Books I'm Glad I Read in 2015

Having a two year old in the house is a joy in many ways, but not exactly conducive to serious reading, so I was pleased to find a baker's dozen of titles I read in 2015 and consider worth sharing. All of them in their way touch on important topics worthy of the time of general readers; not all is lost to academic specialization.

The Global Transformation--Barry Buzan and George Lawson. Addressed to international relations scholars, this book neatly summarizes the 19th century emergence, 20th century consolidation, and 21st century beginnings of the supercession of a highly unequal world with a core whose economic and military advantages enabled it to organize the world for close to 200 years. Looking ahead, they see an end to superpowers and consequential growth of regionalism, but fail to consider whether mass struggles or a terminal crisis of capitalism might further reshape the world.

Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane. Simultaneously a social history of the various slaves, musicians, dressmakers, secret service agents, cabinet members and others who constituted an African American presence among the presidents and a history of those presidents' efforts (or, mostly, not) to grapple with racism,   this is a fresh optic to examine that most over-discussed aspect of American history, the executive branch. Also offers a new way of looking at Obama by setting him in a lengthy line of African American presidential candidates. I don't understand why Eartha Kitt was left out, tho.

A War for the Soul of America--Andrew Hartman. Reading Hartman's tour of the Culture Wars of the last three decades of the twentieth century is a little headache inducing--like reading one after another of those annoying Facebook squabbles constantly cropping up. Still, somebody had to sort it out and put it together in one place. And the discussion of how Christian conservatism became ecumenical in the seventies is particularly useful. Right and wrong that the culture wars have been superseded by class divisions in the last few years.

Radicals in America: The US Left Since the Second World War--Christopher Phelps and Howard Brick. Here is a topic you don't see books about everyday--a history of the post-war left in the United States. Covers a lot of terrain, much of it likely to be familiar to those who closely follow left politics. Particularly good at rendering the seventies as an open moment that faded, although it doesn't quite capture the craziness that prevailed in many circles then. Misses a number of things, including the MOVE bombing and the US Social Forum. And adopts a testy tone about the limits of Occupy Wall Street. But again, very useful to put it all in one place.

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power--Steve Fraser. Ambitious effort to order American history through a stark comparison of two gilded ages, the one in the nineteenth century, when American industry was ascending and workers ferociously fought back, and the more recent one, which he (at least partly) accurately  describes as an age of auto-cannibalism, when worker fight back has been largely absent. I think he overstates the "acquiesence" (between the introduction and conclusion of this book, obviously conceived during the tea party ascendancy, he is scrambling to make sense of Occupy, de Blasio, etc. irrelevant blips? neo-populism?) and overemphasizes ideological reasons for the difference, but well worth reading for its descriptions of class struggle in the nineteenth century.

The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement--Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky. A thoughtful history from a participant grad student. Highlights the contradictions of the 99% utopia. I would like to hear more about encampments beyond New York (and a little Oakland) but that is what the next generation of grad students is for, I guess.

Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labor in the Digital Vortex--Nick Dyer Witheford. Pretty solid walk through of the political economy of the internet and its implications. Uses the autonomist theme that demands from below and struggle spur new forms of capitalist development--hence social media fulfills the demand that content be free while turning this into something worth billions. Read it yourself to understand why it is not a question of accelerating, but of swerving to a better place.

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party--Heather Cox Richardson--This history identifies three points in American history when  Republican party presidents played an important reform role--Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower--is that last one a bit of a stretch? Could it happen again? Seems unlikely to me.

Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing--Jamie McCallum Closely observed study of the practice of transnational unionism, which depicts a more complicated global role for SEIU than the neoliberal-union-leftists-love-to-hate would lead one to expect.

Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago's Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington-- Jeffrey Helgeson. Detailed history of the ecology of African American organizations in Chicago over many decades. Helps to clarify the complex political and ideological terrain out of which such social movement and political highpoints as the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition and the Harold Washington campaign emerge.

Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism"-- Lisa Stampnitzky. This run through of the various academic and journalist discussions of terrorism since the 1970s, when the term took hold in the United States, has a bit of a surprise ending. The political class in the US pretty much doesn't care about those debates, raising questions about the "power" aspect of "power/knowledge" in the social sciences in general.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History-- Sven Beckert. If there were a Pitchfork for left leaning academics with a social science historical bent (and why isn't there?) I bet this would top the best of the year list. Not just an excellent history of the production and distribution of cotton; also offers a more general framework for the history of capitalism--from an early phase when capitalists were unified with war making, to the industrial period, to the contemporary period, when capitalists no longer need to pledge allegiance to any particular state.

