Finally Got the News

The Printed Legacy of the U.S. Radical Left, 1970–1979

Brad Duncan, Interference Archive

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942173281
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art et politique

Finally Got the News uncovers the hidden legacy of the radical Left of the 1970s, a decade when vibrant social movements challenged racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. It combines written contributions from movement participants with original printed materials—from pamphlets to posters, flyers to newspapers—to tell this politically rich and little-known story.

The dawn of the 1970s saw an absolute explosion of interest in revolutionary ideas and activism. Young people radicalized by the antiwar movement became anti-imperialists, veterans of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements increasingly identified with communism and Pan-Africanism, and women were organizing for autonomy and liberation. While these movements may have different roots, there was also an incredible overlapping and intermingling of activists and ideologies.

These diverse movements used printed materials as organizing tools in every political activity, creating a sprawling and remarkable array of printing styles, techniques, and formats. Through the lens of printed materials we can see the real nuts and bolts of revolutionary organizing in an era when thousands of young revolutionaries were attempting to put their beliefs into practice in workplaces and neighborhoods across the U.S.

RADICAL ROUNDTABLE

We gain a deeper understanding of the printed legacy of the seventies radical Left by talking to the people who wrote pamphlets, edited newspapers, printed posters and broadsides, and distributed literature at demonstrations and factory gates. To accomplish this, we have brought together written responses to a series of questions from veterans of a number of movements, all of whom were involved with different aspects of creating publications. While they were not all present in one room for a conversation, we have organized their responses in a roundtable, dialogue-like format.

There is considerable ideological diversity among the voices you will read here, but this section is not representative of the entire seventies radical press, or even fully representative of the material featured in Finally Got the News. Most responses come from African American or white individuals, many were based in Detroit, and most were members of Marxist organizations. This section was organized in November 2016; with more time we could broaden the pool of viewpoints represented. We are extremely grateful to those who were able to take time to respond.

Brad Duncan: Did movement periodicals and publications play an important role in bringing you into revolutionary politics? Which publications were influential in your political development?

Jesse Drew: Yes, a huge role. As a kid I sought out papers like RAT, The Black Panther paper, the East Village Other, etc. Later on, I looked to The Guardian, Ramparts, Chicago Seed, SF Good Times, and many other underground papers.

Dennis O’Neill: As a kid in rural Connecticut, I had no access to political literature. In the ߠburbs from 1964 on, the first thing that influenced my development was I.F. Stone’s Weekly. This was a four page independent publication that was excellent on U.S. foreign policy. Once I joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) around 1968, key publications for tracking the movement overall included The Movement (jointly published by SDS and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), The Guardian, The Black Panther, and New Left Notes for advanced struggles.

Hard Times in Detroit, Bob Hippler and Dave Riddle, Radical Education Project (originally published in Fifth Estate), pamphlet Detroit, MI, 1971

Elly Leary: Of course, the written word played a part—you know, theory and practice. For me the two most important were Irwin Silber’s The Guardian and Izzy Stone’s Weekly broadside. Also, having been involved in a women’s collective that eventually produced the first Our Bodies Ourselves, stuff around women was wicked important. In the sixties I was part of the staff of a local Cambridge, MA radical periodical, The Old Mole.

Alan Wald: Absolutely! I wanted to be a writer of some kind, starting in high school. So I was immediately drawn to radical literary and political publications when I started Antioch College in 1964. Probably the first radical publication I started reading was The Guardian, and the first journals were Studies On The Left, Monthly Review and New Left Review. They drew me into the movement and I imagined that someday I would play a role in helping to sustain them.

Miriam Frank: My awareness of radical social movements began midsixties in high school with discussions about the “wider war” in Vietnam. Civil rights was a topic in our family. Youth group at the Ethical Culture Society had volunteers from SNCC and CORE telling us about the Movement in the south. In the spring of 1968 I studied in a German university town, where there was a student strike during “the Paris Spring.” My German was good enough to take me through seminars on Marxism-Leninism and through intense demonstrations and meetings of the German SDS (sozialistische deutscher Studentenbund) where arguments were dense, Marxist, and male. I read SDS newsletters, position papers, and agit flyers. When I returned to the Bronx, I was angry and radicalized. The Chicago police riot at the Democratic convention had just happened and the campus radical scene was much sharper. During the split in SDS in 1969, I liked the ideas of the Revolutionary Youth Movement–2 (RYM–2;) my friends were moving fast towards RYM–1 and Weatherman. By mid-1969 I was reading more and more about women’s liberation and radical feminism. The left/feminist dialectic was a burning issue. I joined a consciousness raising group at Alternate U, a loft with a freewheeling program of radical education and culture. I also participated in a women’s street theater group for abortion rights. I wrote about that group (anonymously) in The Rat, an East Village based radical paper that feminists took over for about a year. I also read position papers and reprints distributed by New England Free Press; discussions about civil rights next to antiwar reports in The Guardian; Village Voice reports on Redstockings actions; and Vivian Gornick on consciousness raising. Ellen Willis’ Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal totally lit me up. So did Redstockings’ anthologies, Notes from the Second Year and Notes from the Third Year and the indispensable Women and Their Bodies, the first version of what later became Our Bodies Ourselves.

