The editors of Revolutionary History have announced the upcoming release of the new issue of their journal, which will focus on the relationship of the European far left and the Algerian revolution. It includes a paper by the Cliffite historian Ian Birchall on the activities of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Regretably, there is no U.S. counterpart to this valuable publication. While James P. Cannon and the S.W.P. inhabited a position in the international Trotskyist movement out of proportion to its actual influence in American society (let alone the American working class), the U.S. lacked the institutional abode (albeit a precarious one) that the various tendencies of  British Trotskyists were able to secure in the the Labor Party over the decades.

Perhaps the closest parallel in the U.S. is American Communist History, a more traditional academic journal launched in  2002 to give the “revisionist” school of CP historiography a publishing platform. Because the CP was a party of intellectuals and artists, its influence on the working class was minimal. Its impact on American popular culture is another matter entirely. The latest issue of American Communist History is symposium on the revisionist historians’ “Long Civil Rights Movement” thesis.