The four forces of revolution that we had singled out at our birth - rank and file labor, Black dimension, youth, women - made it clear that these freedom fighters wanted to speak for themselves. Whether you looked at African freedom fighters in apartheid South Africa, bursting into open revolt;15 or at Black youth in Greensboro, N.C., sitting-in to begin a new stage of revolt in the U.S.; or at Japanese youth snake-dancing into history by preventing Eisenhower from setting foot in their land - there was no doubt that 1960 had opened a new age.
What was remarkable about the Japanese youth was that their anti-U.S. imperialism meant also breaking with Communism from the Left, and embarking on a study and translation of Marx's Humanist Essays.
Having declared such freedom fighters to be not only force but reason - that is to say, a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory - it became our task, as Marxist-Humanists to work out a new relationship of theory to practice. In creating a forum for the freedom fighters to speak for themselves at the same time as they searched for a theory of liberation, News and Letters Committees, in 1960, published Workers Battle Automation. Though Charles Denby edited it, it not only was a collective effort of workers in the basic industries of coal, auto, and steel, but included also the youth, who had been designated as a "beat generation". A young woman of 16 thus wrote in its pages that, far from being "rebels without a cause," they were rebels who refused to accept the rules of a world they did not make: "My vision is one of a new free society in which, among other things, I will not have to wait until I am 21 to be admitted into the human race." (See p. 61, Workers Battle Automation).
The most exciting color of this new decade continued to be Black, but whereas none could avoid recognizing the color, what remained unrecognized was that out of the racist, sexist South arose a form of Women's Liberation. When two Marxist-Humanist women, one Black and one white, Mary Hamilton and Louise Inghram, joined the first Freedom Rides to Mississippi and found themselves thrown into the hell-hole of Hinds County Jail, they found there, ready to help them, a most amazing organization - Woman Power Unlimited.16 The record of this, as well as of the whole struggle to break down discrimination, comprises the pamphlet, Freedom Riders Speak For Themselves.
In action, in jail and out, the Freedom Riders focused not only on the concrete battles but also on the theories of liberation. Louise Inghram describes the enthusiasm with which the special Freedom Rider Issue of News & Letters (Aug-Sept., 1961) had been greeted. She had taken for granted it was because their stories had been printed there, but discovered it was, instead, the Editorial on the state of civil rights in the U.S. that was appreciated most. It was an Editorial that had reached back to the history of Abolitionism and forward to today, clearly separating Marxism from Communism: it was reprinted in the pamphlet itself. (Sec 11. 39, Freedom Riders Speak for Themselves).
The state of civil rights in the U.S. on which the Editorial had focused revealed the relationship between the events in the Deep South and the new moves to the right by the Administration ever since the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which had taken place only a few months earlier. It had been then that President Kennedy had declared that "the deeper struggle" is not with arms, but with "subversion", promptly trying to himself subvert the freedom of the press.
So ominous was the new counter-revolutionary move American imperialism had launched with the invasion, that we had at once decided to issue a Weekly Political Letter. Since we were too few in number and too poor in finances to print more than a monthly paper, these mimeographed letters were offered to all readers, and initiated a new stage of development for us, testing us by measuring our philosophy against the actual objective developments as they were occurring weekly.
THE FIRST LETTER was written April 22, 1961 as a "Preliminary Statement on the Crisis over Cuba". While we naturally solidarized with the Cuban masses against U.S. imperialism, we reiterated our opposition to both poles of world state-capitalism - U.S. and Russia, and to Castro's own conception of the "backwardness of the masses" who have to be led. Refusing to "take sides" other than opposition to both sides, we singled out Kennedy's declaration of the "new and deeper struggle that is taking place every day, without arms or fanfare in thousands of villages and markets and classrooms all over the globe" as what must concern us:
"This is far beyond the Cuban struggle. This is the American revolution. This is the world anti-war struggle. All this the Kennedy Administration has declared war on, and far from battlefields or on them, in trade unions or schools, this 'new frontier' will come to nip in the bud what McCarthyism only blustered about but had no power to stifle. We must expose, root out this threat to our every freedom, before all life is extinguished in a nuclear holocaust".
