Tom Morello Responds to Angry Fans Who Suddenly Realize That Rage Against the Machine’s Music Is Political: “What Music of Mine DIDN’T Contain Political BS?”

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | June 11th, 2020

“I, Dancing Bear,” a song by an obscure folk artist who goes by the name Birdengine, begins thus:

There are some things that I just do not care to know

It’s a lovely little tune, if maudlin and macabre are your thing, a song one might almost call anti-political. It is the art of solipsism, denial, an inwardness that dances over the abyss of pure self, navel gazing for its own sake. It is Kafka-esque, pathetic, and hysterical. I love it.

My appreciation for this weird, outsider New Romanticism does not entail a belief that art and culture should be “apolitical,” whatever that is.

Or that artists, writers, musicians, actors, athletes, or whomever should shut up about politics and stick to what they do best, talk about themselves.

The idea that artists should avoid politics seems so pervasive that fans of some of the most blatantly political, radical artists have never noticed the politics, because, I guess, they just couldn’t be there.

One such fan just got dunked on, as they say, a whole bunch on Twitter when he raged against Tom Morello for the “political bs.”

That’s Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, whose debut 1992 album informed us that the police and the Klan work hand in hand, and that cops are the “chosen whites” for state-sanctioned murder. That Rage Against the Machine, who raged against the same Machine on every album: “Bam, here’s the plan; Motherfuck Uncle Sam.”

The poor sod was burned so badly he deleted his account, but the laughs at his expense kept coming. Even Morello responded.

Why? Because the disgruntled former fan is not just one lone crank who didn’t get it. Many people over the years have expressed outrage at finding out there’s so much politics in their culture, even in a band like Rage that could not have been less subtle. Many, like former lever-puller of the Machine, Paul Ryan, seem to have cynically missed the point and turned them into workout music. Morello’s had to point this out a lot. (Ditto Springsteen.)

This uncritical consumption of culture without a thought about icky political issues is maybe one reason we have a separate political class, paid handsomely to do the dirty work while the rest of us go shopping. It’s a recipe for mass ignorance and fascism.

You might think me crazy if I told you that the CIA is partly responsible for our expectation that art and culture should be apolitical. The Agency did, after all, follow the lead of the New Critics, who excluded all outside political and social considerations from art (so they said).

Influential literary editors and writing program directors on the Agency payroll made sure to fall in line, promoting a certain kind of writing that focused on the individual and elevated psychological conflict over social concerns. This influence, writes The Chronicle of Higher Education, “flattened literature” and set the boundaries for what was culturally acceptable. (Still, CIA-funded journals like The Paris Review published dozens of “political” writers like Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and James Baldwin.)

Then there’s the whole business of Hollywood film as a source of Pentagon-funded propaganda, sold as innocuous, apolitical entertainment….

When it comes to journalism, an ideal of objectivity, like Emerson’s innocent, disembodied transparent eye, became a standard only in the 20th century, ostensibly to weed out political bias. But that ideal serves the interests of power more often than not. If media represents existing power relationships without questioning their legitimacy, it can claim objectivity and balance; if it challenges power, it becomes too “political.”

The adjective is weaponized against art and culture that makes certain people who have power uncomfortable. Saying “I don’t like political bs in my culture” is saying “I don’t care to know the politics are there.”

If, after decades of pumping “Killing in the Name,” you finally noticed them, then all that’s happened is you’ve finally noticed. Culture has always included the political, whether those politics are shaped by monarchs or state agencies or shouted in rap metal songs (just ask Ice‑T) and fought over on Twitter. Maybe now it’s just getting harder to look away.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Imagining the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Debate That Never Happened

in History, Politics | June 9th, 2020

American history as it’s usually taught likes to focus on rivalries, and there are many involving big personalities and major historical stakes. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. These figures are set up to represent the “both sides” we expect of every political question. While the issues are oversimplified (there are always more than two sides and politics isn’t a sport) the figures in question genuinely represented very different perspectives on power and progress.

When it comes to the history of the Civil Rights movement, we are given another such rivalry, between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Their ideas and influence are pitted against each other as though they had shared a debate stage. In fact, the two leaders met only once, during Senate debates on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “King was stepping out of a news conference,” writes DeNeen L. Brown at The Washington Post, when Malcolm X, dressed in an elegant black overcoat and wearing his signature horn-rimmed glasses, greeted him.”

“Well, Malcolm, good to see you,” King said.

