The Red Thread

Tina Modotti, 1927

Socialist Party Decisively Wins French Elections

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sorry about the size, i'm a neofight

You can edit like this: (img src="linklinklink.jpg" width=300) Angle brackets instead of round in actual code.

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in other words, any idiot can do it if they're far enough left

in other words, any idiot can do it if they're far enough left

I'm confused (doesn't take much)...

1) A picture of a hammer and sickle on a sombrero (Communist Russian symbol on a piece of haberdashery associated with Mexico)
followed by
2) "Socialist Party Decisively Wins French Elections" (non-Communist political leaning, and France).
3) Ah! It's a Red Herring!

Thanks.

>10 WholeHouseLibrary:
And "poisson rouge"...April Fool's, etc.

#9

Well, I don't know about any idiot--you still haven't edited the fuckin huge pic in #4. See the little pencil in the right corner of your posts? That's the "EDIT" button. It's your friend.

12 > but you have to be on the right to do that...

#10

1) A photo by Tina Modotti

2) A heartening recent headline from the New York Times

3) A representative of the Scandinavian social democracies

#11

tag, you're it!

Overpopulation in Manila

...35% of the population is living in slums with limited access to sanitation, healthcare and education.

Gordon Parks

Jacob Riis, author of How The Other Half Lives

Matt Weber

Matt Weber

Jacob Holdt:

Hunger, 1975



Bethel, North Carolina

An interview with Jacob Holdt on the making of American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass.

In the early 1970s, while vagabonding around the United States, Jacob Holdt would write to his parents in Denmark about the unspeakable poverty he witnessed. But his parents didn't always believe what he wrote."They sent me a little pocket camera for my birthday and asked me to send some pictures home," said Holdt, "and that was the beginning of 15,000 pictures."

...Although Holdt knew nothing about him until his own career was well on its way, the great Danish documentary photographer Jacob Riis grew up 15 miles away from Holdt's home in Denmark and came to America 100 years before him almost to the day. And another Danish photographer, Peter Seakjaer, who worked with Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, came to America from Denmark 50 years before Holdt.
"When you look at his photographs of the black people down South they look completely like mine," said Holdt.

..."When you grow up in Europe America is a land of fantasy -- swimming pools everywhere, Dallas and Dynasty. We had seen the civil rights movement, but somehow it wasn't as powerful in shaping our view as all these Hollywood shows were. Europeans come to New York and say "wow, this is like entering the third world. People are laying all over in the streets, panhandlers, beggars everywhere." "

...Holdt finds it ironic that it is easier to shoot devastating photographs today than it was in the early 1970s. In his travels Holdt has also seen how the other half lives. His book discusses a night spent with Senator Edward Kennedy, who he says was involved in a drunken joy-ride. And he spent another night at the home of Senator Jay Rockefeller of Virginia...

...Holdt believed the good will he found among most Americans he got to know would eventually lead to a healing of divisions. "At the time I made American Pictures and came back and saw the shock of Europeans I felt 'gee, did I exaggerate a little bit?' because when you have lived in these conditions for years you don't think of it being anything special anymore. I felt that these pictures would end up in the Schomberg collection in Harlem, I wanted to donate them because I thought soon they would be historical documents. But how wrong I was. Everything has surpassed what I see in American Pictures. I had no idea I'd ever be able to use this on a continuing basis."

Martin Parr: Bongo Burger Bar, Windsor Safari Park, 1990



A few more Bored Couples

Martin Parr: Ocean Dome, Tokyo, 1996



From Small World

Lewis Hine's series on Child Labour

Sebastião Salgado: Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age

Olivier Rebbot: victims of right-wing death squads in El Salvador, 1981





Murry Sill: Olivier Rebbot, moments before he is fatally wounded by gunfire, San Francisco Gotera, El Salvador, January 15, 1981

More from Sill: “This young orphan lived in the streets of Soyapongo, El Salvador. According to older children, his parents had recently been killed by soldiers. Shortly after making this picture, I watched a group of soldiers stop their truck, get out, shoot a man then continue on their way.”

Susan Meiselas

"She first gained recognition for her work in El Salvador. During the civil war there she photographed the uncovered graves of four murdered American nuns. The circulation of these images prompted a Congressional investigation into El Salvador’s right-wing death squads and the United States involvement in the war." (Black Cat Books)

El Salvador, Santiago Nonualco. 1980:







From Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979

China: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky

awesome pictures, Existanai. thanks for posting them.

24>

I haven't read Philip Levine, Silent.

I ought to have noted, though, that you can buy very affordable copies of Lewis Hine's work: Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor and Men at Work are both under $10; America and Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904-1940 is out of print but still available like new under $30, including shipping; and you can sample a few photographs in Lewis Hine (Phaidon 55) or get an academic look at his social context in Lewis Hine as Social Critic.

