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Four Alternatives to Left Vanguardism

CLR James, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya

By David Black

1 September 2024

1. CLR James

[Grace Lee Boggs, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya]

CLR James was born in Trinidad in 1901 and died in London in 1989. In 1932 James left Trinidad and sailed to England to help cricketer Learie Constantine write his autobiography. After working for the Manchester Guardian as a cricket correspondent, James moved to London. He took part in the Pan-African movement, the Independent Labour Party and got involved in Trotskyist politics. James had several books published, including, in 1936, the highly-acclaimed Black Jacobins, the history of Toussaint Louverture and the Slave Revolt of 1791 in the French Caribbean. The first and only successful slave revolt in history, it led to the abolition of slavery by the French revolutionaries in 1794. In 1802, however, slavery was reinstated by Napoleon. Toussaint was betrayed by his comrades and delivered to the Napoleonic regime to die in a French prison in 1803. Toussaint’s historical legacy is that he raised the important question: “are the universal human rights coming out of the Enlightenment and French Revolution truly universal?” – or, just white, male and European?

In early 1939 CLR James relocated to the USA and travelled to visit Trotsky in Mexico. Following the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1939, Trotsky’s designation of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state was disputed within the movement. Max Shachtman argued that it was bureaucratic-collectivist. By 1940 James had decided it was state-capitalist. Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87), formerly Trotsky’s Russian language secretary in Mexico, came up with the same analysis as James, separately but at exactly the same time. Together they founded the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the US Workers Party, which had split from the Socialist Workers Party (US section of the Fourth International) months before Trotsky’s assassination (Joe Johnson was CLR James; Freddie Forest was Raya Dunayevskaya; the third leader of the tendency was Grace Lee – later Grace Lee Boggs, 1915-2015).

In 1947 the JFT rejoined the Socialist Workers Party moved to Detroit, partly because it had become the biggest and most multi-ethnic industrial city of the world, and partly to distance themselves from “petty-bourgeois opportunism” of the intellectuals and the Workers Party leaders in New York. The JFT’s four years in the SWP seems to have consolidated their base amongst miners and auto-workers, but as far as the SWP membership a whole went, their efforts seem to have been a debilitating waste of time. This unhappy relationship ended in 1951. The JFT left the SWP and founded the journal, Correspondence, in Detroit.

Just how far James and his comrades had moved from Trotskyism is evident from the correspondence between the leaders about things well beyond the ken or interest of the unhappy SWP. In 1948 James wrote Notes on Dialectics, a study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. This was a 250 page mimeographed document for internal discussion within the Johnson-Forest Tendency (it was eventually published in book form in Britain in 1980).

Hegel begins his 900-page masterpiece with the movement of philosophical categories: Being, Nothing and Becoming. In James’ interpretation if you determine that you and your experiences are something (like in “I think, therefore I am”), you are also determining that you and your experiences are not something else. Hegel’s Logic tells us – as an inescapable fact of life – that we come from nothing, but we are always trying to become something. This is true for us as individuals, from the day we are born; true for the development of philosophical Logic itself from the Ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment; and true for historical movements. Marx argues that the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing; and by negating capitalism it negates itself. It is this historical movement of the proletariat that James is primarily concerned with.

Greek democracy, forgotten under the Roman Empire and feudalism, returns at a new and higher level with the English Revolution of the 17th century. It is defeated, but it comes back: first with the American Revolution of 1776, then with the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution also gives birth to the idea of communism (Marx was quick to point that out that it was not he or Enge;s who invented it).

James brilliantly uses Hegel’s argument against Kantianism to expose the fixed determinations and categories of Trotskyism in its failure to understand the class nature of the USSR. The Johnson-Forest group argued that what made Stalinism in 1939 different to the 2nd International betrayers of 1914 could only be grasped by grounding the category of state-capitalism in the dialectic of Labour and Capital, as set out in the categories of Marx’s Capital. No wonder, James said, all of Trotsky’s predictions for World War turned out wrong. On the “Hegelian” aspect of Lenin’s State and Revolution James saw that Lenin propounded a new universal in calling for population “to a man” to run production and the state. As Hegel puts it, no doubt with the French Revolution in mind:

“When external actuality is altered by the activity of the objective notion and its determination therewith sublated, by that very fact the merely phenomenal reality, the external determinability and worthlessness, are removed from that actuality.”

In Hegel’s terms the “objective notion” becomes the General Will that the potential of revolutionary change is actually more real than “the merely phenomenal”. “The fact IS, BEFORE it exists.”

The point CLR James makes in 1948 is that both social democracy and the communist parties had become deadly enemies of the proletariat,  because they were both representations of capital. Social democracy represented a section of the proletariat – the skilled workers – who had been incorporated by monopoly capital; stalinism represented the petite bourgeois, technocratic new class of state capitalism. So, James argues that with the millions of workers organised into unions by European Stalinist parties (or, as in England and America, social democrats), there was nothing left to organise. James therefore counterposes spontaneous class struggle to organisation. The historic task of the workers movement had become how to negate the vanguard party. Spontaneous conscious actions by the masses, already organised in fighting form in their workplaces, would spill over into the surrounding communities and negate all the abstract universals that previous revolutions had thrown up.

After leaving the SWP, the Johnson-Forest Tendency published the journal, Correspondence, in Detroit, but in 1955 Raya Dunayevskaya and Black auto-worker, Charles Denby, broke away to found News and Letters and work on Dunayevskaya’s forthcoming book, Marxism and Freedom.

1958 saw the publication of the pamphlet, Facing Reality: The New Society and How to Bring it Closer, by CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs, with an introduction by Cornelius Castoriadis of the French group, Socialisme ou Barbarie group (see next post). Facing Reality threw out any concept of organized mediation in the world of class struggle:

“the organization will not seek to propagate it [socialism], nor to convince men of it, but to use it so as the more quickly and clearly to recognize how it is concretely expressed in the lives and struggles of the people.” Believing socialism to be “inherent in the masses,” the only role left for revolutionaries was to tell anyone who didn’t know it that this was so.

This perspective raised the question of the organisation’s “historic right” to exist. What was it?

2. Cornelius Castoriadis

[(Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort]

In 1960 Guy Debord joined Socialisme ou Barbarie, while retaining membership of the Situationist International, and remained a member for one year.[i]

Debord argued that the academic specialists had abandoned the “critical truth” of their disciplines to preserve their ideological function. And as, he believed, “real people” were going to come together to challenge the capitalist order, all “real researches” were “converging toward a totality.”[ii] These “real researches” could be found in “militant publications like Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris and Correspondence in Detroit,” both of which had broken with Trotskyist vanguardism. Both groups had published “well-documented articles on workers’ continued resistance” to “the whole organization of work” and to their depoliticization and disaffection from unions which had become “a mechanism for integrating workers into the society as a supplementary weapon in the economic arsenal of bureaucratized capitalism.”[iii]

Socialisme ou Barbarie, published from 1949 to 1965, was founded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. Correspondence, published from 1951 to 1962. In 1958, Castoriadis, using the pseudonym, “Pierre Chaulieu,” contributed to the book, Facing Reality, alongside  James and Grace Lee Boggs.[iv]

Castoriadis (1922-97) analyzed the implications for radical politics of developments in post-War capitalism. The “crisis” and “immiseration” predicted by “traditional” Marxism now appeared to have been forestalled. With full unemployment and an increasingly affluent workforce, Castoriadis saw the remaining contradictions of the system as the “alienation” of the worker from work and the division between management and the managed (significantly Castoriadis did not, as did Marx, conceptualize the division as between mental and manual labor).

Since Socialisme ou Barbarie believed that workers’ councils would be the organs for transition to a socialist society, there was a reassessment of the earlier “council communism” which had appeared during the German Revolution of 1918-19 and its aftermath. In 1952, the veteran Dutch council communist and astronomer, Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), wrote to Castoriadis on the issue of workers’ councils and the “revolutionary party”: “While you limit the activity of these councils to the organization of work in the factories after the seizure of power by the workers, we consider them equally as being the means by which the workers will conquer this power.”[v]

Whereas Pannekoek held that the workers would decide for themselves on the organization of the new society once the power of the workers’ councils had been established, Castoriadis had drawn up a veritable blueprint for a new “system” of workers’ councils, with elections at the shop-floor level for a government of councils and a central assembly which would oversee a “planning factory” for coordinating and managing the economy at the national level.[vi]

This looked to Pannakoek like the party-building he was sceptical of. Pannekoek argued that for councilists to retain even the concept of a party – even a non-vanguardist party – was a “knotty contradiction.” Castoriadis, for his part, did not see the role of the revolutionary organization as constituting an external leadership to the working class. He believed revolutionary organization would be necessary to thwart the efforts of “Leninist” parties to “take-over” the autonomous bodies that would be set up by the workers. Castoriadis saw Socialisme ou Barbarie as building the revolutionary organization of the “avant-garde” minority of workers and intellectuals, whose role in the short term would be to protect the immediate interests of the workers. Although this organization would have to be “universal, minority, selective and centralized” -to such an extent that it could be perceived as Leninist – he believed that it could avoid degeneration into a bureaucracy because it would not repeat the fundamental division of management and managed, which the vanguard parties reflected in their theory and practice. The journal carried reports from workers describing the monotony and alienation they felt in their jobs, frequently expressing the view that they, the workers, could self-manage their workplaces much more efficiently and creatively than the existing managers.[vii]

The advent of the Hungarian workers’ councils in the Revolution of 1956 was seen by Castoriadis as an epoch-making anti-capitalist development. Mistakenly, however, he saw Soviet “bureaucratic state-capitalism,” with its highly integrated and centralized bureaucracy, as the “highest” stage of capitalism, and therefore ahead of its Western rivals in the domination of labor by capital – not to mention its ideological hold over workers’ organizations in the West. This position implied that successful revolution might be even more likely in the West, because of the contested democratic space that still existed in bourgeois democracies.

