Continue reading »]]> A major public relations campaign by the Port of Oakland and its allies in the Chamber of Commerce and in Oakland’s political establishment either had no effect or backfired, as the size of the crowd that marched on the port on Monday December 12 easily topped the initial effort November 2.  Although there was some dispute whether the demonstrators shut down the port’s operation completely or only “sporadically” in the bitter cold and rain during the early Monday morning shift, there was no doubt about the shutdown during the 6 pm evening shift.  The port reportedly cancelled the shift, and in fact there was no traffic on Middle Harbor Road or Maritime Road other than demonstrators’ bicycles and the occasional police motorbike.  These major freight arteries belonged entirely to the people, marching several thousand strong.

Continue reading »]]> As part of a nationwide series of demonstrations aimed at stopping and rolling back home foreclosures, more than 100 people gathered in Oakland’s historic DeFremery Park on Dec. 6, and then walked half a block to the home of Gayla Newsom and her family, who have re-occupied their home that was taken away by Chase Bank.

Homeowner Gayla Newsom addresses Stop Foreclosures demonstration at historic DeFremery Park in Oakland Dec. 6

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Angry tent, drawn by unknown artist (in Oakland?)

They say in the Occupy Movement that if you’re looking for its leaders, you should look in the mirror.  Taking that as a cue, I’ve rough-drafted the beginnings of a manifesto for the Tent Party, a political movement that doesn’t exist yet, but probably should.  The Tent Party embraces both action and advocacy.

Rough draft of Tent Party manifesto

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A lone OPD cruiser at 14th and Franklin minutes before 10 a.m. It disappeared moments later.

By ten a.m., when I arrived by bicycle at Oscar Grant Square (formerly Frank Ogawa Square) the crowd had already taken over the intersection of 14th and Broadway, probably the busiest crossing in the City.  For a brief moment I spotted an Oakland Police Department patrol car blocking off 14th and Franklin, a block away, but then it disappeared.  Skeptical, I walked two blocks toward 7th Street, in the direction of the main Oakland police station, looking for the massed assembly of heavy blue that surely must be lurking around the corner.  Nothing!  I reconnoitered the perimeter in two other directions with the same result.  Then and throughout the daylight portion of the rally, until the late afternoon rush hour, when one small unit of five motorcycle officers helped block off traffic for the Critical Mass bicycle contingent, the OPD were nowhere to be seen.  The day before they had sent out a whining sort of email complaining that the political leadership was jerking them around, poor things.  It seemed today that they were pouting and refused to come out and play.  Or perhaps they were expressing solidarity with the strike? If they were hoping that in their absence all hell would break loose, and people would come begging them to please come out and bash in some more heads, they lost the bet.  In their absence, all heaven broke out.  People had freedom of expression, and they took it peacefully.  At each of the triumvirate of Big Banks — B of A, Chase, and Wells, perhaps two thousand demonstrators massed outside the doors, stood within inches of their plate glass windows, maybe even pressed noses to the glass like peasants at the castle, but not one brick was thrown and not one window suffered a ding.  Without the agents of violence to provoke them, people expressed their anger nonviolently.  What a lesson.

West Oakland poet reading "I have given up"

College graduate loaded with debt and no job

For me as an alte kacker, who’s been going to demonstrations since 1961, the most wonderful thing about being part of this demonstration is that I didn’t know anyone.  I met two old lawyer friends there, and that’s all.  I might have met some new friends from the La Pena Community Chorus if I’d hung around the square until 5, but I took off before that with the bicycle contingent.  Seeing all these young new faces I almost cried with joy.  We have lived through some decades of darkness when it seemed that the ruling class could just have its way with us and we would suffer in silence.  That’s over.  These young folks are us, reborn.  They have come here for good reasons.  Many good reasons!  Whether it’s the recent white college graduate, loaded with debt, who can’t get a job (see pic) or the 15-year old African-American boy from West Oakland whose poem, “I have given up,” brought the assembly to its feet (pic), or the homeowners facing foreclosure, and many others, they’ve got real grievances.  Lots of them.  And even if they’re not personally impacted (yet), their sense of fundamental fairness has been violated by the road the country has taken.  Lots of people made homemade signs, and I took as many pictures of them as I could.  (All up on the web here.)

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 contained a long list of grievances — “repeated injuries and usurpations” — and you can read the parade of slogans on the demonstrators’ signs as rough drafts of such a document.  The Declaration came 13 years before the participants put forward and compromised on the set of particular demands that makes up the Constitution.

Today, the demonstration had just about enough organization for the task at hand.  Someone had planned out a route of march on the banks and somehow the main contingent stuck to it.  Members of the SEIU, in bright orange vests and with bullhorns, managed to steer the moving mass in a loop around downtown and occasionally halt it at intersections, not perfectly, not even very well, but just well enough to prevent disasters.  At some intersections, when the crowd was strung out, volunteers emerged from the demonstrators to urge people to make room for cars to get through.  At others, the drivers were stuck and had to wait.  Some honked in irritation, some honked in support.

The entertainment in the amphitheatre before City Hall appeared well organized the entire time.  Acts followed one another with minimal delay and each number fit in somehow with the broad panorama of feelings and rhythms that moved the crowd.

Things got sketchier in the march on the Port of Oakland.  I moved with the bike contingent that moved out, or tried to, ahead of the walkers.  No one seemed very clear on the route, and we ended up looping into the walkers and having to disentangle ourselves to move to the front again.  This was my first ride in a Critical Mass-type event and I learned about the method of riding doughnuts in an intersection to stop all auto traffic in all directions.  Individual motorists pleaded their case for being allowed to go through — having kids in the car was usually a winner — and were allowed to pass.   There were hundreds of bikes, more bikes than I’ve seen in one place since the Davis Double in 1980.  At our first rallying place, five 18-wheelers were parked side by side facing away from the port, effectively blocking Middle Harbor Road, leaving only a narrow channel for passage.  I had no idea who put them there or why, and I don’t think anyone in our group knew, but those trucks appeared to be there in support.  A tractor-trailer operator facing into the port got frustrated and hung on his air horn without letup.  A young longshoreman, ILWU member, explained that the deal was to let people get out of the port, but not to get in.

OPD were not present at the port, but about a dozen County Sheriffs on motorcycles and about as many mounted California Highway Patrolmen stood waiting by this first truck barricade, and after some time, in response to orders unknown to us, mounted their heavy machines and advanced on our milling bike cluster, trying to get through the narrow channel between the big trucks.  ”Stand still, don’t let them through,” went the cry, and two cyclists had their wheels hit and wrecked by the advancing motorcycle squad.  I caught the incident on video.  There were no injuries to persons.  This was the only physical contact between police and the demonstration that I saw during my time in the action from 10 am to 6 pm.

After a while, the three trucks that had barricaded Middle Harbor Road at this point backed up, turned around, and drove away.  Most of the bike contingent continued deeper into the Port, up to the intersection of Maritime and 7th Street, right under the BART tracks.  Several dozen bikes occupied the center of this busy crossing, and we had cars and 18-wheelers backed up in three directions.  The car drivers pleaded to be allowed to go home.  Someone on a bike called “Mike Check,” we gathered round, and the speaker called for a vote.  All in favor of letting the cars go through?  There was a clear majority  for letting the cars through, and the spoke-wheeled ranks opened up to let the autos thread their way through.  But what about the trucks?

A gentleman wearing a Machinists’ Union T-shirt asked for and got the bullhorn and made an argument for letting these trucks through.  These were exploited contractors working sweatshops on wheels, they just wanted to go home and we should let them through.  We should instead go block the gates of the one or two docks were ships were still unloading.   (Disclosure:  I am a former member of the Machinists Union.)  It sounded good, and I was persuaded and peeled off with a number of others to go join smaller groups of bikers clustering and sometimes circling in a picket line at gates deeper in the Port.  There it became obvious that nobody had a clue what we were doing.  One young loud-voiced biker came into our cluster and asked, “Who’s in charge here?”  He was met with laughter.  ”We’re all in charge.”  And, “Nobody’s in charge.”  Someone else got a text message from Mother Jones’ correspondent indicating the Port was shut down and we were done.  There was no tactical communication with other groups and no visible coordination with ILWU leadership, in whose territory, after all, we were pedaling.

