* 1ST JANUARY 1804THE BLACK JACOBINS AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

*1ST JANUARY 1994THE ZAPATISTA UPRISING

*4TH JANUARY 1960THE DEATH OF ALBERT CAMUS

*8TH JANUARY 1972THE DEATH OF KENNETH PATCHEN

*11TH JANUARY 1943THE ASSASSINATION OF CARLO TRESCA

From Bastard Archive, via Ent.:

* Anarcho-Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists, September 1973 from Melbourne/Australia from Bastard Archive, with the article Desire and Need by Murray Bookchin.

* J.A. Andrews – A brief biography

From archive.org via Ent.

* Dittmar Dahlmann: Land und Freiheit. Machnovschina und Zapatizmo als Beispiele agrarrevolutioärer Bewegungen (1986)

* Arthur E. Adams: The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie (1977) Article in the anthology The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution, edited by Taras Hunczak, 1977

Image by Adam Crowe via Flickr

From libcom via Ent.:

-  John Foster: Class Struggle and the industrial revolution: early industrial Capitalism in three English Towns

- Robert Weldon Whalen: Like fire in broom straw: Southern Journalism and the Textile Strikes of 1929-1931

- Antonio Negri: Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy

- Lucien Van Der Walt/Michael Schmidt: Black Flame: The revolutionary class politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism

- Benjamin Franks: Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchism

- Errico Malatesta: At the Café: Conversations on anarchism

From the Irish Anarchist History archive:

* Anarchist Workers Alliance expose fascist meeting – April 1981

* Alexander Berkman -The Only Hope of Ireland (1916)

From anarkismo:

* Del desgaste del modelo neoliberal al ciclo de protestas. by Horacio Vergara Tello

* Aniversario del golpe militar en Polonia (dic. de 1981) y del colapso de la URSS (dic. del… by Frank Mintz

* “The Anarchist Movement In Egypt 1860–1940″ by Anthony Gorman (2010)

*Emilienne Morin

*Las luchas revolucionarias de la región, a calzón quitado by Daniel Tirso Fiorotto

*Facón Grande: en la Patagonia cuentan proezas del legendario carrero entrerriano by Daniel Tirso Fiorotto

From the Marxist Internet Archive:

*Added to the Raya Dunayevskaya Archive: State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats, 1960. This is what Criticism etc has to say about it:

A January 1960 text by Raya Dunayevskaya—”State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats“—has just been released by the Marxists Internet Archive. This article originally appeared inThe Socialist Leader, the newspaper of the Independent Labour Party. Although long past its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, the ILP maintained a newspaper until it re-merged into the Labour Party in 1975.

Dunayevskaya had just visited Italy to attend an international conference of tendencies adhering to a state-capitalist (regarding the USSR) position, which was organized by Onorato Damen. The text of speeches she delivered to workers in Genoa and Milan on this occasion can be found in the microfilmed Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (see #9470 and #9474). Dunayevskaya also visited the UK on this trip, meeting with Peter Cadogan, who was instrumental in publishing her Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions in Britain in 1960, and the Scottish Marxist-Humanist Harry McShane.

The text is a stirring indictment of the theory and practice of what can be called the high era of automated production. This piece is notable for Dunayevskaya’s discussion of such figures as sociologist C. Wright Mills, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Norbert Weiner, the father of now largely forgotten school of cybernetics. Note that in this piece she cites her 1947 manuscript, Marxism and State Capitalism (see The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #472-#504). This was the text that was to be developed into Marxism and Freedom, published in 1958.

*Added to the French  Boris Souvarine Archive: Après le Congrès de Tours et la scission salutaire [1920]

*Added to the Maurice Brinton Internet Archive:  France: Reform or Revolution, Solidarity Leaflet (May 1968); France: The Theoretical Implications, Solidarity, V, 8 (March 1969); The Events in France, Solidarity, V, 9 (April 1969); A Question of Power, Solidarity Leaflet (July 1969)

*Added to the Chris Harman Archive: Response to Christopher Hitchens (1994) (Letter to the London Review of Books)

*Added to the new Arthur Rosenberg Archive: A History of the German Republic, 1936

* The Spanish Section greets the new year with the addition of a text to the Archivo Andreu Nin: El marxismo y los movimientos nacionalistas (1934)

*Added to the French Trotskyists under the Occupation History Archive: Bulletin interne of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, 1944

From radicalarchive.org:

*Murray Bookchin: Anarchism vs anarcho-syndicalism (1992)

Related articles

• Happy new year from Poumista (poumista.wordpress.com)
• From the archive of struggle: the Spanish Civil War at Warwick, the Marxist Internet Archive, and more (poumista.wordpress.com)
• Looking back at 2011 (antigerman.wordpress.com)
• This Is What Revolution Looks Like – by Chris Hedges [Must Read] (jhaines6.wordpress.com)

1. 
    John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism
   Nichols has written a persuasive case that socialism is as American as apple pie.  From the forgotten radical economics of founding father Thomas Paine and the utopian socialists who founded the Republican Party to Victor Berger, the socialist Congressman from Milwaukee, who opposed WWI to Michael Harrington it is a great read.
   The subtitle is a little misleading.  Nichols leaves out some important topics that even a short history should contain: the Populist movement of the 1890s and the most successful Socialist Party of the Debs era–the Oklahoma socialists, discussed brilliantly in Jim Bissett’s Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920.
2. Joe Burns, Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America
   Carl Finamore reviewed it on Talking Union

   a valuable contribution to resurrecting fundamental lessons from the neglected history of American labor.
   As the title suggests and as he emphasized to me, “the only way we can revive the labor movement is to revive a strike based on the traditional tactics of the labor movement.”But he doesn’t stop there. The author reviews for the reader the full range of tactics and strategy during the exciting, turbulent and often violent history of American labor.Refreshingly, he also provides critical assessments normally avoided by labor analysts of a whole series of union tactics that have grown enormously popular over the last several decades.

3. Louisa Thomas Conscience Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family–a Test of Will and Faith in World War I Even though I’ve read two biographies of Norman Thomas, this book by Thomas’s great-granddaughter greatly added to my knowledge and appreciation of Thomas.
   
   Alan Riding’s review in the New York Times seems on the mark

   Louisa Thomas, who never knew her great-­grandfather, might well have chosen to write his biography as a way of meeting him. Instead, in her first book, “Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I,” she has been far more daring. In fact, the lengthy subtitle is a bit misleading. Yes, Norman and his brother Evan were pacifists and their brothers Ralph and Arthur joined the Army. And yes, Evan was jailed as a conscientious objector and Ralph was wounded in the trenches. Yet the thrust of this enthralling book lies with its title: through the experience of her forebears, Thomas examines how conscience fares when society considers it subversive.

   At issue is not Norman Thomas’s socialism: it barely enters the picture because he joined the Socialist Party only a month before the end of the war. Instead, we are shown the “making” of a socialist, formed not by Marx but by the Bible.

   Also recommended is Mark Johnson’s review and interview of Louisa Thomas on the Fellowship of Reconciliation blog.

    
4. Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer

5. Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice  

   

   Two outstanding books on critical episodes in the civil rights movement: the 1961 Freedom Rides to confront the segregation of interstate bus terminals and the 1964 Freedom Summer to register  African Americans in Mississippi.  Watson is the author of an excellent book on Sacco and Vanzetti (which I have read) and one on the 1912 Bread and Roses strike. Aresensault’s book is a long one, but there  is an abridged version and a DVD of the PBS documentary based on it.

   

   9.   Philip Dray, There is Power in the Union

   I bought this at the bookstore at the 2011 Netroots nation and found that it lives up to its subtitle ”Epic Story of Labor in America.” It is now out in paperback.    There are other recent general  histories of US labor (Mel Dubofsky’s Labor in America: A History and Nelson Lichtenstein’s 2003 State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, A.B. Chitty’s 2002 From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend, and the 2007 two-volume Who Built America).  They might be preferred by academics or labor studies professionals, but for the general reader, union activist, or occupier, There is Power in the Union is highly recommended.

   

   10. Barbara Clark Smith The Freedoms We Lost:Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America

   This is an eye-opening study of the real-life freedoms in revolutionary America. In a post on the History News Network, Smith brings out the huge differences between today’s Tea Party and the original. If you find that post  intriguing, you might want to check out the book.

And here are two obituaries of two we lost in 2011, from Criticism etc:

Daniel Bell, 1919-2011

Now largely forgotten, Bell was once an influential intellectual and sociologist from the milieu of those who have come to be known as the New York Intellectuals. He editedThe New Leader, the organ of the right-wing of American  social democracy, during World War II and went on to receive a PhD in sociology from Columbia University. He taught for many years at Harvard. Raya Dunayevskaya often cited his The End of Ideology (1960) as the quintessence of the false intellectual representation of the official capitalist society of the age of state capitalism, while the revolts of the time, among them Hungary and the colonial world, represented the negation of that falsification of reality. Bell contributed to  the development of the school of thought of neoconservatism, so-called, (he helped launch the journal Public Interest with William Kristol), although he did not move as far to right as many of his cohort.

• • •

Lana Peters (also known as Svetlana Alliluyeva), 1926-2011

An almost ghost-like figure from another time, Stalin’s daughter lived a peripatetic life after defecting from the USSR during the early years of the Brezhnev era. She authored several memoirs, including Twenty Letters to a Friend and Only One Year. Alliluyeva’s mother was Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Aliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana Alliluyeva married a member of the Frank Lloyd Wright-Olgivanna Wright circle, William Peters, and had a daughter with him. Although Alliluyeva had harshly criticized the USSR after her emigration, she returned there briefly in the 1980s, but once again left it behind for England and the United States. She died in Wisconsin. The New York Times obituary features several photographs, including one of her as a child in her Young Pioneers uniform.