However, the events in Hungary did not develop the revolutionary tendencies of the French working class; rather they just eroded the authority and hegemony of the French Communist Party. The vote in the referendum of 1958 for De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic – ninety per cent in favor – shattered Castoriadis’ faith in the working class as a revolutionary force and led to a significant shift in Socialisme ou Barbarie towards covering struggles against alienation in the “superstructure” – especially in culture and education.[viii] But for the moment, the “industrial” work continued. In 1959 the journal Pouvoir Ouvrier was founded by Socialisme ou Barbarie to propagate the program for workers’ self-management based on the theories of Castoriadis, as well as to publish reports from workers on the shop floor. But the “knotty contradiction” of party-and-class identified by Pannekoek soon manifested itself. Claude Lefort (1924-2010) broke from the group in 1958 over what he saw as “a permanent contradiction between the theoretical character of the journal and its propagandistic claims.” In Lefort’s view, which was shared by Henri Simon (born 1922), Castoriadis’ position concealed a “radical fiction” posing as a conception of non-bureaucratic socialism, which in turn concealed both a “communitarian” desire for homogeneity and the inevitability of articulation by a small circle of intellectuals.[ix]

Another issue was raised by Raya Dunayevskaya in 1955. She admired the input of reports by workers in the journal:

“Heretofore socialists and other radicals have been content with publishing a paper ‘for’ workers rather than by them. The fact that some now pose the latter question, and pose it with the seriousness characteristic of the theoretical journal, is a beginning.”

She added however, that to say, “A workers’ paper, yes, but in that case it must come from the workers themselves, and not from us the theoreticians,” was an evasion of the task at hand: “theoreticians cannot be bystanders to a paper that mirrors the workers’ thoughts and activities as they happen.”[x] In 1961, Eugene Gogol of Dunayevskaya’s News and Letters Committees attended a Socialisme ou Barbarie conference in France as an observer and engaged with Castoriadis in discussion of Marx’s 1844 Philosophic Notebooks, the first English translation of which had been published in Dunayevskaya’s book Marxism and Freedom in 1958 as an appendix. Castoriadis argued that Marx’s 1844 writings had “no bearing on Marxian thought after Marx because they were not published until 1920,” and that their philosophic nature made them irrelevant to the question of alienation in modern production.[xi]

After Debord broke from Castoriadis in 1961, the journal International Situationist warned that Socialisme ou Barbarie ran the risk of “providing an ideological cover for a harmonization of the present production system in the direction of greater efficiency and profitability without at all having called in question the experience of this production or the necessity of this kind of life.”[xii] A few issues later (in 1963), the critique continued:

these groups, rightly opposing the increasingly thorough reification of human labor and its modern corollary, the passive consumption of a leisure activity manipulated by the ruling class, often end up unconsciously harboring a sort of nostalgia for earlier forms of work, for the truly ‘human’ relationships that were able to flourish in the societies of the past or even during the less developed phases of industrial society. As it happens, this attitude fits in quite well with the system’s efforts to obtain a higher yield from existing production by doing away with both the waste and the inhumanity that characterize modern industry.[xiii]

In Socialisme ou Barbarie’s first manifesto of 1949, Castoriadis had insisted that Marxism was “beyond question.” But in the course of the 1950s he developed the view that Marxism was the ideology of an earlier, “market” and “production” stage of capitalism, and that in the modern bureaucratic world, Marx’s Capital, for the most part, was no longer relevant. Castoriadis argued that, with the aid of the state, continual expansion of capitalism could take place unimpeded. In the age of state-capitalism and bureaucracy, a new “ideology” was necessary for the new movement towards a system of workers-self management. Castoriadis himself concluded that Marxism was a “pseudo-scientific” “obfuscation” of nineteenth-century class struggles, which had themselves “allowed the system to function and survive.”[xiv]

By the late 1960s the Situationists were attacking what they saw as Castoriadis’ “unmistakable progress towards revolutionary nothingness, his swallowing of every kind of academic fashion and his ending up becoming indistinguishable from any ordinary sociologist.”[xv]

3. Guy Debord

Anselm Jappe, in his book, Guy Debord, argues that, “Debord’s theory is in essence the continuation of the work of Marx and Hegel and that its importance inheres for the most part precisely in this fact” [emphasis in the original].

According to Hegel, the application of abstract principles in law and economics was a further negation of the organic unity of life he saw as having once existed in Greek Antiquity. The unity of subject and object expressed in the art of Greek Antiquity had become impossible for a society in which, according to Hegel, the “lower world” of economic nature (once vested in the “family” or “household”) promoted a “bestial contempt for all higher values.” All sense of the divine had been tossed into the world of “superstition” and “entertainment,”[i] the temple reduced to “logs and stones” and “the sacred grove to mere timber.”[ii]

What then was left for art? Hegel said that “as regards its highest vocation, art is and remains for us something past. For us it has lost its genuine truth and vitality; it has been displaced into the realm of ideas.”

Hegel did not doubt that works of art would continue to be produced and that artists would strive for perfection with new imaginative techniques. In modernity. however, what is aroused in us by art beyond immediate enjoyment is “the judgment that submits the content and medium of representation of art to reflective consideration… For this reason, the science of art is a far more important requirement in our own age than it was in earlier times when art simply as art could provide complete satisfaction.”[iii]

In 1967, Guy Debord wrote in the Society of the Spectacle that the defeat of the social revolutions following the First World War had left the Surrealists and the Dadaists “imprisoned in the same artistic field whose decrepitude they had denounced.” Furthermore, Surrealism had mistakenly put itself “au service” of a revolution in Russia which had already been lost. Whereas “Dadaism had tried to repress art without realising it; Surrealism wanted to realise art without suppressing it.” What was necessary, in Debord’s view, was to project suppression and realization as “inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art.”[iv]

[Top: Jacques-Louis David. Below Rene Magritte]

In July 1957, at a conference in Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, the Situationist International was founded. Those attending were: from France, Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein of the Letterist International; from England, the painter Ralph Rumney; from Denmark, the painter Asger Jorn; and from Italy, Guiseppe Pinot Gallizio, the formulator of “industrial painting,” Walter Olmo, experimental musician, and Piero Simondo and Elena Verrone of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.

Debord argued in his Report on the Construction of Situations and the Prerequisites for the Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency that “the problems of cultural creation can now be solved only in conjunction with a new advance in world revolution.” In order to combat the passive consumption that defined spectacular culture, Debord called for the international to organize collectively towards utilizing all of the means of revolutionizing everyday life, “even artistic ones.”

We need to construct new ambiances that will be both the products and the instruments of new forms of behavior. To do this, we must from the beginning make practical use of the everyday processes and cultural forms that now exist, while refusing to acknowledge any inherent value they may claim to have… We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing…[v]

Although any genuinely experimental attitude based on critique and supersession of existing conditions was usable, production of artistic forms was seen as a dead end, leading at best to recuperation and commodification within the spectacle:

It must be understood once and for all that something that is only a personal expression within a framework created by others cannot be termed a creation. Creation is not the arrangement of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws on such arrangement.[vi]

Debord said in 1961 at Henri Lefebvre’s Group for Research on Everyday Life:

the critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday life, before being carried out naturally by all people, must be undertaken in the present conditions of oppression in order to destroy these conditions. An avant-garde cultural movement, even one with revolutionary sympathies, cannot accomplish this. Neither can a revolutionary party on the traditional model, even if it accords a large place to criticism of culture… The revolutionary transformation… will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities, and at the same time the end of all specialized politics.[vii]

Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciouness (1923) saw in the reformism of social democracy a retreat from Hegel and Marx to Kant. Before Hegel and the French Revolution, the rationalists had treated objectivity as independent of, and separate from, the thinking subject; and for Kant, the object was knowable only in how it appeared to the subjective mind, not as the thing-in-itself. In Hegel’s concept of totality this duality in the process of knowledge is resolved by eliminating the autonomy of both the objects and their concepts. The power of the totality is expressed in Lukács’ statement that “the chapter in Marx’s Capital dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism.”[viii] In Capital Marx shows how the value-form which labor assumes depends on the reduction of the concrete labor to abstract labor, which takes place in the production of commodities through the medium of socially necessary labor time.

