Which left is your favorite?

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The Old Left, or "The Folks that Brought You the Weekend and the Welfare State" I've placed roughly between the founding of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864 and the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union in 1956.

The New Left, or "Stalin bad, Mao good" I've placed between the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union and Tienanmen Square.

The Postmodern Left, or "Academia uber alles" I've placed between Tienanmen Square and Occupy Wall Street.

And of course, the Emerging Left, or "I don't know if I'm class conscious or stuck on Tumblr" began more or less with Occupy Wall Street, and continues on to this day.


Ranked:

1. The Old Left
2. The Emerging Left
3. The New Left
4. The Postmodern Left

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Old Left, ie those who actually got sh*t done.

I'm always surprised by how much you and I agree when it comes to this sort of thing, but I feel like we honestly are on the same page, policy-wise, we just totally disagree from a tactical standpoint.

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New Left got the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and started the quest to improve mental health.

The Old Left is a narrow second, but ultimately it failed to combat racism.

The Post-Modern left is okay, if a bit elitist and economically disgusting.

F%^ the "Emerging Left".

[citation needed]

The Old Left organized across racial lines in the Depression-era South, bringing black and white workers into militant labor unions. The entire critique of racism as an ideology emerged from the Old Left itself, and there were plenty of Old Leftists that gave their lives on the battlefield during the American Civil War to end slavery. This idea that only the academic left ever confronted racism is ahistoric hogwash. The CIO did more for building power in minority communities than bourgeois institutions in those communities ever did.

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I'm not talking about the Democratic Party. This is the 'left', i.e. the socialist movement throughout the years.

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I'd prefer the Old Left, even though I'm considered part of the Emerging Left.

No you wouldn't. You're a liberal.

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Is Emergent Left an actual self-descriptor? When I type it in google all I get is a bunch of reviews of a book by Ralph Nader that is something completely different.

No, I chose the term to reflect the revival in the interest in left-wing thinking since the economic collapse. I guess I could have chosen a different descriptor. Horizontal Left or Intersectional Left probably would have worked just as well.

If I may ask, why did you specifically choose the invasion of Hungary as turning point? Just because it generally "fits" with the time of the change within the left, or because there was some change within the left specifically in reaction to this specific event? I cannot think of any, but you could surely tell me if there did occur such...

1956 was the year that the illusions among those in Western communist parties were more or less shattered about the nature of the Soviet Union. That, plus the reconciliation of social democracy to capitalism more or less during the same period makes it a good marker, in my opinion, although I personally would contend that World War II pretty much ended the Old Left

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The definition of "postmodern left" here seems hopelessly confused and sketchy; I'm not sure what it means beyond just being an extension of New Left thinking that had the bad fortune to exist in an age of Third Way strategic retrenchment.  In any case, all of these options are responses to the challenges and opportunities of their particular time and as such I'm uninterested in playing the generational-warfare game of pitting one against another.

Anyway, all these Old Left votes are pretty predictable given how white and male this forum is.  Yes, its achievements were very important, and have the most widespread acclaim today.  But they were also in many ways the low-hanging fruit; I'm not going to fault Einstein for failing to discover Newton's laws of motion, nor will I fault today's physicists for not coming up with E=mc2.

...Eh.  Guess I'd vote New Left.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the fact that the Old Left was far more successful in every way than the student Maoists of the 60s, the aging academics, or the tumblr social justice warriors

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the 'old Left' can include everything from the International Workingmen's Association to Eugene Debs to Marxist-Leninism to the 4th International to the Tallahassee Bus Boycott?

I tried to condense the categories as much as possible. If I were to expand on it, it would be more like this, I suppose -

1864-1886: The First Left (from the International to Haymarket)
1886-1917: The Second Left (from Haymarket to the Russian Revolution)

This is where it gets tricky

1917-1935: The Third Left (Russian Revolution to the Popular Front)
1935-1956: The Fourth Left (Popular Front to Hungarian Revolution)
1956-1968: The Left in Crisis (Hungarian Revolution to May '68)
1968-1979: The New Left (May '68 to Thatcher)
1979-1991: The Left in Retreat (Thatcher to the collapse of the USSR)
1991-1999: The Dispersed Left (USSR to Seattle 1999 protests)
1999-2003: Alter-Globalization Left (Seattle to Iraq War)
2003-2011: ? No idea for what name to give this one (Iraq War to Occupy)
2011-present: Horizontal Left / Intersectional Left (Occupy to now)