(Repost from the recently rediscovered dead sea scrolls.)
anaxarchos 10-01-2007, 01:30 PM
KOBH was musing about what to blog about on one of the "upper forums". The quote below is extracted from my end of the conversation which he suggested would better fit in one of the more "travelled" Forums:
The issue is one of focus. The problem for us is to identify what is useful today rather than to be concerned with what is of interest only to us. I think all arcane discussions fit into the latter category although it is not always clear what is "arcane". I'm afraid to say that all burning appeals to the masses are also meaningless when no "mass" yet exists and when the nature of the issues is so foggy. They have their place, but... Let me tell you what I think is important to write about:
I always insist in bringing Marx and the classical works of Socialism to the foreground. The reason for this is that this material is too timely, too complete, and too important (especially in comparison to current analysis) to be lost to history. They have attempted to bury it all with a few phrases and I think we must prevent that. There is simply too much to reinvent if this material is lost.
The early socialist and proletarian material is already dead and buried... even forgotten. That is a shame because as large a stature as people like Marx had, they also stood on the shoulders of giants. Now, there are a lot of pygmies there as well so it is very important to be highly selective about which Lazarus deserves our energy. I think it is easy to figure this out with a little thought. Pisarev writing on Darwin, for example, seems very important to me because we get a glimpse of method as it forms. On the other hand, long drawn out debates over whether Pisarev knew what we know or whether Darwin was precisely correct as stated... these seem like the height of self-indulgence.
Ditto for historical material which must also be largely "raised from the dead". I think we must be selective but that all efforts are positive.
There is a huge need for "investigative" material or muckraking, intended to understand and to help explain current phenomena. There simply is too large a gap and too many ommissions between the above and the issues of the day. I think Libertarians fit into that category as does "globalization", the current nature and statistics of work, modern forms of imperialism, the superstructure of class in America, and a million other subjects.
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
There is too much material required to be practical. That is why "thinking about thinking" matters. We must teach each other and those outside, "method", particularly in an era in which even the possibility of such a thing is disputed. Materialism, even primitive materialism, is all important from this standpoint.
Above all, we must produce a drumbeat of social criticism, unrelenting and ruthless.
That's what I think. Practically, what has been written about trying to give permanence to some material that fits the above criteria is very important. Elements such as debate and polemics may also be important but often can be more transitory.
As far as audience, reach, methods of distribution - that will all come. Gotta have faith in the masses.
.
What to write about....
What to write about....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
runs with scissors 10-01-2007, 02:35 PM
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
What's the best way to accomplish this? (Can you give any examples where you currently see it happening and believe it's effective?)
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
What's the best way to accomplish this? (Can you give any examples where you currently see it happening and believe it's effective?)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
anaxarchos 10-01-2007, 05:09 PM
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
What's the best way to accomplish this? (Can you give any examples where you currently see it happening and believe it's effective?)
There is a very deep, very broad working class culture in America. Take literature as an example. Proletarian literature goes back well into the 19th century and certainly there is a golden age in the first half of the twentieth. The spectrum is very broad - from Langston Hughes to John Dos Pasos. Even when this has been preserved, it has been re-interpreted after the 2nd World War, McCarthyism and during the "rediscovery" of the 60s and 70s. Many works are practically "gone", others are newly prominent and so on. How do we make use of it all and dust it off? I'm not sure but one way may be to revive the literature about the literature. There were many left-wing cultural magazines and journals which existed back then. They may be one place to start. The New Masses comes to mind... among several others.
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/new ... 192811.jpg
http://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/history.html
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
What's the best way to accomplish this? (Can you give any examples where you currently see it happening and believe it's effective?)
There is a very deep, very broad working class culture in America. Take literature as an example. Proletarian literature goes back well into the 19th century and certainly there is a golden age in the first half of the twentieth. The spectrum is very broad - from Langston Hughes to John Dos Pasos. Even when this has been preserved, it has been re-interpreted after the 2nd World War, McCarthyism and during the "rediscovery" of the 60s and 70s. Many works are practically "gone", others are newly prominent and so on. How do we make use of it all and dust it off? I'm not sure but one way may be to revive the literature about the literature. There were many left-wing cultural magazines and journals which existed back then. They may be one place to start. The New Masses comes to mind... among several others.
