From Pamphlets to Power – Collecting the History of the Revolutionary Left: An Interview with Radical Archivist Brad Duncan. Part One

Brad Duncan, activist and radical archivist.

 Introduction

There is a tendency among the left these days to make ones bona fides through a scathing critique…of the left. While not for a moment denying the need for any number of critiques of and dramatic changes from past (and current) practices and positions, there’s something depressingly defeatist and cynical about the trend. The fact is that, despite all our limitations, it has been the left that has carried the greater part of humanity’s interests, hopes and dignity in the face of the grand barbarism of empire and the countless daily humiliations capitalism bestows upon the working class and the oppressed. For too many, that defense was made foolish by hubris; but there is no denying the exuberance that generations of leftists felt struggling in a cause which they held to be a kind of sacred duty to humanity, their fellow workers, their community, and their children; not to mention the improvement of their own lives.

Every community has had in their time at least one Wobblie or Radical Faerie, or a citizen of New Afrika, a militant abolitionist, or a Knight of Labor, a member of the Furies Collective or the Young Lords, a migrant workers organizer, radical poet or a well-read Marxist, an anti-fascist street fighter, a determined earth warrior or a liberation theologist, and sometimes – often – a mix of many of these. Every block of every community has had someone who rebelled, resisted, refused in its history; and occasionally – more often than we tend to think – it was communities themselves, of people and not just places, that did the rebelling.

The traditions and counter-cultures developed by the workers movement, movements of the oppressed and the left over generations have and still can serve as testimony, warning, prophecy, lesson, celebration and benchmark; they connect peoples and ideas over decades and continents, share experiences and most importantly, belie all the claims to legitimacy of the ruling class, of capital, of empire by pointing to rich alternatives already a part of our present, so deeply rooted are they in our pasts; distant and recent. History is indeed a weapon; both in the service of the oppressors and to the ends of liberation. No one knows this better than the Rustbelt’s friend and comrade of many years, the radical activist and archivist, Brad Duncan.

Detroit Newspaper strike. Mid-1990s.

Brad grew up in the Detroit-area, as you will learn, and is as much a product politically of that city’s history as anything else. And what a history. Gravitating towards counter-culture, left-wing ideas and activism as a middling teen, Brad has always had the exuberance and energy of an old school Wobblie; his booming voice heard leading chants on many a protest and picket line. For Brad, revolution was and is and emancipatory act delivered by the oppressed themselves; he has never been a hack… Not being a hack has allowed Brad to be ecumenical in his interests, following the history of the left without regard to narrow tradition and seeing values in nearly all of the divergent  traditions in the, broadly defined, revolutionary and anti-colonial left. But Brad is no dilettante, he takes positions and holds them, guided by his own understanding of politics. The obsessions he developed as a teen have grown with Brad as he has become a serious and rigorous archivist, indeed one of the leading archivists, of the revolutionary left in the United States.

Brad went to Hampshire College in the 1990s and returned to his native Detroit, became an organizer for a revolutionary group and was deeply involved in the political life of the city. In Detroit, we lived together for a time; hosting Marxist study groups in our living room, organizing benefits and going to countless demonstrations; engaging in countless political and historical discussions. Moving to his new home in Philadelphia in 2010, where he currently works in a rare books library of a leading University, he has begun putting his substantial archive on-line  in a project he has christened the R.F. Kampfer Revolutionary Literature Archive. Brad has an upcoming exhibit, a Trinospohses in Detroit (t1464 Gratiot Avenue) called  ‘Power to the Vanguard: Original Printed Materials from Revolutionary Movements Around the World (1963-1987)’ opening Friday, October 17, 2014,he will be giving a talk there on Saturday, October 18 at 1 pm. The exhibit runs through December 28, 2014.

In this two-part interview we will be discussing how he came to collect, what he collected and how that collecting changed his views about political questions and revolutionary history. We’ll also review the movements, organizations and ideas represented in his collection, the role of history in the left and his place as a radical archivist who views his work, not as an academic pursuit, but as a service to the workers and left movements. In Part two we will discuss the future role of the archive and we will discuss galleries of the Black national and liberation struggle in the US, the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, the labor movement and each will present our own ‘favorite’ picks from the archive.

In the interview we are pleased to present a great number of photos, including many rare first brought to the internet by Brad. Aside from individual pieces, included throughout this portion of the interview are galleries of the Women’s Movement, Detroit, the New Communist Movement, Trotskyism and Ireland from items in Brad’s archive; click on any thumbnail for a larger view or to open a slideshow gallery.

Each of these galleries are just a taste of what is available on his website and readers are encouraged to visit to see the many historically significant, aesthetically arresting, politically astute, counter-cultural gems, reminders of past struggles and fallen comrades, and occasionally, just plain odd and embarrassing reflections of a left that didn’t always have all of its critical faculties intact. We hope readers of the Rustbelt enjoy these interviews as much as we have had putting them together.  Brad Duncan can be contacted through his website or leave a question in the comments section and he will be happy to answer.

Interview

RR: First off, tell us about the name, RF Kampfer, and the person behind the name. Why did you decide to name the archive after him?

Neil Chacker, ‘RF Kampfer’

BD: RF Kampfer was the pen name of Detroit socialist and autoworker Neil Chacker (1942-2004). He used that name when he wrote his quirky humor column, ‘Random Shots’ for Against the Current magazine. It’s short for ‘Red Front Fighter’ in German. He loved history and the history of the left, although not in an overly nostalgic way. I think hardcore political activists are interested in history because it is the back story of the battleground we find ourselves on today. Ultimately socialist activists like Neil are mostly interested in the future. So I named the archive, and subsequently the blog, after him (“The RF Kampfer Revolutionary Literature Archive”) as an irreverent tribute to my comrade.

