stitching the fabric together

This piece was originally written for Current Affairs in 2021. When the editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson fired the entire editorial staff, I decided not to move forward with publication. Though my political perspective has shifted significantly since then, I still strongly believe in the sentiments expressed within it and I wanted to preserve it on Down the Ladder in more-or-less its original state before what would have been the final pass of edits.

For the longest time, the phrase “the end of history” did not make the slightest bit of sense to me. I understood what the sentiment was - a vaguely nihilistic idea similar to “nothing will fundamentally change” - but there was an inherent ridiculousness to it that I couldn’t get past. The phrase was coined by prominent political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1992, in the titular book The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he writes:

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Fukuyama’s specific claim focused on the idea that the development of human societies - rather than events - had stopped, but even this now seems like a hilarious over-reaction to the relative stability that immediately followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. If there was any defining feature of the contemporary moment, I thought, it’s that far too much history was happening far too fast. Sitting directly in the wake of the Trump election, watching liberal publications rattle off anxiety-ridden predictions of the end of western democracy at a machine-gun’s pace, I certainly didn’t think any sane observer could look around and assert that mankind had reached some kind of stable equilibrium.

I remained confident in this assertion for several years, until I came across Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism, a collection of vignettes and stories from former members of the Communist Party USA. The party was established after a split with the Socialist Party triggered by the Russian Revolution, and it was a prominent force on the organized American left from the dawn of the Great Depression all the way to the McCarthy era. The book, published in the midst of the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, centers around stories that took place largely in the party’s depression-era golden age in a country named America. I say “a country named America” because while it shares the name and geographical boundaries of the modern U.S., the world that Gornick and her interview subjects paint is so distant and unfamiliar to our own that it might as well have taken place in Narnia. In the book, she lovingly recounts how contemporary Communists used to self-identify while amongst each other:

I would point to one or another at the table and whisper to her: “Who is this one?” Who is that one?’ … “He is a writer. She is a poet, He is a thinker.” … He, of course, drove a bakery truck. She was a sewing-machine operator. That other one over there was a plumber, and the one next to him stood pressing dresses all day long beside by father.‘

Gornick’s America isn’t easy to describe in 2021: hers is a world in which the seemingly ironclad eternal rules of our political moment do not apply. Instead of reflexively defining their moral worth by the narrow roles capitalism assigns to them - truck drivers, garment workers, and dress pressers - the Communists self-conceptualized themselves first as writers, poets, and thinkers. Instead of material precarity precluding them from participating in politics, politics was the only thing that made their precarity bearable - as one subject described, politics “literally negated [their] deprivation … it nourished us when nothing else nourished us.” Instead of nationalism acting as a destructive force for reactionary ends, Gornick asserts that the only nationhood that mattered to the Communists was “the nationhood of the international working class.”

Gornick remarks in the book that the Communists of her time “spoke and thought within a context that had world-making properties.” They believed not only that history was in robust, unprecedented motion, but that they were the ones who were making it move. They had reason to believe this - their numbers were swelling, labor militancy was ratcheting up to dizzying new heights, and the newly minted Soviet Union - the largest nation in the world - on their team, at least in theory. The prospect of actually overthrowing capitalism was genuinely a possibility, at least in their minds, as one of Gornick’s subjects frantically recalls:

Do you know how strong we were in 1946? We had the country in the palm of our hands! We could have taken over. Yes! We could have taken over. Only we didn’t know it. … Those May Day parades. Thousands marched! We were thousands! We could have had the country.

This is what made me finally grasp the concept of “the end of history.” Knowing - or at least reading about - what it was like to feel that everyday people were meaningfully in control of history’s direction helped explain how much it does not feel that way now. The reason that “history ended” was not because human events stopped occurring, or even because the way that humans governed themselves stopped changing, but because the notion that human beings had any meaningful control over the direction of that change was completely dissolved.

