Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University. He is author of The Party Is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism.
In the United States, like in most countries, critics of Marxism present it as a rootless foreign import. Yet both American admirers of Karl Marx and conservatives’ attacks on him have granted Marxism a distinctive place in US public life.
The Communist International’s history is often told in terms of polemics among its leaders. But studying the biographies of lesser-known militants who came to Moscow gives a more real sense of the movement’s internal life and what it was like to belong to it.
Head of one of the biggest far-left groups in 1970s Britain, Gerry Healy was accused of rape and sexual abuse. A new biography reflects on the swamp from which he emerged — and how his group’s authoritarian model facilitated his crimes.
Right-wingers often hail Edmund Burke as a founding father of modern conservatism. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is based on fear of the mob — and a racialized worldview that blames Jews for upsetting the “natural” social order.
Marriage equality has finally come to Ireland. But what does the victory say about the state of the gay liberation movement?