Talk:Anti-Stalinist left

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion in the past. The result of the discussion was keep.

[edit] the variant of Communism that developed in the Soviet Union

This phrase may be used only in derogative sense. They certainly never claimed to have built Communism. Socialism - yes (so they claimed), but not Communism. That was a dream about to happen, but it never did. I suggest changing it to regime. ←Humus sapiens ну? 13:08, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

It's done. --Inbloom2 12:04, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Definition

After his bid to have the page deleted, Soman deleted the following words from the intro:

Whereas the term anti-communist is at once more general - in the sense of opposition to a wider variety of forms of communism (see criticisms of communism) - and more specific - in the sense that it is associated with right-wing politics, the Cold War and sometimes the moral panic of McCarthyism. The term anti-Stalinist left tends to be used in relation to those currents of the left that define themselves centrally in opposition to Stalinism, rather than anyone on the left who is critical of Stalinism.

I think this, or a better worded version of this, is essential. What do other people think? BobFromBrockley 13:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

A suggested re-wording:

The term anti-Stalinist left tends to be used in relation only to those currents of the left that define themselves centrally in opposition to Stalinism, rather than anyone on the left who is critical of Stalinism. The term does not have the right-wing connotations of the term anti-communist, which is associated with the Cold War and sometimes the moral panic of McCarthyism. For a wider variety of opposition to forms of communism see criticisms of communism.

BobFromBrockley 14:21, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I object to that wording. It is first and formost a case of OR, inventing criterias for definition that doesn't necessarily exist outside wikipedia. 'Tends to be used', by whom? Secondly, the wordings about McCarthyism are highly US-centric. --Soman 16:00, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
1. McCarthyism as US-centric: that's a very valid point. Reference to Cold War would suffice to make that point anyway.
2. It is not original research at all - this is the way the term is used! Just google the phrase and see how it is used. (I'm going to add some scholarly references using the term.) If it is OR to define the term as it used, then ALL articles in wikipedia are OR. Read the definiton of OR and reconsider please.
3. I have restored social democratic/democratic socialist bullet point. This is absolutely within that part of the left regularly refered to as anti-Stalinist left - e.g. Irving Howe, younger Martin Seymour Lipset.
BobFromBrockley 16:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
2. The OR issue is that there needs to be some assertion, by published source if requested, of how the term is used. Interpretions of google statistics is not valid. I would appreciate a scholarly reference to the usage of the term.
3. The soc dem/dem soc bullet point added carries some factual flaws as well as pov issues. "Although many in the mainstream socialist parties were suppotive of Stalinism" is highly POV, and factually erroneous. "a significant current of the democratic socialist movement has defined itself against Stalinism." Who are/were these people? The international social democracy as a whole rejected Marxism-Leninism, with the exception of a handfull of people behind the iron curtain who of course had to pledge allegiance to the communist parties. POUM and ILP are included in another bullet point, namely 'Right Opposition'. The usage of quotation marks in "Stalinist "socialism"." is highly pov.

--Soman 16:45, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

3. For a few examples of social democrats who were huge admirers of Stalinism: George Lansbury, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, the young Michael Foot, the young Tony Benn. These are major figures in the socialist movement, not marginal weirdos. I know more about the British left than elsewhere, but I'm sure similar examples could be given. I have no problem with editing the text to make it NPOV or remove any factual inaccuracies, but (Incidentally, I'd be willing to bet more people are familiar with the term "anti-Stalinist left" than "Right Opposition", esp as regards POUM/ILP.
2. I've started collecting some examples - I'll do this more coherently soon, but have to leave my machine in a minute. Here are some:
  • Irving Howe A Margin of Hope – An Intellectual Autobiography
    • Review at AWL site: "The predominantly Jewish CCNY students were extremely politically involved. Alcoves One and Alcove Two of the student dining area have assumed iconic status. Alcove One was the daily meeting place of the anti-Stalinist left, and Alcove Two of the Stalinists."
  • ANSON RABINBACH “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy” ‘’OCTOBER’’ 108, Spring 2004, pp. 97–111

