Adam Michnik — Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (original) (raw)

2000, Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate

Both of these books, then, seem to end on notes of defeat, if not failure. Mullen's Chicago radicals end up laying the foundation for Ebony, a mass market, middle class magazine, while Maxwell's New York City radicals are, at best, able to leave the left under their own terms. But, in the process of these books, in their analyses, in the stories they tell along the way, there is great hopehope of a cultural politics that links race and class in constructive ways, hope that links white cultural workers and cultural workers of colour in ways that expand them without diminishing them, hope that comes from understanding what earlier generations of radicals might have done wrong, and, perhaps most of all, the hope that comes from the inspiration of being exposed to the