Related articles

• Happy new year from Poumista (poumista.wordpress.com)
• 29 November 2011. Video. JOHNNY CASH… Socialist and Fighter for Justice… The Left Isn’t Just for “Pointy-Headed Intellectuals”… It’s for Ordinary God-Fearin’ Folk, Too! (02varvara.wordpress.com)
• Some Of My Lives – By Rosamond Bernier – Book Review (nytimes.com)
• Hitchens (poumista.wordpress.com)

Arguing: Morning Star’s “fellow feeling” with Cameron on EU. Richard Gott on the Falklands. Socialism and democracy. Michael Foot the extremist. Anarchism and syndicalism.

I’ve barely started going through the flood of obituaries and memories of Christopher Hitchens. I started writing my own, but it seems a little surplus to requirement. Kellie provides the definitive list of links (as well as Hitchens commenting on totalitarianism, in light of the departure of the North Korean dictator), and a good first point of call is Vanity Fair. Rosie sums up the rest: “The tributes are pouring in, the reminiscences, the summings ups, the paying off of old scores. The famous, the obscure, the mandarin and the meanest of spirits are all having their say. I’ve read a few of their pieces and liked David Frum’s best of all for its warmth and this final paragraph from Jacob Weisberg.” Terry Glavin’s, of course, is especially lovely, as is George Szirtes’. And, although it feels strange to say it, given how little regard I’ve had for Peter Hitchens up to now, his lovely brotherly obituary in the Mail is probably the single thing most worth reading.

Francis Sedgemore comments on the throwaway nature of many of the obits, and in a highly recommended short post shows how journalism has changed for the worst since Hitchens entered the trade. Francis is right, and most of the ones I’ve read have irritated me more than anything else.[...]

Drink-Soaked Popinjay

I think this post at Harry’s Place best captures what Hitchens meant in the last decade or so to people like me, who groped for “an anti-Islamist, anti-Saddam, pro-democracy left” in the new world order opened up by 9/11, as we watched our former comrades on the left go deeper and deeper into the abyss of isolationist, anti-American, anti-democratic “anti-imperialism” and its alliance with various forms of right-wing politics, an alliance we could not have imagined a few years before. As the author says, Hitchens was an inspiration for the early noughties trans-Atlantic political blogging explosion (that I was one of the later, smaller tremors), due to the strange synchronicity between the availability of Web 2.0 as a platform and the locking out of morally decent people from the old platforms of the mainstream left.

This point is made too when Francis describes Hitchens as a “fellow drink-soaked popinjay”, taking up as a badge of pride the wonderful term of abuse coined by the eloquent George Galloway, which of course was the name of the collective blog Francis was part of a few years back, which defined the range of anti-totalitarian radicalism so well.

I’m not sure what the connection is between the drink-soaked thing and the anti-totalitarianism, but there is one: totalitarianism is based on the suppression or deferral of human desires and pleasures. Marx, a spendthrift, hard-drinking bon viveur beloved by small children, would have been unable to live under the regimes he gave his name to, while Chomsky’s priggish hatred of sport, music or anything fun illuminates why his brand of libertarianism is ultimately actually authoritarian. Hence the contempt from the puritans Ian Leslie calls “thin-lipped disapprovers”.

Here’s Nick Cohen, who famously turned up splendidly drunk to denounce the right-wingers honoured with a prize named after George Orwell (a truly libertarian socialist, as well as a man who liked to smoke and drink), on the BBC’s mean-spirited obituary:

[It was delivered by its media correspondent, Nick Higham, a ferrety cultural bureaucrat who has never written a sentence anyone has remembered. He assured the nation that Hitchens was an "alcoholic". Hitchens could certainly knock it back. But [if] he were a true alcoholic he… would he have been loved, for addicts are too selfish to love. Something else the BBC broadcast inadvertently explained was why the world feels a more welcoming place for the tyrannical and the censorious without him.

Francis Wheen makes a more important point: “Even when he reached for another late-night whisky, his perception remained unerringly sober.” And Michael Weiss: “Friendship was his only real ideology.”

Former Trotskyist Bushite

Leninists (not least those of bourgeois origin, i.e. most of them) would no doubt call the imperative to not speak ill of the dead a form of “bourgeois morality” to be dispensed with. Of course, they’re right, and Hitchens would agree with them: Kim Jong-il’s passing does not exempt him from derision and hatred, and nor would that of, say, Ahmadinejad or Kissinger (example: Hitchens the day after Jerry Falwell died). But I was irritated by the petty-ness of some of the vindictive lightweights coming out to kick Hitchens’ corpse and of some of the Leninist inquisitors coming out to confirm his ex-communication from the sect.

The reliably appalling Guardian paleo-conservative Simon Jenkins come out with one of the standard lines: writes: “The identikit Trot of our early friendship had became a rabid Bushite defending the Iraq war”. It’s worth noting that his Trotskyism was of a very particular sort: he was inducted into the International Socialists (the forerunner of the current, dreadful SWP) by Peter Sedgwick, in its most heterodox, intellectually vibrant period, a time when its publications were open to several non-party members, and when it was as much in thrall to the anti-Leninist Rosa Luxemburg as it was to Trotsky. (Hitchens, in turn, helped induct Alex Callinicos into the party of which he is now a leading member and Callinicos has written a nice and surprisingly generous obit for the Socialist Worker.) The IS did an important job, in a period when the left dominated by the authoritarian Third Worldist fantasies epitomised by Tariq Ali’s IMG, of retrieving a libertarian, democratic tradition within Marxism, the tradition of William Morris, Hal Draper, Victor Serge, CLR James, Sylvia Pankhurst, Max Shachtman and George Orwell. Arguably, it is this anti-Stalinist left that has been the model for the anti-totalitarianism of the so-called decent left, especially its more left-wing varieties.

HP retorts against Jenkins: “Although he was a Marxist to the end and certainly a Trotskyist for many years, I find it hard to imagine Hitchens as ‘identikit’ in any way. And, of course, he certainly never became a ‘rabid Bushite’. I’ll get to the Bushite bit later, but want to amplify the point about Marxism. Here’s Michael Weiss: “Well unto the toppling of Saddam, the only time I heard Hitch use the word “conservative” in a laudatory fashion was when it preceded the word “Marxist.””[...]

Traitor

The hatred of Hitchens from the Seymours is the hatred of the cult-member for the apostate. He betrayed the left, and it can’t forgive him. Most of them frame Hitchens’ right-ward turn as literally selling out, as exchanging correct thought for the yankee dollar. As David Aaronovitch puts it:

Typical was this, written in May last year, from the high-table revolutionary Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman, claiming that “those who, like Christopher Hitchens, detest a cliché turn into one of the dreariest types of them all: the revolutionary hothead who learns how to stop worrying about imperialism and love… Paul Wolfowitz”. In other words, he was the lean young man corrupted by proximity to power and need for money, and turned into the fat shill of the people’s enemy.*#

Smarter critics understand Hitchens’ turn in the context of the religious structure of leftist thought. Andrew Coates’ review of the book explores the issue of Hitchens’ relationship with the faith of leftism, and faith is exactly the right term. Leftism is a religion, and Hitchens’ boring obsession with religions in general must be connected to his own relationship to the leftist faith. A more interesting analysis of his apostasy was written up by Guy Rundle in the Spiked Review of Books a year of two ago (h/t AC). Worth noting that Spiked’s origins are also in the IS of that era: its guru Frank Furedi left “in 1975 on issues that remain obscure to all concerned”. Like other escapees from the Tony Cliff cult, Furedi’s RCP also eventually became apostates for the left, right-wing libertarians who make Hitchens’ alleged Bushism look like orthodox Trotskyism. Rundle suggests that Hitchens

took from the IS/SWP’s oppositionality, not a mode of doing politics, but a form of political moralising that rapidly becomes a tiresome and inecessant [sic] judgement on the taking and wielding of power itself. Thus in the early Oxford Union years we continually encounter revolutionaries, activists, writers and so on held to be bursting with brilliance, only to be tagged with the premonitory phrase about the thugs, monsters or moral failures they became. Overwhelmingly this is because they took the power they were campaigning for, and having done so, had to make some grisly choices. But for Hitchens, the result is an endlessly repeated political Fall, in which oppositionality becomes a series of impossible standards.

Perhaps this says less about Hitchens than it does about Spiked’s cringeful adoration of power in the form of the Conservative party (for Rundle, Hitchens reached his “low point” when he slagged off Matthew Parrish for being… a Conservative!) and their pose of oppositionality to the “liberal elite”. But it rings true on one level.

