Posts

Posted on

The Death and Life of Urban Planning

Hearing of Jane Jacobs’ death, I am reminded that Elana borrowed my copy of “Death and Life of Great American Cities” and never returned it (and people wonder why I’m stingy about lending out books and CDs). She does work in policy, and I’m just a union organizer. I would like to read it again, though.

When I was in my final semester at Queens College, I was able to indulge a budding interest in urban planning with a few courses on the subject. Within that stale air of academic urban planning – with baroque architecture, the White City of the Chicago World’s Fair, garden cities and Le Corbusier – Jacobs’ writing still is a breath of fresh air. Her simple theses about the “eyes on the street,” diversity of use and how success can drive out success remain such a useful way for viewing street life. I still think about these ideas when driving around on lawnguyland, with its lifeless cul de sacs, sterile office parks, smoggy highways and antiseptic shopping malls.

But I’m also sympathetic to Le Corbusier and the idea of high rises and green space. It’s socialist, albeit the variety of socialism puts academic planning ahead of how people actually live their lives. And Jane Jacobs is so anti-socialist, particularly the convoluted plan for corporate welfare that she proffered as an alternative to simple, public housing (form does not follow function; publicly-owned housing doesn’t have to be cheap, drab and ghettoized – that’s just what capitalist politicians did to it).

Moreover, Jacobs’ simple observations missed the obvious points that not every street can be Christopher Street, and that no one wants to live in the tenement apartment building next door to the hog fat rendering plant. Some planning is required.

Posted on

Bernie

Still clearing out my archives, I found this picture of Bernie Sanders speaking at the Socialist Party’s National Convention in 1983.

At the time, Bernie was the newly elected independent Mayor of Burlington, VT. He had been a notorious left-wing activist and political gadfly, but he launched a serious populist campaign against corporate power and inequality and was rewarded by the support of the people of Vermont. After a successful stint as Mayor, Bernie ran for Congress and won as an Independent. This year, he’s running for Senate and seems quite likely to win.

The Socialist Party is unlikely to endorse his candidacy this year, which speaks more to the puritanism and narrow-mindedness of many of our activists. The fact is that Bernie Sanders is a strong advocate for working people, and his successful independent campaigns point to the way that we can articulate a clear anti-corporate message while accepting and expanding the limitations of the masses (rather than remaining aloof and critical) and topple the two-party oligarchy. He deserves your financial support.

Posted on

Being “Wrong” in the Socialist Party

I recently quit as editor of The Socialist, the magazine of the Socialist Party. After just two issues, I found the intolerance and general stupidity of many of the Editorial Board members that I had to work with too frustrating to continue. There’s real work that has to be done for the movement, and I am no longer willing to waste my time on fruitless endeavors.

I’m thinking about leaving the party altogether, but that’s a much tougher decision to make, as I have been a member for nearly ten years – since I was 17 years old.

Clearing out my archives, I find an article that I wrote for the journal of the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001. At the time, I was being hounded out of office by a caucus of pinheads. I could still find virtue in the party back then. I post it now for a strange sense of reassurance.

Among the Socialist Party’s many virtues over the last one hundred years has been its ability, and the ability of its members, to be wrong. Multi-tendency before there was even a word for such a thing, the party has always been home to wildly divergent opinions and the occasional faction fight. With so many different factions and tendencies, somebody has to be wrong at any given moment. I find this so reassuring.

The party’s early right-wing, made up of Social Democratic politicians in the modern European sense, over-emphasized voting and cynically limited their union activity to cajoling striking workers to “Vote Socialist!” Too often they embraced mainstream racism and xenophobia. Most curiously, they aggressively opposed the Industrial Workers of the World and led a crusade to expel from the party Wobblies who advocated “direct action” (then more confused with violent terrorism than today). Still, they couldn’t be all wrong. They won office and enacted legislation. Clearly, masses of people supported them.

One of my greatest heroes is “Big Bill” Haywood, the most prominent Wobbly to be expelled, precisely because of his wrong decisions. In the SP, he exacerbated the rightwing with vague and irresponsible talk of “direct action” that hinted at violence, precisely the type that he eschewed within the IWW. It was almost as though he wanted to be martyred rather than face a frustrating faction fight, or maybe he was just a natural contrarian (Our party’s had plenty of them, too). On strike, Haywood counseled a crude sort of pre-Gandhian civil disobedience. It’s his greatest legacy.

