Class Power on Zero-Hours was published in April of 2020, just as the magnitude of the covid epidemic was becoming clear and months before the protests against police violence would sweep the United States and subsequently the world.1 Its accounts and analyses are based completely on what the authors did and learned before those dramatic developments. But, if anything, the book’s relevance and importance have been enhanced by them.

aw is a small political collective whose members have been living and working in Greenford, in west London for the past six years. Greenford is a neighborhood that’s out of the way and out of sight and has, for quite a long time, seen very little of left-wing activity. Nonetheless, it houses fairly large concentrations of workers in industries vital for the everyday functioning of the larger London metropolitan area. The aw were determined to change the underestimation of the community by the larger left forces in London. After a good deal of looking around, they began working in food processing and distribution. In their words, they got rooted. Over time, they concentrated their political activities on workplace agitation, building a local solidarity network, publishing a newspaper (Wild Workers West) and developing as a political organization (with one foot in the community and the other in the left). Like many others, they were not sure what they were doing; unlike those many others, they refused to pretend that they were. Without hesitation, they reveal everything that didn’t go as planned and, as a result, we discover things that might really matter instead of fairy tales.

It is an incredibly rich text—with well-told stories, careful analyses and well-crafted arguments. They have a lot that is very distinctive to say. The text is characterized by clarity, not sectarianism.

Insurgent Notes decided to initiate this roundtable discussion because we believe that the book has the potential to initiate some far-reaching conversations about what should be done here in the United States and we’d like to contribute to the further development of the aw’s work in the United Kingdom and internationally. We invited individuals with a variety of different perspectives on the matters at hand to contribute and also asked the Angry Workers to respond.

Let’s say something about the moment. New possibilities appear. Old familiars (varieties of Leninist parties; social democracy; insurrectionism; communalism of one kind or another; anarcho-syndicalism; identitarianism, and, to be fair, left/libertarian communism) seem increasingly less adequate. They are breaking up against the reality of everyday errors and miseries—which provoke ever more insistent proclamations of the necessity of the overcoming of that reality. The Angry Workers can provide us with new ways of thinking through the dangers and the opportunities.

We would urge readers not to see the analyses and arguments presented in the book as positions to simply agree or disagree with. Instead, they need to be studied, understood and seriously engaged with. In that regard, we think that the formation of study groups devoted to grappling with the text over a period of time might prove to be especially valuable. If individuals or groups are interested in doing so, please let us know by emailing us, and we’ll try to help out in putting people together.

In the meantime, if you’d like to respond to any of the contributions, please do so.

Here are a few valuable links to Angry Workers projects:

Website

Facebook Page

Let’s Get Rooted

Finally, we want to express our appreciation to all of our contributors and to the Angry Workers themselves for their cooperation and patience.

Class Power on Zero-Hours is available from PM Press.

• 1Zero-Hours refers to a fairly prevalent form of labor contract in Britain where an individual employee is not guaranteed any minimum number of hours of work in a week but is expected to be available for work on any occasion. It’s the worst of all worlds.

On the last day of 1918, at the founding congress of the German Communist Party, Rosa Luxemburg argued:

…. history is not going to make our revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions in which it sufficed to overthrow that official power at the center and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority. We have to work from beneath, and this corresponds to the mass character of our revolution which aims at the foundation and base of the social constitution; it corresponds to the character of the present proletarian revolution that the conquest of political power must come not from above but from below. The 9th of November was an attempt, a weak, half-hearted, half-conscious, and chaotic attempt to overthrow the existing public power and to put an end to class rule. What now must be done is that with full consciousness all the forces of the proletariat should be concentrated in an attack on the very foundations of capitalist society. There, at the base, where the individual employer confronts his wage slaves; at the base, where all the executive organs of political class rule confront the object of this rule, the masses; there, step by step, we must seize the means of power from the rulers and take them into our own hands. In the form that I depict it, the process may seem rather more tedious than one had imagined it at first. It is healthy, I think, that we should be perfectly clear as to all the difficulties and complications of this revolution. For I hope that, as in my own case, so in yours also, the description of the difficulties of the accumulating tasks will paralyze neither your zeal nor your energy.1

Introduction2

The Angry Workers have provided us with an opportunity to re-think what the radical left in America might do. Faced now with the greatest crisis in capitalist rule since the Civil War, the radical left is a marginal presence in the larger political world and, far too often, we are bystanders to or minor players in events.

Class Power on Zero-Hours is intended for a left audience but it’s not written in a traditional left idiom—neither exhortation (ending every written text with a call for revolution), nor sectarian nor academic.3 The book reads as if it was crafted in anticipation that its arguments could be adapted for more popular audiences. But probably it’s the other way around—the language of the book is likely grounded or “rooted” in the language of their encounters and engagements with the workers of Greenford over the last six years. The analyses and the arguments they advance are the products of the work they have done.

It would be wise not to interpret all of their ideas and recommendations in the book as formal statements that have been crafted to withstand close textual scrutiny. And they are certainly not intended to be stark statements of their unchangeable views in a sectarian food fight. Instead, I see them more as points that they would make in the course of substantial conversations or discussions, mostly with friends and comrades. This is not to suggest that they should not be taken seriously. Although they have a quite good sense of humor, they are very serious. They suggest a different way to have political discussions.

When they wrote this book, the Angry Workers saw no global pandemic coming and they saw no rebellions across America ready to explode beyond its shores. However, the issues they probe in Class Power on Zero Hours have become only more important in light of what’s transpired since the book’s publication in April. Two challenges are fundamental for their argument:

1. what needs to be done to prepare the working class for taking over and transforming the social production needed for human survival for all and dramatically improved life circumstances for billions of impoverished people across the globe, and
2. what kinds of political action do we need to fuse together the explosive anger of rebels on the streets and squares and the simmering anger of many billions of workers and peasants.

In both instances, the answers are intended to allow revolutionaries to come up with a plan for what to do next and for the eventual takeover of social and political control and the replacement of this wretched state of affairs with a classless society. The Angry Workers insist that these are fundamentally practical questions.

The aww folks make a number of distinctive, if not unique, contributions. They urge that we develop very fine-grained and comprehensive understandings of the form and content of global social production with a simultaneous focus on local conditions and international connections. They suggest that workers be prepared for seriously imagining the possibilities of a future society that can meet all material needs, reduce work time to enable active participation in the management of social life, and allow for the elimination of the different kinds of impoverishment that are evident across the globe. The place that workers have in global production provides a starting point for serious thinking about the second.

Group Characteristics

Unlike what I have seen of the overbearing personalities in many left groups, the Angry Workers appear to be people I’d want to have long conversations with. I mentioned their sense of humor (there’s a hilarious line about the prospect of building a revolutionary organization having as much appeal to workers as a “tasty lamb kebab for vegans”); they’re willing to be self-deprecating (as when they show a photo of a sleeping worker who they say probably fell asleep reading their explanation of the origins of capitalism). They’ve been incredibly productive in their combination of on-the-ground activity and the publication of numerous accounts and analyses—including the book at hand. They tell us a bit about that effort:

We wrote this book in six months while working manual, low paid jobs and while continuing our work around the solidarity network and the workers’ newspaper. We don’t want a medal for it, but it’s relevant in two regards: we use it as an excuse for the fact that the book is rough and raw; but we also want to make the point that writing something relatively substantial doesn’t mean you have to become an academic or journalist or take on any another [sic] form of intellectual profession.

All in all, it seems evident that that they’re not traveling down the same old roads made dusty by legions of their predecessors.

When they moved to Greenford, aww were hoping to support the self-organization of workers ignored by the left. They imagined that such organization would take place within the class, “not in place of it and not outside of it.” They came to understand that their efforts needed to be situated in the context of specific class compositions (meaning interlocking hierarchies of skills and wages, unionization, immigration status and gender). Since class composition was seldom transparent, this suggested a need for inquiry—methodically and thoroughly finding out what was what in the immediate reality confronting workers, but also including an account of global connections. They came to appreciate the importance of not paying too much attention to yesterday’s news or the glib analyses of the mainstream media and the self-imagined left about what the workers were like and what they wanted.

Soon enough, they were confirmed in their conviction that if leftists were grounded in a working class community and workplaces, they would be better able to talk about the realities of workers’ lives. They found “real pleasures” in getting to know people. Their accounts reminded me of a couple of episodes from my taxi driving life in the 1970s. Once I was sitting in a diner across the street from my garage. Of all things, I was reading an issue of New Left Review. An older driver, who I knew well enough to chat with, was sitting next to me and he asked what I was reading. I was caught off guard but responded that it was an article about Bertolt Brecht. He then said that Mother Courage was his favorite Brecht play. On a later occasion, I was assigned a cab for the night shift that a day driver had just left at the gas tanks. I got in and drove off into the blistering western sun. I quickly turned down the sun visor for a bit of shade and discovered a wad of bills tied by a rubber band on the back of it. It was the day driver’s take for the day. I turned around, went back to the garage, found the driver and gave him the money. I said, “You were probably worried.” He said, “No, I knew it was you.” Now, what was striking about that encounter was that a couple of weeks earlier, he and I almost came to blows in an argument about whether cab drivers should pick up black passengers. Apparently, my willingness to argue with him on that charged issue is what gave him confidence that I’d never rip him off. Experiences like those are hard to come by but hard to forget.

In January of this year, I spoke at a memorial event for Noel Ignatiev, who died a few months before. Here’s a bit of what I said:

I mentioned [previously in the speech] that he had completed a memoir/novel. It’s about his work in a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, in the early 1970s. The text includes dozens of stories that capture the bittersweet attitudes of workers who had spent years doing backbreaking and dangerous work and the ways in which they tried to make the best of things—covering for each other, sleeping whenever they could, developing elaborate schemes to call in sick so that a co-worker could get overtime for filling in and to reverse the exchange a couple of weeks later, even setting up food stores within the mill and frying fish in a work shanty—with the fish provided, on a seasonal basis, by the mill’s daily draining of the water of Lake Michigan.

From Noel’s account, in those mill years, he was a student—a student of the organization of production, of the profound skills that workers acquired, of workers’ deep-seated convictions about and sometimes quite fantastic notions of why things are the way they are, of the foolishness of supervisors, of the shallowness of corporate propaganda, and of the unexpected friendships that developed across the fault lines of job hierarchies, race and gender. Noel probably knew how to tell a good story before his time in the mill but his time there allowed him to perfect his talent.4

I believe that Bertolt Brecht once said that people should have lots of theories; he may have been right. But more than theories, people need lots of stories. But stories seldom come out of thin air.

The aww tell us stories about their lives, their experiences in Greenford workplaces (especially in food processing), histories about the companies that they worked for, histories about the supply chains within which their factories were embedded and, of course, stories about individual workers, their jobs, their living circumstances and home lives.

For the Angry Workers, the absence of any concrete relationship with workers or working class areas is a very big problem. In its absence, the left remains focused on internal politics and has little to offer in the way of strategic analysis. It remains “crudely insurrectionist and abstract or monopolized by social democracy.” Or, as they write elsewhere in the book, “the left has lost its brains and guts for universal and strategic thinking.”

At the end of the day, the Angry Workers didn’t get very far in their efforts to build a revolutionary class organization in Greenford. Nonetheless, they believe that their organizational framework is a good one. In their words, it’s “better than four old men and a dog discussing Durruti” or going to Socialist Workers Party front demonstrations.

Kidding aside, the aww are not offering up recipes for anyone to follow. They’re telling a set of powerful stories that take very seriously the possibility that workers can free themselves and remake the world. Their stories deserve to be read carefully and discussed extensively. And, sooner rather than later, they deserve to be translated into real activity here in the United States. Hopefully, there will be some really good new stories to be told.

A Few Questions for the Angry Workers

It seems that aww discount the significance of state violence when it is faced with a revolutionary takeover. Is that estimate limited to the United Kingdom? I ask because I see the us armed forces and police as an all but overwhelming danger and I imagine few hesitations on the part of a threatened us ruling class to resort to terror on a grand scale—even against its own citizens.

At one point, one of the aww activists reports that she should have focused on esl classes earlier for the immigrant workers whose limited English proficiency was a significant barrier. How much have you looked into the educational quality of those classes? I ask because most adult education classes (for all practical purposes, worker education classes) in the United States are quite uninspired and do little to develop substantial skills or knowledge by students.

When aww discuss planning for a revolutionary transition, you make no mention of what Marx referred to as “reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.” If anything, Marx underestimated the extent of the need for such a reserve of both human labor power and materials and equipment—which, in the case of healthcare provision, has become excruciatingly obvious during the covid epidemic.

I am inclined to believe that there is a need for a broad democratic affirmation of decisions made to take over and how to go forward during a revolutionary moment. I don’t think aww addressed that. Have I missed something?

In regard to aww’s inclusion of a “communist internet,” have you come across the speculations about planning by the Russian socialist, Alexander Bogdanov, in his sci-fi novel, Red Star or, in a more down-to-earth manner, the approach to statistics, information, planning and distribution developed by Otto Neurath, the Austrian socialist?5 If so, what’s your take on their relevance? If not, you might want to check them out.

Paul Mattick once argued that, given the increasing incorporation of scientific and technical knowledge into production, it made sense to think about more universities as factories. How does that sound to you?

• 1“Our Program and the Political Situation.”
• 2When we were discussing participation in the roundtable with prospective contributors, I was asked for a word limit. I suggested 2,000 words, more or less. I too have had to live with that limit. As a result, there is much that I wished I could have said but could not. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to do so on another occasion.
• 3The aww might object to this characterization since they have their own troubles with being identified as part of the left.
• 4Noel’s memoir, Acceptable Men, is being edited and prepared for publication by Noel’s old comrade, Dave Ranney. If things go well, it will be published in 2021 by Charles Kerr Publishers.
• 5Alexander Bogdanov was an early Bolshevik who broke with Lenin in 1908. He was a physician, an economist, a science fiction writer, a philosopher of science and a theoretician of tektology. For a comprehensive biography, see James D. White’s Red Hamlet. Otto Neurath is most well known, but not nearly well known enough, for his role as Planning Minister in the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, the adviser to the post-war housing squatter movement in Vienna, the inventor of the Isotype symbolic language and a theoretician of post-capitalist planning, production and distribution.

It’s been almost half a century since I spent a decade working in a handful of large Chicago factories with a few dozen Sojourner Truth Organization (sto) comrades. Although I would be hard pressed to point to any tangible beneficial outcome for working class revolutionary autonomous organization—or, for that matter, for any substantially less exalted objective—that developed out of the effort, I don’t regret the experience and suspect that the ambiguities and the opened but unanswered questions that linger from our experiences are not that different from those raised by the Angry Workers political project in West London.

When the sto workplace organizing concentration began in late 1969 there were hundreds of Chicago factories with 500–1,000 workers—and quite a few with tens of thousands of workers. A good number of these workplaces had a substantial history of challenges to some elements of the capitalist control and ordering of production. In combination with the omnipresent issues of white supremacy this history provided a significant general potential for insurgent activity. These efforts towards workers’ control over the production process within the workplace were based largely in informal work groups and separate organizations of Black workers and were almost always distinct from the various forms of trade union activity that were also a factor. Our perspective was that this base of activity and organization, immensely enriched by an influx of new workers radicalized by experiences of war and anti-war…and riot, were the ingredients for mass autonomous proletarian movements and organizations that might realistically provide a base from which to challenge capitalist power in the foreseeable future. Our goal was to be a part of the process and to help it develop to the best of our ability in one important industrial area of the country—but we assumed, of course, that we were working in alignment with the forces of history.

Ten years later, when we took a pause that proved to be a very long pause, there were very few factories left in the Chicago area (now they are essentially all gone) and the layer of class militants had been severely diluted by the changing circumstances of life inside and outside the factory. The charismatic events we had hoped for, the plant occupations and political strikes that we had felt were built into the situation, didn’t happen—despite many occasions when we thought they might…or at least that they should. In any case, we effectively ended our workplace concentration before fully realizing the extent to which capitalism and its work process had moved under our feet. Our triumphalist naiveté merged with the narrowness of our perspective to prevent us from gaining a better understanding of the ways our efforts might have developed more useful strategic approaches to the changed and changing circumstances in the class struggle. I hope that the “Angry Workers” do a better job than we did.

I haven’t read the individual workplace reports in this book, although it is on my task list, so my comments will be brief and decidedly provisional. They will focus on some questions I have that are probably most relevant to the concluding sections of the book that concern “Revolutionary Strategy.”

First a bit of a confession: while sto and Angry Workers both approached workplace concentration intending to locate and support autonomous class organization, I had personally misspent an earlier decade, sometimes implementing and sometimes challenging a very different approach to developing a working class base and a proletarianized cadre—the us Communist Party’s variant of the classic Third International policy of industrial concentration and “factory cells.” That experience raised the most corrupt and opportunist notions of “developing a base in the class” and “embracing proletarian culture and lifestyle”: On the one hand, it entailed conciliating the politics of racial and sexual privilege to facilitate the development and maintenance of a working class “base.” On the other hand it entailed adopting a pseudo-culture of conservative bigotry and anti-intellectualism that was allegedly more authentically “working class.” This experience left me with a solid antipathy to most talk about revolutionaries building a base in the working class and sto adopted a consciously different approach (with some unfortunate deviations that I’ll leave alone for now).

The sto project was organized to recognize the elements of insurgency in workplace situations and to intervene to help them develop. We were attempting to recognize and record what was actually happening in these large factory settings—partly in the flawed terms of Marx’s well known letter to Ruge, but more generally following the approaches that had been developed by the clr James/Raya Dunayevskay Facing Reality grouping that was persuasively laid out in Marty Glaberman’s “Punching Out” pamphlet.

We would not have expressed it in the same words, but we had a parallel analysis to that spelled out in Chapter 13 of Zero Hours—“Class Power and Uneven Development.” The workplace provided the locus of a range of contradictions that impacted workers collectively and individually. Much of this tended to integrate the class into a subordinate role in capitalist production, but there were elements and occasions—similar to what the Zero Hours authors term as “strikes” (p. 238); moments in which their revolutionary possibilities and capabilities become apparent to the workers themselves. This then provides the groundwork for autonomous organization and the development of a class alternative. The problem that we discovered, and I think the Angry Workers did as well, is that these events are fleeting while the yoke of capitalist hierarchy is omnipresent. The issue becomes how can the momentary energy be generalized—maximized and extended; and when it inevitably subsides, how can the militants it has produced survive in an organized form that can impact an increasingly wider range of situations. We found no way of restating the contradictions of proletarian life that clarifies an answer to the problem and we discovered that our largely accidental presence in specific scenes didn’t magically resolve the problems.

Perhaps it is not the same in the United Kingdom, but here in this country there tends to be an opposition between “base-building in the class” and “intervening” in the most significant conflicts. It’s frequently an unproductive discussion because there is no elaboration of the connection between them—involving the development of an organized working class cadre of militants that can provide a political center for such interventions. Traditional communist groups have conflated this goal with recruiting sociologically working class cadre to their own structures—the problems with that are evident enough. However, if this is mistaken, how are the “autonomous” formations that can take on the task developed? I can see that the Angry Workers aren’t satisfied with their answer to this problem just as I’m not satisfied with any alternative one.

I’m embarrassed that I have to claim age and infirmity for my failure to approach this question with a clear comprehension of the granular detail of the political work that I expect is provided in the body of the book. However, I am old and infirm.

The level of active struggle is more important than the degree of formal organization.

—Rosa Luxemburg in 19051

The modern workers’ struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight.

—Rosa Luxemburg, “The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions”2

We learn to fight by fighting. And as workers, we need effective weapons in our arsenal. Class Power on Zero-Hours offers us many lessons on how to acquire these organizing tools. Angry Workers of the World (aww), unlike most left communists trapped in theoretical abstractions, began their project by “getting rooted” as workers on the shopfloor of the logistics sector in west London. Their reason was simple: workers they were surrounded by had “no experience of collective struggle,” so they needed to self-organize and fight to discover their power. Their book offers an abundance of lessons on how we might do so too.

