Socialism truly is a dying religion. Tonight, I’m lighting some red candles for some wonderful comrades who have passed on this year. Yesterday, I learned that Ruth Greenberg-Edelstein passed away on November 24th. Ruth was a stalwart of the Socialist Party in upstate New York. On the National Committee, she was an effective advocate for feminist process and gender balance. A retired faculty member at both SUNY and Rutgers, she had, more or less, left active service on the National Committee by the time I got on there – although she had clearly left her stamp. I remember her as a friendly and vivacious backbencher who genuinely enjoyed the company of her comrades – especially the younger ones. Herself, she seemed much younger than she must have actually been, which is why her death comes as such a shock.

Her death follows so closely that of her husband J. David Edelstein, who passed away this July. His death was – forgive me – slightly less of a shock. Retired from Syracuse University for goodness knows how long, he was 90 years old and physically frail. Mentally – and ideologically – he was sharp as ever, and firm and determined in his convictions. Maddeningly so, from my perspective as a teenage socialist. How could such a good Marxist reject our Socialist Party Presidential campaigns in favor of the Greens? In retrospect, I came to see the logic of his argument, but at the time I got hot and bothered in our debates, and out of line, while he remained calm and civil. Fortunately, I was able to apologize while it still mattered. He remained a calm presence and a beacon of sorts. Looking through my inbox, I found a four-year-old email from Dave, gently admonishing me for an irreverent (and highly controversial!) cover from my two-issue stint as editor of “The Socialist” magazine while firmly standing in favor of my continued tenure as editor.

Finally, the most upsetting passing of the year was of Robert W. Tucker. Rob was my favorite old man in the party. A Quaker pacifist and expert on socialized medicine, he had become a lovable curmudgeon by the time I joined the party. For example, Rob had used his (slight) loss in hearing to make a mockery out of Robert’s Rules. I remember a young comrade from Boston rising to make a speech during a convention, and Rob (LOUDLY) whispering to his brother beside him “HE’S THE BEST ONE WE HAVE IN THAT STATE – GOD HELP US!!!” Kinda took the wind out of the sails of the young man’s speech.

In the true spirit of socialism, Rob would share his talent for LOUDLY whispering by acting as an amplifier for your private asides, as when the same young comrade from Boston took a shot at our YPSL National Secretary who was running for Vice Chair of the Party by questioning if the duties of both offices weren’t too overwhelming. “Well, I did them both at the same time,” I whispered to Rob. “YEAH, SHAUN DID THEM BOTH,” Rob shouted to the convention hall. No one ruled him out of order.

It was a bit of a kick in the guts to see see Rob quoted in Maurice Isserman’s biography of Michael Harrington, which I’ve been working my way through since before I learned of Rob’s passing. In it, Rob tells of Harrington’s tendency to date skinny minnie model-types who would sit – wearing their brand new leopard-skin pillbox hats – in the back of whatever hall Mike had dragged them to while he carried on with speeches and parliamentary maneuvers. Isserman does not publish the ribald conclusion of this anecdote that Rob loved to share, which involves (an unofficial) debate about the protein content of semen and Harrington admonishing all participants, “Oh, no, don’t tell her that!”

Nor does Isserman (or anyone as far as I can tell), share accounts of the younger Shachtmanites’ propensity for group-sex at conventions, in which, Rob, as a Quaker, was too prudish to participate but not too prudish to inquire what it was like. “It’s a wonderful feeling of comradeship,” he was told.

Rob was full of stories like these, and I loved hearing them. I don’t think I had seen Rob since the 2005 convention in Newark. By 2007, I had quit the party. Looking through my records, my last contact with Rob was at the time of my resignation from the party’s National Committee to which he responded with a fairly stern disapproval. Four days after I resigned from the party Rob noted his 50th year as a member, asking – a broad list; I was merely the audience – if he would finally be shown the secret handshake.

A few weeks ago, after being assigned to Philadelphia (Rob’s hometown) by my union in August, I wrote to Rob’s AOL email account to see if he was up to meeting for dinner. His wife – well, widow, now – Cornelia wrote back to inform me that Rob passed away in February after a long illness beginning the previous November. I cannot begin to tell you how shitty I feel that it took me so long to learn of Rob’s passing. I’m mad at a lot of people about not being informed at the time of his passing, but none more than myself.

Robert W. Tucker deserves a fuller obituary than this, and hopefully one day I’ll feel up to writing it. But for now, i just feel awful. But grateful to have written this much and to have known him while I could.

It’s been previously noted the unnatural oddness that is leaving behind a virtual representation of oneself on the myface. As this shit gets more mainstream, the awkwardness gets more familiar and yet more surreal. In the Times, Adam Cohen writes of a friend’s Facebook profile becoming a sort of living shrine to a dead-too-soon friend. At least it served that function to those who friended him up while he was still alive, and until his surviving family chooses to pull the plug on the profile. But what of those who die unloved, unmourned, unfriended?

I recently threw in the towel and joined Facebook, the creepy, creepy improvement on Friendster and MySpace. Immediately, the computer intelligence starts recommending friends I should connect with. How does this bloody thing know the names of girls that I went on one or two dates with three or four years ago? And why does this blasted thing want me to be friends with Don Busky? Busky died late last year, and in life we were something closer to enemies than friends.

He was always an odd fellow, more noted for his reclusiveness than his actual politics or personality. As an ambitious young turk, I quickly butted heads with the guy in an attempt to recruit eager new recruits to charter a more active Philadelphia local of the Socialist Party and overthrow an innocent savant who was more interested in publishing silly little zines with a socialist bent. Shortly after I showed up for work in the party’s national office, as a teenage socialist in 1996, my buddy Clement Joseph started cracking jokes about the disembodied brain in a jar that was Donald F. Busky. My only interactions with the comrade were a fairly acrimonious e-mail exchange over his failure to properly represent the party (or, indeed, turn up to a single meeting) in the “Unity 2000″ rally planning. His last message to me (and every party member for whom he could find an email address) was addressed, simply, “Cde. Richman owes some apologies.” I met him a few months later at a YPSL convention near Rittenhouse Square in 2001. We spoke not a word, but it was the first time I had been in his physical presence. The brain in a jar was a large man, shy and soft-spoken. He was a devoted Mac user, a labor buff and adjunct professor. We might have been friends if we hadn’t started as enemies. It was a sad loss, but C’est la vie. I soon left the party, and didn’t hear about Busky again until Gabe Ross passed on the unfortunate news about his death last December.

The next time I saw Cde. Busky’s name was on an open public records access request for the list of adjunct faculty at a community college down in southern New Jersey, where I’m helping the part-timers form a union. Prof. Donald F. Busky gets to be a voter in their union election, except that he couldn’t possibly vote “Union Yes” (as he surely would have) because he is No Longer Employed. Still, it was a kick in the guts to see his name on that OPRA list, just as it is a kick in the guts to see him recommended as a friend on Facebook whenever I log in, and to see his name and home address on a mailing label for a mailing we worked on last Friday for the union campaign.

