After the new left

Key concepts.
The failure of Raymond Williams's detailed policy document, May Day Manifesto (1966) represents the end of the British New Left as a movement committed to a revitalized state socialism. After this the movement becomes wholly academic.
Within that academicism, 1968 marks the both the moment of the turn to theory and the transposition of the tiny Maoist movement into the kind of cultural populism that will come to dominate cultural studies. To understand this few texts are more important than Rancière's La leçon d'Althusser (1974). Its argument is that Althusser's theoretical return to Marx and anti-humanism in his hey day was a means of accomodating the PCF to an anti-colonialism that the Party had not embraced, but that, in a profound and unintended shift, after 1968 Althusserian theory came to represent the power of the academic hierarchy against the students inside of new kind of youth/student politics that May 1968 represented. It is at this level, that Althusserianism will move seamlessly into Foucauldianism.
The other side of post 1968 academic critique movement moves into identity politics: and in the global context, that move needs to be thought of as an alliance between the intellectual outcome of both the civil rights movement and feminism with the marxist anti-imperialism, not supported by the Comintern and the European communist parties, but of which Maoism was a component.
The collapse of state socialism is the condition for cultural studies' political-intellectual rudderlessness:
1. Stuart Hall: joining the trends.
2. The trajectory of the British Althusserians: Paul Hirst back into pluralism.
3. Perry Anderson