[ The German Marxist philosophers work can help us understand
fascism and how to fight it. Ernst Bloch was a critical Marxist
thinker, a close supporter (though not a member) of the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD) from the 1920s through the 1950s.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

ERNST BLOCH: LOOKING BACKWARD, LOOKING FORWARD IN THE FIGHT AGAINST
FASCISM  
[[link removed]]


 

By Kurt Stand*
July 19, 2023
Socialist Forum
[[link removed]]


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_ The German Marxist philosopher's work can help us understand
fascism and how to fight it. Ernst Bloch was a critical Marxist
thinker, a close supporter (though not a member) of the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD) from the 1920s through the 1950s. _

Ernst Bloch, Ernst Bloch Archives - Progress in Political Economy

 

“Helene Otto, a Communist teacher, said in one of her lectures,
“We do not only want to drink wine, we want to drink it from
beautiful glasses too.” She said something there that might have
been meant especially for me. To a great extent, the realization that
the problems of “little Kathe” from Kaspar Street were the
problems of most working-class children and that they were explicable
and solvable, made me a Communist.”

 

Katharina Jacob [[link removed]] held
onto that remark
[[link removed]]throughout
her life, including the years she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the
Ravensbruck concentration camp. It reflected one way to respond to the
poverty and harshness of the Weimar era. Contrast that sentiment to a
view too many others were to embrace as the 1920s turned to the 1930s.
As Ernst Bloch observed in _The Heritage of Our Times_
[[link removed]],

“The day is empty. Work is lacking. Service is hard. The populace
needs stimuli. The Nazi paints them in the stuffy air as the
“populace” wishes and capital commands. “Workers” of the brow
hold out their hand (nothing else) to the worker of the fist; big
owners of small mining shares shout “Good luck!” To everyone else,
behind the excesses of revenge, the portal of cliches, there always
just appears the same unstopped reality…Doctors have to make people
healthy and productive for a hell, cure diseases which always return
from the living conditions of modern society like wounds in war.
Lawyers dispense justice as a naked expression of violence; the
fascist state tolerates them solely as butchers of a higher order or
as sophists of crime…Nevertheless, petit-bourgeois habit stands in
the way of each of these insights. Nevertheless, a very small stratum
of people with a vested interest shapes the revolutionary situation in
reactionary terms and makes use of those whom the nineteenth century
called “desperados.” Nevertheless too, however, the forces of
reaction would never have been able to seduce people so far IF THEIR
METHODS WERE NOT SPECKLED AND CONTRADICTORY LIKE THE SITUATION ITSELF
. . The irrational needs of today, of course, ULTIMATELY STEM FROM THE
ECONOMIC SITUATION, BUT NOT SO SMOOTHLY AND SIMPLY, AND THEY THEREFORE
CANNOT BE SO SMOOTHLY AND SIMPLY TREATED AND REMEDIED either…For if
there were not as much starved imagination as offended snobbery,
economic ignorance and real deprivation among the pauperized strata,
then it would have been impossible to conduct the “revolution” in
such reactionary terms…with God, Fuhrer, fatherland and fireworks.
(emphasis mine).”

 

Ernst Bloch [[link removed]] wrote this
shortly after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. He was a critical
Marxist thinker, a close supporter (though not a member) of the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from the 1920s through the 1950s.
After the Nazi defeat in World War II, Bloch returned from exile in
the US to East Germany, where he served as a professor of philosophy
at the University of Leipzig. When openings for internal socialist and
democratic reform were blocked he moved again, this time in 1961 to
West Germany, and became an influential figure within New Left and
liberation theology circles during the 1960s and 1970s. His particular
importance as a revolutionary thinker lies in his concept of
“concrete utopia” – the idea that humanity has, from the birth
of class society, striven for a world without oppression, a world of
shared freedom and equality and such visions have inspired folk art,
critical literature, music, theater, and revolutionary movements
throughout history.

