Saturday would have been Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday (thanks to Carl for blogging about this already). Woody Guthrie is one of my favourite singers, and surely one of the greatest ever songwriters as well as a great American radical. As a wordsmith, he is up there with Bob Dylan (whose whole oeuvre is un-imaginable without Guthrie’s influence), with John Steinbeck or Kenneth Patchen.
My mother brought me up on Woody, and I believe her parents brought her up on him. I’ve passed him on to my sons, who sing songs like “Pretty Boy Floyd” and the Car Song.
Like Jim, I have reservations about a hagiographic approach to Woody Guthrie, who was at the very least a close fellow traveller of the Communist Party at a time when the Stalinist regime was committing some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. (Jim recommends Scott Borchert’s very interesting “Woody Guthrie: Redder than Remembered” from Monthly Review.) But that does not diminish him as an artist in my eyes.
I’ve had a hard time choosing which song to accompany with post with, but I think “Jesus Christ”, which Carl’s post featured, is the right one:
June 16, 1848 – The Berlin arsenal was captured by rebellious citizens. The “German Revolutions” of 1848 swept across 50 European states, mostly affiliated with the German Confederation and Austria. While the middle classes were fighting for a unified German state and increased civil liberties, the working class had more revolutionary aspirations. Participants in the revolution included communist and anarchist revolutionaries like Marx, Engels and Mikhail Bakunin, as well as the composer Wagner. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1869 – In the small mining town of Ricamarie, France, troops were called in to suppress a workers’ strike, opening fire on demonstrators protesting the arrest of 40 workers, killing 14 (including a 17-month-old girl in her mother’s arms) and wounding 60 others (including 10 children). (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1918 –Eugene Debs delivered his famous Canton, Ohio anti-war Speech. America was at war with Germany, at the time, and radicals were being routinely rounded up and jailed, often illegally, when Debs gave this speech. The new Espionage Act was being used to prosecute people for their opposition to the war and Deb’s speech was used to make the case that he had violated the Act. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1920 – The U.S. Marines began fighting in Haiti to defend U.S. “interests” there. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which recognized the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively through unions. The legislation was later found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it helped inspire a wave of union organizing and pave the way for the National Labor Relations Act, which was passed in 1935. (From Workday Minnesota)
International Brigadiers at the Battle of Belchite
June 16, 1937 – The Trotskyist POUM, a significant constituent of the Spanish Republican forces (and the group with which George Orwell fought) was outlawed and its militants persecuted by the counter-revolutionary Stalinists and the Republic’s police, thus making the Republic and the Stalinists more vulnerable to the fascists. (From the Daily Bleed). For a good fictionalization of the Spanish war against the fascists, and the POUM’s and anarchist’s betrayal by the Stalinists, see Ken Loach’s Tierra y Libertad.
June 16, 1953 – Jack Hall of the ILWU and six others (the “Hawai‘i Seven”) were convicted under the Smith Act for being communists. (From the Daily Bleed)
Speaker: Richard Gilman-Opalsky Saturday, July 27, 2019, 7:00 PM Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, Studio 632B (Chicago) The capitalist reality of the so-called “communist” regimes of the twentieth century has been exposed. An international diversity of theory and history going back a hundred years tells us that communism was to be found in movements […] […]
Readers of Criticism &c. who have the opportunity to attend the 2018 Left Forum in New York (June 1-3) may be interested in the panel Hegelian-Marxism, Critical Theory and Marxist-Humanism: U.S. Origins and Development. The speakers are Russell Rockwell, author of Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic, Sarah Kleeb, and Kevin O’Brien. Time […]
October: the story of the Russian Revolution China Miéville Verso, 2017 An enormous amount of intellectual effort is necessary to unearth what significance, if any, the Russian revolutions of 1917 hold for us today. Before it is possible to do so, the mind must travel backwards from the integrated spectacle of Putin’s Russia to confront, […]
“He deported himself like an unappreciated genius, whom the world takes for a simpleton.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Daniel De Leon translation) “Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes; but he can give to none without taking from the others.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Daniel […]
The organized bloodshed in Europe entered a new phase in February as the battle of Verdun began on the morning of February 21. In the U.S., antipathy to the war continued to predominate, but President Wilson was well into a commitment to gradually prepare the country’s relatively small army and navy for entry into conflict. […]
The August 1915 cover of The Masses draws attention to the lynching of Leo Frank, which took place on August 17 in Marietta, Georgia. The drawing is by Robert Minor, later a major CP figure. Max Eastman, the magazine’s editor, was traveling in France and an account of a discussion on the war between him […]
History of the Surrealist Movement Gérard Durozoi University of Chicago Press, 2002 This massive work, originally published in France in 1997, is actually a history of surrealism as it manifested itself in the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and film. The movement’s core literary expression receives short shrift in the book’s 800-plus pages. The political b […]
Readers of Criticism &c. may find this panel at the upcoming Left Forum (New York City) of interest: Left Forum Panel: Deepening Technological Changes in the Workplace, Workers’ Organizing, and Marx’s Mature Critical Theory John Jay College 524 West 59th Street Room 127 Sunday May 31, 3:40pm – 05:40pm Karl Marx, in his works Grundrisse […]
