Socialist Review.

Socialist Review ( SR ) was a periodical, initially associated with the New Left movement, which ran from 1970 to 2006 under the titles Socialist Revolution (1970-1978), Socialist Review (1978-2001), and Radical Society: Review of Culture and Politics (2002-2006). The journal focused on socialist discourses, its stated purpose in the first issue being “to help build the theoretical comprehension of advanced capitalism which is prerequisite to the development of mass socialist consciousness” ( Socialist Revolution 145). Over time, the journal also confronted issues surrounding feminism, gender and sexuality, international affairs, social justice, political and economic systems, cultural theory, and postmodern critical theory. Prominent intellectuals who contributed to the journal or participated in its editorial board included: Robert Allan, Debra Chasnoff, Dan Brook, Nancy Chodorow, Noam Chomsky, Gary Delgado, Kate Ellis, Barbara Epstein, Jeffrey Escoffier, Herbert Gintis, Carol Hatch, Dorothy Healey, Michael Kazin, Karl E. Klare, Michael Lerner, Steve McMahon, Robby Meerpol, Ruth Milkman, David Noble, Michael Omni, David Plotke, Pam Rosenthal, Martha Rosler, George Ross, Son Silliman, Albert Szymanski, James Weinstein, Howard Winant, and Eli Zaretsky.

Originally titled Socialist Revolution, the journal was founded by James Weinstein and Anne Farrar, former members of another leftist journal, Studies on the Left . They formed a collective in San Francisco, formally “The Center for Social Research and Education,” but informally referred to as “the SR collective.” Critical of perceived sectarianism in East Coast leftist movements, the SR collective entertained discussions of Marxist theory, Second and Third World experiments with communism, European social democracy, and other variants of socialism. “The journals’ founding mission was to try to develop a democratic socialist analysis appropriate to US conditions,” the SR collective wrote in a 20-year retrospective ( Unfinished Business 3).

In 1976, a second editorial collective was started in Boston. It was made up primarily of individuals who had been members of the San Francisco collective as graduate students, then moved on to accept professorships in the Boston area. While the San Francisco collective continued to be comprised mostly of graduate students and activists, the Boston collective tended to be older and more established in the academy. There was some tension between the two groups, but in the jointly published journal, the collectives strove to bridge the gap between activists and academics. A short-lived New York collective failed to take root. (Silliman)

Socialist Revolution was renamed Socialist Review in 1978, reflecting a “more issue-oriented energy, activism, and optimism [for] a promising and potentially more democratic replacement” to radical socialist revolution ( Unfinished Business 6). SR continued to be an important forum for socialist discourses in the 1980s and 1990s, also engaging in discussions of new social movements. The journal published articles on American politics, labor, feminism, racial and sexual minorities, international relations and development, technology and the environment, and cultural and social theory. In 1981, Socialist Review absorbed the journal Marxist Perspectives .

Funding issues, always a concern for SR, became starker in the late 1990s. Brief hiatuses from publication in 1997, 1998 and 2000 prefigured a reimagining of the journal’s purpose, and a name change to Radical Society: Review of Culture and Politics in 2002. This new incarnation, “a journal of social movements, political strategies, foreign policy, international and economic affairs, fiction, poetry, art, and cultural commentary,” ceased publication in 2006.

Bibliography

Radical Society 29, number 1 (April 2002).

Ron Silliman, “Radical Society is Here,” February 04, 2003, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003/02/radical-society-is-here.html.

Socialist Revolution 1, number 1 (January-February 1970).

Socialist Review Collective, “Introduction,” Unfinished Business: Twenty Years of Socialist Review (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 1-10.