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yasbxxgie · 7 years

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Sadie Barnette Reclaims Her Father’s Black Panther FBI File As Art

Artist Sadie Barnette’s family tree includes a 500-page FBI file. In 1968, the United States government placed her father, Rodney Barnette, under surveillance. For decades, his every daily detail was logged and noted. Family members, employers, even his former high school teachers were interrogated. The reason for the target on his back: Rodney was a founding member of the Compton, California chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

In an era where J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI sought to actively, though covertly, criminalize and destroy the Panthers—and arguably any prominent or rising Black political leader—the elder Barnette was of hundreds of activists subject to state-sanctioned harassment and intimidation, their organizations infiltrated and discredited. Other revolutionaries were incarcerated; some were assassinated.

Growing up, Sadie Barnette’s father’s history was never a secret. It seems almost inevitable that the young artist whose work is dedicated to excavating the constructs of identity would turn her gaze to his FBI file, newly available through a Freedom of Information Act request. For Do Not Destroy, her first solo exhibition in New York City, Barnette reframes the pages of the dossier as a father-daughter conversation. With the intervention of her own visual presence—through unapologetically girly embellishments and abstractions—she subverts the government’s narrative with her own. The spurts of hot pink spray paint on black-and-white pages restore a sense of sinew and blood, returning a dignity of wholeness to the life described therein. And so, it is from an inheritance of being targeted and surveilled, that Barnette has grown a garden of reclamation.

Mass Appeal sat down with the Oakland-born artist to learn more.

Mass Appeal: Your family knows what it is like to be targeted, to be painted as a “terrorist.” What are some of your thoughts on the current administration’s rhetoric and actions in dehumanizing and criminalizing believers of Islam, refugees and the undocumented?

Sadie Barnette: One of the things that was really striking about my dad’s file was that my dad was fired from his job at the Post Office because of his involvement with the Panthers. But, the law used to get him fired was something that President Truman had put on the books. It was an Executive Order that talked about behavior unbecoming to a government employee. That’s what they used to get my dad fired because he was cohabitating with a woman who he wasn’t married to… That was behavior that was unbecoming of a government employee. But, the reason that law was put on the books was to get gay people out of government jobs. So it’s another one of those examples where people think “Oh, this law doesn’t affect me. I’m not Muslim. I’m not an immigrant. I’m not trans. This has nothing to do with me.” But a similar law or laws can be used to target whoever the government is considering inconvenient at the time or whoever is questioning things or fighting for their rights. That’s definitely something that we have to keep in mind today.

Was activism and an awareness beyond self-interest part of your birthright or did you come into your own political awakening?

It was always something I held in my heart… I looked at situations with systemic analysis. If the police beat someone up or say if somebody in the family didn’t have access to something that they needed, I would always see it through a lens of systemic problems in our country. When I was in high school, I was very aware that students were being criminalized and were being shuttled along this school-to-prison pipeline. So those things were always on my mind. And growing up in the Bay area, there is a lot of activism and systemic analysis.

How did that activism and analysis start to factor in or feed your artistic growth?

I think they definitely go hand-in-hand. All art is political even when it’s not. Because it’s still a political choice if you are choosing to ignore politics. Often times, just the act of making art or changing the way people think even if its meant as an act of poetry is inherently political. People need escape and fantasy and fiction and need to feel beautiful and seen and heard. So for me even in my work that isn’t directly talking about the FBI file, it is still a commitment to… The act of making art is still a commitment to humanity.

What prompted your dad to want to look at your father’s file, and then what prompted you to want to work with the material?

My dad always wondered what experiences were tied to his FBI surveillance, harassment and intimidation. He wanted the file and so filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get it. It took about four years to get the file. I’m not sure what at that exact moment made him want to really face what a lot of people don’t want to look at. It can be too painful. But, he knows that it is bigger than himself. He also was very lucky that he wasn’t assassinated at the time or thrown in jail. He really is a strong person that survived a lot and still is able to see the value in sharing his experiences. I’ve always been interested in telling the story of my parents and also the activism and the cultural outpourings of that time period. This just seemed like the perfect way to do that—using this file for good and reclaiming it.

Did you wrestle with how much of the file you should work with or alter or how much you should let it speak for itself?

I definitely had to wrestle with it. The fact that the project’s first debut was at the Oakland Museum for the Black Panther exhibit, All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 really helped give me confidence that this could be framed and contextualized properly because the show is really dedicated to talking about the full complexities of the Black Panthers, not just like the cool image or that kind of thing. So being included in the Oakland Museum exhibition was what really made me excited about making the final decisions as to how to use this material.

I think it will be the type of project that’ll be ongoing. I’m not the kind of artist that thinks this is the like the ultimate or some kind of end. It’s no [laughs] magnum opus—it’s ongoing. One of the things I value about being an artist is that you can be unsure. You can question and try things. I’m sure I will work in many ways with this file. At some point, I’d like to make a book project with it. My intention often when I’m making art is not about making things; it’s about seeing things. So, the re-framing, the juxtaposing of these files and just a few gesture on my part was really what I wanted to do to allow the pages to speak for themselves and then for the viewer to bring something new to it.

The work also calls into the conversation the political activists that were murdered. Others were arrested and some still incarcerated to this day. Is it imperative to you as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Panthers?

Absolutely. It is hugely important. And I think it is something that we still don’t know enough about. There are a ton of names of people in my dad’s file who he knew, who were his mentors who were killed. John Huggins. Bunchy Carter. They were murdered at UCLA. It is a double tragedy if their lives were not only stolen and taken away from their families but that they are also not remembered in the historical consciousness.

Have you become a student of the era as a result?

Definitely. I’ve been reading several books. One is called The Burglary by Betty Medsger. She basically was one of the reporters to receive the first batch of stolen FBI files around 1972 from this small FBI office in Pittsburgh. These anti-war activists realized that the movement was being surveilled so heavily that the only way to expose what the FBI was actually doing was to break into this office. I’ve been learning a ton about J. Edgar Hoover. It’s amazing to think that these activists were just regular, hard-working people. They weren’t criminals, they were actually repelled by [the thought of] breaking into this office, but they knew it would be worse to let Hoover run the FBI unchecked and run democracy into the ground. The other book is Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of The Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.

What did working with this file teach or surprise you about your dad or by extension about yourself?

Well, it’s hard to say. I’m pretty close to my dad so most of the things I knew already. I definitely learned more about our government than I did about my family. Questioning the government, dissent, is legal. It is written into the Constitution. If the government isn’t working properly, then the people are to change it. But people who are in power want to protect their power. As a descendent of slaves and Native Americans in this country, I have never felt like we are included when they say “We the People.” I’ve never felt like this country was mine. My ancestors built this country, but it was never for them either. I’ve always felt that if this country was actually going to be for everyone, then we would have to first really face some things that people don’t want to talk about.

Do Not Destroy is on view through Saturday, February 18, 2017 at Baxter St at Camera Club of New York (126 Baxter St, NY).

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an9el · 6 years

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Uncle Sammy don’t shuck and jive me, I’m hip the popcorn jazz changes you blow, You know damn well what I mean, You school my naive heart to sing red-white-and-blue-stars-and-stripes songs and to pledge eternal allegiance to all things blue, true, blue-eyed blond, blond-haired, white chalk white skin with U.S.A. tattooed all over, When my soul trusted Uncle Sammy, Loved Uncle Sammy, I died in dreams for you Uncle Sammy, Died in dreams playing war for you Uncle Sammy, No, I don’t want to hear that crap, You jam your emasculate manhood symbol, puff with Gonorrhea, Gonorrhea of corrupt un-realty myths into my ungreased, nigger ghetto, black-ass, my Jewish-Cappy-Hindu-Islamic-Sioux-sure, free public health penicillin cured me, But Uncle Sammy if you want to stay a freak-show strongman god, Fuck your motherfucking self, I will not serve.

a black anti-war poem by Bobby Seale, May 1966

#poems #im ready a book called Black Against Empire: The history and politics of the Black Panther Party #and it features this poem #and i love it #poem #black poems #bobby seale

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rockislandadultreads · 3 years

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Black History Month: some reading to get you started

Celebrate Black excellence with these titles

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry, Kali Nicole Gross

A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.

Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd

The author of Baldwin’s Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit—a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city’s past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation’s fabric. Herb Boyd moved to Detroit in 1943, as race riots were engulfing the city. Though he did not grasp their full significance at the time, this critical moment would be one of many he witnessed that would mold his political activism and exposed a city restless for change. In Black Detroit, he reflects on his life and this landmark place, in search of understanding why Detroit is a special place for black people. Boyd reveals how Black Detroiters were prominent in the city’s historic, groundbreaking union movement and—when given an opportunity—were among the tireless workers who made the automobile industry the center of American industry. Well paying jobs on assembly lines allowed working class Black Detroiters to ascend to the middle class and achieve financial stability, an accomplishment not often attainable in other industries. Boyd makes clear that while many of these middle-class jobs have disappeared, decimating the population and hitting blacks hardest, Detroit survives thanks to the emergence of companies such as Shinola—which represent the strength of the Motor City and and its continued importance to the country. He also brings into focus the major figures who have defined and shaped Detroit, including William Lambert, the great abolitionist, Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, Coleman Young, the city’s first black mayor, diva songstress Aretha Franklin, Malcolm X, and Ralphe Bunche, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. With a stunning eye for detail and passion for Detroit, Boyd celebrates the music, manufacturing, politics, and culture that make it an American original.

