2018 HAS BEEN A YEAR OF COMMEMORATION and confusion for the French Left. The fiftieth anniversary of May ‘68 has been marked by museums exhibitions, book launches, and quaintly nostalgic demonstrations, leaving the anniversary proceedings as less a reckoning than a leftist-version of Woodstock II.

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In his still unrivalled 1930 History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky celebrated the type of Marxist revolutionaries who, under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership, carried out the October 1917 insurrection in Petrograd. “Bolshevism created the type of authentic revolutionist,” he recalled, “who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgments. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability whose inspirer was Lenin.”

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IT IS BY NOW WELL ESTABLISHED that millennials are not having sex. Indeed, recent studies have revealed that millennials derogate the emotions evoked in love and lust, which they refer to disparagingly as “catching feelings.” The widespread paranoia surrounding consent presumably only deepens such sentiments.

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TRANSGENDER ACTIVIST LESLIE FEINBERG PROCLAIMED in a 1992 political pamphlet that the time for transgender liberation had come. Over twenty years later, popular media described the increasing visibility of transgender lifestyles as a “trans tipping point” or “trans moment.” However, upon further inspection, one discovers luminaries of the Enlightenment already expressed whatever “new” ideas have come to the fore, and better the first time around.

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On July 21, 2018, Efraim Carlebach interviewed Lawrence Parker about his latest book, "Communists and Labour—The National Left-Wing Movement 1925–1929". The book is available on lulu.com. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

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