Loren was my lover and my best friend. I miss him every day.

Available here: http://insurgentnotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Loren-Goldner-Memorial-Discussion-2024-06-01.mp3

NB: Discussion commences 06:12

I’ll be the moderator for today’s program. Since 2010, I have been a co-editor, with Loren, of Insurgent Notes. Unlike many of you, I met Loren before I had read many of his writings. It was probably in the mid-1980s. We struck up a friendship which deepened over the next twenty plus years. Even forty years ago, it took a while to read what he had already written and, perhaps needless to say, he kept on writing. In the weeks since Loren died, I’ve re-read some of his texts and discovered things that I had either missed, misunderstood or failed to appreciate the first or second time. They’re not quite biblical in character but they do invite serious study and discussion.

I’m hoping that today’s memorial allows all of us to remember who Loren was, what he accomplished and what his legacies might be. Let me briefly summarize what the program will consist of. We’ll begin with brief remarks by, if I’m counting right, nine individuals who knew Loren at different moments of his life and in different ways. Each person will speak for about five minutes or, in some cases, for less. I’ll recognize each speaker in the order we’ve agreed on. I’ll let each of them describe how they knew Loren.

After those remarks have been completed, we’ll take a brief break during which we’ll do a slideshow of photographs that capture aspects of the essential Loren. I’d especially like to thank Sharon Jaynes who agreed to share personal photos for that purpose. If things go as planned, the slideshow will be accompanied by a couple of music selections from the work of the composer Eric Satie, who composed music that Loren and Sharon both loved.

Then we’ll resume with an opportunity for others to speak about their recollections and appreciations of Loren. If you’d like to speak, please raise your hand by clicking on the box at the bottom of your zoom scream that’s titled Reactions, and then click on Raise Hand. I will call on you and you should then unmute your microphone. The open session will last for just less than an hour. The program is scheduled to end at 3 PM EDT.

I want to close with a few comments about the Loren I knew:

• Loren refused to be concerned about being respectable or fashionable. Instead, he held fast to his convictions, especially when they were perceived as going against the tide.
• He valued for himself what he valued for all—a life that was defined by an appreciation for the essential value of time. He hated the idea of wasting time.
• From his earliest political statements, he embraced creativity as a defining aspect of being human.
• He also insisted upon the need to know and appreciate all that had been accomplished and preserved—in philosophy, literature, music and art.
• And, of course, he was a believer in proletarian revolution and doing what he could to make it real.

As you might imagine, this was not an easy road to travel on. But Loren kept on it as faithfully as I can imagine.

Let me close with a mention of several preliminary plans to preserve and disseminate Loren’s distinctive views.

First, we’re hoping to publish a special issue of Insurgent Notes devoted to individuals discussing which of Loren’s essays and fundamental organizing themes were most important and why.

Second, some years ago, Italian comrades conducted extensive interviews with Loren which were published in Italian. Work is under way to translate the interviews into English and arrange for a suitable distribution.

Third, a collective effort is being launched to compile a complete and hopefully definitive catalogue of Loren’s writings and to then develop a plan for one or more edited collections to be published in book form.

We’ll keep you posted about developments by way of Insurgent Notes and the IN facebook page.

The loss of my older brother Loren has been very difficult for me. Most mornings my first thoughts are of how I can’t believe he is gone. My thoughts move through the stages of grief, from the denial that he is gone to anger that I can no longer talk to him, then to wishing I had stayed more connected or that I had gone to see him more often, to regretting not making the effort to travel to Korea or Egypt or Spain when he lived in those places. I find myself ruminating about how I let petty resentments shape our exchanges or ignore his attempts at contact. As these thoughts whirl around my brain, I realize that the stage of grief that eludes me is acceptance. The idea of being at peace with his absence seems very far off if not impossible to imagine.

Near the end and for some time before that, our phone conversations would concentrate on long term memories—often of our childhood together in Berkeley. Our age difference is nearly five years so we were not close but also we were very different personality types. While I was outside playing with friends, riding my bike or skateboarding, Loren was happiest reviewing his Latin cards or reading the Encyclopedia or the Dictionary. Loren’s brilliance at learning languages was evident at an early age. On a vacation in Mexico at the age of twelve he quickly became our interpreter, ordering meals and translating our needs into Spanish. Loren seemed to possess the ability to hear a word and know its meaning. Later, French people would say to me that Loren was the only speaker they knew that they had thought was a native when he spoke. He had an incredible ear.

Of course, books were very important from an early age. For birthday gifts, Loren would often pass on to me what he was reading. I remember receiving The Communist Manifesto followed by Reform or Revolution or The Essence of Christianity. The History of Surrealism, The Theater and its Double and Homage to Catalonia would follow. Then Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the 1844 Manuscripts, and the Trotsky trilogy along with Society of the Spectacle, Why I am a Marxist, and The Making of the English Working Class thrown in, as well as an IWW songbook and a Kenneth Rexroth autobiography.

While I was often too young or disinclined to make the effort to fully understand these readings, in my twenties I was taken under my brother’s wing and mentored more fully by him in the philosophical, economic, and political lessons of Karl Marx. We would spend hours in his favorite espresso cafe while he taught me about the historic specificity of consciousness or how the growth of the productive forces comes into conflict with the social relations of production. I can clearly see him with his hand gestures and his nursed cup of coffee taking the time to mentor his little brother. I’m so grateful to have those memories and I will never forget those moments for as long as I live.

Grief appears on its own time and I’ll be talking to Sharon or hear a certain song and I will burst into tears. One thing that has been very helpful during these past weeks has been hearing from the people who have shared their experiences with Loren. Their stories about his humor, his brilliance, and his vast knowledge have been extremely healing for me to hear. Thank you all for being a part of his life.

I want to thank John for including me in this commemoration of Loren, alongside these other fine comrades. It’s an honor to be invited to consider and document all the ways that Loren influenced our lives and left us changed as a result. It feels important to do so. Because as we all know, there are friends, and there are close friends. But friendship with Loren really was something quite special.