“Good to see you,” Malcolm X replied.

Cameras clicked as the two men walked down the Senate hall together.

“I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle,” Malcolm X told King.

Later, King would express his disagreement with Malcolm’s “political and philosophical views—at least insofar as I understand where he now stands.” The comment allowed for an evolution in X’s thought that would, in fact, occur that year, while later events would push King in a far more radical direction. As Brown writes:

Although the two men held what appeared to be diametrically opposing views on the struggle for equal rights, scholars say by the end of their lives their ideologies were evolving. King was becoming more militant in his views of economic justice for black people and more vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War. Malcolm X, who had broken with the Nation of Islam, had dramatically changed his views on race during his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca.

“Much of America did not know the radical King—and too few know today,” writes Cornell West in his introduction to The Radical King, a collection of lesser-known speeches and writings. But “the FBI and US government did. They called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’” Malcolm X’s extremely harsh criticism of King as “a 20th-century or modern Uncle Tom” is even more unfair and unwarranted against this background, especially given the title of King’s final, undelivered, sermon: “Why America May Go to Hell.”

In the years after X’s death, King fought for labor rights and advocated for “a better distribution of wealth,” writing in 1966, “America must move toward democratic socialism.” His anti-imperialist, anti-colonial stance alienated many former supporters and enraged the government, but “he refused to silence his voice in his quest for unarmed truth and unconditional love,” West writes. Maybe Malcolm’s unrelenting criticisms played a part in King’s radicalization.

The video “debate” above—actually a 9‑minute edit of their interview discussions of each other—begins with one of Malcolm X’s withering statements about King’s nonviolent resistance, which he characterizes as “defenselessness.” One can see, given the ad hominem attacks, why King refused requests for a debate. Had it happened, however, it might have gone something like this, with questions focused solely on violence vs. nonviolence as effective and/or morally justifiable tactics for the Civil Rights struggle.

The nuances and sickening historical ironies of the question get lost when disagreement is staged as a zero-sum prizefight, as the Rocky theme in the intro not-so-subtly suggests it is. King, X, and virtually every other civil rights leader throughout history, understood the practical importance of self-defense in a violently racist state. “Even the pacifist King was a firm advocate of black gun ownership,” writes John Merfield at Wisconsin Public Radio,” although he, like others, drew a sharp distinction between self-defense, which he saw as legitimate, and political violence, which he called folly.”

King also staunchly refused to address the question of violence outside the larger question of justice, without which, he said, there could be no peace. Movement leaders like Angela Davis who carried forward the radical, anti-imperialist analysis of both the later King and X would continue to push against the simplistic question of whether violence is justified as a response to brutal oppression. In a famous interview clip above, she demonstrates the absurdity of the idea that people subjected to racial terrorism by the authorities and groups protected by them should have to answer charges of committing political violence.

The history of racist killings is a long “unbroken line,” said Davis more recently during the Ferguson uprising. While Civil Rights leaders of the 20th century may have disagreed about the right response, all of them agreed it had to end immediately if the country is to survive and the promise of true freedom to be realized.

Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | June 2nd, 2020

Consider the influence of television, even in the digital age. Consider the power that networks like Fox and CNN continue to wield over that nebulous thing called public opinion; the continued dominance of NBC and CBS. These giants don’t really inform so much as sell packaged ideological content paid for and approved by corporate sponsors. There’s really no need to update poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron’s radical, 1971 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” unless we wanted to change the names. His voice still speaks directly to the moment we live in.

We exist on a continuum of conditions that have worsened since the late 1960s—despite promises and appearances to the contrary—until they have become intolerable. Scott-Heron wrote and sang about those conditions since his fiery 1970 debut.

“Dubbed the ‘Godfather of Rap,’” notes Brooklyn Rail in a 2007 interview, “Scott-Heron has become a ubiquitous and practically de rigueur influence for everyone from hip hoppers and indie rockers to aging literati and dyed-in-the-wool academics.”

One might think Scott-Heron’s classic spoken-word testament “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” speaks for itself by now, but it still creates confusion in part because people still misconstrue the nature of the medium. Why can’t you sit at home and watch journalists cover protests and revolts on TV? If you think you’re seeing “the Revolution” instead of curated, maybe spurious, content designed to tell a story and gin up views, you’re fooling yourself.

But Scott-Heron also had something else in mind—you can’t see the revolution on TV because you can’t see it at all. As he says above in a 1990s interview:

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change people is something that nobody will ever be able to capture on film. It’s just something that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to find out what’s happening in this country.”