I don’t think his elderly mother (if she’s still alive), or any other surviving relative knows enough to get Cde. Busky’s Facebook profile retired. Therefore, he will continue to haunt me. Perhaps I’ll learn to be a better comrade to those who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil.

In Michael Harrington’s remarkable deathbed autobiography, “The Long-Distance Runner,” he describes attempting to pick up the pieces of the shattered Socialist Party and a movement split between “Old” and “New” Lefts. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that he formed from his old wing of the party and the diaspora of unaffiliated socialists in the labor and feminist movements was structurally a “mass” organization (albeit, one with few illusions of attracting the masses to it) with a soft cadre at its center.

This terminology, Harrington notes, would be foreign to all but the .0001% of Americans who have spent any time in the organized sects of the left. A cadre are the people who give some internal coherence to an organization. The people who write and photocopy fliers, raise funds, sweep floors, attend meetings and caucus for votes, and so on and so forth. In a Leninist model, this cadre operates with a fairly tight discipline and a democratic centralist decision-making process. Translated to what my 14-year-old cousin would call “normal talk,” that means that the group has an internal debate, following which all members “toe the party line” and carry out the decision of the majority. It also means that no one can join the organization who is not vouched for by a member of the cadre. (Although we don’t use these terms in the context, political campaigns and union organizing campaigns follow similar principles.)

Harrington graduated from an arcane milieu of “anti-Communist, Leninist democratic sects.” Although DSOC (later, Democratic Socialists of America) took all comers, there was a soft cadre at its center – prominent intellectuals and labor leaders, as well as more anonymous volunteers – who nudged the broader organization towards its ecumenical bridge-building envisioned at its founding. One primary challenge, Harrington noted, is that each successive generation has less of a tradition of the movement and less ability to form a coherent cadre. The problem has obviously worsened in the two decades since Harrington published “The Long-Distance Runner.”

Harrington has the decency to note that the old Socialist Party died in a three-way split. Most scholars only deal with the two most prominent factions: Harrington’s and the majority Social Democrats who drifted towards the neoconservatism of Reagan and Bush. The third faction, which kept the name of the old party, provides little of scholarly interest. It is there that I cut my teeth politically. There is probably a paper to be written about the failed experiment of the new Socialist Party in attempting to recreate the mass-based party of yore without the benefit of an intellectual cadre, and, lately, without the benefit of a culture or tradition of the movement. Instead, each successive generation (a generation here being two or three years) joins the party cold after reading some inspiring speech of the long-dead Eugene Debs, and proceeds to engage in pointless faction fights over bureaucratic details (what is to be the name of the magazine, whom shall appoint the members of the International Commission) that are divorced from the actual politics of society.

We do need a socialist party, but first we need to rebuild the cadre for democratic socialism. The first step must be some kind of think tank, which can limit its membership to only the most serious and comradely of comrades, and pt out useful material (studies, statements, blogs, etc) that could find an audience in the greater number of Americans who consider themselves socialists but do not belong to any explicitly socialist organization. With a cohesive cadre and a modest audience, then, and only then, can we consider forming a new socialist formation that is open to any who would join it.

One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there.

Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” co-written with Fernando Gapasin. Centered on the recent split between the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win group, the book features quite a bit of inside baseball reportage on the machinations leading up to the split. Fletcher is highly critical of the “undebate” that took place and focused on marginal and highly technical matters of per capita rebates and core jurisdictions, avoiding a larger reexamination of the role of our labor unions within a wider labor movement. Although Fletcher identifies some key differences in ideology and vision within the union movement, these were not addressed and anyway tend to cut across international union lines. Instead, both the AFL-CIO and what emerged as the Change to Win group, he charges, fundamentally share the same neo-Gompersian framework of “pure and simple” trade union roles and functions that the reason for the split was unnecessary.

One of Fletcher’s most cogent points in this book is that leftists who work in the trade union movement in relatively large numbers have, absent an organized Left, ideologized the mere act of organizing workers into unions, as though this is an inherently radical act. This point hit home for me as I have recently risen to a position of responsibility in my union without any organizational affiliations beyond my union membership and have made organizing workers the most important thing in my life. Indeed, William Z. Foster has become a hero of mine, in his 1919 incarnation, for his sincere belief that organizing mass production workers into the conservative craft unions would necessarily radicalize them and their unions. Of course, Fletcher points out, the real point of organizing workers is to empower them to challenge their employers and improve their jobs and communities, not merely to collect their dues and “represent” them.

The last section of Fletcher and Gapasin’s book is devoted to their modest proposal to transform our trade union movement into a social justice movement that represents all workers, regardless of nation or employment status, and which challenges white supremacy, male patriarchy, U.S. imperialism and the entire global capitalist system. Good luck with that, Bill. In all seriousness, some of Fletcher and Gapasin’s proposals could gain traction among labor movement decision makers, as, for example, their proposal to transform our central labor councils (currently, the umbrella organizations of local unions in a city that gets together for political endorsements and campaigning and occasional strike support) into central workers councils embracing labor organizations beyond “pure and simple unions” and begin functioning like real community coalitions.

However, for the most part, Fletcher and Gasparin’s program is one that needs, as they call for in the proposal itself, an organized Left movement to carry out. At March’s Left Forum, Fletcher made a seemingly oft-hand reference to the need for a real socialist party that inspired very loud and spontaneous applause. During the Q&A, I waited very patiently (and, it turned out, futilely) to be called on and ask: “Bill, I’m with you on the need for a socialist party, and given the applause we heard, I’m not alone. Obviously such a project would not be an easy thing, given our legitimate political differences and the tendency towards factionalism and sectarianism. Still, any process that will move us towards a real organized Left will need leaders such as yourself out front, sponsoring the early calls and meetings. So, in your ample spare time, can you move on this?”

Shannon Hammock just mailed me a parcel of the past: silly factional buttons from the Socialist Party’s 2001 national convention. It was the first time in many years that an organized caucus was formed to compete for seats on the party’s national committee. Although they called themselves “the Issues Caucus,” their focus seemed to be on personalities. They lumped a bunch of comrades with wildly different politics that didn’t necessarily even like each other into a cabal, the “us vs. them” that they had to “get.” And so I was opposed for re-election as the party’s Vice Chairman, and Shannon and I printed up a bunch of buttons that mocked the whole situation.

“This is a shamelessly factional button” was a properly irreverent sentiment, and I think we got comrades on all sides to wear those little yellow buttons. “No Factions” and the Rodney King button further got the point across. “I’m okay. You have ‘Issues’” was cute, I thought. The cowboy button was inspired by a bizarre, rambling attack e-mail by one young comrade from Chicago that ended with the hysterical exhortation, “Circle the wagons, boys!!!”