The Society of the Spectacle argues that the spectacle does not falsify reality merely in an ideological sense, along the lines of the economic base producing false consciousness in the superstructure; nor does the spectacle constitute itself abstractly as a force external to the concrete social activity of individuals. Rather, the spectacle-commodity and reality each transform themselves into their opposites. The spectacle is a real product of that reality; and “real life,” in its subjective passivity, absorbs its own objectified falsification. Their reciprocal alienation is the ground and essence of spectacular capitalism, in which the world is turned upside down:

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.[ix]

Where then, does this leave proletarian class consciousness? Lukács, in his 1923 essay, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, argues that work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a such a way as to make people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasksas being of their own making. People are thus rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how “busy” they are.[x] Against the fragmenting yet totalizing power of the commodity Lukács dialectically juxtaposes the particular commodity that production is based on: labor-power. Since labor-power cannot be separated from the laborer, then any real self-consciousness on the laborer’s part of that relationship can be “ascribed” as revolutionary. Lukács thus postulates a “subject-object identity” constituted by the class that “wakes up” to mass revolutionary consciousness.

Lukács, however, is well aware of the gap between the “ascribed” revolutionary consciousness and the actually existing reformist/false consciousness. Reification, as the “necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society,” can be overcome only by “constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence” and by relating the “concretely manifested contradictions” to the totality of development, and becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions in their totality.[xi]

Debord, taking up this problem of the passive and contemplative nature of everyday life under capitalism, sees the leisure industry, with its Club Med holidays, mass sports events, television and movies, as much more than mere distraction. In “consumable pseudo-cyclical time” the commodified moments of leisure are explicitly presented as moments in the cyclical return of real life, but all that is really happening is the spectacle reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity: “The moments within cyclical time when members of a community joined together in a luxurious expenditure of life are impossible for a society that lacks both community and luxury.”[xii]

Debord argues that because the spectacle attempts to establish an illusory unity over the fragmentation and separation, any real proletarian subjectivity cannot confine itself to concerns over egalitarian distribution of wealth; it must be total itself. The real social contradiction is between those who are at home in alienation – or at least feel obliged to maintain it – and those who would abolish it. The coming revolution would require a complete break with vanguardism as well as anarcho-councilism.[xiii]

As Debord puts it in Society of the Spectacle, Lukács claimed that the Bolshevik form of organization “was the long sought mediation between theory and practice, in which proletarians are no longer spectators of the events which happen in their organization, but consciously choose and live these events.” The trouble was, “he was actually describing as merits of the Bolshevik party everything that the Bolshevik party was not.”[xiv]

The Situationists’ grasp of the difference between class consciousness in-itself and in-and-for-itself was at the root of their polemical attacks on the bureaucratic practices in the workers’ movement and the fragmented, contemplative ideas of sociologizing intellectuals. Situationist writings suggested that workers could reach revolutionary conclusions among themselves and that the Situationist International saw no responsibility for helping this process along, unless approached by the workers’ councils themselves for assistance.

Debord thought that the French revolt of May/June 1968, soon to be followed by the “Hot Autumn” of Italy in 1969, heralded “the beginning of a new era,”[xv] But he had no intention of building a new political party, either on a national or international basis, that would become, like others past and present, yet another “representation” of the real struggle. The Situationists, as les enfants perdus, had no further missions to fulfill in the organizational form they had upheld for the previous fourteen years, and nowhere to return to. In 1972, after a final round of resignations and expulsions, which left Debord and the Italian, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, as the only two remaining members, the Situationist International was dissolved at Debord’s behest.

Twenty years after the May Events of 1968, in his 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord identified the dilemma facing the Left well before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent victory of neoliberalism:

the coherence of the society of the spectacle proves revolutionaries right, since it has become clear that one cannot reform the poorest detail without taking the whole thing apart. But, at the same time, this coherence has suppressed every organized revolutionary tendency by suppressing the social terrains where they had more or less expressed themselves: from trade unions to newspapers, towns to books. In the same movement, one has highlighted the incompetence and thoughtlessness of which this tendency was quite naturally the bearer.[xvi]

In 1967, Debord had noted the ever-increasing size of the working class and the impending proletarianization of the entire workforce. But in the Comments of 1988, Debord, as Jappe puts it, “reversed the terms of this proposition”: the conditions of the middle classes had become proletarianized in their separation and lack of power but, as they lacked class consciousness, they had negated the power of the proletariat as a force irreconcilable with capital, by absorbing it. In late-Debord thought, the early-Lukács’ formulation of a structure of reified consciousness evolves into that of the “integrated spectacle.”

Debord’s “pessimistic” Comments of 1988 should be seen in relation to his original theorizing of the spectacle and the forces resisting it. In distancing the Situationists from both the vanguardist and spontaneist positions, the Society of the Spectacle argued the revolution “requires” workers to become dialecticians:

Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought into practice. Thus it demands of men without qualification more than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified men which it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial ideological consciousness constructed by a part of the bourgeois class was based on the economy, that central part of social life in which this class was already in power). The very development of class society to the stage of spectacular organization of non-life thus leads the revolutionary project to become visibly what it already was essentially.[xvii]

The idea that the organized working class would become “visibly what it already was essentially” bears a similarity to C.L.R. James’ position on the British shop stewards organizations in the 1950s as representing the “future in the present.”[xviii] Debord’s reflections about the importance of theory being lived by the masses and the workers becoming “dialecticians” bears more than a passing resemblance to (if not a subtle détournement of) Dunayevskaya’s portrayal in Marxism and Freedom (1958) of Black civil rights activists, women, rank-and-file workers and youth as a movement from practice which was itself a form of theory, demanding the engagement from intellectuals she saw lacking in Castoriadias:

The task that confronts our age, it appears to this writer, is, first, to recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it…. Far from being intellectual abdication, this is the beginning of a new stage of cognition. This new stage in the self-liberation of the intellectual from dogmatism can begin only when, as Hegel put it, the intellectual feels the “compulsion of thought to proceed to… concrete truths.”[xix]

[The above section is an abridged extract from The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought by David Black (Lexington 2013)]

4. Raya Dunayevskaya

[Diego Rivera, Raya Dunayevskaya, Leon Trotsky]

In 1914 the parties of the Second International were committed to mobilising the international workers movement to prevent war between rival imperialist powers; ,when the Guns of August sounded, socialist and trade union leaders fell into line. When Lenin, then exiled in Geneva, received a telegram telling him that German Social Democracy had voted in the Reichstag for war credits, his first reaction was to dismiss it as a forgery.

Rosa Luxemburg was not so surprised. The “Pope of Marxism”, Karl Kautsky, had long argued that the German working class should subordinate its autonomy to a reformist strategy in which the centralized bureaucracy of the bourgeois state was to be a conciousnesss-forming tool of “progress”. Kautsky, having ruled out the tacticof the Mass Strike, failed to address how the socialists might educate and assimilate those non-proletarian forces that could be won over. In Germany the failure to do so installed the germ of defeat that later led to counter-revolution and the eventual triumph of fascism.

In Luxemburg’s critique of reformism, Gillian Rose in The Broken Middle sees a notion of transcendence: that the proletariat could only exercise its revolutionary will if it went “outside” and “beyond” the existing society. This wasn’t so much utopianism, as the recognition of an “aporia”: a state of being, caught in the schism between theory and practice, which was resistant to a priori logic and determination – as formulated by Kant – even though it lacked any discernable path of transcendence. In Greek Antiquity, Poros, the god of plenty and resourcefulness meets Penia, the child of poverty and powerlessness; and after drinking too much, is seduced by her. Their child is Eros, who inherits the “nature” of both parents, and lives in a state of aporia. The word aporia is the privative of the word porus, which refers to a ford or ferry crossing point in a river. So aporia is an impasse, in which the navigator may be faced with danger and uncertainty of success. In the concrete terms which Rose assigns to Luxemburg, the resolution of the aporia would require the difficult union of the daily struggle and “the great world transformation”. This new movement would have to grope along the path between the revolutionary Scylla of abandoning the mass character of the social democratic party and the reformist Charybdis of abandoning the goal of socialist transformation.

