A retrospective review of Standing Fast by Harvey Swados
By Steve Cohen The revolution is not just about storming the barricades – though that’s one of the best bits. It is also about art and the imagination and living the politics of daily life – with its responsibilities, its eroticism, its building of the socialist project and the obligation to make sense of the relationship between all these. This is why Holding Fast by Harvey Swados is such an important book. First published in 1970 it covers the quarter of a century preceding the Kennedy assassination in 1963. It charts in this period the attempt by a group of worker and intellectual socialist...