I thought the New Left were those who thought of Liberal Democrats as both hypocritical and responsible for the War in Vietnam. They sought a much more fundamental reform of society.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

What New Left?

As Alice B. Toklas said to Gertrude Stein as Gertrude was being wheeled into the operating room, "Gertrude, what is the answer?"

Gertrude replied, "Alice, what is the question?"

Ekilgore, you are absolutely right. The Viet Cong flag wavers managed to get themselves in front of every camera. God how I hated the "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" crowd.
I guess that was the New Left. Though I don't know what was so new about them especially those YSA types with their Trotsky-Deutscher pamphlets.
And let's not forget the PLP (I think it was called), the Maoists. Were they New Left?
Honest to God, I just thought they were all colossal jerks and some of them I thought were provocateurs (feds or narcs).
I think some of the other posters here were seriously involved in the ideological discussions of the era and I give them all credit due. But I just wanted the war to end before I was drafted. And I wanted to see LBJ and then Nixon gone.
In that, I think I was pretty much like the blogosphere activists today although the kids today are smarter. They understand that today's war is a symptom more than THE problem. But, in the end, the solutions most of the blogkids advocate today is the same one we advocated then: getting anti-war Dems in power.

"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow."

It was called just "PL", M.J.  Progressive Labor Party.  I have a friend who was in that group in San Francisco.  He did a year in SF County Jail for his efforts.  I went to a party they threw once - and they were charging their members for beer and pizza, whilst jumping each other about bad habits.

So during induction into the US Army, I was shown the official Attorney General's list of subversive organizations and PL wasn't there.  So I got the attention of a 2nd Louie and asked him, "I went to a party once given by the Progressive Labor Party - do I need to note that?"  He said "What's that?"  I answered "They are a group of Maoist Communists who are dedicated to the violent overthrow of the US government."  "Are they on the list?" he asked.  I said "negatory", and he advised me to just forget about it. 

Neoboho

Today's chaotic recollections are about right.  The left was chaos and it appeared a little different to every participant.  Only the frightened right saw a monolith.

Replace Liberal Democrats with Democrats in power and I think you might be on to something.

Nicely put.

"Today's chaotic recollections are about right. The left was chaos and it appeared a little different to every participant."

That is as good a summary as I could hope to read about this subject, so long as there is no perjorative connotation to the word "chaos."

(Assuming a premise that the "New Left" appears first in the late 1950's), every young person's birthright at the time was the regime often described as the "silent 50's." I suppose there are many ways to examine that regime and its discontents, but why not take an easy approach. Just access that Alexandrian library, NetFlix, and watch in succession ( and in this order ) "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" to understand the ennui, "The Apartment" to understand its spiritual morbidy, and "A Thousand Clowns" to understand the dilemma of those times. The future promised to the youth of 1960 was either the regime of the 50's or, well, the chaos of individuality. The bond among those who we might call "the New Left" was the desire to discover a legitimate foundation for a concept of the dignity of the individual human being. It just looked like chaos to the ancien regime.
I remember a favorite quotation at that time was from a Midieval sage, Meister Eckart. "Only the hand that erases can write the true thing." I think that the "chaos" of the New Left did erase the dictates of the contemporaneous American society and did so in a manner that gave hope to the rest of the world, that is, peacefully and with a certain Eighteenth century Enlightenment lilt. It managed to erase the agenda of the established order and replace it with a new one, albeit one that has yet to be actualized. But erase it did, and just about everything, from the culture of politics to the culture of the street. It was George Stepanopoulos who once said, quite seriously, that sometimes it seemed that Washington D.C. was made up of two groups - those who had fun in the 60's and those who didn't. In the popular culture, rap music follows the tradition of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, not BB King and John Coltrane.

No one erects statues or monuments to those who merely undo things. So there are no memorials to the New Left that would make any sense. But we did clear the way.

It is easy to ridicule the beret wearing militants of the time but we were all learning and rebellion just for rebellions sake can actually be healthy for a society. The complacency we are now witnessing is the death-wheeze of intellectual stagnation.

The New Left was a grasping for a way forward for those anti-capitalists who rejected both Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution. Still grasping.

"Chaos" is not offered in an offensive way.  I participated in that chaos myself.  I only meant to say that all these different and contradictory memories arise because the period itself had, perhaps, some strong leanings, but it had no monolithic culture.  Anyone who thinks s/he was in charge is wrong.

Allen Ginsberg!  You mean the left is about total egocentrism?

