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The Romance of American Communism
Monday 29 June 2020, by Alan Wald
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As protests work to remake the world, the reissue of Vivian Gornickʼs
The Romance of American Communism invites a new generation to reflect on
what it means to live a life of political commitment—where the
passionate pursuit of justice meets organized political action. The
Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick Verso.
Throughout the late twentieth century, assorted political gravediggers
worked overtime to entomb the legacy of the U.S. Communism. In hindsight
they may strike us as having protested altogether too much, as those
were decades when, like today, most activists on the far left referenced
Moscow and its aging authoritarians mainly as punch lines to political
jokes. Yet the terror that the pro-Soviet Old Left might inspire new
forms of radicalism ran deep among the intellectual establishment that
had emerged during the High Cold War and continued to take root in its
wake. These anointed gatekeepers, from the reactionary James Burnham to
the liberal Sidney Hook, wanted their version of the legacy of the
left—in short, a horrific one—so fixed in the cultural firmament that
all roads of inquiry would lead straight to the 1949 collection The God
That Failed: A Confession, that touchstone of disillusionment with
Communism.
Affect and emotion play essential roles in radicalization
One must ask why, among certain domestic historians and cultural critics
in the era of the solidly center-right administrations of Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, a Lazarus-like return of Communism felt
so threatening. Was it really fear of political revolution, or was this
resolve to win the narrative rather induced by a premonition of a coming
loss of status to a new generation of scholars—a certain guilty
trembling before a vision of pink- hued ghosts, holding yellowing copies
of the Daily Worker, sitting in the professorsʼ places at the heads the
seminar tables? I suspect the latter, for the reason that not a few of
these gatekeepers had been complicit in a kind of muscle memory cover-up
regarding the positive impacts Communism had made on the national
political landscape. Among younger labor, civil rights, and literary
historians (including people like myself), evidence was accruing that
both the direct and the indirect achievements of the movement were much
weightier and even prophetic than most scholarship wanted to admit.
Moreover, the core stories of personal commitment to the cause were
inherently compelling. Today, there is no doubt that this insurgent
research was spot-on.
To put it briefly, between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s the
Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) attracted (cumulatively)
around a million individuals to membership, and even more to the broader
organizations that it led. In a prelude to what the New Left of the
1960s promoted and the present- day socioeconomic calamity urgently
requires, the Reds and their allies campaigned relentlessly against
white chauvinism and fascism and on behalf of unionization and
state-sponsored programs for health and welfare. Sundry facets of the
Communist legacy could provide a way for young rebels to reimagine
themselves. Above the establishmentʼs uproar over the movementʼs
grotesque misjudgments regarding the Soviet Union under Stalin, one
could still hear the full-throated cry of American Reds to end racial
and social injustice in the United States.
This is what the gravediggers had to contend with, the legacy they
sought to repress as the star of the New Left began to rise. But
beginning in the mid- 1970s and early 1980s, what would become a long
and bitter fight to nuance the narrative of the Communist experience was
vividly on display in a series of debates about the publication of
several books and one documentary, Seeing Red: Stories of American
Communists, directed by Jim Klein and Julia Reichert. An opening salvo
was the 1977 publication of the essayist and critic Vivian Gornickʼs The
Romance of American Communism, her collective oral history of mostly
middle-aged former members of the CPUSA, rereleased by Verso in April
this year with a new introduction by the author. The structure of this
modest-sized volume fell into three central parts, for which the
memories of some forty-five veterans were synthesized to dramatize their
feelings about their personal lives before, during, and after the party.
Emotions that lay behind the choice of Marxist commitment
The book lacked a granular account of Communist politics, but there was
no pink-washing of Stalinism. Gornickʼs observations were often
clear-eyed and objective about the Communist movementʼs many flaws as
she describes undemocratic expulsions, bullying, delusions of grandeur,
and self-deception about Stalinʼs barbaric rule. Even the idealism that
attracted so many is shown to have a self-serving dimension, as when
Morris Silverman—all the names in the book are invented—boldly states
the following about his years as a leader: “I really donʼt know if I
loved doing it because it was valuable in and of itself, or if I loved
doing it because I was good at it.” What was distinctive, and
threatening, about Romance was precisely this brave foray into the
emotions that lay behind the choice of Marxist commitment. In the
commentary that accompanies Gornickʼs character studies, she was candid
about the many psychological “hungers” that allegiance to a party could
assuage for a time. “One of these hungers, beyond question,” she writes,
“is the need to live a life of meaning.” Conversely, Gornick was
explicit in her memorable concluding chapter, “To End With,” that she
had written the book as a warning to radicals. She gave voice, that is,
to the agonies as well as the ecstasies.