In the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War movement, which created a whole new generation of radical youth, had its organisational origins in the civil rights movement. In 1970 a young Left activist corresponded with Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) on the question of the counterculture: “The movement is now not primarily in the factory; the consciousness is not there nearly so much as in the rock-drug culture.” Dunayevskaya’s reply points out that the workers didn’t respond well to middle-class leftists telling them what they should do – whether agitation for a “general strike now!” or whatever. And the fact that workers were unipressed by leftist arguments  – did not necessarily mean they were only concerned with “bread and butter” issues and incapable of transcending trade-union consciousness. Although Dunayevskaya doesn’t, as does Gillian Rose, employ the term “aporia”, she appears to recognise it historically in relating the New Left to German Social Democracy:

“Do you know that the Kaiser was the only one who knew something that Lenin did not know, that he need not fear the Second International’s opposition to the first world holocaust he was going to unleash because the socialists were so elitist, lived so much by themselves, had their rituals for everything from marriage as ‘against’ the bourgeois type, to naming of their children by revolutionary instead of biblical names, that they has no contact with the unorganised ‘backward’ masses and this isolation ensured capitulation.”

German Social Democracy was a massive movement, but that didn’t make it the party of the masses. In effect, it became a massive sect, a sort of secular religion, preaching to the masses without actually engaging with them. Of course Germany Social Democracy “favoured” the replacement of the Kaiser’s monarchy with a democratic republic, but when it came to elections what figured were the “bread and butter” issues. Rosa Luxemburg argued that holding on to the call for a republic was a principle that trumped the ephemeral short-termism of persuading monarchists to vote socialist, which would have the dire consequences in eventually unleashing fascism.

Quite separate from the industrial proletariat of the 1960s was the Woodstock “nation.” Dunayevskaya conceded that this counterculture was “certainly a superior phenomenon to the Establishment.” After all, the counterculture bespoke of the duality of the existing society and the “two worlds within the existing structure that undermine it.” But counterculture wasn’t the Revolution. And objectively, self-appointed ‘People’s War’ factions – such as the Weather Underground, and other groups, influenced by Maoism, who believed that power came out the barrel of a gun and that a prairie fire could be started by a single spark – weren’t revolutionary. Against their “violent spouting,” she argued,

“…the forces of the new, the combatants, culturally as well as in a class sense, are lined up for the life and death struggle long before they are ‘armed’. Does that make the ones who are ‘armed’ the revolutionaries? Even though their chaotic acts lead to the tragic blowing up of themselves, and even though it gives the Nixon­Agnew terrorists the excuse to conduct their preventive civil war before the objective situation and the subjective forces have coalesced to assure the victory of the social revolution.”

The problem was philosophical:

“…to think that activity is only ‘doing’, irrespective of the underlying philosophy, is not only as one-sided as the ivory-tower type of thinking, but is precisely what the establishment, the power structure…. are counting on us as doing… We, thereby, prove only one thing. We are as organically part of this society we were supposed to be uprooting as the society itself is, because we are operating within its pragmatic, philosophic structure”

Dunayevskaya was not enthusiastic about the new utopian hippie communes, which were set up in separation from the rest of society. Again, that was “precisely what capitalism does want. That is to say, to break up the various revolutionary forces the revolutionary forces from ever finding each other.” She traced the problem back to the times of the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists.

“So-called communal living is not new in America and is the very opposite of the Paris Commune ‘storming the heavens’… the American intellectuals were inspired by the utopian socialists to build their ‘communes’ at the very moment when the Abolitionists were trying to show them that association with the blacks is the only ‘transcendental’ gesture that meets the challenge of the times. Whether or not you would like to look into that period with Abolitionists’ eyes, or only with eyes of today and as a poet. I would very much like to see a review by you of Hawthorne’s Blithendale Romance.’

Sadly, the review never appeared and I have been unable to trace the identity of Dunayevskaya’s correspondent.

ENDNOTES TO pt 3

[i] Vincent Kaufman, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (University of Minnesota Press: 2006) p. 171.

[ii] Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life,” International Situationist, No. 6, S.I. Anthology, pp. 68-74.

[iii] “The Bad Days Will End” (editorial), International Situationist, No. 7. S.I. Anthology, p. 82.

[iv] C.L.R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis), Facing Reality: The New Society, Where to Look for It, How to Bring it Closer (Detroit: Bewick, 1974), pp. 34-39; Cornelius Castoriadis, “C.L.R. James and the Fate of Marxism,” in C.L.R. James, His Intellectual Legacies, eds. S.R. Cudjoe and W.E. Cain (Massachusetts University Press: 1995), pp. 277-97. After 1958 there was no further contact between Castoriadis and James. According to Cudjoe and Cain, Castoriadis was angered because “James published ‘Facing Reality’ without fully working out the ideas contained in the pamphlet and without having Castoriadis’ final approval to publish his section in the pamphlet.”

[v] Pannekoek, Anton. “Discussion sur le probleme du parti révolutionnaire,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, July-August 1952. www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1953/socialisme-ou-barbarisme.htm

[vi] Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (London: Penguin 1975), p. 98; P. Chaulieu, “Sur le contenu du socialisme,” in Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-September 1957).

[vii] Gombin, Origins of Modern Leftism, pp. 99-100; P. Chaulieu [Castoriadis],  “Discussion sur le probleme du parti révolutionnaire.” Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-August 1952); P. Chaulieu, “Réponse au camarade Pannekoek,” Socialisme ou Barbarie (April-June 1954).

[viii] Arthur Hirsch , The French Left (Montreal: Black Rose 1982), pp. 108-31.

[ix] Claude Lefort, “Interview.” Telos, No. 30 (1976).

[x] Raya Dunayevskaya, “A Response to Castoriadis’s Socialism or Barbarism” (1955), reprinted in News and Letters, Oct-Nov 2007.

[xi] “Letter from Eugene Gogol,” News and Letters Bulletin, August 1961.

[xii] Debord, “Instructions For Taking Up Arms,” International Situationist, No. 6. S.I. Anthology, p. 64.

[xiii] “Ideologies, Classes and the Domination of Nature,” editorial, International Situationist, No. 8. S.I. Anthology, p. 102.

[xiv] Cornelius Castoriadis, “On the History of the Workers Movement,” Telos, No. 30, 1976.

[xv] “Lire ICO” (editorial), International Situationist, No. 11. S.I. Anthology, p. 372.

 

Memories of Revolution: King Mob, the Situationists and Beyond

David Wise

Editor’s note: In response to my review of Eric-John Russell’s translation of Jaime Semprún’s book, A Gallery of Recuperation: On the Merits of Slandering Charlatans, Swindlers and Frauds (first published in 1976 as Précis de récupération: illustre de nombreux exemples tires de l’histoire recente) David Wise, co-founder of King Mob, the English radical group of the late 1960s/early ‘70s, which was connected to Guy Debord and the Situationist International., has contributed the following.

FROM LONDON TO LISBON

I enjoyed reading David Black’s Substack comments on Eric-John Russell’s recent translation and re-publication of Jaime Semprún’s Précis de récupération. Decades ago I found myself in agreement with Semprún’s withering dismissal of post-modernism as represented by so-called thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Andre Glucksmann, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. After ‘liberating’ (meaning going beyond monetization rather than ‘thieving’) a fair amount of these authors’ oeuvre from the UK’s ‘nintellectual’ bookshops, I myself, along with other clued-in mates, had had enough of seeing their books stacked up prominently in front of us. These surface commentators, with their endless watering down of the rejuvenating spirit of the May ’68 revolution in France, were being presented as real cutting edge subversive critique; when in truth, the real McCoys couldn’t get a look in with English language publishers.

Although I welcomed Précis de récupération as a breath of fresh air, I was cautious about Semprún’s attacks on Cornelius Castoriadis and ‘Ratgeb’ (Raoul Vaneigem), both of whom once had  meaningful connections with Guy Debord. Sadly, mention of English speaking recuperation was absent, as basically the UK, in comparison with much of Europe and even the USA, was backward regarding the explosions of the late 1960s – so much so that the majority of ‘thinkers’ here wouldn’t know what the fek you were talking about. Hardly surprising then that our merry band was defined by our hatred of the “right little/tight little island” Little Englander mentality of both right and left wing (although we never realised that these tendencies were going to have such an abominable outcome decades later, what with Brexit and the like).

In retrospect and on a general level,  I think Précis de récupération marked the final moment of Semprún’s hero worship of Debord. After that, Semprún took a different radical path as he morphed into the creator of the very influential ‘group’ cum publisher of Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances (‘Nuisances‘ meaning destructive, dangerous substances). On the simplest of levels, Debord and Semprún were very different characters, i.e. Semprún didn’t really fall out with people (at least not in the same way Debord did). I don’t think Guy ever forgave him for walking away, causing Guy to henceforth endlessly obsess about this ‘scally’; finally denouncing him as a ‘mediatique’ in his last ‘book’ Cette Mauvais Reputation. (I remember Michel Prigent – the publisher of Chronos Press and Principia Dialectica in London – not really liking Debord’s final book, although he was somewhat nervous about saying so). Other friends, in France, mainly around Os Cangaceiros, clearly noted that Semprún had been unfairly rubbished as he wasn’t involved with the media and had even gotten rid of films he’d produced and acted in when a youngster.

