CHARLES H. KERR
PUBLISHING
COMPANY
Knowledge and freedom since
1886.
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"The Charles H. Kerr Company is a truly extraordinary example of
living history. Here is the publisher of Gene Debs, Clarence Darrow,
Mother
Jones, Mary Marcy, Jack London, Carl Sandburg and hundreds of other
outstanding
figures-still at it, still fighting the good fight after a hundred
glorious
years. The American labor movement has a great heritage, and the
Charles H.
Kerr Company is a precious part of it. It deserves every support." -Studs Terkel
"What a remarkable history! How can it ever be estimated, the
influence of the Kerr Company over all these years? Above all in this
era of
communication and the rising of the people all over the world, such a
bond with
expressions and education of the people must be truly celebrated-more
than a
statue of liberty: the Kerr Company is a true beacon." -Meridel LeSueur
"Charles H. Kerr has a magnificent record . . . . More
importantly,
it continues that tradition of courageous publishing in these difficult
times.
Kerr's list of titles provides us with excellent material to continue
the fight
for a just society." -Dennis
Brutus
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Dreams & Everyday Life Dreams
& Everyday Life Dreams & Everyday Life Dreams
& Everyday Life Dreams & Everyday Life Dreams
& Everyday Life Dreams & Everyday Life |
By Penelope Rosemont
ANDRÉ BRETON, Surrealism, the IWW,
Rebel Worker, Students for a Democratic Society and the Seven Cities of
Cibola in Chicago, Paris & London ... A 1960s Notebook.
"The book is wonderful! I read
nothing else till I finished it; a great and passionate evocation of
those times–unapologetic and real."—Diane di Prima
"Few books like this one give us the
feeling of the elusive thing called "the spirit of the 60's." —Michael Löwy
"Readers would be hard-pressed to
find a better reminiscence of those days when, for an extended
historical moment, Chicago again became the center of radical energies.
Still, in all this, it is the personal that is most interesting and
charming. The personalities, large and small, many of them oddball in
the extreme, seemed perfectly suited to a moment in history when, as
Rosemont says, life was supercharged with developments that we somehow
expected would go on for decades—to know about the inner life of the
sixties, this book is a good place to start." —Paul Buhle
"Thanks Penelope! Here’s to justice
and remembrance of all our working class heroes!"—Studs Terkel
"A remarkable life record."—Leon Despres
"Rosemont's book is a passionate
remembering. In an era when we are taught that there is no real history
because nothing ever changes, that today's society is the way it has
always been and will always be, amen!, remembering becomes a useful and
subversive tool."—Len Wallace
250 pages. $17 Paper
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SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM
IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM
IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM
IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM
IN '68 |
SURREALISM IN ‘68: Paris,
Prague, Chicago
Dreams of Arson
& the Arson of Dreams
Including Long Live Adventurism! From L’Archibras, June 18, 1968
Letters from François-René Simon, Marie-Dominique Massoni, Jean Benoît
and Michel Zimbacca
With a Statement in Defense of the Students, June-July 1968
By Don Lacoss
Historians will argue about the degree to which the global rebellions
of 1968 can be linked together or what (if any) catalysts
triggered the
transnational movements. But there can be no mistaking the pronounced
cross-pollination of surrealist ideas and activities in ‘68.
32 pages. Paper $5.00
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BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET BENJAMIN PÉRET |
"In Péret ‘bad conscience’ is done
away with, censorship no longer exists, and ‘all is permitted'." —André Breton
This collection is based on the pioneering anthology of Péret’s
writings that first appeared in August 1970 in the SDS journal Radical
America, introduced by Franklin Rosemont. This new, expanded and
illustrated edition includes a selection of Péret’s incomparable poetry
and stories, a wide range of critical essays on the practice of poetry,
the struggle against capitalism, slave revolts in Brazil, Pre-Columbian
art, and appreciations of the great surrealist artists Wifredo Lam,
Jindrich Styrsky, and Toyen. An Afterword by Don LaCoss discusses the
ecological dimension of Péret’s work.
"In this world of specialists and
appointed robots, a man of truth is an archaism. Our time is one of
nihilism, Péret, a man of hope, is a figure of the past. But at the
same time is this not proof that he is the man and poet of the future?"
—Octavio Paz
"One of the most militant of the
surrealist poets, Péret wrote about how poetry serves the revolution
only when the revolution serves poetry. " —from the Afterword by Don LaCoss
148 pages. Paper $14.00
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FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING FLIVVER KING |
FLIVVER KING, A STORY OF FORD AMERICA
By
Upton Sinclair
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BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER
BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN
FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER |
HISTORY
AGAINST MISERY
IN THIS LAVISHLY
illustrated collection
of activist essays, articles and reviews from the late 70s to the
present, the
noted author of The Wages of Whiteness, Towards the Abolition of
Whiteness and
other pathbreaking critical studies of America's "white problem"
focuses on the complex issue of MISERABILISM in its many and invariably
oppressive forms.
"David Roediger is renowned for his brilliant writings on
whiteness, but few readers acknowledge what lay at the root of his
work: his
abiding hatred of all forms of oppression and exploitation. If you
didn't know
this before, History Against Misery ought to make it clear, for
Roediger has
put together a powerful collection of rants and chants against
miserabilism,
and a surrealist road map to liberated futures. This is one of those
books we
must keep close to us as we struggle to overthrow misery once and for
all." -Robin
D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination
"An exquisite corpus of work! Like any great history, Roediger's
work is an act of rescue and restoration. The words, acts and deeds
have always
been out there, and here he meticulously gathers and reconstructs for
us what
has been willfully over-looked and disappeared. It is to the summer of
our
discontent that the surrealist brings us a wintry elation: humor, a
poetics of
resistance, purpose-ful deviance motivated by genuine compassion and a
love of
truth." -Blake
Schwarzenbach,
musician/writer
In this terrific collection of essays, the great radical
historian David
Roediger digs deep into his engagement with surrealism, sports, and
subversion.
It is unusual to read someone so good on such a range of topics, from
Travis
Tritt to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Andr_ Breton to Bugs Bunny. Those
familiar with
his other books will find here Another Side of David Roediger, but in
this book
he brings it all back home." -Eric
Lott, author of
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
This wonderful collection of essays is not only a powerful
indictment of
late capitalism-the system that "dulls and narrows human desire"-but
also a fascinating survey of resistance voices, from the IWW to the
Surrealists, from the "Chicago Idea" Anarchists to Black Liberation.
David Roediger persuasively shows that rebel poetry, free
imagination,
workers' direct action and Black freedom struggles are all part of the
same
great movement against the established order and its (miserable)
ideology
of "whiteness."' -Michael
Lowy, author of On Changing the World: Essays in
Political
Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (1993)
184 pages. Illustrated. Paper $17.00
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JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE |
JACQUES
VACHE
AND THE ROOTS OF
SURREALISM
Including Vaché’s
War Letters
& Other Writings
Vaché is magnificent! An important work.
Comprehensive
and impressive!
- Nancy J. Peters,
City Lights Books
THE DECADE that gave the world Krazy Kat, Rube Goldberg, and Buster Keaton also marked the emergence of Jacques Vaché. A bold jaywalker at the crossroads of history, and an ardent exemplar of freedom and revolt, Vaché challenged all prevailing values, from church and state to white supremacy, and was especially gifted at the fine art of ridiculing the dominant ethics and aesthetics of the emerging age of imperialism. Conscripted into the French Army in World War One, he soon became not only the unsurpassed champion of “Desertion from Within,” but also the master of “Disservice with Diligence.” His post-humous slim book, War Letters (1919)—included in the present volume—is a classic of surrealist anti-militarism and subversion. Renowned as the Inventor of Umour (Humour without the H), Vaché was—along with Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont—the major inspirer of André Breton and the surrealist revolution. The first of its kind in English, this book chronicles Vaché’s boundless originality, creative nonconformity, revolutionary morality (or umoral-ity), and his all-out turn-the-world-upside-down hilarity. Welcomed by André Breton himself into the Paris Surrealist Group in 1966, Franklin Rosemont took part in the Paris group’s activities for several months and went on to co-organize the Chicago Surrealist Group later that year.
A great job, and stirring great interest in
Paris! - Guy Ducornet
This lively study of a central figure in the
origins of
the movement puts the accent on surrealism’s revolutionary significance
today!”
- David R. Roediger
Full of information, subversive surprises, and
wild
humor, this revelatory account of Jacques Vaché is just the book for
our time. - Gale Ahrens.
396 pages. Profusely illustrated with Vaché’s own cartoons. Paper
$20. Cloth
$35
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BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER
BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN
FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER |
BEN
FLETCHER
THE
LIFE AND TIMES OF
A
BLACK WOBBLY
Including
Fellow Worker Fletcher’s
Writings
& Speeches
By
Peter Cole
Ben Fletcher’s all-out revolutionary industrial
unionism
exemplifies Wobbly-style working class solidarity at its creative best.
- Franklin Rosemont
ONE OF THE GREATEST HEROES of the American working class movement! The great African American Wobbly organizer, Benjamin Fletcher (1890-1949), was noted for his brilliant organizing ability and imaginative on-the-job strategies, as well as for his courage, humor, and excellence as a soapbox orator. Not surprisingly, he was one of the IWW’s most admired and best loved figures. Along with a biographical sketch of Fletcher, reminiscences of him by fellow workers who knew him well, and an impressive selection of Fletcher’s own writings and speeches, Peter Cole’s impressive introductory biographical essay also chronicles the ups and downs of the Philadelphia waterfront union in which Fletcher played such a leading role: Local 8 of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union 510.
One of the leading organizers of the industrial
Workers
of the World. He has a vision far beyond that of almost any Negro
leader we
know. - A. Phillip Randolph
Courageous and dedicated to the emancipation of
the
working class. - Matilda
Rabinowitz
Robbins
In a union noted for great organizers, Fletcher
was one
of the greatest. Local 8's achievements are still a model for us
all. - Carlos Cortez
158 pages. Illustrated. Paper $18
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BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK |
THE
BIG RED
SONGBOOK
Edited
by Archie
Green, David
Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno
ARCHIE GREEN HAS JUST
RECEIVED THE
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FROM THE FOLKLORE CENTER OF THE LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS!
America's foremost folklorist and the founder of “laborlore...and
his
collaborators explore the IWW song tradition with marvelous insight. - Paul
Buhle
Best collection of rebel workers’ songs and poems ever compiled: all the songs that appeared in the IWW’s celebrated “little red songbook” from 1909 through 1973—plus scores of others. Songs of Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Dick Brazier, Ralph Chaplin, “Dublin Dan” Liston, Covington Hall, John Brill and other Wobbly “greats.” For the first time anywhere, a good selection of songs by women Wobbies: Agnes Thecla Fair, Laura Payne Emerson, Sophie Fagin, Jane Street, Laura Tanne and others. Not least, songs and poems by the colorful bunch of Wob soapboxers who frequented Chicago’s Dil Pickle Club and Bughouse Square including G. G. Florine, Lionel Moise, James Rohn, Jim Seymour, and Bert Weber. A special section focuses on variants and parodies of IWW songs: a Depression-era version of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” Jack Langan’s 1960s version of “Solidarity Forever,” an Earth First! adaptation of Joe Hill’s “There is Power” by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, and Hazel Dickens’ bold update of “The Rebel Girl.” The essays by the editors and Judy Branfman, Richard Brazier, James Connell, Carlos Cortez, Bill Friedland, Virginia Martin, Haywire Mac, Fred Thompson and Utah Phillips not only provide historical/ biographical context, but also a wide range of perspectives on the Wobbly counterculture and its enduring legacies.
