The
New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of educators, agitators and others who sought to implement a broad range of reforms on issues such as
gay rights,
abortion,
gender roles, and
drugs, in contrast to earlier leftist or
Marxist movements that had taken a more
vanguardist approach to
social justice and focused mostly on
labor unionization and questions of
social class. Sections of the New Left rejected involvement with the
labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of
class struggle, although others gravitated to variants of Marxism like
Maoism. In the United States, the movement was associated with the
Hippie movement and anti-war college-campus protest movements including the
Free Speech Movement. While formed in opposition to the "Old Left"
Democratic Party, groups composing the New Left gradually became central players in the Democratic coalition.