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubborness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

Philip Levine

Thanks, Silent. Someone to add to my library. A sparseness that suits the content, rather than being a vehicle for a window-gazing transcription.

Happy May Day!

Inno dei lavoratori (Workers' hymn)

i am impressed by the photographs posted on this forum. even though some of them are distrurbing, they are thought-provoking and extraordinary.

Yes, lots of posters with a great sense for the visual arts in here.

Aaaannd, a special one for my bud AsYouKnow_Bob.

"The Internationale" conducted by Arturo Toscanini

Aw, thanks. One for you:

Billy Bragg in Toronto

Happy May Day, comrade!

Aw, yeah, I remember trying to figure out whether I could make it... and in my 'hood no less!

And backatcha:

Ani DiFranco & Utah Phillips : 'Pie In The Sky'

The portrait of Sharbat Gula, age 13 (Afghanistan) by Steve McCurry in 1985:



This is her in 2002:

Hip hip hurray!

This is my favourite Bastille Day card (for all my UK/Commonwealth, Dutch, Spanish etc. friends): Monarchy

For Americans, there is this card: Er...hold the Freedom Fries

Joyeux Quatorze Juillet!

hahaha!
Vive la Revolution! Vive la France!

Happy May Day to strikers and Occupiers everywhere!

I shall be going to Toronto's event.

be there for me as well!

I will!

I bought a bunch of red carnations yesterday to give away. I don't think Norteamericanos have that tradition, but I'm sure they'll catch on.

Which reminds me: where the hell are red poppies around here? I can't find them in any of the parks. No, I'm not running a heroin lab, I just miss seeing darn wildflowers!

I live around the corner from the Lange Lombardstraat in The Hague. "Café-concert Excelsior", located on that street, was the venue of the 1872 congress of the First International. That's the one that saw the definite split between Marx and Bakunin and their respective supporters.

I'll try to locate the actual building and if I succeed I'll post a picture.

> 53

According to the page http://www.denhaag.pvda.nl/nieuwsbericht/836, Café Concert Excelsior was at Lange Lombardstraat 15. When you look it up in Google Streetview, it seems something went horribly wrong there. http://resources21.kb.nl/gvn/IISG01/IISG01_30051000551256_U.jpg is a picture of the Café Concert Excelsior.

Yeah, but for some reason many of the house numbers have changed in several streets here. Also, I've see a different number being mentioned. So, still investigating. Not all too much hope though. Urban renewal hit some of my neighbourhood pretty hard.

The city of the Hague puts the Café Concert Excelsior at Lange Lombardstraat 109, as you can see at http://www.haagsebeeldbank.nl/beeldbank/weergave/record/?id=1666674e-2fac-4a82-b.... That number no longer seems to exist, but it should be close to the Prinsegracht. No building looks like the old photograph.

Earlier there were some pictures of socialist heroes in China in this thread. I visited Beijing in September 1988, shortly before the People's Republic national day, and was surprised to find pictures of Stalin (together with Marx, Engels and Lenin) around Tiananmen Square. I wonder if Stalin is still honoured in this way in China.

Nowadays in China, citizens often unite against the authorities in local conflicts about government mishandling and corruption. This leads to cases where

One local official was even reported to have been stripped of his shirt by angry protesters. Users of the Chinese microblogging site Weibo said that having found luxury items in the government offices, demonstrators wanted to know what brand of clothing local Party Secretary Sun Jianhua was wearing. On discovering it was an expensive Italian brand, they are said to have stripped him to the waist and tried to make him wear shirt which bore an anti-pollution slogan.

was surprised to find pictures of Stalin

But Mao never had a quarrel with Stalin, did he? China went popier than the pope after he died. What a way of sticking it to the Khrushchevian new Soviets, those softy turncoats. Stalin remained big in Albania too until the bitter end.

Nowadays in China, citizens often unite against the authorities in local conflicts about government mishandling and corruption.

Now that surprises me, I thought totalitarianism beats out the impulse to take justice in one's own hands. It's almost as if they took their Communist upbringing seriously.

China never went through a process of de-Stalinisation like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Neither has China gone through a formal process of de-Maofication (if that would be the right word). Everything was blamed on the Gang of Four, while Deng famously claimed that Mao was "seven parts good, three parts bad".

There are about 500 protests on average per day in China. This is allowed as long as the monopoly on power of the Communist Party is not questioned. You may want to check my review/summary of Richard McGregor's The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. Lower level corruption is prosecuted and often blamed on an addiction to gambling or mistresses: it is a personal fault and not the party's or the system's. A recent famous case was in Wukan (where everybody can watch Hong Kong television), leading to " the expulsion of officials by villagers, the siege of the town by police, and subsequent détente".