Beautifully illustrated and full of fascinating
detail, a
must for anyone interested in song, labor history, workers’ culture,
and the
struggle for a better world. - Paul
Garon
538 pages. Illustrated. Discography.
Index.
Paper $24. Cloth $36
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MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD
AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD
MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD |
WE
WILL RETURN
IN
THE
WHIRLWIND
By
Muhammad Ahmad
"This book is dedicated to all freedom and
liberation fighters of African descent, past, present, and future, and
to all
our friends and allies: the freedom-loving people of the world." - Muhammad Ahmad
About the Author: Dr. Muhammad Ahmad was national field chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) during the mid-1960s and founder of the African People’s Party in the 1970s. He has worked closely with Malcolm X, Jesse Gray, Amiri Baraka, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), James and Grace Lee Boggs, James Forman, Robert and Mabel Williams, and Queen Mother Audley Moore, among others, in founding and carrying out various Black liberation projects and organizations. In 1968 he helped organize the Third National Black Power Conference, and co-chaired its political workshop. He has consistently worked to build a Black united front. Now in his sixties, he is a member of N/COBRA and teaches in the department of African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
"At last we have a major assessment of some of
the
important Black radical organizations of the 1960s by one of the major
figures
involved. Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford, Jr.) has given us a study
of the
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther
Party
(BPP), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the League of
Revolutionary
Black Workers (LRBW) that only he could have done. Drawing upon his
extensive
network of personal and political contacts and his unique understanding
of the
connections between persons, organizations, and events (too often
viewed in
isolation), Ahmad has made a significant contribution toward deepening
our
understanding of a period whose complexities might otherwise be lost to
future
generations." - From the
Introduction
by John Bracey
350 Pages. Paper $18. Cloth $35
|
American Labor's First
Strike American Labor's
First Strike American
Labor's First StrikeAmerican
Labor's First Strike
American Labor's First Strike American Labor's First Strike |
AMERICAN
LABOR’S
FIRST
STRIKE
Articles
on
Benjamin Franklin,
The
1786 Philadelphia Journeymen’s Strike,
Early
Printers’ Unions in the U.S.,
& Their Legacy
By
Henry P.
Rosemont
Introduction by David
Roediger
"In countless columns in ITU and other labor
publications, Henry P. Rosemont distilled the history of his union. His
interests and insights are brilliantly informed by the everyday, but
never
confined to the narrow." —
From the Introduction by David Roediger
June 2, 1786, journeymen printers in Philadelphia added a whole new dimension to worker’s struggles. For the first time workers went on strike demanding a specific wage, and devised methods of mutual aid to sustain their collective direct action. This book goes on to examine other significant developments in the rise of printing trade unionism, and notably the International Typographical Union. America’s First Strike explores the role of Benjamin Franklin in the June 1786 strike; his lasting influence on organized labor; the early union printers’ support for the abolition of slavery; their leadership in the broader U.S. labor movement, and the struggle for an 8-hour day. Other articles focus on the problems of technological change, and on such epochal labor battles as the Haymarket Affair of 1886, the 1938-40 Newspaper Guild Strike, and the Chicago newspaper strike of 1947-49. Rosemont profiles many brave and thoughtful individuals involved in this colorful history: the 1786 strikers, revolutionary printer-editor George Henry Evans, anarchist Albert Parsons, and others. The son and grandson of printers, Henry P. Rosemont (1904-1979) was himself a lifelong printer and labor activist. Author of much of the ITU’s agitational and educational literature over a span of fifty years, he was also recognized —not only in his own local (Chicago No. 16) but also throughout the international organization—as one of union printerdom’s foremost historians. His massive collection of union printers’ documents is housed at The Newberry Library, Chicago.
"A wondrously effective tribute, it is also a
valuable contribution to the history of the American past. Enthusiastic
congratulations!" - Leon M.
Despres
122 pages. Paper $15
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CHANGING SOCIETY CHANGING
SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING
SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY |
CHANGING
SOCIETY:
The
Lives of Worker Heroes
Who
Made a Difference
By
Bob Breving
"Nineteen years ago when I started teaching union members at Roosevelt University, I knew very little about labor history and neither did the students. As we went on a mutual journey, I began to learn about labor history through the papers the students wrote. I read and wrote about John Peter Altgeld, Mother Jones, Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph and Eugene V. Debs. A. Philip Randolph, a prominent leader in the civil rights movement is almost never referred to in the telling of the civil rights struggle. I decided to tell also about Delores Huerta and Regina Polk, women important to today. These biographies focus on their contributions to improve the lives of working people." – Bob Breving, teacher at DePaul Labor Education Center in Chicago.
88 pages. Paper $9
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SURREALISME SURREALISME
SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME
SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME |
SURREALISME
& ATHEISME
By
Guy Ducornet
SPECIAL
IMPORT
FROM PARIS!
This surrealist critique includes the text of the French Surrealists’ classic 1948 anti-clerical text, with translations by German, English, U.S., Spanish, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech and Arabic surrealist groups.
Supply Limited!
258 pages. Illustrated. Paper $25
|
COMMUNICATING VESSELS
COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELS
COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELSj |
COMMUNICATING
VESSELS
An Anthology
By
Anthony Leskov
A collection of essays, parables, poems and reviews from the lively periodical published in Portland.
189 pages.
Illustrated. Paper $10
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BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES
BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK
HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES |
What's
the
Use of Walking
if There's a Freight Train Going Your Way?
Black
Hoboes
& their Songs
By
Paul Garon & Gene Tomko
In this exciting new
book,
Paul Garon -– celebrated author of The Devil's Son-In-Law: Peetie
Wheatstraw and His Songs; Blues
and the Poetic Spirit; and with
Beth Garon,
Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues -– tells the story of African American
migratory workers and the
songs they sang: at work, in boxcars and hobo jungles, in jail, in
country
roadhouses and urban nightspots. Focused on the years 1910-1940,
Garon's
narrative and the powerful lyrics of 100-plus songs relate in detail
the Black
hobo experience with racism and other injustice as well as with jobs as
varied
as turpentining, track-laying, circus work, lumber, agriculture and
mining.
Here, too, are fascinating digressions on Black Wobblies, Southern
Tenant Farmers'
Union organizers, and the hobohemian counterculture. This invaluable
study
comes with a 25-track CD.
"Paul Garon has produced yet another masterpiece of cultural
history. The stories and songs he gathers together in this remarkable
book
disrupt common notions of what we mean by 'freedom' when it comes to
black
folk. Hoboes represented a significant segment of the black working
class, and
their constant movements were both evidence of constraints and acts of
freedom.
And as he so eloquently demonstrates, the men and women who took to
the road and their bards have much to teach us about America's
'bottom
rail.'" - Robin D. G. Kelley,
author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"The music and the poetry of black workers in motion-hoboing,
hitchhiking, timbering, mining, railroading, loving, leaving, fighting
back and
searching for a new job, a new life and even a new world are
brilliantly
recorded and explained in this arresting collection." -David Roediger,
author of History
Against Misery
"A fascinating book in which Paul Garon has brought together a
truly
remarkable collection of blues and blues songs, created by African
American
hoboes and ex-hoboes, which reveals a new dimension of the personal and
the
experiential nature of the poetic spirit in the blues. The main
motivation of
the black hobo travelers was to find work, and the author has
meticulously
researched the nature and conditions of the lumber and turpentine
industries,
mining, levee-building and other employment that they sought, and about
which
they also sang. This is not a book solely for blues enthusiasts, for
whom it is
indispensable, but it is strongly recommended to all who are interested
in
popular culture, its forms, its expression and meaning."- Paul Oliver, author of
Blues Fell
This Morning, The Story of the Blues, etc.
288 pages. Illustrated with 25-track CD. Paper $22
|
FACING REALITY FACING
REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY
FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY |
Facing
Reality
With
a new Introduction by John H.
Bracey
By
C. L. R. James & Grace C.
Lee
with
the collaboration of Cornelius Castoriadis
"Springing forth from the utopian flames of self-emancipation
kindled by the workers councils of the Hungarian Revolution, this
pivotal book
offers a socialist indictment of the miserabilism of state capitalism
and calls
for the ongoing rejection of both vanguardism and the bureaucratic
rationalism
of state power." - Ron
Sakolsky,
author of Creating Anarchy
In this celebrated
"underground classic," also known as "C. L. R. James's most
anarchist book," the author of The Black Jacobins, History of
Pan-African Revolt and Beyond
a
Boundary examines the practical
process of
social revolution in the modern world. Inspired by the October 1956
Hungarian
workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S.
workers'
"wild-cat" strikes (against Capital and the union bureaucracies),
James and his co-authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass
emancipatory
movements by African Americans as well as
anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist
currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of
the
time, Facing Reality
also
rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed
women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."
First published in 1958 by a tiny group of James's supporters in
Detroit,
Facing Reality was popularized by the Chicago Rebel Worker group,
Solidarity
Bookshop, and other anti-authoritarians all through the 1960s. Later
taken up
by the SDS journal Radical America in its early IWW/surrealist-oriented
period,
Facing Reality became -like the works of Herbert Marcuse and E. P.
Thompson
-one of the most discussed and debated books of revolutionary theory in
the
late 20th century.
This new 21st-century edition includes a new introduction by James's
longtime friend, John H. Bracey, situating the book in its 1950s/60s
context,
and accenting its continued relevance in our time.
"Among the most forward-looking books of the 1950s, Facing
Reality
is not only a merciless critique of the reactionary rationalism that
then
passed for Marxism, but also a passionate celebration of workingclass
creativity and revolutionary internationalism at their inspired
best."-Franklin Rosemont, author of Revolution in the Service of the
Marvelous (2004). "Facing Reality was written in response to
specific historical circumstances half a century ago, but recent events
insist
on reminding us why issues of class, race, state authority, and
military
aggression are as urgent now as they were in 1958. It is a keen and
relevant
text for readers of today who are troubled by the globalized violence
of
neoliberal avarice and neoconservative hubris. Facing Reality poses the
kinds
of questions about freedom that need to be asked openly and repeatedly
during
miserable times." - Don LaCoss,
co-editor of Surrealism, Politics & Culture (2003)
188 pages. Paper $18.00
|
DANCIN' IN THE
STREETS DANCIN' IN THE STREETS DANCIN' IN THE STREETS DANCIN' IN THE
STREETS DANCIN' |
AT LAST, A DIFFERENT BOOK ON THE SIXTIES!
DANCIN'
IN
THE
STREETS!
Anarchists, IWWs,
Surrealists,
Situationists & Provos in the 1960s
Edited
with Introductions by
Franklin Rosemont & Charles Radcliffe
"The dreamkillers won't have finished working over the 1960s
until
they flatten the soaring visions of that decade into petty quarrels
between
vanguardists and aspiring Democratic Party functionaries. They won't be
done
until they turn the movement into one without humor, without poetry,
and indeed
almost without motion. But dreamkilling just got lots harder. This
brilliant
collection gives us back the audacity, imagination, energy, laughs,
wildness
and chance that animated freedom dreams that are as alive today as they
were 40
years ago." -David Roediger
MOST BOOKS on the 1960s focus on large liberal
organizations
and reformist politics. This one is unabashedly devoted to the far left
of the
far left. The Rebel Worker was a mimeo'd magazine started by young
members of
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago, 1964.
