To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Bay Area Reds
PAUL BUHLE recommends a thorough and necessary history of communist organisation and the difficulties it faced in California
(L) Manzanar Relocation Center, California, May 29 1942. A group of Block Leaders who are drawing up the Constitution for this War Relocation Authority center - front row (L to R) Karl Yoneda [communist], H. Inouye; back row, (L to R) Bill Kito, Ted Akahoshi, Tom Yamazaki, and Harry Nakamura; (R) Dorothy Healey, chair of the CPUSA in Southern California, standing before jail cell in Los Angeles, California, June 29 1949
[Francis Stewart/War Relocation Authority/Public domain; Los Angeles Daily News/Los Angeles Times photographic archive UCLA Library/Public domain]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958
Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press £22.05
THE story of the US left has been pretty much ups and downs, something hardly surprising in world capitalism’s leading nation with a working class historically divided by race and ethnicity.
Among the most startling cases is surely the California Story.
The California Socialist Party of pre-1920 days elected mayors, guided at least some craft unions, had quite a following among displaced Yankees and a scattering of ethnic groups. The rough conditions of what would one day become known as the Left Coast meanwhile prompted IWW-like, semi-anarchist labour activism.
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PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention
The daughter of a legendary blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter has spoken out against the reactionary move, says MIKE SCHNEIDER
Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY
PAUL BUHLE agrees that a grassroots movements for change in needed in the US, independent of electoral politics