After a while I rode back to the intersection of Maritime Boulevard and 7th Street and found that the cycle blockade was diminished in numbers but still in effect.  One driver, a heavy-set middle-aged man, pleaded with the handful of bikers who stood in front of his 18-wheeler to let him through.  ”I just want to go home,” he argued, picking up on the Machinist speakers’s argument.  On questioning, however, it turned out that before going home he was going to deliver his load at a nearby gate.  I chatted with a couple of other drivers whose rigs were pointed into the Port.  One was pulling a flatbed trailer and intended to go pick up a load.  The other had a similar plan.  Contrary to the Machinist’s argument, these drivers weren’t done with their day; they weren’t planning to drive their big rigs home, they were working.  And, since this was a strike and we were a picket line, we stood.  It has to be said that these drivers took the delay stoically.  They could have, of course, pushed their towering rigs forcibly through our spindly barricade of limbs and tubes, but they had probably seen other labor stoppages at the Port and they shut down their engines and waited.  Shortly before six pm, the leading contingent of the marching demonstrators reached this pivotal intersection and reinforced the flimsy barrier of bikes with a solid mass of humanity.  Another “Mike Check” and another speech began.   With darkness approaching, I turned my bike around and pedaled for home.

My photos and videos of the day are up for public view at Picasa Web Albums.

Continue reading »]]> (Continued from Simon Fraser)

At a distance, San Francisco in late ‘68 still glowed from the “Summer of Love” festival the previous year.  But that glow was like the light that continues to travel in space after its source  burns out.  My friend in San Francisco — the noted Marxist economist James O’Connor — then lived on Shrader Street, a block from Golden Gate Park and around the corner from Haight Street, the epicenter of the West Coast hippie countercultural explosion.  In a short walk we could see the drugged-out flower children of yesteryear, the emaciated addicts, the teenage prostitutes, the filth and squalor — the hangover after the big party.

Me (left) passing out leaflets at SF State Strike Dec. 1968 (Frame from KQED news video)

But it wasn’t the counterculture I was after.  I’d had my taste of that in Vancouver.  The main attraction for me was the strike at San Francisco State College.  It had begun as a Vietnam war draft protest, but soon broadened.  Black, Latino, Asian and other minority student groups formed the Third World Liberation Front around a series of demands centering on establishment of a degree-granting ethnic studies program.  The duration, size and intensity of this struggle dwarfed the Simon Fraser upheaval.  In one phase of the struggle, hundreds of paramilitary riot police from San Francisco and neighboring cities occupied the campus, and each day featured a gradual buildup of student forces in the central square until a critical moment when the police charged with batons swinging and tried to break it up. I remember diving into the bushes with a baton swishing through the air a few inches behind my head.

I happened to be standing on 19th Avenue on the edge of campus on December 2, within a few feet of the movement sound truck — an ordinary pickup truck with two speakers mounted over the cab —  when newly appointed campus president S.I. Hayakawa climbed on the truck bed like a pirate boarding a ship and began ripping out the speaker wires.  I urged the driver, “Take off!  Take off!”  But the kid, who belonged to one of the Trotskyite organizations that talk and talk but never do anything, sat there like a deer in the headlights while Hayakawa was grandstanding up above for the media. If the truck had driven off, Hayakawa might have fallen off and broken his neck, and it would have been his own fault. Instead, Hayakawa’s trespass and vandalism on the sound truck catapulted him to political stardom.

By this time, I had developed a reputation as an independent academic Marxist.  A paper I had written in a sociology course on social stratification at Brandeis got published in New Left Review in London under the title Proletariat and Middle Class in Marx: Hegelian Choreography and the Capitalist Dialectic. The argument of the paper was somewhat unusual for a young author. I discounted the economic theorizing of the young Marx as idealist (“Hegelian choreography”). I found a much more complex and empirically grounded class analysis in Marx’s later economic writings.

The 1953 edition of the Grundrisse

Someone at New Left Review, observing that I cited from some of Marx’s writings in the German original, and that I was interested in Marx’s later work, had the idea of sending me a copy of Marx’s Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) for review. A big blue-covered brick of 1,102 pages arrived in my mail. This contained the transcription of a set of seven handwritten notebooks from 1857-1858, halfway between Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and the first volume of Capital (1867).  Since its publication in (then East) Berlin in 1953, this behemoth had received relatively little attention from Marx scholars, and had not been translated into English.  My review appeared in the March-April 1968 issue of New Left Review under the title The Unknown Marx.  The article generated enough interest to suggest that a translation might find a market.  The Review editors approached Penguin Books, and before the end of the year we struck a deal for me to translate the whole thing.  The publisher’s advance was my springboard out of Simon Fraser.  I calculated that if I lived frugally, the money would sustain me for two years.

In those days you could still live frugally in San Francisco.  After a week or so crashing at my friend’s apartment on Shrader Street I found an affordable room at the Hotel Stella upstairs from Le Boeuf restaurant on lower Washington Street, between Montgomery and Sansome. Generations of San Francisco immigrants had lived here. The rent was $9 a week.  My room resembled a monk’s cubicle. There was a small steam radiator. There was a built-in sink cabinet and closet opposite the door, a sagging single bed on the left, and a narrow window on an air shaft on the right. At night, the exhaust from the grill at LeBoeuf filled the air shaft, and for a while I became a vegetarian in reaction to this nightly siege of steak vapor.  I had a picture of Marx on one wall and a poster of a topless Janis Joplin on the other. The bathroom was down the hall. With a bit of carpentry I built a high loft platform for the mattress; the metal bed frame went into the basement. A second-hand desk fit underneath the platform and held my Underwood upright typewriter. I could work. My neighbor across the air shaft was an elderly Chinese man who cooked on a hot plate. There were other old Chinese and Filipino men who worked in Chinatown restaurants or factories. There were young men and women who worked in the nearby North Beach tourist joints. There was a Yale architecture school dropout who cruised the rooms trying to sell a baggy of seedy, weedy marijuana. There was a young couple who put their mattresses on the floor and shot heroin.  There were various Bohemian characters. One of them, Jerry Kamstra, later fictionalized the hotel in his novel Frisco Kid, but I don’t recall seeing him.  I mostly kept to myself. I was a misfit among the misfits. I ate at one or another of the cheap Chinese restaurants within a few blocks.

A middle-aged Chinese woman ran the hotel. One day, a few months into my residence, she asked me into her office and showed me a set of legal papers from the City. The City wanted to tear down the building.  Could I intervene somehow?  I saw no way.  A few months later, we all got notices to vacate.  I acted quickly and found a room in the Hotel Bell, just up the street at 37 Columbus Avenue.  The rent there was higher, $11 a week, but my room was larger. It had carpets and a bay window facing onto Washington Street. There was room for a double bed on the floor. I acquired a couple of hot plates and began cooking to save money.  My staples were frozen spinach and beef heart from the new Safeway nearby on lower Jackson Street. I continued working on the Grundrisse translation.  After some struggling and stumbling, I fell in with the rhythm of Marx’s voice and the translation went fluently.  I double-spaced my text and the stacks of finished sheets mounted on my desk.  I usually worked until about 2 a.m., then retired to the nearby Zim’s restaurant and sat at the counter drinking three or four cups of coffee. Then to bed.  Zim’s coffee wasn’t very strong, and it calmed me for sleeping. Meanwhile the whole block where the Hotel Stella had stood turned into a giant excavation, and then the Transamerica Pyramid arose there.

Cover of The Movement newspaper, March 1969

During the entire period of the translation, and afterward, I participated in the San Francisco State strike, the Chevron refinery strike picket line in Richmond, the People’s Park struggle in Berkeley, and any number of other ongoing demonstrations, of which there was no shortage.  I wrote up the SF State strike in the February ‘69 issue of The Movement, originally a Friends of SNCC support paper, edited by Joe Blum. That piece was republished in the March-April ‘69 issue of New Left Review.  I contributed pieces to Marvin Garson’s San Francisco Express-Times (later, Good Times), and to Leviathan, a journal started by Brad Wiley, a son of the Wiley publishing family. Elsa Knight Thompson, the Public Affairs director of KPFA radio in Berkeley, recruited Jim O’Connor, Terry Cannon, Frank Bardacke, Todd Gitlin, and me to co-host a program called The Surplus Prophets.  With many others, I offered my body as a human sandbag to protect the San Francisco office of the Black Panther Party from the police.