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the U.S., the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in 68 U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson by Timothy M. Gay

Before Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball in 1947, black and white ballplayers had been playing against one another for decades--even, on rare occasions, playing with each other. Interracial contests took place during the off-season, when major leaguers and Negro Leaguers alike fattened their wallets by playing exhibitions in cities and towns across America. These barnstorming tours reached new heights, however, when Satchel Paige and other African- American stars took on white teams headlined by the irrepressible Dizzy Dean. Lippy and funny, a born showman, the native Arkansan saw no reason why he shouldn't pitch against Negro Leaguers. Paige, who feared no one and chased a buck harder than any player alive, instantly recognized the box-office appeal of competing against Dizzy Dean's "All-Stars." Paige and Dean both featured soaring leg kicks and loved to mimic each other's style to amuse fans. Skin color aside, the dirt-poor Southern pitchers had much in common. Historian Timothy M. Gay has unearthed long-forgotten exhibitions where Paige and Dean dueled, and he tells the story of their pioneering escapades in this engaging book. Long before they ever heard of Robinson or Larry Doby, baseball fans from Brooklyn to Enid, Oklahoma, watched black and white players battle on the same diamond. With such Hall of Fame teammates as Josh Gibson, Turkey Stearnes, Mule Suttles, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, and Bullet Joe Rogan, Paige often had the upper hand against Diz. After arm troubles sidelined Dean, a new pitching phenom, Bob Feller--Rapid Robert--assembled his own teams to face Paige and other blackballers. By the time Paige became Feller's teammate on the Cleveland Indians in 1948, a rookie at age forty-two, Satch and Feller had barnstormed against each other for more than a decade. These often obscure contests helped hasten the end of Jim Crow baseball, paving the way for the game's integration. Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean, and Bob Feller never set out to make social history--but that's precisely what happened. Tim Gay has brought this era to vivid and colorful life in a book that every baseball fan will embrace.

#black history month #black history #non-fiction #nonfiction books #reading recommendations #book recs #recommended reading #library #civil rights #black excellence #nonfiction #booklr #tbr #to read

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z3r0-f4ilur3 · 3 years

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The Record Begins With a Song Of Rebellion

First Draft Of the Capitalist Surrealist Writing Project. Steal and appropriate, critique and interrogate, with the author's full endorsement and permission. Looking (back)(for)wyrds After the Bush interregneum and the long, terrible, progress destroying Reagan years, the American empire had something like a moment of hope. Riding high on the peace dividend and a delusion of idealism among the donating classes, the economic aristocracy which in effect was the senior partner in “American Democracy” (and so duly represented in both parties) and the voter was a paternalized junior to be both petted and protected had selected the Clinton dynasty. The grand bargain between labour and capital against the state resulted in the bitter fruit of the Bush years, as Conservatives paternalists rightly mocked the Clintonian urge to middling action on domestic issues while gladly partnering with him to rob labour at large. While a wealth transfer had already been going on as part of a trend for the better part of a century, this phase in which a semi-coherent ruling class dynamic of the donating classes and the government service classes became visible. It is beyond satire now, but this was not always so visible, as racism, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, various fundementalist and conservative (as well as equally harmful, supposedly liberal versions of the same) religious beliefs; Turtle Island was rife with reasons for temporary cross class solidarity in order to oppose an other or to advance an idealistic goal.

And yet moments of class consciousness and solidarity have perenially emerged, from the “grassroots” as the insiders like to say. They frame the people as “the base” or “the grassroots” and narrowly target their interests to make people find conflict with each other. It is irrelevent (for this missive) whether this is a conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious process; it is enough to notice it happening. Despite this, moments in the pre new-modern (to be defined later, promise~) politics that predate terms like Black Lives Matter or Trans Rights are Human Rights show that these movements represent an unbroken chain of revolutionary attempts at self-consciousness and conscience transformation that coincide and are just as important as any history of violence. The Ides of March, and the campaign of anonymous internet citizens against Scientology, represents such a moment. Occupy Wall Street was such a movement. “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It!” was such a phrase. The many quotes attributed to names like Mandela and James Baldwin; the Black Panthers, the revolutionary feminists, the Hippie movement, down back to the (In the American mind) hoary days of yore when the Wide Awakes would march a brass band around the houses of pro slave Senators.

It is a poor yet accurate summation to say that the ‘present’ (a dubious notion) political reality is the sum of all of these and more; a reader can orient themselves to the history of late stage capitalism by the growth of the donating classes influence and the acceleration of their detachment from society at large. Moments which also impact this reality are the donating classes sense of pessimism about the future; the devaluing of nearly all forms of labour, the increasing visibility of law enforcement brutality; the list can be referenced in the moment to moment, wide eyed and angry reporting of self-matyring, news-junkie amateur journalists found anywhere online, the shocked and angry expressions of young activists at protests and the weary, numbed faces of the old. Up and down the class system, there has been a wide spread death of hope.

Enter the climate crisis.

Before climate consciousness achieved real steam, our escatological fears were (mostly) confined to the realm of human action or cosmic events unimaginable (and unrelatable) to the modern person’s experience of life. For decades, the effects of climate change were reported to a world told not to care. As Terrance Mkenna said, ““The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

The impact of this can and will be expanded upon, but it is safe to say that the bubble has been popped. Whatever finds popular currency within the dialogue around it, that the climate is changing rapidly in ways inemical to human society at large/at present is true by material impact; people everywhere have experienced some negative result of the changing conditions, and there is a rising anxiety in the classes who cannot afford an escape pod or fortress bunker that the people they’ve entrusted themselves to intend to withdraw to safety and abandon them, or even expose them to more harm in order to “make more of the earth’s carrying weight available in the reclamation” (this kind of talk is not alien to them, though this specific quotation is my own invention.

It is important to acknowledge that the bubble has popped. It is the exclamation on Capitalist Realism; it is the moment of awareness, that encounter with a death of hope, in which Capitalist Surrealism, our phenomenological experience of the Capitalist Real, is born. While this Surrealist stage is both uncomfortable and has deleterious effects on the human condition, it represents the chink in the armour of banality and inertia, and the diminishing politics of the powerful. The sense that anything, absolutely *anything,* can happen to you, is both incredibly terrifying, and when looked at squarely, an opportunity for radical freedom.

It is this radical freedom that we see ourselves invited to in the many facets of human expression and convention which have experienced an awakening of new consciousness (or the restoration of old ones. Beliefs, ways of interacting with the world, and surviving are no longer benefited by or even neutrally treated by their operating environment anymore; if the complete weight of propaganda in circulation at the moment could be translated into sound, it would present an impenetrable and unlistenable wall.

It is that environment that individual ideologies not sanctioned by the operating environment have struggled against; all of them now have new life and vigor because despite that wall, and the spectacle societies which generate them, the literal truth of material impacts trump all prior arguments. With awareness of most likely outcomes of the climate crisis on a sliding scale, we see radicalization and existential depression of all varieties spike; the answers they attempt to generate to these apparent conditions lack hope in broad but uneven spikes along that scale of awareness, with the suicidally depressed expert climatologist and the radical anarcho-primitivist sharing the same ontological space in orientation to that crisis.

This project, among other things, is an attempt to generate an alternative answer (what that project consists of is entirely based in literature and mutual aid, the oldest Christian platforms for emancipatory action.) Terms like Solarpunk and Cloud City Futures approach but fail to capture the spirit of an alternative answer, mostly with an appeal to the world of aesthetics, a dubious method for summoning change at best. Terminology alone, or even in tandem with education, is also not sufficient; the noise environment they enter into immediately drowns out the creators meaning, especially if these terms are successful and gain currency with the wealthy.

Rather, we must articulate the positive from all our apparent negatives: The apocalyptic futures we anticipate cannot begin actually describe the terrain of the future, and the apparancy of our material conditions impact on our lives is now drowning out the sound of the standing ideologies. This is a brave time, where people blaze trails for others to follow out of the collapsing structures of the past and into the dwelling places of the new future. Our experience of reality, though surreal, has now unlocked an awareness of an apparent power: making meaning.

It is with the tools of meaning-making that these, who are the heirs of their elders, queer and colour revolutionary and indigenous land defender and abolitionist, pioneer the hopeful vistas of the future. It is necessary that they *be* hopeful; it was the Buddha who taught that people deceived by Samsara may be “deceived” by the apparent gifts of pursuing enlightenment, the majority of which are ancillary incidentals not to be meditated on. The king calls his indolent heirs out of the burning palace with a promise of gifts; when they arrive, they protest the lack of gifts, but it is in his embrace of them we realize they are the gift, and their survival was worth the promise of chariots and ponies.

But there must also be chariots, and ponies; luxuries, and finery; the grim tools of “defense” and all the things the human animal finds comforting in their resting environment to assure them of its stability. In the Dao De Jing, (Though Mueller butchers the poetry,) the Sage articulates this and describes how to create it: “Let there be a small country with few people,

Who, even having much machinery, don't use it.

Who take death seriously and don't wander far away.

Even though they have boats and carriages, they never ride in them.

Having armor and weapons, they never go to war.

Let them return to measurement by tying knots in rope.

Sweeten their food, give them nice clothes, a peaceful abode and a relaxed life.

