Harvey Goldberg Lectures! Marxism and History: Beginnings of Capitalism
Channel: Matthew Siegfried
Date: 2016-07-26

Harvey Goldberg Lectures! Marxism and History: Beginnings of Capitalism. February 25, 1977. Thanks to the Brecht Forum Archive (http://brechtforum.org/harvey-goldberg-lectures) for all the available audio of Harvey Goldberg's lectures.

From wiki: Harvey Goldberg (March 13, 1922, Orange, New Jersey – May 20, 1987, Madison, Wisconsin) was a teacher, historian and political activist.
For thousands of students, Harvey Goldberg was the greatest teacher of their lives. In an era when an average professor might receive a round of polite applause on the last day of the semester, Goldberg got an ovation at the end of every lecture.
His career as a lecturer began early. "I was just barely 23 when I began to talk and I've been talking ever since," he told an interviewer in 1977. His first lecture was before an ancient history class, when one of his professors "pulled me out of the corridor and into 272 Bascom. After that, everything was an anti-climax."[3]
James K. Sunshine, a 1949 Oberlin graduate recalled that "After the war, a charismatic young history professor named Harvey Goldberg arrived and astonished his classes and much of the campus with incandescent lectures on European economic history. With the Cold War and the civil rights movement heating up, political liberalism and race relations began to dominate conversation, and Goldberg became a leading speaker at “Arch 7” mass meetings held after supper on the steps of the Memorial Arch to protest the latest iniquity in Washington, DC."[4]
Goldberg's classes at Ohio State were frequently standing room only; several of them, including one on the death of Louis XVI and another on the fall of the Bastille, were Ohio State public events, not to be missed even by students not then enrolled in his courses. Goldberg taught in front of the lectern without the aid of notes. "I like to think" he said, "that the students and I melt to nothingness before the significance of the materials." He believed a teacher must "undertake to convey a kind of courage. If he's any good, he must live a life that is true and not hypocritical. He can teach the same kind of courage by example."[5]
Goldberg began his lecture career at Madison in the fall of 1963, in a small room that held fewer than 100 students. By the second semester, he had been given a large lecture hall. Eventually, his audiences (both students and auditors) grew so large his lectures were held in the large auditorium of the Agriculture Hall, a venue capable of holding 600-700 people.
No one who witnessed his lectures at Madison could forget the drama of his meticulously crafted performances, delivered with an actor's sense of timing. Goldberg waited in the wings, then approached the podium and paused for a few beats. He would then take off his glasses, look off to the side of the stage as if expecting a cue, and then turn to the audience, waving his finger and declaring, "The point is, you know..."[6] And once he had warmed to his topic, there was no stopping him. Because of Goldberg's reputation for consistently overrunning the 50-minute period, the History Dept. eventually learned to schedule his class in the de facto last slot of the day, 2:25 to 3:15, to minimize students being late for other commitments.
Noted jazz musician, music scholar and former Goldberg student Ben Sidran likened this performance to jazz: "When he was onstage, he was transformed by the process and the information."[7]
Harvey Goldberg was an out gay activist, an anti-Viet Nam War activist and what he would call an "hórs du parti" (out of the communist party) socialist. Upon return to the University of Wisconsin he gained full tenure, and he used his massive student audience to more stridently speak out on pressing issues of the day. Many demonstrations would start immediately after his afternoon class, e.g. the occupation of the State Capitol grounds by farmer Ed Klessig and his cows in 1977 protesting a freeway through his pastures.[10] As well, protests against the Viet Nam war invariably started after his lectures, just as did later protests against U.S. intervention in Allende's chile. In 1978, he helped form a local chapter of the Mass Party Organizing Committee, which grew out of Sunday morning brunches at the local activist, gay, legislative tavern, the Cardinal Bar.[11] Also out of those meetings (and the Community Union effort) grew the Common Sense coalition which played a role in local Madison mayoral politics for several years.
While sympathetic to Trotsky's form of Marxism, his months of unsuccessful union organizing as a youth, and his outsider status as gay, Jewish and socialist kept him away from being a joiner of parties.
Harvey Goldberg also often took a year sabbatical to research, network, and engage politically in Paris, France, from his long time walk-up apartment at 13, la Rue du Pont-aux-Choux in the Marais, near his beloved sans-coulotte district and the site of the Bastille dismantled in the French Revolutions.