Peter Solenberger
25 October 2008
The US financial crisis, in the context of the underlying world economic crisis, gives revolutionaries in the US an opportunity to discuss our socialist politics with many more workers and youth than we’ve been able to reach for many years. For years we’ve mainly participated in stumbling reform movements that failed to win reforms and discussed socialist politics with the few activists who cared to listen.
Now with the capitalists throwing off their neoliberal pretensions and demanding that the government bail them out, we’re able to say, “Yes, government intervention, but for the workers, not for the capitalists, and under the democratic control of the workers, not the dictatorship of capital.”
Workers are angry. For thirty years they’ve been told that there’s no money for jobs, no money for wages, no money for pensions and health insurance, no money for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, no money for education, and no money for infrastructure. They’ve mostly accepted the government’s spending a trillion dollars a year on past, present and future wars, since that’s for “national security.”
But now they’re being asked to accept the government’s spending trillions of dollars ($2.25 trillion paid or pledged so far) to bail out the banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions whose speculation has gotten them into trouble. They feel lied to and cheated. Much of the middle class feels the same way. A sign held up to the Wall Street skyscrapers in a September protest of the bailout captured this sentiment with the words, “Jump, you fuckers!”
Ratcheting up the rate of exploitation
Thirty years of ratcheting up the rate of exploitation underlie this anger. Average weekly earnings for US workers peaked in 1972. Working-class and lower-middle-class families have struggled to maintain their living standards since then by having more family members work more hours for more years. Women, including the mothers of young children, men and women of retirement age, and teenagers generally have jobs, if they can get them.
The real after-tax income of working-class households has risen modestly for all but the poorest, but nearly all of the increase has been needed to compensate for the unpaid labor that family members can no longer provide. Labor productivity has continued to rise, but workers have gained little from this, as the capitalists have shifted income and wealth to themselves and their entourage.
Workers are particularly incensed because they know that the US economy is entering a recession and there will be no bailout for them. The recovery from the 2000-2001 recession was weak. Many workers laid off then, especially older and less skilled workers, couldn’t find new jobs or could find only jobs at much lower pay, often part-time or temporary.
Since then, although overall employment has risen, layoffs have continued and workers laid off or entering or reentering the workforce have often had to take low-paid, part-time or temporary jobs. Many who have kept their jobs have had to take cuts in pay and benefits. Inflation has reduced the real wages of nearly all workers. The real average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers, 80 percent of the workforce, have fallen 2 percent in the past year alone.
While the US gross domestic product continued to grow through the first half of 2008, by most other measures the US economy has already entered a recession. By the official government statistics the number of unemployed workers has increased by more than two million from a year ago. The real number is much higher, counting those who are working fewer hours than they want to work and those who have given up looking for work. Conditions will worsen as the recession deepens.
The impact of the financial turmoil
Workers have been hurt by the housing bubble and the ensuing financial turmoil. During the bubble speculators bought apartment buildings and houses and raised rents. Now many renters are being evicted as the speculators dump their properties or declare bankruptcy. During the bubble many workers paid more for houses than they could afford, thinking that their value would continue to rise. Many took adjustable rate mortgages with low down payments and low initial interest rates, thinking that their economic situation would improve enough to pay the higher rates later. Now millions of these buyers are losing their houses to foreclosures, because they can’t pay their mortgages and can’t sell their houses.
Most workers are heavily in debt with mortgages, car notes, student loans, and credit cards. While credit was easy, they could juggle loans to ensure that all got paid, although sometimes with penalties for late payment. Now they can’t get the credit they need to juggle the loans and are having to forgo not just luxuries but necessities. They no longer have the refuge of bankruptcy, since a 2005 law makes declaring bankruptcy more difficult and less protective.
Retirees with money in stocks or mutual funds have been hard hit, since the value of their assets has fallen by a third or more and they have no way to replenish them. Workers trying to save money for their children’s college education and their own retirement have been hit too.
As always, the situation of Blacks and Latinos is worse than that of whites. Blacks and Latinos have higher rates of unemployment, lower wages and income, fewer assets, and more poverty than whites. With manufacturing and government retrenching, Black and Latino workers have less access to the relatively well-paid, unionized jobs that once provided a way out of poverty. Last hired and first fired, they have less to fall back on, since the neoliberal regime of the past thirty years has shredded the social safety net. Immigrant workers are even more vulnerable, since they can’t invoke the little protection the law gives citizens and they may be forced to leave the country if they lose their jobs.