Even though the next country can be seen and its doges and chickens can be heard,

The people will grow old and die without visiting each other's land.” A.C. Mueller Translation, The Dao De Jing, Attributed to Lao Tzu

It is as naked an appeal to a return to the life of the community and the village as can be found. A return to idigenous ways of being, which speaks to the preservation of folk ways, while the reality that the sage is administering them (even if only by moral teaching) shows a potential for new ideas to be instanced; innovation is not a property innate to the colonizing and walled world, and memetic culture and the society of truth-telling through representation around it reflect callbacks to this desire. The political movement around Land Back, while perennial to the causes of indigenous people, crystalizes an actionable answer for individuals and collectives to support. Its cousins in other colour movements, many of them representing indigenous people displaced by imperialism in the first place, are also generative of positive futures; it is a fact of history that as the rights of people classified as “minorities” are raised, the general quality of life for all in society rises, with the exception of those who could never be touched but by the highest tides.

These movements and moments of consciousness are their own inestimable goods, not mere ends for the would be conscious person to hijack for their goals. This is in fact a position inimical to the success of any of these movements; grifting starts at home, and it is the white leftist who is more easily conquered by the white liberal, since neither of them have conquered their own whiteness in the first place. But that supporting them generates positive benefits for all can only be argued against if you value the lives and comforts of some over others; those who value the general benefit first can see a clear path.

It is that clarity that gives meaning makers license to create the vistas of the future. It is the “Mandate of Heaven” that endorses the artists, a general operating license to create. Because the material impact of the present is louder than the noise of Capital, there an outburst of fertility and growth, the very seeds of hope, breaking out in the midst of this Surrealism. It is with the tools of meaning making, and the canvas of the crisis, that people escape the real.

#capitalist hell #Capitalist Surrealism #newfuture #say anything

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mortuarybees · 5 years

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What books do you recommend me to read?

I’m not sure what your tastes are but I’ll tell you some of my favorites! To be quite honest, I mainly return to the same books over and over again so the list is rather short and I doubt I have anything to recommend that you won’t have heard of already. I’ll recommend my favorites. It consists mainly of my usual rotation of things i read over and over or books that left an impression on me and I refer back to them often.

When it comes to the non-fiction section just like….keep in mind that most academic texts have many, many problems and I’m not presenting any of the texts I list as The Quintessential Must Read Best Flawless Overview of a topic, I’m mainly listing the books I have found to be approachable and reasonable introductions to topics. Read everything critically, always (and that includes everything else on this list, not just the non-fiction).

Plays:

An Oresteia, translated by Anne Carson (Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Elektra, Euripides’ Orestes)

Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides

I mean like. Shakespeare, obviously; my personal favorites are Hamlet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth; recently, thanks to the productions starring David Tennant, Much Ado About Nothing and Richard II have been added to the list

Doctor Faustus, Edward II, and Dido by Christopher Marlowe

Antigone, particularly Anne Carson’s translation, and after you’ve read Antigone, I’d recommend reading Antigonick, but not before

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (I feel like Lady Windermere’s Fan is also kind of necessary reading and I do love it of course but I’ve only read it the once, for the sake of it, whereas I’ve come back to the Importance of Being Earnest a million times and the 2002 movie is one of the things I watch when I’m down)

Novels (and Epics)

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett if you haven’t yet, obviously

Maurice by E. M. Forster

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

VIRGINIA WOOLF. everything but particularly the Waves, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway. The Waves is my favorite, followed closely by Orlando, but I’d start with the Mrs. Dalloway because it gets you accustomed to Woolf’s writing style and the way she approaches her characters if you haven’t read her before.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (If you haven’t read it yet and you have seen 2005 P&P and love it and you’re opening the novel with the expectation that it’s similar to the 2005 film in tone and feel, you’ll be disappointed. If you’ve seen the 1995 miniseries, that reflects it very well. So just approach it with an open mind with 2005 on the back burner and you’ll find it an amazing and very repressed love story)

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore

The Iliad (the translation I own is Lombardo. It’s extremely approachable and colloquial and I enjoy it, and if you’ve never read the Iliad and you find it intimidating, I would very much recommend it, but my high opinion is not universal. Fagles and Lattimore are very popular translations and I like them both well enough)

I’m dying to get a copy of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation. I don’t love the Odyssey personally but I am a big fan of Wilson and from what I’ve read about her translation and what she’s said about it, if anything could make me enjoy the Odyssey, it would be that translation.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. I would personally recommend reading the Iliad first just because Miller takes…….liberties with it, but I also don’t think there’s a problem with that at all, so if you’re not interested in the Iliad, or you think tsoa would get you interested in it, there’s nothing at all wrong with reading it on its own or reading it first. I just think it’s a genuinely more enjoyable experience to read the Iliad first and then see what Miller does with it. And regardless of what order you read them in, if you read them both you will understand how very different tsoa and the Iliad are from one another and you will not be one of those people who talks about the Iliad when what they mean is tsoa. Again, there’s nothing wrong with tsoa, it’s one of my favorite novels, but it’s just a very separate thing and it gets just a little maddening.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. It’s both poetry and a novel but it’s got to go somewhere so

When I was 14 I got very into Les Mis and i will recommend it. I genuinely love it and it will always have a special place in my heart. I have read the entire brick only once however because as much as i love it. as much as i Relate to the infamous off-topic tangents. there is a limit to my patience.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is just like. extremely good. I really don’t know enough about it to recommend any specific translations; in high school I was given a stapled copy of the whole thing and I read that til I lost it and now if I want to reread it or refer back I just look it up online. I’m a fake fan.

Poetry

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

Devotions, Felicity, and Winter Hours by Mary Oliver. Those are the anthologies that I have read and I adore them. I imagine that all of her anthologies are also amazing and all of them are on my to-read list. I don’t think you could possibly go wrong

I do not have the singular published collection of Elizabeth Siddal’s poetry (My Ladys Soul) but I have read all of her poetry and she is an amazing poet and I hold her very near and dear to my heart

Crush by Richard Siken

Useless Magic by Florence Welch……..yall knew what you came here for

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

Non-fiction and Essay Collections (again. None of these are recommended as the definitive, end all, be all, all-you-need book on any given subject, they’re just some of my favorites). I have limited myself to collection specifically because this is long enough already and if I start just adding essays it’ll never end. All of these were either purchased online for under $10, are available somewhere on the internet as pdfs, or were at my library, so if you look, you can probably find them somewhere (I say this bc while trying to find the authors of some of these I have been stunned by their retail prices and I’m assuring you, don’t be scared off by your initial search bc I sure as fuck did not pay $30):

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

Marie Antoinette: the Journey by Antonia Fraser (controversial but well-researched and approachable and I love it. I would recommend reading like. almost anything else first because Fraser does obviously focus on Marie Antoinette and her life and experiences; and while she does talk about the revolution, it isn’t the focus of this biography, and you won’t understand why it was necessary if you don’t come to it with a good grasp on the broader events outside Marie Antoinette).

A Day with Marie Antoinette by Hélène Delalex

Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life and Liberty or Death: the French Revolution by Peter McPhee

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James

If you’re at all interested in 18th century art, I recommend Rococo to Revolution:Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting by Michael Levey

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn is controversial. But it’s approachable and well-researched and if you don’t know a lot about American history, I recommend it highly (especially for Americans).

Eros, the Bittersweet by Anne Carson (okay literally everything by Anne Carson. All her essays, her poetry, her translations, her weird mashups, all of it. There are a few things I haven’t read yet but. I very much doubt you’re going to be able to go wrong, so just take what I’ve listed as my favorites)

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory and From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty (also the illustrations by Landis Blair are absolutely phenomenal. Look at this. I love it so much I pulled it out of the book to hang in my momento mori corner because it’s so beautiful.)

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Alexander of Macedon by Peter Green is. okay we have a love-hate relationship, me and this biography; me, and peter green, but I have major issues with every single Alexander biography I’ve read and this was the first so if you want to start somewhere, I guess go for it.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

The Honey Bee by James L. Gould. It’s out of date in some respects but a good, simple introduction into honeybee biology and behavior

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich

Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health by Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Kleinman

Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present by Neil Miller

Holy Madness by Adam Zamoyski isn’t by any means perfect, but it’s a alright introduction to the Age of Revolution. Just don’t let it be the only thing you read. It’s here because it has a special place in my heart as my introduction to it.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Erotic Exchanges: the World of Elite Prostitution in 18th Century Paris by Nina Kushner

Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick S. Cheng

Our Lives Matter: A Womanist queer Theology by Pamela R. Lightsey

Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them by Paige Embry

At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell (I really do not know that much about philosophy or existentialism specifically or this subject generally, so I have no idea where the faults of this book are, but I really enjoyed reading it and it made me think a lot. I have a feeling it’s very simplified so take it with a grain of salt as I did?)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau (just. just. it’s enjoyable but don’t get too into it please for the love of God). My copy (and I think most copies?) includes his essay Civil Disobedience as well which is very good.

Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave by Ona Judge

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

The Diaries of Virginia Woolf: I’m currently in the midst of volume 2 (1920-1924). They’re very enjoyable, but they’re something of an undertaking as all diaries are if you aren’t already very familiar with the biography of the person in question, so like. If you find yourself moving slowly don’t worry about it.

Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy

To Be Broken and Tender: A Quaker Theology for Today by Margery Post Abbott

The New Jim Crow byMichelle Alexander

The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy by Judith A. Layzer is a textbook that was assigned to me in my Enviornmental Policy class last semester and I really fkcing enjoyed it. It’s a book of case studies in environmental policy and it’s dense at times, but really interesting and enjoyable.

