Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Mainstream commentators in the US, both liberal and conservative, tend to portray the South as a region whose culture makes it a permanent bastion of reactionary, racist, and anti-labor politics. Michael Goldfield’s new book, The Southern Key: Race, Class and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (...)
President Richard M. Nixon prided himself on the accuracy of his political prognostication. Nixon was never more prescient than fifty years ago this month, in a remark made to his secretary, just before delivering a White House address that announced a U.S. military invasion of Cambodia. “It’s (...)
Cal Winslow, Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919. Monthly Review Press, 2020. 220 pp.
Calls for a general strike have long been a staple of “resolutionary activity” on the U.S. left. During moments of crisis and militancy—from the mass firing of air traffic controllers in 1981 to Occupy (...)
THE COMMUNIST TRADITION in the United States needs a better publicist. The year 2019 was the 100th anniversary of the movement’s founding; the idea of socialism is urgently in the air, thanks in part to Bernie, while splendid new books about Karl Marx are popping up like spring flowers. And yet (...)
THE MOVEMENT AND THE MIDDLE EAST How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left by Michael R. Fischbach 312 pp. Stanford University Press $26
Michael Fischbach is a smart, committed historian who earlier made his name by publishing meticulous (and very important) studies of the U.N.’s (...)
Huey P. Newton (L) and Billy X Jennings in 1971
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The Panthers practised militant self-defence against the US government and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through (...)
For decades, the Highlander School has nurtured some of the most important radical movements by pushing a simple idea: ordinary people can act as agents of change. It’s an idea that’s threatening to the Right — and it should be.
In 1932, coal miners in Wilder, Tennessee went on strike. Wilder was (...)
There is something politically familiar in Cedric Johnson’s two essays in Catalyst (Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2017) and New Politics (No. 66, Winter 2019) [1]. Because his political conclusions are very general, even vague, ones that build “on broad solidarity around commonly felt needs and interest” (...)
Historian Cedric Johnson’s essay “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” published in 2017 in the new socialist journal Catalyst, generated a lot of discussion and won the Daniel Singer Memorial Prize.
Addressing a historic discussion about the tensions between race and class for socialist strategy, (...)
Historian Cedric Johnson’s essay “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” published in 2017 in the new socialist journal Catalyst, generated a lot of discussion and won the Daniel Singer Memorial Prize.
Addressing a historic discussion about the tensions between race and class for socialist strategy, (...)
In this dossier, historian Cedric Johnson addressing a historic discussion about the tensions between race and class for socialist strategy. He argues against the legacy of racial essentialism in contemporary political movements, and for a class analysis rooted in a materialist understanding of (...)
What can socialists today learn from the experience of the left in the past as it grappled with the issue of electoral politics? Over the last 50 years, American leftists have in general adopted two alternative strategies for dealing with the question of electoral politics. On the one hand, (...)
“Now to talk to me about black studies as if it’s something that concerned black people is an utter denial. This is the history of Western civilization.” C.L.R. James1
A formidable and respected scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Cedric Johnson has written an important essay, “The (...)
Leela Yellessety spoke to three authors of recent books that highlight the contribution of women in the Black Panther Party and draw out some of the lessons.
In February 1970, Kathleen Cleaver, communication secretary of the Black Panther Party (BPP), was asked by a reporter from the “women’s (...)
Forty years ago, Philadelphia erupted in one of the most dramatic shoot-outs of the black liberation struggle. Ed Pilkington tells the surreal story of the Move 9 – and what happened to them next.
The photograph is one of the standout images of the 1970s black liberation struggle. An African (...)
This is the first of occasional memoirs relating to the 50th anniversary of 1968.
Wendy Thompson, with Autoworkers’ Caravan at news conference in Washington D.C.
At the beginning of 1968, I was a sophomore at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. I had grown up in (...)
Kim Moody reflects on his time in the New Left, turning to the working class, and opportunities for socialists in the labor movement today.
Kim Moody is one of the most influential left-wing labor activists of the last forty years. He was among the founders of the International Socialists, (...)
Berkeley (California) was probably a unique political-cultural milieu in the U.S. in the 1960s, both before and after 1968. It was part of the larger political-cultural scene of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1945 onward.
The Bay Area at the time was a relative backwater in the U.S., compared (...)
In 1970, postal workers went on strike and provoked a national crisis for the United States government. Their rebellion holds lessons for labor today.
For eight days in March 1970 the country was rocked by an unprecedented and shocking national strike by postal service workers. Starting in New (...)
How Students for a Democratic Society went from building a mass movement to embracing the politics of self-destruction.
The American left has never produced a group more self-critical than Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the years since the organization’s 1969 collapse, its former (...)
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