Interest In Forming An Online Study Group-US Communists

Is there any study group currently studying the work of Theodore W. Allen?

Whatever form this ends up taking, I thought I'd list a set of topics that I think may be interesting assessing or worth considering. I recognize that some of these topics or subjects could constitute entire books or even volumes of books in and of themselves.

-Early attempts of multiracial/multiethnic agitation or rebellion
-The establishment of race as a dividing category that grants privileges to sectors of our class
-Slaves in relation to capitalism
-Role of European and Chinese immigration to class conflict
-The expansion westward and its effects on class conflict
-The Labor movement's exclusion of people of color, women & immigrants
-Trade unionism Vs. Industrial unionism
-The IWW
-Effects of Russian Revolution
-First Red Scare
-The Great Depression and the communist and socialist parties
-1930s upsurge in strikes
-World War II
-Black and white southern migration to the north industries and women entering the workforce in large numbers
-Post-war strikes and displacement of black and female workers by returning soldiers
-The GI Bill and the establishment of the white 'middle class'
-Unions and organized crime
-Second Red Scare
-The 'red purging' of the unions
-Civil Rights movement and the working class
-The New Left and the working class
-Wildcats and worker offensives during 60s-70s
-White flight
-The 1980s swing to the right and the PATCO strike

I counted 24 topics (all of which are excellent) and I could think of about 75 books covering them. Taking some of these topics to their root causes then extrapolating how the effects played out over time, I could think of around 100+ texts. I can think of at least 10 decent pieces covering the period of the Great Depression to World II alone. The main subtext of what Brecher brings forward is how we lost the strike weapon. And racial, ethnic and gender divisions and the way class-against-class struggles became subsumed within the quasi-state NLRB and rule-of-law institutionalization of "industrial relations" (rather than class conflict), giving birth to bureaucratic legalistic top-down business/service unions, played predominant roles.

I think we need to start simple by reading Brecher's Strike!, then people can read some of those texts and bring summaries to extend the argument. I paid a small fortune for Wilfrid Crook's (out-of-print) Communism and the General Strike and would be willing to scan relevant chapters that match the strikes mentioned by Brecher.

So I suggest that we should quickly look at the Ted Allen pieces and then start with Strike! when everyone has a copy. And I fucked up again; I kept throwing out Allen texts, but I really think the best one is Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race. Sorry about being so clueless about which text.

Also, I agree with the proposals that devoration1 put forward earlier. We could have subtopics, like some of the ones Juan Conatz mentioned, on separate threads.

devoration, that idea sounds great to us, so we would be happy to help out in any way.

So if you start the first thread in either the North America or history forums (maybe history would be best?) then we can make it sticky and have links to all chapter discussions and things there. This is what we did with a capital reading group online which worked quite well.

If anyone is having trouble finding the book for cheap, abebooks.com still has a couple copies of the 1973 edition for $6 + $4 for shipping.

Anyone gonna start this up?

i'm gonna start tomorrow...

I'd like to make an alternative suggestion: we should discuss each chapter every 2 weeks. There's too much rich material to combine the chapter on "The Great Upheaval" of 1877 into a discussion together with the equally complex "May Day" chapter about the 8-Hour Day Movement culminating in Haymarket.

Also, we should delve a little into the background of this history like having someone summarize the ramifications of Bacon's Rebellion, emphasizing the unique way race and class are intertwined in the U.S. (like from Ted Allen's writings). Someone suggested reading WEB Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America, which also could be summarized. Another excellent account of the daily life experience of slaves, refuting some of the mainstream mythology, is From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community by George Rawick, which I'd be willing to summarize.

Maybe we could begin with a brief discussion of the role race has played, since its origins, in the class dynamic in the U.S.

Here's a link to a scanned pdf of the beginning of Strike!, including the two chapters to be discussed here, all from the 1973 edition, for those who were not able to get a copy of the book. It is a little rough of a copy but it is readable.

http://ifile.it/gt32yim