Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Erik Olin Wright

University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist and former president of the American Sociological Association Erik Olin Wright died from acute myeloid leukemia on January 23, 2019. He was 72 and both respected as a scholar and as a human being. Part of what made people feel empathy for him was the honesty and openness that marked his career. I only learned about his illness a couple of weeks ago when someone posted a link to the journal he had been keeping on CaringBridge, a website that allows you to connect with someone in failing health. His farewell post from three days ago conveys his stoicism in the face of death:

Recent blogs have been pretty heavy, understandably. I’m in the last days of my life. That kind of focuses the mind around the biggest questions. And that’s been combined with some health crises that had such powerful physical impact on me that I needed to share that as well. So while I hope the spirit of these blogs is not just relentless gloom and doom, they have certainly not been lighthearted. Now, so you can get a fuller picture of what my life is like, even in the midst of this, I thought I would share with you the section of the letter to my grandchildren that Becky and I have just completed, Becky typing and me dictating.

There has been an outpouring of remembrances of Wright from colleagues and students. I will include those that I have seen and update this post as new ones arrive:

Although I was neither a colleague nor a student of Erik Olin Wright, there were always be a place in my heart for him as a prestigious scholar who was not above engaging with me over a book that he wrote in 2009 titled “Envisioning Real Utopias” that was miles apart from my own understanding of Marxism. It was obvious from my initial post 12 years ago based on a preliminary draft of his book that I considered him to be a real mensch:

I had kicked around the idea of responding to sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s manuscript-in-progress “Envisioning Real Utopias” a few months ago, but decided against it mainly out of respect for Wright’s overall scholarship. Although I have big problems with Analytical Marxism (his methodology) and utopian thinking of any sort, he did have an excellent track record when it came to the nitty-gritty empirical research around class questions, starting with the 1973 “The Politics of Punishment: A Critical Analysis of Prisons in America.” If more leftist professors did this kind of yeoman scholarship, we’d all be better off.

When references to Wright’s work-in-progress turned up on recently on Crooked Timber and Political Theory Daily Review, I reconsidered since these two websites are excellent barometers of academic trends. As an outsider to this world, I find it endlessly fascinating–especially when it takes up questions of how to eliminate the capitalist system. So without further ado, here are some scattergun observations on the manuscript.

To start with, we should thank Wright for using the Internet to get feedback in this fashion. Over the years, I have found people such as Robert Brenner to be extremely uncomfortable with email debates. The preferred mode of operation for established Marxist scholars is to go into the woodshed for a couple of years or so and then unleash their finished product on the outside world. I am not sure what motivated Wright to take a different approach, but I hope it inspires others to follow his example.

To my astonishment, Erik took up my criticisms as comments on my blog: https://louisproyect.org/2007/03/07/erik-olin-wright-replies/

In my final exchange, I began by thanking him for his consideration and would from that point on always have a special place in my heart for this thoughtful, warm, and democratically-minded Marxist sociologist:

First of all, I want to thank Erik Olin Wright for taking the trouble to write such a thorough and considered response to my critique. In keeping with remarks I already made, it demonstrates his true respect for the democratic culture of the Internet, which will certainly be as key to our future revolutions as the Gutenberg press was for the peasant revolts of an earlier epoch.

On August 26^th, FB friend Marcus Rediker announced the death of another FB friend Jesse Lemisch. I am posting the entire item since some of you—for good reasons, I might add—are not on FB.

Rest in Peace, Jesse Lemisch (1936-2018), radical historian and fun-loving contrarian. I first met Jesse in 1978. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who would study eighteenth-century sailors, just as Jesse had done so memorably in his famous article “Jack Tar in the Streets.” I visited him in his small Greenwich Village apartment. We sat on the sofa in one corner of the room as his wife, the brilliant feminist psychologist/neuroscientist Naomi Weisstein, wore headphones and pedaled a stationary bike in the other. Jesse was animated, funny, irreverent, brash, and helpful. It was a joy for me to sit and talk with the person who had done so much to give meaning to the phrase “history from the bottom up.”

There was much to like about Jesse – his fierce intelligence, his endearing warmth, his larger-than-life spirit. He was a red-diaper baby and radical to the bone, a natural-born fighter. We worked together on various projects over the years. When his legendary dissertation, “Jack Tar vs John Bull,” was finally published in 1997, I wrote the introduction, link below. That intro begins with a description of an adventure Jesse and I had as we searched the massive Hotel Rossiya in Moscow in 1991 for a group of Siberian miners who had come to the capital city to wage a hunger strike.

It was my pleasure to dedicate my book Outlaws of the Atlantic to Jesse in 2015. I hope he knew how much he meant to me. I lament the passing of someone who showed us how to write history from below.

http://www.marcusrediker.com/writings/jesse-lemisch.php

Rediker announced that he will have a short article on Lemisch in the Nation Magazine this week, so look for it there.

I was obviously not as close to Lemisch as Rediker but I enjoyed the electronic camaraderie I had with him. Whatever you want to say about the rottenness of FB, and it is undoubtedly true, there is still something valuable about its ability to connect you to people you never would have encountered, let alone “friended”, in the pre-Internet days. Besides Rediker and Lemisch, I also value the friendship I have with historians Greg Grandin, David Roediger and Richard Drayton, who also come out of the “history from below” perspective.

My first encounter with Lemisch was in the old-fashioned print media days when I read an article in the October 18, 1986 Nation Magazine that had everybody on the left buzzing, including me. It is an all-out assault on the culture of what Yale historian Michael Denning called “The Cultural Front”, in other words the films, novels, music and dance of the Communist Party and its periphery during its heyday. I loved the book, not least of all for the reason that Denning’s dad taught Latin and French in my high school and was part of the subculture of leftist teachers who cautiously discussed politics at Fallsburg Central in the early 60s.