RR: Neil would have been thrilled with the tribute, I am sure. What brought you into collecting and when?

BD: Well the real short answer goes like this– I became very politicized in my late teens, and as soon as I started reading about radical Left politics I felt like I needed to know something about the history of Left movements, the history of social movements in general. I was already interested in history, so as I became more and more left-wing my first impulse was to look for library books about the Wobblies [Industrial Workers of the World], Black Panthers, the various waves of feminism, and ultimately socialist and anarchist political theory.  All I could find was the mainstream histories.

RR: But the mainstream histories of the Left were not sufficient…

BD: Exactly. There were hardly any sufficient secondary sources on the 1960s-90s protest movements, so I realized I had to find the primary sources myself.  This is especially true if you’re looking for detailed histories of the real radical Left, meaning groups that were seeking revolutionary change—Marxists, anarchists, Black revolutionary nationalists, radical anti-imperialists, revolutionary feminists. I wasn’t looking for liberalism, I was looking for Leninism!

‘Women As Workers Under Capitalism’ in ‘Women – A Journal of Liberation’, United States, 1971.

‘Women & Struggle In Iran’, Women’s Commission of the Iranian Students Association in the U.S., first issue, Chicago, 1982.

Third World Women’s Alliance, United States, [1971].

‘Black Women’s Liberation’, Maxine Williams and Pamela Newman, Socialist Workers Party, United States, 1970.

‘The Lesbian Feminist’, Lesbian Feminist Liberation, New York, 1977.

‘Liberation in Southern Africa’, The Organization of Angolan Women, Chicago Committee for the Liberation of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea (CCLAMG), Chicago, 1976. Supportive of the MPLA.

‘Women’s Liberation And The Socialist Revolution’, Socialist Workers Party, United States, 1979.

‘Sisters Celebrate Vietnamese Independence Day’, September Women’s Action, San Francisco, [1970’s].

‘Lavender Woman’, Chicago, 1974. ‘Mothers & Daughters Issue’.

Back cover of ‘STRUGGLE! Unity, Self-Determination, Solidarity’, Struggle newspaper collective, Boston, 1973.

Union of Women for Emancipation, London, 1971.

‘Newsletter of the Lower Eastside Daycare Coalition’, New York, [early 1970’s]. First issue.

‘Women In Struggle Film Series’, Women Against Imperialism, Oakland and San Francisco, [late 1970’s].

‘Black Graphics International’, Detroit, 1974. International Women’s Day tribute to Frelimo

Women: A Journal of Liberation’, New York, 1970. Includes the articles ‘Speak Bitterness!’ by Diane Feeley, ‘Our Sister Rosa Luxemburg’ by Karen Whitman, and ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’ by ‘a group of Radical Lesbians’.

Click on any photo in the ‘Womens Liberation” gallery to open a slide show and a closer look.

For example, until Max Elbaum wrote the book “Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Che and Mao” in the early 2000s, there were essentially no decent histories of the emergence of 1970’s ‘New Communist Movement’ in the United States. And really there was not a solid text on Trotskyism’s growth and change in the 70s and 80s. Even when I moved away to college and had access to bigger libraries I couldn’t really find in-depth historical writing on international Left movements and liberation struggles from the post-60s period.  You could find some excellent histories of the U.S. Left up to about the early 60s. But then the trail goes cold.

RR: And this is searching before the internet…

Debate Within SDS: RYM II Vs. Weatherman’, Radical Education Project, Detroit, Michigan, 1969.

BD: Exactly. I was a teenager, and the internet hadn’t really become a factor yet. At least not for this kind of research anyway. So here I am, in 1996 and 1997 trying to figure out what’s the deal with, for example, the rise of Maoism in the post-SDS New Left or why Latin American Trotskyists turned to guerrillaism in the 70s and there is no scholarly text or popular text available.

There were a couple of websites eventually, but again, most of them focused on contemporary groups, which I was also very interested in, but this didn’t really help me learn about what exactly happened to the generation of the New Left. Not in any real detailed anyway. I wanted detail.

So the idea of finding and reading pamphlets and newspapers produced by the organizations and movements themselves really appealed to me.

RR: What was it about the New Left that appealed to you? 

The New Left period (say, 1963-1978) was so fascinating to me because it was a period when radical left-wing politics were gaining a mass audience, when real social movements were militant and growing, and yet it really wasn’t that long ago. And this was 20 years ago that I started to really read about the politics of the radical movements of the 1960s, so it was even more recent then!

On a personal note, I think I was interested in the New Left period because I had always loved the music of the late 1960s and early 70s. The Velvet Underground, Sun Ra Arkestra, The Fugs, all this stuff that I had thought was radical as a young teenager. But when you start to learn about the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, all the radical women’s liberation groups, and all the anti-colonial groups worldwide— it changes your conception of “the radical 60s”!

RR: So collecting really begins for you as a project to answer your questions, not the accumulation of pieces?