The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on American Democracy-- Peter Dale Scott Scott is too conspiratorial for many--at times to conspiratorial for my own taste. I do wish his topic--the secretive networks of businesspeople, intelligence officers, military, etc which may or may not move forward assasination plots, terrorism, etc but surely do play an important role in shaping policies of such institutions as the Pentagon and CIA--were the subject of more professionalized research. Compared to practically any more traditional topic, it is extraordinarily difficult, hence the lapse into the conspiratorial isn't too surprising. Here he tells a story where, during the fifties and sixties the deep state, like the executive and legislative branches, typically played a centrist role, with Hoover unleashing dirty tricks on violent actors on the right (such as portions of the KKK that wanted a race war in response to the civil rights movement) as well as the left. The aftermath of Watergate spurred the triumph of deep state neocons, who pushed forward a metastatizing deep state that becomes more and more central over the next few decades.

Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement

We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja is as provocative as it sounds. Tracing a tradition of armed self defense of the African American community before, during and after the visible heyday of the Civil Rights Movement in the early sixties, the text suggests  a new way of understanding the relationship of that movement to the use of force. And it is not only a matter of self defense--at times violence was used to further the goals of the movement. The book unsettles a narrative, widespread in the media and influential on the left, that the movement achieved its goal of desegregating the South by taking the moral high road and through the use of non-violent civil disobedience discredited its opponents, whose cruelty was exposed. In turn, the federal government was impelled to act, passing crucial legislation, i.e. the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. These in turn promptly led to the dismantling of Jim Crow structures. In the context of the failure of the Democratic Party to embrace the movement by seating the Mississippi Freedom Party rather than the Jim Crow delegates at the 1964 and the turn towards more intractable economic issues and Black Power, the question of violence was opened, and growing numbers in the movement embraced it. Depending on ones outlook, this was either a tragic error that invited government repression or a step towards revolution, aborted by forces outside the movement's control.

Umoja's narrative is quite different. Armed self defense was a long standing tradition in the South, due to constant threat of white supremacist violence. Some Blacks would keep firearms in their homes and return fire from night riders and other white supremacist vigilantes. When Civil Rights activism started to accelerate, it was a necessity, due to the intensity of the violent response, the collusion of local law enforcement with white supremacists, and the failure of the federal government to consistently protect movement activists. Early on, there was interest in the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and their parallels to the struggles of African Americans. These anti-colonial struggles were all typically violent. In this context, strict codes of non-violence appear as an importation that always had limited support. And when non-violent groups were most active in the state, they often adopted to grim realities of Mississippi life by accepting offers for self-defense. The Deacons of Defense, an armed group in Louisiana, inspired imitators in Mississippi.

Although the Black Panthers didn't have much of a presence in Mississippi (but see below), Black nationalism does register in We Will Shoot Back. It's particular form is the Republic of New Africa (RNA), an effort to assert a nation composed of Black Belt regions in the South. Participants adopted armed self defense, which the author claims may have saved lives when the police confronted them over a dispute over land. In contrast to the other struggles described in We Will Shoot Back, the Republic of New Africa seems arbitrary and imposed from above. Although it never came close to its goal of a new country and pulling the United Nations in as arbitrar of the status of African Americans, it nevertheless raises similar questions as other efforts to create homelands for people, namely, how many African Americans would actually want to move to such a place, and what would happen to the indigeneous population already present?

During and after the RNA, civil rights struggles, backed by self defense, continued in Mississippi. Although there is a tendency to declare Jim Crow dead following passage of the Civil Rights Act, struggles continued into the late seventies around fairly basic demands such as having African Americans on the police force. These struggles were often powered by the emergence of the United League, a more militant alternative to the NAACP, which developed effective strategies involving boycotts in small cities backed by enforcement squads which would intimidate those within the African American community unwilling to support the boycotts (it might be noted here that many labor struggles in the US have used similar amounts of violent intimidation to enforce compliance).

Of the many stories of self defense recounted in We Will Shoot Back, three in particular stood out for me. In 1961, in Tylertown Mississippi, SNCC workers were told that several months before their arrival, the town had been terrorized by nightriders. Warnings that the terrorism must cease were ignored. African Americans apparently connected to a fraternal order captured one of the nightriders. His head was severed from his body and placed on a bridge as a warning to whites. The terrorism stopped.

The second incident occurred during a boycott in Aberdeen Mississippi in 1970. The context for the boycott was the suspension of two African American police officers for refusing to wear confederate symbols. Organizer Rudy Shields had a friend bring a contingent of Black males from another town to Aberdeen. Amidst rumors that the Black Panthers had arrived, the young men marched through town, striking fear among both white business owners who hoped to break the boycott and Black consumers who were not yet on board. The fear of militant, armed members of a revolutionary organization was more potent than the reality, and helped to strengthen the boycott.