The 40 letters that followed (see Vol. VII) demonstrate what political-philosophic intervention means in establishing new international relations, especially in the Third World. (The last letters in the series were written directly from Africa). The weekly commentaries and analyses of world events did not stop at the description of what is, but involved sensing the direction a particular event would later take. The letter written on Oct. 9, 1961, which dealt with the undeclared wars of imperialism, took up a brief AP dispatch, hidden in the inside pages of the local press that week. It was entitled "Crisis-Soon-To-Be in South Vietnam and the Sending of U.S. Troops."
1962 was the year we began by reconsidering the whole question of war and revolution on the basis of the new forces of revolt that had arisen in China, with a Special Supplement to the January issue: "Mao Tse-tung, from the Beginning of power to the Sino-Soviet Dispute".
It was also the year we went to Africa to establish new relations there. So sharply did the dynamism of ideas which centered around African Socialism contrast with Daniel Bell's "End of Ideology", which characterized America's tired radicals and pragmatists, that we began referring to "the underdeveloped intellectuals" as the U.S.'s most notable monopoly.
The Gambia, the last sliver of West Africa which still did not have its independence, was the place I spent the most time talking both with the high school youth who displayed the most original and mature thought, and with proletarians who had a long history of struggle that no one had ever bothered to learn about. They told me that as long ago as the end of the First World War they had had a General Strike and that the must popular saying had been "The sun never sets on the British Empire, and the wages never rise." Africa Today (July 1962) published the article. "Gambia Closeup: The Gambia Takes the Long, Hard Road to Independence"�
Ghana, which had been the first country to gain its independence, turned out to be the must disappointing. Here was a land that had the most international concepts, via both George Padmore and W.E.B. Dubois, who had established his African Encyclopedia there. It was the land that was still considered by all Africans who had not yet gained freedom as their "homeland" - whether that be Patrice Lumumba of the Congo or Robert Sobukwe of South Africa. And yet, when a General Strike erupted, the rulers of Ghana acted like state rulers anywhere in relation to workers in revolt. (This experience was written up for the Dec 1962 issue of Africa Today, in an analysis entitled: "Out of Colonization, into the Fire"). On the other hand, such good relations were established with African socialists in Nigeria that we continued to have direct reports of the labor struggles there for many years. The two way road between Africa and the U.S. has characterized the untold history of the U.S. from its very beginning: it was resumed in our age in the relationships to African Socialism.
Two exciting letters reached me while still in Africa, from such totally different places as Japan and East Europe. From Japan came a letter from a man who had been a founder of the Communist Party there, had broken with it at the outset of World War II, and was thrown into prison for the duration of the war for opposing both his own country's Imperialism and Russian Communism's Hitler-Stalin Pact. His name was Tadayuki Tsushima. He wrote that he had worked out his own position on Russia as a state-capitalist society and asked permission to translate Marxism and Freedom into Japanese. The other letter was from an East European dissident who had somehow got hold of a copy of Marxism and Freedom and wanted to establish relations with Marxist-Humanists abroad.
THAT SEPTEMBER, WHEN our 1962-1963 Perspectives for the organization was entitled "The Time is Now: Organizational Perspectives in Light of the World Situation and our Unique, Theoretical Contributions", (Vol. IX. Sec. III. 3) we were, of course, aware of the many flash-points in the world, the most serious of which was the unrelenting civil war in Algeria. The March 1962 N&L warned that the so-called cease-fire in Algeria was but a "prelude to civil war". We were not, however, aware that 1962 would become so perilous a time that we would actually be thrust onto the brink of a nuclear holocaust over the missile crisis in Cuba.
Because nothing could stop the developing revolutions either in Africa or the U.S., and because we were not only analyzing the Black revolution but participating in it, we had made our October 1962 issue a "Special Mississippi Issue" by turning over the front page to Charles Butts, Editor of the Mississippi Free Press, who had been viciously beaten for speaking out there. Our own editorial was entitled: "Either Freedom Here and Now - or the Magnolia Jungle".
