Radical Professional and Academic Journals

RADICAL PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC JOURNALS. One of the most lasting expressions of the radicalism of the 1960s is the way in which almost every academic discipline, profession, and major labor and interest group created journals of opinion that voiced the spirit of dissent and social change that informed the movement. In contrast to underground newspapers, which flourished most at the height of the anti-war movement and then either disappeared or were transformed in some way, many of these journals survived and by the late 1980s were celebrating their twentieth anniversaries with special issues. Science for the People, the Radical Teacher, the Insurgent Sociologist, Issues in Radical Therapy, the Conspiracy, Madness Network News, Sipapu, the Radical Philosopher’s Newsjournal, and Radical History Review are just some of the titles that provided an antidote to the official organs of organized disciplines. Nourished by new insights gained from a resurgent Left, academics, professionals, and to a great extent their traditional target groups, students and “clients,” designed the landscape of serious periodical literature.

Beginning its twentieth year, Science for the People (Boston) reflected on its history: “SftP has been a vehicle for antiwar analysis and activity since its inception. Conceived in the struggle against US involvement in the Vietnam War by an organization then called SESPA—Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action—SftP continues to challenge military applications of science and technology.” Two aspects of the history of this journal apply to the history of most of these journals: first, the concept of scientists and engineers working together in spite of the traditional professional haughtiness of the pure scientist; second, the idea of connectedness—that “professional” life was not something separate and apart from the rest of one’s life, that the consequences of one’s work were a matter of personal moral and political responsibility.

The notion of a holistic approach to one’s life may be the most common bond between these academic radicals. The sociologists put it this way: “Radical sociology is whatever radical sociologists do—whether activism, research, teaching, organizing—when, and only when, these activities are not divorced from one another.” A newsletter put out by the Sociology Liberation Movement/Union of Radical Sociology at Berkeley, the Insurgent Sociologist called at first for a radical counterconvention to the 1969 meeting of the American Sociological Association. The Insurgent Sociologist quickly broadened its scope to issues outside of academic politics by proposing a five-part agenda: (1) aiding movements of welfare recipients; (2) exposing counterinsurgency research and power structures; (3) exposing and reforming the American sociological establishment; (4) defending teaching jobs of radicals; (5) struggling against bourgeois hegemony and orienting research to the needs of ongoing movements. Eventually the journal changed from a newsletter to a journal, shed its former activist stance, and changed its title to Critical Sociology (Department of Sociology, University of Oregon) in the spring of 1988.

As it has done for radicals in the United States for at least a century, the existence of a journal made real for many the existence of a movement. Those who studied religion and who came out of the experience of the Berkeley Free Church asserted that “existing institutions are insufficient to develop a new radical vision or meet the bankruptcy of our liberal society. Presently there does not exist in the United States a radical scholarly journal within the disciplines associated with religion. This explains, in part, why the religious Left remains unfocused and ineffectual.” Radical Religion was founded in Berkeley in the winter of 1973, just after the radical philosophers of Boston put together the first issue of the Radical Philosophers’ Newsjournal. The group behind the latter effort “all shared a clear sense of dissatisfaction both with present academic philosophy and with society at large.” In common with many radical academics, the philosophers shared an interest in Marx, felt the irrelevancy of mainstream thought in their field—at the time, analytic philosophy—and hoped to make their discipline serve nonacademic purposes. Also in common with other such ventures, the journal served as the basis for discussion groups that sprang up around the country. Some journals, destined to last, established themselves quickly, taking on subscribers and editorial enthusiasts. Others, like The Radical Proctologist, launched as satirical gestures at the mainstream, had a short life span.

