From the archive of struggle, no.28

Acknowledgments, as always, to Comrade E. Mostly English above the fold, other languages below. Browse the whole series here.

La Bataille Socialiste:

* Socialist Party of the US “Justice Triumphs in Spain” (1938)

Norman Thomas at Archive.org:

*Why I am a socialist – Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968. A pamphlet from the leading American socialist in the midst of the Great Depression HX15.
*What’s the matter with New York; a national problem – Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968
*Justice triumphs in Spain! : a letter about the trial of the P.O.U.M. – Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968. Allen, Devere,; 1891-1955. The US socialist party weighs in on the trial of the POUM leaders in Republican Spain JN8395.O27
*Democracy and Japanese Americans [pdf]. New York: Post War World Council, 1942.

Irish Labour and Working Class History:

*Robert Jackson Alexander, ‘Ireland’, International Trotskyism, 1929-1985 (1991)

Tendance Coatesy:

* Ken Coates “A Note on Workers’ Control”

LibCom:

* The Red Menace: Review: Anti-Parliamentary Communism in Britain, 1917-1945 (1989)
* Nick Heath: Anarchists who turned to the Bolsheviks
* Nick Heath: Jacob Abrams, Jacob aka Jack Abrams (1883 – 1953)
* The Communist Left in Germany 1918-1921 (1976)
* Walter Benjamin: The life of students (1915)
* James Goldwasser: Ret Marut: The Early B. Traven (1993)

Workers Liberty:

* Julius Jacobson: Reflections on Fascism and Communism (1983)

Dublin Opinion:

* John Goodwillie: Family Tree of the Irish Left (1983)
* John Goodwillie: Glossary of the Left in Ireland, 1960 to 1983 (1983)

Marxist Internet Archive:

Added to the Maurice Brinton Internet Archive:
*For Workers’ Power, 1965
*Review: What is Class Consciousness?, 1972
*Review: Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 1972
*The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1970
*Socialism Reaffirmed, 1960
*Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1975

Added to the Barta Archive:
*Letter From Bucharest to Trotsky, May 1936

Added to the Tony Cliff Archive:
*Trotsky: 3. Fighting the rising Stalinist bureaucracy 1923-1927 (1991) (Volume 3 of Cliff’s political biography of Trotsky)
*Trotsky: 4. The darker the night the brighter the star 1927-1940 (1993) (Fourth and final volume of Cliff’s political biography of Trotsky)

The Anarchist Library:

*“Life in Revolutionary Barcelona” by Manolo Gonzalez
*“Beer and Revolution: Some Aspects of German Anarchist Culture in New York, 1880-1900” by Tom Goyens (2009)
*“Chavistas open fire, injure eight protestors in Caracas” by Peter Gelderloos (2007)
*“Dreams, Demands, and the Pragmatic Pitfall: The Barcelona Bus Drivers Strike” by Peter Gelderloos (2009)
*“Anti-patriotism” by Han Ryner (1934)

Marxist theory

1. Hal Draper’s piece on Israel posted by angelus novus at Contested Terrain (and linked to here) has prompted a very thoughtful, intelligent response by Mira Vogel, posted at Engage and Greens Engage, two excellent British left-wing anti-racist sites.

2. Larry Gambone has a couple of recent articles of interest, most notably his dissection of the myth of Lenin’s “libertarian” State and Revolution (a myth that Draper contributed to).

3. Via Bermuda Radical (a bit Pabloite for my liking), I came across Sebastian Lamb’s critique of J Sakai and his theory of “settler” racism – useful.

4. I also recently found the Notes and Commentaries, a very interesting communist blog. This article, on sectarianism and the party, is especially good. (Again, Draper is a key reference point.)

