''New Politics'' is an independent
socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
journal founded in 1961 and still published in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
today. While it is inclusive of articles from a variety of left-of-center positions, the publication is historically associated with a "Neither Washington Nor Moscow!"
Third Camp
The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism that aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism by supporting the organised working class as a "third camp".
The term arose early during ...
, democratic
Marxist
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
perspective, placing it typically to the
left of the
social democratic views in the journal ''
Dissent
Dissent is an opinion, philosophy or sentiment of non-agreement or opposition to a prevailing idea or policy enforced under the authority of a government, political party or other entity or individual. A dissenting person may be referred to as ...
.''
Overview
Julius
The gens Julia (''gēns Iūlia'', ) was one of the most prominent patrician families in ancient Rome. Members of the gens attained the highest dignities of the state in the earliest times of the Republic. The first of the family to obtain the ...
and
Phyllis Jacobson
Phyllis Jacobson (1922 – March 2, 2010) was an American socialist. Together with her lifetime political and personal partner Julius Jacobson, she co-edited the independent left journal '' New Politics'' from the 1960s until the end of the 20th ...
were the founders and longtime co-editors of the journal, which had a political center of gravity reflective of their youthful formative experience in the
Independent Socialist League
The Workers Party (WP) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland and Leon Trotsky's belief that the USSR under Jos ...
of the 1940s and 1950s. During the
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
, ''New Politics'' espoused the idea that
socialism
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
is indissoluble from
democracy
Democracy (From grc, δημοκρατία, dēmokratía, ''dēmos'' 'people' and ''kratos'' 'rule') is a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (" direct democracy"), or to choose gov ...
and
freedom
Freedom is understood as either having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one's purposes unhindered. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving on ...
and argued strongly against
totalitarian
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
Communist state
A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comi ...
s and authoritarian visions of
socialism
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
as corruptions of and departures from the socialist ideal. The journal is perhaps best known for having published the seminal article by
Hal Draper
Hal Draper (born Harold Dubinsky; September 19, 1914 – January 26, 1990) was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on t ...
, "
The Two Souls of Socialism
''The Two Souls of Socialism'' is a socialist pamphlet by the Marxist writer Hal Draper, in which the author posits a fundamental division in socialist thought and action between those who favor "Socialism from Above" and those who favor "Socialis ...
," in 1966. It was also the first English-language publication to publish articles by the dissident Polish socialists
Jacek Kuroń
Jacek Jan Kuroń (; 3 March 1934 – 17 June 2004) was one of the democratic leaders of opposition in the People's Republic of Poland. He was widely known as the "godfather of the Polish opposition," not unlike Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Ku ...
and
Karol Modzelewski
Karol Cyryl Modzelewski (23 November 1937 – 28 April 2019) was a Polish historian, writer, politician and academic of Russian origin, one of the leading figures of the democratic opposition in the Polish People's Republic from the 1960s to the 1 ...
.
The first series of ''New Politics'' ran from 1961 through 1976, after which it ceased publication for a decade. The journal was restarted in 1986 and has been in print ever since, publishing two issues per year.
The current co-editors are Saulo Colón,
Dan La Botz
Daniel H. La Botz (born August 9, 1945) is an American labor union activist, academic, journalist, and author. He was a co-founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and has written extensively on worker rights in the United Stat ...
, Nancy Holmstrom, Jason Schulman, and Julia Wrigley, and its editorial board members are Barry Finger, Thomas Harrison, Michael Hirsch, Micah Landau, Scott McLemee,
Stephen R. Shalom,
Bhaskar Sunkara, Lois Weiner, and Reginald Wilson. For many years Joanne Landy was a member of the editorial board until her death in 2017.
Contributors have included
Michael Albert
Michael Albert (born April 8, 1947) is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published books, articles, and other contributions on a wide array of subjects. He has also set up his own media ...
,
Bettina Aptheker
Bettina Fay Aptheker (born September 13, 1944) is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author. Aptheker was active in civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since worked in developing femini ...
,
Stanley Aronowitz,
Elaine Bernard
Elaine Bernard is the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is also a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for ...
,
Janet Biehl
Janet Biehl (born September 4, 1953) is an American author, copyeditor, and artist. She authored several books and articles associated with social ecology, the body of ideas developed and publicized by Murray Bookchin. Formerly an advocate of his ...
,
Ian Birchall
Ian Birchall (born 1939) is a British Marxist historian and translator, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of numerous articles and books, particularly relating to the French Left. Formerly Senior Lecturer in French at Mid ...
,
Murray Bookchin,
Johanna Brenner
Johanna Brenner is an American feminist and sociologist whose writing and thought is in the socialist-feminist vein.
A graduate of Reed College (B.A., 1964) and the University of California, Los Angeles (M.A., 1970; Ph.D., 1979), she spent four ...
,
Stephen Eric Bronner,
Paul Buhle
Paul Merlyn Buhle (born September 27, 1944) is a (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series ...
,
Eric Chester,
Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff (born Yigael Glückstein, he, יגאל גליקשטיין; 20 May 1917 – 9 April 2000) was a Trotskyist activist. Born to a Jewish family in Palestine, he moved to Britain in 1947 and by the end of the 1950s had assumed the pen na ...