They “got rooted” in the industrial suburb of Greenford, a massive logistics hub directly adjacent to Heathrow Airport, which is “probably London’s biggest workplace,” and this “western corridor” is where “60 percent of the food consumed in London is processed, packaged and circulated.” While analyzing the “logistics revolution” of dispersed manufacturing—tied together by supply chains stretching across the planet—is nothing new,3 what makes aww’s approach relevant and original is they centered their analysis on themselves as workers struggling within this sector. Unlike journalists going undercover at Amazon to write exposés of the “Dickensian conditions” and casting workers as passive “victims” and unions as “saviors,” aww fully immersed themselves as shopfloor militants in food processing plants, grocery delivery fulfillment centers, and assembly workshops over a period of six years.

As their book was released on the cusp of the covid-19 pandemic, their focus on “essential workers” is prescient—especially regarding food production. The worldwide crisis showed how vulnerable this just-in-time inventory-less production system truly is, as well as how effective workplace actions at chokepoints can be. For radicals to contemplate a world beyond capitalism, simply knowing where our food comes from is indispensable. We cannot transition to another communistic system of feeding the 7.8 billion on the planet without reengineering an alternative to industrial agriculture and highly centralized food processing.

A thorough reading of the book helps one see the vulnerabilities of this ever-changing system from an anti-capitalist perspective. For anyone concerned with class struggle, especially among workers arrayed along commodity chains (which includes all essential workers) and believing that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,” I cannot recommend the pedagogical lessons that can be drawn from this book highly enough.

LESSON ONE: Terrain of Struggle

As they admit in their introduction, the book is “rough and raw” because they wrote it over six months while working low-paid manual jobs, as well as participating in other projects. Yet the text has a monumental heft, coming in at 387 pages. I read the book and tried to digest this enormous amount of information in a couple weeks, so I apologize in advance for my own review being “rough and raw” and narrowly subjective.

While the book should be read in its entirety, my emphasis will be on what I consider the analyses that are the most worthy of passing on as lessons. Every worker should analyze their own terrain of struggle in a similar way. With the production process spread to all corners of the earth, capitalism has created a global “factory without walls.”4 To struggle in this context, we need to know the geography of the flows of commodity inputs and outputs the world over in order to situate where we, as the working class, exist and where vulnerabilities can be found.

The book begins with an empirical interpretation of the contemporary conditions of working-class west London, à la Engels explorations of various industrializing English cities 175 years before.5 The region’s history and changes over time are described in detail. The book ends with an appendix that documents prior struggles in west London, like the post-’68 groups Big Flame and Solidarity. The latter participated in strikes in 1969–1970, “which is usually seen as the first struggle where ‘migrants’ and the ‘local working class’ came together.” The continuity had been broken, yet aww attempted in a similar way to forge unity across ethnic divides. Although the first chapter and appendix might have been merged, this historical survey of class conflict and aww’s own attempts at class unity across “ethnic” and all sorts of other divisions are the strengths of the book.

The first four chapters variously describe the rise of the logistics industry along the western corridor in Greenford and Southall, residential living conditions, and prevailing wages. The demographic patterns of immigration are detailed, showing how some of the more settled South Asian immigrants are integrated into the political establishment, while they are pitted against more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Mention is made of recent class struggle in the area, as well as aww’s involvement in overtime strikes and work slowdown as temps.

A chapter is dedicated to the solidarity network that was created for mutual aid and direct action to confront “day-to-day problems” in fighting bosses, landlords, agents of the state, as well as challenging racial and sexual violence. Another chapter tells the story of their paper, Workers Wild West, and its use a tool to critique how management and unions exploited division between agency temps and permanent workers. The solidarity network and face-to-face distribution of literature (the paper, newsletters and leaflets), while seemingly outdated in the age of impersonal Facebook “activism,” actually encouraged communication. This led to public meetings and forums where workplace and community concerns were openly discussed.

The fifth chapter, “Working class families and women’s realities—in and beyond work,” was among the most powerful. It showed the paradox of the state imposing austerity measures to eliminate the social wage, while undermining the family unit at the same time that families were becoming the primary social safety net. The chapter ends with gut-wrenching accounts by three west London women of their abandonment by social service agencies; they seem straight out of cinema, much like Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake. Hanna, originally from Hungary, puts this frightening atomization in context when she says, “you have to be strong when you are alone.”

The sixth chapter offers a cautionary tale. When two aww comrades got positions as union representatives it allowed access to many more of their coworkers, but both examples of accommodation with “actually existing trade unionism” ended in failure. The lesson from their empirical experience is that unions offer more impediments than solutions to workers’ problems. In critiquing the limitations of the British section of the Industrial Workers of the World, aww proposes “class unions” instead, which can exercise “associational” power à la Beverley Silver’s Forces of Labor.6 This form of organization is useful in times when the class movement itself is too weak to create more offensive forms, being a vehicle for self-defense, reminding workers that power comes from collective action, not the “formal organisation.” A confirmation Rosa Luxemburg’s emphasis on active struggle.

LESSON TWO: Stories of Working, Organizing & Struggle

The next section has three workers’ inquiries, but I will only comment on the first two. Everyone who is agitating against their bosses needs to not only read these inquiries carefully, but also keep a diary of their own daily workplace experience and observations. Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, “historical experience” is our “only teacher,” where in the process we make “countless mistakes,” but more importantly we learn from them.7 Writing them down helps us remember, interpret and overcome these failures.

aww borrows from Italian Operaismo8 class composition analysis and workers’ inquiries. The former to identify “specific cycles of history and stages of capitalist development,” in their case looking at “the dispersal of production” away from the sites of power built by workers in the 1960s and 1970s. These were large-scale sites of production or workers in mass proximity to one another, which were broken up. But as supply chains were reconfigured to accommodate production that spread throughout the world, it led to the creation of new, increasingly large hubs of warehouses and distribution centers, which in turn bring increasing numbers of workers together in a “concentration process.” This allows “daily co-operation between workers,” which is “the actual bases for the revolutionary potential of the working class.” Amazon’s global network, bridging production and distribution in order to fulfill consumption, is the quintessential embodiment of this more recent, global development.

The analysis began by looking at industrial sectors along the food supply chain, first food production generally and then the distribution of food products specifically. Large food retailers, like Walmart and Tesco, were places within the “productive sphere,” because they have “industrialised the distribution and administrative system” as they link the whole food chain, from agriculture, through food processing, all the way to the supermarket and consumer. Capitalist agriculture is caught in vicious cycles of debt, linked to global circuits of finance, highly dependent on oil, and is a force driving global migration.

The inquiries began with an account of working three and a half years at a food processing factory owned by Bakkavor, a global corporation supplying supermarkets in the United Kingdom with ready-meals and fresh produce. It explored how workers integrated into the global system of food production have “structural power” (again, à la Silver’s analysis of workplace power), even if passively, as evidenced by the “houmous [hummus] crisis” in 2017, when a metallic taste caused massive shortages from Bakkavor—a major supplier for all of Europe—and demonstrated the vulnerabilities of supply chains. This weakness is driven home by the fact that 47 percent of the food consumed in the United Kingdom is imported—either raw, partially-or fully-processed—from China, Costa Rica, Egypt, Kenya, Hungary, India the Netherlands, Peru Spain, and others. Distance “massively increases the chances of breaches in the supply-chain.”

The second inquiry is about work at a distribution center for Tesco, also for three and a half years, which is the United Kingdom’s largest supermarket chain and largest private employer. The driving job entailed delivering groceries to homes, businesses and other institutions. Again, this brought to mind Ken Loach’s 2019 film Sorry We Missed You, especially when the protagonist Ricky is robbed and beaten up, much like aww’s co-worker who was robbed and had his phone damaged, but in reaction Tesco workers attempted a collective response to put more responsibility on their boss—although futilely. The inquiry details arduous toil of heavy lifting and hazards like accidents, where management’s response—regardless if it is the drivers’ fault—is blame-the-worker; in the ideological jargon of management (in the United States), this is called “behavior-based safety.”

Conclusion: Pedagogy of Practice

I must confess that my path has crossed several times—on two continents—with the aww comrades, whether meetings in London or Berlin to discuss the internationalist implications of class struggle, or exploring the massive logistics hub around the rail yards and warehouses southwest of Chicago. And since I find myself in the same left communist (for lack of a more precise term) milieu, we share a similar theoretical perspective and praxis. Therefore, I will largely leave the final four chapters on “Revolutionary strategy” aside, as I mostly agree and find them to be great fodder for future discussion.

While I do not work in logistics, I share aww’s passion for investigating global production, exploring how it is connected through commodity chains, and trying to exploit those vulnerabilities in fighting for a post-capitalist future. I admire their honesty when they say, “While we didn’t have major ‘organising successes,’ we managed to root ourselves.” I also agree when they write, “consciousness about their situation as a class” does not “develop gradually. It develops in leaps and bounds—in struggle.” E.P. Thompson agreed, saying you do not get “class” until struggle brings workers together with an awareness of their common material interests, the result being “class consciousness.”9 Angry Workers of the World’s rootedness in the terrain of west London allowed their battles to be fought from entrenched positions. We can draw lessons from their experience to strengthen our own struggles, so I recommend that every working-class militant read Class Power on Zero-Hours.

• 1David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, PM Press, 2017), p. 174.
• 2Rosa Luxemburg, Collected Works, Vol. 2 (London, Verso, 2015), p. 465.
• 3There are many excellent analyses of the “logistics revolution,” written by academics and activists, even from a perspective sympathetic to the working class, but none written by the workers themselves. Here is a partial list of the better scholarly works: Nelson Lichtenstein (edit.), Walmart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New York, The New Press, 2006); Edan Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2008); JoAnn Wypijewski, “The Cargo Chain,” CounterPunch 17, no. 5, (2010); Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2017); Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (London, Pluto Press, 2018). Some texts by business writers offer useful insights: Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006); Yossi Sheffi, Logistics Clusters: Delivering Value and Driving Growth (Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2012). There are also extremely good films: Noël Burch and Allan Sekula (directors), The Forgotten Space (Icarus Films, 2010); Graeme McAulay (director), The Box that Changed Britain (BBC Four, 2013).
• 4Brian Ashton, “Logistics and the Factory without Walls,” Mute Magazine (September 14, 2006).
• 5Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London, Penguin Classics, 1987).
• 6Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003); Silver borrows Erik Olin Wright’s definitions of “Source of Workers’ Power,” which are the following: Associational Power, which comes from the formation of collective organizations of workers (groups united by oaths of solidarity like, “An injury to one is an injury to all”); Structural Power, based on 1. Marketplace Bargaining Power, from tight labor markets, 2. Workplace Bargaining Power, from strategic location of an industrial sector (like ilwu longshore workers united in a single contract at all 29 ports on the us west coast).
• 7Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social-Democracy; The “Junius” Pamphlet (1916).
• 8Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism (London, Pluto Press, 2002).
• 9E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class?,” Social History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (May 1978), p. 149.

I know of few left organizations that seriously evaluate and criticize their own experiences, and certainly not in public, so this book is a rarity. The authors, members of the Angry Workers collective, frankly evaluate and discuss their attempt beginning in 2014 and continuing until 2020, based on syndicalist concepts, to organize factory and warehouse workers in and around Greenford in the suburbs west of London. Judging by the photos and their own accounts this seems to have been a group, perhaps thirty young activists in their twenties or perhaps early thirties. No one mentions having a family of their own. As a person who was himself involved in labor organizing at that age here in the United States, I could appreciate and admire the commitment of these organizers and I could clearly see the challenges they faced and empathize with their experiences.

They describe themselves as being “on the communist left,” and seeking jobs in order to “intervene in the class struggle” in order to build “independent working class organization.” After the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, they want to show that there is an alternative to electoral politics (pp. 7–20). The collective was inspired by the Italian syndicalists of S.I. Cobas, Workers Initiative in Poland, and to a lesser extent by Labor Notes in the United States (p. 101). The Angry Worker collective also attempted joint work with the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) of the United Kingdom (pp. 101–118).

Class Power discusses briefly and critically the labor bureaucracy (pp. 107–109) and “democratic socialism” (pp. 323–344), at points takes potshots at the anarchists, elaborates on the collective’s view of their syndicalist theory (pp. 335–348), and puts forward a program for a revolutionary transition (pp. 349–372). There is also a chapter about their newspaper, Workers Wild West (pp. 76–82), one about working class families and women (pp. 85–100), and one about farming and food (pp. 231–250). Finally, there is an appendix giving a labor history of the West London workers’ movement (pp. 373–387). (Unfortunately the book does not have an index.) We will return to discuss these more theoretical chapters below.

Most of the book is made up of chapters that discuss the experiences of various members of the collective in different workplaces. The authors are good organizer-sociologists who provide clear analyses of the workplaces, jobs, and organizing experiences. Each of these chapters has a similar structure:

1. a history of the industry and the company, sometimes within the context of global production chains,
2. a description of the work process,
3. a description of the workforce,
4. an account of organizing activities,
5. an analysis of the experience and the lessons to be drawn.

Some of the workplaces were factories, such as a large one that produced prepared foods and a small one that produced 3-D printers, while others were warehouses in different logistics networks.

The authors note that Greenford’s industrial district was far from London with its students and its leftist activists both geographically and culturally. Most of the jobs discussed were classified as unskilled, the conditions often poor, and the wages low. The Greenford workplaces, where these activists found jobs, employed an ethnically diverse workforce of immigrants that was largely made up of Poles and South Asians of a variety of ethnicities and different religions. Management had created hierarchies that further divided workers, supervision could be intense, and discipline severe. Many of the workers appear to live in nearby communities. The chapter on women and the family provides a candid picture of women’s subordinate role in the community, though they make up about half of the workforce in the factories and warehouses we are told.

The Angry Worker activists used all of the traditional tools of worker organizers. The met with workers individually, sometimes held small meetings of workers, they handed out leaflets, they published a workers’ newspaper, they encouraged workers to take small actions and to walk out on strike. They attempted to organize unions where there were none, and if there were unions, they tried to build rank-and-file groups within them, in a few cases they were elected to be union stewards. They also engaged in all the common auxiliary work one associates with the organization of immigrant workers, such as providing legal help or interpreters. And they attempted to organize in the community as well. While they describe themselves as left communists or syndicalists their practice as they describe it does not differ much from that of the Maoists, Trotskyists, and other socialists of the 1960s and 1970s, or for that matter from that of some of the more lively business unions today.

In their accounts, each of the organizers describes these efforts—mostly fights over questions like wages, hours, job assignments, and so on—that sometimes failed utterly, sometimes led to making more contacts, or occasionally led to actions that won a small victory. The collective frankly admits that their attempts to organize strikes or new unions failed. They attribute these failures to some combination of the employers’ machinations, the maneuverings of the bureaucratic business unions that represent the workers, to the deep divisions among the workers, and to the workers’ own backward consciousness, as well as recognizing some of their own errors.

A Critique of the Angry Workers Collective’s Approach

Toward the end of the book, reflecting on the collective’s work, the argument is made that while they had no tangible organizing successes, they did succeed in building up a network of friends, supporters, and contacts. “While we didn’t have major organizing successes, we managed to root ourselves” (p. 369). As a person who has in different moments organized among immigrant workers, I found this claim very dubious. Their own accounts suggest that the collective was made up almost entirely of British people, and the reader gathers that probably there were few if any immigrants among them. The group had one Polish-speaking woman and contacts with the Polish Initiative, but it appears that other members did not speak Polish or Gujarati or Tamil, and they do not seem to have ever been deeply involved in the communities and culture of those groups. They report no recruitment of workers to their collective. None of the young organizers mentions having a family themselves, one of the things that often roots one in a community through the public schools. (British readers should understand that in the United States “public schools” refers to state-run schools.)

From my own experience and that of others I have observed, I would argue that it is virtually impossible to root one’s self in an immigrant community of which one is not a part. Even bilingual people who can speak the immigrants’ language often find it hard to form deep and strong ties with immigrant workers because they do not share the culture. Language creates enormous barriers, as do religion, biases about ethnicity and gender roles among the immigrants as well as among the native-born organizers. Immigrant organizing is usually most successful when immigrants can build their own organizations where they speak in their own language to people who share their culture. Such organizations allow immigrants to then relate to the broader workers’ movement.

In the United States, immigrant workers centers have played a tremendously important role in workers organizing to fight employers and to create or join labor unions. While Angry Workers did have some of their literature translated into Polish, I had no sense that they could communicate and organize within the Polish-speaking workforce. Nor is that surprising. They would have to have helped to create a Polish workers organization to which they would relate. Communicating well in order to organize among the South Asian immigrants seems even more unlikely. In fact, several of the authors refer to these issues.

Another weakness of the Angry Workers, it seems to me, is their intensely local focus, sometimes on tiny workplaces. Of course any good organizer must be acutely aware of the workplace, the workforce, management policies, and the union’s role. And all workers even in the smallest workplace should have the opportunity to create a union. But what should a small leftist group with a couple of dozen members do with its limited resources? Might it not have made more sense for workers to keep applying for jobs until there were two, three, or four in the same industry, workplace, or union? Or would it have been better to adopt a national strategy? One worker, who worked at the Tesco Customer Fulfillment Center with some 1,400 workers who pick orders for shipping, wrote in the conclusion about that experience:

At Tesco more than 300,000 workers are pissed off with the union. If we had the capacity and comrades all over the country it would be possible to build an alternative network of Tesco militant workers. We could produce alternative leaflets and newsletters and propose small coordinated actions in response to Tesco management strategies. The informal Tesco workers website ‘Verylittlehelps’ has several thousand users, but no practical results. It might take a couple of years and only attract two, three hundred workers at first, but this would be a start.

Why couldn’t the Angry Workers Collective have sent groups of two or three workers to organize with Tesco in different cities? In fact, that was the strategy pursued by my comrades in the International Socialists, as I have described in my essay “The Tumultuous Teamsters of the 1970s.” At most and only briefly, we had 50 is members spread across the United States in the Teamsters in the 1970s, but they were able to connect up with local activists. Such a strategy might require being part of a larger network or socialist organization, which it seems like Angry Workers is now engaged in creating.

Let me return to the theoretical discussions raised in the book. Angry Workers describe the labor officialdom this way:

They have to negotiate with the bosses. Their role as mediators and representatives of the workers, separate from the workers, is created. This develops into bureaucratic structures and methods, which are more easily coopted by the management…. [And because of their dependence on labor law] This in turn results in unions manipulating workers in favor of this or that party or government.

An excellent description of the union leaders to which I would only add that at the higher levels they become not just separate, but a social caste with privileges and their own interests.

Angry Workers characterize the “democratic socialism,” by which they mean groups like Jeremy Corbyn’s forces in the Labour Party, Podemos, and the Democratic Socialists of America, as also being alien to the labor movement, an alliance of experts and labor bureaucrats who wish to govern the capitalist state. It is a revolutionary critique of the social democracy that by and large I share. (Though it is unfair to characterize dsa as a whole as having such social democratic politics.)

The collective, looking toward a revolutionary horizon, offers the working class both a political program of revolutionary transition and a framework for a social transition. There is, however, a huge gap between Angry Workers’ modest organizing experience, and the program, which clearly come not from the group’s experience, but rather from readings in revolutionary working class literature. The ideas in these sections are clearly derived from working class revolutionary experiences from the period of the 1910s to the 1930s, and while we can still draw important lessons from the enormous struggles in Europe in that period, we must also recognize that the economy has changed, as has the control of work through technologies such as satellites and computers, new forms of work organization, the growth of the service sector and the increased diversity of the workforce.