If we realize we’re out of sync with what’s really happening, we cannot find out more on television. The information is where the battles are being fought, at street level, and in the mechanisms of the legal process. “I think that the Black Americans are the only real die-hard Americans here,” Scott-Heron goes on, “because we’re the only ones who’ve carried the process through the process…. We’re the ones who marched… we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts. Being born American didn’t seem to matter.” It still doesn’t, as we see in the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many before them, and in the grievous injuries and deaths from unconstitutional, military-grade police escalations nationwide since.

Scott-Heron asked us to question the narratives. “How do they know?” he sang in “There’s a War Going On” at Woodstock 94, above. How do the self-appointed guardians of information know what’s really going on? Television spreads ignorance and misinformation, as does radio and, of course, social media. This much we should know. But we’ve misinterpreted “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” if we think it’s really about mass media, Scott-Heron always maintained. Before we can engage meaningfully with current events, a revolutionary change must happen from the inside out. No one’s broadcasting the truths we first, most need to hear.

via BoingBoing

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Creating Meaningful Social Change

in Politics | June 1st, 2020

Saul David Alinsky died 36 years before the election of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton’s first attempt for the presidency. But many feverish screeds on social media, talk radio, and YouTube might have made one think he lurked behind these politicians like Rasputin. Spoken of by many on the right as a servant of the devil, “American Joseph Goebbels,” and “dangerous harbinger of insurrection,” Alinsky developed a reputation for insidiousness that may exceed his influence, considerable though it may be.

But liberals and leftists have no special purchase on Alinsky’s legacy. As one thoughtful, eloquent pundit recently wrote, “the Right has taken Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and shoved it up where #TheResistance don’t shine.” Not long before this charming appropriation, Alinsky’s 1971 manual of political warfare found its way into the hands of some of the same Tea Party organizers who had made his name synonymous with everything they despised about the left. (See Alinsky court his Luciferian comparisons in the 1966 interview above.)

But Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals for his demographic. From the 30s to the 70s, he organized poor, working people in Chicago and other cities and addressed countercultural and civil rights activists nationwide. The opening paragraph of the book makes it perfectly clear who his readers are:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

Alinsky’s reference to Machiavelli sets readers up for a high degree of ruthlessness and realpolitik, and the book does not disappoint. If you’re looking for Anarchist Cookbook-level radicalism, you’d best look elsewhere. While Alinsky talked tough, in an honest Chicago way, he did not recommend violence in his manual. In the Prologue, he denounces “parts of the far left who have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right.” In recent revolutionary violence, he writes, “we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”

Rules for Radicals recommends mostly working within the system—though in the twisted way Machiavelli is reputed to have done (whether or not he’s been interpreted fairly). Below, you’ll find Alinsky’s list of 13 “Rules for Radicals,” offered with his proviso that political activism cannot be a self-serving enterprise: “People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.”

1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky’s rules can and have been used for anti-democratic designs. But he defines the U.S. as a “society predicated on voluntarism.” His vision of democracy leans heavily on that of keen outside observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher who “gravely warned,” writes Alinsky, “that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene.”

Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2017. In this moment of protest, we’re bringing it back.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Take Hannah Arendt’s Final Exam for Her 1961 Course “On Revolution”

in Philosophy, Politics | May 5th, 2020

After her analysis of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hannah Arendt turned her scholarly attention to the subject of revolution—namely, to the French and American Revolutions. However, the first chapter of her 1963 book On Revolution opens with a paraphrase of Lenin about her own time: “Wars and revolutions… have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century.”

Arendt wrote the book on the threshold of many wars and revolutions yet to come, but she was not particularly sympathetic to the leftist turn of the 1960s. On Revolution favors the American Colonists over the French Sans Culottes and Jacobins. The book is in part an intellectual contribution to anti-Communism, one of many ideologies, Arendt writes, that “have lost contact with the major realities of our world”?

What are those realities? “War and revolution,” she argues, “have outlived all their ideological justifications… no cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.” This sounds like pamphleteering, but Arendt did not use such abstractions lightly. As one of the foremost scholars of ancient Greek and modern European philosophy, she was eminently qualified to define her terms.

