EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)
Though always active in a wide range of activities, her most sustained and
consequential political work was with the American Labor Party (ALP), a mass party
that counted Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Marcantonio as enrolled members.
Annette served as the ALP Chair for the Fifth Assembly District South, which
comprised much of Manhattan's Upper West Side, south of West 96th Street. Under
the ALP's banner, she ran for political office three times: in 1942 as its candidate for
State Assembly in Manhattan's Chelsea district; in 1949, in a special election for
State Assembly in her own district (where she garnered almost 20% of the vote); and
again in 1949, in a special election for Congress on the Upper West Side. The last
election attracted national attention, because the front-runner, in a field of four, was
the Liberal Party's candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. Annette served as a
member of the ALP's Executive Committee and in its last years as one of its Vice
Presidents. In 1958, Annette also ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York on the
Independent Socialist Party line.
After World War II, the Robert Louis Stevenson High School opened a unique
program for returning Puerto Rican GIs, for whom no school had developed a high-school equivalency program. (In later years, Annette repeatedly said that she was
most proud of her work starting up and administering this innovative educational
program.) Annette's FBI file (which weighs more than 12 pounds) documents J.
Edgar Hoover's unfriendly interest in this program. In 1950, he wrote to the
Veterans' Administration expressing his displeasure for its permitting these GIs to
obtain their education at a school led by a notorious group of Communists. By 1951,
the Veterans Administration had refused to pay tuition for these students, and the
State of New York threatened to withdraw the school's right to issue Regents'
diplomas. The only way that the school could survive was to accede to the State's
demand that Annette and eleven other teachers (including her mother), who had
been identified as Communists, resign, and that the school be placed in partial
receivership. (Although she never won back her job, a court case in 1960 restored
to her and Irwin the large sums of tuition reimbursements, which had been withheld
by the Veterans' Administration.)
The year 1953 saw another huge loss for Annette. She had always worked very
closely with Vito Marcantonio, the 14-term radical Congressman from East Harlem,
who was also the leader of the ALP. The ever-sharpening McCarthyite repression
caused the Communist Party to conclude that the United States was entering full-fledged fascism. One outcome of this assumption was its insistence that the ALP be
disbanded. When Marcantonio opposed this position, Annette sided with Marc and
terminated her membership in the Party. While she never adopted an anti-Communist politics, she was henceforth left without a political home.
Despite her exiting from the CP, the House Committee on Un-American
Activities twice and the Senate Committee on Internal Security once subpoenaed
Annette to appear before them. FBI agents regularly knocked on her door to see if
she and her mother were ready to talk. Once Jean asked them, "Does your mother
know what you're doing?" Annette's options continued to narrow. She sent out over
100 letters requesting interviews for positions advertised in The Times, for which,
if anything, she was overqualified. Not one single interview resulted from these
efforts.
What for many would have been the end of a fruitful life was for Annette the
beginning of a second life — connected to, yet significantly different from, the first,
and certainly no less consequential. Before losing her position as principal of
Robert Louis Stevenson and her leadership position in the ALP, Annette had
lectured widely, especially on literary topics. However, before 1954, she had
published only one full-length article: a four-page essay for Jewish Life (later Jewish
Currents) in 1948 on 20th-century Jewish novelists.
Starting from 1953, the year of her blacklisting, until shortly before her death,
Annette began to produce an avalanche of published work. The most significant
component of her writing was in the area of literature, which she approached from
a historical perspective much influenced by Marxism. Her single most important
work is the two-volume The Great Tradition in English Literature: From
Shakespeare to Shaw, which since its appearance in 1953 has gone into multiple
printings, and is still in print. In 1988, the Beijing Foreign Studies University
published a companion two-volume study, American Literature: Root and Flower,
1775-1955, which has subsequently been republished. Equally remarkable is her
production of nearly 200 articles, 44 in Jewish Currents; 56 in Science & Society, 21
in Mainstream, and 25 in Monthly Review. Another score of articles were published
in journals here and abroad, and in anthologies. Approximately one-half of the
articles explore literary issues and the rest discuss historical and political topics.
