The Relationship Between Marxism and the American Left

The civil rights movement was a cause of the American left in the full-blooded sense of the word. It's only a McCarthy-eye atmosphere of the 40s and 50s that would want to pull this apart or bury this history, says Julian Zelizer. If you see racism like sexism or nationalism as expressions of the alienation in society created by capitalist economic structures, then there's no escaping from them fundamentally outside revolution, writes Zelizer.