Having just read a lengthy account of the difficulties of organizing workers and the failure to achieve any significant success, the reader is surprised to find the more theoretical conclusions of the book open with this: “We…want to outline some basic steps a regional working class uprising would have to undertake in order to defend itself and expand to other regions.” Some of the program outlined is quite traditional, “drastic reduction in working hours” and “collectivizing the control over agricultural production.” Workers will take over essential industries through what is called a “productive insurrection.” Be aware, “This takeover will not be a democratic act of the majority. It will be led by an active ‘minority/vanguard’ of 30 to 40 percent of the working class formed in previous struggles.” Other elements of the program, harkening back to Peter Kropotkin or some anarchist of the opening of the last century, sound like a utopia from another time. The collective proposes reorganizing the entire society into groups of about 250 who will live in communal spaces like “former hotels, schools, office blocks, etc.” “to manage distribution of food, childcare and so on.” There will also be a “communist internet and productive database.” These give you an idea of the program. Unrelated to the organizing work in Greenford, it is part twentieth century syndicalism and part contemporary fantasy.

While Angry Workers collective offers us these theoretical sections, we do not have a clear understanding of their political views. I think that this springs from the workerist character of this group that sees everything through the lens of labor. It is not a wide enough lens. One would like to know, for example, what they think about world politics. They discuss global chains of production but we don’t know what they think about the world’s political power arrangements and things like the rivalry between the United States and China or the struggles of the peoples of the Arab world, questions that form the broader framework for thinking about organizing workers. They don’t even have more than a few words to say about uk politics and Brexit was hardly mentioned.

While this is a book about revolutionary socialists and labor organizing strategies, one would also have liked to learn, for example, if they have any position on environmental issues like climate change and global warming. Though they have two chapters on agriculture and food distribution, there is no mention that I saw about agriculture and the environment, which seems a significant omission. One would also have the impression that lgbtq issues don’t exist in Britain or that in six years they did not come up in Greenford. One can, of course, write a book that is just about labor (as I have myself), but since this is a book from a revolutionary syndicalist perspective, we would like to know what revolutionary syndicalism is and what left communism means for them. And finishing this book, that question—unless the answer is simply worker organizing while thinking about revolution—remains unanswered.

Dan La Botz is a retired professor of History, Latin American Studies, and most recently Labor Studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies of the City University of New York (cuny). He is the author of a dozen books on labor and politics and most recently of a novel titled Trotsky in Tijuana.

The Angry Workers Collective has done us a great service in two ways. First they decided to live in West London where there is a great deal of industrial activity and root themselves there by getting jobs in local workplaces, establishing “solidarity networks” that could offer material support for local struggles, and establish a newspaper that featured struggles in the community and local workplaces. They have also done us a service by sticking at it for six years and then writing Class Power on Zero Hours that offers a comprehensive description and analysis of their work and a theoretical/strategic perspective based on how their approach could lead to revolution and a new society. I particularly liked the fact that the description of their work and organizing experiences, as developed by a “worker’s inquiry” on specific workplaces, was not separated from a detailed analysis of the industry these workplaces were a part of.

An important emphasis of the book and their work was on “food in capitalism.” aw believes that revolution must aim to “takeover, defend and transform the essential industries.” Included in these industries are agriculture, food processing, and distribution. While traditional industrial analysis would separate farming, food processing, warehousing, supermarkets, fast food, and other methods of distribution into separate industries, aw treated all of these as a part of a food supply chain and saw their task as organizers to organize along the chain. They are rightly critical of much of the left who fail to see that capitalism has revolutionized these as an integrated industry so that the work in the supermarkets and fast food joints is integrally linked to that of the warehouse drivers, food factory workers and the farmers. As they put it, “If we think about social revolution we have to think about how integrated our food supply is globally and how the centers of food production will be focal points of working class insurrection.”

While thinking of food production in this way is a real advance in industrial analysis, they tend to gloss over a few other important aspects of food. They point out correctly that the revolutionizing of food production and distribution and increasing productivity has led to real improvements in peoples’ lives. Yet, there is an important contradiction that needs to be a part of any vision of revolution. The vital nature of food to sustain human life is contradicted by the necessity of capitalism to treat food as a commodity to be bought and sold as a way to accumulate capital, profits and to grow the system. Food as a use value (food security) often runs up against food as an exchange value. One manifestation of this is that some food simply isn’t safe. Another is that people go hungry. In addition there is mounting evidence that the revolutionizing of the food industry is contributing to both global warming and to habitat destruction that is in turn generating a series of viruses. These attacks on food security, in my view, need to be a part of a perspective on organizing workers in the industry. While aw talks of the need to take over and transform essential industries, the emphasis is on takeover with little perspective of the meaning of transformation.

There is a need for more thinking about the transformation problem. aw seems dismissive of groups trying to resist the capitalist revolutionizing of food production. Yet there are examples of how, if food was seen not as a source of profit but as a human need and right, farming and food production/distribution could be done quite differently.

But there is something even more fundamental at stake here. aw’s work in the Greenford community on London’s West Side and their workplace efforts at places like prepared food factory, Bakkavor, and the Tesco Supermarket warehouse was motivated by a specific view of capitalism and a revolutionary strategy to replace it. It is difficult to summarize their views and there is no substitute for comrades reading the concluding chapters of Angry Workers’ book. But here is what I got out of their concluding chapters. They argue that a series of strikes at large workplaces in essential industries can make visible the links between different segments of the working class and lead to insurrection aimed at taking over these industries. The objective is to take over and transform these workplaces as building blocks for a new society. This process should occur by region (like England) until it encompasses the world.

This strategic outlook on revolution is based on their conception of the nature of “capitalist power” and the contradictions that can weaken the system. Capitalist power is based, they argue, on exploitation at the workplace; but it has two contradictions that can overcome that. One is that exploitation is based on violence or oppression, which people will tend to resist. The other is that capitalist power depends on “making us think we can’t produce this world by ourselves.” The power of capital is instituted “(most) importantly through company and state management. Capital is able to get millions of people to work together by hiding the need for global cooperation and dividing the people who work together along racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of hierarchy at the workplace. (For this reason) strikes that take place in the heart of exploitation are crucial.”

I have a different view. I believe that the power of capital is based on its ability to force workers to sell their capacity to work as a commodity. The contradiction is that labor is both a commodity under capitalism but at the same time can be a meaningful creative and purposeful activity. That is the fundamental division under capitalism—the divide in the category of labor and it is through this division that all other divisions are made possible—mental versus manual labor; race, gender, ethnicity, temp vs. permanent workers, native vs. migrant, etc.

I would further contend that the power of capital is its ability to turn everything in society into a commodity. The commodity form hides the dual character of all of life’s needs—including food, housing, healthcare, education and even a healthy environment. Struggles against capitalism should be focused on its commodification of everything.

Because Angry Workers see capitalist power mediated by the company and state as more important than the commodity form itself, they see the strike in essential industries which reveals connections between various sections of the working class as the basis for revolution and they connect that to a strategy of insurrection and takeover of essential industries.

While the strike can be effective, other kinds of resistance both at the workplace and in the community also threaten capital’s power if the contradiction between use and exchange values is brought into focus. Contradictions are not confined to the workplace. The commodity form governs all of social existence. The commodity labor power is central to this. To grow and accumulate capital, all aspects of life in capitalist society must be reduced to commodities. Because the system must grow through the accumulation of capital, because it must use dead labor (machines that increase productivity), and because only living labor can produce value, the global system reaches points where the amount of value the system is able to generate is not sufficient to meet basic human needs. It is at such points that the commodity form itself can most clearly be challenged.

Revolutionaries working in production and living in working class communities have an important role that includes recognizing implicit challenges to the commodity form and making these explicit by drawing the lessons from such challenges in terms of a vision of a world without commodities. I saw many examples of such challenges in Class Power on Zero Hours. But I will illustrate my point with a few of my own experiences.

In my book Living and Dying on the Factory Floor I describe a wildcat strike I was part of in a shortening factory. At a point when the strike had become weakened we were summoned to an arbitration hearing that required a train ride from the factory to the downtown Federal office building. We took a beating at that hearing for reasons spelled out in the book and coming back to South Chicago on the train we knew the strike was lost and we were silent and sad. Yet, a man named John Logan broke through the silence and said: “If I knew what was going to happen when we started this I would still have done it. These are the proudest days in my life.” I was on the edge of tears as I looked at him until another worker began laughing. He explained his mirth. “There ain’t no justice,” Lawrence laughed. “There’s just us.” We smiled the rest of the way home.

I get very emotional when I tell this story because John expressed the human side of labor as his pride in being a human being, exposing the contradiction between labor and labor power. For all of us, that pride became what the strike was all about. In the course of the struggle, the contradiction between that and our treatment as commodities by the company, the union and the government became quite clear. We lost the strike but the whole contradiction between labor as a human activity and labor power as a commodity was out of the box. And Lawrence saw that the resolution to this contradiction would not come through government institutions like Federal arbitrators or unions but was contained within “just us.”

I have seen instances of challenges to the commodity form both at the workplace and the community many times.

Another example: a foreman at a chemical plant whistled at us when we were sitting in the lunch room (part of a shop floor protest) and yelled: “Get back to work!” One of the workers yelled back at him: “No estamos perros, cabron!” (We are not dogs, asshole!) We continued to sit until the matter was resolved but, after that, whenever the foreman tried to tell us what to do, everyone began barking.

Another: When public funds were withdrawn from community mental health centers in Chicago, there was a militant effort to demand their reopening. A Vietnam Vet who was part of the demonstration said to me that he had ptsd bad and the closed center was a need for him. Healthcare, however, was seen by the politicians as a commodity that they couldn’t afford. The contradiction was exposed.

Revolutionaries, including myself, who were involved in these struggles lacked the perspective, the number of people, and the organization to move these forward. Perhaps we can do better this time around.

In summary, I don’t believe that insurrection and takeovers can be the basis for a new society unless the commodity form is destroyed in the process. That means the elimination of money, and wage labor. The working class needs to see how this can become a reality through their own acts of resistance and the recognition that these acts not only challenge capitalism but also point at directions toward a new society.

Revolutionaries need to be able to see the revolutionary challenge in such things and record them (possibly in a newspaper like awww). But they also have to have discussions explaining the status of labor power, food, healthcare as a commodity. If we are able to stay in one place long enough, we can build relationships where drawing such lessons is natural and adds to worker consciousness. If this is not done, we will never get beyond takeover even if there is a large-scale insurrection. Instead we are apt to see a manifestation of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” (retrogression) where the slave becomes the master.

Dave Ranney is the author of Living and Dying on the Factory Floors: From the Outside In and the Inside Out (2019) and New World Disorder: The Decline of US Power (2014).

Introduction

In this chapter, I assess the experience of soldiers on the Western Front in the November Revolution. What was it like to be on the ground on the front when the revolution hit? What motivated soldiers to rebel? What was their conception of what was occurring? What did the process of soldiers returning home through revolution look like? Here, I narrate and assess some experiences of soldiers in the revolution, and then compare the experiences of those in the Kriegsmarine to the civilian or worker experience, that of the millions of members of the army who worked in support or bureaucratic roles back home. I will explore these questions and build upon the experience of the working class in the November Revolution presented so far. We will see a recurring theme emerge in these experiences, that of bodily survival being a driver for them. I’ll show that it was the desire to survive the war that led the men to organize politically. The next section will offer some short observations about the German army on the Western Front at the end of the war, exploring the material and psychological conditions there that drove some to embrace the armistice and revolution. The third section will detail the lives of soldiers on the front during the revolution and armistice, also offering some commentary on the experiences of those soldiers who were working back home or in quasi-civilian roles. In the last section, I will offer some concluding remarks about the experiences of soldiers in the revolution.

The Western Front at the End of the War

While it may have been increasingly clear to those back home in the final days of October that the war was nearing a close, to the average German soldier im Felde (in the field) this was not so. Up until the final days of October, soldiers were fiercely fighting for the Kaiser in France and Belgium, though on a slow retreat. After the intensely bloody offenses of Ludendorff in the spring of 1918, the Allies under Foch and Haig had pushed back in the summer, steadily gaining ground while the Central Powers frantically tried to maneuver its dwindling reserves. Though on the retreat, a solid defensive line was maintained until the armistice was called on November 11, and it was never decisively broken. This notion that Germany was somehow undefeated militarily sparked the famous ‘stabbed in the back’ myths which would be featured so prominently as the rallying call for the Nazis in the coming years. It was the civilians, it would be said, that had called for the end of the war. The German troops were undefeated in the field, and they held the line until they were betrayed by the politicians of the spd.

This myth rests in stark contrast to the facts—that it was Ludendorff and the High Command itself who initially declared the war to be lost as early as September 29, 1918. According to Colonel von Thaer, who was present, Ludendorff voiced at a meeting on this day and at subsequent meetings of Reichstag and military officials his view that “there was no relying on the troops any longer” and that “with the help of the high battle morale of the Americans the enemy would gain a major victory.” This victory would result in the West front’s “flood back across the Rhine in complete disorder, bringing revolution to Germany.”1 When Friedrich Ebert learned of Ludendorff’s words, he “turned deathly pale and could not utter a word.”2

Though the High Command had internally admitted defeat, its troops did stay fighting in the field until the armistice. The major breakthrough that Ludendorff anticipated never really came, though the lines were pushed back with more or less force and casualties throughout.

If, from above, we see the High Command emotional and in despair over the situation, we from below see the grim reality of remaining in the trenches: soldiers coping with low morale, mental and physical exhaustion, loneliness/alienation, and constant combat, all while attempting to survive a deadly retreat.

As Scott Stephenson has shown, it was these factors of life im Felde—chiefly, mental and physical exhaustion, loneliness/alienation, and constant combat—that directly impacted how soldiers would react to and partake in the November revolution.3 Soldiers on the front also still had stringent personnel management structures in place, and there was a clear military hierarchy present in their everyday lives. This hierarchy almost quite literally owned their bodies, determining when they ate, slept, relieved themselves, how they interacted with each other, officers, and the enemy, and forcing them into relentless and high-stress combat situations.

In addition, being far from home, these soldiers were less likely to have civilian interaction that would change their opinions on the war. They had limited access to outside information about the war, the strikes back home, or other news. This means that many of their actions would be inspired largely by conditions at the front alone, rather than, for example, by news of the Bolshevik Revolution. Survival of the front, and the psychological impacts that this constant stress and regimentation of everyday life produced pushed the politics of home far from the soldier’s mind. This has led Stephenson and others to call the revolution on the front somewhat “apolitical” in nature, in that it did not necessarily treat with party politics—domestic or international.4

In contrast, the situation of those im Urlaub (on leave) or those who were civilian conscripts working in the factories, on public works projects, in the war-time bureaucracy etc., was quite different. Those im Urlaub or in quasi-civilian roles back home interacted much more with the striking civilians and were exposed to more criticism of the war. Experiencing the food rationing system and shortages like the Turnip Winter were also also unique to those back home. As I shall later show, these two worlds of those im Felde and those im Urlaub would collide in interesting and surprising ways as soldiers returned home at the end of the war.

Armistice and the Return from the Front

I will now detail and analyze the first-hand accounts of two soldiers on the Western front in the revolution.

Herbert Firl was a young soldier on the Western front who would later vividly recall his revolutionary experiences in an sed Erlebnisberichte (experience report). His company of about 80 men went to the front on November 2, and would return within two weeks after the revolution and armistice.5

On November 7, while revolution was spreading throughout Germany, Firl was at the front, where (in his case) this news had not yet reached the troops. On that day, his company and a unit of machine gunners were ordered to start marching “only with rifles.” Gas masks, steel helmets, and other accessories were tossed away. The general came by car and gave a speech to the troops, attempting to encourage them to prepare for new battles. He told them that peace talks were in progress, and that the soldiers would get better living quarters soon. Alongside this, other amenities and basic pleasures were promised to the troops.6

During this speech, however, “the guns boomed.” Firl recalled that about 16 hostile airmen circled over the troops the whole while, threatening at any moment to shoot them. The troops “grumbled: how can they let us sit here in this field, where we can all be shot in one lump!” Calls begin to shout to “skin” the general.7

Soon, the general left, and they saw who Firl cynically dubbed as the “hero” no more. The men, now under a hail of bullets from the airplanes above, scoffed at the departed general’s words. They did not believe that better quarters were coming “as such things should always be better.” Nor did the men believe that peace talks were happening. Soon, they had to leave the village, as a heavy bombardment began to fall on it. Firl’s company then marched for several hours until they stopped at a barn at 11 o’clock at night to rest.8

At about 2am, a nameless Private climbed to the rafters of the barn and roused the men with a speech. Firl recalled some parts of this man’s speech, whom he referred to as “Private X”:

“after four and a half years of war, it was time not for us, but for Wilhelm and August” to do the fighting: “While we perish in the mud, our officers feast and feast. Because we endure and hold our own, our wives and children must go hungry, and we must die, because those at home are holding their own.” The private proposed that the troops take advantage of the opportunities provided by the new influx of Eastern front reinforcements. As these reinforcements had “lain in the East for years,” they should sit on the front and face the bombardment so that Firl’s own comrades did not have to. Then, an officer came and shouted, threatening to have the whole company arrested. “ ‘By whom? Shall we arrest ourselves?’ we roared back.”9

After the speech, as “everyone came slowly out of their straw,” the lieutenant ordered the troops into combat readiness. This, however, raised questions about why the heavy gear needed to be brought with, if the troops were only supposed to be in combat ready mode. To this, the lieutenant had no answer.10

Rain kept the company inside the barn that morning, November 8, with the “Tommies” (the British) all the while keeping up their artillery barrage on the area. After hours waiting in the barn, the company finally marched to the trenches, whereupon they were met with a thick fog.11

Firl and his comrades stayed in the trenches until November 10, and, that evening, orderlies brought word that a truce was to begin at 8 pm:

Nevertheless, the bullets whistled and the heavy guns made the ground tremble. We stood with the clock in hand in the narrow shelter and listened. Should the truce have started? The wiser among us thought that the truce might start at 9 o’clock, because the French clocks were different. But at 9 o’clock it was still the same show. Damn it all! Everyone cursed and one could see that everyone had had their hopes up that peace had finally come. Now it was said that it could also start at 8 o’clock in the morning, but in the morning, no one was looking at the clock anymore, since the roaring [of the guns] did not sound like it was close to going [away] as it should if there were a truce…. At exactly 12 o’clock12 there was suddenly complete silence. Everybody jumped up. What’s happening? A terrible thunder [goes off] from the 38er placed behind us in the village. While we wait, breathless, two more tremendous explosions follow, then there is complete rest. One man jumps up onto the edge of the trench. A whistle. The infantry activity was not set yet. There comes message: immediately withdraw to the ready line. A short while later we are already in place and receive orders to hold elections at 4 o’clock for a soldiers’ council and to get paid…. Everyone was talking only of truce or peace. In front of the regimental office it was discussed. What is this soldiers’ council? Maybe a bread commission? Only one thing we all knew, namely, that now the rule of the officers was over. There were no more supervisors anywhere. A noncommissioned officer suggested that the sergeant be taken as the council leader, since he knew best in everything….13

At 4 o’clock, the men took their pay, as they were told. At a table sat two people with a list of the company members, and everyone had to vote. The sergeant had received only one vote, even though he had been suggested by the men themselves. The other candidate had been the Private X who made the speech in the barn, and he received the rest of the votes.

