We have written about Bruce Elwell on this blog once before, looking at a piece he wrote under the pseudonym “Barbarians for Socialism” (here). Elwell, former member of the American chapter of the SI, who later became a longtime union organizer, was a brilliant writer and theorist, and continually published during the 1970s and perhaps after. However, one would not know much about all the writing he did as it’s virtually impossible to find. It does appear, though, that Yale’s Beinecke Library has acquired much of Elwell’s work as part of their acquisition of Donald Nicholson-Smith’s papers (see here).
Elwell stands out amongst the members of the American SI in the post-SI decades in that he appeared to stay politically active in New York and because his writing, across the few examples we have seen, is concretely grounded, witty, and clear. It is perhaps time someone does a small book collecting his works for wider publication.
Bill Brown has listed out a number of Elwell’s works in a very helpful bibliography he pieced together. The instant piece is not among those listed.
This piece is a poem published for the Lower East Side literary journal Maelstrom. In reading it, the criticisms against the Left, which Elwell would refine and sharpen over the next few years, are quite evident.
Maelstrom was a small-circulation publication that billed itself as “a non-profit journal of all the arts produced by cooperative labor.” Physical copies of this issue of the journal are scarce but JSTOR has digitized some of the issues, including this one, here. We found our copy of this for just $18 though.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 