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 Left Wind is honored to republish Jean Allen’s “Organizational Materialism,” complete with a new introduction and their other related writings. Introduction & Self-Criticism
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 […]
A 2019 Introduction to “Where’s the Winter Palace?” In late 2017, we began drafting what would become “Where’s the Winter Palace? On the Marxist-Leninist Trend in the United States” (WTWP). Its release launched this blog exactly one year ago today. In the past year, we have learned a lot through our political work and studies. […]
by David Thompson The article “Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?” in The New Republic reaffirmed for me why I’ve hitched my wagon to Philly Socialists and the Marxist Center, rather than DSA. It’s not because I share the author’s implied criticisms or think he gave DSA a fair shake. He clearly didn’t! It’s […]
by Jean Allen In “Against Think Tank Socialism,” I argued that the project of ‘left populism’ is ultimately about viewing the left as an intellectual project, and that this might ‘work’ in a broader left but is ultimately a deeply narrow project to build a left around. But even writing this, I could hear myself […]
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