Independent Left Journals, 1970s to 1990s

John Trinkl

INDEPENDENT LEFT JOURNALS, 1970s TO 1990s. The explosion of activism in the later 1960s seemed to issue a powerful challenge to American capitalism, but one popular slogan of the day, “less talk, more action,” turned increasingly ironic. The waves of mobilization prompted little detailed talk of strategy and still less of the obligatory Marxist theoretical analyses. By contrast to the Europeans, American radicals appeared destined to remain intellectually backward: a century-old complaint with kernel of truth. This situation began to change in the following years with the launching of a handful of radical journals, often by graduate students or former graduate students. Many new publications would grow out of specific corners of academia --anthropology to political science and sociology, even science and schooling-- and remain “specialty” publications of their respective professions.

Few examples of earlier and more general leftwing journals beyond the venerable Monthly Review, Dissent and New Politics attracted few New Left readers. Studies on the Left, an effort to reach a youthful audience and offer insight from several generations, expired in 1966. The British journal New Left Review presented to many readers and would be editors a high level of a politically-independent Left perspective. New Left Notes, the SDS tabloid, carried a theoretically-minded supplement for several issues in 1967-1968, following the British example, but did not appeal to readers and expired with little fanfare. For the mass of young radical readers, mostly undergraduates, the Underground Press offered experiments in journalism and art, but little sustained discussion.

The venerable Liberation Magazine, the avuncular pacifist or anarchistic voice of the 1950s generation, survived and reached many young readers, but discounted theoretical explorations. Meanwhile, a handful of “small magazines” with a libertarian or anarchist inclination appeared and disappeared rapidly, including Black & Red, published by Fredy Perlman in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1968. Root & Branch drew upon the syndicalistic ideas of Paul Mattick, a long-time exile who had participated in the German 1919 uprising. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Root & Branch lasted from 1969 into early 1974, with Jeremy Brecher its best-known editor and contributor.

Viet Report, launched in 1965 from Boston with editors including Carol Brightman and John McDermott, was the most successful of the newer independent magazines, with a circulation above 40,000. It was also one of the most short-lived. Boasting a list of prominent leftwing and liberal writers, Viet Report offered hard facts on the US invasion of Vietnam rarely available elsewhere and ceased publication when its editors concluded that the peace movement and its sympathizers within the mainstream press finally offered readers accurate information and insight into the war.

Some of the Viet Report contributors regathered around the magazine/tabloid Leviathan, published from New York and San Francisco by a group centered by brothers Peter and Brad Wiley during 1969-1970. Largely sympathetic to SDS in tone and content, full of cultural features that reflected the arts of the time, Leviathan could not survive the collapse of the New Left.

Radical America (RA), begun in 1967, was the earliest of the sustained journals and arguably the most representative of a generation of young, Marxist-inclined but also undogmatic intellectuals. Planned as part of the SDS Radical Education Project, it was originally intended for “internal education.” It remained “an SDS journal” until 1970.

In Madison, Wisconsin, a center of student mobilization but also of Midwest radical traditions, editor Paul Buhle recruited SDS members of the local chapter to help edit, print, collate and print the journal. Bi-monthly issues presented articles and documents related to the history of American radicalism, including the recent history of various New Left organizing efforts, sometimes with commentary by participants themselves. Bulk copies to SDS chapters competed with individual subscriptions in a circulation of several thousand.

By 1968, RA had begun to emphasize special themes and writers outside of the New Left milieu proper, most notably Black global history with the Pan African savant, C.L.R. James. In 1969, a few months after the all-time best-selling issue (Radical America Komiks) was published, SDS itself imploded. Rather than pursue the SDS fragments, the editors shifted gears by changing the format mostly to special issues. Women's history and Black history became the largest themes, with an anthology of C.L.R. James’s writings. For cerebral-minded radicals, the publication of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (translated and illustrated by Fredy Perlman, by this time also the magazine’s printer) was a standout special.

The readership and financial supporters of Radical America notably included the eldest generational survivors of the Old Left, such as Anna Louise Strong from China, Solon De Leon (eldest son of long-dead socialist leader Daniel De Leon), proletarian novelist Jack Conroy, poet Walter Lowenfels and a youthful participant in the 1919 Seattle General Strike, Harvey O’Connor. Old-timers were especially drawn to the lively spirit and the pictorial element, efforts to get beyond dull journal-looking pages with experiments in design and layout, scattered poetry, likewise contemporary or older illustrations from the radical press.

By the end of 1970 a “radical history” issue, widely circulated among young historians, proved to be a new editorial board’s largest collective accomplishment. In 1971, a lengthy essay in women’s history was destined to become reprinted as a booklet that was widely-used in the first women’s history college courses.

In September 1971, RA moved to Somerville/Cambridge, Massachusetts. The hopes of a new, multi-racial and multi-cultural class struggle encompassed many issues, including specials on events in Italy, Portugal and Quebec. With factory closures and sweeping defeats of social movements, RA’s new editorial board set a path for the long run. Like other New Left publications, its circulation suffered, but the magazine had gained a new community of support in the Boston area and held on. A second comics format issue, this one “An Underhanded History of the US,” drawn by Nick Thorkelson and scripted by Jim O’Brien, sold widely in reprinted, color format. Historians Linda Gordon and James R. Green would be regarded as its most prominent editorial board members in the years ahead.

By the end of the 1970s, RA was a more eclectic publication with no single strategy and certainly not affiliated with any one organization. The emphasis on history began to fade as individual historians as board members generally moved on. The conservatism of the 1980s wore down the determined radical optimism of the publication while rising expenses and shrinking circulation took their toll. In 1999, the creative “movement” publication first known for its freshness and openness shut its doors for the final time.

