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As a result of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) ruptured. Many left the party for Trotskyist groupings or for the Independent Labour Party. Others formed a larval grouping dedicated to revisionist communism.
The historian E. P. Thompson was one of the chief ex-communists accused of revisionism by the CPGB. E. P. Thompson had previously established a dissenting journal within the CPGB called Reasoner. Once outside the party he began publishing the New Reasoner. In 1960, this journal merged with the Universities and Left Review to form the New Left Review. These journals attempted to synthesise a theoretical position of a revisionist, humanist, socialist marxism. In this attempt they published material from the Western bloc Trotskyist traditions and from the Eastern bloc dissenting marxists.
In terms of their actions, the British New Left concentrated on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the hypocrisy of the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 and its allied countries. It often worked in existing popular front organisations to campaign for peace, disarmament, global justice or other issues important to communists. Some students within the British New Left joined the International SocialistsInternational Socialists is the name of the number of Trotskyist organisations in the International Socialist Tendency. International Socialists (Denmark) (Internationale Socialister) (Denmark) International Socialists (Sweden) (Internationella Socialiste, which later became Socialist Workers Party (UK)The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a revolutionary socialist political party in Britain. Publications A weekly newspaper Socialist Worker a monthly magazine, Socialist Review and a quarterly theoretical journal, International Socialism''. In addition th while others became involved with groups such as the International Marxist GroupThe International Marxist Group (IMG) was a Trotskyist political party in the United Kingdom between 1964 and 1987. The party published the newspaper Red Mole''. It emerged from a group of International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI) loyal.
Compare with the simultaneously active, but not revisionist, syndicalist organisation Solidarity, UK.
The New Left was the name loosely associated with a radical political movement that took place in the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in during the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around, primarily among college students. The origin of the name can be traced to an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills entitled Letter to the New Left. Mills argued for a new leftist ideology, moving away from the traditional (" Old Left") focus on labor issues, towards more personalized issues such as opposing alienation, anomie, authoritarianism, and other ills of the modern affluent society. Put differently, Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism, toward the values of the Counterculture.
The organization that came to embody the New Left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1962 Tom Hayden wrote its founding document, the Port Huron Statement, which issued a call for "participatory democracy" based on non-violent civil disobedience. The New Left opposed the prevailing authority structures in society, which it termed "The Establishment," and those who rejected this authority became known as "anti-Establishment." Loosely associated with the New Left was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement which began in 1964 as a coalition of student groups at the University of California, Berkeley which opposed restrictions to political activity on campus.
The SDS became a leading organization of the antiwar movement on college campuses during the Vietnam War. As opposition to the war grew stronger, the SDS became a nationally prominent political organization, but at the same time opposing the war became an overriding concern that overshadowed many of the original issues that inspired the New Left. During the late 1960s, the SDS began to split under the strain of internal dissension and increasing penetration by Maoist ideologues, and some extremist splinter factions emerged, such as the Weather Underground and the Progressive Labor Party.