Marxist Education Following the Closing of the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School

We are writing to you as original founders of the first School for Marxist Education (1975) and members of the regrouped collective that organized the New York Marxist School (NYMS-1979), which was later subsumed into the Brecht Forum. All of us have remained supporters of the NYMS since the Brecht Forum and its board of directors were formed in the late 1980s, and some of us, in varying degrees, continued throughout to organize NYMS classes and events, as volunteers, teachers, Board members or staff.

Like many of you in New York City and around the world, we were shocked and saddened by the abrupt closure of a left institution that had survived, even flourished, for 39 years. Our response, after absorbing the initial shock of the dissolution, was to get in touch with each other to discuss the situation and what we might do.

First of all, we feel that the loss of a Marxist educational project in the country that remains both the most politically backward and the most powerful imperialist hegemon is a defeat for the Left – not only in New York, but nationally and globally. We are concerned that, now more than ever, our Left needs spaces for study and reflection upon our manifold political practice, and dialogue about the important issues, struggles and movements of the day.

We are aware from the many responses to the closing that this need is strongly felt and we see that there are efforts to constitute educational activities, some of which share aspects of the work carried out by the Brecht Forum/NYMS. These are taking place in a variety of forms and environments. We are committed to supporting and providing whatever help we can to those who want to continue organizing classes and forums, and to those who are younger and more representative of the many nationalities and colors of New York City than we are, who might want to take up a more comprehensive Marxist educational project for today.

We, the signers of this letter, do not embody the generational breadth and diversity, nor do we have the energy or resources, to re-constitute a project like the Brecht Forum/NYMS. This would require the formation of an accountable leadership body, and an adequate administrative and financial infrastructure. In addition, the objective conditions are dramatically different from the mid-70s when the New York Marxist School was founded. The re-shaping of New York as a global luxury city has raised real estate prices to a level that makes it extremely difficult to maintain a space that is accessible citywide and doesn’t either charge its users a lot of money, have an endowment or own the building. The falling real wages for the working class and frequent need for workers to work more hours or several jobs has made it harder for people to sustain alternative institutions on a volunteer basis. The rising cost of living makes it harder for people to work for “movement wages” over the long-term. This is all intertwined with the need to find appropriate organizational forms for this kind of work. Can we find forms that allow for more dynamic and less restrictive internal structures than the tax-exempt 501(c)(3)? Addressing these problems will require creative initiatives from a new generation of activists that we expect will emerge in many ways.

So what can we do? We have identified a few areas:

• Support in a limited way and at least for the immediate future the efforts to continue classes and programming at the Commons (the last home of the Brecht Forum/NYMS) that some of us have been involved in. This is now taking place under the auspices of the Marxist Education Project (see following section) in collaboration with new and former BF teachers and activists. The email address is marxedproject@gmail.com. Plans to set-up a MEP website are in the works.
• Maintain the Brecht Forum website as an archive where people can listen to or view some of the lectures, forums and classes held over the past 39 years—including many that still need to be digitalized and posted. We think that this could be a rich resource for movement history. We would try to include internal documents on the initial political objectives, educational principles and orientation, and the formulation of its educational themes. These themes were developed each term through collective discussion with a broad array of progressive activists in which we assessed our changing circumstances, or what we called “the nature of the period.” These materials, such as the regular History and Perspective articles in the school’s course catalogues, could be useful to others thinking about how to create Marxist educational spaces. For information about the archive contact archive@brechtforum.org.
• Perhaps our best contribution, as a historically forged yet informal grouping, could be to review and share in writing the political thinking behind the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School. What ingredients made it a stimulating and nurturing environment for progressive activists from many backgrounds and perspectives for almost four decades? We’d like to share our take on that and invite your creative thinking about how the school’s mission might continue in forms appropriate to today’s conditions. Additionally, some of us are writing more detailed assessments of the project, its history, achievements and shortfalls and the general significance of Marxist education for forging an effective Left in the U.S. context, one that can truly advance a movement towards socialism. If these ideas and the work of the BF inspire others to initiate such projects for this era, we'll be there to help and support.

The Marxist Education Project

After the Brecht Forum closed, a few of us, along with other teachers and activists from the former BF, continued offering classes and forums in space rented from the Brooklyn Commons through the contributions of students. These efforts are now informally organized under the rubric of the Marxist Education Project. This work has enabled the continuation of study groups that have been ongoing (some for several years), the initiation of a few new classes and the maintenance of some important elements from the work of the NYMS/Brecht Forum. We are heartened by the response and interest to these programming efforts and perhaps the MEP will be able to cohere and gain support from younger activists who want to advance non-sectarian Marxist education for today. This is to be seen.

