Taking Back Our Stolen History
CBS REPORTS Airs an Episode Titled ‘The New Left’
CBS REPORTS Airs an Episode Titled ‘The New Left’

CBS REPORTS Airs an Episode Titled ‘The New Left’

The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of reforms on issues such as civil and political rights, feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some saw the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on materialism and social class, while others who used the term saw the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.

Some who self-identified as “New Left” (especially those drawing from Trotskyism) rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism’s historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to their own takes on established forms of Marxism such as the New Communist movement (which drew from Maoism) in the United States or the K-Gruppe in the German Sprachraum. In the United States, the movement was associated with the anti-war college-campus protest movements, including the Free Speech Movement.