In another e-mail, David McReynolds had accused me of being “against Chicago.” My flippant response was that I had nothing against the city of Chicago, except that I hate they way they cut pizzas into squares. I’m really very right-wing on this issue. As my response successfully diverted attention from whatever-the-hell supposed “issue” we were debating to a free-for-all over what constitutes good pizza (I’m not actually making this up), we thought “No Square Pizzas” would make a good button. Bill Stodden later formed a “No Square Pizza” Caucus to keep up the shenanigans, but, being anti-organized factions myself, I did not join.

Much of the personality focus was on lumping myself and Greg Pason together as some kind of gruesome twosome of party bureaucrats. It was so bad that one could be forgiven for thinking that Greg’s last name is “and Shaun.” The picture of the two of us, with the word “Evil?” was a fitting rejoinder. (What’s particularly funny about that button is that there was a third man standing between us in the original photograph, but, like a good apparatchik, I airbrushed the comrade out of the photo!) The idea of floating Greg’s name as a possible Presidential candidate (even on the preposterous ticket of Greg Pason-Angela Davis) was, perversely meant to provoke a little more hostility from the anti-Greg and Shaun crowd. The supreme irony, of course, is that Greg and I, despite being good friends, could never agree on anything politically.

Finally, my sole campaign button read, “Shaun indulges my vices, so I’ll indulge him as Vice Chair.” The only campaign caucusing I did that weekend in Boulder consisted of booze and sex and lots of it (well, mostly booze). I lost, of course.

In his famous 1918 anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he martyred himself for a prison term that would last beyond the World War and shave years off his life, Eugene V. Debs declared, “From the top of my head to the tip of my toes, I am a Bolshevik, and proud of it.” This quote is often taken out of context by some to argue that in his later years Debs was turning towards Lenin’s doctrine and perhaps would have joined the Communist Party had he lived long enough. Too many socialists attempt to freeze Debs in a particular moment and argue that because the pioneering leader of American socialism took a certain position, say, forming new industrial unions to compete with and replace the American Federation of Labor in 1907, that that is the correct position for socialists in 2007, even if Debs himself contradicted that position at another point in his life.

That’s why it’s fascinating to read in Edward Johanningsmeier’s excellent biography of William Z. Foster, “Forging American Communism,” is Debs’ response to Foster’s entreaties to join the Communist Party. In a meeting shortly after he was released from prison in 1922, Debs declared, “Some groups propose to take orders from men in Moscow who know absolutely nothing about American conditions. I know more about American psychology and conditions than all the leaders in Russia know in five years, and I will not accept my orders from a maniac like Zinoviev. Since when, I want to know, has socialism become synonymous with Communism? I am not a Communist and I don’t want to be one, and I do not believe in minority rule.”

Debs did, however, publicly endorse Foster’s Trade Union Education League and its program of encouraging radicals to bore from within AFL craft unions to promote an agenda of organizing the unskilled masses and challenging the conservative business union leaders. Debs also served as the Socialist Party’s National Chairman in his twilight years, the only time he held office in the party, or indeed even attended a convention. And he came to the conclusion that the SP should direct its electoral efforts on uniting with the AFL and other progressive groups to form a national labor party. If we are going to let WWEVDD guide us, let’s look at where he stood politically at the end of his life, in a political era that is closer to our own.

I’d prefer a better term for it, but I think of myself and my peers as being a part of the “Sweeney Generation” of the labor movement. We’re the kids who were recruited to beleaguered labor unions to organize greater numbers of workers as part of a grand movement for social justice (That was the idea, at least). It is hard to believe that if I had come of age thirty years earlier, I’d likely have viewed the AFL-CIO as the AFL-CIA – a pale, male and stale dinosaur that was to the right of most presidents of the U.S.A. in prosecuting the Cold War. Thanks to some inherited books, and Richard Kahlenberg’s new biography of Al Shanker, I’ve recently subjected myself to a history lesson on some of labor’s biggest Cold Warriors.

As head of the AFL-CIO from the time of the merger in 1955 until 1979, George Meany earned the enmity of the left as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the official labor movement: a cigar-chomping bureaucrat who planned Executive Committee meetings around golf games at Miami Beach, a sexist, homophobic coward who enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War but had to be dragged into the civil rights movement. Archie Robinson’s “George Meany and His Times” is a hagiography that might as well be a ghost-written memoir, fleshed out as it is with extensive quotes from public speeches and hundreds of hours of interviews that Robinson conducted with Meany. It is, as Robinson promises, “the real Meany,” so if the man comes off as repugnant as his negative reputation on the left, it’s his own fault, his own words. Take, for instance, Meany’s account of the 1972 Democratic national convention, the most liberal convention the party ever had:

“We listened to the gay lib people – you know, the people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys and legalize marriages between girls and girls…We heard from the abortionists and we heard from the people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odors of johns about them.”

Meany was a business unionist through and through. To him, it never seemed more than a job. On his first job as a Plumber’s union staffer: “there was a financial attraction there because the business agent’s pay was maybe twenty percent higher than a journeyman’s pay, and it was a year-round job.” On becoming President of the NYS AFL: “It was very tiring and all that, but, hell, I was a really young man and had no idea of going any other place. After one year in the job, they doubled my salary.” On being elected Secretary-Treasurer of the national AFL: “I was not looking for a change, but I got to thinking it over: After all, this is what I am doing. I am in the labor movement. This is my life, more or less, and this is definitely a big promotion.” On succeeding William Green as president: “I had been pretty much in charge of running the AFL from 1947 on. Green was perfectly content to let me handle it. So, when he died I felt that I was entitled to the job.”

Meany did not report any great revelation that caused him to oppose Communism. It was simply a matter of seeing that Communists were effective organizers and seemed determined to take over trade unions that made young Meany an anti-communist out of a sense of self-preservation for his well-paying jobs. In later years, he gave his anti-communism the intellectual veneer of preserving freedom, noting that Communist regimes turned independent trade unions into puppets of the state – a charge that is mostly true but which seems like a rationalization that he borrowed from others in order to cover for his own lack of ideological convictions.

David Dubinsky, at least, had an ideology, a core set of beliefs that guided his actions. Dubinsky’s autobiography, “A Life With Labor,” contains some welcome insight into how CP-front Trade Union Education League activists operated inside and outside of the ILGWU, and even provides space for “the other side,” in the form of Charles Zimmerman, an ILG Vice President who had started out as an opponent of Dubinsky’s in the 1920′s. Zimmerman describes the discomfort of following CP policy, as dictated from Moscow, which led party activists to embark on a dangerous strike policy that nearly decimated the union so that one Party faction could score points over another, and how Stalin and Bill Foster led Communists into the ILGWU to “bore from within” and then back out to form a “revolutionary” dual union and back inside the ILGWU again in the space of a few short years at the expense of a good deal of credibility and goodwill.