My first reaction to Lemisch’s article was “what the fuck”? But even if I was annoyed with it, I found it 10 times more compelling than anything I had read in The Nation that year. At this point, I am still with Leadbelly and “Salt of the Earth” rather than MTV and “Sorry to Bother You” but if there was anybody who could dissuade me from my moldy fig preferences, it would be Jesse Lemisch.

Since Lemisch’s article, titled “I Dreamed I Saw MTV Last Night”, cannot be read unless you are a Nation Magazine subscriber like me (only for the cryptic crossword puzzles), I reproduce it below. If you find his arguments overlapping with the aesthetics of Jacobin Magazine, I can’t blame you. It is also funny to see MTV being described on the leading edge. I guess it was 32 years ago. In any case, Lemisch was the kind of polemicist we need more of on the left, not afraid to speak his mind and let the chips fall where they may. The contrast between his vitriolic article and his sweet, gentle presence on Facebook could not be more striking. They were just two sides of his personality, god rest his soul.

The Nation Magazine, October 18, 1986
I Dreamed I Saw MTV Last Night
By Jesse Lemisch

My friend, a fellow red diaper baby, has modified his politics, but he is still locked into the Popular Front culture that we grew up with: Pete Seeger, songs of the Spanish Civil War and some New Left versions of the same thing. He gave up trying to get me to Pete Seeger concerts. I had bad reactions, somewhat surprisingly, since, in my heart, I like Seeger. Sullenly, I mumbled things like “blue overalls,” “disingenuous,” “archaic aesthetic” and “dead end for the left.” So my friend gave up on me. Then one day he called to ask me to go to a Si Kahn concert with him. Kahn, he told me, is a rabbi’s son who came out of the New Left and has played an honorable role in labor, civil rights and community organizing for twenty years, and who sings in new ways about new causes.

My friend’s instinct proved unerring: it was Pete Seeger all over again, but offensive in ways that Seeger is not. Kahn makes a much longer leap than does Seeger into a culture and voice that are not his own. His singing raises some important general questions about left thought and culture, concerning authenticity, class, the relation between the left and the rest of America, yd a variety of issues at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Some of the same questions are raised by the documentary films Seeing Red, The Good Fight and Union Maids.

One of the chief problems in left expression centers on the question of authenticity. Can people on the left speak honestly in their various voices, or must they pretend to be somebody else and speak in a voice that they imagine, erroneously, to be mainstream American? For Kahn it is the latter. He writes and sings songs of love, some of them touching, and of current causes: labor, feminism, gay liberation, Central America, disarmament. He accompanies himself on the guitar, singing of new issues in the old style. Unlike Seeger, whose songs genuinely move audiences, Kahn’s songs are so bad that it’s hard to see how any of the people whose voice he affects would want to sing them. In an updated version of what we used to call white liberal tolerance, Kahn, singing as a man who “loves women,” celebrates his friendship with a gay man:

There’s no need to keep it from me
You can come right out and tell me
You know I love you just the way you are.

A cry of “Thanks, Si” rises from a thousand gay throats.

When he spoke for the victims of sexual harassment- “they say it’s oil yer fo1t”–the women in the audience around me winced. “They call you in their office/And they stare straight at your breasts,” he sang. The sentiments are fine, but Kahn is completely unaware of the arrogance and condescension of his setting himself up in this way as definer of the pain of sexual harassment. Finally, perhaps the ultimate in misplaced authenticity: he sang of his ancestors’ flight from the Cossacks, proceeding to a song of the concentration camps, accompanied by a dulcimer, and, again, in the voice of the cracker.

Kahn imitates the old forms nicely, but why bother? There is much that is noble in these traditions and in the struggles associated with them, but isn’t there sufficient dignity and significance in the causes that Kahn sings about to let them be expressed in a modern voice? Why are they the real people, and not us? To return to Seeger-who is currently on tour with Kahn and has just released a joint recording with him-what goes through the minds of his many college-educated listeners when he leads them in singing Malvina Reynolds’s anthem of middle-class embarrassment, “Little Boxes,’’ in which people go to college, become doctors, lawyers and executives-“And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky/And they all look just the same”? Why must the left dress up in workers’ garb? The whole guilt-trip associated with the notion that blue overalls and only blue overalls, are where it’s at is sexist, aesthetically retrograde and deeply out of touch with the realities of class in America today. Why does authenticity reside only in the accents of the South and West, anywhere but in New York City? How was it determined that this must be the voice in which we speak to-America? Why is it such a bad thing to be a Jew in left folk song? Why, at a time when so much of avant-garde culture is crossing over toward a mass audience, does the left, with more important messages to convey, intentionally remain so isolated? What we have is a culture descended from a noble tradition of popular struggles–one whose public rehearsal is an important ritual of affirmation for those of us who grew up in it–that leaves us speaking a language that more and more Americans don’t understand.

A related complex distorts left film and documentary, where the question of truthfulness is raised more directly. The dominant aesthetic of this genre, which we might call first-person heroic, became the documentary style of the New Left, but it has its origin in the aesthetic of the left of the 1930s. In its older version we were presented with-the voice of the people, apparently unmediated. The style strongly expressed the idea that the testimony of those who participated in great events is the truth, needing no comment or analysis. In fact, as William Stott shows in Documentary Expression and Thirties America, the alleged voice of the people was deeply mediated in the documentaries of the 1930s, sometimes through the selection of data and sometimes through misrepresentation and outright deception.

Seeing Red and other left documentaries are descended from that aesthetic. Their stories are told largely in the first person, with contemporary clips and- with narration playing a secondary role. Truth and art are seen to be at odds, with  truth given a lower priority as a merely academic concern. The films and their “unsung heroes” are described in the promotional literature as “inspiring” and “stunning, ” and no one would deny their power.

