New Left

The New Left was a broad political movement of activists in the Western world that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It campaigned on social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reform and gender relations, where the traditional left had put economic goals first. The sociologist C. Wright Mills popularised the term in a 1960 open letter, and in Britain New Left Review was founded the same year. In the United States the movement centred on campus protest, above all the Students for a Democratic Society, whose 1962 Port Huron Statement called for participatory democracy, and on opposition to the Vietnam War; by 1968 it had begun to split.