←Return to index “…Every new movement, when it first elaborates its theory and policy, begins by finding support in the preceding movement, though it may be in direct contradiction with the latter. It begins by suiting itself to the forms found at hand and by speaking the language spoken hereto. In time the new grain […]
←Return to index The move by many of the Left’s intellectuals towards party building, or party cooption, makes perfect sense in this light. The wall that activist movements have continually hit upon is the fact that no matter how good their tactics, no matter how perfect their organizational chart is, no matter how immaculate their […]
←Return to index The Communist parties failed because, once they had dominated the political field, the flaws inherent in their structure became a general problem for the Left. We now face a similar problem: in our immediate past, the western Left has been dominated by activist organizations and intellectual groups, and the faults inherent in […]
←Return to index This grouping of organizations was crushed in a very short time during and after WW1. Whether from internal mistakes or state violence, the failure of revolutionary activities through all of Western & Central Europe and in the United States was also partially the fault of systemic failures in the constellation of leftist organizations that […]
←Return to index The long counter-revolution from the 1810s to the 1870s led to the transformation of old ‘corporate entities’ (essentially special interest groups constituted under the conditions of feudalism) into modern political organizations aimed at resolving the political and economic inequalities of the state they existed in. In Europe this came in the form […]
←Return to index My aim in this essay is to create the framework which can be used to create a materialist history of the Left, and to show how this framework would ‘work’ in analyzing a set of periods of Leftist history. I will do this by focusing on the way different radical organizations have acted and interacted throughout […]
←Return to index The wake of Occupy Wall Street brought with it a series of new Leftist parties and politicians aiming to turn anti-capitalist sentiment into electoral victories. These politicians have been, in turn, opposed and supported by a variety of journals and activist groups, in many cases regardless of the stated ideology of the […]
by Jean Allen ←Return to index Organizational Materialism remains, to me, the intellectual project I am most proud of. It came just at the beginning of a massive reorientation in US leftist politics (one which continues on as of the writing of this introduction), and predicted many of the developments which occurred since. More and […]
by Avery Minnelli and El Levin The Marxist Center (MC) is a small but growing trend on the U.S. socialist left. Although we do not boast the membership numbers of DSA nor any significant base in the working class, we have made what we hope is a valuable intervention on the left. Against the sects […]
by Arturo Castillon “…the more alien wealth they [the workers] produce, and… the more the productivity of their labor increases, the more does their very function as means for the valorization of capital become precarious.”1 “…within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost […]
The Left Wind