The American Exceptionalism Of Jay Lovestone And His Comrade: Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 1
By (Author) Tim Davenport
Edited by Paul Le Blanc
Haymarket Books
Haymarket Books
20th February 2018
United States
General
Non Fiction
320.532
Paperback
716
Width 154mm, Height 230mm
Few figures in the history of the American Left can claim a more significant and yet contradictory legacy as Jay Lovestone.
Lovestone and his comrades briefly controlled, and then were dramatically expelled from, the Communist Party of America. The so-called Lovestoneites struck out on their own, forming a new Communist political organization with a unique analysis of American conditions and the international political situationdifferent in content, but similar in its development, to the Trotskyist Left Opposition. This book, the first in a six volume series examining the ideology of dissident Marxist movements in America, provides fundamental documents illuminating the political and foreign policy ideas of Lovestones Communist Party Opposition, which included within its ranks at various times such prominent activists as Benjamin Gitlow, Bertram D. Wolfe, Will Herberg, Charles S. Zimmerman, Louis C. Fraina (Lewis Corey),and Ellen Dawson.
By assembling this collection and providing commentary on these little known documents and articles from the Lovestone group, Le Blanc and Davenport have rendered an invaluable service to historians and activists looking to better understand the political landscape of twentieth-century radicalism.
Paul Le Blanc (Ph.D., 1989) University of Pittsburgh, is Professor of History at La Roche College. He is author or editor of twenty-five books related to the labour movement, including A Freedom Budget for All Americans with Michael Yates. Tim Davenport has been centrally involved in a number of important online efforts, including Wikipedia, the Marxist Internet Archive, and oversees a website on early American Marxism (www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html). He is a member of Historians of American Communism.