This determination emerged while she was participating in the burgeoning
feminist movement, a topic she covered for the Village Voice. When she
found herself in a bruising debate with other women over the cause of
female oppression—some attributed it to the “nature” of men while
Gornick held that it was the result of "a system of relationships"—she
experienced an epiphany that she and others were repeating the journey
of so many Communists from an intense awakening to the dead-end of
dogma. “The memory of the Old Left,” she wrote, “surfaced like an
underground stream bursting through encrusted earth, and it overran me.”
In other words, the arc of the narrative of The Romance of American
Communism led to the frustration of ideals at the hands of the very
discipline and ideology that had originally provided efficacy and
viability. Gornick was in awe of the passion of commitment but recoiled
from its capacity to blind and even destroy. Even so, the attention she
devoted to the affective dimensions of the Communist experience
obviously outran the norms of the genre of political deceit and betrayal
that many intellectual machers of the day aimed to defend. Her
publishers at Basic Books might well have put a content warning on the
cover: “Beware! This volume depicts Communists as complex human beings.”
The attraction to Communism
Reviewing the book, Marion Magid, managing editor of the once liberal
Commentary magazine in the first years of its drift toward the right,
cried out in dismay: “On Stalinism, at least, one might have thought the
verdict was in for all time, but no such luck.” Tellingly, Magid
directly proceeded to express alarm about impending developments in the
academic and journalist treatment of Communism that others would also
share: “The revisionist impulse peeping shyly from every publisherʼs
list grows fatter and bolder with each success, thriving on ignorance,
short memories, nostalgia, and that passion for novelty at any cost.”
One can easily imagine her muttering under her breath, “The horror! The
horror!”
She was not alone. One measure of the shifting political landscape over
the last half-century is just how different the reviews of the reprint
today are from those of the time.
While the original edition of The Romance of American Communism received
an astonishing number of reviews across the political spectrum, all but
a few contained sharp rebukes, many assumed a gladiatorial posture, and
several blatantly misstated Gornickʼs intentions.
The crudest conservatives, those who thought the only good Stalinist is
a dead Stalinist, responded with flame-throwing diatribes. Hilton
Kramer, hurling flash-bangs in the New York Times, called it
“particularly odious” and “entirely devoid of political intelligence.”
He then made a mockery of his own alleged acumen by describing
Communists one-dimensionally and retrogressively as foreign agents:
“stalwart followers of the political party whose sole purpose . . . was
to serve the interests of the Soviet terror machine.” The Boston Globe
informed readers that “The ‘romanceʼ of American Communism was an
historical byway where good gulls and sweet dupes and a few steely-eyed
wretches ruined lives—mostly their own.” Theodore Draper, an esteemed
historian of Communism in the 1920s, called it a “sob sister version” of
the Popular Front. Such snark betrays more than a hint of distress about
the presence of a nascent feminist sensibility: Was he furtively fearful
that “scribbling women” would soon be invading his scholarly turf?
The game for these critics was to uphold the tradition of objectifying
Communists and stripping them of their humanity. Anti-Communists of all
stripes insisted on a diabolical uniqueness to the naiveté and powers
of rationalization Communists exhibited apropos a distant regime they
idealized. The proposition that Democrats and Republicans had also
exhibited obtuseness and selective empathy in regard to Cold War
complicity of the United States with mass murder in many countries did
not fit into their calculations.
Struck a profound chord
Even the gifted democratic socialist Irving Howe, capable of wielding
his pen like a sharp scalpel with style and sophistication to offer
insights based on decades of experience, resorted to quips. “One
sometimes has to remind oneself,” he wrote, “that in her evocation of
coziness and warmth she is writing about the CP in the time of Stalin
and not about a summer camp.” Predictably, he next went full pedant on
Gornick and mansplained to her the partyʼs “real” history that she
certainly knew: dual unionism, social fascism, the Popular Front, the
Moscow Trials, the role of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), the
expulsion of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, the trial and
execution of Rudolph Slánsky in Czechoslovia, the Hungarian revolution.
