An Organization of Organizers

[The International Socialists (IS), an American revolutionary socialist organization of the 1960s and 70s, was the most successful of the many left groups involved in labor organizing in that era. The IS helped to organize and found Teamsters for a Democratic Union and was active in the auto, steel, and telephone workers unions.  And the IS created Labor Notes. Its members were also involved in supporting the Black liberation struggles, the anti-colonial movements, and in broader international solidarity. The IS advocated independent political action to the left of the Democrats, helping to create the Peace and Freedom Party. Now Andrew Stone Higgins has written a history of this group—From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists—by assembling short memoirs of many of its members. With the kind permission of the publisher, Haymarket Books, two of those memoirs are included here, by Thomas Harrison and Anne Mackie. These are followed by this review of Higgins’ book by Alan Wald.]

Collective oral histories of the late-twentieth-century Marxist Left are having a moment. In 2018 there was You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance, a compilation of 404 pages. Now, in 2026, we have two more hefty tomes: Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000), coming in at 412 pages, and this Haymarket Books volume topping them all at 458 pages. The last, about a political tendency aptly described as “an organization of organizers” (2), is the focus of this review essay. Its subject is a bit more demanding to grasp than the others and likely to be read differently by different generations.

The principal reason for the difficult comprehension is that, although its first-hand accounts are polished reflections by socialist leaders and activists, they come from a sequence of four connected organizations: the Independent Socialist Club (ISC, founded in 1964), the Independent Socialist Clubs of America (ISCA, 1967), the International Socialists (IS, 1969), and Red Tide (RT, a high school newspaper in 1971 and the IS youth group in 1974). Moreover, as the very clear and sober Introduction explains, behind these was an earlier sequence of small parties and leagues that evolved from orthodox Trotskyism: primarily the Socialist Workers Party (SWP, 1938), the Workers Party (WP, 1940), the Independent Socialist League (ISL, 1949), the Socialist Youth League (SYL, 1954), and the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL, after the fusion with the SYL in 1958). The list of forty-six organizational abbreviations on pages ix and x is an essential tool for following the narrative, although a flow chart would have helped. Most germane would be an acquaintance with the ins and outs of the dissident Marxist Left, likely familiar to veteran militants of the late twentieth century, but less so to newbies of the new millennium.

Narrating a Social Movement

Putting aside the obvious dissimilarity in political programs of the Far Left currents showcased in the three book-length compilations—commonly characterized as Maoist, pro-Soviet, and “Third Camp” (i.e., “Neither Washington nor Moscow”)—appraising the genre of “collective history” can be oddly akin to watching one of the late plays of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). As in Uncle Vanya (1897), for example, rather than featuring a single hero or protagonist, the narratives recounted by these groups about their pasts rely on an assembly of often-fascinating and even high-wattage characters whose lives intersect. Yet they are often the individuals left out of popular accounts of the periods.

Moreover, instead of dramatizing one or several spectacular or singular events, the focus is customarily on everyday activist life with an atmosphere involving change and loss over a period. A few participants offer interpretative frameworks, but most mainly provide the texture of detail. Sometimes there are even elements of tragic-comic ambiguity and suggestions of a submerged subtext. Historian Andrew Stone Higgins’ absorbing From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor has all of these and more.

To boot, my personally reviewing the record of the IS affords a peculiar kind of voyeurism. At least half of twenty-six activists profiled were already known to me as public figures—through their external selves, mostly representing the IS to the outer world. In this volume the same people now come into view a second time—less guardedly and inside their natural habitats.¹ Curiously, I rarely had to struggle to reconcile the person I knew with what is newly revealed. Does that mean there exists an admirable consistency between public and private selves—or are the self-portraits airbrushed to put forward the best self-image, far from an unembellished look in the mirror?

Lest anyone conclude that personal associations render my views too favorably biased, I should acknowledge that my own political history put me at odds with the IS throughout its existence—critical but not hostile. Like many of the older contributors, I passed several years in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), including Narodnik adventures in its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in Cleveland, Ohio. In the spring of 1968, I decided to join the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) at Antioch College and in fall 1969 the SWP at UC Berkeley. Although “Trotskyism” (or even orthodox Marxism) never appealed to my Sartrean Existentialist sensibility, I made this choice for two main reasons that are indicative of the political problems I saw in the IS that I encountered.

