Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2023.2173944
Victor G. Devinatz
There has been an upsurge in union organizing in 2021 and 2022. From October 2021 to March 2022, the filing of union certification election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) increased 57% from the previous year, rising from 748 to 1174 petitions. The increase in organizing activity occurred in unlikely places, such as the coffee shop giant, Starbucks, which as of the middle of December 2022, employees have emerged victorious in some 264 NLRB representation elections in coffee houses throughout the nation. Other employees achieving victory in union certification elections included those at a New York City Amazon warehouse under the auspices of the Amazon Labor Union and a small office of Google Fiber contractors in Kansas City (Missouri) under the Alphabet Workers Union. A major reason for this uptick in union organizing activity is due to the COVID-19 pandemic with front line workers who were serving customers feeling not only vulnerable, but according to Mark Pearce, who had served as an NLRB chairman and is now a Georgetown University law professor, “they were not only scared, but they were also pissed.” And according to 31-year-old Sarah Pappin, a Starbucks union organizer, “We all kick around between the same crappy retail jobs. This is the moment where we’ve all realized that it actually kind of sucks everywhere, so let’s just make a stand at one place and prove it.” Besides the launching of more union organizing campaigns, there also has been an increase in strike activity in the United States. Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics
{"title":"Trade Union Lessons from Early US Trotskyism and US Communism","authors":"Victor G. Devinatz","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2023.2173944","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2023.2173944","url":null,"abstract":"There has been an upsurge in union organizing in 2021 and 2022. From October 2021 to March 2022, the filing of union certification election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) increased 57% from the previous year, rising from 748 to 1174 petitions. The increase in organizing activity occurred in unlikely places, such as the coffee shop giant, Starbucks, which as of the middle of December 2022, employees have emerged victorious in some 264 NLRB representation elections in coffee houses throughout the nation. Other employees achieving victory in union certification elections included those at a New York City Amazon warehouse under the auspices of the Amazon Labor Union and a small office of Google Fiber contractors in Kansas City (Missouri) under the Alphabet Workers Union. A major reason for this uptick in union organizing activity is due to the COVID-19 pandemic with front line workers who were serving customers feeling not only vulnerable, but according to Mark Pearce, who had served as an NLRB chairman and is now a Georgetown University law professor, “they were not only scared, but they were also pissed.” And according to 31-year-old Sarah Pappin, a Starbucks union organizer, “We all kick around between the same crappy retail jobs. This is the moment where we’ve all realized that it actually kind of sucks everywhere, so let’s just make a stand at one place and prove it.” Besides the launching of more union organizing campaigns, there also has been an increase in strike activity in the United States. Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"22 1","pages":"68 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46271423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2023.2187208
P. Filardo
aspects of social experience. Includes substantive discussion of CPUSA.” Adam Beardsworth, Confessional Poetry in the Cold War: The Poetics of Doublespeak ([S.l.]: Springer Nature, 2022). “... explores how confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s US responded to a Cold War political climate... In an era that witnessed the state-sanctioned repression of civil liberties, poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Randall Jarrell adopted what has often been considered a politically benign confessional style. Although confessional writers have been criticized for emphasizing private turmoil in an era of public crisis, examining their work in relation to the political and affective environment of the Cold War US demonstrates their unique ability to express dissent while averting surveillance. For these poets, writing the fear and anxiety of life in the bomb’s shadow was a form of poetic doublespeak that critiqued the impact of an affective Cold War politics without naming names.” Michael Benson, Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in 1930s America ([S.l.]: Citadel Press, 2022). TOC: Part one. The cloven hoof: Jewish gangsters – Rise of Fascism – Fritz Kuhn – Nazi youth camps – Part two. New York City – Judge Perelman and Meyer Lansky – Murder, Inc. – The list – Yorkville – White plans – Part three. Chicago: Father Coughlin, radio priest – Herb Brin, fighter of fascists – Sparky and Barney – The Germania Club – Part. Four. Newark: Longie Zwillman – Nat Arno – Arno’s army – Schwabbenhalle – Irvington – Union City – Return to the Schwabbenhalle – Part five. Middle America. William Dudley Pelly – Davey the Jew – The Elks – Lodge Beatdown – The Great Lakes cities – Part six. West Coast: The Hollywood war – Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel – Part seven. The Bund’s last gasp: Garden party –Nazi perverts and thieves. Ananyo Bhattacyaya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022). “Physicist, mathematician [computers, game theory], European exile who quarreled with Oppenheimer over the AMERICAN COMMUNIST HISTORY 127