Moving in for the kill, he ended by adding insult to travesty: it “is
not so much that she canʼt think as that she evidently prefers not to.”
A man clearly not built to go only halfway, Howe also used the journal
he edited, Dissent, to run a piece by former Communist Joseph Clark that
characterized Gornick as having “both her thesis and ideology . . .
neatly packaged in advance” and as “lacking in candid recollection” and
“barren of political appraisal.” Why this combination of nasty
finger-wagging, use of debating tactics inspired by a Peregrine falcon,
and a creepy aura of hatred that feels oddly personal?
Other reviews from the left were far more temperate, and a few offered
praise. The up-and-coming historian Maurice Isserman, however, concluded
in In These Times that “she ends up developing a set of stereotypes of
the Communist experience as flat and unconvincing as those churned out
by the sectarian and witch-hunting schools of communist historiography.”
In contrast, former Communists Annette T. Rubinstein and Jessica Mitford
admired the same portraits, but demurred at Gornickʼs own reflections;
“curiously apolitical” was the judgment of the former. Other left
critics expressed concerns about lack of documentation and an
explanation of the methods of selecting interviewees and accurately
recapitulating them as stories. What was not predicted was the extent to
which The Romance of American Communism struck a profound chord among
activist readers. Our used copies were passed from hand-to-hand as it
morphed into an underground cult text on the left, a primitive version
of what we now call going viral.
This subterranean activist embrace was even more curious given that
efforts to bury the book aimed to diminish the once proud history of not
just the CPUSA but the broader left to nothing more than a historical
trace. A minimalist understanding of “Stalinism,” a crucial and still
much abused concept, was used to smear any troublesome socialist, so
that even anti- Stalinist Marxists might fear that being seen with the
book would be seen as damning proof of “Stalinoid” tendencies. Then
again, by the 1970s, much damage to all forms of domestic radicalism had
already been accomplished, so this campaign was hardly gutsy. What we
were witnessing at that time, following the McCarthy eraʼs endeavor to
outlaw Communism as a Satanist conspiracy, was a priestʼs desire to
condemn and excommunicate Leninʼs spawn through a safe rearguard effort.
It is pertinent, however, that Gornickʼs doubled-edged project—a
compassionate rejection—stemmed from her own personal trauma in breaking
with Communism during those awful plague years of the 1950s.
Communists as complex human beings
Postwar repression featured harassment, blacklisting, imprisonment, and
executions, but these overlapped with the CPUSAʼs own reckless accretion
of pro-Soviet delusions. Abetted by the movementʼs long history of
top-down decision-making and the Soviet Unionʼs brutal crushing of the
Hungarian revolt, the result was a perfect storm of external pressure
and internal crisis. The upshot was an implosion between 1956 and 1958
that nearly devastated Communismʼs organizational presence in the United
States as its street cred was tarnished worldwide. Thousands of the most
devoted cadres, including the teenage Gornick, walked away from the
movement and the ambient subculture that had sustained political and
social identities for decades.
And yet the afterlives of that Communist era of Marxist commitment seem
unending. Among academics there has been a Forever War since The Gornick
Affair between two interpretative schools in dueling narratives. On the
one side are traditionalists—Draper and disciples—who emphasize the
CPUSAʼs unbreakable ties to the Soviet Union and the political zigzags
that flowed from a culture of submission to a totalitarian hierarchy. On
the other are social historians—Isserman and a cohort of one-time Young
Turks called “New
Historians”—who emphasize rank and file initiative in the implementation
of policy and local history with its ethnic and gender dimensions. More
numerous have been memoirs, novels, plays, Hollywood films, independent
documentaries, paintings, sculptures, monuments, and stand-up comedy
routines. My favorite among the last is Josh Kornbluthʼs 1997
autobiographical one-man show, “Red Diaper Baby.” It begins: “My father,
Paul Kornbluth, was a communist who believed there was going to be a
violent communist revolution, and I was going to lead it. That gives you
an idea of the pressure.” Itʼs hard out here for a Red.
What a difference forty-five years makes! Gornickʼs book is now
rereleased by Verso, the premier leftwing book publisher of our time.
