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.

Turning Forty; Looking Back

If age confers a special knowledge, I haven’t found it. If growing older mellows young revolutionaries and leaves their radicalism behind in a mire of pragmatism, then I am not growing any older. Although forty is hardly a venerable summit from which to survey the world from, it is the highest peak I have climbed and one that I never planned to reach. I ask readers indulgence for the personal nature as I take a little stock looking back at some formative years; forty seems as good a time as any to do so and you never know if you’ll see your next birthday. This will be a little disjointed and not meant to be anything more than a partial look at some past moments.

I came of age politically as part of the anti-racist punk scene in Cincinnati in the mid-80s. As I have written before, Cincinnati was and is an intensely segregated city. Racial codes and politics were learned young, often painfully and sometimes violently. The formations of our identities were first and foremost determined by racial identity; it was impossible to ‘not see color’ as the blind liberal wish was asserted even then. I haven’t been able to shake those racial lessons of my youth. They have informed everything else in my political life. I remember when the city’s schools desegregated in the early 80s. Not only did it change the complexion of my school, it changed the class character. The intersection of race and class: it’s the American praxis.

A single benign example (and I could give a thousand others less benign): around twelve years old a group of us youngsters, maybe a half-dozen, were hanging out near the neighborhood square (a white neighborhood) drinking Jolt cola, skateboarding and smoking cigarettes. In Cincinnati, neighborhoods are clearly defined (by race, class and inertia – if you were born there, you stay there) and you stayed in your own or ventured out only into what was acknowledged neutral space (often areas around bus stops that everyone had to use).  A black kid just about our age walked past us a little anxious when one of our group, a little shit with perpetual Kool-Aid stains around his mouth, said something like “you’re in the wrong place”. The black kid was scared to begin with being in the wrong neighborhood and all, but the terror, and it was real terror, that came over his face makes me shiver to this day. The consequences for breaking the racial code in Cincinnati could be swift and violent and remorseless.

One of the many things I stew about, one of the million things I wish I could change is that. If I could go back to that moment I would lay that little shit out. That would come. If not that particular kid, then others. Always better at starting fights than winning them, I took more back. I still have the scars to prove it.

On every block in every town in this country, from the largest to the smallest, even in a reactionary backwater like Cincinnati, is at least one potential revolutionary. It’s being exposed to the possibility through others that matters. Around fourteen or fifteen an older kid in the neighborhood turned me on to hardcore with a Squirrel Bait tape. Hardcore may be the most limited style in all of music, but it opened up doors for me as it did for so many others in those Reagan years where the Cold War was at its height (I think that this is often overlooked when thinking about the 80s now; the neo-liberal Thatcher/Reagan assault was in the context of a Cold War increasingly hot as in Central America).

The left was dead, or at least invisible to me, and though I was already intensely interested in politics they were limited by what I was exposed to. Punk led me to things happening in Britain, like the Anti-Nazi League, which was, in some ways, where I first came became aware of the existence of a revolutionary politics that spoke to me. The punk scene I came up in was genuinely counter-cultural. As a way to emphasize this: no punk band that I followed or that were started by friends was ever started with the intention of ‘making it’ commercially or even of selling records.

On the contrary, it was fidelity to your community and their embrace that were the mark of success. The ethos of a band like Fugazi is only emblematic of that culture, it was widespread and real.  As limited in its way as it was, the hardcore scene (and the punk scene more generally) attracted all kinds of people to it; art school kids, runaways, the rebellious and the angry, more than a few psychopaths, but mainly just alienated working class young people.

I was at least three of those things.

It was overwhelmingly, but not entirely, white which meant necessarily that it also involved racial politics. By the mid-80s scenes around the country, but especially in the Midwest, were at war around those racial politics as neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists made conscious efforts to intervene in all that anger and alienation. In places the organized left did too, most notably for me the ISO. But, by and large, the left was absent and the right energized even as the movements of the 60s and 70s still made it feel threatened.

At 15, in 1987, I went to my first anti-fascist demonstration. It was in Corryville, a black and student neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati. A group of neo-Nazi skinheads was rallying (I can’t for the life of me remember what they called themselves) and included some kids from my high school. Other kids from my high school came to the counter demo. We would see each other again at school on Monday where whatever happened would be sure to play out in the halls. Going into that demo I was a confused, but committed pacifist. That would change. I dropped acid on the way to the demo and by the time I got there was tripping pretty hard. In retrospect, fifteen may be little too young for rioting on acid. Fights started breaking out and the cops lost a handle on it. The fighting, shouting and shoving moved up Vine Street and the sign in my hand became a stick. We beat them out of that neighborhood that day. Over the next ten years I would go to many hundreds more anti-fascist demonstrations throughout the Midwest and many more street fights too.