The first was that the YSA/SWP was playing a leading role in organizing mass actions against the Vietnam War, for which it has received at least some recognition in histories of the era. The second was because I (mistakenly) thought the professionally run (and interracial) YSA was exiting orthodoxy and advancing toward a synthesis of a New Left/Old Left politics with an organizational stability that would replace the chaotic and politically confused SDS. Central to this misunderstanding about the direction of the YSA/SWP was my long-distance attraction to its more heterodox French and British affiliates in the Fourth International (United Secretariat). These were Alain Krivine’s Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR) and Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group (IMG), not to mention my addiction to the somewhat-allied British journal New Left Review, edited by Perry Anderson. Moreover, in the spring of 1968 I met and held discussions at Antioch with both Ernest and Gisela [Scholtz] Mandel, who at that time bridged European Trotskyism and the New Left.

By the early 1970s, however, I had growing doubts about the internal organizational practices of the SWP, not visible during my early YSA years. Added to this was a perplexity about the SWP’s resistance to inaugurating a trade union intervention for its willing non-student members after the 1971 economic changes (“The Nixon Shock”). As a result, I was keeping an eye out for socialist groups to which I might switch. One was the IS and the other was the New American Movement (NAM).

The former was principally attractive because it seemed to have members more politically sophisticated and adventurous than the SWP and in the fall of 1969 the IS was already initiating its strategy of building rank-and-file caucuses in unions. On the other hand, there were three big obstacles: what seemed to be its all-white composition, a minimal role in helping to organize a national anti-war movement, and the view of its members that Cuba was a perfidious example of Stalinism in close company with the USSR and China.²

Ahead of Its Time

From the outset, I should say that Higgins’ book does not entirely allay these concerns of fifty years ago. We do learn a great deal more about IS members’ relationship with the early Black Panther Party than I had known and about its recruitment of African Americans when the IS connected with the RT in the mid-1970s. Yet, despite IS support for “immediate withdrawal” from Vietnam (and its role in the 1967 Oakland-Berkeley “Stop the Draft Week”), there is almost nothing substantial about building a mass anti-war movement and throughout the volume Cuba is only characterized with one-sided hostility.³ In the category of disappointments, I should also add that I find little in this volume to confirm the positive impression that I had about the cultural life of the IS being more open to intellectual varieties of Marxism than I was experiencing in my years in the SWP.

This misreading about there being significantly more Marxist pluralism in the IS was based largely on my admiration for the journal International Socialism, which started in 1958. This remarkable publication was produced by the British group also called International Socialists, with which the IS was aligned from 1969 to 1976–77.⁴ While there is one mention of International Socialism being displayed on an ISC literature table (38), the only reference to any of its writings is to an August 1970 essay by Hal Draper (the major theorist of “socialism from below”) on “Marx and Engels and Women’s Liberation,” and this is said to be “dismissive of the contemporary women’s liberation movement” (305). Names such as Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, and Bertolt Brecht are never mentioned in Higgins’ doorstop text.

These caveats aside, I must go on to affirm that the Higgins volume is entirely convincing that the IS achievement in this era should earn a well-deserved place in any accurate history of the 1960–70s Left. Although the IS was but a minor player in the contested landscape of the broad anti-imperialist and anti-racist activism, scholarly and popular histories to date have been unconscionably remiss in failing to give full credit to the ISC’s role in the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the 1967 alliance between the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) and the Black Panthers; and above all for its strategic niche as the most effective “rank-and-file” current within labor after 1970.⁵

The record in From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor should be embraced as a unique source of information and guidance that may help create new forms of organized socialism for the new millennium. Although working conditions have changed, the first-hand accounts tell one what to expect and what might be accomplished in rank-and-file union work and implicitly raise some of the benefits and pitfalls of being in an organized socialist group. It may not offer a compelling vision of the future, but it is necessary for those who aim to reimagine and expand our practical vision for socialist struggle.

