Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?

Sexism on the left is the punch you weren't expecting. This week the Socialist Workers party, Britain's largest far-left organisation, is on the brink of collapse after a rape scandal. The scandal is not just that a senior party member was accused of raping a young female activist, but that the party responded by convening its own court, comprised chiefly of the alleged attacker's friends, to decide whether rape had occurred. They decided that it hadn't. At a special conference this weekend its members voted for the second time to uphold that decision.

One of the great mysteries of left is why so many decent revolutionaries end up in political cults that reproduce many of the worst aspects of capitalist society. Unfortunately, most outsider commentaries provide little information on how such Leninist parties actually work. The following writings, mostly by disillusioned ex-members, are the exception.

President Obama has nearly consummated his long courtship with the GOP, yet Black and labor leaders continue to pretend that he is a bulwark against austerity. In an even more nightmarish version of Groundhog Day, "the behavior of the Black and labor leadership actors remains the same, as the economic and political landscape crumbles around them.”

Presidential election years keep me in perpetual cringe mode, as I witness my comrades buying what the 1% is selling. But it’s not only the two-party tango that makes me wince. An equally frustrating Left Wing disorder is a little something I like to call: The Soldier Swoon.

Symptom A: I’ve heard more than a few liberals and progressives (and even some I consider to be radical) using the term “draft dodger” as a method of attacking Mitt Romney.

Well wasn’t that fun! A real hoot in all of its pathetic signals of irrelevance and concession. As though anything would have been fixed if Tom Barrett would have become governor instead of the incumbent Tea Party humping Scott Walker. It is all seemingly quite ridiculous and peculiar, how fast and easily a popular uprising was corralled and broken.

Rumours and unofficial statements are being made regarding major gains in our dispute at St Georges - University of London. So far Ocean the cleaning contractor are refusing to talk to our union. A leafleting session by IWW cleaners promoting tomorrow's protest caused a major stir at the University on Wednesday. Yesterday the Ocean CEO was summoned. Today there are indications of concessions.

  My history as an organizer went from being an unofficial member of the International Socialist Organization to President of the United Socialist Movement of the Americas- Buffalo Chapter to the President of Fight the Power UB. That history has been one of narrowing the struggles I fight and one I stand by fully. As many of you have seen, over the past few months, more and more of my articles and posts have been less about the class struggle and socialism and more about racism and anti-imperialism/settler colonialism. I want to, for those that care to know, explain why I think my primary place right now should be in the African liberation struggle vs the socialist movement proper.

The claim that C. L. R. James is a major contributor to revolutionary thought, not only as regards Pan-Africanism but every major aspect of the Marxist legacy, may seem even now exaggerated or mistaken. He has been no demigod of the younger generations like Herbert Marcuse, has no European intellectual reputation on the scale of a Sartre, his books do not even sell so briskly as those of his bete noir from decades ago, Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel. When I approached a leading American Left book publisher in 1970 with a proposal for a C. L. R. James anthology, the editor politely suggested to me that the author's work could gain attention "on Black subjects only." That has been an all-too-characteristic response. Yet I am persuaded that if civilization survives the threat of nuclear annihilation another quarter century, James will be considered one of the few truly creative Marxists from the 1930's to the 1950's, perhaps alone in his masterful synthesis of world history, philosophy, government, mass life and popular culture.

This paper argues for the pertinence of autonomist Marxism to an era of computerised capital and postmodern culture. Broadly speaking, ’autonomist Marxism’ designates that tradition of Marxism which places at its centre the self-activity of the working class - a tradition with deep historical roots and wide international diffusion.1 However, perhaps its most developed contemporary expression, and the one I shall focus on here, is that arising out of the struggles of Italian workers, students and feminists during the 1960s and 70s and formulated in the work of such revolutionary intellectuals as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Mariorosa Dalla Costa, Francois Beradi, and Antonio Negri.