Her students, on the other hand, might have struggled with such weighty concepts as “revolution,” “rights, “freedom,” etc. which can so easily become meaningless slogans without substantive elaboration and “contact with reality.” Arendt was a thorough teacher. Once her students left her class, they surely had a better grasp on the intellectual history of liberal democracy. Such understanding constituted Arendt’s life’s work, and it was through teaching that she developed and refined the ideas that became On Revolution.

Arendt began research for the book at Princeton, where she was appointed the first woman to serve as a full professor in 1953. Throughout the 50s and early 60s, she taught at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern before joining the faculty of the New School. In 1961, she taught a Northwestern seminar called “On Revolution.” Just above, you can see the course’s final exam. (View it in a larger format here.) If you’re wondering why she gave the test in March, perhaps it’s because the following month, she boarded a plane to cover the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker.

What did Arendt want to make sure that her students understood before she left? See a transcription of the exam questions below. We see the two poles of her later argument coming into focus, the French and the American Revolutionary ideas. The latter example has been seen by many critical philosophers as hardly revolutionary at all, given that it was primarily waged in the interests of merchants and slave-owning plantation owners. It was, as one historian puts it, “a revolution in favor of government.”

This criticism is likely the basis of Arendt’s final question on the test. But in her erudite argument, the American Revolution is foundational to use of “revolution” as a political term of art. As Arendt writes in a late 60s lecture, re-discovered in 2017, “prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the 18th century and the specific sense it then acquired, the word ‘revolution’ was hardly prominent in the vocabulary of political thought or practice.” Rather, it mainly had astrological significance.

Arendt saw all subsequent world revolutions as partaking of the twinned logics of the 18th century. “Its political usage was metaphorical,” she says, “describing a movement back into some pre-established point, and hence a motion, a swinging back to a pre-ordained order.” Generally, that order has been pre-ordained by the revolutionaries themselves. See if your understanding of revolutionary history is up to Arendt’s pedagogical standards, below, and get a more comprehensive history of revolution from the readings on recent course syllabuses here, here, and here.

Answer at least five of the following questions:

What is the origin of the word “revolution”?

How was the word originally used in political language?

Identify the following dates:

The 14th of July

The 9th of Thermidore

The 18th of Brumaire

Who wrote The Rights of Man?

Who wrote Reflections on the French Revolution?

What was the connection between the two books?

Who was Crevecoeur? Give title of his book.

Enumerate some authors and books that played a role in the revolutions?

What is the difference between absolutism and a “limited monarchy”?

Who is the author of The Spirit of the Laws?

Which author had the greatest influence on the men of the French Revolution?

What is meant by the phrase “state of nature”?

The following words are of Greek origin; give their English equivalent: monarchy—oligarchy—aristocracy—democracy.

Write a short essay of no more than four pages on one of the following topics:

It is a main thesis of R.R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution that “the American Revolution was an event within an Atlantic civilization as a whole.” Explain and discuss.
Clinton Rossiter asserts that “America’s debt to the idea of social contract is so huge as to defy measurement.” Explain and discuss.
Differences and similarities between the American and the French Revolution.
Connect on possible meanings of the phrase: Pursuit of happiness.
Describe Melville’s attitude to the French Revolution in Billy Budd.
The American Revolution—was there any?

via Samantha Hill

Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

Large Archive of Hannah Arendt’s Papers Digitized by the Library of Congress: Read Her Lectures, Drafts of Articles, Notes & Correspondence

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #40 on #MeToo Depictions in TV and Film

in Podcasts, Politics, Pretty Much Pop, Television | April 22nd, 2020

These stories are all heavily watched, which means they’re entertaining: The 2019 film Bombshell (about the predations of Roger Ailes), Apple TV’s The Morning Show (about a disgraced anchor), and Netflix’s Unbelievable (about reporting rape) and 13 Reasons Why (about teen suicide resulting from sexual assault). But what’s “entertaining” about sexual assault and harassment? What makes for a sensitive as opposed to a sensationalized portrayal?

Erica, Mark, and Brian consider which stories work and why. How much divergence from true events is allowable in Bombshell or Confirmation (about Anita Hill)? By having characters interpret their situations (Erica gives an example from the show Sex Education), are writers essentially telling audiences how to feel about their own experiences? Should certain depictions be ruled out as potentially triggering, or is it good to “bring to light” whatever terrible things actually happen in the world? Should shows delve into the psychology of the perpetrator (maybe even treating him as a protagonist), or must the message be wholly and unambiguously about the victim?

Art is about risk-taking and capturing difficult ambiguities; this doesn’t sound much like a public service message. So what responsibility to do show creators have to consult professionals about how to present difficult topics like this?

