To watch directly at 11:00 ET on April 25th, go here.

BACKGROUND

Like an autoimmune disease that attacks the body it dwells in, capitalism is tearing apart the very planet that feeds it. Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System, builds on Karl Marx’s insight that while capitalism is dependent on the natural world, it is also waging war on the natural systems that sustain life on Earth.

Focusing on deadly rifts in two of the most important natural systems—the carbon and nitrogen cycles—Ian Angus explains and elaborates on the Marxist view that capitalism is massively disrupting essential exchanges of matter and energy between society and the rest of nature, putting the entire Earth System in danger. After tracing the long-neglected history of metabolic rift theory in scientific and socialist writing, Angus draws on a wealth of modern research to extend and deepen the natural science basis of Marxist ecology. In clear, non-technical language, Metabolic Rifts offers a scientific basis for understanding the deep causes of today’s environmental crises, and a program for action to prevent catastrophe in our time.

Ian Angus is the author of Facing the Anthropocene (Monthly Review Press, 2016) editor of the online ecosocialist journal Climate and Capitalism, and co-author of the Belém Ecosocialist Declaration. His previous books include Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (with Simon Butler) and The Global Fight for Climate Justice.

The post April 25th: Ecosocialism Forum to host Ian Angus, author of “Metabolic Rifts” (Available now!) appeared first on Monthly Review.

EXCERPT

From: Chapter 3

“…As governor of Wisconsin, La Follette sought to defend the interests of the small farmer by pushing for greater regulation of the railroads. He successfully pushed through legislation that significantly increased taxes on railroad lines operating in Wisconsin. His effort to regulate railroad tariffs was less successful, since the state legislature created a commission with only limited power to set rates. Nevertheless, these were significant reforms benefiting farmers, who were convinced that the railroad companies charged extortionate rates on freight shipments. In the face of venomous attacks from mainstream newspapers, La Follette held to his plan to curb corporate power. As a result, he gained enormous popularity, along with the nickname “Fighting Bob.”

In spite of the intense hatred he evoked from the corporate establishment, La Follette was far from a radical. Wisconsin was also the home of the Milwaukee Socialist Party, a mainstay of its dominant social democratic wing. Led by Victor Berger, the Milwaukee socialists advanced a program of structural changes that moved well beyond the limited measures advocated by progressives. La Follette believed in the virtues of capitalism, a system based on privately owned corporations that produced goods and services that sought to maximize profits. La Follette sought to modify the system by breaking up monopoly trusts and regulating corporations to ensure that they did not engage in collusive agreements limiting competition. These were fundamental principles held by most progressive reformers.

In contrast to this perspective, Berger and the Milwaukee social democrats hoped to bring about a socialist society through a series of incremental reforms, such as bringing key industries into public ownership. Progressives and social democrats held two distinct and conflicting perspectives…..

From: The Conclusion

Within months after the United States entered the war, progressives and social democrats became the primary targets of repression. Unfortunately, far too often, they relied on the good faith of the authorities. Progressives scrambled to formulate a policy that was critical of the war effort but remained within the parameters set by the federal government in its interpretation of the broadly phrased wording of the Espionage Act. This choice proved to be risky since the guidelines kept shifting as the scope for permitted dissent became increasingly narrower. The progressive challenge to the administration’s war policies crumbled in the face of government repression.

There was an alternative to the hesitant stance taken by progressives. Eugene Victor Debs, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, demonstrated that through his actions. Debs and Senator Robert La Follette were highly respected and acted as the primary spokespersons for their respective political perspectives. In June 1918, Debs denounced the war in a speech delivered at a rally in Canton, Ohio, even though he knew he would likely be prosecuted. Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and served two and a half years in a federal penitentiary. As a U.S. senator, La Follette was initially allowed a certain leeway. Nevertheless, he soon became the target of a coordinated attack involving much of the intelligence community. Under the impact of this assault, La Follette retreated into silence.

In no other period in U.S. history have fundamental constitutional rights been so drastically curtailed as they were during the First World War. Yet Woodrow Wilson was hardly a fervent ideologue. A pragmatic politician, his record before April 1917 was that of a mildly liberal Democratic Party centrist.
Nevertheless, once the United States entered the war, Wilson was prepared to authorize the ruthless suppression of the antiwar opposition, regardless of the flagrant violations of civil liberties that this entailed. Ideology is a less important explanation of dictatorial behavior than the threat posed by an organized opposition with a mass base of support.

…As the conflict unfolded, power became concentrated in the White House. Woodrow Wilson was certain that he and he alone should make every important decision concerning the course of the war. Anyone who challenged this would become a target of government repression.

….The experience of the United States during the First World War provides an object lesson of what is likely to occur when power is concentrated in the hands of one person. With this power, the president, through his control of the federal government’s agencies, can harass and suppress those who oppose his policies. He can do so openly and secretively. Even a century later, it is very difficult to determine exactly what Woodrow Wilson authorized, as well as the full extent of the covert operations undertaken by those within the intelligence community….”

Read more! Get your copy here.

The post In the public eye: “Silencing Fighting Bob: The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War” appeared first on Monthly Review.

“….For working-class and peasant movements confronting the daily realities of digitalisation: cancelled ration cards, deleted job cards, predatory lending apps, platform exploitation, dispossession from urban spaces, this book provides what has been conspicuously absent: an analytical framework that connects their specific experiences to a coherent understanding of the class project being carried out in the name of “Digital India.” The gig worker’s algorithmic subjection, the farmer’s data dispossession, the welfare recipient’s biometric exclusion, and the small retailer’s displacement by predatory e-commerce are not isolated “implementation failures” to be corrected by better design. They are structural features of a system that is working as intended. That the technology itself cries out for different social relations, for deployment in the service of human needs rather than corporate profit, is not a counsel of despair but a call to transform the relations of production that determine who benefits from India’s digital transformation and who pays for it.” Read more….

The post The Digital Mask of Class Power (Forthcoming: “Digitalization in India” appeared first on Monthly Review.

Controversy, controversy…it’s no surprise that this book is selling very well. See more on this from Bisharat Abbasi, in his post: “In Defence Of Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism: Anti-Imperialist Marxism Versus The Imperial Theory Industry.“

Counterview: “Patronage of dissent? Examining the cold war roots of western Marxist thought’, by Harsh Thakor

“…The narrative begins with the CIA’s pursuit of Che Guevara, using it as an entry point to discuss ideological warfare. Rockhill highlights Guevara’s own belief in the importance of media and ideology, shaped by his experience of U.S. propaganda during the Guatemalan coup. The book is structured in three parts: first, outlining the “imperial intellectual apparatus” of the Cold War; second, a detailed examination of the Frankfurt School’s integration into U.S. and West German institutions, with a focused case study on Herbert Marcuse’s documented ties to U.S. government projects; and finally, a conclusion contrasting what he terms “imperial” Marxism with anti-imperialist traditions. Rockhill’s work challenges the perception that “Western Marxism” emerged organically solely from within the Western workers’ movement or intelligentsia. He proposes that powerful external forces consciously nurtured certain theoretical directions. His ultimate conclusion is that the dominant Marxist tradition inherited in Western academia is a depoliticized one, shaped by the very powers it claimed to critique, and thus ill-suited for building concrete revolutionary alternatives…. Read the rest

MR Online: “An Insider Critique of the Imperial Theory Industry: Gabriel Rockhill Interviewed by Michael D. Yates”

“Michael Yates: Gabriel, what we are as adults is conditioned by our childhoods. Tell us something about where and how you grew up. How do you think this influenced who you are now?

