A Detroit revolutionary league nearly seized city power through multilevel strategy.

Evidence

Let me illustrate this by way of a brief account of the greatest importance and suggestiveness (for problems of space and politics) a historical narrative of the single most significant political experience of the American 1960s. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, by Marvin Surkin and Dan Georgakis is a study of the rise and fall of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in that city in the late 1960s. The political formation in question was able to conquer power in the workplace, particularly in the automobile factories; it drove a substantial wedge into the media and informational monopoly of the city by way of a student newspaper; it elected judges; and finally it came within a hair’s breadth of electing the mayor and taking over the city power apparatus. This was, of course, a remarkable political achievement, characterized by an exceedingly sophisticated sense of the need for a multilevel strategy for revolution that involved initiatives on the distinct social levels of the labor process, the media and culture, the juridical apparatus, and electoral politics. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 885

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete historical instance of the spatial/strategic argument about postmodern politics; ties to Jameson’s broader claim that the cultural dominant is the economy’s way of appearing — a political formation being constrained by city form.