New Left

The New Left was the broad political movement mainly in the 1960s together with 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some see the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on dialectical materialism and social class, while others who used the term see the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.

Some who self-identified as "New Left" rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to their own takes on creation forms of Marxism and Marxism–Leninism, such as the New Communist movement which drew from Maoism in the United States or the in the German-speaking world. In the United States, the movement was associated with the anti-war college-campus demostrate movements, including the Free Speech Movement.

Generally, the New Left, unlike the Old, focused more on cultural issues than economic ones.

Latin America

The New Left in Latin America can be broadly defined as the collection of political parties, radical grassroots social movements such as indigenous movements, student movements, mobilizations of landless rural workers, afro-descendent organizations and feminist movements, guerilla organizations such as the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and other organizations such as trade unions, campesino leagues and human rights organizations that comprised the left between 1959 with the beginning of the Cuban Revolution and 1990 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Influential Latin American thinkers such as Francisco de Oliveira argued that the United States used Latin American countries as "peripheral economies" at the expense of Latin American society and economic development, which numerous saw as an extension of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism.

The New Left in Latin America sought to go beyond existing Marxist–Leninist efforts at achieving economic equality and democracy to put social reorientate and consultation issues unique to Latin America such as racial and ethnic equality, indigenous rights, the rights of the environment, demands for radical democracy, international solidarity, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and other aims.