Distinctive in this notion is the “concrete” prefix, for idle
fantasies have little to do with Bloch’s understanding of utopia. As
a Marxist, he never lost sight of the class dynamics of history, yet
he also remained aware of how cultural traditions inform the way
people understand themselves, and the world within which they live.
His critique of left-wing responses to the danger of fascism lay in
the tendency to rely too much on either the automatic progress of
society or the counter-tendency to envision change through force of
will alone. It was in the vacuum between the two through which the
Nazis gained support for a distorted vision of past glories.

As social theorist Oskar Negt, himself an important figure in the West
German New Left in the 1970s, explained in an introduction
[[link removed]]to Bloch’s work,

“Already in 1924, when Hitler had just emerged, Bloch described the
fascination emanating from his speeches and resisted the temptation to
underestimate his importance. While Marxists continued to adhere to a
rational belief in educative propaganda and spread the truth in an
administrative style, Hitler mobilized the people’s anxieties with
symbols and archetypes of salvation and strength. [Bloch wrote]

‘Revolution not only intervenes in the understanding, but equally in
the fantasy, which has for so long been undernourished in socialism.
The Nazis spoke deceptively, but to people; the socialists spoke
completely truthfully, but about situations; it is our task now to
speak completely truthfully to people about their situations.’

“Socialism, this most human of all concerns, requires a human face
at the top.”

 

The Nazis were unable to shake the core strength of either Communists
or Social Democrats (SPD) in the working class, but their strength was
sufficient when linked to corporate power and existing civic and
military institutions to overwhelm all opposition. The question before
us is how do we build a movement broad enough to address the mass
basis of reaction at its core, without abandoning principles of
solidarity or the necessity of systemic transformations at the heart
of socialist politics?

To understand this challenge, we can look at the mindset of someone
whose experiences are those of many who have fallen under the sway of
Trump. Harris Gruman, a Service Employees Union (SEIU) staff member,
wrote about
[[link removed]]
an encounter he had at a laundromat in Utah:

“An athletic young man came in with a basket of what looked like
mostly toddler’s clothing. He was angry, banging things around,
mumbling irritably. Not the most comforting companion, but I kept
reading my paper.

“Then he began speaking for my benefit. He was on a political tirade
about that [B-word] Hillary Clinton and our [N-word] president. I now
saw him clearly, close-cropped blond hair, late twenties, solid and
trim…

“He was a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, three tours in all, and
now he was unemployed, doing the washing while his wife worked down
the road at Wal-Mart. The Democrats only cared about transgendered
people and immigrants. Trump was his choice.

‘My uncle in Wyoming thinks we should kill President Obama.’

 

“At that point, Gruman confronts him in conversation, and turns the
temperature down. When the man learns that Gruman works for a union,
he comments: “I wish I had a union job.” It turns out, his father,
a railroad worker, was a lifelong unionist. But that pathway has been
blocked – a future for a working person all too bleak. The essay
concludes:

“Back in 2016, I met a face in the rioting white supremacist crowd
of January 6th, 2021. Yes, he was a racist. Yes, he was resenting
people even worse off than himself. Yes, he was far too ready for
murderous violence.

“But don’t talk to him about white privilege…or label him ‘a
deplorable.’

“Get him that union job.”

 

Fair enough as far as it goes – but we still have to ask ourselves
why this person’s anger found an outlet in the extreme right and not
a left-wing socialist organization, why he imagines violent action
against a sitting president but does not imagine joining with others
to build a union and rebuild the economy so that jobs with a future
could be grasped.

The question is not academic. We need to go beyond moralizing to
understand the roots of fascist appeal if that wish for a “union
job” is manifested in action to defend democratic rights instead of
descending into the hatreds of racism, the myth of the self-made man,
the “solution” of authoritarian reaction.

Bloch attempted an answer in 1932:

“Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally,
by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does
not mean that they are living at the same time with others.

“… In general, different years resound in the one that has just
been recorded and prevails. Moreover they do not emerge in a hidden
way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very
peculiar way, awry from the rear. The strength of this untimely course
has become evident; it promised nothing less than new life, despite
its looking to the old. Even the masses flock to it since the
unbearable Now at least seems different with Hitler, who paints good
old things for everyone. There is nothing more unexpected, nothing
more dangerous than this power of being at once fiery and puny. The
workers are no longer alone with themselves and the bosses. Many
earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip
between”.