BD: I would say in terms of collecting; the thing that got me interested in really hunting for New Left and later 70s Left materials was the result of a problem I saw in the history books.  See, all the history books that were around at the time told the story of the 1960s like this: “the early and mid-60s was the Good 60s, because everyone believed in nonviolence, integration, and modest reforms, but the late 60s were the Bad 60s because that’s when everyone embraced violence, reject integrationism for black nationalism, and rejected liberalism for communism”. This general approach was very common in the books I could find in the mid-1990s. It’s the dominant liberal view of the New Left period. Furthermore, and this really made me scratch my head in utter confusion, is all of these histories of 60’s radicalism basically stop abruptly in the early 1970s. They made it seem like the whole generation of ’68, after being drawn into political activism at the height of the anti-war, feminist, and Black Power movements, suddenly retreated from politics in, say, 1973.

‘Ideology Of The Young Lords Party’, Young Lords Party, Bronx, New York, 1972.

But that just couldn’t be the whole story! Even as a young novice I knew that movements that big take a long time to play out and decline. So where was the missing story of what radical activists of the 1960s did during the 1970s? What about the mysterious decade that followed the movement’s zenith? These movements don’t just vanish.

Part of why I started looking for original materials—like party newspapers and pamphlets—was to get a handle on exactly how Marxists, of both Maoist and Trotskyist varieties, dealt with the long dissolution of the “Long 60s”. Because the main histories of SDS, the anti-war movement, Black Power, and the other expression of that period were just not shedding any light on that. I wanted to uncover the hidden 1970s.

RR: And as a model for activism?

BD: As for it being a model for activism, it’s hard to say. I remember thinking of the legacy of the New Left, the radical 70s, and especially the Leninist revival in both its Maoist and Trotskyist forms as having as many negative lessons as it did positive lessons. So I never was one to think that we needed to replicate what they tried back then. Obviously I found the period inspiring, I still find it inspiring. But “model” is a strong word. Really, by the time I was into political activism the kind of organizing that was popular was more influenced by the Zapatistas, horizontalism, the anti-sweatshop movement and the whole style of organizing and ideology that would be called the anti-globalization movement after Seattle in 1999.

My activist experience was more 90s quasi-anarchism to be honest, with a strong influence of the Detroit Newspaper Strike (1995). That’s where I was at politically. I was really interested in all these different periods, I felt like they all had lessons. I was fascinated with the radical 70s and the Leninist “party building” scene–really fascinated–but I never wanted to actually rehash any of that stuff in the late 1990s when I was first digging into this material.

RR: Where did you start looking at first?

BD: What I started figuring out in my late teens is that if you keep your eyes open, and you go to lots of used book stores, used book fairs, library used book sales, etc., you can find items mixed in that tell a hidden story.

The first place I looked was in used book stores, thrift shops, and other places where you might find old printed materials like books and pamphlets. These places were already my haunts. I collected records as a teen, and knew a lot of other record collectors around Detroit and hitting the local old stuff emporiums were already a part of the culture. We’re talking early on here, when I was in my late teens.

Spending countless hours at big, dusty bookstores like John King Books in downtown Detroit, I begin to notice that if you comb through old books enough you will start to see items that were actually published by the organizations, parties and collectives that made up the constellation of Leninist groups that sprung up in the early 1970s.

RR: Give an example?

BD: You’ll see Liberator Press on the spine of a book. Well that’s the October League (Marxist-Leninist). Proletarian Editions? That’s the Communist Labor Party. Pathfinder? Pioneer? Monad? Merit? All publishing imprints of the Socialist Workers Party.

RR: And not only was there a physical paper trail, unlike today where most things are published and discussed digitally, the left  was using what it wrote to organize with…

BD: Because those movements believed in print publishing! They believed in pamphlets and newspapers and books and distributing literature, from Marxist-Leninists to Black Nationalists to anarchists. While most of it has not survived, because ultimately most agitational material was made to be topical, there are remnants that do remain if you just commit yourself to looking.

RR: Detroit seems like it would be rich in old lefty books?

‘Our Thing Is DRUM [Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement]’, Black Star Printing, Detroit, 1970. Contains interview with leaders of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers and an essay titled ‘The Midwest and The League’ by Jim Jacobs.

Detroit Auto Uprising 1973’, Jack Weinberg, International Socialists, Highland Park, Michigan, mid 1970’s.

‘Labor And Automobiles’, Robert W. Dunn, International Publishers, Communist Party, United States, 1929.

‘The Political Thought of James Forman’, Black Star Publishing, Detroit, 1970.

‘The Reproduction of Daily Life’, Fredy Perlman, Black & Red, Detroit, 1969.

‘Manifesto of the Black Workers Congress’, Black Workers Congress, Detroit, early 1970’s.

‘Detroit: I Do Mind Dying – A Study in Urban Revolution”, Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, St. Martin’s Press, United States, 1975. First printing. A detailed study of Detroit’s Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the insurgent movement in the auto factories.

‘Benefit for Striking Auto Workers’ event sponsored by ‘Wildcat’ and GM Strike Committee, featuring the film “Final Got The News” about Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

‘Don’t Buy ‘Buy American”, Kim Moody, Sun Press, International Socialists, Highland Park, Michigan.

‘The Black Uprisings’, Socialist Workers Party, United States, 1967. Looks at the rebellions in Detroit, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey.

‘Detroit Women’s Press’, Detroit, 1974. First issue.

‘Black Workers in Revolt’, Robert Dudnick, The Guardian – an independent radical newsweekly, New York, 1969. On the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. “How Detroit’s New Black Revolutionary Workers are changing the Face of American Trade Unionism”

Labor Party, United States, [mid-1990’s].

Manifesto of the Black Worker Congress, Highland Park, Michigan, [early 1970’s].

Click on any photo in the ‘Detroit” gallery to open a slide show and a closer look.