The Second Amendment: a Biography by Michael Waldman

Michelangelo’s Notebooks: the Poetry, Letters, and Art of the Great Master by Carolyn Vaughan. Just like. Genuinely. Genuinely. unintentionally hilarious. but also sometimes very sad, and very gay. I just adore Michelangelo. Just a shy foul-tempered repressed disaster. Jesus Christ.

#my next read is going to be richard ellmann's biography of oscar wilde #i'm v excited #henry speaks #vocallsama

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nerdiepolitics · 4 years

Quote

Agent provocateurs on the government payroll supplied explosives to Panther members and sought to incite them to blow up public buildings, and they promoted kangaroo courts encouraging Party members to torture suspected informants.

BLACK AGAINST EMPIRE: THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, Joshua Bloom & Waldo E. Martin Jr.

I implore y’all to read this book. Nothing has changed.

#black panthers #black panther party #us politics #politics #social justice #Black Against Empire

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rotuli · 5 years

Text

subcrit note,

Redguards are an interesting example of how the lore has changed throughout the games.

Arena establishes the character of Hammerfell and the Redguards with this paragraph:

Thy race is a people without a past, for in the Tiber War thou wert stalwart guardians of Hammerfell. As time moved on thy people held onto the ground for which they had shed tears of blood, and now the land, and the strength and endurance of rock itself, is thine own to command…

So from the start they are victims of imperialist aggression, which is a thread that TESA:Redguard obviously takes up. There wasn’t any Yokuda in Arena lore, so Hammerfell is the “ground for which they had shed tears of blood”. With Orcs not being playable, the Redguards stand in as the best physically defensive race, with bonuses to agility and endurance, and so their homeland and story reflects that.

Something that this paragraph highlights is how “time [has] moved on” from the days of the “Tiber war”, which is not always the feeling you get from the other Third Era games, which often centre around institutions that were set up in the early days of the Third Era and have endured since. Another oddity that could be reinterpreted in the light of current lore is the phrase “people without a past”, considering the use of Numidium in the Tiber war.

That’s about the full extent of Redguard lore in Arena. There’s the names and greetings of various towns but they don’t tell you much more than the initial paragraph: Redguards are a proud martial culture from a desert land.

In TESII:Daggerfall the lore of Redguards was expanded considerably to include Yokuda, its culture, and how the settlers of Hammerfell only represent an offshoot of it.

Something that’s interesting is that there are references to the settlement of Hammerfell by the Ansei culture but no record of Redguard battles until the Siege of Orsinium. The idea of Yokudans as a conquering force upon western Tamriel didn’t exist. Instead “their land was enemy enough to keep their population checked” (A History of Daggerfall). I don’t think that the disappearance of the Dwarves had a date established by Daggerfall so it’s even possible that the Redguards could have directly succeeded, or even coexisted with, the remaining Rourken Dwarves in speculation upon the lore of that time (although popular history e.g. King Edward states that the “goblins” drove the Dwarves out of Hammerfell prior to the arrival of the Redguards).

Redguard antipathy to the Empire is generally preserved in Daggerfall lore through the ongoing struggles between Hammerfell and kingdoms of High Rock (allied with the Empire at the time of the War of Betony), as well as the implication that some Redguards joined with the Camoran Usurper’s conquests voluntarily. Some Redguards rank in Imperial-founded institutions like the Mages Guild, and as far as I know no Redguards are particularly vocal about distaste for the Empire. There’s some lore which indicates cultural distance of Hammerfell from Cyrodiil:

There were few Redguards who had been to the Imperial Province at the time [3e39], and it may be that he [Destri] took the last name Melarg in order to assimiliate with the Breton, Nordic, and Dark Elf cultures he encountered there. (Notes For Redguard History)

Note however that Akorithi, queen of Sentinel, claims to be the most loyal representative of the Empire in the region (although only says this to the player to gain control of the totem).

That’s most of what Daggerfall has on the Redguards. And I would say none of it goes against what little Arena establishes, but arguably changes the emphasis. The diversity of Yokudan culture and elements of it that continue in Hammerfell are obviously welcome.

TESL:Battlespire doesn’t have any Redguard lore. Skipping that, TESA:Redguard is generally thought of as the turning point of the lore towards Morrowind, with the Pocket Guide to the Empire. It makes LOTS of changes from Daggerfall. Given that the focus of the story of Redguard is conflict between the early Septim Empire and Hammerfell, obviously a good chunk of its lore changes relate to that. Much of what PGE has to say on Hammerfell and the Redguards is intentionally biased against them, which is in keeping with Arenalore Hammerfell’s spirited defence against the burgeoning Empire.

The most relevant changes are summarized in the opening paragraphs of the PGE on Hammerfell (note that the elven scribe YR does not object to any of the claims here):

Some three thousand years ago the continent of Yokuda suffered a cataclysm that sunk most of it into the sea, driving its people towards Tamriel. The bulk of these refugees landed at the uninhabited isle of Herne, while the rest continued on to the mainland. This vanguard “warrior wave” of Yokudans, the Ra Gada, swept into the country, quickly slaughtering and enslaving the beastfolk and Nedic villagers before them, bloodily paving the way for their people who waited at Herne, including the Na-Totambu, their kings and ruling bodies. The fierce Ra Gada became, phonetically, the Redguards, a name that has since spread to designate the Tamrielic-Yokudan race in general. They ultimately displaced the Nedic peoples, for their own agriculture and society was better organized and better adapted to Hammerfell’s harsh environment. They took much of Nedic custom, religion, and language for themselves in the process, and eventual contact with the surrounding Breton tribes and Colovian Cyrodilics hastened their own assimilation into the larger Tamrielic theater. Yoku, the Redguard oral language, was almost entirely replaced as the need for foreign commerce and treaties increased.

Under the provincial organization of the Second Empire, two Redguard “parties” formed to aid Cyrodiil’s administration of Hammerfell. [Crowns and Forebears]

In short, this establishes a (apparently) non-political reason for the exodus of Yokuda, a war of settlement of Hammerfell (more of a massacre), rewrites present Redguard culture and language as essentially Nedic in origin, and introduces the Crowns and Forebears.

The colonization of Hammerfell in post-Redguard lore is particularly interesting. You could easily see it as the frustrating fantasy trope of a presently oppressed race that is in fact reviled (almost in retribution) for a previous act of violence. When this idea appears in other stories it has been criticized for minimizing or justifying racial oppression. It is presumably based in a complete lack of knowledge of imperialism: violence is dealt out to balance historical violence, and the world is just. That rationalization is difficult to fully see through here, as the Empire is most definitely the antagonist in Redguard and yet it is the author, not the Empire, who brings into existence the slaughter of the indigenes by the Yokudans as a justification for the present state of affairs.

To shed more light on this, there’s an MK forum quote on Redguard’s changes to the Yokudans:

[…] when I started writing Redguard I really thought about how unique the black people of Tamriel were: they came in and kicked ass and slaughtered the indigenes while doing so. They invaded. It was the first time I had encountered the idea of “black imperialism”…and it struck me big time, as something 1) new, 2) potentially dangerous if taken as commentary, and 3) potentially rad if taken as commentary.

(Worth noting, incidentally, that from Daggerfall to Redguard the Redguards change to definitely Black from previously somewhat swarthy Iberians)

So Kirkbride believes that, contrary to erasing and disarming the Hammerfell-Septim conflict as an examination of imperialism, the Yoku invasion is a step forward (both “dangerous” and “rad”) in the lore.

Taking the above quote in its immediate context, MK appears to be making the honest mistake of conflating imperialism (hypothetical “black imperialism” notwithstanding) with the ethos of the Black Panthers, seemingly oblivious to the subtle point that the Panthers and imperialism are obviously completely opposite things.

Anyway to cut a long story short this is the Redguard narrative that has largely been preserved in recent games (while Morrowind doesn’t have much contemporary Redguard lore, and Oblivion seemingly only portrays Redguards who happen to be loyal to the Empire, in the second and fourth eras things are more gritty). They are the fearsome people from foreign lands who cut a bloody swathe through elf and nede-man alike, and who must now be held at arm’s length as their proud martial culture makes them incompatible with the civilized west (or, mainland).

I’m not going to go much into the difficulties of the purely aesthetic changes to Redguard culture in lore, saving to note that: (as this post summarizes) how convenient that they serve as cipher for all the enemies of IRL imperium in one.

TLDR:

MK bad and racist, Arena best TES game

#mk #tes fandom #redguard #arena #tes games #op #long post

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godsfavoriteasian · 5 years

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Hi there! I'm wondering if you could recommend some books about the communism wave during the 70s, Europe, America, Asia, wherever's fine with me. I want to learn more about how the world went from 70s during which leftwing movements were quite prevalent, and turned to more conservative right-oriented since 90s. (Ugh, I don't even know if this statement is correct) Thanks a lot!

Hello dear comrade!

One book I would highly recommend is “Chile’s 1,000 Days of Revolution: Communist Assessments of the Allende years.” Basically it’s 9 chapter book detailing and defending the policies of Allende and defends his legacy after much slander by the Western Media. This is one of my favorites and I’ve had it in my library for quite some time.

Another book I would recommend for you is “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” by Eduardo Galeano, which basically details all of the conquests and the terror that was put upon the indigenous people of Lain America from the age of the Spanish Invasion to U.S. meddling and staging coups. If you want a well rounded picture of why Latin America is so unstable today, this is where you want to look.

