New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism

Black Out: Giornale Metropolitano Delle Lotte Autonome (“‘Metropolitan Journal of Autonomous Struggles”) is a bit of a mystery. An internal note states it was sent to the printers on 1 February 1977 as a supplement to issue 24-25 of Rosso. However, it references the New York City Black Out of 1977, which occurred in July of that year, and there was no issue 24-25 of Rosso (there was a #23-24 and a #25-26). Mangano (1998, p. 93) states that it was published in February of 1978.

Black Out was produced during the years of lead and its content relates to struggles in Milan in that context. It positions itself as a place for analysis and development for collective struggle in the wake of the heavy year and movement of 1977, within the theoretical framework of class composition: “The enormous pulverization of the struggle movement in Milan has pushed us to create this newspaper as a possibility to have an instrument of connection of aggregation…giving voice to that enormous proletarian layer that has found in the movement of 77 its political reference and that today and scattered in the enormous metropolis of Milan” (a very rough translation from the introductory article).

The publication lists Emilio Vesce, an important militant in the Italian extra-parliamentary left, as the director responsible for the publication (Vesce was also the director of Rosso in 1978). Mangano (1998, p. 93) notes that there are other issues, though it’s unclear to us how many were published. Some of them, through the late 1980s (issue 9) are made available through the Archivio Autonomia site, here, with different subtitles.

This issue of the journal is scarce with none available in the trade at the time of writing and a single institutionally-held copy in the world (at Yale’s Beinecke Library). We have scanned the issue we hold and uploaded it to Libcom, here, for those interested.

There is frustratingly little about the struggles among the French autonomous left during the 1970s and 1980s that is written or translated into English. A useful, if brief, reflection can be found in an interview published in Jacques Lesage de La Haye’s small book, The Abolition of Prison (AK Press, 2021, pp. 103-116), as well as Leopold Roc’s discussion of Os Cangaceiros, published in the eighth issue of the anarchist journal Rolling Thunder (2009, here and here). Matin d’un Blues was one of the many interesting publishing efforts that autonomous organizers put together during those years, and ran for three issues, from 1978-1979. Most of the contents of the journals can be found online, via the Fragments d’Histoire de gauche radicale archive, here.

Sebastien Schifres has written a chapter on the group and posted it to his website, here. According to Schifres, the group was founded by former members of Camarades, most notably Bob Nadoulek, as well as participants in Marge, and was inspired by Italy’s Metropolitan Indians. The emphasis in Matin d’un Blues on ‘desiring autonomy’ (“autonomie désirante”) and cultural interventions, rather than the more strictly class struggle focus of Camarades. There is a strong situationist influence in both aesthetics and various written pieces in issues of the journal. Commentary found in the 1979 piece by Bob Nadoulek in Le Monde, entitled “La politique et le quotidien” (roughly, ‘politics and everyday life’) is also worth reading for a brief introduction to the group’s perspectives (here).

Issues of Matin d’un Blues are scarce and we locate only four archives holding copies internationally (here and here), all in Europe. We have only issue #2 in our holdings.

This striking poster uses the image on the cover of issue #2, though we have been unable to figure out if the poster was used to advertise for the specific issue or for the publication more generally. (We purchased our copy from someone who ran a bookshop in Paris in the 1970s, but did not recall any background of the poster). The smaller text along the top reads “autonomie offensive et creativitie” (roughly ‘offensive autonomy and creativity’) followed by “mais quand il ne reste que le choix des armes le desespoir n’a pas besoin de caution politique” along the bottom (roughly, ‘but when only the choice of weapons remains, despair does not need a political guarantee’).

To the best of our knowledge this is the sole poster that Bewick Editions, Martin Glaberman’s press, published. The poster measures 22 inches by 29 inches and is offset printed on thick white stock. As of 2001, Glaberman was selling poster for $6.00. It is scarce. OCLC locates a holding, at Penn State University library in their Special Collections department, which is an earlier (and similarly undated) version of the document.