Others may remark on the fact that though Loren received his doctorate from MIT, he never taught at the college level. But in fact, Loren was always teaching, he never stopped teaching. Teaching was his calling, and only now, after his death, am I realizing how indelible his influence on me was, and the extent to which all he taught me over the years influenced the person I’ve become.

I first met Loren in 1985, when I arrived at the Harvard Center for European Studies, where—as has been said—Loren was the librarian. It became my habit, on Monday mornings, to sit with Loren as he went through all the books that had come in from publishers over the weekend, and as he unwrapped the daily newspapers from around the world that had also arrived.

And can we take a moment to speak about this library? It was just one room, but it was Loren’s creation, Loren’s baby: Stanley Hoffmann gave him carte blanche to run the place to his own specifications and in the process fended off the growing concern from the gendarmes of Widener Library, who’d inquire periodically: “Who ordered these books?” From time to time, an outsider—a graduate student or the odd undergraduate, would wander into the library for a few hours and then spontaneously blurt out: “This library is unbelievable!”

Anyway, there we were one Monday morning as he was unpacking the weekly haul of books, and we were discussing what we’d done over the weekend. I don’t remember what I’d done, but Loren said, as I recall, he’d read a fine new biography of Charlie Parker, a monograph on twelfth-century Sufi mystic poetry, and a series of interviews with members of the 1962 San Francisco Giants (the great team of Mays, McCovey, and Marichal).

With some confusion, since I knew he was running a bit behind in finishing his doctorate—on American politics—I said, but Chief [we called each other “Chief,” in honor of a CES colleague who had the odd habit of calling everyone “Chief”], I thought you were researching for your dissertation? “I am, Chief,” he said. “I am.”

That was Loren to the core: No field of human endeavor is unconnected with all the others, a bracing and redemptive antidote to the tendency of many academics—including some of the graduate students and junior faculty at the CES—to regard their field as separate and self-contained from the history or cultural realities of other periods or places, a niche to be carved out and protected. Loren was an internationalist—and an optimist of a special kind—who was ever-alert to patterns or resonances across centuries or continents that escaped lesser minds.

A few years later, we met up in Andalucía, where we both happened to be traveling; our paths crossed in the city of Ronda. Loren was excited to be in Ronda, since it was one of the epicentres of flamenco music and dance, as well as a bane to Franco during the civil war. We searched out and found some of the old flamenco bars, but they’d all been transformed into tourist traps for the endless procession of foreigners who’d arrive by motorcoach and spend an hour in Ronda before traveling on to the next pitstop. To Loren’s horror, each of these places was playing the most annoying sort of Euro-pop, and the waiters were impervious to Loren’s entreaties to put on something more historically accurate. We got up and left several cafes—I don’t recall if we ever had lunch that day—but eventually we did stumble across a tiny storefront, a shrine to one of Ronda’s homegrown flamenco legends—Aniya La Gitana—whose proprietor spoke to us for hours about the city’s extraordinary history of music and anti-fascist resistance.

This was the sort of experience Loren relished and was uniquely skilled at orchestrating. In a way, Loren invented social media, well before the tech world caught up. He would meet people—often after having sent them something he’d written—and then delve into their own network of contacts for other kindred spirits, sometimes following up with a visit, and in the process creating a kind of world-wide web that sustained his unquenchable intellectual appetite and gave him some measure of hope for a revolutionary future.

In his later years, Loren would stop by my house in Brooklyn periodically and hold court in our living room. “Mrs. Chief,” as he called my wife at the time, and the three little Chiefs would drift in and out. I wonder sometimes what the little Chiefs—now considerably older—took from these encounters with this itinerant radical intellectual, who’d regale them with stories of his journeys to the factory towns of South Korea, or the working-class suburbs of Barcelona, or the banlieues of France.

What I hope they derive is that they can find intellectual and spiritual sustenance in the most unlikely places, that around the world there are comrades and kindred spirits you don’t know yet—and who have never heard of you—but it’s your duty to go find them. And by finding them, and sitting with them, and listening to their struggles, and making their struggles your own, you’re committing an act of revolutionary solidarity with working people the world over. There may be no better way to contribute—in some modest measure—to the emancipation of our beleaguered species.

Author of several books in English and numerous articles, lecturer and activist, Loren Goldner left us two days ago.

As I wrote in a preface in 2008:

Loren Goldner is not an ‘academic’ Marxist—in both senses of the word: he does not hold a chair in a university, nor does he waste his time participating in endless Marxological quarrels.

He tries to apply his very personal vision of Marxism to the realities of contemporary class struggles. While reading his writings, the reader will immediately grasp that Loren Goldner’s horizon is not limited to the intellectual or material frontiers of his native United States. He offers us a vision of the world, starting from an international and even anti-national point of view. We may—I would even say we must—not always agree with the author, but we must give him credit for three essential qualities:

• • he always seeks to flush out statist Marxists, to dismantle their reasoning and their pseudo-radical demagoguery. His criticism of the statism of the left and far left is a constant, which sets him apart from many so-called “thinkers” of the no global movement or so-called “revolutionaries”;

  • he takes up the cause of workers’ struggles, here and now, while maintaining an uncompromising anti-bureaucratic position;

  • he is interested in the economic transformations of the capitalist world, which he tries to present to us in a simple (well, when possible…) and understandable way.

He didn’t have the appropriate academic-political networks in the Anglo-Saxon world to enable his ideas to reach a wide audience. In any case, he was neither a middle-class socialite, nor a Third Worldist, nor a leftist identitarian, so he was unlikely to appeal to the intellectual petit-bourgeoisie.

But this didn’t affect him in the slightest, as he preferred direct contact with grassroots activists, workers, the curious and the self-taught, who contacted him by e-mail or at his conferences, and to whom he always replied with kindness. This enabled him to forge lasting friendships at a distance, then face-to-face when he traveled (from Bolivia to Portugal, via South Korea, Spain, Italy and other countries no doubt), and to benefit from an informal international network of correspondents, friends and acquaintances whom he frequently approached with insatiable curiosity.

Never arrogant, always open to discussion, he was a Marxist or “Marxian” as you will, but certainly not a dogmatist.

In France, his texts were published in two books by Editions Ni patrie ni frontières—Nous vivrons la révolution (2008) and La gauche identitaire contre la classe: aux sources d’une régression (2015).

