User:Paul Joseph Le Blanc

Paul Le Blanc
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Paul Joseph Le Blanc (born 1947) is Professor of History at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), and has written and edited more than 20 books, mostly dealing with the labor and socialist movements, in which he has been active.

Among his better known works are A Freedom Budget for All Americans (co-authored with Michael Yates, 2013), A Short History of the U.S. Working Class (1999), and Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (1990). The latter title, plus his selection of Lenin’s writings – Revolution, Democracy, Socialism (2009), and the essays gathered in Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine (2014) – place him among a group of scholars articulating a critical-minded but positive interpretation of the role of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in history.[1]  In October 2012 he delivered the keynote address to the international Lenin conference, Wuhan University on new trends in scholarship on Lenin, and on the centrality of revolutionary democracy in his political thought.

Le Blanc's book Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (2006), bringing together views from diverse traditions (anarchist, Christian, conservative, “new left,” and socialist), examines both critically and positively the impact of modern Communism.[2] He has also produced a highly-acclaimed collection of writings, Work and Struggle: Voices From U.S. Labor Radicalism (2011), presenting fourteen prominent figures associated with revolutionary currents within U.S. labor – including Tom Paine, Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones), Eugene V. Debs, A. Philip Randolph, and others. His contribution "The Third American Revolution" to the best-selling collection Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, edited by Frances Goldin, Michael Smith and Debby Smith (2014) was singled out by Kirkus Reviews as "persuasive . . . cogent, well-informed."

Le Blanc has also been involved in helping to popularize and promote the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, editing Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings (1999) and, with Helen C. Scott, Socialism or Barbarism: Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (2011) – and he has spoken around the world (including in South Africa and China) about her ideas. He is currently a member of the editorial board of a project, associated with Verso books, to produce an English-language edition of Luxemburg’s complete works. He has also given attention to the theories, writings and the historical role of Leon Trotsky.[3]

Academic Background and Contributions

From 1965 to 1989, off and on, Le Blanc studied at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on History and receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1971, a Master of Arts degree in 1980, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1989. He has engaged in a number of occupations (agricultural worker, dishwasher, shipyard worker, autoworker, health care worker, social service worker, etc.) but since 1989 he has worked as a college and university teacher. His teaching has primarily been at Slippery Rock University and Carlow College (now Carlow University) and, since 2000, at La Roche College. At La Roche he served as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2009, and he currently is a Professor of History there.[4]

While a Dean at La Roche College, Le Blanc initiated an annual Global Problems, Global Solutions conference, carried out by a partnership of educational institutions, drawing a number of prominent speakers and hundreds of participants to its gatherings. In part because of these efforts, La Roche College was awarded in 2010 the prestigious Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for outstanding initiatives in internationalization.[5] The Global Problems, Global Solutions gatherings served as a model for the 2009 Pittsburgh People’s Summit, an effort Le Blanc also coordinated. This event drew 700 participants to critically discuss issues relating to the G 20 summit which met in Pittsburgh that year, and it was hailed by a resolution of the Pittsburgh City Council for “outstanding efforts … certain to create a greater understanding about the challenges we face, the solutions we should explore and the social dialogue that is necessary for the realization of a better world.”[6] Le Blanc has also been active in the field of labor education, and was a consultant for the award-winning Allegheny County Labor Council website, for which he wrote a number of articles on Pittsburgh labor history.[7]

Le Blanc has spoken at educational conferences and forums in a number of countries on six continents.

Editorial Work

Many of Le Blanc’s books are edited volumes of writings by others, and from 1990 to 2005 he served as Series Editor of Revolutionary Studies, through which 25 volumes were published by Humanities Press (Atlantic Highlands, NJ) and Humanity Books (Amherst, NY). From 1992 to 1994 he was managing editor of an independent monthly journal, Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (which had originated as the publication of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency before its 1992 dissolution). More recently, he has served on the editorial board of WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, a multidisciplinary journal that examines labor and social movements. He was the primary associate editor of the eight-volume, 4280 page International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, edited byImmanuel Ness. With Peter Hudis and others, he serves on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (see above). Le Blanc is also a co-editor of a new series associated with Pluto Press, entitled "Revolutionary Lives".

