Reviving the art of the pamphlet

Alright, well, I went to go reserve that little Jacobin pamphlet The ABCs of Socialism at the library so I could see if it's a decent thing to recommend to people, and discovered that actually you can just read the entire thing as a PDF online? It's not even pirated; the URL for the PDF is at jacobinmag.com. But also it turns out it's really short, it is much more of a pamphlet than a book, and I read the whole thing in like two hours -- and also did some work in the same two hours (it is, admittedly, a slow day today). The pamphlet is 148 pages, but that includes a bunch of illustrations and a few pages at the back dedicated to taking notes, which is very considerate.

 

The book is a collection of short articles by a variety of modern socialist writers, including the excellent Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, editor of How We Get Free which I read at the beginning of the year, and Nicole Aschoff, whomst I have met twice and is very cool. Also some dudes. At least some of the writers are fairly serious academics, but the book is not especially academic or theoretical; in register, in seems pitched at roughly the same educated, reasonably politically aware audience as most middlebrow news glossies.  There are moments of humor via pop culture references, including a real good dunk on the Rolling Stones' "Harlem Shuffle," which is indeed not their best effort.

 

The framing here is "rebuttals to common objections/myths about socialism," and as such seems more pitched at fence-sitters than at folks who already consider themselves socialists, but is probably also a pretty good starting point for folks who are like "I am pretty sure I am on board with this socialism thing because capitalism is terrible and I would like to do something else" but have not done much reading and are not sure where to start. The pamphlet also contains a lot of links to further reading; in this case, "further reading" means Jacobin articles, which one would probably expect given that this is a Jacobin publication. Jacobin is pretty good at giving short overview-y things that easily point people towards More Things To Read (just this morning I bought Haymarket's James Connolly Reader, largely on the strength of Jacobin's Connolly at 150 profile from the spring), and I'm generally of the opinion that given the total marginalization of socialist thought in American political discourse for my entire lifetime, brutally sacrificing depth in favor of breadth is a perfectly acceptable thing to do for the sake of bringing the scope of socialist history and socialist writing from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown" in people's minds. And ABCs of Socialism does quite well in that regard. If one is so inclined, one could fill up the Notes pages with a robust list of Interesting-Sounding Things To Check Out Further--historical writers including Marx, Trotsky, and Martin Luther King Jr.; modern writers like the authors of the articles; ecosocialism; socialist feminism; at least five separate instances of the U.S. government overthrowing democratically elected governments that we don't talk about anymore; the interconnections between racism and capitalism (especially in the U.S.). 

 

One criticism I do have is that the grand and glorious history of bitter interleftist infighting is a bit handwaved, frequently written in a way like "Democratic socialists were on [the good side] and some other blokes were on [the other side]," which definitely muddies the attempts to explain who was doing what and sometimes comes off like they're claiming certain parties/thinkers/movements were socialist when they succeeded and not socialist when they fucked up. While it is true that the history of socialism is much more complex than "Stalin did gulags and some people went along with it," this borders on No True Scotsman-ing in a way that I think deals some damage to credibility, although given the brevity of the piece in question I'm not as disturbed by it as I would be in an otherwise more in-depth work. Anyway, the CPUSA did both good things and messed-up things, and anyone whose brain cannot handle that level of complexity is probably not someone you should be relying on to teach you history anyway.

 

Anyway. Where was I? Right, driving myself nuts trying to read every Socialism 001 book published in the U.S. So, this book does pretty much what it says on the tin, which is great if that's what you're looking for. I should go read some fiction.

The Boston renascence

 For book club this month, we decided to read Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture (1920-1940) by Lorraine Elena Roses, a study of the Black art scene in Boston during the interwar period. It's a bit more academic than many of the other books we've read in this book club, but not overly so. 

 

The book seems very thorough but is not very long, for the unfortunate reason that there's not a lot of surviving records about a lot of the arts projects that the Black population in Boston was involved in during this time period. The Black population in Boston was also very small in the interwar period, but that didn't stop them from producing quite a lot of art. The educated black elite in Boston was even smaller, which meant that much of the Black arts scene was organized and sustained by a relatively small cast of influential families. Two women's clubs, founded as relief groups for Black troops stationed in Massachusetts before being shipped off to fight in World War I, were especially important drivers of art initiatives, carefully navigating Boston's institutional segregation to occasionally cross the color line in the high arts. Black Bostonians discusses Black Bostonian's contributions to newspapers, theater, visual arts, music, and literature, as well as the institutions that facilitated these contributions, from private writing clubs to the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program to employ theater workers. 

 

While the overall pattern is a bit depressing -- short periods of brilliance and successful artistic output, soon crushed by larger political forces -- the discussion of the works is quite interesting and there's an abundance of intriguing personal stories. Some of the editorializing rubbed me a tiny bit the wrong way; Roses' discussion of William Monroe Trotter carries a distinct tone of disapproval that he neglected his high culture training in favor of dedicating himself to public political protest, which she seems to find a bit embarrassing. I think he sounds friggin' awesome, and if he thought getting arrested and running an inflammatory newspaper were better uses of his time than "high-culture activities" then he gets to think that. He was a principal organizer on the protests against Birth of a Nation showing in Massachusetts, which is rad. (The movie aired anyway, and sold out repeatedly, because Boston is racist and disappointing.) 

 

The relationship between the Boston scene and the Harlem Renaissance that was going on in New York is portrayed as complex, with New York providing both inspiration and a sense of rivalry, somewhat related to it being bigger with a much larger Black population, but also related to the fact that Broadway was there. (Still is, I believe.) 

 

I'm not sure how much of the art discussed in the book is actually still available for consumption. Some of the visual art certainly is; the plays, on the other hand, don't seem to be ones that are still staged, and Roses assures us that a lot of the ones by the older generation would sound pretty goofy and Victorian to modern audiences if they were. This does exactly zero to make me not want to see a staging of The Trial of Dr. Beck; in 2018, as in 1939, "There's always room for a good murder trial in the theatre." 

 

I think we will have an interesting discussion this weekend, especially if I can brain enough to pull together some halfway decent questions.