1. Action Will Be Taken 
   Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2004
   Marxism's decline isn't just an intellectual concern -- it too has practical effects. If you lack any serious understanding of how capitalism works, then it's easy to delude yourself into thinking that moral appeals to the consciences of CEOs and finance ministers will have some effect. You might think that central banks' habit of provoking recessions when the unemployment rate gets too low is a policy based on a mere misunderstanding. You might think that structural adjustment and imperial war are just bad lifestyle choices.
2. The Activists' Handbook
   A Step-by-Step Guide to Participatory Democracy
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2012
   A guide to grassroots activism.
3. Connexions Digest
   Volume 12, Number 2 - Issue 48 - Winter 1988-89 - A Social Change Sourcebook
   Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
   First Published: 1989
   
4. Critique of Nonviolent Politics 
   From Mahatma Gandhi to the Anti-Nuclear Movement
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1984   Published: 2002
   Ryan accepts that sometimes nonviolence can be effective, but says that sometimes it is not: "a principled insistence on nonviolence can in some circumstances be dangerous to progressive social movements." He says that nonviolence theory "is troubled by moral dogma and mechanical logic."
5. Easily Led
   A History of Propaganda
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1999
   From Ancient Sumer to modern Poland, Thomson traces the use of propaganda and its influence on human events.
6. Framing the Future
   How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People
   Resource Type: Book
   Polls show that most Americans favor progressive policy, but they also embrace conservative philosophy. George Lakoff and other analysts have shown that, in order to reclaim America for all Americans, progressives must put forth our moral vision, celebrate our values and principles, and shout them out loud. But which values? And how do we communicate them? In Framing the Future, consultant and political strategist Bernie Horn argues that the task is easier than it sounds. His book proposes a new philosophy of progressivism that articulates what we really stand for.
7. From Dictatorship to Democracy 
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2002   Published: 2010
   A short, serious introduction to nonviolent struggle, its applications, and strategic thinking. Based on pragmatic arguments, this piece presents nonviolent struggle as a realistic alternative to war and other violence in acute conflicts. It also contains a glossary of important terms and recommendations for further reading.
8. Hegemony How-To
   A Roadmap for Radicals
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2017
   Hegemony How-To is a practical guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about questions of power, leadership, and strategy.
9. "Hegemony How-To": Rethinking Activism and Embracing Power
   A review of Hegemony How-To: a Roadmap for Radicals, by Jonathan Smucker
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2017
   "How many times, I wondered, had I favored a particular action or tactic because I really thought it was likely to change a decision-maker’s position or win over key allies, as opposed to gravitating toward an action because it expressed my activist identity and self-conception? How concerned were we really, in our practice, with political outcomes?"
10. How to End the Tea Party (and Scare Obama at the Same Time)
    A Black / Brown Coalition
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    One of the reasons the left doesn't do better is because it tends to view the right's transgressions as a moral issue rather than as a pragmatic problem as, for example, a baseball coach would do if the Tea Party were the other team. In fact, calling someone a racist is not a particularly useful political move whereas figuring out why they're getting to first base all the time, and you're not, is. The right keeps it simple. It speaks plain talk, not bland abstractions devised by some third rate branding coach. There is hardly anyone in the country who doesn't know the right opposes gay marriage, abortion and illegal immigration. Now try describing three primary goals of liberals or the left and you see the problem.
11. In and against the state
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1979   Published: 1980
    The state is not neutral. It does provide services and resources which most of us need – education, health care, social security. But it does not do so primarily for the good of the working class. It does it to maintain the capitalist system. Although the state may appear to exist to protect us from the worst excesses of capitalism, it is in fact protecting capital from our strength by ensuring that we relate to capital and to each other in ways which divide us from ourselves, and leave the basic inequalities unquestioned.
12. In and Out of Crisis 
    The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2010
    Political economists Albo, Gindin and Panitch lay bare the roots of the crisis, which they locate in the dynamic expansion of capital on a global scale over the last quarter century – and in the inner logic of capitalism itself.
13. Is that an archive in your basement... or are you just hoarding?
    Sources News Release
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    Are you an 'accidental archivist'? Have you been saving the publications and documents produced by the social justice projects you've been involved in? Then Connexions would like to hear from you.