The poster/pamphlet is a stunning piece. The text is from an interview published in the McGill Reporter on November 4, 1968. The interview was conducted by Michael Smith during the Congress of Black Writers, held in October of that year at McGill University in Montreal. Glaberman’s publication of the poster almost entirely a replica of the document as it appeared in the Reporter (pictured below). The text on the earlier version, pictured above, has a publication address of Facing Reality at 14131 Woodward in Detroit. The text on the later version that we hold simply states “Poster Pamphlet” on the bottom left and, on the bottom right, states Bewick Editions at the PO Box in Detroit. Presumably the “#1” is removed on the latter version because Glaberman did not print any other posters.

The phrase “you don’t play with revolution” is a near quote from James, as Smith’s interview notes, from his book Party Politics in the West Indies (1962). In 2009, AK Press printed a book entitled You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James edited by David Smith. The book includes Smith’s interview as a chapter. Below we pull out the section of the interview where James clarifies what he means when he says not to play with revolution:

Dan Georgakas passed away yesterday, November 23rd, 2021. The National Herald ran an obituary here, and he maintained a sparsely updated website here.

Georgakas is one of those figures in the radical left whose work had a major impact across sectarian splits and whose name always seemed to be mentioned with appreciation. He helped found Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in the 1960s, was a prolific poet, a scholar of cinema among other subjects, and a lifelong activist.

A native of Detroit, Georgakas, in 1975, co-authored the classic study Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution with Martin Surkin, which is one of the most important studies of revolutionary Black working class struggles in the 1960s and early 1970s.

There have been three editions published of the book:

Our copy of the first edition is signed by Georgakas.

Marxism and Freedom is the most impactful book that Raya Dunayveskaya would write in her decades of scholarship. Coming on the heels of Dunayevskaya’s split with Correspondence in 1955, Marxism and Freedom includes a breathtaking and brilliant analysis of Marxism, Trotskyism, and state capitalism. Dunayevsakya follows a militantly dialectical approach, building a narrative of Marxism that is carried and re-evaluated by proletarian struggles, this tour de force begins with the French Revolution and ends with mid-20th-century automation. It is the key text by which one can understand how Dunayevskaya’s reading of Marx’s ‘humanism’ was central to the split with James, and also learn how she situates the concept within Marxism, past and present.

It would be silly to try and do any sort of review of the book as a whole given the focus of this blog, so we’ll note just a handful of thoughts and observations that occurred to us while preparing this post.

1. There has been a growing number of Marx reading groups formed in recent years. Simultaneously, there has been an increasing interest in ‘guides’ to reading Capital: Harvey, Cleaver etc. It’s of note that Marxism and Freedom hasn’t seemed to draw attention as a guide, of sorts, to reading Marx, specifically but not limited to Capital. We hope that changes.
2. If one is interested in understanding the Marxism of the News & Letters group, in its best articulation, this is the go-to.
3. Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the French Revolution includes this stand out observation: “Democracy, thus, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their methods of action. There is a double rhythm in destroying the old and creating the new which bears the unmistakable stamp of the self-activity, which is the truly working class way of knowing.”
4. Key to Dunayevskaya’s analysis is her centering of relations of production in understanding capitalism, rather than distribution.
5. In her analysis of the Russian Revolution, this quote: “Without the Humanism of Marx, and later, of Lenin, the economic theories of both are meaningless. Leaders are not classless creatures floating between heaven and earth. They are very much earth men. When they lose close connection with the working class, they begin to represent the only other fundamental class in society – the capitalist class.”
6. Marxism and Freedom is a very good example of efforts by Marxists within the broad autonomist tradition to rescue Lenin from Stalin and embrace Lenin as a revolutionary thinker. It’s often forgotten in discussion of autonomist Marxism as a broad tradition that many ‘autonomists’ – from Johnson-Forest through Negri and so on – have a deep appreciation for Lenin and Leninism. From our perspective this is generally cringeworthy, but nevertheless it is an important piece of the tradition, both organizationally and analytically.
7. In Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya spares no blow at anarchists. This is seen in her analysis of Proudhon, but it shows up most forcefully in her analysis of anarchists during the early years of the Russian Revolution. She notes: “At this moment in our history – Lenin turned sharply to Shlyapnikov – you and your “Workers’ Opposition” are the greatest danger to our continued existence. Just look at your position, look at the Kronstadt mutiny and see how quickly the White Guards have grabbed on to the anarchistic, syndicalistic talk of ‘freedom from political leadership,’ and with guns in their hands, are threatening the new workers’ state.” In the endnote for that paragraph Dunayevskaya writes: “No one is as inventive in creating new words as those who try to hide an ugly truth. Thus, the Social Revolutionary, I.N. Steinberg, has invented for the word, counter-revolution, the expression “revolution within the revolution,” as the explanation for Kronstadt.” This is, from our point of view, a very unfortunate analysis of Kronstadt, which surely shouldn’t be reduced to a “counter-revolution.” Nonetheless, it is Dunayevskaya’s perspective.

