by NADEEM F. PARACHA
It was called the ‘New Left.’ Emerging in Britain in the 1950s, the New Left was the left’s disparaging response to the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism mainly symbolised by so-called ‘Stalinism’. The New Left revisited Marxist doctrines and attempted to bring them more in line with concepts like liberal democracy.
The New Left criticised both western capitalism and Soviet communism and attempted to put forward a more non-dogmatic and democracy-friendly version of Marxism. By the 1960s, it was ideologically informing the evolution of the various leftist movements that began taking shape around the world.
The New Left thinking also contributed to the various contemporary socialist experiments taking place in the Muslim world at the time, where certain leaders and political organs attempted to cut through Marxist dogma and capitalist whiplash by fusing nationalism and the more egalitarian notions of Islam with socialist economics. By the early 1970s, the New Left had begun to influence conventional social-democracy in Europe as well, where leftist parties emerged without any ideological strings attached to the Soviet Union.
However, the oil crisis, brought on by Egypt and Syria’s war against Israel in 1973, triggered a serious economic downturn in the West. It also began generating a gradual reaction against the New Left politics and economics. Consequently a number of economists emerged who severely critiqued social-democracy, socialism and the concept of the welfare state.
By the early 1980s, this tendency was referred to as the ‘New Right’ and its early political and economic manifestations were defined by the Ronald Reagan presidency in the US and Margrate Thatcher’s rule in the UK. The New Right forwarded an aggressive mixing of free market economy, religion, patriotism and a militarist foreign policy, a tendency which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, peaked in the shape of neo-conservatism during George W. Bush’s administration (2001-2008).
In Pakistan, the New Left’s frontline expressions were the students’ movement against Ayub Khan in the 1960s and the populist emergence of social-democratic parties such as the PPP. However, interestingly, just as the New Left was being wiped out in the West by the New Right in the 1980s, in Pakistan it was the old right (i.e. conventional religious parties in cahoots with a politicised military) that did the trick.
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