Why “Comrade?”
A friend and, dare I say, comrade wrote me and asked why I use the word “comrade” so freely, instead of the more accepted “brother” and “sister.” Won’t people associate you with James Bond villains and bomb-throwing radicals when you use that word? And it’s true. I do throw it around a good deal, both as a warm expression of solidarity and friendship and, a little bit, to make people a bit uncomfortable in otherwise stodgy rooms.
Fuck it; I’ve already been blown up by Fox News for being dangerously un-American, so why pretend to be a safer person than I am? Besides, saying “brother” or “sister” instead of comrade is one of those bits of American exceptionalism, like not celebrating Labor Day on May 1 or calling football “soccer,” that really ought to be resisted as a matter of global solidarity. Comrade is the preferred salutation of the labor movement in most countries. Perhaps it gets lost in translation? The British default to comrade, but, being British, they pronounce it funny (“comb-rayd”).
I was a teenage socialist. I joined the Socialist Party when I was 17 years old. Although I’ve since quit the party, I remain a socialist. In socialist politics, we say comrade. We even abbreviate it as “Cde.” in the minutes (“Cde. Richman seconded the motion”). It was when I first started saying the word and where I first gained an appreciation for its meaning.
Firstly, the word conveys a sense of equality that brother and sister don’t quite get across. As I said, I was a teenage socialist. But I was a comrade, on equal footing and with equal title as people who had been in the movement for decades; people who had been trained by Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, Michael Harrington. I was their comrade.
When I organized a teach-in against one of those many little Clinton wars at Queens College with one of my professors, he called me comrade. Of course, he’s British; it comes easier to him. But it was a tremendous equalizer. I still see him at rallies or union meetings and he still greets me with a warm, “Hello, comrade. How are you?”
I first started using the word in a union context as a dare. A bunch of my co-workers marched together under no banner in the first huge march against the proposed invasion of Iraq. It was an unseasonably warm early spring day. There were a million of us. It felt like a celebration (and then the war started).
At some point during the march, my friend Alan and I found ourselves separated from our group. “It appears we have misplaced our comrades,” I said. Alan paused, laughed and challenged me, “How amazing would it be if you and I called each other comrade at the office on Monday?” And so we did, and so we have ever since.
It’s significant to this story that one of our friends at the union was trans, but not yet out. Hell, he wasn’t even out to me but it just felt wrong to call him sister. Comrade, as a gender-neutral salutation, just made practical sense. This old word has some relevance to the 21st century yet!
Finally, comrade is used in the military. The salutation is standard at VFW halls. (What could be more American than that?) To me, comrade implies that we’ve been through some shit together; a tough campaign, a boss fight, some controversy. And there’s a greater loyalty that comes out of having been through some shit together. Calling someone a comrade, for me, is about trying to always keep that first and foremost. It’s too easy to get into an argument of some immediate political issue or campaign decision and just go to war or give someone up as dead to you. But you don’t do that with a comrade. You’ve been through some shit.
You could argue that brother and sister do all of this equally well (well, not the whole gender neutral thing). But I would say that those salutations in labor have become a bit too pro forma. They are said to fill the air, with not much deep thought behind them. Saying comrade, in America, in the year 2015, requires more of a thought process. And I’m generally in favor of people doing more thinking.
Tuli’s Archives
Gothamist has a pretty incredible story about some newly discovered Bob Dylan lyrics, to a song-never-recorded about Robert Moses. It’s easy to assume that the lyrics sheet is a hoax. But, because, it was discovered in the Tuli Kupferberg files, I’m inclined to regard it as legit.
Tuli was a true American character. He was a member of the musical avant garde jug-band the Fugs, an early progenitor of the Village underground, a leftist and a proto-zinester. I first learned of him when, accompanied by a (paid!) intern, I poured through David McReynolds’ archives to find suitable material for the Socialist Party’s 100th anniversary conference journal.
McReynolds was a long time leader of the SP, a pacifist and student of Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, a two-time candidate for President (I managed his second campaign in 2000; his first, in 1980, is purportedly the first time that an openly gay man ran for the office) and a long-time bohemian and Village resident. Before David complains about this post, I use the past tense because I am describing an event from 2001, not because he is dead. He is very much still alive (and blogging!).
David’s archives included many incredible photographic negatives of Socialist Party and War Resisters League events from the prior 40 years, including some of the last “new” pictures of Martin Luther King – from a WRL (or possibly Fellowship of Reconciliation?) – awards dinner in the early 1960’s.
It also included a shot from that same dinner night that I has developed into a 11″ x 14″ print that has adorned the walls of every home I have since called my own, of A.J. Must and Norman Thomas locked in an intense yet casual conversation at that same awards dinner, (I think) with the glass reflection of MLK’s back behind them.
So, what convinces me of the authenticity of these new Dylan lyrics because they were found in Tuli’s archives? Well, many of Tuli’s archives wound up in McReynolds’ archives – most notably a zine called “FUCK GOD!” When we came across that one, McReynolds chuckled and said, “That was pretty controversial back in its day. I don’t know how Tuli got away with that one!”
A few minutes later, I came across Tuli’s sequel to that particular opus, a mimeographed volume entitled, “FUCK GOD IN THE ASS!,” its cover adorned by a crude line drawing of a be-robed man with long grey hair, from behind, spreading his butt cheeks. “Yeah,” I said, “I think this would still be pretty controversial today.”