The Project's Fall 2014 offerings, for example, include key elements of the original New York Marxist School’s core curriculum, such as the presentation of historical materialism contained in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Marx, and its complement, the study of science and method through analysis of diverse phenomena. There will be a new Capital class along with three classes on science and method, one on Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, another on Hegel’s Science of Logic, and the third on the science and politics of our ecological crisis. There will also be classes relating to a third premise of the NYMS core curriculum: lessons of revolutionary struggles. Studying and assessing critically their accomplishments, mistakes and shortfalls can, we believe, help us think more deeply how to develop program, strategy, tactics and organizational forms for today. Another class will study works by Frantz Fanon, key theorist of the anti-colonial struggle and the crucial role of the peoples of the periphery in revolution. This class will be complemented by two critical studies of earlier revolutionary movements that influenced politics on a global scale: one within the center of capitalist development at its time, France, and the other within the periphery, Russia.

Another cornerstone of the NYMS’ core curriculum related to our tasks as socialists within the U.S. We stated in 1975 and reaffirmed in 1979 that our “principal international responsibility” is “in clarifying and unifying the struggle against our own capitalist class – the imperial colossus, which is losing ground throughout the world but remains a raging beast of destruction.” (From Statement of Principles) We put forward that a primary theoretical task for U.S. Marxists was “to grasp the underlying dynamics of the development of capitalism in the U.S. and the formation of our own working class, in order to address the burning question: Why does the U.S. working class have no mass independent political organization?” Currently, the Precarity Taskforce, which was active in the former Brecht Forum, has organized a reading group on Precarious Labor/Precarious Lives and is planning other classes and forums that address these issues and the changes taking place in the labor process, the circulation of capital globally and its effect at home, and the circumstances confronting organized and unorganized labor in the US today.

What Was Behind a Four-Decade Run?

Of all the educational projects that originated in the 70s U.S. left, the NY Marxist School/Brecht Forum arguably has had the greatest longevity and a significant influence worldwide. Many theoretical traditions enrich our struggles and strategies and our sense of the society we’re fighting for, and were reflected in the school’s offerings. But the school put Marxism—in the most undogmatic sense of the word—as the place to start. We called ourselves Marxists and taught and advocated a method of analysis that we consider crucial to conscious, emancipatory action—while being clear that no one had to buy into this to come to the school. In this context, we developed a core curriculum—described above—that was a key to the school’s success. A second key was the spirit of inquiry and the premise that “nobody has all the answers.”

Initially, the founders did not know if this project would find resonance within the Left. But from the more sectarian 1970s through today, the school’s classes relating to the core curriculum were the best attended and most requested—partly because they were hard to find at other alternative educational spaces or within existing parties and tendencies. Similarly, not just independent leftists have valued the school’s independent and anti-dogmatic spirit. Many members of cadre formations have told us that they value spaces where they can dialogue and be challenged by others to think outside the box of their own organizations’ formulations and lines.

A third key to the school’s longevity was its focus on the issues, struggles and movements of the day, using Marxist theory and conscious summation to move beyond just reacting. The school’s main conceptualizer, the late Arthur Felberbaum, reminded us “the tasks of seeking the truth and changing the world go hand in hand.” The school’s programs brought together activists from diverse arenas and scholars to overcome the bourgeois dichotomy of theory and practice, analyze the common root causes of our many oppressions, pinpoint the system’s vulnerabilities, figure out how to overcome the errors and weaknesses of past movements and organizations, and explore how diverse oppositional impulses might cohere to challenge capitalist rule. This commitment to concrete analysis of our concrete situation, identifying key questions and putting them on the left’s agenda, and facilitating principled dialogue, lesson-sharing and engagement of disagreements within the progressive movement was central to our mission.

And the fourth key to success was the centrality of culture in the school. Art exhibits, music, dance, comedy and theatrical performances and workshops like Theater of the Oppressed, often provided first experiences of the space to newcomers. Culture helped us to voice our outrage, mock the rich and powerful and ourselves, celebrate our struggles and victories, make analysis accessible and give form to our dreams and aspirations for liberation. Culture was not an after-thought but integral.

Legacy and Beyond

In his June Monthly Review article on “Popular Movements toward Socialism,” Samir Amin articulated the same premise on which the school was based:

“...a rigorous scientific critical analysis of capitalism taking into account all aspects of its historical reality. This had not been the case with previous socialist formulations or later ones that disregarded Marx. The formulation of capitalism’s law of value; the specification of the long-run tendencies of capital accumulation and their contradictions; the analysis of the relationship between class struggle and international conflicts and likewise of the transformation in methods for managing accumulation and governance; and analysis of the alienated forms of social consciousness—these together define the thought of Marx that initiated the unfolding of historic Marxisms...”

As 2014 has brought the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School to a close, it has not brought to a close such ideas nor the need to address the questions of the era, though many need to be reformulated and new organizational forms appropriate to current conditions need to be found. We look to all generations in all our diverse colors and cultural, ethnic, religious and national expressions, gender identifications, sexual orientations and commitments to particular issues and struggles to advance the movement towards human emancipation—and we’ll stick around for the many struggles ahead.

Two, three many Marxist schools!

Mary Boger
Eric Canepa
Bill Henning
Lisa Maya Knauer
Michael Lardner
Liz Mestres
Juliet Ucelli

September 17, 2014