Changing objective conditions after the 1980s were certainly critical to the ultimate failure of all Left groups in the late twentieth century. However, one can make the argument that the ultimate collapse of IS as an organization was due in part to its being ahead of its time, based primarily on its misreading of the pace of expected rank-and-file union rebellions but also on organizational matters that still remain unresolved. That’s why ideas and many of the experiences of the IS live on through the widely admired publications of activist-writer Kim Moody and in the debates and discussions in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and smaller Marxist groups of the present time. Above all, they exist in practice through the influence of the IS-initiated organizing project Labor Notes and grassroots member-led Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU).

A Luge Ride through the 1960s and 1970s

Summarizing the vast amount of descriptive material in Higgins’ volume is impossible, but a selective list of topics covered indicates the flavor of the material offered. This includes the formation of the ISC and the student movement in the context of the Free Speech Movement and UC Berkeley activism (by Mike Parker and Thomas Harrison); the relation of the ISC to the Peace and Freedom Party and the Black Panthers (Marilyn Moorehead); undertakings of ISC and IS in the Bay Area, Southern California, Maryland, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, and New Jersey (Sheila Jordan, Sam Friedman, Kim Moody, Nancy Holmstrom, and Robert “Gabe” Gabrielsky); labor activity in auto, steel, teamsters, and United Parcel Workers (Wendy Thompson, David McCullough, Candace Cohn, Mark Levitan, Dan La Botz, and Anne Mackie); and organizing in high school and anti-racist movements (Michael Letwin, Larry Bradshaw, Kim Anno, Arnita Dobbins, Tonya English, and Kyle Hopkins).

There are also several chronicles by IS leaders providing an overview of the history of the movement (Joel Geier, David Finkel) as well as the experience of socialist feminists (Barbra Winslow, Lois Weiner), a compelling review of the influence of the IS on academics (Nelson Lichtenstein), and a highly informative narrative about producing “A Paper for Working People” (Gay Semel). These memoirs may start by appearing to be snapshots but they accumulate into an impressively panoramic view. And they are far from yawn-inducing nostalgic tales from a bygone heroic age; for instance, Cohn’s “My Experience as a Steelworker in the IS” and La Botz’s “A Socialist in the Teamsters Union” are stunners, while David McCullough writes with wit and flair.

Still, some topics are only lightly touched on, partly because the form of short accounts is not amenable to them and perhaps from a reluctance to open up wounds from a painful past. What I missed most were assessments of the guiding theoretical positions of IS. No, I don’t want to read a debate about “Who was the noblest Leninist of them all,” but I wonder if there are elements of IS ideology that clearly have no tomorrow or should be acknowledged as theology in disguise.

To be sure, there are many references to “Third Camp” politics and “Socialism from Below,” as well as totemic readings by Hal Draper and Stan Weir (a blue-collar Marxist intellectual with a long history of union activism). Unfortunately, in this volume they come off more like a catechism of catchphrases than freighted with the kind of reflections merited by a backward look of five decades. (Surely, I can’t be the only person whose perspective has been enriched by age and experience!) What would be helpful would be to have a companion volume of classic IS documents accompanied by updated evaluations; and especially ones with a dollop more irony, contingency, and insight into the complexity of human nature than is available here.

For example, Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism” (1968) is terrifically inspiring morally. Yet its sharp bifurcation (a historic split between socialism from “above” and “below”) doesn’t attend to the reality faced by revolutions in the twentieth century. These have occurred mainly in economically underdeveloped countries under violent and economic siege from developed capitalist and imperialist countries. This suggests that it takes time and material resources—including from international allies—for state institutions to be fully captured, rebuilt, and democratized. In these settings, it seems more likely that socialism from below will have to be promoted and nurtured over years, not straightaway summoned into existence. One should constructively promote efforts in that direction, focusing mainly on getting hostile nations off the country’s back, until a decisive turning point has been reached. Distilling complex ideas and situations into simple, binary categories of “below” and “above” can have a downside.