Around the same time as Précis de récupération was published,Jaime was also involved with radical social struggles erupting in Portugal and then Spain after the death of the fascist dictator General Franco. Practically,  he did so in a somewhat clandestine way, in and around a group – if one can call it that – aptly named Los Incontrolados (The Uncontrollables). 

First though. something of a detour. The end of the ‘glorious’ late 1960s was somewhat marked world-wide by a ‘collapse’ of its protagonists, ourselves included. Dazed and depressed, overcome with a sense of failure, we were floundering, desperate again to reignite our fiery passions, as well as desperately searching for a wide-ranging and nuanced re-think. Some individuals – rapidly or cautiously but slowly – sold-out, while others destroyed themselves with drink and drugs. Also, there were the suicides, which were really hard to bear as it was often the finest individuals who decided to end it all.

Others fled to other countries. Ex-King Mobber, Phil Meyler, was one such person. After a tumultuous, exhilarating time in the late 60s/early 1970s, journeying between London, Ireland and the USA, Phil seemed to abandon everything and, after sometime desolately moping around in east London, he suddenly upped-sticks and disappeared to Portugal where he found casual paid work teaching English as a foreign language. His first letters to me in London from Lisbon were desolate and harrowing… then, then, then on the 25th of April 1974 the ‘Revolution of the Carnations’ broke out and the streets and work places erupted amidst the ferment in and around the final overthrow of Salazar’s/Caetano’s 50 year old fascist dictatorship. Phil’s letters transformed overnight; becoming absolutely fascinating. Moreover, Phil and I had been best mates throughout the late 1960s; reinforced by the fact we were from similar working class backgrounds, had little money and no prospect of inherited wealth coming our way. Now, whoosh, here was a rejuvenated Phil sending me one stunning letter after another about what was going down on the Iberian Peninsula. In response, I just wanted to get this information out there in the English speaking parts of the globe.

In the following months, frequent visits to Portugal became essential; the country having become a hub for all kinds of radical tendencies, with many rebels from different European countries enthusiastically proclaiming Situationist ideas – amongst other persuasions. Described at the time as ‘revolutionary tourism’, (as against the typically banal, often hated, mass consumer tourism) it was a 24/7 fascinating mix of thought, action, love and alcohol. Already there was an emerging tendency beginning to put an emphasis on the need to update Marx’s critique of value, etc, with clued-in individuals saying the Situationists had missed out on this essential factor, thus implicitly raising the question: ‘what steps do we take from here?’. 

The immediate outcome was that Phil put together a book in Portuguese and English entitled, Portugal, The Impossible Revolution. It was a producedby Solidarity (the Castoriadis-inspired off-spring in the UK of Socialisme ou Barbarie). I was able to fund it, as I was earning really good money as a plasterer on building sites, had no family to support and as a squatter I had a rent-free place to live. The book captured the warp and woof of the uprising, that unmistakable, ‘I was there’ dimension, emphasising at times its delightfully crazy essence. Little did we know at the time that Jaime Semprún had also put together a book called La sociale guerre au Portugal, published by Champ Libre in France (the company owned by Debord’s rich friend, Gérard Lebovici (who was murdered in complicated circumstances which I won’t go into here). The book was immediately proclaimed as the finest critique and evaluation of the Portuguese uprising, though to my mind it was touch and go in comparison with Phil’s hands-on unruly passionism, which captured the emotional euphoria of the uprising. As I put down in a notebook at the time:

“I certainly had a memorable New Year in Lisbon in 1976-7. A crowd of us got drunk in a workers’ tasca  which ended up with a conga winding through the adjacent streets. It was nearly dawn before the cavorting ceased and then some of us decided to go to the local zoo for some reason even though we knew it would be closed. We went with some vague notice of liberating wild nature as happened during the Paris Commune of 1871. Climbing the fences into the zoo we were in a mood to fraternise directly with the animals on display and proceeded to do so. Although we couldn’t get into the tigers den we certainly were able to stroke the creatures a little as we could the giraffes, etc. But then it was easy to get into the hippopotamuses enclave. A big hippo with such friendly, benign eyes opened its mouth wide and laughingly the assembled drunks dared “the mad Englishman”(Me) to put his head in the hippo’s mouth. Well I did and everybody gasped. BUT THAT WAS IT,OVER AND OUT. Armed police had been called and they immediately came for us and later, we were banned from ever going again into a Portuguese zoo. But the incident had gotten out and about on the alternative grapevine and years later people were still sending me tiny toy hippos with their mouths open. Evidently – in reality – hippos instantly bite heads off……. but how was I supposed to know that???”

More importantly, the atmosphere in Portugal started overlapping with what was happening in Spain after the death of General Franco and the impending demise of the fascist dictatorship. Shortly after returning to London, Phil sent me through the post a small Spanish pamphlet which had knocked him out. It was named, “Manuscrito encontrado en Vitoria”  (A Manuscript found in Vitoria). Like Phil, I also thought the pamphlet was terrific.Then he ‘found’ another pamphlet and then another- all with different titles and all anonymous!  All we had to go on was the name: Los Incontrolados…. and for the life of us, for what seemed like ages, we simply couldn’t find out the names of the individuals who’d written them. One by one Phil forwarded these pamphlets to me in London and we then decided to translate and publish them. Needless to say our command of the Spanish language wasn’t that good and my twin bro’ Stuart Wise – who did most of the translation – also  wasn’t that much better. There again, there was no one around to help us: educationally we were the old notorious 11-Plus failures, not worthy of ‘proper’ education and hampered by the fact our “English” was truly awol (Phil being from Dublin and us from County Durham and Yorkshire). Who could we to turn to? Comatose academics who hadn’t grasped Lautreamont’s pre-Surrealist maxim: ‘The new tremors are running through the atmosphere and all you need is the courage to face them’? Thus, in consequence the book with all its somewhat gobbledygook translatese, Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy was kind of stillborn! 

It’s worth saying here that ‘revolutionary anonymity’ in the mid to late 1970s rapidly seemed to acquire quite a profile, or rather, anti-profile. In a way it had become a principled gesture against the horrendous groundswell of stardom and names in lights which was taking off like never before, as post modernism and its academic parade imbibed the accoutrements of pop culture with the gradual eclipse of the revolutionary spirit of 1968. It was all for the sake of money and more money, preparing the way for today’s kleptocratic rule.  For all like us, a name didn’t matter and any pseudonym was just as good as another. It was the hoped-for inspirational content that mattered, mirroring the fact you lived your life in an anti-spectacular, non-touchy/feely way. Thus, that’s how our pamphlets were signed. As for Phil there was another pressing reason; he slightly altered his last name from Meyler to Mailer – a la Norman Mailer the famous contemporary American hipster writer – as the Portuguese state was rapidly becoming hell-bent on getting rid of subversive foreign undesirables.

The town of Vitoria (Victory) in the Spanish Basque country became a brilliant hot spot in the mid-to late 1970s as home to an autonomous worker revolt which was quite astounding in its breadth, hence the nuanced ‘victory’ pun in the subsequent A4 pamphlet by Los Incontrolados. As a consequence, a few years later we discovered that the principal authors of Los Incontrolados were Jaime Semprun and Miguel Amoros. Subsequently, Semprun’s post situationist radical eco-orientation was to have a profound influence on us although contact was kind of ‘in and out ‘and mostly – at a distance. Miguel’s critique of the destructive ultra- commodification of music was contemporaneous with my own pamphlet, The End of Music. Inevitably, Miguel lamented our inadequate Spanish translations. Unbeknown to us, at the same time Miguel Amoros was slowly writing a really fascinating account of their differences with Debord, etc, (much of which has ended up in the web pages of Libcom.org). And finally (for me) I discovered that Jaime was the son of the Spanish/French novelist, Jorge Semprun, whose dissident-communist writings I’d had a lot of respect for in mid 1960s Newcastle. Lo and behold in post- Franco Spain, Jorge, who had been expelled by the underground Spanish Communist Party, had become a literary celebrity, and was set to become Spanish Minister of Culture (!). I was horrified and later gratified to find out that Jaime would have nothing to do with his Dad, having always detested his membership of the Communist Party and no doubt much else besides.

And yes, I’d become nervous of Debord and subsequent “Our Party” Debordism. After our pamphlet on the 1981 riots in the UK, A Summer with a Thousand Julys, was translated into French I was subsequently was invited by Guy Debord to visit him in Champot in the remote French countryside where he was then living. I’d be accompanied by Michel Prigent. But I had to turn the invite down as I knew I’d completely fek-up, especially when I’d hit the booze to calm my nerves. I knew individual sentences in the pamphlet would be picked on and obsessed over (as was the regular pattern) and I didn’t have the character armour to resist  this interrogation thus, ‘[a sadder and a wiser man (David Wise) rose the following morn.’