The third incident happened amidst the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 70s. In Tupelo in 1978, the aforementioned United League led a boycott of White owned businesses around demands relating both to racism of the police and failures to expand economic opportunities for Blacks. Tensions rose as the Klan joined the battle to break the boycott. The city council tried to appear above the fray, equating the struggle for social justice with Klan terrorism and trying to stop the protests of both. In this fraught environment, the United League brought arms to demonstrations, and had scouts on rooftops searching for snipers and other dangers. Things came to a head on June 10, when the United League held a demonstration in downtown Tupelo, and the Klan held a counterdemonstration.  The UL's demonstration was more than twice as large. No violence occurred, but "local Blacks were emboldened by the greater numbers of UL protesters and took the opportunity of the Klan counterprotest to unleash verbal assaults at White supremacists for years of racial intimidation and terror." Sixty four year old Jack Clark told reporters "We used to have get off the sidewalks for White folks.. and them Klansmen, wooie boy, you didn't go messin' with them. But now I tell them, "go to hell.""  Umoja attributes the new attitude not only to the size of the United League demonstration, but to the presence of armed Blacks. The release from fear of the Klan provides a stark contrast with the more famous incident in Greensboro North Carolina, where Klansmen assassinated five members of the Communist Workers Party in 1979 at a "death to the Klan" rally.

Above I've summarized just a small amount of the content of We Will Shoot Back. I strongly recommend reading the entire book. I suspect most readers will find their understanding of the civil rights movement transformed. The image painted of Black activists willing to use force if necessary to protect themselves and advance their movement is quite different from the way the civil rights movement is usually portrayed. It is not that images of disciplined non-violent activists not being provoked by beatings, or communities singing in churches are wrong. Rather, these practices should be seen as part of the same movement that at times provided armed guards to movement activists and shot back at nightriders. Attempts to disentangle an early,  good, noble, non-violent movement from a later bad, nationalist, violent movement are a lot harder to do after reading this book. Apart from the chapter on the RNA, one of the most striking things is how consistently the protests described, protests which involved armed self-defense, were advancing demands that involved rudimentary reforms necessary to abolish segregation--firing the most racist police, attaining a minimal level of respect from city governments, ending the refusal of white businesses to hire African Americans. The RNA is something of an outlier, but for the most part, armed resistance was advancing basic goals of the civil rights movement. It is also important to note that movement activity of this sort persisted long after the civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-nineteen sixties. Jim Crow was not simply abolished by legislative fiat in Washington, but through a multitude of hard fought struggles in small cities all over the South.

Past and future of Multiracial Coalitions--Some Thoughts on Power to the Poor

In the last few years, our understanding of the social movements of the sixties has been transformed by new scholarship that looks beyond familiar narratives of SDS and the civil rights movement in the South. Works like Penny Lewis’ Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks, Amy Sonnie and James Tracy’s  Hillibilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power and The Black Revolution on Campus by Martha Biondi have undermined notions that the movements in the sixties were largely bereft of class politics, or that identity was foregrounded in ways that marginalized economic struggles. In fact, identity and economic struggle were combined in innovative ways by groups not well represented by the existing labor movement. Not preserved in an amber of nostalgia like some highpoints of struggle, these struggles were nonetheless highly significant. The fact that they cannot be glibly classified as victories may in fact make them even more useful to understanding struggles in the present. Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974 by historian Gordon K. Mantler is a worthy addition to this literature. Focused on efforts to build multiracial alliances, mostly between African Americans and Mexican Americans, it highlights a number of these struggles, showing how assertions of identity, multiracial coalitions, and economic struggles could, for a time, all build together, rather than at the expense of each other.

The notion of multiracial coalitions, or “rainbow coalitions,” can seem natural, or a “no-brainer.” Until recently, the American polity largely excluded non-whites, and, to this day, whites constitute a large majority of the most privileged groups. On the other hand, less privileged, powerful and wealthy groups are also disproportionately non-white. Furthermore, whites are often racist against all those who do not look like them. At the same time, the position of poorer whites could conceivably be strenghthened through an alliance with people of color. However, the author identifies three concrete challenges to the scenario of inevitable multiracial coalitions. First, the history of different racial groups is quite varied, leading to different priorities in the present. Secondly, the evolution of struggle in the US led to an activist hierarchy in which African American leaders saw themselves as the leaders of all oppressed, sometimes folding other groups priorities into their own. Finally, the racial hierarchy in the US is not simply white and non-white. Racism against African Americans is more sharply posed, and other groups have sometimes acted to distance themselves from African Americans, in effect, asserting that they are not so far from whites. All of these emerged as concrete problems in efforts to build coalitions between African Americans and Mexican Americans. On the other hand, continued violence at the hands of police was a shared experience that facilitated unification.