Jacobin has already published two congratulatory pieces by Hannah
Proctor and Laura Tanenbaum and hosted a podcast about it. The Nation,
which had been fairly critical in its original review by Ronald Radosh
(the ex-Communist, ex-leftist, almost ex- Radosh), has now published a
fiercely admiring one by political theorist Corey Robin, and the New
Republic, which had formerly been warm albeit critical of factual errors
in a fine appraisal by David Caute, has revisited the book with a wholly
laudatory one by Sophie Pinkham. In These Times and Dissent have
similarly published second reviews, the former by Micah Uetricht,
completely admiring, and the latter by Alyssa Battistoni, generous and
thoughtful. In December the Los Angeles Review of Books as well devoted
considerable space to a celebratory commentary on it by Lana Dee Povitz.
The titles tell it all: “The Humanity of American Communism,” “What
Todayʼs Socialists Can Learn From the Heyday of American Communism,”
“What Vivian Gornick Got Right,” “How Vivian Gornick Reinvigorated
Political Writing,” and so on. This generation gets it.
Breaking with Communism
The question remains, however, whether this reception might also
translate the lessons of the book into the serious business of building
a new socialist movement. In the 1960s hundreds of thousands of young
people were drawn to an activist left, and in the 1970s a variety of new
revolutionary groups popped up, while old ones revived like both flowers
and toadstools after a spring rain. Nevertheless, all went into steep
decline during subsequent decades of backlash. Even so, as social
movements diminished in size, Marxist ideas remained a permanent and
dynamic fixture of the intellectual landscape as a Third Wave of
feminism became ascendant, Gay Liberation moved toward LGBTQ rights, and
intersectionality became de rigueur among anti-racists.
The pattern of history suggests that intervals of retreat and repression
come and go, while the radical tradition hangs around to be rediscovered
and revived when the population is prodded by dramatic events. This
nudging transpired as the new millennium generated a steady march of
endless war in the Middle East, grotesque financial mismanagement and
heightened inequality, environmental disaster, and the ability to record
police murders of African Americans on video. The evolving sequence of
domestic protests—together with the opening to discuss class politics
afforded by Bernie Sandersʼs presidential campaign—has now metamorphosed
into a yearning for a fresh take on socialism by the best and the
brightest young people of our time. And many of them mean business.
A year ago New Left Review hosted a symposium of such activists members
of the once ultra-moderate Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), now
66,000-strong (not far behind CPUSAʼs peak membership of 85,000), in
which the first participant explained: “only organized socialists can
consolidate the gains of the class struggle, assimilate the lessons of
the international working class and bring these to a new generation.” To
old-time ʼ68ers like myself, this is a familiar truism; some of us have
devoted much of our lives to addressing the problem and failed miserably
to achieve anything that could even compare to the heyday of the Old
Left. Since we live under the long shadow of memories of the disastrous
fate of the relatively unstructured and extemporaneous Arab Spring in
Egypt, itʼd hard not to agree that this formula—organized
socialists—encapsulates the foremost challenge faced by the present far
left. Massive new protests are erupting but they are as yet without
clear-cut national leadership, have been (understandably) organized on
the fly, and are driven by slogans that can evolve in various but not
yet fully determined directions. This situation goes a long way toward
explaining why The Romance of American Communism still matters.
This takes us to the revenant of this wonderful but also strange book as
it enters the political mix of twenty-first-century radicalism, which
now incorporates the capitalism-related twin crises of a mishandled
pandemic and revolt against racist police violence. Wonderful, because
Gornick built bridges to a realm of crucial, unwritten dimensions of
socialist dedication by daring to rush into a delicate subject where
more straitlaced radicals fear to tread. Anyone listening to the
interviews with protesters on the street in response to the killing of
George Floyd can understand that affect and emotion play essential roles
in radicalization and the impulse toward necessary action. They will
also be factors as individuals move from the raw rage occasioned by
particular events to thinking about how collective structure and
organization can enhance power and clarity. Even beyond that, taking
into account emotional requirements and frailties is vital to the
perilous task of defining the most effective program and trustworthy
leadership.
