What do you guys think of the New Left movement that happened in the 60s and 70s in the west? Woke? Joke...

My parents were hippies (who stayed true to their ideals, unlike many), and their generation did a lot of good, important things that weren't happening yet in the post-FDR socdem era, and needed to happen: Pacifism, environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, civil rights, freedom of expression, secularism, rehabilitating socialism (coops, communes, counterculture), etc. For that, I will always be proud of them.

While I and many others now harp on idpollers and SJWs for wasting time on the nonissues they obsess over, that is precisely because those issues have already been solved to the extent they can under capitalism. Their "my revolution waiting for your revolution" rhetoric is a strawman now, not because it is of any inherent theoretical faultiness (if something like the New Left's 1960s Culture Wars hadn't happened, all the problems it defeated could certainly still exist under socialism), but because historical events have rendered it moot.

That said, I am sincerely unsure as to whether we gained more than we lost. The lack of focus on organized labor ultimately gave rightists devastating unopposed free reign in economic policy, and after the massive victories of the 1960s "Culture Wars", leftism as an institution was suddenly evacuated by competent normal people, leaving positions of influence within all the most then-powerful activist orgs up for grabs by every Don Quixote too delusional to notice they'd won the Culture Wars and move on.

If only the left had pivoted from their victories in the 1960s, bringing that momentum back to renewed class war, the New Left united with the Old Left would've been a huge win on every front. I sometimes imagine that if only some people in the era like MLK who were voicing similar ambitions hadn't been assassinated, that might've happened.

What actually happened in the 1970s was pure freefall. Deregulation, open borders, privatization, poverty, debt, sectorial financialization, all against the backdrop of the worst economic depression since the 1930s.

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Hippie bashing is the height of laziness.
The dumb conformist culture of the 50s had to be destroyed, and things have genuinely not been the same since.

That graph needs a source or two. At least reference an event that caused the right and left to switch policies because right now that picture is a Holla Forumstier infograph

so cultural marxism ?

what is going on in that chart?

So? If you reject an union you start new ones.

It was alright. It ended up being coopted by morons and the effects still persist. My largest criticism would be that it supported and allowed factionalist/bourgeois liberal movements (factionalist being BPP, as it was fascist in tendency, albeit black)… by bourgeois liberal movements I mean feminism, critical race studies, etc… overall, my attitude is "nice try, but you've had long term negative effects on the left that will be hard to recover i.e. the shift in American politics from class to idpol

Wat

youtube.com/watch?v=-NYXkM7460U

We need a post-New Left. Take from it what is good and useful, and leave the rest to the past.

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies by Jodi Dean

Isn't this essentially what Bookchin tried to do?

It's a pretty big part of his ideas. If you look at the videos he put out in the 90s, he was deeply disturbed by the direction leftism was heading

This.

Yeah, this is likely.
It's pretty funny how MLK starts talking more about economics and the more extreme Malcolm X abandons his separatist stuff and they both get assassinated shortly thereafter. Oh well, nothing to see here.

Everybody was acutely aware nobody was safe, all the way to the top. The Kennedies had to be some kind of intentional, obvious warning to the rest of us, to keep our noses down to the grindstone.

BPP was literally the best Ameriburger leftist political party to ever exist

Don't discuss topics you know nothing about.

one of the things mark rudd criticized about the new left or specifically the ones who became the weather underground was the emphasis on "self-expression." i.e. they thought the revolution would come if they ran down the street waving the NLF flag. they also misread the foco theory of guerrilla warfare, thinking the cuban revolution could be replicated in the u.s. by a small vanguard of committed militants.

both ideas were wrong as the student strikes of 68 were preceded by years of real political organizing, as was the cuban revolution.

they remind me of the alt-right in a way. charlottesville was their big moment that took two years to organize, with the theory being if they put on a big enough show that people would naturally follow. well, it backfired.

The Panthers were definitely guilty of the guerilla thing, but they really weren't on board with the self-expression part. Newton constantly hated on 'independence' within the Party and considered it to be suicidal in a situation where the community as a whole should stand as one in order to survive. He also constantly hated on 'cultural nationalist' blacks who believed that liberation would come from rediscovering African culture or changing their name.

nah the Communist Party USA under Foster was better imo, unfortunately they had the twin cancers of Browder and Lovestone

Load of revisionist shit that led to Eurocommunism and the weakening of trade unions in exchange for psyop hippie drug rubbish.

that first pic is 10/10