Multi-racial and
working class, they were inspired not only by the hobo wisdom of the
Wobblies,
but also by surrealism. While square critics derided them as "the left
wing of the Beat Generation," The Rebel Worker and its sister journal Heatwave
in London became well known for their highly original revolutionary
perspective, innovative social/cultural criticism, and uninhibited
class-war
humor and cartoons. Rejecting traditional left dogma, and proudly
affirming the
influence of Bugs Bunny and the Incredible Hulk, these playful rebels
against
work expanded the critique of Capital into a critique of daily life and
developed a truly radical theory and practice, rooted in poetry,
provocation,
blues, jazz and the pleasure principle. Active in strikes, free-speech
fights
and other tumults, they also ran the IWW's celebrated Solidarity
Bookshop and
introduced countless readers to writings by surrealists, situationists,
IWWs,
anarchists, libertarian Marxists, Provos, Japanese Zengakuren, etc.
Here for the first time in book-form are dozens of selections from
both of
these legendary journals, with lengthy introductions by Franklin
Rosemont
(editor of The Rebel Worker) and Charles Radcliffe (editor of
Heatwave).
More pre-publication comments on Dancin' in the Streets
"Look here for links between the Beat Generation and the later
Underground Press, but also between traditional Marxist theory and the
new
"critique of everyday life" developed by an increasingly defiant and
countercultural young left that made Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancin'
in
the Streets" its international anthem."-Paul Buhl
"Thanks for Dancin'! We surely need it!"-Diane di Prima
"A remarkable collection, full of interesting material. If I were
still an editor, I would be looting stuff from it." -Colin Ward (editor of the London
Anarchy, 1960s)
"A very handsome book, and an important history of an era and a
milieu."-Lorraine Perlman
"I really enjoyed Dancin' in the Streets. I didn't agree with it
all, but what the hell! It has given me many hours of pleasure."-Ken Weller (a mainstay of
the London
Solidarity group from the early 1960s on)
"Here is the missing link of books on the Sixties, an essential
text: It tells a lot of heretofore untold stories and fills in a lot of
gaps.-Ron Sakolsky
"More than other
recent
collections, Dancin' has a certain surreal punch stemming from the
exponential
contrast between its pure youthful spirit and the current miserabilism.
Anyone
with any life in them will want to flip all the way back and pick up
the lost
thread of those days."-Joseph
Jablonski
Sixties Series, 450 pages. Illustrated. Paper $17. Cloth $25
|
STARVING AMIDST STARVING AMIDST STARVING AMIDST S TARVING AMIDST STARVING |
STARVING
AMIDST
TOO MUCH
&
Other IWW Writings on the Food
Industry by
T-Bone Slim, L. S. Chumley,
Jim Seymour & Jack Sheridan
Edited
& Introduced by Peter
Rachleff
Foreword
by Carlos Cortez
"What the Wobblies of yesteryear had to say about the
all-important
"food question" is still relevant in our time. These writings clearly
deserve wider circulation, and should be considered and discussed by
working people today." -Carlos
Cortes (from the Foreword)
THIS IS A BOOK about the
irrepressible conflict between the poorly paid workers who actually
feed the
world and the parasitical multi-billionaire corporate powers that make
the
rules and grab the profits. Reproduced here are rare classic documents
on the
"food question" by four old-time members of North America's most
creative, colorful and uncompromising union: the revolutionary
Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), known as Wobblies.
Here is the greatest Wob writer of them all, the one and only T-Bone
Slim,
whose detailed critique of the industry-chockful of penetrating insight
and
knockout black humor-is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift and Benjamin
P_ret.
Organizer L. S. Chumley portrays the horrid living and working
conditions of
hotel and restaurant workers circa 1918, stressing the need for
workers' direct
action. Here, too, is Wobbly troubadour Jim Seymour, with his inspired
saga of
"The Dishwasher" and reflections on the possibilities of a radically
different diet. Jack Sheridan's fascinating 1959 survey of the role of
food in
ancient and modern civilization, especially in economic development, is
also a
crash-course in the materialist conception of history at its Wobbly
soapboxer
best.
In the introduction, historian/activist Peter Rachleff traces the
history of
food-workers' self-organization, and brings the book up to date with a
look at
current point-of-production struggles to break the haughty power of an
ecocidal
agri-business and the union-busting fast-food chains.
Informative and provocative, this lively collection provides just
the kind
of background and inspiration needed by young workers today, who are
striving
to build a new revolutionary movement based on direct action and
solidarity.
"The pamphlets, columns, and articles collected in this volume
make
available to us a rich wellspring of ideas. . . . These are far more
than
historical artifacts. They offer today's workers a first class
breakfast, a
place to begin consideration of all our places in the food chain, from
farming
to processing and production to the preparation and serving of meals.
The
metaphor reminds us of the ways that workers and consumers are bound in
their
work and by their most fundamental of bodily practices-eating-by broad
economic
and social decisions from which workers' input has been excluded. We
are bound
by these chains of the food industry. T-Bone Slim, L.S. Chumley, Jack
Sheridan,
and Jim Seymour offer us acute analyses of these industries and
processes, and,
even more importantly, they offer us access to the IWW vision of how to
break
these chains, how to change the world."
-Peter Rachleff (from
the Introduction)
128 pages. Illustrated. Paper $12
|
JOE HILL JOE HILL
JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE
HILL JOE HILL JOE |
NOW IN ITS SECOND PRINTING!
"In Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill has finally found a chronicler
worthy of his revolutionary spirit, sense of humor, and poetic
imagination.
This is no ordinary biography. It is a journey into the Wobbly culture
that
made Joe Hill and the capitalist culture that killed him. But as
Rosemont
suggests in this remarkable book, Joe Hill never really dies. He will
live in
the minds of young rebels as long as his songs are sung, his ideas are
circulated, and his political descendants keep fighting for a better
day."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, ,
author
of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
"This is an exceptionally important book in many ways, and
Franklin
Rosemont has done us all a great favor in writing it. The fine chapter
on
Hill's involvement in the Mexican Revolution is alone well worth the
cove
price, for no other study comes even close to offering so much
information, so
much rich detail, on that crucial moment in his life. There's no doubt
about
it: This is the best book ever written about Joe Hill."
-Utah Phillips
"Extraordinarily interesting ... a tremendous achievement, full
of
insight into Joe Hill, carefully separating his life from his
post-mortem
elaboration, and substantiating all of it. Hill is not quite as alive a
you and
I, but almost, and this book has contributed to his long life."-Leon M. Despres
JOE
HILL
The
IWW & the Making of a
Revolutionary
Workingclass
Counterculture
By
Franklin Rosemont
JOE HILL (1877-1915) is
the best-known
figure in the heroic history of the Indus trial Workers of the World
(a.k.a.
Wobblies). U.S. labor's most world-renowned martyr and celebrated
song-writer,
he is remembered above all for his songs in the Little Red Song Book:
"The Preacher and the Slave" ("Pie in the Sky"), "Mr
Block," "There Is Power in a Union," and many more that are
still popular on picketlines today.
Franklin Rosemont's important new book presents a fresh and in-depth
study
of the life and work of the famous Wobbly bard, and of the
revolutionary
counter-culture he came to personify. Older books on Hill focused on
the crime
he didn't commit, his frame-up and martyrdom. This study sheds new
light on
those topics -particularly on the ongoing use of frame-up in the
U.S."justice"
system-but its overall focus is on Hill's ideas and activity: as
songwriter,
poet, artist, hobo, thinker, humorist, and archetypal rank-and-file
Wobbly.
No other book discusses in such detail Hill's views on capitalism,
white
supremacy, gender issues, religion, wilderness, law, and prison, as
well as on
songwriting, humor, direct action, and revolutionary industrial
union-ism.
Several chapters explore Hill's little-known work as a cartoonist.
Collected
here for the first time is all his art, including his one surviving
painting.
The scores of other illustrations feature Hill-inspired art by IWWs
from Ralph
Chaplin to Carlos Cortez, and by such other labor artists as Mike
Alewitz, Gary
Huck, Mike Konopacki, and Lisa Lyons.
Examining Hill's status as a "near-mythic" figure in history as
well as his enormous influence-on Wob artists; other radicals,
songwriters, and
poets; on movements as varied as the 1910s Chicago Renaissance and the
1950s
Beat Generation-Rosemont also examines the many appearances by Hill and
the IWW
in popular culture, including mass-market mysteries, science-fiction,
and
rock'n'roll. In chapters on "The Hobo Contribution to Critical
Theory," "Wobblies Against Whiteness," "Forerunners of
Earth First! and Eco-Socialism," and "Surrealism, Wobbly Style"
he argues that Hill's legacy -the profound but playful old-time Wobbly
counter-culture-is still the "most important inspiration and model for
a
new revolutionary movement" today.
Franklin Rosemont's nearly thirty books include T-Bone Slim:
Juice Is
Stranger Than Friction,
and From Bug-house
Square to the Beat
Generation: Selected Ravings of Slim Brundage,
both published by Charles H. Kerr, and Penelope: A Poem (Surrealist Editions).
A Few Words About Franklin
Rosemont's JOE HILL
"A remarkable book, and badly needed."-Paul Avrich
"This full-length study . . . discusses for the first time the
Wobbly bard's contributions to labor cartooning, wilder-ness
radicalism,
women's liberation, and the struggle against white supremacy. Far more
than a
biography, this book is a fundamental re-examination of the IWW, its
rich and
manysided culture, and its relation to such currents as romanticism,
Futurism,
the Chicago Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and surrealism,
emphasizing
throughout the significance of the Wobblies' multiple legacies for
revolutionary struggle in our own time."
-Ron Sakolsky, in Surrealist Subversions: Rants,
Writings and
Images by the Surrealist Movement in the U.S. (2002)
"It's the right man by the right biographer at the right time.
...
This magnificent, practical, irreverent, and (as one might say)
magisterial
book has sixteen chapters and more than 600 pages, profusely
illustrated ... It
is written in a direct, passionate, sometimes funny, deeply searching
style. It
is a labor of love. Rosemont's book, like E. P. Thompson's Making of
the
English Working Class, has a job to do-making the class which brings to
birth a
new world from the ashes of the old. ...The Wobbly vocabulary of mutual
aid
that Thompson called for is not going to be found in theory, or in
instinct,
but it might be found in song. Here we need Rosemont and Joe Hill."
-Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch
"It has been a long time since so much new material on Joe Hill
and
the Wobblies has been collected in one volume. All students of the IWW,
labor
cartoons and songs, radical humor, and the history of blue-collar
countercultures in the U.S., will find this book indispensable."
-Salvatore Salerno,
author
of Red November, Black November
(1989)
"Extraordinarily interesting . . . a tremendous achievement." -Leon Despres
"Exceptionally important . . . The fine chapter on Hill's
involve-ment in the Mexican Revolution is alone well worth the cover
price. . .
