Jack London on the historic failure of the capitalist class

There are many counts of the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to which capital has never replied and can never reply.

The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed. And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed deplorably, ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the world. It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and made modern society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and spiritual uplift. Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life organized, all this was possible. Here was the chance, God-given, and the capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. It prattled sweet ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased one whit in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous only as was the opportunity it had ignored.

But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As it was blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand. Well, then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and unmistakable...The capitalist class has mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging. In New York City 50,000 children go hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1320 millionnaires. The point, however, is not that the mass of man kind is miserable because of the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself. Far from it. The point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of the wealth taken by the capitalist class, but for want of the wealth that was never created. This wealth was never created because the capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally. The capitalist class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best of its management, but made the worst of it. It is a management prodigiously wasteful. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.

With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labor more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody. There would be no more material want and wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts. Not only would matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered. In such a day incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. No man, woman, or child would be impelled to action by an empty stomach. On the contrary, they would be impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action, as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors applying law, as artists and sculptors painting canvases and shaping clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity by singing and by statecraft. The spiritual, intellectual, and artistic uplift consequent upon such a condition of society would be tremendous. All the human world would surge upward in a mighty wave.

This was the opportunity vouchsafed the capitalist class. Less blindness on its part, less greediness, and a rational management, were all that was necessary. A wonderful era was possible for the human race. But the capitalist class failed. It made a shambles of civilization. Nor can the capitalist class plead not guilty. It knew of the opportunity. Its wise men told it of the opportunity, its scholars and its scientists told it of the opportunity. All that they said is there to-day in the books, just so much damning evidence against it. It would not listen. It was too greedy. It rose up (as it rises up to-day), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. It lulled its conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities, and allowed the suffering and misery of mankind to continue and to increase. In short, the capitalist class failed to take advantage of the opportunity. But the opportunity is still here. The capitalist class has been tried and found wanting. Remains the working-class to see what it can do with the opportunity...
Jack London, 'Revolution', 1905

New book on Malcolm X

Malcolm X: Visits Abroad April 1964-February 1965
By Marika Sherwood

Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) after a troubled childhood and imprisonment, became a Muslim on his release in 1952. A gifted speaker he became the major preacher and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, indicting white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against African Americans. But tension between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, led to Malcolm X's resignation in March 1964. He now made the pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Sunni Muslim and disavowed racism. While he had crisscrossed the USA many times for the NOI, Malcolm now travlled widely in the Middle East and throughout Africa, and also paid a number of visits to England and France, addressing Muslim, student and political organizations.
An erudite man of great charisma and intelligence, he was a national and international figure when he was assassinated in New York on 21 February 1965.
This book is an introduction to Malcolm's travels in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, taken from his travel Notebooks, autobiography, FBI papers and local newspapers.

ISBN: 978-0-9519720
Special sale price £5
Email Savannah Press: savannah@phonecoop.coop.

Marika Sherwood will be launching her fascinating book - which among other things has details of Malcolm's visits to not just the London School of Economics and Oxford University but also Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester - at a Black and Asian Studies Association seminar on Tuesday, September 14 (room G37) at 6pm, Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1. Everyone is welcome - for more info see here.

Selected Writings of George Rawick

A New Book from Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company

LISTENING TO REVOLT: SELECTED WRITINGS OF GEORGE RAWICK
Edited by David Roediger with Martin Smith
Charles H. Kerr | 194 pages | 2010
To order send $12.00 plus $2.00 shipping to:
Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company
1726 West Jarvis Avenue
Chicago, Il 60626

This volume offers the first major collection of the wide-ranging and revolutionary writings of the late George Rawick, a leading figure in both radical history and Marxist sociology. Personal assistant to C.L.R. James, comrade of Marty Glaberman and Selma James, and friend of C. Wright Mills and Michael Harrington, he influenced such leading scholars as Noel Ignatiev, Robin D.G. Kelley, Peter Linebaugh, Rosemary Feurer, Huw Beynon, Margaret Washington, Bruno Cartosio, Nando Fasce, Peter Rachleff and John Bracey and organizations like Students for a Democratic Society and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Rawick was a rarity who contributed decisively to African American history and to the study of white workers. His exciting scholarly and activist writings are generously represented here and put in context by David Roediger's extensive introductory essay on Rawick's life, thought, and politics.

