By Fei Guo China Today was a monthly periodical and the official organ of the American Friends of the Chinese People (AFCP), an organization formed by a group of American Communist Party members and left-leaning intellectuals devoted to introducing the Chinese communist revolutionary movement to Americans. Located in New York, the AFCP also organized public […]
Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests
By Aleksej Demjanski The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled […]
Gramsci on Hegemony
by Juan Carlos de Orellana Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist intellectual and politician, who can be seen as the perfect example of the synthesis of theoretician and politician. He was not only a thinker involved in the revision and development of Marxism, who wrote in several socialist and communist Italian journals, but also a […]
Louis Althusser on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918-1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who wrote in the wake of Stalin’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956.
A Ferro e Fuoco: La Guerra Civile Europea, 1914-1945 by Enzo Traverso (2008)
The period from 1914-1945 has sometimes been called a “European Civil War,” but that concept has rarely been put to a systematic examination. Fortunately, Italian historian Enzo Traverso’s recent work A Ferro e Fuoco, which can be loosely translated as Put to the Sword, offers some intriguing proposals for understanding the period as a continental civil war.
The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman (2013)
Perhaps one day some whimsical people with money will get together and honor books for their subtitles. Lawrence Friedman’s new biography of Erich Fromm, subtitled “Love’s Prophet,” wins for getting the total picture; for, in just two words, capturing a imagewhole life. But it couldn’t have been a difficult choice.
Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (2010)
In July 1997, a Cuban-Argentine forensic team unearthed the skeletal remains of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Vallegrande, Bolivia. Thirty years earlier, on October 9, 1967, CIA-trained Bolivian Special Forces agents had captured and executed the thirty-nine-year-old revolutionary before dumping his body in a shallow pit near a dirt runway.