 

The labor movement, the organized left in all its iterations,
maintains and builds upon a sense of history, past victories, defeats,
and sacrifices that have brought us to the present – yet it is a
movement that consistently looks to what might be. One can almost see
class consciousness as a form of modernism, a search for a possible
future, not a buried past. We need but think of the words of the
_Internationale_: “No more tradition’s chains shall bind us, Arise
ye slaves no more in thrall, The earth shall rise on new foundations,
we have been naught, we shall be all.” Or the words of _Solidarity
Forever_: “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the
old, for the Union makes us strong.” Or of Bertolt Brecht’s
_Solidaritätslied,_
[[link removed]]
[[link removed]]which concludes:
“Whose tomorrow is tomorrow, whose world is the world?”

Millions, however, including those who suffered from capitalism and
war, sought instead status or authority within a society that was
gone. The Nazis confronted workers’ strivings to create the world
anew with a return to an atavistic past. The mass base of reaction lay
within the declassed middle class and sections of the nobility who
lost security and status in the social dislocations that occurred
after Germany’s World War I defeat. Many soldiers were unable, after
four years of total war, to readjust to civilian life. Refugees from
territories lost with the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1919 and
peasants forced off the land felt homeless. All these were existing
within the “unbearable Now.” So the turn by many to Hitler – who
“paints good old things for everyone” – a society that is
hierarchical but stable, in which everyone had their place and knew
where they stood, a past that was insular and not welcoming of
strangers who could be agents of change and disruption, a past in
which a seemingly benevolent authoritarianism bound all together
against the rest of the world.

The vision of what socialism could create is exactly what the Nazis
contested, as has every mass-based right-wing movement that appeals
not to an envisioned future but to an imagined past (i.e. “Make
America Great AGAIN”).

Bloch terms these differences “synchronous” and
“nonsynchronous” contradictions, meaning contradictions emerging
of the time, rooted in the genuine conflicts within contemporary
society and through which an alternative society based on justice can
emerge. These are distinct from a consciousness rooted in past social
formations, out of step with future possibilities embedded in present
day realities – and through which a politics of hate can be
manipulated. Although complex, it is important to look at Bloch’s
elaboration of this concept:

“The subjectively nonsynchronous contradiction is pent-up anger, the
objectively nonsynchronous one is unsettled past; the subjectively
synchronous one is the proletariat’s free revolutionary act, the
objectively synchronous contradiction is the impeded future contained
in the Now…the impeded new society with which the old one is
pregnant in its productive forces…The increasing socialization of
labor is no longer compatible with the private capitalist property
relations, with the bourgeois form in which industrial labor grew up.
This is the objectively synchronous contradiction of the times…Only
this exact antithesis is decisively revolutionary for the times.
Nonetheless: it is not the only one there. The other antithesis, that
between capitalism and the nonsynchronously immiserated classes, lives
alongside the synchronous antithesis, even though only in a diffuse
way. Thus it produces fear and pent-up anger in the class of the petty
bourgeoisie which “lacks a history.” Nor does it allow for an
elaborated, present class consciousness of its own. For that reason it
makes the thrust of the conflict external and blunt, directed only
against the symptoms, not against the core of exploitation.”

 

That anger reflects legitimate frustration with society. Yet
frustration without direction opens the door to violent rage. Clearly
this is what marks people like that guy in the laundromat: my life
could have been different, but society has gone to hell. It is a way
of thinking “out of sync” with the times, thus the ease with which
the Protocols of Zion or QAnon or “Great Replacement” fantasies
take hold.

