Lisa Maya Knauer recently posted this to Facebook.
It's a heartfelt memory of one of the pillars of autonomous political education in New York City past.
She writes:
One of my dearest and oldest friends (that is, a friend of long standing, not in age), Michael Lardner, died on Thursday. Michael and I met when we were both young activists in the late 1970s -- we met at the School for Marxist Education in the West Village around 1977 or 1978, and quickly became active in the collective that ran the school. We often joked, in recent years, that back then we were the babies among the members of the Marxist Education Collective, and now we had become the alte kakers (old farts, literally) of the project that emerged from the ashes of the Brecht Forum back in 2014 when the board somewhat precipitously (in my view) dissolved the organization, the Marxist Education Project. I'd been a member of the Brecht board for 20+ years but eventually we established term limits and I was required to take a few years off, so I wasn't on the board at the time that the board shut down the organization. Michael and I and a few others had recently established a working and reading group on precarity or precariousness, called Precarious Labor, Precarious Lives, and the last event held at the Brecht in April or May of 2014 before it shut down was a panel discussion that the two of us had organized on Precarious Labor with a mixture of academics and labor activists (not that those two categories are mutually exclusive -- Ed Ott was one of the panelists). I think the date was May 8, 2014, but I'd have to check some old files (of which I have plenty).
Mike was traveling abroad in 1979 when Arthur Felberbaum, the founder and guiding spirit of the School for Marxist Education, died suddenly. Arthur had been a mentor to both Michael and me -- Mike was working at that time as a typesetter, and Arthur was keenly interested in technology and labor, and changes in the labor process, and both Mike and I were part of a working group on Technology and Labor that unfortunately did not survive long after Arthur's death. Mike and I had somehow arranged to meet up in London that summer (this was in the days before cellphones and the internet), and it was my sad task to tell him of Arthur's death. We spent time knocking about London, meeting up with British leftist and anti-racist activists, went to Rock Against Racism and punk concerts, and Troops out of Ireland protests.
It's hard to summarize a friendship/comradeship that has extended for nearly 45 years (let's say 44 and change). There were 5 a.m. breakfasts at the Kiev after spending the night at a Gang of Four or Bad Brains concert. Many, many collective and committee meetings, Capital classes, protests against U.S. involvement in Central America, days spent painting walls and sanding floors as the Brecht moved to different locations, pushed by the increasingly tight real estate market in New York City.
More recently we often talked late at night when he was out on his nightly walks, about nothing and everything. I can say without any hesitation that we loved each other very deeply -- a love that wasn't erotic or romantic -- except in the sense that many revolutionaries have a romantic tinge to our political passions. It was the love of shared ideals and commitments, a strong and lasting bond that will always be there.
Mike was, of course, the driving force behind the MEP, along with others. I was very active for the first several years -- I still have files and files of notes from meetings -- but markedly less so in the last several months (not for any specific reason, just the natural ebb and flow of political and other commitments) and helped it grow into a truly global intellectual and activist community. It remains for us, his friends, comrades, and co-conspirators, to carry that work through.
Camilo Vive commented:
Sorry for your and our loss, thanks for sharing, I think it is hard for some to image how marginalized the Cold War made many activists over the years, I know that it wasn’t easy to keep the seeds of resistance alive, but I hope that by more people learning more about what it has taken to tend to and maintain a wider political spectrum that more can be inspired by people like Michael about what it takes to strive for fundamental change for the long haul.
Illustrations via thetricontinental.org
See also:
Our Legacy: 2014-today: Birth of The Marxist Education Project
https://marxedproject.org/our-legacy/
New York’s Brecht Forum to Close by Mostafa Heddaya April 14, 2014
https://hyperallergic.com/120414/new-yorks-brecht-forum-to-close/
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