However, the notion that Hitchens abandoned the left is simplistic. First, it ignore the fact that in some ways he was always a dissident within the left. In Hitch-22, he describes the double life he led in his early IS days, when by night he dined, drank and fucked with the most decadent dredges of the ruling class in Oxford, and later his early (limited) enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher. His support for Solidarity and other Eastern Bloc rebels was shared with the rest of the anti-Stalinist left (including, I think, the SWP). His support for Western intervention in the 1990s also presaged his post-9/11 position. As Aaronovitch puts it:

Rwanda provided the embers, Bosnia the fire. Any internationalist, any progressive, any leftwinger would want to intervene to try to prevent such horrors – and not just because they were horrible either, but because they made the world worse for everyone.*

And the idea of Hitchens as turncoat also ignores the continuity in his leftism after 9/11. Not just the obvious points that he continued his crusade against Kissinger and Mother Teresa, against the moral majority dominant strand of American conservatism, and so on, and pretty sharp criticisms of Bush, as well as his attacks on his friend Martin Amis’ ignorant anti-communism in Koba the Dread and his championing of Trotsky on Radio 4. But more fundamentally that his opposition to Ba’athism and to Islamism was rooted in left-wing values not conservative ones. In short, the caricature of Hitchens is, again quoting Aaronovitch, “a self-comforting lozenge that the lazy intellectual Left sucks on to make its pain and doubts go away.”

What the meme reveals is the extent to which the Iraq war, even more than Israel, has acted as a cultural code, a shibboleth, for the self-definition of a left that has lost its moral compass as it has abandoned its core constituency and core values. Aaronovitch again: “When the Iraq war finally began in the spring of 2003 after almost a year of argument, it became clear that many on the Left now regarded being against the war as the test of belief, as the essential membership card for comradeship.” Perhaps now, as the last American troops withdraw from Iraq, the left has the opportunity to let go of its obsession and move on. But probably not…

Related articles

• Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 – The Star Democrat: Home (chomskywatch.wordpress.com)
• Christopher Hitchens: He died too young, with too much left to say | Nick Cohen (guardian.co.uk)
• On Hitchens, Havel, and Kim – and Totalitarianism (insightscoop.typepad.com)
• Christopher Hitchens: Man of the Year (blogcritics.org)
• The Jewish Chronicle – What Hitchens and Havel shared – Chomsky’s wrath (chomskywatch.wordpress.com)
• A double loss: Havel and Hitchens (blacktriangle.org)

My top referrers, not counting google etc, in 2011 were:
1. Rooieravotr
2. Tendance Coatesy
3. Shiraz Socialist
4. Boffy
5. Bob From Brockley
6. Luxemburger Anarchist
7. ΟΥΤΕ ΘΕΟΣ – ΟΥΤΕ ΑΦΕΝΤΗΣ
8. Journeyman
9. Histomatist
10. David Osler
11. Inveresk Street
12. Entdinglichung
13. Lady Poverty
14. On A Raised Beach (much missed)
15. A Very Public Socioloigist

Most popular posts were:

1. Anarchism or your money back
2. Amidah: Defiance
3. Globalise the jasmine revolution: some notes from history and theory
4. From the archive of struggle no.43
5. On this day, 1945: Eileen O’Shaughnessy died
6. On this day: 22 June 1937 – Andres Nin murdered
7. Jews versus Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War
8. Books
9. Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service talk Trotsky
10. Shoot them like partridges
11. From the archive of struggle no.37
12. Orwell turning in his grave?
13. Music Monday 1: Carnation revolution
14. From the archive of struggle: student activism in the 1930s
15. Poumatica

Most commented on posts:

1. More catching up
2. Anarchism versus Leninism
3. Workers’ Liberty
4. Max Shachtman, Hal Draper and the anarchists
5. My obsessions
6. Uses and abuses: George Orwell and Norman Thomas
7. Orwell turning in his grave?
8. War, and class war
9. On a roll, no.3
10. Shoot them like partridges
11. Democratic Green Stalinist?

Most popular search terms:

1. poumista
2. dirlewanger [I have no idea why!]
3. poum
4. spanish civil war
5. carnation revolution
6. george orwell
7. eugene debs
8. andres nin
9. trotsky
10. victor serge
11. leon trotsky death
12. trotsky dead
13. anarchism
14. spanish civil war posters
15. leon trotsky
16. mika etchebéhère
17. spanish anarchists
18. united farm workers logo
19. robert service trotsky
20. poum poster
21. emma goldman
22. eileen o’shaughnessy
23. gerda taro
24. manolis glezos

Most prolific commenters:

1. Michael Ezra
2. Petey
3. Entdinglichung
4. Kellie Strom
5. Darren

Second, via Mike Killingworth, Maria Farantouri, socialist and anti-fascist, performing “Asma Asmaton” (Song of Songs). The first of four songs of the “Ballad of Mauthauzen”, a set of songs inspired by the experiences in the Mauthauzen death camp.

Third, via Mike Killingworth, via Jams O’Donnell: Mari Boine, Sami ant-racist.

The second, recorded in 1988, is “El Cant de la Sibil·la“, the song of the Sybil, “a liturgical drama and a Gregorian chant, the lyrics of which compose a prophecy describing the Apocalypse, which has been performed at some churches of Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) and L’Alguer or Alghero (Sardinia, Italy) in Catalan language on Christmas Eve nearly uninterrruptedly since medieval times… The Song of the Sibyl was almost totally abandoned throughout Europe after the Council of Trent (held in 25 sessions from 1545 to 1563) declared its performance was forbidden. Nevertheless, it was restored on Mallorca as soon as in 1575.” Interestingly, the great leftist musicologist Alan Lomax recorded a fragment of a version during his Balearic fieldtrip of 1952, in the Franco years. Franco of course suppressed Catalan language, and Figueras and her husband Jordi Savall lived in exile in Switzerland until after Spain democratisation in the 1980s. The decision of Hesperion XX, formed in 1974, to record Catalan songs (and to recover the repressed memory of Jewish Iberia) was thus an act of defiance against the Francoist regime.

These songs are part of an on-going series on Catalan music. Previously, I have featured Jordi Barre, Pau Casals, Isaac Albinez, Enrique Granados, and Enrique Morente.

Related articles

• Montserrat Figueras obituary (guardian.co.uk)
• For Montserrat Figueras (therestisnoise.com)
• Montserrat Figueras, Catalan Soprano, Dies at 69 (nytimes.com)
• Hespèrion XXI/Savall: La Sublime Porte: Voix d’Istanbul – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Montserrat Figueras, 1942 – 2011 (volokh.com)
• Monday music: Jordi Barre (poumista.wordpress.com)

Added to the new Ken Coates Archive in the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). [These are mostly texts from International Socialism, then close to entering its golden age. As they wrote in 1961: "Readers will recognize Ken Coates as one who has had a varied career. A miner for nine years from the age of sixteen, he won a state scholarship for a prize winning essay on Sean O’Casey, which took him to Nottingham University to study English. He now lectures in sociology in the university’s extramural department. While a miner he was on the Executive Committee of the Young Communist League and was active in the National Union of Mineworkers. He left the CP in 1953 to rejoin later as an opposition member. He left it finally in 1956. At university, he was secretary of the National Association of Labour Students’ Organizations, editor of its paper Clarion, and a major force in revitalizing that body. He has been excluded more than once from the Labour Party." It is a good indicator of the relative lack of sectarianism of the IS then that they published so much by Coates, who was, as they rightly saw him, a left reformist, more syampathetic to both labourism and Stalinism than they were.]
*Spluttering Taper (1961) (book review) [on Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (aka Alexander Uralov) on Stalin]
*Socialism and the division of labour – Some notes on the views of Paul Cardan (1961) [Cardan was the pen-name of Cornelius Castoriadis.]
*Caribbean Pilgrim (1961) [This is a fascinating and wonderfully written criticism of Theodore Draper's criticisms of Fidel Castro. Although not uncritical himself, Coates, like the IS at the time, was still enamoured with Castroism, seeing it as a sexy democratic alternative to Stalinism, as brilliantly sketched in an early chapter of Hitch-22.]
*Reform and Revolution – Rejoinder 1 (1962) [A polemic with Alasdair MacIntyre on the nature of the Soviet Union.]
*Incomes Policy and Class Power (1966)
*Workers’ Control Conference (1969) [A response to the IS's Raymond Challinor, on whom see below]
*Peter Fryer (1929–2006) (2008) (obituary)

Added to the Brian Pearce Archive:
*Marxism and the Asiatic Mode of Production (2002) (letter)
*The Asiatic Mode of Production (2003) (letter)

Added to the new Raymond Challinor Archive in the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). [These are short historical notes on revolutionary history from late in Challinor's life.
*Bernard Dix (1996) (letter)
*Rocking the Boat (1996) (book review) [on Les Forster]
*Frank Maitland (2002) (letter)

Added to the Christian Rakovsky Archive:
*The Origins of the Potemkin Mutiny (1908). [Rayakovsky was later an important oppositionist to Stalinism but in 1908 was part of the emerging group within the Social Democratic movement that would define orthodox Marxism and then give birth to Bolshevism. Details on the writing of this text are here.]