14. Lenin On The Need For Political Compromise
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    Considering the nature of compromises and how to deal with them.
15. Losing Toronto: How Olivia Chow and the left may be giving away an election
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2014
    As we head into the Labour Day weekend that may be accurately deemed to be the start of the homestretch of Toronto's very long mayoral and council election season, the news is not good for leftists or progressives in the city.
16. Manifestos, Programs, Visions 
    Selected Manifestos - Political Statements - Programs
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 1649   Published: 2016
    A selection of left manifestos, programs, poltical statements and visions from the 1600s to today.
17. Marxists Internet Archive 
    Resource Type: Website
    Large archive of the writings of Marx and Engels and of others in the Marxist tradition. Searchable.
18. A Movement Without Demands?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    We claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons.
19. Nader, Greens and Socialists
    Against The Current vol. 91
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2001
    Blaming Ralph Nader for Bush is like blaming the abolitionists for slavery. The Greens ran Nader to end corporate oligarchy, not to support one wing of the oligarchy as a lesser evil against the other wing. Nevertheless, the Democrats, their liberal satellite organizations, and the corporate media are playing the blame game for all it is worth.
20. No Cheers For Anarchism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    A successful movement requires compromise, organization, and yes, even leadership, to actually get things done, none of which appeal to anarchists.
21. Occupy and the Tasks of Socialists 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    
22. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 11, 2017
    Left Parties
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2017
    In recent years, there have been repeated attempts to build left political parties and coalitions, i.e. parties to the left of the established social democratic parties which have long become part of the neoliberal capitalist mainstream. Left parties have emerged out of mass movements in countries like Spain (Podemos), Germany (Die Linke), and Greece (Syriza). In Latin America, in the last two decades, left movements or parties have formed governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay. What these new left parties/movements have in common is a strategy of engaging in grassroots organizing and also running in elections. They all describe themselves as socialist, though in many cases their programs are more reminiscent of what social democrats used to advocate decades ago: reforms that would tame and manage capitalism rather than abolish it. Their ultimate vision may be a world without capitalism, but their immediate proposals are more modest and incremental, though still significantly to the left of the neo-liberal consensus.
23. Politics without Democracy, Democracy without Politics
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    The aim of the Occupy movement is to create a big tent, to represent the 99%, in the name of democracy. But democracy requires not big tent politics, but the very opposite. It requires the drawing of political lines, the engaging in political conflict, the making of political choices.
24. Presenting Insurgent Notes
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    We take our Marx and Engels seriously. Recent history, beginning perhaps (in the US) with the UPS strike of 1997 and the 'battle of Seattle' in 1999, now quickened by the abject financial and ideological meltdown (Fall 2008) of the three decades of the stifling 'neo-liberal' era, has favored a certain revival of the radical critique of capitalism, by which we understand first and foremost the work of Karl Marx.
    "Theory must seek its practice," Marx wrote long ago, but "practice must also seek its theory", and such theoretical ferment expresses the rising tide, in fits and starts reaching back to the 1990's, of an accelerating global reaction to the ravages of the 'neo-liberal', 'Washington consensus' phase of capitalism, after the rollback of what we might consider he last (l968-1977) offensive of the world working class.
25. A progressive dialogue on the future: Six questions for leftists 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    Leftists don't spend enough time or energy working on important strategic questions. If we could resolve a handful of these, even tentatively, and try out some solutions, we would be far more successful. Here are six from my list of the most important questions, as well as my answers, which by their very incompleteness and inadequacy should suggest that more people should work on them.
26. The Prophet Alarmed
    The Extreme Center: A Warning (Book Review)
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    Review of Tariq Ali's The Extreme Center: A Warning. In The Extreme Center, Ali gives more than just a pungent and entertaining smack-down of corruption in British politics.
27. Publicity and the Canadian State
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2014
    A collection examining the state's relationship with public practices and the "permanent campaign," the constant search for politicians and their strategists for popular consent.