His worst legacy is that he fled to Russia to avoid a long prison term for opposing the war. This is why I sympathize with “Big Bill.” Disillusioned by his government, which had usually vindicated him when he was innocent (at least until whatever “crisis” that put him in jail had been averted), and by his own IWW, which had rejected him, Haywood went to the one place where he would be least appreciated: Bolshevik Russia! It was the sort of stupid mistake that comes from wounded pride and that any one of us can and does make.

Sam Friedman, who died six years too soon for me to meet him, is another SP character that I enjoy. Maybe it’s because he did so many things that I have done (Chaired the New York local, edited the NY Call – at a time when it was actually impressive to do such things) or would like to do (He organized a mutual aid society that helped bail party activists out of jail and pay legal bills). Maybe it was because he was such a set-in-his-ways pain in the ass. He stuck with Social Democrats, USA in the 1973 split because he did not believe in splits and they technically won the final vote. He hated their politics and stayed close to the SP so he could be around people who still used the “S” word. He telegrammed the party’s 1983 convention: “DEEPLY REGRET INABILITY TO ATTEND. DISAGREEING WITH SOME OF YOUR JUDGEMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS, I STILL ADMIRE AND LOVE YOUR TENACITY, COURAGE AND DEVOTION TO SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES. MORE POWER TO YOU.”

It’s a great encouragement to read in Rob Tucker’s brief history that Eugene V. Debs had such personal animosity towards Daniel Deleon and mistrusted anyone recently associated with him. Debs, too, is a hero, but in history books he comes across as too perfect. Saints belong in the Bible, not the Socialist Party. It’s the Eugene Debs who said, “While there is a lower class I, am in it; While there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison I am not free” that inspired me to join the Socialist Party, but it’s the Eugene Debs who called Daniel Deleon a “black-hearted scoundrel” that I can relate to.

Posted on

Pages From a Worker’s Life

My studies have provoked in me a keen interest in the Trade Union Education League, and its founder, William Z. Foster. The T.U.E.L. was a rank and file movement in the 1920’s to organize millions of workers in the basic industries along industrial lines (that is, in “one big union”). Where this differed from the Industrial Workers of the World was a dogged insistence on working within the existing AFL craft unions and “amalgamating” them.

Foster seemed to be a tireless organizer as well as a savvy strategist, but his own beliefs eventually became muddled by the Stalinist party line so that the “real” Foster, in his later years, is something of an enigma.

I sought out Foster in his own words. The only book of his that remains “in print” is “Pages From a Worker’s Life,” from International Publishers. One of the great things about International is that the cover price remains the asking price no matter how old the printing is, so that this fine book can still be had for $3.25. (One of the other great things about International is that the adventurous reader can travel to that storied building on 23rd Street, up the rickety manually operated elevator, to their offices to shop.)

“Pages” does not contain much of Foster’s theoretical or polemical writing, nor much of a standard biography. This seems to be outtakes from his other books; delightful stories and anecdotes that fit nowhere else. It’s a brisk and enjoyable read that makes me sorely miss the lack of adventure in my own life. Much of it is hard to believe. His jobbing, hoboing, seafaring and organizing seem to constantly place him in positions where he narrowly escapes sudden death or tortured lynching. Still, it’s not that implausible.

Foster’s ability to reevaluate, correct and criticize his own decisions is refreshing, as is his ability to admit that he misjudged a man, generously providing space to acknowledge the goodness of John L. Lewis, as well as an obscure building trades business agent who turned out to be a dedicated organizer in the 1919 steel strike.

As early as 1912, Foster pioneered the notion that the last thing labor radicals should do is abandon the mainstream trade unions to the bureaucrats and conservatives. He spent many years in the political wilderness as the IWW absorbed much of the energy of the labor radicals of the era. However, when a triumphant Lenin endorsed Foster’s model of “boring from within,” his organization became a cause celibre among the new throngs of Communists. He joined the Communist Party, and joined his cause, and the cause of his organization, with that of the CP. The ranks of both the T.U.E.L. and the CP swelled and their campaigns laid the building blocks of the CIO that was to come.

Years later, Stalin led Foster out of the AFL and back into independent union organizing. Foster remained an apologist for Stalin to his dying day, which makes the search for the real William Z. Foster, much like the search for the real Michael J. Obermeier, that much more intriguing.

Proudly powered by WordPress