A proper history needs to be compiled of what would become Anti-Racist Action (ARA). It had a couple of roots, but the one that sprung on my soil was the Syndicate. Mainly anti-racist skinheads, the Syndicate brought together a bunch of crews from Minneapolis to Cincinnati to New York City to counter racists in the scene. This wasn’t black bloc stuff, this was street fighting. Your clubs, venues and street corners, your school and your neighborhood- all these were contested territory between increasingly organized racists and anti-racists. A fight could not be avoided.

I had to make myself fight. I always disliked it and was horrified by those around me I saw get pleasure from it. But I did fight. I had to go to the emergency room a few times, like a lot of us did. I got arrested a few times, like a lot of us did. I hurt people too, like a lot of us did. I was way more scared than I ever let on, but I was in it and I was not going to back down.

Some crews were based around bands, others around schools and geography; some were based on something like ideology. Mine was. I had called myself a socialist since about sixteen, for whatever it was worth. I grew up in a family with strong union traditions, my grandfather’s family being seven generations of coal miners. I spent formative summers climbing around the hollers of southeast Ohio coal country and grew up with stories from the depression and of immigration. My parents were public service workers; as baby boomers the first of their families to go to college. Class was apparent to me always. 

The scene I was in was rebellious, but not particularly left-wing. As we began to organize against the racists and the right some of us started making connections, looking further and got serious. As the sun was setting on the Soviet Union and the age of ‘No Alternative’ was commencing we were looking to the working class and to socialism.

In the spring of 1990 the Klan marched on Oxford, Ohio (where Miami University is). It was a helluva day. This was before the cops had learned to deal with us by creating static situations. Back then anything could happen. The Klan marched that day, after that they would only stage rallies. We were able to maneuver around there march as hundreds more, students, people from the neighborhood, joined in. As the march passed over railroad tracks the stones started flying from every direction. You could actually pick your target and we dropped the Grand Dragon types first. We fucked them up. Some of us got hit by rocks as well; a case of friendly fire. Jacked up by our success, we were able to besiege the city jail and retrieve our comrades from arrest. A glorious day.

In the organizing that proceeded we met a bunch of folks that would become ARA; the folks from Columbus around Jim McNamara being the most important. I and others in my crew got attracted to the Revolutionary Workers League out of Detroit. That summer I would join my first Marxist (sort of) organization. I would leave the next year after the increasingly cultish RWL unveiled their ‘Avenge Iraq’ slogan in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The RWL was already when I joined a sectarian, cultish caricature of revolutionary organization where Freud played a bigger role in its politics than Marx. I’m glad it didn’t ruin me politiclly. I could tell some stories.

It wasn’t the best way to be introduced into a life in the left perhaps, but we all come from somewhere and travel paths we don’t have any maps for.

About a dozen of us, all under 22 or 23, made up the branch of a small Trotskyist organization that formed in the aftermath of leaving the RWL. We were passionate and committed and we burned out in a few years. We had a party the entire time too. I remember one night of the rolling party where we had to be at a Planned Parenthood clinic defense at 6am the next morning. The idea of six in the morning seemed so shocking to us that we decided to just party straight through the night and show up to the gates however we were. We did just that and didn’t miss a beat picking it up the very next evening. Ahhh, youth. 

That group of people are those I still identify most closely with. There were complicated relationships, of course (a dozen young people making revolution in close proximity is bound to have layers of ‘complication’), but we swam against a tide of reaction and we were all made better people for it. Some of us drifted from organized politics, some of us have remained doggedly engaged, and others are no longer with us. Comrades: there is no more powerful relationship. Comradeship when you are young and full of yearning for a future not yet arrived; well, it is as special a thing as I can think of.

I have changed a lot, including my politics, over the years and the person I am now would probably not like the person I was then very much. But I would be prepared to say that my main beliefs remain unchanged since I first developed them from the things around me. My revolutionism, my sense of alienation, the detest I feel for capitalism and its ‘culture’, my belief in the centrality of class and the pivot of race, all these things have only been strengthened by a life lived in the world of Marxism and of political action.

What does any of this have with turning 40 today? Nothing in particular, I suppose. Sitting here drinking coffee on this rainy Ypsilanti (a place I didn’t even know of twenty years ago) morning I turn forty; it is a moment where I have to wonder how the hell I got here. Like any other day where we are reminded of our own past, just a moment to look back and try to trace a route made by a million variables.

‎’The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations…a unity of the diverse.’ Marx, Grundrisse.

The Rustbelt has been on semi-hiatus these last few months as a new job competes with continuing school in taking my time and leaving me knackered at the end of the day. I apologize. I am growing increasingly resentful that I can’t read what I want and that my writing is confined to things I am uninterested in, but compelled to do. It is preventing me from taking full breaths and looking at the world around me. As I get used to my schedule I hope to be back at it semi-regularly.