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/new ... 192811.jpg
http://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/history.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
anaxarchos
10-02-2007, 03:45 PM
"The New Masses"
Upon the teeming sea of U.S. magazine publishing there was launched last week a smoky vessel, ungainly but powerful, with daubs of red on her lunging bows and red marks here and there on her some-what disorderly running gear. She was the New Masses, a workers' monthly floated (TIME, Dec. 21) to replace the Masses and Liberator by the friends of those defunct organs, with money from the American Fund for Public Service (Charles Garland fund).
The editors and contributors— there was no chief among Editors Egmont Arens, Joseph Freeman, Hugo Gellert, Michael Gold, James Rorty and John Sloan—included some of the mainstays of the older magazines, especially artists: the powerful Gellert, convulsive William Gropper, sly Art Young with his tongue in his foxy-grandpa cheek. But for the most part they were new hands—economic malcontents and idealists recruited from the younger generation. There were names like Klein, Lozowick, Soglow and Dehn signed to some of the pictures. A young lady called Wanda Gag contributed a startling portrait of "The Tired Bed."
No wind that blew dismayed this crew or troubled their artist minds; they fired salutes beneath Capital's boots, with every expectation of booming gales of applause from "workers." The cover design was a brawny miner with an idea bursting from his skull. Scott Nearing, famed sociologist, just back from a trip to Moscow, Kharkov, Rostov, Tiflis and other centres of culture, limned a deplorable contrast between the mammon-ridden U.S. and progressive Soviet Russia. Robert W. Dunn, young Yale Communist, described with devastating irony the activities of a Massachusetts labor-spy. "Bad Bishop" William Montgomery Brown contributed his revolutionary blessing (and a check for $1,100 to help the sheet get started). The current Passaic garmentworkers' strike was recorded in all its gory glory by Mary Heaton Vorse. An editor of the New Student compiled reports of undergraduate demonstrations of all kinds and dimensions to show how many "learners" were "in active revolt." More coherent was a dialog in limbo between Lenin and Anatole France, by Poet Babette Deutsch. More profound, and quite un-Communistic save in its departure from conventional form, was an "Apology for Bad Dreams" by the country's new national poet, Robinson Jeffers of the Pacific headlands.
Like many another nonspecific magazine, the New Masses solicited contributions, offered prize-money for "the best letter." Like most radical efforts to become and stay articulate, it said it needed more money (but only $5,000) to keep going for three years.
Copies of the New Masses may be had for 25¢ by addressing: New Masses, 39 West Eighth St., New York City.
"Contributors included Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Maltz, Granville Hicks (who was also the editor for a number of years), Max Eastman, Dorothy Day, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur. New Masses was the venue in which Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," later popularized in song by Billie Holiday, first appeared in 1937. The journal also sponsored the first Spirituals to Swing concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall which was organised by John Hammond."
.
10-02-2007, 03:45 PM
"The New Masses"
Upon the teeming sea of U.S. magazine publishing there was launched last week a smoky vessel, ungainly but powerful, with daubs of red on her lunging bows and red marks here and there on her some-what disorderly running gear. She was the New Masses, a workers' monthly floated (TIME, Dec. 21) to replace the Masses and Liberator by the friends of those defunct organs, with money from the American Fund for Public Service (Charles Garland fund).
The editors and contributors— there was no chief among Editors Egmont Arens, Joseph Freeman, Hugo Gellert, Michael Gold, James Rorty and John Sloan—included some of the mainstays of the older magazines, especially artists: the powerful Gellert, convulsive William Gropper, sly Art Young with his tongue in his foxy-grandpa cheek. But for the most part they were new hands—economic malcontents and idealists recruited from the younger generation. There were names like Klein, Lozowick, Soglow and Dehn signed to some of the pictures. A young lady called Wanda Gag contributed a startling portrait of "The Tired Bed."
