Revolutionary Left Research Articles

The Bolivarian Revolution: a paradigmatic refounding project of the Ibero-American revolutionary left.

La Revolución Bolivariana es el proceso político iniciado en Venezuela a finales del siglo XX por Hugo Chávez y perpetuado en el siglo XXI por Nicolás Maduro. Por originalidad, longevidad, impacto interno e influencia exterior, es uno de los proyectos refundacionales más relevantes de la izquierda revolucionaria iberoamericana tras finalizar la Guerra Fría. Sus múltiples rasgos han propiciado diversas caracterizaciones desde la ciencia política. Se ofrece aquí una aproximación general al respecto, mediante una periodización que permite apreciar la evolución en el tiempo del movimiento y régimen chavista; una breve exposición del socialismo bolivariano como propuesta retórico-ideológica; una descripción sucinta del giro desarrollado en política exterior por parte del gobierno venezolano tras asumir la condición de estado revolucionario; y una caracterización general del chavismo-madurismo como movimiento y régimen político, concluyendo que sus rasgos y tendencias totalitarias son las que mejor definen su naturaleza en términos globales.

Design of a media agenda in Cuba in response to the challenges faced by the Juventud Rebelde newspaper from the revolutionary left in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and new geopolitical variations

The present research aims to describe the variations in the process of construction of the media agenda in the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde during the pandemic stage due to Covid-19 in the period 2020-2022. Through a triangulated analysis between the broadcasting contexts, the practices related to the creative work and the characteristics that distinguished the production in the selected time. It also seeks to demonstrate new communicative practices used to convey messages in accordance with the media's policy to the public, and the challenges that this period entailed in the fields of politics and public policies from the revolutionary left. The work leads to the critical reflection and reverts results to the institutional direction of Juventud Rebelde newspaper that, presumably, will be able to use these data for the present and future decisions in the work of the media.

Guevara and Marx: critical remake of an old film

ABSTRACT This text offers a restatement of Che’s theoretical development around Marxism. Based on new findings, including his Bolivian Diary, his reading list, and personal testimonies, the article describes the early development of Che’s Marxism (anti-orthodox and culturally vivacious) before analysing the more intensely pro-Soviet period and thus the adherence to the principles of Diamat (dialectical materialism). It then describes the transition phase embodied in the ‘great economic debate’ in Cuba and concludes with Guevara’s harsh criticism of the Soviet model and its implications for reassessing Che’s theoretical and praxeological legacy for the revolutionary left.

ایران و جنبش عدم خشونت در آستانه قرن حاضر

One of the developments coinciding with the turn of the century in Iran that has shaped the society’s political culture and revolutionary discourse is the shift towards a non-violent method of political struggle, which is clearly seen in the mode of thought and behavior of post-revolutionary generations. This shift has also been accompanied by a change of orientation from state to society, as well as increased attention to women and gender, which has been evident in the protest movements in the last two decades. In addition, the prevalence of non-violence as a political philosophy among political activists and civil rights advocates has disburdened the revolutionary left of the past tradition of violent struggle, thus contesting the equation between radicalism and violence advanced by conservative circles. This turn towards non-violence is indicative of a new political realism wherein change, unlike during the 1979 Islamic revolution, is neither identity-oriented nor ideological, but demand-driven. From this perspective, the shift to non-violence is related to a new discourse for dealing with systematic repression that seeks changes in legal, cultural, socio-economic, and gender terms on a national scale. This discourse aims at uniting diverse groups of people against the institution of velayat-e faqih through a conceptual appeal to human honor. Historical parallels may be seen in the way that the idea of a House of Justice (Edalat Khaneh) functioned during the Constitutional era as a central and unifying concept across diverse groups. This paper asseses how, at the threshold of a new century, Iran might achieve historical political change through non-violence, especially with reference to excluded and marginalized groups. This prospect is discussed with particular reference to Mohandas Gandhi and Judith Butler and especially engages strategic and philosophical views of non-violence from secular and radical perspectives.

