Old and New Left Internationalism and the Search for World Peace

This chapter traces the trajectory of the political Left’s international peace agenda. It argues that differences over how to implement a politics of peace caused a rift between Old and New Leftists. Committed communists saw capitalism and imperialism as the root cause of war. Only the elimination of these twin evils and the triumph of international communism, they reasoned, could guarantee peace. Noncommunist leftists, and eventually the New Left, saw peace as a precondition for achieving all other political objectives of the Left, including ending poverty, promoting development in the Third World, equalizing economic opportunity, and ultimately producing a social-democratic world order that permitted the free and open exchange of ideas.