The essay posted below is the one that brought Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! home to your editor (who morphed into a “New York City man” many years ago). Linebaugh’s case for “commonizing” the city seemed fresh and audacious, though he almost lost me when he invoked the panopticon. (Bentham? Again?) But Linebaugh wasn’t content to reheat Foucault’s leftovers.
World
“New Ancient Strings” (& Gangster Critics)
When I had a yen for kora music in the past, I used to play In the Heart of the Moon — the 2005 CD by Toumani Diabaté and guitarist Ali Farka Touré.[1] But last month I caught up with Diabaté’s CD of duets with another kora master, Ballaké Sissoko. Their cooly canonic New Ancient Strings (1999) may be my go-to kora groove going forward.
To the God of Abraham
You
make me taste your
……………….vastness on my tongue
then dismiss me
one of many loved
……………….beneath the belly of the sun
Two Histories of Germany: Frank Trentmann’s “Out of the Darkness, the Germans, 1942-2022” and Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany”
Frank Trentmann, a German-born historian, teaches at the University of London and writes books in felicitous English. The special distinction of his latest study is its focus: Out of the Darkness is a history, not of facts alone but of the successive agonies of conscience besetting the Germans from the years 1942 (with the beginning of the rout at Stalingrad) till the present, with Germany’s diffident support of the Ukraine. It is a history of moral mentalities.
From the Foreword to E.P. Thompson’s “William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary”
What follows below comes from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (PM Press, 2014). First of the Month will reprint pieces from Linebaugh’s collection of essays, which has been called a “Commonist Manifesto,” throughout 2024. The following text is an excerpt from a piece of Linebaugh’s that served as the foreword to a revised edition of E.P. Thompson’s biography of William Morris. (Thompson’s book was first published in 1955 — the year before his break with the Communist Party.)
Thompson has been in the cultural conversation lately. (His huffy back-and-forth with Lesezk Kolakowski has been invoked here.) Thompson may have always have been too full of himself. (Like most would-be vanguardists?) His duller certainties deserve skepticism. (I’m recalling just now Thompson’s dimness about a distinguished thing dear to Stuart Hall: “‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson once admonished me, with exasperation.”[1]) Thompson’s blankness about certain aspects of “high” intellection, though, deserve more than forbearance since it seems to have allowed him to focus on The Making of the English Working Class and his other histories from below.
Linebaugh has a near familial feeling for Thompson (who was his mentor), but he doesn’t do hagiography. He interrogates Thompson’s takes on Morris without being prosecutorial. Here he gets to what Thompson missed in Morris’s essay “Under the Elm Tree” even as Thompson saluted Morris for…
High/Low Paris at the Dawn of the 20th C. (“New Acquisitions” at the Met)
Last season, at the Met, a curator with Dickensian sensitivity to class matters organized a set of eleven Paris prints and watercolors linked to the Manet/Degas show. These pieces—stuck in that odd, tight corridor between the museum’s grand entrance and the European painting wing—were part of New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. (The title wsn’t the only yawner, who’d stop for New Acq‘s silverware prototypes or “Design for Transeptal Altars”?) The Paris scenes, though, were a trip. So much for peintres celébrès down the hall, Marie-Louise-Pierre Vidal’s watercolors floated viewers into luxe-life while Edgar Chahine’s prints dragged them down and out.
Triplicate (Poems On Domination & Consequences)
Fate
If the Fates come to take
those I love, bear witness to this —
………………………..they will not be victims
………………………..of what the ignorant, or,
………………………..perhaps, the grieving,
………………………..call terror.
……………….
Rockets fly into neighbors’ homes —
………………………..tonight? Tomorrow?
……………………….My own home?
If the Fates come for those I love,
I will not wrap them in white sheets,
lay them at the door of the man
who forced this war. He will not see us.
And if the Fates come for me, well,
there is no wrong in dying. But
bear witness, bear witness to this —
……………………………………I am not killed
……………………………………by a foreign hand.
……………….
Israel. Gaza. May 2021.
Peter Linebaugh’s “Great Act of Historical Imagination”*
“A commonist manifesto for the 21st Century…”
High praise for Peter Linebaugh’s 2014 collection of essays, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, went right by me. I missed the book when it came out and only grabbed it last month to pass time on the subway. My commutes went FAST! Though I didn’t ride the book into the ground. I savored the essay “Meandering at the Crossroads of the Commons and Communism” with a Negroni at an Upper West Side joint that does a damn good job of cultivating commons. (Fam style Italian dishes bring in big parties — happy b-day sung every 15 minutes…) A meet spot to muse with Linebaugh even if dollarism is in the equation. I finished his book as I rolled around the city gathering Thanksgiving provisions. A perfect read in the run-up to a fam-and-friends fête. I’m sure you’d’ve been swept away too as Linebaugh limns (with a feeling) one-for-all-all-for-one struggles to preserve people’s rights and resist privateers and hierarchs.
The late Mike Davis’s summative graph is on point:
From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, who advocated communizing industry and agriculture, to the twentieth-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital “commonist” tradition. He traces the red threat from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensable collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, “Stop, Thief!”
The Invisibility of the Commons
What follows is the concluding essay in Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance PM Press, 2014.
Mass Rape (& Obliviousness)
It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here. And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth. So I began to look for information, for specific facts. As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focused subject than the general slaughter. Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves. Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped.
To Be A Giraffe
1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates,
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.
News from Nowhere (A Land Beyond Vengeance): Poems by Aharon Shabtai
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet…”
What follows are two poems from J’Accuse (New Directions, 2003) by Aharon Shabtai, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole.
“We are sweet since we are born”
Six Miles Out isn’t La Terra Trema, but this short film about fishermen gently brings home the truth talked up by its Palestinian sponsors: “we are not numbers.”
Click on “Read more” for a bigger screen…
A Palestinian Gandhi (Redux)
Back in 2002, First published this interview with Mubarak Awad who’s long made the case to Palestinians for nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. He remains committed to his ethic and his NGO, “Nonviolence International,” is still engaged (though the Israelis exiled him to America in the course of the first intifada). Awad may not be an ace prophet – his prescriptions for elections in Gaza seem almost quaint now but his moral imagination is undeniable. Let’s hope he and his kind help write the future of Palestine…
The Revenging Angels of Our Nature
I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”
Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse. As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime. “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Table Music (Kierra Sheard; The Band; Lillie Mae; Tony Joe White; Smokey Robinson; JB, Bobby Bland & BB King; Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins; Sugar Blue; Playboi Carti; JUL; St. Etienne; Obrafour)
I’ve been stuck on Kierra Sheard’s duets lately. There are wonderful ones with Jekalyn Carr (on Sheard’s last album), with Tasha Cobb, and a couple with Sheard’s mother Karen Clark (of the Clark Sisters). One of those Mother-and-Daughter ones has an indelible moment where Karen gently induces her pregnant daughter not to go full-on. (The tale of what once happened to “Gimme Shelter’s” Merry Clayton shadows her maternal attentiveness.) What comes next here is great from the jump (catch the guy who starts hopping on one leg pretty early on) but it gets transcendent when Ms. Sheard and her chorus lock on their truth: “He’s holding me up!!!”
Betrayal
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
The Tropes (Slight Return)
A slightly revised version of the author’s commentary in today’s First Respondents’ email…
Narcissus in Gaza
A view from one of London’s wisest …
The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.
In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.
The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)
This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…
Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.