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. The Old Left tended to emphasise the importance of party organisation 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 the two Red Scares-- one in the 1920s and 30s, the other in the McCarthy era. By the late 1950s most far-left and communist Old Left people were gone, in jail or had become liberals. Vladimir Lenin in 1920 Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism; it is a branch of Marxism (and it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920s). ... Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. ... Stalinism is a brand of political theory, and the political and economic system implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... The New Left is a term used in political discourse to refer to radical left-wing movements from the 1960s onwards. ... The Palmer Raids were a series of controversial raids on American, resident, and non-resident alien citizens in the United States from 1918 to 1921 based on their assumed political beliefs. ... This article contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ... McCarthyism took place during a period of intense suspicion in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954, when the U.S. government was actively countering American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. ... Communism - Wikipedia /**/ @import /w/skins-1. ... In politics, the term liberal refers to: an adherent of the ideology of liberalism or a state or quality of this ideology. ...
The remains of the OldLeft were waiting with "theory" and organisational discipline for those who ascribed the failure of their previous efforts to the lack of these two items.
The strength of the New Left is to be sought in the fact that the liberalism of its beginnings and the Leninism of its later stages represented nodes of failure.
The failure of the OldLeft organisations to develop in the USA during and after the Great Depression may be traced indeed to the fact that the Democratic government and the trade unions filled the role played in Europe by "socialist" workers' Organisations.
In politics, left-wing, the politicalleft or simply the left are terms that refer to the segment of the political spectrum typically associated with any of several strains of, to varying extents, socialism, green politics, anarchism, communism, social democracy, progressivism, American liberalism or social liberalism, and defined in contradistinction to its polar opposite, the right.
The left is often seen to include secularism, as in the United States, India, the Middle East, and in many Catholic countries, although religion and left-wing politics have at times been allied historically, such as in the U.S. civil rights movement, or in the cases of liberation theology and Christian socialism.
New Left refers to the strands of leftpolitics that emerged in the 1950s and especially 1960s, which tended to follow more democratic organisational forms, emphasise the cultural and personal as well as the economic, and were open to the new social movements.
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