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The Unlikely Life of a Socialist Activist Resonates a Century Later

Jennifer Szalai The New York Times
Adam Hochschild here produces a rich biography of the World War One-era socialist insurgent, Russian Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor Stokes, an impoverished cigar worker who counterintuitively married well and never forsook her working class roots.

When Solidarity Mattered

Paul Buhle CounterPunch
This book is a new and innovative look at a pivotal moment in U.S. labor history.

The Dilemmas of Lenin

Lindsey German Counterfire
A look back on the key revolutionary more frequently worshiped on the left than read, Ali's Lenin biography includes his last years' observation that "we knew nothing," insisting that the revolution had to be renewed lest it wither and die.

Debating Black Freedom

Robert Greene II Jacobin
Liberator Magazine was one of the most important African American periodicals to be published in the United States during the 1960s. The book under review is the first full-length account of the life and times of this pivotal journal.

Dorothy Day’s Radical Faith

Casey Cep The New Yorker
A new book charts the life and legacy of the writer and activist, cofounder of the radical Catholic Worker movement that aimed to aid the poor and whom some hope will be made a saint.

Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology Forty Years Later

Kieran Durkin Marxist Sociology Blog
Fromm was famous for this critique of consumer capitalism as well as for his penetrating studies of authoritarianism. He was a significantly influential figure on U.S. radical thought during the second half of the 20th Century.

A Dialectical Delight

Sophia Beach International Socialism
A deep, translucent dive into Marx's capacity to take Hegel's comservatizing worldviews and turn them into elements of revolutionary theory and practice.

Radical Wordsworth, Well-Kept Secrets

Freya Johnston The Guardian
The great English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), writes reviewer Johnston, based his groundbreaking style on the "radical claim that apparently trivial things and people, the rhythms of ordinary life, were the stuff of true poetry."

Populism of the Left?

Federico Finchelstein Critique & Praxis
A prominent scholarly critic of the Far Right and its populist pretensions weighs in on an equally problematic stance: the unfortunate valorization of a left populist orientation.