Historian, Teacher, Writer

Signs of Subversion

If somebody would’ve told me that in 2018 I’d see a magical realist film comedy about a labor struggle in Oakland, well, I’d say that sounds just about right. Boots Riley’s hot new film Sorry to Bother You exposes the absurdity of America’s racial capitalist regime. It critically portrays the modern workplace, while also giving us a glimpse of what it may take to radically transform it. Check out my Read More

The Socialist Minimum

What would it take to build a global challenge to neoliberal capitalism? How might socialists from different countries join together and devise collective solutions to problems that transcend national borders? Talbot C. Imlay provides a historical answer to these questions in his important new book The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960 (OUP, 2018). Check out my review essay in H-Diplo. It turns out that pragmatic Read More

Inflatable Marx

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. Gareth Stedman Jones’ recent biography, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, gives us the chance to take stock of Marx’s legacy. Do his theories still speak to our twenty-first century world? Stedman Jones doesn’t think so. My review essay in H-Ideas reconstructs the book’s arguments in the context of its author’s own intellectual biography. The image we get is of an inflatable Read More

Reclaiming Antifascism

Antifascism needs restoration. Layers of additional meanings and intentions have accumulated since its inception in the 1920s and ’30s, obscuring its original character. The first layer formed already during World War II, when the phrase “premature antifascists” entered the American lexicon as a label for those on the left who had actively opposed fascist regimes in Europe well before the United States entered the war against the Nazis. Among other Read More

Going Underground

Lately, the idea of resistance has a renewed urgency and appeal. But we won’t be able to fight a fresh wave of authoritarianism without appreciating the symbols that animated the antifascist imagination of the past – in particular, the underground. That symbol has very deep roots in European and US culture, but over the course of the 20th century it was transformed from a threatening zone of subversion into a Read More

The Partisan’s Lament

From eastern Ukraine to an Oregon wildlife refuge, right-wing militias have lately expropriated the memory of antifascist resistance and partisan struggle. But we would do well to remember the progressive and emancipatory potential of that history. Below I’ve translated a famous song of the French Resistance, “La Complainte du partisan” (1943). Here’s a beautiful version by the Russian-born French singer Anna Marly, who composed the song’s original music in 1943 (the lyrics date Read More

A Poem for Dark Times

We surely live in dark times. This afternoon I remembered a poem that Bertolt Brecht wrote in the late 1930s. It was called “An die Nachgeborenen,” and it aimed not to console, but to provoke. Below is my loose translation from the German. (Here’s a recording of Brecht reading the original.) To Future Generations – I –Really, I live in dark times!Innocent words are foolish. An unfurrowed browIndicates apathy. He who Read More