We drew on some articles to help us look at these questions:

“Hollywood Taboo: A Review of Bombshell” by Spencer Hagaman
“Megyn Kelly, Other Fox News Accusers Dissect ‘Bombshell’ In New Video” by Greg Evans
“Unbelievable Has Delivered a Rare Honest Portrayal of Rape Survival on TV – It Should Be Our New Blueprint” by Harriet Hall
“13 Reasons Why a Conversation About Rape Culture Is as Important as One About Suicide” by Alia Dastigir
“Yes, ‘The Morning Show’ has a #MeToo problem. That’s the Best Thing About It” by Meredith Blake
“The ‘13 Reasons Why’ Graphic Sexual-Assault Scene: Did the Show Go Too Far Again?” by Kevin Fallon
“We’ve Seen Sexual Assault on TV Before—But Never Like This” by Jessica Radloff
“TV’s Reckoning with #METOO” by Emily Nussbaum
“From Harvey Weinstein to the New #MeToo Movies, True Justice Still Remains in the Realm of Fantasy” by Mary Elizabeth Williams
“The Progress and Pitfalls of Television’s Treatment of Rape” by Maureen Ryan

Here’s that weird scene where Jennifer Aniston and Billy Crudup sing on The Morning Show.

If this topic is too depressing, check out our episode #39 from last week about what to watch on TV during quarantine:

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Bernie Sanders Time as an Educational Filmmaker: Watch His Documentary on Socialist Activist Eugene V. Debs (1979)

in Film, History, Politics | February 27th, 2020

If you grew up in the United States of America, you’ll remember the name Eugene V. Debs from history class. And if you grew up during a certain era in the United States of America, you might have learned about Debs from Bernie Sanders. Try to recall one of Debs’ speeches; if you hear it in Sanders’ distinctive Brooklyn accent, you have at some point or another seen Eugene V. Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary. A film-strip slideshow with an accompanying audio track, it came out in 1979 as a product of the American People’s Historical Society, Sanders’ own production company.

That venture constitutes just one chapter of a storied life and career, which includes periods as a high-school track star, a folk singer, and the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Now that Sanders, junior United States Senator from Vermont since 2007, has pulled ahead in the race for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election, people want to know what he’s all about — and he has long been given, certainly by the standards of U.S. politicians, to clear and frequent expression of what he’s all about. He has made no secret, for example, of his admiration for Debs, a socialist political activist who five times ran for President of the United States. You can see it come through in Eugene V. Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary, which Jacobin magazine has reconstructed and made available on Youtube.

Hyperallergic’s Nathan Smith writes that the documentary frames Debs “as a lost prophet before explaining how he ended up where he did ideologically. It opens with Debs’s final presidential campaign, conducted in 1920 from prison. If a million people voted for this man while he was behind bars, if more people went to hear him speak than President Taft, then how could history have forgotten him?” Sanders explains Debs’ socialism “as a response to issues which still resonate today: the exploitation of working people, segregation and violent racism, voting rights, and the suppression of free speech and dissent during World War I.” More so than see Sanders’ admiration for Debs — Jacobin having had to use visuals other than the ones on the film strip at the time — you can hear it: as in all the shoestring productions of the American People’s Historical Society’s shoestring productions, Sanders himself plays the roles of the historical characters involved.

In this case, that means we hear Sanders give Debs’ speeches, and in certain moments we viewers of 2020 could easily mistake Debs’ indictments of the distribution of wealth, goods, and the means of production in America as Sanders’ own. A self-described socialist, Sanders has in his political career placed himself in Debs’ tradition, and having made a documentary like this more than 40 years ago shores up that image. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out that, before becoming a U.S. senator, Sanders did a couple more acting jobs in feature films, once as a man stingy with Halloween candy and once as a Dodgers-obsessed rabbi. As much as those roles might have suited his demeanor, it’s safe to say he played Eugene V. Debs with more conviction.

via Hyperallergic

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Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burlington Snow” (1986)

Albert Einstein Writes the 1949 Essay “Why Socialism?” and Attempts to Find a Solution to the “Grave Evils of Capitalism”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Bertrand Russell’s Prison Letters Are Now Digitized & Put Online (1918 — 1961)

in History, Philosophy, Politics | February 18th, 2020

Boethius, Henry David Thoreau, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Luther King, Jr…. It’s possible, if one tried, to draw other comparisons between these disparate figures, but readers familiar with the work of all four will immediately recognize their most obvious literary commonality: all wrote some of their most impassioned and persuasive work while unjustly confined to a cell.