Gabriel Rockhill: I grew up on a small farm in rural Kansas, and manual labor was an integral part of my life from an early age. This included work on the farm, of course, but I also worked construction. My father is a builder and an architect, so when I wasn’t working on the farm, I spent most of my time, outside of school and sports, on construction sites.   

Before I even knew the word, I had the lived experience of exploitation (farm work was never waged, nor was construction work early on). This is clearly one of the things that drove me to the life of the mind: I enjoyed school as a welcome reprieve from manual labor. 

My father is deeply passionate about design, and his motto is ‘hand and mind,’ meaning that to be a true architect, you need to have the practical knowledge to build (hand) what you design (mind). I was desperate for more of the latter when I was young, but I have also remained deeply attached to the former. In retrospect, this approach obviously had a lasting impact on me, since I have definitely embraced what I would now call the dialectical relationship between practice and theory….”

Excerpt of a book review by Gabriella Golea, RN, MN, CPMHN(C), Ontario, for the Canadian Federation of Mental Health Nurses newsletter:

“The Book as a Psychological Case Study: As a seasoned mental health nurse, the writer of this review was particularly intrigued by some of the psychological perspectives that Rockhill appeared to offer. From a psychological standpoint, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, offers several important lessons about how power, especially institutional power, can shape cognition, identity, motivation, and collective belief systems. Below are some psychological insights that appear to be weaved throughout the book, presented here without judgement, so that readers of the book can form their own opinions….

1. Critical Thinking Is Not the Same as Political Agency
   •High levels of sophisticated thinking can coexist with low capacity for collective action.
   •Intelligence does not immunize people against ideological conditioning.
   •Overemphasis on critique can weaken confidence in action (“analysis paralysis”)
   •Endless critique can undermine people’s belief in change and alternative possibilities. (Should there be an online link to the CPMHN newsletter, we will link to it here…)

MLT – Marxism-Leninism Today: Joseph Jamison on Rockhill vs. Saunders and the term “Western Marxism”

“’He who pays the piper calls the tune’ is the proverb alluded to in the title of Gabriel Rockhill’s outstanding new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? subtitled “The Intellectual World War. Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry.” [1] The title of Rockhill’s book calls to mind the British title of a well-known earlier book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders.[2] While rich in factual detail, the Saunders work rarely went beyond liberal outrage about CIA deceit, corruption, contempt for democracy, and brutal violence.

Gabriel Rockhill’s book is a far deeper and more ambitious work. It strives to make a number of advances in Marxist theory, and it focuses on a specific aspect of the Cold War of ideas by concentrating on the capitalist ruling class’s attempt to destroy its communist nemesis by consciously shaping a form of bogus ‘Marxism’ — ‘Western Marxism’ — that would not threaten the capitalist status quo.

Rockhill’s main contention is that much of what is known as ‘Western Marxism’ — especially the strain associated with Frankfurt School and what he calls French Theory — was not a genuine revolutionary or anti-capitalist current. Rather, it functioned as a vehicle of ideological control under capitalism and imperialism. Rockhill shows through a massive amount of archival evidence that powerful capitalist interests — including states, foundations, and institutions tied to imperialist powers — actively funded and promoted this so called ‘critical theory’ tradition.  The aim of all this funding and promotion was to produce a ‘compatible left’ — a left-leaning intelligentsia that would appear critical but would ultimately serve the needs of the ruling capitalist order by diverting attention away from systemic class struggle, revolutionary social change, and the achievements of actual socialism.” Read the rest here…

Counterpunch: “When Marxist Intellectuals Collaborated With the CIA“, by Charles Reitz

“In agreement with the highly respected recent work of Daniel Immerwahr and David Vine and other contemporary radical scholars, Gabriel Rockhill’s new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, The Intellectual World War. reinforces the by now quite widely-held notion that there is a US empire. Following World War II and the establishment of cold war and the US national security state, a global intellectual contest was underway between those promoting and those opposing the political/philosophical hegemony of US imperial interests. A key element in the political economy of the US knowledge production system was (and is) a CIA partnership with elite universities and Cold War scholars, key corporate foundations, federal research projects, and the top leaders of the corporate mass media. Utilizing wide-ranging archival documentation, Rockhill’s book establishes these interconnections anew (previously adumbrated by Parenti, Mills, Domhoff, etc), and he does so in admirable depth. There was a concerted endeavor to draw critical social commentary into the ‘compatible’ (150) Western Marxist camp and away from what Rockhill sees as the incompatible revolutionary Marxism practiced by Che (whom he lionizes in his first several pages and sees as emblematic of a Marxist fighter and leader in Cuba and Bolivia, in the end assassinated by CIA-linked operatives. Rockhill views Che’s legacy as consistent with other leading lights, such as Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro (338), who were at the helm of real socio-economic alternatives to capitalism in practice.

Given the accompanying context of ideological contestation, Rockhill investigates the systems of US knowledge production and counterrevolution for what they were [and continue to be]. This is a worthy project, and Rockhill’s skepticism is warranted with regard to radical intellectuals (like Marcuse, Neumann and many others) serving with the intelligence services of the US government during and after WW II, especially in connection with certain New Left criticisms of Old Left policies. He sees himself as defending anti-imperialist Marxism against the ‘imperial theory industry.’ This industry is considered to be part of the US imperial project, and his mission is unveiling the intellectual ‘pipers’ it paid and those who paid them.” Read more at Counterpunch….

Weaponized Information: Who Paid the Pipers? Empire’s Safe Marxism and the War on Revolutionary Consciousness, by “Prince Kapone”

“This book arrives not a moment too soon. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? is not a contribution to academic debate. It is an intervention into a global struggle over consciousness, one that determines whether the working classes of the world will recognize their enemies—or continue to fight shadows while empire tightens its grip. Gabriel Rockhill’s work speaks directly to the material reality facing billions of people today: escalating imperial violence, permanent war, economic strangulation, ecological collapse, and an ideological environment carefully engineered to make all of this appear inevitable….” Read more here…

In translation….

‘Nymarxister ble sponset av CIA’, in Klassekampen: “….Over dammen var livet enklere. I løpet av krigen utviklet Frankfurterskolen sin virksomhet og bygget opp det som skulle bli deres ubestridte merkevare: «kritisk teori». Gjennom de neste tiårene skulle denne gruppa av tyske eksilanter opparbeide seg heltestatus blant akademikere over hele verden. Nå har imidlertid den amerikanske filosofen Gabriel Rockhill kastet sine kritiske øyne på aktiviteten til dette intellektuelle arbeidslaget – også kjent som Frankfurterskolen….”

