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“[N]ext to the Communist Manifesto, the whole body of capitalist apologetics, from Adam Ferguson to Milton Friedman, is remarkably pale and empty of life. The celebrants of capitalism tell us surprisingly little of its infinite horizons, its revolutionary energy and audacity, its dynamic creativity, its adventurousness and romance, its capacity to make men not merely more comfortable but more alive.” — Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air
“Foreign observers were amazed at what seemed to them the incredible size of the English national debt. They echoed British criticisms, poked fun at processes they did not understand or, more often, saw this as a signal weakness, an unthinking and facile policy which would take the country to disaster… . And yet all these rational observers were wrong. The national debt was the major reason for the British victory.” — Fernand Braudel, on the English national debt.
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“What interested Chandler was the here and now of the daily experience of the now historical Los Angeles: the stucco dwellings, cracked sidewalks, tarnished sunlight, and roadsters in which the curiously isolated yet typical specimens of an unimaginable Southern California social flora and fauna ride in the monadic half-light of their dashboards. Chandler’s problem was that his readers - ourselves - desperately needed not to see that reality…The excitement of the mystery-plot is, then, a blind, fixing our attention on the ostensible but in reality quite trivial puzzles and suspense in such a way that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally, with its intensity undiminished.” — Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
When I finished the book, I sent it from prison to several publishers, but none of them took it on. It was thanks to Rafael Galvan, the former leader of the electricians’ union and a sympathizer of Trotsky’s, that it got published. Galvan, a Cardenista who later became a PRI senator, rang El Caballito publishers and urged them to do it. The book came out in 1971 and went through four editions in the space of a few months. I was released in 1972.
- From an interview with Adolfo Gilly, found in a New Left Review back issue. He wrote The Mexican Revolution while a political prisoner in Mexico.
Makes me think of Fernand Braudel writing The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German POW camp—and somewhat less heroically, the fictional Mikael Blomqvist writing his expose during a self-scheduled prison term for libel.
It’s Kamehameha Day.
Circulation, 1857: New York, Rochester, Buffalo, Whitehall.