In the case of Bertrand Russell, however, perhaps one of the most famous figures in 20th century philosophy and intellectual life more generally, periods of incarceration in Brixton prison in 1918 and, forty-three years later, in 1961, play a minimal role in the larger drama of his writing life, despite the fact that he did a good deal of writing, including some significant philosophical work, behind bars.

Even scholars well-read in Russell’s work may have little knowledge of his prison writing, and for good reason: most of it has been inaccessible. “Now, for the first time,” writes Erica Balch at McMaster University’s Brighter World blog, “Russell’s prison letters—part of McMaster’s Bertrand Russell Archives—are being made available online through a new digitization project developed by the Bertrand Russell Research Centre. Complete with detailed annotations and fully searchable text, the project is providing scholars from around the world with access to these rarely seen materials.”

The contents of the letters reveal other reasons that Russell’s prison writing isn’t better known. He did plenty of impassioned and persuasive writing for the public outside of a prison cell—publishing fiery books, essays, and lectures against war and propaganda and in defense of free thought throughout his life. Behind bars, however, Russell’s writing turned almost solely professional and personal, in letters addressed primarily to “his then lover Lady Constance Malleson (known as ‘Colette’) and his former lover, aristocrat and socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell.”

The 105 letters “reveal the private thoughts of one of the 20th century’s most public figures and provide an interesting window on Russell’s inner life,” says Andrew Bone, Senior Research Associate at McMaster’s Bertrand Russell Research Centre. Most of the letters “were written in secret,” Balch notes, “and smuggled out of Brixton by Russell’s friends, concealed between the uncut pages of books.” Russell was only allowed one letter per week; officially sanctioned correspondence is written on prison stationary and bears the Brixton governor’s initials.

A lifelong pacifist, Russell was first jailed for six months in 1918 for a speech opposing U.S. entry into World War I. “I found prison in many ways quite agreeable,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, ‘Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy’… and began the work for ‘Analysis of Mind,’” a project that never reached fruition. In 1961, at age 89, he was jailed for seven days for participating in a London anti-nuclear demonstration.

During his first stay as a prisoner of Brixton’s “first division,” Russell was “allowed to furnish his cell, wear civilian clothes, purchase catered food, and most importantly, be exempted from prison work while he pursued his profession as an author,” as the Bertrand Russell Research Centre points out. It’s little wonder he looked forward to the experience as a “holiday from responsibility,” he wrote in a letter to his brother, Frank, four days after he began his sentence.

Russell may not have suffered—or acquired a heightened sense of political urgency—while behind bars (at one point he was heard laughing out loud and had to be reminded by the warden that “prison is a place of punishment”). But his prison letters offer significant insight into not only the deeply emotional relationships he had with Malleson and Morrell, but also his relationship with other members of the famous Bloomsbury group and “literary celebrities such as D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot,” writes Balch, “many of whom are referenced in the letters.”

The 104 letters from 1918, including Russell’s correspondence with his brother, his publisher, The Nation magazine and others, are all available in original scans with transcriptions and annotations at the McMaster University Bertrand Russell Research Centre site. The final letter, number 105, the sole piece of correspondence from Russell’s weeklong stay in Brixton in 1961, is addressed to his wife Edith.

My Darling,

The lawyer’s nice young man brought me cheering news of you and told me I could write to you, which I had not known. Every one here treats me kindly and the only thing I mind is being away from you. At all odd minutes I have the illusion that you are there, and forget that if I sneeze it won’t disturb you. I am enjoying Madame de Staël immensely, having at last got round to reading her. At odd moments I argue theology with the chaplain and medicine with the Doctor, and so the time passes easily. But separation from you is quite horrid, Dearest Love, it will be heavenly when we are together again. Take care of yourself, Beloved.

B.

As in most of the earlier letters, Russell avoids politics and keeps things personal. But as in nearly all of his writing, the prose is lively, evocative, and poignant, revealing much about the personality behind it. While these letters may never achieve the status of great literature, by virtue of their private nature and their minor role in Russell’s major canon, that does not mean they aren’t a joy to read, for students of Bertrand Russell and anyone else who appreciates the workings of a brilliant philosophical and ethical mind. Enter the Brixton Letter archive here.

Bertrand Russell Authority and the Individual (1948)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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