Marxism Casts Its Eye On Empire

What sets imperialism of the capitalist sort apart from other conceptions of empire is that it is the capitalist logic that typically dominates, though … there are times in which the territorial logic comes to the fore. But this then poses a crucial question: how can the territorial logics of power, which tend to be awkwardly fixed in space, respond to the open spatial dynamics of endless capital accumulation? And what does endless capital accumulation imply for the territorial logics of power?

David Harvey, The New Imperialism

Imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism, primitive accumulation, war, democracy, nation and revolution; all of these and more are major theoretical and practical considerations for Marxists. Unfinished, and in some ways, unfinishable in their contemplation, they continue to define the world we live in. We need to understand what we seek to overcome and to constantly reevaluate and deepen that understanding.

I still hold to Lenin’s conception fundamentally, that imperialism is:

…capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and fiance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

But that is not the whole story. The political, social, geographic and economic dynamics of the international system of capitalist accumulation have gone through inevitable change in the century passed since Lenin wrote his work. However, it is impossible to address what has changed, to frame our current reality, without an understanding of the system’s origins, development and consequences over the last hundred years and more.

The list below necessarily addresses that past though many of these writings retain their pertinence and their vibrancy, some with great eloquence and even elegance. As much as I like the easy convenience of lists, things are never as simple as 1-2-3. These are in no particular order, nor is it a reading list for a study, though I certainly suggest the reading of these articles, essays, speeches, manifestos and books. Some of them are history, some are theory, some are debate. All of them played a role in the development of the ideas of imperialism and the struggle against it.

Hardly exhaustive, I encourage readers to suggest other works both past and contemporary on the subject. Here then is a brief survey of some of what Marxism sees when it casts its eye on empire:

Self-Determination of Nations and Self-Defense (1915) and The Main Enemy Is At Home (1915) Karl Liebknecht

Analysing Imperialism (2003) Chris Harman

Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism (1965) Kwame Nkrumah

Economics Cannot be Separated from Politics [On Growth and Imperialism] (1961) Che Guevara

The Canton, Ohio Anti-War Speech (1918) Eugene Debs

The Empire and the Revolution (1922) MN Roy

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa PDF (1973) Walter Rodney

The Junius Pamphlet [The Crisis of Social Democracy] (1915) Rosa Luxemburg

Erin’s Hope The End & The Means (1909) James Connolly

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

War and the Fourth International (1934) Leon Trotsky

The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1916) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

On Neoliberalism: An Interview with David Harvey (2006) David Harvey

Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (1961) Jean-Paul Sartre

Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State (1915) Nikolai Bukharin

The Marxist Theory of Imperialism and its Critics (1955) Ernest Mandel

The Structure of US Imperialism: America Nears the Crisis (1952) Harry Braverman

Democracy, Pacifism and Imperialism (1917) Leon Trotsky

And finally I end with Mark Twain’s rewriting of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Composed in 1901 as the United States was entering the international struggle for markets for the first time. Twain was an anti-imperialist from the get-go and here he pours his derision on the republican Empire whose conquest of the Philippines was done in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘humanitarianism’. A sick joke of a precedent never to be gotten tired of, it seems.

Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps—
His night is marching on.

I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!”

We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her retreat;*
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on!

In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom—and for others’ goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich—
Our god is marching on.

István Mészáros Sees Light At The End Of The Tunnel

István Mészáros speaking earlier this year on the unfinished economic crisis at a London Counterfire forum emphasizing his position that this crisis will result in the further concentration of capital and a massive attack of austerity…nail. on. head.  He also emphasizes that what we are seeing is not a conjunctural crisis of capitalism, but a systematic crisis.  I’m not sure if I find his overall thesis convincing.  In the end, given the cyclical nature of capitalist reproduction what’s the difference between a conjunctural and a systemic crisis?  Scale perhaps, or results maybe, but neither of these have, in my opinion, fully revealed themselves as of yet, so I can’t arrive at some of Mészáros’ conclusions.  That said, he has been a close observer and keen chronicler of capitalism’s workings and saw clearer this spring that, while others were rejoicing and promoting (marketing) the end of the crisis, the crisis was far from over.  We use the tools of analysis to see trends and in some cases events, but they are different sorts of prognoses though deeply related.  Mészáros offers both and in doing so raises many valuable questions, at the very least.

If ever there was a time to make some good old-fashioned structural analysis popular, now is it.  Done correctly the dynamism an honest debate and a living movement produce might add a dynamic corrective to any determinist heresy that might arise; the analysis framing the issues and offering the reaching, out-stretched finger to new possibilities.  Given the four months or so that have passed since this was recorded I would say that Mészáros grasp of the situation was and is far superior to Timothy Geithner or Barney Frank or the liberal’s darling Robert Reich and the progressive’s darling Paul Krugman.  More proof that, in the midst of these stormy economic seas, Marx remains the best ‘navigator’ we have.  I just hope the train doesn’t hit me, I’m still bruised and working myself to my feet from the last one to barrel through.

