Bill Livant was a communist intellectual whose main purpose was to provide theoretical tools to people engaged in revolutionary struggles. The Red Scare after WWII did not diminish the admiration Bill felt for the Soviet Union during the war. The subsequent execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was an ideological turning point for him.
While doing his Ph.D at the University of Michigan, Bill was a prominent radical who contributed to the Students for a Democratic Society movement that resulted in the Port Huron Statement as well as organized opposition to US imperialism in Vietnam.
On the faculty at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, he was notorious among administrators for aligning himself with the students when they demonstrated. He was a charter member of the Waffle, an off-shoot of the New Democratic Party formed to take the new political formation in a thoroughly anti-capitalist direction. At the same time, he engaged in ongoing union solidarity and was able to influence the writing of occupational health and safety legislation eventually adopted by the NDP government. He actively supported Third World national liberation developments, participating in grassroots diplomacy and fair trade with various nations emerging from colonialism and fighting against neocolonialism. Hence, he was loyal to Cuba from 1959 onward and exhilarated by what is happening in Venezuela today.
But most of all, Bill was an advanced theoretician consistently guided by the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. In his teaching work, he was deeply inspired by Mao's mandate to make Marxist methodology accessible to the masses. Bill taught what might be called “dialectical literacy.” Attending to a diverse range of problems in the fields of social psychology, practical linguistics, media studies, evolutionary biology and the philosophy of labor, Bill categorically focused on the movement of material contradictions or asymmetrical relations in motion. That he was able to make his complex abstractions immediately relevant, increasingly intelligible and ultimately fertile for the praxis of his students was his special skill.
A lifelong reader of Monthly Review, Bill regularly incorporated MR in his teaching and activism. For a number of years he received 50 copies a month for use in the classroom and distribution at political events. An independent socialist himself, the independent socialism of MR was for Bill an absolutely indispensable element of his critical consciousness and faith in the future.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
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