Women have been especially hurt by the deteriorating economy, since in this patriarchal society they are usually the primary caregivers, as well as wage laborers. Even in the best of times trying to hold a job or develop a career and simultaneously take care of children, partners and often parents is daunting. With the loss of jobs, wages, benefits, social welfare, and homes the demands on women can become overwhelming, especially if they have to face them alone.
The underlying crisis of the real economy
Capitalism in its imperialist stage is the root cause of the economic crisis. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Vladimir Lenin described imperialism in words as appropriate today as they were nearly 100 years ago when he wrote them.
But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:
(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
The curve of world capitalist development combines three underlying curves: a secular rise in labor productivity and production, a fifty or more year alternation of periods of relatively rapid expansion followed by periods of relative stagnation, and an eight to ten year business cycle.
In the early 1920s the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev first noted the fifty or more year alternation of periods of relative expansion and stagnation and wrongly described them as “long waves,” thinking they could be explained by purely economic factors analogous to those explaining the business cycle but acting over a longer period of time. Leon Trotsky rejected this purely economic understanding of the phenomenon and explained it in terms of capitalist equilibrium and disequilibrium involving not just the dynamics of capital accumulation but also the social, political and military relations among classes and among nations. Ernest Mandel and others revived Trotsky’s concept in the 1970s.
World War I through the aftermath of World War II was a period of capitalist disequilibrium marked by economic convulsion, wars and revolutions. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of capitalist equilibrium. The period saw several recessions and many struggles, including union struggles, national liberation struggles, struggles by racially and nationally oppressed groups, and struggles by women, lesbians and gay men, and youth. But these were in the context of a world economy that was expanding relatively rapidly and class and international relations defined by bourgeois democracy and the welfare state in the imperialist countries, the Cold War coexistence of Stalinism and imperialism, and the shift from colonialism to neocolonialism.
The 1970s opened a period of capitalist disequilibrium which continues today with no end in sight. Economically, capitalism had accumulated such immense productive forces that further investment on the scale of the previous twenty years wasn’t profitable enough for the capitalists to undertake it. In the 1950s and 1960s the world economy had expanded rapidly enough so that the capitalists could make massive concessions to the workers and the oppressed to buy social peace. As economic growth slowed, the capitalists shifted their strategy from investing to expand productive capacity to jacking up the rate of exploitation. Socially and politically, the demands of the workers and the oppressed collided with the capitalists’ diminished ability to make concessions and profits at the same time. The capitalists retreated through the first half of the 1970s and then, as the movements of the workers and the oppressed lost momentum, launched a counteroffensive.
The Soviet Union, although not capitalist, went through an analogous process in which its economy slowed to a point where it could no longer deliver the rising living standards that, combined with diminishing repression, had held the country together. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the Stalinist bureaucrats transformed themselves into capitalists or administrators of newly capitalist states. The Eastern European bureaucrats generally failed to transform themselves into capitalists but instead became social-democratic or nationalist politicians in capitalist states quickly drawn into the orbit of European and US imperialism. The Chinese bureaucrats, learning from these experiences, have carried out a transition to capitalism under tight party and state control. The workers in the new capitalist states, like those in the old, are exploited at a level that would have seemed impossible thirty years ago.
Capitalist restructuring and working-class retreat
Workers have lost ground partly as a result of technological changes that have allowed corporations to restructure themselves at workers’ expense. Improvements in computers and telecommunications have allowed employers to replace workers with machines and to decentralize production. They no longer need the huge concentrations of workers they once needed. They can more easily shift production to other parts of the country or abroad, where unions are weaker, wages are lower, and governmental regulation is more lax. They can sell or spin off operations, subcontract, and outsource.
The technological changes and restructuring have increased labor productivity, but their main goal and effect has been to weaken the ability of workers to organize and resist, as the capitalists promote competition by playing off one group of workers against another.
Workers could have countered these developments by higher consciousness, better organization, and more militancy, as they have in the past. But they’ve been blocked by the bureaucratic leaders of the unions, the social movements, and the reformist political parties. These leaders do not want to risk their careers and social positions by leading militant struggles. They try to steer their organizations toward collaboration with the capitalists, rather than struggle, despite overwhelming evidence that collaboration leads to surrender or defeat.
