Jameson on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers

Here's what I referred to in a recent email about Fredric Jameson's excited comments on the LRBW, on our book, and on the film.  A slightly better version of this is found in the conclusion to his influential tome, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (pgs 413-415).    There he opines that The League was "the single most significant political experience of the American 1960s."  These are words of extraordinary high praise from America's leading marxist literary critic. 

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excerpt from Fredric Jameson:

. . . .   If you cannot build socialism in one city, then suppose you conquer a whole series of large key urban centers in succession.  This is what the League of Black Revolutionary Workers began to think about; that is to say, they began to feel that their movement was a political model and ought to be generalizable.  The problem that arises is spatial: how to develop a national political movement on the basis of a city strategy and politics.  At any rate, the leadership of the League began to spread the word in other cities and traveled to Italy and Sweden to study workers' strategies there and to explain their own model; reciprocally, out of town politicos came to Detroit to investigate the new strategies. At this point it ought to be clear that we are in the middle of the problem of representation, not the least of it being signaled by the appearance of that ominous American word "leadership."  In a more general way, however, these trips were more than networking, making contacts, spreading information: they raised the problem of how to represent a unique local model and experience to people in other situations.  So it was logical for the League to make a film of their experience, and a very fine and exciting film it is.
    Spatial discontinuities, however, are more devious and dialectical, and they are not overcome in any of the most obvious ways. For example, they returned on the Detroit experience as some ultimate limit before which it collapsed. What happened was that the jetsetting militants of the League had become media stars; not only were they becoming alienated from their local constituencies, but, worse than that, nobody stayed home to mind the store.  Having acceded to a larger spatial plane, the base vanished under them; and with this the most successful social revolutionary experiment of that rich political decade in the United States came to a sad undramatic end.  I do not want to say that it left no traces behind, since a number of local gains remain, and in any case every rich political experiment continues to feed the tradition in underground ways.  Most ironic in our context, however, is the very success of their failure: the representation -- the model of this complex spatial dialectic -- triumphantly survives in the form of a film and a book, but in the process of becoming an image and a spectacle, the referent seems to have disappeared, as so many people from Debord to Baudrillard always warned us it would.
    Yet this very example may serve to illustrate the proposition that successful spatial representation today need not be some uplifting socialist-realist drama of revolutionary triumph, but may be equally inscribed in a narrative of defeat, which sometimes, even more effectively, causes the whole architectonic of postmodern global space to rise up in ghostly profile behind itself, as some ultimate dialectical barrier or invisible limit.   This example also may have given a bit more meaning to the slogan of cognitive mapping to which I now turn. . . .

Whole presentation from Jameson can be downloaded here: 
http://www.scribd.com/doc/56416345

1st meeting debrief

Roger, Phil, Jonathan, and I met for the 1st meeting, a 2-hour discussion that ranged all the way from personal memories of the racial stratification in Detroit in the '70s, to a bit of local Portland stuff, and then onward to issues of immigration and postcolonial theory (although we didn't name it that exactly).  How we got there from the opening chapters in this book might appear to be mysterious, but it was more directly obvious if you were in the discussion.  But everything is connected to everything else, so you hang on for the ride that might veer off at any intersection or pause at some vista that looks out for as far as you can see.  

Some items of business and recent updates: 

• AK Press told me on the phone that they lost our order, and besides they have 0 copies of our book.  This past month we assumed that the order was being shipped.  So... now with no books, I will be posting scanned in chapters for you to download.  
• To avoid scheduling conflicts, our schedule is now revised (see above).
• We opened by noting a local coincidence.  Martin Glaberman is mentioned (pg 16) as leading a study group on Marx's Das Kapital for the activists who went on to start a radical newspaper (Inner City Voice) and the union and then the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.  The coincidence is that our PDX IWW branch now has Glaberman's library -- some 2000 books -- but we still need to find an appropriate space for those books. 

Tentative schedule

We're beginning.  The book is Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution.  You can read one review under the Linkage in the column on the right side here.   You can also get a PDF file of the opening chapters.  You can also watch the film online from the Linkage.  It is titled Finally Got the News.  One chapter in the book covers the film, how it got made, why it was never finished, and what happened to the union before during and after the film.

The aim of this blog is to share notes and comments about our reading.  If you want to join in, just let me know and I'll add you as an "author" of this blog so that you can not only comment, but also post. 

Here's our revised meeting schedule:


*  Thursday, May 12, 6 PM to 8 PM.  pages 1 - 43.  (overview and intro)
*  Tuesday, May  24,  6 PM to 8 PM.  pages 43 - 106.  (League of Revolutionary Black Workers and "niggermation")
*   Thursday,  June 9,    6 PM to 8 PM.  pages 106 - 150  ("Finally Got the News" and Black Workers Congress).
*  Tuesday, July 5,  6 PM to 8 PM.  pages 150 - 201.  (STRESS: "Stop the Robberies; Enjoy Safe Streets" and chapters on the marxist judge and the 54 hour work week.)

Again, this schedule is not set in stone, and is likely to change based on your feedback.  Let me know!

-- FW Erick