Yet, and this is the critical insight for Bloch, that appeal to a
supposed past “serves not only in a reactionary way, to hold up to
the present a past as something which in part is genuinely not dead.
It also positively delivers in places a part of that matter which
seeks a life not destroyed by capital.” Contrary to fascists past or
present, this look back can be rooted in positive notions of
pre-capitalist life, a life with meaning in work, community through
harmony with the natural world, and thereby a universality that ties
equality to freedom. As such, it is part of an intersecting stream of
myths and dreams. It is a way of understanding that can reinforce and
be reinforced by socialist movements working within time to create a
suppressed yet possible future. The failure to make such yearnings
explicit as the context for ongoing political activism, contributed to
the isolation of the militant working class during the last years of
Weimar. The failure to make such connections today leaves the field
far too open for the disconnected and isolated who can’t imagine
their place in the world as it could be.

A politics built on this understanding will go nowhere unless rooted
in the conditions that make the threat of reaction greater at one time
as compared to another. The depth of the threat to democratic and
constitutional structures in the United States today is greater than
any other time since the Civil War, due to a set of crises that
leading sections of business cannot see a resolution for – absent
sharp limitations on democratic rule. Too many locate the danger we
face today with Trump and his entourage’s personalities, or in the
racism and misogyny manifested in militias. Trump personifies a danger
in his individual presence that cannot be ignored, nor can the danger
posed by armed right-wing white supremacist groups be minimized. Yet
ignoring the structural basis of authoritarianism and the reasons why
attacks on democratic rule are posed so sharply at the moment inhibits
our ability to overcome the looming crisis.

Noting that corporate capital is at the root of the fascist danger
does not mean reducing anti-fascist politics to a narrow “class
against class” perspective. During the 1920s, demands for the rights
of women, anti-authoritarian public education, opposition to social
conformity, militarism, domestic violence, anti-Semitism, and national
chauvinism were part and parcel of the class struggle and is the
reason “culture wars” were launched by the Nazis with as much
fervor as our reactionary equivalents do today. Similarly, current
struggles against book banning, for freedom of sexuality and new
definitions of families, against mass incarceration, against
manifestations of racism in everyday life, are intrinsic to the class
struggle understood as working people grasping hold of their lives at
work, at home, and in society.

Behind these lie contrasting notions of freedom, contrasting notions
of what has been lost over the course of history. These contrasts
ought to be an explicit part of every confrontation over the direction
we take as a society.

 

ALTERNATIVE PATHS

“It is great that we humans are born unfinished as a species, not
only as children. But it is a hard lot to be engaged in a development
which proceeds so slowly since it is trapped over and over again by
deceivers…Mankind is the animal who takes detours, yet often in an
obdurate and flagrantly foolish way, not just cunningly. Otherwise,
all of outward life would run as easily and peacefully as now happens,
at best, among friends.”

 

Bloch, as the quote from “Dialectics and Hope
[[link removed]]” above indicates, was keenly
aware that political struggle doesn’t exist as something separate
from the struggles each of us face in our daily lives. The
“correct” program will inevitably fall short if the contradictory
lives and thoughts of the people for whom such programs are written
are ignored. The path toward liberation twists and turns. Hopes can be
disappointed, defeats need not be final.

Reexamining Weimar can remind us that Germany’s turn toward fascism
was not an inevitable response to military defeat. From 1918 until
around 1923-24, working-class organizations acted upon a broad demand
for genuine democracy and revolutionary change, a society without war
or exploitation – aspirations that, for a brief period, became a
dominant influence in German society. During those years, the majority
of the discontented saw hope in socialism, a significant section of
the middle class proved open to democratic politics and a program of
peace, some sections of business were willing to make concessions to
labor. Reaction, of course, was also on the scene. Assassinations
against revolutionaries and reformers were rife, as was armed
suppression of every attempt to assert working-class power. Yet those
indicated weakness, not strength, for authoritarian politics were
unable to command a mass movement in the open.

Bitter divides among working people, the inability of any left
organization to construct a politics around which a decisive majority
of the population could rally (be it on a reformist or revolutionary
basis), eventually led to loss of popular initiative. Business and
landed interests reunified politically, glorification of war reemerged
in popular culture and contempt for democratic possibility grew. The
wide range of left-wing organizations with meaningful support dwindled
to just the SPD and KPD. Despite each having hundreds of thousands of
members and millions of supporters, they became ever less able to
generate mass support outside the working-class, and were no longer
credible as alternatives to existing power.

