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 […]
by Jean Allen This is in response to Sophia Burns’ article, “The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies”. In it, Burns makes an argument that’s been popping up more and more in the last two years, and one I generally agree with: that the geopolitical splits which defined US socialist politics during the Cold War […]
by Sophia Burns Objectively, most inherited tendency divisions are obsolete. For instance, your evaluation of the USSR (and its rivals) mattered 50 years ago, because the right line could get you Soviet or Chinese money (with strings attached). Today, the USSR is not a live issue with practical implications, and the PRC no longer funds […]
by Jean Allen 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 […]
We would like to thank everyone who made this essay possible, whether that was through proofreading, editing, providing suggestions, giving reading recommendations, or simply talking with us about politics and strategy. In particular, we would like to thank our friends and comrades Mattie Boyd, Sophia Burns, Brendan Campisi, Charles H., Tim Horras, John-Paul Keblinski, Morgan […]
←Return to index This essay is not about “debunking” the political and historical analysis of U.S. MLs or Marxism-Leninism more broadly. Instead, it is one contribution towards a critique of MLism as a trend in the U.S. We still identify the need for an organization to bind various elements of the class and articulate a […]
←Return to index In the previous three sections, we (1) evaluated the practice of U.S. MLism (2) argued that its organizational forms are based on a dogmatic reading of the Bolshevik Party and (3) argued that “correct line” without mass organizing is illusory. Having explored what the ML trend is, we have to ask “why” […]
←Return to index As Marxists (and avid students of Lenin), we have a generally more favorable view of ML “political line” than that of social democracy or anarchism. By “political line”, we mean the ML theoretical framework and historical analysis, such as its conception of the State, view on national oppression, appraisal of which countries […]
←Return to index “Polly Parks, once associated with the magazine Theoretical Review, maintains, ‘I don’t think there is such a thing as the Leninist party.’ She argues that activists in the party-building movement were fixated only on ‘the nature of how the Bolsheviks operated in a revolutionary situation in Russia.’ Val Moghadam, a former leader […]
The Left Wind