Editors’ Introduction
2012; Michigan State University; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/jsr.2012.0008
ISSN1930-1197
Autores Tópico(s)Religion and Society Interactions
ResumoEditors’ Introduction S ince the dissolution of the Soviet Union, communism, as an ideology and organized political force, appears to have been on the wane internationally. Communist outposts exist, of course, at least nominally; but as an ideological force, communism almost seems to have vanished from the contemporary political scene, certainly in the United States, but also in the West more generally. Clearly, however, it was not always so, and in fact, when communism wanes in one form, it arguably comes back in another. Over this issue and the next, our authors will explore aspects of communism and post-communism, with an eye to radicalism in the Americas. We begin by exploring the development of a Latin American, Catholic/ Marxist hybrid in liberation theology, with Ryne Clos’s article on the role of Christianity in the Sandinista movement of the 1970s. Marxism is, of course, known for its dismissal of religion as an “opiate of the masses,” but as Clos shows, the history of late twentieth century Latin American radicalism was closely bound up with liberation theology and drew a significant number of Christian adherents. “In the Name of the God Who Will Be,” as a title, invokes the other-worldly, Christian, millenarianism that liberation theology and the Sandinista movement inherited and converted into a different, more materialistic, this-worldly, vision to be realized by violence. We then turn to two articles that explore the period when communism still seemed to represent a genuine political force in the United States. In vii the first of these, Jacob Zumoff explores the relationship between the American Communist Party and African American radicalism. On the one hand, he looks at the extent to which the American Communist Party leadership was at all interested in the African American community or figures; and on the other hand, to what extent African Americans participated in the Communist Party during its formative years of the 1920s. By exploring American Communism and the “Negro Question,” Zumoff demonstrates that, like the complex relationships between the Sandinistas and liberation theology and various kinds of committed Christians, so too, Communism had a complex set of interconnections with African Americans. Political radicalisms, on closer scrutiny, often turn out to be at least as much, and perhaps more, a product of the societies in which they exist than they are shapers of them. The third of our articles in this issue takes the theme explored by Zumoff more broadly—communism and the “Negro Question”—and focuses on a particular case, that of Marvel Cooke, a black radical and communist, as well as a well known journalist, with special attention to her activities in the 1930s and 1940s, but also surveying her entire career. In her article on Cooke, LaShawn Harris argues that Cooke, in her long life (she died at age 99 in 2000), represented a conduit between communism and other forms of later American political radicalism through the 1960s and after. In many respects, communism remained influential and even determinative for many forms of leftism, even if it was not necessarily visibly so. Also in this issue, we include Morgan Shipley’s conversation with the well-known countercultural figure of Wavy Gravy, the hippie clown whose personal history is so deeply intertwined with the major sociocultural events of the 1960s and 1970s. Wavy Gravy conveys the uniquely humorous brand of social radicalism for which he is justly famous, the peculiar combination of lightheartedness and seriousness that marks his presence from Woodstock to his various philanthropic projects today. Is he a radical in the sense that the Sandinistas and the American Communist Party were radical? In some respects, one would have to argue that he is not—and yet, perhaps there is also a case to be made that his disarming humor and kindness are more radical, precisely because he does not take himself quite so seriously. After all, Wavy Gravy did not viii Editors’ Introduction exhort people to violence; instead, he sought to deflect people from a course of violence. One has to wonder whether psychedelics were decisive in moving the counterculture that Wavy Gravy represented away from more strictly political and ideological forms of radicalism. Our book reviews in this issue...
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