Unitary unionism in the transition: a general approach from Navarre

ABSTRACT Confederación de Sindicatos Unitarios de Trabajadores (CSUT, Confederation of Unitary Workers’ Unions) and Sindicato Unitario (SU, Unitary Union) were two unions promoted by the largest Maoists parties in the Spain of 1970s: Partido del Trabajo de España (PTE, Labor Party of Spain) and the Organizacion Revolucionaria de Trabajadores (ORT, Workers’ Revolutionary Organisation), respectively. Both trade unions, if they had been presented together, would have been the third trade union force in Spain during the Transition to democracy. The following text presents two parts: In the first, a general approach to unitary unionism is set out, in order to understand its emergence, development, difficulties and disappearance. Through this text we will try to understand the unitary and assembly-based proposal of CSUT and SU in its context, considering the dynamics of the labor movement in the previous years, the change of cycle of the struggle of the revolutionary left, the transformations that were taking place in labor relations and the labor movement in the late 1970s. In the second part, however, we will focus on a specific case, that of Navarre, the region where these unions obtained the best results.

‘We’ll be like Che’ Foquismo and sacrificial ethics within the Latin American revolutionary activism

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the double dimension – political and moral – that the Guevarist legacy assumed within the Latin American left in the 60s and 70s. First, it identifies those postulates emanating from Guevarist rhetoric that offered both a language and a political sense to the revolutionary left, thus promoting armed action. What fundamentally stands out, among those postulates, is the inclusion of the revolutionary process in a war on a continental and global scale, as well as the foquist assertion that the armed action from the revolutionaries creates the subjective conditions for the revolution. Secondly, the article approaches a central figure of the revolutionary imaginary erected as a model of conduct: the new man. By addressing this dual legacy, the aim is to illuminate the particular forms in which the thought and action of Guevara shaped a political subjectivity and sacrificial ethics for thousands of Latin American revolutionaries.

Toward a global history of Latin America's revolutionary left

Toward a global history of Latin America's revolutionary left

A Proletarian Turf War: The Rise and Fall of Barcelona's Sindicatos Libres, 1919–1923

AbstractFrom 1919 to 1923, Barcelona experienced unprecedented levels of social conflict. The growth of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had awakened the spectre of social revolution among the city's conservative classes, and a broad constellation of reactionary forces lined up against it, the Sindicatos Libres (free trade unions) being the most formidable among them. Created in 1919 by Catholic workers, the Sindicatos Libres were able to capitalize on the exhaustion that had set in among certain working-class groups who had grown wary of reckless strike action. Using violence to fight back against the CNT, the Libres could claim 175,000 members by mid-1922. They mobilized the religious, corporatist, and regionalist sentiments harboured by sectors of the city's workforce and, by adopting a modern repertoire of action, they bypassed the traditional aversion to mass mobilization that had characterized the Catholic labour movement and Spanish conservative parties until then. In many ways, the ideology and tactics of the Libres adumbrated fascism, but their success was short-lived. In late 1922, an upswing in strike action and an abatement of state repression allowed the CNT to recover at the expense of the Libres. This article explores the rise and fall of an organization the study of which has been neglected, situating it in a European context of political polarization whereby the traditional right attempted to modernize its tactics and adapt them to a rising challenge from the revolutionary left. It will also serve as a window through which to examine the complex relationship between workers’ trade union affiliations and their political and cultural identity.

INDEFINICIÓN, FALTA DE TEORIZACIÓN Y CONFUSIÓN. LA IZQUIERDA REVOLUCIONARIA ANTE LOS "PAÏSOS CATALANS" (1962-1982)

espanolLa idea nacional de los llamados Paisos Catalans tomo fuerza durante los anos del tardofranquismo y la transicion. Su principal teorico, el escritor valenciano Joan Fuster, se convirtio en un totem del antifranquismo. Todas las culturas politicas de Cataluna, el Pais Valenciano o las Baleares debatieron sobre la propuesta nacional fusteriana. La izquierda revolucionaria no fue menos. Toda la amalgama de siglas y organizaciones que formaron parte de esta cultura politica, se vieron abocadas a debatir sobre el tema. Pero el debate fue a remolque tanto de los acontecimientos politicos como de los debates intelectuales que el nacionalismo y la izquierda mayoritaria llevaron a cabo. La falta de teorizacion y la indefinicion se convirtieron en la regla general English: The national idea of the so-called Catalan Countries took off during late francoism and the transition. Its main theorist, the Valencian writer Joan Fuster, turned into a totem of the anti-Franco struggle. All the political cultures in Catalonia, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands debated on Fuster’s national proposal. The revolutionary left did not stay out of the discussion. The whole amalgam of acronyms and organizations that were part of this political culture , were bound to debate on the topic . Nevertheless, the discussion was always lagging behind the political events as well as the intellectual debates which nationalism and the majority of the leftist movement carried out. Both, the lack of theorizing and vagueness became the general rule