Suddenly, on Oct. 22, the whole world was thrust right to the brink of a nuclear war. No longer did anyone talk of history or theory. It was now nothing short of life and death. Our statement on the brink-of-war situation made clear that the Kennedy-Khruschev confrontation was perilous enough without falling into the mire of the Left which was trying to argue that Russia had as much right to have missiles in Cuba as the U.S. to have bases in Turkey. We demonstrated a completely different ground by holding out the vision of social revolution and a totally new society on human foundations.17
That infamous world-terrifying event on the high seas - when Kennedy was sealing off Russian ships on their way to Cuba, an island 90 miles from U.S. shores where Khrushchev had placed missiles aimed at the U.S. - proved all over again that the World was divided into two, and only two, nuclear Titans, each fighting for single world control. It also revealed how inconsequential to both U.S. imperialism and Russian Communism was Cuba if ever it impinged on their imperialist goals.
Though Cuba's life was on the line, neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy bothered to ask Cuba's views, either before or after the decision to place missiles there, and then remove them.
A great deal more was involved than writing about this in the Two Worlds column of the November issue. "Ideology and Revolution: A Study of What Happens After", which discussed Cuba's tailending of Russia. And more was also involved than editorializing that "Kennedy and Khrushchev Bring the World Close to the Point of No Return" in the same issue. In this life and death question, with death looming as the more likely victor, it was imperative not to act as if the world had already come to an end and nothing could be done about it. On the contrary, new eyes were needed to look at every possible force of revolution. It was a question both of reality and of philosophy to look at the whole globe for new points of departure.
As 1962 ended, with a new confrontation between India and China, the two exponents of "peaceful coexistence" in Asia, we were opening up new relations with freedom fighters in Africa, dissidents in China, the youth in Japan, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England. But what towered above all others as masses in motion was the Black dimension in the U.S.
"The power of negativity - the dialectic - never ceases to amaze me", I wrote on Feb. 12, 1963. The reference was to the process, by which the statement we had intended to issue on the so-called Emancipation Proclamation had been transformed into American Civilization on Trial and signed by the whole National Editorial Board.
Since 1963 was the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, once the immediate missile crisis was over, Kennedy rushed to take advantage of that year and present himself as an alleged "freedom fighter". We, instead, held that not only could the Emancipation Proclamation not be glorified, but we must show the Black masses as vanguard precisely because it impossible to separate them from any part of American history. Black masses in motion were revealed as the touchstone of the whole of American development, whether one took 1776 as the point of departure and showed the Declaration of Independence in its true limited light, i.e. that it meant independ�ence for whites only: or the 1830 Abolitionist movement when the white intellectuals did gain a new dimension by joining with the Blacks to carry on a 30-year struggle that culminated in a Civil War: whether one took America's plunge into imperialism with the 1898 Spanish-American War, when the Blacks were the first to establish an Anti-Imperialist League and demonstrate their affinity with Latin America "which had known, ever since 1820, that while the Monroe Doctrine could protect it from European invasion, there was no such protection from American aggression for which the Doctrine was designed" (p. 16); or whether one brought it all the way to 1963.
It was clear that instead of writing a mere statement on the Emancipation, American Civilization on Trial had become a 200-year history of American development,18 which delved, at the same time, into Karl Marx's relationship to the Civil War and the post-war struggles for the eight-hour day, and to Lenin's relationship to the Negro in the U.S. who was made integral to his 1920 Resolution on the National Question.
OUR INTRODUCTION BEGAN with the section: "Of Patriots, Scoundrels and Slave-Masters" - referring to the FBI, the Presidency, the Attorney General, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Congress. Our Conclusion ended with "What We Stand For and Who We Are". We said:
"Today, as in the days of the Abolitionists, we see the new beginning. It is high time now to proceed to a middle, a theory; and an end - the culmination of the creative drama of human liberation freed from exploitation and discrimination and the wars that go with it...
"The ideal and the real are never as far apart as the philistines, in and out of power, would make it appear. Whether we take the 200 years of American development or the last 20 years of world development, one thing is clear: the turning point for the reconstruction of society occurs when theory and practice finally evolve a unified organizational form. We have reached the turning point".
