ABSTRACT
The leadership of the early civil rights movement, explicitly reformist and integrationist, was concerned with altering the existing structure of law and improving social justice. Everywhere nonviolent direct action politics was taking initiatives absent in parliamentarist reformism. Extra-parliamentarism in the English new left (NL) developed alongside Labourist tactics; Civil Disobedience alongside party infighting; none was totally predominant, or seen as exclusive. There was thus, so long as the Democratic Party remained monolithic and basically racist, a fundamental ambiguity in the voter registration and electoral strategy. The proliferation of organized groups and communities of people largely excluded from or marginal to the exercise of national power, was taking place in Britain and America largely independent of the NL and continued to take place after its subsequent crises and fragmentations. Despite radical pronouncements, and a strong extra-parliamentarist spirit at the heart of many projects, the NL in America remained ambiguous about electoralism.