The incredible chronological and spiritual distance between the events depicted in Romance and our own time only seems to grow greater by the day. Class is not a meaningful axis of contemporary politics at all, let alone being the basis for some kind of transcendent allegiance to humanity. Morning Consult polling around the 2018 election revealed that when Americans are asked to rank their social identities by their importance, class ranks dead last, decidedly trumped by just about every other conceivable identity category a person could have. Ursula Le Guin’s description of the “inescapable” power of capitalism and the society it creates feels more accurate than ever.

However, as Le Guin herself points out, the divine right of kings also once seemed inescapable. It wasn’t. Gornick’s account of those years of ferment in America and the social fabric that defined it proves that history was not always over, either.

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America was and continues to be a big place, and Gornick’s vivid vision is but a cross-section of it. To get a better understanding of why Gornick’s America looked the way it did, we need to zoom into its particular boundaries: a dense and clustered series of Jewish neighborhoods dotting Depression-era New York City. In the early part of the 20th century, Eastern European Jews had migrated en masse to America, running from pogroms and other incidents of horrifying anti-Semitic violence. 

These emerging communities shared not just a common ancestral heritage, but also a very immediate memory of the reality of anti-Semitism in Eastern European countries. This created a great deal of excitement in the early 20th century when those very countries seemed to erupt in revolution all at once, with the promise of eventual liberation for oppressed people around the globe. One of Gornick’s subjects lovingly recounts the Red Army opening the first library he’d ever seen in his home village, making him feel welcome in his country for the first time in his life. Many of these Jewish ex-patriots would form the basis of the burgeoning New York left, and the Communist Party in particular.

What’s most important to note about these Jewish Communists is that they were not some kind of separate bloc, exiled from their communities for their ideology. Leftist politics was “as natural a part of the stream” as every other ideological strand within the Jewish community, as Gornick notes:

If a Jew growing up in this world was not a Marxist he may have scorned the socialists or shrugged his shoulders at them or argued bitterly with them, but he did not in the deepest part of himself disown them, or find them strange or alienating creatures. They were there, they were recognizable, they were us.

The force preventing Jewish Communists from being disowned or othered was trust - trust that came from the fact that the Jews in New York generally emerged from and existed in the same social fabric: the shared combination of material conditions, cultural expressions, and civic institutions that govern life in a given community. It is that trust that makes Gornick’s description of the Jewish left so novel from a modern perspective - many leftists think of other leftists as strange and alienating creatures, let alone what their immediate communities may think of them. In our time, it’s taken for granted that leftists are aliens to mainstream politics, and it is also taken for granted that all politics is alien to social life.

And yet, it’s abundantly clear that the reason why the Gornick’s Communists were able to assume and maintain such a level of legitimacy in their communities was because they were deeply integrated into social life, not just among their political comrades, but in the whole of their social group. You will be hard-pressed to find any place in contemporary America where the Young Communist League, or any organization like it, is the “center of all social life in the neighborhood,” as Gornick described the situation of one of her subjects growing up. It has been documented that political persuasion is much more potent when it comes from people in your social group whom you trust. Gornick drives this point home by describing how a general culture of mutual trust within the Jewish community “produced a people richly receptive to the possibility of conversion in any direction.”

Why is it that the contemporary left continually fails to produce enough people richly receptive to the possibility of conversion? What is it about the approaches we have thus far taken that have failed to generate the necessary energy, to, say, win a Democratic presidential primary or reverse the continually-falling private sector unionization rate, let alone trigger a revolution? Answering these questions requires an honest interrogation of the Left’s recent history, and an analysis of where they have genuinely fallen short.

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We have often counseled ourselves with the idea that we have “won the ideological battle,” but that idea serves to obfuscate more than it clarifies. We have been winning the ideological battle for going on half-a-decade now, if “winning” means “support for single-payer polls above 50 percent.” Getting enough people to have the right opinions clearly does not change the world in the way we imagine it does. The Overton Window is just that: a window, through which one is able to see a different world but isn’t able to step through. Moving the window is not enough - we need to find out how to move the earth.

