeois society singled out by the New Left, which provided direct causes for their revolt against the establishment, are real aspects of modern capitalism and the consistent struggle against these cannot but bring nearer the destruction of the institutions essential to the bourgeois dictatorship. It is this circumstance which explains the historical importance of the New Left’s opposition to capitalism. That movement did not “discover” an empirically new agent of historical action in the form of student youth and the intellectuals as certain bourgeois sociologists would have us believe.

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p Yet as individuals engaged in the cultural sphere and constituting an object of capitalist exploitation, through the practical experience of their protest they did empirically outline the contours of a new emergent set of social needs which in the context of advanced capitalist society were able to provide a direct incentive to revolutionary action; these were needs for free, unalienated creativity, for beauty (in relations and products of creativity) and for the harmonious self-discovery of the individual.

p Mass-scale preoccupation with these needs would have led to a break with the values evolved by modern capitalist society, which have to some extent been assimilated by a certain sector of the working people and are thus regarded by advocates of social integration as the cementing force of the establishment; these values have made it possible for the interested parties to interpret the securing of these values by the corporate state as the securing (and hence “ exhaustion”) of those social demands which at previous stages of social development constituted an essential component of socialist programmes and could be presented by vulgar materialists as the only demands possessed of revolutionary potential. Yet at the same time members of the New Left were rarely heard saying that they were opposing capitalism. They tended to designate the target of their criticism in more abstract terms such as "the society of oppression", "corporate society", "bureaucratised society", the "consumer society" or "technocratic society". Similarly they associated their ideals not so much with socialism as with an abstract concept of the “free” society.

p Precisely here lay the political weakness of the New Left, which in its abstract historical reasoning was unable to reach an understanding of capitalism as a complex social structure based on historically shaped economic factors, a weakness typical of non-proletarian revolutionaries.

p In so far as capitalist society was identified by the New Left with the one-dimensional bourgeois system of social relations, institutions and values, and the need to destroy the latter was mechanically extrapolated to the whole of capitalist society, the left radicals also directed their criticism against all those who attempted to draw such dividing lines and single out the positive elements in that society as 19 starting points for subsequent development within the fabric of advanced capitalist society, as preconditions for its transformation into socialist society. This first of all explained the fact that many American and West European radicals under the influence of extremists opposed communist organisations in the capitalist countries, as a result often finding themselves side by side with those who logically speaking should have been their main enemies, namely the anti-communists.

p “Down with Parliament!", "No compromise!", "Guerilla war in the jungles of the cities!"—slogans such as these were bandied about by the left extremists in the ranks of the protesting students and intellectuals. Certain ideologists of the New Left tried to make this radical negativism, this declaration of war against everything without any clear knowledge of the exact enemy (as it was ironically summed up by the journal Express), or the "Great Refusal", into the decisive principle for rallying together all the groups of the New Left. However events were to show that this principle was highly unreliable and possessed little cohesive force, whenever the question of positive alternative to capitalism was raised.

p The radicals’ negative principles inevitably gave rise to elements of anti-intellectualism and cultural nihilism in the political behaviour of their adherents, developments which shocked “society” and gave reactionary forces an additional pretext for attempts to suppress all opposition to the bourgeois regime, branding it as “anti-social”.

p The radicalisation of the New Left, however accidental it might seem at first glance, was the logical outcome of the whole course of post-war social development and closely bound up with the political events of recent years both within the advanced capitalist countries, and also in the international arena. An important role in the reorientation of the New Left was played by the victory of the revolution in Cuba and the successful resistance of the Vietnamese people to American aggression, events which enabled the New Left to sense more keenly the profound nature of the crisis within modern bourgeois (above all American) society and start believing in the possibility of radical changes being wrought in the bourgeois establishment.  [19•* 

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p There were frequent instances of subjectivism in the New Left’s assessment of events in Cuba and Vietnam, just as there were amazing aberrations in their views on other sociopolitical events and movements in the contemporary world  [20•*  What is important however is that the outward stimulus for the movement’s radicalisation was the practical experience gleaned in the people’s struggles against imperialism, struggles that were revolutionary, were based on violence and were designed to destroy existing social structures.

p However the predominance of radical political tendencies in the protest movement and the transition from active criticism to critical action did not mean that the New Left’s aims in the field of culture and enlightenment had lost all 21 their importance. Given that the movement had stemmed from the crisis of contemporary bourgeois (late-bourgeois) civilisation both as a result of that crisis and as a Utopian attempt to solve it, the movement could not ignore the questions of the formation of "revolutionary consciousness", the education of the "new man" and the need to search for elements of a "new revolutionary theory”.  [21•*  However during the second half of the sixties the implementation of these tasks was regarded above all as the precondition for the radical solution of political problems, for the success of immediate radical political action—ranging from demonstrations, strikes and university and campus “take-overs” to fundamental change on a scale embracing the whole of society.

p At the beginning of this decade the movement entered a new stage of development. It is now clear both for the radical masses and for many ideologists of the New Left, that the forms and methods relied on in recent years cannot, in existing historical conditions, ensure decisive success in the struggle against the establishment. It is essential that values be reassessed, conclusions be drawn from recent experience, particularly since, in several countries, there is a decline to be observed in the activeness of left-wing students and intellectuals. Differences between leading New Left organisations are coming more to the fore and some of these like Students for a Democratic Society in the United States and the Socialist Union of German Students in West Germany are breaking up altogether. Different trends are also to be observed among radical activists: some who earlier already showed predilection for extremist methods have joined small terrorist groups; others have turned their back on militant political activity altogether; still others are establishing contacts with communist organisations. Finally, some of them, after reaching the conclusion that social reality is still too impregnable to be moulded into qualitatively new forms, while it would be premature to attempt to take by storm existing social structures, have come back to 22 where they started, to preoccupation with questions of culture and enlightenment. The so-called “new” New Left is now in the forefront of the picture; its world outlook, views and objectives find quite eloquent expression in Charles Reich’s theory of "revolution through consciousness" and Theodore Roszak’s conception of "counter-culture.”

The resultant situation gave bourgeois observers good reason to start talking of a “crisis” or even “end” of the New Left  [22•*  as an independent mass movement aiming at radical transformation of bourgeois civilisation in view of the “unassailability” of the establishment. The movement did indeed go through a crisis, yet this was not a crisis of left radicalism as the product and inevitable result of the disintegration of bourgeois civilisation or as a specific type of non-conformist consciousness shaped by the bourgeois establishment, but rather a crisis of specific forms and methods of action, a crisis of ideas and principles towards which leaders of the radical Left had been orientating the protesting masses. It is possible that we are now on the threshold of a new stage in protest movements, for as yet not one of the fundamental problems which gave rise to the revolt of the New Left has been solved.