In Venezuela, as elsewhere in Latin America, the construction of such a party is necessary in order to achieve authentic democracy. The democratization of the PSUV and greater input from the grassroots are more imperative now than at any other time for the very survival of the Chavista project and the success of its strategy for change.

Edited by CD founder Cy Gonick with chapters from 25 writers who evaluate how CD discussed diverse subjects over a span of 50 years: 50 years of class struggle; 50 Years in Indian Country; 50 Years of art and culture; 50 Years of making socialism; 50 Years of rebelling youth; 50 years of anti-racism, human rights and immigration advocacy and much more.

A is for Activist is the most recent addition to the field of radical children’s literature, but it is by no means the first revolutionary children’s book. In fact, there is a long history of oppositional children’s storytelling, from socialist primers in the 1910s to the anti-authoritarian and contrarian sensibilities of stories from authors such as Dr. Seuss in the 1960s and 1970s.

Radicals including our own founding editor Cy Gonick, legal theorist Ummni Khan, author Gary Kinsman and musicians Geoff Berner and Todd Kowalski recount the early experiences that shaped their political lives, galvanized their spirit for activism and ultimately defined their diverse creative work.

They fell because they lost competitive elections, not because of US invasions or military coups. These same leftist leaders, who had successfully defeated coups and withstood gross US political intervention via AID, NED, the DEA and other US government agencies, lost at the ballot box.

This is his vision. It is a far sight more humane than what passes for liberalism in the U.S. It is what appeals to the common sense of people who have found their own wealth disappear and their incomes deteriorate, who see children flounder with debt and their credit cards provide the means to maintain their standard of living.

Barely five feet tall but considered an intellectual giant, Marxist scholar and political science professor Ellen Meiksins Wood was instrumental in making Toronto’s York University a centre for the radical critique of social and political thought toward the end of the 20th century.

We should not confuse respect for the plurality of human experience and social struggles with a complete dissolution of historical causality, where there is nothing but diversity, difference, and contingency, no unifying structures, no logic of process, no capitalism and therefore no negation of it, no universal project of human emancipation.

There is a decisive mood of resistance in America – a backlash to the status quo. The Bernie Sanders campaign for president is capturing that mood, and it is no surprise that ‘socialism’ was the most looked-up word in 2015.

What the NDP needs is a combination of its existing social progressivism with a recommitment to the principles of economic democracy and a healthy skepticism of capitalism, argues Canadian Dimension columnist Christo Aivalis. This, and not electoral opportunism, is the enduring legacy of the democratic socialist tradition in Canada.