A young woman from Italy who came to visit me at the Bell found the setup perfectly ordinary.  Millions of students in Europe lived in similar situations, except that two or three would be sharing the room I had all to myself.  But to some of my American friends who had been raised in the suburbs, life in a cheap hotel with the bathroom down the hall was a different planet. One of my comrades, Brian D., coming to the Bell the first time, could not wrap his mind around the situation and fainted on the rug.

One of the big struggles of the day was the battle to preserve the International Hotel on Kearny Street, around the corner from the Bell.  I saw the busloads of demonstrators that the Reverend Jim Jones brought to support the elderly Filipino workers who had made the I-Hotel their home for decades. I took some turns on the picket line with them. Among the Asian community organizers  I met during this time was Wilma Chan.  She was already impressive then, and became even more so decades later as Majority Leader of the California legislature.  She is currently a member of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.  But all the lawful organizing and picketing in those days could not save the hotel.  Sheriff Richard Hongisto, formerly a progressive, earned attaboys from the local power structure by smashing in the door of the hotel with a sledgehammer and leading a phalanx of Tac Squad officers to oust the old men by force. Developers quickly tore down the hotel, and to prevent the men from finding a new home in the community, the Bell Hotel soon came under the wrecking ball as well.  The demolitions were purely about ethnic cleansing.  For four decades afterward, the site of the Bell Hotel remained a hole in the ground; new construction is only underway now, as I write this in 2011.

Local politicians in those days made their careers by breaking the law in public — Hayakawa by trespassing on and vandalizing the sound truck, Hongisto by breaking and entering, each time with the lights on and the cameras rolling. Their crimes were always rewarded, never prosecuted. The murders of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk a few years later were partly a consequence of this official culture of glorifying politicians’ contempt for the law.

The origins of homelessness in San Francisco can be traced in large part to the City’s policy of giving a green light to developers to destroy the traditional SROs (Single Room Occupancy hotels like the Stella and the Bell). SROs were affordable housing for people making the minimum wage or less. The City handed over most of the neighborhood below North Beach and Chinatown to gentrification. Developers razed whole blocks of warehouses and factories between Battery Street and The Embarcadero.  A manicured park, Sydney Square, popped out of the ground, and luxury condos sprang up all around it.  One day these will serve as dormitories for scholarship students, on the Cuban model.

When the Bell closed, I found a room in an apartment with a mix of radical students and others at 925 Church Street, in Noe Valley, a short walk from Dolores Park. The rotating cast of characters included a recent Stanford graduate who was active in a power structure research project in Palo Alto, a woman who worked as a waitress, three SF State students, a young man who was slowly drinking himself into oblivion, and various others.  One day, Robin Blackburn, an editor of the New Left Review, appeared there and announced that the journal had awarded me the first annual Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize. He also put his hand on my thigh under the table.  I never received a certificate or money for this award.  I don’t know whether the omission was due to Blackburn’s discovery that I did not share Deutscher’s admiration for Leon Trotsky, or to my moving my thigh away.

Anti-Mandel in Italian

Anti-Mandel in German

In the January-February ’70 issue of New Left Review, under the editors’ title The Universal Contradiction, I published the opening salvo of an attack on the work of the leading Trotskyite economist of the day, Ernest Mandel. Mandel replied, I wrote a rejoinder, and the whole thing was published and translated into French, German, and Spanish under the title Anti-Mandel.  Shortly thereafter, in the April 1970 issue of Monthly Review, I published an article on Lenin’s theory of the labor aristocracy that took indirect aim at the same target.

In those early San Francisco days I was so consumed by the translation that I led an almost monastic life, much of the time.  I smoked cigarettes but confined my drinking and marijuana smoking mostly to weekend parties.  I surprised myself by turning down some sexual advances.  The young wife of a well-to-do academic friend, having just had a baby, declared that now she needed a lover, and came to my room at the Stella and began to take off her blouse.  I felt that somehow I was being made into a lifestyle accessory, and I turned off.  The girlfriend of a movement comrade, the day after a social evening where group conversation had turned to the Kama Sutra, came to my place and proposed that we try out some of the 99 positions of coitus together.  That felt too much like an athletic exercise.  But those perhaps Puritan impulses were the exception.  I got involved in a number of episodes typical of the relaxed mores of the period.   Many marriages and other relationships in those days were wide open.  In one instance I was in the downstairs bed with the wife, and the husband was in the upstairs bedroom with three young women having a noisy sex romp.  In the morning we all met for a giggling breakfast with the children, who seemed unruffled. I stayed away from the swinger parties; that felt too cold and impersonal.  I wanted to know and to like the people I had sex with.   On the other hand, having sex was a good way to get to know them and like them.   I had a number of one-night or one-month affairs with women, some single, some not.  That’s what people did in those days.  But not all the time.  One night I got stinking drunk and propositioned the girlfriend of an absent friend, who turned me down.  So did the waitress who shared the Church Street apartment with me.  People had a lot of sex, but they made choices.  I was lucky in that the only “bug” I caught was a case of the crabs, itchy but easily cured.

After translating Marx’s writing, which took about a year and a half, I still had to write my introduction.  This involved some intensive, time-consuming research.  While I was working on the introduction, my money ran out. Not a big problem. I worked a variety of odd jobs around the city.

I drove a Yellow Cab. I still remember some basic lessons from the driving course at the beginning of this job, such as: foot on the brake pedal on entering intersections, form a diamond pattern on a multi-lane road.  Unfortunately they didn’t have a lesson on backing up.  To accommodate a fare, I backed into their driveway, too far, and put a dent in the garage door.  The cab company paid for the repair and put me out its door. Cab driving is tedious work, and today if I take a cab I try to tip well, remembering my time behind that wheel.

I also had odd day jobs on the San Francisco longshore through Ship Scalers and Painters Local 1 of the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union).  We took apart the contents of containers and parted them out to different destinations.  One memorable evening I boarded a container ship to find a big discussion underway among the black longshoremen. Some of them were defending the integrationist approach of Martin Luther King Jr., and others were advocating the Black Nationalism of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. I held still as a mouse and listened in awe. It was sharp, intense, well informed, emotional, mostly free of rhetorical bullshit, deeply rooted in personal experience, and conducted in a spirit of brotherhood and solidarity. I wish I had a movie of that hour as a model for how to conduct hot arguments over political line without splitting.

My steadiest job was sweeping up and driving deliveries for a two-man furniture shop named, creatively, The Wood Shop. Two gay men who knew their cabinetmaking turned out Parson’s tables, coffee tables, and bookcases for sale to unfinished furniture retailers. The shop sat in a storefront on Duboce Street under the freeway. Driving a white Econoline van, I soon got to know the location of every unfinished furniture store from San Rafael to San Jose.  At the end of the day I swept up the piles of sawdust in the shop.  The owners were hard workers.  Once or twice they invited me socially to their apartment in the Marina.  It was outfitted in antiques, stuffed animals, and porcelain knick-knacks. They never hit on me and always paid me on time. I also got to use the shop to build a few projects of my own.  Working part time, I made enough to pay my rent and groceries, and still had time to study and write.

The completed Grundrisse manuscript made a package more than two feet thick.  I sent it off to London in late 1971 or early 1972.  London took more than a year in typesetting, editing and printing.  The first edition came out in 1973 under the Pelican Marx Library imprint.  A Vintage edition for the US market followed.  The book is still in print.