The Call, vol. 4 no. 3, October League (Marxist-Leninist), newspaper, Chicago, IL, 1975

David Finkel: Before I joined SDS in winter 1966 at the University of Chicago—a chapter led by “Third Camp” socialists, saving me from the ruinous lure of Stalinist-Maoist “Marxism-Leninism,” Guevarist guerillaism and the pro-imperialist social democracy of Irving Howe and similar types—I encountered a variety of socialist and Movement publications in assorted bookstores. Little could I imagine then that my political life would be centered around the publications of a socialist political tendency.

For someone new to the Left, it was a bewildering array. A newspaper published by the American Socialist Organizing Committee presented, in quite small type, a detailed history of the Vietnamese struggle. A magazine called the International Socialist Review—published by the Socialist Workers Party, not to be confused with today’s journal of the same name—carried declarations of the “United Secretariat of the Fourth International,” where I encountered the memorable phrase “the profit bloated capitalist hogs of Wall Street.” At the time I thought this sounded retro, but maybe after all it foreshadowed Occupy Wall Street?

Nick Medvecky: Yes. Upon becoming educated at my job by far earlier radicals in UAW (United Auto Workers) Local #212 during 1965–66, I acquired literature that significantly advanced my knowledge, especially Donald Duncan’s It Was All a Lie!, James P. Cannon’s Socialism on Trial, and assorted literature from the Fifth Estate and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Laura Whitehorn: The Black Panther Party newspaper, and the Young Lords newspaper, Pa’lante. Also wherever I read the original statement, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” which introduced me to the politics we later developed into revolutionary anti-imperialism; mainly in the paper I was moved by the concept of Black revolution with solidarity from white anti-imperialists, plus the way the war in Vietnam fit into an imperialist strategy that could be fought, not just protested. Later on I started to read Midnight Special, which covered struggles in prison, Notes from a New Afrikan POW Journal, Spear and Shield, and The Black Scholar, especially an article by Angela Davis, “The Role of Black Women in the Community of Slaves” (1971). In 1972, The Black Scholar published an essay titled “The Struggle is for Land” by Imari Obadele, the Republic of New Afrika leader and political prisoner. I also was reading NACLA Reports; and I appreciated the posters being produced by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) in Havana, Cuba.

Ethan Young: I read The Black Panther, The Movement, New Left Notes, The Guardian, Monthly Review, Ramparts, The Black Scholar, NACLA Report, Rising Up Angry from Chicago, Line of March, Frontline, the Union of Democratic Filipinos’ Ang Katipunan.

Banbose Shango: I read Black Scholar, Robert F. Williams’ Crusader newsletter (published in exile in Cuba and China, 1964–68), Muhammad Speaks/Final Call, The Liberator (NYC), Committee of Returned Volunteers’ newsletter, the SNCC newsletter, the Black Panther Party newspaper, and the Student Organization for Black Unity Newspaper, The African World.

Paul Buhle: I was already a socialist (Socialist Labor Party) and avid subscriber to SLP’s The Weekly People in 1963, then a one year trial subscription reader of Socialist Workers Party’s The Militant during my first year in SDS, 1965, but New Left Notes was huge to me, as well as Studies on the Left (Radical America was launched in part because Studies had closed).

Afterwards, as I published Radical America and got exchange copies, these impressed me: Connections (in Madison, I sold it on campus), The Rag (which had the first comics), Ramparts, Peoples World (from CPUSA in California, the best of the Old Left), and others like Monthly Review and New Politics. Of the seventies New Communist Movement publications, only Sojourner Truth Organization’s Urgent Tasks crossed my desk, and I edited an issue on C.L.R. James.

Radical America, vol. 12 no. 3, Alternative Education Project, journal, Cambridge, MA, 1978

Abayomi Azikiwe: Yes. Key publications included Muhammad Speaks, The Black Panther, Inner City Voice (Detroit), Ebony Magazine, Jet, and Black World.

Jim Skillman: I read National Guardian (later just The Guardian), New Left Notes, as well as Liberation News Service mailings, which we used in our own weekly newsletter at Georgia State College. Some of us Vietnam vets also helped distribute Vietnam GI, which was published by Vietnam Veterans Against War. Also, the Peking Review and many other publications from China.

Which movement organizations were you a member of in the seventies? What periodicals or publications did your group publish?

Wendy Thompson: I joined the International Socialists in 1969. I had just returned from France the previous year, where I witnessed the events of May of ߠ68 and the whole revolutionary situation there. And it really opened my eyes to the role that the working class can play in creating change, way beyond what I had been exposed to in the United States. So when I came back home I was looking for a revolutionary organization to join and wanted one that had that an understanding of the role of workers. At first we published International Socialist, but we soon started publishing Workers’ Power.

Ron Whitehorne: I was a leading member of the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), which was associated with the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OCIC), a national formation. I edited our newspaper, The Organizer, and wrote several pamphlets.

Abayomi: I was part of the Black Student Association in Junior High School and the Chama Cha Kiswahili at Wayne State University in Detroit. I was the editor of the Swahili Club Newsletter at WSU.

Elly: I was in Proletarian Unity League (PUL); our two books Two, Three, Many Parties of A New Type? Against the Ultra Left Line and A House Divided: Labor and White Supremacy were seminal. I was also involved in socialist-feminist organizations, but moved to PUL because I came to understand the key link was white supremacy as opposed to broadly defined gender issues.

Dennis: I was part of the Revolutionary Union (which became the RCP), which was a bit unusual. Most groups in the New Communist Movement hewed more closely to what was called the Iskra principle, and focused from the start on producing a single national organ for propaganda, sometimes combined with agitation. Our first publication was an occasional strategic publication called Red Papers, which addressed quest...