ECO-ACTIVISM V. GREENWASHING

By the late-1980s, Jaime Semprún’s eco critique was getting really cutting edge the more he acknowledged the profundity of the English language description of that devious con and substitute for authentic eco involvement becoming known as  ‘greenwashing’. Jaime was also one of the first individuals to call out the duplicitous horrors of a double dealing ‘Nature Bureaucracy’, made up of all the species protection societies and the like. Initially we naïvely thought these bodies were on our side when engaging in actions to genuinely increase and enrich biodiversity, only to find out they were some of the nastiest – forever calling the police on our activities. The realisation of such a truth was shattering both for Jaime and ourselves. 

What  followed somewhat later for Jaime and Co was radical eco-action on the Larzac Plateau in south west France in the mid-1990s. This also involved the former-Situationist International member, René Riesel, who had played such a significant part in May ’68 in France. At the time I was also getting a lot of fresh comment from other friends involved, again mainly from Os Cangaceiros. Suffice to mention here one amusing incident. There was some kind of festive eco get together in a small town on the Larzac Plateau and stalls were erected. Stalwarts of Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances in souped-up militant attire turned up really ready for action against the brutal French police. First though, they had to put together a stall. Most of the activists couldn’t do it as (it seemed) none of them had ever used a hammer or screwdriver (they were so ‘middle class’, or at least ‘middle class’ in practical disposition). In exasperation, Riesel (who by then had become a neo-peasant farmer) jumped in and assembled a stall made up of wooden planks within minutes. Everybody present had a good laugh….. Nonetheless, Nuisances was quickly to acquire a huge influence especially regarding the future French ZADS (Zones a Defendre). And subsequently we might ask: how could the comradely alliances around Earth Uprising and the Sainte-Soline Battle of the Basins of March 2023 have come about without this ‘distant’ history?

One more comment haphazardly comes to mind. Michel Prigent kind of liked Jaime Semprún, though he said to me he didn’t like the way he ‘supported the Unabomber terrorist’ (Ted Kaczynski) in the mid-west United States. As for myself, I balked at the terrorist name tag. Though I didn’t approve of the haphazard parcel bombs and was leery about innocent casualties, I liked some of the Unabomber’s writings.

Ah, but then, slowly but surely on a more general, historical level, a morphing Situationist perspective was disappearing quite rapidly after say, 2015. What was happening? Miguel Amoros was of the opinion that a dreadful counter-revolution was finally taking place especially in English speaking countries. Yes, it certainly feels like that as today you can’t find traces anywhere of the Situationist experience in what now passes contemporary revolutionary critique. As an interesting aside to all this – even though again utterly out of place – the writings of Alèssi Dell’ Umbria really have edge, even though, as far as I know he, also, never mentions the Situationists. I’ve been told this guy, who is from Marseilles, was a fellow traveller of Os Cangaceiros and has written some really interesting tracts around major social upheavals in France over the last 20 years or so. It’s certainly true that his C’est La Guerre. written in the first few months of 2023 is so far the best account of those exhilarating moments. And there is also an excellent tract on the Gilets Jaunes disturbances in Marseilles in 2019. I was asked by Jack-de-Montreuil if I could translate into English Alessi’s recent major theoretical contribution named Antimatrix. I rapidly found out that It was certainly a dense and very interesting text and by my reckoning a relevant update to The Society of the Spectacle without ever mentioning the latter’s existence… But I wonder if my French and background knowledge are really up to it. Whatever, it would be excellent if say, MIT Press Ltd could publish a selection of Dell’Umbria’s writings in English.   

Sadly, Jaime Semprún died in 2010 of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 63. His death was untimely, but in truth his writings in later years had become a lot more sombre and it may be that he found the derailing of his radical eco experiments heart breaking. In something of a final missive Jaime said all he could do now was cultivate his own back garden. We indeed felt something of the same, re broken hearts, even though we had no back  – or front – garden to cultivate as we lived in sub-standard social housing. We, on the contrary, had turned our attention to scruffy, gloriously weed-ridden public space with the intention of vastly increasing their inherent bio-diversity. We never asked permission of the powers that be  – usually town councils – because we knew we’d be told to fuck off for not possessing requisite qualifications, etc. Constantly under attack from officialdom and the police we nevertheless over the years produced some remarkable spaces which even moronic bureaucrats had to grudgingly admit was the case.  

This was especially true of our eco intervention between 2010-17 in the Bradford Canal and Shipley’s ‘Industrial Gorge’ in West Yorkshire – an arena which had obsessed John Ruskin in the late 19th century. That encounter, regarding greenwashing, was a brutal eye opener, as the authorities came for us with no holes barred, deploying thuggery and threats of jail regarding our eco interventions. We also sprayed up on various stone walls in the gorge some relatively recent lucid quotes from Miguel Amoros on the subject of greenwashing, only to find them jet sprayed out a few days later by council goons.(In retrospect I think Miguel knew about these slogans and was pleased we had given them prominence). Also our eco interventions over the last few years on Wormwood Scrubs in West London were somewhat simultaneously explained by ourselves through placards, bird boxes and the like hung high up in trees – many around the subject of ‘suicide capitalism’, which was basically an ecological concept elucidated by Jaime Semprun. A few months ago I could have directed you the reader to our website, The Revolt Against Plenty, where photos alongside texts explained the concept. Then kaput: there was nothing except total wipe-out! The brutal redaction of thewebsite in spring 2023 meant all of this history has now been liquidated along with so much else besides and now can only be accessed via The Wayback Machine archives. Why wasn’t a reason given for such brutal action? Why did absolute silence reign? Finally, I came to the conclusion that basically, it’s a sign of the brutal reaction which is today spreading throughout the world. And if you aren’t rich enough to hire a good lawyer the attitude is you can just fuck off as we can do what we like with you; not forgetting that law centres for those surviving at the sharp end disappeared yonks ago. Left in a catastrophic dilemma, just what is there to do about such fiendish acts when reaction is becoming so omnipotent everywhere and all emancipating hope is rapidly dwindling? It’s beyond heart-breaking. 

Dave Wise (together with the inseparable shadow of my twin bro’ Stu’ Wise who is forever and forever by my side).

Manson and Trump: Object Lessons in How to Build a Death Cult

As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.

David Black

9 August 2023

The late Charles Manson is back in the news with the controversial parole of his former ‘Family’ member, Lesley Van Houten, who was convicted 53 years ago of murdering on his behalf. A new Netflix true crime series, How to Become a Cult Leader, features Manson in the first episode. Manson is portrayed as a sharp gaolbird, who learned to convince his 100 or so cult followers that he was god-like.

After more than 50 years the curse of Charles Manson maintains its grip.  ‘Edgy’ ironists have his image tattooed on their skin; there is a roaring trade in Manson T-shirts and other merchandise (especially his songs, which have been covered by over 70 recording artists); and an endless output of film and television productions. He has become so much part of the culture that the mythology built around him and his disciples has largely buried whatever ‘truth’ is still ‘out there’. What How to Become a Cult Leader does not explain is how Manson got his gentle hippie followers to become vicious drug-addled murderers. Nor does it examine the role of law enforcement agencies in protecting him from justice and enabling him to commit heinous crimes.

Manson built a cult which deeply impacted American culture. Donald Trump built a larger cult – MAGA- which took over the US government for four years and to this day threatens the very survival of the democratic state (current indictments not withstanding). Experts in authoritarianism and fascism perceive the threat quite clearly. New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat says “I see Trump as a cult leader. So [his followers] are cult followers, personality cult followers.”

In the future, presidential historians and researchers of new media mind-control techniques and state spookery will no doubt unearth many dark secrets about the Trump Years. In the meantime, one might ask: What does Donald Trump have in common with the late Charles Manson? There is certainly a stark contrast between their respective family backgrounds: Trump born rich and privileged; Manson born poor, to an alcoholic mother and an absent father. The similarities, however, are noticeable and many:

  • Toxic family relationships.
  • Delusions of being god-like.
  • Messianic/apocalyptic dogma
  • Pathological narcissism.
  • Inflated sense of entitlement and victimhood.
  • A taste for inflicting harm.
  • Sexual abuse. Rape.
  • Weaponization of racism.
  • Endlessly repeated lies and false promises.
  • Friends and protectors in high places (especially the secret state).
  • An ability to get indoctrinated followers to commit violent crimes –and do time for it, pending future absolution (or presidential pardon in Trump’s case).
  • Careers in the entertainment industry.
  • Determination to fulfil the cult’s ‘mission’ even from a prison cell.
  • Plotting insurrection and civil war.

Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ – A Case Study in Violent Cultism

Four years ago, Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties tore a few strips off the ‘official version’ propounded in the book Helter Skelter by the corrupt Manson Trial prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi.

