Today in Labor History May 19, 1989: Trinidadian Marxist historian and journalist C.L.R. James died. James was the author of The Black Jacobins (1938), Breaking a Boundary (1963), numerous articles and essays on class and race antagonism, West Indian self-determination, cricket, Marxism, & aesthetics. In 1933, he published the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government. He was a champion of Pan-Africanism and a member of the Friends of Ethiopia, an organization opposed to fascism and the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. He also wrote a play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History. Paul Robeson starred in the 1936 British production.
Intriguing analysis of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and its central flaw.
From M. Keith Booker’s Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (2001) #scifi#sciencefiction#Marxism#history
Today in Labor History April 16, 1994: Ralph Ellison died on this day. Ellison was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for his book, The Invisible Man. He was friends with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He became active in the Communist Party, as did many of his peers. But he became disillusioned with them during World War II when he felt they became reformist. He wrote The Invisible Man during this era (published in 1952), in part, as a response their betrayal. But the book also looks at the relationship between black identity and Marxism, the reformism of Booker T. Washington, and issues of individuality and personal identity.
Prompted by a passing remark by @RustyBertrand I just reread Philip K Dick's novel 'Ubik'.
It has all the strangeness Dick's readers, or viewers of the famous films that have come from his work, like Total Recall and Bladerunner, will be familiar with. It follows a group of characters exercising psychic powers in corporate rivalries and espionage, in a future where people near death are frozen in 'half-life', always dreaming but visited from time to time and brought back to reality to talk with living friends and relatives. But this being Dick, both the characters and the reader soon come to question which is half-life, and which is really real...
But at first the most striking features of Ubik are the advertising parodies that appear at the head of every chapter, claiming amazing results for all kinds of commercial products, all called Ubik, and the fact that in the dystopian future it describes, commercialism has invaded every aspect of life - the insides of people's homes and families are dominated by coin-operated smart appliances - even the doors to your own home demand payment before they let you in. In this respect Ubik is, in fact, hematically similar to other 60s American novels like Catch-22 and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road - about the empty commercialisation and oppressive corporate culture of late capitalism. (Catch-22 is a multi-level satire, first on the absurdity of war, but through this the commercial labyrinth of modern American society.)
This is the world of capitalism just as Marx foresaw it: "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned."
Some readers have seen god in Ubik - influenced perhaps by Dick's later religious mysticism - but this makes no sense in the novel's own terms. Ubik is a commercial product that clearly alludes to the history of quack medicinal 'cure-alls' the very history that gave us the archetypal 'brand' Coca-Cola. It has all the appearances of a solution - it makes you feel better for a while, and it indeed seems sometimes to be omnipotent and omnipresent - 'ubiquitous'; but in the end, there is no salvation through commerce for the novel's characters - in the end, Ubik presents itself as all-powerful, but humanity is nevertheless still lost.
It's #BlackHistoryMonth, and in 2024 I'm reflecting on the fact that although I've known about Walter Rodney and his seminal work "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" for years, it wasn't until I started reading it last year that I found out that Rodney was assassinated by his own Guyanese government in a car bombing. He was 38.
I'm obligated to point out to fellow white people, in case you missed it, the trend of white people lionizing a heroic Black person in a show of solidarity while studiously ignoring the vicious violence enacted against that person by the powers that be.
Also, Rodney was banned from Jamaica and from his teaching position at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. This caused protests that escalated to riots in Kingston in 1968. Part of the wave of protests that swept the world from that year to the next.
Today in Labor History October 15, 1966: The Black Panther Party was created by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, in Oakland, California. One of their early core practices was open-carry armed citizen’s patrols monitoring abusive police behavior. They also implemented free breakfast programs and community health clinics, and advocated for revolutionary class struggle. The FBI sabotaged the Panthers through its COINTELPRO and participated in the assassination of Panthers, like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. In 1969, the Panthers officially declared sexism to be counterrevolutionary and ordered its male members to treat women as equals. In 1970, Huey Newton expressed support for the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the LGBTQ Liberation Movement which, he correctly noted, were subject to much of the same police brutality as were African Americans.
A new article up on my website Sociological Infatuation about world historical political economist and general dirtbag Karl Marx. This is an introduction aimed at community college #sociology students and instructors looking to approach this material. This is not focused on various critiques of #Marxism because it was already 2,200 words and I wanted to get something out.
"One of the most interesting parts of the book was the section on Emerson, in which West places Emerson in the larger historical context of thinkers like Marx and Nietzsche. I had not realized before how similar Emerson’s outlook is to Nietzsche, and it made me wonder how many Nietzscheans are unwitting Emersonians."
"The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working
class" (Marx 1872)