The New Left crystallized in 1967-68 after divergent national origins

Evidence

‘New Left’ means a great many different things in different contexts, but as a distinct political tendency within the plethora of diverse radicalisms which arose in this period, the term has to have, I believe, some claim to an affiliation with Marxism, however the affiliation or the Marxism may be conceived. In Britain, surely, the roots go back to at least the consequences of 1956 (Suez, Hungary, the Khrushchev Report). In the USA, the Cuban Revolution was perhaps more decisive, even though Monthly Review had started even earlier to define an alternative kind of Marxism, different from the Stalinist one. It is possible to argue, in any case, that while the origins of the ‘New Left’ may be traced back even to the ‘Old Left’ of the 1930s, it was in 1967-68 that it first made major interventions in most Western societies, especially the universities. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 662

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that different historical catalysts (1956 for Britain, Cuba for the US) produced the same formation invites deeper comparative inquiry into how national path-dependent each ‘New Left’ actually was.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar New Leftists rediscovered the Frankfurt School through pirated and reissued pre-1950 writings — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 76

Related

• The pre-1950 Frankfurt School’s dilemmas anticipated and fueled the postwar New Left (similarity 0.83)
• The 1956 New Left emerged from a third-position third-world student milieu (similarity 0.82)
• The New Left predated and anticipated the era of new social movements. (similarity 0.81)
• A new anticommunist Third-Worldist intellectual displaced traditional left affiliations after 1975 (similarity 0.81)
• The 1960s metropolitan Left wrongly conflated anti-colonialism with domestic social progress. (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar New Leftists rediscovered the Frankfurt School through pirated and reissued pre-1950 writings (similarity 0.80)
• Post-1968 Western radicalism abandoned belief in domestic socialist revolution (similarity 0.80)
• American literary theory developed in isolation from revolutionary political history (similarity 0.80)
• A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism (similarity 0.80)
• The British New Left emerged in 1956 amid the disintegration of Marxism (similarity 0.79)
• The Frankfurt School’s New Left influence peaked only decades after its founding (similarity 0.78)
• The 1956 Suez and Hungary crises catalyzed Britain’s New Left movement (similarity 0.78)