Tribute to you, Loren, and to your companion!

Ni patrie ni frontières

April 13, 2024

Photo above - Loren's library

First, I want to offer my condolences to Sharon and Loren’s family. The loss we all feel is hard enough, but of a different order. And thanks to John Garvey for staying close to Loren and keeping us in touch during the last difficult period, and for gathering us here today. And for including me.

I met Loren in the ’80s, in his Cambridge days, through politics and through books. Loren often signed his messages “your friend and comrade,” and that’s exactly how I felt about him. I’d see him often at the Harvard Bookstore where I worked; I recognized him for what he was: a first-class Marxist intellectual with wide-ranging – omnivorous – interests – and expertise, who also reacted with strong emotion to works and people of depth. I was at the time in one corner of the Trotskyist movement, while Loren oriented to his own interpretation of communism, I think you can say. Arguments ensued, of course, but unusually, they grew more interesting rather than less.

At one point, Loren had to move out of his tiny Cambridgeport apartment, where the books were so ubiquitous, they literally supported his bed and they topped the refrigerator. They were huddled like bats in a cave. He’d rented a 24-foot U-Haul to drive the library to Berkeley, and he needed a couple of burly movers to help. What he got was myself, weighing in at 135 lbs. (~60 Kilo), and Michael Mack, his neighbor and poet. It took a while, but we did it, and Loren, in a characteristic gesture, took us to the Sunset Grill, a Portuguese diner in East Cambridge that proved to be the best of its kind I’ve ever found. It’s now gone, like so much of the neighborhood charm of Cambridge. So much for the books in their physical presence.

Loren was kind of a model for me. I am occasionally, at seminars, forced to introduce myself as an “independent scholar.” I blush when I think of what kind of unaffiliated academic Loren was. He steadily dealt with the most important issues for the left over a period of several decades. I still think his Vanguard of Retrogression is an excellent take-down of the trendy exits from Marxism that characterized the 1980s, a model for a critique of intellectual backsliding.

He was a genuine non-party intellectual, but actively organizing the basis for future organization as he saw it. Similar in some ways to Trotsky in the down-period after 1905. His polemics against the recent Maoist revival were sharp and to the point. He had so much experience and knowledge, I urged him to write his memoirs. He balked, thinking that had not lived through revolutionary times. I think of memoir as being a Homeric moment, when the oral tradition is written down; it a loss that we won’t have that side of Loren’s life, present company excepted!

When I read his polemics at their best, I think of what Trotsky wrote of Marx and Engels’ correspondence: “there is so much instruction, so much mental freshness and mountain air! They always lived on the heights.”

He had no illusions about our time, though he followed every movement of workers. He would reread Victor Serge, whose tragic optimism seemed to be a compass for his heart, as it is for mine. He felt a similar affinity for Melville, his scope and searching. And like Serge and Melville, Loren was a true internationalist. Loren was also an exemplar of what Isaac Deutscher termed the “non-Jewish Jew”, like Rosa Luxemburg, who took the best of the Jewish and Enlightenment traditions in the service of humanity.

Byron wrote: “there are only two sentiments of which I am constant: a hatred of cant and a love of liberty.” Loren was tireless in his commitment until he could no longer function. I will miss our conversations and will have to rely on the works he left us.

Farewell, friend and comrade! Long live socialism and the memory of those who have fought for it!

Loren and I first met through exchanging letters in July 1997 after he was laid off from his position as librarian for the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. On a whim, he decided to use his severance pay to travel around East Asia for three months. He was fifty and I was a thirty-five-year-old itinerant radical who had been living in Seoul, South Korea since 1994, teaching English and living out of a backpack, but more importantly making contact with Korean revolutionaries and working-class militants. This is where Loren and I found instant affinity. In September, when I arranged to meet him at the old Kimpo Airport, he told me to look for an “old guy in a blue windbreaker,” a seemingly trivial description that defined my lifelong image of Loren’s humbleness and lack of pretense. He literally had no interest in the spectacular consumer frenzy for commodities and lived a life of extreme frugality. In that spirit, I helped him find a cheap, tiny room in an old-style inn, called a yo-in-sook, in the historic and ungentrified center of Seoul, replete with sliding doors under a tiled roof supported with exposed log beams, that would be fitting for the most ascetic Buddhist monk. He loved it!

Loren was fascinated by Seoul, so I took him on long walks and introduced my militant Korean friends, many of whom were veterans of the Great Strike of 1987. We found “gritty” workers’ districts, where during long talks over sumptuous—but cheap—dinners we discovered we had both been radicalized in Berkeley albeit a half-generation apart. We contrasted his experience of the tumultuous sixties with my coming of age in the Reaganite eighties. The highlight of his brief first stay in Seoul was attending the annual Jeon Tae-il rally, in honor of the garment worker whose self-immolation in 1970 sparked the modern Korean labor movement. Prior to the event in a massive sports arena, we sat on the ground outside, eating snacks and drinking with younger Korean militants. We marveled at a huge contingent of Hyundai auto workers—most of whom had just been driven across the country in charter buses from the company town of Ulsan—marching into the event with such swagger and confidence from their recent strike successes that it felt like watching a conquering army of larger-than-life heroes coming home to celebrate a decisive victory (including their participation in the four-week nationwide general strike, December 1996–January 1997, involving a total of over 600,000 strikers). Loren dubbed them the “workers’ 82^nd Airborne,” an insider reference—about the most militant elements of the working class—that we shared for the rest of his life.

When I left Korea in 1999, both Loren and I had left our marks. I worked with comrades to translate and print a pamphlet of Loren’s Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today. It was very well received because our Korean friends knew next to nothing of this tradition, to the point that some had assumed Bordiga was a Stalinist. Due to our influence, these comrades were translating texts from other unorthodox radical perspectives, like Italian left communism, Dutch-German council communism, and the Situationist International, and publishing them for the first time. South Korea’s military dictatorships, which only ended in 1993, drove political radicals underground and the comrades we met were hungry to learn about revolutionary ideas that had been censored for decades.

