Reflections on the Brecht Forum / New York Marxist School

The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School—an important left educational and cultural center in New York City since 1975--is undergoing a significant change. Liz Mestres, one of the organization's founders and its Director for the last 18 years, is stepping down and a new generation is stepping up. More than just a transfer of leadership, the Brecht Forum's transition brings to mind both the changes and the continuities between the movements of the 1960s and the new movements that are emerging today.

On December 11, 2012, the Brecht Forum hosted a festive event to honor the members of the founding Marxist Education Collective – Arthur Felberbaum (1935-1979), Mary Boger, Susan Boger, Carol Goldman, Bill Henning, Lisa Maya Knauer, Liz Mestres, Eli Messinger, Luis Prado, and Juliet Ucelli – and to welcome the Next Generation. While all of the founders collectively worked out the strategy for the original School for Marxist Education, it was Arthur Felberbaum who was most responsible for conceiving this remarkable project. The following is based on brief remarks excerpted from that evening.

My memories start in the period just prior to the founding of the school – the early 70s when I was a young radical just getting started. Now, as I step down as director, I've been thinking back on this experience-- not just to see how we've grown and what we've achieved, but how in a lot of ways, we're back where we started, but with some very big differences.

We began just at the moment that the post war boom was coming to a close and the financial crisis of the 70s was the first real setback for US hegemony. In comparing the current crisis with that one: If the 70s crisis can be understood as a first wave, then this second crisis appears more like a tsunami.

And, the 70s was a time when the movements of the 60s were about to be pushed back. We're now in a time when movements are trying to emerge. What I'd like to do in these remarks is trace some of the threads that link our origins to our current period.

In thinking about my experience in the founding of the school, it was Alfredo Lopez, who is here tonight, who first introduced me to Arthur Felberbaum and made his study groups sound absolutely irresistible.

I had been working with Alfredo in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Alfredo had the audacious idea that the Puerto Rican movement could fill Madison Square Garden in a rally in solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence. This event was designed as part of a movement-building strategy not only to build the Puerto Rican independence movement but to bring together the various liberation struggles, in an awareness that we are in a common struggle and that each particular struggle offers a window on the whole social order. By the way, the event was a success; we filled Madison Square Garden and went on to form the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee with chapters across the country.

I highlight this to illustrate the climate of the times and because all of the founders of the school were involved in some other movement work, and that fact brought a lot to how we conceived the School.

So, backtracking for a moment, Alfredo introduced me to Arthur in probably 1971. Arthur had started annual alternate summer schools at NYU the year before with the help of Bertell Ollman and Jim Paul. These summer schools became our current July Intensives and formed the first institutional basis for the Marxist School. During the rest of the year, Arthur organized a number of study groups and I joined quite a few, including a long-term – that's 4-year—study of Capital. Then, in 1973 Arthur brought a number of us together to form the Marxist Education Collective to expand the work and, in 1975, we founded the School for Marxist Education—later called the New York Marxist School.

Most of the collective members were in our twenties at the time. Arthur was in his thirties. But, we could count on support from the generation before us. Annette Rubinstein and the Monthly Review crowd -- Harry Magdoff, Paul Sweezy, Irving Kaplan among many others--were our steadfast advisors from the start.

While the whole collective was engaged in working out the strategy, it was Arthur who initiated the concept and organized the rest of us to think it through together. A point I'd like to stress is that Arthur saw the School as a strategic movement-building institution and we established it with two main objectives:

The first objective was directed to building our capacity to analyze our situation so that we can develop effective strategies – seeing Marxism not as a dogma, but as an invaluable tool in that process. The school was to be a place to promote collective study and collaborative work—a place to advance what we called a counter-hegemonic culture in the US.

Our first directors, Juliet Ucelli and Lisa Maya Knauer, in addition to organizing and teaching classes, held together an array of volunteer working groups and committees—a film committee, a women’s committee, a publicity committee and on and on -- that formed the base of the school. For many years I would receive a phone call every day at 8 a.m. from Lisa who would tell me what flyer I should produce or remind me of a meeting coming up.

Arthur's idea was that we need activist intellectuals, grounded in Marxism, who can take on rigorous study in the service of movement-building. I remember him introducing a group of us to the Statistical Abstract, which is this big book put out by the US Census Bureau each year. Arthur told us we should get a copy every year and study it. I thought, who? Me? I have no expertise in statistics. But he was constantly studying these things and encouraging us to follow closely what's going on. Mary Boger recently told me that he once pointed out to her that there was this new thing called derivatives that we needed to keep an eye on.

Arthur was right.

All of this involved identifying key areas in need of analysis and forming task forces or research study groups to address them.

The first task force that I recall has, I think, an important link to our current situation. It was a task force that did research on the Emergency Financial Control Board – part of the Municipal Assistance Corporation known as Big Mac. Big Mac was established during the 1975 financial crisis to allow the banks to take direct control of the city and impose austerity. Big Mac raised taxes, laid off many city workers, ended free tuition in the CUNY system, closed hospitals and raised subway fares, etc, etc. Sound familiar? Now, in the current crisis, new financial control boards are being established in various parts of the country including several in New York State.

There were also areas that became what we called our core and, with varying degrees of success, we would form task forces that could carry out ongoing work. These areas have been present throughout our history, but the neoliberal counterrevolution had devastating effects on left and progressive movements and much of our early work contracted. Task forces and classes became hard to maintain and have only slowly been reemerging. At this point classes are beginning to flourish while task forces or major projects in these areas are only occasional.