"This is the best thing I have read on slavery in general and in particular in the United States. [It] will make history."
C.L.R. James on reading George Rawick's FROM SUNDOWN TO SUNUP

From the Afterwords:

"George Rawick could never accept the satisfied moralism of the Cold War dominant paradigms in social sciences. He moved from place to place. His many removals were part of his fight for freedom of speech and for intellectual honesty."
Ferruccio Gambino (University of Padua)

"Rawick was a white man who knew where he stood in respect to racism. Through his activism and his scholarship, he battled white supremacy, not solely out of sympathy for aggrieved others, but also because he wanted to respect himself."
George Lipsitz (University of California at Santa Barbara)

"He charged scholars to abandon the established academic tendency to dichotomize this proletariat as the regularized Sambo and marginally deviant Rebel; and to recognize these not as two different personality types, but rather as ambivalent, contradictory personalities struggling within the millions of subjectivities formed by radicalized and racist class society."
Enoch Page (University of Massachusetts)

CHARLES H. KERR SUBVERSIVE LITERATURE FOR THE WHOLE
FAMILY SINCE 1886

Grace Lee Boggs on 'Requiem for Detroit'

I while back on this blog I noted catching some of the excellent documentary 'Requiem for Detroit’, and so it is nice to note that the veteran thinker and activist Grace Lee Boggs, who was interviewed by the show has written about her take on it as well:

Requiem for Detroit aired March 13 on BBC2. But I didn’t view it until last week when I received the DVD (with a thank you note) from Julien Temple, the director, and George Hencken, the Films of Record producer.

In 1960 Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame was a turning point in American consciousness because it forced us to recognize that the food we enjoy is picked by migrant agricultural workers living and working under unspeakable conditions.

Requiem for Detroit can play a similar role in this period of transition from an increasingly destructive industrial culture. The documentary makes very clear that Detroit’s notorious devastation is not a natural disaster but a man-made Katrina, the inevitable result of illusions and contradictions in our insane 20th century pursuit of unlimited economic growth. We witness auto workers reduced to robots to produce Henry Ford’s Model Ts, and then struggling to reclaim their humanity by sitdown strikes and battling Ford’s goons at the overpass.

We meet southern Blacks who relish the “freedom” of Northern cities but also experience the racial tensions that exploded in 1943 and 1967.

Cars that grow the profits of the auto industry speed by on freeways which destroy neighborhoods to provide escape routes to the suburbs.

Neighborhoods are turned into war zones as the drug trade replaces jobs that have been exported overseas.

This documentary is the Odyssey of how a mode of production and transportation, once celebrated as the height of human creativity, morphed into a dehumanizing consumerism at the expense of human beings and other living things.

A number of Detroiters, Black and white, comment throughout. But the only named cast members are white-bearded John Sinclair, poet, former MC5 manager and White Panther Party leader; Martha Reeves, Motown’s earthy, gospel-infused singing star; Heidelberg Project community artist Tyree Guyton; and me.

John Sinclair recalls the glories of the last century as he drives through disintegrating neighborhoods. An exuberant Martha Reeves helps us understand how the distinctive Motown sound emerged from the “this is my country” euphoria of Blacks who had left behind them the sharecropping and lynching culture of the South. Tyree Guyton explains that he created the Heidelberg Project to depict the destruction of his neighborhood. He also describes today’s rising hope as neither a white or Black thing but “I” becoming “We.”

My closing comments make clear that the new American Dream emerging in Detroit is a deeply-rooted spiritual and practical response to the devastation and dehumanization created by the old dream. We yearn to live more simply so that all of us and the Earth can simply live. This more human dream began with African American elders, calling themselves the Gardening Angels. Detroit’s vacant lots, they decided, were not blight but heaven-sent spaces to plant community gardens, both to grow our own food and to give urban youth the sense of process, self-reliance and evolution that everyone needs to be human.

That’s why growing numbers of artists and young people are coming to Detroit. They want to be part of building a Detroit-City of Hope that grows our souls rather than our cars.