Our paths crossed again in early summer 2001, when I returned from my seven years of living abroad and spent a week sleeping on the floor of Loren’s Bronx apartment. While he was doing paid translation work during the day, I explored the city but most evenings we grabbed inexpensive Chinese takeout food, cans of beer, and ate, drank and talked in a nearby park. Afterwards, back at his apartment, we sipped more inexpensive beer, listened to jazz, and talked nearly to dawn. At the beginning of autumn 2001 we were both in Berkeley, as I relocated there and Loren was staying for a few months to take care of his elderly mother who was in poor health. When my mom, who was also living in Berkeley, died unexpectedly in her early sixties, Loren saw how hard I had taken it. He borrowed his mom’s car and we drove down Highway 1 along the California coast and simply talked. It was the best therapy for grieving imaginable. Several hours later, when we got to Carmel, we bought burritos at a stand catering to farmworkers at the edge of town, got a six-pack of beer, and spent the day at the beach in Big Sur, sitting on the sand, eating, drinking, and talking. At the end of that long day, we drove down narrow and twisty roads through the Big Sur wilderness—along Carmel Valley Road—until we reached Salinas Valley, then drove north back to the Bay Area, talking the entire time. There is no remedy that makes the process of mourning easier, but Loren really, really helped me get through that painful and emotionally difficult period.

Since I knew Loren could not get the memory of those legendary Hyundai auto workers out of his head, the “workers’ 82^nd Airborne,” I was not surprised when he found an English teaching job at Yonsei University in Seoul in 2005. But before leaving for South Korea, he needed to transport his library of over 10,000 books from California to his new U.S. base in New York City and I agreed to be co-driver. When we had met in 1997, we also bonded over a love of Beat Generation literature, especially Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, so we lived out our Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty fantasy in our four-day cross-continental road trip (albeit in a huge rental truck). He left soon after and was in Seoul until 2009, returning to Brooklyn during each school break. While there, he wrote several excellent accounts of class struggle in East Asia, especially about his visit to the 77-day occupation of the Ssangyong Motors factory at the end of his stay.

I did not get to see him as often, except for a few short trips I took to New York City or during his infrequent visits to the Bay Area, but he was one of the only true friends and comrades with whom I have shared so many common interests and passions. We could talk into the wee hours – or for the entirety of a 2,900-mile drive – about anything under the sun, literally. I deeply miss those discussions, yet they have forever shaped my character. Loren’s keen intellect and passion for fighting for a better world will be missed by all who had the good fortune to know him.

Whenever the working class rises up, with militant strikes or factory occupations, or people fight back against exploitation and domination anywhere, I will remember Loren, raise my fist in solidarity, and cheer them on in the spirit of those Hyundai “82^nd Airborne” auto workers we saw when our paths first crossed in 1997.

On April 19, 2024, I facilitated a workshop called “Striking to Win: Identifying Chokepoints Along Supply Chains” at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. The room was packed with rank-and-file workers from various logistics sectors, like railroad, longshore, maritime, warehouse (mostly from Amazon), and other related industries. I began the session by honoring my fallen comrade; in unison, all ninety of us chanted:

“Loren Goldner—¡Presente!”

San Francisco, California

June 1, 2024

I consider Loren to be a father to me. And this I mean in more ways than one, and in ways even more important than my biological father.

My biological father—an otherwise greedy and selfish drug-addicted criminal who tried to steal my name and identity—gave me some intellectual and historical perspective that I needed when I was a very little boy.

Loren helped me fill in that perspective.

Not that he just poured knowledge into me, although I did spend many an hour just listening to him talk about the history of the workers movement and of the New Left. It was more that he guided me with questions, book recommendations, and encouragements to write on particular subjects at particular times.

I have never met anyone with as broad and deep a Weltanschauung as Loren Goldner, and this is why he is special. The interconnectedness that Steve Hubbell noted. This is his gift to us, and the legacy I hope we can preserve and honor.

Let me be specific. I think Loren’s work has circled the entire time around the importance of what one might call spirituality to the working class movement of self-liberation.

I think we all know what spirituality is: a basic striving and longing for ultimate unity and sensuous praxis with the universe. To make sense of existence, of the cosmos, in a way in which the individual can participate. This is the basis of all religious and philosophical traditions.

Look, not even the art world speaks of spirituality with a straight face anymore. Let alone philosophy or politics. But it’s still there. I think Loren’s work on Melville is the lynchpin of his whole theoretical project, and cosmic concerns are pretty close to the surface. The Pequod is peopled with cannibals and savages from both the backward and the advanced countries of the world; out of their worlds, they each find a reason to come aboard. There is some element of freedom they seek, even in backbreaking labor aboard the whaling vessel, that brings them aboard the Pequod. This is everything. What in their own lives and traditions brings them to collective endeavor as a labor of freedom? All of them together, and only all of them together, can defeat Leviathan, the Behemoth, the state. How and why?

We know from Kolakowski and others about the neo-Platonic philosophical heritage of Marxism. But what about the other inherited currents flowing into our actions?

I believe that some among us must keep this work going; at least some of us must serve as anthropologists of liberation. Like Marx, in the last quarter century of his life, during his Russian detour. I believe Marx was looking for a bit of magic, so to speak, something like Thor’s Hammer, among the Russian peasantry, a weapon that would enable the European working class to smash the state. This particular research into pre-capitalistic social organization was not fruitful, but it is noteworthy that Marx devoted so much time to it.

Now that capitalism has well and truly swallowed the world, we are now all aboard an aluminum and carbon-fiber Pequod, sailing a spectacular sea of lies, word salad, and AI generated content. Though it is now helmed by blinkered technocratic billionaires, they still believe their own lies, and are hoist on their own petard of arrogance and ignorance. Who else is aboard? What fires their passion for freedom? What do they want?

Some of you may be familiar with such phenomena as the Malaysian ghost strikes; this has been going on for decades. A factory will be haunted and no one can go to work. A supernatural labor action. Obviously there’s the civil rights movement, calling upon activists to be actually Christ-like in their long-suffering forgiveness to topple Jim Crow nationwide. But there’s also the Tonton Macoute in Haiti, who used black magic to create zombie assassins.

