Apart from some limited consensus, the “new left” is a deeply contested category among historians. It is universally recognized that the new left took shape during the late 1950s, consolidated during the 1960s and 1970s, and marked a contrast with the “old left” because it promoted the independence of leftist intellectual currents and political movements from the Soviet line. Moreover, it is widely accepted that the new left promoted the revolutionary potential of youth, peasants, students, and the Third World, in contrast with the “old left,” which glorified the working class of industrialized nations as the ultimate revolutionary subject. Beyond that, however, there are few agreements about what the new left was, what its main features were, and what elements made it “new.”
The historiographical debate about the new left is particularly heated in Latin America. On the one hand, the Cuban Revolution opened a new horizon of hope, intellectual creativity, political action, and armed struggle in the region. On the other hand, the repression of the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone and the multiple guerrilla groups formed after the Cuban example contributed to an especially violent Cold War experience. This has made recent political history in Latin America at once dynamic, brutal, and traumatic. It has also opened vibrant discussions and creative interpretations about the history of the new left in the region.
This is why the publication of La nueva izquierda en debate, edited by Nicolás Dip, is especially relevant. The book is the culmination of Dip’s larger project, which included an earlier publication of interviews with different historians about the potential of the new left as a conceptual window to explore the Cold War in Latin America. However, La nueva izquierda does not propose a conclusive definition of the category. Rather, it embraces the contradictions of the concept. Dip argues that these “tensions and disputes” provide creative force to develop imaginative historical research about the particularities of the new left in different subregional contexts and national realities. The volume invites readers to think about the characteristics of the new left in specific countries and periods, while simultaneously exploring the regional impact that the transnational circulation of leftist people, ideas, and political repertoires had during the “long 1960s.”
The volume is composed of eight chapters. The guiding thread among them is blurry, as the authors are not in direct discussion with one another. The book also lacks introductory and concluding sections that unite the chapters. Moreover, some chapters comprise original research while others are historiographical essays or summaries of previous works. Nonetheless, the contributions to the volume show that the new left is a productive category for exploring the political history of the Cold War in Latin America. They also provide conceptual insights and possible pathways for future research. Chapters by Aldo Marchesi, Vania Markarian, and Fernando Herrera Calderón are especially interesting. From different perspectives and countries (Uruguay and Mexico), these authors argue that the new left was not a completely novel phenomenon; in many cases, leftist intellectuals and activists reclaimed theoretical tools, political arguments, and sensibilities from the 1920s and 1930s and adapted them to the circumstances of the long 1960s.
Eric Zolov and Vera Carnovale’s contributions are also noteworthy, as they try to make sense of the tensions and contradictions within the new left, as both a historiographical concept and a political field. Zolov argues that the unifying core of the new left were the youth, who were the movement’s most powerful and disruptive political actor and main agent for social change. For her part, Carnovale maintains that, in the Argentine case, revolutionary violence and human rights advocacy were not two different phases of the new left. Rather, they were two sides of the same coin; both were responses to state repression. Finally, Rafael Rojas, Elisa Servín, and Sandra Jaramillo Restrepo focus on the intellectual history of the new left. Rojas tracks the evolution of debates about Latin America in the New Left Review, showing how they evolved from enthusiasm for the Cuban experiment during the 1960s to heated discussions about democratic transitions in the 1980s. Servín and Jaramillo focus on the “intellectual new left” of Mexico and Colombia, respectively, arguing that its signature characteristics were an anti-authoritarian ethos, an openness to debate, eclectic interpretations of socialist thinkers, and discussions about violence as a (il)legitimate mode of political action.
In the end, La nueva izquierda does not solve the historiographical disputes over the definition and possible historiographical uses of the new left. But the book does expand the field by showing that the new left’s contradictions are what make it an effective concept for historical inquiry in Latin America. The book also demonstrates that the new left should be seen as a spectrum instead of a monolithic category. Artistic vanguards, countercultural movements, guerrilla groups, and heterogeneous intellectuals uneasily coexisted within the leftist field. More importantly, the book invites us to think about the similarities and differences between multiple new lefts in Latin America. Deepening this historiographical exercise of comparing, contrasting, and connecting the experiences of leftist activists and intellectuals in different areas of the region could shed light on underexplored dimensions of Latin America’s recent political history and the dynamics of the Cold War in the region.