In Cuba Debate: “Conocí a Gabriel Rockhill por casualidad, mas no por azar. Nos presentó Helen Yaffe, amiga entrañable de Cuba, en enero de este año durante el Congreso Internacional que conmemoró —en la Universidad de La Habana— los 60 años de la Conferencia Tricontinental (1966). La actual coyuntura política le agregó al evento una peculiaridad: los allí presentes estaban desafiando esa reciente manifestación de agresividad contra nuestro país que incluye la posibilidad de una agresión armada. De ahí que la confluencia no fuera por azar. Fue por convicciones….” Read more…

Canarias Samanal: “Durante décadas, la lucha de clases no solo se libró en fábricas, calles y frentes militares, sino también en universidades, en las editoriales y en círculos intelectuales. Bajo la apariencia de un “debate teórico” , el imperialismo desplegó una estrategia sistemática para vaciar al marxismo de su potencia revolucionaria y sustituirlo por una “izquierda aceptable” al orden capitalista. El último libro de Gabriel Rockhill desvela con rigor histórico esta ofensiva ideológica…..” Read more…

Batalla de Ideas, “Marxismo occidental e imperialismo: Un diálogo”, John Bellamy Foster y Gabriel Rockhill

Editor of MR Magazine, John Bellamy Foster spoke with Rockhill about his book on the Monthly Review Magazine website, and this was quickly translated into Spanish at Batalla de Ideas. Read here or see below…

And the same dialogue in French, in Histoire et Societe: Voilà un très bon sujet soumis à notre réflexion par Danielle, et qui mérite un moment d’étude ce dimanche. Il donne envie de lire Samir Amin et Losurdo au plus vite. En guise d’entrée en matière et d’illustration j’ai mis en ligne samedi « Alex Nodinot et le pacifisme de l’agneau pascal« , mais ici il s’agit plutôt du combat contre l’idéalisme que de celui contre la métaphysique. Si Marcuse, « qui appartenait généralement à la tradition philosophique marxiste occidentale, a été profondément touché par la révolution vietnamienne », il n’y croyait pas, ajoutant dans la préface de « L’homme unidimensionnel » : « même si ces hommes sont à la fin battus ce qui est vraisemblable… ». Et c’est bien souvent sa conception charitable, pitoyable et non marxiste, qui a inspiré nombre de progressistes opposés à la guerre aux USA et en Europe. Mais la particularité de cet homme unidimensionnel écrasé par la « société de consommation » c’est-à-dire une société de l’abondance (on pourrait dire du « communisme déjà là » de Friot), c’est que cet homme est un pur consommateur. Il ne produit pas. Il est en somme un rentier, pur produit lui-même d’un impérialisme qui aurait externalisé toute sa production dans le tiers monde. Cette réflexion critique et autocritique nous est nécessaire pour nous différencier de la social-démocratie et du « communisme de bobos« , celui-là même qui a coulé le parti communiste dans la considération populaire….” Read more….

WATCH

Marx Memorial Library

Watch their interview with Rockhill, here: https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/events-archive/who-paid-pipers-western-marxism-gabriel-rockhill-interview

Bad Faith

Read more here….

Red Scare

Hakim: “The Latest Developments in Socialist Theory and Analysis (Must-Reads!)”

Critical Theory Workshop book launch

Also! You can follow Rockhill’s substack here.

BACKGROUND

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? offers a crash course in the history of imperialist propaganda, as well as in the Marxist method for analyzing culture and ideology. Author Gabriel Rockhill demonstrates the explanatory and transformative superiority of a dialectical and historical materialist approach, while elucidating how the world of ideas is a crucial site of class struggle. He then engages in a meticulous counter-history of the Frankfurt School—which made a foundational contribution to Western Marxism—by situating it within the global relations of class struggle and the imperialist war on actually existing socialism.

With the explicit and direct backing of powerful elements in the capitalist ruling class and the world’s leading imperialist state, the Frankfurt School developed a widely promoted form of compatible critical theory as an ersatz for dialectical and historical materialism. The volume concludes by bringing to the fore the positive project that serves as the guiding methodological framework for the work as a whole: a thoroughly anticolonial and anti-imperialist Marxism dedicated to building socialism in the real world. Drawing on extensive archival research to pull back the curtain on ruling class machinations, Rockhill’s book elucidates how the intellectual world war on the socialist alternative has sought to shore up and promote a “compatible left” intelligentsia while misrepresenting, maligning, and trying to destroy the revolutionary left.

PRAISE

“Gabriel Rockhill’s illuminating and original work offers a crucial historical understanding of twentieth-century critical thought.”~Suchetana Chattopadhyay, author of Voices of Komagata Maru: Imperial Surveillance and Workers from Punjab in Bengal

“Few on the left will not have been uneasily aware, whether from textual disingenuousness or from rumors about capitalist or secret service gravy trains, that there was something fishy about some Western Marxists’ claims to be Marxists or socialists. Few will not have wondered how deeply and broadly this problem extends. Well, wonder no more. In this first book of a planned trilogy, Gabriel Rockhill begins his sensational root and branch exposé. He investigates the political pathology of the ‘theory industry’ dominating Western Marxism in terms of the ‘international relations of intellectual production.’ What emerges is a many-layered apparatus of intellectual counterrevolution. The state and its clandestine agencies such as the CIA or MI6 are its apex and they work through the big capitalist ‘philanthropic’ (really misanthropic) foundations, to wage it in universities, publishing houses, newspapers and magazines by recruiting thousands of scribblers, journalists, scholars, and academics to their service. For decades they have worked to hide the natural alliance of capitalism and fascism, to erase imperialism, to dismiss actually existing socialism and to discredit actually existing socialism and anti-imperialism with dishonest discourses that mislead those seeking ways out of an increasingly decrepit, desperate and destructive capitalism and its imperialism. This first volume deals with the Frankfurt School with volumes on French theory and twenty-first century developments to come. Rockhill must be commended for the sheer scale of his ambition, for taking on not just this book or that argument or the other thinker, but the entire universe of bourgeois ‘Theory’ in Marxist drag. It helps that the book, though it soberly sticks to the facts and arguments, nevertheless ends up, as it must, reading like an extended and particularly salacious gossip column. You won’t be able to put it down!!!”~Radhika Desai, author, Capitalism, Coronavirus and War

“Any global citizen who cares about international affairs, especially intellectuals, must study and ponder the important information and incisive comments in this book if they truly wish to understand and accurately recognize the ‘war in the world of knowledge,’ the ‘truth about ideology,’ and ‘Western Marxism’.”~Cheng Enfu, author, China’s Economic Dialectic

“In his remarkable work, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, Gabriel Rockhill has taken Georg Lukács’s famous criticism of the Western Marxist tradition for its “residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss” a step further, demonstrating that admission to the “beautiful hotel…on the edge of the abyss, of nothing, of absurdity” almost invariably came at a price.

