This blog concerns politics and not family, but it should already be clear that my constant companion from the Wisconsin years forward, until her death in 2002, was my wife Donna. In my entry for the 45th Reunion book of my Harvard class--a “blog” written at five-year intervals--I wrote:
“My wife, Donna, was killed in a car crash in Holland, Michigan, on August 19, 2002. Our relationship was based on love, respect, and support; we were the best of buddies and fully shared our lives. My admiration for what she achieved as a writer, arts activist, and mother continues to grow.”
In my introduction to British Marxist Criticism, I called her “the best of comrades.,” but Donna was not herself a member of a socialist organization--in part because, as a former Presbyterian missionary, she found the atheism of some socialists offensive and in part because McCarthyism had instilled a fear of socialist groups in a generation of Americans. Donna had, nonetheless, served on the Governor’s Commission for human rights while still in high school and worked as a missionary among the poor people in the hills of Puerto Rico. I remember our marching together on a May Day demonstration in Dublin in the year 2000, she holding up copies of the newspaper of the Socialist Party. At her death, both The Socialist (UK) and Socialism Today (UK) published tributes, and both a conference at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea and the World Congress of the Committee for a Workers International meeting in Belgium were that year dedicated to her.
This blog entry covers much of the thirty-four year period that I spent at Michigan State University, and over that length of time it is more difficult to recall the sequence of events, particularly since they were not punctuated by changes of place, other than our back-and-forth movements to England. I want, moreover to take steps to shorten a blog that would be excessively long. My organization of this section will be more topical than the other sections. It will skip over my thirty-four years teaching English romantic poetry, the task for which I was hired at Michigan State, and my administrative work as Assistant Dean of the Graduate School (1977-82) and as Chair of the Department of English (1988-96), except as they are relevant to our political theme. On this principle, I pause here to mention writing an article for the Graduate School Newsletter using Marx as an example of how doctoral work in the humanities can be part of the preparation of a thinker who will have profound impact.
Socialist newspapers, which had been hard to find before, were now available, and I at various times subscribed to the Guardian--not the British paper, but the left-wing New York publication, now defunct--and Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party, also in New York) as well as various Communist Party papers, including one from California later merged into the People’s Daily World and the Finnish-language Tyomies-Eteenpain from Superior, Wisconsin. I, however, took a detour in my crawl toward socialism, by studying Anarchism , reading some Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, etc., and teaching a course on Literature and Anarchism, anarchism being a political outlook often associated with the English romantics, especially Shelley. I remember visiting Freedom House in Angel Alley in Whitechapel, where Kropotkin had once worked, and meeting an anarchist who had edited Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy. (Angel Alley will be known to some as the site of a Jack-the-Ripper murder.) It was with anarchist texts to contribute that I joined Professor Richard Peterson of the Department of Philosophy, an expert on Marx, in team-teaching an honors course with the alarming title A Critique of Bourgeois Culture. Peterson, and Marx, got me back on track, and I remain grateful for Professor Peterson’s guiding me and these students through Capital, and revealing the wide range of philosophic, political, social, psychological, and economic thought that Marx` and Engels contributed.
Some experience with Anarchist thought did have the beneficial effect of making me see that socialism could not simply be superimposed on the existing governmental structures, an assumption which is generally the error of the socialism of the Second International-- the error of social democracy. But Marx and Engels also exposed the modern state as simply the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the ruling class. New participatory structures such as those first tested in the Paris Commune would be needed.
I worked on some biographical essays on socialist and anarchist writers for the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, starting with an essay on Robert Burns but moving on to the Communist authors T.A. Jackson, A.L. Morton, Jack Lindsay, and Christopher Caudwell and the anarchists Herbert Read, Colin Ward, and George Woodcock. In the process I had some correspondence with Ward and Woodcock, but in England I was able to meet both Lindsay and Morton, who was married to the daughter of Jackson. Leslie and Vivien Morton became family friends, whom Donna and I and the boys visited in their thatched-roof home The Old Chapel in Clare, Suffolk, and who visited us in Hastings. I treasure the memory of my son Karl leading the distinguished historian A. L. Morton--author of the People’s History of England--around the battlefield at Hastings and explaining the geographic aspects of that event. My chapter on Morton in British Marxism Criticism is a tribute to a man that I felt to be the very model of a committed socialist scholar.