My Grundrisse translation, Vintage ed. 2001

Publication of the Grundrisse occurred in faraway London and had no immediate impact on my life. But as the book trickled into the consciousness of people around me, an amusing cognitive dissonance arose.  Some people who read it, or pretended to, assumed that the translator and author of the Introduction must be a white-haired German refugee professor of the generation that fled in the 1930s, like Marcuse, Wolf, and Coser. They had a hard time matching their fantasy with the reality of a kid barely 30 who swept sawdust in a carpentry shop. Several times, on being introduced to someone from a non-movement setting who was interested in Marxism, I was asked whether I was the son of the Grundrisse translator.  Sometimes I would play along and pretend the translator was my uncle.

By contrast, most movement people interested in Marxism had little problem with my age or occupation.  The model of the scholar-worker fit in with the idea of the barefoot doctor, the worker/teacher, and other hybrids of otherwise strictly segregated roles. One of my friends, Joel from the San Francisco Newsreel movie collective, popped the aura that sometimes grew around the book by referring to it as the “Gundersnatch.”

Decades later, the Grundrisse translation still works surprises. A woman whom I was dating in Berkeley in 2005 went to visit academic friends of hers in Manhattan.  She mentioned my name.  Her hostess swept to her wall of books and pulled out the Grundrisse translation.  Way to impress a date! We later married.

This year (2011) my son Fred was best man at a wedding where the young couple are both Grundrisse readers, and he blew them away with a copy of the book containing my personal dedication to them, as a wedding present.  They didn’t suspect the translator was still alive.

As an immigrant to this country, I sometimes feel like a guest at a party.  You’re expected to bring a present, something nice from the Old Country.  The Grundrisse was my immigration present.

Like many other movement activists in the “New Left” during that time, I felt the urgency of better organization, and I was of course in the camp of “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought.”  In this pursuit, at some point in late ‘70 or early ‘71, I joined Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Union (RU). What pulled me into it wasn’t Bob Avakian. I knew Bob from the Movement newspaper and the Richmond refinery strike and other events as a fast talker who was a master at stringing Marxist-Leninist phrases and rhetorical formulas together. He was a highly intelligent young man, and well-intentioned, but his verbal glibness allowed him to play a leadership role without ever going deeply into the concrete facts of any particular situation.  He was one of the political entrepreneurs who capitalized on the prestige and popularity of Chairman Mao in those days by acting as if he owned the local franchise. He raised money by guilt-tripping kids from other affluent families (his dad was a local judge) into signing over their assets.

It was a woman, Davida E., who recruited me into the organization. Davida was irresistible.  She was educated at a top Ivy League school, drop-dead beautiful, and a hard-core no-nonsense Leninist.  She didn’t think much of Bob, either, but the RU promised to become an improvement over the transient formations of the day, and that was a good thing.

A handful of us started up the RU’s idea of a worker’s paper, called The Wildcat, and gave it away  plant gates in the early mornings.  We rented a small storefront in the cheapest area of the Mission District in San Francisco as a base for local organizing.  The landlord, no beginner, made us buy plate glass insurance to cover the storefront window.  It wasn’t long before the office received threats from right-wingers.  We brought our sleeping bags and rifles to guard the place at night.  One night I stood guard together with P., a retired mine worker who had lost the hearing in one ear due to a dynamite blast at work.  At an hour before midnight there was a huge “BANG” outside the office door.  I dove under the desk.  P just sat there, nonchalant, smiling. “Firecracker,” he said.  His experienced good ear knew the different types of blasts like a musician knows the sounds of the instruments.

In those days in the RU we all had rifles and practiced regularly at a range in Pacifica.  I carried my rifle in a guitar case.  It was a single-shot bolt action World War I relic from Italy that would make a modern soldier crack up with laughter, but in those days the appearance mattered more than the functionality.  One time as I returned to the Bell Hotel with my guitar case, two real musicians who also lived in the hotel approached me in a friendly way and asked to see my “axe.”  I had to be rude, and cultivated the pose of a recluse.

Davida was the best sharpshooter with the rifle, and also had a pair of pistols and knew how to use them. She was Jewish and talked sometimes about running arms to the Palestinians.  If it ever came to armed insurrection, which in those days seemed not so far off,  I wanted her by my side. We moved in together in a shared apartment on Guerrero Street in the Mission.  For Davida’s sake I put up with Bob, and even drafted a RU pamphlet on the economic crisis of the day, in which I supplied the analysis and Bob added the rhetoric. I also began a study project to investigate the new capitalism in the USSR, but before that got very far, something happened that caused me to leave the organization.

My mother had remarried and moved back to Germany in 1968, and at some time in 1970, I believe it was, I went for a visit.  After a week with her and her new husband in their home near Kiel in northern Germany, I connected with German SDS comrades in West Berlin and in Frankfurt.  There I met the radical filmmaker Claudia von Alemann, who was irresistible in her own way. It was lust at first sight, and we had ten or so steamy days together in Frankfurt and Paris. Sometime in early ‘72, Claudia came for a visit to San Francisco, and one thing led to another. Davida found us out, and according to Joe Blum, who shared the apartment with us, Davida had both pistols loaded and was prepared to blow me away and maybe Claudia in the bargain. Joe claims he saved my life by cooling her out. Davida was a communist but she did not believe in sharing her man, even for a weekend. She dumped me. Claudia fled back to Germany. I moved out to a furnished room on Mission Street and stopped attending RU meetings.  I did not see Claudia again for thirty years. Davida has managed the difficult feat of disappearing completely from the Google radar screen, but if anyone could do that, she could.

Me in San Francisco 1973

I found a new home shortly in a shared house at 4637 18th Street in the Castro district. The main tenants at the 18th Street place were Mickey and John Rowntree, two Canadian movement intellectuals who had published a number of articles that stirred lively discussions. The house had an overgrown garden that I helped clear.  We grew artichokes and lettuces and cooked and cleaned collectively. Another member of the house collective was Julia M., a woman from New Jersey who was new to the movement. She bore no resemblance to Davida, and I suppose that was what I needed at the time.  After some months in the house together, Julia and I hooked up and became an item, and looked for a place to live together. The ad for a rental house at 3296 Folsom Street on the corner of  Stoneman Street in Bernal Heights said “fixer-upper.”  A piece of City road equipment had rolled free and cut a gash in the siding on the Stoneman Street side.  We could have the place if I did the repair. It took me the better part of a week, but then it was done. We had the whole house with three bedrooms upstairs and a cavernous ground floor and garage for a ridiculously low rent. There was a small yard in back that had once been a stable. The soil was so fertile that if you were eating a tomato sandwich and accidentally dropped a seed, it would sprout almost before your eyes.

We had some reasonably happy months of domestic tranquility together on Folsom Street when I got a phone call from New York City. The interlude of peace was about to end.

(Continued in New York)

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Continued from Hell No I Won’t Go)

Looking north from Vancouver (Forrest Croce photo 2006)

My first impression of Vancouver was of a beautiful vacation land.  I had found temporary lodging in a tiny furnished apartment in the city with a window facing north onto the harbor , and on the first clear morning, the panorama of snowy peaks across the water, almost within arm’s reach, took my breath away.  It brought back childhood memories of Switzerland.  I had visions of hikes and picnics and leisurely outings in the park, good living, loving, productive studying and writing, getting a PhD, and humming along in harmony with the universe, for a change.

Some of that happened — the outings and the living and loving — but as to the rest, I was dreaming.  Shortly after my arrival, I became part of a political struggle that an official historian forty years later described as “the most notorious conflict on a Canadian campus then or since.” ^[1]

Simon Fraser University (SFU), my new academic home, was then all of two years old.  The conservative (Social Credit) government of the province of British Columbia, intent on developing “human capital,” had commandeered a forested, fog-shrouded mountain east of the city, in the suburb of Burnaby, and planted a university on the top of it.

Simon Fraser, main plaza facing library (D. Koyanagi photo, undated)

The architecture was all in grey concrete with long horizontal lines, sharp vertical pillars, and never a curve.  On the exceptional sunny day, most of it resembled a Silicon Valley industrial park; on the average foggy day, an aircraft carrier; and on days when the fog was thick, which was often,  working there was like being in a submarine.  By the time I got there, the core classroom and office buildings were finished, but construction on the perimeter went on around the clock.

