Quotes About New Left

The worst thing that can happen to the New Left in this country is to turn the struggle into a military struggle against the establishment.

From early on, important segments of the movement against the American involvement in Southeast Asia were not so much antiwar as they were partisans of Hanoi, whose victory they sought to hasten through achieving an America withdrawal from Vietnam. Given the fragility of the Saigon government and the dependence of the South Vietnamese armed forces on American assistance, none could have any illusion about the effects of this policy. The New Left, too, soon came to favor a victory of Hanoi.

The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the '60s generation invited a conservative backlash.

Above all, the new Left—and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency—rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor.

I]n the work of the New Left one finds philosophical justification for what are now intuitive commonplaces of our culture: to be free is to be sexually liberated; to be happy is to be affirmed in that liberation.

By silencing speech, the new Left makes life more dangerous by leaving violence as the only option. Maybe that's what they want.

Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot at doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hope or fear.

The question of the possibility and prospects of industrial democracy has come to be of key importance in discussions on democratic socialism; it has in itself nothing in common with the apocalyptic dreams of the New Left as inspired by Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich, and is historically and logically independent of Marxism.

One indicator of the self-conscious dissociation of radicals like Gitlin and Hayden from reformers like King is that neither of them, nor any other white student activist, sos leader, or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis for the demonstrations King was organizing in 1968 at the time he was killed.. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) could still be called a serious supporter of King in the year before he was assassinated.

In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.

It was a worldview that both resonated and broke with the New Left, for Brand rejected traditional politics and focused instead on what he called direct power—a focus on tools and skills for the individual—emerging from his early libertarian sympathies.