Banning the Veil?

Statement from the (highly recommended) revolutionary Marxist Indian website Radical Socialist:

In country after country in Europe, political forces ranging from liberals (Belgium) to the openly right wing (Sarkozy in France, the Northern League in Italy) have been initiating actions to ban Muslim women from wearing the veil, or seeking punishment for those wearing it.  The Netherlands and Italy already have regional or local restrictions, as do twenty municipalities in Belgium.  Now the Belgium Lower House has voted to ban the burkha in the name of protecting Muslim women as well as security.  This has had immediate impact in a string of countries with Christian and white majorities – from France, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands inside the European Union to Australia, with various prominent politicians calling for similar measures. Two basic arguments have been put forward in defence of such actions.  The first is that the veil, in any form, is degrading to women, and Islam is contemptuous to women.  The second is that the veil hides the face and obscures the public interpersonal exchange — which is supposed to be a gain specifically of western civilization, as well as the fact that by so hiding the face it creates a security problem.

Our response to this is very clear.  We are absolutely certain that Islamic fundamentalism/ communalism is repressive towards Muslim women, and not merely by seeking to impose various forms of control, by imposing social inequality, and so on.  We have seen some of its horrible forms in the well publicized case of the Taliban and its rule in Afghanistan.  But several very important considerations compel us to warn that the picture, if we stop at this point, is utterly false and misleading.  In the first place, there are diverse views within Islam Second, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, imperialist ruling classes of North America and Europe have been busy creating a new “other”, this being Islam, which is supposed to stand against all the values of the Enlightenment, modernity, and so on, and is seeking to erase progress.  It is quite true that Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary force.  But what is forgotten or suppressed is the role of the imperialist west in fostering this Islamic fundamentalism –Saudi Wahabism as a bulwark of the imperialists and a sure supplier of oil, a precious commodity ever since the early 20th century, controlled by Britain and France in West Asia till the USA managed to support Saudi Arabia and got in. Islamic fundamentalism was also supported against Arab progressive bourgeois nationalism – e.g., the Islamic Brotherhood against Nasser.  Islamic fundamentalism was the chosen instrument of the USA in its proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, when opposition to the ill-judged and politically illegitimate Soviet invasion was used by the imperialists to shore up fundamentalist forces, out of which grew the Taliban.  Finally, it should be remembered that even in Afghanistan after its spurious liberation the anti-women laws are much in force.

This leads us to the next issue.  Attacking colonial subjects for their attitude to women is not a new strategy for imperialism.  British colonialism and its allies pursued this strategy throughout British rule in India, from James Mill depicting Hindus as degenerates because they ill-treated women and by implication suggesting that colonial rule was therefore necessary, in the interests of women. Attacking Muslims because of the veil is a similar strategy.  It is worth noting that in Belgium, only a minority of Muslim women wear the burkha.  In 2009, only 29 women were apprehended by the police in the municipalities that have already banned the burkha, while the total number of Muslims in Belgium is about 400,000.

Among those who wear the veil, there are those who do so out of choice, as well as those who are compelled by family and community pressure.  Those who wear the veil out of choice do so either because they have internalized all the patriarchal, anti-women assumptions behind it, or because, as minorities, they are choosing to express their identities in that particular fashion.  We disagree with their choice.  We believe that ultimately, the dress code, targeting women, reflects reactionary views.  In a very difficult situation, the New Anti-Capitalist Party of France, when one of its candidates, Ilham Moussaid, was targeted for wearing the headscarf, argued in a statement:

• Ilham herself saw no contradiction between wearing a headscarf and abiding by the secular and feminist principles of the NPA

• The NPA leadership felt that notwithstanding Ilham’s own feelings, they considered the headscarf to be an instrument of subjection of women

• They made a distinction between the debates within the social movements over Ilham’s headscarf, and the hysteria promoted by the rightwing parties. They would engage in serious debates within the social movement.  But the Right was hypocritical, considering that Sarkozy was willing to embrace the Pope, and that bourgeois parties spent millions on financing private high schools, in particular Catholic ones.

• They also criticized the Communist Party for its opportunism, since on other occasions it too had counted women like Ilham in its list of candidates.

Like the NPA, we consider that the demand that women must cover their heads is a part of instrument of subjection of women.  But, like the NPA again, we agree that if women have adopted this through choice, we need to politically discuss the issue and struggle to change the situation.  In India, as in the West, the Muslim minority can be and are often targeted.  We don’t hear anything when Hindu religious symbolisms are used, or when Hindu women are subjected to all manners of religious commands that make them inferiors.  What seems “normal”, “civilised” for the majority community, appears different for the minorities.