So, do I think it’s possible that young Bob Dylan threw a lyrics sheet of a song taking the piss out of “master builder” Robert Moses Tuli Kupferberg’s way? Yeah, you betcha.
The Sandpiper Serves as Lookout Against the Ferals.
I’m taking a mental health day; smoking a cigar on the fire escape. I bought my Padron at the Humidor, a neighborhood spot where the old men can smoke their stogies on the leather couches inside. They’re watching coverage of the Greek elections like it’s a soccer game. I’m not sure which side they’re on.
I take the opportunity to refill our bird feeders. Bay Ridge doesn’t have a lot of bio-diversity. We get lots of finches and the occasional mourning dove. Lately there’s been a couple of sand pipers to enliven the scene. They’re beautiful. Their tail feathers are slightly robotic in motion. I hear a bird whistling like an alarm. Is she pissed that I won’t vacate the fire escape so she and her comrades can enjoy the new snacks we’ve laid out for them? I notice it’s one of the sand pipers alerting all the other birds to the presence of one of the neighborhood ferals. She flies along the top of the fence that surrounds the Catholic Church’s parking lot and perches occasionally to renew the alarm as the neighborhood stray saunters along the bottom of it.
The kids from the Catholic junior high school stream into the parking lot with their parents, resplendent in their green “graduation” gowns. It’s “moving up” day. The girls are model-tall and stumbling in their high heels. The boys have the misfortune of looking a little too much like Glen Bishop from Mad Men. A couple of goobers toss their four-cornered caps into the air, in a re-enactment of whatever just took place in that 50-year-old auditorium. It’s hard to imagine being that excited about something ending and a new thing beginning. And yet we’ve all been there.
“yo,” my wife e-mails. “i forgot my phone. email in the next few minutes if you need anything. there’s a laptop on this pedicure chair.”
“this is the future.”
I take another drag from the cigar and look at the spray paint marks on the grating of the fire escape, where she preps her canvasses and think, “Maybe this is.”
Review: James P. Cannon and Origins of the American Revolutionary Left
Quitting the Socialist Party freed me to commit the twin heresies of reading V.I. Lenin and Michael Harrington. My political perspective hasn’t changed very much, but my perspective has become more nuanced. This leaves me very familiar with American social democratic theory and with the twists and turns of the old Socialist Party, as well as its last major off-shoots, and, thanks to Si Gerson’s library, with the external work and internal factionalism of the Communist Party, at least up until 1960. But the history of the American Trotskyite movement has remained a willful gap in my knowledge, mostly because I tend to find modern-day Trotskyites so interminable.
Bryan D. Palmer’s “James P. Cannon and the American Revolutionary Left” begins to fill in some of that gap. Cannon is best known (to the extent that he’s known at all) as a father of American Trotskyism and founder of the Socialist Workers Party. Palmer’s volume focuses on the period when he was a founder of the Workers (Communist) Party. Along with such odd bedfellows as William Z. Foster and Jay Lovestone, Cannon helped foster a native expression of Marxist-Leninist agitation in America, while navigating intense and ever-changing factional intrigue in the party and the International. As such, it is an adjunct to Theodore Draper’s stalwart “The Roots of American Communism” and a cousin to Edward P. Johanningsmeier’s and James Barrett’s recent biographies of Foster.
I consider Foster my favorite tragic hero; the first truly modern trade union organizer and a brilliantly pragmatic navigator of union structure who cast his lot with the Communists after Lenin endorsed his union work in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” In Palmer’s pages, in the first flush of the Third International, when revolution was proved to be possible, the attraction of foreign revolutionary leadership for Cannon and Foster is understandable. It is quite possible that most people on the Left would still be spinning their wheels trying to create new, perfect labor unions if that generation of activists were not directed from Moscow to get dirty inside the bureaucratic AFL unions and organize some new members and strike actions. Equally ironically, the lily-white left might never have evolved past the chauvinism that led good men like Eugene Debs to say dumb things like, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races,” to take seriously the civil rights of African-Americans without the pressure from Moscow.
But as the Communist International degenerated into a cult of personality around Stalin, national issues in Russia came to dictate what was seen to be in the best interests of the American activists, and led to constant faction-fighting that hobbled much of the party’s potential in the 1920’s. Foster eventually came out on top, losing most of what was best about him and becoming an unrepentant Stalinist. Cannon left at his earliest opportunity and cast his lot with Trotsky.
Much of the book is taken up in documenting temporary alliances like Cannon-Foster, Foster-Bittelman and Lovestone-Ruthenberg. It’s somewhat tedious and distracting from the main action, which may well have been Palmer’s point. (His attention to detail is laudable). The book is at its most exciting in describing Cannon’s International Labor Defense work in support of class-war prisoners like Sacco and Vanzetti, and in describing the intrigue of smuggling Trotsky’s criticism of the 1928 CI proceedings into America and surreptitiously forming the new Socialist Workers Party. That’s where Palmer’s book leaves off. It is clear that there is another volume still to come, documenting the effort to build a new sectarian political party and the lesser-noted work of Trotskyites in the labor struggles of the 1930’s, and that that book is where Palmer’s heart truly lies. I look forward to it, and to continuing my cautious research into American Trotskyism.