BD: Detroit has more of this stuff than most cities. I grew up in suburban Detroit, and then lived in the city of Detroit for over a decade, so all of my early years of collecting centered on Detroit. And for a whole number of historical reasons, Detroit has a higher concentration of people who have been involved with Marxist, socialist, Black Nationalist, revolutionary, internationalist and class struggle organizations and movements than people can really comprehend. I mean, the city is at the center of Labor history and Black history, and honestly you can tell by making the rounds of the city’s used book stores, junk shops, yard and estate sales, and libraries. So I would realize in time that I was searching in pretty fertile ground for historical remnants of radical social movements.

Brad Duncan at Ypsilanti’s used book store gem; Cross Street Books.

RR: What book stores were you looking at?

BD: Early on in my used book shop adventures around the Detroit area in the mid-1990s I found a number of books that really gave me a thrill then, although looking back now they’re not really the rarest titles. But back then I found lots of labor history books published by Charles H. Kerr, the incredibly long-standing radical publisher in Chicago; John King Books had tons of them, all priced around 2 bucks each, maybe 3 bucks.

There was also a bookstore in Ann Arbor called the Wooden Spoon, which was run by lefties and had a terrific collection of left-wing used books at a fair price. So I built myself a budget library of the basics, and then some, with a certain manic intensity.  Again, there wasn’t an Amazon to help you find books with small print runs. You really just had to go look in as many places as possible. I’d visit radical bookshops like Blackout Books in New York, New World Resource Center in Chicago, Lucy Parsons in Boston, and Wooden Shoe in Philly.

That’s just the story behind finding this old material hidden in public places, just one side. Ultimately most of my material was given to me by friends, friends of friends, and people I have come to know through political activism. That’s a whole other story!  That started in my early 20s, when I had moved to Southwest Detroit.

RR: What kind of people were you meeting politically? Did they encourage your interest in their history?

BD: That was another key factor that brought me into collecting. It’s really central to what I do; my relationship with my elders. What I mean is that as I got more involved with political activism during my early 20s I met more and more veterans of the 60s struggles, folks my parents age. Some of them actually lived on my block near Clark Park in Detroit. Socialists, anarchists, Pan-Africanists, longtime rank and file labor activists. When they discovered that I was really interested in movement history, and that I was a voracious reader, some of them would say “I have all these old pamphlets and newspapers in my attic, or office or garage or whatever, that I’ve been meaning to do something with for decades, so if you want to take some…”

RR: Rather than have them sit in basements forgotten or thrown out, you became a sort of guardian that folks could trust to respect their work….and clean out their closest?

BD: Exactly, I became like this attic-cleaning service for veteran Detroit leftists! I could come to you house and simply load all your tanned, tattered old socialist newspapers from 1971 into my Ford Ranger and you’d have a nice, uncluttered office or attic or garage! I’m only half kidding!

Honestly, many older comrades thought I was doing them the favor. I was clearing out old paper materials that were no longer topical. So I started inheriting and being gifted whole collections by my early 20s. That’s when the whole collecting, researching, discovering, archiving project really started to gain steam.

The One Big Union Monthly’, Industrial Workers of the World, United States, 1937.

RR: What were some of your first pieces?

Over time I grabbed all these beautifully aged, dusty little hardcover books about the Wobblies, socialism, Debs, Marx and Engels, all the various topics of the radical 1910s. I was about 18 or 19 years old, maybe 20, and obsessed with the Wobblies, and these beaten little books, and they were in terrible shape, were like a portal to the past. Around that same time I started to realize how robust the publishing arms of the Communist Party, USA and the Socialist Workers Party really were once upon a time.

Titles released by both parties could very easily be found in used book shops around town, and in terms of figuring out the twists and turns of these two attempts at Leninist party building, discovering random paperbacks from International Publishers or Pathfinder Press was an early thrill. Especially finding independent Marxist publishers in a bookshop stuffed with utterly mainstream titles, and you found the one subversive nugget. Priceless!

RR: Are you collecting contemporary things, like flyers handed out at demos or meetings you attend?

BD: All the time, in this period I’m going to a lot of actions, forums, etc. and picking up a lot of contemporary materials all the time; flyers and newspapers that I get from socialist and anarchist groups at protests; that stuff was really starting to pile up.

RR: So when did this collection really start to explode and become more than just a collection of books? What was the turning point?

BD: That happened in the summer of 2000. There’s a small, gritty used paperback shop in Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood that I would visit while out on my rounds despite it rare yielding anything good. One day the owner says he has “some commie stuff in the backroom” that I might be interested in. People say that to me all the time and often they mean Soviet-related stuff that’s dry and generally uninteresting. But what he brought out took my breath away. Apparently one of the long-standing Marxist-Leninist organizations of the 1970s and 80s, part of the New Communist Movement which arose from the New Left, had sold its entire archive of movement publications from the late 60’s through the mid-80s. The shop owner brings out 12 large boxes of printed items, mostly newspapers and pamphlets, from just about every single radical left current of the 1970s, especially those that were influenced by Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese revolution.

RR: So a Marxist group had assembled a collection of material by other groups?

BD: Most groups assembled libraries like this. They’d send their periodicals and publications to other parties or collectives that were a part of their political milieu, and those groups would in turn send their periodicals. This was said to help cross-organizational co-operation by my feeling is it was mostly to provide quotes for lacerating polemics against rival parties, but that’s another story. Anyway, here it was in front of my eyes, packed into a dozen cardboard boxes on Cass Ave. in Detroit, a perfectly preserved archeological find. The entire 1970s, post-New Left ‘New Communist Movement’, from the U.S. to Iran to India to Ireland to El Salvador, sprawled out in front of me. I was dizzy.

