Skip to main content

Tidbits - March 30, 2017 - Reader Comments: Single Payer; Gorsuch Disaster; Israel-Segregationist, Apartheid; Religious Left, Socialists, Feminists; Censorship and Art; Teachers’ Union Guide for Immigrant Children; Announcements; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Trump Failure Answer is Single Payer; Gorsuch-"Originalist" Disaster; Israel Segregationist and Apartheid; Left Growth Today - Religious Left, Socialists, Feminists; Censorship and Art - Emmett Till painting; PBS; Maine Fishermen; Job Growth and Worker Injury; Resources: Teachers’ Union Guide for Immigrant and Refugee Children; Announcements: Black Women in the Media; Chicago-April 4; 81st Annual Celebration of the Lincoln Brigade; and more...

Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality

Christopher Vials Against the Current
Based on research during and immediately following World War 2, this pathbreaking book analyzed the proclivities individuals might have toward support for authoritarian regimes, stressing preconceived attitudes on race, class, sexuality and nationalism, concluding that fascism’s attraction came not (or not just) from political agreement but from a personality structured by larger, repressive social forces in which sociological influences upon ideology are mediated.

Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the Legacy

Duane Campbell Talking Union, a DSA labor blog
“When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of people we are. ..I am convinced that the truest act of courage..is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice.” Cesar Chavez (1927-1993)

Activism Then & Now: Organizing in the Pre-Twitter Era

John Eklund Portside
There’s no question that social and digital media are transforming the way movements are built and organized. But technology by itself has never overthrown a tyrant nor seized state power. Self-expression is a potent thing, but as a plan of action it’s just a start. Progress demands that the contemporary social media-based resistance overcome its fear and loathing of leadership, organization and ideology.

Claude McKay's Long-Lost Novel Brings the Harlem Renaissance to Life

Ross Barkan The Village Voice
Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a Jamaican-born poet and novelist who became one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s upsurge of black culture that was a central feature of the jazz age. He was also a leading left wing intellectual of the era. This newly discovered novel is a literary and cultural milestone.