The Failure of the New Left?

Before discussing the reasons for the failure of the New Left, we must address two questions: first, who and what this New Left is, and second, whether it has in fact failed. To begin, some comments on the first question. The New Left consists of political groups that are situated to the left of the traditional communist parties; they do not yet possess any new organizational forms, are without a mass base and are isolated from the working class, especially in the United States. The strong libertarian, anti-authoritarian moments that originally defined the New Left have vanished in the meantime or yielded to a new "group-authoritarianism." Nevertheless, that which distinguishes and essentially characterizes this movement isthe fact that it has re-defined the concept of revolution, bringing to it those new possibilities for freedom and new potentials for socialist development that were created (and immediately arrested) by advanced capitalism. As a result of these developments, new dimensions of social change have emerged. Change is no longer defined simply as economic and political upheaval, as the establishment of a different mode of production and new institutions, but also and above all as a revolution in the prevailing structure of needs and the possibilities for their fulfillment. This concept of revolution was part of the Marxian theory from the outset: socialism is a qualitatively different society, one in which people's relationships to one another as well as the relationship between human beings and nature is fundamentally transformed. Pressured by the economic power of capitalism, however, and forced into co-existence, the socialist countries eem to have been damned over time to an almost exclusive emphasis on developing the means of production, on expanding the productive sector of the economy. This priority has necessarily perpetuated the individual's subjugation to the exigencies of his/her work (a subjugation that, under certain circumstances, can be "democratic" and can mean a more rational and more efficient form of production, as well as a more equitable distribution fgoods).