In other words, we argue that every religion is historically an ideology of, among other things, gender oppression.  It does not follow that calling for bans on all religions or religious customs is the correct way to fight such oppression.  Classical Marxism did not require the inscription of atheism in the programme of social movements.  On the contrary, in his 1874 critique of the Blanquist émigrés from the Paris Commune, Engels rejected their call to abolish religion by decree.  His view has been completely confirmed by 20th Century experiences, as when he wrote that: “persecutions are the best means of promoting disliked convictions”.  The more minorities are persecuted for belonging to minority religions, the more they turn to so-called community heads for material and spiritual help.  As a result, ghettoisation leads to the growth of minority communalism.  However, classical Marxism, with essentially European and a little North American experience, had not dealt with the further complexities introduced by colonialism.  Colonialism and its attendant racism means we must additionally reject persecutions of minority religions because they constitute a dimension of ethnic or racial oppression, no less than political or economic persecution and discrimination.

In most countries where Islam is the religion of the majority, religion is still the dominant form of ideology.  Retrograde, more or less literal, interpretations of Islam are used to retain entire populations in submission and cultural backwardness.  The first victims are the women.  In such countries, struggles for socialism must involve, from the start, an ideological struggle against religion as an instrument of oppression.  But while women’s liberation must in all such cases involve liberation from the headscarf or its grosser forms, to impose “freedom” by law on women would be a travesty of emancipation.  Neither women wearing the hijab or the burkha, nor men wearing the beard, should have the police set upon them for that reason.

Like the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other fundamentalisms aiming to imposed a puritan interpretation of religion as a code of life, if not as a mode of government, Islamic fundamentalism is a real danger to social progress and emancipatory struggles.  By taking care to establish a clear distinction between religion as such and its fundamentalist interpretation, the most reactionary of all, it is necessary to fight Islamic fundamentalism ideologically and politically, as much in the Islamic countries as in the midst of the Muslim minorities in the West or elsewhere.  But that cannot however constitute an argument in favour of a public prohibition of the Islamic scarf.  This amounts to singling out Islamic fundamentalism while remaining silent about other religious fundamentalists.  Has there been a call to ban campaigns against abortion by Christian extremists?

Turning to the argument about security, we reject this outright.  This is nothing but the profiling of particular groups of people as dangerous.  There is no evidence that wearing the veil in public threatens public safety, public order, health, morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.  And rather than help women who are coerced into wearing the veil, a ban would limit, if not eliminate, their ability to seek advice and support.  Indeed, the primary impact of legislation of this kind would be to confine these women to their homes, rather than to liberate them.  Nor will the act of treating Muslim women who believe that it is pious to wear the veil as criminals help in integrating Muslims in those countries.

Our stand can therefore be summed up by saying:

• Oppose the ban on religion or custom specific dress as a form of racism and anti-minorityism.

• No legal sanctions for following particular religions.

• Politically combat the oppression of women using religion as an ideology.

Some Thoughts on Class Independence

There is obviously much more to say on these questions and this small post can’t possibly do them the service they deserve, but this is a question I have been thinking about quite a bit lately and since I have a blog I have the ability to think out loud.  Please take this in that spirit-

For a Marxist all political work hinges on the proposition that the self-emancipation of the working class is a process whereby the class “of itself” transforms into a class “for itself.”  It is for this reason revolutionaries push for the independence of the working class both politically and organizationally.  Nearly all of the most important struggles within the international workers movement historically have revolved around the question of “class independence” and that is no accident.  The process can go the other way and militants “for” the class can become militants “of” the class, politically there is a world of difference.

The struggle between classes is, in some ways, unfair.  After all, a liberated working class, the producing class, has no need for the capitalist class while the capitalist is chained to his worker as the source of his wealth.  It is the working class that can solve the class conflict; the capitalist exists only with it.  As is so often the case that fundamental reality of capitalist society is masked by its culture which presents the capitalist, recently in the guise of a banker, as the indispensable class.  A society whose cultural understandings are so at odd with the underlying reality produces any number of warning signs.  The Cult of the Celebrity is certainly one such sign.

However, this enculturation is based on the reality that in capitalist society the working class is dependent on the capitalists as workers.  Capitalism has long stripped individuals of the means of producing their own subsistence.   They have to sell their labor to a capitalist to exist.  The working class “of itself” cannot liberate itself, because it exists only in the context of that relationship.  It is not only the relationship with the capitalist that needs to change if we are to overcome this contradiction.

Workers are led to believe that choice in life is exercised at the mall and between different brands of the same product.  Real choices about our life, how we enrich ourselves and what we contribute to our society, are left to the market and the value of our labor in it.  Again, culture reinforces the problem for the working class where, with all of the dynamism available to it, the capitalist marketing of commodities has convinced workers that their primary role, indeed their contribution, to society is that of consumer with our job also being a sort of consumer choice with all of the associated status markers of other “choices.”  And just as with products, only the brand is different.