No wind that blew dismayed this crew or troubled their artist minds; they fired salutes beneath Capital's boots, with every expectation of booming gales of applause from "workers." The cover design was a brawny miner with an idea bursting from his skull. Scott Nearing, famed sociologist, just back from a trip to Moscow, Kharkov, Rostov, Tiflis and other centres of culture, limned a deplorable contrast between the mammon-ridden U.S. and progressive Soviet Russia. Robert W. Dunn, young Yale Communist, described with devastating irony the activities of a Massachusetts labor-spy. "Bad Bishop" William Montgomery Brown contributed his revolutionary blessing (and a check for $1,100 to help the sheet get started). The current Passaic garmentworkers' strike was recorded in all its gory glory by Mary Heaton Vorse. An editor of the New Student compiled reports of undergraduate demonstrations of all kinds and dimensions to show how many "learners" were "in active revolt." More coherent was a dialog in limbo between Lenin and Anatole France, by Poet Babette Deutsch. More profound, and quite un-Communistic save in its departure from conventional form, was an "Apology for Bad Dreams" by the country's new national poet, Robinson Jeffers of the Pacific headlands.
Like many another nonspecific magazine, the New Masses solicited contributions, offered prize-money for "the best letter." Like most radical efforts to become and stay articulate, it said it needed more money (but only $5,000) to keep going for three years.
Copies of the New Masses may be had for 25¢ by addressing: New Masses, 39 West Eighth St., New York City.
"Contributors included Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Maltz, Granville Hicks (who was also the editor for a number of years), Max Eastman, Dorothy Day, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur. New Masses was the venue in which Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," later popularized in song by Billie Holiday, first appeared in 1937. The journal also sponsored the first Spirituals to Swing concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall which was organised by John Hammond."
.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
anaxarchos
10-02-2007, 04:06 PM
This is the the original: "The Masses"
"The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the U.S. from 1911 to 1917, when government suppression shut it down. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later the New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed and Floyd Dell."
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... _Sloan.jpg
Cartoon Archive:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... ub/masses/ (http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... ub/masses/)
A few articles:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTmasses.htm
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... oung20.jpg
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... oung13.jpg
10-02-2007, 04:06 PM
This is the the original: "The Masses"
"The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the U.S. from 1911 to 1917, when government suppression shut it down. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later the New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed and Floyd Dell."
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... _Sloan.jpg
Cartoon Archive:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... ub/masses/ (http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... ub/masses/)
A few articles:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTmasses.htm
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... oung20.jpg
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/vis ... oung13.jpg
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
PPLE 10-02-2007, 04:08 PM
"Contributors included Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Maltz, Granville Hicks (who was also the editor for a number of years), Max Eastman, Dorothy Day, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur. New Masses was the venue in which Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," later popularized in song by Billie Holiday, first appeared in 1937. The journal also sponsored the first Spirituals to Swing concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall which was organised by John Hammond."
.
Most interesting!
Hammond on wiki:
In 1938, he organized the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, presenting a broad program of blues, jazz and gospel artists, including Ida Cox, Big Joe Turner, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Count Basie orchestra, Sidney Bechet, Sonny Terry, James P. Johnson, and Big Bill Broonzy (who took the place of the murdered Robert Johnson).
After serving in the military during World War II, Hammond felt unmoved by the bebop jazz scene of the mid-1940s. Rejoining Columbia Records in the late 1950s, he signed Pete Seeger and Babatunde Olatunji to the label, and also discovered Aretha Franklin, then an eighteen year-old gospel singer. In 1961, he heard folk singer Bob Dylan playing harmonica on a session for Carolyn Hester and signed him to Columbia and kept him on the label despite the protests of executives, who referred to Dylan as "Hammond’s folly." He produced Dylan's early recordings, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". In the early 1960s, Hammond also oversaw the highly influential posthumous reissues of Robert Johnson’s recorded work (produced by Frank Driggs), and signed to the label such artists as Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen.
Hammond retired from Columbia in 1975, but continued to scout for talent. In 1983, he brought guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan to Columbia and was credited as executive producer on his debut album.
_______
My mom passes email jokes back n forth with Stevie Ray's mom. It is a shrinking world. Six degrees of separation and all that.
"Contributors included Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Maltz, Granville Hicks (who was also the editor for a number of years), Max Eastman, Dorothy Day, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur. New Masses was the venue in which Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," later popularized in song by Billie Holiday, first appeared in 1937. The journal also sponsored the first Spirituals to Swing concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall which was organised by John Hammond."
.
Most interesting!
Hammond on wiki:
In 1938, he organized the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, presenting a broad program of blues, jazz and gospel artists, including Ida Cox, Big Joe Turner, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Count Basie orchestra, Sidney Bechet, Sonny Terry, James P. Johnson, and Big Bill Broonzy (who took the place of the murdered Robert Johnson).