In the US the Democratic Party occupies the space that a reformist workers’ party would occupy in a more politically developed country. The union and movement bureaucrats claim that backing the Democrats is the way to get the government “on the side of the people” and a prerequisite for improving the situation. The Democratic Party politicians welcome this endorsement, since without it they would have no leverage, but they take their orders from the capitalists who fund them and whose media can make or break them. Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election, initially protested George Bush’s theft of the election, and then stood down when the ruling class told him to do so “for the good of the nation.” Barack Obama was once a community organizer and a believer in Black liberation theology, but he renounced his former beliefs to get the $700 million in campaign contributions and the media blessing he needed to win the presidency.
The recession and the financial crisis
The world capitalist economy is entering a recession. The business cycle has peaked and is turning downward. The capitalists are cutting back investment, because they have excess capacity in most industries and are able to produce far more than they can sell. They can still make killings in the bottleneck sectors of oil and other commodities, but the high prices there are mostly a drag on the rest of the economy and are coming down as the recession develops.
The workers and the lower strata of the middle class are cutting back consumption, because they have lost jobs to layoffs and income to wage cuts and inflation and have too much debt. Foreign demand for US goods and services has picked up some with increased US productivity and the falling value of the dollar, but the US still imports far more than it exports, reducing demand for US production. Government spending, mainly on war, is the economy’s last prop, but short of a world war that alone can’t hold off a recession for long.
The financial crisis dramatically underlines the problem of speculation in the current capitalist economy. Unable to make as much as they want through jacking up the rate of exploitation of workers in the real economy, the capitalists resort to financial manipulation to increase their take. Some of this is simply swindling workers or each other by fraud or enticing their victims into lending or borrowing that they would not have agreed to if they’d known the true risk. But much of it is the collective irrationality of speculation.
Looking for extraordinary short-term gains, the speculators bid up the prices of stocks, futures, derivatives and other financial instruments that are or purport to be claims on future profits. They bid the prices well above what could be justified by the profits that the real economy of production and distribution of goods and services can yield.
For a while the speculators get fabulously and fictitiously rich, because every bad investment they make they can find some other sucker to take off their hands for even more. They play musical chairs moving from one bad deal to another until the music stops. Those who are left standing go bankrupt, and the others move on to the next game. In the past ten years we’ve seen the stock market bubble that burst in 2000, the real estate bubble that burst in 2007, and the commodities bubble that is bursting now.
A sharp recession is inevitable because of massive overproduction and overaccumulation in the real economy. An obvious question is whether the financial crisis will transform the recession into a depression. We can’t know for sure, but at this point that seems unlikely.
Having learned from the disastrous stock market crash of 1929 and the contained crashes of 1987 and 2000, the capitalist governments are moving quickly to shore up the banking and insurance system by guaranteeing loans, deposits and exchanges, arranging mergers, buying risky mortgages and other bad assets, infusing capital by buying non-voting preferred stocks that give them no managerial control, and in some cases temporarily nationalizing the institution. The US government has paid or pledged $2.25 trillion so far, and the Japanese, European, Canadian and Russian governments have paid or pledged correspondingly large amounts.
At this point it seems that the outcome of the financial crisis will be a massive consolidation of the US and world financial system. In the US half a dozen banks with one to two trillion dollars in assets each will survive, linked to a network of smaller regional and local banks. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,the two big mortgage holders now in government conservatorship, will be returned to their stockholders, possibly broken up into more manageable pieces. The financial system will be more regulated but basically back in business.
Even if the US and world economies escape a depression, we can expect a continued ratcheting up of the rate of exploitation through the sharp recession developing now and the weak recovery that will follow. The conditions of the workers and of the lower middle class will continue to deteriorate, as the capitalists continue to shift income and wealth to themselves and the upper middle class.
The deteriorating conditions of life, the increasing social inequality, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and whatever country US imperialism targets next, political shocks like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant bill, and the daily corruption, violence and injustice of capitalist society will eventual provoke a fightback. At that point all the parameters will change. Revolutionaries will participate in and lead mass struggles that could actually realize the socialist vision we propose.
