The new issue of Against the Current features a long essay by historian Alan Wald on the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (“A Winter’s Tale Told in Memoirs“), of which he was a member in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is safe to characterize the piece as largely an exercise in SWP nostalgia and […]
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation by Herbert Marcuse (Routledge) This book is Volume 5 of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, edited by philosopher Douglas Kellner. A Preview is available at Google Books. • • • “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers by Allen Ruff. (PM Press) Originally published by the University of Illinois […]
The HathiTrust Digital Library contacted Criticism &c. to report that the missing pages from the News & Letters pamphlet Two Articles on New Emerging Forces have been added to the scanned image (see message below). Readers can now view the entire Political-Philosophic Letter on the Six Day War by Raya Dunayevskaya, a particularly important document […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1961 piece by Raya Dunayevskaya on the political tensions inside the Communist world at the time (“The New Russian Communist Manifesto“). Dunayevskaya was an early critic of Mao’s attempt to create a rival center for world Communism and kept a sharp eye on the Russia-China split. Many […]
Several weeks ago, Criticism &c. noticed a statement released by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative on the subject of the Libyan revolt and U.S. and NATO intervention (“Support Libyan Rebels While Opposing U.S./NATO Intervention“—March 12, 2011). At that time, comment was not deemed worth the effort involved. Upon a second reading, however, at least one distortion of […]
Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives hosts a collection of scanned images of two important U.S. New Left/post-New Left journals, Radical America and Cultural Correspondence. The two journals, closely connected with the prolific historian of the left and left culture Paul Buhle, were among the more interesting intellectual by-products of Students for a Democratic […]
None of these three books will be available soon, but they look interesting. ••• Sojourning for freedom : Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. by Erik S. McDuffie. Durham [NC] : Duke University Press, 2011. McDuffie has written on Black women in the Communist Party. His perspective seems to be the “revisionist” […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a column by Raya Dunayevskaya (“The African Revolution, I“) on the state of the African revolutions circa early 1959. Dunayevskaya here critiques the turn away from the mass initiative of the initial post-war period toward authoritarian state solutions to economic and political problems, as practiced by leaders such […]
News & Letters has compiled a list of all of the texts by Raya Dunayevskaya that have been reproduced in the print and online versions of the newspaper since 1997. Needless to say, there is much of great interest here. A cursory set of recommendations includes: A Restatement of Some Fundamentals of Marxism against ‘pseudo-Marxism’ […]
• Dick Howard, author of The Specter of Democracy, has a chapter titled, “In Search of a New Left” in a new book called Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia. • Paresh Chattopadhyay has a review of a book titled The Seductions of Karl Marx by Murzban Jal in the April 30-May 6 2011 […]
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