Left-wing intellectual movements

Introductory courses dealing with sex, gender and sexuality are usually quite biased, going as far as to deny the reality of biology. Drawing on the Catholic tradition (Aquinas), this article presents an accessible argument aimed at restoring deliberative balance in the classroom.

The New Left was a broad, heterogeneous, transnational, anti-systemic movement of
movements which pursued the radical transformation of power structures during the
1960s and the early 1970s. Its activists opposed all forms of oppression – class, racial,gender and so forth – and strove for the redistribution of power on a global scale. Their ideas fuelled the intense cycles of protest of the period and allowed for symbolically connecting movements all over the world.
This book reconstructs the dissemination of the characteristic ideas and traits of the New Left by analysing its most prominent magazines and journals. Through the analysis of US, European and Latin American publications, it reveals how the ideological framework of the New Left was conceived and disseminated by a series of critical communities of activists and intellectuals who communicated and debated across borders. The result of the joint efforts of a group of eminent specialists and young scholars from seven different countries, this pioneering work contributes valuable empirical evidence to the study of the processes of intellectual change occurring throughout the twentieth century.

This book is about one of the key political actors in contemporary Mexican politics: Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). This study describes the political environment surrounding the then Head of Government of Mexico City through his personality, his speech, and his decisions. The study seeks to understand how a politician like AMLO reached the peak of popularity and power in a new democracy immersed in a country with significant social inequalities. Politicians strengthen their popularity based on the ability they have to get their messages to the electorate. This study analyzes AMLO´s career in order to explain his position within Mexican politics. The study concludes that the risk of a lopizta government would be its gradual transformation into a PRI presidential style, without any of the advantages of the former hegemonic system.

This chapter frames the emergence and development of the New Left in the context of the main geopolitical, socioeconomic and cultural transformations occurring from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The spotlight is placed on the critical communities comprising  activists, revolutionary leaders and leftist intellectuals whose theories, ideas and debates made up the core of the ideological frameworks of New Left movements. In turn, these frameworks were disseminated by a small set of magazines and left- wing publishing houses promoted by these same communities which translated into the virtually global availability of this stock of counter- hegemonic thinking.

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP. UNIVERSIDAD DE SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA. MAY 2018

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence, development and disappearance of the New Left, a transnational movement of movements that posed a challenge to the basic tenets and foundations of capitalism and imperialism on a global scale. Although in terms of strategy, their different organizations and movements had important differences, they were inspired by a shared ideology and conceived their own struggles as part of the same international fight. In Latin America, the armed struggle became one of the distinctive features of the repertoire of action and identity of the organizations of the revolutionary left. In Europe and the US, the New Left emerged since the end of the 1950s and although it did not develop the armed struggle in its own territory, conceived its strategy as part of a global combat against imperialism and capitalism where Third World revolutionaries were in the forefront. Later on, in the aftermath of thé68 mobilizations some sectors of the US and European student movement adopted urban guerrilla strategies following the example of their Third World counterparts. This International Workshop is aimed to analyze one of the main mechanisms of political-ideological diffusion of the time: the non-organic publications of the New Left. We start from the premise that diffusion processes are key to understanding the emergence and development of the new revolutionary left and that, in this sense, publications were essential in the construction of a shared ideological framework that gave meaning to the actions of its militants. Publications were the main channel of political-ideological diffusion of the period, and fed the cycle of mobilization of the New Left by being places where the discussion, sharing and evolution of ideas took place. This way, publications contributed greatly to the creation of a transnational imagined community of revolutionary militants. In addition, these publications, based on a common political-ideological framework were part of a network. A network that was perhaps not organic, but that allowed for a global circulation of ideas and debates and which will also be a subject of analysis of this workshop.

Instead of concurring with the stance of the overall rejection of formal institutions, Nigel Thrift poses the question of “how one can rework institutions and their work ethic in order for them to be appropriate to our times”. As a general principle, he outlines the view that “rather than a cipher, the organisation should be a ‘body’ people can interact with”. The growth of a large number of informal institutions in the past years, “all the way from citizens’ juries to NGOs”, embodies, along these lines, a form of politics that has positive effects. It allows for the dispersal of diverse forms of activism, promotes a degree of transparency, and allows for the closer monitoring of larger formal organisations.