A socialist response to the crisis
Meanwhile, revolutionaries should take advantage of the moment, which may be a moment of political epiphany for the working class. Workers are angry. They feel lied to and cheated. They are also scared. In their thinking, if not yet in their action, they are more open to collective and radical solutions than they have been in many years, since the situation seems desperate and the capitalists have resorted to collective and radical solutions for themselves.
Socialists should propose solutions to the crisis on the theme, “Bail out the workers, not the bankers,” following the transitional approach of the Communist Manifesto:
This cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
The solutions should include:
- No evictions, foreclosures or utility shutoffs.
- No bailout of the Wall Street speculators. Reclaim their stolen wealth and prosecute them for theft.
- Nationalize the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. Allocate investment and credit for human needs, not speculative profits.
- Nationalize the transportation and energy industries. Develop mass transportation and clean, safe, sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels.
- End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bring the troops home now. Not a penny, not a person for imperialist war.
- Fund jobs, wages, pensions, healthcare, education, housing, mass transportation, and alternative energy.
- Elect committees of workers and consumers at all levels from workplaces and neighborhoods to a national planning commission to oversee the nationalized industries and the public sector generally, to ensure that they serve the people, not business, and to prevent abuses in what remains of the private sector.
The thousands of organized socialists and tens of thousands of unorganized socialists in the US can’t realize such a program of action or even much more modest reforms. Only the workers and the oppressed can emancipate themselves. But we can participate in struggles as they emerge and in the political discussions they provoke. By this we can contribute to building the mass revolutionary parties and other organizations the working class needs to emancipate itself.
*Peter is a member of Solidarity in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti and veteran revolutionary activist in the Detroit area.
Statement from the (highly recommended) revolutionary Marxist Indian website 
Among those who wear the veil, there are those who do so out of choice, as well as those who are compelled by family and community pressure. Those who wear the veil out of choice do so either because they have internalized all the patriarchal, anti-women assumptions behind it, or because, as minorities, they are choosing to express their identities in that particular fashion. We disagree with their choice. We believe that ultimately, the dress code, targeting women, reflects reactionary views. In a very difficult situation, the New Anti-Capitalist Party of France, when one of its candidates, Ilham Moussaid, was targeted for wearing the headscarf, argued in a statement:
John McAnulty of Ireland’s
Although it is not widely understood to be the case, support for Darwinism contradicts Theism – the idea of a God personally involved in creation and the day-to-day running of the world, and restricts the faithful to Deism – the possibility of a God as a vague ‘initial cause’ Not only that, the theory of evolution situated humans inside the animal kingdom, subject to the same evolutionary pressures as other living things. Understanding ourselves became a task for reason and rationality, rather than an appeal to religious obscurantism.
The Marxist response to ‘social Darwinism’ is to argue that the laws used to explain one level of reality cannot be extended to another. The laws of Physics apply to living things, but they are of little use in explaining the development and behavior of living systems . In the same way the laws of Biology apply to society, but explaining social behavior in humans requires the sort of social and economic explanation offered by Marxism.
Turning Forty; Looking Back
Posted in Comment with tags anti-racist action, cincinnati, marxism, revolutionary on February 29, 2012 by Rustbelt RadicalIf age confers a special knowledge, I haven’t found it. If growing older mellows young revolutionaries and leaves their radicalism behind in a mire of pragmatism, then I am not growing any older. Although forty is hardly a venerable summit from which to survey the world from, it is the highest peak I have climbed and one that I never planned to reach. I ask readers indulgence for the personal nature as I take a little stock looking back at some formative years; forty seems as good a time as any to do so and you never know if you’ll see your next birthday. This will be a little disjointed and not meant to be anything more than a partial look at some past moments.
I came of age politically as part of the anti-racist punk scene in Cincinnati in the mid-80s. As I have written before, Cincinnati was and is an intensely segregated city. Racial codes and politics were learned young, often painfully and sometimes violently. The formations of our identities were first and foremost determined by racial identity; it was impossible to ‘not see color’ as the blind liberal wish was asserted even then. I haven’t been able to shake those racial lessons of my youth. They have informed everything else in my political life. I remember when the city’s schools desegregated in the early 80s. Not only did it change the complexion of my school, it changed the class character. The intersection of race and class: it’s the American praxis.