Reading Marx in Beirut: Disorganised Study and the Politics of Queer Utopia

This article draws on ethnographic research carried out with Marxist reading groups run by a Lebanese revolutionary socialist organization. I examine the labor that Marxist theoretical practice was doing in a political conjuncture widely viewed as post-Marxist , discussing the relationship between theory and affect, and the role that affective infrastructures play in maintaining and reproducing social movements and political organisations. Drawing on Moten and Harney, I frame this intellectual labor as a form of dissonant , disorganized study - a mode of preparing for revolution by being together in brokenness and routinely generating a commitment to a particular political horizon. This form of political praxis as study unfolded within a Lebanese activist scene dominated by a pragmatic conception of politics, within which the critical labor of the radical and revolutionary left was largely considered sterile , mired in something akin to what Berlant calls cruel optimism. Drawing on Munoz, his conceptualisation of the politics of queer utopia, and his defence of utopian imaginativeness, I argue that for radical and revolutionary leftists in counter-revolutionary times, cultivating solidarity and camaraderie by maintaining a space of study that could enable technologies of both self and collective constituted a productive political act.

Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic by Isabella Cosse

Reviewed by: Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic by Isabella Cosse David William Foster Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic. By Isabella Cosse. Trans. Laura Pérez Carrara. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xv + 265 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $26.95. It is always a pleasure to return to Mafalda, a cultural product that has marked my life since my first residence in Argentina in 1967, when the first volume of the collected strips had just been reprinted and the creator, Joaquín Salvador Lavado (a.k.a. Quino), was on the cusp of launching a publishing empire and spin-offs associated with his cartoon figure, which he had originally conceived a few years earlier as part of an advertising campaign. But Lavado was onto something larger than just a convenient cartoon figure for selling products to the new Argentine middle class that had been created in the two previous decades by the Peronista experiment. Perón had been overthrown in 1955 and by 1966, when military authoritarianism affirmed itself with vigor, Argentina had gone through a whirlwind of social and economic fluctuations. But the middle class was firmly entrenched, and the consumerism for which Mafalda had first served generated an attitude of sociocritical analysis that the spunky and sassy little girl effectively channeled in her unfiltered and highly verbalized responses to contemporary urban Argentina and to the often extreme social and political violence that, while barely perceived directly, was part of the unmistakable backstory of the typically four-paneled strips. Suddenly Mafalda was all over the place, and there didn't seem to be any aspect of Argentine daily life that she did not eventually have something pithy to comment on. And if the genius of Quino's work was that he so succinctly captured the unique flavor and texture of Argentine urban life, what is truly astounding, sixty years after the original strips, is how Mafalda has spoken receptively to other Latin Americans and, indeed, to a global audience (English readers are [End Page 461] rather unique in not having the entire oeuvre disposable to them in translation). Quino is widely respected for very sophisticated cartoon art with other narrative threads, but he will always be identified first as the creator of Mafalda. While Mafalda has always been compared superficially to Little Lulu (for its young female protagonist) and to Peanuts (for its gallery of unconsciously "existential" children), a world separates them, beginning with the unambitious social critique of the American product and the mordant wit of Mafalda in the face of an extensively irrational and profoundly unjust world. It has been said that Quino's figure is only a mouthpiece, no matter how cutely portrayed, for adult concerns, but that sort of observation overlooks how quickly children have to mature in Latin America, even in relatively comfortable Buenos Aires, and how quickly children become uniquely independent sophisticates in that urban megalopolis. Isabella Cosse's sociohistorical study of Mafalda (which was originally published in Argentina in 2014) is an outstanding example of one important current of cultural studies in that country. Communications-based research flourished in particular in Argentina, where there was a perception of the urgency to analyze the failures of liberalism and the grip of authoritarian/neofascist governments. This meant a very close interpretive analysis of the content of cultural texts, testing them for the presuppositions they implied about the social contract, praising their ability to align with prioritized political values (that is, essentially those of the revolutionary left, but which meant often profoundly divergent principles and practices), and denouncing their "retrograde" deficiencies (which fundamentally meant traces of reformist liberalism and any defense of the status quo). It rarely meant any commitment to discourse analysis and little sense of the cultural text as fictive embodiment. The result is that Mafalda was wont to provoke critical stances that we are unused to in the world of American cartoon art. While most Argentines were delighted with Mafalda, it was denounced by the right (especially with the reactionary military coup of 1966) as "subversive," while the oppositional left saw it as pointless in its lack of...