RR: We’re talking about Maoism here, right?

‘Join Us At The Giant Anti-War March’, Attica Brigade, United States, early 1970’s. Attica Brigade was associated with Revolutionary Union (RU).

‘The Call’, newspaper of the October League (Marxist-Leninist), United States, 1977.

‘Proletarian Cause – Journal of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought’, New York, 1972. First and only issue. Edited by Bill Epton, an African American former leader of Progressive Labor.

‘Break The Chains! Of Wage Slavery And National Oppression – All Out For May Day! Fight For Socialism!’, Workers Viewpoint Organization, United States, 1977.

‘Osawatomie’, Weather Underground Organization, Red Dragon Press, United States, 1975.

‘Program of the Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective’, Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective, Tucson, Arizona, 1976.

‘Towards A Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question’, Los Angeles Research Group, Los Angeles, mid-1970’s.

‘Palante’, Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (Young Lords Party), New York City, 1972.

‘Unity And Struggle’, Congress Of Afrikan People, NewArk, New Jersey, [1976]. Led by Amiri Baraka

‘American Mass Line’, American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist), Cleveland, 1970.

‘El Amanecer Rojo’, Communist Collective of the Chicano Nation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1973. Third issue.

The Challenge. Progressive Labor Party.

‘The Red Banner’, August 29th Movement (Marxist-Leninist), United States, 1976.

‘Negro National Colonial Question’, Communist League, United States, 1972. The Communist League was a majority African American Marxist-Leninist organization based in California. In 1975 they united with members of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers to form the Communist Labor Party (CLP).

‘The Building of the Vanguard Party of the U.S. Proletariat’, Kansas City Revolutionary Workers Collective / Wichita Communist Cell, United States, 1979. ‘Written for the Multilateral Conference on Party Building’.

‘Class Struggle: Journal of Communist Thought’, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), United States, 1979.

‘Principles Of Unity’, Organization For Revolutionary Unity, San Diego, California, 1983.

‘Follow The Path of Red October – Polemic on the International Question’, Sun Rise Books Collective, New York, 1977.

‘“It’s Not The Bus” – Busing and the Democratic Struggle in Boston, 1974-1975’, Proletarian Unity League, United States, 1975.

Uncut sheet of stickers promoting a May Day event organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party, United States, 1975.

‘Communist Line’, Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee, United States, 1976.

Click on any photo in the ‘New Communist Movement” gallery to open a slide show and a closer look.

BD: Well sure, Maoism for lack of a better word. The Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution of the 60s, and China’s bold declarations of support for national liberation struggles had a wide-ranging influence on radical Left movements everywhere from the U.S. to India. Not all of these movements would call themselves ‘Maoist’, although some would. But yeah, we’re talking about the same current of revolutionary politics. As opposed to Trotskyism or the mainstream Communist Parties.

Another  reason why ‘Maoism’ as a term doesn’t tell the whole story is that many groups in this current were also influenced by the Cuban revolution, Black nationalism, and other sources. This was an important trend in the late 60s and through the 70s.

Let me just say that this wing of the movement was exactly one of the wings of the far-left that I was so eager to research but had hit a wall! These were exactly the organizations that I was trying to investigate, and here were all the primary sources I could possibly handle.  I bought the first box for forty bucks, and then bought the other boxes for about 20 bucks each. I’d go in every other weekend and get a new box until I had them all.

‘I Wor Kuen’s Reactionary Line on May Day and the Workers’ Movement’, Wei Min She, San Francisco, 1974.

RR: Unbelievable. Talk about luck.

BD: This wasn’t just a nice book collection; this was an archive of extremely unique items ranging from the Naxalite movement in India to the Black liberation struggle in the U.S.  Although majority white groups, such as the Marxist-Leninist “party-building” groups that emerged from the dissolution of Students for a Democratic Society, feature in the collection, many of the organizations were people of color majority organizations. This was one of the aspects of the 70s New Communist Movement that had always interested me the most, but again hard information and primary sources had been so hard to find.

But here was newspapers Asian-American groups like I Wor Kuen, J-Town Collective and Wei Min She, Chicano organizations like August 29^th Movement and the Communist Collective of the Chicano Nation, and African-American groups like Black Workers Congress and the Congress of Afrikan People.  These 12 boxes became an obsession. I feel like I spent the first half of my 20’s reading every paper and pamphlet in this entrancing haul. In terms of hunting for old leftist literature, this was my baptism by fire.

RR: But you’re mostly getting things from friends you said. Let’s get back to that. I’m very interested in how these historical materials change hands, about the personal and political connections behind it.

BD: You’re right, and hot on the heels of this insane Maoist literature score I started to come into some great materials from another wing of the Marxist left entirely. I joined the socialist group Solidarity when I was 21, and was involved with the Detroit branch as soon as I moved to Southwest Detroit the following year.

I actually worked full-time for the organization for a couple years right out of college, so I knew a whole vast network of socialists in Detroit and different cities. Solidarity was started in the mid-1980s as a fusion of three groups that come from a Trotskyist background. So lots of the older members of Solidarity that I would meet, who I of course really looked up to and was constantly learning from, were former members of either the International Socialists or the Socialist Workers Party.