Although Rockwill’s book is written in the spirit of critique, the intention is not the absolute rejection of Western Marxism, but the development of an indispensable self-critique within contemporary historical materialism aimed at the reconstruction of the philosophy of praxis for the twenty-first century.”~John Bellamy Foster, editor, Monthly Review; author, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx

“A valuable contribution that exposes the machinations of capital in perverting revolutionary theory. Given that the war of ideas is a key battleground in the class struggle, revealing how empire undermines revolutionary institutions becomes essential for grounding revolutionary organization on a more solid foundation. This book accomplishes precisely that, with the added strength of situating imperialist politics within its broader theoretical framework. It engages in a dialectical dance between observable reality and the dynamics of theory. Essential reading for anyone seeking to grasp the depths of socialism’s ideological crisis.”~Ali Kadri, author, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction

“In these times, where the objective conditions for revolution are excellent, the need to sharpen the ideological weapons of the subjective forces is urgent. Without the right tools to analyze the situation, there can be no correct strategy and effective praxis. Hence the importance of Gabriel Rockhill’s ideological struggle against the Frankfurt School’s and Western Marxism’s anti-communism and their de facto support for imperialism—ideological struggles matter!”~Torkil Lausen, author, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism

“The most important material history of ideas since The German Ideology.”~Aymeric Monville, author of “Neocapitalism according to Michel Clouscard”

“The Intellectual World War meticulously deconstructs the age-old myth that Western Marxism represents a radical departure from capitalism and imperialism. Instead, we are compelled to reckon with the painful reality that opportunistic Marxist academics are servants of Western imperialism posing no threat to the bourgeois order, but are cyphers of repression and conformity operating in the guise of scholarly respectability. Gabriel Rockhill’s careful and detailed account compels us all to revisit more than fifty years of twisted Marxist prattle purveying unscientific stupor upon generations of sincere students who reproduce and sustain imperialism and capitalist exploitation under the pretense of Marxism.”~Immanuel Ness, author, Migration as Economic Imperialism

“Concepts such as intellectual world war, imperial theory industry, empire of ideas, doctrinal warfare, class struggle in theory are not in common currency. Gabriel Rockhill shows why they should be. From a farm in Kansas, he went seeking enlightenment in Paris, becoming an acolyte of empire, until discovering it to be an imaginary la-la land, paralyzing explanation of actual historical events. From there, he set out to map the maze of knowledge production in which the military-industrial-academic complex has adopted a two-pronged strategy in relation to Marxism. Its preferred line of attack was to discredit it altogether. However, recognizing its attraction, it also promoted an anticommunist version of Marxism to reintegrate potentially insurgent forces into the orbit of the system. Seeing this as a conflict that forces us to take sides, Gabriel Rockhill is a frontline warrior in this intellectual world war. He marshals both philosophical argument and empirical archival research to make his case, revealing the extent to which such radical recuperators as the Frankfurt School have been directly funded and promoted by the capitalist state and its cultural apparatus. This, along with two further books in a trilogy, is essential reading for anyone serious about the historiography of Marxism within the political economy of knowledge of our times.”~Helena Sheehan, author, Until We Fall

“In his exposé of covert funding of critical theory, Gabriel Rockhill asks what the American century sought to hold up, beat down and split apart when it came to culture. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? is an illuminating, indispensable chapter expanding work on the CIA penetration—in its decades-long war on the left—of literature, student life, the symphony orchestra, feminism, black movements, and the world of modern art.”~Joel Whitney, author, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers

The post In the public eye: Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” appeared first on Monthly Review.

Coeditors Sarah Sills, Esther Farmer and Ros Petchesky on Mondoweiss: A Land With A People is a “contribution to a constellation of projects that began as a Jewish Voice for Peace study group on Zionism and then a booklet of personal stories titled Confronting Zionism. It evolved into a Readers Theater whose performances of “Wrestling with Zionism” were held in numerous venues throughout the New York metropolitan area and in which many local Palestinians shared their stories. The project continues in multiple formats, bringing the book and its messages to online and in-person audiences in the U.S. and Palestine. It has spawned numerous new storytelling projects and study groups and, most recently, an art and story exchange with youth in Gaza.” Read more….

REVIEWS

Socialism and Democracy, by Inez Hedges

Anyone who has organized a public event to highlight the situation of Palestinians today has encountered the objection of Zionists who complain that any such event fails to present “both sides of the issue.” Here is, finally, a book that does that brilliantly. The first two personal testimonials, one from a Palestinian whose family was dispossessed in 1948, and another from the descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors, set the stage for the book’s basic question: how can a people that has suffered persecution become a persecutor in turn?

MLT, by Martin Halpern:

“The title of the work is a critique of the Zionist concept that ‘Israel was a land without people for a people without land.’ Zionists viewed the millions of Palestinians – Muslims, Christians, and even Jews — as less worthy than European Jews. When I first began teaching U.S. history in 1990, the textbook that I used and then replaced similarly viewed the indigenous people of the ’empty’ Americas as inferior and invisible. The resulting settler colonial states, from the sixteenth century to the twenty first century, were built on racism, patriarchy, exploitation, and genocide….”

EVENTS

On Jewish Network for Palestine:

Community Bookstore Live:

LAUNCH

I never choose activism. It chose me,” Riham Barghouti began. “It’s like I was born into royalty, but in my case the exact opposite….”

In 2021, for the first time since years before the pandemic, Monthly Review Press, together with Jewish Voice for Peace, drew together a live crowd to celebrate the release of  A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. Hosted by The People’s Forum, the book launch drew over 200 RSVPs, and featured Riham Barghouti alongside the coeditors of the book, Sarah Sills, Rosalind Petchesky and Esther Farmer, as well as two of her fellow contributors, Asaf Calderon and Tzvia Thier.

Riham continued:

“…I was born into a people being dispossessed, a history being erased, a culture being appropriated, a land being confiscated.

But I was also born into a family whose mind refused to be colonized. I was born into resistance.

My grandmother ran guns for the resistance in the 1930s. My aunts were all activists supporting the cause in various ways. My aunt’s husband – Ahmed Qatamesh has been arrested 7 times being held imprisoned for a total of 14 years under administrative detention – without charge or trial. Ultimately each time he is released, because there are no charges against him, only to be rearrested as he was most recently this past October.

Both my parents were political activists – mind you on opposite sides of the Palestinian political spectrum; My father was an ardent Arafat supporter while my mother leaned left. I leaned with her!

I was raised on liberation songs and dabka and political debates that went long into the night. I walked the streets of NY in protest from 2nd Avenue in front of the Israeli embassy to Atlantic Avenue through the largest Arab community in NY at the time. I remember one demo when I was scheduled to take part in a civil disobedience action. However, when I saw police dragging people off the street literally pulling one man’s shirt off, I promptly got up and walked back to the demo, only to have my mother ask in puzzlement and with a little bit of disappointment, ‘why didn’t you get arrested?’. I explained to her that is not what most parents hope for their children!

So for me it was not a question of if I would resist but merely how I would contribute to my people’s struggle. I don’t see myself as a writer but I welcomed the opportunity to participate in this project. It provided me with a new avenue to contribute to the Palestinian struggle.

Participating in the book gave me hope…it is a manifestation of my vision of liberation. What this book epitomizes is that it does not matter if you are a queer Southern Palestinian woman, a Muslim Gazan man, a self-identified Palestinian Jew, a refugee living in Syria, Lebanon or Jordan, or an Israeli Jew raised in a kibbutz, you are my people.

The dichotomy is not one of Israeli vs. Palestinian or Jew v. Muslim and Christian; It is one of colonizer vs. anti-colonizer, it is one of those that maintain and perpetuate oppression and those that oppose it. It is one of zionist vs. anti-zionist.

So you are all my people because my people are anyone that stands for justice – no matter how you got here. By presenting our collective narratives, I hope that this book will help decolonize the reader’s mind so that more and more of us can be born into resistance….”