Dialektyka „swój”–„obcy” w prawicowej filozofi i politycznej 1789– 1945. Część II

DIALECTICS “WE”–“ALIENS” IN RIGHT-WING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 1789–1945. PART IIThe aim of the author of this text is to polemicize with the stereotype according to which nationalism is a synonym of the “extreme right.” For this purpose the method of historical exemplification was used. In Part II we discuss examples of nationalisms in various European states between the years 1890 and 1945: France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Italy. This is the epoch when nationalism denies its initial close relationship with the political and revolutionary left. Now it is in close relations with the right. During the Boulanger and Dreyfus affaires in France, the nationalists are on the political right. Their ideology is not only right-wing but also anti-Semitic. Sometimes openly racist Maurice Barrès. In general, however, French and Italian nationalists preach “state nationalism,” similar to the classic doctrine of raison d’état. In Spain and Portugal the right is strictly Catholic. This is the imperial right. We have here the dream of restoration of the Spanish Siglo de Oro. This project is antithetic to nationalism because it is universalist and supranational. It is different in Germany, where at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the whole right is lit up by the vision of conquests, German empire, struggle of races. First, the Protestant, then also the German Catholic right is chauvinistic, racist and anti-Semitic. The article ends with reflections upon the relations between political right and the idea of nationalism.

Dialektyka „swój”–„obcy” w prawicowej filozofii politycznej 1789– –1945

DIALECTICS ‘WE’–‘ALIENS’ IN RIGHT-WING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 1789–1945 The aim of the author of this text is to polemicize with the stereotype according to which nationalism is a synonym of the “extreme right.” For this purpose the method of historical exemplification was used. Part I of this text is devoted to defining the concept of the “right” and to present the supporters of the French Revolution and other 19th-century revolutions, their idea of nationalism, the nation-state and sovereignty of the nation. This presentation shows that up to 1890 nationalism is located in the revolutionary left. The first nationalists are Jacobins. The counter-revolutionary right is opposed to nationalism. For this right, nationalism is combined with the idea of empowering nations to the rights of self-determination, which is closely connected with the idea of people’s sovereignty. This situation persists until 1870–1914, when the ideas of national sovereignty are implemented in the politics of the modern states. However, the liberal state does not meet the expectations of nationalists, because it neglects the interests of the nation as the highest value. That is the cause for them moving from the political left to the right part of the political scene, replacing the legitimist right. The latter is annihilated with the decline of aristocracy. In the 19th century, the left is nationalistic and xenophobic. We find clear racist sympathies on the left. The political right does not recognize the right of nations to self-determination, the idea of ethnic boundaries. It is cosmopolitan.

Alemania 1918-1919: la revolución de la violencia

This article examines the role of violence in the German revolution of 1918-1919, after the defeat of Germany in the First World War. It demonstrates that the brutal violence employed by the new social democratic government against the revolutionary left was a turning point in the history of the German state. The period between November 1918 and mid-January 1919 was marked by the persistence of war mentalities that allowed for the use of violence in politics. However, government violence was not only a simple product of the war experience. It had a performative role: demonstrating and reinforcing the authority of the new state.

