May 1970: The Kent State Killings Built a Generation of Radicals — Myself Included

On May 4, 1970, four students at an antiwar protest were shot at Kent State University in Ohio. One activist, a teenager at the time, recalls how the massacre radicalized him and young people across the country. 

Chile ’73: Was Victory Possible?

Chilean president Salvador Allende’s experience was the most radical attempt to achieve socialism through elections and gradual reforms. What went wrong?

Organizing the Unemployed in the 1930s: Lessons for Today from U.S. Working Class History

The article below by Danny Lucia, from the now-defunct International Socialist Review, discusses how the Communist Party and other groups became involved in organizing the unemployed in the 1930s. This history can be instructive for socialists as unemployment soars amidst the current crisis.

Multidimensional Class Struggles and the U.S. Civil War

In the Americas, capitalism was established on the basis of slavery. The struggle against slavery was part of the class struggle.

Black Liberation and the Early Communist Movement

The struggle for Black liberation was an integral part of the US Communist Party’s practice in the years after its foundation. The party’s work was particularly influenced by the Bolshevik Party and Black radicalism in America.

The Jew Who Built An Anti-Nazi Resistance In Hitler’s Army

Martin Monath (1913-1944) was a German Jewish Trotskyist, a member of the Fourth International, and the editor of German-language socialist paper Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), who in 1943 began organizing resistance cells within the Nazi army. A new work by Nathaniel Flakin, Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers, out this month from Pluto Press, uses archival materials to piece together his fascinating story. This is an interview with its author.

Socialists Need Organizations, Even if They’re Small

"From Little Things Big Things Grow": Mick Armstrong of the organization Socialist Alternative in Australia has written a book about strategies for building revolutionary organizations. A former member of the ISO reviews it and investigates the debates about the "micro-sect."

Why the Deafening Silence on Reagan’s Racism?

In July the National Archives released an audiotape of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1971 calling African U.N. delegates “monkeys.” This recording was kept from the public for at least two decades. What role did Reagan play in anti-Black oppression in the modern United States, and why has he been enjoyed such an untouchable, undeserved public image for so long as an American hero?

A Marxist History of the Nicaraguan Revolution

It has been 40 years since the Nicaraguan Revolution. What happened and what lessons are there for socialists today?