Criticism &c. looks upon efforts towards left “regroupment” with great scepticism. Too often “regroupment” has meant merely a tactical improvisation in lieu of the developement of new ideas. The statement by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar excerpted below appeared in the November 10 issue of Economic & Political Weekly (edited in Mumbai, India) under the title “21st […]
Category Archives: Passing References
Confirming the adage that bureaucrats die at home in bed, Santiago Carillo, one of the chief architects of the trend called Eurocommunism, expired last month in Madrid at the age of 97.The New York Times recently published a mildly sympathetic obituary for Carillo, in which he was quoted as offering this less-than-comforting observation on the […]
David Ames Curtis, the curator of the Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website, incuded this announcement in the latest issue of his e-mail newsletter (dated July 31). • • • Death of Chris Marker We have just learned of the death of Chris Marker (July 29, 1921 – July 29, 2012, born Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve), poet, essayist, critic, translator and […]
Richard Greeman’s blog features a recent communication from Russian activist Alexei Gusev. Of interest is a brief update on the Victor Serge Library. • • • Another interesting development concerns the Victor Serge Library in Moscow. We have established contact with the State Social and Political Library (SSPL), whose representative participated in our series of seminars on […]
Dada/Surrealism was the sole academic journal to devote itself to the study of these two related currents in the U.S. The scholarly study of Surrealism emerged here just slightly later than it did in France, with the publication of Anna Balakian’s Literary Origins of Surrealism in 1947. Dada/Surrealism‘s first issue appeared in 1971 and it […]
In his book C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary, Paul Buhle refers in several places to a manuscript of an abortive attempt at an autobiography by James. Buhle describes the project, undertaken in the last period of James’s life with the assistance of Anna Grimshaw, as one that simply did not jell the way one […]
Daniel Bell, 1919-2011 Now largely forgotten, Bell was once an influential intellectual and sociologist from the milieu of those who have come to be known as the New York Intellectuals. He edited The New Leader, the organ of the right-wing of American social democracy, during World War II and went on to receive a PhD […]
The New York Times Saturday Profile of December 3 features an interesting look at former Communist (PCI) and current president of Italy Giorgio Napolitano (“From Ceremonial Figure to Italy’s Quiet Power Broker“). While it may not be necessary to be reminded that Eurocommunism was essentially an euphemism for class collaboration, it is striking the degree […]
The Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library has opened the C.L.R. James Papers to researchers. The acquisition of this material was announced in 2007 (although the exact provenance of the collection is not clear from the press release). A detailed finding aid on the collection is available online. Of particular interest is a manuscript […]
Historian Paul Buhle reminisces about the 1960s in the latest issue of Against the Current (“Memories of [my] Syndicalism“). Buhle, author of C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary, describes his entry into the New Left via the oldest of the Old Left, the Socialist Labor Party. Buhle elsewhere (for example, in A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost, […]
