May, 1999

In Memoriam: Felix Martin, Labor Editor, 1921-1999

by Olga Domanski

Felix Martin, Labor Editor of NEWS & LETTERS from 1983 to his death last month, identified with everyone who was struggling for freedom all his life. "I was always involved with labor," he once said. "My daddy was a miner, organizing the mines, so we were organizers too." From those earliest years in Kentucky to the end of his life, he kept on fighting for freedom whether it was organizing a union or fighting a labor bureaucrat or arguing with his fellow workers to recognize racism as "the whip which the privileged use to keep us in our place-at the bottom." That was the appeal he made specifically to his fellow-workers at the GM South Gate plant in California in the very first article he wrote in NEWS & LETTERS in April 1972, right after he found Marxist-Humanism, and saw in Indignant Heart not only Charles Denby's autobiography, but his own.

In her 1980 retrospective-perspective of the first 25 YEARS OF MARXIST-HUMANISM, Raya Dunayevskaya wrote that in the mid-1970s the "new militancy of workers white and Black raised again the question of what kind of labor human beings should do" and saw this as what was represented by a white production worker like Felix Martin joining our Black worker-editor Charles Denby as his West Coast editor. That revolutionary relationship of Black and white is what permeated all of his life from that moment on.

Above all else, Felix Martin was a profound thinker, who manifested Marxist-Humanism's unique concept of "worker AS intellectual." At the memorial meeting for Raya Dunayevskaya, he said that "when I read chapter one of PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION on Hegel, I could just feel the scales peeling off my mental seeing. Hegel wrote, 'Individualism that lets nothing interfere with its Universalism, that is, freedom.' What a smog Raya looked through to be able to say that."

That kind of individualism is precisely what his life manifested. Of all the stories he captivated audiences with as he delivered them in a unique hill twang, the story he most loved to tell was of how he found a way to read PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION while he was working on an assembly line in the factory-reading a paragraph and then mulling it over as he turned to hang a door, his job on the line.

He credited his meeting up with Marxist-Humanism as what kept him from spending his life in prison for killing his foreman, when it made him see that it was the whole system that needed uprooting and that his life had to be spent on that and not wasted on one foreman. His deep respect for workers as the creators of all value allowed him to understand Marx's CAPITAL as if all the categories were specifically about his life.

Most of all, he understood the imperative importance of a revolutionary organization like News and Letters Committees. In one especially powerful report he gave to an N&LC Convention, he told a story about visiting the Sherman tree in Sequoia National Park. "It used to be called the Karl Marx tree," he explained. "It's the largest living thing on this earth that is still growing. That's why it is still the Karl Marx tree to me. It represents the idea of Marx's Marxism, which is the greatest idea still living and still growing. What we're talking about at this Convention is the story of the Karl Marx tree in terms of our ideas and our organization that we have to make sure continues to grow."

The story embodied not only his deep love for N&LC but how deep was his love for nature, which made him a co-thinker with a whole generation of young environmentalists. Felix Martin's love for nature came out of his own multidimensional nature as both farmer and worker, and philosopher. The poetry you heard in his stories came out of the way he combined all of those dimensions spontaneously.

There was no one he met-from someone walking a picket line he came upon and joined, to a fellow-shopper in a grocery store he would engage in discussing the plight of the small farmer today, to the doctors and nurses tending himin the last years of his life-who was not introduced at once to Marxist-Humanism and NEWS & LETTERS.

He personified the overcoming of the gulf class society imposes between practice and philosophy and made the American Revolution seem imminent. As we mourn his passing and honor his life, it is abundantly appropriate that we are carrying our In Memoriam to this extraordinary American revolutionary in the May Day issue.

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS