The marking of the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, the prelude to the liberation of France, presents an opportunity to make available two brief texts on the role of the Stalinists in the resistance. The first comes from the extremely interesting short book Internationalists in France During the Second World War by […]
Tag Archives: World War II
Several weeks ago, Criticism &c. noticed a statement released by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative on the subject of the Libyan revolt and U.S. and NATO intervention (“Support Libyan Rebels While Opposing U.S./NATO Intervention“—March 12, 2011). At that time, comment was not deemed worth the effort involved. Upon a second reading, however, at least one distortion of […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available an excerpt from American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard by Raya Dunayevskaya. This work was originally published as a pamphlet in 1963 (the title of the original was American Civilization on Trial: The Negro As Touchstone of History) and distributed in large numbers at the massive […]
Constellations of Miró, Breton By Paul Hammond City Lights Books, 2000 The period spanning André Breton’s return to France in 1946 to his death in 1966 is too often dismissed by critics as a mere coda to the productive decades of the twenties and thirties. This attitude essentially obscures a third of Breton’s life, drawing […]
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima, which resulted in at least 70,000 immediate and direct fatalities (an additional 40,000 were killed outright in the bombing of the historic city of Nagasaki three days later—40,000 more died there in the following months from injuries). To commemorate this occasion, […]
Martinique: Snake Charmer by André Breton, with text and illustrations by André Masson University of Texas Press, 2008. 117 pages. One of Franklin Rosemont’s final contributions before his death in 2009 was seeing this book—part of the University of Texas Press Surrealist Revolution series, which he edited—through to print. As Rosemont says in his valuable […]
In honor of André Breton’s birthday, I am supplying a link to a scanned full-text image of his book Arcane 17. This image appears in the Hathi Trust Digital Library, which is a consortium of university libraries serving as an academic supplement to the (controversial) Google Books project. I intend to comment on the Google […]
Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn by Victor Zaslavsky Telos Press, 2008. 133 pp. I hesitate to review anything connected to the Telos school. The journal has undergone a precipitous theoretical decline from its origin as a center of phenomenological Marxism, critical theory, and council communism to become a vehicle for the Americanization of French […]
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