[Marxism] Franklin Rosemont

[Shacht at aol.com]

Missed the notice of death of Franklin Rosemont while I was off line due to 
 an abundance mail. What comes to my attention on reading the note from 
Fidler is  his comments mentioning Lamantia and Kaufman. There was nothing 
quite so  unnerving as standing in a bookstore and hearing a voice in your ear 
muttering  something like: "Have you heard that Wohlforth has been expelled 
from the  Workers League..." turning around and finding Lamantia standing 
just a little  lower, hat drawn down, face obscured. In those days, there were 
1 Cochranite, 1  Johnsonite (formerly of the CP, then SWP then SUA), one 
Marxist Humanist and Jac  Wasserman (who owned the place, "PM 
Bookstore),ed-SWP, ex-ISL. To hear such a  comment out of the blue from an uyndetectable 
voice in the ether...We were such  a few, such elect, with the secrets of 
knowledge far beyond the academic and  bourgeois. That's a world long gone.
 
Another part of it though was Bob Kaufman. He wasn't exactly "discovered"  
in a 3rd Street Hotel. He had been a member of the communist party - 
weaterfront  branch, I believe - one of the most brilliant Marxists in it from what 
I am  told. He was expelled during the fifties, disappeared, drifted, 
washed up on  "the Beach" as they called it in those days. The telling I relate 
here came from  Jim Kiernan, longtime activist in the Marine Cooks and 
Stewards in the thirties  and forties. He was expelled from CP around '48 and from 
the SWP in '53 with  Cochran. He had been Revels Cayton's second-in-command 
of the party fraction in  the MCS.
 
The worst part of the story was that it was Kiernan who had been Kaufman's  
accuser at his expulsion. This footnote, having come from a surrealist  "on 
 the Beach" may not be trustworthy. It was a matter I never asked Kiernan 
about  before his death. George Olshausen, another old Cochranite "on the 
Beach" (and  on the Editorial Board of American Socialist) had been Lamantia's 
lawyer.  Alcohol weas the bane of all of us.






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