The Stalinist experience drove the New Left to favor ideas over party institutions.

Evidence

We were, in the light of the Stalinist experience, deeply suspicious of the bureaucratic apparatus of the political party. So we decided to sidestep that question. What matters, we argued, was what new ideas the Left subscribed to, not which party label it adopted. It was a struggle for the renewal of socialist ideas, not for the renovation of the party. “One foot in, one out,” we said. What is interesting is “What are you doing on the ground? Do you have a local CND? Are you going into the local market?” It was like occupying a space without organizing it, without imposing on people a choice of institutional loyalty. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 788

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s notion of organic struggle over civil society and ideological hegemony — the New Left’s ‘occupying a space’ prefigures the cultural-politics approach Hall later theorizes more formally. — connects to: The Frankfurt School preserved Marx’s libertarian impulse through the Stalinist era — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 883; The New Left rejected economic thought as the essence of bourgeois contempt — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 530