The state of affairs is similar with the call for “Third Camp” politics, as there are assorted perceptions and criteria for its meaning. In 1972, in a trial supervised by Farber (77), the IS expelled a “Third Camp tendency” led by founders Landy and Harrison (and supported by Lichtenstein, Weiner, and Capper) holding that the new IS position of “military support” to the National Liberation Front of Vietnam was a violation of this principle. And the ways in which the IS was Trotskyist, “Shachtmanite” (after Max Shachtman, a proponent of the “bureaucratic collectivist” theory of the USSR), and “Draperite” are not much clarified; Winslow, in fact, announces that she was only an “Anne Draperite” (301), referring to Hal Draper’s partner.

What about the lessons from Weir and Moody’s focus on a militant network of workers inside and independent of union leaderships? Clearly, they misestimated the ability of spontaneity (like wildcat strikes) to operate as a sustaining engine, not to mention the difficulty of consolidating gains without a durable organization. Moody’s argument for “social unionism” (fighting for broad social and economic issues beyond just wages and working conditions) certainly stands. On the other hand, his belief in systematic waves of labor upsurges every few decades created expectations still unrealized.

I’m not suggesting there are easy answers to any of this, especially since my doubts about orthodox Marxism have always stemmed from a view like that of Stuart Hall in “Marxism Without Guarantees” (1983). That is, many Marxist categories and analyses of the past are convincing to me, but I could never accept versions of the future that assume that history is unfolding in a predictable, law-like way. Too many multiple forces—economic, political, cultural, ideological, psychological—are at work. This seems to be one of the subtexts of the 2022–2025 New Left Review debate over Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley’s “Seven Theses on American Politics,” especially in Lola Seaton’s summary “Reflections on Political Capitalism.”⁶ Perhaps I shouldn’t confess it, but most “Marxist predictions” have always seemed to me like a competing set of guesses.

Gratifying Illusions?

What is more, if you’re interested in legible interior lives, this may not be the book for you. Facts alone can’t account for everything that occurs in the history of an organization; this is especially in relation to the two elements that plagued the IS after its auspicious start subsequent to its founding: devastating faction fights and the inability of many talented members, especially working-class recruits, to stick with the movement. Sometimes the real drama lies beneath the surface—unspoken desires, regrets, and frustrations.

To be sure, I’m not looking for a telenovela of passion, angst, and guilt, narratives of those so haunted by the past that they spend their time jousting with the ghosts of the dead. Nevertheless, while we lack a list of ex-members (many once prominent), we do see a sufficient pattern of an all-or-nothing devotion to the movement to explicitly build a revolutionary workers party and implement its full-blown ideology—until there wasn’t. Why so many burned-out candles and unorganized veterans (who may still be socialists), and who or what is to blame?

Longtime central leader Joel Geier, who knows more about the Left than I ever will, gives a pep talk about all the IS achievements in “Life with the IS.” This is drawn from a book-length study on which he is at work and he will surely have more to say there. Here, however, while he does his best to be uplifting, there are parts that sound over-the-top and exhibit some obvious blind spots: “the IS has passed the judgment of history” (154); “the IS and our British comrades were [in the 1960s] the only exponents of socialism from below” (154); “we were the most sane revolutionary group on American politics” (156); “Stronger than our formal rules was a culture that made democracy a living reality, and a membership trained to…not tolerate restrictions on their rights….no serious question was off limits, nothing prohibited” (138); and “There was never a cult of leadership, or of personality” (162).

Yet throughout the volume there are intimations of something much darker, suggesting that Geier may be promoting gratifying illusions about the internal culture of the group. These come mostly from women, and all the references remain consistently brief and undeveloped—as if, like in a mummy movie, there is a fear that meddling too much with something buried from the past might unleash forces that one can’t control.

Nevertheless, in 1972–73, Morehead reports that she was sent by the IS leadership to Los Angeles to fight the “Revolutionary Tendency,” which turned the organization into “a snake pit with each side charging the other side with betraying their socialist and revolutionary politics” (63). Holmstrom remembers that, in the later 1970s, “disagreements about strategies” led to “an extremely hostile factional atmosphere within the organization, leaving little room for the exciting intellectual discussions of the past” (135). She opposed the March 1977 expulsion of the “Left Faction” for “factionalism.”