{"title":"United States Communist History Bibliography 2022 (Annotated)","authors":"P. Filardo","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2023.2187208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2023.2187208","url":null,"abstract":"aspects of social experience. Includes substantive discussion of CPUSA.” Adam Beardsworth, Confessional Poetry in the Cold War: The Poetics of Doublespeak ([S.l.]: Springer Nature, 2022). “... explores how confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s US responded to a Cold War political climate... In an era that witnessed the state-sanctioned repression of civil liberties, poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Randall Jarrell adopted what has often been considered a politically benign confessional style. Although confessional writers have been criticized for emphasizing private turmoil in an era of public crisis, examining their work in relation to the political and affective environment of the Cold War US demonstrates their unique ability to express dissent while averting surveillance. For these poets, writing the fear and anxiety of life in the bomb’s shadow was a form of poetic doublespeak that critiqued the impact of an affective Cold War politics without naming names.” Michael Benson, Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in 1930s America ([S.l.]: Citadel Press, 2022). TOC: Part one. The cloven hoof: Jewish gangsters – Rise of Fascism – Fritz Kuhn – Nazi youth camps – Part two. New York City – Judge Perelman and Meyer Lansky – Murder, Inc. – The list – Yorkville – White plans – Part three. Chicago: Father Coughlin, radio priest – Herb Brin, fighter of fascists – Sparky and Barney – The Germania Club – Part. Four. Newark: Longie Zwillman – Nat Arno – Arno’s army – Schwabbenhalle – Irvington – Union City – Return to the Schwabbenhalle – Part five. Middle America. William Dudley Pelly – Davey the Jew – The Elks – Lodge Beatdown – The Great Lakes cities – Part six. West Coast: The Hollywood war – Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel – Part seven. The Bund’s last gasp: Garden party –Nazi perverts and thieves. Ananyo Bhattacyaya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022). “Physicist, mathematician [computers, game theory], European exile who quarreled with Oppenheimer over the AMERICAN COMMUNIST HISTORY 127","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"22 1","pages":"94 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44682769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2142020
D. Rousselière
Abstract Going beyond the idea that utopia, when it becomes a reality, is necessarily doomed in the long run, this article proposes to analyze the nineteenth century Icarian communities. Based on the current interest within the field of communal studies on the measurement of the success of utopian communities, and following the developmental communalism theory, our study addresses the economic organizational dimension of these communities, which were a testing ground for innovation and new social practices. The article provides a better understanding of how the Icarian communism inserted itself into American society and some key lessons for the implementation of emancipatory alternatives.
{"title":"“It Was Not a Failure, and It Will One Day Be Recognized as the Only Right Social Order”. On Icarian Communism","authors":"D. Rousselière","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2022.2142020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2022.2142020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Going beyond the idea that utopia, when it becomes a reality, is necessarily doomed in the long run, this article proposes to analyze the nineteenth century Icarian communities. Based on the current interest within the field of communal studies on the measurement of the success of utopian communities, and following the developmental communalism theory, our study addresses the economic organizational dimension of these communities, which were a testing ground for innovation and new social practices. The article provides a better understanding of how the Icarian communism inserted itself into American society and some key lessons for the implementation of emancipatory alternatives.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"22 1","pages":"51 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49084985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2135914
Reiland Rabaka
Abstract In 1951 Du Bois was indicted by the U.S. federal government for being an agent of a foreign state as a result of his work with the Peace Information Center, an organization committed to peace activism and nuclear disarmament. As detailed in his often-overlooked 1952 book, In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday, the then eighty-two-year-old Du Bois was arrested, handcuffed, searched for concealed weapons, fingerprinted, briefly jailed, and subsequently released on bail. However, his passport was immediately revoked and remained canceled until 1958. Du Bois’s misguided support for dictatorial leaders like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, who claimed to be communist and committed to Marxist principles, has caused many scholars to disregard or even lampoon his late life work and instead focus almost exclusively on his early and middle years prior to his 1935 publication of Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Considering the complex nature of his life, scholarship, and activism, this article’s primary objective is to provide a brief overview of Du Bois’s discourse on, and development of, democratic socialism, both before and after In Battle for Peace.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2132844
P. L. Sinitiere
Abstract This article offers a book history of In Battle for Peace. It presents an account of In Battle for Peace’s creation and emergence as a physical publication. It addresses the authorial ideas behind its assembly as a text, in other words the literary and infrastructural choices about chapter arrangements and textual adornments such as appendixes and interior images. It explores questions around In Battle for Peace’s editorial history, from copy-editing to cover design. It considers its circulation in culture, and its reception history amongst ordinary readers, journalists, and scholars. The essay also includes In Battle for Peace’s archival history, the documentary foundation upon which Du Bois based the book as well as the accumulation of historical artifacts related to it that he and others collected and deposited in different repositories since its publication 70 years ago. This article advances the idea that In Battle for Peace’s book history reveals how networked knowledge in a community of radicals, many of whom were communists, influenced the text’s creation and produced the generative ideas that animated the book. Specifically, artist, playwright, and writer Shirley Graham Du Bois (as co-writer, spouse, and curator) and US Communist Party leader and historian Herbert Aptheker (as copy editor and comrade) were among the most important individuals who helped shape the Black radical intellectual book history of In Battle for Peace.