5. Principia Dialectica lay into Amadeo Bordiga and his cult here.

Below the fold: From the archive of struggle, no.22

From the archive of struggle, no.20

Heroes:

Spain Turns by Roberto. From the International Review, Vol.2 No.3, New York, April 1937

“From 1936 to 1939 a magazine called International Review was published in New York, with contributions from exiles from Germany and other European countries. It was responsible for the first English translation, from the German, of Rosa Luxemburg’s  ‘Reform or Revolution’ and Julius Martov’s ‘The State and the Socialist Revolution’. Its general political line can be best described as “Anti-Bolshevik Marxism”, rejecting Lenin and Trotsky’s vanguardism and arguing that the socialist revolution, to be successful, required the conscious understanding and active participation of the working class.
A MySpace exclusive: this is the first time that this article has appeared on the web.”

[Thanks to Darren for the tip.]

Great George Orwell photo gallery here.

Villains:

Added to the Dolores Ibárruri Archive: Stalin, Leader of Peoples, Man of the Masses, (1940). A lot of people think “La Pasionaria” was a wonderful person, because she came out with that great line about living on your knees or dying on your feet. In fact, at least until late in her life, she was a Stalinist hack, complicit in the murders of people like Andreu Nin and, more directly, Gabriel León Trilla.

Ambivalent:

I only recently found the excellent TheoryAndPractice.org.uk, which mainly archives texts from the ultra-left, including Amadeo Bordiga and Gilles Dauvé (aka Jean Barrot). I am ambivalent about these people: Bordiga fetishisation of the party rivals Lenin’s, and while Dauvé’s critiques of vanguardism are powerful, his anti-anti-fascism is reprehensible. On the other hand, The Communist Club and Julius Martov were cool.

Poumerouma

The libertarian socialist tradition

New blog: Big Flame, on the history of this UK radical group of the 1970s.

Why Philosophy? Why Now? On the Revolutionary Legacies of Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James and Anton Pannekoek, By David Black at The Hobgoblin

Andre Gorz, or the Ecological Demand, by Serge Audier at Principia Dialectica.

Anarchist Studies: Perspective 2009. On the legacy of Murray Bookchin.

Poster art, folk song and historical memory

More from BCNDesign: The everyday comes to Santa Coloma: Local things for local history. Graphic design in 1930s Spain.

History Today: The Mexican suitcase. British volunteers and Republican posters.

Rio Wang: Russian poster design and the war on coca-cola. Carlos Gordel and the zorzal.

George Szirtes: Fado da Tristeza.

Polish gentile, Jan Jagielski, chief archivist at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, to receive the Irena Sendler Memorial Award from the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.

The extraordinary anti-Nazi photo-montages of John Heartfield.

Scoop Review of Books: Kiwi Compañeros: NZ’s anti-Franco volunteers. See more in TNC‘s comment here. Which led me to these two great older posts: Fieldtrip to the International Center for Photography (Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Francesc Torres and poster art). ¿Viva la Insurgencía?: The Spanish Civil War and the Legacy of the Totalitarian International Brigades. There’s plenty more TNC posts on memory and archives and on Communism.

Watch Land and Freedom at A Complex System of Pipes.

From the archive of struggle, no.14 (below the fold)

Dark is the room where we sleep

Art News

Artium Presents the Exhibition Dark is the Room Where We Sleep, by Francesc Torres

“Whilst doing only what is possible is healthy and reasonable, it is also dreary, and life is short anyway. Maybe for these reasons I am determined to win the Spanish Civil War”. These words were uttered by the Catalonian artist Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948), talking about his installation Dark Is The Room Where We Sleep, which has provided the title for the exhibition presented at ARTIUM. He went on to explain what he meant by his statement. Winning the war “consists, no more and no less,” he declares, “of preventing people from mistaking those who are in the right historically for those who are not. It involves never putting the innocent and the tyrants in the same basket. It consists of recovering the victims of a sinister regime so that everyone may know that they were indeed the victims and, once the fire is out, abandon weapons.”

one city: Painting as an act of compassion

“Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought…Painting is…the mind realizing itself in color and space.”  – Robert Motherwell

On Friday May 1^st, the ID Project Arts Group went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit one of Robert Motherwell’s paintings from his series of “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”.  He made over one hundred and seventy of these paintings which were a lament for the people and the culture that died in the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell, who was only 21 at the time the Civil War broke out was struck by the realization “that the world could, after all, regress.”

