Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Long before I began blogging, I was posting articles to my Columbia website as indicated below. Last October, a technical problem involving the newest Apple operating system and the ssh software used to access the Columbia Unix system prevented me from updating the page below, which is at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mypage.htm. This has now been fixed and as such I have begun updating it again. If you are demented enough to appreciate my writing, you might want to bookmark that page.

Louis Proyect Home Page

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“a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.”   Max Horkheimer
	Louis Proyect, Istanbul, 2005

I am the moderator of the Marxism
mailing list, where my various articles first appear. For information on how
to subscribe to the list, go here.

I first became active in socialist politics in 1967,
the beginning of my 11 years in the American Trotskyist movement.
Despite my profound respect for Leon Trotsky as a Marxist thinker, I
view the Trotskyist movement as such a sectarian mistake. Throughout
most of the 80s, I was active in the Central American solidarity
movement, first with CISPES and then with Tecnica, an organization that
sent computer programmers and other skilled professionals to Nicaragua.
The project eventually took root in southern Africa as well, where it
worked with SWAPO and the ANC. More recently I have given workshops on
the Internet to community and union groups, as well as moderating a
Marxist mailing list on the Internet that can be linked to above.

I have been strongly influenced by the example of The Socialist
Union, a group led by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman who left the Trotskyist
movement in 1953 in order to create an alternative to the sectarian
“vanguard” model. For six years they published a magazine called The
American Socialist and worked to regroup the left. Marxmail is a conscious
attempt to link up with their traditions.

I have also created a small archive
of the writings of James M. Blaut, who died in November, 2000. Jim was an
outstanding scholar and revolutionary whose contributions to our movement are
best commemorated through his work.

My articles, many of which appeared originally as postings to
the Marxism list, have appeared in Sozialismus (Germany), Science and
Society, New Politics, Journal of the History of Economic Thought,
Organization and Environment, Cultural Logic, Dark Night Field Notes,
Revolutionary History (Great Britain), New Interventions (Great
Britain), Canadian Dimension, Revolution Magazine (New Zealand), Swans
and Green Left Weekly (Australia).

I am also a proud member of the NY Film Critics Online:

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