Happy May Day, workers, labourers, "employees", the underemployed, the not-yet-laid-off, wage slaves everywhere!

Avanti popolo!

Alla riscossa!

More working folk:

http://earldotter.com/

Forty years ago, the elected Chilean government of President Dr. Salvador Allende was deposed in a vicious U.S.-backed coup d’etat.

Henry Kissinger famously mapped out the American position as follows: "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves....I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people."

I remember the British Government issuing a statement criticising the torture techniques used by the new regime in Chile. Amazingly the techniques they were criticising, wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, and deprivation of food and drink, were the very ones the British security services had been using in Northern Ireland for some time.

It's only bad when the bad people do it. ;)

Silly me. I was forgetting that.

If you're nostalgic for the CCCP, scroll through this tumblr http://sovietico.tumblr.com

Interesting, I put it on follow. There are several "Commie-nostalgia" sites I found very informative in the past--I'll see whether I can hunt down those links.

Good thing they seem to like Joe, though, wouldn't do to get too sentimental.

Speaking of which, one tangentially interesting book I read recently was Inside the Stalin archives, from one of Yale U. Press editors who secured the Russian contract for their "Annals of Communism" series. There's just a fundamental disconnect in how Americans and Russians perceive the past, and nothing will bridge it.

The odd thing is, to a third-party observer such as this reader, the two sides are--fundamentally--so much alike.

69> I came to a similar perspective (more similar than different) after reading Dialectic of Enlightenment. Yet, there remained a distinct "utopian" feeling, represented by the existence of the CCCP. Even though everyone (aside from the most ardent Stalinist) knew it was horrible da drüben, it was also different in its larger aim which was not entirely debased by really existing socialism. The fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to sap the collective energy out of intellectual and political movements on the left.

Nothing will kill the left as long as there's injustice in the world.

Speaking of them utopian feelings and yearnings, this is delicious (and vewwy, vewwy ENGLISH in outlook): An Englishman abroad.

The story of how Australian actress Coral Browne met Guy Burgess (of "the Cambridge Five") in Moscow--played by Browne herself and Alan Bates, directed by John Schlesinger.

Cool tip on that film.

By "left" I mean the old non-commie, socialist, "radical democratic" left (1945-1989). I noticed a relative dissipation of intellectual and political projects focusing on economic and political injustice; the void was filled by projects that centered on cultural injustice.

I know what you mean. Still, cultural injustice is something that the left needed to discover. Far too often in the past it was in the position of the American revolutionaries--liberty, happiness and all that--if you were a white guy with cattle.

If the idea is to work towards a "most-just" society, a society most bearable to the masses crowding the planet (and poised, it seems, to crowd it even more, possibly to the point we can barely envisage today) then the cultural injustices must fall off in the first line.

As for rallying around economic and political projects, if Occupy can happen in the US, then serious revolt is perfectly possible anywhere. There is no other population in the "developed" world as immunized from the revolutionary virus as the praying, junk food-guzzling American one. So when they take to the streets--well, I'm not saying the Commune is around the corner, but it tells me that, bitten hard enough, people do wake up.

What I think is missing is the grand theoretical schemes underpinning demands for change, but must we follow 19th century fashion? The beauty of marxism is its certitude that "this must happen", and there are things that "must happen" whether you explain them by marxism or not.

Even if its pretension to scientific certainty was exposed as closer to faith than fact, Marxism provided a unified framework for imagining something else, which could drive movements, spur debate, etc. It provided coherence. Post-1989, there is fragmentation. Movement types can't agree on the problems to be solved (climate? North/South? surveillance? identity? Empire?) and, in many cases, theorists turn their critique on each other (e.g., "feminism"). What I sensed as a student was an organic link between intellectual work, within a "tradition," and politics outside the academy and its journalistic productions. That link was supplied by an engagement with an "enlightenment project." Marxism (economic justice + radical democracy) was one important element of that project. With the critique of that project's biases and blind spots, there is dispersal, centrifugally, and in some cases self-defeating purism. While people do occasionally wake up (e.g., Occupy's break from waiting in line at the Apple Store), today's wakefulness is likely to take the form of Jihad, Tea Party madness, or the culture of outrage enabled by social media.

My problem - having studied the Marx vs. Bakunin thing - is that I've deeply grown to dislike Marx. Authoritative git. Paranoid. And not to be trusted in statements of fact. (Never mind though: that still says nothing about the systems they proposed).

P.s.: obviously that also has nothing to do with the US sponsored coup in Chile. I remember how that threat hung over us in Western Europe too - and it happened in Greece. And let's support Franco in Spain - never mind he used to be a buddy of Hitler.

For sentimental reasons I still hang onto a copy of Handboek voor de nieuwe illegalen, intended as a manual for organizing resistance if such a coup happened here in the Netherlands. (Very naive, it would have gotten most of us killed without any real damage to the oppressor, but still).

