Download or read book The Communist International and US Communism 1919 1929 written by Jacob Zumoff and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Cold War, most historians have set up an opposition between the “American” and “international” aspects of early American Communism. This book examines the development of the Communist Party in its first decade, from 1919 to 1929. Using the archives of the Communist International, this book, in contrast to previous studies, argues that the International played an important role in the early part of this decade in forcing the party to “Americanise”. Special attention is given to the attempts by the Comintern to orient American Communists on the role of black oppression, and to see the struggle for black liberation and the fight for socialism as inextricably linked. The later sections of the book provide the most detailed account now available of how the Comintern, reflecting the Stalinisation of the Soviet Union, intervened in the American party to ensure the Stalinisation of American Communism.
Download or read book Red Chicago written by Randi Storch and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realities of the street-level American Communist experience during the worst years of the Depression "Red Chicago" is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists. Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities in which they lived and the industries where they worked. "A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz"
Download or read book American Labor and the Cold War written by Robert W. Cherny and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American labor movement seemed poised on the threshold of unparalleled success at the beginning of the post-World War II era. Fourteen million strong in 1946, unions represented thirty five percent of non-agricultural workers. Why then did the gains made between the 1930s and the end of the war produce so few results by the 1960s? This collection addresses the history of labor in the postwar years by exploring the impact of the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union on American workers and labor unions. The essays focus on the actual behavior of Americans in their diverse workplaces and communities during the Cold War. Where previous scholarship on labor and the Cold War has overemphasized the importance of the Communist Party, the automobile industry, and Hollywood, this book focuses on politically moderate, conservative workers and union leaders, the medium-sized cities that housed the majority of the population, and the Roman Catholic Church. These are all original essays that draw upon extensive archival research and some upon oral history sources.
Download or read book Red Black White written by Mary Stanton and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red, Black, White is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans. After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton—a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South—explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments. Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.
Download or read book The History of the North Carolina Communist Party written by Gregory S. Taylor and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a re-evaluation of the objectives and actions of the 'Tar Heel Reds' from the 1920s to the 1960s. The author argues that, contrary to widely held belief, they were not a threat to national security, nor were they beholden to the Soviet Union and that their aims are now accepted parts of the national consensus.
Download or read book Faith in the Masses written by Tony Pecinovsky and published by International Publishers. This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith in the Masses is a collection of 12 essays by historians and activist-scholars on various aspects of the 100-year history of the CPUSA. The essays in this book demonstrate the Communist Party, USA's century long commitment to equality, workers' rights, peace, and socialism. They highlight the struggle for African American equality, Black liberation, and women's rights, and place athletic, cultural, and literary activities well within the scope of CPUSA work. This book asserts that the CPUSA played a leading role in the social and economic justice struggles of the 20th century. Included in this collection are three essays that challenge the narrative dominant within traditional academic circles that the CPUSA became a marginal political force post-1956. Faith in the Masses adds the historiography of the CPUSA with a discussion of Communist involvement in the 1960s and 1970s youth and student upsurge, peace, civil rights, and the movement for environmental sustainability.
Download or read book The Communist Party on the American Waterfront written by Vernon L. Pedersen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early years of the Great Depression, the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) was a colorful presence on the American Waterfront. In 1935, the MWIU seemed to vanish, closing its halls and stopping its publications. Vernon L. Pedersen convincingly demonstrates that the MWIU did not vanish—instead it was ordered by the Moscow-based Communist International to send its members into mainstream ALF unions and take over from the inside. Initiated by accident on the west coast and deliberately duplicated in the east, the Communists seized control of the west coast longshoremen’s union, destroyed the International Seamen’s Union, and created the Communist-dominated National Maritime Union.
Download or read book Hammer and Hoe written by Robin D. G. Kelley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.
Download or read book The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions written by Roger Keeran and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Communists and American labor raises three questions. Were the Communists legitimate (or good) trade unionists? Were they an important influence in the labor movement? Were they good Communists? These questions involve matters that go beyond the history of Communists in the auto industry. Consequently, this work does not provide the last word on them. Yet, raising these questions has a point. It enables the expression of views on these questions that differ from others that have been written about Communists and labor and what assumptions lie behind this work. Finally, this book refutes some commonly held ideas about Communists and labor. The introduction also discusses several problems of method: the identification of Communists and the reliability of Communist sources and oral history.
Download or read book The Romance of American Communism written by Vivian Gornick and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.
Download or read book It Didn t Happen Here written by Seymour Martin Lipset and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why socialism has failed to play a significant role in the United States - the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism - has been a critical question of American history and political development. This study surveys the various explanations for this phenomenon of American political exceptionalism.
Download or read book The Nanyang Revolution written by Anna Belogurova and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking analysis of how the Malayan Communist Party helped forge a Malayan national identity, while promoting Chinese nationalism.
Download or read book California Red written by Dorothy Healey and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Manifesto written by Ernesto Che Guevara and published by Ocean Press. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to ‘do something,’ you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.” — Adrienne Rich With a preface by Adrienne Rich, Manifesto presents the radical vision of four famous young rebels: Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Che Guevara’s Socialism and Humanity.
Download or read book Bounded Choice written by Janja A. Lalich and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate "monks" awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, a compelling look at the cult phenomenon written for a wide audience, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives—and sometimes their very lives—to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational. Looking closely at Heaven's Gate and at the Democratic Workers Party, a radical political group of the 1970s and 1980s, Janja Lalich gives us a rare insider's look at these two cults and advances a new theoretical framework that will reshape our understanding of those who join such groups. Lalich's fascinating discussion includes her in-depth interviews with cult devotees as well as reflections gained from her own experience as a high-ranking member of the Democratic Workers Party. Incorporating classical sociological concepts such as "charisma" and "commitment" with more recent work on the social psychology of influence and control, she develops a new approach for understanding how charismatic cult leaders are able to dominate their devotees. She shows how members are led into a state of "bounded choice," in which they make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations. In addition to illuminating the cult phenomenon in the United States and around the world, this important book also addresses our pressing need to know more about the mentality of those true believers who take extreme or violent measures in the name of a cause.
Download or read book The Workers Opposition in the Russian Communist Party written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919-30 comprises translations of articles, speeches, theses, letters, and other documents pertaining to the activity of the Workers’ Opposition group and its members during its existence and until 1930.
Download or read book Organizing the Unemployed written by James J. Lorence and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1996-07-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Michigan during the Great Depression, this book highlights the efforts of community organizers and activists in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to mobilize the jobless for mass action. In doing so, it demonstrates the relationship between unemployed activism and the rise of industrial unionism. Moreover, by discussing Communist and Socialist initiatives on behalf of displaced workers, the book illuminates the impact of radicalism on social change and shows how political claims influenced the cultural discourse of the 1930s. The book not only helps fill a void in our knowledge of community activism, worker culture, and labor history in the 1930s but also sheds light on the New Deal's domestication of American labor and the channeling of mass protest toward politically and socially acceptable goals. The UAW acceptance of responsibility for the underclass of the 1930s raises pertinent questions for labor in the 1990s.
