Song of the Day: The Good Son (“End Credits”) [YouTube link], composed by the legendary Elmer Bernstein, is a lush, melodic closing to the 1993 psychological thriller, starring Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood. This cue is more expansive in its motif and variations than the “opening credits” I featured in 2021. And it provides the “end credits” to my Nineteenth Annual Film Music February Festival. My loving thanks to my dear friend, Ryan Neugebauer, for introducing me to (or reminding me of) so many of the films and entries for this year’s Festival. Till next year …
Don Lavoie Lectures, 1980-1981, Part III
Having unveiled the first of three YouTube presentations featuring the late Don Lavoie on February 13, 2023 (on “Immigration”), and the second on February 20, 2023 (“Planned Chaos: The Failure of Socialism”), I am proud to present the finale to this series today, “Freedom: Libertarian versus Marxist Perspectives: A Discussion with Don Lavoie and Bertell Ollman”, which was recorded at New York University on April 22, 1981. This nearly two-hour dialogue was sponsored jointly by the Center for Marxist Studies and the NYU chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society. Because it was such a long discussion recorded on cassette tapes, there are small gaps in the conversation due to the necessity to flip or change the cassettes when necessary.
As I explained in my opening essay to this series, this presentation is, by far, the one dearest to my heart. It challenged me profoundly and motivated me to continue my studies at NYU on the graduate and doctoral levels, with the great Marxist theorist Bertell Ollman as my mentor and doctoral dissertation advisor.
Wherever one stands on the issues discussed herein, it is worth noting that each of these thinkers understood the other’s perspective thoroughly. As I have pointed out in previous posts, Bertell not only knew of libertarianism, but had worked closely with libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Leonard Liggio in the Peace and Freedom Party, and he was a Volker Fellow under F. A. Hayek at the University of Chicago. Don studied Marxism; he read and grappled with the entirety of Marx’s work, and Engels’s work, and of the broader Marxist literature. This is not a man who would have had the audacity to get on a stage to attack Marx and “Marxism”, while simultaneously admitting that the only work by Marx he had ever read was “The Communist Manifesto” as an undergraduate in college.
Despite their opposing interpretive perspectives, Don and Bertell had a depth of comprehension for the intellectual traditions they engaged. Each makes significant points of methodological, substantive, and historical importance in an atmosphere of mutual admiration and respect. Their dialogue exemplifies a humane exchange of ideas, something that has become an anomaly in today’s toxic ideological environment.
I urge folks to listen carefully to this finale of the Don Lavoie Lectures, 1980-1981; it’s a lesson not only in content but in the art of civility.
On Facebook, in various discussions, I had this to say:
Don’s thinking evolved considerably over time. Many in the Austrian school deeply appreciated his enormous contribution to the calculation debate (his dissertation on “Rivalry and Central Planning”), given his emphasis on such epistemic issues as the role of tacit knowledge in interpersonal transactions and the price system. In later years, they were less enamored of his turn toward hermeneutics and a kind of Hayekian anarchism.
But even in his ancap days, he always championed progressive values, and as I have said on many occassions, he would have been aghast at the right-libertarian reactionary shift. He was among the most humane thinkers and people I’ve ever known.
It should be noted too that at this time, he hadn’t yet completed his doctorate and was even referring to Bertell as “Professor Ollman”, in deference to his position in the academy. And Bertell, given his command and presence, could often dominate a conversation. (As an aside, that wasn’t as much of a problem in later years with me because … well… I have a Brooklyn motor mouth and sometimes he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.)
In any event, I’m really happy that I preserved these materials for posterity. And it was nice hearing 21-year old Chris with the same Brooklyn accent of 63-year old Chris (minus the four-letter words).
One other thing I wish to re-emphasize about this discussion between Don and Bertell. Something a bit more personal.
Bertell knew me as an undergraduate in the NYU Department of Politics, and in my work in the history honors program with the Marxist historian Dan Walkowitz, from whom he heard “wonderful” things about me. He also greatly admired all the campus activism I was involved with in the antiwar, anti-imperialist, and antidraft protesting I was doing with Students for a Libertarian Society. By the time this presentation occurred in April 1981, I had had so many conversations with him but had never taken a single undergraduate course with him. He kept driving home the point that it was less important where I pursued my doctorate and far more important to pursue it with a mentor I could not only work with, but learn from. A mentor who could challenge me. And he wanted to be that mentor.
Having already been accepted to the master’s program at NYU in the Department of Politics, this discussion between Don and Bertell, more than any other, convinced me that Bertell was the mentor I was looking for. When he made that comment that libertarians were “a little bit like people who go into a Chinese restaurant and order pizza,” it rocked me to my core. As he used to say, there may be lots to choose from, wildly different meals that one can order in a Chinese restaurant, “but pizza isn’t one of them”. He emphasized over and over again: What’s on the menu for social change?—given the real conditions on the ground, the objective conditions and constraints with which we all live.