Dubinsky came out of the heavily-Jewish socialist movement on the Lower East Side that had as its pillars the Socialist Party, Jewish Daily Forward newspaper and the Amalgamated Clothing and the Ladies Garment Workers unions. For him, the battle with the Communists was ideological and stemmed from the very split of the CP from the Sp in 1919, over whether to follow directions from Moscow. Dubinsky’s anti-communism made him an inveterate splitter. After taking the ILGWU out of the AFL to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Dubinsky’s was the first union to split from the CIO, partly over the role of Communist organizers, and back into the AFL after CIO resources helped him rebuild his union. In New York State, he split from our splendid American Labor Party because he felt Communists had too much influence. The ALP was a “fusion” party, created to provide a second ballot line for liberal Democrats (indeed, the party was created in order to entice all those Lower East Side Socialists to vote for Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936, without having to cast ballots for Tammany Hall’s Democratic line), but the party also ran a good number of leftist independents – Socialists, Laborites and a few Communists – who won offices ranging from City Council to US Congress. The Liberal Party that Dubinsky created and which replaced the ALP became much more narrowly a Democratic pressure group, and steadily moved to the right along with the Democrats over the ensuing decades. In the end, after Dubinsky died, it became the power base for Rudy Giuliani.

Nobody carried the ideological load of anti-communism as defense of freedom as much as Al Shanker, who is given a glowing portrait in Richard Kahlenberg’s “Tough Liberal.” it is an excellent biography that is marred by Kahlenberg’s clumsy title refrain and enthusiastic party-line reporting on an obscure sect of the socialist movement, called Social Democrats USA, who influenced much of Shanker’s thinking (and who comprised much of his staff). SDUSA started out as the old Socialist Party of America, until, after a series of splits, “it finally got down to this small group that sort of agreed with each other,” in the words of Sandra Feldman. What they agreed with each other about was that it was more important to be against communism than to be for socialism.

Shanker is the father of teachers unionism, organizing the United Federation of Teachers union in New York City and leading the union to strike for collective bargaining rights and higher salaries in the early 1960′s. In the late 1960′s, he led the union on a series of divisive strikes against community control of schools, when a black-led community group took control of the public schools in the ghetto neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn. The strike left Shanker with a lasting reputation as a racist and as a man who, in Woody Allen’s satirical estimation, would use a tactical nuclear warhead in a contract negotiation. Kahlenberg successfully rehabilitates Shanker’s role in the dispute, documenting the community control group’s hard-line refusal to compromise and the simmering anti-Semitism of the group that fired and barred white, Jewish teachers from working in schools where the majority of students were black. Kahlenberg does a slight disservice in this account by not seeking to represent “the other side,” but otherwise makes a persuasive case that Shanker did the best that he could for his members under difficult circumstances, and that failure to protect unionized teachers from racially motivated terminations would have fundamentally weakened the movement towards teachers union organizing.

Kahlenberg points to Shanker’s example and finds a model for “tough liberalism” the Democratic party to emulate in order to recapture the votes of the white working class. Kahlenberg (and Shanker) emphasize a central focus on economic and class issues, and have no quarrel from me on that score. Furthermore, the author points to Shanker’s role in the education reform movement and finds in professionalism, shared governance and white collar unionism a prescription for a revitalized labor movement, and again I find room for agreement. However, when Kahlenberg lauds Shanker’s color blind emphasis on civil rights and promotion, he misses the special role of racism in this country that has reduced black Americans to a caste, a role that requires affirmative action to address. And, finally, when Kahlenberg praises Shanker’s “muscular anti-Commmunism” and calls for the left to return to a vigorous internationalism in moving other nation’s towards “democracy,” I see a history of imperialism and the folly of the kind of adventurism that leaves US Armed Forces stuck in quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq. Al Shanker left a proud legacy at the American Federation of Teachers. The last vestiges of anti-communism, however, are one part of the legacy that has to go.

Steadily making my way through Si Gerson’s books, I’m surprised (although I’m not sure why) by instances of prudishness of our revolutionary heroes. In his “History of the Three Internationals,” William Z. Foster spends a hundred pages after the end of the Third International to ruminate on then-contemporary issues. This material is all, essentially, Party-line, what with the impending crisis of capitalism (in 1954), the imperialist Social Democrats and so on. Within it, this passage manages to stand out as uniquely wrong-headed:

In the field of culture there is likewise a general retrogression throughout the capitalist world, above all in the United States, with its cultural mess of pragmatism, psychoanalysis, neo-Malthusianism…with its swamp of “comic” books, oceans of sex, crime and horror stories, printed and on the radio and television.

Foster was 73 when he wrote this, and he sounds like a nagging grandpa. But, sadly, this is Party line stuff and it is thinking like this that results in reigns of terror like the Cultural Revolution, that makes Beatles records contraband, etc. And let’s not forget, as David McReynolds reminds in an e-mail forum earlier today, the Soviet Union, like many Communist countries, outlawed homosexuality at one time as a “sexual deviation” brought on by capitalism.

Not that social democrats can’t be fuddy duddies too. Reading Norman Thomas’ “Socialism Re-examined,” I was struck by a similar passage:

I know modern novels mostly through their reviews, but if I thought they portrayed the true state of mankind, I should doubt our capability of achieving a social order worth saving…It is a sick humanity which revels in sexuality, on the screen, and in the books of Henry Miller, William Burroughs and that ilk.

All politicians, revolutionary and bourgeois, would do well to stay out of the field of literary criticism. With apologies to Emma Goldman, if I can’t read pulp novels, I don’t want your revolution!

Still poring through Si Gerson’s books, I’m having fun playing labor historian, although I’m not sure who’s benefiting (a young comrade in another forum complained, “this post seems like a big name drop…I don’t really need to read the words of dead men to know how I think society ought to be structured.”). I came across a fascinating observation about William Z. Foster in Nat Hentoff’s lamentably brief biography of A.J. Muste.

Muste is best known as a pacifist, a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, who mentored Bayard Rustin, David McReynolds and scores of other activists committed to nonviolent resistance and was a leading light of the opposition to nuclear armaments and the early stages of the Vietnam War (he died in 1967). He had quite the interesting biography before all that. A protestant minister who quit his congregation to resist the first World War, he became a labor activist and leader of the failed Amalgamated Textile Workers union following the second Lawrence strike, headed up the radical Brookwood Labor College in the 1920′s and became a leading Trotskyite in the 1930′s. Here is where the Muste story gets particularly juicy and weird. Apparently, in 1936 Muste set sail for Europe to meet with the exiled Russian revolutionary. When he returned, he spoke little of the meeting but was no longer a Trotskyite and instead had returned to Christian pacifism.

Hentoff unfortunately skims over the details of Muste’s labor activism. That’s a great disappointment because while I am familiar with Muste’s pacifist work, I was shocked to find venomous denunciation of “the Musteites” in so many Communist Party-related publication starting around the mid-1920′s while researching Michael J. Obermeier, Foster and others. That’s why this observation from Muste about Foster’s visit to Brookwood in 1923 is so tantalizing and frustrating:

“One of the questions in the minds of all labor activists at that time was whether Bill had joined the Communist Party. He sought to create the impression that he had not. I have carried with me all through the years a vivid recollection of that day nearly forty years ago. I have lived it over again at fairly frequent intervals since. It was a feeling of uneasiness, certainly not of hostility in the personal sense. I felt there was a human being inside him, but that it was under restraint, hidden somewhere. The element of straightforwardness was now lacking. There he was, over there, and here I was. It would remain so.”

