ABSTRACT
The initial development of the New Left (NL) was to a significant extent precipitated by the organizational and theoretical bankruptcy of the Old: 'its destructive factionalism and sectarian infighting'. With the non-exclusion policy and organizational openness of both the nuclear disarmament movement in Britain, and the NL in America, both Trotskyites and a gradually reviving Communist Party, became more active in the early 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society, the major organizational expression of the NL, emerged out of exactly the kinds of boundary defining skirmishes between the Old Left and the New. The rather complicated dialectic relationship between Old and New Lefts has to be understood in terms of the range of Old Left positions and the changes in attitude to the NL as it grew and as the Old Left itself evolved through various stages.
