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New on redwedgemagazine.com this week: “Listening for Mrs. Lynch: Left Culture as Mass Matter” by Joseph Ramsey Brian Dolinar opens The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) by quoting not from a major artist or critic, but from a virtually forgotten participant in a long-dismembered radical organization, an audience member at a panel about “Culture” held by the National Negro Congress of 1940. During the lively discussion that followed the official presentations, a woman identified in the proceedings only as “Mrs. Lynch” spoke up, reminding the room that the cultural front mattered because “it is the cultural things that keep us from going stark crazy” (3). http://redwedgemagazine.com/articles/listening-mrs-lynch-left-culture-mass-matter “Walter Benjamin and the Classical Marxist Tradition” by Neil Davidson An earlier version of this article by Neil Davidson appeared in International Socialism <http://www.isj.org.uk/> 121. An updated version appears in Davidson’s new book Holding Fast to an Image of the Past: Explorations in the Marxist Tradition <http://www.amazon.com/Holding-Fast-Image-Past-Explorations/dp/1608463338/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404702768&sr=8-1&keywords=NEIL+DAVIDSON> (Haymarket Books, <http://www.haymarketbooks.org/> 2014). While Davidson’s article is part of debate with British socialist Chris Nineham we feel it offers an excellent introduction and method by which to approach the work of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin is arguably the most important Marxist cultural critic of the 20th century. His legacy, however, has long been distorted by sectarian dismissiveness on the one hand and academic obscurantism on the other. We hope Davidson’s nuanced but rooted Marxist approach will help to reclaim Benjamin from the academic swamp and help inoculate practical socialists from a vulgar approach to art and culture. Most importantly we hope this article contributes to a discussion that reconciles the best of so-called “Western Marxism” and the Frankfurt School with the actuality of revolution and immediacy of the class struggle. http://redwedgemagazine.com/articles/walter-benjamin-classical-marxist-tradition “In Defense of Classical Crowd Surfing” by Xavier Pontoon For the past two weeks, buried within the interminable detritus of most mainstream news, there has been a real gem of a story. I am speaking, of course, of David Glowacki: the scientist and artist who was ejected <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/25/crowdsurfing-handel-messiah-classical-music> from a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Old Vic Theatre in Bristol, UK for the offense of, apparently, trying to crowd surf. http://redwedgemagazine.com/articles/defense-classical-crowd-surfing plus “Bells Being Best Heard in Darkness,” “The Political Murals of Belfast” and “The Russian Revolution, Stalin and Shostakovich and the Jazz Age” ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