Riham’s cousin Omar Barghouthi sent in a recorded endorsement for A Land With A People, followed by special video appearances by contributors Sara Abou Rashedand Mohammed Rafik Mhawesh. Shurouq Aljammal, a contributor to A Land With A People scheduled to read an excerpt ultimately could not appear, but managed to send the following message, read aloud by Jewish Voice for Peace-NY Organizer Elena Stein:

When my father first learned that the story of his experiences as a Palestinian during the time of the Nakba was going to be published in this book, he was beside himself with Joy. As a former journalist, he is aware of the resonant power that stories can possess. The fact that his experience could be of interest and meaning for those so far from home, that it would be of such significance for those of Jewish identity, makes him feel connected to the brotherhood of man in a way that he perhaps had become cynical about over the years…”

Watch this powerful event at The People’s Forum, below.

It was a completely full house, and we sold every single copy — 90 books!

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BACKGROUND

A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism elevates the moving stories of secular, Muslim, Christian and LGBQT Palestinians along with Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Palestinian and LGBQT Jews, who find the courage to face what Zionism has wrought in very personal terms.

A Land With a People is a book of stories, photographs and poetry which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. Eloquently framed with a foreword by the dynamic Palestinian legal scholar and activist, Noura Erakat, this book began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area.

Contextualized by a rich historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future—one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be. Read more…

The post In the public eye: Contributors to “A Land With A People” appeared first on Monthly Review.

After Gramsci was transferred in July 1928 to the Turi prison for the infirm and disabled in Bari, Calabria, he began, in a little plot of soil along a sidewall of its courtyard, to grow different plants and flowers. His letters to Tatiana and Giulia thereafter fill up with news of their progress. On April 22, 1929, he wrote Tatiana: “On one fourth of a square meter I want to plant four or five seeds of each kind and see how they turn out.” He asks his sister-in-law if she can get hold of sweet pea, spinach, carrot, chicory, and celery seeds.

Gramsci says he’s become more patient, “but only by virtue of a great effort to control myself.” He seems to take inspiration from his flowers and plants, from their slow and persistent growth, from the rose he’s trying to cultivate, patiently and persistently—against all odds. “The rose has fallen victim of a dreadful sunstroke,” he says, “all the leaves in the more tender parts are burnt and carbonized; it has a desolate, sad aspect, but it is putting out new buds.” Seemingly referring to himself, he adds: “It isn’t dead, at least not yet.” In Gramsci’s letters, the plight of his dear rose strikes as an allegory of his own dear plight.

“The seeds have been very slow in pushing up small sprouts,” he tells Tatiana, again maybe referring to himself and to the life of a Marxist radical; “an entire series obstinately insists on living an underground life.” Each day, Gramsci says, he’s seized by the temptation to pull at them a little, making them grow a little faster.

“I remain undecided,” he admits, “between two concepts of the world and of education: whether to follow Rousseau and leave things to nature, which is never wrong and is basically good, or to be a voluntarist and force nature, introducing into the evolution the expert hand of humanity and the principle of authority. Until now the uncertainty persists and the two ideologies joust in my head.”

Still, Gramsci’s voluntarist environmentalism—the intervention of human authority and action—doesn’t impose itself brutally on nature. He lovingly cares for his rose, admires its beauty and tenderness, the delicate texturing of its petals, its poetic quality, the radiance of its blossoming, often sounding the way Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince would sound a decade on, nurturing his own rose; at the same time, Gramsci marvels at how robust his rose is, how hardy, struggling to survive, persisting on living, sometimes on the point of death, yet pulling through with new buds despite the impending “solar catastrophe.”

Elsewhere, Gramsci says to Tatiana: “The rose is beginning to bud after it had seemed reduced to desolate twigs. But will it manage to survive the approaching summer heat? It looks puny and run-down to be up to the task. It is true of course that, at bottom, the rose is nothing but a wild thorn bush, and therefore very vital.” Again, maybe with himself in mind, we might recall one revealing letter he’d written Tatiana, earlier in his incarceration (February 19, 1927), taking the boat with other prisoners to Ustica. One of the banished was an “anarchist type,” Gramsci says, called “Unico,” a sort of superintendent, who upon hearing Gramsci introduce himself to other inmates, “stared at me for a long time, then he asked: ‘Gramsci, Antonio?’ ‘Yes, Antonio!’ I answered. ‘That can’t be,’ he retorted, ‘because Antonio Gramsci must be a giant and not a little squirt like you.’”

On February 10, 1930, Gramsci writes Tatiana: “So, then, become more energetic; cure your will too, do not let the southern winds fill you with languor. The bulbs have sprouted already, indeed some time back; one of the hyacinths already shows the colors of its future flower. Provided the frost doesn’t destroy everything. The rose has also borne new buds; it is wilder than ever, it seems a thorn bush instead of a rose, but the vegetal vigor of the thorn bush is also interesting. I embrace you affectionately, Antonio.”

TODAY, OCTOBER 17, 2023, GRAMSCI’S GRAVE IS COVERED with brilliant flowers, blooming everywhere, a sight to behold. Who could have placed them all here? Today as well I began to think about what it was I wanted to stress in this book. If earlier I spoke of stones and a sense of obligation—obligation to Gramsci, to Marxist politics, to the left, a sentiment somehow reinforced by the grapefruit-size rocks a deformed Gramsci lifted as a child—now, I think it’s the rose I want to emphasize, a rose for Gramsci, and the notion of resilience. Not just of our intervening to nurture nature, to sustain ourselves ecologically, but of an individual capacity for resilience, a stoicism to resist, to learn and educate oneself, to promulgate a politics of emancipation even in incarceration, even in an inferno resembling Dante’s.

“It seems to me that under such conditions prolonged for years,” Gramsci told his younger brother Carlo (December 19, 1929), “and with such psychological experience, a person should have reached the loftiest stage of stoic serenity and should have acquired such a profound conviction that humans bear within themselves the source of their own moral strength, that every- thing depends on them, on their energy, on their will, on the iron coherence of the aims they set for themselves and the means they adopt to realize them, that they will never again despair and lapse into those vulgar, banal states of mind that are called pessimism and optimism. My state of mind synthesizes these two emotions and overcomes them: I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”…..’ READ MORE HERE

Events

Reviews

In Counterfire: “Merrifield is a beautiful writer: closer in spirit to John Berger than to Gramsci himself. He reaches politics through the particular: a red rose on a marble casket, the semi-feral cats prowling the cemetery, the Sardinian stones that gave a young Antonio his patience and his sense of deep time. His account of Gramsci’s prison letters – translating Brothers Grimm fairy tales for nephews who would never know their uncle, writing to his son in Moscow who was becoming Russian and slipping beyond reach – is genuinely moving….” Read more…

In Marx & Philosophy Review of Books: “Marx Dead and Alive offers much succour and cause for hope. Merrifield’s own ‘school’ of Marxism he has defined as ‘Magical Marxism’, but this should not be misunderstood. It can be taken to mean a non-doctrinaire Marxism drawing on the heart and soul as much as the head, a bold and exhilarating philosophy dialectically synthesising the two, never however, underplaying its materialism. All of Marx’s work – from the 1844 Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach to Capital – is an unfinished project, and it is for his historical heirs to ‘update his work, explore the layer upon layer of Marx’s paint, and do our own touching up along the way’ (15). As readers of this publication will be aware, the materialist method is one of analysis and critique of the conditions of which it finds itself a part. To understand and explain the urgent present in order to change it and create the future is our task: one that is both necessary and possible, albeit vertiginous in its scope: ‘Marx’s plane of immanence incorporates the whole wide capitalist world’…” Read more…

BACKGROUND:

Roses for Gramsci

A remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci

In June 2023, author Andy Merrifield and his partner and their daughter moved from the UK to Rome, she to take a new job, he to get his creative juices flowing again, and both to begin a new life. A short time later, he visited Gramsci’s grave at the Non-Catholic Cemetery, home as well to the great Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Soon he took a volunteer position helping to maintain the cemetery and as it turned out, to keep a watchful eye on Gramsci’s tombstone, admiring the roses and notes that visitors left, talking to some of them and communing with the sentinel cat that kept watch near the gravesite. Thus began Merrifield’s deep dive into Gramsci’s life.