Orwellia
Cervantes on Orwell on Jura

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father “could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father’s time on Jura recognise how essential she was.”

Will Self on Jura:

George Orwell wrote 1984 on Jura. Did you think about him much?
Yes, particularly when I went up to Barn Hill. The people there now are the same people who rented the house to Orwell, so there’s that continuity. The house is unchanged since he was there. I found it oddly moving – which is not like me. The consciousness of how ill he was and how driven he was to work under those circumstances, what a grim time it was in the post-war period.

Obituaries

José María Martínez Castillo, ‘Koke’
1926 Cabredo-  2009 London

Word doc from Children of ’37

Paul Larkin on Jack Jones, Martin McGuinness and Bob Doyle.

Below the fold: anarchist history from Australia, Pittsburgh, Russia and Italy, council communist texts on-line, Karl Korsch, Franklin Rosemont…

Poumtastic

In no particular order:

Coatesy: The Spirit of Factions and Sects

Jewish Socialist: Review of Rick Kuhn on Henryk Grossman [pdf]

Steve Fraser in the LRB: on Emma Goldman [subs]

Norman Geras: on Orwell on Dickens; Winston Smith in the shower.

The Normblog profile: Jim Denham

The Daily Maybe: Alexandra Kollontai

Airforce Amazons: Sketches of Mallorca

HarpyMarx: the Matchgirls

David Semple: Hobsbawm’s unmarxism.

From the archive of struggle, no.7

More updates from Entdinglichung:

Here are some highlights:

Projet de scannerisation de la revue Socialisme ou Barbarie:

* Socialisme ou Barbarie, No. 1, März-April 1949

Marxists Internet Archive (MIA):

* Victor Serge: The Bandits (1912)
* C.L.R. James: The Task Of Building The American Bolshevik Party (1946)
* Irwing Howe: On Comrade Johnson’s American Resolution – Or Soviets In The Sky (1946)
* Paul Mattick: Arbeitslosigkeit, Arbeitslosenfürsorge und Arbeitslosenbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten (1936)

Miscellany

The ghosts who refuse to die

Wonderful post by Terry Glavin on George Orwell. (And, here, the ghost of Eric Blair inhabits Will Rubbish.)

Nick Cohen on Eric Hobsbawm and the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Isaac Rubin and Paul Mattick Junior: A three part essay by PM on the financial crisis in the Brooklyn Rail (1, 2, 3), brought to us by Will. Principia Dialectica hosted the late I Rubin in London last week.

Paul Hampton on William Morris, ecology and socialism (the sixth of a series).

From the archive of struggle, no.6

Trotsky on workers’ control (posted by the AWL’s Rebbe Sean Matgamna to hold the line against The Commune and their alleged “drift towards anarchism“.)

From Entdinglichung: some early Bolshevik Max Eastman, lots of De Leon, Serge in Dutch and more.

In the new Democratiya, Susan Green of the Independent Socialist League/Workers Party from 1949 on the third camp position.

Against undemocratic centralism

philosophy and revolution

From the archive of struggle, no.5: Raya Dunayevskaya on Leon Trotsky at The Commune.

From the archive

[From the archive of struggle, no.2]

Some good new stuff at La Bataille Socialiste and The Commune, including:

• Manifesto and Program of the United Workers Party of America (1934)

• Independent socialism: a perspective for the left (Hal Draper, 1964)

Class Against Class

[From the archive of struggle, no.1]
Important new stuff at the wonderful Class Against Class archive:

• Korsch in Spain – Paul Piccone [doc]
• Ante Ciliga, Trotskii, and State Capitalism: Theory, Tactics, and Re-evaluation during the Purge Era, 1935- 1939 – Michael S Fox [pdf]