Things like this show the depth and resourcefulness of our movement for freedom and also the depth and resourcefulness of counterrevolution. This is important stuff.

I believe that humanity’s dream of freedom is real, true, and a material possibility instantly. I believe the spiritual traditions of the world are battlegrounds, just like factory floors and gentrifying urban geographies. My conviction that we will win is not just the result of an analysis of class forces in this pathetic conjuncture, but a full-fledged religious faith, rooted, notably, in Marx’s Promethean atheism.

That is to say, Marx’s atheism is a challenge to rise to the occasion of divinity, much like the civil rights movement challenged its activists. To sublate the old Feuerbachian projection of the collective anthropos into the divinity means ultimately, and yet simply, to take responsibility. For what? For everything. For the cosmos.

And that is why we need the wisdom of the traditions. To see and know how people have conceived literally the cosmos. Not how contemporary science conceives it, but how people have conceived and lived it in their prehistoric community, in their Stone Age fragmentation, and in their contemporary alienation. And of course the history of that change. I endeavor to be such a cartographer of the anthropocosmos. Deep cosmopolitanism. Because of the fundamentality of the concepts, reinvestigation will probably have implications for hard science, too, especially mathematics.

Am I saying we need our own little “Russian detour”? Not really. I just think we need to remember and appreciate that the Promethean atheism of the Marxist tradition is the only means by which human spirituality can actually be understood and fulfilled, abolished, sublated, etc., because we are “explorers of the future,” as Bordiga put it. We speak from beyond the realm of necessity, having passed through the eye of the needle, the only way out of this mess: responsibility for everything, tolerating neither gods nor masters. We therefore see the future in the present and in the past. That’s the only way that Marx can be right in the 1844 manuscripts when he writes, from the future, that “man returns to himself not as he began at the origin of his long history, but finally having at his disposal all the perfections of an immense development, acquired in the form of all the successive techniques, customs, religions, philosophies whose useful sides were – if we can be permitted to express ourselves in this way – imprisoned in the zone of alienation.”

Our comrade Loren Goldner passed away on April 12. His death represents the loss of a great militant and brings a great sadness for those who knew him.

Loren’s political life began with his arrest as a student at Berkeley amidst the sit-ins and anti-war riots of the sixties. In this context Loren was radicalized and turned to Marxism in search for a critique of Maoism, Stalinism and the New-Left that dominated the scene. For a while he joined the Independent Socialist Club, which eventually would become the Trotskyist organization International Socialists (IS). But before that happened, Loren left Berkeley and the ISC behind and began traveling regularly to Europe attracted by the traditions of the Ultra-Left.

In Europe, he became familiar with Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationist International, Invariance, Jean Barrot, Le Prolétaire and other elements of the Italian Left in exile. Important for his political formation was an encounter with Henri Simon who represented for Loren a definitive break with any idea of the Soviet Union being a “degenerated worker state” and a historical link to the internationalist orientation that he was to embrace.

By the seventies, Loren had settled in New York City. Here, he lived out his self-proclaimed political isolation—working part-time jobs, talking to people in leftist bookstores and reading Marx. It was here that he published his first important work, The Remaking of the American Working Class.

In the eighties, Loren moved to Cambridge where he took up a position as librarian at Harvard. He continued to interact with others who identified with the Communist Left and became an important reference point for many. Although Loren was active in many political circles, he never associated with any organization, preferring instead to “write against the grain”. He strongly believed in the need for non-sectarian discussion. He loved to bring people from different political backgrounds together, both in person and later online. He initiated several online discussion-lists, such as the “Meltdown” list which he moderated for years until his health deteriorated.

Loren’s first and foremost concern was tracking the cycles of proletarian struggles. In the nineties, he became interested in Asia. He traveled to India, China, Japan and South Korea following the shop-floor struggles of the world proletariat while developing his analysis of the economic crisis and fictitious capital. Between 2005 and 2009, he lived in South Korea teaching English (and of course learning Korean and producing an important text on the Korean working class).

Back in NYC, Loren participated in founding Insurgent Notes and continued to track working class movement, develop his analysis of capitalism, facilitate Marx reading groups and learn Chinese. In 2017, Loren made his last trip to China.

Loren had many qualities. He was a formidable linguist, he had an awe-inspiring intellect accompanied by a disarming humility; he was passionately curious about everything and anybody who he met, for whom he always had many questions. Loren’s unquenched thirst for knowledge and dedication to working class struggles shaped his militancy and pushed him far and wide around the globe. He traveled to Turkey, he lived in Egypt to learn Arabic, in the south of Spain to live with a Roma community, in Italy he became known for introducing Bordiga to the greater Anglophone world… Loren left an impression wherever he went.

He will be remembered as a caring friend to many, an affectionate person and a spirited contributor to what he, as many others, hoped would be a world-revolution, a fight for communism and the breaking of their haughty power.

To IP he was a friend and a comrade. He will be missed.

April 18, 2024

On April 12, Loren Goldner died in Philadelphia. For the author of these lines, he was an intellectual discussion partner and a friend, and though living in different countries, we managed to get together on a number of occasions.

It’s often occurred to me that when you write in memory of someone we’ve lost and you mention your relationship with that person as well as events you experienced together, you run the risk of talking more about yourself than about the one you’re supposed to be remembering.

In this case, however, I believe a couple of anecdotes should offer a glimpse into a few of Loren Goldner’s traits that may help explain his political and theoretical development. Once when he stopped in Turin a number of years ago, my partner and I did the customary thing, which was to show him around town. But instead of asking to see the city’s most beautiful monuments and areas, he wanted to go to proletarian neighborhoods like Le Vallette, Mirafiori, and Barriera di Milano, evincing placid indifference to esthetics or, to put it another way, showing esthetic preferences that kind of knocked me for a loop.

When I traveled to the U.S. years later, he and I went to a restaurant in an area I can’t quite recall. It seemed to me like a run-of-the-mill place; what I wasn’t so crazy about was that you weren’t allowed to smoke (this was before the current wave of health fanaticism had reached Italy) and they didn’t serve alcohol.

