Left Americana

Paul Le Blanc, Professor of History at La Roche College, is author of A Short History of the U.S. Working Class; Work and Struggle: Voices of U.S. Labor Radicalism; and Choice Award winner A Freedom Budget for All Americans.

“Left Americana offers an open-minded overview of select experiences and thinkers in the context of “what is to be done” in America. Le Blanc does not seek or offer a formula; he simply asks that leftists think anew about what kind of revolutionary organization can overcome the global triumph of capitalism. How can an organization be thoroughly democratic yet disciplined enough to be successful without just replicating the authoritarian society it wishes to replace? What specific national factors must American radicals take into account? The only given in Le Blanc’s view is that a viable American left must exemplify the values and governance of the new society it advocates.”—International Socialist Review

• 1.Introduction: Engaging with History2.Socialism in the United States: Absent and Latent3.Haymarket Revolutionaries: Albert Parsons and His Comrades 4.Brookwood Labor College 5.U.S. Labor Vanguards in the 1930s6.Remembering Ruth Querio7.The Marxism of C.L.R. James8.Martin Luther King, Jr.: Christian Core, Socialist Bedrock9.Revolutionary Road, Partial Victory: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom10.Reluctant Memoir of the 1950s and 1960s11.Triumphant Arc of U.S. Conservatism12.New Left and Beyond 13.Making Sense of Trotskyism in the United States14.Revolutionary Redemption 15.Occupy: Ancestors and Descendants