Historians in America participated in the movement of the 1960s with at least five major journals, with the last three still publishing into the 1980s or 1990s: Studies on the Left, Marxist Perspectives, Radical America, Socialist Revolution (now Socialist Review), and the Radical History Review. The Radical History Review began, like the Insurgent Sociologist, as a newsletter, the MARHO Newsletter (Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians’ Organization), first published in 1973 in New York. The editors reflected on the change from an activist newsletter to a scholarly journal this way in 1977: “The growth of the Review reflects the emergence of a new generation of Marxist historians in the United States, politically awakened in the 1960s.... The collapse of the student based movement of the sixties, and the failure of its strategic vision, left many people on the Left in despair, but inspired in others a mood of introspection, a hunger to analyze the development of a society which seemed so unjust yet resistant to basic change.” The review thus became the outlet for a critique of American society based in a Marxist framework. Socialist Revolution interested itself in more contemporary problems than the Radical History Review did and also attracted a circle of Left academics beyond the historical profession. In many ways, it continued the work of Studies on the Left, which for seven years beginning in 1959 was the precursor of much New Left thought and whose editorial board members resurfaced in many other Left radical journals. According to an obituary written by one of the editors, “Studies made its contribution to the thinking of the new radicals in two areas. (1) It identified welfare state liberalism as the political ideology of the large corporation throughout this century, and, therefore, as the dominant political ideology in the United States. (2) It began the process of orienting socialist thought toward the problem of building a post-industrial socialism.” Radical America, originally an outgrowth of the Radical Education Project of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took shape among graduate students in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, which nurtured many of the graduate students who continued to play an active role in Left academic life, the labor movement and other social movements from the late 1960s onward. Originally subtitled “An SDS Journal of the History of American Radicalism,” Radical America broadened its editorial board to include nonhistorians as it shifted to the Boston area in 1971. Among the longest lasting of New Left journals, it survived until 1999, publishing a mix of articles but emphasizing history, current and older.
Radical professional journals in other academic disciplines tended to cluster around area studies, most notably among economists, anthropologists, and political scientists. NACLA: Report on the Americas was founded in 1966 as a newsletter and began NACLA’s Latin American and Empire Report in 1971 before taking its current form in the mid-seventies. Published by the North American Congress on Latin America, it consistently exposes North American involvement in the political and economic life of Latin America. MERIP Reports, the publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project, does the same for the Middle East, and the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars for its area.

By the twenty-first century, these and a handful of newer radical journals succeeded in creating and redefining what is possible for academics in the United States. A large handful of the survivors, including the Radical History Review, turned over their actual publication, with its rising costs and complications, to university presses.

The rightward march of US society from the later 1970s to the later 2010s limited the prospects of influencing practical politics, but the journals and their surrounding milieux brought the lessons of the 1960s Left to new generations charged with taking over the editorial decision-making. The shift of graduate student interests toward deconstructive approaches during the 1980s-1990s moved some of the publications, especially those based in and around English Departments, toward the examination of language rather than social structures and populations. After 2000 but especially following 2010, the sharpening of social and political concerns for a generation suffering a widespread downward mobility restored to some degree the political interests of scholarship, passed to new generations of students and younger academics.

The emergence of yet newer, basically online publications with limited print runs as a sideline renewed the idea of academics, graduate students and others acting as journalist-scholars, prompting a new wave of scholarly investigations including web-based research. Jacobin, outstanding example of a newer publication with scholarly contributors, led a considerable leftwing parade of smaller, sometimes fly-by-night efforts resembling the older DIY efforts professionalized, in effect leftwing art-and-politics publications such as Viewpoint and Commune.

Conservatives often complained, through the half-century following the 1970s, that the Left was “taking over” the academy. By extension, the more radical scholarly publications presumably threatened the mainstream journals, as the Left was said to seize control of college and university departments, imposing its will and its agenda upon students and fellow academics. This wild claim contained a small kernel of truth. Some departments increasingly encouraged scholarship on class, on race, gender and global issues that addressed historic imbalances of power. Individual radical scholars also rose to high editorial positions within mainstream journals and sometimes rose to the presidency of mainstream academic institutions such as the Organization of American History and the American Studies Association. The “mainstreaming” of Left thinking might be seen as temporary, a generational phenomenon, but for conservatives and cautious liberals, the central consideration of subjects such as race, racism and empire left a lasting mark upon fields of study.

Conservatives and conservative-leaning liberals sought to redress the advance of radicalism through the power of donations to influence university administrations. On increasingly sensitive issues such as Palestinian or Middle Eastern studies, a particularly fruitful area of newer scholarship, these influences could be deadening. The long-term use of underpaid adjuncts radicalized new generations of young scholars, many of them seeking union protection. At the same time, the downsizing of colleges and universities closed down or threatened left-led achievements in many fields. The handful of tenacious journals launched in the 1960s and 1970s continued, then, to be refuges for radical scholarship and speculation.

Buhle, Paul.“Building Radical America Magazine,” Jacobin, May 9, 2015.

Buhle, Paul. “Good Luck, Young Comrades!” Commune magazine, #5 (Winter, 2020).

“The Search for a Useable Past,” an interview with Paul Buhle by Salar Mohandesi, Viewpoint Magazine, Mar.2, 2015.