But the films mishandle first-person testimony, leading to ahistoricity, and, finally, to falsehood. First-person testimony is important in the reconstruction of history, particularly for getting at the lives of ordinary people. Social. historians have been turning to material like the- Works Progress Administration’s extraordinary collection of slave reminiscences, which was largely ignored by the profession until the 1960s. A new history that focuses on biographies of ordinary people has produced modern classics such as Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms. These works rely on first-person testimony, but never uncritically, and never alone. History is complicated; people disagree. For all the filmmakers’ antiacademicism, their characters take on the authority that we associate with the textbook. There is little sense of the complexity of the past and little confrontation between conflicting views. Interviewers’ questions are admiring and credulous. The simple repetition of pieties and platitudes by people who were “there” is not history.

Despite the subordination of truth to story-telling, the irony is that, ultimately, these documentaries are boring. They are didactic and klutzy. They look like the 1930s, and they speak in-the-ancestral visual language. Pete Seeger praises Union Maids: “No, it’s not wide screen, not color. Hell with all that. It’s real.” The assumption is clear: plainness and antiquated presentation translate into truth. As Seeger’s statement suggests, the appearance of these films has as much to do with ideology as with money; it’s militant amateurism. Seeger’s assumptions dominate contemporary left aesthetics, reinforcing a New Left notion that concern with form is “bourgeois” and elitist. Those assumptions are present in film, in new but old-fashioned agitprop theater, and in public-access cable television, an area of enormous potential but one in which the impact of otherwise promising left efforts has been limited by the rejection of mainstream technology and the use of such devices as handheld and hand-lettered signs. The same applies to much left journalism. A direct-mail solicitation from a brand-new left magazine boasts that it “isn’t slick,” has “no lavish color spreads” and is “printed entirely on newsprint.” In these ways the left fails to address people raised on and thoroughly at home with a more advanced, “bourgeois” aesthetic.

Finally, for all its plainness and artlessness, sometimes what we see in this left genre just isn’t true. The euphemism “progressive” hangs heavily over some of the films, masking the presence of the Communist Party. This cuts both ways, suppressing the Communist role that is open to criticism and also concealing the party’s positive accomplishments. The Good Fight is, to say the least, a debatable view of the Spanish Civil War. Seeing Red has come under heavy fire from researchers who have compared the 400 interviews done by the filmmakers with the fifteen actually used. Looking at what was edited out, Phyllis Jacobson, writing in New Politics, accuses Seeing Red of presenting a “fairy tale version of Party life and history.” Harvey Klehr, writing in Labor History, has pointed out the disproportionately low presence of Jews in the film, and he objects to the film’s caricature of anti-Communism, as if the only critique of the C.P. came from Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. The film is one long platitude, epitomized in Seeger’s remarks on the C.P. (“Better to have loved and lost . . .”), followed by a scene of Seeger chopping wood in the cold. The left should be embarrassed by the authoritarianism, manipulation and falsehood in much of the current documentary-film genre.

There are new ways of looking at the world, some from inside the left, some from outside. Say what we will about the values of television advertising and MTV, we recognize their form as distinctly contemporary, and so does much of America. They offer us rapid movement, mobile cameras, quick cutting, excitement, condensed expression, wit, comedy and attractive color. While I hold plenty of reservations about content, anyone who wants to talk to Americans–as the left presumably does–must understand this language. MTV’s influence has pervaded the culture, and, as we will see, the left is beginning to produce some visual images that have a similar look. But even in the mainstream there are some fine examples of the use of music video to convey political messages. One thinks of the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin’s video, “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.” The strongest evidence that real songs of protest can be presented in the music video genre is Artists United Against Apartheid’s “’Sun City Rap’”, written by Little Steven Van Zandt and produced by Van Zandt and Arthur Baker, which topped both The Village Voice’s and The New York Times’s list of singles for 1985 [see “’Sun City Rap’,” The Nation, December 21, 1985]. “Sun City” delivers a hard political message in the contemporary idiom, reaching a mass audience and making what Robert Christgau calls “the essential rock and roll equation between celebration and revolt.”

The most powerful example I know of an emerging left aesthetic is found in the work of the American Social History Project, which, in its own way, draws on music video and underground comics, as well as other influences. Begun at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York under the supervision of the late social historian Herbert Gutman, the project has turned out a prize-winning collection of films and audiovisual productions, under the overall direction of Stephen Brier and with the magnificent art direction of Joshua Brown. This work represents a striking alternative to the traditional aesthetic and is a fascinating example of left culture in transition.

The project’s most ambitious production to date is the thirty-minute film 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation. In that year, propelled by economic depression and pay cuts, 80,000 railroad workers struck, and across the country hundreds of thousands of others joined a national protest which was called the Great Uprising. Describing these events, 1877 is full of visual excitement, much faster than what we expect from this genre. The color is beautiful, and the camera is wonderfully active: it pans, zooms in on detail, pulls back.

Among the basic materials used in I877 are nineteenth-century graphics: black-line wood engravings from the newspapers of the day. But they are put into motion by two deliberate anachronisms:, tinting and animation. Brown found that the engravings looked “archaic, static and murky to audiences accustomed to the photographic and moving image.” Rather than immerse us in this antique look, Brown tinted the engravings, as he says, “to bring out details and add dimensionality to the drawings.” Suddenly, we are looking at a colorful scene that conveys familiarity and reality, rather than a dead and impossibly unreal past. Sometimes the graphics are retouched and animated, and the film has the overall appearance of a cartoon. Based on stills, 1877 is more of a movie than are the left documentaries.

The sound of this film is also innovative. An original score by Jane Ira Bloom takes us far from the folk singer’s guitar to synthesizer, trumpet, percussion and soprano saxophone. Just as the period graphics were colored to avoid archaisms, so was a deliberate decision made to avoid folk music, with its archaic connotations.

Like Seeing Red, 1877 uses first-person testimony. But in 1877 there is a strong narrative for which the first-person testimony is illustration. The narrative is spoken, powerfully, by James Earl Jones. Seeing the past through the mediation of the narrator brings us closer to reality than does the unmediated presentation of first-person testimony. Oral history is not history; narrative is. Here we are not left on our own to worship past heroes.