I hope Requiem for Detroit will be shown at the 2nd USSF meeting in Detroit June 22-26 . It is the story behind the USSF mantra:

Another World is Necessary. Another World is Possible. Another World is happening in Detroit!

Viewing it can help Detroit’s mainstream media become less shallow.

It can deepen the imagination of the new generation of media makers attending the annual Allied Media Conference which precedes the USSF.

These young people need this deepened imagination to do justice to the present escalating struggle between the Bings and Bobbs, scheming to gentrify Detroit by closing down neighborhood schools, and grassroots Detroiters who are organizing not only to save our schools but to bring the neighbor back into the ‘hood by inventing new forms of education that motivate schoolchildren to learn through community-building activities.

For more about "Requiem for Detroit"

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/10/detroit-motor-city-urban-decline

www.filmsofrecord.com/content.php?id=138

www.imdb.com/title/tt1572190/

Peter Gowan Memorial Conference

A one-day conference to discuss the contribution and ideas of Peter Gowan (1946-2009), author of The Global Gamble, founding editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, long-standing editor of New Left Review, and Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University.

Saturday, 12 June 2010, 10.00 to 5.30
School of Oriental and African Studies, Room G2

Agenda

10.00 – 12.30
Introduction: Tariq Ali
Session 1: Eastern Europe
Speakers: Gus Fagan, Marko Bojcun, Catherine Samary

12.30 – 1.30 lunch

1.30 – 3.00
Session 2: Imperialism and American Grand Strategy
Speakers: Gilbert Achcar, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Susan Watkins

3.00 – 3.30 coffee break

3.30 – 5.00
Session 3: The Dollar-Wall St Regime
Speakers: Robin Blackburn, Robert Wade, Alex Callinicos

5.00 – 5.30
Mike Newman: Peter Gowan as an educator
Awarding of the Peter Gowan Prize

The Conference is sponsored by Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and Historical Materialism. gus.fagan@ntlworld.com

New Book: Marx at the Margins

Kevin B. Anderson: Marx at the Margins:On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi- layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
2. Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
3. Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
4. Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
5. From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
6. Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion
Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today
Notes
References

Kevin B. Anderson is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California–Santa Barbara and most recently, with Janet Afary, the coauthor of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Charlie Brooker on the wonder of Mad Men

Though he doesn't make any kind of comparative reference to the novels of Richard Yates, author of the classic Revolutionary Road and 'the most perceptive author of the twentieth century' according to The Times, Charlie Brooker's discussion of Mad Men is still evocative enough of why the series is worthy of all the critical adulation it has garnered over its first three series.

Eugene Debs on what Socialists say about Immigration

[The American radical Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was one of the greatest revolutionary socialists who ever lived. In 1910 he wrote this letter to counter the arguments of those 'socialists' who argued for the necessity of supporting immigration controls - a letter which 100 years later still speaks to us today on an ever topical issue given the current climate of racism in Britain around the question today being whipped up by all manner of mainstream media 'social commentators' and politicians from Gordon Brown ('We are fighting for Britain's future', 'We will put the British people first') downwards...]

My Dear Brewer:

Have just read the majority report of the [Socialist Party] Committee on Immigration [which called for the exclusion of Asians from America]. It is utterly unsocialistic, reactionary and in truth outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation...

Away with the “tactics” which require the exclusion of the oppressed and suffering slaves who seek these shores with the hope of bettering their wretched condition and are driven back under the cruel lash of expediency by those who call themselves Socialists in the name of a movement whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and down-trodden of all the earth. These poor slaves have just as good a right to enter here as even the authors of this report who now seek to exclude them. The only difference is that the latter had the advantage of a little education and had not been so cruelly ground and oppressed, but in point of principle there is no difference, the motive of all being precisely the same, and if the convention which meets in the name of Socialism should discriminate at all it should be in favor of the miserable races who have borne the heaviest burdens and are most nearly crushed to the earth.

Upon this vital proposition I would take my stand against the world and no specious argument of subtle and sophistical defenders of the civic federation unionism, who do not hesitate to sacrifice principle for numbers and jeopardise ultimate success for immediate gain, could move me to turn my back upon the oppressed, brutalized and despairing victims of the old world, who are lured to these shores by some faint glimmer of hope that here their crushing burdens may be lightened, and some star of promise rise in their darkened skies.