William Z. Foster also had an interesting biography. He was a brilliant union organizer and tactician. It is on the one hand incredibly impressive and, on the other, terribly pathetic, that articles and plans that the man wrote in the 1910′s are still directly relevant and prescient today. Foster started out as a syndicalist who was expelled from the Socialist Party during the days of dynamite and gravitated towards the IWW. Sent by the Wobblies to European labor confabs, Foster witnessed firsthand huge and impressive union demonstrations in France and came to appreciate the C.G.T.’s policy of boring from within the traditional craft unions to turn them into revolutionary organizations and returned to the U.S. to advocate that the I.W.W. abandon its “dual unionism” and commit to transforming the American Federation of Labor into a militant and radical movement. His proposal was seriously considered and rejected, and Foster set out on his own.

Foster set out on his own to spearhead two huge organizing campaigns during the Great War under AFL auspices and his own, brilliant “amalgamated” formula (i.e. working through an umbrella organizing committee of the various craft unions). One, the Chicago stockyards, was an unqualified success. The other, the steel industry, was a fiasco of historical proportions. Following the October Revolution, Lenin endorsed Foster’s program of boring from within the conservative craft unions, and the free-thinking boy genius of the labor movement married his fortunes to the new Communist movement. At first, as Muste wrote, Foster kept his affiliation secret. By 1924, he was the presidential candidate of the party’s legal expression, the Workers Party. Shortly thereafter, he became the chairman of the Communist Party USA and pawn and apologist for Stalinism.

It was only years later, near death, that Foster allowed any hint of “human being inside him” to be glimpsed in his delightful memoir, “Pages From a Worker’s Life.” One wonders what would have become of the brilliant tactician if he hadn’t cast his lot in with the Communists. His biography and writings indicate that he was developing a pragmatic syndicalism that I’d like to think would have nudged labor in a more radical and independent direction. But we’ll never know. We can only lament what could have been, if Foster could have been the “human being inside” that summer at Brookwood.

Shortly after writing about Sophie Gerson’s passing a few weeks ago, I was contacted by her grand-daughter Frieda and daughter Deborah. They’re cleaning out the family house in Bensonhurst and thought I might be interested in some of Si Gerson’s books. Would I! Si had a voluminous book collection on topics like socialism, the labor movement, election law and policy and New York City politics that stretched back decades.

There was an impressive diversity to Si’s collection, as it was not limited, like too many young leftists’ today, to those writers with whom he agreed. Si’s habit of underlining sections and scribbling exclamation points in the margin suggest his opinion of the material. My favorite so-far being the prominent question mark beside Norman Thomas’ preposterous claim, in “Socialism Re-Examined,” that Marx’s theory of surplus labor value could not account for automation (Marx, of course, devotes several chapters of “Capital Vol. 1″ to the topic, and Thomas’ claim reveals the Socialist Party’s standard bearer as one who read Marx in order to claim that he read Marx and disagreed with him).

My selection’s from Si’s library suggest my own narrowness. I declined, for example a handsome, multi-volume set of Stalin’s writings, clearly preferring books on or by A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas and Morris Hillquit – heroes from “my” corner of “our” left. I was delighted to find five rare books from my favorite tragic hero, William Z. Foster, all inscribed “To Si Gerson, With Comradely greetings, from Bill Foster” (or something like it).

So, now I am the owner of a big box of historical socialist and labor books, and seeking “time enough at last” to read it all. Today I am reading Morris Hillquit’s “Loose Leaves From a Busy Life” and want to share a pearl of wisdom from it with you. Hillquit, for your possible edification, was a Jewish immigrant who was a leader of the strong socialist movement in the Lower East Side, centered around the garment unions, “The Daily Forward” and the Socialist Party from the 1890′s well into the 1930′s. A National Chairman of the Party and frequent candidate for political office, he lived long enough to become the leader of the “Old Guard” that was challenged by Norman Thomas.

In 1917, Hillquit was the Socialist Party’s candidate for Mayor of New York, running on an anti-war platform. The election was the first since the United States entered the World War and a Socialist victory, Hillquit challenged, would show that the people of the largest city in America wanted an immediate end to the war. The campaign attracted national attention and at one point Hillquit was ahead in the polls. In the end, Hillquit polled about 21% in a four-way contest, losing to Tammany Hall’s candidate, John F. Hylan. (Hillquit notes that he added about 110,000 votes to the previous election’s Socialist tally, and that a constitutional amendment extending voting rights to women – which had failed two years prior – passed by 100,000 votes – mostly from the Lower East Side.)

The Socialist Party, then a major force in U.S. politics, with a quarter million members and hundreds of elected Mayors, city councilmen, state assemblymen and even a Congressman, was opposed to the war and to U.S. entry into it, and huge demonstrations – not unlike the demonstrations that put millions of people in the streets marching against the current war back in 2002 and 2003 – were held across the country. Once the United States entered the war, Hillquit believed it was the role of Socialists to press for an immediate negotiated peace. And, here, from a stump speech in 1917, is your pearl of wisdom:

“A victory in arms would mean terms of peace imposed upon the vanquished. It would lead to rancor and striving for vengeance. It would not be a peace on firm foundation but one founded on quicksand and would lead to more war.”

It’s as fine a statement of pragmatic pacifism as I have ever read. Hillquit’s words were, regrettably, all too prophetic. The terms of the Versailles treaty were imposed upon Germany and did lead to a striving for vengeance that was harnessed by Hitler and the Nazi movement and led to more war. A typical challenge put to pacifists is what we would do about a Hitler. A pacifist position on the “good” war is not an easy or obvious one, but a continuation of the cycle of militarism should be obviously unwise. The history of the bloody 20th century should show what a vicious cycle it is.

As for our modern case, when public opinion has swung decidedly and emphatically against the war in Iraq and the presidential contenders hem and haw over a withdrawal of forces “with honor” and with our chosen government in place, heed Hillquit’s 90-year-old words. What each of the Democratic and Republican candidates for President propose are terms of “peace” to be imposed upon the Iraqi people. Such a peace could not last. Anything less than an unconditional withdrawal and offer to pay reparations to a government of their choosing will result in a dark day of reckoning for us in the future.

I learned today from a comrade that Sophie Gerson passed away on March 20, 2006 at the age of 96. Sophie was a lifelong Communist activist whose own work was overshadowed by her husband, Simon W. Gerson, the writer, champion of proportional democracy and shoulda been City Councilman from Brooklyn. At Si’s memorial a year earlier, speaker after speaker (including yours truly) paid tribute to his illustrious career as a public Communist and lightning rod for controversy, but only one (not me, perhaps it was Tim Wheeler) took the opportunity to point out that Sophie was notorious–indeed, framed for murder–before Si’s name was ever known.

