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Who Would Believe It? Annals of the New Left Era

Buhle, Paul
http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/08/who-would-believe-it-annals-of-the-new-left-era

Publisher:  Counterpunch
Date Written:  08/01/2019
Year Published:  2019  
Resource Type:  Article

A review of "You Say You Want a Revolution" a collection of memoirs of the Progressive Labor Party.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Of the various factions that sundered the Students for a Democratic Society at its most promising moment, 1969, when it had perhaps a hundred thousand student members and followers, the Progressive Labor Party is the one that has seemed to have fallen out of history. Apart from pretty uniformly unfriendly descriptions in various historical accounts, "PL" (as known to all, friend or foe) has had no talented memoirist, no extended documentary film treatment, and apparently no faithful members who could stick with it and make much of a claim for its value beyond the early 1970s.

Here, at last, is such a work. Although privately published, "You Say You Want a Revolution" has a chance in today's fluid book market to reach thousands of old-timers and even young radicals with something far better than a "message." The reminiscences in here are deeply personal, often deeply local, and offer just the kind of text that tells us how politics was lived, not written about by the intellectuals, or about the leaders who are remembered, while followers are forgotten. On those grounds alone, it’s a worthy book.


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