Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poetic loudspeaker of the Russian Revolution, came to socialist ideas with the enthusiasm of youth. He began to read Engels and illegal pamphlets under his desk-lid when he was 12. When later the same year his school was closed by Military Edict because of the 1905 uprising, he became chief school leaflet distributor. When he made his first contact with the illegal Bolshevik Party, he immediately presented them with his forester father’s shotgun. Aged 15, he was arrested in Moscow for helping to organise the escape of political prisoners from jail and was himself held in Novimsky Prison where he began to write poems. For the following 20 years he served the Revolution as a poet-agitator with the same audacity and passion. And when he shot himself in Moscow in 1930, he died a Bolshevik, brandishing his poems:
Read moreDays of Celebration
Editors' note: Naomi Weisstein passed a way in March. She was a pioneering voice for feminism in psychology and was a formidable socialist-feminist activist in the 1960's and 70's.
She was also a founding member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and of its musical group: the Chicago Women's Liberation Union Rock Band. The band was formed as an effort to push back against the chauvinism prevalent in popular music at the time and as a way to provide space for feminist art and culture to thrive. We publish this essay, which also appears at the CWLU Herstory Project, in her memory.
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In Chicago, one cold and sunny day in March of 1970, I decided to organize a feminist rock band. I was lying on the sofa listening to the radio -- a rare bit of free time in those early days of the women's movement. Perhaps a meeting had been canceled. The trendy station that had just switched to all-rock was playing a medley of hits. First, Mick Jagger crowed that his once feisty girlfriend was now "under his thumb." Then Janis Joplin moaned with thrilled resignation that love was like "a ball and chain." Then The Band, a self-consciously left-wing group, sang:
Read moreThe Worker's Maypole
Editors' Note: Walter Crane was a socialist, artist and children’s book illustrator; a part of the Arts and Crafts Movement inspired by socialist and artist William Morris. Crane produced some of the most memorable images in the cause of labor. He wrote this poem, reposted below in honor of International Workers' Day to accompany his illustration, “The Workers Maypole." Also reposted here are some of Crane's illustrations in service of international socialism.
Read moreThis Ain't China
Editors' note: Allan Sekula’s This Ain’t China (1974) was a photo-conceptual artwork that fused what would later be called social-practice art with a narrative aesthetic. Sekula seemed to echo the surrealism of Jean Luc Godard’s late 1960s political films (such as Weekend and La chinoise). Maoist China, a rallying point for the attenuated New Left, stands in as the bogeyman of American cultural and economic life. What is remarkable is that Sekula’s This Ain’t China avoids both the paternalism and faux neutrality of much latter social practice art. Instead of avoiding “metanarratives” Sekula creates one by staging photographs combined with text. He tells the semi-fictional story of a group of San Diego restaurant workers (including himself). They discuss their working conditions, organize a union and pose with weapons. In This Ain’t China Maoism exists as a touchstone for protagonists and antagonists alike. “China” exists as a pun; the plates in the diner where Sekula works are anything but “fine china.” For more on Allan Sekula’s This Ain’t China, read Monika Szewczyk’s “Negation Notes” on e-flux.
Read moreFrom London's Theatre World
Editors' note: It is a real shame that history has only remembered Jenny von Westphalen as the wife of Karl Marx. Though nowhere near as prolific a writer, she certainly held just as keen an intellect as he and had a talent with words to rival his own. The article below concerning the London theatrical scene reflects as much.
Westphalen loved the theatre, in particular the works of Shakespeare, and she was keenly aware that it could expose cultural contradictions under capitalism. This article focuses on one such contrast: between the enthusiasm held by London working class audiences for unique and honest reinterpretations of Shakespeare and the wooden panning such performances received from the bourgeois press and the middle classes. Today, re-imaginings of Shakespeare are commonplace, but in 1876 such works were apparently deemed not sufficiently authentic — at least not in the eyes of the major papers, who evidently wanted the same Hamlet, the same King Lear, the same Macbeth, every time.
Read moreLong Live Degenerate Art!
Editors’ note: The Egyptian surrealist movement really doesn’t get a whole lot of attention from scholars or radical arts types. This is a shame because in their short time they created some impressive work. And with the boot of repression firmly falling on the Egyptian revolution (along with the workers movement and any dissidence — political or cultural) it stands to reason that there is much to learn from the movement.
The manifesto published below was penned by artists who were affiliated not just with the global surrealist movement but by and large the Fourth International -- at that time the main global organization formed by allies of Leon Trotsky on the basis of a rejection of Stalinism. Andre Breton and a great many of surrealism’s luminaries in the West were likewise connected with the International and attempted to forge the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (acronymed as FIARI) toward the purpose of corralling artists in the name of creative freedom against both capitalism and Stalinism. The dawn of World War II meant that FIARI was practically stillborn.
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