The third book I would recommend about the communist wave of the 70s would be Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party” by Joshua Bloom. You see, the Black Panther Party is still a very polarizing group even in America today, and this book is one of the few that comes close to not taking sides and evaluating their values and tactics in an impartial manner.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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IN THESE TIMES

With the popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the explosion in membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), socialism is all of a sudden central to the national political conversation. And it's happening in the United States. Despite being a country long argued to be uniquely allergic to all talk of class conflict and any alternative to capitalism, here we are, watching many Americans question whether we should remake our political and economic systems from top to bottom.

But this isn't the first time mass numbers of people in the United States have considered socialism. The last time was half a century ago, when the New Left raised questions about capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism and much more. At the tail end of the 1960s, those questions were taken up by the New Communist Movement (NCM), a collection of groups in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. While the movement was made up of organizations that had different answers to burning political questions, on the whole, these groups were inspired by the left-nationalist projects of the day, including domestic movements like the Black Panthers and Puerto Rican nationalist groups, and international communist movements in Cuba, Vietnam, and especially China.

Max Elbaum was deeply involved in that movement. After joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as a college student in Madison, Wisconsin, Elbaum co-founded the NCM group Line of March. He ended up devoting his life to various movements against war and racism, and served as the editor of the leftist magazine CrossRoads throughout the 1990s.

Elbaum is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Che, and Mao, reissued in April by Verso Books with a new foreword by Alicia Garza, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter. Though he was a participant in some of the organizations and campaigns and the overall movement that he chronicles in the book, Revolution in the Air takes a more dispassionate look at the NCM, fairly weighing its achievements and missteps.

It's hard to come away from reading Elbaum's book without thinking that the movement made far more missteps than achievements. As we explore in our conversation below, the movement's orientation towards “Third-World Marxists” and left nationalism gave it some redeeming characteristics, like its steadfast commitment to anti-racism and creating a multiracial movement. But it also quickly became a movement rife with undemocratic behavior, obsessed with doctrinal purity, and orientated towards regimes like China that radicals later realized were far from successful democratic, socialist societies.

This is a history that's worth excavating in its own right, given how significant the NCM was at the tail end of the New Left. But it is also history that radicals today would do well to wrestle with. Socialists in the 21st century don't have to completely reinvent the wheel — they can learn from the often-heroic efforts of radicals several decades ago. Revolution in the Air is essential reading for the new generation of radicals that wants to get anti-capitalism right this time, avoiding the same sectarian, undemocratic, purity-obsessed mistakes that the past generation of Marxist-Leninists did.

I recently interviewed Elbaum about his book. Our conversation focused on the history of the NCM and—especially—what it can teach members of the DSA.

Micah Uetricht: Let’s start with the basics. What was the NCM?

Max Elbaum: The NCM was an effort by several thousand people to revitalize communism, during a period when traditional communism had been stagnant. It evolved out of the radical movements of the 1960s and had some momentum on the left from the late 1960s into the 1970s. At that point, it was the predominant trend within the Left. It had the highest proportion of people of color and some influential political initiative.

It ran into difficulties into the mid- to late-1970s. Some parts carried on into the 1980s, but was finished as a coherent force by the late 1980s.

Micah Uetricht: What was meant by “communism”?

Max Elbaum: The movement arose at a time when Third-World revolutions were shaking the empire, and when several of the leading organizations within those revolutions identified with Marxism-Leninism — versions of it that were not strictly within the ideological niche of the Soviet Union, particularly the Chinese Communist Party and the Cubans. The NCM identified with those movements politically and ideologically, and defined itself as building a genuinely revolutionary party as opposed to what it saw as “reformism” or “revisionism” of the Communist Party USA.

The idea was to build a new revolutionary vanguard on the basis of a more orthodox, left version of Marxism-Leninism, one especially inspired by the liberation movements then existing throughout what we called the Third World.

Micah Uetricht: Why was the NCM so ascendent in the post-New Left?

Max Elbaum: It attracted a plurality of people who turned to revolutionary politics — not necessarily a majority, but a plurality. It was particularly strong in freedom movements from communities of color among those who turned to revolutionary politics. People who went into it had an extremely strong commitment to revolutionary politics and made sustained efforts to sink roots in the working class and oppressed communities.

The largest left newspaper of the time, the Guardian, embraced these politics. It was a time when the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Communist parties and other left-led national liberation movements had very high prestige, and this movement identified with those forces. All of this gave the movement initiative.

Micah Uetricht: Your book isn’t really a defense of the NCM. Most of it is quite critical. But you also repeatedly point out some of the positive features of that movement. Can you briefly sketch out the good and the bad from those movements?

Max Elbaum: My book is an effort to document what the movement did and thought and what its components and parts were. So in a sense, it’s resource material for people to draw their own conclusions of what the strengths and weaknesses were. (Though I do, at the end, draw my own balance sheet.)

For my part, on the positive side, the movement did see how central empire-building and racism were to U.S. capitalism. There was a strong commitment to sinking roots in those communities that had the greatest potential to make radical change. The movement grasped the importance of collective action and the idea of people prioritizing political activity and advancing it in a collective way.

The movement did make some headway in breaking out of a U.S.-centric view of the world. And there was an attempt to learn from and offer ideas to revolutionaries in other countries, and a strong sense of internationalism. In its early years, certain component parts did some interesting work on U.S. politics, especially on the particular role of the special oppression of communities of color.

On the negative side, all sides of the movement were afflicted with a misassessment of the conditions in the country, especially the resilience of capitalism. Lots of people were off-base in the late 1960s and 1970s, but the movement couldn’t adjust when it became clear that the motion of national politics was moving to the right.

The ideological frameworks of the different component parts of the movement were rigid in their quest for orthodoxy — seeing Marxism-Leninism as a kind of omniscient science. Those ideological frameworks were off-base.

The movement was generally afflicted by ultra-left tendencies and a tendency to polarize forces that weren’t, in their view, as revolutionary as them. The model of organization the movement implemented was “miniaturized Leninism”; we essentially built small sects instead of flexible, mass revolutionary groups. This was related to our misassement of the historical conditions. There was a proliferation of sectarian attitudes over political differences, some of which were important but many weren’t.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #in these times #bernie sanders #alexandria ocasio cortez #history #socialism #democratic socialism #DSA #Democratic Socialists of America

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

Link

Goldner on Elbaum

Commune has a new review out of the 2018 reissue of Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, which recounts the trials and travails of the New Communist Movement in the US. Written by Colleen Lye, “Maoism in the Air” is very sympathetic to the book’s central thesis: namely, that three distinct strands of American Maoism (Cultural Revolutionary, Third World nationalism, and orthodox Marxism-Leninism) shaped the politics of the post-’68 generation in a novel and generally beneficial way. Lye even goes a step further than Elbaum, remarking on the NCM’s institutional legacy that “today’s academic field of critical ethnic studies might well be described as a space where anti-racism and anti-imperialism continue, in a different key and perhaps even unknowingly, the Marxist-Leninism of the ’68 generation.”

She may well be right about this, but I hardly think this is a legacy to be proud of. Usually the so-called “long march through the institutions” is seen as a political defeat held up as an intellectual victory. Marxism’s relegation to the academy is a sign of its neutralization, in other words. I can only speak to the field of Jewish Studies, which is what I’m most familiar with, but for the most part I find it a useless discipline — despite my persistent interest in the history of Jews. Regardless, I was somewhat surprised to see such a positive review of Elbaum’s book in the pages of Commune, a magazine that I am very excited about. (For any readers who haven’t already, I encourage you to check out Jay Firestone’s ethnographic survey of alt-Right NYC and Paul Mattick’s outstanding piece on the centenary of the German Revolution.)

Admittedly, I’ve never understood the appeal of Maoism for American communists, either in the seventies or today. Perhaps it possessed some exotic aura back then, or was maybe just a dope aesthetic. Either way, the theory and practice of the Chinese brand of Stalinism ought to have been long discredited by now. Virtually all of the national liberation movements that were supposed to destabilize global capitalism and pave the way for international socialist revolution have been seamlessly reintegrated into the world of commodities. Nowadays, of course, there is the added association of Maoist ideas with the Black Panther Party, which is still celebrated as a high point in the history of revolutionary politics in the US. How much of this is simply mythologization after the fact is difficult to say, but it was certainly influential.

But even in light of this association, the attraction of Maoism is difficult to grasp. It was recently revealed, in fact, that the person who introduced the Black Panthers to the writings of Mao was an FBI snitch. Richard Aoki, the Berkeley radical and leader of the ethnic studies strike, informed his Bureau contact: “The Maoist twist, I kind of threw that one in. I said so far the most advanced Marxists I have run across are the Maoists in China.” Despite this ideological straightjacket, BPP spokesmen like Fred Hampton were able to say fairly interesting things (all this before he was gunned down in Chicago at the age of 21). While it gave Hampton the perspective he needed to denounce the empty culturalism of Stokely Carmichael, whom he referred to as a “mini-fascist,” it otherwise limited the Panthers’ scope of inquiry into capitalist society.