. No doubt about it: This is the best book ever written about Joe
Hill."-Utah Phillips
"Blends the best of labor history with popular culture [and]
debunks
the many myths surrounding Hill. . . Rosemont's passion for IWW history
and
lore is compelling". - Julie
Herrada, Fifth Estate
"Informative, fascinating, fun to read-a little like The New
Yorker,
with great cartoons every other page".
-Tom Geoghegan
"In these 600-plus pages there is not one bit of tedious reading.
This is an important book." - Industrial
Worker
656 pages. Illustrated.
Paper $19.00. Cloth $35.00
|
LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS
LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY |
LUCY
PARSONS
FREEDOM,
EQUALITY & SOLIDARITY
Writings
& Speeches 1878-1937
Edited
& Introduced by Gale Ahrens
With
an Afterword by Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz
"The most prominent black woman radical of the late nineteenth
century,
Lucy Parsons [was also] one of the brightest lights in the history of
revolutionary socialism."-Robin D. G. Kelley, in Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination.
"Lucy Parsons's writings are among the best and strongest in the
history of U.S. anarchism. Although written long ago, these texts
tackle the
major problems of our time.
Her long and
often traumatic experience of the capitalist injustice system-from KKK
terror
in her youth, through Haymarket and the judicial murder of her husband,
to the
U.S. government's war on the Wobblies -made her not "just another
victim" but an extraordinarily articulate witness to, and vehement crusader against, all injustice. That kind of direct experience
gave her a
credibility and an actuality that
those who lack such experience just don't have. Lucy Parsons's life and
writings reflect her true-to-the-bone heroism. Her language sparkles
with the
love of freedom and the passion of revolt."
- Gale Ahrens, Introduction
"More dangerous than 1000 rioters!" That's what the
Chicago police called Lucy
Parsons- America's most defiant and persistent anarchist agitator,
whose
cross-country speaking tours inspired hundreds of thousands of working
people.
Her friends and admirers included William Morris, Peter Kropot-kin,
"Big
Bill" Haywood, Ben Reitman, Sam Dolgoff-and the groups in which she was
active were just as varied: the Knights of Labor, IWW, Dil Pickle Club,
International
Labor Defense, & others. Here for the first time is a hefty
selection of
her powerful writings & speeches-on anarchism, women, race matters,
class
war, the IWW, and the U.S. injustice system.
"Lucy Parsons's personae and historical role provide material for
the makings of a truly exemplary figure ... Think of it: a lifelong
anarchist,
labor organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and dynamic speaker, a
woman of
color of mixed black, Mexican, and Native American heritage, founder of
the
1880s Chicago Working Woman's Union that organized garment workers,
called for
equal pay for equal work, and even invited housewives to join with the
demand
of wages for housework; and later (1905) co-founder the Industrial
Workers of
the World (IWW), which made the organizing of women and people of color
a
priority. . .For a better understanding of the concept of direct action
and its
implications, no other historical figure can match the lessons provided
by Lucy
Parsons."
- Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Afterword
192 Pages. Illustrated. Paper $17.00
A few copies are
available of
Lucy
Parsons:
American Revolutionary
by
Carolyn Ashbaugh.
Published by Charles H. Kerr in 1976. This is the only biography available.
288 pages. Paper $24.00
|
LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON
LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON |
"Six important speeches by Wendell Phillips, one of the great
figures in American history, mark this volume as an indispensable
source that
should be read by all serious students of the national past and
present."
-Sterling Stuckey,
University
of California at Riverside, author of Slave Culture and Going Through the Storm
THE
LESSON
OF THE HOUR
Wendell
Phillips on Abolition &
Strategy
Edited
& Introduced by Noel
Ignatiev
DURING the winter of
1860-61, as
southern states announced their intention to secede from the Union, the
great
Abolitionist Wendell Phillips walked the streets of Boston under threat
of
attack from mobs that blamed him for the breakup. Barely one year
later, when
Phillips traveled to Washington, the Vice President of the United
States
welcomed him to the Senate chamber, the Speaker of the House invited
him to
dinner, and President Lincoln received him as a guest at the White
House.
The Abolitionists were revolutionaries, willing to tear up the
Southern
economy and society by the roots, wreck Northern commerce, and disrupt
the
Union irretrievably. They renounced all traditional politics. They
openly hoped
for the defeat of their own country in the Mexican War. They preached
and
practiced racial equality. They fought for the equality of women. They
understood the need to break up the Union in order to reconstitute it
without
slavery.
Have ever revolutionaries been more thoroughly vindicated by events?
Although William Lloyd Garrison was the founder of the movement and
remains
the most widely known of the Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips was the
real
leader. This volume is the only collection of his work generally
available. It
includes six speeches charting a revolutionary course for abolition,
with an
introduction establishing their historical context.
160 pages. Paper $12.00. Cloth $28.00
"This collection of Wendell Phillips's speeches brings back to
light
one of the magnificent rhetoricians of the abolition movement. Noel
Ignatiev's
introduction makes a compelling case for treating Phillips as the "real
leader" of nineteenth century American radicalism, and the orator's
words
as a guide to an alternative society."
-David W. Blight, Amherst College, author of Race and
Reunion:
The Civil War in American Memory
Noel Ignatiev is the author of How the Irish Became White and the coeditor of Race
Traitor: journal
of the new abolitionism. He
teaches in the
Department of Critical Studies at Massachusetts College of Art.
|
PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT
PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT |
"Autoworker, historian, humorist, sociologist, poet, and baseball
coach, Marty Glaberman had as close a knowledge of working people as
any
intellectual of his generation. He also had, as these wonderful
collected
writings show, the most firm confidence in their revolutionary
potential."
-David Roediger
PUNCHING
OUT:
Selected
Writings of Martin Glaberman
Edited
& introduced by Staughton
Lynd
GLABERMAN is the most
important
writer on labor matters in the United States during the second half of
the
Twentieth century. He developed distinctive concepts concerning the
nature of
trade unionism; the unfolding of working-class consciousness; and the
forms of
revolutionary organization appropriate to modern industrial society ...
Glaberman received a bachelor's degree from City College of New
York. He was
working on a master's degree in Economics at Columbia University when
he dropped
out to become a radical doing full-time industrial work. There followed
twenty
years laboring for wages in plants in and around Detroit as an assembly
line
worker and machinist. On the eve of World War II, Glaberman associated
himself
with the West Indian Marxist intellectual, C.L.R. James [and] became a
member
of the Johnson-Forest Tendency within American Trotskyism. This small
but
enormously productive and influential group made the first trans-lation
into
English of what came to be called the "early economic-philosophical
manuscripts" of Karl Marx.
-From the Introduction by Staughton
Lynd
246 pages. Paper $15.00. Cloth $35
|
RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID
RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID |
THE
RAMBLING KID
ByCharles
Ashleigh
CHARLES ASHLEIGH'S novel, The Rambling Kid, is one of the
best and
most informative books concerning the IWW. It is also one of the rarest
and
hardest to find. First published in London, 1930, it has never been
reissued
and is practically impossible to locate, even in libraries.
Soapboxer, writer, poet, agitator, and publicist, the British-born
Ashleigh
was active in the IWW from 1912 until his deportation in nine years
later. As a
first-hand account of the Wobbly way of life in the 1910s, The Rambling
Kid has
few equals.
ON THE ROAD WITH THE WOBBLIES
"Charles Ashleigh's semi-autobiographical novel fills a void in the
record of the events that led to the federal government's brutal
attempts to
suppress the "One Big Union" during World War I. Ashleigh's
characters ride alongside IWW job delegates, bindle-stiffs, and gandy
dancers
as they crisscross the country hopping freights en route to jobs and
strikes
and everything in between. In the tradition of The Milk and Honey Route
by Dean
Stiff (Nels Anderson), The Main Stem by William Edge, and Home to
Harlem by
Claude McKay, The Rambling Kid offers an intimate glimpse into
pre-World-War-1
workers' culture on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Steve
Kellerman's superb
introduction provides the critical and biographical context for
understanding
the importance of Ashleigh's work and the historical forces that
produced The
Rambling Kid." - Salvatore Salerno,
Red November, Black November)
302 pages. Paper $17.00
|
REVOLUTION MARVELOUS
REVOLUTION MARVELOUS REVOLUTION MARVELOUS REVOLUTION MARVELOUS |
REVOLUTION
IN THE
SERVICE OF
THE MARVELOUS
Surrealist
Contributions to the
Critique of Miserabilism
By
Franklin Rosemont
"It is somehow comforting to see how much our lines of thought
converge."
-Herbert Marcuse, letter to
Franklin
Rosemont
S U R R E A L I S M
A G A I
N S T M I
S E R A B I L I S M !
THE Chicago Surrealist
Group burst
on the scene in 1966 and has remained one of the most active and
innovative
surrealist groups in the world. Well known for their impressive
achievements in
poetry, the arts, and direct action, the Chicago surrealists are also
noted for
their highly original contributions to revolutionary theory and
criticism. As
Ron Sakolsky points out in his anthology, Surrealist Subversions
(2002), the group has attracted the sympathetic interest of writers,
thinkers
and creators as varied as Herbert Marcuse, Nelson Algren, Octavio Paz,
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Robin D. G. Kelley, Leonora Carrington, Maurice Nadeau,
Luis
Bu–uel, Cecil Taylor, Diane di Prima, Noel Ignatiev, and George Rawick.
Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous contains twenty essays by one of
contemporary surrealism's major poets
and theorists, Chicago Surrealist Group co-founder Franklin Rosemont.
These
essays focus on the ways in which surrealist perspectives have
continued to
evolve and expand since the movement's worldwide resurgence in the
1960s. This
wide-ranging and well-illustrated collection includes prefaces to
international
surrealist exhibitions and texts concerning wilderness, the politics of
humor,
the black radical tradition, and the critique of whiteness-documenting
key
developments in surreal-ism's collective evolution. Other essays
explore the
work of individual poets, painters, musicians and dancers whose
creative
activity exemplifies the movement's ongoing transformative project.
Rosemont remarks in his Introduction: "As a book about surrealism,
this
is also inevitably a book about freedom, desire, surprise, love, play,
humor,
black music, painting, collage, dance, film, ecology, subversion,
revolt and
revolution. Above all it is concerned with the practice of poetry: poetry as audacity and insubor-dination,
a source
and method of knowledge, a model for a better society, an adventure and
experience that makes
all the difference in the world."
160 pages. Illustrated. $14.00
Welcomed by Andr_ Breton into the Surrealist Movement in Paris,
1966,
Franklin Rosemont later edited Breton's What Is Surrealism?
Selected
Writings (1978). His other
surrealist works
include Surrealism & Its Popular Accomplices (1980), The Forecast Is Hot!
Tracts &
Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the U.S. (with Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon,
1997); An
Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers (2003); and three books of poetry. He has
also written widely on U. S.
radical history, most recently Joe Hill: The IWW & the
Making of
a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles
H. Kerr, 2003).
|
DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL
PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE |
Most people found the Dil Pickle exhilarating, liberating,
illuminating,
educational, and above all fun. Some found it shocking, subversive,
irreverent,
"un-American," and decadent. But nobody called it boring!
"An amazing job of bringing the Dil Pickle to life. I am lost in
admiration over the material_a sensational collection!"-Leon M. Despres
THE DIL PICKLE E X P E R I E N
C E !
(Yes-DIL with one L!)