,
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
,
Bogdan Denitch Bogdan Denitch (born Bogdan Denis Denić, sr-Cyrl, Богдан Денис Денић; August 9, 1929 – March 28, 2016) was an American sociologist of Serb origin. He was a leading authority on the political sociology of the former Yugoslavia, an ...
,
Hal Draper
Hal Draper (born Harold Dubinsky; September 19, 1914 – January 26, 1990) was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on t ...
,
Martin Duberman
Martin Bauml Duberman (born August 6, 1930) is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. Duberman is Professor of History Emeritus at Herbert Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City.
Early life
Duberman was born ...
,
Martin Glaberman
Martin Glaberman (December 13, 1918 – December 17, 2001) was an American Marxist writer on labor, historian, academic, and autoworker.
Biography
Glaberman was associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a radical left group which underst ...
,
Robin Hahnel
Robin Eric Hahnel (born March 25, 1946) is an American economist and professor emeritus of economics at American University. He was a professor at American University for many years and traveled extensively advising on economic matters all over t ...
,
Herbert Hill,
Doug Ireland,
Staughton Lynd,
Sidney Lens
Sidney may refer to:
People
* Sidney (surname), English surname
* Sidney (given name), including a list of people with the given name
* Sidney (footballer, born 1972), full name Sidney da Silva Souza, Brazilian football defensive midfielder
* S ...
,
Nelson Lichtenstein
Nelson Lichtenstein (born November 15, 1944) is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is labor historian who has written also about 20t ...
,
Michael Löwy
Michael Löwy (born 6 May 1938) is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the ''École des ha ...
,
Manning Marable
William Manning Marable (May 13, 1950 – April 1, 2011) was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University.Grimes, William"Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60" ''The Ne ...
,
Sean Matgamna
Sean Matgamna is an Irish Trotskyist active in Britain. A founder of Workers' Fight in 1966, he is still a prominent member of the group, now called the Alliance for Workers' Liberty.
Early life
Matgamna was born in 1941 in Ennis, County Clare ...
,
Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick Sr. (March 13, 1904 – February 7, 1981) was a German-American Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions.
Throughout his life, Mattic ...
,
Kim Moody
Kim Moody (born 1940) is an American socialist activist and writer on labor who advocates social movement unionism, a revitalized labor movement of mobilized and militant rank-and-file workers, rather than business unionism, structured from the t ...
,
Christopher Phelps
Christopher Phelps (born 1965) is an American political and intellectual historian of the twentieth century. The subjects of his research and writing include philosophical pragmatism, class and labor in social thought, the American Left, and rac ...
,
Adolph Reed
Adolf (also spelt Adolph or Adolphe, Adolfo and when Latinised Adolphus) is a given name used in German-speaking countries, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Flanders, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and to a lesser extent in vari ...
,
David Roediger
David R. Roediger (born July 13, 1952) is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas, where he has been since the fall of 2014. Previously, he was an American Kendrick C. Babcock Professor o ...
,
Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen (born January 5, 1947) is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York City, and Centennial ...
,
Jane Slaughter,
Immanuel Wallerstein
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (; September 28, 1930 – August 31, 2019) was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his wor ...
,
Stan Weir,
Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society an ...
,
B. J. Widick B. J. Widick (born Branko J. Widick in Okučani, present-day Croatia, October 25, 1910; died Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 28, 2008) was an American labor activist in the United Auto Workers union and socialist movements.
Background
An immigrant to t ...
,
Ashley Dawson
Ashley Dawson is an author, activist, and professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Dawson specializes in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental hum ...
,
Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic. A 2014 collection of her essays, ''The Essential Ellen Willis,'' received the National ...
,
Kevin B. Anderson,
Dan Georgakas
Dan Georgakas ( el, Νταν Γεωργακάς; 1938–2021) was an American anarchist poet and historian, who specialized in oral history and the American labor movement, best known for the publication ''Detroit: I do mind dying: A study in u ...
,
Patrick Bond
Patrick Bond (born 1961, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology. From 2020-21 he was professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-19, d ...
,
Sharon Smith,
Christian Parenti
Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist, academic, and author.
Early life and education
Parenti is the son of Michael Parenti and Susan Parenti. He attended Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, The New School for S ...
,
David Bacon,
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
__NOTOC__
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of ''From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation'' (2016). For this book, ...
,
Gilbert Achcar and
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a politica ...
.
References
* Worcester, Kent. "''New Politics''," in ''The Encyclopedia of the American Left,'' 2d ed., ed.
Mari Jo Buhle
Mari Jo Buhle (born 1943) is an American historian and William J. Kenan Jr. University Professor Emerita at Brown University.
Early life and education
Buhle was born in 1943 as Mari Jo Kupski. She graduated from North Chicago Community High S ...
,
Paul Buhle
Paul Merlyn Buhle (born September 27, 1944) is a (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series ...
, and
Dan Georgakas
Dan Georgakas ( el, Νταν Γεωργακάς; 1938–2021) was an American anarchist poet and historian, who specialized in oral history and the American labor movement, best known for the publication ''Detroit: I do mind dying: A study in u ...
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 555–556.
External links
Official website
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Alternative magazines
Political magazines published in the United States
Biannual magazines published in the United States
Magazines established in 1961
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