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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Daniel Deweese of the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted an interview on November 20, 2021 with Timothy V. Johnson, author of “‘Death for Negro Lynching!’: The Communist Party, USA's Position on the African American Question” (2008). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

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Book review: David North and Thomas Mackaman, eds., The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews (Oak Park, Michigan.: Mehring Books, 2021).

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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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