RE: great texts of the 60s

Grover Furr (furrg@alpha.montclair.edu)
Sun, 25 Aug 1996 16:47:33 -0400

Books that were very influential on me and many others were those
dealing with American politics, and which helped us grope towards an
understanding of the Vietnam War and related imperialist
misadventures; the Cold War; and racism. These included:

Gabriel Kolko, _Who Rules America?_

Ferdinand Lundberg, _The Rich and the Super-Rich_ ("the only
best-seller never reviewed by the major magazines")

and all the works by G. William Domhoff, who showed that
mainstream social science methodology, when applied to studying
"wealth and power in America" (the title of one of his books), could
lead to conclusions strikingly like those of a Marxist class analysis.

If we do not confine ourselves to American writers (and why should
we?), we'll recall that Franz Fanon's works were very widely read. And
after the student-worker revolt in France in May '68, classic
Communist works became suddenly very relevant. I recall lots of
students at Princeton (where I was a grad student in Medieval
literature) reading:

Marx, _Value, Price and Profit_
Lenin, _Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism_ and _The
State and Revolution_
Mao Tse-Tung.

, all this in an effort to try to understand the cataclysmic
events we were all immersed in. In fact, within a few years many of
these books were _on course lists_ at Princeton -- maybe to inoculate
the students, but they were there!

Grover C. Furr

English Department | Phone: (201) 655-7305
Montclair State University | email:
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043 |

"When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I
asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist."
--Dom Helder Camara
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