Soon after my first visit to England I began teaching courses on contemporary British literature, and I also saw the value of immersion in the culture of which the literature is only one aspect.
My Department lacked an overseas program when I arrived in it, so I organized first an annual London summer program in Central London and then an annual fall semester program at Roehampton University and occasionally taught in these programs. Living in Hastings led to my interest in the great working-class novel written there by a house-painter: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by “Robert Tressell.” At least four doctoral dissertations that I directed would deal with aspects of this book.
In the USA, I wrote some articles and reviews for Nature, Society, and Thought published at the University of Minnesota and attended their Marxist Scholars conferences, one of which caused me to be named in a Marxists on Campus expose in a right-wing journal. These conferences put me in touch with Marxist scholarship on many fronts, including a field about which I had not thought for a long time--physics, the research area of the editor of the journal and the organizer of the conferences, Professor Erwin Marquit.
I would single out two books that consolidated my grasp of Marxism. One was Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams, a book whose scope goes far beyond what its title implies to develop the Marxist positions on language, the hegemonic, and alienation, among other topics. The other is History and Class-consciousness by Georg Lukacs who proves the startling thesis that the class-consciousness of the working-class is the self-consciousness of history. In this formulation, the process that Marx undertook in turning Hegel right-side-up in completed, and the meaning of history is freshly asserted. Lukacs also helped with other points that are difficult for someone like myself who lacks training in philosophy. He led me finally to see, through his chapter “The Antimonies of Bourgeois Thought,” what the flaw is in Kant’s conception of the Thing-in-Itself, the seeming impasse that has justified the irrationalism that extends through modernism to the influential French thinkers of the twentieth century. But reading all of the work of A.L. Morton and Christopher Caudwell and most of the work of Jack Lindsay (the author of about 150 books), the other books by Raymond Williams, and the work of the rest of the writers included in my British Marxist Criticism also contributed to an education that I had sought for a long time.
From the years at Williams College onward, I also read what I could find about political organizations of the British left. Living in England meant that I became familiar as well with papers like The Morning Star, the daily paper of the Communist party--Leslie Morton had been the “proprietor” of its predecessor The Daily Worker. Leslie Morton personally walked me over to the Marx Memorial Library in London so that I would get to know its resources. I came to know the several left-wing bookshops. And, through my reading, I had come to know something of the Militant Tendency in the Labor Party and such leading figures in it as Ted Grant, Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh, Clare Doyle, and Keith Dickinson, but I had never seen its paper Militant, which was not related to the paper published in the U.S. by the American SWP. In fact, I walked into the Pathfinder Bookshop of the American SWP in the Cut in London, near the Old Vic, and saw the American paper on sale there. I said, “There’s a British paper by that name.” The person in the shop said, ”Yes, but we don’t like it.” Then, one day, in the center of Hastings, there was a young man selling Militant, and I bought a copy then and whenever he reappeared.
I was pleased with the correctly applied genuine Marxism of the paper and its focus on the working-class rather than on squabbles on the left and reformism. I attended one of their meetings in London and soon subscribed to the Militant International Review, as the journal now called Socialism Today was then called. I received the magazine by mail for a couple of years but assumed that I was the only reader in the USA. Then, to my astonishment, I found a classified ad in the Guardian (the US paper) for a US organization allied to the Militant Tendency of Britain. I contacted them at their Chicago address of the time, and eventually became a member. I was involved for the next ten years or more in trying to create a Labor Party on the British model for the USA and, since then, in other efforts. I published occasional articles and reviews in the Militant International Review and in Socialism Today, and with others maintained an East Lansing branch of the US organization, Socialist Alternative, until my retirement. I am now a member of one of the Boston branches.
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