The result is a stunning portrait that offers fresh insights into nearly every aspect of Gramsci’s often tortured existence: a childhood scarred by severe health problems; his growing understanding of political economy; his generosity and kindness; his grasp of the culture of workers and peasants; his friendship with the economist Piero Sraffa; and his frustration trying to communicate with and be father to the son he never saw. Above all, Merrifield illuminates how Gramsci kept his humanity, suffering horribly in prison while writing a revolutionary classic, The Prison Notebooks.

Personal, compassionate, moving—and illustrated with the author’s photographs —Merrifield revives both the legacy and meaning of Gramsci’s work and the dying art of belles lettres. Roses for Gramsci is an evocative and indelible book.

Beyond Plague Urbanism.

Our cities have been plagued by economic injustices and inequalities long before COVID-19 upended urban life everywhere. Beyond Plague Urbanism delves into this zone of urban pathology and asks what successive lockdowns and exoduses, remote work and small-business collapse, redundant office space and unaffordable living space portend for our society in cities? Andy Merrifield journeys intercontinentally as he reflects on these questions, in a narrative that moves imaginatively between plague and populist politics, the U.S. Main Street and the British High Street, overcrowding and undercrowding, the right to the city today and eco-cities of tomorrow. Blending jazz with French Surrealism, Thomas Pynchon’s rocket science with the odyssey of James Joyce, Henri Lefebvre’s Marxism with the street ballets of Jane Jacobs, this challenging book appears at a timely moment in our fraught political history and opens up an urgent humanist conversation about the future of city life.

Marx, Dead and Alive

A contemporary interrogation of Marx’s masterwork

Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog.

In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London graveside—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity. Bolstering his argument with fascinating examples of literature and history, from Shakespeare and Beckett, to the Luddites and the Black Panthers, Merrifield demonstrates how Marx can reveal our individual lives to us within a collective perspective—and within a historical continuum. Who we are now hinges on who we once were—and who we might become. This, at a time when our value-system is undergoing core “post-truth” meltdown.

Dialectical Urbanism

Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view.

Dialectical Urbanism discusses a range of urban issues, conflicts and struggles through detailed case studies set in Liverpool, Baltimore, New York, and Los Angeles. Issues which affect the quality of everyday life in the citygentrification and development, affordable rents, the accountability of local government, the domination of the urban landscape by new corporate giants, policingare located in the context of larger political and economic forces. At the same time, the narrative constantly returns to those moments in which city dwellers discover and develop their capacity to challenge larger forces and decide their own conditions of life, becoming active citizens rather than the passive consumers.

Merrifield draws on a wide range of sourcesfrom interviews with activists and tenants fighting eviction to government and corporate reportsand uncovers surprising connections, for example, between the rise of junk bonds in the 1980s and urban improvement schemes in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. This lively and many-sided narrative is constantly informed by broader analyses and reflections on the city and engages with these analyses in turn. It fuses scholarship and political engagement into a powerful defense of the possibilities of life in the metropolis today.

Andy Merrifield is a writer and independent scholar, author of numerous books, including The Wisdom of Donkeys, Magical Marxism, The Amateur, Marx, Dead and Alive, and Beyond Plague Urbanism.

The post In the public eye: Andy Merrifield appeared first on Monthly Review.

Monthly Review Magazine republished the article online in 2009, making the article even more widely available. Monthly Review Press‘ recent reprint, ‘Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”‘ stands out, however, for the extremely enlightening and thorough introduction written by magazine editor, John Bellamy Foster.

Einstein’s perspective links alienation and nuclear annihilation, capitalism to the devastating possibility of omnicide — the destruction of all human life on earth. As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary and the current US President imprisons and kills the heads of Venezuela and Iran in a clear attempt to control access to their oil supplies, we already find ourselves mired in another imperialist war in the Middle East that is very likely to veer towards World War III.

EINSTEIN IN THE ART WORLD

In October, not so long after the book’s release, the NYC/Mexico City gallery Kurimanzutto convened a show curated by Gabriel Orozco, featuring Ariel Schlesinger of Forensic Architecture, Minerva Cuevas, Petrit Halilaj, Robert Longo, Roman Ondak, Wilfredo Prieto, Zoe Leonard, and special guests. The prompt to which the artists responded, Einstein’s article, “Why Socialism?” The show was listed as a “Must See” in ARTFORUM magazine. Kurimanzutto excerpted the article in full, and e-flux Agenda excerpted the same portion of the article that we excerpted in the animated short above.

In Autre: “While visitors are left with political thoughts ruminating, they enter the almost all black-and-white main room of the exhibition and approach large grayscale flags of United Nations members, made by Wilfredo Prieto in a piece called “Apolitico.” Their loss of color strips away any signs of allegiance or patriotism and presents these flags as interchangeable. Other works, such as Ariel Schlesinger’s “Burnt Newspapers,” show the fragility of historical records, which is brought up again in the final and most shocking part of the exhibition, “The Pegasus Stories” by Forensic Architecture….” Read more….

REVIEWS

By David C. Perlman, for Marx & Philosophy review of Books

In the current era in which anti-science ideology, disinformation and ‘the destruction of reason’ are again increasingly being utilized as key components of a broader anti-materialism which reinforces a transition from neoliberalism to neofascism in response to crises of capitalism, Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’: The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay is timely. It brings to the fore the links between science and the struggle for justice, a rich meaningful life, and environmental sustainability of humanity and other species. 

On Open Culture: ‘Einstein saw a public role for scientists in matters social, political, and even economic. In 1949, he published an article in the Monthly Review titled “Why Socialism?” Anticipating his critics, he begins by asking “is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism?” To which he replies, “I believe for a number of reasons that it is.”

Einstein goes on, sounding something like a combination of Karl Marx and E.O. Wilson, to elaborate the theoretical basis for socialism as he sees it, first describing what Marx called “primitive accumulation” and what the socialist economist Thorstein Veblen called “’the predatory phase’ of human development.”

…most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

The science of economics, as it stands, writes Einstein, still belongs “to that phase.” Such “laws as we can derive” from “the observable economic facts… are not applicable to other phases.”

ACCLAIM

As seen listed as one of Book Culture‘s “top titles from university presses”:

The post In the public eye: “Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?'” appeared first on Monthly Review.

Requiem for French Theory soundly criticizes this tradition’s chameleonic ideological permutations under new names, such as postcolonial thought, decolonial theory, new materialism, and other trendsetting discourses. But it also reveals how these theoretical developments are all part of a broader anticommunist cultural front. Most importantly, Monville and Rockhill develop the positive project of anti-imperialist Marxism as the ultimate antidote to French theoretical sophistry. Far from indulging in the political defeatism characteristic of the Western Marxist critiques of postmodernism, this intellectual exchange issues a clarion call for revitalizing revolutionary theory and putting it into practice.