The
Rise & Fall of the
DIL PICKLE
Jazz-Age
Chicago's Wildest & Most
Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot
Introduction by Franklin
Rosemont
WHAT do Lucy Parsons,
Clarence
Darrow, Carl Sandburg, Mary MacLane, Lawrence Lipton, Elizabeth Davis
(Queen of
the Hoboes), Jun Fujita, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Chaplin, Kather-ine
Dunham,
Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Rexroth, and Slim Brundage have in common? They
were all
Dil Picklers!
And what was the Dil Pickle? Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack
Jones,
Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented
Bughouse
Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle in just a few years was
widely
recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most
radical
nightspot in the known universe-especially after Dr Ben Reitman (Emma
Goldman's
former lover and press agent) joined the club in 1917.
In this book-the first ever devoted to one of this country's most
colorful
and best-loved counter-institutions-Franklin Rosemont has collected
forty-one
reminiscences of the Dil Pickle by poets, artists, journalists,
novelists,
hobos, scholars, anarchists, wobblies, and other assorted radicals and
oddballs. Among them are accounts by the club's founders, habitu_s,
visitors,
and even a few hardhearted critics. Few of these texts have ever been
reprinted
since their original publication in old, hard-to-find books and
periodicals.
Three appear here for the first time.
Included are lively portrayals of the Dil Pickle as "A Most
Important
Part of the Mythology of Chicago" (Kenneth Rexroth), "A Temple of the
Disinherited" (Emanuel Carnevali), "A Hobo Jungle of Ideas"
(Alexander Ebin), "The Flaming Crater of Chicago's Revolution in the
Arts" (Vincent Starrett), and "Bohemia in All its Glory" (John
Drury)-and much more.
Franklin Rosemont's introduction provides the fullest account so far
of the
Dil Pickle's chaotic history-its background in "Chicago Idea"
anarchism and earlier free-speech forums, as well as its close
association with
the IWW and the Charles H. Kerr Company-and goes on to explore the role
of the
Picklers in the arts and the "Chicago Renaissance," along with its
meaning(s) for our own troubled times.
190 pages. Illustrated. Paper $14.00
|
POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA
POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA |
"Posada, as great and prolific as Goya and Callot, was
inexhaustibly
inventive-a wellspring of creativity. He was the interpreter of the
joys and
sorrows, the anguish and aspirations of the Mexican people, a precursor
of
Zapata and Flores Magon."
-Diego
Rivera
VIVA
POSADA!
A
Salute to the Great Printmaker of
the Mexican Revolution
Edited
& Introduced by Carlos
Cortez
MEXICO enjoys a continuity
of
artistic expression of more than six millennia, and despite the fact
that the
Spanish conquerors tried to enforce European styles on the Mexicans,
that
continuity persists into our own modern times. When modern technology
such as
the printing press was introduced into Mexico, artisans readily adapted
their
talents to the new medium while retaining their millennia-old values. .
. .
Because of the high quality and the quantity of his art, Jos_
Guadalupe
Posada is the one Mexican printmaker who has acquired posthumous and
inter-national fame. Posada was at his peak at the turn of the
twentieth
century, during the closing years of the Diaz dictatorship. He has long
been
recognized as one of the personifications of the ensuing Mexican
Revolution,
which he did not live to see completed. He illustrated many broadsides
of
revolutionary ballads, printed on cheap paper and sold for centavos in the streets.
Posada remains an important part of the great living tradition of
radical
popular art that continues to flourish in Mexico and throughout the
world
today.
-From the Introduction by Carlos Cortez
Published on the 150th anniversary of Posada's birth
(1852-2002),
this book features 121 of the finest works by the great popular
engraver and
relief-etcher who inspired not only the Mexican muralists but also the
international Surrealist movement as well as poster artists and radical
cartoonists from all over the world. Also included here are excerpts
from
classic texts on the artist by Jean Charlot, Jos_ Clemente Orozco,
Frida Kahlo,
Andr_ Breton and others, as well as statements by poets and artists of
our own
time-Dennis Brutus, Rikki Ducornet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Franklin
Rosemont,
Joseph Jablonski, Ted Joans, Casandra Stark Mele, and many more-all
published
here for the first time.
96 pages. Profusely Illustrated. Paper $10.00. Cloth $ 27.00
|
PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE
PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE
PEETIE |
THE
DEVIL'S SON-IN-LAW
The
Story of Peetie Wheatstraw &
His
Songs
(with
24-track CD)
by
Paul Garon
BLUES-SINGER, songwriter,
piano- and
guitar-player, William Bunch (1902-1941) was well-known as Peetie
Wheatstraw,
the Devil's Son-in-Law and the High Sheriff from Hell. Long recognized by con-noisseurs as one
of the most
influential blues people of all time, his life and work are little
known to the
broad public. Blues scholar Paul Garon's important and abun-dantly
illustrated
study-drawing on his own extensive interviews with Wheatstraw's
relatives, and
fellow musicians-brings the exciting Wheatstraw saga to life at last.
With insight and imagination, Garon explores Peetie Wheatstraw's
crucial
role not only in blues history, but also in African American urban
mythology
(he was, for example, a pivotal character in Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man), and-via
a penetrating analysis of song lyrics-his appreciable contributions to
blues
poetry and to vernacular surrealism.
Originally published in England in 1971, this substantially revised
and
expanded edition includes a mass of new information and images as well
as an
updated bibliography, discography, and index.
Also included with the book is a 24-track CD portraying Peetie at
his
best, with a bonus track by "Peetie Wheatstraw's Buddy" Harmon
Ray-the previously unissued
XMAS
BLUES!
156 pages. Paper $15.00. Cloth $21.00
What the Critics Say About Paul
Garon and
the Blues
The Devil's Son-in-Law
"A brilliant reconstruction of one particular blues singer and the
life
he must have led . . . a fascinating picture of an era long-departed .
. . a
very fine book.
-Derrick
Stewart-Baxter, Jazz
Journal
"A model for any future books of this kind. No blues lover should
fail
to read this illuminating account."
-Bob Groom, Blues World
Woman with Guitar: Memphis
Minnie's
Blues (with Beth Garon)
"The authors have added a new dimension to blues scholarship"-Paul
Oliver
"The first full-length study devoted to [an] outstanding artist
noted
for her merciless imagination and dark humor. While too many books on
blues are
afflicted with descriptive sociology or naive sentimentality, Garon's
emphasis,
in keeping with his surrealist priorities, is always on blues as
poetry, magic,
humor, eroticism, revolt, and the quest for freedom and the Marvelous."
-Ron Sakolsky, Surrealist
Subversions (2002)
152 pages. Illustrated. Paper $18.00. Cloth $28.00
Blues and the Poetic Spirit
"A new and important approach to the analysis of the blues as a
psychopoetic phenomenon . . . An important starting place for
researchers who
intend to investigate the essence of the blues." -Samuel Floyd
"Combines Marxism, surrealism and psychoanalysis in an innovative
and
engaging analysis of the poetry and power of black secular music. Garon
is
especially impressive in his command of a vast body of blues lyrics and
his
ability to isolate and to digest the meaning of the most striking
images in
these lyrics." -David Roediger
"The special merit of Blues and the Poetic Spirit lies in its illumination of the poetic
beauty and
subversive power of blues through the sights of a radical perspective.
No other
author, in my opinion, covers the thematic universe of blues with such
imagination and breadth as Garon does. [His] vision of blues . . . captures what is best in
[the] fusion
of Western and Afro-American poetry and music."
-Carl Boggs, Socialist
Review
Should be required reading for all college graduates and especially
those
few editors (whites) who earn a living from Black music, even those
thousands
that continue to imitate Black musicians.... Blues and the Poetic
Spirit is the best to be
published to this date concerning
the blues."
-Ted Joans, Coda
"One of the most important surrealist texts to come out of the
United
States."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
|
HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA
HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHE |
"I loved the book. I plan to get copies for all my friends!" -Polly Connelly
HOBOHEMIA
Emma
Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben
Reitman & Other Agitators & Outsiders in 1920s Chicago
by
Frank
O. Beck
FROM the 1910s through the
Depression 30s, when Chicago was the undisputed hobo capital of the
United
States, a small north side neighborhood known as Towertown was the
vital center
of an extraordinary cultural/political ferment. It was home to Bughouse
Square
(the nation's most renowned outdoor free-speech center), Ben Reitman's
Hobo
College, and the fabulous Dil Pickle Club, a highly unorthodox
institution of
higher learning that doubled as the craziest nightclub in the world.
In such places, and in scores of other nearby open forums,
tea-rooms, little
theaters, bookshops, art galleries, taverns, and cafes, Wobblies,
anarchists,
and other agitators mingled and debated with a wide range of jazz-age
artists,
writers, musicians, and eccentrics. It was something like New York's
Greenwich
Village, but-thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW-much
more
workingclass, and more openly revolutionary.
Frank O. Beck's Hobohemia
contains a
long-time Towertowner's vivid reminiscences of this colorful, dynamic,
creative
and radical community that flourished for a generation despite constant
onslaughts from the Red Squad, the Vice Squad, bourgeois journalists,
funda-mentalists and other bigots.
Some of the characters he writes about are well known-Emma Goldman,
Lucy
Parsons, Ben Reitman, Jane Addams-but Beck's personal recollections of
them
will be new to most readers. Even more exciting are his memories of
such
less-well-known personalities as "Red" Martha Biegler, widely
regarded as the greatest woman orator at the Square; softspoken labor
organizer
Anna Martindale; Nina van Zandt Spies, widow of Haymarket martyr August
Spies;
and irascible Jack Jones, the former Wobbly who from 1916 till his
death in
1940 served as the Dil Pickle's ringleader and referee.
Originally published in 1956, Hobohemia
has long been out of print and hard to find. This new edition is long
overdue,
for the book is still one of the best first-hand accounts of a unique
place and
time.
Franklin Rosemont's introduction provides a historical overview of
Chicago's
workingclass counter-culture and a biographical sketch of Beck. It also
relates
the book to earlier and later literature on the subject and fills in
some gaps
in the narrative. Helpful notes in the text correct a few errors.
Also new in this edition are the illustrations, and a useful index.
"Chicago was once richly ornamented with numerous open forums,
crowned always by Bughouse Square (Washington Square Park, at Clark and
Walton,
across the street from The Newberry Library.
"Until radio and television intruded, the free forums entertained
the populace and provided training grounds for labor organizers,
political
orators, and religious eccentrics. There were women_s forums,
African-American
forums, anarchist forums, and even a plain, large, successful forum in
the
South Side_s Washington Park just called the Bug Club. In cold winter
weeks.
the forums often found security indoors in the Dil Pickle Club, the
College of
Complexes, and elsewhere.
"These choice books from the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company
bring many of Chicago_s erstwhile public forums back to vivid life." - Leon M. Depres
Bughouse Square Series
128 pages. Paper $12.00. Cloth $30.00
|
CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME
CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME
C |
"There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they
pretend
to accomplish. They are a blot upon civilization, and a jail is an
evidence of
the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and
fill
them with the victims of their greed. -Clarence
Darrow
CLARENCE
DARROW
CRIME
& CRIMINALS
Address
to the
Prisoners in the Cook
County
Jail & Other Writings on Crime & Punishment
CLARENCE DARROW'S Crime
and Criminals, originally published by Charles H. Kerr in
1902, is not only one of the
greatest works by the greatest
attorney in U.S. history, it is also a little masterpiece in the
literature of
social criticism and the struggle for freedom.