The alleged advantages that would come to the Socialist movement because of such heartless exclusion would all be swept away a thousand times by the sacrifice of a cardinal principle of the international socialist movement, for well rnight the good faith of such a movement be questioned by intelligent workers if it placed itself upon record as barring its doors against the very races most in need of relief, and extinguishing their hope, and leaving them in dark despair at the very time their ears were first attuned to the international call and their hearts were beginning to throb responsive to the solidarity of the oppressed of all lands and all climes beneath the skies.

In this attitude there is nothing of maudlin sentimentality, but simply a rigid adherence to the fundamental principles of the International proletarian movement. If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare.

Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.

Let us stand squarely on our revolutionary, working class principles and make our fight openly and uncompromisingly against all our enemies, adopting no cowardly tactics and holding out no false hopes, and our movement will then inspire the faith, arouse the spirit, and develop the fibre that will prevail against the world.

Yours without compromise,
Eugene V. Debs.

Requiem for Detroit?

Those with 75 minutes to spare who missed this programme detailing the history of the city of Detroit (which among other things has contributors including the legendary veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs can catch up with it here.

More from Moore

'Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.'
Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story

This bit of historical detail about Roosevelt also caught my eye in Moore's recent interview with the Guardian:

Moore has dug out of a South Carolina archive a piece of film buried away 66 years ago because it threatened to rock the foundations of the capitalist system as Americans now know it. President Franklin D Roosevelt was ailing. Too ill to make his 1944 state of the nation address to Congress, he instead broadcast it by radio. But at one point he called in the cameras, and set out his vision of a new America he knew he would not live to see.

Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights to guarantee every American a job with a living wage, a decent home, medical care, protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness and unemployment, and, perhaps most dangerously for big business, freedom from unfair monopolies. He said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence".

The film was quickly locked away.

"The next week on the newsreels – and we've gone back and researched this – they didn't run that," said Moore. "They talked about other parts of his speech, the war. Nothing about this. The footage became lost. When we called the Roosevelt presidential library and asked them about it they said it wasn't filmed. His own family told us it wasn't filmed." Moore's team scoured the country without luck until they were given a tip about a collector connected to the university of South Carolina.

The university didn't have anything archived under FDR's speeches that fitted, but there were a couple of boxes from that week in 1944.

"We pop it in. It was all there. We had tears in our eyes watching it. For 65 years not a single American saw that speech, not one. I decided right then that we're going to fulfil Roosevelt's wishes that the American people see him saying this. Of all the things in the film, probably I feel most privileged that I get to share this. I get to give him his stage." It's a powerful moment not only because it offers an alternative view of American values rarely spoken of today – almost all of which would be condemned as rampant socialism – but also an interesting reference point with which to compare the more restrained ambitions of the Obama administration.

For more on Obama's conservatism in his first year of office, see 'President of Cant' by Tariq Ali in the new New Left Review, Megan Trudell From a bang to a whimper (and analysis of Obama's banking reforms and Richard Seymour 'Obama: the dream dies'.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Though I only saw the legendary 'people's historian of the United States' once, at the 'Marxism' conference in London in 2000 (where his play Marx in Soho was also performed), news of Howard Zinn's passing is still very sad - as it is I am sure for many many readers of Histomat. His writings on race, class and power in America, the nature of history and the role and responsibility of the historian in society more broadly were an inspiration, revelation and education personally - and his sane, courageous voice will be sorely missed in the struggles ahead. I will add tributes/obits etc etc below when I get time.

Ambre Ivol 'Howard Zinn: Bridging generations'
Howard Zinn on Making History (2007 interview)
Howard Zinn.Org
Brian Kelly 'Howard Zinn: a life of insubordination'
Alan Maass, 'The people's historian'
Dave Zurin 'Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History'
Geoffrey Hodgson 'Obituary'
Michael Greenwell 'Howard Zinn: Radical Historian'
Victoria Brittan 'Howard Zinn's lesson to us all'

More on W.E.B. Du Bois

This blog has always had a soft spot for W.E.B. Du Bois, so Lenin's Tomb's long review of The End of Empires: African Americans and India by Gerald Horne was most welcome. Some issues of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP that Du Bois founded and edited for a long period, seem to be available online - which is also nice.

