HAS BASE-BUILDING FAILED as a strategy for the socialist movement? What is our movement’s vision for a reconstituted socialist society? In regards to these questions, I’ve been thinking about a recent essay by D. L. Jacobs. I disagree with a lot of what Jacobs wrote, but the piece also highlighted some points I’d been neglecting.

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anel and roughly a decade before D. L. Jacobs. Like many active members at the time, regardless of our age, there was a great sympathy to Michael Harrington and the other DSA founders, especially about the strategy of realignment to shift the Democratic Party to the Left.

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he Italian Communist Party’s (PCI), the Eurocommunist, and then the academic): hegemony and war of position.

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IT TOOK THE AMERICAN LEFT until the end of this past summer to formulate a response to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. military retreat. Indeed, only after a silence so suspicious as to suggest that the Left had nothing at all to say on the matter did it finally find the words it was looking for. As perhaps should have been expected, this response took the form of blaming U.S. imperialism for Afghanistan’s woes.

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LESZEK KOŁAKOWSKI’S “THE CONCEPT OF THE LEFT” (1958) is useful for addressing what it means to say that there is a Left and a Right in Marxism. The actual occasion for Kołakowski’s article was Soviet Premier and Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin for “crimes against Leninism” and against socialism. What did this mean?

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