Added to the new Pierre Broué Archive [Broué was an orthodox but maverick Trotskyist, who has done very interesting historical work on the movement.]
*Remarks on the History of the Bolshevik Party (1962)
*Spartacism, Bolshevism and Ultra-Leftism in Face of the Problems of the Proletarian Revolution in Germany (1918–1923) (1972) [Defence of doctoral thesis.]
*The “Bloc” of the Oppositions against Stalin in the USSR in 1932 (1980) ["Pierre Broué’s Bloc of The Oppositions first appeared in the Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 5, January–March 1980. It was significant for a number of reasons. First, the article not only reinforced our awareness of the degree of opposition to Stalin in what for him was the troubled year of 1932 but emphasized its aspiration to unity. Second, Broué documented for the first time that links existed between Trotsky and non-Trotskyist opposition groups inside the Soviet Union. Third, he was able to demonstrate that the later terror had its roots in earlier difficulties: the charges in the Trial of the Sixteen in 1936 were not simply pathological inventions but had some rational basis in the events of 1932. Fourth, the research undertaken by Broué and his team from Grenoble at Harvard confirmed the necessity for continuing archival research. Isaac Deutscher had earlier worked in the closed archive but The Prophet Outcast, while referring to Trotsky correspondence at this time, makes no reference to these matters."]
*Walter Held (1979) (short biography of young German Trotskyist executed by the Stalinists in Russia in 1941)
*Rudolf Klement (1971) (short biography of young German Trotskyist murdered by Stalinist agents in Paris in 1938)
*The Socialist Youth in Spain (1934–1936) – When Carrillo was a Leftist (1983)
*The Bolshevik-Leninist Faction (1988) [This is on one of the early Communist oppositionist groups.]
*Kurt Landau (1988) [Born on 29 January 1903 in Vienna (Austria); disappeared in Barcelona (Spain), September 1937. Member of the Austrian Communist Party, then of various Left Opposition groups in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Member of the POUM in 1936.]
*Van Heijenoort – A Trotskyist in New York in the Second World War (1990)
*In Germany for the International (1993) (Leon Sedov’s experiences in Germany)
*Trotskyism in Poland (1996) (letter)
*Five Years On (1997) (The situation in the Comintern in 1924)

Update of the Revolutionary History Mirror including complete contents of:
Vol. 5 No. 2. Germany 1918–23: From the November Revolution to the Failed October (1994) (almost complete)
Vol. 6 No. 1. Trotskyism in Poland (1995) (almost complete)
Vol. 8 No. 2. Mutiny: Disaffection and Unrest in the Armed Forces (2002) (complete)
Vol. 9 No. 4. Pierre Broué: Revolutionary Historian (2007) (complete)

Added to the PCF under the Occupation History Archive:
*This is the New Order, 6 May 1941

Added to the German Archiv Leo Trotzki: [Leon Trotsky]
*Über Brandler und Thalheimer (On Brandler and Thalheimer) (1929) (Criticism of Brandler and Thalheimer)
*Nochmals über Brandler und Thalheimer (Once again on Brandler and Thalheimer) (1913) (More criticism of Brandler Thalheimer)
*Rosa Luxemburg und die IV. Internationale (Rosa Luxemburg and the Fourth International) (1935) (Critique of attempts by the SAP and the KPO to claim the heritage of Rosa Luxemburg)

Added to the French  Boris Souvarine Archive:
*Nécessité « d’une » scission [1920] [This is Souvarine's call for a break within the French socialist movement and turn into the Communist International of the revolutionary currents. Later, of course, Souvarine would become an anti-Bolshevik.]

Added to the Ludwik Hass Archive [These are all texts from or on the heroic history of Trotskyism in Poland.]
*Open Letter to Ozjasz Szechter (1977) / Trotskyism in Poland up to 1945 (1992) / Against All Odds – True to the Ideals of his Youth (1994)

Added to the Archivo Andreu Nin:
*Socialismo y nacionalismo – Consideraciones preliminares / Socialismo y nacionalismo – Calma, calma… Con los nacionalistas, no; con el nacionalismo, si. (1914) [These are polemics by the young Nin against  Antoni Ribas i Fabra (* Reus , 1879 - Cambrils , 1958), Catalan socialist, of whom the Spanish-language Wikipedia says this: "He moved to Barcelona to pursue his studies. Later he collaborated with The Socialist Magazine in Madrid , from 1903 to 1905, under the pseudonym of Mark Antony . In 1907 he joined in Paris with the group of Jean Jaurès ( L'Humanité ). That same year he attended the Congress in Stuttgart , as a representative of the Second International. A year later, in 1908 he returned to Barcelona closer to Pablo Iglesias , the PSOE and participate as a delegate to the union Solidaritat Obrera, published weekly  La Internacional  from 1908 to 1909. Also tried to create a Catalan and Balearic socialist Federation and was an active participant in the protests against the war in Morocco that led to the Tragic Week of Barcelona. Following these events returned to France. From 1920 to 1931 he held institutional places of little relevance. During the Second Spanish Republic was a member and Director General of the Ministry of Labour, marching in 1931 to Switzerland and in 1942 to Colombia where he worked at the University of Cauca. He returned to Catalonia in 1950." These texts were written before Nin joined the the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). My Spanish is not good enough to follow his argument, but I think he is arguing that socialists need to take Catalan national aspirations seriously.]
*Consideraciones sobre el problema de las nacionalidades (1932) [Nin returns to the same issues as a mature thinker, when he was part of the Izquierda Comunista de España and before his break with Trotsky. He argues strongly for the role of national self-determination (including that of Catalans), and against an abstract "ultra-left" internationalism that effectively does the work of the dominant ethnicity in a given nation-state. While claiming a Bolshevik orthodoxy for his ideas, he perhaps actually more closely resembles the Bundism of Vladimir Medem.]

Added to the Early American Marxism Archive the following set of 7 documents:
*“ Report of Proceedings of the Executive Committee of the Workingmen’s Party of the US,” by Philip Van Patten [August 6, 8, 11, 18, 1876] Minutes of the governing Executive Committee of the newly-organized Workingmen’s Party of the United States, forerunner of the Socialist Labor Party.
*“Let Us Build,” by Eugene V. Debs [Aug. 9, 1913] The Socialist Party’s great mediator, Gene Debs, attempts to patch up the factional war between radicals and moderates in this 1913 article from the SPA’s official bulletin. “We have heard and still hear a great deal about ‘the Reds’ and ‘the Yellows’ in the Socialist Party,” Debs remarks.
*“Lovestone’s Appeal to Party,” by Max Shachtman [Aug. 15, 1929] Jay Lovestone was expelled from the Communist Party USA late in June 1929 for violation of party discipline by leaving Moscow without permission and factional activity.
*“Shortcomings of Party Fractions in Language Work.” [June 1930] Official published statement on the activities of the non-English members of the Communist Party, USA. Even at this late date somewhat more than half of the party’s membership seems to have been participants in one of the CPUSA’s 16 “Language Bureaus.” The largest of these remained the Finnish, accounting for a reported 1800 members— more than double the membership of the next largest Language Bureau, the Yiddish-language Jewish Bureau.
*“Right Danger and Radicalization,” by Alfred Wagenknecht [June 21, 1930] Formerly the Executive Secretary of the Communist Labor Party and United Communist Party and the head of the Friends of Soviet Russia, by 1930 Alfred Wagenknecht had been largely shunted aside from a position of top leadership in the Communist Party. This article from the Daily Worker is written from the perspective of a rank-and-filer and discusses the party’s all-out propaganda campaign among its members against the so-called “Right Danger” in Wagenknecht’s own party group.
*“The Socialist Party City Convention: Groups in the SP— Perspectives of the Left Movement— The Line of the Communists,” by Will Herberg [events of Dec. 27-28, 1930] This is an assessment of the December 1930 New York City Convention of the Socialist Party of America written by one of the leaders of Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow’s Communist Party USA (Majority Group).

Added to the Raya Dunayevskaya Archive:

State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats, 1960 [The Socialist Leader (Glasgow), January 2, 1960]

Related articles

• Radikale (poumista.wordpress.com)
• From the archive of struggle: the Spanish Civil War at Warwick, the Marxist Internet Archive, and more (poumista.wordpress.com)
• From the archive, 2 August 1950: Stalin and the Soviet state (guardian.co.uk)
• Please Donate to the Internet Archive (archive.org)

Pierre Broué: Kurt Landau

Also known as Agricola, Wolf Bertram, and Spectator

(1988)

From Revolutionary History, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2008, pp. 229–236.
From Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, partie 4, 1914–1939, t. 33, Paris 1988, pp. 203–205.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

Born on 29 January 1903 in Vienna (Austria); disappeared in Barcelona (Spain), September 1937. Member of the Austrian Communist Party, then of various Left Opposition groups in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Member of the POUM in 1936.

The son of a prosperous Viennese wine merchant, Kurt Landau had a Bohemian student youth similar to that of many young people from the Jewish intelligentsia in the imperial capitals: but it is also said that he attempted various circus jobs and for a time was a lion tamer at the Hagenbeck Circus. In 1921 this educated and cultured adolescent joined the new-born Austrian Communist Party, already shaken by fierce factional struggles and in 1922 became leader (Leiter) of the Warring district (Bezirk) in Vienna. Early in 1923 he supported the left-wing criticisms made by the Italian Bordiga [1] of the new line of the International, which was described as “opportunist”. In 1924, still in Vienna, he made the acquaintance of Victor Serge, who was part of a group of Comintern emissaries and who worked on its press bulletin Inprekorr. [2] It seems that Serge gave him the first solid items of information about the factional struggle in the USSR. The same year Landau took charge of the CP agitprop department and became an editor of its main publication, Die Rote Fahne (Red Flag), with responsibility for cultural matters. In the discussion on culture he adopted the arguments developed by Trotsky against “proletarian culture”.