Despite the architecture, the place was lively; it buzzed.  SFU had opened the doors of higher education to thousands of students for whom there was no room in the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus west of downtown.  Almost forty per cent of the SFU student body identified the principal wage earner in their family as a blue collar worker.  A sizeable portion of the students had had years of experience working in the real world and were more mature than the average student.  Nearly half the students were women.

I feel almost nostalgic describing this period of time, when governments — even conservative governments — spent money to open the doors of educational opportunity to wider sections of the population.  It is such a contrast to the time and place where I am writing.

Tom Bottomore (web photo)

Kathleen Gough (web photo)

To staff the new school, the administration recruited heavily from abroad.  There was no choice.  Canadian universities produced few PhDs,  and other new universities in Canada competed for the available talent.  Tom Bottomore, chair of the combined social sciences department (Politics, Sociology & Anthropology or PSA) came from the London School of Economics.  Kathleen Gough, the eminent anthropologist, was also a Brit but most recently had taught at Brandeis and Oregon.  John Leggett had taught sociology at UC Berkeley.  One of the few Canadians on the PSA faculty was Mordecai (Mort) Briemberg.  Among the junior faculty in all departments were many like myself who did not yet have their PhD.

Mort Briemberg (2006 web photo)

The newness of the place and the diversity of the faculty made for a mixture of expectations.  Brits like Bottomore expected to rule their departments like dukes of the realm, with little interference from above or below.  American faculty expected to operate in a web of collegiality with the chair acting as negotiator or referee.  The university administration, by contrast to both these models, operated on a top-down military or corporate model.  The university’s founder, Gordon Shrum, had been both a military officer and head of a major corporation (B.C. Hydro), and was notorious as an aggressive ramrod who respected no laws and brooked no opposition.  The province’s premier, a self-made man with an eighth-grade education, gave Shrum a free hand.

One of the first people I met on campus was Martin Loney.  He was a cheerful, athletically built teaching assistant from the UK who had got himself arrested, twice, for supporting a local high school student’s publication of a satirical poem.  The administration decreed that Loney and four other TA’s who had organized support for the high school student should be fired.  This move raised two issues.  (1)  Was the punishment commensurate with the act?  And more importantly, (2) who had jurisdiction to decide the matter?  The faculty felt that the fate of individual teaching assistants was for them to decide, not for the administration to micromanage.  A large portion of the student body, and many faculty, were outraged at the punishment.  Big demonstrations and rallies followed in support of the TAs, and they were eventually reinstated.  Throughout these battles, Martin conducted himself nobly and became a much esteemed young man on the campus and to an extent nationally — he was once on TV with Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau. In recent years he appears to have become rather a reactionary, outraged beyond measure that a few exceptional women and minorities achieved successes that remained out of his own reach.

Sharon Yandle (2004)

One of the big leaders of the student movement was Sharon Yandle.  Sharon was one of the older students; she had worked and traveled and had two young children.  The children were privileged to have as mother an accomplished and tireless organizer.  She served as one of the student senators and was an eloquent writer and speaker.  She was devilishly effective in exposing administration hypocrisy, a fact that made her the target of personal invective from conservatives. She was a core member of the growing feminist caucus on campus.  It wasn’t long before I joined the queue of young men who were in love with her, but in her wisdom she chose a brilliant and dedicated economics prof, the economic historian and now Latin American specialist, Mike Lebowitz.

Kathleen Gough was an inspiring colleague.  Her years of anthropological field work among the poorest farmers of India had endowed her with a dim view of colonialist and imperialist authority and a firm grip on the nexus between thinking and doing.  She hosted splendid dinners for friends at her seaside house in West Vancouver.  An emblematic moment that sticks in my mind came as we were enjoying snacks on her deck on a warm afternoon.  Someone announced the news that Cesar Chavez had initiated a boycott of California table grapes.  Our eyes gravitated toward a bowl of grapes on the coffee table.  In a swift, decisive gesture, Kathleen pounced on the bowl and launched its contents in a high arc over the railing into the waters below.

Holding the status of lecturer, I was at the very bottom of the faculty totem pole, but I had a salary and an office, and sat in on faculty meetings. It took some time for the other faculty to accept me, a 26-year old kid, as a peer, and even longer for me to adjust to being in the front of the classroom facing the rear, instead of the other way around.  But I did my job.  I lectured on sociological theory to a class that approached 300 students.  I led a graduate seminar in industrial sociology, about which I knew next to nothing, but I stayed a chapter ahead of the students.

The most fun I had was in a course on social change.  I started the students out by reading the Communist Manifesto, certainly one of the most influential texts in the history of social change.  We analyzed the main elements that made up the text, such as a sketch of history, a statement of the problem or obstacles to be overcome, an identification of the agency of change, and the outlines of a program.

I then dramatically tore a copy of the Manifesto to shreds before the class, to gasps from some of the devout Marxists in the group.  Now that you understand the basic building blocks of an effective manifesto, I told the class, go forth and write your own!  I gave them a free choice of topics, but added one process condition:  they must team up with at least one other student, and not more than four others, and produce the work jointly.  Each member of the group would receive the same grade.

The students were shocked at first.  Nobody had ever asked them to write out a systematic statement of their own dreams and plans, or had even acknowledged that students could have the fire for a manifesto inside of them.  Soon they caught the spirit, searched their souls for their hidden passions, and went to work energetically researching and writing up their causes.  They produced marvelous documents, some of them richly illustrated.  All of them displayed real thought and serious work.

The administration, not surprisingly, did not share the students’ new-found enthusiasm for manifesto writing. Moreover, it found the concept of cooperative work and group grades offensive to its dog-eat-dog model of learning.  It wanted each student to compete against every other student.  It hated the idea of students learning and working as teams, and being rewarded as a group.  The fact that virtually all scientific projects are group projects and that virtually all scientific papers are authored by a group,  was surely not unknown to Chancellor Shrum, who had also taught physics.  Moreover, as a Northerner, shouldn’t he have understood about sled dog teams?  But the idea that the skills of cooperative learning and writing, so essential in the real world, should be taught at the undergraduate level was far ahead of the administrative mindset in that time and place.

The administration was also upset by the fact that virtually all the papers produced in this course were very good and deserved and got an “A.” Naturally, when students work together, they tend to produce better work.  The administration wanted a bell curve.  With the overwhelming support of my department colleagues, I refused to assign bad grades for good work.

During that same period, some of my colleagues were advocating a simple pass-fail system, or doing away with grades altogether, and my group grading project fed into this simmering controversy.  Some voices in the more conservative departments accused the PSA department of imperialism: by giving out high grades we were supposedly  pirating students away from their departments, to the detriment of their budgets.  The administration threatened to erase all of our department’s grades and give the students no credits.  This of course incensed the students, who had indeed worked very hard, and with great enthusiasm, and learned a lot.

Tempests were also brewing inside our department.  Tom Bottomore was a very prominent academic Marxist.  He had translated a number of early works of Marx and written extensively about the sociological dimensions of Marx’s thinking.  He validated Marxism as an important sociological theory, one which must be included in the history of sociological thought along with the more conventionally accepted sociological works of Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies, etc.  In a word, he had made Marxism respectable in the academic world, even at the staid University of British Columbia, which used one of his books as a text.  That was an important contribution, and one which attracted a number of leftist academics to Simon Fraser’s PSA department from the moment that his appointment was announced.  Kathleen Aberle, John Leggett, Louis Feldhammer, Mort Briemberg and others of my colleagues, including of course myself, were in this group.  Many graduate students and also undergraduates responded to the same attraction.  Bottomore was a big red magnet.

However, for Bottomore Marxism was only an academic pursuit.  He certainly knew, but did not go along with, Marx’s famous saying, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world.  The point, however, is to change it.”  He soon saw that the SFU administration paid no deference whatever to his status as department head, and this infuriated him, but he did not rally his troops to fight back.  His faculty colleagues meanwhile expected him, as department chair, to show deference to their consensus, and this also offended him.   The administration was far to the political right of his own Labour Party inclinations, while most of his faculty colleagues and the students were considerably to his political left.  Inside of a year, Bottomore wished a plague on both houses and departed in a huff to teach at Sussex in more sensible England.