In a few pages radiant with the forceful eloquence and dry humor for
which
he was so justly renowned, Darrow offers the man in the street-or more
precisely in this case, in jail-a crash course in the theory and
practice of
law and criminology. He discusses what crime is, what causes it, why
more
people go to jail in winter than in summer, why the real criminals
almost never
go to prison, why punishment doesn't work, and-in the end-why the U.S.
criminal
justice system is in fact a system of injustice,
a colossal and barbaric failure.
Today, when the "Prison-Industrial Complex" and its accomplices in
local, state and federal government are trampling underfoot what little
remains
of the Bill of Rights, and locking up millions of the working poor,
Darrow's
radical and liberating message is not only timely, but urgent.
This new edition includes important supplemental material, most
notably the remarkable
essay, "Darrow's Crime and Criminals
a Century Later," by Leon M. Despres, who is himself a courageous
attorney
in the Darrow tradition. Opening with valuable biographical and
historical
background regarding Darrow's views on crime and criminals, Despres
also
discusses the results of a survey made in 1996, in which a number of
prisoners
at Cook County Jail were invited to comment on Darrow's 1902 talk.
Their
agreements and disagreements with Darrow make fascinating reading!
This edition also features excerpts from several other writings by
Darrow on
law, crime and punishment. An important Afterword by Carol Heise, an
attorney
and an activist involved with prisoners on Cook County Jail's Death
Row,
focuses on Darrow's views on capital punishment.
Penelope Rosemont notes in her Foreword that "Darrow's association
with
the Charles H. Kerr Company was long and intimate." Of his many Kerr
titles, Crime and Criminals
has proved
to be the most popular. Here, as Charles H. Kerr said, Darrow "tells
the
real reason for 'crime,' and points out the only cure."
60 pages. Paper $7.50. Cloth $25.00
|
WALLS & BARS WALLS
& BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS
& BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BA |
"Capitalism must have prisons to protect itself from the
criminals
it has created." -Eugene V.
Debs
EUGENE
V. DEBS
WALLS
& BARS
Prisons
& Prison Life in the
"Land of the Free"
with a New Introduction
by
David Dellinger
EUGENE DEBS (1855-1926),
the
best-loved socialist agitator of his time, is to this day one of the
best
remembered radicals in U.S. history. More than anyone, he brought the
emancipatory zeal of the Abolitionists into the workers' movement. His
liberating message reached a larger portion of the U.S. population than
any revolutionist
ever reached, before or since. Debs's passion for freedom and his
unshakable
confidence in the ability of working people to create a better world
inspired
millions.
Few are aware that this popular and influential radical wrote one of
the
most insightful books on prisons. Debs's only full-length book, Walls
and
Bars (first published in 1927)
is a lively
memoir as well as a stirring critique, drawing on his own prison
experiences.
He served time for his leading role in the Pullman Strike in 1894, and
was sent
to the penitentiary again in 1919 for opposing World War I. In 1920, as
Convict
No.9653, he ran for
President on
the Socialist ticket and received a million votes.
Debs explains in this book why prisons don't (and can't) reform or
deter
anyone, and how prisons in fact create criminals. He discusses prison
labor and
the links between prison and militarism. Above all he exposes the class
bias of
the entire U.S. criminal justice system, showing that "the prison
problem
is directly co-related with poverty." His conclusion: "Capitalism and
crime have become almost synonymous terms."
Arguing that prison "should not merely be reformed but abolished,"
Debs called for a socialism of solidarity, freedom and love, firmly
rooted in industrial
democracy, without which
political
democracy is a sham. Only with the advent of such a social revolution,
in Debs'
5 view, can society succeed in "taking the jail out of man as well
taking
man out of jail."
This new edition of Walls and Bars includes
an important introduction by David Dellinger-himself a life long
revolutionist
who, because of his opposition to imperialist war and his devotion to
the cause
of civil rights, has spent a good deal of time behind bars, as
chronicled in Revolutionary
Nonviolence (1970), his
autobiography, From
Yale to Jail (1991), and other
books.
Dellinger discusses various changes that have taken place in the prison
system
since Debs's time, and emphasizes that this decades-old book is very
much a
book for today.
Revolutionary Classics
256 pages. Paper $15.00. Cloth $35
| Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook |
HAYMARKET
SCRAPBOOK
Edited
by Dave Roediger and Franklin
Rosemont
THIS profusely illustrated anthology by many
of today's finest labor and
radical historians focuses on the most world-reverberating event in
American
labor history: the Haymarket Affair of 1886-87, and on the vast,
incredibly
varied and enduring influence it has exerted in the United States and
across
the globe.
Haymarket Scrapbook contributors include William J. Adelman,
Carlotta
Anderson, Carolyn Ashbaugh, Paul Avrich, Alan Dawley, Heiner Becker,
Sam
Dolgoff, Richard Drinnon, George Esenwein, Philip Foner, Paul and
Elizabeth
Garon, Joseph Jablonski, Stuart Kaufman, Sidney Lens, Blaine McKinley,
Bruce
Nelson, Penelope Rosemont, Beryl Ruehl, Sal Salerno, Stephen Sapolsky,
Morris
U. Schappes, Diane Scherer, Richard Schneirov, Fred Thompson, Fred
Whitehead
and many more!
Haymarket Scrapbook also features reprints of hard-to-find writings,
speeches and poems by Jane Addams, Oscar Ameringer, Kate Austin, Edward
Bellamy, John Brown, Jr., Ralph Chaplin, Voitairine de Cleyre, Eugene
Debs,
Floyd Dell, David Edelshtat, Emma Goldman, Sam Gompers, Lizzie Holmes,
Mother
Jones, Harry Kelly, Peter Kropotkin, Jo Labadie, Lucy Parsons, Kenneth
Rexroth,
Carl Sandburg, Nina van Zandt and many more!
Haymarket Scrapbook also includes more than three hundred cartoons
and other
illustrations by Flavio Costantini, Walter Crane, Robert Green, George
Herriman, Mike Konopacki, Man Ray, Robert Minor, Thomas Nast, Ernest
Riebe,
Mitchell Siporin, "Dust" Wallin, Art Young-and many more!
256 pages. Paper $19.00. Cloth $35.00
"A magnificent work of research, memory and love." -Meridel LeSueur
"A masterpiece of American radicalism-exactly the book that the
radical movement needs today." -George
Rawick
"A major contribution to labor history. . . . One of the most
visually exciting collections to be published in recent years. . . . It
should
be on the shelves of every high school and college library. Unions and
social
action community groups should purchase bulkorders." -Joyce L. Kornb1uh
"A marvelous, massive, very important book." -Studs Terkel
"A remarkable compilation. A genuine scrapbook, with literally
hundreds of items and an abundance of visual material."
-George Woodcock, Freedom
"For the best insight into relations between old anarchist and
socialist movements, and a hundred varieties of opinion swirling about
them
over the last century, get the Haymarket Scrapbook. . . a wonderful,
big, fat
compendium."
-Pete Seeger, Sing Out
"A large-scale, innovatively designed collection. A remarkable
intellectual accomplishment. . . . The editors have gathered much of
the best
and most recent historical work on Haymarket and anarchism. Introduces
us to
many obscure but important anarchist figures." -Steve Rosswurm, Chicago
History
|
VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES
VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES
VOI |
REBEL
VOICES
An
IWW Anthology
Edited
by Joyce L Kornbluh
with
a New Introduction by Fred
Thompson,
&
"A Short Treatise on Wobbly
Cartoons"
by
Franklin Rosemont
NO group in American labor
history
has exerted so profound, widespread and enduring an influence as the
Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies, founded in Chicago
in 1905.
Welcoming women, Blacks and immigrants long before most other
unions, the
Wobblies from the start were labor's outstanding pioneers and
innovators,
unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as
"unorganizable." Wobblies organized the first sitdown strike (at
General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike
(6,000 Studebaker
workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three
coalfields in
Colorado (1927) and the first "no-fare" transit-workers' job-action
(Cleveland, 1944). With their imaginative, colorful and world-famous
strikes
and free-speech fights, the IWW wrote many of the brightest pages in
the annals
of workingclass emancipation.
Wobblies also made immense and invaluable contributions to workers'
culture.
All but a few of America's most popular labor songs are Wobbly songs.
IWW
cartoons have long been recognized as labor's finest and funniest.
The impact of the IWW has reverberated far I beyond the ranks of
organized
labor. An important influence on the 1960s New Left, the Wobbly theory
and
practice of direct action, solidarity and "class-war" humor have
inspired several generations of civil rights and antiwar activists, and
are a
major source of ideas and inspiration for today's radical
environmentalists.
Indeed, virtually every movement seeking to "make this planet a good
place
to live" (to quote an old Wobbly slogan), has drawn on the IWW's
incomparable experience.
Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Joyce Kornbluh's
Rebel
Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history,
fiction,
songs, art and lore. Besides the full text and illustrations of the
original,
this new and expanded edition includes thirty-two pages of additional
material:
a new introduction and updated bibliography by oldtime Wobbly organizer
and
scholar Fred Thompson; an informative essay on Wobbly cartoons and
cartoonists
by Franklin Rosemont; more than three dozen additional cartoons and
drawings;
and a useful index.
464 pages. Paper $24.00. Cloth $60.00
|
DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP
SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP |
LABOR
STRUGGLES IN THE DEEP SOUTH
&
Other Writings
by
Covington Hall
Edited
& Introduced by David R.
Roediger
"HERE is a unique account
of
the hidden class and race conflicts that punctuated that region's
history during
the first wave of industrialization. H is also the engaging
autobiography of a
remarkable radical named Covington Hall, who broke with Deep South
traditions
and who captured in moving words and poetic images the hard lives of
black and
white workers and the bloody fights they waged against an oppressive
social
order." -James R. Green
In the half-century since it was written, Covington Hall's Labor
Struggles
in the Deep South, published here for the first time, as become an
underground
Classic among activist historians writing on the South and on working
people.
Hall-a journalist, organizer, rebel, professor and above all
poet-brings to
life the dramatic early twentieth-century struggles of the waterfront
workers
of New Orleans and the militant timber workers or Louisiana and East
Texas.
Writing about events in which he played a central role and bout the
broader
history of Southern labor, Hall describes many f the finest hours of
integrated
industrial unionism in the U.S. and the role of the Industrial Workers
of the
World in creating agile unity across racial lines.
The always lively narrative is heightened by dozens of rare WW
cartoons and
other period illustrations. Also included is a sampling of Hall's
articles on
labor history and education as well 5 his editorial opinions, poems,
and
"factful fables," revealing their aspects of Hall's remarkable
creativity, humor, imagination, and lifelong dedication to libertarian
socialism.
David Roediger's introduction expands our knowledge of Hall and his
influence, and assesses his legacy in the light of current-day
struggles
against white supremacy and wage slavery.
David Roediger teaches history at the University of Illinois:
Champaign. His
books include The Wages of Whiteness, Black
on White, and Dreams
and
Dynamite: Selected Poems of Covington Hall.
Paper $14.00
|
PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN
PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN |
A
HISTORY OF
PAN-AFRICAN REVOLT
by
C L. R. JAMES
with
a New Introduction by Robin D. G.