Originally he kept aloof from the struggle between the two rival oppositions of Josef Frey and Karl Tomann, but he moved closer to them after their unification in September 1925. In March 1926 he joined this “united opposition” which he seems to have considered as the Austrian equivalent of the Russian United Opposition. [3] Expelled along with most of his comrades in late 1926, he was, in early 1927, one of the founders of the Kommunistische Partei Oesterreichs-Opposition (KPÖ-O – Austrian Communist Party Opposition), led by Frey, which publishedArbeiterstimme (Workers’ Voice). Originally he supported the view that the KPÖ-O should not work for the reform of the Austrian CP, but should itself aim to become the real Austrian Communist Party. However, the KPÖ-O continued to reproduce the fierce internal factional struggles of the Austrian Communist Party with its regroupments, its shifts of alliance and its bitter personal conflicts. Following a heated theoretical debate with Frey, Landau and some of those close to him were expelled from the KPÖ-O in April 1928 for an “ultraleft deviation” (according to the historian W Wagner [4], this involved sympathy for the ideas of Karl Korsch [5]). He then founded a rival organisation, the Kommunistische Opposition-Marxistisch-Leninistische Linke(Communist Opposition, Marxist-Leninist Left), whose support was based in the city of Graz, and he began to issue his own publication, Klassenkampf (Class Struggle), then Der Neue Mahnruf (The New Warning Cry).The conflict between Landau and Frey then reached new heights of invective and personal accusations. He met Rosmer at the station when he visited Vienna in July 1929, and made the best impression on him. [6] Trotsky and Rosmer considered transferring him to Paris to support Rosmer in international work. Landau, in an article which was reproduced notably in the publication of the Leninbund [7], Die Fahne des Kommunismus [The Flag of Communism], and then in Contre le Courant [Against the Stream][8], supported Trotsky’s position against Urbahns [9] and Maurice Paz. [10] This marked the beginning of a correspondence with the exiled Russian. Impressed by the talent and clarity of expression of this young militant – Landau was only twenty-six – and anxious to get him away from the overheated factional culture in Vienna and make full use of him in work appropriate to his abilities and of enormous importance, Trotsky had no difficulty in persuading him to go and settle in Berlin with his partner (Katia Lipshutz had been living with him since 1923). Trotsky took responsibility for meeting his material needs out of the money he received for copyright in Germany.

Contact with the militants of the Leninbund sympathetic to Trotsky proved very difficult. Landau presented himself as a “representative of the Russian Opposition” – that is, of Trotsky – and seemed unwilling to allow any discussion. Seeing that the Leninbund did not offer him favourable ground, he turned to the small Berlin group known as the “Wedding Opposition”, which had been in contact with the Russian Opposition for a long time, and which was at this time led by the young Hans Schwalbach [11]; he was thus able to have his own political force at his disposal. It seems that Trotsky was not able to keep him to a path which no longer meant winning over the Leninbund, but rather splitting it; nor could he improve his relations with the German nucleus of veterans who made up the “Leninbund minority”. After the expulsion of the latter group, he came under renewed pressure from Trotsky and from the insistence of visitors to Constantinople, Pierre Naville [12] and Max Shachtman [13], to commit himself to progress towards unification; this was concluded on 30 March 1930 by the formation of the Vereinigte Linke Opposition (United Left Opposition – VLO) in the KPD (German Communist Party) Bolshevik Leninists, the German section of the International Opposition which was being built. As a member of the Executive of the VLO from its creation, and editor-in-chief of its publication Der Kommunist (The Communist), and elected a member of the International Bureau a few days later, Landau seemed destined to become one of the main international leaders of the Left Opposition – in fact he was only passing through. To begin with there was his unconditional support for his Austrian comrades in Der neue Mahnruf in their factional struggles and the excessive accusations made in support of their cause, and the political conflict with the Leipzig organisation of the VLO, being manipulated at this time by Stalin’s agent Ruvin Sobolevicius, who was using the pseudonym of Sobolev or Roman Well. Moreover his pursuit of international alliances was dubious in Trotsky’s eyes, and finally his own policy of removals from office, expulsions and forcible takeovers within his own organisation made a split inevitable. Landau’s opponents described him as a “psychopath” and insisted that no cooperation with him was possible because of his “methods”. The split was finalised on 31 May 1931, following the visit of Pierre Frank. [14] Kurt Landau then kept control of Der Kommunist, and transformed the faction of the organisation which he had kept under his control into the Linke Opposition der KPD/Bolshewiki-Leninisten (Left Opposition of the German CP/Bolshevik-Leninists). Its sole basis seems to have been a shared hostility to Trotsky’s “methods”. Landau, who still had good relations with Rosmer, was also in contact with the Gauche communiste (Communist Left) of Claude Naville [15] and Michel Collinet [16], and, it appears, with the Izquierda comunista(Communist Left) of Andrés Nin. [17]

The organisation led by Landau – at most three hundred members – continued clandestine activity in German until spring 1934 when it was destroyed by Gestapo infiltration and the arrest of militants. Kurt Landau had emigrated to Paris in March 1933 with Katia. He pioneered the denunciation of Trotsky’s “betrayals” and “capitulations”: this was how he described the latter’s orientation in 1933 towards “a new communist party” in Germany, then towards “a new international”, and subsequently his policy from 1934 onwards of “entrism” in the Socialist Parties and the “French turn”. From May 1933, he had printed in Vienna and published in Paris Der Funke [The Spark], organ of the Marxist-Internationalists, of which he was the main and often the sole member of the editorial team. But this paper was to be killed off in Austria in 1934. Henceforth Landau was reduced, in the words of Hans Schafranek [18], to “circle work”, and duplicated publications. Shortly after his arrival he had grouped around him a certain number of oppositional members of the Communist Party [PCF] who were in process of breaking with Trotsky, and he began to orient himself towards work inside the PCF. He considered that the Left Opposition had been destroyed by “Trotsky’s liquidationist current”, but insisted that it had “laid the ideological foundation for the oppositional tendencies of the future”; for him now the only perspective was “the struggle to win over politically the Stalinised vanguard of the proletariat” through the building of a clandestine “internal faction” capable of giving life to “spontaneous oppositional tendencies” within the PCF. On the basis of this line he made contact and merged with the small internal opposition group in the PCF led at this time by André Ferrat [19], a member of the Political Bureau, and the Pole Georges Kagan/Lucien Constant [20] who was in charge of agitprop. From 1935 Landau became one of the members of the nucleus and of the editorial team of the journal Que Faire? (What is to be Done?) published by the group in question, in which also participated the former oppositionists Pierre Rimbert [21] and Hipólito Etchebéhère and his wife Mika Etchebéhère. [22]

Landau began his collaboration with this review with a startling article entitled: From the Fourth International to the Second International. The Path which led Leon Trotsky to Social Democracy. In this he stated in particular: “Revolutionary Marxists must follow their own road both within the Party and in the Communist International. They must group together within the Party to help the Party and the International find the right road, Lenin’s road.” In September–October he published another article in Que faire?, a polemic against “comrade Bréval” (André Ferrat), who had cautiously envisaged the use of “defeatist” slogans in the event of a war in which the USSR was France’s ally. Landau, for his part, declared that everything should be done for the defence of the USSR, writing: “The defeatist slogan does not take account of this double and complicated problem: it is correct in the case of a war between two armed imperialist groups, but not for the Soviet-imperialist bloc, which is a bloc full of contradictions.”

Kurt Landau was profoundly shaken in August 1936 by the trial of the Sixteen in Moscow, following which Zinoviev, Kamenev and other old Bolsheviks were sentenced and executed. He tried to organise a joint protest in Paris by the émigré oppositional Communist groups, and he made vain efforts to convince Brandler, the leader of the KPO [23] and the leaders of the SAP.[24] He ended up merely with a joint action with the German section of the ICL [25], the IKD [26], and with the International Group of Ruth Fischer [27] and Maslow. [28] But he also polemicised against Trotsky and Sedov [29] and their opinion that the accused Olberg [30] was a GPU agent who had played the role of police spy in the trial. Olberg, a former member of the German Left Opposition, had followed Landau at the time of the 1931 split, and the latter preferred to see him as a victim of the GPU. On this occasion he entered into correspondence with the oppositional group in the Czech CP around Josef Guttmann [31] and Záviš Kalandra. [32]

After the relative failure of his attempts to mobilise action against the Moscow Trial, Kurt Landau turned to Spain where he saw an authentic proletarian revolution with the potential to regenerate the Communist movement. His friends Hipólito and Mika Etchebéhère had already gone there, and the former had died on the Madrid front. Landau arrived in Barcelona with Katia in November 1936. He rapidly won substantial influence with the leaders of the POUM which he joined – without abandoning his general strategy of “reforming” the Communist Parties. He contributed to La Batalla [33], and coordinated the POUM’s international relations, especially in connection with the preparation of the international conference in Barcelona being planned by the POUM leadership. He still envisaged “a new Zimmerwald” of which the POUM would be the axis, and in this perspective he drew up programmatic bases for the international regroupment which was to be created. This activity drew him into a sharp polemic against the Brandlerites and the SAP supporters, and particularly against the young Willy Brandt [34], who was at this time a defender of the Popular Front policy. But this battle of ideas against the supporters of the POUM “right” did not prevent him from presenting in his articles and pamphlets a defence and celebration of the POUM’s policy which formed a permanent and particularly sharp polemic against Trotsky and the Fourth International. Landau’s activity against the POUM could not fail to draw him to the attention of Stalin’s agents who knew that this militant did not enjoy any diplomatic protection. He had to go into clandestinity after the days of May 1937 and the outlawing of the POUM. [35] We do not know why he left the relatively safe shelter which the Catalan CNT [36] had obtained for him at the request of Augustin Souchy. [37] He lived for some weeks in the suburbs of Barcelona, at the home of a veteran woman activist of the Spanish opposition, the Izquierda comunista and the POUM, and it was there that he wrote in particular his article against Trotsky Bolshevism, Trotskyism and Sectarianism. The police or at least the Soviet intelligence services were actively looking for him: we know from the interrogations of other prisoners that he was accused of being a member of the Executive Committee of the POUM and the instigator of a “terrorist group” for which Stalin himself was a target. He was arrested on 23 September at the home of the POUM militant, Carlotta Durán, who was hiding him, by three policemen – two in plain clothes and one assault guard in uniform – who came at 7.30 p.m. Nothing more was heard of him. On 30 September, the General Delegate for Public Order in Catalonia, Paulino Gómez, officially denied that the police service had anything to do with his arrest. It is probable that he had been arrested by officers who were members of the intelligence services, or that he was immediately handed over to them and held captive in one of the “chekas” [38] that they controlled. Kurt Landau was never seen again. Neither protest movements abroad, nor the heroic efforts of his partner could shed any light on the route that led to his death. One version that circulated in the jails claimed that he had actually been tortured and put to death in the cellars of the Colón Hotel in Barcelona. Others say he had been seen in the premises of the cheka at 299 Corcega Street in Barcelona. Katia Landau did not rule out the possibility that he was taken to the USSR with a view to a “Moscow Trial”, and that he was executed there.