Another of the project’s productions, a slide/tape presentation titled “Tea-Party Etiquette,” offers a fine example of a critical approach to oral history. “Tea-Party Etiquette” is an adaptation of Alfred Young’s biography of George Hewes, the shoemaker who was lionized late in life for having been at the Boston Tea Party. “Tea-Party Etiquette” shows a biographer interviewing and arguing with Hewes, challenging his memory of the event. The effect is like watching Mike Wallace hector someone on ’60 Minutes. It’s lively, but, more than that, it adds layers to our understanding of the complexities of the past at a point where Seeing Red closes down and presents a single sanctified vision.

The only other left documentary I know of that breaks with the frozen conventions of the 1930s“there must be others-is Jill Godmilow’s Far From Poland. Unable to make the trip to Poland to do a film on Solidarity, she instead uses all sorts of comic and imaginative devices. An actor walks through the countryside reciting the published reminiscences of a government censor who came over to Solidarity, the scene set to a laugh track. Blackout. With melodramatic piano music in the background, there’s Fidel on the telephone, delivering an apologia for Soviet policy on Poland and lecturing Godmilow on art and politics. (“It’s your nickel,” she tells him.) This film has the mark not of the 1930s but of Jean-Luc Godard, with a touch of Laugh-In. What all of this adds up to is not solely a question of aesthetics; it is also a question of politics and honesty. The aesthetic I’ve criticized is disingenuous; it has not and it will not serve the left well. If that is the best we can do, the American people show their good sense by not listening.

Jesse Lemisch is a professor of American colonial and social history on the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is currently a visiting professor of history at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer

–Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish”

Ten years ago, I wrote about the passing of my mother on Mother’s Day. At the time, I was overwhelmed by grief and the article reflected that. Now, a decade later, it is time to tell her story.

My mother was born in Kansas City in 1921, the daughter of a cobbler named Morris Rothstein and his wife Sarah, who used to peddle clothing from door to door in Kansas City’s Mexican-American neighborhood. Her Spanish was better than her English, mostly by necessity.

My maternal grandparents ended up in Kansas City as part of the Galveston Plan funded by Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff who helped to repatriate Polish and Russian Jews to the USA but not in areas where they were heavily represented like New York. Fearing that a surplus of Jews would antagonize the Gentiles, he sought to settle them in places where they would hardly be noticed—like Kansas City. It got the name Galveston Plan because that was the port of entry for people like my grandparents. Among the other Jews who ended up in Kansas City were the parents of actor Ed Asner and long-time Nation Magazine and New Yorker contributor Calvin Trillin who had this pithy take on Jacob Schiff:

According to Stephen Birmingham’s book Our Crowd, for instance, Jacob Schiff had displayed on his office walls two of the largest checks he ever wrote, one of them for $62,075,000. (Big k’nockerl)…Unlike Jacob Schiff, I point out, my Uncle Benny had never consorted with robber barons like E. H. Harriman (“When it comes to rapacious nineteenth-century capitalism, my family’s hands are clean”) and would have never put a framed check on his wall.

My mother had three older brothers. There was Benny who started out playing violin in big bands but became a liquor salesman after they died out in the late 40s, Joe who was an electrician and Abe who sold cars. With his income as a shoe repairman in the 1920s, Morris made enough money to buy a four bedroom house on Linwood Avenue in Kansas City, an indication of how relatively affordable housing was back then. When the Depression hit, the Rothsteins continued to pay their mortgage but could only afford meat once a week, the chicken they shared on Friday night.

My mother went to work as a secretary-typist after graduating high school for the CEO of an envelope manufacturer she revered. Like other Jews, she used to spend time at the Jewish Community Center that was part of the Reform Temple B’nai Jehudah. It was there that she became totally devoted to Irving Levitas who as education director gave classes on Jewish history.

Years later, after Irving had relocated to New York, I got to know him fairly well when I visited my mother in Woodridge. She used to have him come up to give the same kind of classes he gave in Kansas City and I would talk politics with him. Irving was a Labor Zionist and friendly to anarchism. The Levitas clan was on the left but not Marxist by any stretch of the imagination. His nephew Mitchel was the NY Times Sunday Book review editor for many years and embodied Cold War liberal politics. I am not sure of the exact family ties between Irving and Daniel Levitas but he could well be Mitchel’s son. Daniel is a long-time anti-fascist who was a board member of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights that might be described as a northern version of the SPLC but with a much more modest funding base.

Calvin Trillin wrote a brief profile on his fellow Kansas City native in an article about people who were customers of the Strand Bookstore in New York:

Levitas is a short, slight man in his sixties. A lifelong bachelor, he seems interested in luxuries only to the extent of keeping himself in cigarettes. His expenditures on books have always coincided roughly with his salary. For many years, Levitas made his living as the educational director of a Jewish temple in Kansas City, and several years ago he took the same job at Temple Emanu-El in Yonkers. He has always lectured on the side—most often to non-scholars at, say, a cultural series organized by the men’s club of a temple. “I’ve always considered myself a middleman in intellectual matters,” he has said, and his discussion of any scholarly subject is studded with “you know”s and “of course”s that may come from years of trying to explain Husserl or Spinoza or William James to businessmen without sounding patronizing. Levitas’s nephew—Mitchel Levitas, who is assistant metropolitan editor of the Times—believes that his uncle genuinely assumes that anyone he is talking to knows at least the context in which a Levitas observation about a Chinese emperor or a nineteenth-century American anarchist is made. “He has an innocent enthusiasm,” Mitchel says. “He is more than a dilettante and less than a pedant.”

Not only did he keep himself in cigarettes, he chain smoked them. He died of lung cancer in 1987 and for the last few months of his life, my mother nursed him at our upstate home.

During WWII, my grandparents opened their doors to Jewish soldiers who were used to having Friday night sabbath dinners. One of them was my father Jacob who was a mess sergeant stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. You know that scene in “The Honeymooners” when Ralph Kramden and Alice are having an argument over one thing or another? Ralph concludes the argument with these words: “You never loved me. You fell in love with my uniform.”