These folks, most of whom had joined the IS or SWP during the late 60s or early 70s, were real mentors to me. I wanted to know about their history. I took their history very, very seriously because I took these people seriously as activists. So when a comrade hands me a stack of old party newspapers—with front page coverage of the crucial struggles of the radical 70s!!—it’s like a portal to the past. It’s as close as I’m going to get to really understanding the mechanics of the movement during its 1968-1974 heyday. Flyers for local events, internal debates, theoretical and agitational publications, and other course the revolutionary tabloids that cadre sold at factory gates across the country, often at shift-change in the middle of the night.

The more I got to know folks from the Trotskyist Left—and the, um, post-post-Trotskyist Left?—the more folks learned that I’m really interested in the history of the movement and that I really like to read old newspaper and pamphlets. So to a certain extent I developed a profile as someone who you should donate your old political literature to. I’d treat it well and read it and give it a good home.

RR: Who were some of the Trotskyists?

‘The Coming American Revolution’, James P. Cannon, Pioneer Publishers, Socialist Workers Party, 1947.

‘Greensboro Was Racist Murder! Court Turns Fascists Loose – Jail the KKK/Nazi Killers!’, in ‘Workers Vanguard’, Spartacist League, United States, 1980.

‘Abortion Rights – A Socialist Approach’, Militant Tendency, Britain, [1985].

‘Vote For Socialism in 1956’, Socialist Workers Party, United States, 1956.

‘The Two Souls of Socialism’, Hal Draper, Young People’s Socialist League, United States, 1963.

‘Towards an American Socialist Revolution – A Strategy for the 1970’s’, Socialist Workers Party, United States, 1971.

The Transitional Programme and the Workers Revolutionary Party’, Cliff Slaughter, Workers Revolutionary Party, Britain, 1974.

‘The Battler’, Socialist Workers Action Group, Australia, 1975.

‘The Torch’, Revolutionary Socialist League, United States, 1985.

The Chicano Struggle: a racial or a national movement?’, Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish, Freedom Socialist Party, Seattle, 1982.

Workers’ Power’, International Socialists, Highland Park, Michigan, 1975.

‘Fourth International’, International Committee of the Fourth International, London, 1966.

‘Leon Trotsky – The man & his action’, Ernest Germain, Merit Publishers, Calcutta, India, [1950’s].

‘The Marxist Case For Revolution Today’, Ernest Mandel, Fourth Internationalist Tendency, United States, 1992.

‘For Workers’ Revolution In Southern Africa – Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe’, Workers Socialist League, London, 1981.

Click on any photo in the ‘Trotskyism” gallery to open a slide show and a closer look.

BD: Around this time I also became friends with people in Detroit and Ann Arbor who were in a small group called the Trotskyist League. Members of the TL had been involved in Anti-Racist Action, extensive local labor activism, and other struggles since the early 80s when they were a part of the Revolutionary Workers League. My close friendship and political collaboration with TL folks led to boxes of comrades unwanted old movement literature too, including cool items from exiled Iranian left groups from the early 80s, shop-floor agitprop from Dearborn’s Ford Rouge factory, and of course anti-fascist stuff.

I also became close with people who had previously been in a group called the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, which included many significant SWP veterans. One friend who had been in the FIT and later joined

Solidarity: a socialist-feminist, anti-racist organization, Detroit, 2002.

Solidarity gave me an entire Ford Focus full of original Socialist Workers Party publications from the 1930s-1980s. It was unbelievably generous, I felt so honored to be the caretaker.

I ended up inheriting an incredible amount of material from the International Socialists (circa 1969-1985) and Socialist Workers Party (circa early 1930s to early 1980s), and that was thanks to people who were first and foremost friends and comrades. That’s the foundation of my Trotskyism collection. But really I’ve got friends and friends of friends in a number of other groups that I have received literature donations from.

RR: You obviously took your role as caretaker seriously. And once you get a reputation in a circle of people it grows and you become something like a magnet for old left-wing paper materials.

BD: Exactly! My apartment became something of repository; at least once this whole dynamic snowballed. I was never pushy; I never twisted anyone’s arm for old pamphlets! But I did honestly help a lot of comrades clean out their office or garage and took old literature as payment. I wasn’t exaggerating about that.

Once it got rolling, it was basically a full-time thing. I was looking for old leftist newspapers—Trotskyist, Maoist, anarchist, Black Power, feminist, anti-imperialist—constantly and looking everywhere. I could tell you so many ridiculous stories about going great length to find old leftist literature, or stories of blind luck. I don’t want to ramble; there are other things to talk about!

Republic of Angola, Ministry of Information, 1975.

RR: I like the stories of discovering this stuff, go on.

BD: Sure. Once I was cat-sitting for a friend of mine who is a longtime socialist. She was radicalized in 1968 and eventually took a job in an auto factory and become a popular local union leader. Not an entirely uncommon story for New Left era Marxist activists, although most were not as successful.  It was a 3 month gig and I was given most of her collection of posters from the Angolan independence movement that I discovered in her basement as (most of) my payment. She was perhaps a bit perplexed that I was that in love with these posters. They were musty and torn.  But by that point I was so wrapped up in finding original printed materials from radical social movements and liberation struggles that the idea of having original posters printed by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in 1975—on the eve of victory—was simply more important than anything to me. And if you’re not personal friends with veteran socialist, anti-imperialist activists, how do you find those items? Those kinds of items are by definition only in the basement/attic/closet of a very specific kind of person. I’m just lucky enough to be friends with political activists who found it difficult to throw things away for decades.

Want to hear another one of my favorite random mega-score stories?

RR: Of course I do.

