I'm making slow progress down my exam list. Today i finally finished (after five years of trying) Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx, and read the intro and first chapter (thus far) of Levy's The New Left and Labor in the 1960s. The former seems at once extraordinarily prescient and strangely dated (perhaps because of its prescience,) while the latter seems overly simplistic thus far in its analysis of race and its reading of leftist political commitments, so i'm hoping it gets better later on. It's not so much that it's undertheorized - though after NDW's autonomist marxism-meets-media-theory most labor history reads that way - as that there's not enough of a critical inquiry into the stakes and assumptions implicit in the notion of a labor-new left alliance -- and the claim that the New Left was principally, or even entirely, a Student movement proscribes the scope and limits of such a discussion. Work by Arif Dirlik and Immanuel Wallerstein, and Georgy Katsiaficas, among others, might complicate this kind of limited or overly localized account. (And here i demonstrate my debt to Michael Denning's Socialism and Marxism in the 20th Century syllabus.) Lest i sound too critical, let me say that the archival work Levy does is fascinating, as are some of the connections he's able to make - Stokely Carmichael hanging out with the children of CPUSA bigwigs at Bronx Science and organizing with AFSME in DC as a Howard University student being, for me, the most intriguing.

I'm stepping out for a hot chocolate. Then it's back to the east balcony of the tenth floor of the panopticon, which seems to be the one place in Bobst that's dimly lit and sparsely populated enough for me to get work done.