Moving the earth requires understanding that the fight being waged is not really an ideological battle at all. For example, Rep. James Clyburn - described by NPR’s Susan Davis as “the most influential Democrat” in South Carolina, and whose endorsement of Biden was considered decisive in his victory - did not gain the political power he did because his arguments against Bernie’s policies were masterfully crafted works of intellectual rigor. Retreating to standard conservative talking points - describing left-wing policies as “free lunches,” etc. - his thinly-veiled attacks on the Sanders program were far from novel.  On the contrary, his constituents believe his arguments about free lunches, or free college, or free healthcare because he is deeply enmeshed in the same social fabric that they are. Jacobin contributor Cedric Johnson laid out Clyburn’s deep relationship with his constituency in such a way that illustrates how he maintains his power:

Clyburn’s influence is maintained through his constant presence; the dense social relationships that he, his staffers, and his surrogates maintain with local constituents and organizations; the real, material benefits like jobs, economic investment, scholarships, and infrastructure improvements that his office delivers to black South Carolinians; and the reputation those deliverables have created over a long career of public service. That kind of clout can’t be achieved or dethroned in an election cycle, certainly not through stop-and-drop voter canvassing runs and political rallies, but is rather earned by much more involved and intensive political organizing.

Many of the points listed seem purely material and transactional. However, it must be reiterated that Bernie’s pitch was also transactional, and on a scale that would, if implemented, completely dwarf Clyburn’s transactions by a factor of ten. It ultimately didn’t matter, because Clyburn had what Bernie did not - trust. 

The collective experience of Black people in the United States contains in it something of a quasi-national allegiance, with its own culture, norms, and historiography. This allegiance, like that of Gornick’s Jews, is and has always been a patchwork of fractious swatches, with internal struggles for control around and between religions, political ideologies, and geographic origins. With that said, in the pockets of the nation where the traditional, church-based Civil Rights-era coalitions hold strong - like Clyburn’s district, for example - the staying power of this allegiance is as clear as day.

It is not only scholarships and infrastructure appointments themselves that constitute the social fabric - it is the consistent delivery of those material benefits in the context of a shared socio-cultural history and shared institutions. Clyburn holds a stranglehold over Black South Carolinan civic life because he ensures, through constant cultivation, the very existence of a civic life over which to hold a stranglehold. This dynamic - not ideological appeals - is how he has become such a critical power broker that Democratic presidential candidates stumble over themselves to attend his “world famous fish fry” every election cycle. 

The usual acknowledgments that hindsight is 20/20 aside, the idea that a presidential campaign - with its uniquely transient and time-limited nature - could have even come close to creating a level of trust that could supplant the dense networks that Clyburn had created was a pipe dream. Clyburn, for all the criticisms one could make of him, is a stalwart steward of the Black South Carolinan. For his decision to endorse Biden, some may have scorned him or shrugged their shoulders at him or argued bitterly with him, but none of them in the deepest parts of themselves could disown him. He is there, he is recognizable, he is one of  them, through and through.

It is up for debate whether the cultural force of the president’s office would have allowed Bernie the political capacity to install himself in communities like Clyburn’s such that he could command a similar degree of trust..The cultural force of being a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, however, evidently wasn’t.

The process of that trust-building, particularly if we imagine the Left’s strategy to be engaging the unengaged, has to happen in a deeper context than presidential politics; the bulk of it will take place far away from any state-sanctioned ballot box. The Left’s success in the future will depend almost entirely on the degree that it is able to integrate itself into the fabric of communities across the country and engage with them directly. 

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The response to the realization that electoral politics is a poor substitute for constructing a durable social fabric is often followed by an impulse to search for other modes of engagement. These modes are most often ones more directly and intimately connected with a given community: its membership organizations, its churches, its unions, and any other social institutions it may have. Another immensely comprehensive reflection on the CPUSA - Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe - tells the story about how the Depression-era Alabama CP did exactly this. Many stories in the book center around how Alabama’s communists leveraged the existing social networks among the Black working-class in Birmingham, from coordinating anti-snitch protocols to prevent the city government from taking Blacks off the relief rolls, to joining the leading unions in the area to agitate for labor militancy and anti-racism.