Me speaking to demonstration at Simon Fraser University 1968

With him went my PhD thesis plans and my initial reason for being there.  I wasn’t having any luck studying with great names in academic Marxism; both Marcuse and Bottomore fled soon after I arrived.  (Marcuse did visit SFU as a guest speaker at the invitation of the PSA department, and the department attempted to hire him, causing a huge uproar.)  But there was so much else going on at SFU that I hardly had time to think.  There were endless department meetings and all-faculty meetings and protest rallies and sit-ins and occupations.

My own contribution to all of this brouhaha was very minor.  All I remember is a short talk I gave at a rally concerning an upcoming university Board of Governors meeting on the campus.  I said, to general laughter, “Since we have not been invited, it would be impolite to refuse to go.”  There is a photo of me addressing the rally, with a university administrator in the background, looking disgusted (left).  The board was said to be looking for the parties responsible for the “troubles,” so I had a glass shop make up a stack of small mirrors that we held up to the trustees as they entered the meeting.   Either at this meeting or at another one, I don’t remember, the board did fire university president Patrick McTaggart-Cowan, and later also chancellor Gordon Shrum, but their replacements proved no better.

In June of ’68, I drove to the Michigan State campus in East Lansing and attended the national SDS convention there.  My memories of this event are a blur.  There was the Black Panther Party, enjoying enormous prestige, but poisoning the air with anti-women slurs; there was the Progressive Labor Party or one of its front groups, tightly disciplined but offending almost everyone with its smug know-it-all dogmatism; and there was the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), the most vibrant of the predominantly white groups, but already splitting into RYM-I (Weathermen) and RYM-II, a volatile coalition of Marxist-Leninist groups.  It was a turbulent gathering, like free-for-all combat in a food court.

At the convention, I got briefly acquainted with Bill Ayers, Rick Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd.  At this time they were radical student activists, leaders of big student protests, with the ambition to lead broader movements.  Their main aim was to get the masses to rise up, battle the police in the streets, and seize political power.  The stupid bombing bit that some of them got involved with, and that earned them the “terrorist” label, came later, after their mass mobilization dreams were mostly frustrated.

Bernardine Dohrn (RYM-I) at the '68 SDS Convention

In East Lansing, I stayed in a house belonging to some of the campus RYM-I people.  Late at night after the convention session, three young RYM-I women put down their sleeping bags next to mine on the floor.  One of them volunteered, “You can have sex with us, but we all have the clap.”  I thought about it and declined.

The SDS convention felt wildly exciting at the moment.  Listening to the presentations I found myself pulled and fired up this way and that, high on the smoke of radical change.  But it left me with a depressing afterglow.  On the drive back to Vancouver, I found myself fantasizing that if one could combine the best qualities of each of the competing trends, one would have a formidable fighting force.  Then I immediately castigated myself for thinking such un-Leninist rubbish.

Departmental announcement for PSA chair elections

Some time after Bottomore’s departure, after some interim substitutes, we faculty  in the PSA department elected Mort Briemberg the department chair.  Mort was an excellent choice.  He was a culturally conservative Canadian in a stable marriage; he didn’t do drugs, screw his students, or cheat and lie.  He could not be painted with the “hippie” or “outside agitator” brush.  He had outstanding academic credentials as a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He was a calm, thoughtful, soft-spoken person, absolutely honest and up-front, and courteous with everyone.  If he had chosen to go that route, he might have made a very popular rabbi, even with his steadfast support of the Palestinian cause.  In a brighter academic setting he would have been a consensus pick as department chairman, and probably would have risen to become university president.

Mort’s election was also a time when the department (or most of it) came together and adopted something like a mission statement, or perhaps it was a manifesto.   This had three main planks; it went like this:

Simon Fraser University is rapidly moving toward the multiversity, toward the imitation of an American model of education. We, faculty, students and staff of PSA, counterpose to this spectre the vision of a department grounded on the philosophy of participation and control from below and designed to serve the needs of the people of British Columbia.

1. Critical social science: We must tell the truth. We must tell the truth not only about what the powerful regard as useful but about important, controversial issues. We must shrink neither from the conclusions of our criticism nor from conflict with the powerful. We are social critics. We seek to understand society in its totality and to reveal the relations and dynamic of that totality. We see within each social order the possibility of going beyond that social order. We identify, analyze and so help to overcome obstacles to the realization of human liberation.

2. Democratic control: We assemble in classes. We assemble in meetings. These are different settings but they cannot be isolated. Faculty power in decision-making complements faculty authoritarianism in the classroom. Parity in decision-making complements uninhibited intellectual discussion in the classroom. We affirm the principles of parity between students and faculty and openness in the meeting-room. We affirm the principle of uninhibited discussion in the classroom. We stand for a philosophy of education which counterposes dialogue to monologue and which counterposes open debate to the didactic delivery of information and opinion. We encourage cooperative struggles for truth and mutual criticism instead of the manipulation of exams and the competition for grades.

3. Community integration: The university is not neutral on social questions. The work of most social scientists serves the interest of the wealthy and powerful. We will contribute our energies to solve the problems of workers not the ‘problem with workers’, the problems of native peoples not the ‘problem with native peoples’, the problems of welfare recipients not the ‘problem with welfare recipients’, the problems of youth not the ‘problem of youth’.^[2]

I heartily subscribed to this document then, and I still do today.  The first point, critical social science, is largely a question of mental survival.  Uncritical social science, such as the structural-functionalist celebration of the status quo that ruled sociological theory in those days, was like a cloud of carbon monoxide, inimical to life inside the skull.  The second point is a matter of creating an environment conducive to learning; without democracy in education we breed too many caged parrots.  The third point is about righteous work: whom do you serve?  My study of the Michigan State University program (published in Viet-Report) had crystallized for me the lesson that it is shameful for an intellectual to be a lackey of an oppressive power structure, and all honor lies in working for the underdog.

There were a number of American draft evaders in Vancouver,  as well as kids who had been inducted and refused to stay with their units, which earned them the label “deserters.”  I became friends with one such kid, “Terry.” He was from Indianapolis. His father had left.  His mother worked in a store.  He hated the Vietnam war as much as any student did, but he didn’t have the privilege of the student deferment.  I helped out as best I could with temporary shelter, moral support, job references, and a bit of cash.  Mort and Liz Briemberg had co-founded a much-needed aid organization for people in this situation.

Inbetween lectures and protests, I managed some reading and writing in pursuit of my growing interest in Marxism.  I acquired the complete works of Marx and Engels in the original and plunged in.  I published a couple of pieces in the London journal New Left Review, which led a British student to apply to the PSA department to study for the PhD with me.  (I didn’t have a PhD myself.)  More on that later.

In August 1968, more or less as my last act before leaving Simon Fraser, I flew to Boston to attend the annual conference of the American Sociological Association (ASA).  A group of radical professors and grad students had formed the Sociology Liberation Movement (SLM), and were organizing a protest against the appearance of Wilbur Cohen, then  the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, as keynote speaker. Giving a platform to Cohen was an indirect endorsement of the administration and its Indochina war policy.

Before I arrived in Boston, SLM leaders had met with ASA organizers and painted the spectre of loud, organized disruptions from the floor during Cohen’s address, with the attendant police intervention, batons, chairs flying, mass arrests … similar to what was happening during this period at other venues around the world, and very bad publicity for the ASA.  A compromise was reached, whereby the SLM was given fifteen minutes for its own speaker to respond to Cohen’s keynote.

The SLM speaker had not been picked yet, and I remember sitting with the SLM caucus in the back of the hall minutes before Cohen was due to start.  Who was going to go up there in front of those thousand colleagues and answer Cohen?  I didn’t volunteer, I was scared.  Nobody volunteered.  But people knew about the SFU struggle, and eyes turned toward me.  Suddenly a consensus crystallized and I was pushed up on the dais. I had less than ten minutes to prepare.  Hastily I scribbled notes on the back of the program.