Capitalism: A Love Story

Louis Proyect on Michael Moore's new film

Hubert Harrison on how to review books

'In the first place, remember that in a book review you are writing for a public who want to know whether it is worth their while to read the book about which you are writing. They are primarily interested more in what the author set himself to do and how he does it than in your own private loves and hates. Not that these are without value, but they are strictly secondary. In the next place, respect yourself and your office so much that you will not complacently pass and praise drivel and rubbish. Grant that you don’t know everything; you still must steer true to the lights of your knowledge. Give honest service; only so will your opinion come to have weight with your readers. Remember, too, that you can not well review a work on African history, for instance, if that is the only work on the subject that you have read. Therefore, read widely and be well informed. Get the widest basis of knowledge for your judgment; then back your judgment to the limit.'
Quoted in Harrison Redux: The resurrection of a pioneering cultural journalist by Scott McLemee

Franklin Rosemont RIP

Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009), celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. This is a brief obituary from here.:

He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.

Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area’s more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student movement at Roosevelt.

Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he had "majored in St. Clair Drake" at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics, and of historical scholarship—all concerns that would remain central for him throughout the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the United States later that year and founded America’s first and most enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of André’s writings in English.

Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964, and put his considerable talents as a propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press. A long and fruitful collaboration with Paul Buhle began in 1970 with a special surrealist issue of Radical America. Lavish, funny, and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow.

The smashing success of the 1968 World Surrealist Exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced the ability of the American group to make a huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the reorganization of the nation’s oldest labor press, Charles H. Kerr Company. Under the mantle of the Kerr Company and its surrealist imprint Black Swan Editions, Franklin edited and printed the work of some of the most important figures in the development of the political left: C.L.R. James, Marty Glaberman, Benjamin Péret and Jacques Vaché, T-Bone Slim, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and, in a new book released just days before Franklin’s death, Carl Sandburg. In later years, he created and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the University of Texas Press, in addition to continuing his work with Kerr Co. and Black Swan.

A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington, and the historians Paul Buhle, David Roediger, John Bracey, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Rosemont’s own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspirations and results. Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers.

He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. Indispensable compendiums like The Big Red Songbook, What is Surrealism?, Menagerie in Revolt, and the forthcoming Black Surrealism are there to ensure that the legacy of the movements that inspired him continue to inspire young radicals for generations to come. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include Morning of the Machine Gun, Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra’s Eye and Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny artwork—to which he contributed a new piece every day—graced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions.

Indeed, between the history he himself helped create and the history he helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to write—about the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the US, or about the international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing through the Rosemonts’ Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones, Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching the next generation of surrealists worldwide.

Edited to add: 'Remembering a Wobbly Surrealist'

A quick reminder of the dream of Martin Luther King...

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

- Martin Luther King, 1967.

Richard Seymour Speaks

The caretaker over at Lenin's Tomb will be speaking on 'The Liberal Defence of Murder- the 'pro-war left' and US foreign policy since 1989' - the subject of a book I am meaning to buy and review on this blog at some point - on Monday 1 December 2008, 17:30 - 19:30 in central London. See here for more info. Meeting organised by the London Socialist Historians Group, whose forthcoming conference in January on 1649 I plugged here.

Why Obama should read Trotsky

'US capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must be redivided. For Germany it was a question of "organising Europe". The US must "organise" the world. History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.'
Leon Trotsky, 1934. For more on Obama, see this month's Socialist Review, which carrys extensive comment from the likes of Manning Marable, David Hilliard, Noam Chomsky and Gary Younge.

A change is coming...

War, budget cuts and austerity we can believe in

Edited to add: 'But it is a leap forward in class consciousness'. And it does feel damn good. Two final words to George W Bush, who I know reads this blog avidly: Black. Power.

Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

The struggles of working people in America are often ignored. One person who devoted his life to recording the voices of the voiceless was Studs Terkel, peoples oral historian of America, who has sadly died aged 96. In 2006, the veteran radical gave this interview about his life to Ed Rampell. RIP.