Loren Goldner’s review, lightly edited and reproduced below, provides a much-needed corrective to the laudatory reception Revolution in the Air has met with so far. Goldner grounds his critique of Elbaum in the left communist and heterodox Trotskyist tradition he belonged to at the time, even though he likewise went to Berkeley and knew many of the same characters. Other Maoists, such as Paul Saba, have gently criticized Elbaum’s book over the last few months. Saba contends that the main fault of the NCM — of which he was also a veteran — was its theoretical poverty, and that it might have benefited from a more sophisticated Althusserian-Bettelheimian viewpoint. Quite the opposite holds for Goldner: the New Communist Movement was wrongheaded from the start.

You can read a 2010 interview with Elbaum by clicking on the link, but otherwise enjoy Goldner’s blistering review. Maoism may still be “in the air,” as Lye contends, if the various Red Guard formations are any indication. According to Goldner, however, it might be in the air the same way smog and other pathogens are.

Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist/Maoist/“Third World Marxist” and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the “best and the brightest” coming out of the American 1960s.

Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum’s book (describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what “Third World Marxism” stood for in its 1970s heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled “progressive politics” for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing “progressive” forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neoliberal phase has shot its bolt.

I lived through the 1960s too, in Berkeley of all places. I was in an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist milieu (then called Independent Socialist Clubs, which by the late 1970s had spawned eight different offshoots) a milieu the author identifies with “Eurocentric” Marxism. We argued that every state in the world from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to North Vietnam and North Korea, by way of Albania, was a class society, and should be overthrown by working-class revolution. We said the same thing about all the Third World “national liberation movements” and states resulting from them, such as Algeria, and those in the then-Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau). We were dead right, and Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists,” who cheerleaded most or all of them, were dead wrong. This is now clear as day for all with eyes to see. We based our perspective on realities that did and do not to this day exist for Elbaum and his friends: the question of whether the Russian Revolution died in 1921 (Kronstadt) or 1927 (defeat of the Left Opposition). In Elbaum’s milieu, the choice was between 1953 (death of Stalin) and 1956 (Khruschev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress). “Eurocentrics” that we were, we took note of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous China policy in 1927 (which Mao Tse-tung at the time had criticized from the right); of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Third Period policy and its results in Germany (above all), but also throughout the colonial world (e.g. the 1930 “Communes” in Vietnam and China). We critiqued Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Popular Front policy, which led to a mutual defense pact with France, the reining in of the French mass strike of May-June 1936, and above all to the crushing of the anarchists and Trotskyists (and with them the Spanish Revolution as a whole) in Barcelona in May 1937 (it also led to the abandonment of anticolonial agitation by the Vietnamese and Algerian Communist Parties in the name of “antifascism”). We were disturbed by the Moscow Trials, whereby 105 of 110 members of Lenin’s 1917 central committee were assassinated, and by the Stalin-Hitler pact, through which Stalin handed over to the Gestapo dissident factions of the German Communist Party who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, We read about Elbaum’s one-time hero Ho Chi Minh, who engineered the massacre of thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945 when they advocated (with a real working-class base) armed resistance to the return of English and French troops there after World War II (Ho received them warmly under the auspices of the Yalta agreement, wherein Uncle Joe had consented to further French rule in Indochina). Stalin had done the same for Greece, where again the Trotskyists were slaughtered while pushing for revolution, and in western Europe, where the French and Italian resistance movements were disarmed and sent home by their respective Communist Parties. We studied the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolution (and Polish worker unrest) of 1956; we distributed the brilliant Open Letter to the Polish Workers’ Party (1965) of Kuron and Modzelewski. We were heartened by the Polish worker uprising in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970, which arguably heralded (through its 1980-81 expansion) the end of the Soviet empire. Elbaum mentions none of these post-1945 worker revolts against Stalinism, which were undoubtedly too “Eurocentric” for him — they did after all take place in Europe — assuming he heard about them. At the time, he and his milieu would have undoubtedly described them as revolts against “revisionism.”

From 1970 onward I moved into the broader, more diffuse anti-Stalinist milieu in the Bay Area. We read Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; we discovered Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and the Situationists; we saw Chile’s 1970-1973 Popular Front once again crushed by the same collaborationist policies which Elbaum’s Stalinist lineage had first perfected in France and Spain in 1936, and unlike Elbaum and his friends, we were hardly startled when the Chinese Communist Party embraced Pinochet. It had not escaped our “Eurocentric” attention that China itself had pushed the Indonesian Communist Party to adopt the same Popular Front strategy in 1965, leading to the massacre of hundreds of thousands (a success for US imperialism that more than offset the later defeat in Indochina), or that it had applauded when the Ceylonese regime (today Sri Lanka) bloodily repressed its Trotskyist student movement in 1971. We were similarly not shaken, like Elbaum and his friends, when China went on to support the South African intervention against the MPLA in Angola, or call for the strengthening of NATO against Soviet “social imperialism,” or support the right-wing regroupment against the Communist-influenced Armed Forces Movement in Portugal in 1974-1975. We “Eurocentrists” snapped up the writings of Simon Leys, the French Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the Shanghai proletariat by the People’s Liberation Army in the course of the “Cultural Revolution,” the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976. Elbaum and his friends were at the same time presenting this battle between two wings of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times, as a brilliant success in “putting politics in command” against the capitalist restorationists, technocrats, and intellectuals, and burning Beethoven for good measure. All of these writings of Chinese Stalinism struck us more as the second-time farce to the first-time tragedy of the worldwide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920s onward. Elbaum and his friends cheered on Pol Pot’s rustification campaign in Cambodia, in which one million people died; no sooner had they digested the post-1976 developments in China after Mao’s death (the arrest and vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the turn to the U.S. in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after Vietnam occupied Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked Vietnam, and the Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult, in those days, to be a “Third World Marxist”!

We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in motion by the serious diffusion of the “early Marx” and the growing awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the “late Marx” in the Grundrisse, Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value. We leapt upon the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of vol. I of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the “early” and “late” Marx (though we did not yet know Marx’s writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew an even sharper line between a truly “late Marx” and all the bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to the “diamat” world view and texts which were the standard fare of Elbaum’s world. It was of course “Eurocentric” to rethink Marx and official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, “not Eurocentric” to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria, and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and China from the 1840s onward may have been “Eurocentric” but the braindead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the “three goods” and the “four bads” were, for these people, decidedly not.

Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable writings — no doubt “Eurocentric” — on primitive accumulation in the colonial world and her rich material on precapitalist societies everywhere in Einführung in die Nationalökonomie) meant nothing to these people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the latter’s lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques of Korsch and Lukács similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard of the 1940s and 1950s CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China’s four “revolutionary operas” and songs such as “The Mountain Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers” while the serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the latter’s limitations) and Guy Debord.

Then there was the influence of “Monthly Review” magazine and publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to various Third World “anti-imperialists” to China; they were infused with the “Bandung” climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the Soviet-Chinese-neutralist “anti-imperialist” bloc. Names such as Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mindset, as did the later “Tricontinental” (Latin America-Africa-Asia) consciousness promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton Woods system, did not even mention credit) became a major theoretical reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arghiri Emanuel, and the South American “dependency school” (Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the lynchpin was Lenin’s theory of imperialism, with its idea of “imperialist superprofits” making possible the support of a “labor aristocracy” and thereby the reformism of the Western working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed. Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy’s economics, Elbaum still uses “monopoly capital” as one of his many unexamined concepts.

Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in reality, in most cases, the study of Volume I, which is tantamount to reading Hegel’s Phenomenology only on the initial phase of “sense certainty” of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite was Beria’s “On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucasus,” reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: “the publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars.” He might have added that it wasn’t worth reading at the time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of soviets and workers’ councils for direct democratic worker control of the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far more interesting ones), by Elbaum’s own account the vision of the socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly discredited, or the invocation of the “socialism in one rural commune” of William Hinton’s Fanshen, or the writings on Viet Cong “democracy” by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who had also written lyrically about Stalin’s Russia 30 years earlier). The real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value, (i.e. the regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960s, not for Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization process but as a quasi-Dühringian system ultimately of power and domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing Keynesianism pervaded this part of the Left, relegating the law of value to the capitalism of Marx’s time and (following Lenin) seeing everything since the 1890s as power-political “monopoly capital.” This “anti-imperialism” was and is in reality an ideology of Third World elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class, like all the “progressive” regimes they have ever established. It did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the 1960s, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places between the three major capitalist centers of the US, Europe, and East Asia (so much for Lenin’s theory of imperialism); the illusory prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being looted). The ultimate implication of this outlook was, once again, to implicate the “white” (e.g. Eurocentric) working class of the West in the world imperialist system, in the name of illusory bureaucratic-peasant utopias of labor-intensive agriculture. This working class in the advanced capitalists countries had meanwhile, from 1955 to 1973, carried out the mounting wildcat insurgency in the US and Britain, May 1968 in France and the “creeping May” of 1969-1977 in Italy, apparently not having been informed by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists” that they were bought off by imperialism.

