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