28. Rebuilding the Left in a Time of Crisis
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    The type of organizers we need to develop need to be those who have developed the skills and capacities and depth that allow them to be good at taking a defensive struggle and saying we can both fight it, and maybe fight it more effectively, if we can link it to a set of demands that are forward looking. They need to be visionary in terms of a socialist strategy.
29. The Red Menace 
    A libertarian socialist newsletter
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1975   Published: 1980
    Articles on topics such as socialism, Marxism, anarchism, work, popular education, organizing, wages for housework, Leninism, bureaucracy, hierarchy, jargon, prostitution, obscenity, science fiction, and terrorism.
    
30. Reform and Revolution 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1967   Published: 1968
    An essay taken from Andre Gorz's Le Socialisme Difficile in which he discusses how socialist strategy can aim to crate the objective and subjective conditions which will make mass revolutionary action and engagement in a successful trail of strength with the bourgeoise possible.
31. Rosa Luxemburg 
    Selected Political Writings
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    A selection of Rosa Luxemburg's writings which highlight her outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of revolutionary socialism.
32. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2004
    A definitive one-volume collection of Luxemburg's writings.
33. Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution in the Twenty-first Century
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform and Revolution, written at a high point of socialist struggle, contains invaluable lessons for today's new generation of activists as they confront the political and organizational challenges of the day.
34. SDS 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1973   Published: 1974
    The rise and development of the Students for a Democratic Society, the organization that became the major expression of the American left in the 1960s -- its passage from student protest to institutional resistance to revolutionary activism, and its ultimate impact on American politics and life.
35. Shades of Grey -- A Left Chapter look at strategy, tactics and endorsements in the 2015 election
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    With just under two weeks to go until election day, anti-capitalist leftists are in something of a quandary.
36. Socialism and Revolution 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1967   Published: 1973
    Representative democracy in every industrially advanced country is in a state of profound crisis. But we have been accustomed for so long to accept democracy in the form of its outward appearances and parliamentary institutions that its decay often does not become apparent to us until those institutions have been either brushed aside or reduced to a purely decorative role.
37. Spinwars
    Politics and New Media
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1999
    An examination of media manipulation in late 20th Century North American politics.
38. Three Questions of Political Strategy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2019
    As I read contributions to The Call and Jacobin, and from Solidarity members, I wonder if that doesn't explain some of the disagreements about "reform or revolution" that have come up between some Solidarity members and some members of DSA’s Bread and Roses caucus. Framing these disagreements as a set of questions has helped me better understand the contending views.
39. 2013 Unoccupied
    Sun Tzu's Messages to the Occupy Movement
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    The ”Occupy” movement has apparently receded into the long night. The structural challenges remain the same, and opposition is still needed. What has been exposed as fruitless, however, is the idea of occupying parks in chaotic sieges that signify nothing.
40. The Unknown Dimension 
    European Marxism Since Lenin
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    The radical intellectual tradition of European post-Leninist Marxism, so different from the dogma of the orthodox leftist parties, is an unknowwn dimension. This anthology sets out to recover this Marxist tradition and to restore the centrality of Marxist revolutionary thought and practice.
41. What Needs To Be Done: A Socialist View
    Published in Monthly Review, Volume 61, Number 6 - November 2009
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    What is worth fighting for? Perhaps this severe recession offers us an opportunity to ask this question. This crisis has revealed the rotten foundation of our economy and called into question the neoliberal policies and ideology that have deepened the rot.
42. What to do with a tin of beans? Food banks, the left and the movement
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    Acts of collective practical solidarity are a springboard to participation in campaigning against austerity and the Tory war on the poor.
43. Where Is Indonesia Going?
    Against The Current vol. 87
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2000
    For both admirers and critics of Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, the picture is disturbing: At the presidential palace in Jakarta there are signs of a new “royal court” in the making. Officials converse in Javanese, not the national language Bahasa Indonesia; Wahid himself borrows from mysticism and ancient tracts to plot political strategy; and family and friends are acting as gatekeepers and facilitators, in some cases for businessmen hoping to curry favor. Some analysts describe it as a form of “benign Suhartoism,” a throwback to the disastrous last decade of President's 32-year rule.

Experts on estrategia pol¡tica in the Sources Directory

1. Marxists Internet Archive