{"title":"W.E.B. Du Bois’s In Battle for Peace: A Black Radical Intellectual Book History","authors":"P. L. Sinitiere","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2022.2132844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2022.2132844","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers a book history of In Battle for Peace. It presents an account of In Battle for Peace’s creation and emergence as a physical publication. It addresses the authorial ideas behind its assembly as a text, in other words the literary and infrastructural choices about chapter arrangements and textual adornments such as appendixes and interior images. It explores questions around In Battle for Peace’s editorial history, from copy-editing to cover design. It considers its circulation in culture, and its reception history amongst ordinary readers, journalists, and scholars. The essay also includes In Battle for Peace’s archival history, the documentary foundation upon which Du Bois based the book as well as the accumulation of historical artifacts related to it that he and others collected and deposited in different repositories since its publication 70 years ago. This article advances the idea that In Battle for Peace’s book history reveals how networked knowledge in a community of radicals, many of whom were communists, influenced the text’s creation and produced the generative ideas that animated the book. Specifically, artist, playwright, and writer Shirley Graham Du Bois (as co-writer, spouse, and curator) and US Communist Party leader and historian Herbert Aptheker (as copy editor and comrade) were among the most important individuals who helped shape the Black radical intellectual book history of In Battle for Peace.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"21 1","pages":"150 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44426499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2124819
Charisse Burden-Stelly
Abstract This article argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’s struggle for a durable peace was inextricably linked to his rejection of the United States’ racialized economic order that emplaced Blacks at the bottom of society within its borders and, given its imperial ambitions, threatened perpetual war abroad, with particularly dire consequences for colonized peoples. The first section re-interprets Du Bois’s writings and speeches about “caste” as, more accurately, explicating a system of “U.S. capitalist racism” in the United States that was inexorably tied to imperialism and war. Such clarity opens up an understanding of Du Bois’s conception of peace not as the absence of conflict, but rather as a necessary condition for the eradication of political, economic, and social inequality and injustice on a world scale. The next section argues that Du Bois’s analysis and critique of U.S. capitalist racism undergirded his advocacy of “People(s)-Centered Human Rights” (PCHR). Coined by Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka, PCHR emanate from and address the everyday realities, needs, and challenges of racialized and colonized people. For Du Bois, PCHR could only be achieved through a durable peace, and durable peace could only be maintained through the extension of PCHR to all persons irrespective of race, class, or nation. The final section explicates how this anticapitalist, antiracist, anti-imperial, and anticolonial conception of durable peace drew the ire of the U.S. government and made Du Bois, the Peace Information Center, and his fellow peace activists targets of Black Scare and Red Scare repression.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2115276
R. Lieberman
Abstract This essay highlights W. E. B. Du Bois’s peace advocacy, encouraging readers to consider “the roles of Black folk” in affecting U.S. foreign policy. It contextualizes the U.S. Department of Justice’s 1951 indictment of Du Bois, the occasion for his writing In Battle for Peace. The essay’s chief concern is the effects, both short and long term, of the anticommunist attacks on Du Bois and his contemporaries. Du Bois’s peace advocacy drew harsh attacks from those who supported U.S. Cold War policies or who worried about being associated with communism if they championed peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Moreover, his Cold War activism and writing have received less attention than his earlier contributions to American life and letters. Yet Du Bois linked his peace efforts to Black liberation and socialism, and the ideas he spoke and wrote about during the latter part of his life continue to have significant implications for our own time.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2118509
Sara E. Rzeszutek
Abstract This article examines the relationship between W. E. B. Du Bois and James and Esther Cooper Jackson over the course of their long and overlapping careers. In it, I will argue that through this relationship, Du Bois demonstrated the importance and utility of intergenerational activism by adapting to changing times, offering guidance and support to young people, and learning from up-and-coming activists. James (b. 1914) and Esther Cooper Jackson (b. 1917) grew up admiring Du Bois, and as youth activists in the 1940s began to build a relationship of mutual respect with their idol. By the time Du Bois wrote In Battle for Peace, the dynamic had blossomed into a collaborative friendship. James Jackson was among the Communist leaders indicted under the Smith Act in 1951, and Cooper Jackson was active in the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership. Her advocacy extended to Du Bois’s indictment and trial. When Jackson stood trial, Du Bois testified in his defense. Jackson was among those engaged in conversations with Du Bois about Communism prior to his petition for membership in the CPUSA and he transmitted the announcement of his decision to join the Party via the Jacksons before his departure to Ghana. Cooper Jackson collaborated with Du Bois and his wife Shirley in the establishment of Freedomways magazine, a quarterly journal that showcased Black writers, artists, and thinkers, shaping the discourse of race in American social thought for nearly 25 years. After Du Bois’s death, the Jacksons endeavored to preserve his memory and commemorate his legacy. In addition to sponsoring a 100th birthday celebration for Du Bois through Freedomways, Cooper Jackson worked to establish Du Bois’s Great Barrington birthplace as a national landmark. For the Jacksons, Du Bois’s enduring importance over the course of nearly a century reflected the necessity of adapting one’s activism as the world changed around them. Du Bois offered a model for lifelong activism that was not only based on guiding younger generations but on learning from and growing with them as well.