With the onset of the Depression, business became even more determined
to undo the concessions to labor made at Weimar’s birth. They feared
that further immiseration of working people might recreate a
revolutionary situation, while the army saw the opportunity to break
free of restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. A shift with
non-synchronous contradictions becoming dominant politically was
underway as the Nazis gained a mass base rooted in myths and violence,
all with capital’s full support. Old slogans and strategies were
insufficient in response, and left-wing and democratic groups were
unable to counter that outlook to the degree necessary. By 1932-33
defeat was already in the cards.

Our crisis in the United States today has unfolded over a longer sweep
of time. What brought us here had a beginning in the mid-1970s, when
US defeat in Vietnam marked the limits of our “guns and butter”
policies. Leading business circles concluded that no return to higher
rates of profitability nor re-assertion of imperial power was possible
without undoing concessions made to labor during the New Deal era in
the 1930s, nor concessions made thereafter to movements for equality,
social justice, and peace.

Corporate globalization and neoliberal deindustrialization followed;
the resulting mass unemployment and dislocation diminished labor
strength and vehicles of resistance. Subsequently, inequality grew in
the country overall and within the working class itself as racial
justice gains were systematically attacked. Civil liberties were
undermined by the war on drugs, which led to the enormous increase in
our prison population, its racialized edge used to undo every step
forward toward political power and improved conditions of life that
the black community had made in prior decades. Financialization via
the dollar was used to dominate allies that were becoming competitive,
destroy attempts at economic independence by countries in Africa,
Asia, Latin America, and, ultimately, prevail in the Cold War.

Ideologically, the process was justified by posing the private and
individual against the social. The anonymity of government, large
corporations, huge universities, the distance between leaders and led,
that had been subject to critique after World War II was twisted
around so that “government” (i.e. universal rights and programs)
was demonized, the privilege of private wealth extolled. The attendant
atomization was accompanied by promotion of a sense of community that
was exclusive, not inclusive, the glue being a revival of evangelical
religion centered on limiting women’s autonomy.

The whole was held together by a kind of “patriotism” rooted in an
abstract notion of freedom and democracy, defined by the ideology of
American exceptionalism grounded in glorification of war – itself a
breeding ground of violence, abusive policing, and the spread of
neo-fascist ideology. Although sharp divides within mainstream
politics never vanished, “opportunity” instead of equality, the
primacy of individual over collective rights, “growth” as an end
in itself, became hegemonic during Reagan’s presidency, defining
social policy across corporate circles and dominant in both Republican
and Democratic parties.

Here lay the outlines of what took full blown shape with Trump and his
supporters – the revival of a “myself alone” outlook, in forms
that were implicitly and then explicitly racist, anti-egalitarian and
anti-democratic. Here we see too that look to the past, growing out of
hatred of the present and fear of the future – nonsynchronous, out
of time.

Although left-wing, working-class, and community movements were
demoralized and disoriented, such struggles as did occur were
sufficient to prevent full implementation of Reagan’s neoliberal
project. Moreover, the financialization of the economy and
debt-financed growth was unable to overcome systemic weaknesses as
reflected in 2008’s banking collapse. That, in turn, undermined
neoliberalism’s ideological dominance, fueling the attack on
constitutional rule backed by violent “white power” movements.
These gained a mass base among people who felt betrayed by the decline
of the past 40 years but put the blame on movements to extend rights
to the excluded. Hence, the danger of fascism.

This shift, however, has been accompanied by deep divides over social,
economic, and environmental policies within the “power elite,”
quite unlike during Germany’s Weimar years. Also quite unlike what
prevailed when fascism became ascendant in much of the world in the
run-up to World War II is that after a period of relative dormancy,
the left, social justice movements and labor have also risen in
strength.

