Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson (Arbor House 1988)

Maybe I'm just homesick, Yasmin thought. She was flooded with a sudden desire, almost frightening in its intensity, to see her little wood-frame ochre house on the canal in Charleston.

They stopped to top off the battery, and Grissom phoned the old lady's house. Yasmin noticed that people down here talked a little more like Grissom and a little less like her mother-in-law. The African-softened accent of the border was noticeably beginning to give way to the harsh Northern twang.

But Laura May Hunter still lived on the border. The first thing Yasmin saw when the uniformed day nurse let her and Grissom into the little house was a tinted picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall.

Lincoln was a Whig, backed by U.S. capital, who had organised a fifth column of Southern whites to support an invasion of Nova Africa in 1870, right after the Independence War. If the whites couldn't keep the slaves, they at least wanted the land back. Though the invaders had been routed at the Battle of Shoat's Bend without crossing the Cumberland River, "One nation indivisible" had become a rallying cry for white nationalists on both sides of the border. The next five years, 1870-75, were as close to a civil war as Nova Africa was to see. When it began, the new nation south of the Tennessee River was 42 percent white; when it ended, it was 81 percent black. In the U.S., veterans and descendants of the "Exitus" formed the racist backbone of the rightist movements for years: in the Bible Wars of the 1920s, the Homestead Rebellion, even in the Second Revolutionary War of '48. In Nova Africa the whites who embraced (or made their peace with) socialism were called "comebacks" - even if they had never left - and Lincoln was no hero to them; but before his body had even been cut down in 1871, he had become a legend among the border whites in Kentucky, Virginia and parts of Missouri.

Apparently he still was.

Yasmin pointed the picture out to Grissom, who nodded, then shrugged. "The Lost Cause," he whispered.

Favourite quote of the Left Forum weekend

He attributes it to someone else but I heard it from the lips of the DSA's Michael Hirsch:

"There is no such thing as spontaneity. It just means someone else has done all the organising."

I would have claimed that quote as my own, but that's just me.

Getting past that first footnote

Via Andy N over at Socialist Unity blog:

"David Harvey, the Marxist urban theorist and geographer, has been teaching a course on Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1) to postgraduate students at CUNY and John Hopkins University for more than thirty years. This is a (slightly) famous course and several noteable Marxist academics have taken it at one point or another.

This year, Harvey is making the whole course available online for free.

Each of the lectures, including questions and discussion from his postgraduate students, is being filmed and put on his website soon afterwards. The course consists of 13 two hour lectures. The first two are already up, an introductory lecture and a lecture dealing with Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. The idea is that people will read two chapters of Capital and then listen to the lecture before moving on to the next two, as if you were taking his class in CUNY. If anyone is thinking about reading or re-reading Capital this will probably be of great assistance. Harvey is a very interesting thinker and also an engaging lecturer and he knows Capital inside out. 26 hours of lectures look like they will be a fantastic resource. The third lecture is due to go online in three days.

Here it is: http://www.davidharvey.org"

Should be worth checking out. What with the world economy more jittery than Peter Cech in a penalty box at the moment, all the old theories for impending economic crisis will be doing the rounds again.

I heard David Harvey speak on a panel at the recent Left Forum. If I concentrated, I was lucky if I understood every tenth sentence from the esteemed panellists. It was an hour and a half of drowning in economics terminology and academic jargonese. Perhaps I should be checking out that course, rather than just linking to it?

If Chic Murray had subscribed to War Commentary

Hot on the heels of attending the meeting 'Towards a synthesis of Anarchism and Marxism?' at last weekend's Left Forum, where one of the panel speakers, Ruth Kinna, spoke on “Bridging Differences Through Revolutionary Action: Aldred on Anarchism and Marx”, comes news - via a SPGB google alert - of a fascinating article on the anarchist movement in the 1940s in Glasgow that has recently been posted on the LibCom website.

'Anarchism in 1940s Glasgow' contains an interview with Charlie Baird Sr that dates from '77 and the transcribed reminiscences of a roundtable discussion of Glasgow based Anarchists (1940s vintage) that dates from 1987.

Both pieces are fascinating insights into a tumultuous period for radical politics, and, like Ruth Kinna's talk at the Left Forum, it was a blast from the past for me 'cos many, many years ago, I went through a period of reading up on this subject in depth.

Not for any academic reasons, but simply because I was combining my interest in the history of radical politics with my interest in the history of Glasgow. I was reading John Taylor Caldwell's biography of Guy Aldred; Mark Shipway's book on Aldred and Sylvia Pankhurst; Wildcat's mega-pamphlet on the APCF; and Freedom's hundredth anniversary works on their tradition amongst others at a time when I would have been better served listening to Pop Will Eat Itself and getting drunk on snakebite. Maybe in my next life.

PS - Chic Murray? War Commentary? Chic Murray was a brilliant Scottish comedian who is probably best known today - if at all - for playing the headmaster in 'Gregory's Girl', and War Commentary was the name of Freedom during World War II (it's a convoluted story . . .don't ask me now), and Eddie Shaw came across as that sort of speaker even before I spotted the reference in the roundtable expression.

It seems that Glasgow has a history of outdoor speaking that comprised of half polemicist, half patter merchant.

Bubble Troubles

"The intoxicating US housing boom has come to an end. Now the economic hangover has arrived. What is likely, at the very least, is a prolonged crisis of the credit system. And as credit greases the wheels of capitalism this is no laughing matter for the capitalist class." ['Bubble Troubles' by Michael Schauerte]

Hot on the heels of sitting through the 'Decline of the Dollar: Decline or Flexibility of the Empire?' meeting at last weekend's Left Forum with a mixture of bewilderment and the cold sweats comes 'Bubble Troubles', the latest article from the World Socialist Party of the United States website.

I'm now taking odds on who'll be the first amongst McCain, Clinton and Obama to quote Norman Lamont's old words of: "If it's not hurting, it's not working." (I'm not taking bets on Ron Paul. He's been mouthing those words with a smile on his face for the last thirty years.)

Where did I put my copy of 'Sullivan's Travels'? I think I'll be needing it for the long haul.

What is the Left Forum?

In their own words . . . and better late than never, I guess:

Wait up . . . what's that that Francis Fox Piven says in the clip?

She briefly mentions the differing traditions and movements that make up the attendees of the Left Forum but when she mentions the Anarchist Left the camera pans to a copy of the magazine, Left Turn, on a shelf. Are the Left Turn touting themselves as anarchists these days? That's a bit of a departure from their (brief) time as the American franchise of the International Socialist Tendency after Callinicos and the SWP leadership in London expelled the ISO in murky circumstances back in 2001/02.

Had a quick nosey around the Left Turn website and, at first glance, it does look like they've dropped the S-word in favour of social justice this and anti-capitalist that. I guess that's the sort of misbranding that gets the punters in these days. Bit cheeky that, and it's also a wee bit naughty that they don't clarify their real origins in their 5 Year Anniversary Editorial that they've published online.

But I put it down to the fact that we're living in interesting political times for the left. Revolutionary? No. Confusing? Definitely.

Why else would you have the Left Forum citing Left Turn as the public face of activist anarchism whilst, at the same time and at the same event, the anarchist publishers, AK Press has a mini-bookcase solely devoted to books about and by Che Guevera on its stall at the event.

The world truly has been turned upside down.