Old Left
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The New Left arose first among dissenting intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom and later alongside campus in the United States and in the Western Bloc. |
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The Old Left is the pre-1960s left-wing in the Western world, the earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had often taken a more vanguardist approach to social justice and focused mostly on labor unionization and questions of social class in the West.
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History of the New Left
The New Left arose first among dissenting intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom and later alongside campus in the United States and in the Western bloc.
The German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse is referred to as the "Father of the New Left". Marcuse rejected the theory of class struggle and the Marxist concern with labor. According to Leszek Kołakowski, Marcuse argued that since "all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant". He regarded the realization of man's erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the utopias of Jerry Rubin and others.
Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in U.S. Government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) and criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958). After his studies, in the 1960s and the 1970s he became known as the pre-eminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France and the United States.
Social policy
Unlike the New Left, the Old Left puts less emphasis on social issues such as abortion, drugs, feminism, gay rights and gender roles. Since the mid-1970s with the advent of revisionist movements such as Eurocommunism (and earlier in the Anglosphere, the New Left), some parties on the far-left in the West they have begun to adopt homosexual rights from the New Left as part of their platform while parties in the East such as the Communist Party of Greece and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have rejected this move and continue to focus exclusively on worker politics as the Old Left. The party voted against the Civil Partnerships Bill proposed by Syriza, responding: "With the formation of a socialist-communist society, a new type of partnership will undoubtedly be formed—a relatively stable heterosexual relationship and reproduction". The Communist Party of the Russian Federation supported a ban on the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations to minors", mostly named a ban on "homosexual propaganda to minors" in Western media. The party is known to support bringing back the death penalty, like Communists of Russia.
Militant was a Trotskyist entryist group in the British Labour Party, based around the Militant newspaper launched in 1964. According to Michael Crick, its politics were influenced by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky and "virtually nobody else". Militant has been cited as an example left-wing opposition to feminism and gay rights initiatives within the labour movement in the early 1980s, specifically within the context of reaction to the financial support given to gay rights groups by the Greater London Council under the leadership of Ken Livingstone. While Militant was present in Labour Party women's sections, claiming forty delegates attended the Labour Party women's conference in 1981, it opposed feminism which declared that men were the enemy, or the cause of women's oppression.
Communist leaders and intellectuals took many different positions on LGBT rights issues as Marx and Engels said very little on the subject in their published works. Marx in particular commented rarely on sexuality in general. Writing for Political Affairs, Norman Markowitz writes: "Here, to be frank, one finds from Marx a refusal to entertain the subject, and from Engels open hostility to the individuals involved". This is because in private Engels criticized male homosexuality and related it to ancient Greek pederasty, saying that "[the ancient Greeks] fell into the abominable practice of sodomy [original German Knabenliebe, meaning "boylove" or pederasty and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede". Engels also said that the pro-pederast movement "cannot fail to triumph. Guerre aux cons, paix aus trous-de-cul [war on the cunts, peace to the arse-holes] will now be the slogan". Engels also referred to Dr. Karl Boruttau as a Schwanzschwulen ("faggotty prick") in private.
The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality volume two is unequivocal on Marx and Engels view of homosexuality, stating: "There can be little doubt that, as far as they thought of the matter at all, Marx and Engels were personally homo-phobic, as shown by an acerbic 1869 exchange of letter on Jean-Baptiste von Schweitzer, a German socialist rival. Schweitzer had been arrested in a park on a morals charge and not only did Marx and Engels refuse to join a committee defending him, they resorted to the cheapest form of bathroom humor in their private comments about the affair".
In 1933, Joseph Stalin added Article 121 to the entire Soviet Union criminal code, which made male homosexuality a crime punishable by up to five years in prison with hard labor. The precise reason for Article 121 is in some dispute among historians. The few official government statements made about the law tended to confuse homosexuality with pedophilia and was tied up with a belief that homosexuality was only practiced among fascists or the aristocracy. The law remained intact until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and was repealed in 1993. Gay men were sometimes denied membership or expelled from Communist parties across the globe during the 20th century as most Communist parties followed the social precedents set by the Soviet Union.
However, this was not the case in the West and notable gay members of Communist parties include the following:
- Mark Ashton (founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and LGBT rights advocate) – member of the Communist Party of Great Britain
- Harry Hay (gay rights activist, labor advocate, Native American civil rights campaigner, Mattachine Society founder, co-founder of Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front) – member of the Communist Party USA
Another example of left-wing opposition to homosexuality is the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, a left-wing party which strongly opposes LGBT rights in Moldova. Despite officially associating itself with the left-wing movement, the party is working with nationalist, right-wing and religious movements to counter the "promotion of vice spread with the help of the US in Moldova".
The old left often took a right wing stance on immigration. Unlike today's new left, the old left promoted an immigration policy that would keep the country ethnically homogeneous. Australian Prime Minister John Curtin who was part of the Australian Labour Party reinforced the White Australia Policy and said the following in his defense: "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race." Arthur Calwell, another old leftist who led the Australian Labour Party in the 1960s strongly defended the White Australia Policy and said the following: "I am proud of my white skin, just as a Chinese is proud of his yellow skin, a Japanese of his brown skin, and the Indians of their various hues from black to coffee-coloured. Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatize the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm... I reject, in conscience, the idea that Australia should or ever can become a multi-racial society and survive."
Parties that subscribe to the Old Left
- Communist Party of Greece (since 1918)
- Communist Party of the Russian Federation (since 1993)
- Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (since 1997)
See also