In early 1929, 19-year-old Sophie Melvin joined striking National Textile Workers Union members at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC. The Gastonia strike, one of NTWU’s smallest at the time, was part of a larger southern organizing campaign initiated by the Communist-led Trade Union Unity League. The T.U.U.L. presaged the C.I.O. movement in the 30′s, training many of activists whose work made that mass upsurge possible. The strike was called in January over some of the lowest-paying, most sped up and stretched out working conditions in the entire south.

Sophie organized a children’s support section in the strikers’ tent city and was present on June 7 when a carload of armed police invaded and declared war on the strikers. In the melee, one union organizer was seriously wounded, three police deputies were slightly wounded and the chief of police, O.F. Aderholt, was killed. Seventy-five strikers were arrested for the murder of the police chief and sixteen were eventually indicted. Among these were three women, Vera Buch, Amy Shechter and Sophie Melvin (this was not, notes Philip Foner in his History of the Labor Movement…, young Sophie’s first arrest connected to her union agitation). The three young women became an immediate cause celibre, their hefty bail raised by Communist charities and national speaking tours serving as strike support fundraisers. Public outcry caused local officials to drop the charges against the three young women, who continued their propaganda work in spite of the losing campaign. By September, strikers were returning to work without a union, although the Loray mill had reduced the work week to 50 hours(!). The real value of the strike was that it laid crucial groundwork for New Deal and C.I.O. organizing that was to shortly follow.

Si Gerson was a cub reporter for the Daily Worker when he was assigned to the Gastonia strike, met and fell in love with Sophie. Of course, they married and were a lovely couple. Sophie continued to be a political activist, in addition to being a mother and grandmother, but Si’s work cast a long shadow. It is a shame that while news of Si’s death reached me by notices from comrades in the Socialist Party, colleagues in the Coalition for Free and Open Elections and general e-mail listserve forwards, I had to learn about Sophie’s passing in passing conversation with a comrade, a year and a half after the fact. Sophie Gerson (nee Melvin) is truly an unsung American hero and deserves more of a monument than this little blog post.

The Times has an article on one of my favorite places in the world, the Tamiment Institute archives at NYU, which has recently acquired a huge chunk of the Communist Party USA’s files. The CP should really be applauded for its openness and willingness to view its past truly as history. I have seen some of the neato gems of these files – such as Seeger’s handwritten lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” – on display while doing my own research at the library.

It was there that I recently found Michael Obermeier’s letter to Jay Rubin. The letter would have provided much-needed pathos to the term paper that I ultimately wrote about the Communists who founded New York’s Hotel Employees union, who were ultimately thrown out early in the Cold War. The letter was meticulously misfiled away with Rubin’s correspondence from the 1970′s (he must have kept the letter close at hand until the end of his tenure). Most of the union’s files are archived at Tamiment, so I’ve spent much time there.

I’ve continued to write about the union in term papers on its organizing strategy, its health care politics and its collective bargaining. I will ultimately flesh out my earlier term paper on the Communist influence and betrayal in Local 6 in my Masters thesis, which I hope to have published (which is why I have hesitated to post that earlier paper on this site).

In the meantime, I gather as much material as I can. I FOIA FBI and INS files, seek out sister unions’ files and living relatives of the main players. The Communist Party’s archives are quite promising for my research, although the most explosive material was likely shipped over to the Soviet Union in the late 1940′s. It exists today at the Library of Congress and at Tamiment as a microfiche reproduction of the source material in Moscow. The files are indexed in Russian, so I will likely need some translation assistance, tovarich.

Today I resigned from the Socialist Party after eleven years of membership. This decision has been a long time coming. Indeed, it was made some months ago but I had been waiting to sever my remaining fiduciary responsibilities to the party to announce it. I have given the party tremendous amounts of time and energy as an officer, an editor, a speaker, a fundraiser and a campaign manager and it was a formative learning experience for me. Truthfully, I should moved on a long time ago – back when the crippling faction fights first arose about five years ago – but I was biding my time, hoping that all that negative energy would expend itself. I have come to the sorry conclusion that such fruitless bickering will never go away.

I leave a Socialist Party that is irrationally bureaucratic, where misleaders place a premium on formal charges of sedition, investigation committees and e-mails of denunciation over simple and direct phone calls and conversations. I leave a Socialist Party that makes a fetish of running token electoral campaigns, which blinds it to genuine opportunities for a break with the two-party system, like the Nader and Sanders campaigns. I leave a Socialist Party full of snotty little boys who are blind or indifferent to their white, male privilege. And most galling of all, I leave a Socialist Party whose leadership chooses to vomit the kind of anti-union rhetoric one would expect from management consultants and who would rather play at being a union with the IWW than organize strong, militant and democratic unions where the majority of workers are.

My decision to resign will likely disappoint some of the comrades who hope to “take it back.” I say to them and the others, “take it, it’s yours” (apologies to Paul Westerberg). The Socialist Party had a proud history in the early 20th century, but it should have been left in the history books. I dare say that most of the new members “recruited” to the party drifted in on their own because of an attraction to the writings and actions of Eugene Debs, even though the past three quarters of a century have badly dated Debs’ beautiful but simple rhetoric. Why, even now, in the midst of the current split, one of our earnest young National Committee members is pointing to an article from 1911 by Debs to prove that he has the “correct” position on electoral activity. Never mind the fact that Debs lived until 1926 – an era that is politically closer to our own – and that by that time he was advocating building a mass labor party and had endorsed the Trade Union Education League’s policy of boring from within the conservative AFL craft unions (both are policies much closer to what I advocate in this article). The simple fact is that Eugene Debs, and the Socialist Party of America, was from another era and needs to be put in the proper historical context, predating the New Deal, World War II, civil rights struggle, Black Power, feminist movement, environmental movement and globalization among other changes.

When Eugene Debs wrote in 1903 that “the class struggle is colorless,” it was a beautiful rhetorical challenge to the racists in the movement, but 104 years later, to continue, as he did, to say, “we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races” is to be blind to the special persecution faced by black Americans and all people of color in the United States and avoids the work we must do to challenge white skin privilege. Yet, too many members of the Socialist Party still agree with Debs’ color-blind politics. Indeed, they were attracted to the party because of it. This historicism also results in a party that is cool to reproductive rights and gender politics and downright hostile to feminist process and gender-balanced committees. It’s a vicious cycle, discouraging women to join and be active, resulting in even more male-centric politics and a greater discouragement to women. Probably 90% of the party is male at this point, which is regrettable (and not only because the possibility of a slutty convention hook-up is sometimes the only thing that makes those meetings tolerable).

