ABSTRACT

The political movement of the New Left (NL) emerged from a situation of global tension dominated by several vast military-industrial blocs. Political choices seemed to be presented, especially for those uncommitted to the major blocs, in terms of the proliferation of autonomous national versions of Communism: Yugoslav, Chinese, Algerian, Cuban, Vietnamese, as well as Rumanian, Albanian, Polish, and fleetingly Czech and Hungarian. The NL focused, in T. B. Bottomore’s view, on four main dimensions of alienation, each associated with one aspect of an industrialized society; ‘capitalist society in which man is separated from his material products as a result of private ownership of industry’. The years of the break-up of the simple contrasting polarities of the Cold War, which had been accompanied by notions of ‘convergence’ and ‘end-of-ideology’, also saw a discrediting of both Liberalism and Marxism. The major theoretical attempt to transcend the convergence of capitalist and collectivist materialism and bureaucracy was the revival of Marxian alienation concepts.