The pamphlet came off the press on the eve of the June 23 "Walk to Freedom" in Detroit when over a quarter of a million poured down Woodward Avenue to show their solidarity with the struggles going on in the South and to bring it North, American Civilization on Trial quickly became a "textbook" for the Freedom Movement.
We found that important Black historians saw in it an affinity of ideas. Thus J. A. Rogers wrote in his column "History Shows" in the Pittburgh Courier of Aug. 3, 1963: "As I am on the subject of books, I will mention a few of the others I have received, though Courier book-reviewing is done by Mr. Schuyler. Among them is American Civilization on Trial: The Negro as Touchstone of History. It gives and able and excellent review of what the Negro has been through in the past century, and is well-documented, too. Is the United States losing the global struggle in the minds of men because of its treatment of the Negro? It gives the answer... Please get it".
1963 was also the year that Presence Africaine published my article on Marxist-Humanism. Our concentration on the American revolution did not stop the development of our international relations. The analysis of the new France-German axis carried in the March 1963 issue of N&L was discussed internationally, especially by the state-capitalist groupings that had met in 1959. An Italian edition of Marxism and Freedom for which I had written a new Introduction came off the press.
And at home the intensification of activity among the youth which the Black revolt had inspired was marked for us by the publication of a new pamphlet, The Young Marxist-Humanist, and its extension as a regular broadside on the UCLA campus.
Just as we had given over N&L for a special Mississippi Issue in 1962, so in March 1964, we published a special Hazard, Ky. issue. As soon as we had learned that the striking Kentucky miners and their wives had organized themselves into an Appalachian Committee for Full Employment, we sent down as our own reporter and photographer, Andy Phillips, the coal miner who had been active in the historic 1949-50 General Strike and was now an editor of N&L.
At the same time that we were working with the miners in Kentucky, we were also involved in new activities in Mississippi - the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Eugene Walker - who later wrote, "My mind was made up for me by the murder of the civil rights workers James Chancy, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerter..." - worked as a teacher in the Freedom Schools where American Civilization on Trial was widely used as a textbook of freedom. Not only that. The two-way road between Africa and this second American fighting for freedom continued to intensify. Thus the very same issue of N&L (June-July 1964) which focused on Mississippi also carried a direct report and page one picture from Nigeria on the victorious two-million strong General Strike there.
No sooner had the white students returned from their Mississippi Freedom Summer experience to their Northern schools, especially Berkeley, California, than they were at once thrown into a struggle with the administration over every question from the civil rights movement to what is education. It resulted in the most massive student revolt ever - the Free Speech Movement. Mario Savio, the philosophy student who had been thrust into the leadership of the FSM, contributed "Berkeley, Fall", and Eugene Walker contributed "Mississippi Freedom Summer" to our pamphlet The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution. Because we never separate on-the-spot "reports from below" from philosophy, the pamphlet carries two very different types of appendices: "Inside Sprout Hall" by Joel Pimsleur, and "The Theory of Alienation: Marx's Debt to Hegel", the lecture students had most frequently requested of me.
AT THE VERY TIME that these great movements from practice were developing - in class battles, in the civil rights struggles, and in the student movement - a second (paper-back) edition of Marxism and Freedom came out which included a totally new chapter on the Sino-Soviet Conflict in which the question had been posed: "Can There Be War Between Russia and China? The Non-Viability of State-Capitalism". A Japanese edition which followed it a few months later, and which also included this new chapter, had no sooner come off the press than China exploded its first bomb, and Khrushchev fell from power.
The whole year had proved the urgent relevance of the analysis in the January-February 1964 Two Worlds about how the Western intellectuals had helped Khrushchev rebury Lenin's philosophic notebooks by reviving the vulgar materialism of his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism from which he had broken:
"Instead of helping Khrushchev in the 35th year since the first Russian publication of Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks, once again to perpetrate a live burial of these dialectic notes, isn't it high time finally to come to grips with their challenge to today's thought? Without such a meaningful encounter, the ossification of Western thought is sure 'to outdistance' Communist putrefaction".