These articles evidence a breath of knowledge and a remarkably clear and engaging
prose style applied to some very dry themes. Her political writings include her
editorship of I Vote My Conscience: Debates, Speeches, and Writings of Vito
Marcantonio (the second edition of which is still in print), and Schools Against
Children: The Case for Community Control. Annette wrote pamphlets and countless
articles for left newspapers and letters to the editors of left journals. In addition to
Science & Society, she served on the editorial boards of Jewish Currents, and
Mainstream.
In an attempt to break out of the blacklist's stranglehold, in 1958 Annette
embarked on what became the first of six cross-country lecture tours. On her stops
in major cities, she spoke to audiences of older committed leftists in the evenings
and a new generation of student activists sometime during the day. On her journey back from the West Coast, Annette almost always also spoke
to large audiences in Canadian cities.
Compensating for the lack of employment and
celebrity at home, from 1960 to 1985, Annette embarked on three trips to Eastern
Europe and three to China, where she received much honor and acclaim. In the
socialist bloc, her articles had been translated and widely distributed. She spoke at
universities and was awarded visiting professorships in the German Democratic
Republic and China. In Budapest, she met three times with the world's foremost
Marxist literary critic, Gyorgy Lukács, from whom she was delighted to learn he was
familiar with her work and had a copy of The Great Tradition in English Literature
in his library. Annette maintained her connections with her host countries by
participating in the activities of the American Society to Study the German
Democratic Republic and the U.S.-China Friendship Association, both of which at
various times she served as vice president.
From 1963 to 1973, Annette served as the Executive Secretary of the Charter
Group for a Pledge of Conscience, which brought together a relatively small group
of leftists, most of whom were former (and some still active) party members, to do
something to combat racism in New York. Among its accomplishments was the
organization of a spirited and effective appeal of the sentences against the Harlem
Six, a group of African-American youth, who many concluded had been denied the
right to a fair trial. The Charter Group also mobilized support for the
African-American community's demand for community control of the schools.
Among other things, Annette wrote pamphlets in support of the Harlem Six and
against inhumane prison conditions.
In 1941, Annette and her mother moved to a four-room apartment on the top
floor of a ten-story building on West 71st Street. (The adjacent apartment was
occupied by Irwin, his wife and their twin sons, Robert and Phillip, with whom
Annette remained particularly close throughout her life.) Together with Jean, and
then on her own after her mother died in 1973, Annette created what was likely the
longest-lived and the most important left salon in New York City. In their
apartment's modest-sized, L-shaped living room, they hosted parties to celebrate
rites of passage for preeminent left dignitaries, such as W. E. B. Du Bois's 90th
birthday celebration and Vito Marcantonio's 53rd birthday celebration — his last.
In her living room, Paul Robeson chaired an important meeting of the Civil Rights
Congress and Annette helped Howard Fast launch the publication of Spartacus,
which no commercial publisher would consider printing. Her classes (on topics
such as "Good Political Poetry," "Shakespeare and Politics," and "The Romantic
Revolutionary Poets"), sponsored by the Brecht Forum, were also taught in her
living room. In addition, the editorial boards of the journals for which she worked
met there. Her decorum caused these meetings to be conducted with a politeness
rare in the shrinking world of the left. Without a second thought, Annette provided
lunches, coffee and cake, cold drinks for the sometimes bruised and disoriented
bands of leftists, who attended hundreds upon hundreds of these events in her living
room. Then, there were ostensibly non-political dinners, which served the purpose
of bring together people on the left whose work, she believed, would benefit by
knowing one another. These events helped sustain and build the left community,
which provided the human and material resources for its activities. Annette
introduced a much-needed woman's sensibility into a highly masculinized
movement.
On Tuesday, May 22, 2007, Annette realized she could not continue her life
— even in a much-curtailed manner. After her dinner guests left, she had the
greatest difficulty standing up from her chair, and when she walked across the room
and sat in the chair where she did her reading, she was completely exhausted. She
asked a friend to call David Laibman, the editor of Science & Society, to inform him
that she was unable to host the Board's meeting scheduled for that Friday. Then
thinking about her class scheduled for the next evening, she said, "I guess that's my
last course." (It was "Brecht's Poetry and His Play Galileo," which like her other
courses for the previous 25 years was sponsored by the Brecht Forum.)