After serving in the military during World War II, Hammond felt unmoved by the bebop jazz scene of the mid-1940s. Rejoining Columbia Records in the late 1950s, he signed Pete Seeger and Babatunde Olatunji to the label, and also discovered Aretha Franklin, then an eighteen year-old gospel singer. In 1961, he heard folk singer Bob Dylan playing harmonica on a session for Carolyn Hester and signed him to Columbia and kept him on the label despite the protests of executives, who referred to Dylan as "Hammond’s folly." He produced Dylan's early recordings, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". In the early 1960s, Hammond also oversaw the highly influential posthumous reissues of Robert Johnson’s recorded work (produced by Frank Driggs), and signed to the label such artists as Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen.
Hammond retired from Columbia in 1975, but continued to scout for talent. In 1983, he brought guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan to Columbia and was credited as executive producer on his debut album.
_______
My mom passes email jokes back n forth with Stevie Ray's mom. It is a shrinking world. Six degrees of separation and all that.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
anaxarchos
10-02-2007, 04:40 PM
"The Liberator"
The Liberator, editorial, introductory issue (March 1918)
Never was the moment more auspicious to issue a great magazine of liberty. With the Russian people in the lead, the world is entering upon the experiment of industrial and real democracy. Inspired by Russia, the German people are muttering a revolt that will go farther than its dearest advocates among the Allies dream. The working people of France, of Italy, of England, too, are determined that the end of autocracy in Germany shall be the end of wage-slavery at home. America has extended her hand to the Russians. She will follow in their path. The world is in the rapids. The possibilities of change in this day are beyond all imagination. We must unite our hands and voices to make the end of this war the beginning of an age of freedom and happiness for mankind undreamed by those whose 'minds comprehend only political and military events. With this ideal The Liberator comes into being on Lincoln's Birthday February 12, 1918.
The Liberator will be owned and published by its editors, who will be free in its pages to say what they truly think. It will fight in the struggle of labor. It will fight for the ownership and control of industry by the workers, and will present vivid and accurate news of the labor and socialist movements in all parts of the world.
It will advocate the opening of the land to the people, and urge the immediate taking over by the people of railroads, mines, telegraph and telephone systems, and all public utilities.
It will stand for the complete independence of women - politi- cal, social and economic - and an enrichment of the existence of mankind.
It will stand for a revolution in the whole spirit and method of dealing with crime.
It will join all wise men in trying to substitute for our rigid scholastic kind of educational system one which has a vivid relation to life.
It will assert the social and political equality of the black and white races, oppose every kind of racial discrimination, and conduct a remorseless publicity campaign against lynch law.
It will oppose laws preventing the spread of scientific knowledge about birth control.
The Liberator will endorse the war aims outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson - a peace without forcible annexations, without punitive indemnities, with free development and self-determination for all peoples. Especially it will support the President in his demand for an international union, based upon free seas, free commerce and general disarmament, as the central principle upon which hang all hopes for permanent peace and friendship among nations.
The Liberator will be distinguished by complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction and criticism. It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attacks against dogma and rigidity of mind upon whichever side they are found.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jliberator.htm
"The Liberator was a group magazine. The list of contributing editors was almost as exciting to read as the contributions themselves. There was a freeness and a bright new beauty in those contributions, pictorial and literary, that thrilled. And altogether, in their entirety, they were implicit of a penetrating social criticism which did not in the least overshadow their novel and sheer artistry. I rejoiced in the thought of the honour of appearing among the group."
Claude McKay described what it was like to have his poem, If We Must Die, in The Liberator.
.
10-02-2007, 04:40 PM
"The Liberator"
The Liberator, editorial, introductory issue (March 1918)
Never was the moment more auspicious to issue a great magazine of liberty. With the Russian people in the lead, the world is entering upon the experiment of industrial and real democracy. Inspired by Russia, the German people are muttering a revolt that will go farther than its dearest advocates among the Allies dream. The working people of France, of Italy, of England, too, are determined that the end of autocracy in Germany shall be the end of wage-slavery at home. America has extended her hand to the Russians. She will follow in their path. The world is in the rapids. The possibilities of change in this day are beyond all imagination. We must unite our hands and voices to make the end of this war the beginning of an age of freedom and happiness for mankind undreamed by those whose 'minds comprehend only political and military events. With this ideal The Liberator comes into being on Lincoln's Birthday February 12, 1918.