We have a few copies of this book in our collection, but this copy is unique and a bit of a treasure. Dunayvskaya inscribed the book to John Miller in 1962:

John Miller was an autoworker who wrote a column for News & Letters for nearly two decades under the name John Allison. He died in 2003. News and Letters published an obituary:

This copy of the book seems to have traveled the used book trade. There’s a pricing of $.75 on the inside from a seller different from the one we purchased it from. A unique copy of this important text.

State Capitalism and World Revolution, first published in 1950, is perhaps the definitive polemic of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT). The JFT’s lead theorists were C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevsakaya, and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs). The essay provides a demolition of Stalinism and Trotskyism. It lays down an analysis of “state capitalism” based on a sharp reading of Capital, and also Lenin, which centers class struggle in production and locates the proletariat as the source of capitalist crisis. Paul Buhle (1986) has noted that the piece was “the last of James’ texts to be set in the classic Marxist-Leninist strategic framework” (p. xx).

There are at least 5 English-language editions of State Capitalism and World Revolution:

1. 1950: The essay originally appeared in the September, 1950 Discussion Bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party (a scan is available here) and was credited to “Johnson-Forest.”
2. 1956: Published by “a Marxist Group” with a preface by James, Castoriadis, Brendel et al (see below) in England. There was no new authorship claim in the second edition, and the collectively-signed preface, likely written by James, references authorship of State Capitalism with “The writers of the document” and that “They bring all phenomena into one integrated and growing body of theory, shedding new lights as new events unfold.”
3. 1969: Published by Facing Reality Publishing Committee with authorship credited to James.
4. 1986: Published by Charles H. Kerr with authorship credited to C.L.R. James. “[w]ritten in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee.”
5. 2013: Published by The Charles H. Kerr Library and PM Press, with authorship credited the same as the 1986 edition.

Authorship of State Capitalism is a bit contested. Martin Glaberman’s preface to the 1969 edition attributes the document to James in a context of collective activity.

However, Frank Rosengarten, in his important biography Urbane Revolutionary, credits the document to all three thinkers: “Two chapters of State Capitalism and World Revolution, jointly written by James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Boggs and published in 1950…” (p. 57). Rosengarten goes on to mention Lee and Dunayevskaya’s involvement in “discussions of the work-in-progress that eventually bore the name State Capitalism and World Revolution, but which first entitled Marxism and State Capitalism” (p. 61). And then Rosengarten challenges Glaberman’s claim on authorship (pardon our highlights/notes):

In a speech in 1985, Dunayevskaya stated the the work was written “under [James’] direction” (Dunayevskaya, 2013, p. 2). It seems to us that the collectively attributed authorship is likely the most accurate, so we are attributing it that way.

While the first edition of State Capitalism and World Revolution was published in the SWP’s Discussion Bulletin, based in New York City, the second edition was published in England. The publication was credited to “A Marxist Group” based in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. James had been in England for more than three years at this point, after he had been expelled from the United States. In his introduction to the 1969 edition, Glaberman notes: “When the second edition of State Capitalism and World Revolution was at the printer, the Hungarian Revolution exploded.”