Winslow describes IS “branch life in Cleveland” as “wracked with bitter political and personal differences.” A community college teacher, she believed she was “resented for not industrializing” and that “sexism played a role” with “three alpha males in the leadership” (309). Contributions from veterans of RT, an affiliated organization admittedly not under the direction of more seasoned IS members, also contain charges of “abusive behavior” (338), “toxic masculinity, sexism,” and “bullying” (354), and one episode of a “physical altercation” (399). Even more problematic for Geier’s rosy depiction, La Botz recently published a new essay in Links claiming: “For a few years in the late 1970s…a British Socialist Workers Party comrade became our [IS] leader and, under his influence, we adopted a full-fledged democratic centralist form of organization, with no representation in the leadership for political minority factions. Most of us briefly bought that approach….”⁷

As one might expect, skilled journalist Finkel, whose political acuity and well-grounded restraint I have long admired, provides a precise and lively summary of IS activities from 1969 until the organization’s fusion with other socialist groups into Solidarity in 1986. It’s a bit sad to read about the final years of the IS. Reaching end-stage polarization in a climactic battle with the “Left Faction” minority, it seems as if the majority took careful aim at the opposition and then shot themselves in the foot. After that, following along about the further decline of the IS seems like listening to the final bits of air seeping out of a flaccid tire.

Where I did cringe quite a bit was in reading Finkel’s aggressive insouciance—if not sangfroid—in describing how the “loyal” members had to “isolate the RT [Revolutionary Tendency], leading to its expulsion shortly thereafter when documented proof emerged that they were already functioning as a separate organization” (185). Then, in 1976 he refers to a “secret faction inside the IS” resulting in an expulsion (the one Holmstrom opposed) for “manifest disloyalty” (186).

I’m in no situation to judge the fairness and accuracy of any of these claims, but Finkel writes as if the minorities had fewer scruples than Al Capone, and British SWP leader Alex Callinicos comes off as a state-capitalist Dr. Evil (187). Moreover, Finkel uses the exact political terms employed against minorities by the student clique that I saw take over the leadership of the SWP in the same period. Yes, some people in a group do act like preening gasbags and wrecking balls, but sometimes one doesn’t really know what one “knows” about a minority. One person’s truth-telling dissident is another person’s scumbag. And “the party” isn’t always right.

A Window into Many Things

If one is wondering whether the above incidents and controversies are aberrations or recurrences, norm-busting, or a standard playbook, I can assure you that all are quite familiar from my own involvements and those reported by members of other organizations. Nor is the blame to fall exclusively on some DNA inherited from Leninism inasmuch as social democratic and non-Leftist groups have undergone similar experiences. This means that a fuller discussion of the causes of such conduct would open the door to addressing—and hopefully making some small steps toward resolving—issues that are certain to plague future socialist movements.

Sometimes the discipline that allows one to “punch above one’s weight” comes at too great a price. Can we explain the cause of bureaucratic cliques and recommend how to prevent them? How do we know when a minority should stay in and fight or split and build separately? Understanding these puzzles are not footnotes. If workable explanations do not emerge, we socialist activists now long-in-the-tooth will never find younger people to replace us and carry on.

How and why do people in even a small group use power—and even hunger for it? Economic greed can’t be the motive, so is it a matter of political hubris? What kinds of guardrails for fair treatment are necessary and have worked? What have we really been told about the deliberations at the top of organizations with a history of the kinds of problems recounted above? What about underlying structures that silence people, causing many to simply drift away from movements rather than work to improve them?

Is the constant activist pressure of a “combat party” deleterious in the long run; is living a “full life” in the small world of a group the same as living a “whole” one? We all sometimes go over the line, and some of us can’t help stirring up trouble now and then; so how does one productively channel the rebellious and combative mentalities that revolutionary groups naturally attract? How much active unseeing appears in these memoirs?