Socialist Revolution was founded in 1970, spearheaded by longtime socialist activist and former key editor of Studies on the Left, James Weinstein. The new journal was seen as an intellectual guiding hand for the New American Movement. It positioned itself as a revolutionary publication critical of existing Marxist groups and the Maoist New Communist Movement. Launched by an editorial collective in San Francisco, it was joined later by an editorial collective in Boston. By the 1980s, the publication developed a more social democratic perspective and a greater interest in culture. In 1978, its name changed to the less flamboyant Socialist Review. The Boston collective would be known best for economic analysis, while the Bay Area group focused more on activist movements and theory. In later years, the publication highlighted postmodern discussions of cultural issues. In 2002 the publication was renamed Radical Society: A Review of Culture and Politics and a few years later ceased production.

Theoretical Review (TR) formed out of a collective in Tucson, Arizona, launched in 1977. In the initial issue the editors wrote: “Theoretical Review is being established for a specific purpose: to serve as a concrete link between the two forces involved in the process of forging a genuine communist party…those elements who have understood theory to be a central of American communists in this period of party building and those elements who have put their emphasis on mass practical activity.” TR began as bimonthly journal of Marxist theory, politics and cultural criticism, edited by Paul Costello. US communism, according to the editor and contributors, had long been theoretically shallow, dogmatic, and poorly grounded in the realities of US political and social life. To remedy these weaknesses, TR proposed what it called “the primacy of theory.”

TR aimed to bring the works of theoreticians such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Charles Bettelheim, Nicos Poulantzas, and Marta Harnecker to US movement activists. In 1979, a second editorial board was established in Boston, and a small network of discussion groups supporting the Theoretical Review project developed. The collapse of the New Communist Movement in the early 1980s resulted in a decision to end Theoretical Review in early 1983

North Star Review, its first issue published in 1983, emerged in he wake of a curious political event. That year, Peter Camejo, a charismatic leading figure of the Socialist Workers Party, was expelled for arguing that some of the approaches he saw in Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution could be applied to the United States. Shifting from New York to the West Coast, he got in touch with old friends from several other left currents, including Steve Hamilton, a founder of the Revolutionary Union in the 1960s, and John Trinkl, formerly a staff writer for The Guardian. These three formed a loosely organized national North Star Network (NSN) focused on support work for the Central American revolutionary movements and other projects but especially Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. They aspired, in general, to break out of the Left’s political isolation. Initially, NSN published a newsletter, but in 1984 developed this contribution into a journal called The North Star, after Frederick Douglass’s Abolitionist newspaper. The editor was Steven Hiatt, who joined North Star from the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, along with Steve Hamilton. In 1988, The North Star absorbed the small publication Socialist Politics, the combined journal now renamed North Star Review. With the decline of the Central American movements and the dissolution of the Rainbow Coalition, the North Star Network disintegrated. When North Star Review closed, Hiatt and others became supporters of a new broad left, nonsectarian journal, Crossroads.

Crossroads appeared as an experiment in political dialogue within the Left. Beginning in 1990, the new magazine confronted many obstacles during a time of turmoil on the Left. The installation of a new Board of Directors for the Institute for Social and Economic Studies (ISES, the non-profit that published Crossroads) proved to be a big boost: decision-making editorial responsibility was assumed by a diverse set of activists. On the ISES Board, members of the Communist Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and smaller groups from the Maoist and Trotskyist traditions worked alongside “independents” and former members of Line of March and North Star, not in a tactical, single- issue coalition or in organizing a one-shot conference, but on a common, ongoing socialist project.

This degree of non-sectarian cooperation was almost unprecedented in the US Left. The interaction between once-warring activists proved to be substantive, democratic and exciting. Crossroads, an attractive magazine with a popular format, included many illustrations. Too soon, however, the excitement of dialogue passed, and a theoretical or practical way forward, as in a new model for socialism, failed to materialize. Crossroads published its last issue in 1996.

Cultural Correspondence, founded by two editors of Radical America, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, launched in 1975. It was named in part after the tabloid of the 1950s C.L.R. James group, Correspondence. If its namesake had been intended, uniquely for the time, to bring the discussion of culture into the blue-collar projects of the Left, the newer magazine urged a study of popular culture that might provide the disheartened New Left a road back from isolation. Rediscoveries included themes and creators within television, music, children’s literature and elsewhere. The magazine published its last issues around the 1982 Radical Humor Festival at New York University, and folded the next year, into the Political Arts Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) network of radical artists.

Z Magazine, the most enduring of these publications, was founded in 1987 by two of the founders of Boston’s South End Press, Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent. The name of the magazine was inspired by the anti-imperialist film directed by Costa-Gravas. Its founding aims were particularly inclusive: “Z is an independent monthly magazine dedicated to resisting injustice, defending against repression, and creating liberty. It sees the racial, gender, class, and political dimensions of personal life as fundamental to understanding and improving contemporary circumstances; and it aims to assist activist efforts for a better future.” It survived in print and on-line, and its contributors have included Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Mike Kuhlenbeck, Jack Rasmas, Paul Street and Kevin Zeese.

Recommendations

Verso Gift Card

Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet

Freud and the Non-European

Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change

A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight

The Homegrown City: Reclaiming the Metropolis for its Users

Berlin Childhood around 1900

You’re viewing our site

Independent Left Journals, 1970s to 1990s

Further reading