Reginald Wilson, the prominent African American psychologist and educator, civil rights activist and socialist, and a member of the New Politics board, died on December 13, 2020 at the age of 93. His was a quintessentially Black American story of the twentieth century, if a particularly illustrious one. From his role as a Tuskegee Airman to his activism with C.L.R. James’ Correspondence group, to his founding of the first Black ski club, to his academic career he was a remarkable individual. A socialist for 75 years, he serves as a model for us today.
Reg’s parents — Oliver Leon Wilson…
Ten years ago, when I lived in Cincinnati, I was the Socialist Party’s candidate in Ohio for the U.S. Senate. No, I didn’t win. I didn’t even get many votes, just 25,000. But who thought then that there were so many socialists in Ohio? At the time I believed running a propaganda campaign as a socialist was a worthwhile project. I still do — even though, because of the extraordinary conditions in our country, this year I’m voting for Biden.
How did it come about that I ran as a socialist for the Senate? The Socialist Party and other “minor…
For the first time in my life, in fifty years of voting in America, I am voting for a Democratic Party presidential candidate and urge others to do so as well. As an activist on the left, a writer on politics in various publications, and an editor of New Politics, I feel that I must publicly acknowledge that I have changed my position on this question and explain why I recently signed a letter advocating a vote for Joseph Biden.
I became an activist in the 1960s in the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Our enemy was the…
In my counter-historical novel Trotsky in Tijuana, being published on the anniversary of his assassination eighty years ago, I attempt to understand Trotsky the man and the political leader by projecting his life into a future he did not live to see.
Eighty years ago, on August 20, 1940, Ramón Mercader, an agent of the Soviet Union’s secret police attacked Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, in his home in exile in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City. Trotsky died the following day.
Why was Trotsky killed? Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, leader of…
I am a child of the atomic age. The atomic bomb, that is, the threat of nuclear war and mass destruction, has been in my consciousness — sometimes in the background but frequently in the foreground — nearly all of my life.
I was born on August 9, 1945 at the Lying Inn Hospital of the University of Chicago, the day that the second atomic bomb was dropped in Japan on the city of Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of people. My birthplace, the U of C, was also the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which had been conceived there…
Book Review: Branko Marcetic. Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. New York: Verso, 2020.
Branko Marcetic ends his book . Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden with this:
Democratic primary voters improbably hold the future of the country but potentially modern civilization in their hands. By July 2020, we’ll know if they learned from history.
From the author’s point of view, they didn’t. Rather than choosing the progressive Bernie Sanders, the voters chose Joseph Biden, the compromiser, the advocate of bipartisanship, an erstwhile liberal whose decades-long political career led him since the late 1970s to adopt a series…
This article was originally written for Viento Sur, a newspaper of the Left in the Spanish state.
A march came by my house in Brooklyn a few nights ago, a river of thousands of young people of all races, wearing masks because of the pandemic, walking together, shouting out the name of George Floyd, demanding justice. I saw history making its way through the city, the young people carrying the future on their shoulders. So it has been everywhere in America for more than a week. And still the protests continue and grow in size. …
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the biweekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
In the midst of the worst pandemic in U.S. history and what may be a Second Great Depression worse than the first, President Donald J. Trump’s chief concern is reelection to the presidency in November. He is now using the coronavirus crisis and the economic collapse of the economy to rev up his campaign and rouse his base with a reopening of the economy that jeopardizes the health and the economic well being of millions. …
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the biweekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
President Donald Trump is driving the United States toward complete loss of control of the coronavirus pandemic, a development that will lead to tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths and further devastation of the economy. Today the United States has 1.3 million known cases and 78,763 official deaths while 40 million people or 24.9% of the workforce are unemployed. With Trump’s plan for reopening next month’s death toll will continue to rise and the economy could virtually collapse.
Peter Dreier’s vicious attack on Bhaskar Sunkara in The Nation is an embarrassment to that publication. The Nation editors should be ashamed of having allowed Dreier to lambast the editor of Jacobin in such a venomous piece because Sunkara said he would vote for presidential candidate Howie Hawkins of the Green Party in New York, a “safe state” that will go overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party candidate for president.
In an outburst of bile Dreier wrote that, “Sunkara’s stance is self-indulgent — an individual act of virtue signaling rather than part of a collective movement for justice. …
Dan La Botz
Dan La Botz is a writer. His most recent book is Trotsky in Tijuana at trotskyintijuana.com