Kelley
A History of
Pan-African
Revolt is one of those rare books that continues to strike a
chord
of urgency, even half a century after it was first published. Time and
time
again, its lessons have proven to be valuable and relevant for
understanding
liberation movements in Africa and the diaspora. Each generation that
has had
the opportunity to read this small book finds new insights, new
lessons, new
visions for their own age.
No piece of literature can substitute for a crystal ball, and only
religious
fundamentalists believe that a book can provide comprehensive answers
to all
questions. But if nothing else, A History of Pan-African Revolt leaves us with two incontrovertible
facts. First, as
long as Black people are denied freedom, humanity, and a decent
standard of
living, they will continue to revolt. Second, unless these revolts
involve the
ordinary masses and take place on their own terms, they have no hope of
succeeding.
Paper $14
|
BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE
BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUG |
SLIM
BRUNDAGE
FROM
BUGHOUSE SQUARE TO THE
BEAT GENERATION
"If you wish to
see
the so-called 'beat generation' in action, drop in at the College of
Complexes.
"
- Dorothy
Kilgallen
(1960), The Playground for People Who Think
"Slim Brundage was Chicago_s last guerrilla fighter for free
speech.
We celebrate him today as an extinct volcano on the Chicago landscape.
We loved
his turbulence, his passionate fire, and his continuing
unpredictability. His
eruptions kept us alert. Hail, Slim Brundage!"-Leon M. Despres
THAT'S WHAT THEY CALLED Chicago's
College of Complexes in its heyday (1951-1961). A unique combination of
tavern,
university and nonstop wild party, the College was for many years the
city's
outstanding outsider outpost-a rare living link between the old
IWW/Bughouse
Square/Dil (yes-one l!) Pickle Club counterculture of the 1920s and the
Beat
Generation/New Left counterculture of the 1960s.
The writings collected here by the College's Founder and Janitor,
Slim
Brundage (1903-1990), chronicle the colorful history of what may well
be the
oldest continuous dissident workingclass intellectual community in the
U.S.
Hobo, Wobbly, Soapboxer, veteran of Bughouse Square and the Dil
Pickle,
"little theater" playwright/actor, president emeritus of the Hobo
College in the 1930s, housepainter, humorist and chief architect of the
scandalous Beatnik Party during the 1960 electionss, Brundage was very
much a
maker of of the history he writes about.
Here are exciting first-person accounts of tramping, open forums,
the
fabulous Pickle, the hobo colleges, the Radical Bookshop, and a guided
tour of
North Clark Street in its most deliriously disreputable days. And here
too is
the hilarious story of the College of Complexes as it evolved from the
last of
the old-time free-speech forums into Chicago's Number One "beatnik
bistro."
Also included are several of the Janitor's "Ravings" from the
College's "official neurosis," The Curriculum, articulating his free-wheeling,
let's-see-what-happens radical philosophy.
Franklin Rosemont's introduction discusses the IWW/hobohemian roots
of the
College, outlines the Janitor's radical (and Dadaist) critique of
education,
and relates Brundage's life, the College and Chicago's hobo/beat scenes
to the
broader struggles for a better, freer, truly eqalitarian and
non-exploitative
society.
Minors Admitted If Accompanied by Their Grandchildren
Paper $14.00
|
JOE HILL LESSON PUNCHING
OUT POSADA PEETIE HOBOHEMIA CRIME WALLS & BARS HAYMARKET VOICES
DEEP S |
Attention: Bookstores!! ISBN Prefix:
0-88286-
No. of
Copies
|
|
AMERICAN LABOR’S FIRST STRIKE by
Henry Rosemont |
|
_____ |
Paper $15.00 |
|
|
APPARITIONS OF THINGS TO COME Edward Bellamy's Tales of Mystery and
Imagination |
|
_____ |
Paper (#165-4) $12.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth (#164-6) $25.00 |
|
|
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES |
|
_____ |
Paper (#166-2) $12.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth (#167-0) $25.00 |
|
|
BEN FLETCHER: Black Wobbly. Intro by Peter Cole |
|
_____ |
Paper $18.00 |
|
|
BENJAMIN PERET, A Menagerie
in Revolt! Intro by Franklin
Rosemont. Afterwards by Don LaCoss |
|
_____ |
Paper $14.00 |
|
|
BEWARE ANARCHIST
Life of Augustin Souchy |
|
_____ |
Paper (# 214-6) $10.00 |
|
|
BIG RED SONG BOOK. Edited
by Archie Green et al |
|
_____ |
Paper $24.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth $36.00 |
|
|
BLACK HOBOES AND THEIR SONGS (See WHAT'S THE USE OF WALKING) |
|
|
CHANGING SOCIETY: Lives of Worker Heroes by Bob Breving |
|
_____ |
Paper $9.00 |
|
|
CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE
and Writings on the Paris Commune by Karl Marx |
|
_____ |
Paper (#236-7) $10.00 |
|
|
COLD CHICAGO A
Haymarket Fable. A Play by Warren Leming. Woodcut illustrations by
Carlos Cortez |
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Paper (#256-1) $15.00 |
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COMMUNICATING VESSELS by Anthony Leskov |
|
_____ |
Paper $10.00 |
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COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels. Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley |
|
_____ |
Paper (#235-9) $5.00 |
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CRIME & CRIMINALS
by Clarence Darrow |
|
_____ |
Paper (#250-2) $8.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#253-7) $18.00 |
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CRIME: ITS
CAUSES & CONSEQUENCES by John Keracher. |
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_____ |
Paper $4.00 |
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CRYSTAL GAZING the
Amber Fluid by Carlos Cortez |
|
_____ |
Paper (#206-5) $9.00 |
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DANCIN' IN THE STREETS edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe |
|
_____ |
Paper (-301-0) $17.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth (#302-9) $25.00 |
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DAY WILL COME Stories
of the Haymarket Martyrs and Others Buried Alongside the Monument |
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Paper $5.00 |
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DEVIL'S SON-IN-LAW
The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw & His Songs by Paul Garon. with CD |
|
_____ |
Paper (#266-9) $15.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth $21.00 |
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DIL PICKLE Rise & Fall Edited & Introduced by Franklin
Rosemont |
|
_____ |
Paper (#274-8) $14.00 |
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DIRECT ACTION AND SABOTAGE, Three IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s by
Flynn, Smith, & Trautman. Introduction by Salvatore Salerno |
|
_____ |
Paper (#185-9) $15.00 |
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DREAMS & EVERYDAY LIFE by Penelope Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper $17.00 |
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EAGLE FORGOTTEN Life
of John P. Altgeld. by Harry Barnard |
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_____ |
Cloth (# 100-x) $10.00 |
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EUGENE V DEBS by
Bernard Brommel |
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_____ |
Cloth $17.00 |
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FACING
REALITY by
C.L.R. James, et al |
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_____ |
Paper (#308-8) $16.00 |
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FELLOW WORKER The
Life of Fred Thompson (IWW). Edited &Introduced by Dave Roediger |
|
_____ |
Paper (#220-0) $10.00 |
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FLIVVER KING A Story
of Ford-America by Upton Sinclair |
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_____ |
Paper (054-0) $12.00 |
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FREDERICK ENGELS by John Keracher |
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_____ |
Paper $4.00 |
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FROM BUGHOUSE SQUARE TO THE BEAT GENERATION Ravings of Slim Brundage. Edited by
Franklin Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper (#232-4) $14.00 |
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GOLDEN BOOK OF
SPRINGFIELD by Vachel Lindsay.
Introduction by Ron Sakolsky |
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_____ |
Paper (#242-1) $22.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#243-x) $38.00 |
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HARLEM GLORY A Story
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_____ |
Paper (#163-8) $12.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#162-x) $20.00 |
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HAYMARKET
ANARCHISTS, Reasons for Pardoning by John Peter Altgeld.
Introduction by Leon Despres. |
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_____ |
Paper $7.00 |
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HAYMARKET HERITAGE
Memoir by Irving S. Abrams. Edited by Dave Roediger & Phyllis Boanes |
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_____ |
Paper (#197-2) $10.00 |
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HAYMARKET SCRAPBOOK.
Edited by Dave Roediger & Franklin Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper (#122-0) $19.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#147-6) $35.00 |
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HEAD-FIXING
INDUSTRY by
John Keracher. |
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_____ |
Paper $5.00 |
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HISTORY
AGAINST MISERY by
David Roediger |
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_____ |
Paper (305-4)
$17.00 |
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HISTORY OF PAN-AFRICAN REVOLT by C.L.R. James. Introduction by Robin
D. G. Kelley |
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_____ |
Paper (225-1) $12.00 |
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HOBOHEMIA by Frank
O. Beck. Introduction by Franklin Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper (#251-0) $12.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (# 252-9) $25.00 |
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ISADORA SPEAKS
Writings & Speeches of Isadora Duncan |
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_____ |
Paper (#227-8) $12.00 |
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IWW SONGS 1923
Edition |
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_____ |
Paper (#189-1) $5.00 |
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JACQUES VACH... and the Roots of Surrealism by Franklin Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper $20.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth $35.00 |
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JOE HILL The IWW
& Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture by
Franklin Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper (#264-2) $19.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#265-0) $35.00 |
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JUICE IS STRANGER THAN FRICTION Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim |
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_____ |
Paper (#070-4) $10.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth (069-0) $19.00 |
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LABOR LAW FOR THE RANK-AND-FILER or Building Solidarity While Staying
Clear of the Law by S. Lynd. (1980) Only a few left! |
|
_____ |
Paper $14.00 |
|
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LABOR STRUGGLES IN
THE DEEP SOUTH and Other
Writings by Covington Hall. Introduced by David R. Roediger |
|
_____ |
Paper (#244-8) $14.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth (#245-6) $24.00 |
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LESSON OF THE HOUR
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_____ |
Paper (#257-x) $12.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#258-8) $28.00 |
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LUCY PARSONS
American Revolutionary by Carolyn Ashbaugh. (1971) |
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_____ |
Paper (#014-3) $24.00 |
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LUCY PARSONS Freedom,
Equality & Solidarity,Writings & Speeches. Introduction by Gale Ahrens. Afterword by
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_____ |
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MEMOIRS OF A WOBBLY
by McGuckin |
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_____ |
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MR BLOCK Twenty-Four
IWW Cartoons. by Ernest Riebe. Introduction by F.
Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper (#062-3) $12.00 Limited Supply! |
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MYSTERIES OF ST LOUIS.
