Social progressivism and counterculture[edit]
See also:
Socialist feminism and
Socialism and LGBT rights
Social progressivism is another common feature of modern leftism, particularly in the United States, where social progressives played an important role in the
abolition of slavery,
[75] women's suffrage,
[76] civil rights and
multiculturalism. Progressives have both advocated
prohibition legislation and worked towards its repeal. Current positions associated with social progressivism in
the West include opposition to the
death penalty and the
War on Drugs,
as well as support for legal recognition of same-sex marriage,
cognitive liberty, distribution of
contraceptives, public funding of embryonic
stem-cell research and the right of women to choose
abortion. Public education was a subject of great interest to groundbreaking social progressives, such as
Lester Frank Ward and
John Dewey, who believed that a democratic system of government was impossible without a universal and comprehensive system of education.
Various
counterculture movements in the 1960s and 1970s were associated with the "
New Left". Unlike the earlier leftist focus on
union activism, the New Left instead adopted a broader definition of political activism commonly called
social activism. The United States New Left is associated with the
hippie movement, college campus mass protest movements and a broadening of focus from protesting
class-based oppression to include issues such as
gender,
race and
sexual orientation. The British New Left was an intellectually driven movement which attempted to correct the perceived errors of "Old Left".
The New Left opposed prevailing authority structures in society, which it termed "The Establishment" and became known as "anti-Establishment". The New Left did not seek to recruit industrial workers but rather concentrated on a social activist approach to organization, convinced that they could be the source for a better kind of
social revolution. This view has been criticised by some
Marxists (especially
Trotskyists) who characterized this approach as "substitutionism", which was what they saw as the misguided and non-Marxist belief that other groups in society could "substitute" for the revolutionary agency of the working class.
[77][78]
Many early
feminists and advocates of
women's rights were considered left-wing by their contemporaries. Feminist pioneer
Mary Wollstonecraft was influenced by the radical thinker
Thomas Paine. Many notable leftists have been strong supporters of gender equality such as the Marxists
Rosa Luxemburg,
Clara Zetkin and
Alexandra Kollontai; anarchists such as
Virginia Bolten,
Emma Goldman and
Lucía Sánchez Saornil; and the socialists
Helen Keller and
Annie Besant.
[79] However, Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg,
[80] Clara Zetkin
[81][82] and Alexandra Kollontai,
[83][84] though supporters of radical social equality for women, opposed feminism because they considered it to be a
bourgeois ideology. Marxists were responsible for organizing the first
International Working Women's Day events.
[85]
The
women's liberation movement is closely connected to the New Left and other
new social movements that challenged the orthodoxies of the Old Left.
Socialist feminism, as exemplified by the
Freedom Socialist Party and
Radical Women; and
Marxist feminism, as with
Selma James, saw themselves as a part of the left that challenged what they perceive to be male-dominated and
sexist structures within the Left.
Liberal feminism is closely connected with
social liberalism and the left wing of mainstream American politics (e.g.,
National Organization for Women).
The connection between left-leaning ideologies and LGBT rights struggles also has an important history. Prominent socialists who were involved in early struggles for LGBT rights include
Edward Carpenter,
Oscar Wilde,
Harry Hay,
Bayard Rustin and
Daniel Guérinamong others.