Who produced that commodity?  Money didn’t magically transform itself into a television; hands were bloodied somewhere in that process.  Commodities are produced, actually made, by a whole class of people beyond boundaries.  By now we have all been to a meeting where we are told to look at the tag of our shirt to see where it was made.  It not only takes the grower, the sewer, the truck driver, the store clerk or office worker to make a shirt, moving its components across continents; it also takes the whole of society that sustains that grower, that driver, etc.

While technology may have removed many who sell their labor from the direct manufacture of goods into information and service industries, further masking their role as producers, the fact remains that they labor in the service of that process, it is that process which allows them to labor.  The worker may get her wages from the boss, but she gets her belly filled by other workers, a world of workers.  How convenient for the bosses that the answer to this reality on the part of most US trade union “leaders” is the call: “American Jobs for American Workers!”  The divisions of race, sex, nation, etc. that exist across class lines divide the working class internally too and everywhere is “the other” when it reality it is “each other.”

In the productive process it is the working class that adds value; money only represents it.  But in capitalism it is also true that “it takes money to make money.”  In general, workers, by their labor alone, do not make value.  It also requires means, tools, to produce values.  Marx would call that “fixed capital” and it is the reason it takes capital to transform labor into values.  The worker brings his “capital” to the process in the form of his labor, or rather his ability to labor, which is determined by that world of workers out there.  It is here that lays the central contradiction of capitalist production and the fulcrum on which class transformation rests.  The labor to produce goods, values, is a social labor, collective in form and in essence, while the means, the tools, to produce goods, are owned individually, even if by a group of individuals who then decide on how all of the surplus values are distributed.

In a society where the capitalist is the ruling class the products of the labor process go to the one who owns the tools and not to the one who uses the tools, naturally.  The “right to property” has deprived workers of the products of their own labor, the only “property” they own (we do not include all of the many homes workers “owned” now returning to the banks).  The worker is doubly robbed because the worker also made the “fixed capital” that is the source of capitalists claim to ownership of the product made.   It is to those means of production that the workers’ relationship must change.  As long as the working class accepts the capitalist claim on the means of production any effective struggle with the capitalists is made impossible.  They have you before you start since the rules of the game, and the imagination of the participants, are set.  The capitalist, incidentally, wrote the rules.

A working class that acts “for itself” has to wade through a wide river of muck; that consciousness which is “false” because it is only partial (there is no such thing as unconscious consciousness).  As Marx said “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”  As long as workers see themselves simply as consumers then they won’t be able to imagine how to apply themselves as producers.  As long as the working class imagines that it can’t live with out the capitalist they will surely die for the capitalist.  As long as the working class sees its interests tied up with the capitalists system it will never seek to go beyond those interests.

At the heart of that re-expropriation is the class realizing itself as producers and ending itself as workers.  As surely as it must destroy the capitalist class as a class it must also end itself as the dependent class it now is.  This is no easy process, however it is a process that is continually happening.   Even by asserting the interests “of the class” the questions of what is the interest “for the class” arises.  It is what Lenin called “the actuality of the revolution”, it is where form is seen through to essence. The generalization of such everyday lessons is where class consciousness is developed beyond the immediate.  It is where, as a class, workers begin to imagine another world because they begin, through the muck of the ages, to see the world now as it really is.

It is the task of revolutionaries to hold up “the essence of things” and to foster such imaginations, that is why we stick to the principle of class independence.  However, we also understand that the class coming to such independence is a process.  It is only by organizing as workers and putting forward demands as workers that the class can begin to define its own interests for itself.  We participate fully in the struggles “of the class” for better conditions that workers might make conditions for themselves.  In the day to day struggle over living conditions the more independent the demands of the working class are, the greater the threat backing them up is.  It is only with such threats that anything is won in the class struggle.

The struggle for better conditions within the framework of capitalism, necessary as it is, places enormous pressure on revolutionary organizations.  It is all too easy to give up revolutionary imagination, but the requirement for doing so is to reject the essence and embrace the form, to lose sight of the world as it really is.  Mighty Internationals have fallen over the years because of such pressures.  By “independence” we do not just mean political and organizational independence from the interests of capital.  No, it is only by acting “for itself”, independent and in conflict with the needs “of itself,” that the working class can take what, by law and by culture, does not belong to them; the products of their own labor.  By doing so they remake the world, their tools in their hands.

Darwinism and Its Discontents

John McAnulty of Ireland’s Socialist Democracy reflects on Darwin’s anniversary year in a prequel to a longer study

The anniversary year of the ‘On the Origin of Species’ has seen a renewed interest in Darwin and in the theory of evolution and many celebratory articles have been carried in socialist journals.  Few go beyond celebration to look at the often strained relationship between Darwinism and Marxism or try to explain why, 200 years after the birth of Darwin and 150 years after the publication of the book establishing the theory of evolution, the majority of humans would still reject a rational explanation for their place in the world that has survived a century and a half of scientific study to emerge as the foundation of our understanding of biology.