A radical gothic novel from 1851 by Henry Boernstein. Edited by Steven
Rowan and Elizabeth Sims |
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Paper (#168-9) $15.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#169-7) $25.00 |
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NEW RADICALS in the
Multiversity and Student Syndicalism by Carl Davidson |
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_____ |
Paper (#177-8) $8.00 |
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_____ |
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NOTES OF SIXTY YEARS
The Autobiography of Florence Kelley. Introduced by Kathryn Kish Sklar |
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On the Duty of
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE by Henry
David Thoreau. Introduction by George Woodcock |
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PORT HURON STATEMENT
by Tom Hayden et al |
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_____ |
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_____ |
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POSTCARDS: Radical
History |
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15 for $7.00 |
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30 for $12.00 |
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PROGRESS WITHOUT PEOPLE In Defense of Luddism by David F. Noble |
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_____ |
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PROUDHON AND HIS "BANK OF THE PEOPLE" by Charles A. Dana. Preface by Benjamin
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_____ |
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PUNCHING OUT
Writings of Martin Glaberman. Edited & Introduced by Staughton Lynd |
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RAMBLING KID by
Charles Ashleigh. Introduction by Steve Kellerman |
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_____ |
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_____ |
30 for $12.00 |
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REASONS FOR
PARDONING (See
Haymarket Anarchists) |
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REBEL VOICES An IWW
Anthology. Edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh |
|
_____ |
Paper (#237-5) $24.00 |
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_____ |
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REVOLUTION IN THE SERVICE OF THE MARVELOUS by Franklin Rosemont. |
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_____ |
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RIGHT TO BE LAZY by
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_____ |
Paper (#182-4) $12.00 |
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RISE & REPRESSION OF RADICAL LABOR 1877-1918 by D.R. Fusfeld |
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_____ |
Paper (#051-8) $5.00 |
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ROLL THE UNION ON A
Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union by H.L. Mitchell |
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_____ |
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SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THOMAS SKIDMORE by Amos Gilbert |
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_____ |
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SOCIALIST & LABOR SONGS of the 1930s with Music by Elizabeth
Morgan. Preface by Utah Phillips |
|
_____ |
Paper (#230-8) $16.00 Scarce! |
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SOLIDARITY UNIONISM
Rebuilding Labor from Below by Staughton Lynd. Cartoons by Mike
Konopacki |
|
_____ |
Paper (#208-1) $15.00 |
|
|
STARVING AMIDST TOO MUCH & Other IWW Writings on the Food
Industry by T-Bone Slim, L. S. Chumley, Jim Seymour and Jack Sheridan.
Edited and introduced by Peter Rachleff. Foreword by Carlos Cortez |
|
_____ |
Paper (#303-7) $12.00 |
|
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STATE CAPITALISM by
C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee. Introduction by Paul
Buhle |
|
_____ |
Paper (#079-8) $12.00 |
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STORY OF MARY MACLANE
& Other Writings. Introduced by P. Rosemont |
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_____ |
Paper (#233-2) $12.00 |
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SURR...ALISME & ATHEISM... by Guy Ducornet |
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_____ |
Paper $25.00 |
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SURREALISM IN '68 Paris Prague Chicago by Don LaCoss |
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_____ |
Paper $5.00 |
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SYNDICALISM by Earl
C. Ford & William Z. Foster. Introduction by James R. Barrett |
|
_____ |
Paper (#187-5) $9.00 |
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_____ |
Cloth (#188-3) $20.00 |
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VIVA POSADA!
Introduced by Carlos Cortez |
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_____ |
Paper (#261-8) $10.00 |
|
_____ |
Cloth (#262-6) $27.00 |
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WALLS & BARS by
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_____ |
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_____ |
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WE WILL RETURN IN THE WHIRLWIND by Muhammad Ahmad |
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WHAT'S THE
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WHERE ARE THE VOICES? & Other Wobbly Poems by Carlos Cortez |
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_____ |
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WRITTEN IN RED Poems
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_____ |
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YEAR IN THE LIFE OF
A FACTORY by M. Seider |
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_____ |
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YOU HAVE NO COUNTRY! Workers' Struggle Against War by Mary Marcy |
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_____ |
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KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR
KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR
KERR |
When Crain's Chicago Business, of all
publications, recently profiled the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company,
it
quoted the historian Paul Avrich, who enthused, "A few people at Kerr
do a
lot of very hard, very fine work, which meets a real need for radical,
socialist and labor history."
The company's story begins improbably enough with the birth of
Charles Hope
Kerr to abolitionist parents living in LaGrange, Georgia just before
the start
of the Civil War. According to some accounts, the Kerrs used the
Underground
Railroad, designed to transport fugitive slaves, to beat a hasty
retreat from
the South. By 1881, Charles Hope Kerr had graduated from the University
of
Wisconsin, where his father chaired the Department of Classics. The
younger
Kerr's undergraduate training in Romance Languages would later serve
him well
as he was to translate into English such works as Antonio Labriola's Essays
on the Materialist Conception of History and
Paul Lafargue's brilliant The Right to Be Lazy.
When the Haymarket bomb exploded at a Chicago labor demonstration in
1886,
Charles Hope Kerr was a resident of that city, an experienced editor of
Unitarian periodicals and the founder of his own Charles H. Kerr
Publishing
Company. He later recalled learning much from the left Unitarians,
though he
noted that the radicalism of many of them dimmed quickly when the
property
question came to the fore.
In the wake of Haymarket and of the 1894 Pullman strike, the
property
question was to become an increasingly sharp concern for Kerr and for
his wife,
the feminist temperance advocate, May Walden. After first embracing the
monetary reform ideas of the Populist movement, the couple accepted
socialism
at the century's turn. A 1900 Kerr Company catalog suggests the
expansive range
of interests which the publishing house brought with it in joining
forces with
the organized left, promising books "on socialism, free thought,
economics, history, hygiene, American fiction, etc."
A year later music would join the list, with the publication of Socialist
Songs With Music, the first such
collection
printed in the U.S. Kerr edited Socialist Songs himself and provided a translation of the
"Internationale," one destined to become the standard English text.
In subsequent years, socialist playing cards, post cards and even board
games
found places in Kerr catalogs alongside works of theory.
In the early twentieth century, the Kerr Company became the world's
leading
English-language radical publisher. It issued, between 1906 and 1909,
Ernest
Untermann's translation of the three volumes of Marx's Capital, the first full such text, and published
the initial
popular edition of the anthropological classic Ancient
Society, by Lewis Henry Morgan.
The works of Clarence Darrow,
Peter Kropotkin, Carl Sandburg and Jack London also graced Kerr's lists.
The International Socialist Review (ISR), published by Kerr and affiliated with the
Second International, began
in 1900 as a rather staid and academic journal edited by the socialist
intellectual A. M. Simons. But, after 1908, under Kerr's and later Mary
Marcy's
editorship, it became a lively mass circulation magazine featuring
radical
theory, culture (including exclusive publications of London's short
stories)
and reportage. Contributors included virtually every well-known figure
in the radical
labor movement, here and abroad.
During the critical World War One years, the Kerr Company
represented not
only a publishing house, but also a current in the American socialist
movement.
Openly and uncompromisingly revolutionary, sympathetic to the
proletarian
socialism of the Industrial Workers of the World and intractably
opposed to
militarism, the Kerr Company vigorously opposed the war, both before
and after
U.S. entry. The U.S. government as vigorously opposed the Kerr Company,
seeing
to it that ISR was banned from the mails under the infamous Espionage
Act.
Repression, splits in the Socialist Party and the decimation of the IWW
all
took their toll and, by 1928, an exhausted Charles H. Kerr retired from
the
company which he had directed for 42 years.
Kerr left the company which bore his name a rich heritage,
especially as the
American publisher of works representing the viewpoints of the
libertarian far
left and of revolutionary industrial unionism. Out of the IWW
experiences came
Kerr's publication of Austin Lewis' The Militant Proletariat, one of the most important theoretical
works written
in the U.S. Especially during the war, ISR opened its pages to the best of the
European far left, including Rosa
Luxemburg, Otto Ruble, Hermann Gorter and S. J. Rutgers. Not only did
Anton
Pannekoek's articles appear, but his Marxism and Darwinism, translated
into
English, became a Kerr pamphlet. Perhaps most remarkably, in 1913,
shortly
after being investigated by the Socialist Party leadership for its
heterodoxy,
the Kerr Company published a translation of Marx's The
Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte done
by the
SP's sternest left critic, Daniel DeLeon. Kerr himself, though still an
SP
member, also included DeLeon's 1897 introduction and to top off a
noteworthy
adventure in nonsectarianism, added a "Publisher's Note" stressing
that the "events of sixteen years have in many ways confirmed [the
introduction's] forecast" on political matters.
Prior to leaving, Charles H. Kerr took steps to ensure that the
company
would continue. Well before he departed, he turned over much of the
operation
to John Keracher and other members of the Proletarian Party. The PP,
which
originally adhered to the Communist International, dissented from any
analyses
which hinted that the time of triumph of American Bolshevism was at
hand. It
proved to be a small party, but an apt caretaker for the Kerr Company.
The
Proletarians' roots in the Michigan Socialist Party imparted a deep
respect for
Kerr's past. Perhaps for that reason, the PP never sought to transform
Kerr
into a narrow party press. The PP also enjoyed a substantial following
among
self-educated skilled workers. It often conducted workers' schools and,
at
times, seemed as interested in spreading knowledge of the natural
sciences as
in propagating Marxism. This love of knowledge, along with the
long-range
perspectives of the PP, fit Keracher and his associates well for
radical
publishing work.
Through 1971, the Proletarians ran Kerr, a company much diminished
in size
from its early twentieth century heyday, but one still able to keep
Marxist
classics in print and even to add an occasional new title, such as
Keracher's
own witty and biting critique of advertising and media, The
Head-Fixing
Industry.
In 1971, with the PP passing out of existence, its leaders gave
control of
the Kerr Company to a new Board of Directors, including longtime IWW
leader
Fred Thompson, labor defense activist and radical economist Joseph
Giganti,
socialist historian and expert on American Indians Virgil Vogel, and
Burt
Rosen, a Korean War draft resistance activist and veteran socialist.
Cooperating with the Illinois Labor History Society, the revived Kerr
Company
far exceeded the original expectations of its new Board of Directors,
which, as
Thompson recalls, at first hoped to give a "decent burial" to a
historic institution by distributing its existing stock. Instead, and
largely
through the hard work of Burt Rosen, the company rebounded and
published new
biographies of Eugene Debs and of Lucy Parsons, as well as Daniel
Fusfeld's
masterful short history, Rise and Repression of Radical Labor. Old Kerr
titles
by Engels, Marx and Lafargue were reprinted, along with The
Autobiography of
Mother Jones, a labor classic
first
published in the twenties, reissued in time to sell thousands of copies
in
mining towns during the coal strikes of the seventies.
The past couple of decades have seen further growth of the Kerr
Company.
Organized as a worker-owned co-operative not-for-profit educational
association, its rapidly expanding list features beautifully printed
but
reasonably priced books which bring back into print some of the best of
C.L.R.
James, Mary Marcy, Edward Bellamy, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow,
Isadora
Duncan, Vachel Lindsay, Mary MacLane, C. H. George, and Voltairine de
Cleyre,
as well as heretofore unpublished writings by T-Bone Slim, Claude
McKay, Slim
Brundage, and Covington Hall, and new books by H. L. Mitchell,
Staughton Lynd,,
Warren Leming, and Carlos Cortez. Several books on Haymarket, a
"Sixties
Series" (inaugurated by the first textually accurate edition ever
published of the celebrated 1962 Port Huron Statement), a "Lost Utopias Series," a
"Bughouse Square Series" and a large and steadily growing number of
books on the IWW: These are just a few of the important books brought
out by
Charles H. Kerr in recent years.
Now (in 2003) in its 118th year, the Kerr Company is not
only a
living link with the most vital radical traditions of the past, but
also an
organic part of today's struggles for peace and justice in an
ecologically
balanced world.
Dave Roediger & Franklin Rosemont
(Originally published in the journal Workers' Democracy in 1986 the above article appears here
slightly
abridged and updated.)