BD: It was the summer of 2001 and I was living in Southwest Detroit, on a street nicknamed “Red Row” for the high concentration of socialists who had lived on that street over the years. The SWP had set up a Pathfinder bookstore on the corner near Clark Park. By this time their Detroit presence had dwindled to almost nothing so the bookstore was never really open. Needless to say this is not the SWP of the New Left era, but that’s another story. Anyway one day I’m driving by and not only is the store open, and not only are they having a going out of business mega-sale—which means I’m already kind of freaking out—but this sale includes more than just Pathfinder titles from recent decades (some of which I’m decidedly not interested in actually), but contains the personal book collections of many members of the branch as well as the Detroit branch’s library going back to the 1940s. Like the branch and its members were getting rid of all print media at once!

RR: The kind of thing a collector dreams of! It’s all about knowing the right people and place and then being in the right place at the right time. Knowledge, art and luck.

And this process meant being there just when they were selling pamphlets about the Minneapolis Teamsters strike from the 40s, anti-colonial pamphlets from the early 60s (cool items about Algeria and Congo), Malcolm X and Fidel pamphlets from 1963, and stacks on items from Trotskyist parties around the world, especially the Lanka Sama Samaja Party of Sri Lanka from the 1950s. And lots of 70s materials from other Fourth International groups across Europe and Latin America. There weren’t many customers there.

And they were selling this stuff for 50 cents for pamphlets and paperbacks, dollar for hardcovers. Basically, it was a yard sale of 65 years of Trotskyist publishing. I figured I’d make them a deal. I said how about I donate 100 or so bucks to the branch and we just load all of this stuff into my truck right now and call it a day.

I remember that day well. I was at a going away part for a friend and Marty Glaberman was there. And then I stumbled into buying an entire Trotskyist bookstore on the way home. Much like the scene at that musty old bookstore in the Cass Corridor where I stumbled into that Marxist-Leninist group’s archive, this was another complete lucky break. I don’t have any explanation! These situations just find me!

The Workers Republic. Irish Workers Group. Dublin. 1975.

RR: We both share a long interest in Ireland. the first conversation I remember having with you was about the 1981 Hunger Strikes on the steps of Zoot’s Coffee House in Detroit. I know you visited in the 90s, were you collecting when you went?

BD: I remember it like it was yesterday! Everyone was sitting around on the front porch, as was the tradition at Zoot’s Coffee, and I hear this guy saying to someone “Martin Hurson, Michael Devine, Joe McDonnell…” and I immediately thought ‘this guy is talking about the 1981 hunger strikes in Ireland!’ And it turns out that you were also the guy who had been leaving Marxist newspapers—including ‘conflicting’ tendencies—on the back table. I had been looking for you! And that was our first bond. I remember sitting in your miniscule apartment on Fourth Street in Detroit watching the protests against the Orange Order parades on television. I remember watching the standoff at Drumcree with you, and talking all night about the twists and turns of Northern Irish politics in the mid-90s.

RR: And that was the time of the Detroit Newspaper Strike, which was the reason I came to Detroit to live; a transformative event for all involved.

1995-8 Detroit Newspaper Strike.

BD: The Detroit Newspaper Strike was going full swing back then, which had a huge, huge impact on me. There were massive picket lines, conflicts with the company’s rented police force, and some pretty bold direct actions. It was exciting. And at the same time there were strikes in Decatur, Illinois and actually a couple other Upper Midwestern towns, and there was the emergence of the Zapatistas in Mexico–so there were little pockets of protest, little islands of resistance–but honesty, that whole mid-90s era was a horrible period for leftists. I really came on board at a low point! But I’ll tell you what; I sure picked up a lot of newspapers, pamphlets, and flyers at those strike demonstrations.

I remember the huge national demonstration for the Detroit Newspaper Strike in the summer of 1997. The whole radical labor subculture was there. Militant unionists came from far and wide, it was pretty incredible. Well over 20,000 marching through downtown Detroit. And what a selection of agitprop newspapers! I filled my backpack that day, and took home a half dozen different discarded picket signs for my collection.

RR: OK, back to Ireland…

‘In Struggle!’, Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee of Canada (In Struggle!), Montreal, Quebec, 1981.

‘Ireland in Rebellion’, Gerry Foley, Pathfinder Press, Socialist Workers Party, United States, 1971. This is one of many works on national liberation struggles by U.S. Trotskyist activist Gerry Foley (1939-2012).

‘Red Patriot’, Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist), Dublin, 1975.

‘The Irish Fight For Socialism’, Bernadette Devlin, from a speech given to a meeting organized by the International Socialists in Berkeley, California, 1971.

‘Workers Solidarity’, Workers Solidarity Movement, Ireland, 1994.

‘Ireland’s Path to Freedom – Manifesto of the Communist Party of Ireland’, Workers Library Publishers, Communist Party, United States, 1934.

Official Irish Republican Movement fundraising effort, 1972.

‘The United Irishman’, Official Irish Republican Movement, Dublin, 1972.

‘The Worker – For A Workers’ Republic And International Socialism’, Socialist Workers Movement, Dublin, 1973.

Irish Republican Socialist Party, Ireland, [mid 1980’s].

‘Labour, Nationality, and Religion’, James Connolly, Socialist Party of Ireland, Dublin, 1920.

‘Britain Out Of Ireland – Self-Determination For The Irish People’, May 8th Demonstration

‘Don’t let them die!’, Irish Northern Aid, New York, 1981.

‘Troops Out’, United Troops Out Movement, London, 1978.

Provisional Irish Republican Army Calendar, 1990s.

Click on any photo in the ‘Ireland” gallery to open a slide show and a closer look.

