Volume 54, Number 3 | July/August 2002
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Volume 54, Number 3 | July/August 2002 |
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Cultures of the U.S. Left » Fifty-four years ago when MR was being
planned, one of the questions that the editors, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy,
had to decide was whether to have a section at the back of the magazine on
literature and the arts, what in publisher's parlance is called "the back
of the book." The MR editors decided not to do so, mainly for practical
reasons. They did not feel that they had the necessary knowledge and training
to do a good job editorially with such cultural material, and they felt sure
that in the circumstances that the U.S. left then found itself they could not
count on the support of enough serious socialist critics to sustain an arts
section meeting the same standards as MR as a whole. In 1963, the first of
these conditions changed temporarily, when Frances Kelly, who had been Business
Manager of the New Left Review in London and whose special field of
competence was the arts, came to work with the MR editors as Assistant and then
Associate Editor. Under Frances Kelly's editorship, MR published a cultural
supplement called Review 1 as an experiment in 1965. The Cultures of
Socialism in the United States The little-understood roots of the left offer us the chance to demonstrate a vital continuity. A bridge just now being rediscovered exists between the nineteenth century Euro-American traditions upon which the modern Marxist movements were founded, and the cultures (i.e., the collective, including artistic, expression) of minority populations old and new to the United States. At the bottom of the social ladder and increasingly at the heart of blue-collar class life, the latter groups have only in recent decades begun to be studied as potential agents of transformation. Since the 1965 change in immigration law, a new working class, largely but by no means entirely from the Caribbean Basin region (including Mexico and Central America), has taken shape. That new class has served to remind keen observers that the black, Asian, and Latino working populations were never absent. Indeed, large numbers of "Mexicans" along with Indians predated Europeans, afterwards suffering the continuing shocks of colonization. These groups were merely outside the purview of organized labor at large, and-despite often ardent efforts-outside the reach of the political left as well. A grasp of continuity removes the subject from the realm of antiquarianism (or mere sentimental backward-looking) and makes it available for today's political priorities. Red New York On the panorama of the twentieth century, occasionally a red glow emanated from a city electrified by the culture of the left: red Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s; Moscow, after the Revolution; Weimar Berlin; Paris '68. Midcentury New York, with its Broadway musicals, liberal Democratic leaders, and commercialized mass culture, seems a world apart. "Cultural Capital of the World," some dubbed it, not for its radicalism, but for its embrace of depoliticized modernism-abstract painting, modern dance, jazz, International-style architecture.1Yet in its own way, New York in the 1940s and early 1950s had a tangle of left culture as dense as any in the history of the United States. One or Two Things
I Know about Us: Rethinking the Image and Role of the
“Okies” While at work on this paper, I glanced at the headline in the morning newspaper: "SWAT Team Kills Gunman at Sacramento Tax Office," and I said to myself, "Probably an Okie." I read the article and found no reference to Okies—that would never happen in California these days—but the evidence was there: A white man named Jim Ray Holloway, age fifty-three, from Manteca, wearing a cowboy hat, carrying a rifle, a shotgun, and a hand gun, ex-cop, mad about taxes. The name, the age, the hometown in the agricultural Central Valley, the cowboy hat, the kinds of weapons, the career, the lightening rage at the state, all point to his being an Okie. Mike Alewitz,
Labor Muralist The reappearance of the mural marks the return of painting from the museum to its public role in the human community. The work of muralist Mike Alewitz and the collective character of his projects draw upon centuries or eons of collaborative activity, from cave paintings to Michelangelo, the Dada and Surrealist movements to political graffiti. Alewitz's approach is ideally suited to the postmodern and post-state socialist era when everything rebellious must be created anew and when "culture" along with "labor" is urgently needed to salvage a world from eco-disaster, perpetual war, and the plundering of human possibility. The art of Alewitz and Co. (with the Co. constantly changing) has already been part of labor's recovery from decades of poor leadership, part of the struggle for democratic unions in a changing global marketplace and with a rapidly changing workforce. The Left and Popular Culture: Film and
Television There's an almost unknown story about progressives and solid left-wingers near the centers of U.S. popular culture. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this can be found in Hollywood itself-in film and television (often regarded as the apex of U.S. popular culture). Since at least the middle 1930s, stars and their vehicles have added legitimacy, luster, and funding to progressive and radical causes. Not only Charlie Chaplin, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra (sometimes), Humphrey Bogart, and Katharine Hepburn, but also Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe, and Danny Kaye, and on some issues Rita Hayworth, Betty Davis, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Ryan, not to mention character actors like Jack Gilford, Zero Mostel, Sam Jaffe, Morris Carnovsky, Marsha Hunt, Howard da Silva, Jeff Corey, John Randolph, and Anne Revere, could all be counted upon until things got risky (and for most of the last group in particular, far beyond). Hundreds more writers, directors, editors, choreographers, and cinematographers, including some of the most prestigious in the business, were more often directly involved in left politics, although their names were never widely recognized. Left Turns in the Chicano Movement,
1965–1975 The following three articles by Chicano/a writers depict the left within that movement in the Southwest during the years 1965-1975. The first article is an overview of the movement by Jorge Mariscal. Arnoldo García offers a study of the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), probably the best-known organization on the Chicano/Mexicano left in the 1965-1975 period. Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez's article focuses on left and other radical forces within the movement in New Mexico.-P.B. The recycled stereotype of the Chicano movement of the Vietnam war era as a narrowly nationalist and separatist social movement continues to dominate contemporary historiography. The feminist critique of the movimiento which began in the late 1960s and developed into the 1980s was certainly a necessary adjustment to foundational Chicano/a intellectual and activist agendas. But the faux-radicalism fashionable in U.S. universities by the late 1980s cast early Chicano/a militancy in much the same light as did the neoconservative project during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton period. Coupled with academic pronouncements condemning "master narratives" and "essentialisms," a multifront revisionist project designed to discredit the entire 1960s inevitably targeted the movimiento. Toward a Left Without Borders: The Story of
the Center for Autonomous Social Action—General Brotherhood of
Workers A unique left organization of Mexican and Mexican-American workers emerged in the 1960s whose story still waits to be told. Meanwhile, these brief notes on its history by a former member should at least help to show why it was such an important, pioneering project. A View from New
Mexico: Recollections of the Movimiento Left If ever there has been a chapter of the U.S. left with deep cultural roots in every sense, it is the movimiento of New Mexico. The roots include social relations, economic traditions, political forms, artistic expression, and language—everything that defines peoplehood. They are Native American, Spanish, and Mexican mestizo (mixed) and they go back centuries. Migrant workers of the last 150 years have played a crucial part, but "immigrant" does not describe the totality of those roots. Kim Stanley Robinson, Science Fiction
Socialist Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the most highly-awarded science fiction (SF) writers anywhere, winning the Nebula and Hugo Awards with his Mars series (Green Mars, Red Mars, Blue Mars, and The Martians), among a dozen other novels and short story collections. Especially treasured by science fiction readers for his knowledge of "hard science," he is often regarded by left-leaning readers as the successor to Ursula Le Guin, the peace- and ecology-minded writer famed since the early 1970s. BOOK
REVIEW A review of Granny D: Walking Across America in My 90th Year by Doris Haddock (with Dennis Burke). |
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