Left History (E-Journal - York University)
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Agents Provocateurs: State Infiltration in BlacKkKlansman and the Greensboro Massacre
Full text linkIn 2018, director Boots Riley posted a short, but scathing critique of the film BlacKkKlansman to his Twitter. His criticism emanates mostly from the film’s portrayal of the real-life police detective Ron Stallworth as a hero and its numerous omissions regarding Stallworth’s infiltration of Leftist groups. Much of Riley’s commentary focuses on the film’s failure to account for the police as a foundational aspect of everyday white supremacy, but his essay also speak to the consistent use of white nationalist forces by the State to suppress Leftist and Black radical activism. This paper uses both the film and memoir BlacKkKlansman, as well as Riley’s critique, to frame an analysis of the Klan as a synergistic form of State, white nationalist, and anticommunist repression against a broad spectrum of Leftist activism. Beyond Stallworth, I focus on the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, in which Klansmen and Neo-Nazis murdered five Communist Worker’s Party organizers. The events in Greensboro prove a far more representative example of the true nature of police infiltration of radical groups than those presented in BlacKkKlansman. I argue that despite the popular belief that the Klan and Communist groups constitute the disavowed fringes of American society, the State has routinely provided a space for the Klan’s existence while it has simultaneously persecuted, villainized, and criminalized American Communists and Black radicals. This is borne out by the fact that there has rarely, if ever, been a point where the violence of the Klan has not been favored by law enforcement and government officials over the activism of the Klan’s radical adversaries
Red Yarns: Poetry by a Former Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) Activist
Full text linkA collection of poems from a former Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) activis
Ali Shariati: Islamizing Socialism and Socializing Islam
Full text linkIn this article, I argue that Ali Shariati was a socialist and a religious thinker at the same time. In order to fulfill his mission as a revolutionary thinker who is based largely on Marx, Shariati maintained that he should weaken the link between his thoughts and traditional Marxism or some aspect of them especially the Materialist basis of Marxism. While Shariati establishes his arguments largely on Marxist tools and analysis, he tried to entwine them (and other western philosophies) with Islam, and to insist on the metaphysical basis of his worldview. He formulated his Tawhīd theory to merge between Existential-Marxism and Islam as a total Ideology of action and a vital world-view that he believed in, instead of the institutional static religion of the clergy
Tarah Brookfield, Our Voices Must Be Heard: Women and the Vote in Ontario (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018).
Full text linkElena Chebankova, Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).
Full text linkVictoria Kelley, Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).
Full text linkAtul Kohli, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Full text linkEric W. Sager, Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).
Full text linkDonica Belisle, Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
Full text linkA Failure of Praxis? European Revolutionary Anarchism in Revolutionary Situations 1917-1923
Full text linkAbstract: This article investigates the action of anarchists to the revolutionary situations that emerged in Europe from the October Revolution in Russia until 1923, and their reaction to the failure of anarchist revolutionary practice. It focuses on Russia, Spain and Italy to show the similarities and differences in the anarchist critique of the failure of anarchists to guide the social unrest into a successful revolutionary outcome. Rather than simply looking at the role of their opponents this critique centers on aspects of anarchist praxis and tactics which some anarchists argued needed to be revised in light of experience.
Key words: Anarchism, Russian Revolution, anarcosyndicalism, Triennio Bolchevique, Bienno Ross