Thus, the relationship of ideology to state-capitalism was alive in every development, be it the new generation of revolutionaries, white and Black, or the Goldwater nomination: be it the Sino-Indian War19 or the developments in Japan where the appearance of Marxism and Freedom led to an invitation to lecture in Japan: or be it just the usual professional anti-Communist American pragmatism, celebrating their analysis of the 10th anniversary of Stalin's death by reburying Lenin's philosophic legacy.
With Lyndon Johnson's bombing of North Vietnam in 1965, the whole world situation changed, including what the New Left was unwilling to see - that China could no longer claim to be "the besieged fortress" when the bombs were raining on Hanoi. Not only that. the "Cultural Revolution" was soon to arise and deepen all illusions about China being a veritable new world. In any case, a great anti-Vietnam War movement soon literally covered the earth. In the U.S. it became the most popular anti-war movement, comprising a massive student movement which adopted the Black Revolution's slogan, "Hell, no, we wont go", and eventually growing to include every segment of the population.
Laboring under the illusion that activity and more activity and still more activity would bring about revolution and a new social order, the movement was so eager to concentrate all its energy against U.S. imperialism that, instead of unfurling a totally independent banner, it tailended either Russia or China. We, on the other hand, while solidarizing with Vietnam revolutionaries and being active in the movement against U. S. imperialism as the greatest enemy,20 refused to whitewash either Russia or China, as if they had no nationalist or even imperialist interests of their own. And we did not leave it at just pointing out that the Cultural Revolution showed China's interests centrered not around Vietnam but on its view that Russia was Enemy Number One.
Where all others in the New Left had their eyes fixed on the 1986 Cultural Revolution - accepting it as it was promulgated by Mao - we pointed to the year 1965 as the crucial year of the collapse of Mao's aim for the Djakarta-Peking axis. Far from any new axis, what resulted was the bloody counter-revolution that totally destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party which had toed the Maoist line.
Where all others took the Cultural Revolution at face value, we were listening to the voices of dissent from the Chinese masses, proletarian and youth, whose goals were entirely different from those of Mao.
AT THE SAME TIME we were active on three other fronts. First was the international dialogue that was developing around Socialist Humanism. I contributed an article on "Marx's Humanism Today" to the first international symposium on that question which included East as well as West Europe, Asia and Africa.21
Second was a trip to Hong Kong which brought me into contact with newly arrived Chinese dissidents. One of those I interviewed, Jade,22 considered the chapter in Marxism and Freedom on "The Challenge of Mao Tse-tung" so relevant, both because of the retrogressionism of Mao and the criticism of Chou Yang's defamation of Marx's Humanist Essays, that she undertook to translate the chapter. It was soon published in Hong Kong and smuggled into mainland China.23
Third, was the group in Japan which had been responsible for the Japanese edition of Marxism and Freedom and which was now busy publishing our pamphlets on class struggles, like Workers Battle Automation, as well as analyses such as the Afro-Asian pamphlet. They arranged an extensive lecture tour throughout Japan for me. They were also anxious to transmit their own views on Vietnam, and we brought out a special bulletin of discussion articles from Japan, after my return, "The Vietnam War and the World Today", (See Vol. IX, Section VI, 3). But I found that the Marxists who had agreed that Russia and China were state-capitalist societies wanted to stop at the economic analysis rather than continue to the philosophy of Marx's humanism. We were the only ones who devoted an entire issue (N&L, Dec 1966) to present both that view and our own. Tadayuki Tsushima's contribution was entitled "State-Capitalism and Socialist Revolution". Mine was entitled "State-capitalism and Marx's Humanism".
It has become clear that although the one factor above all others that had motivated my trip to the East was the attempt to find collaborators for a new book on the relationship of philosophy to revolution, that task was mine. It took form as Philosophy and Revolution: from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao.
It became ever more imperative to rediscover the missing link of a philosophy of liberation as the l960s were drawing to a close and guerilla wars appealed to the New Left as a substitute for a social revolution. As far back as 1960, I had begun summarizing Hegel's major philosophic works - Phenomenology of Mind, Science of Logic, and the Smaller Logic from the Encyclopedia of Philosophic Sciences. By 1967 I restudied Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks and created notes for a series of lectures others might be able to use for a series of classes, while I undertook my own lecture tour.