Worlds of Western Anarchism and Syndicalism: Class Struggle, Transnationalism, Violence and Anti-imperialism, 1870s–1940s

The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Exile arid Transnationalism in the First Globalisation, by Constance Bantman. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 US (cloth). The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880-1917), by Pietro Di Paola. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 US (cloth). The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, by Timothy Messer-Kruse. Urbana, Chicago, Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2012. ix, 236 pp. $30.00 US (paper), $85.00 US (cloth). Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Authoritarianism and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897-1921, by K.R. Schaffer. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2013. 240 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). Many political movements--anarchism included--have draped themselves in the clothes of antiquity, by imagining a historical lineage fading back into the mists of history. Anarchism is, in fact, a younger movement than Marxism: an integral part of modern socialism, it as an active political movement within the First (or International Workingmen's Association), a coalition of unions, political groups and clubs, and cooperatives that ran from 1864-1877 (Bantman pp. 1, 7-8). From the 1890s into the 1920s, it was in many contexts the dominant force on the revolutionary left, with a substantial impact on unions, popular and anti-imperialist movements worldwide. Even outside of this glorious period, anarchism and its union offshoots, anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, was (and is) an important current. (1) Its initial rise coincided, and not accidentally, with the first modern globalization of the 1880s to the 1910s, a period characterized by massive international flows of labour and capital, a transportation and telecommunications revolution, and the rapid spread of industrialization. Anarchism was a global movement not only in aspiration; in practice too, it was global and transnational. Migration--both voluntary and forced (due to persecutions)--and a widely circulating press facilitated the exchange of ideas, struggle repertoires and key militants, which in turn linked and created international activist communities. Stereotypes of an action-first outlook notwithstanding, the movement an intensely bookish culture stressing publication, theory, and debate (Bantman p. 20). Repression, aimed at suppressing radical ideas and formations, including the First International, often had the opposite effect, as exiles spread their ideas abroad and developed, debated and applied these ideas in different contexts on their travels. One effect was the massive dissemination of radical ideas in Europe and abroad: Italian anarchists, for example, were active in the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa, West Europe, and both Americas (Di Paolo p. 3). Exile enriched radicalism, and many ideas were developed, even forged, abroad. Thus exile exerted a remarkable influence on the development of socialist ideas in Italy and in other countries (Di Paola p. 2), and proved very fruitful despite the pressures and frustrations that exile inevitably brought (Bantman p. 73). A growing literature continues to shed new light on this historical and contemporary current that--despite its importance--remains strikingly under-researched. The four books under review are part of the welcome recent upsurge in research. A core part of three of the volumes under consideration centres on the operations of international anarchist and syndicalist networks as they emerged in the context of this increased radicalism. Di Paola and Bantman focus on anarchist exile communities--Italian and French respectively--in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London, where relatively tolerant British immigration and political asylum policies enabled the flourishing of a range of overlapping, polyglot radical milieus. …

Socialism from the Right? Aesthetics, Politics and the Counter-Revolution in Weimar Germany

