- Old Left
The Old Left is a term used to describe classic 1930s-era Western Leninists, Trotskyists and Stalinists to differentiate them from the Marxists of the
New Left who emerged between the 1960s and the 1970s. [See article by C. Wright Mills, the originater of the terms "Old" and "New" left, in his article from 1960: " [http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm Letter to the New Left] "] The New Left developed as a separate, typically anti-Stalinist tendency from the developingMarxist-Leninist New Communist Movement . The Old Left and New Communist Movement tended to emphasise the importance of party organization and class consciousness over a cultural agenda, and to organize in the then-mass-based industrial sectors of society.The Old Left experienced a massive decline with the combined effect of several anti-communist ventures on the part of governments, including such things as the
Palmer Raids and theFirst Red Scare in the 1920s, and theSecond Red Scare in the McCarthy era. TheCommunist Party USA was tremendously weakened by this, as well as problems of the line within the party and byKhrushchev 's denunciation ofStalin in theSecret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of theCPSU . The ensuing Sino-Soviet andSino-Albanian split s further divided the Old Left forces. By the late 1950s many far-left and communist Old Left people were gone, in jail, had become liberals, or had joined the emerginganti-revisionist groups.References and footnotes
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