During the next two weeks, she continued to evaluate manuscripts in bed. At
some point around that time, she decided to stop eating. She told her many visitors
that she combated boredom by reciting poetry to herself and was thinking of the
wisdom of the philosophers. Over the following days, she saw every family member,
every close friend and comrade. A lawyer arrived, and she made her will. And then,
without the ministrations of clergy or the false hopes of medical science, her heart
gave out, and she died peacefully in her own bed, in her own home. Her last words,
which were spoken to a hospice nurse staying the night with her, were: "I'm
comfortable." Without ever intending it to be so, her death was as inspirational as
her life.
Gerald Meyer
------
Annette joined Science & Society in 1964, and worked with the Editorial Board (and
with the Manuscript Collective, once that body was created), for the next 43 years.
In the last several years, the Manuscript Collective met at her home, as it had
become hard for her to travel. I saw her just days before she left us, and we
discussed several manuscripts she was reading in preparation for the next meeting.
Annette's contribution over these decades to the work of the journal is, of
course, incalculable, but I want to give those of you who were not there a flavor of
her impact on our process. Her erudition is, of course, well known, but the role she
played in orienting our approach to authors, especially in cases where there were
unrealized possibilities and potentials, is something we will never be able to
duplicate. The interweaving of literature and history; the mastering of context; the
sense of literary style, not just as adornment but as essential to communication,
especially when the subject matter is inherently dialectical — it is an
understatement to say that we will miss all this.
But you might not know that Annette was also able to contribute to our work
in political economy! Like others in her generation on the left who neither knew nor
greatly cared about the boundary lines created for the academic disciplines, she had
studied Marx, socialist economics, the debate about genetics, anything that entered
into the warp of knowledge, and power. Many years ago, the renowned Marxist
economist Maurice Dobb submitted an article about the socialist pricing debate in
the Soviet Union, with some apologies for stretching Science & Society's outer limit
of the permissible when it came to technical and formal material. Annette read the
manuscript for us, and then calmly announced that the paper was really not all that
difficult; that, with effort, it could be read by anyone who knew the essentials of
linear programming! At her suggestion, we asked Dobb to create an introductory
section on these essentials, which he did.
Our discussions repeatedly became three-dimensional, and rich, as a result of
Annette's literary interventions: from Shakespeare to the romantic poets, to any
number of British and American novelists (her forte), but other areas of world
literature as well. And these were not the well-worn cliches, the famous bits that all
of us know: tales full of sound and fury, all the world's a stage, and so forth. No,
Annette could reach into a seemingly endless store of little-known conceptual wealth
for the precise nugget that captures what we were all trying to grasp at a given
moment.
Annette was the living embodiment of Lenin's famous thesis in What Is to Be
Done?: Revolutionary ideas must be brought to the working class from outside of
their own experience and struggle. But this was not an elitist position at all. On the
contrary, by reaching upward for the entire legacy of literature, philosophy and
science, the working class empowers itself, connects itself to the entire human
heritage, and carries the torch forward. No reductionist readings of the literary and
historical classics here! Simply a confidence in our enterprise of preserving and
creating, envisioning and embodying the beauty that we aspire to create, and the
superb people we hope to become.
But there was also an inexhaustible humor in Annette's work with us, so
essential to genuine perspective. I remember one story that captures for me the
dialectic of will and determinism. Annette told of a man hawking the socialist
newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, outside of a factory gate. He was there, day after
day, in all weather, with his papers, calling out: "Socialism is inevitable! Buy the
Appeal to Reason! Socialism is inevitable! Buy the Appeal to Reason!" Finally, one
day, a worker came up to him and asked: "Hey Mister, if socialism is so inevitable,
why do you have to knock yourself out like this?" To which the man responded:
"You don't understand! Socialism is inevitable because I am here day after day,
selling the Appeal to Reason! Socialism is inevitable! . . . "
Annette could also be devastating. On one occasion she held a manuscript in
both hands, and, looking at no one in particular, said: "I wish there were something
worse we could do to this than simply reject it!" She once commented wryly on a
paper, whose author, she averred, "had chewed more than he bit off." But there was
always a firm optimism. Whenever the manuscript flow weakened, and dire
warnings of disaster came forth (usually from yours truly!), Annette would put up
her hand, and say, "Don't worry; there is a great need for what we do, and our
authors will respond to that need." And, sure enough, the flow would soon pick up
again.