The preface to the 1956 second edition, which was republished in the 1969 and 1986 editions (posted online here), is signed by six men: Johnson (C.L.R. James), Alan Christianson, Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis), Cajo Brendel, Maassen (Theo Massen), and IP Hughes. In his 2006 essay, “Beyond the Boundary of Leninism? C.L.R. James and 1956”, James scholar Christian Høgsbjerg explores this eclectic grouping:

The second edition of State Capitalism and World Revolution is rare. OCLC locates one holding, in the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, but it’s also held in the C.L.R. James Papers at Columbia. At the time of writing there is one copy found in the trade at the indomitable Bibliomania in Oakland.

Was the growth of flexible labor and the proliferation of ‘off-the-books’ work an outcome of capitalist counter-attack in response to the mass struggles of the late-Keynesian years, or was it a victory of those same struggles? Was it neither of these entirely, and rather somewhere in-between? These questions, very simplistically put here, took up many column inches in autonomist writing in the 1980s, particularly as militants looked at the mass “refusal of work” in light of the Reagan and Thatcher counter-revolutions.

They were also raised in court in the Italian state’s effort to crush autonomia. Antonio Negri, who had been arrested along with many others on April 7th, 1979, found himself explaining to the state the content of his files that they had confiscated, and the meaning of writings – his and others – contained within. In an interrogation about these writings, a judge asked Negri about so-called “proletarian patrols” (see “Negri’s Interrogation” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, here), which led to the following interaction:

This transcript (of which this is only a small clip) was co-translated from Italian to English by Phil Mattera, who had been a participant in New York Struggle Against Work, and was part of the editorial collective that produced the second issue of Zerowork.

The second issue of Emergency was published in 1984 (we were unable to figure out that exact month, but the deadline for submissions for the 3rd issue is noted as July, so likely early in the year). This issue featured cover artwork by the famous visual artist Barbara Kruger. For the second issue the editorial collective had changed and John Merrington was no longer a member (see our notes on the first issue of Emergency here). The journal was still distributed by Pluto Press.

In addition to his work with Zerowork, Mattera had by this point also published pieces in Library Journal, Radical America, and The Nation.

Mattera’s translation of Negri’s interrogation above is relevant here because he would go on to dedicate years of research and writing to the question of what some Italian autonomists would call the “diffused” work, including “off the books” labor and the “underground economy.” Many would emphasize the liberatory aspects they believed it presented. Take, for example, these paragraphs in Lotringer’s interview with Christian Marazzi in the 1980 book Autonomia: Post-Political Politics:

Mattera’s article in this issue of Emergency is ambivalent:

Mattera sees the growth of the underground economy as a development in class struggle, as an outcome of the previous cycle of struggle (including repression), but the ambivalence in this piece is illustrative of the larger crisis that overcame the Marxist left during the early years of neoliberalism – as movements waned (and were repressed), poverty deepened and class composition shifted. In many ways, it appears that Mattera is taking the issues raised by Negri and Marazzi (and many others) and trying to come up with some evidence and grounded answers. This is easier to see in the following year, 1985, when Mattera published his book Off the Books: The Rise of the Underground Economy (Pluto Press).

This issue of Emergency, like the first issue of Emergency, is oddly difficult to come by in the trade and has few institutional holdings, with only two in North America (at Labadie and Harvard, respectively). We have scanned Mattera’s article and posted it to Libcom for interested readers, here.

The Activist was a publication run by students at Oberlin College in the 1960s and 1970s and printed a number of relevant (to this project) pieces over the years. This issue (technically two issues in one) was entirely about Wages for Housework and prints the following articles:

• Editorial collective: “Women are Workers Too”‘
• “Wages for Housework: If Women Were Paid For All We Do There’d be a Lot of Wages Due”
• Windsor, ON Wages for Housework Collective: “Portrait of a Canadian Housewife”
• Toronto, ON Wages for Housework: “Wages for Housework: Questions and Answers”
• Wages Due Collective: “Fucking is Work”
• Suzie Fleming: “All Women are Housewives”
• Sylvia Gentile and Betsy Lewis: “History of our Collective”
• Modern Times Collective (Cleveland): “The Social Factory”
• Wages for Housework Bibliography

Within our copy was a letter from one of the editors to a member of the Amazon Bookstore collective in Minneapolis, which gives a few useful details for how the journal came to be. Here’s a clip of the relevant piece:

The opening paragraphs in the introductory editorial of the journal lay out the gender and class analysis that the issue centers:

Those opening paragraphs harken to long-time debates within Marxist thought and activism, and specifically the heavy 1970s debates on “productive” and “unproductive” labor that proliferated in journals, books and pamphlets at the time. (That debate obviously still continues within anti-capitalist thought). Activists who furthered the wages for housework’ perspective took strong influence from the welfare rights movement and other struggles for a social wage, and they intervened in class debates with a perspective that shook the ground: reproductive labor (e.g. the work of housewives) is made invisible by capital, even though capital relies on it to exist, and the demand for wages for that work was a strategy for working class power and the restructuring of society:

Organizing autonomously as women was key:

Like the Wages for Housework campaign in general, the journal was internationalist in perspective and scope. Articles were sourced from far outside of Ohio and, reprinting an introductory pamphlet to Wages for Housework, activists clearly saw themselves as part of a global struggle:

The articles that make-up this issue are disproportionately sourced from Canadian organizing, which is likely attributable to the impact that participating in the Montreal Wages for Housework conference in 1975 had on members of the Oberlin Wages for Housework campaign.

The last piece in the journal is entitled “The Social Factory”. The article, written by members of Cleveland’s Modern Times Collective (including activists in Wages for Housework) in Cleveland, would travel internationally and provide an important and concise take on a perspective, rooted in Italian operaist analyses, that the factory had extended beyond its walls. Louise Toupin, a political scientist and Wages for Housework activist, notes in her important 2018 book Wages for Housework: A History of An International Feminist Movement, 1972-77:

The pieces notes its history in both a footnote and in the text itself. Here is the note:

And here are, perhaps, the key points across work, class, and gender:

“The Social Factory” would be the cover article for issue five of the Falling Wall Review, the journal of Falling Wall press in the UK, which in this issue focused on Wages for Housework and autonomist perspectives (articles from Bruno Ramirez, Ferrucio Gambino and others appear).

On a related sidenote, found within our copy of the fifth issue of Falling Wall Review was an advertisement for the first issue of Zerowork, which was distributed by the Falling Wall Book Service:

This issue of The Activist is oddly scarce – student journals are typically not difficult to come by but we have seen only a few in the trade over recent years. Still, it’s inexpensive when it does show up (as are all issues of The Activist that we’ve seen). We could not locate a copy online, so we scanned and uploaded it to Libcom, here, for interested readers.

This 1980 booklet by Tom Murray was released in 1980 as one of the Singlejack Little Books. It begins with Murray’s note, “It is therefore the purpose of this book to shed a little light on a rapidly disappearing group: the men of the San Francisco waterfront.”

If you’re curious what ‘Supercargo’ is, here’s a definition: “the title a hold over from the old days, and denoted the company representative responsible for all functions involved in loading or discharging a vessel. In years past he had the authority to hire and fire both clerks and longshoremen, select and decide what cargo must be loaded and where and how in a loading vessel; to order and release tugboats if required, as well as derrick and flat barges and to order lighters of fuel oil (often called “bunkers”) for the ship’s consumption. He ordered potable water for the ship’s tanks, kept up the necessary tonnage, cargo and stowage papers, as well as myriads of other clerical details; he ordered the vessel shifted from terminal to terminal when necessary, as well as linemen to “let go” the lines at the present dock, and others to “take in” the mooring lines at the next dock. In short, practically whatever detail had to be taken care of, the old-time Supercargo did it. However, from the early 30s on the title Supercargo persisted but he was actually no more than a supervisor of clerks engaged between dock office, Walking boss and clerks. Very few if any domestic steamship lines use the old-time Supercargo per se, as his functions are now performed by a number of lesser individuals.”

Tom Murray passed away in 1979, before the booklet was published.

While this one is a bit drier than the other booklets in the series, it’s got lots of useful information for this interested in how waterfront work looked last century. Like the other Little Book(s), this book is common in the trade.

For those interested we have posted a scan on Libcom, here (not our best scanning job, apologies in advance).