The Liberator will be owned and published by its editors, who will be free in its pages to say what they truly think. It will fight in the struggle of labor. It will fight for the ownership and control of industry by the workers, and will present vivid and accurate news of the labor and socialist movements in all parts of the world.
It will advocate the opening of the land to the people, and urge the immediate taking over by the people of railroads, mines, telegraph and telephone systems, and all public utilities.
It will stand for the complete independence of women - politi- cal, social and economic - and an enrichment of the existence of mankind.
It will stand for a revolution in the whole spirit and method of dealing with crime.
It will join all wise men in trying to substitute for our rigid scholastic kind of educational system one which has a vivid relation to life.
It will assert the social and political equality of the black and white races, oppose every kind of racial discrimination, and conduct a remorseless publicity campaign against lynch law.
It will oppose laws preventing the spread of scientific knowledge about birth control.
The Liberator will endorse the war aims outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson - a peace without forcible annexations, without punitive indemnities, with free development and self-determination for all peoples. Especially it will support the President in his demand for an international union, based upon free seas, free commerce and general disarmament, as the central principle upon which hang all hopes for permanent peace and friendship among nations.
The Liberator will be distinguished by complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction and criticism. It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attacks against dogma and rigidity of mind upon whichever side they are found.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jliberator.htm
"The Liberator was a group magazine. The list of contributing editors was almost as exciting to read as the contributions themselves. There was a freeness and a bright new beauty in those contributions, pictorial and literary, that thrilled. And altogether, in their entirety, they were implicit of a penetrating social criticism which did not in the least overshadow their novel and sheer artistry. I rejoiced in the thought of the honour of appearing among the group."
Claude McKay described what it was like to have his poem, If We Must Die, in The Liberator.
.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
runs with scissors
10-04-2007, 01:31 AM
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
What's the best way to accomplish this? (Can you give any examples where you currently see it happening and believe it's effective?)
There is a very deep, very broad working class culture in America. Take literature as an example. Proletarian literature goes back well into the 19th century and certainly there is a golden age in the first half of the twentieth. The spectrum is very broad - from Langston Hughes to John Dos Pasos. Even when this has been preserved, it has been re-interpreted after the 2nd World War, McCarthyism and during the "rediscovery" of the 60s and 70s. Many works are practically "gone", others are newly prominent and so on. How do we make use of it all and dust it off? I'm not sure but one way may be to revive the literature about the literature. There were many left-wing cultural magazines and journals which existed back then. They may be one place to start. The New Masses comes to mind... among several others.
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/new ... 192811.jpg
http://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/history.html
Interesting link, anax. Good summary and brief history.
The U.S. Post Office denied mailing privileges in 1917 to magazines such as The Masses , Appeal to Reason and Emma Goldman's anarchist magazine Mother Earth for their opposition to the war. All three ceased publication.
Turn of the century in my neck of the woods had the Seattle Union Record and the Portland Labor Press. Hard to imagine picking up an alternative today that looks like this:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/c ... adline.jpg
10-04-2007, 01:31 AM
There is also a gigantic need to clean-off the elements of working class culture and to resurrect them. It is as if a huge flood hit the treatment plant and then arrived at where we live. Everything is covered in sewage. Everything has some middle-class crap encasing it. That cannot stand.
What's the best way to accomplish this? (Can you give any examples where you currently see it happening and believe it's effective?)
There is a very deep, very broad working class culture in America. Take literature as an example. Proletarian literature goes back well into the 19th century and certainly there is a golden age in the first half of the twentieth. The spectrum is very broad - from Langston Hughes to John Dos Pasos. Even when this has been preserved, it has been re-interpreted after the 2nd World War, McCarthyism and during the "rediscovery" of the 60s and 70s. Many works are practically "gone", others are newly prominent and so on. How do we make use of it all and dust it off? I'm not sure but one way may be to revive the literature about the literature. There were many left-wing cultural magazines and journals which existed back then. They may be one place to start. The New Masses comes to mind... among several others.
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/new ... 192811.jpg
http://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/history.html
Interesting link, anax. Good summary and brief history.
The U.S. Post Office denied mailing privileges in 1917 to magazines such as The Masses , Appeal to Reason and Emma Goldman's anarchist magazine Mother Earth for their opposition to the war. All three ceased publication.
