Don Hamerquist's A Brilliant Red Thread with Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan

Link / Additional Info

Don Hamerquist's A Brilliant Red Thread (Kersplebedeb 2023) marks the long-overdue publication of essays by one of the sharpest and most provocative communist intellectuals in the US today. Drawing on nearly seventy years of social movement activity, including stints in the Communist Party, the New Left, and the co-founding of the Sojourner Truth Organization, Hamerquist brings a unique and supremely practical perspective to bear on questions of political organizing, class struggle, the threat of fascism, and the possibility of proletarian revolution. Befitting Hamerquist's position outside the academy and in tune with working-class struggles, many of these texts originated as correspondences with organizers on the ground. Accordingly, they are short, concise, unpretentious, and concerned with the pressing matters attendant to taking action. To celebrate the release of this unique book, Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan (authors of States of Incarceration and editors of Noel Ignatiev's Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity and the journal Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life) will screen pre-recorded remarks from Hamerquist, followed by a discussion of the book and the lessons (and provocations) it offer a new generation of organizers, agitators, and would-be revolutionaries. For more about A Brilliant Red Thread, check out Shanahan's recent review in the Los Angeles Review of Books.