But what Loren strongly objected to — though it left me entirely unmoved — was that all the patrons were white, that there were no African Americans, Asian Americans or Latinos eating there. This incident highlights his intense focus on the presence or absence of proletarians in the places he went to, an indication of how central the issue of class was to him. And while I’m far from indifferent to such problems, I sensed that for Loren they took on a near-existential significance that I found peculiar, and perhaps unique.

Loren’s radical political education began in the early 1960s, when he joined in many demonstrations demanding racial integration in the workplace.

Those were years of rapid growth for the new left, both in the United States and elsewhere.

In the U.S. in particular, the issue of race was crucial at the time. The key players in the drama were the blacks, of course, but along with them was the white left, the liberals who still believed to a large extent in the Democratic Party and President Lyndon Johnson, a figure viewed as a continuator of the Roosevelt’s party and the New Deal after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Johnson bombed North Vietnam and invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, the liberal milieu split, giving birth to a new left that no longer identified with the Democrats. The party went into a steep decline, finding itself out of power for two decades, and when it finally returned to power, there wasn’t much of the Rooseveltian tradition left.

Opposition to the Vietnam War generated an extraordinary degree of radicalism. It’s worth recalling that between 1966 and 1973, about half a million young Americans became draft dodgers. This was a mass movement, or rather a mass revolt, with unprecedented impact that went largely unnoticed in Europe. In other words, the U.S. experienced what I see as its own 1968 before the French did in May ’68.

Loren was acquainted with the Black Panthers, and in 1967 joined the Independent Socialist Clubs, renamed the International Socialists in 1970. Back then, the group offered a left critique of Stalinism, Maoism, and Third-Worldism, which held sway in the U.S. new left. Broadly speaking, Loren, still under age 20, could be termed a Trotskyist at that point.

Yet he wasn’t really satisfied with that outlook. He started reading texts from Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International and found the latter group’s positions stimulating, though his own class-based analysis kept him from endorsing them.

Back around then, he also became acquainted with the writings of Amadeo Bordiga, Jacques Camatte and the broader Bordigist current.

I suspect that this wide variety of references is what has led a number of comrades to describe Loren as a “Luxemburgian Bordigist.” Aside from the fact that such a definition strikes me as a theoretical oxymoron and that an orthodox “Bordigist” would find it non-sensical to align him with their current, I maintain that Loren’s use of Bordiga’s writings was utterly non-“Bordigist.” Viewing Bordiga as an original, non-Leninist thinker, he made use of specific individual texts without treating them as components of the author’s own system — an approach that would be anathema to any Bordigist.

In subsequent years, Loren got familiar with the work of comrades like the libertarian Marxist and thought-provoking critic of “Marxism” Maximilien Rubel, Henri Simon, a radical critic of party communism, and others whose works he greatly appreciated. In any case, what I find so noteworthy was Loren’s ability to connect up with a wide range of milieus, positions, and experiences that are usually considered incompatible with each other.

That attitude was interwoven with two characteristics of Loren’s experience:He was multi-lingual. As I recall, he learned French, German, and Italian early on, also studied at least Arabic and Korean, and worked as a translator from French and German.

• He traveled widely abroad, contacting milieus and comrades in many countries and often working outside the U.S. In addition to Italy, France, and Germany, he also spent time in Spain and Portugal, and, once again if I remember correctly, subsequently in the Arab world and South Korea.

The breadth and scope of his knowledge and his inexhaustible curiosity were ultimately what most relevantly defined him.

What now comes to mind are his writings and above all the conversations I had with him, especially on the question of “class/race” in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the reality of South Korea, and many other topics.

Allow me to end this paper with a long quote that I find both stimulating and problematic, covering the cycle of struggles in the 1970s and current outlook. It’s taken from a book that may in a sense be viewed as Loren’s autobiography.1

“All power to the international workers’ councils” was seemingly the best “universal” of that era, and there were ephemeral moments when its realization did not seem that far off.

The capitalist counter-offensive involved a direct attack on the “visible” dimension of the movement toward “generalized self-management”: breaking up the big factory into cottage industry and isolated rural “greenfield” sites, further de-urbanizing workers into sprawl and exurbia, the casualization of labor, outsourcing to the Third World, and “high-tech” intensification of production. The resulting “de-socialization” of the workers of the 1968–1977 rebellion achieved in these ways was deep and thorough. It was a textbook illustration of the way in which technology—in this case, first of all, new telecommunications and improved transportation—is inseparable from its capitalist uses; not since the mass production of the automobile did an innovation have such an initial impact of isolating and dispersing the universal class which the proletariat IS. That such telecommunications and transportation may tomorrow contribute to the practical unification we advocate is another matter, and remains to be seen….

The programmatic question can obviously not be one of rebuilding the old mass production factories as such. No one misses the assembly line, and automobile-centered production and consumption has already ravaged enough “social” space. It has been pointed out often enough that, despite the creativity of the wildcat movements from the 50s to the 70s, most of the left (myself included) theorized the factory worker as worker, and not as the leading force in a striving to break the logic of factory work to accede to a Grundrisse-like “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption,” i.e. communism. Nonetheless, while recognizing that mass production seemed to produce something much closer to class consciousness and class action than what we have seen since, we can also recognize that breaking the old “social contract” of the post-World War II period also broke the conservatism built into attachment to one job, a mortgage, etc. that must have inhibited as much solidarity as it fostered, in one factory, in one industry. This has led, in some countries such as France and Italy, to movements of working-class youth, who will never have the stability their parents had, using this precarious mobility as a way of building city-wide “flying picket” movements centered on whole cities as opposed to one big factory or industry.

In short, Loren was engaged in an ongoing, tireless quest for a possible breaking-point in the current productive and social order, drawing on both study and field work, on encounters with activists and workers in struggle—a quest that in the varied ways in which it manifested itself, was far from his alone.

This, then, was a human, political, and intellectual undertaking by someone we can consider an “unconventional” revolutionary in a counter-revolutionary phase in history.

