Mary E. Marcy (1877-1922) was an outstanding member of the left wing of the pre-war Socialist Party of America. She was on the editorial staff of the International Socialist Review and was closely associated with the small but influential left current led by her co-thinker, publisher Charles H. Kerr. Her array of interests was extremely […]
The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory Edited by Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell Lexington Books, 2012 Revolutionary and Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya struggled throughout her life to win a hearing for her ideas, developed in decades of intense participation in the inter […]
American expatriate and Victor Serge translator Richard Greeman has an excellent article (“Europe at a Dark Crossroads“) on France in the Hollande administration in the current issue of New Politics. This piece is particularly strong on anti-Roma and anti-Arab racism in France, as well as on the stark absence of evidence of international solidarity—in either […]
Criticism &c. recommends Ken Knabb’s recent retrospective analysis of the significance of the Occupy movement (“Looking Back on Occupy“), originally composed for a French audience. Knabb has very little criticism to offer of the movement. In our opinion, the chief weakness of his analysis is revealed by his response to this question, “Would you agree […] […]
Criticism &c. marks its three-year anniversary with a new theme and a new contact e-mail (see “About” page for new address). According to the WordPress annual statistics summary, Criticism &c. had over 6,000 visits from 109 different countries in 2012. Minuscule traffic by most standards, but approaching the lower levels of blog respectability in our […]
American Night: the Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War by Alan M. Wald University of North Carolina Press, 2012 Historian Alan Wald brings to a close his three-part study of the literary output of the American left from the 1920s through the 1950s with American Night: the Literary Left in the Era […]
A record for the American expatriate Marxist-Humanist Margaret Ellingham’s Le Multinazionali e la Crisi has been added to the Open Library. When possible, links to Open Library bibliographic records will be included with future references to book titles. See also: Margaret Ellingham, An American Marxist in Italy
Film director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick have produced a cable television documentary series and book—The Untold History of the United States—which packages Stone’s left liberal and small-bourgeois populist interpretation of the twentieth century into some serious infotainment. Stone passes for an incisive crititc of U.S. politics only because […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1956 analysis of post-Stalin Russia (“Where Is Russia Going?“) by Raya Dunayevskaya. This unsigned piece appeared in the March 30, 1956 issue of News & Letters, the same issue which carried a column by Dunayevskaya on the 20th congress of the Communist Party, at which Khrushchev delivered […]
Criticism &c. looks upon efforts towards left “regroupment” with great scepticism. Too often “regroupment” has meant merely a tactical improvisation in lieu of the developement of new ideas. The statement by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar excerpted below appeared in the November 10 issue of Economic & Political Weekly (edited in Mumbai, India) under the title “ […]