I chose Bertell as my mentor because I wanted to be challenged; I wanted to think more critically about my own social and political values. I could not embark on a career of writing unless I began with that kind of rigorous critical self-reflection.
And so I took formal courses with Bertell on Marxism, fascism, and, of course, dialectical methodology; I took independent studies with him; he was my doctoral dissertation advisor and followed me thru to the completion of my PhD. He even went on to loudly and publicly endorse all three books in my Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy.
And through it all, having adopted the “dialectical libertarian” mantle, I believe that Ollman’s question continues to resonate and is as relevant today as it was in 1981 when he asked it. I continue to ask libertarians of all stripes: What’s on the menu for social change, what kinds of social changes can we advocate and pursue, given the conditions that exist?
Sadly, so many of the responses I continue to get remain much too ideologically rigid, undialectical, and ahistorical for my tastes. We are all guided by basic values and frameworks, but if one’s values and one’s framework cannot accommodate the complex realities and structural rigidities of our particular time and place, then at the very least, a shift in our perspective on things is requisite to our acting in—and upon—the world we seek to change.
Song of the Day #2039
Song of the Day: The Hateful Eight (“L’Ultima Diligenza Di Red Rock”), composed by Ennio Morricone, can be heard in the 2015 film, directed by Quentin Tarrantino. It was the first Western—since 1981’s “Buddy Goes West“—that Morricone scored in 34 years. And it was well worth the wait! In 2007, Morricone had won an Honorary Oscar for his “magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” But this soundtrack, which won a Golden Globe, gave Morricone his first and only Oscar for Best Original Score.
Song of the Day #2038
Song of the Day: Cocoon (“Main Theme”) [YouTube link], composed by James Horner, has all those gentle, magical touches that complement this 1985 film, directed by Ron Howard. Horner left us much too soon, but his scores have left an indelible mark on cinematic music.
Song of the Day #2037
Song of the Day: The Shawshank Redemption (“Main Theme”) [YouTube link] was composed by Thomas Newman of the Newman Movie Music Dynasty. It is derived from one of the most successful film scores of its era. The 1994 film, starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, is an intense, well-crafted, finely acted, and inspiring adaptation of a 1982 Stephen King novella. And it’s got the score to match.
Song of the Day #2036
Song of the Day: The Thomas Crown Affair (“Soundtrack Suite”) [YouTube link], composed by Michel Legrand, is an indispensable extension of this 1968 heist film, starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. Though the nominated score didn’t win the Oscar that year, Legrand won an Oscar for Best Original Song, “The Windmills of Your Mind” (with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman). The song opens this suite, which also features so many of those jazzy inflections for which the maestro was famous. The Grand Legrand was born on this date in 1932.
Song of the Day #2035
Song of the Day: Quigley Down Under (“Soundtrack Suite”) [YouTube link], composed by Basil Poledouris, enhances the Western motif of the 1990 film, starring Tom Selleck and Alan Rickman. The film may not have been a big hit, but its score remains a winner.
Song of the Day #2034
Song of the Day: BUtterifield 8 (“Gloria’s Theme”) [YouTube link], composed by Bronislaw Kaper, is from the 1960 film that brought Elizabeth Taylor her first of two Oscars (the other was for her raw performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?“). It’s a lush theme befitting the composer of the classic standard, “Invitation” [YouTube link] (from the 1952 film of the same name).
Song of the Day #2033
Song of the Day: Making Contact (“Soundtrack Suite”) [YouTube link], composed by Paul Gilreath, is from a 1985 West German horror-fantasy film (also known as “Joey”), directed by Roland Emmerich, which features a demonic-possessed ventriloquist dummy named Fletcher, of whom I’m not too thrilled. Just as Emmerich provides various nods to “Poltergeist“, “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” and “Star Wars“, so too Gilreath, who re-scored the film for its US release, provides nods to the scores of John Williams and James Horner in this lovely suite.
Don Lavoie Lectures, 1980-1981: Part II
Last Monday, February 13, 2023, I unveiled the first of three YouTube presentations featuring the late Don Lavoie. Today, the second installment debuts on my YouTube channel.
“Planned Chaos: The Failure of Socialism” was recorded at New York University on September 23, 1980, as part of a series of lectures that the NYU chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society dubbed “Libertython”. This lecture, with its accompanying Q&A, runs over 90 minutes in length. In many respects, it is a precursor to the central themes that Don explored in his 1985 book, National Economic Planning: What is Left?
See Facebook discussion on this lecture here.