By the time of the Eichmann controversy the New York intellectuals were already experiencing what the writer Paul Goodman called “the breakup of our camp.”47 They had navigated the route from the Stalinist Left to liberal anti-Communism, via a brief detour through Trotskyism during the 1930s. Their political heyday had come and gone more than a decade earlier, when as “premature” anti-Stalinists they defined the crossroads of the American Left, i.e., whether to continue to excuse the crimes of Communism for the sake of anti-fascist solidarity, or to “break ranks” with wartime philo-Sovietism, despite the “common enemy.” (p.105) The New York intellectuals’ denouement came in 1949, when at the famous Waldorf Conference for Peace dissidents such as McCarthy, Macdonald, Norman Mailer, and Lowell took potshots at Soviet cultural functionaries such as Alexander Fedayev, producing a parting of the ways that defined their politics as a resolute anti-Stalinism. (106) Several years earlier, in a 1948 lecture, Arendt had warned of illiberalism on the Left, expressing her disapproval of the term anti-Stalinism because it still preserved a stance of “innertotalitarian” opposition, rather than a principled one. She wrote that it “indicates no political philosophy, not even a definite stand on totalitarianism—one can very well be an anti-Stalinist and still believe in dictatorship, at least, if not in totalitarian rule.” (108)

  • Alan Wald The New York intellectuals, the rise and decline of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s to the 1980s

Lionel Abel, Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, James Burnham, Elliot Cohen, Lewis Coser, Midge Decter, F.W. Dupee, Max Eastman, James T. Farrell, Leslie Fiedler, Clement Greenberg, Louis Hacker, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Harold Isaacs, Alfred Kazin, Hilton Kramer, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Eugene Lyons, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, John McDonald, C. Wright Mills, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Selznick, Herbert Solow, Ben Stolberg, Harvey Swados, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson… with few exceptions, the people listed above were associated with an ostensibly revolutionary "anti-Stalinist left' in the 1930s, in some cases well into the 1940s. […]Wald notes that, "simply put, without Trotskyism there would never have appeared an anti-Stalinist left among intellectuals in the mid-1930s.' There was, of course, the anticommunism of mainstream liberals and conservatives, but this had minimal intellectual attraction when capitalism was in shambles during the Depression decade. (p.1)

  • Norman Podhoretz Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer The Free Press

[T]he New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century--or, as Podhoretz calls them, using Murray Kempton's term, "the Family"--was our best example of a tight-knit, complicatedly connected hothouse group of writers and intellectuals whose ideas changed the culture…. The Family took form in the 1930s, mainly around the founding of Partisan Review. Most of its members were Jews from working-class backgrounds, and most were ex-Communists. They came together in shared commitment to anti-Stalinist Left politics, but they were really esthetes first and political people second. Indeed, their disillusionment with Communism was over not just the Moscow trials and Stalin's alliance with Hitler, but also over the Party's insistence that its members celebrate mediocre, didactic works of art and literature and condemn great ones that didn't hew to the party line. (p.1)

Their opponents on the anti-Stalinist left and liberal anticommunists argued that the USSR was a dictatorship as brutal as Nazi Germany… The Popular Front (understood either as a movement led by the Communist Party or as a broad-based coalition of the left), the anti-Stalinist left, noninterventionists, liberal anticommunists, and New Dealers, among others, have each had their acolytes and their detractors among historians… There were many ideological splits within this left. Among the most salient of these divisions—both in later decades and for the purposes of this study—was the division between the Communist Party and its sympathizers on the one hand and the anti-Stalinist left on the other… The non-Stalinist (or anti-Stalinist) left was smaller, but even more variegated. Its ranks included Marxist-Leninists who contended that Stalin had betrayed the Russian Revolution: Trotskyists and quasi-Trotskyists, among them many intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review in the late 1930s and the 1940s; Lovestoneites, who were associated with the Bukharinite critique of Stalinism; and a variety of independent Marxist thinkers. Many, like the young Sidney Hook, left, or were expelled from, the CP during the ideological warfare of the 1920s and early 1930s and later drifted in and out of various groups on the sectarian left. The non-Stalinist left also included individuals and groups from other radical traditions, including the old Socialist Party, then led by Norman Thomas. Although much less visible than the Popular Front, anti-Stalinist leftists were intellectually very important in the development of the American critique of dictatorship. Many, though by no means all, of them moved steadily rightward over the course of the 1930s and 1940s.(n.p.)

  • Stephen J Whitfield Radical Evil Temple University Press Review by Alan M. Wald ‘’Reviews in American History’’ 1981 pp.260-265 (Critical description of Arendt’s r/ship to anti-Stalinist left in New York)

“in the second half of the 1930s "totalitarianism" was often employed by members of the anti-Stalinist Left who appreciated the term's ability to connect Nazi and Communist dictatorships.”