Abstract The early years of the Weimar period in Germany (1918-33) saw radical right paramilitaries and other activists engage in a violent struggle to roll back the post-war advances of the revolutionary left. This article examines the writings of Ernst Junger and a number other writers from the period, arguing that their work elaborated a violently misogynist pedagogy of the body and subjectivity designed to engineer these counter-revolutionary fighters. What is frequently missed in commentary on these writers, however, is the extent to which their work was not simply about the repression of the left, but involved the production of a radical right 'socialism' whose powerful dynamic was crucial in breaking down the left socialist project over the course of the Weimar years; this dynamic was recognized at the time by critics like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Drawing on the work of these theorists, this paper traces the logic of fascist mobilization, arguing that the appropriation of the revolutionary energies of a left in crisis shaped the trajectory of the radical right, and drove their production of a masculinist, aestheticized 'state of total mobilization' (Junger). Keywords Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Junger, Ernst von Salomon, Oswald Spengler, Socialism, Fascism, Gender, Freikorps Thus the enemy is not content with torturing and killing workers. He not only wants to smash the red front but also strips the jewellery off die supposed corpse. The deceiver and murderer cannot show his face other than with would-be revolutionary speeches and forms of combat.1 Ernst Junger's novels on the First World War take the form, at least in part, of diaries. Ostensibly culled from his writings during die war, Junger's retention of the diary form expressed a commitment to a documentary aesthetic evident in his famous Storm of Steel, with its original and unwieldy subtitle from the Diary of a Stock Troop Commander, Ernst Junger, War Volunteer, and subsequently Lieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (73rd Hanoverian Regiment), and even more so in his novel Copse 125. Junger's documentary realism was of a particular kind, however, combining the immediacy of the diary form with an obsessive rewriting that saw the appearance of multiple versions of his novels. Ideologically, though, his work depended upon a documentary immediacy emerging out of the experience of the front. As he describes it early in Copse 125, his writing there emerged 'illegible, like the wavelines of a seismograph [wie die Wellenlinie eines NadeUtifies] recording an earthquake, with the ends of the words whipped out into long strokes by the rapidity of the writing - these must have been flung on paper after the attack, in shell-holes or fragments of trench swept by machine-gun bullets like a swarm of deadly hornets'.2 An interesting and telling contradiction emerges here. The diary, ostensibly a most personal and interior form of writing, becomes instead an entirely depersonalised and external text. Junger the writer disappears, reconstituted as a recording device, a seismograph whose output precisely mirrors the experience of the front. The writing itself (the strokes of the pen, the words) is identified directly with the front and the machine-gun bullets sweeping over the landscape. Both the writer and the text disappear into the cauldron of what the Germans called uve Materialschlacht, the industrialised mass warfare and technologically mediated violence epitomised by the First World War. Jiinger's own rewriting of his texts of course belies this claim of an unmediated relationship between experience and writing, but the erasure of his own writing, I will argue, is at the heart of the metaphor of the seismograph. Jiinger's aesthetic strategies, his writing practices, were bound up with his politics; his self-constitution as a militarised writing-machine involved a purging of individuality and interiority that was placed in die service of a radical right counter-revolutionary practice. …

Católicos y nacionalistas vascos: las elecciones de febrero de 1936 y la guerra

It was clear the division of the Catholic Basques, with nationalists and those who believed that the parliamentary elections of February 1936 were the moment of truth face the threat of the revolutionary left. It studies the political consequences of the decision of the PNV to go alone to the polls and tension of those months. The expectations of harmony, sparked by the first message Azana, sank to some measures of the Government and a string of facts that seemed to make way for the revolution, exceeding and violating the Constitution.

The Idea of Socialism: From 1968 to the Present‐day Crisis

Abstract: In 2008 the 40th anniversary of that iconic year, 1968, was celebrated in the media in relation to student uprisings and cultural revolts, largely neglecting the very significant movements of workers and peasants who were challenging power structures around the world at that time. This omission reflects the failures of socialism in the twentieth century, which are explored in this essay. Beginning from a more complete picture of 1968, the essay examines the history of socialism, identifying the main sources of failure in its theory and practice, in particular that of the revolutionary left. If the failure lies in the elite character of socialist politics and its focus on distribution rather than production, it is to be remedied by a firm focus on the politics of the workplace and the goal of substantive equality. The concluding section reviews the prospects for such an alternative in the current circumstances of global crisis.

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

James P. Cannon (1890-1974) helped build the American revolutionary left. Reared in a radical Midwestern household, he served a class struggle apprenticeship in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the underground communist movement. From the founding of the Workers Party in 1921, Cannon guided the forces of United States communism. Increasingly disappointed in the international and domestic leadership of the revolutionary movement, Cannon eventually embraced Trotsky's criticisms of emerging Stalinism. When he was expelled from the Workers (Communist) Party in 1928, a particular age of U.S. radicalism had come to an end, but another was just beginning. Bryan D. Palmer's magisterial study is both a biographical treatment of Cannon's formative years as well as a richly detailed and passionately argued examination of a pivotal epoch of American radicalism. Meticulously and imaginatively researched, it brings to life a major figure in the underappreciated United States revolutionary tradition. It also recasts our understanding of those movements Cannon championed, from the Wobblies and Left-Wing of the Socialist Party to early communism and its decline under Stalinization.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about.
 At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover