The Homesickness of the New Left

By the end of the Fifties it seemed—did it not?—that the leftist ideologies of the nineteenth century had run their course. Germany’s Social Democrats had foresworn Marxism, the anarchist movement had met a violent death during the Spanish Civil War, even Leninism appeared to have reached a kind of plateau and run out of new ideas and methods. One of America’s noted social scientists published a book proclaiming The End of Ideology.

But then a new upsurge of ideology made itself felt in a number of Western countries. Its first spectacular outbreak occurred at Berkeley in 1964, the Free Speech Movement with Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker. Since she was a Communist, it seemed at first that this might be a new Communist tactic. But subsequent developments made it clear that the situation was not that simple. In Germany the former student organization of the Social Democratic Party had broken away from the mother party and set itself up as the more radical autonomous SDS. In the United States, another SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, had been founded at Port Huron in 1962. A left-wing student group within the civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), turned into an exclusively black radical organization. A still more radical group, the Black Panthers, emerged on the West Coast. Among white students, the Youth International Party (Yippies) was formed while the SDS has recently split into a number of different groups, one of them Maoist. German students rioted repeatedly in 1966-67, French students in 1966 and the spring of 1968. In ’68 they succeeded in pushing the French workers to a revolutionary general strike and occupation of some factories. Italian students, with a long background of radicalism, particularly at Bologna, occupied Rome University, and Spanish students followed suit in Madrid.

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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By the end of the Fifties it seemed—did it not?—that the leftist ideologies of the nineteenth century had run their course. Germany’s Social Democrats had foresworn Marxism, the anarchist movement had met a violent death during the Spanish Civil War, even Leninism appeared to have reached a kind of plateau and run out of new ideas and methods. One of America’s noted social scientists published a book proclaiming The End of Ideology.

But then a new upsurge of ideology made itself felt in a number of Western countries. Its first spectacular outbreak occurred at Berkeley in 1964, the Free Speech Movement with Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker. Since she was a Communist, it seemed at first that this might be a new Communist tactic. But subsequent developments made it clear that the situation was not that simple. In Germany the former student organization of the Social Democratic Party had broken away from the mother party and set itself up as the more radical autonomous SDS. In the United States, another SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, had been founded at Port Huron in 1962. A left-wing student group within the civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), turned into an exclusively black radical organization. A still more radical group, the Black Panthers, emerged on the West Coast. Among white students, the Youth International Party (Yippies) was formed while the SDS has recently split into a number of different groups, one of them Maoist. German students rioted repeatedly in 1966-67, French students in 1966 and the spring of 1968. In ’68 they succeeded in pushing the French workers to a revolutionary general strike and occupation of some factories. Italian students, with a long background of radicalism, particularly at Bologna, occupied Rome University, and Spanish students followed suit in Madrid.