What we have proposed, in this dossier, is not a simple response to base building. It is not an argument to do labor work and electoral work instead of tenant organizing or mutual aid. It is, rather, a call for us to consistently hone our thinking about the work we do, to have our goals […]
A Review of Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener by Avery Minnelli Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties [hereafter SNF] by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener [hereafter D&W] (Verso, 2020) is a tremendous gift to today’s burgeoning movement(s) against racism, police violence, and […]
by Teresa Kalisz When the Marxist Center (MC) was founded about a year and a half ago, it received immediate criticism from the more Maoist elements of our milieu. The now dissolved Austin Revolutionary Organizing Collective (AROC) criticized MC in a short reflection on our founding convention for our lack of clarity on party building. […]
by Avery Minnelli I have written at some length about my experience as a member of Workers World Party, which I left due to the organization’s flawed political practice. What I’ve said less about is my psychological and ideological state during this time. If “Where’s the Winter Palace?” was a critique of the concrete practices […]
The following originally appeared at Cosmonaut Jean Allen reviews Srnicek & Williams’ ‘Inventing the Future’, which calls for an intellectual counter-hegemony to neoliberalism. Does this proposal for counter-hegemonic institutions really put anything new on the table, or just reflect the prevailing organizational norms of the existing left?
The following originally appeared at Cosmonaut Jean Allen reviews L.A. Kauffman’s Direct Action, a history of the protest movements that filled the gap between the New Left and the modern left that are often ignored and forgotten. Allen argues that these movements cannot be understood strictly in terms of their theory, but by grasping the […]
The Left Wind is honored to republish Jean Allen’s “Organizational Materialism,” complete with a new introduction and their other related writings. Introduction & Self-Criticism
←Return to index For decades the left has interacted with itself in a way dominated primarily by ideological relations: Trotskyist versus Stalinist, Anarchist vs. Marxist, Maoist versus Social Democrat. But in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union most of these relationships have persisted despite their signifying no material relationship. Despite the various […]
←Return to index In earlier articles I have referred to the central problem of organizational materialism as “what are you really doing”, and the central project of organizational materialism as disregarding the justifications built around practices to look at real practical activity. But it really isn’t so simple as that. The question ‘what are we […]
←Return to index Amann, Peter H. Revolution and mass democracy; the Paris club movement in 1848. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.
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