the 150th anniversary of the communist manifesto at cooper union
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The 150th anniversary of the communist manifesto atcooper unionEric CanepaPublished online: 13 Dec 2007.
To cite this article: Eric Canepa (1998) The 150th anniversary of the communist manifesto at cooper union, Socialism andDemocracy, 12:1, 231-232, DOI: 10.1080/08854309808428223
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854309808428223
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The 150th Anniversary of theCommunist Manifesto
at Cooper Union
On Friday, October 30, in the Great Hall of Cooper Union,where, in 1883, five days after Marx's death the largest memorialheld that year anywhere in the world took place, "900 people ...packed the Cooper Union ... to celebrate the 150th anniversary ofThe Communist Manifesto," in the words of the New York Times(November 1).
The event, produced by the Brecht Forum/New York MarxistSchool,* echoed the 1883 memorial not just in the number of peopleattending (1,000 on Friday, 1,500 total for the two days), but also inthe breadth of the participation, which included many who rarely, ifever, attend socialist or Marxist events. Even the New York Times,in an unusually long and positive report, did not attempt to portraythe audience only as elderly cadre, but spoke of "fervent unionorganizers, students, academics" along with "graying socialists." Inpondering the causes for the event's success, the Times wonderedwhether it was not in part due to
the poverty of political discourse these days or the habit of judging a society'swell-being largely by the coughs and sneezes of its stock market On the other hand,the explanation may lie in something else entirely, something so lyrical that it couldstill rouse hundreds of people late on a Friday night to spring to attention and lustilysing out by heart "Arise, you prisoners of starvation/' the marching song of therevolutionary proletariat.
The recent occasional openness to Marxism shown by themainstream press in the last year is thus still evident.
One of the goals of the Brecht Forum was to mobilize New Yorkcultural sectors beyond those usually thought of as belonging to leftprotest culture. Thus the event opened with a Caribbean percussionensemble accompanying actors reading a poem of Carlos Bulosan;this was followed by readings of poetry and theater, Klezmer musicplayed by Hot Pstromi, led by Yale Strom, and then a surprisingly
* Executive Director. Liz Mestres; Associate Director Sam Anderson;Coordinator of Manifesto Commemoration: Eric Canepa.
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gripping and witty reading of the greater part of the Manifestoitself. The readers were the playwrights Tony Kushner and WallaceShawn, the actresses and writers Vinie Burrows and Serena Berne,the poets Dennis Brutus, Sandra Maria Esteves and Louis ReyesRivera, and the scholar and preacher Michael Eric Dyson. Theevening concluded with the singing of the Internationale.
The many interesting panel discussions of Saturday, October 31,culminated in a performance by Wallace Shawn and DarenFirestone of a scene from Brecht's Life of Galileo along with a finalpanel discussion. The event's organizers wanted to stress that theworking-class politics of Marxism are based on the deeper goal ofMarxian socialism: the creation of the many-sided human beingwhose potential realization is blocked by the fragmentation ofpersonality inherent in capitalist society. For this reason the finalpanel took the unusual form of a round-table dialogue betweentheologians, natural and social scientists, journalists and activists.The participants were Cornel West, Stephen Jay Gould, BarbaraFields, Richard Levins, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Daniel Singer andMaria Helena Moreira Alves.
The Brecht Forum will make videos of the event available in thenext months. Please contact the Brecht Forum, 122 West 27 Street,10th floor, New York, NY 10001-6281, (212) 242-4201, <[email protected]>, •cwww.brechtforum.org>.
Eric Canepa
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