At 5 o’clock, they assembled again. The lieutenant explained that, according to his reports, the government had resigned, and that a Greater Soldiers Council was being established in Metz. The Private X went off on the lieutenant’s horse to the council in Metz to get more information, telling the soldiers before leaving to stick to the march plan for the first day. They were also not “to throw away rifles” and they were “to give utmost care to the superiors.”14

The men did not harm the sergeant and lieutenant physically, but they stripped them of their uniform stripes and immediately organized both the writing room and the regimental kitchen to fit their needs. About an hour later, the men were already marching towards Metz and were homeward bound. Though they were “tired and hungry from the day before, we marched very proudly, even though the rations had not yet been raised.” The streets were full of columns:

all yelling at each other: “Armistice, now it’s come home!” Officers higher than company commanders were nowhere to be seen. Yes, even these were already partly gone. Everyone had to march in rank and file. The lieutenant marched on the side and when he asked us—there were no more commands—if we did not want to rest, for it was hot, [the men replied] no need, go on! Steel helmets and gas masks were thrown away, heaps of military equipment were already piled up on the roadsides. The gray ribbons and the caps were torn down, everywhere the color red was sought out. Anyone who had something red tied it as a ribbon. To show that we were no longer soldiers like before, we hung the rifle down. We philosophized about what was going on in the homeland….15

In Firl’s story, we see the psychological and physical factors of the wartime experience that Stephenson highlighted as impactful on revolutionary activity. Survival and well-being—limiting physical exertion, taking only needed gear into combat, avoiding combat, and getting enough food and rest—were first on Firl’s mind and the minds of other soldiers with him. We see this emphasis on bodily survival repeatedly.

In the barn, the Private X who would be elected to head up the soldiers’ council had proposed that the veterans of the West front take advantage of the newcomers from the east so that they could remove themselves from the front, heightening their own survival chances. Nor were the men pleased when they were exposed to unnecessary danger from circling aircraft while waiting in an open field during a general’s speech—“where we can all be shot in one lump!” they complained.16 When they moved out from the barn, all questioned why it was necessary to take heavy combat gear, viewed by the soldiers as extra weight that might slow them down in combat and lead to their death, let alone make the physical demands of the day’s march that much harsher.

After the armistice, the immediate emphasis was still on survival and limiting physical exertion. When it was clear that military order was breaking down, the men took over first the kitchen of the regimental house. This gave them direct control of the food supply, something they had not had since their conscription. When the soldiers’ council was first being established, the men were hopeful that it might be a body to address food security and distribution. “What is this soldiers’ council?” they asked, “Maybe a bread commission?”17 The goal was to secure physical well-being for the foreseeable future. This involved too not taking any unnecessary equipment on the march back home. To limit the physical demands of the march, “Steel helmets and gas masks were thrown away, heaps of military equipment were already piled up on the roadsides.”18 Human life, rather than the successful continuation of the German military machine, was now to come first.

Survival was more than the immediate avoidance of danger or the constant struggle to remain healthy, however. It meant the pursuit of peace or any means possible to leave the front. While bullets whizzed overhead on November 10–11, Firl and his comrades anxiously held the clock, desperately waiting for the appointed time of armistice to arrive. They incessantly questioned when the truce might be coming, and rumors were clearly running wild amongst them. Did they mean 8 am? Did they account for the time difference between French and German clocks? When initial truce hopes were dashed on the night of the 10 after it passed 8 pm, “Everyone cursed and one could see that everyone had had their hopes up that peace had finally come.”19 Especially for those in combat, the armistice was the ultimate guarantor of survival, and once a rumor of it came it preoccupied the men’s minds.

But, this bodily survival was quite political, even if it may not have been associated with any formal/surrogate political organizations like the uspd, the spd, or the Spartacists. This is evident from the Private X’s quite socialist speech in the barn. He said that it was unjust for the men to be there, risking their lives for so little food and basic supplies, especially when the officers had so much and could “feast and feast.” Though Firl did not report on the reaction of the men to the speech in the barn, we can assume it was at least neutral, if not positive, given that they all refused to arrest him and jeered at the officer who threatened them with arrest. To some of the men, survival meant taking back what the officers had so unjustly taken, to reclaim the kitchens and redesign the regimentation of their lives so that they could have enough to live. Hence, the old scheduling of meals and the takeover by officer supply depots at the regimental houses were the first occurrences of the armistice for the men in Firl’s company.

Another point to be made about Firl’s account of the armistice on the front is that there is no description of any kind of elated celebration by the soldiers on the battlefield. Once the first man stepped to the edge of the trenches, all happened quickly to get the men out of there. In just a few hours, they were paid, had organized soldiers’ councils, took over the regimental house, established communication with the Greater Soldiers’ Council at Metz, and started on their way back home. They wanted to return to their families and their people to celebrate peace at home.

The armistice did not just mean a ceasefire to these men. Rather, it meant leaving the battlefield altogether. As they shouted at each other in the streets, the armistice had to “come home.”20 It was not something that could stay on the front. This shows too that they conceived of armistice as something that they would bring by their own actions and agency. It was only once the men elected to march home that the armistice could “arrive” there.

That they were prepared to leave the battlefield within only a few hours’ time shows too their feelings towards the war. Four and a half years into a conflict that had claimed the lives of their comrades and caused them so much emotional and physical distress, the men were very ready to commence the armistice, to leave these horrors and their lives as soldiers behind.

This transition in their minds from soldier back to civilian life occurred over these few days as a part of the armistice process. The soldier returned to civilian life by taking charge of his affairs, physically removing or altering that that stood in his way in a very confrontational, headstrong, masculine fashion. As we saw, the soldiers took back control over their survival factors—they regained control first over their own bodies, over whether they were put in danger, where they were allowed to sleep, when they were able to eat and what, where they could rest and stay. Next, the abstract systems of their regimentation and of their danger were repurposed or stripped away. On the march home, Firl and his fellows hung their rifles down, “To show that we were no longer soldiers like before.”21 They flung all their badges and equipment away and sought anything red to tie around themselves, in a symbol of unity with their fellows of the revolution. The lieutenant’s own horse was taken by the private elected to head the soldiers’ council so that he could go to Metz to obtain more information for the troops. Their superiors, actors and symbols of the military authority, were mostly gone, with those ranked “higher than company commanders were nowhere to be seen.”22 Those officers that remained were literally brushed to the side, as the lieutenant, marching on the side of the street, out of rank with his troops, was. They had their badges and ribbons stripped away, a protest against those that had quite literally endangered soldiers’ lives for so long with their orders.

Yet, they still marched in rank and file, with the streets full of columns. They marched “very proudly” even though they were exhausted from many days in the field with little rest and poor quarters. The marched still in part because they were told by their newly elected authority, the nameless private of stirring oration from the barn, to do so. This was therefore partly a choice which the men were “very proud” to carry out.

However, pressures from the new spd government also called for the maintenance of order in the military as much as possible. At home, numerous leaflets had been disseminated after the continuous days of revolutionary street action from the start of the month. Soldiers were repeatedly addressed as a special, separate body of the population in these proclamations, with one starting: “Inhabitants and soldiers of Greater Berlin!”23 Another one closed with: “Workers, soldiers, see to it that quiet and order are observed.”24 “Quiet and order” meant that soldiers were to come home in rank rather than flooding back as great, unorganized masses—masses armed to the teeth.

As a special category of the population separate from workers and civilians, a new office was created to manage the affairs of returning soldiers. The Demobilization Office, under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Josef Koeth, was established initially to deal with the anticipated growth of the problem of soldier unemployment. In the coming weeks, Koeth’s office would build unemployment benefit programs for former soldiers and would see to it as best as his office was capable that their arms were handed over to the new Republican Army. The Demobilization Office also worked to keep some regulations on the large-scale industry in place so that some employment opportunities existed for the returning soldiers. In this broader, macro-economic sense, Gerald D. Feldman has argued that the demobilization process in Germany was actually quite similar to that in other Western nations after the war, even though it was part of the revolution.25 In this context, the order and organization of Firl’s and other companies on November 11 was not unusual, but explicitly planned for by the spd government. The maximum organization of those troops returning home was essential if the spd government was to stay afloat. Otherwise, the millions of returning, armed troops, faced with unemployment and economic hardship, could quickly turn into an armed mass.

Finally, we can account for why the men marched home in that there was probably a sense of nationalist pride. Though the idea of the German nation was up in the air at this point, the soldiers probably felt some semblance of a sense of honor and showmanship in their marching, if not for the fact that they deemed themselves to be the carriers of the armistice itself, the ones who had the honor of “bringing the armistice home.”

The initial revolutionary experience for those at the front was therefore one of returning home, of transitioning to civilian life, and regaining agency in those areas that it was previously denied to the men. In carrying out the armistice, however, these soldiers would interact with millions of other Germans, spurring some to action. We see this in the case of two other stories, Max Hoelz and Otto Henning.

Max Hoelz was a twenty-nine-year-old, working-class communist at the end of the war who would later organize the Red Army of the Voigtland region around Falkenstein. He had been working in some capacity since the age of seven, when he had had to go out into the fields with his family. Conscripted into the war, he was wounded and went in and out of hospitals and various behind-the-front work for the army. Towards the end of the war, he was discharged as unfit for service.26 With his pension of forty marks per month, he searched for a job related to his prior work as a mechanic, and eventually became a supervisor for a construction company of some two hundred workers to make concrete, fences, chicken wire, and other implements for the army. Though not himself a soldier at the end of the war, his comments about trying to travel while so many soldiers were headed back home in early November 1918 gives us more insight into the experiences of soldiers coming from the front.27

The construction company Hoelz worked for was just outside Alsace, and therefore close to the front. Receiving word that his wife was ill, he began his return journey to her on November 7. What he saw on his next few days of travel was “a picture that I would never have thought possible.” The trains were so crowded with troops returning home that he was only able to board by climbing into the Frankfurt train through a window, where he and two others then stayed in tightly packed quarters for the rest of the several-hour-long train ride. As he rode, Hoelz later wrote, he felt a sense growing in him that there were other important events developing besides his wife’s health at home in Falkenstein. About hearing of the formation of soldiers’ and workers’ councils through talks with others on their ways home, he wrote: “What I heard and experienced then became, in the truest sense of the word, a revelation to me. On the 9th of November I arrived at home in Falkenstein. My first question was about the [status of the] Workers’ and Soldiers Council.”28

Hoelz, who had previously only had one socialist leave an impression on him back in 1917, was inspired by what he saw to pursue the building of the soldiers’ and workers’ council in Falkenstein. This council he would lead until he was ousted by its co-leader, at which point he began organizing the Red Guard in the Voigtland—his illegal, armed band of militants. That what he saw on his journey home, what he said that he “experienced” in talking with soldiers headed back from the front, influenced him so much that he began to partake in the revolutionary action himself speaks to the type of heavy influence that the actors of the armistice had on those around them. If they were able to move Hoelz—and many millions like him to action—then perhaps they were correct when they conceptualized the armistice as only arriving home once they did.

Otto Henning was a soldier sent back in July of 1918 to work in the fields and at a construction company to supply the army. In October, Henning was put into a special company of soldiers that was to be used against strikers and protesters in Germany. In early November, he was sent to a suburb of Hannover to guard with the other troops of this special detachment an important railway junction. Their commander told them: “Trains arrive here [at Hannover] from Wilhelmshaven, Kiel and Hamburg, and all of them stop here. All sailors and soldiers on the train that are not on leave are to be arrested; in case of resistance weapons are to be used.” Two machine guns were put in position to be able to fire on those arriving if needed. The commander then stressed further that “he had been informed by telephone that resistance was to be expected because the sailors were for the most part armed.” This, noted Henning humorously, was a great mistake to tell the troops, as their whole unit was comprised of those who had been undesirable elements in the army. A “lively discussion” amongst the troops led to their conclusion: “[to] Wait, see what comes and not immediately apply our weapons.”29

Two to three hours later, a train came in. Sailors and soldiers with red ribbons on their caps and some with red armbands descended from the train. “Do not shoot, comrades!” they said. “The emperor, has fled to Holland, the war has ended, the government has fallen, in Berlin [there is] revolution and under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert a provisional government of People’s Commissars has been formed, in which the spd and the uspd are represented.” Henning and his comrades “agreed with the sailors immediately and only our captain with his three officers did not understand what was going on.” What made them realize that they had lost power, Henning wrote, was that the sailors then helped the troops to drive their train back to Minden, where they then organized a soldiers’ council. There were then demonstrations on November 9 of “infantry, pioneers, and artillerymen under red flags…of 5,000 soldiers, as they had never seen [in] this city of officers.”30

In Henning and Hoelz’s stories we see the masses of soldiers and sailors bringing the armistice to their comrades on their ways home. Hoelz’s “revelation” was that so many people could be so easily mobilized for the cause of peace, which was exactly what shocked Henning’s superiors at the Hannover station and Johann Fladung’s superiors when troops were disarmed at the station he was at.31 Yet, what we saw of soldiers at the front was in a certain sense true to those behind the front as well: the war was so hated that, at their first good looking opportunity, the men would abandon it with all possible haste—primarily for their own survival. It took only a “lively discussion” and a comrade to explain that the Kaiser had fled and there was revolution in Berlin for Henning’s unit to join up, just as it took Hoelz only a short time amongst these same types of revolutionary soldiers to be converted wholly to their cause and believe that he had new duties alongside tending to his ill wife.

The sociologist Asef Bayat has used the term “passive network” to explain how people can come to be easily united into action with no or little previous active or formal organizing. The network forms through the “instantaneous communication among atomized individuals, which is established by a tacit recognition of their common identity, and which is mediated through space.”32 Though the men in these units might not have had explicitly aired their grievances with each other, they had common experiences of the war and of the hated Prussian militarism, of being separated from their families and being told to shoot the undesirables of the government. In this way, they had developed a shared identity through their mutual hatred of the Prussian militarism and the war. This concept helps explain in part how so many soldiers and sailors were easily mobilized into armistice and revolutionary actions to secure peace. This passive network through shared identity was powerful enough that it took only a few sentences explaining the situation and red armbands or spending a short time amongst these people to become enraptured in it. So it was that soldiers in the trenches, marching home, taking the train home, or threatened with disarming at train stations quickly came together into cohesive forces of revolution.

These stories also speak to the material reality of millions of people jamming the roadways and railways in the revolutionary fall of 1918. Hoelz’s description of trains so full that he had to cram into the window to ride, are similar to stories told of transportation networks all over Berlin at the time. Everywhere the trains were full of soldiers and sailors on the return—this demobilization should be thought of as a massive migration and reorganization of peoples all its own. Yet, the newspapers did not comment on this material reality of armistice and of mass troop transport or warn people away from the mess that had been made of public transport. They instead focused on the words of the important politicians and vague news about which towns had declared soldiers’ and workers’ councils.33 Little information was presented by the press about the trains, which were overcrowded, rerouted, delayed, and physically damaged by the revolution in unexpected ways. Much anxiety was had over the fates of loved ones, friends, returning soldiers and sailors, and more. Carl Keuschner, the working-class arms smuggler from Chapter One, remembered waiting the night of November 9 on the platform until midnight for a train to come that he thought was bringing his wife from Wismar. When it came, however, she was not on board. The train’s wagons had been “without light and window glass,” and had held very few passengers. Afterwards, because the street cars were not running, he had to walk “about six kilometers along the way back to my place located in Neuköllner Sonnenallee through the unlit Berlin.”34 His story is a small sample of the chaos engulfing transportation networks during the revolution, which would get worse as more soldiers and sailors joined the armistice.

Though the transportation was in chaos, for many it was a thrilling form of chaos. As we saw in Hoelz’s story, one could easily become enraptured in the moment. Over the course of a train ride, he became convinced by the mood of the soldiers there that he must help form a council in his own hometown, thoughts which were so powerful that they competed with his anxieties for his ill wife. Similarly, as we saw with Johann Fladung’s story in Chapter One, one never quite new what to expect from arriving trains during the revolution. Though they did not bring Keuschner his wife on the night of November 9, they did bring to some stations crowds full of revolutionary soldiers, ready to arm or disarm themselves at a moment’s notice.

The arrival of soldiers back home in the fall of 1918 was a process which lasted until late December. Those who came home were met with a drastically different world than perhaps the idyllic visions of home that they had had on the front. While it offered some aid, the Demobilization Office was unable to cope with the hordes of soldiers returning to the cities during this time. Exact figures on the numbers of soldiers on the streets of Berlin are difficult to verify, but, we know that there were 75,000 unemployed there in December 1918, the greater part of which would have been soldiers.35 Karl Grünberg, a working-class writer who, a few weeks after the revolution sought to join up in the Republikanischer Soldatenwehr (the Republican Guard, the militias raised in defense of the revolution) in Berlin, wrote that the city was “teeming” with soldiers—both those unemployed and those in the garrisons. He figured that the spd would have no trouble finding volunteers like him to join up.36

The thrill of the revolutionary exaltation then quickly wore out for some. The working-class communist Hans Marchwitza described the scene of soldiers coming home in Sturm auf Essen, his novel about the Ruhr valley armed struggles of 1919 and 1920:

It is the year 1918, and winter. Snow falls. The men who survived the war come home. The colliery houses to which they return are gray and crooked, and their plaster looks like the shabby fur of old mining pens. The “trench animals” are again to become fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, the women scream, mothers cry, sisters howl: “He is back, O my God!” O my God! The children ask the strange man who is their father: “Do you bring bread?” The word “bread” looks like the scent of flowers in a fairy tale. “Holy Bread,” stammer the old people, trembling with hunger, while accepting with reluctance the piece they have received. “The dead believed in us.”

A hated, cursed war was followed by a hated, cursed post-war.37

As Marchwitza depicted, soldiers returning home found their families, cities, and lives that they knew before the war turned upside down and inside out by material hardship. Unemployment, increasing inflation, and the food rationing system had combined to make life in wartime and postwar Germany very difficult. Families barely recognized their men returning to them—faces haggard and minds numb from the trenches, some missing limbs or with scarred, battered bodies. This was just as the men hardly recognized their own families—barefoot, dirty, malnourished children, and careworn, thin, wives and relatives.

The Spanish flu was also raging across Europe at this time, and it took as easy victims the many malnourished people of wartime and postwar Germany. Karl Grünberg, wrote of the flu (German Grippe): “This epidemic, which had been raging since the summer, had taken dangerous forms among the undernourished. Everywhere on the street, in the trams and in the factories, people with peculiar gray faces were found. Doctors, pharmacists and the gravediggers were hardly able keep up with the work they needed to do.”38 Grünberg himself was stricken with the Grippe, which he called the Hungertyphus (hunger typhus). He lay with fever in bed in mid-November, just after the November 9 revolution in Berlin, with an “agonizing cough.” His room-mate and his two inn-keepers had also been stricken, with his room-mate being forced to go to the emergency rooms of the hospital. Of going to the pharmacy, he wrote that “every second person in line standing behind me received the same ready-made mixture, which tasted disgusting but did not help.”39 With the little that medicine could then do for the Grippe, those unfortunate enough to catch it were in for a miserable time as Grünberg had, with hospitalization or death non unlikely.

Many of the soldiers that returned would be stricken with the disease, just as many of their friends and family that they were returning to already had contracted it. The Spanish flu would claim at least 14,000 soldiers of the German army in its second wave from October to November of 1918.40 Some soldiers were sent away from the front therefore not due to the armistice, but to go to hospital for the Grippe or to die from it. This was the case for the 22-year-old private August Brodschelm, who died of the Grippe on November 8, 1918, as well as for 24-year-old Private Franz X. Bauer, dead of the same on November 19, 1918.41 For the thousands more like these two, young privates, slow, painful death from the flu was their experience with the revolution and armistice.

The “hated, cursed, postwar” Marchwitza discussed was a situation of very real material hardship and uncertainty—the revolutionary social imaginary, that leap into the open air of history in which anything seemed possible, gave way by December to an endless freefall in which even survival seemed unlikely.42 In January of 1919, 800 Germans a day were dying of dietary deficiencies. In the first three months of 1919, about a third of all children born would die in a few days, with Düsseldorf seeing a child mortality rate of 80 percent. Living in Germany in December 1918 were 300,000 unemployed, a quarter of whom were in Berlin alone. This figure would jump to about 1.1 million unemployed in Germany by February 1919.43 The affects of the postwar economy on the working class were coupled with the spd government’s refusal to socialize the economy, leading to increasing radicalization in the winter and spring of 1919. This was the “hated, cursed, postwar” that awaited many of the elated soldiers of Firl’s unit as they marched home near Metz on November 11. It would soon be more than just the children who were asking the all-important question—“Do you bring bread?”—in the fall and winter of 1918.

