The 'American Exceptionalism' of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929–1940
The 'American Exceptionalism' of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929–1940

Author: Paul Le Blanc

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 716

ISBN-13: 9004272135

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The first 'American Exceptionalists' belonged to a left-wing current led by Jay Lovestone. Briefly in control of, then dramatically expelled from, the US Communist Party, they maintained an independent existence on the US Left from 1929 to 1940. Some became prominent in the labour and civil rights movements, while Will Herberg became a prominent Jewish theologian and an editor of the conservative National Review, and Bertram Wolfe worked as an anti-Communist ideologist with the US State Department. Lovestone himself collaborated with the CIA to help shape the Cold War foreign policy of the AFL-CIO. Yet earlier documents and articles from the Lovestone group provide rich information and remarkable insights on twentieth-century realities and radicalism.

The American Exceptionalism of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940
The American Exceptionalism of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940

Author: Tim Davenport

Publisher: Historical Materialism

Published: 2018-02

Total Pages: 710

ISBN-13: 9781608467563

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The first 'American Exceptionalists' belonged to a left-wing current led by Jay Lovestone. Briefly in control of, then dramatically expelled from, the US Communist Party, they maintained an independent existence on the US Left from 1929 to 1940. Some became prominent in the labour and civil rights movements, while Will Herberg became a prominent Jewish theologian and an editor of the conservative National Review, and Bertram Wolfe worked as an anti-Communist ideologist with the US StateDepartment. Lovestone himself collaborated with the CIA to help shape the Cold War foreign policy of the AFL-CIO. Yet earlier documents and articles from the Lovestone group provide rich information and remarkable insights on twentieth-century realities and radicalism.

American Exceptionalism
American Exceptionalism

Author: Ian Tyrrell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-06-19

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0226833429

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A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part II: Endurance
U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part II: Endurance

Author: Paul Le Blanc

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-11-26

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 9004389261

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U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part II: Endurance: The Coming American Revolution is the second of a documentary trilogy on a revolutionary socialist split-off from the U.S. Communist Party, reflecting Leon Trotsky’s confrontation with Stalinism in the global Communist movement. Spanning 1941 to 1956, this volume surveys the Second World War (internationally and on the 'homefront'), the momentous post-war strike wave, ongoing efforts to comprehend and struggle against racism, as well as the early years of the Cold War and anti-Communist repression in the United States. Also covered are internal debates and splits among Trotskyists themselves, including a far-reaching split in the international Trotskyist movement (the Fourth International) in the face of a persistent and expanding Stalinism. Scholars and activists will find much of interest in these primary sources.

U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part III: Resurgence
U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part III: Resurgence

Author: Paul Le Blanc

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-12-24

Total Pages: 728

ISBN-13: 9004389288

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U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part III: Resurgence: Uneven and Combined Development is the third of a documentary trilogy on a revolutionary socialist split-off from the U.S. Communist Party, reflecting Leon Trotsky’s confrontation with Stalinism in the global Communist movement. Spanning 1954 to 1965, this volume surveys the Cold War era, the civil rights and black liberation movements, the 'third wave' of feminism, and other social and cultural developments of the 1950s and 1960s. Documenting responses to a variety of anti-colonial and revolutionary insurgencies, the volume also surveys the crisis and decline of Stalinism. Attention is given to internal debates and splits, but also to the partial reunification of the international Trotskyist movement (the Fourth International), as well as substantial contributions to the study of history and the development of Marxist theory. Scholars and activists will find much of interest in these primary sources.

Your Comrade, Avreml Broide
Your Comrade, Avreml Broide

Author: Ben Gold

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2024-11-12

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 0814351395

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A working-class radical revolutionary's tale—penned by a prominent union leader—now available in English. Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline. With bold and stimulating illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's translation brings Gold's emotionally rich narrative forward to reveal some of the most dramatic conflicts in America's suppressed Communist history. This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists.

The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 3, 1900–1945
The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 3, 1900–1945

Author: Brooke L. Blower

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-03

Total Pages: 866

ISBN-13: 1108317847

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The third volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World covers the volatile period between 1900 and 1945 when the United States emerged as a world power and American engagements abroad flourished in new and consequential ways. Showcasing the most innovative approaches to both traditional topics and emerging themes, leading scholars chart the complex ways in which Americans projected their growing influence across the globe; how others interpreted and constrained those efforts; how Americans disagreed with each other, often fiercely, about foreign relations; and how race, religion, gender, and other factors shaped their worldviews. During the early twentieth century, accelerating forces of global interdependence presented Americans, like others, with a set of urgent challenges from managing borders, humanitarian crises, economic depression, and modern warfare to confronting the radical, new political movements of communism, fascism, and anticolonial nationalism. This volume will set the standard for new understandings of this pivotal moment in the history of America and the world.

“Truth Behind Bars”
“Truth Behind Bars”

Author: Paul Kellogg

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2021-11-05

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 177199245X

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Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independent miners’ unions were central to overturning the Stalinist system. Paul Kellogg uses the story of Vorkuta as a frame with which to re-assess the Russian Revolution. In particular, he turns to the contributions of Iulii Martov, a contemporary of Lenin, and his analysis of the central role played in the revolution by a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform. Kellogg explores the persistence and creativity of workers’ resistance in even the darkest hours of authoritarian repression and offers new perspectives on the failure of democratic governance after the Russian Revolution.

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Author: Jane Anna Gordon

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-21

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 178661443X

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Rosa Luxemburg is unquestionably the most important historical European woman Marxist theorist. Significantly, for the purpose of creolizing the canon, she considered her continent and the globe from an Eastern Europe that was in constant flux and turmoil. From this relatively peripheral location, she was far less parochial than many of her more centrally located interlocutors and peers. Indeed, Luxemburg’s work touched on all the burning issues of her time and ours, from analysis of concrete revolutionary struggles, such as those in Poland and Russia, to showing through her analysis of primitive accumulation that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles had to be intertwined, to considerations of state sovereignty, democracy, feminism, and racism. She thereby offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new paths of understanding the complexities of revolution.