Darwin’s theory of the origin of species is one of the fundamental and pivotal theories of modern science.  It presents a convincing mechanism for all the wide variety of living things, for their evolution over time, and for the interaction of living things and their environment that makes up modern ecology. Alongside its daughter science, genetics, it stands posed to massively increase our control over our own bodies, over disease and over the natural world in the coming century.

Yet it is in the 21st century that Darwinism has come under the greatest attack from the forces of religious fundamentalism and obscurantism.

The reason for this is quite simple.  Darwinism goes well beyond its status as a scientific theory.  By explaining the origin of species through a process of natural selection, Darwin removed the need for a god to fulfill the same function.  In the film “Creation” the point is dramatically underscored when Darwin explains the theory to a friend who exclaims in delight (and to Darwin’s horror) “wonderful – you’ve killed God!” The award-winning film has not been distributed in America.

Although it is not widely understood to be the case, support for Darwinism contradicts Theism – the idea of a God personally involved in creation and the day-to-day running of the world, and restricts the faithful to Deism – the possibility of a God as a vague ‘initial cause’  Not only that, the theory of evolution situated humans inside the animal kingdom, subject to the same evolutionary pressures as other living things. Understanding ourselves became a task for reason and rationality, rather than an appeal to religious obscurantism.

For much of the 20th century Darwinism was seen in opposition to Marx, as a defender of order against the opponents of capitalism.  Yet initially it was seen as a deadly threat to that order. These contradictory roles arose from the contradictory nature of capitalism itself.

Much of capitalist society rests on the application of rationality and science to production, to research and to the structure of society and the everyday working life of individuals.  At the same time capitalist society is dedicated to the irrational aims of defending class rule and subordinating human needs to the profit motive.

These contradictions lead to a contradictory approach to the question of religion.  On the one hand, application of rationality in the service of capital sweeps away all the pretences of social solidarity and of any obligation on the capitalist to treat the poor and oppressed as their brethren.  On the other hand, religions teach the poor to respect a class structure endorsed by god and to look for happiness and the satisfaction of their needs in the afterlife rather than the here and now.  The result is that capitalism tears down religion, and the background ethical issues that they distortedly express, only to support it as an abstract ideology. Religions themselves changed.  Protestantism arose partly from the need to break out of the constants of feudal society, especially the ban on charging interest on loans, and partly to free the merchants from being forced to donate to charitable works.

Today US Christian fundamentalism preaches that riches are a result of god’s favor, a message entirely opposite to the original biblical Christianity.  The role of religious obscurantism is seen clearly in the North of Ireland, where imperialism depends on the darkest forms of religious fundamentalism to form the leadership of the local executive and panders to their religious bigotry and kow-tows to their rejection of science in relation to both evolution and climate change.

Initially the origin of species was seen as too dangerous a threat to religion to be allowed to stand.  A sharp battle broke out between different factions of capitalism, with the most reactionary elements fighting to throw back science and impose biblical superstition.

The reactionaries were defeated and the victors immediately set about making Darwinism itself a reactionary ideology.  The new social Darwinism drew on the authority of Darwin to argue that unrestrained capitalist exploitation and savage repression of the working class were the result of our biological make-up – that society, like nature, is ‘red in tooth and claw’.

The rise of mass working class organizations made it much more difficult to advance these ideas, but they remain the staple diet of right-wing movements today and have been reborn in new currents that preach genetic determinism – the idea that social problems such as crime are the result of faulty genes.

The latest edition from this perspective is the theory of sociobiology – the idea that the prehistoric environment in some way uniquely fixed human character for all time.

Marxists reject these views.  We believe that all human activity has a material foundation, but we reject utterly the view of mechanical materialism – that activity at one level of reality determines our behavior at another level.

The bestiality and massacre throughout our history are part of our biological capacity, just as the acts of solidarity and self-sacrifice are. Any explanation that claims that we are forced by our genes to murder and oppress others is nonsense.   The oppression must be explained in its own terms, by the political ideology that drives it, the class aims expressed by the ideology and the underlying economic forces.

Marxists support a dialectical view of the world.  Nothing is uniquely determined.  If economic forces give rise to our political consciousness, it is then possible for our political consciousness to change economic reality.

The Marxist response to ‘social Darwinism’ is to argue that the laws used to explain one level of reality cannot be extended to another.  The laws of Physics apply to living things, but they are of little use in explaining the development and behavior of living systems . In the same way the laws of Biology apply to society, but explaining social behavior in humans requires the sort of social and economic explanation offered by Marxism.

