"We can't decide in the abstract which of any social relations is more determinant in any particular social phenomenon. Some have primacy in particular moments, some come in a particular kind of sequence, but we can't just say: race, class, which one is more important?"
How did a young American woman, born to a secular, working-class New York Jewish family and raised during the Depression, end up in Algiers during a heady period of revolutionary fervor?
In this excerpt from the epilogue to his landmark 1986 Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis sketches the necessary conditions to build an independent left politics that has real and effective social anchorage in the United States.
Historian Margaret Stevens discusses transnational connections between Black radicals during the interwar years, the interplay between militant Caribbean workers’ uprisings and Communist Party leadership, and the lessons of Communist anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizing.
A playlist of songs that informed or express aspects of the theory and history presented in Mistaken Identity.
By ignoring African American intellectual history, many accounts of 1968 consolidate the very segregation 1960s youth were once so determined to undo.
The experiences of 1968 show us that it is possible to organize against racism as part of the structure of American capitalism — and to join together projects of street protest, popular education, workplace struggle, and political organization.
How a Black United Front in Harlem, the Students’ Afro American Society, and Students for a Democratic Society took on Columbia University, Mayor John Lindsay, the New York Times, the NYPD in 1968 — and won!
Philosopher Lewis R. Gordon discusses the relevance of Frantz Fanon's thought to activists and intellectuals today, and the misconceptions that have shadowed his best known work.
On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we present an updated edition of William F. Pepper's An Act of State.
Marcus Rediker on the life of Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay and the methods of "history from below."
Zoé Samudzi on anti-black psychic violence as a kind of governmentality.