Ginsberg is interesting in this regard - an old Trotskyite, likely to have stood out as a politico amongst the Beats, who generally saw politics as anti-marginal.  

The Fugs?  You may be time-traveling here.  By 1965 the Beats were historical items.  Even in SF what survived through the early 60s was pretty dismal - a collection of self-appointed avant gardes trying to cash in on the former glory and notoriety.  

But Snyder is really problematical.  He's such an outrageous individual that he escapes categories.  It's arguable, I know, but a lot of folks who are interested in this sort of thing deny that Gary was ever a beatnik at all, but rather a San Francisco Renaissance sort of fellow.  But I can accept the "beat generation" label for Gary - guilt by association.  But was he ever "New Left?"  He was in Japan during the formative years of the New Left - and certainly his work on ecology inspired many in the New Left. 

I still can't see the connection - other than very vague notions of counterculturalism which actually are shared experiences across many generations (like where does Henry Miller and Big Sur fit into all of this?) 

Neoboho

I was taught that the Beats gave voice to some dissatisfaction with the glossy post-war world of the 1950s, a dissatisfaction that was articulated in a political setting by the New Left.  I think, though, that the Beats are better connected with the hippies and with the counterculture. 

Of course, I also try to make sense of the 1960s with grid: political v. cultural, within established systems v. outside them.  They're all connected by wanting stuff changed, but exactly what and how was left up in the air.

That's about right with what I know about it - except the beatnik/hippy connection.  I suppose there are connections, though - and argument would be about how significant.  I lived in the Haight in SF during the interim between the Beats the emergence of the New Left, and it was a great neighborhood -quite international and a significant number of artists/poets etc. residing there.  Rents were pretty cheap by SF standards.  

But I just thought of an anecdote that might underscore the big chasm between the old and new left.  I was talking about the old labor days in SF with Levon Moscofian, a printer who used to print all of Bill Graham's psychodelic concert posters.  Levon was an old lefty who knew my mom and dad in the labor strikes in the 30s.  Levon was cheerfully bragging to me about how he and other union organizers would manipulate strikes to force confrontation between the strikers and their supporters with the SFPD - which typically resulted in spilled blood.   The funny part of this was that it was known and deemed ok by the people who were being manipulated, so Levon had no reason to be ashamed of himself.  And that was the work of the totalizing ideology driving the labor protestors.  Part and parcel of the radicalization of the proletariat.

Now fast forward to San Francisco in 1968, where daily protests, confrontations and clubbings were taking place on campus at San Francisco State.  My neighbor was a student there at the time, and he gave me daily reports.  Ronald Regan, then governor, had created the dreded "Tach Squad" to deal with demonstrations.  These guy were recruited from a pool of kids from all over rural Northen California who had signed on as reservists in local law enforcement agencies - waiting for that opening to go regular.  Chaw spitting redneck teenagers, all pumped up and eager to get a "nigger or a commie."  But word got out in SF that there were old-style lefties with bull horns, hanging outside the edge of the student demonstrators. When the Tach Squads attacked, these guys were telling the people trying to run for safety "Walk, don't run!" it would force the crowed to get balled up and easy prey for a good beating and arrest by the rednecks.  This is more or less what Levon did in the thirties, but this time the students were outraged, and it ended up that students attacked the paleo-lefties and beat the crap out of them.  No one accepted the legitimacy of that kind of manipulation. And it certainly didn't radicalize students who were there out of curiosity and estranged from the issues at hand.

Big difference, by my measure, mediated by the presence or absence of a totalizing ideology.   

Neoboho

neoboho,

Admittedly, I'm reaching.  But the lines were not all that clear-cut from my perspective.  Ginsberg likely connects best with the New Left through Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the 1967 march on Washington and Pentagon levitation demo/prank (I recall Hoffman remarking that the West Coasters believed they could really do it).  The Fugs connect the Beats to the New Left, individually through the pre-band lit and poetry of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg; and collectively in their participation in the Festival of Life in Lincoln Park opposite the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention (one may also draw a line through Beat-New Left/Yippie-protopunk by the MC5's appearance at the same gig).  I recommend Sanders' Tales of Beatnik Glory for its signature style of cultural fermentation between Beat, Left and "counterculture."  The lit and poetry of Richard Braughtigan may also apply here.

For our purpose here, I might question the benefit of drawing too rigid distinctions between all these political and cultural phenomena.  People being what they are, it would seem that mobility is the key to understanding the tension and continuum of cultural history.  Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States examines the life, work and loves of Emma Goldman, for example, in a similarly fluid context in the turn of the 19/20th century milieu of the labor and free love movements.