Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
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. 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.
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