That pretty much describes my parents. As you can see from the photo below taken in 1947 or so, he was a handsome devil and my mom wasn’t bad-looking herself. Me in the middle, filled with existential angst.

My father had just returned from fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and hoped to return to a life of normalcy running the fruit store he inherited from grandfather Louis who operated a small empire of businesses in Woodridge.

Louis Proyect on the left, a hotel builder and small business entrepreneur who also was chairman of the local Workman’s Circle and Socialist Party. Photo taken sometime in the early 40s.

Around the time I got to be 10 or so, it dawned on me that my father didn’t like me very much. He never spoke to me and when he did, he was judgmental. He would have preferred someone less bookish than me. When I was a kid, there was nothing I loved better than sitting in my bedroom pouring through the pages of the Book of Knowledge, a kid’s encyclopedia. Since my mom preferred that her kid be a good student rather than a good Little Leaguer, they tended to bicker over how he treated me as well as his patriarchal attitudes toward her. Since my mom had a mouth even bigger than mine, any customer in our fruit store who showed some kind of attitude would get told off by my mom until he banned her from the store.

My mom was not one to sit around watching TV. She was involved in the Hadassah, a woman’s Zionist organization, and the PTA. Just like she was in the store, she had a big mouth. Even out of the store, my father had to urge her from time to time not to make enemies because he didn’t want to lose customers. She also wrote a column for the local newspaper called “Woodridge Whirl” that reported on who had vacationed in Florida or whose kid had been bar mitzvahed. She also threw in wisdom she had absorbed from one of Irving’s lectures.

After my father died in 1970, she was forced to go back to work as a secretary since my father’s life insurance was a paltry sum. I guess he thought he’d live forever after coming out of the Battle of the Bulge in one piece. She worked at the Homowack Hotel in Ellenville that was still thriving at the time, mostly I suppose for its strictly kosher kitchen. When that job dried up, she went to work for a home for the developmentally disabled in South Fallsburgh, a town near Woodridge.

Since these jobs didn’t pay very much, I used to send her a monthly check to help out. This obligation made it impossible for me to go on full-time for the Socialist Workers Party so inadvertently she helped save me from going full-tilt cultist.

Although strongly self-identified as a Jew, my mother grew increasingly disaffected from the synagogue in Woodridge that was orienting more and more to the Hasidim that had begun to colonize our village. She was also upset with the attraction that eastern religions had to local kids. As the Borscht Belt hotels like the Homowack collapsed, a number became ashrams geared to New Yorkers looking for a weekend where they could eat vegetarian food, do yoga and achieve some form of spirituality that organized Judaism could not deliver.

For my mom, it was only reform Judaism that could deliver so she began attending services at the Monticello reform Temple Sholom. She really loved the place and soon began a relationship with a man named Victor Gordon whose wife had died not long after she became part of the congregation. Like my mother, Victor was no stranger to tragedy. His son was a pilot who made a living smuggling marijuana until he died in a crash.

Around the time I began bringing my wife up to Woodridge for visits in the early 2000s, my mom had become an ultra-Zionist. I tend to think that if Irving had not succumbed to cancer, he might have helped her think more clearly about Israel even if she remained a Zionist. Her views led to clashes with me and my wife but we never stopped loving her. In my last phone call with her on Mother’s Day, when she was in the ICU, she told me that she was so happy that I found my wonderful wife (even her father was named Hasan!) and could leave this life with a full heart.

Below are excerpts from the comic book I did with Harvey Pekar that will help you understand her story.

Going through something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder following my forced exit from the Trotskyist movement after 11 years, I began looking for medical help for what turned out to be a psychosomatic low-grade fever. On the advice of my old friend Nelson Blackstock, who died 3 months ago, I picked up a copy of a book he recommended by Joel Kovel written in 1976 and titled “A complete guide to therapy: From psychoanalysis to behavior modification” as a kind of shopping guide. Nelson was particularly enthusiastic about behavior modification, whether specifically behavioral or cognitive, its offshoot. I only wished that I had looked into behavior modification before I joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1967.

Joel’s book is totally brilliant. Apart from being a shopper’s guide, it is permeated with a certain degree of skepticism about all these therapies since they so often fell short of dealing with the underlying problem, a sick society that could only become healthy through the overthrow of the capitalist system. He would make these ideas more focused in a 1988 book titled “The Radical Spirit” that was an attempt at synthesizing Marx and Freud. By this point, despite my post-Trotskyist depression having lifted, I jumped at the opportunity to register for a class on ecosocialism that Joel was giving at the Brecht Forum in N.Y. To this day, I can remember Joel explaining what the environmental crisis was about and can even see his face in front of me, with the words coming out of his mouth that struck me like a lightning bolt.

He said that capitalist growth is like a metastasizing tumor. Whether it is chemicals used for farming, plastics or aluminum, such highly profitable commodities also have the capability of killing human beings, animals and plants. This was in line with Barry Commoner’s “The Closing Circle” that I had read shortly before taking the class with Joel and that had also made an indelible impression on me.

Joel’s ideas eventually found their way into print in the 2007 “The Enemy of Nature” that can be read online. On page 39, he elaborates on the cancer metaphor:

We need to examine why we talk of capital as though it has a life of its own, which rapidly surpasses its rational function and consumes ecosystems in order to grow cancerously. Capital is not in itself a living organism, needless to say. It is, rather, a kind of relationship like that set up by a cancer-causing virus that invades living human beings, forces them to violate ecological integrity, sets up self-replicating structures, and polarizes the giant force field. It is humanity living as capital, people who become capital’s personifications, that destroys ecosystems.

After finishing Joel’s class at the Brecht Forum, I became a committed environmentalist and tried to persuade Marxists both on and off the Internet to become Green as well.