Turn of the century in my neck of the woods had the Seattle Union Record and the Portland Labor Press. Hard to imagine picking up an alternative today that looks like this:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/c ... adline.jpg
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
Mary TF
10-04-2007, 09:21 PM
I'd subscribe to that rag, I'd distribute them too, great stuff here.
10-04-2007, 09:21 PM
I'd subscribe to that rag, I'd distribute them too, great stuff here.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: What to write about....
anaxarchos
10-05-2007, 02:06 PM
The link which Anax provided got me thinking about the old "underground papers" of yore and brought to mind that I still had a few in my archives(junk pile). East Village Other, Berkley Barb, L A Free Press, Rat, all 69-70, which I paged thru yesterday. Rat was the most ideological, with a strong feminist component. SDS was all over those papers. L A Free Press had the best reporting. Other than Rat, those papers would have gone out of business without sex ads. It seems that the desire to shock, which without good context is juvenile, was probably counter-productive, though it amused us kiddies.
Anax, do you see any practical lesson from those days, besides the negative?
Oh yes, the LA music scene was unbelievable.
The practical lesson for today, at least for me, is that the web is potentially much better. The logistical costs and threshold of newsprint was prohibitive.... before you ever got to "distribution".
The history from the time of the New Masses back to the 1870's was a genuinely proletarian press based on the open acknowledgement of class-struggle by all parties. It was rooted in working class political and social organizations. The New Masses was a very specific expression of that (in "culture") and embraced many of who we would call the cultural giants of the last century (Hemingway, Steinbeck, many many others). The 60s movement was somewhat different but there were also hundreds of journals, many political, that emerged. The ones that you mentioned were the most "commercial" and many were also "cultural" without having a political perspective. Yet, towards the end of that period, there were very real movements in the underground press. Part of what drove that was "radicalization" and politicization, and part of what drove it was the fact the "old" working class organizations hadn't died - a dozen of the old commie unions were survivors, the Finnish Socialist leagues were still around, the Farm-Labor vestiges were still operating, the jewish commie press was alive and well in the garment district and a whole wave of activity (broader than union, but huge "up-surgencies" in the IAM, The Farmworkers, 1199, UAW, USWA, UMW, The Teamsters, and so on) driven by the 60s was on. There seemed to be real possibilities in a "synthesis".
It's a different time now, but it's worth exploring the similarities and differences in a concrete way.
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10-05-2007, 02:06 PM
The link which Anax provided got me thinking about the old "underground papers" of yore and brought to mind that I still had a few in my archives(junk pile). East Village Other, Berkley Barb, L A Free Press, Rat, all 69-70, which I paged thru yesterday. Rat was the most ideological, with a strong feminist component. SDS was all over those papers. L A Free Press had the best reporting. Other than Rat, those papers would have gone out of business without sex ads. It seems that the desire to shock, which without good context is juvenile, was probably counter-productive, though it amused us kiddies.
Anax, do you see any practical lesson from those days, besides the negative?
Oh yes, the LA music scene was unbelievable.
The practical lesson for today, at least for me, is that the web is potentially much better. The logistical costs and threshold of newsprint was prohibitive.... before you ever got to "distribution".
The history from the time of the New Masses back to the 1870's was a genuinely proletarian press based on the open acknowledgement of class-struggle by all parties. It was rooted in working class political and social organizations. The New Masses was a very specific expression of that (in "culture") and embraced many of who we would call the cultural giants of the last century (Hemingway, Steinbeck, many many others). The 60s movement was somewhat different but there were also hundreds of journals, many political, that emerged. The ones that you mentioned were the most "commercial" and many were also "cultural" without having a political perspective. Yet, towards the end of that period, there were very real movements in the underground press. Part of what drove that was "radicalization" and politicization, and part of what drove it was the fact the "old" working class organizations hadn't died - a dozen of the old commie unions were survivors, the Finnish Socialist leagues were still around, the Farm-Labor vestiges were still operating, the jewish commie press was alive and well in the garment district and a whole wave of activity (broader than union, but huge "up-surgencies" in the IAM, The Farmworkers, 1199, UAW, USWA, UMW, The Teamsters, and so on) driven by the 60s was on. There seemed to be real possibilities in a "synthesis".
It's a different time now, but it's worth exploring the similarities and differences in a concrete way.
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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."