This sort of understanding enabled Marx to be amongst the first to welcome and support Darwinism and Marxism to be in the forefront in opposing social Darwinism.  It was a political sophistication beyond the Stalinist gravediggers of the revolution.

They opposed social Darwinism by opposing the biological theory.  Stalin’s henchman, Lysenko, faked experiments ‘proving’ that animals evolved due to direct environmental pressure rather than genetic change. The result was that under Stalinism science degenerated into a dogma that persecuted individual scientists and distorted science to support a corrupt bureaucracy.   This had disastrous outcomes for workers – dogma applied to agriculture meant inevitable crop failures.

The greater strength and self-confidence of capitalist society allowed for a wider level of individual freedom amongst scientists.  That individual freedom did not mean that science was free.  At one extreme there was the witch hunts and repression of the McCarthy era in America, designed to make sure that the scientists produced weapons of mass slaughter without expressing any concern about their use. At the other extreme was the social structure of science and academic life, holding scientists to narrow specialisms, advising caution about drawing political conclusions – all the forces that allowed capitalism to avoid the clear conclusions of climate research and environmental degradation.

Marxism claims to go beyond science.   Because science is a social construct in the service of capitalism it will always be constrained by ideology that reflects the interests and worldview of capitalism.  This is clearly the case in the ideas of social Darwinism and is even the case in discussions within science – ‘the selfish gene’ is an idea loaded down with social metaphor.

From a Marxist perspective the mechanism of adaptation is an extraordinary powerful one.  Its power does not end with biological evolution.  Adaptation may be the main mechanism organizing the basic neural elements of thought and identity and is clearly an important element in many aspects of our behavior as we unconsciously fit into different social milieus.

What an adaptive process cannot deal with is human intention.   If humans were simply biological units personal consciousness would be superfluous and we would act as directed by selfish genes or on the basis of habit patterns grounded in our history as hunter-gatherers.

Adaptative mechanisms also lack direction. People often speak of evolutionary progress but a more realistic picture is of the ‘tree of life’.  Life constantly adapts and changes.  All living organisms are the outcome of that process.  All are equally adapted – the buttercup just as much as the human. Evolution does not ascend to humans or plan to produce humans. Biological evolution simply makes human society one possibility among many . Intentions, purposes, goals – they all come from humans themselves.

Marxists believe they can deal with these weaknesses by advancing the concept of dialectical materialism.  Human consciousness and society rest upon a material base.  These material conditions determine the way in which we think and out picture of the world but, because the relationship is dialectical, humans are not simply passive objects formed by the forces of production but active agents who can struggle to change the world and society they live in and, in the process of struggle, can burst the bounds of existing society to create a new one.

If consciousness determined being then a clear explanation of the theory of education and a greater level of education would be sufficient to see it established.  If being determines consciousness without any restrictions then the slow decay of the capitalist mode of production would also mean a slow decline of scientific understanding and a descent into religious fundamentalism and barbarism.

Marx argued that once being determines consciousness it is possible for consciousness to determine being – that through struggle the working class could save humanity and establish a socialist society where the savagery of class struggle would be suppressed and rationality would rule over superstition.  Then at last people could see clearly their relationship with the world of life in the long history of planet earth and the book “Origin of species” would finally come into its own.

Baseball, Marxism and George Carlin

It is mid-season for baseball and the Tigers are doing well, though a couple of deficiencies (relief pitching!) could cause problems in getting to the post season.  The Tigers’ bats seem to only want to open up at their home park as well.  The Phils seem to have the opposite problem and only light up on the road.  Somehow they keep fighting for the lead in their division.  Where there’s life there’s hope.  I have every hope of watching a Tigers game come October.

The game on the radio is the highlight of my day.  It is a relief from troubles and replaces prosaic poverty with quotidian contentments.   The noise of the crowd and the occasional smack of the ball are the warmest of sounds.  Full of comfort and familiarity.  For a long time I’ve wondered about the draw baseball seemingly has on Marxists (though not all Marxists to be sure) and raised it before on the blog.

Capitalism damages the game, no doubt.  The Big Leagues are full of marketing intrigues and bottom line bullshit.  It was not steroids that made all of those home runs a few years back; it was the owners making small parks to bank on the long ball.  Players have been getting juiced before games since there were games.  In all probability there hasn’t been a single baseball game since 1860 without at least one player being a little addled.  Apparently one can even drop acid and play exquisitely.  Yet capitalism can’t kill what is central to the game without destroying the game itself in the process.  Which it may well end up doing.  Then I really will move to Cuba.

Baseball is awash in the dialectic and relies on the combination of individuals into a collective.  It eschews the awful showupmanship of so many other sports.  It commands attention to detail and statistic, yet relies on the unquantifiable art of reading the field and performing the right play at the right time.  I’ve often considered the game to be one of the last bulwarks of civilization in this country.  Here’s George Carlin, ever looking at our uses of language, with his own explanations on why that might be.