Daniel Geary

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Daniel Geary | "Becoming International Again": C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left, 1956–1962 | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

"Becoming International Again": C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left, 1956–1962

For American left student activists of the early 1960s, C. Wright Mills's 1960 "Letter to the New Left" provided inspiration. The prominent radical sociologist and social critic proclaimed to the emerging white student movement that "new generations of intellectuals" could be "real live agencies of social change." Thus, to readers who already revered Mills for his trenchant social analysis, "Letter to the New Left" legitimated the notion that university students, although relatively privileged, could be pivotal agents of social transformation. Mills's "Letter" was published in a leading American New Left journal, Studies on the Left, in 1961 and reprinted in pamphlet form by the movement's most prominent organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Its publication in the United States was all the more influential because Mills was perceived as a quintessentially American thinker. He had the body of a football player and a noticeable Texas twang in his voice. He famously rode a motorcycle and wore a black leather jacket, suggesting to many a heroic outlaw figure akin to movie characters played by James Dean and Marlon Brando. If such a red-blooded American could become an outspoken radical, then, far from being un-American, left-wing politics had native roots from which it could grow.¹	1
An interpretation of Mills as a "peculiarly American" thinker, whose primary historical significance was his influence on the campus-based American New Left, has dominated the often hagiographic literature about him.² The common misconception of Mills as a "lone-wolf writer" has cast him as a precursor to American groups such as SDS, but it has consequently neglected his substantial engagement with New Left movements emerging outside the United States, particularly in Europe and Latin America. Yet Mills conceived of the New Left as an international political and cultural movement, and his influence extended to radicals throughout the world. In fact, his "Letter" was originally published in the British journal New Left Review. In it, he asked, "Who is it that is getting fed up with what Marx called 'all the old crap'? Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world ... the answer's the same: it is the young intelligentsia." To illustrate his point, Mills cited the revolution in Cuba, the protest march at the Aldermaston nuclear weapons research center in England, the sit-in movement in North Carolina, and worldwide student protests against established governments and American power in Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.³	2
Intellectuals, Mills argued, needed to "become international again" when thinking about radical social change and to "attempt to get in touch with our opposite numbers in all countries of the world." Indeed, Mills's international conception of the New Left grew out of concrete connections he established with intellectuals and activists in Europe and Latin America. In encountering diverse global intellectual networks and political movements, Mills gained a new conception of possibilities for radical social protest in the post–World War II world. No longer looking to the working class as the most promising agent for social change, as he had during the 1940s, he theorized about the galvanizing effects of middle-class intellectual and cultural dissent in the United States and Europe in his unpublished manuscript "The Cultural Apparatus." He also hailed the explosion of anti-imperialist revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world. No longer focusing primarily on American society, Mills enlightened U.S. and world audiences on issues of international significance by publishing two influential books, The Causes of World War Three (1958), an outgrowth of his engagement with the peace movement in the United States and abroad, and Listen, Yankee (1960), a defense of the Cuban Revolution.⁴	. . .

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