Around the same time, Joel and I both became passionately committed to the Sandinista revolution, which was for many of us in the 1980s a sign of hope for socialist renewal. Joel wrote “In Nicaragua” in 1988 as an act of solidarity in much the same way that my involvement with Tecnica was intended. When he lived in Nicaragua in 1986, Joel found himself drawn to the liberation theology wing of the Catholic Church that was a pillar of support for the Sandinistas. In a two-part article explaining his conversion to Christianity that appeared in Mondoweiss, Joel describes the initial and ineluctable attraction the church had for him:

The other thing is, every one of us that’s a leftist, with very few exceptions–we’re fearful. We’re afraid of the cops, afraid of the corporations, the authorities. Well, a common admonition in the New Testament is, Be not afraid, because I am with you. So you have that presence with you, and you’re not afraid. You’re not happy as a pig. You’re happy because you’re in the thick of the universal. I saw that in Nicaragua. I took communion at Casa Jesuitica. I made four trips and on one of them, we’re sitting around with the Jesuits. “Let’s have communion.” I said, “No no, oh no.”But they told me to stay, and we passed the bread and the wine. So I said, Well, ok, I’ll do it. It was the first time I did it. And it came around a table, there was no hierarchy. It was Ok– Ok. So I took communion. Then I said alright, I have to go home, I had to walk a half a mile to the place I was staying. And I was walking– I suddenly had a sense of I wasn’t walking anymore, I was floating through the air. Well how did that happen?

I guess I feel the same way about this sort of thing that I felt when Stan Goff turned to Jesus. Whatever gets you through the night…

In 1988, Joel Kovel was appointed to the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies at Bard College, my alma mater. A year earlier Leon Botstein, the school’s president for life, also appointed Martin Peretz to Bard’s board of trustees. This led me to write a letter (you remember what they were, right?) to Botstein complaining about the appropriateness of having a supporter of Nicaraguan contras, who were in the habit of burning down schools, to such a post. Leon was so stung by my letter that he took the trouble to write one reprimanding me. As you might expect, he argued that Bard did not apply litmus tests to board members. He was so much for free speech that he defended Bard College inviting a member of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany to speak at a conference on “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times”.

Twenty-one years after his appointment, Joel learned that Botstein’s free speech absolutism did not include the right to attack the state of Israel. Two years before his firing, Joel wrote a book titled “Overcoming Zionism” that had become the target of the Israel lobby. The U. of Michigan Press came under so much pressure from its major donors that they dropped the book. (Eventually, counter-pressure forced them to reinstate it.) Do you think that Leon Botstein came to Joel’s right to academic freedom? Don’t be foolish. In an article on his firing, Joel recounts the circumstances:

• 2007. Overcoming Zionism was now on the market, arguing for a One-State solution (and sharply criticizing, among others, Martin Peretz for a scurrilous op-ed piece against Rachel Corrie in the Los Angeles Times. Peretz is an official in AIPAC’s foreign policy think-tank, and at the time a Bard Trustee — though this latter fact was not pointed out in the book).  In August, Overcoming Zionism was attacked by a watchdog Zionist group, StandWithUs/Michigan, which succeeded in pressuring the book’s United States distributor, the University of Michigan Press, to remove it from circulation.  An extraordinary outpouring of support (650 letters to U of M) succeeded in reversing this frank episode of book-burning.  I was disturbed, however, by the fact that, with the exception of two non-tenure track faculty, there was no support from Bard in response to this egregious violation of the speech rights of a professor.  When I asked President Botstein in an email why this was so, he replied that he felt I was doing quite well at taking care of myself.

This was irrelevant to the obligation of a college to protect its faculty from violation of their rights of free expression — all the more so, a college such as Bard with a carefully honed reputation as a bastion of academic freedom, and which indeed defines such freedom in its Faculty Handbook as a “right . . . to search for truth and understanding without interference and to disseminate his [sic] findings without intimidation.”

I am eagerly awaiting Joel’s final book, a memoir titled “The Lost Traveller’s Dream”, especially for its caustic take on his time at Bard that I browsed in Book Culture near Columbia University.

I had my political differences with Joel, especially when he was on the editorial board of “Capitalism, Nature and Socialism”. CNS had trouble with basing ecosocialism on Marx’s writings as Foster had done in “Marx’s Ecology”. To this day, I support Foster’s approach no matter how wrongheaded he has been about Syria. I summarized the debate between Monthly Review and CNS here: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/foster-o’connor.htm.

Joel was a true public intellectual, in the same league as Cornel West or David Harvey. He was also a friend. Not long after I moved into the Studebaker Building on in 2007 that was the initial outpost of Columbia University’s expansion into Manhattanville, I bumped into Joel a few blocks from my office. I was surprised and pleased to see him there. He explained that he had just moved into a co-op close by. From that point on, we used to have lunch together 2 or 3 times a year. I loved to draw him out on his experience at Bard as well as exchange ideas on the wretched American political situation. He was like me, incorporating pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

At one point, I asked him to do a video interview that except for the crappy lighting was one of my better efforts. I will close with that.

Nelson Blackstock, 1944-2018

Yesterday, Nelson Blackstock, a comrade and friend for nearly 50 years, died from the complications of Parkinson’s. He was a central leader of the SWP in the 1970s, serving as the editor of the Militant newspaper and on the political committee. Under ordinary circumstances, someone with those kinds of credentials would deserve an obituary in the Militant but Nelson became persona non grata to some extent because he was perceived as my friend. But it is just as possible that his death would have gone unnoticed since there were other “offenses” on his record after he had left the party in the mid-80s having nothing to do with me. When he and his wife Diane decided to take a trip to Cuba, they were told that sympathizers were not permitted to make such an unsupervised trip. They ignored the party’s instructions just as Nelson ignored my banning.