For the fathers, brothers, and friends returning as former soldiers, being unable to help provide for loved ones due to the flu, unemployment, and the rising inflation would have been demoralizing and emasculating. With armistice, they had only just regained some sense of control over their own fates, and then they saw it very quickly taken away from them again with the chaos of the revolution. This would lead many to radicalization, into the waiting arms of the Spartacists/kpd, the Shop Stewards, and the new, radical unions that would form in the Ruhr Valley in the months to come.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have seen how and why some soldiers revolted in November of 1918. What revolution initially meant to many coming back from the Western Front was simple: armistice. The end of the war meant an end to the control of the Kaiser and officers over their bodies, minds, spirits, and psyches. It meant the liberation to have control over one’s own fate again, and to have physical security from harm and well-being. As a part of this process, officers, who had so often been the source of the abuse of well-being and the hoarders of army resources, were stripped of the ranks, pushed to the sides of the columns, and had their old headquarters occupied. In their places, the men elected new leaders from their own ranks, men whom they trusted would fight for their survival.

What the men felt was revolutionary was their bringing the armistice home, the armistice which they were the reification of. Contained partially in their concept of armistice was their concept of revolution. Coming home was as much a part of the act of revolution for the men as was the stripping officers of their ranks and the election of new leaders through the council systems. This meant that the revolution did not typically take place in the trenches. Rather, it took place as they were on their ways home.

Upon arriving home, the men were met with the shock of the postwar economy and malnourished, needy families and friends. If it was thrilling for Max Hoelz to ride with the soldiers and be with them in their moments of revolutionary bliss—the bliss of possibility and freedom—coming home was shock of reality. The real economic woes and challenges that lay ahead for the soldiers returning from the front throughout the November days would become critical drivers of their radicalization and further participation in the revolution. The realization that the war that they had been fighting was contributing to such misery at home must have been one of the final blows to the identities of soldiers as such before they shirked it off. The speech of the socialist Private X from the barn described the situation well: “Because we [soldiers] endure and hold our own, our wives and children must go hungry, and we must die, because those at home are holding their own.” While the war continued, men were dying and suffering in defense of those back home while those back home were dying and suffering in defense of those very same men. In the fall of 1918, it was not civilians who “stabbed in the back” “undefeated” German army. Rather, the longer the German Army fought, the more they drove the knife into themselves and the more defeated they became. In November, soldiers realized this, and tried to top the knife by returning home.

Nick Goodell is an activist and a doctoral student in History at Vanderbilt University.

1. Haffner, Sebastian, Failure of a Revolution (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986), p. 38.↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 37.↩︎
3. Stephenson, Scott, The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and the German Revolution of 1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 9–10.↩︎
4. Ibid., Introduction and Ch. 1.↩︎
5. Bundesarchiv at Berlin Lichterfelde, SgY 30–0216 Firl, Herbert, p. 1.↩︎
6. Ibid., p. 2.↩︎
7. Ibid.↩︎
8. Ibid.↩︎
9. Ibid., p. 2.↩︎
10. Ibid., p. 3.↩︎
11. Ibid.↩︎
12. 11 o’clock French time, hence the 11–11–11 Armistice Day celebrations.↩︎
13. Ibid., p. 4.↩︎
14. Ibid., p. 4.↩︎
15. Ibid., p. 5.↩︎
16. Ibid., p. 2.↩︎
17. Ibid., p. 4.↩︎
18. Ibid.↩︎
19. Ibid.↩︎
20. Ibid., p. 5.↩︎
21. Ibid., p. 5.↩︎
22. Ibid.↩︎
23. Burdick, Charles B., and Ralph H. Lutz, editors, The Political Institutions of the German Revolution 1918–1919 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1966), p. 45.↩︎
24. Ibid., p. 44.↩︎
25. Feldman, Gerald D., “Economic and Social Problems of the German Demobilization, 1918–19,” The Journal of Modern History 47, no. 1 (1975): 1–47.↩︎
26. The discharge was also likely due to his constant misbehavior. Alongside a medical assistant who Hoelz slapped when they treated him “too roughly,” he also beat up a “fat sergeant” who continuously accosted him “in a defiant tone for not running fast enough” on his injured feet.↩︎
27. Hoelz, Max, “Last Months of the War in the Hospitals and as a Technician in Alsace,” Vom Weißen Kreuz zur Roten Fahne, (1929).↩︎
28. Ibid.↩︎
29. Bundesarchiv at Berlin, Lichterfelde, SgY 30–0373 Henning, Otto p. 1–2.↩︎
30. Henning, p. 2–3.↩︎
31. See p. 46 in Chapter One.↩︎
32. Bayat, Asef, “From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’ Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South,” International Sociology, 15 no. 3 (September 2000): p. 533–557.↩︎
33. For examples, see the front pages of the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung from November 11 and 12.↩︎
34. Bundesarchiv at Berlin Lichterfelde, SgY 30–0464, Keuschner, Karl, p. 4.↩︎
35. Geary, Dick, and Richard J. Evans, editor, “Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution 1914–23,” Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1978), p. 274.↩︎
36. Grünberg, Karl, and Wolfgang Emmerich, editor, “Als meiner Soldatenratszeit,“ Proletarische Lebensläufe: Autobiographische Dokumente zur Entstehung der Zweiten Kultur in Deutschland Band 2: 1914 bis 1945 (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1975), p. 187.↩︎
37. Marchwitza, Hans, Sturm auf Essen (1930), ch. 1.↩︎
38. Bundesarchiv at Berlin, Lichterfeld, SgY 30–1116, Grünberg, Karl, p. 26.↩︎
39. Ibid., p. 28.↩︎
40. Wever, Peter C., and Leo van Bergenc “Death from 1918 Pandemic: Influenza During the First World War: A Perspective from Personal and Anecdotal Evidence,” Influenza Other Respiratory Viruses, 8 no. 5, (September 2014).↩︎
41. Ibid., Section “Influenza Produced no Heroes.”↩︎
42. Ibid.↩︎
43. Geary, p. 274–275.↩︎

Interview with Karl Marx (excerpts)- H.

Chicago Tribune, January 5 1879

London, December 18 [1878]—In a little villa at Haverstock Hill, the northwest portion of London, lives Karl Marx, the cornerstone of modern socialism. He was exiled from his native country—Germany—in 1844, for propagating revolutionary theories. In 1848, he returned, but in a few months was again exiled. He then took up his abode in Paris, but his political theories procured his expulsion from that city in 1849, and since that year his headquarters have been in London. His convictions have caused him trouble from the beginning. Judging from the appearance of his home, they certainly have not brought him affluence. Persistently during all these years he has advocated his views with an earnestness which undoubtedly springs from a firm belief in them, and, however much we may deprecate their propagation, we cannot but respect to a certain extent the self-denial of the now venerable exile.

Our correspondent has called upon him twice or thrice, and each time the Doctor was found in his library, with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He must be over seventy years of age. His physique is well knit, massive, erect. He has the head of a man of intellect, and the features of a cultivated Jew. His hair and beard are long, and iron-gray in color. His eyes are glittering black, shaded by a pair of bushy eyebrows. To a stranger he shows extreme caution. A foreigner can generally gain admission; but the ancient-looking German woman [Helene Demuth] who waits upon visitors has instructions to admit none who hail from the Fatherland, unless they bring letters of introduction. Once into his library, however, and having fixed his one eyeglass in the corner of his eye, in order to take your intellectual breadth and depth, so to speak, he loses that self-restraint, and unfolds to you a knowledge of men and things throughout the world apt to interest one. And his conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves. A man can generally be judged by the books he reads, and you can form your own conclusions when I tell you a casual glance revealed Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Moliere, Racine, Montaigne, Bacon, Goethe, Voltaire, Paine; English, American, French blue books; works political and philosophical in Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, etc., etc. During my conversation I was struck with his intimacy with American questions which have been uppermost during the past twenty years. His knowledge of them, and the surprising accuracy with which he criticized our national and state legislation, impressed upon my mind the fact that he must have derived his information from inside sources. But, indeed, this knowledge is not confined to America, but is spread over the face of Europe. When speaking of his hobby—socialism—he does not indulge in those melodramatic flights generally attributed to him, but dwells upon his utopian plans for “the emancipation of the human race” with a gravity and an earnestness indicating a firm conviction in the realization of his theories, if not in this century, at least in the next.

Perhaps Dr. Karl Marx is better known in America as the author of Capital, and the founder of the International Society, or at least its most prominent pillar. In the interview which follows, you will see what he says of this Society as it at present exists. However, in the meantime I will give you a few extracts from the printed general rules of The International Society published in 1871, by order of the General Council, from which you can form an impartial judgment of its aims and ends. The Preamble sets forth

that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule; that the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor—that is, the sources of life—lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence; that all efforts aiming at

the universal emancipation of the working classes “have hitherto failed from want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labor in each country,” and the Preamble calls for “the immediate combination of the still-disconnected movements.” It goes on to say that the International Association acknowledges “no rights without duties, no duties without rights”—thus making every member a worker. The Association was formed at London “to afford a central medium of communication and cooperation between the workingmen’s societies in the different countries,” aiming at the same end, namely: “the protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes.” “Each member,” the document further says, “of the International Association, on removing his domicile from one country to another, will receive the fraternal support of the associated workingmen.”

…. I said, “socialists generally look upon the transformation of the means of labor into the common property of society as the grand climax of the movement.”

“Yes; we say that this will be the outcome of the movement, but it will be a question of time, of education, and the institution of higher social status.”

“This platform,” I remarked, “applies only to Germany and one or two other countries.”

“Ah!” he returned, “if you draw your conclusions from nothing but this, you know nothing of the activity of the party. Many of its points have no significance outside of Germany. Spain, Russia, England, and America have platforms suited to their peculiar difficulties. The only similarity in them is the end to be attained.”

“And that is the supremacy of labor?”

“That is the emancipation of labor.”

“Do European socialists look upon the movement in America as a serious one?”

“Yes: it is the natural outcome of the country’s development. It has been said that the movement has been imported by foreigners. When labor movements became disagreeable in England, fifty years ago, the same thing was said; and that was long before socialism was spoken of. In American, since 1857, only has the labor movement become conspicuous. Then trade unions began to flourish; then trades assemblies were formed, in which the workers in different industries united; and after that came national labor unions. If you consider this chronological progress, you will see that socialism has sprung up in that country without the aid of foreigners, and was merely caused by the concentration of capital and the changed relations between the workmen and employers.”

“Now,” asked our correspondent, “what has socialism done so far?”

“Two things,” he returned. “Socialists have shown the general universal struggle between capital and labor—the Cosmopolitan Chapter in one word—and consequently tried to bring about an understanding between the workmen in the different countries, which became more necessary as the capitalists became more cosmopolitan in hiring labor, pitting foreign against native labor not only in America, but in England, France, and Germany. International relations sprang up at once between workingmen in the three different countries, showing that socialism was not merely a local, but an international problem, to be solved by the international action of workmen. The working classes move spontaneously, without knowing what the ends of the movement will be. The socialists invent no movement, but merely tell the workmen what its character and its ends will be.”

“Which means the overthrowing of the present social system,” I interrupted.

“This system of land and capital in the hands of employers, on the one hand,” he continued, “and the mere working power in the hands of the laborers to sell a commodity, we claim is merely a historical phase, which will pass away and give place to a higher social condition.

“We see everywhere a division of society. The antagonism of the two classes goes hand in hand with the development of the industrial resources of modern countries. From a socialistic standpoint the means already exist to revolutionize the present historical phase. Upon trade unions, in many countries, have been built political organizations. In America the need of an independent workingmen’s party has been made manifest. They can no longer trust politicians. Rings and cliques have seized upon the legislatures, and politics has been made a trade. But America is not alone in this, only its people are more decisive than Europeans. Things come to the surface quicker. There is less cant and hypocrisy that there is on this side of the ocean.”

I asked him to give me a reason for the rapid growth of the socialistic party in Germany, when he replied:

“The present socialistic party came last. Theirs was not the utopian scheme which made headway in France and England. The German mind is given to theorizing, more than that of other peoples. From previous experience the Germans evolved something practical. This modern capitalistic system, you must recollect, is quite new in Germany in comparison to other states. Questions were raised which had become almost antiquated in France and England, and political influences to which these states had yielded sprang into life when the working classes of Germany had become imbued with socialistic theories. Therefore, from the beginning almost of modern industrial development, they have formed an independent political party.

They had their own representatives in the German parliament. There was no party to oppose the policy of the government, and this devolved upon them. To trace the course of the party would take a long time; but I may say this: that, if the middle classes of Germany were not the greatest cowards, distinct from the middle classes of America and England, all the political work against the government should have been done by them.”

“It is said that you are the head and front of socialism, Doctor, and from your villa here pull the wires of all the associations, revolutions, etc., now going on. What do you say about it?”

The old gentleman smiled: “I know it.”

“It is very absurd yet it has a comic side. For two months previous to the attempt of Hoedel, Bismarck complained in his North German Gazette that I was in league with Father Beck, the leader of the Jesuit movement, and that we were keeping the socialist movement in such a condition that he could do nothing with it.”

“But your International Society in London directs the movement?”

“The International Society has outlived its usefulness and exists no longer. It did exist and direct the movement; but the growth of socialism of late years has been so great that its existence has become unnecessary. Newspapers have been started in the various countries. These are interchanged. That is about the only connection the parties in the different countries have with one another. The International Society, in the first instance, was created to bring the workmen together, and show the advisability of effecting organization among their various nationalities. The interests of each party in the different countries have no similarity. This specter of the Internationalist leaders sitting at London is a mere invention. It is true that we dictated to foreign societies when the Internationalist organization was first accomplished. We were forced to exclude some sections in New York, among them one in which Madam Woodhull was conspicuous, that was in 1871. There are several American politicians—I will not name them—who wish to trade in the movement. They are well known to American socialists.”

“You and your followers, Dr. Marx, have been credited with all sorts of incendiary speeches against religion. Of course you would like to see the whole system destroyed, root and branch.”

“We know,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation, “that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear.

“Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.”

“The Reverend Joseph Cook, of Boston—you know him—”

“We have heard of him, a very badly informed man upon the subject of socialism.”

“In a lecture lately upon the subject, he said, ‘Karl Marx is credited now with saying that, in the United States, and in Great Britain, and perhaps in France, a reform of labor will occur without bloody revolution, but that blood must be shed in Germany, and in Russia, and in Italy, and in Austria.’ ”

“No socialist,” remarked the Doctor, smiling, “need predict that there will be a bloody revolution in Russia, Germany, Austria, and possibly Italy if the Italians keep on in the policy they are now pursuing. The deeds of the French Revolution may be enacted again in those countries. That is apparent to any political student. But those revolutions will be made by the majority. No revolution can be made by a party, but by a nation.”

“The reverend gentleman alluded to,” I remarked, “gave an extract from a letter which he said you addressed to the Communists of Paris in 1871. Here it is:

We are as yet but 3,000,000 at most. In twenty years we shall be 50,000,000—100,000,000 perhaps. Then the world will belong to us, for it will be not only Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, which will rise against odious capital, but Berlin, Munich, Dresden, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Brussels, St. Petersburg, New York—in short, the whole world. And before this new insurrection, such as history has not yet known, the past will disappear like a hideous nightmare; for the popular conflagration, kindled at a hundred points at once, will destroy even its memory!

Now, Doctor, I suppose you admit the authorship of that extract?”

“I never wrote a word of it. I never write such melodramatic nonsense.

“I am very careful what I do write. That was put in Le Figaro, over my signature, about that time. There were hundreds of the same kind of letters flying about them. I wrote to the London Times and declared they were forgeries; but if I denied everything that has been said and written of me, I would require a score of secretaries.”

“But you have written in sympathy with the Paris Communists?”

“Certainly I have, in consideration of what was written of them in leading articles; but the correspondence from Paris in English papers is quite sufficient to refute the blunders propagated in editorials. The Commune killed only about sixty people; Marshal MacMahon and his slaughtering army killed over 60,000. There has never been a movement so slandered as that of the Commune.”

“Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?”

“No great movement,” Karl answered, “has ever been inaugurated without bloodshed.

“The independence of America was won by bloodshed, Napoleon captured France through a bloody process, and he was overthrown by the same means. Italy, England, Germany, and every other country gives proof of this, and as for assassination,” he went on to say, “it is not a new thing, I need scarcely say. Orsini tried to kill Napoleon; kings have killed more than anybody else; the Jesuits have killed; the Puritans killed at the time of Cromwell. These deeds were all done or attempted before socialism was born. Every attempt, however, now made upon a royal or state individual is attributed to socialism. The socialists would regret very much the death of the German Emperor at the present time. He is very useful where he is; and Bismarck has done more for the cause than any other statesman, by driving things to extremes.”

_________________

Karl Marx - John Swinton

The Sun, No. 6, September 6, 1880
The interview with the The Sun’s editor took place in August 1880.

One of the most remarkable men of the day, who has played an inscrutable but puissant part in the revolutionary politics of the past forty years, is Karl Marx. A man without desire for show or fame, caring nothing for the fanfaronade of life or the pretence of power, without haste and without rest, a man of strong, broad, elevated mind, full of far-reaching projects, logical methods, and practical aims, he has stood and yet stands behind more of the earthquakes which have convulsed nations and destroyed thrones, and do now menace and appal crowned heads and established frauds, than any other man in Europe, not excepting Joseph Mazzini himself. The student of Berlin, the critic of Hegelianism, the editor of papers, and the old-time correspondent of the New York Tribune, he showed his qualities and his spirit; the founder and master spirit of the once dreaded International and the author of “Capital,” he has been expelled from half the countries of Europe, proscribed in nearly all of them, and for thirty years past has found refuge in London. He was at Ramsgate the great seashore resort of the Londoners, while I was in London, and there I found him in his cottage, with his family of two generations. The saintly-faced, sweet-voiced, graceful woman of suavity who welcomed me at the door was evidently the mistress of the house and the wife of Karl Marx. And is this massive-headed, generous-featured, courtly, kindly man of 60, with the bushy masses of long ravelling gray hair, Karl Marx? His dialogue reminded me of that of Socrates—so free, so sweeping, so creative, so incisive, so genuine—with its sardonic touches, its gleams of humor, and its sportive merriment. He spoke of the political forces and popular movements of the various countries of Europe—the vast current of the spirit of Russia, the motions of the German mind, the action of France, the immobility of England. He spoke hopefully of Russia, philosophically of Germany, cheerfully of France, and sombrely of England—referring contemptuously to the “atomistic reforms” over which the Liberals of the British Parliament spend their time. Surveying the European world, country after country, indicating the features and the developments and the personages on the surface and under the surface, he showed that things were working toward ends which will assuredly be realized. I was often surprised as he spoke. It was evident that this man, of whom so little is seen or heard, is deep in the times, and that, from the Neva to the Seine, from the Urals to the Pyrenees, his hand is at work preparing the way for the new advent. Nor is his work wasted now any more than it has been in the past, during which so many desirable changes have been brought about, so many heroic struggles have been seen, and the French republic has been set up on the heights. As he spoke, the question I had put, “Why are you doing nothing now?” was seen to be a question of the unlearned, and one to which he could not make direct answer. Inquiring why his great work “Capital,” the seed field of so many crops, had not been put into English as it has been put into Russian and French from the original German, he seemed unable to tell, but said that a proposition for an English translation had come to him from New York. He said that that book was but a fragment, a single part of a work in three parts, two of the parts being yet unpublished, the full trilogy being “Land,” “Capital,” “Credit,” the last part, he said, being largely illustrated from the United States, where credit has had such an amazing development. Mr. Marx is an observer of American action, and his remarks upon some of the formative and substantive forces of American life were full of suggestiveness. By the way, in referring to his “Capital,” he said that any one who might desire to read it would find the French translation much superior in many ways to the German original. Mr. Marx referred to Henri Rochefort the Frenchman, and in his talk of some of his dead disciples, the stormy Bakunin, the brilliant Lassalle, and others, I could see how his genius had taken hold of men who, under other circumstances, might have directed the course of history.