The story begins in March 1967 – around the time Donald Trump was lying to the draft board about his bone spurs. 32-year-old Charles Manson was released from prison on parole after serving 7 years for check forgery. His parole supervisor, Roger Smith, who was researching gang violence and drug use, had the bright idea of sending drug-abuser and gangster Manson to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, just as the summer of love was getting underway.

In San Francisco, Manson, the guitar-strumming sugar-daddy, slid into his new career as a cult builder. Many of his recruits were under-age girls, whom he sent out to prostitute themselves, deal drugs and steal. In July 1967, Manson was sentenced to three years probation for obstructing a police officer who arrested a 14-year old girl he had recruited. But this didn’t prevent Smith from filing a report in which he claimed that ‘Mr Manson has made excellent progress’ in becoming a respectable citizen. In fact his whole cult was granted respectability. In O’Neill’s words, ‘The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbits.’

Roger Smith ran an Amphetamine Research Project at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which had been founded by his namesake, David Smith. The two Smiths jointly wrote a study of the Manson Family for the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, entitled ‘The Group Marriage Commune’, based on ‘participant-observer’ research at the Family ranch. The Smiths’ research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which was later found to have been used by the CIA as a front for the agency’s MK-Ultra ‘mind control’ project.

Dr Jolyon West, later exposed for his role in the CIA’s ‘mind control’ project, was provided with an office at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic to recruit subjects for ‘LSD research’. After West died in 1999, O’Neill found crucial correspondence between West and Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra. In a letter dated 11 June 1953, West wrote to Gottlieb outlining proposals for a project to use hypnosis and drugs to extract information from unwilling subjects, to induce amnesia of the interrogation, and alter ‘the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew’.

West added that the experiments ‘must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field’. O’Neill comments ‘All these were the goals of MK-Ultra and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.’ When O’Neill asked psychology professor Alan Scheflin if the Manson murders might have been an MK-Ultra experiment gone wrong, the professor replied, ‘No. An MK-Ultra experiment gone right.’ This was informed speculation, but necessarily so, given that the CIA operational files on MK-Ultra had been destroyed by Gottlieb in 1973.

The Manson Murders

In late 1968, Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ moved to the Spahn ranch, a 55-acre spread in Los Angeles County, California, which had previously been used as a set for filming westerns.

On 1 July 1969 a Black man named Bernard Crowe visited the Spahn ranch to complain about being ripped off by Family member Tex Watson in a marijuana deal. Days later, Manson went to Crowe’s Hollywood apartment, shot him in the stomach and left him for dead. (Unknown to Manson, Crowe survived and would eventually testify against him in court.) Manson told his followers that Crowe was a member of the Black Panther Party (he wasn’t) and that the Beatles White Album song, ‘Helter Skelter’, was a ‘prophecy’ of full-scale race war.

On 25 July, Manson and several accomplices invaded the home of Gary Hinman, a musician associate of Tex Watson. After two days of brutal torture, Manson realised there was no money to be had and ordered Bobby Beausoleil to kill him. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and wrote ‘Political Piggy’ on the wall in blood. Hinman’s body was discovered by friends on 31 July. Beausoleil was arrested on 6 August for theft of Hindman’s station wagon, in which police found the murder weapon. Beausoleil concocted a story that Hinman had been killed by two Black Panther militants.

On the night of 8 August 1969, Manson sent four members of the Family – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Linda Kasabian and Tex Watson – to the mansion home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon. On entering the property, Watson shot and stabbed to death 18-year old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker and was sitting in his car. In the house the gang found Voytek Frykowski, an aspiring Polish filmmaker; Abigail Folger, his girlfriend; Jay Sebring, a hairstylist; and the pregnant Sharon Tate (Polanski was away, making a film in Paris). All four of them were tied up, then knifed to death as they begged for mercy. Susan Atkins soaked a towel in Sharon Tate’s blood and used it to write ‘Pig’ on the wall.

The following night the four killers teamed up with other members of the Family: Clem Grogan, Leslie Van Houten and Charles Manson himself. They piled into a camper van and drove around the suburbs of Los Angeles, looking for another target. Manson entered the home of chain store entrepreneur Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, and tied them up at gunpoint. Manson then returned to the van and ordered Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkle to go in and stab the couple to death. After killing the couple, Watson carved the word ‘War’ on Leno’s stomach. On the walls, the killers wrote ‘Rise’, ‘Death to pigs’ and ‘Healter [sic] Skelter’ in their victims’ blood.

The LA police were now investigating three killing sprees which had in common the reference to ‘pigs’ written on the walls in blood. But despite the arrest of Beausoleil in connection with Hindman’s murder they chose to ignore the signs that the residents of the Spahn ranch might be involved. This was especially strange as they had been secretly watching comings and goings at the ranch for weeks.

On 16 August – a week after the Cielo Drive murders – the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office (LASO) mobilised dozens of officers and a SWAT team in a raid on the Spahn ranch. The raid had nothing to do with murders; they were looking for firearms, drugs and stolen property, which they found aplenty. Given that Manson and several of his followers were also in clear violation of their parole terms, they could have all been jailed there and then. But all were released without charges three days later. They were thus free to carry on killing. And they did. On 26 August Hollywood stuntman Donald Shea was killed because Manson thought he had provided the police with information that led to the 16 August raid (his body was eventually discovered in an excavation at the ranch in 1977).

Rock and Roll

Like Trump, Manson was determined to carve out a name for himself in the entertainment industry.

During the four months it took the Los Angeles police to connect Manson with the murders, the media speculated that somehow the hedonists of Hollywood, with their sex-and-drugs lifestyles, had brought disaster onto themselves. Manson was more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. The Cielo Drive mansion had previously been occupied by record producer Terry Melcher, who had auditioned Manson in May 1969 for a record deal. Melcher had been introduced to Manson by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Melcher, Wilson and songwriter Gregg Jacobson – nicknamed the ‘Golden Penetrators’ – were welcoming to the Family, who took over Wilson’s house for the summer, supplying drugs and sexual favours while running up massive bills for food, clothes, car repairs and gonorrhoea treatment. Dennis Wilson told Rave magazine,

‘Sometimes the Wizard frightens me. The Wizard is Charlie Manson, who is a friend of mine, who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records [the Beach Boys’ label].’

Bobby Beausoleil later claimed that Melcher promised to pay Manson $5,000 for his song ‘Cease to Exist’ (which the Beach Boys recorded as ‘Cease to Resist’) but then reneged on the deal. In August 1968 Wilson moved house and Manson moved the Family into the Spahn ranch.

Dennis Wilson and Greg Jakobson knew that Manson had previously shot Bernard Crowe. When O’Neill managed to get an interview with Melcher decades later he was met by evasions, denials, and threats to sue him and his publisher, Premiere magazine.

According to ex-LASO detective Preston Guillory, the police didn’t go after Manson ‘because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers after intelligence had revealed Manson’s shooting of Bernard Crowe. Guillory told O’Neill: ‘I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on. Cause a stir. Blame it on the Panthers . . . Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.’ Another interviewee, former assistant District Attorney Lewis Watnick, made the ‘educated guess’ that ‘Manson was an informant’.

COINTELPRO

Two of most notorious secret-state campaigns to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the American Left were the CIA’s CHAOS, an illegal domestic surveillance program, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Both of them targeted the Black Panthers. In the summer of 1969, COINTELPRO activities were at their most murderous (such as arranging assassinations of Panthers by cops or by rivals such as the United Slaves Organisation). In August 1967, J Edgar Hoover reanimated COINTELPRO ‘to prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability’. The Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive had become a gathering place for ‘liberal Hollywood’ figures such as Mama Cass, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda – all of whom were reportedly under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, one of the Cielo victims, was an outspoken civil rights activist. Hoover’s memo says,

‘An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of the PFP [Peace and Freedom Party] in which it is set forth that the BPP [Black Panther Party] has made statements in closed meetings that when armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.’

As O’Neill points out, ‘Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.’

Two of a Kind?

In today’s MAGA world, for Black Panthers read Black Lives Matter; for Anti-War movement read ‘Antifa’.

As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.

(‘Beyond Bugliosi: the Manson murders revisited’, my full review of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), appeared in Lobster magazine Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

 

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Channel Four: Dumbed Down and Dumbing

Earlier this year, in yet another government U-turn, a plan to privatise Channel Four was quietly dropped. But considering how much the content has been dumbed down since its ‘golden age’, should anyone have cared? No and yes.

A warning from television history

David Black

9 August 2023

Earlier this year, in yet another government U-turn, a plan to privatise Channel Four was quietly dropped. But considering how much the content has been dumbed down since its ‘golden age’, should anyone have cared? No and yes.

