From Here to There

Staughton Lynd

Description

From Here to There collects unpublished talks and hard-to-find essays from legendary activist historian Staughton Lynd.

The first section of the Reader collects reminiscences and analyses of the 1960s. A second section offers a vision of how historians might immerse themselves in popular movements while maintaining their obligation to tell the truth. In the last section Lynd explores what nonviolence, resistance to empire as a way of life, and working class self-activity might mean in the twenty-first century. Together, they provide a sweeping overview of the life, and work—to date—of Staughton Lynd.

Both a definitive introduction and further exploration, it is bound to educate, enlighten, and inspire those new to his work and those who have been following it for decades. In a wide-ranging Introduction, anarchist scholar Andrej Grubačić considers how Lynd’s persistent concerns relate to traditional anarchism.

Sujets

• Rank and file
• Working class
• Solidarity unionism
• Labor history
• Lawyer
• Prison

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604863536
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for FROM HERE TO THERE: THE STAUGHTON LYND READER
“Staughton Lynd’s work is essential reading for anyone dedicated to implementing social justice. The essays collected in this book provide unique wisdom and insights into U.S. history and possibilities for change, summed up in two tenets: Leading from below and solidarity.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt and Outlaw Woman
“This remarkable collection demonstrates the compassion and intelligence of one of America’s greatest public intellectuals. To his explorations of everything from Freedom Schools to the Battle of Seattle, Staughton Lynd brings lyricism, rigour, a historian’s eye for irony, and an unshakable commitment to social transformation. At this moment of economic crisis, when the air is filled with ideas of ‘hope’ and ‘change,’ Lynd guides us to understanding what, very concretely, those words might mean and how we might get there. These essays are as vital and relevant now as the day they were written, and a source of inspiration for activists young and old.”
—Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed and Starved
“I met Staughton and Alice Lynd nearly fifty years ago during an exuberant time. As a young man, I was greatly impressed by their combining of serious academic work with Quaker morality and willingness to throw themselves into a social movement. It has been many years since that time, but Staughton’s reflective and restless life has never ceased in its exploring. This book is his great gift to the next generation.”
—Tom Hayden
“From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader is a veritable treasure chest of Lynd’s unparalleled brilliance and respect for rank-and-file movements. If you’re interested in broad social change and meaningful democracy, you simply must read Staughton Lynd.”
—Daniel Gross, IWW Starbucks organizer, co-author of Labor Law for the Rank and Filer
“Staughton Lynd’s life of non-violent accompaniment with workers and the poor has been marked by a prodigious literary output. While immersed in the world and its struggles, he, with the steady involvement of his wife and partner Alice in their extensive joint work, has consistently recorded, studied, and written about social change from the viewpoint of workers and the poor. History, analysis, and the faithful transcription of the voices of struggle that emerged out of the 1960s and ’70s civil rights and antiwar campaigns, out of the resistance to the mill and factory shutdowns in the north in the 1980s and ’90s, give flesh and blood to the dry bones of theory. No one has better balanced an understanding of traditional Marxist and anarchist revolutionary theory with American traditions of democratic rights and individual liberty.”
—Charles McCollester, former chief shop steward at Union Switch & Signal, author of The Point of Pittsburgh

TABLE OF CONTENTS Praise for FROM HERE TO THERE: THE STAUGHTON LYND READER PREFACE, STAUGHTON LYND INTRODUCTION: LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