A number of unexamined concepts run through Elbaum’s book from beginning to end: revisionism, antirevisionism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, ultraleftism. Elbaum never explains that “revisionism” meant to this milieu above all the ideological demotion of Stalin after 1953, and that therefore those who called themselves “antirevisionists” were identifying, implicitly or explicitly (usually the latter) Stalin’s Russia with some betrayed “Marxist orthodoxy.” In his counterposition of “revisionism/antirevisionism” Elbaum does not devote one line to the consolidation, in 1924, of the grotesque concept of “socialism in one country,” a concept that would have made Lenin (whatever his other problems) wretch. (Not for nothing had Lenin’s Testament called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, another “fact” that counted for nothing in the mental universe of “Third World Marxism.”) For someone who is writing about it on every page, Elbaum has, in fact, no real theory of Stalinism whatsoever. Whereas the milieu I frequented stayed up late trying to determine if the seeds of Stalinism were in Leninism, Elbaum and his friends saw mainly or entirely an unproblematic continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and affirmed it. As for “Marxism-Leninism,” Elbaum does admit that it was a concoction of Stalin. In its subsequent career “Marxism-Leninism” could mean anything to anyone, anything of course except the power of soviets and workers’ councils which in every failed proletarian revolution of the twentieth century (Russia 1905 and 1917-1921, Germany 1918-1921, Spain 1936-1937, Hungary 1956, France 1968) had more genuine communist elements than all the large and small totalitarians in Elbaum’s “Third World Marxist” pantheon put together.

“Ultraleftism” for Elbaum means little self-appointed vanguards running amok and demarcating themselves from real movements. Elbaum seems quite unaware of the true historic ultraleft. One can agree or disagree with [Anton] Pannekoek (whose mass strike writings influenced Lenin’s State and Revolution), [Herman] Gorter (who told Lenin in 1921 that the Russian revolutionary model did not could not be mechanically transposed onto western Europe) or [Amadeo] Bordiga, who called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution to his face in 1926 and lived to tell the tale. But such people and the genuine mass movements (in Germany, Holland, and Italy) that produced them are a noble tradition which hardly deserves to be confused rhetorically with the thuggish antics of the (happily defunct) League for Proletarian Socialism (the latter name being a true contradictio in adjecto, inadvertently revealing bureaucratic dreams: Marxian socialism means the abolition of wage-labor and hence of the “proletariat” as the commodity form of human labor-power). As indicated above, figures such as [Karl] Korsch, [Paul] Mattick, [Cornelius] Castoriadis, and the early CLR James (whatever their problems) can similarly be considered part of an ultraleft, and unlike the productions of Elbaum’s milieu, their writings are eminently worth reading today. One Dutch Marxist organizing in Indonesia in 1908 had already grasped the basically bourgeois nature of nationalism in the then-colonial world, an idea Elbaum was still catching up with in 2002.

“Internationalism” for Elbaum means mainly cheerleading for the latest “Third World Marxist” movement or regime, but in reality his vision of the world is laughably America-centered. He refers on occasion (as a source of inspiration for his milieu) to the French mass strike of 1968, which swept aside all self-appointed vanguards, “Marxist-Leninists” first of all. This is lost on Elbaum. By the early 1970s, Trotskyist groups had clearly out-organized the Marxist-Leninists, and for what it’s worth, today the two largest Trotskyist groups, Lutte Ouvrière and Ligue Communiste, together account for 10% of the vote in French elections and are now larger than the Communist Party, without a Marxist-Leninist in sight. In Britain, similarly, Trotskyist groups out-organized the Marxist-Leninists hands down, played an important role in the 1972 strike wave (never mentioned by Elbaum), and today the British Socialist Workers’ Party (not to be confused with the American rump of the same name) is the largest group to the left of the Labour Party. Elbaum refers in passing to the Japanese far left of the 60s as an influence on some Japanese-Americans, but he seems blissfully unaware that the Zengakuren was overwhelmingly anti-Stalinist and mainly viewed Russia and China as state-capitalist. The most creative and internationally influential currents of the Italian 1970s, the so-called operaisti or workerists, were breaking with Leninism from the early 1970s at the latest. (To be fair, in Italy and in Germany large Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups did exist, and the Trotskyists were basically marginal.)

On the subject of Trotsky: I am not a Trotskyist, and have basically (as previously indicated) since my callow youth viewed all so-called socialist societies as class societies, and not (as Trotskyists do) as “workers’ states.” But I have more respect for Trotsky (who should be distinguished from the Trotskyists) than I ever had or will have for Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim il-Sung, Castro, Guevara, or Cabral.

Wearing the blinders of his milieu, Elbaum shows real ignorance of Trotskyism. (“Third World Marxism’s” philistine hatred for Trotsky, while generally not stooping to 1930s “Trotsky the agent of the Mikado”-type slanders, was exceeded only by such ignorance.) Blinded by his milieu’s acceptance of complete and positive continuity between Lenin and Stalin, the world events of the early 1920s, which decisively shaped both Trotskyism and the aforementioned ultraleft (and the last eighty years of human history) have no importance for him. Hence (as indicated earlier), the triumph of “socialism in one country” after 1924 and the total subordination of all Communist Parties to Soviet foreign policy are totally unproblematic for these people, as were all the debacles of the Comintern mentioned earlier. Similarly, the question of the relationship of the Bolshevik party and Soviet state to the soviets and workers’ councils, i.e. the question of the actual working-class management of society, which was settled (in the negative) by 1921, is of no consequence either. It is Eurocentric to be concerned about Soviet history before the rise of Stalin, not Eurocentric to admire Stalin’s Russia with its ten million peasants killed in the 1930s collectivizations, its massacre of the Bolshevik Old Guard in the Moscow Trials, its factories operating with killing speed-up under direct GPU control or its twenty million people in slave labor camps at the time of Stalin’s death. For such a view, “revisionism” must therefore be Khrushchev’s (equally top-down) attempt to decompress (a bit) this nightmare. The memory of Stalinist Russia still weighs on the consciousness of masses of people around the world as the seemingly inevitable outcome of trying to do away with capitalism, and reinforces the still potent neoliberal mantra “there is no alternative,” but why the people Elbaum describes as the “most dynamic” part of the American left in the 1970s were so taken with the Stalinist legacy never seems to strike him as a major problem to be addressed.

Elbaum might also inform himself about Trotsky’s (and Marx’s) theory of permanent revolution, which was the centerpiece of the Bolshevik internationalist strategy in 1917, and its repudiation by Stalin the key to all the post-1924 politics swallowed whole forty-five years later by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists.” Permanent revolution-rightly or wrongly-meant the possibility that a revolution in a backward country like Russia could link up with (or even inspire; cf. Marx’s preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto) revolution in the developed European heartland, and in that way be spared the bloody primitive accumulation process which every capitalist country from Britain to Russia to contemporary China has necessarily undergone. It is this theory, and not some “Eurocentrism,” that made (the small minority of) honest Trotskyists keep their distances from regimes using “Third World Marxism” as a fig-leaf for capitalist primitive accumulation. Most Trotskyists were howling with the wolves that “Vietnam Will Win!” Well, we have seen what won in Vietnam (and even more so Cambodia).

This is hardly the place to describe the devolution of Trotskyism since Trotsky, but honesty and courage of convictions were not the strong suit of the [Ernest] Mandels and [Jack] Barneses and [Michel] Pablos who shaped it after 1940. Elbaum sees the American SWP as the main face of Trotskyism for 1960s and 1970s leftists in the US (and he is right about that), and claims that Trotskyism’s involvement with “old 1930s issues” and “European questions” was the main hindrance to a larger impact of Trotskyism when the Third World, from China to Vietnam to Cuba was supposedly sizzling with revolution and the building of socialism.

In point of fact, watching the SWP (like their French counterparts Ligue Communiste) in the 1960s and 1970s, I could only laugh up my sleeve watching the way they buried their critique of Stalinism (as in the case of the Vietnamese NLF) in the fine print of their theoretical journals while rushing after popularity, waving NLF flags, in exactly the milieu influenced by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.” To take only one anecdotal example: In a 1969 debate in Berkeley between the ISC and the SWP, we put SWP spokesperson Pete Camejo up against the wall about the 1945 massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in front of a large New Left audience. And Camejo conceded that, yes, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had in fact oppressed the Vietnamese comrades of the Fourth International. I am sure most of the New Leftist cheerleaders present considered our point to be “ancient history” — just twenty-four years earlier! Today, as they watch Vietnam rush into “market socialism” with investment capital from Toyota and Mitsubishi, I am sure they do not think about it at all. I remember Camejo’s brother Tony telling a similar audience that we should not be too critical of black and Latino nationalism in the US because blacks and Latinos had not yet passed through their “bourgeois revolution,” as if American blacks and Latinos did not also live in the most advanced capitalist society in the world. But he had put his finger on a certain reality, since many of the black and Latino nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s were in fact on their way to middle-class careers, once the shouting died down, as uninterested in genuine proletarian revolution (and the true twentieth century examples of it) today as they were then. (They were and are in this way no different from the great majority of the white New Left.) Elbaum approvingly quotes Tariq Ali attacking those who (such as myself and the ISC to which I belonged) saw no difference between “Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, or Castro and Batista,” whereas all of world history since Ali uttered that remark has demonstrated nothing except that the main difference made between old-style US-backed dictators and “Third World Marxist” dictators with state power is that the latter better prepare their countries for full-blown capitalism, with Mao’s China exhibit A for the prosecution, and Vietnam following close behind.

Further, Elbaum never seems to notice that many of the twentieth century Marxists still worth reading today (and he apparently has not read them), such as the early Shachtman, James, Draper, and Castoriadis, made their most important contributions in a break to the left of Trotskyism. In 35 years in leftist politics, I have met many ex-Stalinists and Maoists who became Trotskyists and council communists; I have never met anyone who went in the opposite direction. Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.