A single benign example (and I could give a thousand others less benign): around twelve years old a group of us youngsters, maybe a half-dozen, were hanging out near the neighborhood square (a white neighborhood) drinking Jolt cola, skateboarding and smoking cigarettes. In Cincinnati, neighborhoods are clearly defined (by race, class and inertia - if you were born there, you stay there) and you stayed in your own or ventured out only into what was acknowledged neutral space (often areas around bus stops that everyone had to use). A black kid just about our age walked past us a little anxious when one of our group, a little shit with perpetual Kool-Aid stains around his mouth, said something like “you’re in the wrong place”. The black kid was scared to begin with being in the wrong neighborhood and all, but the terror, and it was real terror, that came over his face makes me shiver to this day. The consequences for breaking the racial code in Cincinnati could be swift and violent and remorseless.
One of the many things I stew about, one of the million things I wish I could change is that. If I could go back to that moment I would lay that little shit out. That would come. If not that particular kid, then others. Always better at starting fights than winning them, I took more back. I still have the scars to prove it.
On every block in every town in this country, from the largest to the smallest, even in a reactionary backwater like Cincinnati, is at least one potential revolutionary. It’s being exposed to the possibility through others that matters. Around fourteen or fifteen an older kid in the neighborhood turned me on to hardcore with a Squirrel Bait tape. Hardcore may be the most limited style in all of music, but it opened up doors for me as it did for so many others in those Reagan years where the Cold War was at its height (I think that this is often overlooked when thinking about the 80s now; the neo-liberal Thatcher/Reagan assault was in the context of a Cold War increasingly hot as in Central America).
The left was dead, or at least invisible to me, and though I was already intensely interested in politics they were limited by what I was exposed to. Punk led me to things happening in Britain, like the Anti-Nazi League, which was, in some ways, where I first came became aware of the existence of a revolutionary politics that spoke to me. The punk scene I came up in was genuinely counter-cultural. As a way to emphasize this: no punk band that I followed or that were started by friends was ever started with the intention of ‘making it’ commercially or even of selling records.
On the contrary, it was fidelity to your community and their embrace that were the mark of success. The ethos of a band like Fugazi is only emblematic of that culture, it was widespread and real. As limited in its way as it was, the hardcore scene (and the punk scene more generally) attracted all kinds of people to it; art school kids, runaways, the rebellious and the angry, more than a few psychopaths, but mainly just alienated working class young people.
I was at least three of those things.
It was overwhelmingly, but not entirely, white which meant necessarily that it also involved racial politics. By the mid-80s scenes around the country, but especially in the Midwest, were at war around those racial politics as neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists made conscious efforts to intervene in all that anger and alienation. In places the organized left did too, most notably for me the ISO. But, by and large, the left was absent and the right energized even as the movements of the 60s and 70s still made it feel threatened.
At 15, in 1987, I went to my first anti-fascist demonstration. It was in Corryville, a black and student neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati. A group of neo-Nazi skinheads was rallying (I can’t for the life of me remember what they called themselves) and included some kids from my high school. Other kids from my high school came to the counter demo. We would see each other again at school on Monday where whatever happened would be sure to play out in the halls. Going into that demo I was a confused, but committed pacifist. That would change. I dropped acid on the way to the demo and by the time I got there was tripping pretty hard. In retrospect, fifteen may be little too young for rioting on acid. Fights started breaking out and the cops lost a handle on it. The fighting, shouting and shoving moved up Vine Street and the sign in my hand became a stick. We beat them out of that neighborhood that day. Over the next ten years I would go to many hundreds more anti-fascist demonstrations throughout the Midwest and many more street fights too.
A proper history needs to be compiled of what would become Anti-Racist Action (ARA). It had a couple of roots, but the one that sprung on my soil was the Syndicate. Mainly anti-racist skinheads, the Syndicate brought together a bunch of crews from Minneapolis to Cincinnati to New York City to counter racists in the scene. This wasn’t black bloc stuff, this was street fighting. Your clubs, venues and street corners, your school and your neighborhood- all these were contested territory between increasingly organized racists and anti-racists. A fight could not be avoided.