The passion of commitment
Socialists, for whom radical politics are a way of life, are prone to
look to the construction of a new political party that can more
effectively represent the interests of working people; organizational
forms that are transparent; a leadership that is collective and fully
accountable; a program that addresses immediate needs but creates
stepping stones to an anti-capitalist future; and so on. Enduring
vulnerabilities lie in our susceptibility to relying on leaders who
claim authenticity and act decisively, and on analyses based on what we
want to hear. Gornick offers no blueprints, but she teaches us that we
must address the slippery ingredient of the emotions of a committed
political life by first recognizing and naming them.
But besides being wonderful, The Romance of American Communism is also a
bit strange because it is so seductive. The younger, uniformly admiring
reviewers of the rerelease are not much worried that Gornick operates
without documentation, evidence of crosschecking, or the slightest
concern about justifying her reasons for selections or the authenticity
of her data base. Her case studies are frequently made through
novelistic methods, for which she has an indubitable talent. Along the
way one can be mesmerized by perfect sentences. One character in the
book, David Ross, explains, “My studies, my marriage, my friendships
were all strained through the liquid flow of Marxist thought before they
entered my brain and my feelings.” A group of former Communists are
“governed by an emotional frame of reference that cannot be wrenched
from the socket of an old and passionate experience inextricably bound
up with disciplined structure.”
Why isnʼt there greater skepticism of the genuineness of the primary
interviewees? Are they candid or are they performing—saying what they
think will make the best impression or rehearsing old speeches well
honed after being delivered many times before? Then there is the
uncertainty of the degree to which Gornick is cherry-picking and
selectively hyping her material. Beyond that, it can hardly be missed
that all kinds of quick characterizations are offered about the
intelligence, motives, sexual drives, and talent of the principal
intervieweesʼ relatives, friends, comrades, and fellow workers, none of
which may be accurate or fair. In her depiction of the chief villain of
the book, a snarling renegade dubbed Bitterman who calls Communism “the
work of the devil,” Gornick may have badly misjudged. The character
appears to be Joseph R. Starobin, author of the widely esteemed study
American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, published in 1972. Starobinʼs
friends insist that his misbehavior arose out of grief over a son who
committed suicide and his own recently diagnosed fatal illness.
Nevertheless, I have also interviewed at least half a dozen of the same
activists—Dorothy Healey, Herman Liveright, Carl Marzani, among
others—and what she writes about them rings true to my own research.
If there is a climax to Gornickʼs narrative, it is that moment in the
concluding fifth chapter when she finds her own emotional hardwiring
triggered in response to a harsh debate among feminists. This is the
point at which she is overwhelmed by the same type of emotion turning
into fanaticism that she has depicted among Communists at their worst.
Now she feels as if these Old Reds had somehow been residing inside her
psyche expecting to be acknowledged. “For the first time since 1956 I
did not feel anger toward the Communists,” she writes. “Itʼs as though
theyʼve lain there all these years, deep inside me, chained to the wall
of remote memory, waiting for the right psychic moment to be brought
forward, waiting to let me understand.” This recognition allows her to
grasp her peril and to pull back.
I suspect that this frank acknowledgment that she is not one whit better
or different from those former comrades she had been previously
dissecting is a central reason why young radicals are powerfully drawn
to her book despite its scholarly and analytical drawbacks. When Gornick
wrote that “the real point about Communists” is that they “were like
everybody else, only more so,” she was willfully countering the notion
of a deep ethical chasm between active Communists and ordinary citizens
that is no longer defensible. Moreover, Gornick is asking the
self-proclaimed far leftists of the 1970s—and now 2020 —to look at her
gallery of veteran Marxist militants and ask: “Is their Redness not like
my own Redness?” Are not their flaws the same as those that we, too,
have already exhibited or to which we may one day fall victim? By
dehumanizing the Reds, and vaunting their own superiority, the anti-
Communists actually made it easier for young activists to identify with
the maligned targets.
Might reprintʼs warm reception translate into the serious business of
building a new socialist movement?
What radical has not bristled against false and simplistic
characterizations of our motives and behavior? In the 1960s and 1970s,
those of us fighting war and racism were told that we were simply mad at
our parents, guilt-ridden about privilege, and otherwise neurotic.
Feminists have been told they are man-haters. People of color have been
accused of being too sensitive to perceived racial slights. Activists
for Palestinian human rights have been ritualistically denounced as
anti-Semites or, if Jewish like myself, as self- hating Jews. Today the
peaceful protesters against police brutality are being paternalistically
lectured that “violence is not the way” by those who have shut their
eyes to anything other than explicit Southern racist violence for their
entire lives.