THE SIXTIES

FOREWORD

1. HENRY THOREAU: THE ADMIRABLE RADICAL

2. HOW THE COLD WAR BEGAN

3. SOCIALISM, THE FORBIDDEN WORD

4. REMEMBERING SNCC

5. EVERY SCHOOL A FREEDOM SCHOOL

6. THE NEW RADICALS AND “PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY”

7. THE COLD WAR EXPULSIONS AND THE MOVEMENT OF THE 1960s

8. WEATHERMAN

HISTORY

FOREWORD

9. REFLECTIONS ON RADICAL HISTORY

10. PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S ASSASSINATION

11. DE TE FABULA NARRATUR [THIS STORY IS ABOUT YOU]

12. THE TWO YALES

13. INTELLECTUALS, THE UNIVERSITY AND THE MOVEMENT

14. GUERRILLA HISTORY IN GARY

15. A VISION OF HISTORY

16. HISTORY’S SIMPLE TRUTHS

POSSIBILITIES

FOREWORD

17. NONVIOLENCE AS SOLIDARITY

18. OVERCOMING RACISM

19. FROM GLOBALIZATION TO RESISTANCE

20. STUDENTS AND WORKERS IN THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM

21. EDWARD THOMPSON’S WARRENS

22. SPEECH AT THE IWW CENTENNIAL

CONCLUSIONS

FOREWORD

23. THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY

24. SOMEDAY THEY’LL HAVE A WAR AND NOBODY WILL COME

25. TOWARD ANOTHER WORLD ALSO AVAILABLE FROM PM PRESS
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PREFACE, STAUGHTON LYND
To begin with, apologies to sisters in the movement that until about 1970 I used masculine pronouns—“he,” “his”—to refer to all human beings. I find that Eleanor Roosevelt defended this practice when helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after World War II. More remarkably, Barbara Deming, a colleague on the editorial board of Liberation magazine and, in my opinion, the most perceptive commentator on nonviolence that our movement produced, did the same in the Sixties. No matter. It was wrong. I apologize.
About half of the essays in this volume are talks that never appeared in print. With one exception (a chapter in a book), the remainder appeared in periodicals that may be difficult to access and in some cases no longer exist.
For better or worse I have had fundamentally the same outlook on things since I turned twenty-one in 1950. (That was also the year I met my wife, Alice. See our joint autobiography, Stepping Stones, published by Lexington Books in 2009.) That is, I have advocated nonviolence during years when it was the radical thing to do to call policemen “pigs”; I have celebrated the decentralization of decision-making, also known as “participatory democracy,” whether in a movement, a trade union, or a nation; and I have insisted that, whatever you believe, you must act on it: put your body where your mouth is, as we used to say.
This last article of faith—do it now—becomes more challenging to practice as I approach and pass eighty. I hope I have avoided telling other persons to do things that I am no longer able to undertake.
For readers who may have encountered one or more of these essays before, I need to explain the following: As I have thought about a matter and gradually clarified my ideas, I have built an argument from one talk or essay to the next. Inevitably, the result is repetition. In a first presentation I would highlight hypothesis A, and then repeat it in my next presentation while adding two new theses, B and C. In offering successive presentations in this Reader I have sometimes eliminated the repetition of an argument in a second or third elaboration of a theme.
Occasionally I have made slight corrections in a text that may have come into being fifty years ago. I have also sometimes added an explanation in brackets to clarify a word or phrase that would have been obvious to an audience at that time, but may no longer be self-explanatory.
Finally, I should like to acknowledge that like our previous joint venture, Wobblies and Zapatistas, this book is in significant part the product of Andrej Grubacic as well as of myself. It was his idea that there should be a “Reader” made up of unpublished talks and articles in obscure journals. And his Introduction, beside being extremely generous, paid me the compliment of focusing on ideas rather than personal characteristics.
That’s about it. Have fun.
INTRODUCTION: LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
In November 2008, French academic Max Gallo argued that the great revolutionary parenthesis is closed for good. No more “magnificent barefoot men marching on a dazzled world” whom Victor Hugo had once admired. Any revolutionary transformation, Gallo said, inevitably means an eruption of violence. Because our societies are extremely fragile, the major responsibility of intellectuals and other public figures is to protect those fragile societies from such an eruption.
Gallo is hardly alone in putting forth this view, either historically or within the current moment of discussion and debate. Indeed, his cautionary plea was quickly echoed by another man of letters, and another notable French leftist, historian François Furet. Furet warned that any attempt at radical transformation was either totalitarian or terrorist, or both, and that the very idea of another society has become almost completely inconceivable. His conclusion was that we are, in a certain sense, condemned to live in the world in which we live.
And then, only one month later, in December, there was the Greek rebellion. The Greek miracle. Not a simple riot, most certainly not a “credit crunch rebellion,” but a rebellion of dignity and a radical statement of presence: of real, prefigurative, transformative and resisting alternatives. Rebellion that was about affirming the preciousness of life.
I am writing this Introduction on the anniversary of the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, the act that put the fire to the powder keg of the Greek December. While writing, I am reminded of words from Staughton Lynd in a personal communication written to me during those days:
At the same time, just as we honor the gifts of the Zapatistas, we should ceaselessly and forever honor the unnamed, unknown men, women and children who lay down their lives for their comrades and for a better world. There sticks in my mind the story of a Salvadoran campesino. When the death squad arrived at his home, he asked if he might put on his favorite soccer (“football”) shoes before he was shot. The path to a new world cannot be and will not be short. Any one of us can walk it only part of