FINALLY GOT THE NEWS - BRAD DUNCAN

Another impulse find at the library and something closer to an archive or photo-book than the other stuff I’ve gotten to recently. This book is built to showcase a remarkable collection of 70’s leftist propaganda that Duncan has acquired. The material is broken into “themes” (such as anti-prison work, or feminist movements, general anarchism etc.) each theme given a chapter and each chapter is given an intro paragraph, some written by people I know (like Silvia Federici) but mostly by people I most certainly don’t. Many of these essays lay bare and break down the almost endless variety and subcategories of leftist groups. For example, the book includes a glossary that serves as a “brief list of some of the organizations mentioned” features the BLA, the ALD, the APP, ASPS, the BWC, the CAP, the AAPRP all of the first two pages, all of which “only” cover Black Power/Black Separatist issues. Each movement features so many groups and proliferations, all of which have their own (sometimes profoundly different, but more often than not, largely simpatico) ideologies which, due to the narcissism of small differences, often prevents these groups from being effective together. Plus there are more insidious examples of this, like stories about Marxist groups supporting the opponents of bussing in Boston based on a “class-first” reading of the situation. Regardless, the material is uniformly excellent, both historically and as pieces of design. Often times the flyers and pamphlets are very catchy and really well laid out. I’d single out the Queer Liberation stuff as well as the Anti-Colonial stuff and all the work related to Chicano Power to being really exciting to look at. You can see DIY punk-show and Soviet propaganda in equal measure. Likewise issues like the creation of “New Afrika” (a proposed Black-majority independent nation, sometimes called the New State of Kush, made up of the American Southeast) or the story of Susan Saxe (a White, lesbian, radical who hid out in various lesbian communes after being involved in a bank robbery/murder) are fascinating to think about. It seems that in my lifetime most American political radicalism and political violence has been decidedly right-wing (from Oklahoma City to the killings of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky John Best to various abortion doctors’ murders) but perhaps it’s a blacklash from this era. Or, more likely, the American, mainstream Right-wing supports its radicals and revolutionaries more than the Left. 77 burning cop cars.