Being ostracized from the SWP and its periphery of sympathizers has Kafkaesque dimensions. Last year, when Priscilla Ring died, Nelson called party HQ in Los Angeles to find out where the memorial meeting was being held but was told that he could not attend. I surmised that this was because he was seen as my friend. This mattered more than his close ties to Harry and Priscilla Ring who had treated Nelson like a son in many ways. More recently, when Nelson tried to contact Jeff Powers, another diehard supporter of the SWP who was Nelson’s friend even longer than me, he got the cold shoulder. I doubt that the Jehovah’s Witnesses “shunning” behavior is more inhumane than this.

Nelson was born on September 7, 1944 to a working-class mother and father in suburban Atlanta. For most of his youth, they used an outhouse. His father sanded floors for a living and could easily be reduced to the status of a “deplorable” since his racial views were like those of other Southern whites. There’s a photo of his father holding a dead snake by its tail that Nelson treasured. If you look at it, you’d conclude that he was the least likely father to raise a son who would devote many years to opposing racism and capitalism.

Nelson started out sharing the same views as his father and his peers. Always a gifted draftsman, who used to draw caricatures of comrades in executive committee meetings in the Houston branch, Nelson used to draw pictures of the Confederate flag in the margins of his notebooks during elementary school classes.

All that changed when he began to read Harry Golden’s columns in the Carolina Israelite. Golden was a Jew who had immigrated from the Ukraine and become an outspoken opponent of Jim Crow in the 1930s. For many of us who grew up in the 1950s, people like Golden and talk show host Steve Allen were the only source of liberal ideas.

Besides being a political liberal (and dogmatic anti-Communist), Allen was tuned into the beat generation, enough so to feature Jack Kerouac reading his poems while he played jazz piano as background. Kerouac was a major influence on Nelson, and me as well. Since we were a bit older than most of the people who would join the SWP in droves during the Vietnam antiwar movement, we had one foot in the beat generation. When I first met Nelson in 1969, we found ourselves talking as much about “On the Road” as Marxist theory.

Before joining the SWP, Nelson had been a leading figure in the Southern civil rights movement. He helped to found the Southern Students Organizing Committee (SSOC) in 1964, a group that was intended to be a combination of SDS and SNCC for white students. You can see Nelson’s application for the Mississippi Summer Project in the University of Southern Mississippi’s digital archives here that identifies him as an SDSer, where his political career began.

Nelson took part in an obscure initiative that was part of the Mississippi Summer. Called the White Folks Project, this was an attempt by SNCC to organize poor whites. As part of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), it sent volunteers like Nelson into Mississippi in order to try to win men and women who shared his father’s prejudices to the cause of desegregation. Nelson’s report can be read here.

It shows the prose mastery that Nelson would display later on writing for the Militant newspaper when it was of such relevance and intelligence that Malcolm X himself recommended it to a largely Black audience at a meeting organized by the SWP. I suspect that the Jeff mentioned in the report is his old friend Jeff Powers.

I entered the barber shop alone – leaving Jeff at door. I had on Levis and Jeff dressed in usual manner. One old man was cutting another bald-headed old man’s hair, No one else inside, As soon as I sit down the man getting haircut mentions seeing a man about 22 or 23 and a girl 19 “just a’eatin’ with Lem” in a “colored” restaurant. Says a couple of white restaurants have integrated last week and he expects that it is going to happen that “black and white” will eat together. The barber breaks into a wheezing, coughing tirade about how only a sorry son of a bitohin’ white man would eat with the black filthy-ass bastards. (I suspect that I have been recognized.) Barber goes on to say he would drive his car all over U.S. before he would eat in some place as a stinkin’ nigger. Bought car to get out of riding trains and busses. They take up all front seats. The other man reverts to using nigger in recounting how he has eaten with then at VA hospital but hover at same table. They have sat down beside him but he has gotten up.

Nelson came up to N.Y. in 1969 to edit the Young Socialist, the magazine of the Young Socialist Alliance. When we were introduced at party headquarters, we hit it right off. I found most SWP leaders back then to be aloof characters with a manner I associated with student government types but Nelson was funny, smart and warm. After I left N.Y. in 1970 to reinforce Peter Camejo’s faction in the Boston branch of the SWP, we lost touch.

We were reunited in 1973 when I was sent to Houston in order to take up the fight against the local opposition to Jack Barnes. This group, amounting to nearly half of the branch,  raised the same objections I countered in the Boston branch as well as new ones that were associated with Ernest Mandel’s Fourth International. One of the people I was sent down  to “crush” in Houston was a young man named Mark Lause, who is now a respected Civil War historian and the comrade I feel closer to politically than any other human being. Mark was allied at the time with Peter Gellert, who is also a long-time friend and comrade who was the first to send me email after hearing about Nelson’s death.

Nelson and I grew much closer in Houston. We used to spend time hanging out at Liberty Hall where we would always make sure to hear Asleep at the Wheel when they were in town. This was a Bob Wills tribute band that was led by Ray Benson, a great Western Swing vocalist and a Jew who grew up in Philadelphia. As much as I enjoyed spending time with Nelson, I began to become deeply alienated by the SWP, so much so that told people that I was boycotting the next “social” because it would be nothing but a bunch of people getting drunk as they talked about party matters. By this time, Nelson had departed to Berkeley where he was once again taking up the fight against the “Mandelistas”. Like Mark and Peter, the respected Marxist literary scholar Alan Wald was opposed to the Barnes leadership. I received this note from him just after I informed him that Nelson was dying:

Very sorry to hear this–and I appreciate being kept informed. If it is helpful to send a message of support or solidarity to anyone, I’m happy to do it.

Of course, Nelson and I fought like cats and dogs in the late 60s/early 1970s when he was Oakland/Berkeley SWP organizer and I was the YSA organizer (until I was “removed” in fall 1971). But we had a half-dozen or so pleasant exchange in the last few years.

1) Nelson was the first person who showed me a bound volume, personally owned in his apartment, of all issues of FI/NI/ISR from the 1930s-40s onward. He must have gotten them from his time in New York when he designed/edited YS. I was very jealous but only able to start collecting individual copies. (Now they are all on line.)

