Dimitrios Roussopoulos, ed., The New Left: Legacy and Continuity.

Lexier, Roberta

Dimitrios Roussopoulos, ed., The New Left: Legacy and Continuity (Montreal: Black Rose Books 2007)

IN RECENT YEARS, the Sixties have attracted a great deal of scholarly discussion and debate in Canada. This became clear in the summer of 2007 when a conference on the period held at Queen's University brought together hundreds of academics, former participants, and current activists to discuss the meaning and legacy of this period. The collection edited by Dimitrios Roussopoulos on the New Left contributes in important ways to these debates. While it would benefit significantly from more critical analysis of the history and legacy of the New Left, it nevertheless brings some interesting articles together into a single work and contributes to the growing literature on the Sixties.

In his introduction, Roussopoulous explains the purpose of this collection: it "is meant to focus and colour the emergence of the New Left during the latter half of the 20th century and into that of our own. In doing so it will analyze the legacy of the New Left of the 1960s and the continuity that exists between the past and today." (7) In this way, the collection is meant not only as a historical study but also as a guide for current and future political activism. Divided into two sections, titled "Legacy" and "Continuity," eleven different contributions comprise this collection. These cover a range of formats, including scholarly articles, interview transcripts, and a list of fugitive radicals from the period. Some of the contributions were written specifically for this collection, but a number have been published previously. On the one hand, this gives scholars access to a number of commentaries on the New Left all in one location. On the other hand, though, some of the pieces are now quite dated and do not adequately address the current political context upon which they are expected to reflect; articles written in the 1990s do not, for example, address the post-9/11 world in which current social and political activism takes place.

In these articles, both new and republished, the authors emphasize the importance of participatory democracy to the legacy and continuity of the New Left. Thus, while the authors suggest a number of different legacies, both positive and negative, they almost unanimously agree that the most important contribution was this notion of participatory democracy. The belief that people should participate directly in making the decisions that affect their lives, the authors explain, formed the basis of the New Left's philosophy and continues to be important in the current social and political movements around the world. This discussion of participatorydemocracy is incredibly important and contributes to our understanding of the Sixties.

Former participants in the New Left movement of the Sixties wrote the vast majority of pieces that are included in this collection. This is an interesting strategy. It allows former participants to reflect upon their experiences and consider through the lens of the present what they hoped to accomplish and what they actually achieved. The best contribution of this sort is the article by Tom Hayden, a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society. At the same time, however, it is often difficult for participants in past events to achieve the perspective necessary to fully analyze the history and legacy of their activities. The three articles written by academics and activists who did not live through the period provide a counter to these personal reflections, but the collection would benefit from a more balanced approach. In addition, all of the former participants who contributed to this collection are men, while the three non-participants are women. This overlooks the important contributions of women participants in the New Left; a much better gender balance is required.

This gender imbalance also reflects one of the major shortcomings of the collection, namely a general failure on the part of the authors to sufficiently explain the New Left. The editor's introduction defines the New Left as "an inclusive politics including analyses and propositions derived from or inspiring the various movements and bearing a specific reference to social, political and cultural change." (8) As well as being rather vague, this definition does not adequately reflect the usage of the term "New Left" in the articles that follow. Most of the authors unproblematically equate the New Left with the student movements of the 1960s, therefore privileging a primarily white, middle-class, male story of the period. Recent scholarship has challenged this definition and seeks to provide a more inclusive understanding of the New Left. According to Van Gosse, in Rethinking the New Left (2005), for example, the New Left includes movements such as the Civil Rights Movement, the early ban-the-bomb movement, the student movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Black Power movement, the Aboriginal and Chicano movements, second-wave feminism, and the gay liberation struggle. This perspective, he argues, provides a more inclusive history of the period rather than unnecessarily elevating one particular wing of the New Left. This collection would benefit from a discussion of this new scholarship and further consideration of what the New Left actually entails.

Another area where further critical analysis would be beneficial is in the discussion of identity politics, which many authors in the collection argue was among the (unfortunate) legacies of the New Left. Their argument is that the political and social movements of the 1960s were rooted in something other than identity, namely in a unified critique of "the system." It is only in the 1970s, they insist, that the movement splintered into fragments embedded in particular and separate identities. This is by no means a new position, but recent scholarship has challenged the notion of a unified movement during the Sixties and the paucity of differing identities in the New Left itself. Leerom Medevoi, for example, argues in his book, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005) that identity politics actually developed during the 1950s when youth became, for the first time, a separate and powerful political category. Furthermore, Stuart Hall and others have argued for decades, drawing inspiration from the theories of Antonio Gramsci, that identity is often central to the development of social movements. Thus, rather than repeating a common assumption, which invariably privileges the Sixties movements over the social and political movements that followed, this collection could offer more critical engagement with the notion of identity politics and its role in the New Left.

These assumptions regarding the unity of the New Left and the divisive identity politics that followed also find their way into the discussions of continuity in this collection. Many of the authors argue that the New Left connected a variety of issues into a cohesive critique of society, which collapsed when various identities arose by the 1970s. Yet, many of the authors argue that this unity has been restored in the current anti-globalization movement, which, they explain, is also rooted in a wider analysis of society. While there is no doubt a connection between the Sixties movements and the current social activism, as many authors in this collection successfully point out, this analysis overlooks the divisive nature of both the New Left and of the new protest movements. While many participants in both movements attempted to present cohesive critiques of society, there was rarely unanimity or agreement and such positions were subject to continued discussion and debate. In order to avoid mythologizing the Sixties as a period of united activism, much more could be done to analyze the continued attempts to create agreement in the face of diverse and sophisticated positions.

Overall, this collection contributes to current discussions and debates surrounding the Sixties in important ways. In particular, the in-depth analysis of participatory democracy provides tremendous insight into the political and social movements both of that period and at the present time. While much more critical engagement with the current literature on the Sixties would strengthen this collection, it is nevertheless a useful work for scholars of the period and social movements more generally.

ROBERTA LEXIER

University of Alberta