I know that we will never exhaust the trove of stories, ideas, reserves to draw
upon, even feelings, that Annette left us with. I think I can speak for the entire
group of Science & Society editors, Manuscript Collective members, authors,
correspondents, and long-time readers and supporters when I say that her death is
a great and specific loss. She is the last of the generation of founding editors —
people like Henry Mins, Margaret Schlauch, Edwin Berry Burgum, Samuel
Bernstein, David Goldway, Russ Nixon — all of whom were her contemporaries.
She is the last to leave us, and, like children losing the last parent, we feel — finally,
if momentarily — alone. We have a sense, now, that we are truly on our own, and
this makes the need to pass the torch again — to a still younger generation imbued
with the profound attachment to Marxist scholarship and the wider political
movement that uses and nourishes it — seem all the more urgent and necessary.
David Laibman
------------------<>------------------
IN THIS ISSUE
Except where articles are grouped in special sections, or were written in response
to a Call for a Special Issue, the articles in any given issue of S&S are stand-alone
contributions in a variety of subject-matter areas. In the present issue, however,
there is an unintended synergy between two articles, and this calls for comment.
It is not merely that the articles in question cover related terrain (trade union
struggles in the 20th-century USA); more importantly, each — embodying a spirit
of cross-disciplinary synthesis that is central to (what we see as) the journal's
mission — links history to wider social and political perspectives. The study of the
struggle between Caterpillar, Inc. and its workers during the 1990s, by Phil McCall,
is about that struggle, to be sure, but it is also an intervention into a vital debate in
Marxist theory. Must all social behavior and institutions be explained, ultimately,
by reference to the preferences and consciousness of individuals? The affirmative
answer to this question, one of the founding commitments of the school of
Analytical (or Rational Choice) Marxism, is intended by adherents of the school as
a way to place Marxist claims on a more sturdy foundation — the methodological
individualism of mainstream social science. Coalitions and group actions, then,
such as those of trade unions in struggle for the jobs and dignity of their members,
are the result of calculations by individuals of their (the individuals') best course of
action. McCall uses the rich materials of his historical narrative to test this
proposition, and he finds it severely wanting: "the explanation of social change
cannot be reduced to the decisions of individuals, at a specific place and time, to
take a specific action, based on their individual needs or desires." Individualist
theory cannot account for the formation of consciousness in collective experience,
as revealed in the Caterpillar workers' struggle, nor for the extent of the self-sacrifice by individual workers in the wider interest of all.
Victor Devinatz' study of the United Farm Equipment Union (FE) and
International Harvester, from the earlier period of the incipient Cold War in the
1940s and 50s, also links the recounting of an instance of class struggle to a wider
concern: this time not with theory as such but with politics. In his view, the labor
conflict, and especially the attack against the Communist-led FE by an "unholy
alliance" (I have always wanted to use that cliché!) of Harvester and the UAW, can
only be understood in a context of the widening international Cold War and the
broad attempt to throttle and contain the militant grass-roots labor movement at
home. But this larger political direction also found expression in an internal
struggle within the FE's Local 6, in which an ostensibly militant socialist faction,
the Schactmanite Positive Action Caucus, attacked the Local's leadership in a way
that enhanced the impact of the ever-present assault from without. The Biblical
injunction, "By their deeds ye shall know them," is here extended to: "By the actual
effects and outcomes of their deeds ye shall, indeed, know them."
Finally, we offer the study by Spyros Sakellaropoulos and Panagiotis Sotiris,
"American Foreign Policy as Modern Imperialism: From Armed Humanitarianism
to Preventive War," as an entry in a long-standing (and continuing) discussion in
S&S on the social and class nature of capitalist power in its present stage of
development and in the contemporary world. We have had many important
statements of the view that today's capitalism can only be understood as a process
of formation of a transnational capitalist class, and a corresponding transnational
state. The role of the U. S. government must be understood in this context, even as
conflicts between transnational and national interests continue to play themselves
out. Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris, as their title implies, do not accept this view.
They see U. S. hegemony, never without challenges, as nevertheless essentially
secure, and as reflecting the continuing world dominance of U. S. national capital.
Along the way, they develop an intriguing and useful set of interpretations of policy
episodes and ideologies that should provide much raw material for continuing
investigations into the new modalities of capitalist class structure and political
power.
D. L.