Political Activism

Between 1965 and 1969, Le Blanc was a member of the “new left” formation, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and for a short period of time worked in the national office of that organization.[8] A conscientious objector, when drafted in 1966 he worked for the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee, doing youth work, draft counseling, and peace education in its Pittsburgh and Baltimore offices. He served on the board of the Pittsburgh Peace and Freedom Center in the early 1970s, on the coordinating committee of the National Peace Action Coalition between 1971 and 1974, and on the board and on various committees of Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center beginning in the 1990s.[9] The socialist movement has been a major focus of his political activism. He has been a member of a number of groups, including the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, Solidarity, and the International Socialist Organization.[10]

Issues absorbing his energies from the 1960s through the 1980s included opposition to the Vietnam war, anti-racist activity – most prominently as part of the Pittsburgh Black Construction Coalition of 1969 (when he was arrested with hundreds of other peaceful demonstrators)[11] – as well as feminist activities, defense of Latin American political prisoners, and Central America solidarity work. In 1987, he attended the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam, which is associated with the Fourth International. In the 1990s he was active in ill-fated efforts to create a Labor Party, and has been a supporter of the Green Party. His opposition to war and militarism extended to consistent opposition to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also collaborated closely with South African poet and global justice activist Dennis Brutus in building Pittsburgh participation in gatherings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2003 and Mumbai, India in 2004.[12]

Since 2009, he has been especially active as a member of Pittsburghers for Public Transit, in efforts to help defend, extend and democratize the public mass transit system in the Pittsburgh area.

Personal Information

Born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania and living from the ages of 3 to 18 in Clearfield, Pennsylvania (where his parents, Gaston Le Blanc and Shirley Harris Le Blanc, were central figures in the labor movement), Le Blanc has lived in several cities (Chicago, IL; Baltimore, MD; Albany, NY; New York City; Amsterdam in the Netherlands), but spent most of his life in Pittsburgh. He has two sisters (Patricia and Nora), two sons from different marriages (Gabriel Le Blanc and Jonah McAllister-Erickson), and two grandchildren (Sophia Le Blanc and Zachery Le Blanc).

As a labor historian, Le Blanc was influenced by and personally associated with David Montgomery, Philip S. Foner, and Frank Lovell. As an historian of Marxism, he was influenced by and personally associated with Richard N. Hunt, Paul Sweezy, George Breitman, Ernest Mandel, and Michael Löwy.

[edit] Works

Le Blanc’s writings have appeared in a number of publications, including: Against the Current; American Communist History; Colliers Encyclopedia; Critique; Encarta On-Line Encyclopedia; Europe Solidaire sans Frontieres (Europe: Solidarity Without Borders); The Historian; Historical Materialism; International Socialist Review; International Viewpoint; Journal of History; Labor Standard; Labour/Le Travail; Left History; Links; Michigan Quarterly Review; Monthly Review; New Politics; Revolutionary History; Russian Review; Science and Society; and Socialist Studies/Études socialistes. His books include the following:

•	"American Exceptionalists": The Rise and Decline of the Lovestone Group, 1929-1940, edited with Tim Davenport (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015 forthcoming)

•	Trotsky (London: Reaktion Books, 2015 forthcoming)

•	Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party, second edition, with Dianne Feeley and Tom Twiss (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014)

•	Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014)

•	A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today, with Michael D. Yates (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013)

•	Leon Trotsky: Writings From Exile, co-edited with an introduction with Kunal Chattopadhyay (London: Pluto Press, 2012)

•	Work and Struggle: Voices from U.S. Labor Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 2011)

•	Socialism or Barbarism: Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, co-edited with an introduction with Helen C. Scott (London: Pluto Press, 2011)

•	Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of V.I. Lenin, edited with an introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2009)

•	The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 8 volumes, edited with Immanuel Ness and others (Boston/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

•	Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York/London: Routledge, 2006)

•	Black Liberation and the American Dream: The Struggle for Racial Justice and Economic Justice – Analysis, Strategy, Readings (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003)

•	Revolutionary Labor Socialist: The Life, Ideas and Comrades of Frank Lovell, edited with Thomas Barrett (Union City, NJ: Smyrna Press, 2000)

•	U.S. Labor in the Twentieth Century: Fragmentation and Insurgency, edited with an introduction with John Hinshaw (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000).

