New Politics
NEW POLITICS. is a journal of socialist thought that provides an independent forum for dialogue and debate on the left. First launched in the early 1960s, New Politics offers in-depth coverage of current events and political controversies from radical, democratic, and pluralistic viewpoints. While the range of topics covered in any given issue varies widely, the journal has a number of long-established preoccupations, such as the politics of race and class, the legacy of Stalinism, U.S. foreign policy, and the prospects for the international left. In recent years feminist and environmental themes have been added to the mix.
The origins of New Politics traces back to New York intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s. The journal’s founding editors, Julius Jacobson (1922-2003) and Phyllis Jacobson (1922-2010), were politically active during the Depression and became leading members of the Workers Party (1940-1949) and its successor organization, the Independent Socialist League (1949-1958). Led by Max Shachtman (1904-1972), the WP/ISL advocated for what it described as “third camp socialism” and was highly critical of both Western capitalism and Soviet bloc “bureaucratic collectivism.” Under the pen name Julius Falk, Julius Jacobson served as the final editor of the WP/ISL’s theoretical journal, the New International, before it ceased publication in 1958.
The inaugural issue of New Politics appeared in the fall of 1961. In an opening statement, the editors set forth their reasons for starting the magazine: “Our journal is sponsored by socialists and radicals of widely differing opinions. Thus, heterogeneity of opinion in its pages will be sought after. However, the sole criterion of editorial selection will be neither conformity nor heterogeneity, but rather the ability of articles to stimulate thought and debate, or to contribute in some way to thinking out acute questions of politics and theory.”
The first issue reflected these editorial principles. It included articles on American labor, the early Marx, Hannah Arendt, and the civil rights movement by Sidney Lens, Michael Harrington, Lionel Abel, and Tom Kahn respectively. A highlight was a four-way exchange over the nature of Castroism. The issue also featured a debate between Julius Jacobson and Joseph Clark on the prospects for meaningful change in the Soviet Union. In its early years the journal was edited by Julius Jacobson with the assistance of an editorial board whose members included Robert Alexander, Hal Draper, Albert Fried, and George Rawick. Subsequent issues addressed such topics as race and organized labor, the movement against the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party and the left, and the emergence of the campus-based New Left.
Forty-five issues of New Politics were published between 1961 and 1978. Key contributors in this period of heightened social unrest included Murray Bookchin, Burton Hall, Herbert Hill, Julius Jacobson, Phyllis Jacobson, Staughton Lynd, Paul Mattick, Norman Thomas, Harvey Swados, and William Appleman Williams. Hal Draper’s essays on “In Defense of the ‘New Radicals’” (1965) and “The Two Souls of Socialism” (1966), along with the “Open Letter to the Party” (1966) that was penned by the dissident Polish leftists Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, were especially noteworthy. In addition, three trade paperbacks collected material that originally appeared in the first series: The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968), Autocracy and Insurgency in Organized Labor (1972), and Communist Myth and Soviet Reality (1972).
Despite these achievements, it became increasingly difficult to keep the magazine going during the late 1970s. As Phyllis Jacobson later explained in an interview that was published in 2014, “We were affected by the fact that the antiwar movement fell apart. We realized our time was up in the late 1970s when we couldn’t get people to write. It was not a question of being hostile to the journal, but rather a lack of interest, reflecting the increasing apathy and demoralization afflicting the political left.”
Detecting a modest revival of interest in leftist politics, Phyllis and Julius Jacobson relaunched the journal in 1986 as a biannual publication averaging two hundred pages per issue. During the hiatus between the two series, the Jacobsons coedited a book, Socialist Perspectives (1983), that served as a trial run for the relaunched journal. The new series has revisited the themes that characterized the old series, but it has also moved in new directions, with a greater emphasis on gender and sexuality, political economy, and popular culture. Recent contributors include Paul Buhle, Lynn Chancer, Sam Farber, Barry Finger, Thomas Harrison, Cedric G. Johnson, Michael Löwy, Scott McLemee, Kim Moody, David Roediger, Saskia Sassen, Steve Shalom, Jane Slaughter, Stephen Steinberg, Lois Weiner, and Reginald Wilson. At present the journal is edited by a team of five editorial board members: Dan La Botz, Nancy Holmstrom, Jason Schulman, Julia Wrigley, and Saulo Manuel Colón Zavala.
Further reading
Drucker, Peter. Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the ‘American Century’. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994.
Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Jacobson, Phyllis and Julius Jacobson, eds. Socialist Perspectives. Princeton, NJ: Karz-Cohl, 1983.
New Politics, 1961-1978 https://www.unz.com/print/NewPolitics/.
New Politics, 1986-present. Table of Contents and selected articles. www.newpol.o
Worcester, Kent. Silent Agitators: Cartoon Art from the Pages of New Politics. New York: New Politics Associates, 2018.
Worcester, Kent. “Third Camp Politics: An Interview with Phyllis and Julius Jacobson.” Left History 18.1 (2014): 39-60. https://lh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/lh/issue/view/2238.
Worcester, Kent. “Third Camp Politics in Theory and Practice: An Interview with Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison.” Left History 21.2 (2017): 9-49. https://lh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/lh/issue/view/2246.