BD: Yeah, Ireland. I had been learning about the Irish republican movement in Ireland since, well, long before I was a radical. I remember seeing Irish republican demonstrators picketing a bagpipe concert by members of the British

Button supporting the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Irish Northern Aid, United States, [late 1980’s].

Army. I went with my family as a kid to hear the bagpipes, but the musicians were soldiers so people from Irish Northern Aid protested out front with photos of people killed by the British Army in the north of Ireland. So I had always been interested, and as I became a leftist and started really digging in and learning about 20^th century revolutionary movements, Ireland really came to the fore with me.

Of course the peace process hadn’t really blossomed yet, and there were campaigns that I could participate in like the campaign to free Roisin McAliskey. So Ireland was important for me, and learning the ins and outs of the Troubles was a whole political education. I took learning the history seriously.

By the time I spent a summer in Belfast in 1999, a year after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, I had been completely obsessed with the history and politics of the post-1969 conflict for years. Actually spending time there and meeting people and just walking around Belfast was absolutely life-changing.

I was definitely collecting political literature pretty seriously already then, and you better believe that I was determined to find cool items during my summer in Belfast!  It was almost too easy. There are a number of places that sell anti-imperialist and leftist literature and, unlike bookstores back home, nearly all of the periodicals and publications were titles you really couldn’t find back home. A couple of republican groups had a bookshops right on the Falls Road, which of course had some cool items. There’s an Irish language cultural center that has periodicals from different independence movements around Europe.  I got newspapers and pamphlets from Connolly Books in Dublin, too. I had always wanted to go there. I came back to Detroit with a duffel bag of party newspapers and flyers.

Ireland has always been a collecting focus, always. And other interests come and go to a certain extent, but I’m never not interested in the Troubles, the Irish left, Marxism and the National Question, republicanism…even just talking about it makes me want to read some old pamphlets from 1973!

 RR: Let’s talk about some of the pieces. Which one tells a story about Ireland that you think people should know, but don’t? 

‘Prison Struggle – the story of continuing resistance behind the wire’, Republican Press Centre, Falls Road, Belfast, 1977.

BD: One of my absolute favorite Irish pieces is a hefty pamphlet from 1977 titled “‘Prison Struggle – the story of continuing resistance behind the wire”. It was published in Belfast by publishing imprint of the Provisional Republican Movement. It basically details life in prison for Irish Republican prisoners of war before Britain decided to revoke their political prisoner status. So the pamphlet is a really intimate look at POW camps during a period when Irish Republican prisoners were exempt from prison labor and could hold classes, socialize with comrades in their own clothes, and other activities aimed and political education of Provisional IRA members and also keeping up moral and cohesion while behind bars.

The pamphlet includes prisoner drawings of political education sessions, with POWs shown reading classic revolutionary works. And there are photographs to, which of course required ingenuity to take inside the prison walls. The pamphlet was assembled by supporters on the outside, but most of the content is by the prisoners themselves. Of course as you read it you realize that not long after these photos were taken the prisons became increasingly oppressive and whatever small rights POWs had was taken away. Britain was attempting to isolate the prisoners from their supporters, to demoralize them, and to present Irish republicanism as being merely an armed criminal conspiracy. This all lays the basis for the hunger strike of 1981 when ten Irish republican prisoners died. So the pamphlet comes from an important era, and it captures a turning point in the struggle. Before the blanket protest, before the no-wash protest and eventually the hunger strike.

RR: Do you have original 1980-81 Hunger Strike material in your collection?

BD: Yes, not just material that came out of the campaign, but I also have newspapers by many left groups that cover the hunger strikes. For example there was a quite dynamic M-L organization in Montreal at the time called Marxist Leninist Organization of Canada (IN STRUGGLE!), and they sent journalists to the north of Ireland in 1981 to cover it. I have some great items from them. I also have a newspaper from Amiri Baraka’s group, League of Revolutionary Struggle, with the hunger strikes on the cover. The whole radical Left covered the events that spring and summer.

RR: I know you are passionate about all of this, but are there parts of your collection that you’ve assembled as a completest or to get the technically correct material, while others you are drawn to for personal or even sen timental reasons?

BD: I would say that’s true. Things make it into my collection or get pruned from my collection based on a number of criteria. And we should talk more about pruning items too, that’s important for collectors. However, there are some items that I keep because they are representational. They fill in gaps; they help tell a fuller story.  Items that are bibliographically necessary, you might say. But really I’m pretty disciplined about what I take on now. My overall trend these last few years has been towards becoming more and more focused. If I’m not that interested in a topic or a specific printed item I’ll rethink if I should even have it in the archive.

RR: Do you ever ‘prune’ the archive to make room, or get rid of redundant or lesser material?

BD:  I get rid of materials all the time. I donate books to movement spaces, I give books away to friends, and generally try to re-circulate anything that doesn’t seem like it should really go with what I’m trying to do with the archive.

A ton of my books are at Trinisohphes in Detroit, so you can read about labor and radical history while enjoying a Free Jazz performance or an art exhibit. Some of my books are at an anarchist vegan coffeehouse in South Philly, some of my books are at a Black nationalist café on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park, Michigan, some of my books were confiscated during the raid on the Occupy Wall Street, some of my books have been given to groups that send books to prisoners, and a lot of my books have gone to activist friends who are younger and don’t know the history yet but want to learn. I just give away books a lot. Like I said, that’s how I got most of mine. That’s what separates me from hoarders! I have a very socialist approach to re-circulating old books.

End of Part I

Brad Duncan’s exhibit at Trinosophes in Detroit.