In translation….

In advance of the book’s release in summer of 2026, John Bellamy Foster’s introduction to Requiem for French Theory has already been translated into Spanish by the publication La Haine: “Del 18 al 21 de octubre de 1966, se celebró en el Centro de Humanidades de la Universidad Johns Hopkins de Baltimore una conferencia internacional aparentemente inocua titulada «Los lenguajes de la crítica y las ciencias del hombre». La conferencia se anunciaba como un encuentro en EEUU de las principales figuras del pensamiento estructuralista francés. Entre los ponentes de la conferencia se encontraban filósofos y críticos literarios franceses de renombre como Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Hyppolite y Jacques Lacan. Michel Foucault no pudo asistir, pero desempeñó un papel fundamental en la organización de la conferencia. Gilles Deleuze, aunque invitado, tampoco asistió, pero envió una comunicación para que fuera leída. En la conferencia, Derrida conoció a Paul de Man (antiguo colaborador nazi), que se convirtió en uno de los principales deconstructivistas de la crítica literaria estadounidense….” Read the rest at La Haine

The post In the public eye: “Requiem for French Theory” (Forthcoming!) appeared first on Monthly Review.

Excerpt: Chapter 3

“….As the end of the 1960s approached, these lettuce workers, most of them braceros until 1964, had reason to believe their time had come. Small groups of volunteers leafleted the Salinas and Santa Maria valleys and distributed the UFWOC newspaper.* The workers, many of them dispossessed farmers and farmworkers, including among them workers who were no strangers to struggles for land and rights in Mexico, were watching events unfold in the grape growing areas.

By 1968 a number of wine companies, fearing a boycott of their easily identifiable labels, came to terms with UFWOC. This included Almaden and Paul Masson in the southern Salinas Valley. Then, on July 29, 1970, Delano grape growers, battered by the nationwide boycott, met UFWOC officials in Delano and reluctantly signed union recognition contracts, putting an end to an epic five-year grape strike and boycott.

Workers in the coastal valleys appealed to UFWOC that their time had come. Chávez, who was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the new responsibilities of the union to set up dispatch services and enforce con- tracts to 85 percent of the table grape industry, wanted the Salinas and Santa Maria Valley workers to hold off on a strike.

Sensing an approaching groundswell, the growers set out to erect a wall of protection. So while Delano grape growers were concluding that agreements with UFWOC were inevitable, Teamster union officials were counting bundles of cash delivered to them by vegetable growers to sweeten a deal the growers desperately wanted. On July 27, 1970, the day before the Delano signings, came the stunning news: thirty-two Salinas, Watsonville, and Santa Maria growers signed contracts with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to represent their workers. The Teamsters declared that farmworkers had approached them about union representation, but it was the lettuce growers, not the workers, who had done so.

The Teamster deal provided growers with a valuable legal argument. In the event of a strike they could claim they were the victims of a union jurisdictional dispute and plead for legal relief. To undermine a boycott they could claim that their lettuce was already union label, a tactic sure to confuse at least part of the public. This was strike and boycott insurance financed out of the union dues now being deducted from farmworkers’ paychecks. And as an additional bonus, the Teamsters got 2 percent of each worker’s check for their “retirement fund.”

When the Teamsters announced they were moving into the vegetable fields the anger of many Salinas Valley workers headed toward a breaking point. When workers on Salinas ranches refused to sign with the Teamsters and were fired, it was spark hitting tinder. Sporadic, unorganized walkouts began and were spreading. If UFWOC didn’t call a strike, it might just happen anyway. There were intense, heated meetings, with members packed shoulder to shoulder in the union hall on Wood Street, where the UFWOC leadership argued with the workers to delay a strike while the union tried to bargain with United Fruit negotiators and placate Church allies who feared the consequences of a big strike. There were delays as the growers and union leaders jockeyed. But the determination of the workers to strike was palpable. Chávez came to Salinas and called for all the union staffers and volunteers from around the country to head to Salinas and Watsonville. The flame ignited.

Raphael Lemus was at the union hall in August 1970 when union staffers put out signs for different ranches and asked workers from these ranches to claim them. Lemus picked up the D’Arrigo sign and held it up over his head. With that he became an organizer. Word got back to the company. The next day at work a supervisor approached Lemus and offered him a foreman’s job. “Do I look like a dog to you?” Lemus asked the smiling supervisor. “What do you mean?” the supervisor replied. Lemus said coolly, “You must think I’m a dog. You just offered me a bone. I don’t take bones.”

This defiant attitude was expressed in a mass way on August 24, 1970, when 7,000 workers in dozens of companies from Watsonville, Salinas, and Santa Maria walked out and joined long caravans that wove their way through the valleys. Production stopped in the middle of the year’s biggest harvest. For days no lettuce market figures were being quoted out of Salinas because, as one grower spokesperson understated, there was a “scarcity of the product.”

Production of strawberries, celery, carrots, and tomatoes was also hit. In the days leading up to the signing of union grape contracts, representatives chosen by strawberry workers at Pic ’n Pac had gone to farmworker rallies in the Central Valley to seek out UFWOC leaders. “We’re await- ing your arrival in Salinas,” they told the union people. “We’re ready to strike. We’ve waited a long time for something like this.” As strike fever mounted a group of Pic ’n Pac workers and their families were gathered near the entrance to the La Posada trailer camp at the edge of the Alisal, near Salinas’s old Chinatown. When a union sound truck passed by La Posada announcing the decision of Freshpict workers to strike, someone in the camp misunderstood the message and yelled out, “Ya ha llegado el momento. Nos estan llamando en huelga!” (The time has come. They’re calling us out on strike!) The residents of La Posada formed a car caravan and went to the Pic ’n Pac fields and called the pickers out on strike! They’d misunderstood the message, but the strike was on.

It did not take long for Pic ’n Pac’s losses to mount up. After losing 500 acres of berries, the company signed with the union, one among ten strawberry companies to do so.

The wall the growers erected to keep out the flood they feared did not hold. Grower unity broke down when Interharvest renounced its agreement with the Teamsters and signed a UFWOC contract on the last day of August. Local growers, already disturbed and worried about the entry of conglomerates like United Fruit into vegetable farming, were furious. They formed the Citizens’ Committee for Agriculture, announced a boycott of Interharvest products, and set up a blockade of an Interharvest yard to keep trucks from leaving. Salinas police and sheriffs, normally quite adept at keeping traffic flowing at struck firms, were somehow unable to this time. The Interharvest blockade ended after a little more than a week, but it provided tactical advantages to the growers. By keeping Interharvest, the largest Salinas Valley grower, with about 20 percent of the valley’s production of lettuce, out of the fields for a crucial week of the strike, lettuce prices were driven skyward, aiding some struck firms to recoup through high prices at least some of what they’d lost in volume.

The strike gave weight to the threat of a boycott. By October, Freshpict, another giant with 40,000 acres of vegetables, and a subsidiary of the Purex Corporation, signed with UFWOC. In November, D’Arrigo, a long-established, family-owned grower, also gave in. By then, UFWOC had companies representing nearly 20 percent of vegetable production under contract. But others held firm and fought wickedly to keep the union out.

By forcing some of the most powerful growers and agribusiness corporations to recognize a union of farmworkers and negotiate wages and working conditions, the general strike accomplished what no other farm strike had previously achieved. Most crucially it put initiative in the hands of workers as a collective organization.

