By MLToday Editors
December 2024
Tribute to Joseph Jamison on the Twentieth Anniversary of MLToday
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the website Marxism-Leninism Today (MLT). The editors would like to take this occasion to pay tribute to one of the founders of MLT and the site coordinator for most of these years, our esteemed comrade, Joseph Jamison. This small tribute is not because Joe is retiring or leaving MLT but because we wish to express our appreciation for all he has done and continues to do for the website.
In 2004, after several years of witnessing with alarm the frankly reformist drift of the leadership of the Communist Party USA, Joe was among a group of Party members, including what were then past and present members of the Party’s National Committee, who decided to create a website that would serve as an independent platform, initially within the Party, “for class-struggle ideas, anti-reformist ideas, and the view of the international Communist movement, as well as for Left, anti-imperialist, and democratic writing generally. It would have a special stress on Cuba solidarity.” These ideas have remained the guiding principles of MLT.
On June 24, 2004, the site was registered. In 2007, Joe, a longtime Party member, activist in the trade union and peace movement, and co-author of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, took over the job of site coordinator, a position he continues to occupy.
Joe has provided ideological and political leadership for the MLT collective. Under the pen name, Edward A. Drummond, under his own name, and under the name of the Editors, Joe has written some of the key ideological pieces that have appeared in MLT as well as book reviews and other essays. Most notably in January 2006, Joe wrote Reflections of Revisionism in the USA, a masterful history of revisionism in the world movement and in the American party and an incisive critique of revisionism of CPUSA at the time. In 2017, Joe was largely responsible for producing, A Contribution to a Party Program, a statement reflecting the editors’ views on what a real Communist Party program should be.
When Joe took over as site coordinator he already had considerable writing and editorial skills but he was not a tech person. Nonetheless, in short order he undertook [and] mastered the technical skills of managing a website. This included finding, formatting and posting articles, developing archives and a useful search engine, improving the look of the web pages, and introducing graphics and other enhancements.
Joe also gave the site an international presence by cultivating contacts with Communists and other activists abroad. While handling the site, Joe also traveled to Canada, Ireland, England, Portugal, France, Greece, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam and China. As a result, MLT has an international readership, its articles are often republished by other Communist parties, and its editors and writers are invited to fraternal party conventions and other events.
When the occasion called for it, Joe has taken the lead in raising money for the site, and he and his wife Mary have hosted face-to-face meetings of MLT editors and writers at their home in Queens.
Under Joe’s stewardship, MLT developed relations with the late Glen Ford, the founder of Black Agenda Report, and with other Marxist-oriented individuals, as well as aspiring Marxist-Leninist formations. Through Joe’s efforts, MLT has extended the number of contributors and outside sources of articles and has increased the readership, which this year reached nearly 25,000 visits some weeks and hundreds of thousands of views over the last twenty years. This includes readers from nineteen countries besides the U.S.
All of the editors, contributors, and readers of MLT owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Joe’s tireless efforts, his admirable writing, editorial, and organizational talents, and his confident and steady leadership. As one of the editors said, Joe was and continues to be “the heart and soul of Marxism-Leninism Today.” We look forward to many more years working with Joe.