Translated from Italian by Larry Cohen

• 1Revolution in our Lifetime – Intervista a Loren Goldner sul lungo Sessantotto, Loren Goldner (author), Emiliana Armano (editor), Raffaele Sciortino (editor), Colibrì Edizioni, 2018. Original version: “The historical moment that produced us: global revolution or recomposition of capital?” Loren Goldner, Insurgent Notes, June 2010.

“Do you read Loren Goldner?”

That question caught me by pleasant surprise as I spoke with a few Trotskyists I randomly met at a late 2010 protest rally in downtown Manhattan. If I recall correctly, we discussed seemingly “obscure” topics, depending on one’s political standpoint and milieu as well as intellectual background. Well, certainly “obscure”, if not out of a completely different universe, to those with “mainstream” political stances in the United States of America and mainly if you only think in terms of “Republican versus Democrat”.

We talked about the theorizations of “really existing socialism” (also referred to as “actually existing socialism”) as “state capitalist” and/or “bureaucratic collectivist”. Relatedly, we discussed the political figures who proposed and articulated “state capitalism” and “bureaucratic collectivism” as conceptual devices for understanding “Stalinism”, an all-too-often used and abused term that is less than satisfactory but still useful as a single-word descriptor: Mostly Trotskyists, such as Max Schachtman, Bruno Rizzi, and Tony Cliff, hailing from tendencies that were ultimately marginal within the wider Trotskyist milieus, to say nothing of the historical, or twentieth century, New Left as a whole which became deeply wedded to “Third World”-ism à la Guevarism, Maoism, etc. Inevitably, and if my memory still accurately serves, we went on to talk about imperialism and opposition to such, the history and politics of left-wing support for struggles for national self-determination, the differences between “vanguardist” and council-oriented approaches to social and political revolution on the, very broadly speaking, “Marxist” Left, et cetera.

My enthusiastic answer in the affirmative to that question within the framework of discussing the aforementioned topics indicates something about my meandering and idiosyncratic political trajectory as well as the evolution of my worldview.

How his path and mine crossed is a long story. If the reader is willing to bear with me, then here goes…

I can’t remember when or how I first came across Loren Goldner’s writings, mostly posted to his website Break Their Haughty Power. I do recall I was in my late teens during the early-to-mid 2000s when I became deeply interested in social and political theory as well as history that focused on social and political issues, especially “the Left”, “political economy”, and socioeconomic class divisions. I was amazed by Loren’s erudition across multiple subjects and topics as well as his remarkable ability to meld together facts, viewpoints, and sociopolitical theory into scintillating and deep insights. You only have to read his wide-ranging and eclectic essays, articles, and commentaries to discover and know for yourself. I certainly did. That impression remains vivid and memorable.

Like others who knew, or at least knew of, Loren, if only by byline and reputation, I was impressed and in awe by his clearly obvious intellectual abilities and his longstanding political commitment as a “left communist” or “ultra-leftist” (to wit: Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Otto Ruehle, Sylvia Pankhurst, Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen, Jan Appel, Paul Mattick, Sr., Paul Mattick, Jr.). His works, as far as I was concerned fifteen to twenty years ago as I write these lines, were invaluable. Any new additional writings uploaded to his Break Their Haughty Power website were welcome, indeed anxiously awaited. He also took part in a roundtable discussion in the late summer of 2007 which I, as usual with anything related to Loren’s commentaries on history and politics from an “ultra-leftist” standpoint, seized upon, grasping for whatever insights I could derive. Likewise, the interviews he did with the Korean Socialist Workers Newspaper Group (SaNoShin) during late 2007, and which he probably posted to his website during spring 2008. Loren’s perspectives were that important.

I never thought I’d meet Loren in person, much less befriend him, until one of the Trotskyists I spoke with in 2010 put me in e-mail contact with him during the following summer of 2011. Loren and I soon enough agreed to meet in person in front of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue. Sure enough, we met and he told me about his life story: His parents’ departure from the Communist Party USA (acronym: CPUSA) after the then-Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech (officially known as “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”) at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956; his mother’s fear of repression under McCarthyism as well as her staunch anti-Stalinist stance after having left the CPUSA; his undergraduate and graduate studies which culminated in a PhD; his abortive attempts at learning Arabic while in Egypt; and his involvement with the Independent Socialist Clubs and the rest of the anti-Stalinist and non-Stalinist “Marxist” Left.1 He also mentioned where he went in the world, of having traveled to and resided in France shortly after he completed his secondary school studies and then, from France, moving to Germany. Along the way, he became fluent in French and German. During that initial conversation, Loren may have also mentioned he lived briefly in Italy and accordingly became proficient in Italian. That, or he mentioned his time in Italy later on.

All the above was a truly surreal moment—akin to watching a dream come true, unfolding itself before one’s eyes, and experiencing it. Yet it felt familiar as Loren and I became on friendly speaking terms. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune and convenient time for him, either. Loren was trying to begin learning Mandarin Chinese to better understand mainland Chinese social, economic, and political realities from his “left communist” standpoint. Therefore, he was looking for anybody who’d help him get a start. Upon discovering that I speak the language, he asked me if I could tutor him. He didn’t know what he could do for me in return, though. He explained to me that, when he started studying Korean (from the mid-to-late or late 2000s into the early 2010s), he did language exchanges with Korean speakers. The Korean speakers tutored him in Korean and he in turn instructed English to them. Since I wanted to stay in communication with him, I proposed a language exchange as well, to which he said to me, “You don’t need any help with English”. But, I countered, I could try learning a non-English language from him. Maybe… German? At that point, I was thinking of anything on the fly.

I don’t remember, either, if I had intended, much less planned, to study German as a language, but there I was proposing such a notion. I remember telling him I might as well try learning German, to read it at least, to become more familiar with the Neue Marx Lektuere, or the New Reading of Marx. Loren merely chuckled at this justification, probably because he already had a reliable working knowledge of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy as well as the Grundrisse and The Theories of Surplus Value. He also recommended I read a review he wrote of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory.Nevertheless, he agreed to my idea and we continued to meet.

Thus, our language exchange and broader relationship began from that chance meeting in mid-2011 via a random decision by a mutual acquaintance. We initially met during 2011 and 2012, through regular weekly two-hour appointments, in midtown Manhattan as we started and continued with the language exchange. Partway through 2012 and into 2013, we continued with our exchange-oriented meetings at his and his wife Sharon Jaynes’s apartment in Brooklyn.

