Orwell was free from doctrinaire sectarianism. At the same time, he firmly hated the exact bastards who deserve to be hated.
Tag: Communism
A Communism of Feelings
What role should emotions play in leftist political movements?
Ideas Alone Won’t Tame Capital
Inequality emerged after the French Revolution, and again after the postwar boom, because our institutions have been hardwired to serve capital.
Hong Kong: “When We Burn You Will Burn With Us”
The most telling chant of the 2019 Hong Kong protests is “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” (光復香港 時代革命), not because it offers a vision ...
And Cuba Shall Lead Them
In an era when, history textbooks contend, the United States lurched to the right, Gus Newport presided over an unapologetically leftist government in the San Francisco Bay Area. If the region has a ...
“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”
When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists ...
B-Sides: Ivan Olbracht’s “Nikola the Outlaw”
Some of Central Europe’s greatest political novels have been meditations on disillusionment. Many of them—from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to ...
Legacies of Italian Marxism
“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” What was left of this seemingly ominous prospect a century after the publication of Karl Marx and ...
The Devil Wears Pravda
In the mid-1930s, amid the Second World War and the Great Depression, competing forms of internationalism—the Communist International, Black Internationalism, the League of Nations—defined the ...
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Revolutions
“Today I have reached my conclusion,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois on October 1, 1961: “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No ...
Cuba’s Next Chapter
In April 2016, Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) convened its Seventh Party Congress. Sprinkled throughout the published proceedings were a few attempts at levity by the otherwise laconic Raúl Castro. One ...
The Mortal Marx
In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens ...
The Politics of Networking a Nation
In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for ...
Sex and Socialism
Three recent books tell the stories of four women whose lives both absorbed and propelled the vast, multifaceted socialist movement in Britain from 1870 to 1920: Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel ...
On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
The Art of the Communist Museum: The Leon Trotsky House in Coyoacán
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Villa Coyoacán, Mexico, home to El Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, is now a posh ...
Perestroika Blues
Now nearing the end of its fourth season, The Americans is a confounding success. It’s hard to figure out which of its triumphs is the most unlikely: that it has millions of Americans rooting for KGB ...
Totalitarian Sprawl
Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected ...
Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by ...
Famine Fiction
Betraying friends. Trading sex for food. Devouring human flesh. All of these occurred during the famine that followed China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), and all of them ...