I had to make myself fight. I always disliked it and was horrified by those around me I saw get pleasure from it. But I did fight. I had to go to the emergency room a few times, like a lot of us did. I got arrested a few times, like a lot of us did. I hurt people too, like a lot of us did. I was way more scared than I ever let on, but I was in it and I was not going to back down.
Some crews were based around bands, others around schools and geography; some were based on something like ideology. Mine was. I had called myself a socialist since about sixteen, for whatever it was worth. I grew up in a family with strong union traditions, my grandfather’s family being seven generations of coal miners. I spent formative summers climbing around the hollers of southeast Ohio coal country and grew up with stories from the depression and of immigration. My parents were public service workers; as baby boomers the first of their families to go to college. Class was apparent to me always.
The scene I was in was rebellious, but not particularly left-wing. As we began to organize against the racists and the right some of us started making connections, looking further and got serious. As the sun was setting on the Soviet Union and the age of ‘No Alternative’ was commencing we were looking to the working class and to socialism.
In the spring of 1990 the Klan marched on Oxford, Ohio (where Miami University is). It was a helluva day. This was before the cops had learned to deal with us by creating static situations. Back then anything could happen. The Klan marched that day, after that they would only stage rallies. We were able to maneuver around there march as hundreds more, students, people from the neighborhood, joined in. As the march passed over railroad tracks the stones started flying from every direction. You could actually pick your target and we dropped the Grand Dragon types first. We fucked them up. Some of us got hit by rocks as well; a case of friendly fire. Jacked up by our success, we were able to besiege the city jail and retrieve our comrades from arrest. A glorious day.
In the organizing that proceeded we met a bunch of folks that would become ARA; the folks from Columbus around Jim McNamara being the most important. I and others in my crew got attracted to the Revolutionary Workers League out of Detroit. That summer I would join my first Marxist (sort of) organization. I would leave the next year after the increasingly cultish RWL unveiled their ‘Avenge Iraq’ slogan in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The RWL was already when I joined a sectarian, cultish caricature of revolutionary organization where Freud played a bigger role in its politics than Marx. I’m glad it didn’t ruin me politiclly. I could tell some stories.
It wasn’t the best way to be introduced into a life in the left perhaps, but we all come from somewhere and travel paths we don’t have any maps for.
About a dozen of us, all under 22 or 23, made up the branch of a small Trotskyist organization that formed in the aftermath of leaving the RWL. We were passionate and committed and we burned out in a few years. We had a party the entire time too. I remember one night of the rolling party where we had to be at a Planned Parenthood clinic defense at 6am the next morning. The idea of six in the morning seemed so shocking to us that we decided to just party straight through the night and show up to the gates however we were. We did just that and didn’t miss a beat picking it up the very next evening. Ahhh, youth.
That group of people are those I still identify most closely with. There were complicated relationships, of course (a dozen young people making revolution in close proximity is bound to have layers of ‘complication’), but we swam against a tide of reaction and we were all made better people for it. Some of us drifted from organized politics, some of us have remained doggedly engaged, and others are no longer with us. Comrades: there is no more powerful relationship. Comradeship when you are young and full of yearning for a future not yet arrived; well, it is as special a thing as I can think of.
I have changed a lot, including my politics, over the years and the person I am now would probably not like the person I was then very much. But I would be prepared to say that my main beliefs remain unchanged since I first developed them from the things around me. My revolutionism, my sense of alienation, the detest I feel for capitalism and its ‘culture’, my belief in the centrality of class and the pivot of race, all these things have only been strengthened by a life lived in the world of Marxism and of political action.
What does any of this have with turning 40 today? Nothing in particular, I suppose. Sitting here drinking coffee on this rainy Ypsilanti (a place I didn’t even know of twenty years ago) morning I turn forty; it is a moment where I have to wonder how the hell I got here. Like any other day where we are reminded of our own past, just a moment to look back and try to trace a route made by a million variables.
’The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations…a unity of the diverse.’ Marx, Grundrisse.
The Rustbelt has been on semi-hiatus these last few months as a new job competes with continuing school in taking my time and leaving me knackered at the end of the day. I apologize. I am growing increasingly resentful that I can’t read what I want and that my writing is confined to things I am uninterested in, but compelled to do. It is preventing me from taking full breaths and looking at the world around me. As I get used to my schedule I hope to be back at it semi-regularly.
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