A Precious Residue: Poems that ponder efforts to spark a working class socialism in the 1970s and after

Author(s): Sam Friedman
Release Date: Oct 13, 2022
Publisher: International Marxist-Humanist Organization

  1. Preface: How this booklet came to be
  2. Introduction: Youthful fuck-ups
       a. Youthful fuck-ups of the 1970s
  3. Learning the ABCs of working class struggles
       a. Penance
       b. Whose rules?
       c. Field Work
       d. Laws make liars of us all
       e. becoming other
       f. When I was 32
       g. Trembles, 1973
  4. Organizing a New Jersey Branch of the International Socialists
       a. Elizabeth, NJ—or Standing Fast
       b. Was I a recruiter for Don Quixote
       c. “Fucked”—It makes you bitter
       d. UPSurge
       e. Fish story: A tale of “Tasks and Perspectives
  5. Poetic reconstructions of interviews with radical worker activists
       a. Kicking capitalist ass
       b. Dis Belief
       c. We came to feel diminished
       d. The soul of soulless conditions
       e. Kindness, 1984
       f. I ache to know
  6. What the radical workers thought of “us”
       a. Getting physical
       b. Coming home
       c. A worker’s voice
  7. Ebb tide in the class struggle, 1983 – 2011 56
       a. Ebb tide in the class struggle
       b. Martin’sDay 1995
       c. Martin’sDay 1996—Hope amidst the Rue
       d. Workers with cups in their hands, 1997
       e. They have stolen our words
       f. Of time and emergence
       g. Only the crazies make the news
       h. Silence
  8. Looking Forward: What futures? What hopes?
       a. BLM
       b. Nightmare of the common ruin
       c. Growing old in a world of sneers
       d. Coercion
       e. Eruption
       f. Socialists of the ‘70s
  9. Aftertoughts
       a. Timeline
       b. Notes on Friedman’s other writings
       c. Excerpts from a letter by leaders of Teamsters for a Democratic Union