In the early twenty-first century there are a number of different American “Lefts” that are united primarily by their commitment to achieving more social and economic equality in American society Although these Lefts remain quite fragmented and marginal in an organizational sense, each one has produced vehement and incisive critiques of capitalism, liberal individualism and the commodification of social relations. They have, for the most part, abandoned or deeply problematized the Marxist and “scientificsocialist” approach of the pre-Second World War American “old” Left, and abhor the Bolshevik or Leninist model of revolution and social transformation. It is only in these senses that it is possible to speak of the American Left in the singular.

The modern American Left can trace much of its origins to the so-called New Left that emerged in the 1960s. This New Left was primarily university based, and, at least in its beginnings, abandoned what C. Wright Mills called Marx’s “labor metaphysic” (which considered the working class to be the primary vehicle for revolutionary consciousness).

For the New Left, alienation did not result primarily from an individual’s relation to the means of production, but was instead created by a lack of democratic participation in the central institutions of American culture: primarily universities, the state, corporations and the military The New Left was deeply influenced by the civil rights revolution and the feminist awakening of the 1960s and 1970s. These movements asserted that the traditional Left was unable to offer convincing explanations of racism and the continued subordination of women.

Broadly speaking, it is possible to trace two primary intellectual formations that emerged out of the successes and failures of the New Left. What may be called a socialdemocratic Left maintains that continuing problems of poverty and racism can begin to be addressed primarily through statist economic reforms, political mobilization within the existing framework of the American party system and the revival of an energetic laborunion movement. This social-democratic Left recognizes the importance of class in political and historical analysis, but is wedded to more-or-less traditional majoritarian and “realist” methods to achieve incremental change.

The other, so-called “cultural Left” is a quite complex phenomenon. It has been nurtured by several powerful philosophical critiques of modernism and Enlightenment rationality that were first articulated in Europe during and following the Second World War. For these critics and philosophers, including such diverse figures as Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Irigary and Kristeva, the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century was the end result of a rationalist innerlogic of Western culture that first gained cultural hegemony in the West in the seventeenth century. The “cultural Left” critical formation scorns all forms of foundational metaphysics, Enlightenment universalism and economic determinism. The cultural Left celebrates the autonomy of dissident cultures of race, gender and ethnicity, and relentlessly historicizes routine assumptions about hierarchy and order. It is heterodox, particularist and perspectivist in orientation. It has been unjustly criticized as mere “identity” politics that has little to say to the “majority of Americans,” and, while it shares many of the objectives of the social democratic Left, its analysis and methodology are obviously quite different.

In an era in which capitalism is more powerful than ever in world politics, it remains to be seen whether the different American “lefts” can create a compelling vision of an alternative social order.