The afternoon is waning toward the twilight of an English summer evening as Mr. Marx discourses, and he proposes a walk through the seaside town and along the shore to the beach, upon which we see many thousand people, largely children, disporting themselves. Here we find on the sands his family party—the wife, who had already welcomed me, his two daughters with their children, and his two sons-in-law, one of whom is a Professor in King’s College, London, and the other, I believe, a man of letters. It was a delightful party—about ten in all—the father of the two young wives, who were happy with their children, and the grandmother of the children, rich in the joysomeness and serenity of her wifely nature. Not less finely than Victor Hugo himself does Karl Marx understand the art of being a grandfather; but, more fortunate than Hugo, the married children of Marx live to cheer his years. Toward nightfall he and his sons-in-law part from their families to pass an hour with their American guest. And the talk was of the world, and of man, and of time, and of ideas, as our glasses tinkled over the sea. The railway train waits for no man, and night is at hand. Over the thought of the babblement and rack of the age and the ages, over the talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind one question touching upon the final law of being, for which I would seek answer from this sage. Going down to the depth of language, and rising to the height of emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I interrogated the revolutionist and philosopher in these fateful words, “What is?” And it seemed as though his mind were inverted for a moment while he looked upon the roaring sea in front and the restless multitude upon the beach. “What is?” I had inquired, to which, in deep and solemn tone, he replied: “Struggle!”

At first it seemed as though I had heard the echo of despair; but, peradventure, it was the law of life.

Glad you’re making the effort to try to capture what is going on at this moment.

I don’t think I have any particular insight. What follows will probably be not very coherent.

Like any transformative moment (if that is what we’re in, and I think we probably are), there are a confluence of factors. Just as the Civil Rights movement could not have happened without the “third world” liberation movements and the Cold War fears for American imperialism’s image, this moment could not have happened without Trump and the Coronavirus pandemic.

Trump is a nasty authoritarian provocateur and the virus has exposed the fragility of life in the United States.

I always thought that the crisis of American capitalism would happen when it became clear to the white working class that they were going to be treated like (or nearly like) the black population. The disaster of the American healthcare system and the incompetent (not to say malicious) response to the pandemic on the part of Trump has led to a surge of social anxiety and, for those looking further ahead, grief. Without in the least coming to grips with the pandemic, the government is now forcing workers back to work in dangerous conditions, pretending it is not happening, etc. Much in the same way that violence against blacks has always been treated. At best, it’s “sorry, now shut up.”

But many whites (and Asians and Latinx), especially the youth, are not racist. This has been a huge change, going on for a long time. There is some truth to the idea that the left retreated to the academy after the failure of the sixties/seventies. There they have influenced, not only through direct instruction, but through volume after volume of scholarship and textbooks, public intellectuals, etc., the ideology of the country. This has been a generational effort, with blacks in the lead, as always. Maybe a quarter of whites are racists. The rest, especially the young, not so much.

Of course, liberals are not being asked to give up anything right now on behalf of egalitarian goals. While I think it’s fair to say that most of the people in the street are working class, there has not been a class differentiation around the issue.

This moment is making people feel that it’s not enough to feel anti-racist, something must be done. The cops have been basically acting like Nazis toward the black community and now toward protests at times. The culmination of several incidents, the George Floyd being the most horrifying, and there for all to see, is the last straw. When everyone is feeling vulnerable—job, financial insecurity, fear of loved ones or oneself being brought down by the virus—this is particularly awful. You have to be a stone racist not to want to see those cops get justice.

The movement is powerful enough to wake the Dems from their slumber. They are scrambling to keep up. No surprise that Sharpton (who did give a powerful talk) was at the funeral, or that Biden and Obama have popped up in videoland. Or that Nancy Pelosi has declared that something big must be done. They have many motives for this. Capturing the movement, way up there. Pushing through some reforms, desirable. Pushing back on Trump.

Trump has clearly overstepped his bounds and frightened the ruling class as much if not more than the protesters. When Trump was elected I wrote a friend saying that I thought Trump was a “premature fascist.” He would love to be Mussolini, but the ruling class is not with him in wanting to eliminate democracy. Erode it, yes. Some of them, eliminate it. (The gop has a clear vision that they are a minority party and must curtail democratic norms, limited though they are. Since incarceration has reached its effective limit, and anti-immigration is not enough, the vote must be attacked.) But when the generals (most of them) come out and say—no we do not want to be used to directly repress the American people now—that’s indicative. There are no mass strikes, there’s no political or social force organized and active on the scene that can threaten the ruling class. (As you said, it’s still the black community allied with white youth, despite many differences from the 1960s.) The fascists and the military are not to be dogs unleashed now. The demonstrators feel powerless as much as powerful even in their numbers. Everyone is out there thinking—thank god this seems to matter. But will it? Will anything change?

But to me the great problem looming in the background for the bourgeoisie is this: The Dems historically always had a brake on them; they were “the people’s” party, but not black people’s. The Southern racists could always make sure that there were limits to social programs. Jim Crow was the checkpoint. Then the Civil Rights movement, despite its limits, broke that. Now, the racists are aligned with the most reactionary capitalists while blacks vote Democratic. Unions are Democrats, mostly. Progressives and social democrats, all Dems. Big problem: who will prevent the party, when the crisis intensifies, from radicalizing (and ultimately splitting left and right), who will prevent a left-right divide in us politics? You only have the centrists (Obama, dnc, etc.), whose only move is to fake left, as they are doing now. Some of them will want to implement significant reforms to quell the chaotic ferment, and some of those reforms are rational for capitalism. But these things have a dynamic. If by some miracle, you got universal healthcare (even a single-payer system), wouldn’t the appetite be whetted? Wouldn’t the right resort to more violent and repressive measures to prevent social reform?

The relief in liberal circles when Mattis and others said that they opposed using the military against the people was palpable. (I shared the relief of course.) The time for that has not come.

Interestingly, this movement is different from the 2014 blm movement, though it also continues it. Also from the 1960s. The sixties went from mass protest to violence. This, if anything, is going the other way, starting with sporadic and chaotic rallies (some of the violence perpetrated by fascists exploiting the chaos), but is now expanding into mass rallies. There is now a call for a march on Washington (August 28 I think). This is perfectly timed for the Dems, of course, for the fall elections. But it is more than that in impulse. Whites want to march with blacks against racism. I think there is a deep felt need for this among whites. Black movements have tended to welcome white support when they can get it. They are not a majority alone, so I am sure they welcome it (with appropriate skepticism). And there are people black and white comfortable across racial lines in a way that was barely possible back in our youth.

So, I don’t know. I love the protests, their creativity, their lack of political leadership (which could only be Dems right now), their persistence. The humanity of the Floyd family is stunning. It is a moment of hope, finally. Whether it will be more than that is still not clear, but that is not nothing.

Here’s an interview with Orlando Patterson, slavery scholar, that I think captures one important facet of the protests.

GAZETTE: What is new about these protests, compared to the protests of 1967, 1968, or 1992, or the more recent ones organized by the Black Lives Matter movement?

PATTERSON: For one thing, and this is even true of the Rodney King demonstrations in 1992, the difference is the composition of the demonstrators. One cannot help but be struck by the significant proportion of the protesters who are white, Hispanic, and Asian. It was interesting, for example, that when the police brutally broke up a demonstration near the White House and trapped protesters on a road, a South Asian man took 70 of them in his house. My sentiment is that this is a more diverse, although still predominantly black, expression of outrage. I think it has to do with the moment we’re living right now. People seemed horrified that we’re seeing this sort of thing after all these years, but they also sense that something is profoundly wrong. What’s terrifying about this moment is that the foundational institutions of our democracy are under assault, that the fundamental norms upon which our Constitution and our system of government rests are being threatened.

This I think is an important insight:

“[The protesters] don’t have democracy; they are people who don’t have power.”

These protests are an attempt to grab a modicum of power—to punish and perhaps change the police whose practices likely killed George Floyd. Protesting and disrupting are the only way some people have to exercise power. They are what people who lack more effective avenues of influence sometimes do. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

Archung Fong is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Addendum June 7

Protests have now lasted 12 days; people are tired but still coming out. They understand that this is their moment, and that they have shaken things up. Trump’s attempt to repress and intimidate the movement out of existence has failed for now, and the protesters know it. They are being backed by significant portions of the ruling class who do not want to see the ideological and practical framework of the American version of bourgeois democracy disposed of now, for domestic motives and also for the not insignificant reason that Trump’s military authoritarianism makes it more difficult to aggress against China, say. But the mood is moving to one of strength of the streets and this is not wrong.

When NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell has to eat crow and say “Black Lives Matter” and repent of the league response to players taking a knee (though not yet of blackballing Colin Kaepernick), when Amazon Prime has a blm banner on their streaming home page (while attacking unionization), you know that the ruling class is trying to adapt quickly. But when, e.g., the liberal Democratic mayor of Minneapolis is booed because he won’t disband the police, you know that blm has, like a starter motor, activated something much more potent than their original forces. The outrage has reached a boiling point, while the depth of the problem has reached the point of undeniability. When a grad student calls 7 friends on twitter to protest (I believe this was in dc) and thousands of people show up, you know there is a mood. Significantly, she said on NPR—we’ve moved past the “hope” phase and on to the “change” phase. (I’m paraphrasing.) And she added: “By any means necessary.” Thousands upon thousands want police abuse and institutional racism to stop. They are asserting the right of the masses, and in particular the black masses, to be served by, not “dominated” by, the state. What they can do now is protest.

The immediate beneficiary will probably be the Democratic Party, which is the only political party of any size on the scene claiming a reform purpose. What is significant, though, is that the activists on the streets are not committed to it, but see it as a pragmatic vehicle for their agenda. It is not likely that they will be satisfied with the compromises that will be offered. Many if not most will be “anybody but Trump,” but their enthusiasm will depend on the Democrats’ actual response. The ideology of the movement, long generating and now rapidly developing, is more Social Democratic than Democratic. The obduracy of American capitalism’s intrinsic racism and the fact that the slumping world economy does not allow much room for concessions to workers means that the protest movement can be open to genuinely radical and egalitarian ideas.

Victor Serge, Notebooks, 1936–1947 (New York Review of Books, 2019).

This book was discovered in 2010 in a box left by Serge, then published in French and now in English. A fitting sequel to his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and just as gripping.

Gabriel Thompson, Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do (Nation Books, 2019).

An interesting account by a journalist who took three shit jobs over a year to get a taste of what the real proletariat does every day.

Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2018).

A labor journalist and activist writing about several recent struggles. The chapter on the Chicago teachers’ strike is particularly good.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton and Oxford University Press, 2020).

Two academics who attempt to analyze the “hole” in us demographics where a good part of the white working class used to be, before they died in a wave of suicides, drugs and alcohol after the factories closed in the “rust belt” states.

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: LA In the Sixties (Verso, 2020).

Very good journalistic account by two writers who were there, as activists.

Elizabeth D. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2018).

The author is affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations, but this is still a fact-packed book on Xi’s China. Notably silent, however, on the rising tide of urban and rural struggles.

I was hoping that this article would be more thorough and integrated but the topics proved a bit too many for that. I’m publishing it because I hope that it contains some valuable observations and helpful suggestions. I should note that some sections have previously appeared in Hard Crackers.

Introduction

We’re faced with a grim present and we’re facing what might be an even grimmer future. For the moment, we’re facing the rolling catastrophe of the covid epidemic (measured in cases, illnesses and fatalities as well as in growing numbers of impoverished individuals and families), the quite savage realities of enduring patterns of police violence (mostly inflicted against black men), and the threat posed by the emergence of what might be called “vigilante repression” in cities and towns across the country.1

If the future remains in the hands of the rulers who have brought us to this current moment, that future will only be worse. But a simple exhortation to that effect will have little significance. Instead, if we want to fundamentally affect the course of events, we will have to come up with a comprehensive analysis of what has happened and where things stand, something of a plan for what we might do and a plausible idea of how we might actually do it. This is a modest contribution to that effort.

Not too long ago, we were surprised, astonished and encouraged by the eruption of the massive anti-police protests that swept the nation and, to some extent, the world. We took heart that such a hopeful turn could take place in the midst of the epidemic and began thinking about how that uprising might be sustained as an insurgent, anti-system movement. We still need to be pursuing that line of thought but we now have to confront the possibility that the situation might devolve into an, all but certainly miserable, armed fight that will inflict pain and suffering but not terribly much in the way of forward movement.

The us ruling class is faced with a multi-dimensional crisis that is the worst it has faced since the Civil War. The crisis involves largely uncontrolled viral spread (albeit with certain exceptions that may or may not prove durable), resulting (as I write) in more than 6 million cases across the entire country and almost 190,000 fatalities; dramatic declines in people’s material well-being (soon to be made worse by housing evictions and the inability to afford essential goods); a looming second closure of production and renewed rising rates of unemployment (because of the reduction of federal funds); continuing financial uncertainties in banks and corporations; a shattered state of the rulers’ internal coherence; perhaps unprecedented popular political disagreements resulting in pervasive distrust of normal governmental functioning, and unmoored forms of popular consciousness reflected in wild conspiracy theories. The crisis has become three-dimensional and the powers that be seem unable to move beyond “churning and flailing.”2

From the ruling class point of view, dealing with the crisis is primarily a matter of restoring enough of an acceptable state of affairs that it can return to its main tasks—of maintaining social stability without too much obvious turmoil and allowing the necessary adjustments to their economy so that profit-making across broad sectors can be resumed. For them, effective system management requires the necessity of growth; the manufacture and manipulation of messages; “acceptable” levels of illnesses and fatalities; the avoidance of any collapse of healthcare; the preservation of existing healthcare institutions (hospitals, medical supply companies, pharmaceutical companies and insurance); the continued dodging of financial breakdowns; the maintenance of law and order (including the protection of existing property relations); the reproduction of commonsensical notions regarding the norms of electoral and governmental processes; and more or less obvious counter-insurgency to deflect or defeat system-level challenges. One thing that has made all this much harder than they would prefer is the erratic presidency of Donald Trump, who clearly has a congenital predisposition to look to make a quick buck at every turn and simply cannot be counted on, by friend or foe, to play by some sort of recognized rules.

Beyond that, what makes things hard for them? Perhaps the key reason is that the world capitalist system is grounded in what has been termed “fictitious capital”—capital generated by future claims on value that has not been produced and, in all likelihood, will not be. The economy is dominated by endless speculative maneuvers in banking and the equity markets—even after those kinds of maneuvers resulted in the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Often enough, the maneuvers constitute fraud.

Before the epidemic, what was developing was almost certainly going to be another financial crisis. The masters of the universe might very well be the only people who were grateful for the outbreak of the epidemic. They got to be bailed out once again by the government and the Federal Reserve, but the reason why the bailout was needed was disguised as the virus. Looking back at the original congressional actions in response to the shutdown of companies and layoffs in the millions, it should be clear that the bills pretty much sailed through the legislative chambers because the important matter of saving the banks and Wall Street demanded attention. More recently, when that matter no longer seems so pressing, the Democrats and Republicans can go back to their usual squabbles.

From our point of view, crises create the opportunity for large numbers of people to realize that what appears to be permanent need not be so. There are choices to make about the future we want and decisions about what we should do. It is worth emphasizing, however, that often enough people’s actions themselves create the crises and thus create the circumstances for something very new to emerge.

The Epidemic and its Complexities

It is tempting to begin this section with an enumeration of all the crimes and misdemeanors committed by governmental and corporate leaders and institutions. I’ll get to that in a moment. But I begin instead with an acknowledgment that the virus has proven to be an especially devilish phenomenon and it is likely that, even if all of the institutions and individuals involved had done just about everything well, there still would have been unexpected developments resulting in viral spread and disease. I have come to think that even a well developed and well-executed plan, with cohesive mass support, will get things wrong in this kind of situation. This should suggest the need for some humility in the face of a great social-natural threat. Beyond that, however, it points to the imperative need to eliminate the conditions that are conducive to viruses “leaping” from animal populations where they remain harmless to other animal species and subsequently to humans and to reduce the frequently mindless global traffic in people and goods that accelerates the spread of viruses.3

There was an initial obliviousness to the threat that the virus posed—a classic instance of the banality of ignorance, which was subsequently raised to an art form by Trump and his supporters. As a result of that obliviousness, there was a bungled response to viral spread. There was an ineffective ban on travel from China and a delayed imposition of a ban on travel from Europe. While people were breathing easy that the viral spread had been contained in the Northwest, it was spreading like proverbial wildfire in the East, especially New York, due to viral spread from Europe. The travel bans allowed for escape hatches of sorts for us citizens with a claim that returning travelers would be screened and, if necessary, quarantined. Instead, there was lackadaisical airport screening. While the virus was rapidly making its way, politicians de Blasio and Cuomo played to their respective political supporters and all but certainly caused additional deaths.4

Once the viral spread became evident, the problems multiplied. There was no testing; protective equipment was in short supply and ventilators were nowhere to be found. Soon enough, it became clear that the shortage of essential medical supplies and equipment was placing severe limits on the quality of medical care being provided. The shortage also illuminated the ways in which healthcare institutions had been caught up in the madness of global supply chains—built on just-in-time supply models, with a small number of manufacturers concentrated in a small number of countries, resulting in lengthy transportation routes. Even well-endowed hospitals had to scramble for things that should have been abundantly available. It became clear that, fundamentally, profit was the guiding principle, even in supposedly non-profit institutions.

After all has been said and done, the United States is doing the worst in controlling the virus. According to a New York Times report from early August, the United States has about 4 percent of the world’s population but it has recorded over 20 percent of deaths due to the virus. In July, 1.9 million Americans tested positive; that was five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia combined. In that same month, Spain experienced an unexpected second wave of 50,000 new cases but that seems small in comparison to 300,000 new cases in Florida (especially since Florida has about half as many people as Spain).5 The reasons for the us disaster are many but the Times article highlighted a few—the initial decision not to require masks of all people and to restrict their use to healthcare personnel; the subsequent and continuing “debate” about mask requirements; more generally, the profoundly inconsistent character of messages from politicians and public health figures regarding appropriate steps, including most egregiously, the recommendation of wrong-headed treatments like hydroxychloroquine and snake-oil remedies like swallowing disinfectants. Finally, the Trump-endorsed rush to “liberate” states and “reopen the economy” (mostly on the basis of wishes and prayers) all but certainly added millions to the case total.6

Interestingly, there appears as if there was not only one sure-fire way to control the virus. What probably mattered more was a steadiness of purpose and a willingness to make modifications as indicated by unexpected developments, trends or discoveries. This was evident in New Zealand, which relied on a complete lockdown of the economy for seven weeks and completely closed borders, and South Korea, which relied on extensive and rapid drive-thru testing and did not shut down economic activity. What became clear in that nation was that test results which are mostly right most of the time are good enough for purposes of tracking potential viral spread. Both New Zealand and South Korea had the advantage of being relatively small countries—in one case, two islands and the other, with only a sole, sealed border. In both cases, there was a cohesive national response.7 In the United States, major party political conflicts deeply grounded in different geographical areas (rural/urban; the coasts/the middle of the country), along with very different trajectories of viral spread, made such cohesion hard to come by.

