I bet you probably didn't even know that the Industrial Workers of the World was still around, much less that it launched a book review. It's a good idea, in theory. But oh that gap between theory and practice... The organized left stopped paying much serious attention to culture decades ago—there was the Maoist Internationalist Movement and their hysterical (in both senses of the word) reviews of films and music. A personal favorite of mine was their review of Blades of Glory: Although MIM does not want to promote this movie, we find it provocative to discuss, because the rap against socialist realism is that characters are too simplified, either all good or all bad. The proletarian intellectual has argued that such class polarization in art is the goal of proletarian art and that it is others with their petty-bourgeois ambiguities that are the problem, not the proletarian art. That's about the size of actual radical engagement in culture from the organized left. Tenured Marxists who vote for Obama don't count.
So I was excited to see the IWW Book Review. They had a very good fiction issue earlier this year, and turned me on to The One-Straw Revolution, which I gave to my parents. They have a farm stand on Long Island and are now growing fig trees in Florida part-time. Also interesting, but not without its problems, was a column by Eric Miles Williamson. I like Williamson's work—his Welcome to Oakland was fantastic is a bit over the top with its proletcult posing. I enjoyed, with more reservations, his book of essays Play It Hot, which I reviewed here. The Review, like Williamson's work generally, is all White Boy Special stuff. I count two people of color with bylines in the IWW Book Review, and I don't remember seeing a single woman in it. Odd, given that the Review is a working-class organ, and that blacks and women are a plurality, if not majority, of the American proletariat. Oh, and pretty much everyone was middle-class: professors, mostly, with working class roots.
I was waiting for the eventual collapse of the Review for the simple reason that it changed emphasis a couple of times—let's look at short fiction, let's interview songwriters, let's review environmental books, let's do theme issues around particular writers, let's give Anis Shivani a column—and because Williamson is basically a racist and a homophobe. It's half vulgar Jack London, and half uncomplicated acceptance of capital's drive to divide and conquer. Rather than making common cause with blacks and LGBT against capital, Williamson is overly in love with the valorizing work ("Boo middle-class climbers!" says the tenured professor, with his enemies list from the long journey from the assembly line to the 4/4 course load) and adopting an essentially Reaganite Democrat mode ("Boo, Affirmative Action, and unqualified black professors!" says the writer whose books were once published by the Big Six, and now by a black-owned micropublisher.) Interestingly, Shivani himself figured out Williamson's problem in this IWW Book Review essay.
Anyway, last time around, Williamson did the sort of thing I'm sure he loves to think of himself as doing: he went too far. Gasp! Oooooh! His last column, no longer online (even archive.org doesn't have it archived), details his victory over a bunch of middle-class lesbians who published a bunch of lesbians in the departmental literary journal, thus ruining it. Then Williamson tapped Barry Hannah to write a gross, horrible story to drive away the lesbians. It worked because Hannah was famous. Then Williamson controlled the journal once again. Advantage Williamson!
Well, the Review got a lot of letters about it, and now its editor is crying censorship and quitting. The essay-cum-resignation letter really is something. It invokes Nietzsche, fascism, claims about comedy—missing the difference between jokes about racism and racist jokes!—Socrates, the terrors of Affirmative Action, appeals to Latin roots of English words, and all the usual right-wing dudebro stuff. A solid B- rant by a college Republican in frosh comp...and yet, isn't this supposed to be a working class, anarchist publication?
Maybe it still can be.
So I was excited to see the IWW Book Review. They had a very good fiction issue earlier this year, and turned me on to The One-Straw Revolution, which I gave to my parents. They have a farm stand on Long Island and are now growing fig trees in Florida part-time. Also interesting, but not without its problems, was a column by Eric Miles Williamson. I like Williamson's work—his Welcome to Oakland was fantastic is a bit over the top with its proletcult posing. I enjoyed, with more reservations, his book of essays Play It Hot, which I reviewed here. The Review, like Williamson's work generally, is all White Boy Special stuff. I count two people of color with bylines in the IWW Book Review, and I don't remember seeing a single woman in it. Odd, given that the Review is a working-class organ, and that blacks and women are a plurality, if not majority, of the American proletariat. Oh, and pretty much everyone was middle-class: professors, mostly, with working class roots.
I was waiting for the eventual collapse of the Review for the simple reason that it changed emphasis a couple of times—let's look at short fiction, let's interview songwriters, let's review environmental books, let's do theme issues around particular writers, let's give Anis Shivani a column—and because Williamson is basically a racist and a homophobe. It's half vulgar Jack London, and half uncomplicated acceptance of capital's drive to divide and conquer. Rather than making common cause with blacks and LGBT against capital, Williamson is overly in love with the valorizing work ("Boo middle-class climbers!" says the tenured professor, with his enemies list from the long journey from the assembly line to the 4/4 course load) and adopting an essentially Reaganite Democrat mode ("Boo, Affirmative Action, and unqualified black professors!" says the writer whose books were once published by the Big Six, and now by a black-owned micropublisher.) Interestingly, Shivani himself figured out Williamson's problem in this IWW Book Review essay.
Anyway, last time around, Williamson did the sort of thing I'm sure he loves to think of himself as doing: he went too far. Gasp! Oooooh! His last column, no longer online (even archive.org doesn't have it archived), details his victory over a bunch of middle-class lesbians who published a bunch of lesbians in the departmental literary journal, thus ruining it. Then Williamson tapped Barry Hannah to write a gross, horrible story to drive away the lesbians. It worked because Hannah was famous. Then Williamson controlled the journal once again. Advantage Williamson!
Well, the Review got a lot of letters about it, and now its editor is crying censorship and quitting. The essay-cum-resignation letter really is something. It invokes Nietzsche, fascism, claims about comedy—missing the difference between jokes about racism and racist jokes!—Socrates, the terrors of Affirmative Action, appeals to Latin roots of English words, and all the usual right-wing dudebro stuff. A solid B- rant by a college Republican in frosh comp...and yet, isn't this supposed to be a working class, anarchist publication?
Maybe it still can be.