Kurt Landau’s partner, Julia Lipshutz, known as Katia (born in 1905), who shared his life and struggles from 1923 onwards, was arrested in Barcelona while he was in hiding; in prison she went on hunger strike from 8 to 22 November 1937 to demand information on her husband’s fate and to know whether she herself had been imprisoned with a specific charge or as a hostage. She was released following numerous representations made by French socialists, especially Marceau Pivert. [39] Remarried to Benjamin Balboa (1901–1976), the man who had enabled the crews of the Spanish fleet to forestall the officers’ rising in 1936, she emigrated with him to Mexico in 1940 and settled in Cuernavaca where she was still living in 1984. [40] She continued trying to cast light on the murder of Kurt Landau.

Notes

1. Amadeo Bordiga (1889–1970): Italian left Socialist, opposed World War I, supported Third International, but within Italian Communist Party was totally opposed to parliamentary participation; expelled 1930, but remained active with his own current until his death.

2. International Press Correspondence was the weekly organ of the Communist International, published in Germany in several languages, including English.

3. The alliance formed in 1926 between Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

4. The reference is to Winfried Wagner’s thesis on Trotskyism in Austria, Salzburg 1976.

5. Karl Korsch (1886–1961): Joined German Independent Socialist Party 1917, German Communist Party 1920; Minister of Justice in Thuringia in 1923; expelled from Communist Party 1926 as ultra-left; emigrated and settled in USA; now best known for philosophical writings.

6. Alfred Rosmer (1877–1964): Revolutionary syndicalist, opposed World War I, active in Comintern and Red International of Labour Unions; expelled from French CP 1924; 1929–31 organiser of Left Opposition, but broke with Trotsky. For Rosmer’s account of the meeting see Revolutionary History, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 119–122.

7. Leninbund (Lenin League): Formed 1928 by expelled left-wing members of the German CP; sympathetic to Trotsky’s positions; included prominent former CP members such as Maslow, Fischer and Urbahns.

8. Journal in support of Russian Opposition launched by Maurice Paz in 1927, but ceased publication in 1929 when Trotsky ended his collaboration with it.

9. Hugo Urbahns (1890–1947): Joined Spartacus League 1918, became leading figure in German CP; expelled as leftist in 1926, became a leader of Leninbund; developed view that Russia was state capitalist; emigrated to Sweden in 1933.

10. Maurice Paz (1896–1985): Lawyer, member of Communist Party from 1920; in 1927 launched Contre le courant in support of Russian Opposition; expelled from CP; Trotsky ended cooperation with him in 1929; joined Socialist Party 1931; withdrew from political activity for health reasons after 1940.

11. Hans (Johann) Schwalbach (1905–1994): German Trotskyist.

12. Pierre Naville (1904–1993): Surrealist; joined French Communist Party 1926; met Trotsky in Russia in 1927; expelled from CP 1928; pioneer French Trotskyist; organised founding conference of Fourth International in 1938; withdrew from Trotskyist movement in 1939, but wrote copiously on Marxist theory; leading member of PSU in 1960s.

13. Max Shachtman (1904–1972): Leading US Trotskyist from 1928; in 1940 split with Trotsky, rejecting defence of Soviet Union; founded Workers’ Party; later moved to right.

14. Pierre Frank (1905–1984): Joined Communist Party 1925, Trotskyist from 1929; founder member of Ligue Communiste; secretary to Trotsky 1932–33; in 1935 he and Molinier launched La Commune, leading to dispute with Trotsky; after World War II leading figure in Fourth International and French section.

15. Claude Naville (1908–1935): Brother of Pierre Naville, Communist from 1926, Trotskyist from 1929; broke with Ligue communiste in 1931 and formed Gauche communiste.

16. Michel Collinet (1904–1977): Developed towards Trotskyism in late 1920s; founder-member of Ligue communiste in 1930; opposed to Frank-Molinier leadership; split in 1931 to form Gauche communiste; in 1935 joined Revolutionary Left of Socialist Party; became member of POUM and published POUM’s French journal; after World War II wrote a number of books on socialist theory.

17. Andrés Nin (1892–1937): Supporter of Left Opposition; returned to Spain 1931, formed the Communist Left, which in 1935 merged with the Workers and Peasants Bloc to establish the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification); kidnapped, and murdered on Russian orders.

18. Hans Schafranek (born 1951): Austrian historian; biographer of Landau – see Revolutionary History, Vol. 4, Nos. 1/2, pp. 54–72.

19. André Ferrat, pseudonym of André Morel (1902–1988): Joined French Communist Party 1921; member of Political Bureau 1928–36, but expelled 1936; became open member of Que faire?; active in Resistance, leading member of Socialist Party after Liberation.

20. Georges Kagan, known as Lucien Constant (1905–1943): Polish Jew; expelled from France 1927 for CP membership; returned to France 1931, involved with Ferrat in Que faire?; left CP 1935; went to US 1940, became academic.

21. Pierre Rimbert, pseudonym of Charles Torielli (1909–1991): Joined French Communist Party 1925; expelled 1932 for supporting electoral agreement with Socialist Party; member of Ligue communiste and Gauche communiste before joining Socialist Party; active in Resistance; after war rejoined Socialist Party, later in PSU.

22. Hipólito Etchebéhère (1900–1936): Born Argentina; anarchist, then Communist and Trotskyist; came to Europe 1931; was in Germany when Hitler came to power; died fighting with POUM at Atienza. For a biographical sketch by his wife Mika see Revolutionary History, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 33–37.

23. Communist Party Opposition, formed in 1929 by Brandler and his followers after their expulsion from the German CP.

24. Socialist Workers Party of Germany, centrist split from German Social Democratic Party in 1931; dissolved in 1945.

25. International Communist League, name of the International Left Opposition from 1933 onwards.

26. International Communists of Germany, German section of the International Left Opposition from 1933.

27. Ruth Fischer, pseudonym of Elfriede Eisler (1895–1961): Founder-member of Austrian Communist Party 1918, then leading figure in German Communist Party; with support from Zinoviev reached leadership of German CP in 1924, but expelled in 1926; founder of the Leninbund and other oppositional groupings. Exiled in France in 1933, moved to USA in 1941 and naturalised as American.

28. Arkadi Maslow, pseudonym of Isaac Chereminsky (1893–1941): Active in German Communist Party from 1920, supported March Action; in 1924 leader of German CP with Ruth Fischer, but expelled 1926; co-founder and leader of Leninbund; emigrated to France in 1933 with Fischer; unable to enter USA, settled in Cuba where he died in road “accident”, which Fischer attributed to Stalin’s assassins.

29. Lev Sedov (1906–1937): Elder son of Trotsky, active in Left Opposition; exiled with father; Berlin 1931, Paris 1933; probably murdered.

30. V.P. Olberg (1907–1936): Active in German Opposition in 1930, follower of Landau; one of the accused in the first Moscow Trial.

31. Jozef Guttman (1902–1958): Joined Czech CP in 1921; became editor of Rude Pravo in 1929 with Klement Gottwald; critical of German Communist Party in 1932, formed faction which fused in 1938 with Trotskyist groups; later emigrated.

32. Záviš Kalandra (1902–1950): Surrealist poet and historian, joined Czech CP 1923; member of Guttmann’s faction in 1933, broke with CP over Spain and Moscow trials; deported to Mauthausen; returned to Czechoslovakia after war; arrested 1949, tried and hanged.

33. Newspaper of the POUM.

34. Willy Brandt, pseudonym of Herbert Frahm (1913–1992): Member of SAP in 1930; journalist in Spain during civil war; after World War II leading figure in German Social Democratic Party; Chancellor of West Germany 1969–74.

35. Fighting in Barcelona 3–8 May 1937 with Communist Party forces against POUM and anarchists; the POUM was outlawed the following month.

36. National Confederation of Labour, Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade-union confederation, founded 1911; participated in Republican government 1936.

37. Augustin Souchy (1898–1984): born in Germany, went to Sweden in 1914 to evade conscription; active as syndicalist in Germany from 1919; moved to France 1933, then Spain, where he was an adviser to the CNT; interned in France 1940, but escaped to Cuba and Mexico, where he remained active in the anarchist movement.