The most urgent question that was being raised was how to fight imperialism, how to transform an imperialist war into a social revolution, and whether it was possible to consider guerilla war as a substitute for social revolution, rather than seeing that, far from being a shortcut to revolution, it was the "long road to tragedy". None answered the question more tragically than that great revolutionary, Che Guevara, who met death in 1967 as he tried to start a revolution in Bolivia, with no mass base whatever.24
As for the Black uprisings that covered the U.S. following the Watts Revolt of 1965, it was in Detroit in 1967 that they reached a climax, because it was there that the class distinction so dominated the revolt that it was clear it was not so much against "whitey", as against white landlords, white merchants, and white police. Indeed, while many Black stores were spared the torch, Black merchants who had gouged the community were not spared. And unlike other cities, in Detroit the repossession as well as the sniping was integrated. The country was aflame with a Black revolt that was a challenge to capitalism as well as to racism, and clearly its anti-Vietnam War activities were under-taken not as pacifists but as revolutionaries.
1968 brought everything to a climax as rebellion reached a highpoint in Paris that Spring,25 when students were joined by no less than 10 million workers in General Strike. Instead, however, of proving Cohn-Bendit's view that activity was primary and that theory could be picked up "en route", the almost-revolution in France aborted and De Gaulle came out the victor without firing a single shot.
The disastrous counter-revolution was the one that saw Russia move in to crush Prague Spring. The news of the tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia came the very morning that the report we had received direct from Prague, "At the Crossroads of Two Worlds", was coming off the press, in our Aug-Sept. 1968 issue. We at once re-published it in a full pamphlet, Czechoslovakia: Revolution and Counter Revolution, together with a Foreword written jointly by myself as Chairwoman of News and Letters Committees in the U.S. and Harry McShane as Chairman of the Marxist-Humanist Group, Glasgow.
IT HAD BEGUN TO look as if all the great revolts of the 1960s had come to an end - whether in East or West Europe, or in the U.S., where Nixon was soon to take over the Presidency. It was just then, however, that a still newer and more unexpected revolutionary force was arising in Mao's China - and precisely in Mao's own district of Hunan. It was the Sheng Wu-lien, who demanded the concretization of the Paris Commune for our age, for China - the very country which was in the forefront of the greatest world contradictions and deepest revolutions. We rushed to print the Sheng Wu-lien document (See Vol. XI, Sec. II, 3).
Still another new movement - Women's Liberation - had also been arising out of the Left. Though it did not gain the attention of the media until the 1968 protest in Atlantic City against the demeaning Miss America pageant (which the media sensationalized as a "burning of the bras"), the truth is that elements of this new force could be felt - if you knew how to recognize it - ever since World War II when women had begun to fill the factory jobs left vacant by the drafting of every eligible man, and Black women had begun migrating North to those jobs.26
It was no accident that at our birth in 1955 we had already singled out women as one of the four forces of revolution27 any more than it was an accident that our women Freedom Riders had found Woman Power Unlimited in Mississippi, or that it was Black women trying to organize nursing homes in Baltimore with whom Marxist-Humanists like Michael Connolly worked to establish the Maryland Freedom Union.28 By 1969 we decided to publish the many voices we had heard and elicited, together with a lecture I had given to WRAP at Chicago University that April29 in a mimeographed pamphlet we called Notes on Women's Liberation: We Speak in Many Voices. In 1970 we issued it as a printed pamphlet, which attracted many non-Marxist-Humanists.30
We had also begun circulating draft chapters of Philosophy and Revolution to various conferences that we called. Whether they were conferences of youth, of women or of Black activists, all had a chance to read the drafts first, hear my presentation, and then proceed to their own discussion and to drawing their own organizational conclusions. The most exciting of these was the Black-Red Conference held in January, 1969, out of which came the "Black Red View" column for the paper written by John Alan.
Minutes of the Black/Red and the Women's Liberation Conferences were published in special bulletins so that non-members as well as members of the main forces of revolution could become part of the process by which, in the early 1970s, we would tackle what I called "Absolute Idea as New Beginning", both in theory and in practice (See Vol. X, Sec IX).
