1960s-70s New Left: Activists Fighting for Social Change - Essay Sample

Introduction

In the 1960s and 1970s, the new left was an extensive movement that consisted of activists that came from countries from the west or the western world (O'Donohoe, 2000). The main deal of the action was to campaign for many social issues that affected people in the community such as feminism, abort rights, gay rights, and policies concerning drug reforms, political and civil rights as well as gender roles (O'Donohoe, 2000). The youths in the 1960s started to rebel against the countercultures in the society that involved the individual behaviors, the forms of dressing, and music at large. Some customs were standing for a very long time that the youths felt were outdated and needed to change. The counterculture questioned the traditional principles and released a movement that affirmed the basic principles (O'Donohoe, 2000).

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The students for a democratic society (SDS) was an organization formed in 1962 that led to the New Left in the University of Michigan. There was a claim by the university students that there was no faulty of bureaucracy in the leadership (O'Donohoe, 2000). The leaders of the movement had the belief that in colleges, there were private grounds for social changes. The hot topics that circulated the campus grounds were the freedoms of the students that concerned their dressing, admissions of the minorities, discrimination by sororities, and course requirements earlier of the Vietnam War (O'Donohoe, 2000). After the university administration got in and tried to control and contain the situation, another movement was formed that was called the free speech movement.

The students employed certain strategies at Berkeley, such as taking over the buildings of the school and also sit-ins. Those strategies became the popular ways in which the students went on with their protests. The student's democratic societies supported a campaign that ran worldwide that was advocating against the draft during the spring of the year 1965 (O'Donohoe, 2000). The protests were very vocal, and they entailed a lot of sit-ins that were focused on ROTC programs, burning of draft cards, and a lot of confrontations with the recruits of the military. Some companies got themselves involved with the movement, but they became the targets after they came to get recruited to the university.

There was also the hippie movement of 1960 that challenged what was perceived as the proper norms that people lived by in society. They were people that the community viewed as spoil, and they were associated with smoking bhang and staying on the corners. Most of the counter cultures involved the young generation like that of the hippie movement who were in large groups (O'Donohoe, 2000).

In some people, the new left was seen as an opposition to the labor union and also the social justice that was directed towards dialectical materialism, and the social class and some individuals also viewed it as a movement that continued and revitalized the traditional goals of leftists.one' involvement with the movement was a rejection to the other types of movements that had different ideologies. The main goal that the campaign had was to acquire peace and prosperity in the Vietnam War period in the United States of America, as well as to be their troops back home safely. The youth also blamed the government for being corrupt and wanted to make a change (O'Donohoe, 2000).

References

Desmond, J., McDonagh, P., & O'donohoe, S. (2000). Counterculture and consumer society. Consumption, Markets, and Culture, 4(3), 241-279. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10253866.2000.9670358