These accomplishments did not come easily. Many striking workers were evicted from the labor camps and forced to sleep in the fields or on the concrete floors of those camps that remained open. Families of strikers endured intimidation and harassment from police and eviction from company housing. Striking workers faced forces mustered by the growers and the state—police, private guards, and bands of armed vigilantes, some of them directly employed by the Teamsters Union, which partnered with the growers to suppress the strike.

The strike met with unrelenting hostility from the Salinas establishment. Bumper stickers proliferated around the Salinas community with the message, “Reds, Lettuce Alone” and “Get César Out of Our Salad.” Early in the strike the local Salinas paper, The Californian, published front-page stories and pictures featuring growers and their families bravely taking to the lettuce fields determined to save their rotting crops. A look at the news photos was enough to cause sidesplitting laughter from Lemus and his fellow workers. In none of the photos are the hardworking growers even bent over. Either they were unable to bend down as their workers did for hours at a time, or they felt it was beneath their dignity, so standing up, head of lettuce in one hand and knife in the other, they smilingly carried out the harvest work. Such pleasant work, the photos seemed to say: only a misled ingrate would choose to strike over this!

Numerous articles in the local paper pleaded the growers’ case: They could not survive on the $2.10 an hour demanded, or a union hiring hall the new contract would force on them, or the new rules that guided the use of pesticides in the fields. Economic disaster was on the horizon, and furthermore, the American way of life was now under siege. To dramatize this, growers flew U.S. flags from non-union trucks and buses and field equipment. Even the celery burros (work tables) of the strikebreakers were propped with U.S. flags. (Indeed, there was more truth to this threat than perhaps the growers themselves realized, since the American Way of Life was, and is, only possible because the intense, cruel exploitation of some sustains the privileged lives of others.)

Growers organized rallies denouncing the intrusion that now threatened the well-being of California’s farms. Anne Merrill, from one of the prominent local grower families, became a star at these gatherings. Acclaimed as the growers’ answer to the union’s Dolores Huerta, Merrill spoke in defense of farmworkers who now faced an evil form of union- ism. She and other grower representatives became champions of the

By the end of the 1970 Salinas harvest season, UFWOC had contracts with Interharvest, D’Arrigo, and Freshpict, major vegetable growers; Meyers and Brown and Hill tomato packers in the King City area; Delfino, the largest artichoke grower; and Pic ’n Pac and other strawberry firms in the Salinas-Watsonville area. In addition, it had contracts previously won at Almaden and Paul Masson wineries in the San Ardo area south of King City. In all, by 1972, UFWOC could count 147 contracts in the grapes and vegetables covering more than 50,000 jobs, thirty-three boycott centers in major cities, and more than 600 volunteers on its staff.

The strike was a life-changing event, sending some workers on a path of activism they had never imagined for themselves. Something “immutable” had been suddenly flung in the air, and no one could tell how it would come back down to earth, nor what things would look like when it did.

The growers feared their old autocratic control over workers would never be the same. Farm unions may be inevitable, one grower conceded after the strike. Although this reflected the direction things were going at the time, it did not signal any general resignation. Whereas growers gave ground in wages and working conditions, this was only a tactical retreat. They remained hostile to unionism but even more so to the dangerous elements they saw lurking in the shadows of the picket lines.

When clergy and religious activists joined the Delano grape strike, a hue and cry went up of “outside interference.” When students, fresh from the civil rights, antiwar, and Free Speech movements, turned their energies toward supporting farmworkers, the criticisms intensified. The struggle of farmworkers for better conditions hit up against the racism and chauvinism they faced as Mexicans, Filipinos, and so on, raising issues that struck deeper than workplace conditions, issues that hit on a central feature of a society built on national oppression. This drew in politically awakened sections of people with a broader critique of U.S. society, which in turn provoked denunciations that drifted across the political landscape like a smoky cloud after an explosion. UFWOC was accused of leading, not a union, but a “social movement.”

In the wake of the Salinas general strike these accusations grew more persistent. “Movement” became a dirty word. In the discourse of the day, unions, as long as they stuck strictly to bread-and-butter issues, were judged in the court of public opinion makers as respectable and responsible. Movements, on the other hand, were political, social, and reckless. For the growers and a growing chorus from other defenders of the system, including, as we shall see, powerful trade union leaders, there was no place in the fields for a social movement.

There was, for sure, an element of truth to the charge that UFWOC was part of something more than a union struggle, but this was one of its great strengths. The farmworker struggle gained in vitality to the degree to which it came to represent the rebellion against the two- fold oppression of farmworkers: as highly exploited workers with low wages, few benefits, poor housing, and so on, and as Mexicans, subject to intense forms of repression and discrimination in nearly every aspect of social and civil life (or as some farmworkers considered themselves with ample justification, a lower caste). To many campesinos these early years of the 1970s brought a newfound strength and optimism. It seemed only a matter of time before the storm that swept the valley the summer of 1970 would reshape the landscape. The other valley growers would fall one day to the union. The balance of power was shifting, all this in the context of other changes going on in society and the world. It was possible for farmworkers to sense their struggle was part of something larger, contributing to bigger changes taking place. Not to oversimplify the matter, individual outlooks varied greatly. Many farmworkers were, after all, displaced peasants, that is, small owners who maintained entrepreneurial ambitions. And some still ran small farms or aspired to return with money made in the United States to begin their own businesses. Visions and aspirations thus varied greatly. This does not contradict the notion that the struggle had opened up the field to new potential and new aspirations, including radical ones, as farmworkers sought to struggle against exploitation and the oppression they faced. *UFWOC, the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee was the precursor of the United Farmworkers Union. UFWOC was formed during the Delano grape strike and boycott of 1965 to 1970 when the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta merged with the Agriculture Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by the Filipino farmworker leader Larry Itliong….”

Read more…

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See here for a reprint of her original 1968 Monthly Review article… https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/nonfrenchpublications/english/solidarity60-77/otherspamphlets/anthropology-child.pdf

With clear and empathetic prose, author Sandra Lindemann, herself an anthropologist, invites us to trace the arc of a life lived according to the values of a radical anthropologist. Born in England in 1925 as the youngest daughter of the village blacksmith, Gough entered the world of higher education on scholarship and continued into academia with a pronounced sense of fairness and justice. Her outspokenness in favor of civil rights and against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War led to her placement on an FBI watch list, and institutional reactions to her progressive views disrupted her career trajectory on several occasions. She fielded the array of obstacles presented by workplace misogyny, only to find herself fired from some jobs and compelled, on principle, to resign from others. Eventually she withdrew from academia altogether to become an independent radical scholar, but not before her painstaking fieldwork in South India on marriage, class, and caste reshaped the anthropological understanding of these critical social relationships, and helped to transform the world of academia she had left behind. Through it all, she maintained her fierce dedication to the liberation of workers and peasants—whether in India, Vietnam, or anywhere in the world people were oppressed.

With the rise of fascism in the United States, and the unleashing of malign forces around the world, more than ever before those who struggle for justice are searching for examples of how to live a politically relevant life: Kathleen Gough’s is such a life. Fervently anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, Gough lived her life keeping a Marxist vision of a better, more peaceful, more equitable world in clear view at all times, never losing faith that such a world was within reach.

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