The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolitionism by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen is a thorough and engaging new history of Black struggle in the US. However, its central argument, that all historic anti-racist struggles fit under the umbrella of anti-fascism, is theoretically flawed, and leads to bad organizing strategy and political defeat.
Evangelical Christians are a dominant social force in the US, instigating culture wars and making or breaking presidential candidates. In recent years they have led a surge of reactionary politics into the mainstream, and are largely responsible for Trumpism as a movement. Understanding the origins and characteristics of Christian nationalism — especially how it relates to US capitalism and imperialism — is key to challenging its influence.
In recent years, the threat of Trotskyist entryism has served as a bogeyman for some members of the Democratic Socialists of America — and a stated goal for others. But the history of the French Turn reveals a strategy that is only viable for Trotskyist organizations under very specific conditions. It is always doomed to fail within the DSA, which is essentially an appendix of the capitalist and imperialist Democratic Party. This analysis has important implications for how we approach the united front and revolutionary regroupment.
Palestinians have been under siege, colonial occupation, expulsion, dispossession, oppression and repression for over 75 years. They have resisted Zionism and imperialism for even longer. Much of this resistance has been nonviolent or at most the hurling of rocks. On...