ABSTRACT
In the period of the New Left's (NL) birth, the organized Old Left – especially the Communist parties and the anti-Communist Left, the social democrats – had been in disarray. As for the developing youth culture, and the counter-communities, for the most part the Old Left groups were equally contemptuous. In the main, the Old Left of the 1960s does represent a continuity with the groups of the 1930s, whereas the NL, at least before 1969, does not. Both in Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), NL style was opposed to manipulation, elitism, and Stalinism’s ‘use of slander as a political ploy’. The Marxist groups throughout the 1960s were less successful than NL groupings in mobilizing mass support. It has been argued that Progressive Labour’s decision to abandon May Second Movement and move its members and sympathizers into SDS in 1966 was a confession of this failure to organize an independent mass-base of its own.