Apologies for not being more methodical and concise, but I've run out of time. BobFromBrockley 17:28, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Some comments on the last postings:
  • The issue is not which term of 'Right Opposition' and 'anti-Stalinist left' is most known. I'd argue that 'anti-Stalinist left' is far more known by one reason, namely that the naming explains itself. 'Right Opposition' is far more complicated, as one has to known on forehand to what it was an opposition to. However, the Right Opposition is a well established historical term for a relatively coherent political movement.
  • I don't buy the argument that the main figures of anglo-saxon social democracy would have been 'huge admirers of Stalinism'. If they were, why didn't they join the communist parties?
  • Regarding the quotations, I do appreciate the effort. However, in the midst of the discussion its a bit difficult to known which quotation relates to which issue in the article text. I suppose some clarification will come later.
  • In general, it seems that the discussion focuses largely on the US political scenario, and on a grouping of New York intellectuals in particular. Perhaps a move, or a splitting of the article would be appropriate? --Soman 15:19, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • I have nothing against the mention of Right Opposition; I was just trying to make the point that anti-Stalinist left is a known term, with a known meaning, not a neologism.
  • The social democrats as fellow travellers point is pretty marginal. The reason I used the term fellow travellers is precisely that it captures the combination of admiration for the Soviet system AND refusal to "get their hands dirty" or submit to the discipline of the Leninist party. But that's not so important to the article - I have deleted it.
  • The quotations: the point I am making is simply that the term has a currency. I am trying to refute your suggestion that I am "inventing criterias for definition that doesn't necessarily exist outside wikipedia." In answer to your question, "'Tends to be used', by whom?", the quotations are intended to give a few examples of historians and scholars and past leftists using the term in a fairly precise and coherent way.
  • NY intellectuals: it's true that the quotes I put in yesterday are mostly about the NY intellectuals. But the term is heavily used in relation to the French political scene between the wars - where people like Boris Souveraine and Voline, with quite disparate political philosophies, published in shared platforms (see the footnotes to the recent Revolutionary History collection of Souveraine's works). I also have a biography of Frida Kahlo that uses the phrase anti-Stalinist left in relation to the Mexican scene in the late 30s, about the milieux around people like Diego Rivera, Victor Serge, Trotsky. I'll try and dig some of these out!
BobFromBrockley 16:43, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I still find the bullet point of dem soc/soc dem problematic: 1. POUM and ILP were part of a political tendency of their own, the Right Opposition, mentioned in another bullet point. They were however, not necessarily the only prominent forces of this tendency. POUM is immortalized through literature and movies, but wasn't that significant in real life as the myths about it make it seem. Parties like KPO of Germany or the Socialist Party in Sweden were more notable on their own. In any case, a party like POUM was part of the communist tradition in a broad sense. It should not be grouped as dem soc/soc dem. 2. What is the linkage between POUM/ILP and the NY folks? The US Right Opposition was the Lovestoneites. Was there a linkage between them? If not, the NY should perhaps have a bullet-point of their own. 3. The international Social Democracy as a whole rejected ML. The examples mentioned are not really the most notable ones. I fact none of the examples are particularily typical for social democracy in post wwii era. Also the last sentence doesn't really reflect the character of the rejection of communism by the social democrats (which was a far more complex issue). I personally feel that, for the sake of delimitation of the article, leave out the social democrats. In many countries, the Social Democrats are seen as part of the Centre-Left and not the Left. USA, in this case, is an exception in the sense that the left as a whole never became part of the political mainstream. --Soman 17:31, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, how would you feel if it said "democratic socialists" without the "social democrats"? The ILP were not part of the Right Opposition were they? There were significant contacts between Orwell and the NY intellectuals (he wrote a column, I think, for Partisan Review - Alan Wald has an essay about this in one of his book). There were also significant links between the ILP and the Shactmanites and other "third camp" Marxists after WWII. But equally significantly, Orwell, Souveraine, Serge and others represent close connections between socialist and Marxist anti-Stalinists and the anarchist movement (see the book George Orwell and the Anarchists). I wish I had more time to write this up more solidly, but I have edited the democratic socialist bullet point - see what you think. BobFromBrockley 10:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
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