Octubre, once días que aún nos estremecen. Reseña del texto Estallido, la rebelión de octubre en Ecuador

John Reed, en su calidad de periodista, describía los sucesos de los días previos a la revolución rusa como los Diez días que estremecieron al mundo; de la misma manera, Leonidas Iza, Andrés Tapia y Andrés Madrid, reflexionan desde una lectura marxista y desde la praxis como sujetos de lucha, los 11 días de las gloriosas jornadas de movilización vividas en octubre de 2019, como un acontecimiento que estremeció América Latina y lo sigue haciendo. En este sentido, el texto Estallido es un análisis hecho al fragor de la confrontación de clases y de fuerzas que estrepitaron frente al arremetida del modelo neoliberal y, de fondo, contra los procesos de acumulación y crisis inherentes a la reproducción del sistema capitalista.

Roads to and from Revolution

This chapter traces Rahv’s forays into and retreats from political radicalism. Letters to Ethel Richman and essays published in the early 1930s (“An Open Letter to Young Writers”, “The Literary Class War”) reveal his deep-seated faith in Marxism and ambivalent commitment to Communism. It describes the founding of Partisan Review, sponsored by the Communist John Reed Club. It considers the magazine’s attention to diversity and social justice and the modern feminist theory of intersectionality, through which interconnected categories of race, class, and gender create overlapping systems of discrimination. The chapter focuses on Partisan Review’s publication of works by proletarian writers including Richard Wright and several women writers: Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Lerner (Olsen), Grace Lumpkin. It explains Rahv’s break with communism after 1934, in response to the Soviet policy of the Popular Front and Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials. The “Personal Reflections” sections shows how Communism touched my life.

Regrouping: The Liberator Years

On Lincoln’s Birthday, 1918, Crystal and Max Eastman launched the Liberator: The Journal of Revolutionary Progress. The magazine plainly supported Bolshevism, and also served as watchdog for propaganda and misinformation concerning revolutionary revolts. Eastman’s most important writing was her reporting from inside Communist Hungary in August 1919. However, the lived human experiences of revolution she witnessed put her at odds with the Liberator’s star radical, John Reed, and her brother Max. A pacifist and feminist, as well as a radical, she praised the abolition of private property but deplored the bloodshed and repression under the revolutionary government. The experience brought her to a political impasse. Two elemental goals, once aligned, now appeared to be competing claims: justice or peace? In an era of revolutionary victory, how could she make sense of violence perpetrated to achieve the equality and justice she had long believed was the only recipe for world peace?

Four Poems from Langston Hughes's Spanish Civil War Verse

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.