Resources

Or, things with which to waste your time.

The premiere intellectual journal of the New Left, Radical America began as an effort of SDS members to come to terms with the United States’ radical past.  It quickly evolved into much more than that, becoming a general journal of the movement which engaged with questions of contemporary strategy and tactics as well as providing a base for the importation of European Marxist theory.  A number of its early contributors would go on to become prominent academics, such as Mark Naison, Linda Gordon, and its founder, Paul Buhle.  Thanks to the good folks at Brown University, nearly all issues are available to download for free.

The Israeli Left Archive contains an incredible amount of material on various manifestations of the Israeli Left from the sixties to the present, a great deal of it in Hebrew. Organizations such as the Israeli Black Panthers and Women and Black are here, along with the Israeli Socialist Organization, or Matzpen, whose analysis of the class nature of Israeli society has been crucial in the positions of a number of contemporary socialist groups, in particular those of the International Socialist Tendency.

The Bureau of Concerned Asian Scholars began as a Left journal of Asian Studies, founded by students and faculty upset with the dominance of the field by State Department scholars and dollars.  Continuing today as Critical Asian Studies, its early issues contain a wealth of articles on both Asian radicalism and US policy on the continent.

Socialist Register is an annual collection put together by the Canadian Marxists Leo Panitch and Colin Leys.  The journal features contributions from leading socialist theorists around the world, from Ellen Meiksens Wood to Aijaz Ahmad to John Berger.  The editors have been generous enough to put the entire back catalog of the journal online for free.  There are a number of formerly rare and wondrous articles here.  Two excellent starters are Norman Geras’ classic “Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism” and Rob Beamish’s “The Making of the Manifesto,” which reconstructs in detail the political and intellectual context in which the Communist Manifesto was written.