Afterward, conference organizers transcribed the audio tape of the talk and published it along with other convention talks in the Journal of the ASA.  The text seems to reflect generally what I said, but I have no way of verifying it in any detail.  Someone (not me) gave it the title “Fat Cat Sociology” and under that name, the text was widely reprinted.  The editors of an anthology on Radical Sociology published it as a document of the movement, opining that “In many ways, Nicolaus’s speech outlined the major views of the Sociology Liberation Movement.”  That qualification, “in many ways,” hints at the fact that some of my radical academic colleagues were scandalized by parts of the talk.  I probably did not need to call Cohen “secretary of disease, propaganda, and scabbing,” as I did.  Apart from that and a few similar rhetorical flourishes that formed the common coin of the period, my talk echoed the points I had made in my Viet-Report articles, and it borrowed greatly from the manifesto that my PSA colleagues had formulated just previously in Burnaby.  The main idea is that the machinery of knowledge must be reversed: instead of carrying knowledge from the poor to the rich and powerful, it must expose the rich and powerful to the poor, in a language that even a 15-year old high school dropout can understand.  A year later, the Antioch Review gave me the opportunity to address these issues at more leisure in the form of an article titled The Professional Organization of Sociology:  A View from Below.

It would be misleading to paint my Simon Fraser experience as an unremitting crusade of radical activism and scholarship.  Far from it.  In my spare time I led a dissolute life.  I had come late to sex, and I worked to catch up.  Within a week I was in bed with a department secretary.  Then followed a threesome with two townies, a tumble with  a girl who could not have been 16, a foursome, a fling with a roaming faculty wife, a lost weekend with a Catholic undergraduate virgin, an affair with a woman six months pregnant, and other brief entanglements whose memories are mercifully shrouded in smoke.  Somehow I also managed two (consecutive) living-together relationships that in those fluid days qualified as “long-term,” meaning longer than a month.

The truth was, I was lonely.  People were kind, there were moments of comradeship in the struggle, my classes were popular, but I never had the feeling of really belonging.  I should have been used to that already, but it still ached inside, and I found temporary relief in sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

There were weeks when I smoked marijuana on waking and at breaks during the day.  Some friends and I pooled our money and bought a kilo of “Okanagan Green,” and spent hours cleaning out seeds and stems. I scattered the seeds in the National Forest.

For a while I believed that marijuana stimulated my brain and made me more creative.  I tested that hypothesis by writing down my thoughts while stoned.  I came to the conclusion that it only made me more paranoid.  I still smoked nevertheless, but much more infrequently, with the rationale that it loosened me up in social conversation, where I tended to be tongue-tied.  I quit smoking marijuana altogether a couple of decades later, after graduating from law school.

Me on Melody K'.s BMW, Vancouver 1968 (E. Briemberg photo)

I dropped acid (took LSD) three times.  The first time, acid indirectly ended my cello playing, and could have ended my life.  Some years earlier, while at Wesleyan, I had taken cello lessons.  I bought a student-quality instrument during a summer vacation from a violin maker who worked out of a farmhouse in southern Wisconsin.  He scoured the countryside for old Norwegian barns and salvaged the lumber to build violins and other string instruments, and had won ribbons at the state fair.  At Brandeis some friends and I would get together occasionally to play simple chamber music pieces.  I took the cello with me to Canada, but rarely played there. My then girlfriend in Vancouver, Melody K., had a BMW motorcycle which she would let me borrow.  One evening, after taking a tab of LSD, I got on the bike and rode it full throttle on a straight, empty road, absorbing the exquisite sensations of the headlight piercing the fog, the pavement blurring by beneath me, the dotted line slicing through my brain, and the wind stripping my breath away.  Against all odds, I got home safely, but when I turned off the bike’s engine, it seized up.  The cap of the cylinder head on the right side had sprung loose, probably from overheating, and jammed the piston so that the engine couldn’t turn over.  I sold the cello to pay the mechanic to fix the bike.  It was no great loss; Yo Yo Ma had nothing to fear from my cello playing.  Melody later hooked up with one of the Ayers boys from Chicago and had a baby. But that’s another story.

On my second LSD trip, I found myself sitting on my porch in Kitsilano totally enraptured for an hour in watching rain drops splatter on the railing.  Whoa! I said to myself.  Being totally in the moment is overrated!  There’s more to life than watching raindrops!

The third happened the night after the ASA convention.  I was staying with Tonia A., a Brandeis grad school friend.  Another guest there was a gay friend of hers, Monroe G.  She told me that Monroe was interested in me.  What the heck, I thought.  Monroe and I spent an hour together.  The next morning, with the acid worn off, Toni asked me how was it?  Great!  I admitted, truthfully.  She gave me the names of some gay friends in San Francisco.  I never looked them up.  I had mixed feelings, and in a different universe I probably would be occasionally bisexual.  (I had one other homosexual encounter as part of a threesome decades later.)  But there were very few men who ever turned me on.  Sometimes I have a hard time understanding what women see in men.  Women are just as intelligent if not more so; the best ones are also sociable, witty, empathetic, realistic, practical and dreamlike at the same time, and their bodies tend to be soft, curvy, beautiful, delicious.  I have sometimes thought that I am really a Lesbian in a man’s body.

Pacific Rim National Park (Tourism BC photo)

My Vancouver friends also introduced me to the scenic beauties of the region.  We walked for miles along the harbor.   We went into the mountains and played in the snow a bit.  We explored beautiful Stanley Park.  We drove up the North Coast a ways.  We hit the cultural hot spots of Kitsilano, where I lived for a few months in a crumbling house slated for demolition.  I especially enjoyed our weekend trips to the west coast of Vancouver Island, where we camped on the beach in what is now Pacific Rim National Park.  That is such a spectacular place that I brought my young family there for a vacation decades later.

In late ’68,  having spent about a year and a half at SFU, I decided it was time to move on.  One didn’t need a crystal ball to see that the administration was going to axe the whole lot of us radicals, first chance they got.  My reason for having gone there in the first place, Tom Bottomore, was gone.  Very exciting things were happening in San Francisco, where I had a friend.  Most important, I had a contract and a publisher’s advance to translate a mammoth work by Karl Marx, the Grundrisse, from German into English.  And so I once again piled my belongings into and on top of my aging Beetle and headed south to San Francisco.

P.S.:  The movement at SFU continued with full force after I left.  As expected, the administration did fire most of the radical PSA professors, including Mort Briemberg, Kathleen Gough, John Leggett, Louis Feldhammer, Nathan Popkin, Saghir Amad, David Potter, and Prudence Wheeldon.  The firing was totally illegal and earned the university a formal vote of censure by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, but the university basically said “fuck you” to the Association and refused to reinstate them.  The whole protracted episode, which I watched from afar, soured my interest in following an academic career.  What happened to my SFU colleagues would have happened to me.  Several of the fired professors, including Mort, found it impossible to get university jobs, and their academic careers were destroyed.  Decades later it turned out that the CIA was tracking Mort and other professors as part of an “Operation Chaos.”

In memory of this movement, the students of SFU pushed through a resolution renaming the main plaza of the campus, the scene of all the rallies and demonstrations, “Freedom Square,” and marked it with a commemorative plaque.

Forty years after the start of the protest, in 2005, the university commissioned a book in which that struggle, seen through the eyes of the administration,  occupies a central part.  The book dubs SFU “the Radical Campus.” This reminds me of my high school in Kansas, Shawnee Mission, which was named after the Shawnee Indian nation.  First they almost exterminated the Shawnees, then they stole their name for a school.

If you are interested in knowing more about this “most notorious conflict on a Canadian campus then or since” — notorious for the viciousness of the administration — here are some web links:

A Taste of Better Things.  A detailed account of the PSA struggle, by Mort Briemberg.   Originally published in Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology Vol. 1 No. 3 Oct. 1970.

On SFU Turning 40, by Mort Briemberg, in Seven Oaks magazine

Radical Campus or Haunted House on the Hill?  A review of the Radical Campus book by Mort Briemberg in Canadian Dimension magazine

Remembering the Fired Professors.  A podcast by Mort Briemberg.

Radical University, Not!  A podcast by Mort Briemberg.