Death of a red Marshall Berman http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/145134/marshall-berman-marxist-humanist-mensch

Marx is, to use a great French word, incontournable: literally not-getting-around-able. Inescapable, inevitable, necessary. Every time I read a bit of his critique of capitalism I have to pinch myself to remember it was written cca 150 years ago. His analysis stands; the problem is to work out solutions for our times and circumstances.

Thanks for the Berman link, theoria, I must get that book... All that is solid melts into air.

he could bend over backwards toward populist enthusiasm for any sign of insurgent life anywhere, however obscure.

My sort of people.

“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Gospel.

I'm sorry to hear about Berman. That book was had a real impact on me.

fdytd

theoria at #76 - thanks for the news, I hadn't heard.

Happy May Day!

>81 LolaWalser: ...and the same to you.

Was there maypole dancing on the village green?!

That would be an English custom that never took hold in Ireland, especially the Republic.

Fada beo an réabhlóid!

Oh, SORRY! :)

Got a bit carried away with visions of Arcadian revelry.

Now I'm in the glum grey concrete vastness again.

Maypole dancing might be a rural legend.

No need to apologise. The Internet always distorts the truth. It is a feature programmed in by the founding systems analysts.

Party poopers! I'm thinking I'll be needing a slug of cognac in my tea to withstand your pink-cheeked, fresh-faced doom and gloom!

>88 LolaWalser: Forget the cognac. Use some whiskey, top it with some cream and have a real Irish coffee.

First I need some Irish magic that will turn tea into coffee. Or, wait. Is that just a name? Tea, whiskey, cream? Sounds positively diabolical.

But I'll remember the rec! I have a visit to a local absinthe bar on my alcoholic agenda, so I'll look for the best "Irish coffee" too.

It always amuses me when our former colonialists equate socialism with communism. There may have been a relationship when we lowered Karl into Highgate Cemetery, but these days, even in France, there is a distinction.

'As soon as this bar closes
The revolution starts ... '

I remember asking a publican in the West of Ireland, "When does this bar close?"

His answer was, "Mid October!"

Interesting vocations:

http://www.cracked.com/article_21267_5-insane-jobs-people-had-to-do-before-moder...

Happy May Day!

Good ones LW!

The fight continues! I mean, look at this crap:



Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil

Happy Bastille day!

Where oh where is Camille Desmoulin now that his country - and Europe - needs him!?

The Prussians are coming! The Prussians are coming!

Ut resurgam!

Tariq Ali: Jeremy Corbyn: the Most Leftwing Leader Labor Has Ever Had

I'm kinda down on this thread, because I'm currently reading Homage to Catalonia. Any suggestions to get out of this funk?

Let's see--you could red-ex the thread or ditch that rotter or read another book on Spain or get your head out of 1936 altogether and take in the glories of fascistoid neoliberal paradises we live in. I find there's nothing like the present to remind me why WE NEED A BLOODY REVOLUTION.

Happy May 1, Labour Day, international workers' day!

Same to you, comrade.

>104 LolaWalser: ...and a very happy May the 1st to you too.

Guysss... *fist bumps all around* The fight continues! :)

A day late but yes, as we say it hereabouts, "A luta continua!"

>108 deebee1:

Venceremos! :)

Verso Books' May Day sale (50% off on select titles) goes on till 11 PM today:

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2619-50-off-for-may-day

Labour wins the mayoralty of London! Yessss!

Elections: Labour's Sadiq Khan elected London mayor

May all Bastilles fall!

Vive la republique!

Labour lives! May the Blairite abomination be purged forever.

JEREMY CORBYN’S ACHIEVEMENT

A century later and we still need Lenins...

First Lenin statue in western Germany to be erected after heated battle

Happy May 1, Labour Day, international workers' day!

Happy May 1, Labour Day, international Workers' Day!

>119 LolaWalser: Thank you! And happy 1st May to you too!

Please accept this gift of Louise Michel, giving a rousing anarchist feminist speech as a senior, from a contemporary newspaper.

MERCI I love it!

Seventy-six years since the victory over Nazism.

Vive la révolution!

>123 LolaWalser: Hear! Hear!

Happy Bastille Day!

Go Graz!

The Communist Party Just Won the Elections in Austria’s Second-Biggest City

Half a century after the US-supported fascists killed Salvador Allende and Chile's socialism:

Gabriel Boric’s triumph puts wind in the sails of Latin America’s resurgent left

Today in Madrid



Happy Labour Day!

The best that can be said of May Day 2023 in the UK is that there are perhaps more workers on strike in conflict with our unspeakable government than there are people enthusiastic about the coronation of our Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor-Mountbatten princeling.

Progress, of sorts!

I laugh so I wouldn't cry.

Rise early, rise often, rise soon!