In the beginning, for example, our science task force, headed up by Eli Messinger and others, lasted for several years and, in addition to classes and forums, organized a number of conferences including our first on Towards a Strategy for Health and Survival, then conferences on Dialectics, on “Human Ecology: The Case of Vieques, Puerto Rico,” on Technology and Work, and on the Energy Crisis. A while after the task force had faded, Sam Anderson revived the thread in 1995, by initiating a conference that challenged the social Darwinism of the book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve.

The project of advancing a Marxist current within the US has been our centerpiece. Arthur, Mary, Juliet and others held down continuous classes on all three volumes of Capital and other Marxist studies. Then, the demise of the Soviet Union bolstered the idea that Marxism is dead. In 1998, we challenged this notion. While the 150^th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto was being celebrated around the world, it might have gone unnoticed here in the US, had we not, together with the journal Socialism and Democracy, organized “The Manifestivity,” a beautiful two-day event at Cooper Union coordinated by Eric Canepa.

Another core area was what we called “The American Question.” At the start we had a research study group on the dynamics of American Capitalism that looked at why the US has no significant left political party. This thread has continued, though again without being able to sustain an ongoing working group or consistent study. To refocus attention in this area, we held a conference, in 2001, marking the 100th anniversary of The Souls of Black Folk and W.E.B. Du Bois's famous statement that the problem of the 20^th century is the problem of the color line.

In relation to another core area, the dynamics of revolution, Michael Lardner has launched an ongoing and highly successful study group on revolutions that is now going into its fifth year.

That brings me to the second main objective of the school, which was to advance the capacity for movement organization. By that we meant advancing party-building & regroupment processes on the left by providing a non-sectarian space for open exploration of ideas and of differences in a non-competitive environment. It was our hope that the kind of work we do could help to overcome the fragmentations that mark both socialist organizations and grassroots movements. Again, the issue of left organization receded to a large degree and has been only slowly reemerging.

In the early 90s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and what Richard Levins termed “the bottom of the trough,” we went through what was perhaps our most difficult period both politically and financially. We lost our space on Leonard Street, packed up all of our belongings and stored them in people's basements in Brooklyn. Jerry Meyer, then chair of our board of directors, sprang into action and raised the funds that enabled us keep going and to relocate just next door to our long-time friends at Monthly Review. Claire Picher, our director at the time, introduced a major innovation that I believe was key to our continued vibrancy through a very bleak period for the left. That innovation was the Theater of the Oppressed workshops that have brought a whole new dimension to our work. These workshops, based on techniques developed by Augusto Boal and influenced by Paulo Friere, explore non-verbal means of communication that help people get past some of our entrenched barriers to understanding each other. As such they are very useful tools both in organizing and for group problem-solving, planning and conflict resolution. They are also in tune with the concerns that the new generation is taking up about developing better awareness of our relations to each other, and thus are a bridge to new styles of organizing that are developing.

In 1994, when I came on staff, the left was still reeling from the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The good news is that while I've gotten older, the Brecht Forum has gotten younger. In the early and mid-90s, most audiences were predominantly grey-haired. That's no longer the case. We're also less white and closer to our original aim of being multi-racial, interdisciplinary, intergenerational and better able to address issues of social fragmentation.

And, we've brought more new program collectives into our work. Barbara Burch and Ras Moshe organized a collective to stage Neues Kabarett, which has presented regular experimental jazz performances for over ten years. Leese Walker and the Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble are a regular part of our program. For several years the Ground Floor arts collective has organized Black August nd Black History Month exhibits. The Women on Wednesdays series, organized by Ebony Golden and Nina Mercer, has become a vibrant part of our annual Black History Month programming.

Last spring, my co-workers Kazembe Balagun and Max Uhlenbeck were the lead organizers for a major event with Cornel West and Michael Moore called “The Beginning is Near” -- a title taken from a slogan at Occupy Wall Street. I think that's right. I think that we have clear evidence that a new movement is trying to emerge.

There is a lot of creative energy in this new wave of radicalism and there is a lot of innovative thinking on developing ways to work together across differences and trying to address some of the problems of our time. In the old days, as just one example, we had workshops on public speaking; now we see workshops on listening.

I think we are once again in a movement-building moment.

And, again I think Arthur's conception was right. Institutions like the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School are strategic to a movement-building process, and our original objectives are still valid. We are in very tumultuous times when not only the left but the broader population needs and wants deep analysis. And, we are still a left that needs much more effective political organization and strategies.

As I transition out as director but remain an active member of the Brecht Forum community, there are several areas that I can think of working in to support the next generation.

• First, revisiting some of our early ways of working that I've been mentioning – such as task forces, research study groups, and conferences--to see what's both relevant and possible now.

• Then, I think we need more institutions like the Brecht Forum – one of our supporters remarked that every community needs one, and visitors from other cities often say they wish they had one in their city. We've already been working to network with other radical spaces around the country and here in New York City. I think we need to actively share our experiences and learn from the new ideas and approaches that others are exploring with the objective of being able to help in the formation of new movement-building centers.

• Third, to go full circle, I had a call just recently from Bertell Ollman who helped with the first Alternate Summer School that formed the foundation for the Marxist School. Bertell raised the idea of establishing some kind of on-line university based on our work. He offered to help and had ideas on how we could build a team from within the Brecht Forum community. This is an idea that many of us have thought about, but now I think its time has come.

In short we have plenty of work to do. Thank you and I look forward to continuing to work with all of you.