Throughout the course of the epidemic, governmental responses in the United States lacked a coherent strategy. In New York, state and local authorities delayed important decisions about shutting down various activities and likely caused many preventable deaths. Thomas Frieden, formerly the director of the cdc, has suggested that 80 percent of virus-related deaths in New York City could have been avoided if the shutdown had taken place just weeks earlier.8 In addition, in the early days of explosive spread in New York City, the dominant public message concerned “flattening the curve” in order to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed by cases—which meant an all but exclusive focus on individuals sheltering in place and shutting down almost all public spaces and many workplaces.9 Of course, those considered to be “essential” were expected to continue to go to work and those whose jobs allowed for it could work at home.10

Flattening didn’t work out so well at the beginning and, according to the Times article just cited, some hospitals were in fact overwhelmed. At the time, a few voices were critical because a “flattening the curve” strategy ruled out any methodical efforts to eliminate the virus—meaning to drive its transmissibility down to very low levels. Such a suppression strategy wouldn’t necessarily even require testing; what it did require was identifying all those who had been in contact with those with viral symptoms, tracking them down and arranging for their isolation. This would likely have meant that some people who were not infected would have been affected but it could have driven transmission down to insignificant levels.

As I understand it, the purposes of testing for the virus include: the identification of positive cases for accurate counts of incidence; the analysis of the characteristics of those infected (such as age or pre-existing conditions) and not infected; the plotting of the geographical distribution of positive and negative cases to target outreach efforts intended to reduce disease spread (such as contact tracing) and the identification of volunteers for clinical trials. In the United States, for many weeks, the state of testing was disastrous. There was, and still is, a general lack of purpose to testing. Debates were primarily about how many tests were being done. Over time, testing in the United States has been repaired enough to meet some of those purposes but serious problems with the turn-around time for test results remain.

What went wrong? Soon after the Chinese made available the genetic sequence of the virus, German researchers were able to develop a test which was adopted by the World Health Organization and subsequently used by most countries. The United States refused to do so and the Centers for Disease Control worked to develop its own test. That only took four days but it soon became evident that the test was flawed. Weeks of delays resulted. Eventually, the cdc acknowledged that the test had been contaminated during production. At the same time, the cdc promulgated rigid requirements for determining who should be tested and many who were infected were never able to secure a test. The sad story went on and on.

Right or wrong, necessary or not, governmental decisions produced a “stopped” society—manifested by empty streets and highways, skies without airplanes, shuttered factories and schools, and many millions simply staying at home. Eventually, this resulted in weeks without pay; endless delays in getting unemployment insurance; miserly stimulus payments; unusually generous unemployment insurance and worsening worries about paying rent and other bills. And for all too many, it meant forced labor in hospitals, meat-processing plants, supermarkets, logistics hubs (quintessentially Amazon) and delivery services (such as ups, FedEx, usps).

But not everything collapsed; there appeared to be a reasonable stability of essential supplies (food, energy and medications) once the silly preoccupation with toilet paper passed; essential sanitation (water supply and garbage removal); the more or less adequate maintenance of safety precautions; emergency healthcare; routine financial transactions; transportation. At bottom, this durability is evidence of the remarkable material wealth of the United States. It confirms that there is more than enough to go around to keep people alive—in spite of severely diminished wages.

Underlying Conditions

While the preoccupation of most public discussions about healthcare in the United States is the matter of health insurance, the extent of profound healthcare system inequities—including the number of hospitals for residents in a community, town or city, the number of icu beds, staffing levels, extent of adherence to standards of care related to matters such as infection control)—became glaringly clear. Consistently worst outcomes occurred in nursing homes or other long-term care facilities—where, as of this writing, more than 40 percent of the total recorded fatalities have taken place. In Japan by way of comparison, only 14 percent of fatalities were in eldercare facilities—even though Japan has a slightly higher percentage of people in such places. In nyc, what kind of hospital you were admitted to was literally a matter of life or death—with those admitted to the city’s elite hospitals doing much better than those admitted to various community-based institutions and public hospitals operated by the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation.11

We all became used to what doctors and other experts on the cable news shows said—people with underlying conditions are much more vulnerable to the covid-19 virus and are in much greater danger of becoming seriously ill and dying. Those underlying conditions have been identified, among others, as heart disease, diabetes, lung ailments, suppressed immune systems, and obesity (although there also appear to be some odd factors that don’t quite add up—like the greater likelihood that younger men will get infected and die more often than younger women).

Relatively early on, a stark and frightening addition was added to that more or less routine pronouncement. Being African-American was added to the list of underlying conditions. To understand what they were talking about, let’s look at Chicago—which, at one point, was considered the center of the explosive rates of African-American infections and deaths.

Block Club Chicago

reported that: “Auburn Gresham’s 60620 zip code now has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any Chicago zip code, with 359 cases, according to data from the Illinois Department of Public Health. Neighboring communities to the south and east also have high numbers, with the 60619 zip code at 306 cases and 60628 at 288.”

The Block Club Chicago journalist offered an all too familiar explanation for the dismal realities: “Officials have pointed to a wide range of reasons for the high number of cases in African-American communities, from historic disinvestment that’s led to wide healthcare disparities for generations to higher numbers of residents working essential jobs that don’t allow for working from home.”12

For all practical purposes, the reasons cited by the journalist appear to have become simple facts of nature and there is little to be done other than to pray. But it was not supposed to be that way. In the years since the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement (from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s), those inequities were supposed to be understood as fundamentally not natural but social and, therefore, gradually to be sure, eliminated.

The underlying conditions destroying the lives of African-Americans in Chicago and elsewhere are much more than the specific diseases that make them ill and vulnerable. They are the concentrated totality of their life circumstances—bad housing, lousy schools, rotten healthcare, intense policing, more or less constant imprisonment for many, frequent unemployment, low-paid and life-threatening jobs, no sick leave, very limited access to high-quality foods, high levels of air pollution, and probably more. Those circumstances are the real underlying conditions that place them at risk. And then they get sick—a condition that’s much worse than it needs to be in “normal” times and, more or less, catastrophic in these times.

The underlying conditions, as all too many seem to assume, are not their identities as African-Americans. There are many African-Americans, even in Chicago, who are at little risk because their life circumstances have all but nothing in common with the working-class communities of places like Far Southeast Chicago.13 At the same time, they may well be the victims of careless inattentiveness, if not malpractice, in healthcare settings. In spite of Barack Obama, the social contempt for African-Americans is not yet extinguished.

American healthcare institutions are characterized by an extraordinary level of carelessness about following protocols of care and routinely place patients in worse danger than they would face if they were not hospitalized. Each year, about 700,000 patients acquire a preventable infection while they are hospitalized; about 70,000 of them die. I have no grand explanation for the tendency to be careless. It may well be that it’s most often in evidence when the patients involved are not considered to be worth all that much—see, for example, this video about a woman’s death in an Emergency Room at Kings County Hospital, a public hospital in Brooklyn.

Science and its Discontents

Throughout the epidemic, there has been a superficial elevation of medicine and science—most clearly evident in the designation of acceptable experts and acceptable views, usually associated with Ivy League institutions. The understandable skepticism of ordinary people, reflected in a wide variety of more or less sensible views, remained largely unaddressed.

I know that science is not held in much high regard but I think that we need to challenge that tendency. In the same way that the arguments of anti-vaccine advocates have accumulated believers by shredding scientific evidence to argue that vaccines endanger kids, rather than protect them, people have come to rely on anecdotes and legends about all sorts of things. An outstanding book on this and related topics is Eula Biss’s On Immunity, published by Graywolf Press in 2015.

Science is a way of thinking designed to avoid magical explanations or conspiratorial fantasies.14 For all practical purposes, for many, science does not exist. To the extent that people have a view of science, they probably would say something about the Scientific Method taught in high school. But science has little to do with that formula; science is achieved by work, usually work among many individuals in collaboration. Within the last few decades, that collaboration has been internationalized and researchers in many different countries are up to date with what is being done elsewhere and contributing their own findings and interpretations. This development makes the routine claims that the health professionals in the United States are the best in the world a hollow pr stunt.

It bears repetition that capitalist science, meaning the priorities that are set for research activities and the uses that are made of research conclusions, is fundamentally distorted by the demands of profit seeking. Scientific knowledge needs to be rescued from that hole and re-established as a common universal knowledge for humanity, with no private claims on it. The starting point of science is that what appears to be self-evident at the level of everyday experience is mistaken—the earth is round, not flat; the sun doesn’t really rise and set; profit is not the result of investment.15

Beyond that, scientific knowledge needs to be made understandable to many millions of people. That will never happen so long as that knowledge is organized in numerous special fields which are only really comprehensible to individuals in those fields. What’s needed is a general framework for scientific thinking that can be applied broadly, with some differentiations, to understanding both natural and social phenomena. And beyond that, what’s needed is a sustained effort to produce understandable interpretations of that knowledge, written in accessible language, without resorting to simplifications. One aspect of the language issue is to familiarize people with the practice that common words have different meanings in everyday conversations and in scientific discussions—a “virus” in everyday talk is not the same as a “virus” in science talk.

A brief observation about the science of society—many would insist that science is not appropriate for thinking about and understanding society. The separation of natural science (biology, chemistry and physics) and social science (the study of society) does not serve us very well. Think, for instance, about this current epidemic or pandemic:

1. it is increasingly clear that its origins go back to the spread of industrial agriculture into previously natural forests and the disruption of the more or less normal processes that would have prevented the spread of disease,
2. the spread of the virus around the world has been accelerated by global trade and travel, and
3. its spread within countries has a great deal to do with pre-existing inequalities and dysfunctional public health systems.

The line where biology ends and society begins is mostly an invisible one.

But scientific knowledge is not enough. It needs to be combined with the good sense of many millions of people—people who know how to talk with their co-workers and neighbors, who know how to get things done in an emergency (like what happens in the aftermath of hurricanes or earthquakes), who know how to fight for what they need. I’m reminded of what happened during the aids epidemic. Against all odds, activists in groups like act-up (aids Coalition to Unleash Power) organized themselves to become scientific experts about the disease and how to fight it. Often enough, they were ahead of the medical profession. Ultimately, the doctors, nurses and activists needed each other and they stopped the carnage, at least in places like the United States.16

The George Floyd Uprisings

Several months ago, during the early days of the epidemic, I wrote: “My best guess is that people might come to think differently after they act differently.” Subsequently, there was a good deal of speculation about what people might be thinking about during the strange period of forced isolation and inactivity. Some dreamed that people were planning on actions to be taken once it was possible. But no one in their wildest imagination saw mass demonstrations around the proverbial corner. There is something fundamentally unpredictable about the moment when great numbers of people act on long-held convictions that they have had enough. What more than 100,000 deaths due to the virus could not provoke over a couple of months, the brutal murder of George Floyd, captured on video, managed to accomplish overnight. The stories of what occurred on the streets of this country and elsewhere need to be told well so that we might understand better what led to what.

The last months have witnessed an extraordinary explosion of protests, of just about every imaginable variety, by who knows how many people across the United States and the world in an ever-changing flow of innovation and improvisation. Protesters have been willing to: be bold, confront police forces, refuse to obey or back down, engage in widespread breaking of laws (including arson) and to be arrested. As a result, they have often met unrestrained attacks by the local police and other mobilized forces—with tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades, low-flying helicopters, baton swinging, and rushing and pushing. Rather than thinking about these tactics as evidence only of out-of-control cops (of whom there are many), it would be better to see them as elements of, perhaps haphazardly implemented, intentional tactics of suppression. Otherwise, why would the cops have all these weapons ready to use?

I am pretty confident that participation in the protests has often been exhilarating (maybe even providing a new sense of being alive) and has expanded participants’ sense of the possibilities of how they can act and enhanced their appreciation of the power they have. As one Instagram poster, who had attempted to publicize every protest in New York City, wrote:

One of my favorite parts about running this account over the last two weeks has been watching so many of you find your place as a leader in this movement, most of you unexpectedly.

Some of you have had experience organizing but never commanded crowds so large, while others were newbies just eager to bring the conversation to their own neighborhoods. Some found themselves leading a chant for the first time, while others, for the first time, chanted back. Some of you were speakers sharing your truths in front of strangers, while others sat and taught us how to listen. Sometimes you were in the middle of the dance circle, and sometimes you were on the sidelines handing out food, water, masks, and first aid. And don’t forget those behind the scenes connecting interpreters and solo protesters. All of you experimenting with little to no precedent. All of you different races and ages.

It has been my greatest honor to watch you all grow as leaders in your own right. To hear how it has changed you. To share with you in that pride, vulnerability, and personal strength as you inspire everyone watching to hope and to dream and to fight so that maybe this time it will be different. Hold onto that and don’t ever forget how much you are all needed here. Now and later.

Some people are referring to this as a “leaderless movement.” But I don’t see a leaderless anything, do you?

The geographic dispersion across cities, suburbs and rural areas was nothing less than astonishing. In the cases of the suburbs and rural areas, as well as the cities, the actions suggest that many white people are ready for something beyond “going along to get along” lives. The “culture” (to use an admittedly inadequate word) of many social “blocks” (more or less cohesive groups that think and act alike, with or without direct personal connections) that has sustained the existing state of affairs in white communities, has started to break apart. This would include: nascar’s decision to ban the Confederate flag at its races; the statement by the National Football League (nfl) Commissioner that the league should have listened earlier to its black players and that it now believes that Black Lives “Do” Matter; the toppling of Confederate statues all over the place (without waiting for legislative approval). Once they lose the flag, nascar, the monuments, what do they have left? More recently, in the wake of the police assault of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, the startling scenes of rapid-fire strikes by professional athletes in basketball, football, baseball and hockey (especially baseball and hockey) confirmed that something quite fundamental is underway.17

Police departments and their traditional supporters have been divided and, hopefully, weakened. But, predictably enough, the cop unions are mobilizing their defenses—with full support from Trump—who has received their endorsements. And, remarkably, in the midst of everything going on, police departments and mayors do not seem able to stop police killings. There’s way too much to say about this than I can incorporate at this time but I would note that I think that explaining police shootings by a phrase as vague as “systemic racism” does not seem adequate. To the best of my knowledge, there is no town or city government and no police department in the United States that approves or endorses police killings of unarmed black men. And beyond that, there is certainly no government or police agency that endorses the kind of brutal savagery that is evident in putting a knee on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes or shooting Jacob Blake in the back seven times. There’s something much more wrong with the police than can be cured by better laws, policies or trainings on implicit bias. I may be overdoing it but I’d suggest the serious possibility of a social psychosis among the cops—they can’t stop themselves and they will not be reformed out of their behavior.

Within the last few weeks, events have once again taken a dramatic turn with the emergence of vigilante repression across the country. The most extreme instance of this occurred in Kenosha where a rag-tag assortment of armed militia types rushed to volunteer their services to the police forces to “protect property.” The police welcomed them and offered them water bottles. In the midst of a more or less chaotic scene, seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killed two anti-police protesters and seriously wounded another. What was most remarkable it that he calmly walked past a convoy of police vehicles with his hands raised and they simply let him pass. He managed to get home safely in a nearby Illinois town and to sleep in his own bed before he was finally arrested the next morning.

A few days later, a truck caravan of armed Patriot Prayer Trump supporters descended on Portland, Oregon, and attacked protesters on the streets with an assortment of weapons such as paintball guns. During the ensuing free-for-all, Michael Reineohl, an anti-fascist activist, shot and killed Aaron Danielson, a Patriot Prayer member. Reineohl got away and a few days later recorded an interview that appeared on Vice News during which he insisted that he had acted in self-defense.18 The next day, he was killed in a barrage of shots from members of various police agencies. Details are still obscure.

In any case, though, the situation on the ground has turned deadly serious and could relatively easily get much worse.

Towards the Future

If I had completed this essay a month ago, I would have emphasized that the developments related to the upsurge in rebellious actions were very encouraging. I remain convinced that that is the case. That assessment needs to be tempered by a recognition of the dangers posed by various forms of repression. Let me turn, though, first back to the optimistic moment because it should not be lost.

I thought then that it was time to ask, as Paul Gilroy had put it in a recently recorded conversation, if the “mobilization can become a movement” and to think about what we might do to make that more likely. Gilroy suggests that there is, for the first time in a long time, the possibility of a different future than the one we thought. He and his partner in the conversation, Ruth Gilmore, suggest that the moment creates an opportunity for reinvigorating the notion of universalism—of humans across the globe seeking liberation in common. They also suggest that an embrace of universalism might very well be essential for the mobilization to become a movement.19 clr James once wrote that Marxism was the “theoretical basis of scientific humanism”—a humanism that would sweep away all the archaic and modern notions of the witches’ brew of divisions that plague our world—races, castes, particularistic religions, and nations.20

Some time ago, Gilroy modified that insight with a call for a planetary humanism, one that would incorporate the future life of the planet as being all but inseparable from the liberation of humanity. In their recent talk, Gilmore suggested that the “livingness of the planet” is imperiled; the “livingness of the planet” is a wonderful phrase. Let’s hold on to it. It might come in handy. Both Gilroy and Gilmore endorse the likelihood that the path forward will not be straightforward—there will be “detours, loops, new roads.” They see in the present signs of a “rehearsal for the future”—allowing for new relationships, new expectations, new desires, new organizational forms. Gilroy argues for the development of a “different conception of democracy” while Gilmore, building on the ideas of the English writer, Raymond Williams, suggests that we may be on the verge of seeing new “structures of feeling” crystallizing that will come to define the emerging era.

The Vision of a New World

We should insist that we want a new world! Not a somewhat improved version of this world! Let’s call it socialism. Over hundreds of years, the vision of a new society has been named: “Jerusalem” by the poet William Blake, “a free association” or a “union of free individuals” by Karl Marx, a “Gemeinwesen” (or community) by Frederick Engels, a “universal republic” by the Paris Communards, a “beloved community” by the American Civil Rights activists, or a “good life” by clr James. In his book titled Modern Politics, James described what he meant by the phrase:

An American woman told me once that she forgot herself and told an audience of white women in the United States—she was a Negro woman—speaking to them she said, “When I look at you all, I am sorry for you because although whites are oppressing us and giving us trouble, I am actively on the move; every morning I am doing something, but you all are just sitting down there watching.” It is not the complete truth, but it is a great part of the truth. It is some idea of what I mean by the good life—the individual in relation to society. It is not, it never has been, merely a question of what the vulgarians call “raising the standard of living.” Men are not pigs to be fattened.21

It is beyond doubt that the continued rule of capital will only make the current situation worse and provides no basis for thinking that whatever measures capitalist states introduce could be better enough. It is also reasonable to conclude that there is an inevitability of more crises—economic, health, educational, environmental—crashing on top of each other. The possibility of a future requires a profound social revolution.

So, let’s talk about a revolution and what it could lead to. I take for granted the provision of essential goods and services to all; the abolition of private property in the means of production; the elimination of the various manifestations of militarism (standing armies and navies, weapons of destruction, military bases); the dismantling of the organs of repression (the police, jails and prisons); an end to the routine violence enforced by bosses and bureaucrats; the end of mindless production and the destruction of the natural environment by the dumping of wastes in the ground, the air, the lakes, rivers and oceans and the burning of fossil fuels.

But we need to imagine much more than that. As a small start towards the recovery of the utopian, I’d suggest a few fundamental socialist principles: the abolition of the wages system and the elimination of the social relations of surplus value; no use of the existing state machinery (instead, the direct democracy of something like the Paris Commune); the maximization of free time for all through the greatest possible reduction of required work time; the cultivation of “social individuals,” prepared for active participation in a wide range of intellectual, technical, athletic and artistic activities, as well as collective responses needed when challenges arise.

