Re: [Marxism] Kevin Coogan
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I like first piece though it had no real relation to try the corporate NY Times project. The Democratic Review is interesting enough and available online, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the history of political radicalism. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Kevin Coogan
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Looking now at the second article that Kevin sent me, which is a fascinating study of the Democratic Review, a magazine that supported slavery: In a country where in 1840 some 78% of all white males voted in the election – a statistic utterly unthinkable in Europe – Democratic Review’s embrace of political radicalism led it to champion the radical Loco-Focos wing of the Democratic Party with its populism, embrace of the annexation of both Texas and the Oregon Territories, opposition to any federal bank, the rejection of capital punishment, and active support (both covert and overt) for European revolutionaries. At the same time, Democratic Review embraced the expansion of slavery and published pseudo-ethnographical racist articles such as “Transactions of the American Ethnological Society” and “Origins and Characteristics of the American Aborigines.” He described the Democratic Review as an "obscure" magazine. I only wish I had been able to discuss my reading of the magazine under the editorial direction of poet William Cullen Bryant, who was an early supporter of the abolition of slavery. My interest in the magazine was focused on Bryant's attitude toward American Indians, which was contradictory as I pointed out here: https://louisproyect.org/2019/05/08/thomas-cole-william-cullen-bryant-and-the-american-indian/ Most people, including professors, by the time they reach 70 lose their intellectual drive. Kevin was burning bright up until a couple of weeks before he died. My blog is diminished by his passing. His comments were in a class by themselves. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Kevin Coogan
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I have begun work on an homage to this comrade who died recently. The last communications I got from him were about my CounterPunch article about Project 1619 that got into the divisions between the Victoria Woodhull and Friedrich Sorge wings of the First International. Drawing from Timothy Messer-Kruse, who told me that he has his own article for CounterPunch on this stuff in the works, I pointed out that Sorge's views on race were pretty awful. He told me that he had worked on a book about Karl Marx and racism that only remained a work in progress. He sent me 3 chapters that I will be posting as part of the memorial. This is the start of chapter one: GETTING PAST THE “N” WORD: MARX AND RACISM “The Jewish Nigger Lassalle, who fortunately departs at the end of this week, has luckily again lost 5,000 taler in a fraudulent speculation. The fellow would rather throw his money into the muck then lend it to a ‘friend,’ even if the interest and capital were guaranteed.” - Marx to Engels, 30 July 1862. “Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.” – Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Some years ago a friend commented on the problem of talking with a Christian fundamentalist. She noted that no matter what the initial subject of the conversation was, say the weather or traffic, sooner or later as the conversation evolved it was almost certain that the name “Jesus” was going to be mentioned with testimony about what how he was really a great guy. A similar fate all too often awaits readers of books written by devout Marxists. No matter what the ostensible subject under discussion with regard to Marx’s view of this or that, time and time again the reader will discover just how great Karl Marx really was. In fact it is virtually impossible to read any tome produced in (for example) either the former East Germany or the Soviet Union that came to any other conclusion. Needless to say, neither the Russians nor the East Germans failed to see any irony in the fact that any author who tried to argue otherwise would never see a word of his argument in print even as both states assured the readers that they embodied Marx’s democratic heritage unlike their capitalist scoundrel rivals in the West. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Kevin Coogan: A Bibliography | beyondthefringepolitics
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://beyondthefringepolitics.com/2020/03/08/kevin-coogan-a-bibliography/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Kevin Coogan has died
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Most of you probably don't know who he is but I got to know him as a regular and very smart commenter on my blog as Hylozoic Hedgehog. It turns out that he had adopted that name after beginning to post attacks on Larouche's movement so as to protect himself against retaliation. He showed up after I began writing a series of posts on Larouche myself. He is the author of a book titled "Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey & The Postwar Fascist" that is obviously related to his interest in the American ultraright. The last I heard from him was on February 14th. After I had written something about Victoria Woodhull versus Friedrich Sorge for CounterPunch, he told me about a project he had abandoned years ago. This will give you an idea of how consumed he could become in his research: Hi Louis, Some years ago, I began a huge project on Marx and the 19th century. Although my main interest was in the "Great Game" involving England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire (Marx was a Turkophile), I did get diverted into the Marx/race issue. One reason is that one centerpiece of my study was Marx's totally obscure book Herr Vogt. Karl Vogt was a leading scientific racist as well as an 1848 revolutionary. In a way, this project ironically mimicked Capital, which Marx basically gave up after Volume One. I gave up for a lot of reasons, including my belief that I was writing for a Left that no longer existed. The deeper I got, the more I felt this stuff was simply too esoteric for a movement whose intellectual depth was like an inch deep. It just became too big and too depressing. In any case, here are three draft sections from the book. The first is on Marx and the South and the debates over slavery. I think Marx is awful, but he does evolve a bit from the nadir which is in the 1840s-1850s. But he is terrible. I also began research into Engels and I spent a bit of time in Manchester. I was trying to find out more about his firm Ermen and Engels. They were a cotton textile firm and Engels was supported in a way by black slave labor as the firm got its cotton from the South. At one point, Engels was even supposed to visit New Orleans. The second section is on the 1848 radicals and how some of them backed the South. It goes to my investigation of Karl Vogt, a key ideologue of scientific racism and a mentor of Agassiz if I can even remember what I wrote. IN my book, I write as a historian and not a cheerleader. Nor did I find much to cheer about. I entered the project inspired by Hal Draper. At the end, I was amazed at how Draper could write five books and Marx comes out as the hero every time. It felt preposterous. Section three is on a weird French racial writer who believed geography is destiny that Marx liked and Engels rightly thought was crazy. Anyway, it's been over a decade since I abandoned the project as it had grown so massive that it was crushing me for no real purpose that I could see except bringing me down while further isolating me. But I'm sending you these excerpts. If nothing else, I have a lot of great sources in the footnotes. Again, I have not looked at all this for over a decade. I have no idea if I can defend everything I wrote and I'm also sending you first drafts. Don't read it as an argument; just read it for background. Frankly, when I was copying sections of it, I could not even remember writing some of them. But I can see from your interest in this topic that there may be leads or suggestions that you might find worthwhile. Cheers, Kevin _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