The problem of assessing Gornickʼs message for a new generation may also
be connected to the enigmatic emotions of love. To quote the old Lerner
and Loewe song, the attraction to Communism was “almost like being in
love.” But love is problematic, definitions disagree, and the
consequences vary. One hopes love will last, that love is love is love,
but it sometimes turns into hate. Love can also mean falling into
dependency, sometimes into entitlement, and of course it can be confused
with fleeting erotic attachment. People in love donʼt always come to
know, truly to know, the object of their love. And lovers change; lovers
can surprise. Love also hurts. Putting this all together, Gornickʼs
primary aim is to reveal the secret lives of Communists, and her chief
revelation is that we are all potentially susceptible to passionate
dogmatism when making an ideological commitment, whether to Leninism or
feminism. This prospect apparently convinces her to pull back from
immersion in a collective project and rely on her own resources.
While regaining control of oneself is certainly part of the solution, it
may not count for much if one is also out to change a world dominated by
classes, states, and armies. Here is where I agree with part of Howeʼs
review: echoing Gornick he issues his own warning against committing
“the whole of life” to some totality, but to that error he juxtaposes
the creation of “a union of autonomous persons.” The accent is on union.
No one can doubt that “surrender of the self” can lead to
authoritarianism, no matter its guise. That is why we must search for
versions of socialist identity politics that militate against that
longing for “wholeness” that ends in submission and ultimately in abasement.
After reading The Romance of American Communism, some millennial
socialists may understandably say to one historical wing of the
organized left: “Sorry, Bolsheviks, weʼre just not that into you.”
Nevertheless, to build a socialist movement, one could do worse than
ransack the archive of Communists, Trotskyists, and Socialists to make a
substantial, critical-minded visit to Leninismʼs past. To advance and
sustain the current action in the streets, we need to learn how to build
national and local coalitions with democratic functioning, defense
committees on behalf of our political rights, and a union movement that
campaigns for social justice. From decades of struggle there remain
documents and memories of how to effectively counter fascism through
mass mobilizations, how to understand the interrelationships among
national racial, gender, and class oppression, how to intervene
effectively on the shop floor, how to defend the socialist movement
against the violence of the right and provocateurs, how to recognize
when a once- promising revolutionary upheaval has turned in a
Thermidorian direction, how to express genuine international
solidarity—and much more.
None of this, however, suggests that the mechanical imposition of old
political forms on new content would amount to anything other than a
recipe for disaster. There is wisdom in this legacy of the Old Left, but
too many issues were omitted and poorly handled. Today it will take a
good deal of work to figure out once again what is to be done, or at
least what is to be done next. In the meantime, while listening,
learning, and abetting, some of us can still take heart from people like
Ben Saltzman, son of a rabbi and former Communist without illusions.
Immediately after his interview with Gornick, Ben joins a picket line.
“Iʼm going now to take my place in a war to reduce the worldly
humiliation of men and women like myself,” he explains. “After fifty
years of fighting, I know this war will never be won, but I go anyway. I
take my place. I stand on the line. I do this because I was a Communist.”
P.S.
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Attached documents
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Extraction PDF [->article6666]
Marxism
Emancipation and science: Ernest Mandel 25 years later
The work of Ernest Mandel, a significant legacy for revolutionary combat
in the 21st century
The economics of Ernest Mandel, yesterday and today
Ernest Mandel and ecosocialism
1980: Methodological problems in defining the class nature of the
bourgeois state
USA
The Debate in the Left on the Elections in the United States
United States of America: Socialism for Big Capital and wild capitalism
for the poor
Palestinian members of Israeli parliament call on Democrats to oppose
annexation
Clinic Defense and Abolition
Abolish the police?
Reviews
More than a Left Foot
The Living Flame
“Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey”
Bohrer’s loving, fuming critique
Understanding the Holocaust
Alan Wald
Alan Wald is a member of Solidarity and an editor of Against the
Current. He is a cultural historian of the United States Literary Left
in the mid-20th century and the author of several books including
"Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade,"
(December 2006, University of North Carolina Press). He is also
co-author with George Breitman and Paul Le Blanc of "Trotskyism in the
United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations" (New York:
Humanities Press, 1996).
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― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life