It appears evident to me that it is simply out of the question for us to continue the current mode of globalized production and distribution if we have any real interest in preserving the planet and creating the circumstances for individuals to become able to shape their lives in fundamental ways. As much as humanly and technically possible, we need to imagine ways of bringing decisions regarding the complexities of modern social life as close as possible to where people live—in communities that are intentionally designed, especially with regard to size, to enable mutual understandings and real self-government. In that context, it would be especially valuable and important to recognize the need for an incorporation of traditional anarchist perspectives on decentralization into any socialist vision worthy of the name.

Strategies and tactics based on that vision

In April of this year, in the midst of the covid epidemic, a member of the Angry Workers of the World group in London responded to a blog post, by a member of another friendly organization, regarding the centrality of insurrection to revolutionary politics:

When it comes to moments of social struggle this dependency on the state as a social organiser of socially necessary labour becomes important. Limits for struggle are not mechanically set by ‘repression > or < struggle.’ I would dare to say that in a situation such as in Egypt 2011, where nearly 70 percent of staple food has to be imported from abroad through state foreign trade relations and subsidies the limit of the movement (also in the consciousness of the people) is not primarily determined by the violence of the state or the ‘lack of will to struggle,’ but by the fact the struggle, the working class hasn’t developed the practical relations to deal with a shortage of food once state-mediated foreign trade collapses. At some point this limit might be even in the ‘back of the mind of people’ and work as an unconscious force that decides how far people go. The same is true for the complex social structure of vital ‘public services.’ It would be fruitful to perhaps focus on the main line of argument: is the main hurdle for the working class the state and capital as repressive or divisive forces (trust etc.) or as forces that gain their power by coordinating our essential social labour and thereby turning it into a seemingly independent power. Is it more difficult to imagine ‘insurrection’ or a revolutionary transition that not only smashes state power but guarantees the material survival of 7 billion people?

In particular in the current situation of a ‘health crisis’ I propose to see the state also in its function to organise an essential social division of labour, e.g. in the form of health provision, transport, communication etc., and to organise essential ‘central coordination and administration.’ A revolutionary critique would be to demonstrate that given its peculiar contradictions (having to defend a class interest, relying on capitalist profits, being hierarchical etc.), the state is incapable to organise these essential social tasks in the ‘general interest’—we can see that e.g. mass hospitals and elderly care homes become the real death-traps. Starting from a critique of the capitalist social division of labour would also re-focus what ‘revolution’ would primarily mean: the ‘insurrection’ would be placed into a pragmatic relation to the take-over and transformation of the productive apparatus.22

I believe that we should try to contribute to the development of a self-sustaining movement committed to social transformation—which incorporates and goes beyond insurrectionary acts.

What’s really important is the need to develop organizational forms that can be real alternatives to the forms of activity engaged in by non-profit membership organizations (such as Make the Road New York, the Restaurant Opportunity Center and the Laundry Workers Center here in New York) and electoral campaigns or, on the other hand, the miserable slog of Leninist pre-party groupings.23 We need organizations that can enable individuals to become directly involved in organizational decision-making; promote extensive participation in self-education and, most importantly, make people feel like they’re getting somewhere in the development of their own personalities and interests. Put simply, we need to build organizations that don’t manipulate, humiliate, exhaust or drive people away.

Against Trump

It appears as if it’s all but too late to take a campaign against the reactionary character of the Trump phenomenon into the communities from where it draws its strongest support (as I had once imagined). Such a campaign, intentionally provocative and confrontational and making every effort to split apart family members, friends and neighbors, no longer seems realistic when armed Trump supporters are driving around in truck caravans and Trump-friendly militia members are offering themselves up as auxiliary cops.

Something that still retains some potential would be undertaking such a campaign in workplaces with efforts to initiate strikes against one or more of Trump’s misdeeds. Imagine what might happen—in many workplaces, there will of course be Trump supporters and they will find themselves faced with a direct challenge from people they work side by side with everyday. What might they do? Will they join the strike? This argument is grounded in a conviction that what people say does not represent a full accounting of who they are and who they might become. What they think is often different from what they say and what they do is often enough different from what they think.

Against Trump’s Opponents

I suggest that we need to focus attention on the virtuous opponents of the Trump policy—the liberal politicians and advocates who dominate the cable tv talk shows, the newspapers and opinion journals and the wide array of policy and advocacy organizations.

I think it helps to look at voting as a form of symbolic speech. It is not especially about doing anything. Indeed, talking seldom convinces anyone of anything. On the other hand, activity has a way of confronting individuals and either scaring them off (as apparently happened with the various elements of the alt-right in the wake of the Charlottesville demonstrations a year ago) or startling them into doing something they never thought possible. As has been said often enough, it’s easier to imagine someone changing his mind after he starts acting differently than to imagine that he’ll start acting differently after he changes his mind.

Simply voting in the privacy of a voting booth against legislators who support Trump will represent a very dim protest indeed. Furthermore, given the inevitable pressures of campaigns, Biden will consistently oppose any actions considered to be too extreme—lest they jeopardize the possibility of electoral victory. Just when we need more to be done, we will be advised to do less. That is a great peril for as one principled thinker once proclaimed: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Liberals can always move left—mostly because they’re starting from so far to the right. I’d like to do a quick review of what I remember of the last challenge to the dominance of liberal views from the left in the United States.

Let’s start in 1964. During that year, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (mfdp) organized a massive grassroots campaign to form an alternative to the segregationist Democratic Party in that state. Although blacks constituted 40 percent of the state’s population, blacks were denied the right in the Party’s primaries, which effectively meant that they had no vote because the Party was in secure control of the white electorate—whoever won the Democratic primary would win the general election. The mfdp signed up 80,000 members who sent 2,500 delegates to a state convention, which picked 68 delegates to attend the national convention in Atlantic City. Their goal was to remove the state’s segregationist delegation and replace it with their own. The mfdp had been counting on liberal support but Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded jfk in November of 1963, recruited Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who would subsequently be rewarded with the nomination for vice president, to kill the challenge. The Credentials Committee held a hearing to consider the mfdp’s case. The somewhat legendary activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, gave a stirring speech. But the Committee responded with a dumb compromise that would have seated two mfdp members as observers alongside the regular party. mfdp refused and mounted protests inside and outside the convention hall. But the party had been shaken by the betrayal.

Johnson was, of course, nominated and presented himself as the peace candidate as opposed to the bomb-crazy Barry Goldwater. sds proceeded to embrace him with its “Part of the Way with lbj” slogan—to distinguish itself from those who were “All the Way with lbj.” Of course, Johnson would go on to escalate the war against Viet Nam to increasingly horrifying levels and what would eventually become a mass anti-war movement quickly began to take shape.24 The next several years would be characterized by the growth of a millions-strong anti-war movement—with a wide array of strategies and tactics—draft-card burnings; flights to Canada; refusing induction; massive marches; sabotage of various kinds; eventually, the emergence of opposition within the armed forces (including the killing of officers—called “fragging”). At the same time, there were numerous debates within the movement on which slogan to adopt. Would it be “End the Bombing” or “Bring the Boys Home” or “Immediate Withdrawal” or “Victory to the nlf”?

Opposition to the war was not the only major story in the mid to late ’60s. Riots became an increasingly common way for people to express their outrage (usually at police violence) and their demands for justice. In 1964, a riot in Harlem lasted for six days and spread to Brooklyn; in 1965, the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded; in 1966, it was Chicago’s turn; in 1967, riots (or rebellions) took place in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Johnson and the powers that be were concerned enough that he appointed a Commission, led by Governor Kerner from Illinois and Mayor Lindsay from New York City. They issued a report in February of 1968. The big headline was that America was a divided nation.

Faced with challenges to his re-nomination in 1968 by Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, Johnson unexpectedly announced in March that he would not run again. Faithful Hubert Humphrey stepped into his shoes. Other dramatic events would come fast afterwards—the assassination of Martin Luther King provoked riots in more than a hundred cities. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. Humphrey walked forward to his date with destiny at the August Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. As has often been told, the demonstrations on the streets led to bloody battles with the police and lots of quarrels inside the convention. Humphrey’s nomination looked more like a funeral than a coronation. The contrast between what might be considered the radical and liberal positions for the election was embodied in the Peace and Freedom Party. In the fall of 1968, I attended a lecture by the veteran social democrat, Michael Harrington, who argued that it was essential for the left to support Humphrey and not waste their votes on a fringe party. As I have written elsewhere, I was torn about the debate—not that it mattered much what I thought. For me, however, it is illuminating about the various forms that journeys to radicalization take. For many people, it begins with more or less well-developed liberal convictions. What I am clear about, in retrospect, is that a radical politics had to represent a stark alternative to liberalism and not merely a move a few degrees to the left or it simply would not have the same kind of potential.

Humphrey went on to defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon and radical politics, on and off campuses, seemed to be on an upswing. But, within a year, sds was in a shambles, characterized by a degeneration into sectarian stupidity. Soon afterwards, a turn to the working class by veterans of the student movements was accompanied by a retreat from confrontation, especially on the question of white supremacy. Most groups adopted traditional left positions on the strategy of “Unite and Fight.”25

A few years ago, Loren Goldner and I synthesized our views about the echoes of the ’60s in an Insurgent Notes editorial:

… small groups do not shape consciousness, events do. Events for the 1960s were the later years of the southern civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the radicalization of black people after the civil rights movement hit a wall, and the rank-and-file and wildcat upsurge in the United States working class. By the late 1960s, some many thousands of young people coming out of the New Left and the Black Liberation Movement had declared for revolution, and many joined groups organizing for it. It did not end well, for reasons that we cannot do justice to here. For the most part, the emerging revolutionary movement was dominated by either Stalinist/Maoist/Trotskyist sects or by groups well on the way to embracing an all-purpose, and hardly anti-capitalist, “progressive” politics. A not insignificant part of the black left turned towards nationalism. And a small part of what might be considered the middle-class white left was drawn into the substitution of terrorist violence for politics. Little of consequence is left of all of it although, to be fair, Sanders’ current vision has more than a little in common with the above-cited progressive politics.26

As I look back at the period, what seems evident is that the eventual turn to the working class by a good number of ex–student radicals as the potential driver of revolution was not accompanied by an equally serious turn to the work needed to understand exactly what capitalism was up to.

As has been noted often enough, the Civil Rights movement had given rise to the student, anti-war and black liberation movements and, in turn, to the emergence of women’s liberation and gay liberation movements and had a deep and broad influence on music and popular culture. In other words, something quite significant had occurred because of the impulse of a black freedom movement. The song seems to be playing again.

Progressives and Social Democracy

While there is a great deal to be encouraged by in the recent increase of popular interest in and support for socialism (specifically in the form of the remarkable growth of Democratic Socialists of America or dsa), the limits of what might be considered the main currents of the new socialist imaginary seem to be clear—they imagine a society measurably better and fairer than the one we have now. One observer wrote that it would mean “state ownership of certain industries, worker councils and economic cooperatives, sovereign wealth funds.” The same writer argued that the program outlined in the original Communist Manifesto reveals the extensive common ground between modern liberalism and socialism. Marx and Engels seem to have become aware of that possibility as a problem and, in 1872, when they issued a new German edition of the Manifesto in 1872, they wrote:

However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated.27

In the backdrop of this “new socialism” is what might be considered the domestication of the left that was left behind by the ’60s. Part of that domestication was the result of what David Graeber has termed a “grand bargain” wherein ex-radicals were granted significant autonomy within their professional niches, especially the academy, substantial material benefits (including early entry into the developing gentry economy in the context of re-shaped urban environments and consistently appreciating real estate values), and an inside track of sorts when it came to the education of their children into the next generation of those who could afford to be altruistic.28

Socialism came to be understood as a reformed capitalism—a society more equal and more solicitous of human needs but not fundamentally a different kind of human community. At the same time, this notion was accompanied by a growing conviction that any explicit articulations of radical views would not be met favorably by ordinary workers, especially ordinary white workers—which, in turn, led to a hesitation in confronting workplace practices that advantaged white workers.

This assemblage of notions, combined with appreciation for the folk songs of people like Pete Seeger and the “progressive” politics of the handful of unions still led by cp-influenced folks, produced a “left common sense” that saturated the emerging left scene outside the campuses.

Then, there was a slow drift backward into liberalism, electoralism and lesser evilism. Eventually, it culminated in the Clinton debacle of 2016. Spearheaded by Bill Clinton, the Democrats, with many “progressive” supporters had become Republicanism with a new face. Many thought that redemption would come through Obama. But the reality of his rule should have been clear from the start. Truth be known, it was to some. Within days of the 2008 election, the great radical Bob Fitch gave a talk to a group of tenant activists and he christened Obama as “the man from fire” (finance, insurance and real estate). The result of “hope and change” was a bizarre healthcare system, the further enrichment of the rich, and steadily worsening conditions of life for workers and the poor—manifested in shortened life spans, an opioid crisis, and renewed police violence.

Fortunately, the possibilities of dsa’s ongoing development do not seem to be limited by such concerns. Instead, the organization has been quite willing to support the development of a grassroots branch model, with those branches enjoying considerable autonomy about their activities and the development of various organized tendencies within the larger organization—such as the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (lsc).29 Much more needs to be understood about dsa and its potentials.

Concluding Thoughts

I don’t really have a conclusion so I’ll settle for some concluding thoughts:

• These have proven to be very challenging times (albeit ones that still possess extraordinary possibilities) and we need to think long and hard about how we should navigate through them. The emerging possibility of serious armed conflicts in the context of extraordinarily volatile political cross-currents demands no less. I am not confident that any lessons from the past will prove to be especially powerful. To that extent, we are on our own.
• A couple of months ago, Kristian Williams was interviewed by Hard Crackers. When he was asked to talk about undercover infiltration of movement groups, he responded by emphasizing how important it was to “remember that the purpose of good security is to preserve our capacity to act. And so security is about managing and mitigating risk, not eliminating it. Resisting power is inherently risky.”30 The matter of security has only increased in importance and it deserves serious political discussion well before it becomes an immediate concern; security should not be reduced to simply technical decisions about what to do and who should do it.
• We need to work to deprive armed far-right groups of political support. More than anything, that means to continue efforts to break apart the “white block.” It may well be that we’re in a better position to do so after the months of anti-police violence protests attracted the active participation of hundreds of thousands of mostly young white people. Presumably, many of those who protested came to understand that what needed to be attacked were the systems and structures that maintain white supremacy and black subordination. Better by far for our efforts to remain focused on those systems and structures than to be sidetracked in the perpetual activity of self-flagellation for individuals’ thoughts and motivations that’s promoted by the shameless promoters of white “privilege” and white “fragility.”
• No matter the temptations when it comes to fighting against the far-right, we should refuse to work politically with the state. We should try to become completely realistic about the dangers we may face and methodically work through the strategies and tactics that we’ll pursue without any assumption of assistance from the authorities. I do not believe that this precludes the possibility/necessity of individuals calling for the police in extreme circumstances.
• Once again, no matter the temptations, we should refuse to support Biden and the Democrats. On the other hand, we should be consistent in our support for all efforts to defeat voter suppression. Although I may be mistaken, I think that we should be able to articulate a revolutionary rationale for the defense of the democratic rights of speech, assembly and voting. In that regard, we might find it helpful to read some of Karl Marx’s writings on democracy from his pre-communist phase in the 1840s as well what he had to say about the relationship between “pure democracy” and communism.
• While the demands of battles on the streets often suggest that we do otherwise, we should deepen our commitments to solidarity and human emancipation. The forces on the side of reaction will all but always be prepared to engage in all sorts of violence. They have no reason not to. But we have many reasons to judge what we do by the standards of the dreams we have for a free society.

1. The phrase “vigilante repression” was coined by Matthew Lyons in an essay titled “Trump, the far right, and the return of vigilante repression.”↩︎
2. David Ranney used this phrase in his book, New World Disorder, to capture the profound inability of capitalist legislative bodies to seriously grapple with any of enduring important issues.↩︎
3. For more on this, I recommend reading some of what evolutionary biologist, Rob Wallace has written. See, for examples, “Capitalist Agriculture and covid-19: A Deadly Combination,” and “covid-19 and Circuits of Capital.”↩︎
4. See the especially detailed report in The New Yorker: “Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not.”↩︎
5. See “The Unique US Failure to Control the Virus.”↩︎
6. Ibid. The author of an entry in the usually rather reserved New England Journal of Medicine, wrote: “Reopening state economies without the precision provided by analysis of rigorously reported testing data seems a particularly American form of madness.” Downloaded from nejm.org on August 26, 2020.↩︎
7. See “Successful Elimination of covid-19 Transmission in New Zealand,” and “South Korea’s Health Minister on How His Country Is Beating Coronavirus Without a Lockdown.”↩︎
8. See “How Delays and Unheeded Warnings Hindered New York’s Virus Fight.”↩︎
9. What was left unsaid during the extensive promotion of the “flattening” strategy was that it took for granted that many would still become infected.↩︎
10. I think that there’s a problem with the category of “essential” workers—as distinct from all necessary workers (those whose labor is required for the satisfaction of material and non-material needs of the great majority of people) and as distinct from workers who perform useless tasks (as in finance, real estate, advertising, and much of the commercial newsmedia). On the other hand, it is clear that those who went to work when others did not have to—to care for the sick, to grow and prepare food, to deliver supplies, to keep systems running, and more—deserve special recognition and gratitude from their fellow workers—not just now, but for a good deal of time to come. I’d welcome other perspectives on this.↩︎
11. See “Why Surviving the Virus Might Come Down to Which Hospital Admits You.”↩︎
12. See “With City’s Largest Coronavirus Cluster Now On South Side, Aldermen Beg Residents To Stay Home.”↩︎
13. An incisive and penetrating analysis of these issues, “The Black Plague,” was published by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker on April 16. If anything, in these days of information and analysis overload, deserves to be considered indispensable, this article should be.↩︎
14. I’d suggest that the most significant anti-scientific force in American society is tv advertising. The ads are filled with people facing serious illnesses who, when given the recommended medications, turn out to be completely happy characters doing all sorts of apparently quite wonderful things. But the most important thing is that the ads present a way of understanding the world that is incredibly convincing. Otherwise, the companies doing the ads wouldn’t be wasting their money.↩︎
15. The great German poet, Goethe, was also a very accomplished student of plant life; he called his method a “delicate empiricism.” I think that what he meant by that phrase was that he would be patient, careful and consistent in his observations of specific forms of plant life—he would not rush to premature conclusions. It sounds like a good idea.↩︎
16. For a history of act-up, go to their archive.↩︎
17. Still more evidence—on August 31, Nick Saban, the all-but-legendary University of Alabama head football coach, led a march of current team members and other athletes to the infamous doorway where, in 1963, George Wallace defied a federal order to desegregate that University. See “Nick Saban, Alabama Players Hold Protest March on Campus.”↩︎
18. See “Man Linked to Killing at a Portland Protest Says He Acted in Self-Defense.”↩︎
19. See “In conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore.”↩︎
20. “Education, Propaganda, Agitation,” in Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization, edited by Martin Glaberman. University Press of Mississippi: 1999, p. 33.↩︎
21. C.L.R. James, Modern Politics. PM Press: 2013, p. 110.↩︎
22. Both the original post and the comment are at “What is the world coming to? (Episode one).”↩︎
23. See “The New Worker Organizing.”↩︎
24. The folk singer, Tom Paxton captured the emerging view of the president in his performance of “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” (1965).↩︎
25. See “White Blindspot” by Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen.↩︎
26. See “Editorial: us Party Elites Hemorrhage at the Edges.”↩︎
27. See the 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto.↩︎
28. As I was finishing this essay, I learned of the death of David Graeber (at the age of 59), a remarkable thinker and activist. Andrej Grubacic has written a fine obituary.↩︎
29. For an interesting glimpse into the internal life of the lsc, take a look at this reading list for a study circle in Baltimore on Left Wing and Council Communism. They made excellent choices.↩︎
30. See “‘Preserving Our Capacity to Act’: An Interview with Kristian Williams.”↩︎