The Left has spent a huge amount of time debating political theories and programs, which is certainly necessary. And I definitely don’t believe that formal membership in a party is the only way to contribute to the cause. Yet too little effort has been devoted to understanding bad political behavior and burnout in the organized Left, so that what starts as gaps between valuable experienced cadres and their movements evolve to become an abyss. Clarity about these facets and past disputes—their causes and suggested resolutions—is not antiquarian; it is necessary. Notwithstanding, so many stones have been left unturned in the history of the Left that Higgins’ volume, despite incompleteness, is a worthwhile initiation.

In the exciting events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, none of us who made a revolutionary socialism commitment could see where we were truly headed. So how did we get to where we are and how must we change? Enduring organizational dedication seems to be part of the picture for socialist survival and advance, so we can’t allow the continual regurgitation of old problems in new forms to continue to cripple us. Joining a socialist outfit is a kind of marriage; if it works for one, despite the vicissitudes of life, one stays in it over the long haul. But what to do when the exhilaration of the rousing events ebbs and age introduces new challenges? To quote the most famous statement attributed to Chekhov, “any idiot can face a crisis, but day to day living is what wears us out.”

notes

1.  Historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Charlie Capper were part of my graduate student cohort at UC Berkeley and IS leaders Mike Parker, Joel Geier, Joel Jordan, and Ken Paff were much on the political scene. Joanne Landy, a historic founder of the IS and its predecessors, at that time married to Nelson, was the secretary in my department (English); we used to chat about politics almost every day. Although I didn’t meet David McCullough (a philosophy graduate student who industrialized in Detroit) until fifteen years later, I was a member of the executive committee of the graduate student AFT local 1570 that he founded and took his place as the delegate to the Alameda County Central Labor Council along with long-time socialist Anne Draper. At Berkeley I spent an afternoon interviewing Marxist scholar Hal Draper, and later, while I was at the University of Michigan, labor activist Stan Weir stayed at my house and I visited him in San Diego. In 1992 I traveled to Cuba to speak at the University of Havana in a group that included Philosophy Professor Nancy Holstrom, and I have edited the journal Against the Current for three decades with managing editor David Finkel and historian Robert Brenner, as well as sociologist Sam Farber and Holmstrom for part of that time. In 1986 I was a founder of Solidarity with Labor Notes initiator Kim Moody, teamster Dan La Botz, and auto worker Wendy Thompson.

2.  At that time, the Cuba position forwarded by the SWP’s Joseph Hansen made more sense to me. It was essentially that Cuba had advanced to the equivalent of a dictatorship of the proletariat by expropriating capitalist property and aligning against U.S. imperialism but was inhibited in an advance to socialism because it did not have a pluralist revolutionary party system and political power was concentrated in the Castro leadership that was relying increasingly on the USSR. In his 1961 essay “The Theory of the Cuban Revolution,” Hansen clearly stated that Cuba “lacks, as yet, the forms of proletarian democracy” and in his book Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution (1978), he criticized bureaucratic tendencies and leadership concentration. I should add that I never saw the differences in theories characterizing the USSR’s economy to be a major obstacle requiring separate organizations in the 1960s and after; most members of the SWP and IS, including myself, lacked the skills and knowledge to convincingly hold a specific theoretical position. The question was primarily about democratic opposition to the Stalinist bureaucratic regime and its politics, where there was mostly agreement.

3.  It is described as “chief among the Stalinist states” with Vietnam and China (14); among the “so-called socialist states” with “nothing progressive” (39); and one of the “so-called progressive countries” with “Stalinist bureaucracies” like “Russia, China, Cuba, Albania, Vietnam and…Pol Pot’s Cambodia” (154).

4.  The alliance ended with a bitter a split that led to the formation of the rival International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States at the same time as the British IS changed its name to Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

5.  This claim of neglect is based on a survey of major books on the Left in those decades. Especially surprising is the absence of the ISC in Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik’s The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2002), although Hal Draper’s writings are cited, and the IS in Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), although centers of IS activity such as Cleveland and Detroit are discussed.

6.  This debate began in New Left Review 138 (November-December 2022); Seaton’s summary, which was mid-way in the discussion, appeared in New Left Review 142 (July-August 2023).

7.  Dan La Botz, “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” Links (26 April 2026).