38. By analogy with the “The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage” in post-revolutionary Russia.

39. Marceau Pivert (1895–1958); leader of the “Revolutionary Left” in the French Socialist Party from 1935; expelled 1938 and founded PSOP (Workers and Peasants Socialist Party); after World War II returned to Socialist Party.

40. We have been unable to get any information about Katia Landau after this date.

“The Marion Masscre,” recorded in 1929 by the duo of Welling and McGhee, is about the deaths of striking textile mill workers in Marion, North Carolina, in a confrontation with sheriff’s deputies.

‘Tis ere the same old story
With the laborers of our land.
They’re ruled by mighty powers,
And riches they command.

If Paul Ryan and his fellow Republicans think that requiring the very rich to pay at least the same rate of taxes as the middle class is class warfare, imagine how they would react to words like those.

Note the remarkable combination of class warfare and old-time gospel, of a kind regrettably rare these days.

Why is it over money,
These men from their friends must part,
Leaving home and loved ones
With a bleeding, broken heart?

But some day they’ll meet them
On that bright shore so fair,
And live in peace forever,
There’ll be no sorrow there.

Credits: Welling and McGhee (Billed as The Martin Brother)(Frank Welling [vocal, steel guitar], John McGhee [vocal, guitar]) New York c October 1929. On Paramount Old Time Recordings box set 2006.

More about Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Welling here.

A third type of material was hard-hitting labor songs such as “North Carolina Textile Strike,” which the record company felt was a bit controversial and thus slipped out under the name of the Martin Brothers.

And on John (JL) McGee here. Listen to “He Abides” (1928) at Archive.org.

Partial discography:

1. Are You Washed in the Blood [of the Lamb]?, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #C.01 [1928]
2. Busted Bank Blues, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #B.03 [1931]
3. Marion Massacre, Poor Man, Rich Man: American Country Songs of Protest, Rounder 1026, LP (198?), trk #B.05 [1929]
4. Marion Massacre, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #B.01 [1929]
5. My Mother’s Bible, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #C.04 [1928]
6. North Carolina Textile Strike, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #B.02 [1929]
7. Old Account Was Settled [Long Ago], West Virginia Hills. Early Recordings from West Virginia, Old Homestead OHCS 141, LP (1982), trk # 12 [1930]
8. Picture on the Wall, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #B.04 [1931]
9. What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #C.02 [1928]
10. When the Roll is Called Up Yonder, Paramount Old Time Recordings, JSP 7774A-D, CD( (2006), trk #C.03 [1928]

Some interesting discussions of Occupy and anarchist history lately, as Roland has noted. In a guest post at Roland’s place, TNC writes:

Some including Paul Berman and Michael Kazin identify anarchist elements of OWS such as presenting a living, breathing, counter-modelto capitalism and the utilization of consensus decision-making.

 The notion that you can create a rival community, a new world “within the shell of the old”, a counter-culture, is intrinsic to anarchism. That this must be consensus-driven is much more recent. It is not evident among the various groups that considered themselves anarchist–anarcho-mutualists/collectivists/syndicalists/communists—from the mid-nineteenth century until the Spanish Revolution. All of them felt that voting within their own organizations and groups was just fine.

By the 1960s, elements within the New Left including Students for a Democratic Society and others were experimenting with styles of decision-making that were viewed as more inclusive, participatory and democratic. These themes were also taken up by the Radical Feminist Movement in the 1970s. Certainly by the 1990s consensus organizing was gaining steam primarily though the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), Earth First! and a few other groups. FNB in particular was effective at distributing inexpensively reproduced literature, including their Handbook, promoting consensus as the only way to order a local chapter:

We make decisions by consensus rather than voting. Voting is a win or lose model in which people are more concerned about the numbers it takes to win a majority than they are in the issue itself. Consensus, on the other hand, is a process of synthesis, bringing together diverse elements and blending them into a decision which is acceptable to the entire group. In essence, it is a qualitative rather than quantitative method of decision-making.

From my experience on the radical left, the influence of consensus decision-making was incredibly negative. The long, drawn-out meetings with no discernable outcome eventually take their toll. People start to drop out.

While Michael Kazin, Paul Berman and others note the attempt by the OWS movement to create a counter society (some have termed the encampments “micro societies”) an important difference between OWS and the classical anarchists is an emphasis on what form the future society would take. All of the utopian socialists going back to St. Simon and Fourier had a model in mind. Never mind how wacky the model was, at least they had something to refer to. This is completely missing from OWS. They say this is “all part of the process”but it is not enough for most of us. We want to know what you want, especially if you claim to represent us (as part of the 99%).

There is an interesting interview with Kazin at The Browser.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement writes a new chapter in the history of American leftism, you’ve published a history of radical movements in the United States titled American Dreamers. Tell me about it.

It chronicles almost 200 years of the American left’s history, interpreting what the left did right and what it did wrong. What it did wrong is better known. The subtitle of the book is “How the Left Changed a Nation”. I emphasise the positive difference it made, focusing on a couple of themes.

One is that the left expanded the meaning of individual freedom. It made sure that people of all races, religions and sexual preferences are, at least in theory, able to enjoy the same opportunities and freedoms as everybody else. The book begins with the abolitionists and goes up until the gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s. The other theme is that the left succeeded in presenting a vision of a more egalitarian and socially responsible society. The left may have had less success in this respect but its success has been considerable nonetheless.

I highlight figures like Henry George and Edward Bellamy, both journalists. Henry George wrote a bestselling economics tract called Progress and Poverty in 1879. He was very popular among the labour unionists. Edward Bellamy was a Christian Socialist who wrote Looking Backward. Published in 1888, it ranks with Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the most influential political novels of the 19th century. Bellamy’s followers were important figures in the populist movement of the 1890s and the Socialist Party in the early 20th century. These figures articulated an anti-corporate platform which continues to be influential even in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

Do you see the DNA of the abolitionists, suffragettes and other leftist forebears in today’s protest?

Yes, in many ways I do. There are different strands. Of course you have civil disobedience, which abolitionists were known for. You have nonviolence and a “beloved community”, which civil rights protesters were known for. And you have a very strong emphasis on the 99% being injured by the 1%, and a critique of American democracy as being corrupted by big money, that began in the late 19th century with people like George and Bellamy.

He goes on to talk about Marx and Engels, about Howard Zinn’s historical vision, and then Students for a Democratic Society, and finally Gene Sharp, who has also been cited as an important influence on the Arab Spring.

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According to the info on YouTube, this is a clip from the documentary Mariza and the Story of Fado.

Here are the lyrics:

Humanitarian science
A symbol of altruism
Has a goal to condemn
God, country and militarism

The world shall behold
The poor free from oppression
Smashing the butchers
Of the ruling bourgeoisie
They shall see the birth
Of the ideal that will bring
Enlightenment and well-being
And promote true patriotism
Misery is what anarchism condemns

The subdued people
Get torn apart and tortured
While there’s a cure for this evil
In the desired ideal
They live as martyrs
In the talons of servitude
The social abyss deepens
The fanaticism of humanity
Relies on the trinity of God, country and the military

More from the Anarchofolk website, which I can’t believe I have not seen until now, and which I will be linking to regularly henceforth!

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Every year, hikers trek the “Chemin de la Liberte” in the Pyrenees, to commemorate the 800 or so Allied airmen and Jewish refugees who risked their lives on a 60km (40 miles) route escaping Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

“The good escaper,” says a 1944 British military document called Tips for Escapers and Evaders, “is the man who keeps himself fit, cheerful and comfortable.”[...]

Reflect on what it was like, for example, to be shot down over Belgium when you are only 19 years old. Your parachute works – something of a surprise in itself, since you have had only the most rudimentary training – and when you land you find yourself behind enemy lines, with most of Nazi-occupied Europe between you and freedom.

You have to ask someone for help, even though you know they are risking their lives if they give it to you. And if you are lucky and they do not turn you in, there is still the long journey south to negotiate, past German checkpoints and patrols with, at the end of it all, the climb over these massive mountains.

Or think of the Jewish families who attempted the Pyrenees just one step ahead of arrest and deportation to the death camps.

I was told the story of a woman who carried her two-year-old daughter across in November snow. When the child cried in the cold their guide said she should be suffocated because the noise might alert the German patrols.

And what of the French helpers? One local supporter of the Chemin remembered his mother hiding escaping Allied airmen in her mountain bed and breakfast, where she was providing lodgings for German troops at the same time.

All of these experiences are so far beyond our own that they seem to belong almost to another dimension. The walk, I reasoned, might help me build an imaginative bridge over that chasm.

At the pass where we crossed the frontier into Spain – 2,280m above sea level – we paused for a brief ceremony in remembrance of Maurice Collins, an RAF pilot who asked that his ashes should be scattered there.

Collins had needed real grit and determination to get home in 1941 – he crossed the mountains “up to my testicles in snow”, as he later so vividly put it, and spent three months in a Spanish concentration camp before the British authorities were able to extract him.

It seemed ironic that he had chosen the mountains which had caused him so much pain and suffering as his final resting place.

[...] The Escape Lines Memorial Society calls the Chemin a “walking memorial”, and it has become a way of passing the idea of remembrance on down the generations.

You can hear more about Ed Stourton’s journey in The Freedom Trail, broadcast on Monday, 14 November 2011 at 1100 GMT on BBC Radio 4.

Here is the website of the Escape Lines Memorial Society.

The WW2 Escape Lines Memorial Society is dedicated to the ‘helpers’, escapers and evaders who either organised or used the escape lines of mainland Europe during WW2. Our membership is made up of former WW2 ‘helpers’, escapers and evaders, their families and friends, historians, researchers, and others who are interested in our aims.