{"title":"W. E. B. Du Bois, James and Esther Cooper Jackson, and the Promise of Intergenerational Solidarity in the Black Freedom Movement","authors":"Sara E. Rzeszutek","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2022.2118509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2022.2118509","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the relationship between W. E. B. Du Bois and James and Esther Cooper Jackson over the course of their long and overlapping careers. In it, I will argue that through this relationship, Du Bois demonstrated the importance and utility of intergenerational activism by adapting to changing times, offering guidance and support to young people, and learning from up-and-coming activists. James (b. 1914) and Esther Cooper Jackson (b. 1917) grew up admiring Du Bois, and as youth activists in the 1940s began to build a relationship of mutual respect with their idol. By the time Du Bois wrote In Battle for Peace, the dynamic had blossomed into a collaborative friendship. James Jackson was among the Communist leaders indicted under the Smith Act in 1951, and Cooper Jackson was active in the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership. Her advocacy extended to Du Bois’s indictment and trial. When Jackson stood trial, Du Bois testified in his defense. Jackson was among those engaged in conversations with Du Bois about Communism prior to his petition for membership in the CPUSA and he transmitted the announcement of his decision to join the Party via the Jacksons before his departure to Ghana. Cooper Jackson collaborated with Du Bois and his wife Shirley in the establishment of Freedomways magazine, a quarterly journal that showcased Black writers, artists, and thinkers, shaping the discourse of race in American social thought for nearly 25 years. After Du Bois’s death, the Jacksons endeavored to preserve his memory and commemorate his legacy. In addition to sponsoring a 100th birthday celebration for Du Bois through Freedomways, Cooper Jackson worked to establish Du Bois’s Great Barrington birthplace as a national landmark. For the Jacksons, Du Bois’s enduring importance over the course of nearly a century reflected the necessity of adapting one’s activism as the world changed around them. Du Bois offered a model for lifelong activism that was not only based on guiding younger generations but on learning from and growing with them as well.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"21 1","pages":"214 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49623304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2125251
D. Lynn
Abstract W.E.B. Du Bois’s peace crusade was influenced by his second wife Shirley Graham and their friend Claudia Jones. Both Graham Du Bois and Jones understood that peace was a prerequisite to global emancipation and that war and militarism affected the most vulnerable; only by securing peace would the most oppressed be liberated. By the time of Du Bois’s arrest and trial chronicled in In Battle For Peace, Jones was also under indictment for her peace work. She had long articulated an emancipatory ethos that recognized Black women as the most vulnerable population, and she theorized that peace was necessary to their liberation. Graham Du Bois articulated the same in her letters and work during the peace movement. Both women argued that war and militarism were an attack on the Black home and that women were the most susceptible to the exploitative labor conditions and violence that predominated in military societies. While scholars have often dismissed this focus on gender and home as maternalist; Jones and Graham Du Bois recognized that the home was the site of revolutionary potential and socialist transformation, and they were instrumental in influencing Du Bois’s own peace commitments. The personal was not just political; the personal was the site for socialist liberation and all three believed that socialism could secure peace and equality.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2022.2131193
D. Lynn, P. L. Sinitiere
Abstract In August 1952 W.E.B. Du Bois published In Battle for Peace. Part memoir and part polemic, the book is a testament to Du Bois's later, and arguably most radical years in the Black Freedom Struggle. He wrote about being caught up in the anticommunist hysteria of the mid-20th century because of his growing devotion to the peace movement. But it is also an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist text that links war to capitalism and imperialism and argues that American policy was an extension of corporate greed. While In Battle for Peace is an account of Du Bois's 1951 arrest for his involvement in the Peace Information Center, trial, and eventual exoneration, it reveals the increased radicalization of a man that would eventually join the Communist Party out of protest to the growing militarization of the United States. It is a Cold War narrative that humanizes the McCarthy era witch hunts through the eyes of a loved and admired historical figure. It is a chapter of Du Bois's life too few know and still too few care to know. This special issue of American Communist History brings together scholars of peace, anti-communism, the Communist Party, gender, and Africana Studies to explore the legacy of Du Bois's book and his devotion to the peace movement. Together these authors offer insight into Du Bois's late in life radicalism and commitment to global liberation; they conclude that this book is an important part of the Du Bois canon that deserves greater attention and study.
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