The example of the Socialist Party garnering six percent of the vote for President, and electing Congressmen, mayors and legislators across the country is clearly an inspiration for many of the Party’s newer members, but the Socialist Party cannot win elections in 2007 or anytime soon. The laws and finances have changed, making running such campaigns impossible in most areas. Voters have become much more loyal to the two-party system, and non-voters are much more likely to be right-wing as left in this day in age. Please do not mistake this as a call to endorse the Democrats or to avoid politicking openly as Socialists. As I have previously written, being “the Socialist Party” makes running “Socialist” candidates its raison d’etre, and results in unnecessary sectarianism and an aversion to coalition work. It is, indeed, essential to seek out independent alternatives to the two-party system, and there is often a real value to putting the “S” word on the ballot, but not at the expense of missing opportunities like the Green Party movement, Nader candidacies and the opportunities for boring from within the Working Families party. Only a socialist organization that is emphatically not a party can be open to all possibilities.

Finally, considering my life’s work is in the labor movement, it is disappointing how few comrades I can truly count on in the Socialist Party. As an organizer, I deal with vicious anti-union campaigns from the Boss and too many workers who would rather race each other to the bottom for loss of pay and benefits than unite to win more for all. Every day I am reminded of the dire need for a sane, organized left to carry out meaningful educational work on how the Bosses rob us and the power of coming together, like the old IWW and SPA used to do. Instead, we have a SPUSA and IWW that focus on badly out-dated AFL and “pie card” bashing. The more challenging, but more valuable work, would be for comrades to get their hands dirty as organizers and activists in the large trade unions in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win (regardless of their militancy or whether they endorse Democrats or not), organize, win and change the policy. Sadly, the labor movement is so small these days that a few dozen dedicated comrades could have a real impact on on the unions.

I hold out no hope for the Socialist Party because young men with infantile “leftist” politics will forever be streaming into membership in larger numbers than the tiny organization can absorb and educate. Suffering from delusions of grandeur of being in “THE” Socialist Party, their ridiculous posturing and aggressive factionalism seems somehow noble to them, but sadly, by the time they burn themselves out enough to stop for a moment and learn, they are replaced by the next wave of political infants. Granted, one could count me in this company. If you were to give me a flux capacitor and send me back to 1996 to meet 17-year-old Shaun Richman, I’d want to punch that kid in the fucking face. C’est la vie.

I choose to start over with an organization that is consciously smaller. I intend to use the American Socialist Foundation, a small non-profit corporation I set up, to hold conversations with comrades I respect and trust about what the hell is the matter with the left and what hope there can possibly be for a small socialist membership organization to do meaningful work. There is, perhaps, enough seed money to start a magazine or hold a conference. If there is enough consensus, perhaps then a new membership organization will result. “American Socialist Federation” has a certain ring to it. As of this writing, I am inclined to favor a soft-cadre structure centered around local clubs, with a weak national committee and a central political document that is ratified every few years in the interest of maintaining consensus and unity, as a model worth exploring. However, political principles are more important than structure, and any organization that I am apart of must speak to issues of race and gender within a class framework, must strive to build a mass party of the people and must be an active part of the mainstream labor movement. These are, after all, the areas in which I have been most disappointed, programatically, in the Socialist Party USA.

Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with.

Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by equalizing their equalizing their costs with those of employers that do not currently provide health insurance for employees (and for whom such a payroll tax would be a new and unwelcome development). Business, being business, would likely seek to take the cost of health care off its ledger and dump it on the public in the form of tax income tax increases – which would naturally be controversial. Yes, polls show that Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for more social services. But, the millions of Americans who already receive health care through their employers do not want to pay for what they already have. This would not be a tax increase, as much as it would be a pay cut. The combination of such anti-business tax agendas with the fact that such a “Medicare For All” solution would necessarily be a frontal assault on the rich private insurance industry creates a powerful coalition of capitalist opposition to universal health care that is built in to the problem. This is to say nothing about the potential to energize the religious right over the issue of public financing of reproductive health services. Clearly, it will take a rock-solid coalition of “the good guys” if we have any chance, and the labor movement must take a leading role in forming such a coalition.

Where Dean’s class has taken an interesting turn is the presentation of Ichiro Kawachi’s research of the effects of inequality on health. The research presented in his book, “The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health,” basically finds that the level of inequality in a given society has a direct relationship with average life expectancy, disease rates and infant mortality. Kawachi controls for income levels, access to health care and a host of other factors one might expect to explain these numbers. Holding all other things equal, a person who lives in a country that has a large gap between the rich and the poor is unhealthier than his direct counterpart in a more equitable country. This is the same for rich people as it is for the poor.

You might expect a socialist to love this report, but I find it troubling. The problem is that wealth redistribution is just so…un-American. In my past life as a teenage mutant ninja socialist, going on speaking tours and doing media interviews for the Socialist Party, I’ve always de-emphasized the Robin Hood aspect of socialism. What’s most important to talk about is, first, what we as working people need and deserve: Meaningful work at good pay; decent, affordable housing; health insurance, vacations and pensions. Second is what’s preventing so many of us from having these things: the capitalist system of production for profit and not for need. I’ve always differentiated between private property and personal property. What we want is to publicly own and control the basic companies and industries, not to share your toothbrush and wife. Taking away mansions and yachts from the rich is not crucial to the functioning of the economy, and would not be the first step of a socialist revolution. But I don’t talk about it because Americans don’t like the idea. They want to believe that anyone can “earn” such ostentatious wealth (as if the Waltons and the Hilton’s “earned” their daddies’ money!). But, if Ichiro Kawachi’s research is correct, those ostentatious displays of wealth are terrible for our health. Watching “MTV Cribs” could literally kill you (and the rich idiot with the air-conditioned display room for his hats).

In many ways this is a moralistic argument for socialism, and I hate those. I’m a materialist, and prefer to focus on jobs, peace and freedom. But, Robin Hood was right, and we need more people like him.

This is his testimony. In 1991, Jon Langford and his mates from Leeds, the Mekons, had just missed their opportunity as rock-n-roll’s latest last best hope. After almost 15 years of lineup changes, a bunch of classic albums with lousy distribution, countless raucous alcohol-soaked tours and stylistic shifts from punk to country, dance and back, the Mekons were on the verge of saving rock music from big hair and empty heads when fights with A&M Records left their newest record without an outlet in the U.S., just as Nirvana opened up the radio to so-called “alternative rock.” They called that record “The Curse of the Mekons,” but their contract problems and bad luck didn’t piss them off as much as the fall of the Soviet Union and the media’s declaration of the “death of socialism.” “How can something really be dead when it hasn’t even happened,” long-time lefty Langford demands in the album’s highlight, “Funeral,” which concludes, “This funeral is for the wrong corpse!”

Last year marked the Mekons’ 25th anniversary, and Jon Langford has continued to be busier than ever. His Pine Valley Cosmonauts assembled an impressive line-up of underground country artists – including Neko Case and Steve Earle – released a well-received anti-death penalty benefit album, “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” early last year, and later in the year, he brought back many of the same artists to record, “The Bottle Let Me Down,” a tongue-in-cheek children’s album that parents could stomach. His alt.country band, the Waco Brothers, just wrapped up a tour on which Langford pulled double duty, playing in support of the Waco’s sixth disc, “New Deal,” as well as playing with tour openers the Sadies, with whom he just released a collaboration titled, “The Mayors of the Moon.” And, last fall, the Mekons marked their silver jubilee not with a compilation looking back on their career, but with an album of new material, “Out of Our Heads,” and a world club tour.

