Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican

At 7pm on Monday 1st September, at the Cock Tavern, Chalton Street/Phoenix Road (NW1), the AMM [Association of Musical Marxists} launches the latest from Unkant Publishers:
David Black’s collection of Helen Macfarlane’s wildly fantastic journalism for Chartist newspapers: Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican.

No-one has heard of Macfarlane [except readers of this blog *], and this omission hurts you – and all the things you think you know about feminism/marxism, personal/political, potential/actual etc.

In 1850, a Scottish governess who’d experienced revolution in Vienna in 1848, left “respectability” behind and began contributing to Democratic Review, Red Republican and Friend of the People, newspapers aimed at the revolutionary working class (‘the Chartists’). Macfarlane read Hegel better than S.T. Coleridge and wrote better prose than George Eliot; she translated The Communist Manifesto into English thirty years before the version you know. Karl Marx called her a ‘rare bird’. Macfarlane’s neglect by ‘Marxists’, ‘feminists’ and ‘progressives’ since is a historical crime only the AMM, with its obstinate reappraisal of subject-object relations, can imagine.

At the Cock, Macfarlane will be reimagined by actress Helene le Bohec, by Dave Black as MC and by musicians as diverse as tape-manipulator Ian Stonehouse and bassist Mark Harvey. Please come down to a left pub-upstairs-meeting which is free, welcomes kids, includes ace improvising musicians and still has not made up its mind (entirely) on the Big Political Issues bearing down on you.

http://ammarxists.org/amm10-launch-of-helen-macfarlane-red-republican-at-the-cock-tavern/

* Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - ANTIGONE in VICTORIAN ENGLAND - Helen Macfarlane, Revolutionary and Feminist in the Year 1850. By David Black.
 

ANTIGONE in VICTORIAN ENGLAND - Helen Macfarlane, Revolutionary and Feminist in the Year 1850. By David Black

The Divine Idea of Liberty
 Following the overthrow of Louis Philippe in France in February 1848, the tide of Revolution reached Austria within weeks. In March, the citizens of Vienna overthrew the government of Prince Metternich and forced Emperor Ferdinand to concede a representative Diet and a new constitution. But the Hapsburgs played for time and struck back. In October, Field Marshall Windischgratz’s troops stormed the city and restored the status quo. A new Emperor, Franz Joseph, annulled the constitution. In Hungary however, the imperial army was driven out and independence was declared. Here, counter-revolution required outside help, and this was provided by Czar Nicholas I under the terms of the Holy Alliance. Russian troops invaded Hungary and restored Hapsburg rule. Afterwards, Windischgratz’s successor, Field Marshall Von Haynau, unleashed his own troops on the defeated Hungarian population in an orgy of reprisals.
            Present in Vienna in 1848 was a British woman called Helen Macfarlane, then about 30 years old. The experience of Revolution and ensuing Counter-Revolution had a profound effect on her. When she