Our aim is to preserve and commemorate the memory of the ‘helpers’ of the escape lines and of the ‘helpers’ who worked alone, in order to teach successive generations about their vital role in WW2. Without those brave people, many Allied soldiers and airmen, who found themselves stranded behind enemy lines, would not have been able to return to the UK to continue the common fight for freedom; they would have been captured, or dead. They have never forgotten the people who helped them.

The ‘‘helpers’’ of the escape lines aided Allies of many nationalities by sheltering, feeding, nursing, and guiding them – they did this at great cost to themselves and their families – many paid with their lives for their selfless acts of humanity and courage towards total strangers.

At the Conscript Heroes site, you can read things like this:

A roaring open fire. The bartender knows your name. Your pint of draught stout comes in a china cup. Did George Orwell have the recipe for the perfect pub?

Who knows who you might bump into in the perfect pub

… In an article written for the London Evening Standard in 1946, he produced a detailed description of his ideal watering-hole, The Moon Under Water, which “is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights”.

The Guardian has a nice photo gallery of posters from the Occupy movement, with an emphasis on the retro look. Here’s one:

Turning to the alternative, Entdinglichung has a round-up of the latest in German on the Marxist Internet Archive, as part of the on-going project of bringing socialistica to the masses.

He also introduces to a great archival website called Workerscontrol.net, which “aims to be a virtual open library for the collection and access to documentation and theoretical essays on past and current experiences of workers’ control”. Material in a few languages by Cornelius Castoriadis, Ken Coates & Tony Topham, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernest Mandel, Paul Mattick, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, and Leon Trotsky, as well as stuff like “The Universe of Worker-Recovered Companies in Argentina (2002-2008): Continuity and Changes Inside the Movement” and “The South London Women’s Hospital Occupation 1984-85“. Check it out.

But my favourite is this post of old papers, as it has a nice greeting to me, as well as nice newspaper images:

1.) Betriebszeitungen der KPD aus dem Jahre 1924 auf archive.org: Der Kruppianer, Nr. 2 und die Betriebszeitung bei BASF Ludwigshafen, Der Aniliner Nr.2, 3 und 4

2.) [Read this on the Blog irishanarchisthistory,  including the first edition of Workers Solidarity (1984), an edition of the anarchist workers of 1978 and a special issue of Anarchy from 1971 to the Northern Ireland conflict]

3.) [On marxists.org additional pages from the United States: The New Review (1913-1917), more years of the Militant or Socialist Appeal (19128-1940) and The Ohio Socialist (1917-1920) and The Toiler (1920) from Cleveland, Ohio]

4.) Sozialdemokratisches von den Rändern: Die Arbeiterzeitung aus Wien (1915-1927) und der Böhmerwald-Volksbote (1915-1917) aus Český Krumlov auf ANNO sowie die Danziger Volksstimme : Organ für die werktätige Bevölkerung der Freien Stadt Danzig (1920-1932, 1936) auf der Webseite der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung

5.) Einige Ausgaben der Clarté (1922-1923) auf RaDAR

(The bits in square brackets are translated badly into English by me and google.)

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Aurelio Martinez, Garifuna musician and activist from Honduras, sings about migrants in the US. The album, Laru Beya, is on Real World, and is a tribute to the late, wonderful Andy Palacio. Part of it was recorded in Senegal, and the title, meaning “On the beach”, refers both to the coastal lives of the Garifuna and to the experience of seeing the coastal forts where Africans were taken out of the continent into New World slavery.

But by the time the Grammy-nominated album Watina was released in 2007 by his Belizean friend Andy Palacio, Aurelio was off the radar. He’d gone into politics – spending four years in the Honduran congress, the first   politician of African descent in the country’s history.

Four years was long enough: “Corruption, discrimination, everywhere. No one was interested in indigenous rights, only in getting rich. And I had no time for music,” he says. “But through music I can reach out to everyone.”

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Although 1984 and Brave New World are hardly the only great dystopian novels of the 20th century (hi there, Margaret Atwood), George Orwell and Aldous Huxley may well have shaped most English-language readers’ nightmare visions of the future. So it makes sense to contrast Orwell’s world of constant war and government thought control with Huxley’s drug- and entertainment-pacified society. You may have done just that in a high-school paper, but the folks behind the documentary #Kill Switch have created a graphic that examines the ways in which each author’s predictions have come true over the past few years. Click here to see a larger version. [via BlackBook on Tumblr]

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The Guardian’s Wykhamist associate editor, Seumas Milne,  cut his political teeth in the Straight Left faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Straight Left were “Tankies”: that is, hardline Stalinist opponents of the liberalising “Eurocommunist” faction within the CPGB. They were called “Tankies” because they (notionally) supported the “liberation” (by tanks) of Hungary and Czechoslovakia from “counterrevolutionaries” in 1956 and 1968. Here’s Milne, demonstrating his lack of repentance:

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment… Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

Milne has helped to fill the comment pages of the Guardian with the supporters and representatives of genocidal antisemitic terrorist movements.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is run by Kate Hudson, who is a leading member of the Communist Party of Britain. The CPB is the Stalinist rump of the CPGB, which reconstituted itself after the Eurocommunist wing dissolved the party. CND itself previously contained a Stasi spy, Vic Allen, at its highest level.

Hudson was previously married to the late Redmond O’Neil, Ken Livingstone’s chief of staff, who was an activist in Socialist Action: which is what the Trotskyite International Marxist Group became after it infiltrated the Labour Party. Socialist Action controls the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Kate Allen, the Director of Amnesty International UK… Under her leadership, Amnesty has hosted a series of meetings promoting the delegitimisation and indeed the destruction of Israel, at which prominent anti-Jewish racists have spoken. Moreover, her team at Amnesty includes Elena Dallas the daughter of Tony Cliff: the founder of the Socialist Workers Party,

The Stop the War Coalition is run by Andrew Murray, also of the Communist Party of Britain. He is also the communications officer of the union, Unite. Famously, he is a supporter of North Korea:

“Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear”

I could say more, but you get the general idea.

Stalinism watch:

From The Soviet Files: An American ‘Negro Republic’ – the Communist Secession plot; Paul Robeson, Stalinist;

More polemics:

The AWL versus the anarchists; Carl Packman vs Hugo Chavez.

Book notes:

A Rebel’s Guide to Rosa Luxemburg by Sally Campbell; Classic read – Studs Lonigan by James T Farrell. A review (scroll down) of Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain by Dwight Macdonald (New York Review of Books, October 2011)

Unfortunately, like the political causes Macdonald championed—he was long-involved with the anti-Stalinist left and fancied himself an anarchist—history has not been kind to his cherished concept of Midcult. The cultural lines that Macdonald defended have mostly gone the way of the Berlin Wall, replaced by a heterogeneous culture of blended boundaries.

And from Socialist Review: A Rebel’s Guide to Rosa Luxemburg by Sally Campbell, Classic read – Studs Lonigan by James T Farrell.

History notes:

The AWL on the Clyde Workers’ Committee of 1915; Rosa Luxemburg on trade union bureaucracy; Paul Buhle on syndicalism;

From Entdinglichung:

Erklärung des Barrikade-Herausgebers zu den Ermittlungsverfahren wegen Rudolf Rocker, gefunden auf syndikalismus.tk, die Staatsanwaltschaft Münster hat das vom Rechthaber und bürgerlichen Kommunalpolitiker Heiner M. Becker angestrengte Verfahren gegen einen Genossen wegen angeblicher Verletzung Beckerscher Urheberrechte an Rudolf Rocker eingestellt, hier ein Auszug:

„Die Staatsanwaltschaft Münster hat umfängliche Untersuchungen angestellt und das gesamte Umfeld der FAU und der Internet-Plattform „Syndikalismus.tk“ ausgeleuchtet.

Was bleibt? Bösartige Verleumdung, nachweislich falsche Anschuldigungen, unbewiesene Behauptungen – und eine Staatsanwaltschaft, die nun eine dicke Akte über die aktuelle anarchosyndikalistische Szene („Bewegung“) vor sich liegen hat.

Dies hat nun zwar für mich keine weiteren strafrechtlichen Konsequenzen, aber der Schaden für unsere kleine Bewegung ist immens. Aus diesem Grunde verlange ich eine öffentliche Erklärung der FAU Berlin zu diesem Vorgang und die Übernahme sämtlicher Kosten, die durch diese Beschuldigung [strafrechtlich übrigens ebenso relevant lt. §§ 164 und 187 StGB wie eine Verletzung eines angeblichen Urheberrechts] entstanden sind, durch die Verursacher.

Ansonsten bleibt es dabei: weder Heiner M. Becker noch sonstwer hat die Rechte und private Verfügungsgewalt über das literarische und agitatorische Werk von Rudolf Rocker und seiner Frau Milly Wittkop-Rocker!“

bleibt anzumerken, dass die Schriften aller Revolutionäre der revolutionären Bewegung gehören, woran auch das Rumgepupe von angeblichen Eigentümern – ob sie nun Herr Becker oder Pathfinder Press heissen – nichts ändert!

From the US Marxist Humanists:

Between Barbarisms: The Arab Spring, Marx, and the Idea of Revolution – by Greg Burris

An assessment of the Arab Spring half a year later, in light of (1) the “clash of barbarisms” between the U.S. and Al Qaeda, (2) Marx’s concept of revolution, and (3) the possibilities for a revolutionary future Read More…