Channel 4 was launched in 1982. Its first chief executive was Sir Jeremy Isaacs, a ground-breaking maker of television documentaries, such as the award-winning World at War series. With a strong team of commissioning editors, Isaacs encouraged upcoming talent to produce documentaries, arts programmes, and dramas.  And so they did.

If you could time-travel back 40 years to spend three evenings watching Channel Four from 25-27 July 1983, you could watch the following:

Communes and Windups. Self-sufficiency series visits communes in Wales and Scotland.

The Best of CLR James. Veteran Caribbean Marxist historian affirms the legacy of Marx and Lenin and argues –contrary to the practice of the Soviet Union – socialism means democracy.

A Veiled Revolution. On the regression of the status of women in Egypt under the rise of Political Islamism.

For What it’s Worth. Exposure of consumer rip-offs by Penny Junor and Which? magazine.

Brookside. Scouse, leftish, working class soap opera, which had 9 million viewers at its peak.

Eastern Eye. Asian-oriented magazine programme tackling the controversy over arranged marriages.

Ulster Landscape. Exploration of ruined castles and settlements in Northern Ireland.

Opinions. Jonathan Steinberg, banker turned Cambridge academic on the current economic crisis.

Letters Home. A 90-minute drama about the life, poetry and suicide of Sylvia Plath.

Mozart. Piano concerto number 24 in C minor at the Helmsley Festival.

Bake Off. Munchy hour.

Now compare with the output for 25-27 July 2023:

Sky Coppers. Police PR.

999: On the Frontline. Ditto.

First Dates. Cringe Porn.

George Clarke’s Old House. Renovating your way up the property ladder.

Britain’s Most Expensive Housing. Mansion porn.

The Girl from Plainville. Crime drama mini-series. US import.

Gogglebox. Celebrity couch-potatoes discussing bad TV programmes.

Dog Academy. Therapy/training for dogs and their owners.

Supervet. Tearjerker for animal lovers with ‘cutting edge’ surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick.

Sun, Sea and Selling Houses. Rain-soaked post-Brexit Brits expating to sunny Spain.

Get the picture? In 1983 C4 was a “public service broadcaster”. What is it now?

According to the Daily Mail’s Stephen Glover:

“I’m afraid the rot began with the appointment of Michael Grade as his successor. Jeremy Isaacs is said to have wept when he heard that Lord Grade (as he now is) was to replace him…. Michael Grade plunged Channel 4 downmarket, sanctioning tacky programmes such as The Word magazine show (featuring viewers eating worms or bathing in pig’s urine), Eurotrash (nudity and transvestism) and Dyke TV.”

Glover, in this screed written back in 2011, seemed to see the changes as stemming from moral degeneracy and “pornography” (a present-day Daily Mail hack would no doubt complain about “wokery”). However, Glover also noted, “Only a few months earlier, Isaacs had criticised him [Grade] for his obsession with ratings while he was BBC director of programmes.”  So it was all about driving ratings-determined revenue. It still is; only more so.

Recently, Phil Redmond, creator and producer of Brookside, told the Daily Telegraph (28 October 2022) that in the 1980s,

“What we had then was this British ingenuity, creating something out of nothing … And it was good. It was great for a while. Then telly folk got involved. The ’90s became a time where people just wanted to be ‘in telly’.”

As regards Channel 4’s current bosses, Alex Mahon and Ian Katz, Redmond says, “I think they really don’t understand what Channel 4 is about any more.”

Have they lost sight of the original remit?

“Absolutely. It’s gone completely. I’d characterise it now as a privileged clique, making programmes for a particular audience but actually not contributing enough to the public service debate.”

Also, the ratings are down. Deadline (5 June2023) reports that for May this year Channel 4’s UK reach stood at 35.8M, down 3.5M on May last year; and its UK network audience share was down to 4.48% – the worst four-week period in its 40-year history. This isn’t just a problem for C4. With the inexorable rise of non-linear outlets such as You Tube and Tik Tok, linear TV viewing has dropped across all age groups, but has fallen 23% year-on-year among 16 to 24-year-olds, who now watch a third less than they did in 2010, preferring instead to watch online.

if there is good reason for keeping the channel as public-service broadcasting it has to be Channel Four News, which retains a sense of independence of the Tory/Blue Labour establishment which effectively calls the tune for the  BBC’s Newsnight. C4News still has moments to savour: like when anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy had a hot mic moment after a “robust” interview with Northern Ireland minister, Steve Baker. Thinking he was off-air Guru-Murthy quipped to a colleague, “What a cunt.” Guru-Murthy apologised for this lapse in professional conduct (if not accurate judgement) and got the very light sentence from the C4 bosses of a week’s banishment. The BBC would likely have sacked him.

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‘Humorous courage’ and ‘fearful realism’ – George Orwell on Jack Hilton

By David Black

9 August 2022

Rochdale’s Jack Hilton (1900-83) was hailed in the 1930s as a great novelist by George Orwell and WH Auden, but died modestly and unacclaimed. For 80 years his novels have been virtually impossible to get hold of after they went out of print, the ownership of the publishing rights being unknown. Now, Hilton’s works are getting back into print, thanks to the literary detective work of Jack Chadwick, a 28-year-old bartender and aspiring writer who discovered Caliban Shrieks while visiting Salford’s Working Class Movement Library last year.

“Caliban Shrieks has this unique quality that I hadn’t come across before and I found it so compelling,” Chadwick told the Independent.

“It’s so raw, it feels like it’s coming to you from across the pub table.”

As BPC couldn’t find George Orwell’s review of Caliban Shrieks online, we did a paper-search and transcribed it.

Adelphi magazine, March 1935.

Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton

Reviewed by George Orwell

This witty and unusual book may be described as an autobiography without narrative. Mr Hilton lets us know, briefly and in passing, that he is a cotton operative who has been in and out of work for years past, that he served in France during the latter part of the war, and that he has also been on the road, been in prison, etc etc; but he wastes little time in explanations and none in description. In effect his book is a series of comments on life as it appears when one’s income is two pounds a week or less. Here, for instance, is Mr Hilton’s account of his own marriage:

Despite the obvious recognition of marriage’s disabilities, the bally thing took place. With it came, not the entrancing mysteries of the bedroom, nor the passionate soul-stirring of two sugar-candied Darby and Joans, but the practised resolve that, come what may, be the furnishers’ dues met or no, the rent paid or spent, we – the wife and I – would commemorate our marriage by having, every Sunday morn, ham and eggs, So it was we got one over on the poet, with his madness of love, the little dove birds, etc.

There are obvious disadvantages in this manner of writing — in particular, it assumes a width of experience which many readers would not possess. On the other hand, the book has a quality which the objective, descriptive kind of book almost invariably misses. It deals with its subject from the inside, and consequently it gives one, instead of a catalogue of facts relating to poverty, a vivid notion of what it feels like to be poor. All the time that one reads one seems to hear Mr Hilton’s voice, and what is more, one seems to hear the voices of the innumerable industrial workers whom he typifies. The humorous courage, the fearful realism and the utter imperviousness to middle-class ideals, which characterise the best type of industrial worker, are all implicit in Mr Hilton’s way of talking. This is one of those books that succeed in conveying a frame of mind, and that takes more doing than the’ mere telling of a story.

Books like this, which come from genuine workers and present a genuinely working-class outlook, are exceedingly rare and correspondingly important. They are the voices of a normally silent multitude. All over England, in every industrial town, there are men by scores of thousands whose attitude to life, if only they could express it, would be very much what Mr Hilton’s is. If all of them could get their thoughts on to paper they would change the whole consciousness of our race. Some of them try to do so, of course; but in almost every case, inevitably, what a mess they make of it! I knew a tramp once who was writing his autobiography. He was quite young, but he had had a most interesting life which included, among other things, a jail-escape in America, and he could talk about it entrancingly. But as soon as he took a pen in his hand he became not only boring beyond measure but utterly unintelligible. His prose style was modelled upon Peg’s Paper (“With a wild cry I sank in a stricken heap” etc), and his ineptitude with words was so great that after wading through two pages of laboured description you could not even be certain what he was attempting to describe. Looking back upon that autobiography and number of similar documents that I have seen, I realise what a considerable literary gift must have gone into the making of Mr Hilton’s book.

As to the sociological information that Mr Hilton provides, I have only one fault to find. He has evidently not been in the Casual Ward since the years just after the war, and he seems to have been taken in by the lie, widely published during the last few years, to the effect that casual paupers are now given a “warm meal” at midday. I could a tale unfold about those “warm meals”. Otherwise, all his facts are entirely accurate so far as I am able to judge, and his remarks on prison life, delivered with an extraordinary absence of malice, are some of the most interesting that I have read.

 

 

HL Mencken – Words As Weapons

“As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

“That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words. . . . Yes this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.”

Richard Wright, Black Boy, The Richard Wright Reader, (New York: Harper &Row, 1978), p. 17.

CBS broadcast – Radio Biography 1956