The Mekons Story
Langford spoke with The Socialist from his home in Chicago, on the eve of the Mekons’ tour. The Mekons, he says, were formed in punk’s first wave, with the idea that, “Your favorite band didn’t have to be people you never meet.” Indeed, the band got its start when schoolmates Langford, Tom Greenhaigh and Kevin Lycett borrowed their favorite band’s (and good friends), the Gang of Four’s, instruments to practice and record their new songs. The art school punk scene in Leeds, centered on the Mekons and Gang of Four, was more political, more intellectual and more danceable than London’s.

In the early days, Langford, Greenhaigh and Lycett released a string of 7″ singles, recorded on simple two track equipment, using borrowed instruments and whatever friends they could rope into the session to fill out the band. Their first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was a piss-take on the Clash’s “White Riot.” Langford says he has always disliked the romantic outsider stance of punk and some of its thoughtless rhetoric. “When you say ‘smash the system,’” he asks, “what the fuck are you talking about? The national health system?” He found the same problem in parts of the organized left. “I was in the Socialist Workers Party for about half an hour,” quips Langford, who describes himself as a Welsh socialist and an “unaffiliated lefty.”

The Mekons’ early singles attracted the attention of Virgin Records, which released their first album in 1979. Its title, “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen,” a reference to that old axiom about a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters and a work of Shakespeare, was also a commentary on the band’s limited aptitude and everybody-pick-an-instrument-and-play style. Another album followed, but the band fizzled as England’s gig scene grew violent and they became financially dependent on a record label that didn’t know what to do with them. They broke up in 1982, and moved on to new projects. Langford even sold his drums to the goth band Sisters of Mercy, who painted them black.

However, “even when the band thought we split up,” says Langford, “we hadn’t.” The band members continued to hang out and work on art projects together. They even did a few live shows as the Mekons to benefit the striking miners. In 1985, the Mekons made a startling comeback as a country band. They added talented new members, such as Steve Goulding on drums, Susie Honeymoon on fiddle, and singer Sally Timms and released “Fear and Whiskey” on their own independent record label. The album was Hank Williams distilled through punk rock. “Country music struck quite a few chords at that point in our lives,” he says, as a string of broken relationships and too much hard drinking resulted in songs that were stark and personal, but also warm – not to mention musically accomplished.

Two more country albums followed, with better distribution in America, as did other sounds and influences. “Once we got past the first Year Zero days of punk,” he says, “we started to get into the idea of folk music, dance music, reggae.” Along with the new sounds came new members, who seemed to come and go at a rate that could populate several new bands a year, although Langford bristles at the idea that there have been that many personnel changes. “It’s kind of an open door policy, but there’s a core of people,” he says, although he likes the idea of adding younger members and having the band go on. “Here’s the Mekons,” he jokes, “with no one from the Mekons.”

The Curse of the Mekons
Their work in the 80′s made the Mekons critical darlings with a cult-like fan following, and brought them to A&M records. Their first album for A&M should have made them stars. “Destroy your safe and happy lives,” they demanded on the opening track of “The Mekons’ Rock and Roll.” The album was packed full of super-charged rock and rave-ups, but, ever the intellectuals, the band deconstructed their chosen art form throughout the album. One track offers a prostitution analogy for rock-n-roll; others use imperialism and consumerism. “The battles we fought were long and hard, just not to be consumed by rock and roll,” goes one refrain. Unfortunately, their second experience on a corporate record label proved to be more frustrating than the Virgin days. The album’s cover art, which incorporated a licensed image of Elvis Presley, tied the album up in lawsuits and delayed its release. When it finally hit record stores, it was poorly promoted.

More battles with A&M followed. The band wanted to release more albums. The label wanted fewer. Of course, the label also wanted more commercial material. A&M declined to release “Curse of the Mekons,” and it was available in America only as an import for a decade. The Mekons’ curse continued when they moved from A&M to Loud Records, a short-lived subsidiary of Warner Brothers, which tied them up in red tape for two years and never released a single note of music recorded by the band. When the Mekons were finally released from their contract, they immediately released the superb “I (Heart) Mekons” on the independent Touch and Go Records label and never looked back.

“I don’t work for major labels anymore,” Langford says today. Despite his own problems with the major labels over the years, he says he’s mostly uninvolved with the recent artists’ rebellion at the major labels. “There’s such a disparity between musicians,” he says, “that I don’t quite feel a part of that Don Henley struggle.” Still, he’s incredulous at the way the system is set up. “Somebody gives you some money,” he explains, “which you then owe them, to make something which they then own. I can understand why someone who sells three million records gets pissed off.”

Langford manages to eke out a living for himself through his art. “My wife will kill me if I do any more work for no money. For my next benefit album I have to do,” he jokes, “I promised her I’d embezzle all the money.” Working for indie labels, he says that he receives modest royalty checks about six months after a record is released, but that he would have to record about four or five records a year in order for that money to translate into a living wage. His biggest source of money recently was the use of two Waco Brothers songs in episodes of the HBO series “Sex and the City,” which, after repeats and DVD releases, translated in a “sizeable” royalty check.

Heaven and Back
These days, Langford, like the rest of the Mekons, no longer lives in Leeds. He moved to Chicago in 1992 to be with his then-girlfriend, Helen, who is now his wife. The couple has two children, 5-year-old Jimmy and newborn Tommy. He says that it’s because of his children that he finally became involved in U.S. political issues, most notably the campaign to end the death penalty. “I felt like it’s time I should step up,” he says, describing it as a “winnable fight.” On “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” Langford assembled over a dozen Chicago-area alternative country artists, along Nashville’s Steve Earle among others, to cover classic songs about murder and mayhem, with the proceeds benefiting the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Langford speaks very warmly of the Chicago music scene, which he feels has even more of a sense of community than the old punk days in Leeds.

“I’m a socialist because I believe in a sense of community,” he says. “I think a community needs to look after people, rather than rip them off. It’s as simple as that.” His sense of community is underscored by his strong identification with the three places he has called home over the years. “I feel like Chicago’s the only place I could live in America,” he says. Ten years in, Chicago (and America) are as much a part of his identity as Leeds and Wales, whose working class identity and “people got to work, people got to eat” ethos he credits for his socialist politics.

Jon Langford will continue to be an activist in the U.S. on his own terms, and despite his own ambivalence about the organized left. “A lot of people on the left seem to fear musicians and artists, for some reason, as being free spirits, or kinda sneer at them for not being intellectually rigorous,” he says. “Music reflects social change,” he explains. “I don’t think it instigates social change, but you can be a morale builder.”

This article was originally published in the March-April 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”