In retrospect while considering the bigger picture, I admit to having a sense of unreality as to what I’ve described so far.

First, the fact that I’d even become interested and/or involved with any kind of “leftist” (or “left-wing”) and “socialist” politics. I grew up in a Taiwanese immigrant family that had a trajectory and mindset influenced by the Cold War and which, resultantly, developed a deeply engrained right-wing to far-right Cold War anti-Communist worldview. For us, “socialism”, “communism”, “Marxism”, and any kind of “left” politics amounted to Stalinism à la the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China, Democratic Kampuchea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, etc. Period. Full stop. The notion of an anti-Stalinist or non-Stalinist “Marxist”, “socialist”, and “leftist” was and remains a contradiction in terms—an utterly inconceivable absurdity—although my family has since made a few concessions to Nordic social democracy.

But despite the cultlike anti-Communism, or anticommunism, I internalized and believed in during my childhood and adolescence, I became attracted to the basic principles and goals of socialism—of direct democratic control of the economy, of reducing and ending socioeconomic inequalities, of workers’ management of the industrial means of production and circulation. This interest in such a tantalizing political, social, and economic philosophy existed and persisted in spite of the aforementioned anticommunism as well as, relatedly, the no less strongly anchored assumption that “free market” (or “free enterprise”) capitalism is the only ideal and optimal mode of production for all time. Or, at least, humanity’s existence. Thus, when I first discovered Loren’s works, again sometime during the early-to-mid 2000s, they must’ve been curiosities. All insightful, incisive, and informative. Mind you, though, they were anything but mere curios. As I told Loren once by e-mail, so much of my post-adolescent life has been me reasoning my way out of a quintessentially conservative and reactionary mental political universe.

Second, that I’d even tutor someone else, Loren in this case, in elementary Mandarin Chinese. My family expected my sister and me to completely assimilate and integrate into “mainstream” US-American society and culture, which meant regarding vernacular North American English as our primary language. Indeed, for a long time I considered myself monolingual in English and unable to learn other languages until, since 2010, I tried learning Spanish and Mandarin Chinese (I had been illiterate in the latter and I was becoming literate since 2009) on my own. The reader can imagine why I’d write here about a “sense of unreality”.

Third, that Loren would be interested in such a language exchange and, relatedly, having political discussions with me. As with so many other “Generation Y” and “Generation Z” leftists, my grounding was more so in intersectionality, identity politics, postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc., none of which really meaningfully related to Loren’s worldview and approach to sociopolitical issues. Not to mention his focus on working-class struggles throughout the world. Granted, I knew something about the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Soviet and mainland Chinese political and economic histories, as well as “really existing socialism” via my upbringing but even then, that knowledge was at best general and rudimentary. I didn’t think I could hold my own in political discussions with an esteemed “left communist”, or “ultra-leftist”, intellectual like Loren. Certainly not when Loren appeared to know so much about, and could endlessly cite multitudes of sources about, all kinds of topics related to the arts, the humanities, social studies, and, of course, assorted leftist political and intellectual figures.

But none of those three reservations fazed Loren, leading him to decide against continuing his relationships and communications with me. We spoke in person and by telephone. We corresponded by e-mail. On occasion, I sent him postal mail. As the contributors to this Antifada episode in memory and honor of Loren attest: He was always open, generous, and encouraging—with my informal German-language studies; with talking at length about left-wing politics and the many, multifaceted, and diverse histories of such; with the authors he recommended such as John Eric Marot, Simon Pirani, Hillel Ticktin, Pierre Ryckmans (better known as Simon Leys), and Victor Serge. He also wanted me to become involved with Insurgent Notes, the online journal he and John Garvey co-edited.

After I found full-time employment in mid-2013, a minor miracle since I became in part a casualty of the 2008–2009 economic crisis from mid-2010 onward, Loren and I had more sporadic communications. I only saw him again twice in 2014 and twice in 2019. When I last met him in person, I did so at his request. He was due to give a lecture at the Woodbine Collective about the contemporary mainland Chinese working class and its travails vis-à-vis the post-Stalinist party-state in Beijing, the nascent domestic mainland Chinese capitalist class, and multinational capital. Aside from the occasional e-mail, I more or less lost touch with Loren since 2019. The last time he wrote to me, he merely noted that he wasn’t well. I didn’t know about his passing until a mutual acquaintance informed me about a week and a half after the fact.

There is so much more that I can write about Loren’s work and thought, so I will very likely revise and expand this remembrance essay, which has already become long enough, as more memories worth mentioning return, as I reread some of his writings, and as I listen to the reminiscences of others who knew him at the online memorial that John will convene on Saturday, June 1, 2024. I may also write more essays in honor and in critical reflection of Loren’s oeuvre, at least parts of it, over the next several months. Should I do so, I’ll include in my reflections and thoughts on Loren’s works where I still agree with him and where I may differ.

But, in the meantime, this much suffices, at least: Among libertarian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, left communists and council communists, and assorted leftists (or ultra-leftists, not to mention some Trotskyists) throughout the world, Loren was and still is an inspiration. His work and legacy remain a, if not the, gold standard for those struggling to achieve a genuinely socialist, and eventually communist, mode of production and society—not the repressive Stalinist “bureaucratic-peasant utopias” (Loren’s term for the “really existing socialist” societies and nation-states of North Korea, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Albania, etc.) which the historical New Left, with and because of its “Third World”-ist self-delusions, glorified as “socialist” and as being admirably distinct from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. alike. One in which, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels aptly wrote in 1848:

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

We’ll keep trying, Loren, because that’s the ultimate and most appropriate tribute to you, your life’s work, and your legacy.

And so, with all that written and in the same spirit…

Loren Goldner, October 18, 1947 to April 12, 2024, ¡Presente!

Rest in peace, power, and solidarity, comrade!

安息!

Sunday, May 26, 2024

• 1For more on Premier Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the McCarthy era: https://monthlyreview.org/product/the-prosecution-of-professor-chandler-davis/.