Recovering a history of Indigenous Communism in the US

Posted by Owen Walsh and Kathryn Berry on 2025-10-20

The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) has long been seen as a thoroughly ‘un-American’ organisation, not least by Cold War historians. Over recent decades, the claim that Communism only ever appeared in the US as a hostile Soviet plot has been roundly refuted in scholarship. Instead, scholars have established the importance of Communists to thoroughly American cultural traditions, civil rights [...]

Read More

Trotsky in the Andes

Posted by Peter Morgan on 2025-07-03

The late 1920s were a hard time to be a cosmopolitan Marxist. Anticommunists were going after Marxism for its lack of nationalism, and the Soviet Union itself – increasingly dominated by Stalin – had dialled down the internationalism of the early Russian Revolution. All of this was a headache for the Peruvian thinker, José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930). Mariátegui is the most important figure in [...]

Read More