These more direct approaches are appealing to those disillusioned with electoral politics because where they’re possible to implement, they get results. Eric Blanc’s account of the 2018 teacher strikes, Red State Revolt tells an inspiring story of rank-and-file teachers leveraging their connections with parents and the community to build popular support for their labor actions, which were unprecedented in their respective states among public sector workers.

Most notably, Jane McAlevey’s concept of whole-worker organizing is centered around this concept. In her first book, Raising Expectations, she tells the story of home-care workers who got the support of their community in their labor struggle by having the workers appeal to their pastors. It worked as a method because it took advantage of social connections where they already existed: trust between workers organizing in a labor campaign and other members of the community that they lived in. 

But the operative phrase above is “where they already exist.” In the case of Red State Revolt, teachers remain one of a dwindling number of professions where workers are in regular direct contact with each other and the community at large, and there are few professions where that contact is more involved or intimate. In the age of COVID-19, the ability to engage with co-workers in a physical space has been eradicated for an incredible number of people, and more and more jobs are mediated by gig-economy tech, meaning that workers are rarely in the same physical space long enough to establish relationships and organize. In the case of McAlevey’s anecdote, her home care workers are notable in the fact that they had a church to appeal to - yet another condition rapidly changing in modern America.

What these examples reveal is that the Left victories of the past were achieved in communities with very particular kinds of social fabrics, and that the Left victories of today have overwhelmingly been concentrated in places in which those fabrics still hold. McAlevey herself outlines how conditions have changed:

When we think back to the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, there’s this image … we have these huge factories, which we know from Marx … are our workshop for class power. But we don’t have those factories anymore. Not in this country.

The very manner in which work happens has profound importance for the ability to organize meaningfully - as well as the way our built environment affects us. Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns once laid down a list of guidelines to find out if your community is resilient. One guideline he laid was unconventional, but instructive: if there was a revolution in your town, would everyone know where to go? The answer for a great many people is no - and even if it isn’t, we haven’t even begun to address where to park. (This is not a joke - parking is a real, significant constraint on mass action in areas with a high level of automobile dominance.)

The reason why Gornick’s America feels so distant to us is that, among other reasons, those who lived in it have been physically displaced. The infernal engine of gentrification has ripped apart the densely packed, inner-city working-class communities of Gornick’s time and scattered them out to atomized suburbs, which are quickly replacing the archetypal “inner-city” as the prime drivers of national poverty. A 2015 Brookings report on the question found that the suburban poor had eclipsed the urban poor by 2000 - in Atlanta, the poor population in the suburbs exploded by 159%, while the urban poor populations stayed flat.

The modern, sprawling suburb - and the labor conditions that come with it - are a far cry from the tightly packed pressure cooker of the early 20th century urban neighborhood. The kind of natural and spontaneous generation of class consciousness in the Marxist imagination is predicated upon workers living atop one another, working in close concert, and, as a result, having ample opportunity to compare notes. It is not predicated upon workers living completely apart, working completely individualized gig-economy jobs in competition with each other, and having few interactions with each other outside of being on either end of the drive-thru window. 

All this is not to say that creating a social fabric in the midst of suburbia is impossible, but it is to say that the physical form of suburbia doesn’t do you any favors - which proves to be much more of a problem now that it increasingly looks to be the only place where the working-class - or literally anyone - will be able to afford the rent. It won’t be enough for the Left to try to take advantage of social fabric where it already exists - it has to come up with a plan to create it from whole cloth.

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There is an inherent immaterialism to a concept like trust that can cause a certain type of leftists to dismiss it as a factor in organizing. “Our arguments are correct, after all! Surely, the sheer force of our correctness can overcome all obstacles - no need to waste our time on petty things like the power of friendship.”