2) I used to hang out in a bookstore called PM in San Francisco (open only in the evening) owned by Jac Wasserman. Wasserman had been the founder of the SWP’s Pioneer Publishers–hardly even recognized in SWP history because he became a Shachtmanite in 1940. When Jac came back from WWII his marriage broke up and he moved down South, to Alabama. There he became deeply involved in sharecroppers rights and in the 1960s ran into Nelson. Jac really admired Nelson and praised him to high heaven–but he said that, after Nelson joined the YSA/SWP, he changed. I had always planned to try to get Jac and Nelson together to see what might happen, but by that time either Nelson and I were on bad terms or else Nelson had gone to Texas. Years later I went back to visit Jac with a tape recorder in hopes of an interview; he had been in the John Reed Club before the SWP and was friends with a famous Brazilian art critic (Mario Pedrosa) who lived in NYC in the 1930s and was on the International Executive Committee of the FI.. But I found Jac alone in his apartment with his memory entirely gone…

Nelson’s next assignment after Berkeley was to become the editor of the Militant newspaper. In that capacity, he began writing about the FBI’s Cointelpro program that had been used against our members (including me) as well as many others on the left, including Martin Luther King Jr. His articles were collected into “Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom” in 1975, a book that profiled victims of this attempt to create dissension in the SWP and to get people fired from their jobs as this excerpt would indicate:

In still another poison pen episode, the FBI tried in April 1969 to get Maude White (now Wilkinson) “separated from her employment” as a preschool teacher in Washington, D.C. The local FBI sent an anonymous letter signed “A Concerned Citizen,” purporting to be from Wilkinson’s neighbor, to the superintendent of the D.C. school system. The letter said that “Miss White has held weekly meetings of a socialist youth group” in her apartment.

After expounding upon the classical FBI distortions of the YSA as a group supporting “violent activities against established authority,” the letter continues, “I bring this information to your attention in order to protect the D.C. School System from the menace of a teacher who does not have the interests of the children or the country at heart.”

But it was precisely the interests of the children and the American people that led Wilkinson to become a socialist: “Being a teacher, especially in the D.C. schools, I saw how rotten the schools were, how much money was spent on war and how little on education,” she says.

Four years later, Nelson became the organizer of the Birmingham, Alabama branch of the SWP that as part of “the turn to industry” was colonizing the coal mines. To help win workers to the socialist cause, party members would sell the Militant newspaper on the road leading to a coal mine. One morning as Nelson was out on a sale, he and a comrade were attacked by Klan members who left permanent damage to Nelson’s hip as this article from the Militant details:

You can get some more detail on this incident from page nine of the Militant newspaper dated June 22, 1979.

Afterward, Nelson walked with a cane and as a result was not able to get a job in industry. This led to his being sidelined politically and becoming willy-nilly a less than worthy party member. Within a couple of years, I had become part of Peter Camejo’s North Star Network and a fierce critic of the party. This did not make any difference to Nelson.

When I used to go out to Los Angeles to visit friends working in the film industry, I would always spend time with Nelson and his wife Diane Jacobs. He listened patiently to my charges against the party leaders even if he thought that they indicated that I “lost faith in the working class” or something like that.

Me (l) and Nelson (r) in my living room in the mid-80s, probably after drinking bourbon

In the mid-80s (I am not sure exactly when), Nelson dropped out of the SWP for personal reasons. In weighing the benefits of being the book store director against enjoying Saturday afternoon reading novels and smoking his pipe or a cigar from the terrace of his apartment in Lago Vista condos overlooking Echo Park lake, he went with the novels and the smokes. This unique modernist complex, designed by architect Allyn E. Morris, is known as the “Crown Jewel” of Echo Park and was beloved by Nelson and Diane who were both art students when young. I used to take great pleasure sitting out on the terrace with Nelson discussing music or film, even if I was rude enough to bring up the degeneration of the SWP from time to time.

I think Nelson finally figured out that there was something wrong with the party when the N.Y. Observer reported that Jack Barnes had sold his condo in the West Village near party HQ for nearly $2 million. It was literally large enough to fit two of the Lago Vista apartments into.

Nelson began to lose interest in politics by this point. His only project that could be described as political was to begin work on a documentary about SWP leaders like George Novack. Unfortunately, declining health and a failure to master the editing software that could turn the videos into a finished product got in the way. I worked with Nelson to interview some of the leading Cochranites, however. They can be seen on my Vimeo channel. My hope is to finish Nelson’s project since the videos would be critically important oral history.

Nelson’s health began to decline in the mid-80s with a series of issues that made him into a modern-day Job. First there was the hip injury that was finally overcome through an artificial hip joint. Next there was the loss of the sight in one eye because an ophthalmologist had urged him to continue using steroids after cataract surgery even though it was damaging the nerves in one eye. Adult attention deficit disorder worsened to the point that he occasionally missed plane flights because he lost track of the departure time. But the worst problem was with his spine. He underwent surgery to relieve pain from a herniated disk only to discover that a few  years later that scoliosis had worsened to the point that he needed to have a titanium rod attached to his spine if he wanted to stay out of a wheelchair. An 8 hour surgery a few years ago relieved this problem even if it meant him not having the mobility of a normal person.

And, just as the spine problems seemed to be under control, he came down with Parkinson’s. Nelson was trying hard to live with Parkinson’s but the illness made it difficult for him to function. He was hospitalized twice with pneumonia, an illness caused by the aspiration of food into the lungs—a common hazard for Parkinson’s patients who have difficulty swallowing. The finale began two months ago after a series of falls and a weakened condition led to him being cared for in a hospice a few days ago.

When I think of the kind of revolutionary party I want to belong to, it will be made up of people like Nelson Blackstock whatever their skin color, nationality, gender or sexual orientation. That was the kind of party I thought I was building in the 1960s and 70s. Maybe the tumultuous period we are living through will lead to the real thing. I hope to god that it does or else we are doomed.