African American giants W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were tireless opponents of racial oppression and colonialism. Du Bois was the most prominent black intellectual leader and political activist of the early twentieth century, while the vastly talented Robeson was a brilliant athlete, multilingual actor, and singer. Murali Balaji talks about how their legacy of radicalism has been largely rewritten.

They were socialists, free love advocates, birth control campaigners, and trade unionists. Feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham describes the women who transformed gender relations in the US and the UK at the turn of the last century, prefiguring in many ways the New Left, and embodying an optimism about social change that is sorely lacking today.

The First International was founded in 1864, but a decade later the anarchists, led by Mikhail Bakunin, and the socialists, led by Karl Marx, rancorously parted ways -- and anarchism and socialism have since been uneasy allies and often outright antagonists. Yet at a moment when capitalism is unraveling, as Andrej Grubacic argues, perhaps it's time to see what common ground can be found between the two most potent tendencies within the radical left.

Did socialism begin with Marx and Engels? Or do we need to go back to certain utopian thinkers of the early nineteenth century? And what did Karl Marx believe about workers, capitalism and revolution, anyway? Michael Newman discusses early developments in socialist theory and practice. Also, Mike Davis comments on California's budget crisis.

A forerunner of radical politics a century later, Edward Carpenter advocated women's and homosexual liberation, prison reform, free love, health food, recycling, and Eastern mysticism. Sheila Rowbotham talks about the life, times and legacy of the 19th-century gay socialist writer.