•	The Working-Class in America (by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling), edited with an introduction (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000).

•	 Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings, edited with an introduction (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).

•	A Short History of the U.S. Working Class (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).

•	From Marx to Gramsci: A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996).

•	Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, with George Breitman and Alan Wald (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996)

•	C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, ed. with Scott McLemee (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993)

•	In Defense of American Trotskyism: Revolutionary Principles and Working-Class Democracy, edited work (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1992)

•	In Defense of American Trotskyism: Rebuilding the Revolutionary Party, edited work (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1990)

•	Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, with an introduction by Ernest Mandel (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990; expanded paperback edition 1993)

•	Permanent Revolution in Nicaragua (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1984)

•	Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party, with Dianne Feeley and Tom Twiss (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1984)

•	In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity, with Dianne Feeley (San Francisco: Socialist Action, 1984)

[edit] References

1. On this phenomenon, see: Sebastien Budgen, Strathis Kouvelakis, Slavoj Zizek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin’s Return,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, September 2007, vol. 10, issue 3, 273-285; and http://www.isreview.org/issues/59/feat-lenin.shtml

2. See substantial interview with Michael Yates http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/yates280806.html

3. On the Luxemburg Complete Works project, see: http://www.versobooks.com/series_collections/20-the-complete-works-of-rosa-luxemburg and http://www.versobooks.com/events/105-the-life,-letters-and-legacy-of-rosa-luxemburg; on Trotsky, see Paul Le Blanc, "The Second Assassination of Trotsky," Links (2010) http://links.org.au/node/1440, and Paul Le Blanc, "Trotsky -- Truth and Fiction," International Socialist Review 75, January-February 2011 http://www.isreview.org/issues/75/featrev-trotskybooks.shtml.

4. See: http://www.laroche.edu/faculty/leblanc.htm and http://www.laroche.edu/pr/release-print.asp?NewsID=229

5. See: http://www.laroche.edu/global/pdfs/GPGS%20Backgrnd%20Info%20Flyer.pdf and http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10068/1041404-100.stm

6. See: BBC report Pittsburgh G-20 meeting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBDxGaSZytE, website of People’s Summit http://www.peoplessummit.com/, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette video on People’s Summit reproduced on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI0cKrwWwT4

7. See Allegheny County Labor Council website: http://pa.aflcio.org/alleghenyco/

8. For a memoir on earlier years including SDS, see http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/1478 and http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1613. Le Blanc receives brief mention in Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973) as well as Harvey Pekar, Gary Dumm, Paul Buhle, Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), p. 90.

9. See Thomas Merton Center website: http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/

10. For information on the SWP, see http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/266 and http://www.laborstandard.org/New_Postings/Camejo_Evans_Review.htm; on the FIT, see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fit.htm; on joining the ISO, see http://links.org.au/node/1323.

11. On the Black Construction Coalition, see Joe W. Trotter and Jared Day, Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh Since World War II (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), and information on one of its leaders, Nate Smith -- http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2011/04/01/labor-rights-activist-nate-smith-passes-away/.

12. See Brutus's foreword to Le Blanc's Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience (New York/London: Routledge, 2006), pp. ix-xi, and Le Blanc's review of Brutus's poetry that includes a personal recollection in Paul Le Blanc, "Artistry Serving Activism," Against the Current 129, July-August 2007 -- http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/581. On Le Blanc and Brutus at the World Social Forum, see: Paul Le Blanc, "The World Social Forum, 2004," Against the Current 110, May-June 2004 -- http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/414.