15 The April, 1960 issue of N&L carried as its lead article "South Africa, South U.S.A.", relating the vicious use of tear gas and fire hoses to disperse Black students in Baton Rouge, La., Marshall, Tex., Orangeburg, S.C., Savannah, Ga. and Tallahassee, Fla. with the savage rulers in South Africa. Our front page photo was of the 30,000 demonstrators demanding release of their leaders from the Capetown, South Africa police station. And the Two Worlds column was devoted to "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in South Africa", pointing out that the revolt had been continuous, including the 1952 resistance of the South African women to currying passes.
16 The discovery of Woman Power Unlimited seems, on the face of it, to have nothing whatever to do with the role of women revolutionaries in Russia. Yet, when Natalia Trotsky died on Jan. 23, 1962, instead of an In Memoriam to her alone as a revolutionary, it was developed into the whole question of the role of women in revolution. (See N&L, Feb., 1962). It was translated into French and included in a memorial book to Natalia, published in France, Summer, 1962. (See Vol. VII).
17 With the Oct. 23, 1962 Letter on "Marxist-Humanism vs. The U.S. Blockade of Cuba, the Russian Missile Bases there, Fidel Castro's 'Selective' Party, ALL Playing with Nuclear Holocaust", a new series of Political Letters was begun.
18 Angela Terrano developed the relationship of Abolitionism to the Women's Rights Movement in her columns in the May and August, 1963 issues of N&L, drawing on the U.S. Dept. of Labor Women's Bureau Bulletin No. 224, issued in 1948, the 100th anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.
19 See Two Worlds column (June-July, 1964 N&L): "Sino-Indian War Reveals Relationship of Ideology to State-Capitalist Imperialism".
20 The overriding truth is that the main enemy is always at home. Thus, it was not only the anti-Vietnam War movement in which we were active, nor even only the Black Revolution, but all freedom movements that arose anywhere. Because we were always listening to the new revolutionary voices from below, we were among the first to be in Delano with the grape strikers in their Huelga (See N&L, Oct. 1965 front page: also Nov. 1965 N&L interview with the then relatively unknown strike leader, Cesar Chavez).
21 Socialist Humanism was edited by Erich Fromm and published in 1965 by Doubleday, New York.
22 The interview was published in Two Worlds in the June-July, 1966 N&L as "Alienation and Revolution: A Hong Kong Interview".
23 The translation was printed in China Monthly, No. 39, June, 1967, published by Union Research Institute.
24 We wrote a memorial Editorial entitled "Che Guevara, Revolutionary" in our Nov. 1967 issue of N&L, in our May and April, 1968 issues, the Two Worlds column carried a review of Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution?, entitled, "Shortcut to Revolution or Long Road to Tragedy?".
25 Eugene Walker wrote an eyewitness critical report which we published as France, Spring 1968: Masses in Motion, Ideas In Free Flow.
26 In the immediate post-war period I was working with a group of Black women on their factory grievances, and showed them some translated excerpts from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Instead of being impressed with the work, because de Beauvoir had brought sexuality out of the closet, they were angered at her conclusion that, since men were responsible for the double oppression of women, it was the man's task to free woman. "That", said one of the women, "is one more example of what Blacks have always suffered - the Idea that our freedom is white man's burden. No-body ever gives you freedom. You get it by fighting for it. And we women will have to fight for ours."
27 And we didn't leave it only at "theory". We practiced it, as is clear from the three proletarian women columnists we had for N&L: Dunbar, Kegg and Terrano.
28 See our pamphlet, The Maryland Freedom Union: Black Working Women Thinking and Doing, by Mike Flug (Connolly). Reports of all the MFU activity from 1966 through 1988 were carried in N&L regularly throughout those years.
29 Molly Jackson's article about her activity in WRAP (Women's Radical Action Project) appeared in Notes on Women's Liberation under the title, "The New and the Newer". It was reprinted in several anthologies, including Student Power, Participation and Revolution, (New York, Association Press, 1970).
30 See, for example, two articles written for N&L by Doris Wright on Black women, in Jan. and Feb, 1972 issues of N&L.