It’s certainly true that mainstream political discourse vastly over-inflates the importance of culture as a predictor of political behavior, but it would be an equally grievous error to rubber-band in the other direction - to insist that mere rhetorical might can drive people to mass action. Class consciousness is still, after all, an idea, and it’s one that heretofore has been rejected by the people who most need to understand its professed correctness. Even if you successfully make a pitch to somebody on material terms, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re committed for life to a broad political project. “Unionized workers make 11.2% more on average” is a useful fact to have in your arsenal, but the sharecroppers in Hammer and Hoe were not having shootouts with Klansmen so they could make 11.2% more on average. They were doing it out of a profound sense of commitment to a moral cause that transcended a marginal increase in spending money. People may fight for bread, but they will only die for roses.

The image of the rose works particularly well because they are nice to look at. The question of whether the modern left creates a particularly rosy environment for its members to exist within or for the outside world to look upon, I shall leave to the reader - but what is certain is that whatever the left’s internal culture is, its political priority ought to be creating a culture around a proletarian identity, rather than a narrowly political one.

The most immediate way to begin re-forging that proletarian identity is for leftists to take into their own hands the revival of civic and social life, both in places where it is in decline, and in places where it’s been demolished entirely. In addition to agitating and organizing around policy, labor, and housing, our political institutions also have a responsibility to serve a broader social function: connecting members and those in their orbit together in contexts that are not overtly political. Mutual aid - when the mutual piece is taken seriously - is a powerful tool towards this end, but even tagging along with outright charity from can prove useful on rare occasions, if engaging in it provides opportunities to build relationships with existing local institutions. 

Furthermore, one of the core pieces of Gornick’s world and the fabric that held it together was the common vision of the world - the media, the art, and the historiography. The concept of “voices” and “lived experiences” have had their meaning ground into dust by contemporary liberalism, but the fact remains that the “international working class” is the mother of all intersections, and stitching together a coherent identity from the patchwork of social fabrics within it will require a considerable intentional effort in collective storytelling and mythmaking. The good news is that those stories already exist - the books I have quoted from here are filled to the brim with them.

More importantly, even more stories exist in the minds of American workers everywhere, particularly in places where the opportunities to tell them are few and far between. We may lament that the mainstream media never dives deeper than diner conversations with the first person they see with a MAGA hat, but in their failure is an opportunity for the organized left to assume the responsibility of the everyman’s storyteller. Max Alvarez’s Working People podcast is a great example of this kind of media project, and is proof (along with you reading this magazine right now) that a vibrant and growing audience for these stories exist. But pushing projects like Working People further - integrating them into our organizations, tailoring those stories to the specific history of individual communities and, most importantly, using those stories as the rhetorical fuel of our concrete work - will be essential for the left moving forward. Every place is a world unto itself, and it remains to be seen how many unsung heroes lie in the annals of a historical society’s archive, protagonists of stories erased from the collective memory of their communities by the passage of time.

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Though the proletarian nationhood of Gornick’s Communists is absent in our contemporary political moment, the gaping hole it left is still there, and people are desperately grasping for some kind of replacement. Some find it in more conventional nationalism, others in racial or ethnic affiliations, but a great many of us have absolutely nothing, and are left only with the veritable array of facades provided to us by the modern world. It is ironic that the phrase “we live in a society” has become a by-word for pretentious pontification about our age, because if there is any one trait that defines our historical moment, it is the fact that a great number of us do not - and the silent horror of that reality weighs on us daily.

The bankruptcy of modern America is both literal and spiritual, and if the Left seriously wants to re-conjure the kind of commitment that led people to put their lives on the line for social change, it cannot afford to focus on one type of bankruptcy instead of the other. The material deprivation of people and the destruction of their social bonds are intimately linked together. To persuade someone to take a great leap - to convince them that history is not over, and that they have a chance to push it forward - requires first that they trust you enough to believe you. Building that trust is the project of our time - and maintaining, reinforcing, and expanding it will be the project of our future.