Since her association with Leon Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, Sylvia Ageloff has been demonised and vilified, pushed to the margins of history or simply ignored. What has been all too frequently lacking is any sense of respect, sympathy or understanding of her as a human being, a political activist and someone thrust into a situation not of her making. This short essay attempts to set the record straight.
Since her association with Leon Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, Sylvia Ageloff has been demonised and vilified, pushed to the margins of history or simply ignored. What has been all too frequently lacking is any sense of respect, sympathy or understanding of her as a human being, a political activist and someone thrust into a situation not of her making. This short essay attempts to set the record straight.
Sidney Hook briefly emblazoned the Marxist heavens like a revolutionary nova, only to end his political career as a menacing black hole, through which neither the illuminating vision of a socialist alternative nor the heat of insurgency's passion would ever more emerge. Unlike, say, Max Shachtman, who virtually lost the capacity to write, when to do so would have meant justifying the ideological repudiation of the work and commitment of a lifetime, Hook is remembered chiefly by the blighted literary landscape with which he cluttered posterity in the wake of his extended moral collapse.
Four days after House Republicans voted in lockstep to block COVID-19 relief aid backed by economists from both sides of the aisle, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted that House Republicans are counting on a bad economy to help them politically.