Foggy Portrait of a Radical Campus, a review of the Radical Campus book by Jerry Zaslove in the Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers

Book Review by Donald Fisher of Radical Campus, in Canadian Journal of Education (2008)

No Longer Radical but Reactionary; a July 8 2011 article in Politics Respun magazine on the university’s lockout of unionized staff members.

(Continued in San Francisco 1968-1973)

1. ^[1] Hugh Johnston, Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University (2005) ↩
2. ^[2] From M. Briemberg, On SFU Turning 40, Seven Oaks magazine, Sept. 6 2005. ↩

Continue reading »]]> (Continued from Viet-Report)

Draft Card 1968

At Brandeis that fall (1966) a student dive-bombed and crashed a light airplane into the center of campus, killing himself and his female passenger.  Rumors swirled that it was a love pact, a Romeo-and-Juliet affair, but in the background there was the Vietnam draft.  With the massive escalation of the ground war, the Army was hungry for bodies.  Single men not enrolled in school had no protection and were being inducted by the many hundreds of thousands.^[1]

The war was hugely unpopular on campuses nationwide.  The draft, and how to avoid it, became a major preoccupation publicly and privately.  Everyone who lived through those years has a story to tell.  Here’s mine.

When I took a leave of absence to go to Mississippi in the fall of ’64, I lost my student deferment for the year, but the marriage to Viki entitled me to the marriage deferment.  On returning to Brandeis in the fall of ’65, I had both the marriage and the student deferment, and was looking good.

Nevertheless, in the summer of ’66 I was reclassified 1-A, the category of those immediately eligible for induction.  My draft board was in Olathe, Kansas, the site of a major military base.  While Viki and I were on vacation in St. Pierre et Miquelon, the draft board sent me a status questionnaire that did not reach me.  Because I did not respond to the questionnaire on time, the board treated me as delinquent and sent me a notice to report for a pre-induction physical exam in Kansas City.  By telegrams from St. Pierre I filed an appeal, and also notified the Board by letter of my work for Viet-Report and my pending federal criminal indictment for conspiracy to organize the second Cuba trip.  It was my hope that this sinister-sounding federal criminal case would mark me as undesirable.  The tireless Leonard Boudin submitted a letter in support.

This maneuver, an echo of my mother’s efforts in Nazi Germany to play one bureaucracy against another in favor of my father in 1939,  worked to an extent: on appeal, the draft board in Olathe put my status on hold until the federal criminal case in New York was resolved.  But when my divorce papers from Mexico arrived in early ’67, at about the same time as the Supreme Court decision dismissing the federal criminal case against me and my fellow defendants in the Cuba trip, all I had was the student deferment, and by this time students were being drafted.

At some time in early ’67, I received a notice for a pre-induction physical examination in Boston.  The air at that time was thick with tactics for trying to get disqualified on fitness grounds, and I tried several.  I made an appointment with the campus psychologist and tried to convince him I was mentally unfit.  He didn’t buy it.  The night before the physical, I drank a gallon of black coffee, which was supposed to mess up your heartbeat.  Rotten luck, my EKG was fine.  It was time for more creative measures.

On January 12, 1967, I sent a Conscientious Objector (C.O.) form to my draft board.  Its central feature was a set of full-page color photographs, glued to the form, taken from Ramparts magazine‘s famous expose that month, by James Colaianni, of the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam.  Similar pictures soon appeared more widely, chilling support for and firing up opposition to the war.

Vietnamese children running after U.S. forces napalmed their village

In response to the questions on the form, I wrote:

If there were a Supreme Being, could He allow children to be napalmed like in the pictures on this page?  I do believe in a Supreme Principle, namely that People’s Inhumanity toward Each Other has to be Stopped, and that the Duty of not becoming Tainted with this evil Massacre is superior to what any Nation commands me.  Nothing can justify what is being done to these children.

I was born in Germany in 1941 during the midst of the War.  As a small child I suffered the bombardment of cities.  I remember air raids and the Sky being red with fires and black with smoke and after the War I walked and played on ruins and rubble heaps and I was there when one day they dug out some corpses that had been buried there.  I was shell-shocked  when I was four years old, and until I was in High School I still had nightmares about bombs falling on me.  As a child in Germany, I had to see doctor to help me get over these dreams but it didn’t help much.  In the last two months it has been coming Back to me and seeing the pictures of the Children of Vietnam brought my dreams back, and I am seeing another doctor about it.  I am very suspicious of people who say that their Consciences prevent them from doing something, and so I don’t know whether my reaction to War is like the sort of Conscientious Objectors that don’t want to fight, even though they don’t know what War is like.  I know what it’s like.  These children are Me. I feel their suffering deeper than my conscience and I won’t have anything to do with anybody who has done that to them.  Whether this is a matter of Conscience or something Deeper not covered by Law you have to decide.

From the legal standpoint, this application for C.O. status was a guaranteed loser.  You had to profess belief in a Supreme Being, and my “Supreme Principle” — which sounded like a fancy-language version of the popular antiwar slogans,  ”Hell, no, we won’t go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ!  How many kids did you kill today?” — wasn’t going to cut it, especially because I also wrote that “My Beliefs and convictions are Moral, not religious.”  The official response came promptly, denying C.O. status.   But my liberal use of capital letters for emphasis, suggesting an unhinged 19th century zealot, may have left an impression.  It’s the little things that tip the scale sometimes.  Somehow my file got moved to the back of the drawer.

After my second year at Brandeis, I had pretty much picked the brains of the faculty clean of what interested me, and felt restless.  I counted a handful of good friends among my fellow graduate students.  Steve Rosenthal and his wife Mimi come to mind, as do Tonia Aminoff, Nancy Stoller, Judy Adler, Juan Corradi, Volker Meja, Chuck Nathanson, Roger Pritchard, Barrie Thorne, and Gaye Tuchman.  Steve recently retired as Professor of Sociology at Hampton University.  Tonia became a modern American painter.   Nancy became a feminist and health care activist and professor at U.C. Santa Cruz.  Judy  and Volker became Professors of Sociology at Memorial University in Newfoundland.  Juan became a Professor of Sociology at New York University.  Chuck became an education leader at U.S. San Diego and died in 2003.  Roger became a business adviser and activist.  Barrie is Professor of Sociology at U.C. Berkeley.  Gaye is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut.  And I also would probably have become a professor of sociology at some such place, but my life took a different turn.

Word came via the sociology grapevine at this time that Tom Bottomore, a senior Marxist sociologist from Britain, had been hired to head up a new department at a brand-new university near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  The timing was good.  I had enough credits for the M.A. from Brandeis, and had not yet started work on the Ph.D.  I was in a relationship with one of my fellow grad students, but this was more what today would be called a “friendship with privileges” rather than a long-term commitment, and when the time came for me to move, we handled it without major grief and remained friends.  I applied for and was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate at the new place, Simon Fraser University.  The position also offered subsistence employment as lecturer.

And, of course, the fact that it was in Canada was a factor in my mind.  I remembered that my father had delayed too long in getting out of Germany, and I did not want to make the same mistake.  And so, at the end of the school year in the spring of  ’67, I packed my belongings into and on top of another second-hand Volkswagen Beetle and took off for Vancouver B.C.  But I was careful to keep my draft board up to date.  In a letter of May 10, 1967, I gave them my new address, and added:

I should point out that my going to this university to do my PhD (having finished my MA at Brandeis) is motivated by the presence here at Simon Fraser of an internationally renowned authority in sociology … and has nothing to do with the university’s geographical location. I mention this to prevent misunderstanding.

Since I was then no longer enrolled in a college in the United States, my eligibility for the student deferment was gone, and as of January 1968, I was reclassified as 1-A, and remained 1-A when I returned to the States in 1969, and for the duration of the war.   I never burned my card.  I never dodged the draft.  But my number never came up.  I have to guess the good people at the Olathe draft board — and they always treated me with courtesy — figured out that I was just not a good fit.

(Continued in Simon Fraser)

1. ^[1] The Indochina war theater involved nearly three and a half million American troops, of whom about half were draftees.  War statistics website: 3,403,100 personnel in the Southeast Asian theatre, 1,728,344 draftees. ↩