Finally, while Elbaum rightly says that the turn ca. 1969 of thousands of New Leftists to the American working class was largely fruitless, he does neglect one important counterexample, namely the success of the International Socialists (the renamed ISC after 1970) in building the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and through it being the sparkplugs for the election of Ron Carey as President of the Teamsters in 1991. There is no question that this development, however much it turned into a fiasco, was the most important leftwing intervention in the American labor movement since the 1940s. I no more wish to go off on a long tangent about that terribly-botched episode than I wish to expound on the history of Trotskyism; I left the IS milieu in 1969. It is rather, again, to show Elbaum’s blindspot to the real flaws of his own tradition. The IS’ success with TDU came at the price of burying (at least for the purposes of Teamster politics) the fact that they were socialists, not merely honest trade-unionists (It turned out that Carey wasn’t even that.) Anyone educated in a Trotskyist group (and the IS, despite its rejection of the socialist character of the so-called “workers’ states” was Trotskyist on every other question), in contrast to most Stalinist and Maoist groups, develops a healthy aversion to the trade-union bureaucracy and to the Democratic Party. Elbaum provides a long history of how Maoism evolved out of the wreckage of the old CPUSA after the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. Some of these groups looked back to the CP under Browder; others preferred William Z. Foster. But almost all of them saw something positive in the CP’s role during the Roosevelt era, both in the Democratic Party and in the CIO. The problem of those working off of Trotskyism was, on the contrary, the “bureaucracy” that developed in exactly the era of CP influence; the problem of those working off of Marxism-Leninism was “revisionism” (Stalinists and Maoists for some reason don’t have too much to say about bureaucracy, except-as in the “Cultural Revolution,” when they are supporting one bureaucratic faction against another). And the concept of “revisionism” rarely inoculated these people against seeking influence in high places, either with Democratic politicians or with trade-union bureaucrats, as the CP had done so successfully in its heyday. It is certainly true that many of Elbaum’s Marxist-Leninists did neither. But he seems to ignore the fact that the ability of a group like the IS to intersect the Teamster rank-and-file rebellion of the 1970s and thereafter had something to do with the fact that they, in contrast to every Marxist-Leninist around, were not approaching the American working class with tall tales about socialism in Cuba or Albania or Cambodia or North Korea. The oh-so-radical defenders of Beijing’s line, whether for or against the “Gang of Four,” turned out to be defending a considerable part of the global status quo.

Finally, if Elbaum would lift his head from the rubble of “Third World Marxism,” he might notice that, in Britain and France, Trotskyist groups have a solid mass base (whatever one thinks of the politics involved), whereas Marxist-Leninists are almost nowhere to be seen; and even in the politically-backward U.S., groups such as the ineffable ISO, not to mention the youthful anarchist scene, are attracting more young people interested in revolution than any Marxist-Leninists. Being for the overthrow of every government in the world lets you see and do things that the baggage of Pol Pot or Shining Path or Kim Jong-Il conceals.

It is now time to turn to the merits of Elbaum’s book, which, contrary to what the reader may conclude from the above, it indeed has. First — and with this I have no quarrel — Elbaum attacks the “good sixties/bad sixties” vision of figures such as Todd Gitlin, for whom the late-sixties turn to revolution was the “bad sixties,” compared to the early sixties Port Huron vision of participatory democracy. Revolution was necessary then, and is necessary today, whatever the current ideological climate might favor. Elbaum is also right in critiquing Gitlin’s (and many others’) almost exclusive focus on the white New Left, seeing the movement essentially collapse with SDS in 1969-1970, and not recognizing its extension, particularly among blacks and Latinos (not to mention the thousands of white New Leftists who went into the factories, and the wildcat strike wave which lasted until 1973).

But Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World Marxist/Stalinist/Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more successful, in the 1960s and 1970s, in attracting and influencing militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the Trotskyist currents, not to mention the “post-Trotskyists” to whom I was closest, were partially blind to America’s “blindspot,” the centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was in it in Berkeley in the late 1960s, was all for black power, and (like many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have some, as did all the others. but there is no question that Elbaum’s milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out, many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of their families to attend college, and were — whether they knew it or not — on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising, when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes and movements of “progressive” middle-class elites in the Third World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such people in the “prairie radicalism” (i.e. populism) of the Midwest, in contrast to the more “European” left of the two coasts, one important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are important social/historical/cultural insights, which could be developed much further. Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Notebook (Denby was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya’s New and Letters group) effectively identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers’ distance from it; the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly antinationalist itself.)

It is undeniable that the 1960s movements of peoples of color in the U.S. were influenced by the global climate of the decolonization of most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia following World War II, and the “decentering” of actually Eurocentric views of Western and world history, following the 1914-1945 “decentering” of Europe in the new lines drawn by the Cold War. They were similarly influenced by — and themselves were the main force enacting-the shattering of centuries of white supremacy in American society. It would be idealistic and moralistic to explain their attraction to “Third World Marxism,” Maoism and Marxism-Leninism by the meaningless assertion that “they had the wrong ideas.” One important part of the answer is definitely the weight of arriving middle-class elements in these political groups, who are today to be found in the black and Latino professional classes. But the typical black, Latino or Asian militant in the U.S. waving Mao’s little red book or chanting “We want a pork chop/Off the pig” was not signing on for Stalin’s gulag, or the millions who died in Mao’s “great leap forward” in 1957, or mass murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the ghoulish torture of untold numbers of political prisoners in Sekou Toure’s Guinea (where the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael spent his last days with no dissent anyone ever heard about), any more than the working-class militant in the CP-USA in 1935 was signing on for the Moscow Trials or the massacre of the Spanish anarchists and Trotskyists. All the above real history and theory blotted out or falsified by “Third World Marxism” was available and known in the 1960s and thereafter to those who sought it. The question is precisely one of exactly when groups of people in motion are ready to seek or hear certain truths. What Elbaum can’t face is that the entirety of “Third World Marxism” was and is anti-working class, whether in Saigon in 1945 or in Budapest and Poznan in 1956 or in Jakarta in 1965 or in case of the Shanghai workers slaughtered in the midst of the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966-1969. Workers, white and nonwhite, in the American sixties sensed this more clearly than did Elbaum’s minions, blinded by ideology. As Marx said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, speaking of the English Revolution of the 1640s:

…in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habbakuk.

When the upwardly mobile middle class elements of the 1960s and 1970s New Left and Third World Marxism, both white but also important numbers of blacks and Latinos, had established themselves in their professional and civil service jobs and academic tenure, suburban life and VCRs drove out Ho, Che, and Mao. Things went quite differently, above all for blacks without a ticket to the middle class, as one can see in the difference between the ultimate fates of even the Weather Underground after years on the run, and black political prisoners such as Geronimo Pratt.

But, to conclude, if Elbaum has offered us hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies that no one — himself included — misses, it is not from an antiquarian impulse. The real agenda is spelled out in one of the effusive blurbs on the dust cover: “Finally, we have one book that can successfully connect the dots between the battles of the 1960s and the emerging challenges and struggles of the new century.” The giveaway is Elbaum’s treatment of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, which are presented as something almost as momentous as the 1960s, and which offered the few Marxist-Leninist groups (“Marxist-Leninists for Mondale” as someone once called them) still around their last chance at mass influence. In contrast to the 1960s, the Jackson campaigns came and went with no lasting impact except to further illustrate the dead end of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition and the Keynesian welfare-statism that was the bread and butter of the old Democratic Party and of the CP-USA’s strategy within the Democratic Party. And when all is said and done, this fatal legacy of the CP’s role at the height of Stalinism in the mid-1930s is Elbaum’s legacy as well. Just as he tells us nothing about the true origins of Marxism-Leninism and Third World Marxism, Elbaum tells us nothing about the CP-USA coming off its 1930s “heroic” phase, herding the American working class off to World War II through the enforcement of the no-strike pledge, the calumny of any critic of US imperialism’s moment of arrival at world power as a Hitlero-fascist, and applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is necessary to connect some further dots: this book aims at being a contribution to some new “progressive coalition” wedding the American working class to some revamping of the capitalist state in an all-out drive to “Beat Bush” around a Dean campaign (or something like it) in 2004. It joins the groundswell of dissent among capitalist forces themselves, currently being articulated by the likes of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman as the still-dominant neoliberal paradigm of the past twenty-five years begins to seriously fray. While Elbaum’s book makes occasional passing reference to economic hard times times the 1970s, he does not see the extent to which American decline has circumscribed any possible agenda of “reform,” which can only be some kind of “Tax The Rich” scheme, share-the-wealth — the declining wealth — kind of left populism, with suitably “diverse” forces that will probably be the final fruit of the “progressive” middle classes, whites and people of color, that evolved out of Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.”

Despite what Elbaum thinks and what he and his milieu thought thirty years ago, the fate of the world is in the hands of the world working class. In contrast to thirty years ago, however, this working class is no longer limited to North America, Europe and Japan, but is now spread through many parts of the “anti-imperialist” Third World, led by China. The East will be red again, not as the bureaucratic-peasant hallucination of the “Third World Marxists” of the 1960s and 1970s, but as a genuine working-class revolt against precisely the forces that used “Third World Marxism,” in the Third World as in the U.S. and Europe, to muddle every social question and advance their social stratum. The remnants of these forces are positioned today in and around the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy, as well as in the antiglobalization movement, readying themselves to again revamp the capitalist system with torrents of “progressive” rhetoric, as they did in the 1930s and 1940s.

The only thing that is “progressive” in today’s world is working-class revolution.

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