Often forgotten today, the US saw a tidal wave of rank-and-file worker militancy in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Many socialists of the era took jobs on the shop floor to help foment the upsurge and build a revolutionary movement to replace capital
While not providing a clear antidote to Trumpism, Michael Ansara’s “Hard Work” still delivers indispensable insights into activism from the 1960s to today.
In a new memoir, New Left leader Michael Ansara wants to impart lessons from his own time as a campus activist to today’s protesters. But his later role in a corruption scandal that set back Teamsters reform for decades offers its own cautionary less
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The postwar Second Red Scare successfully smashed the American left. But in the midst of its devastation, a small number of old leftists refused to be shut up by the climate of fear. Without their heroism, the New Left could never have emerged.
I believe that my experience, especially as a female, is both timely and relevant as an account of the struggles against the ruling class. I still believe that imperialism and capitalism are the scourges of democracy.
Two new memoirs portray the activist left over the last half-century.
The FBI had played its role as the “political police of the national government,” Noam Chomsky wrote and the government maintained to the bitter end that it had a right to undermine an organization just because of its ideas.
“Max Elbaum has given us an incisive and critical history of the Other New Left – the radicals who brought class struggle and Third World liberation to the forefront, looked to the world for allies, and tried their best to work through the dynamics of race and class.
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