CAPITALISM IS IN A MOVING CONTRADICTION in that it presses to reduce labor employed to a minimum and yet posits wage labor as the only way for 99 percent of people to make a living. People may recognize this as a simplified (or bastardized, if you like) version of a section of Marx’s contentious “Fragment on Machines.”
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WHEN IT COMES TO LYOTARD’S POSTMODERN THESIS about the end of grand narratives, from enlightenment to historicism, everybody knows he’s talking about Marx. Politically speaking, no other grand narrative survived the 19th century.
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THE AVANT-GARDE WAS A MODERN THING. It came in the middle of the nineteenth century, circa 1848, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as the proletariat multiplied and the democratic spirit became enamored of the absolutist state under the bewitching spell of the antagonism of capital and labor.
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On April 20, 2019, Spencer A. Leonard wrote to David Gilbert by the post, sending him written interview questions. Gilbert replied with his responses in a letter dated May 12, 2019. A former member of the Weather Underground, Gilbert is currently imprisoned at the Wende Correctional Facility for his role in a 1981 armored car robbery that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard. He has written two books: No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner (2004) and Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond (2011).
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The following is an edited transcript of a panel hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of Pennsylvania on March 21st, 2019. The panelists were Jon Bekken, editor of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, Warren Breckman, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and Erin Hagood, member of the Platypus Affiliated Society. The panel discussion was moderated by Austin Carder, member of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
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