For that upsurge to sustain itself, those organizations and movements
need to maintain an openness to ideas, experimentation, difference,
generally reflected in initial waves of political activism which all
too often dissipate as hopes in renewal fade, as radicalism becomes
detached from the complexity of human life. Politics rooted in
“concrete utopia” provide a pathway to maintain a connection
between organizing around pressing needs without losing sight of
deeply held aspirations. Doing so will better enable us to understand
those detours we face and provide a possible means to break the
boundaries of hatred that create the space within which fascism
develops. Linkages that tie the varied steps, no matter how small,
people take to challenge existing power, to build mutual support and
solidarity, can, in turn, re-humanize engagement and create the
framework to see as a realizable possibility a world in which all live
with dignity and respect.

Tom Moylan [[link removed]], a scholar of
science fiction and a longtime activist, noted that for Bloch,
“dreaming ahead” can become

“ … an act which is capable of revolutionary awareness and which
can enter the activity of history. With such wishes and dreams [Bloch
wrote], ‘virtually all human beings are futuristic; they transcend
their past life, and to the degree that they are satisfied, they think
they deserve a better life (even though this may be pictured in a
banal and egotistic way), and regard the inadequacy of their lot as a
barrier, and not just the way of world.’

“Utopian literature as a form of romance or fantasy serves to
stimulate in its readers a desire for a better life and to motivate
that desire toward action by conveying a sense that the world is not
fixed once and for all. In the estranged vision of another society lie
the seeds for changing the present society. Utopian writing that
resists cooptation and limitation within the categories of the given
system can offer a forward and emancipating look toward an autonomous
existence in a non-alienating setting. To be sure, that forward
-pulling vision also carries with it the necessity of willed
transformation, of struggle against all types of exploitation and
domination – that is, of revolution.”

 

A LEGACY TO DRAW UPON

Is it possible, in the face of anger at life as it is, to sustain a
movement that also contains hope? A movement that looks to drink wine
from beautiful glasses? Authoritarian danger loomed in the United
States as the Depression deepened in the early 1930s. That danger was
overcome by building mutual support across lines of disagreement
through reform programs and a sense of what our country ought to be.
The New Deal was a reimagining of Jeffersonian democracy to encompass
all and connect decentralized, participatory structures of engagement
to national organizations and government able to constrain private
power. Reengaging that sense of US history underscored the
possibilities, rather than the constraints, that exist within our
heritage – forming the ideological framework within which the
industrial unionism of the CIO, the building block of democratic
advance in that era, was created.

Toni Gilpin, in her history
[[link removed]] of
one of those unions – the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) –
encapsulates the profound implications when “an injury to one is an
injury to all” moves from slogan to collective action to
interpersonal relationships:

“…this is a tale about a long deep grudge, and how that anger and
resentment prodded workers to demand what was justly theirs and to win
at least a larger portion of it. But it is also a story about love:
about workers who genuinely loved their union, and thus each other, as
they had developed the deep bonds of affection and solidarity that
uplifted them and energized them to fight on together. To build a
successful labor movement – and thereby a fair and equitable society
– the grudge needs to be acknowledged and acted upon. But the love
must be there too.”

 

Put more prosaically, Roger Horowitz described
[[link removed]]that
process of how that solidarity is built in a history of another CIO
union – the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA):

“The channels for rank-and-file influence in the UPWA led to an
acceleration of the organization’s social unionism. The new union
militants rose out of their departments to become stewards, officers,
members of important union committees. They pressed their concerns
inside chain meetings, at UPWA conventions, and the biennial wage and
contract conferences that set negotiating priorities. Beginning in
1953, the union attached anti-discrimination and women’s conferences
to the contract meetings. These sessions…allowed rank-and-file
leaders to raise their priorities and forge links with like-minded
activists in other UPWA plants. As participants in critical contract
sessions, blacks and women on the chain negotiating committees watched
carefully that their particular interests were not
sacrificed…[during bargaining]. The institution of union democracy,
which survived the difficult postwar years, now expanded to allow
union members to make a strong imprint on their organization’s
objectives.”

 

That this survived through the 1950s within the AFL-CIO was rare. As
social transformation was stalled, as corporate power grew, the kind
of unionism represented by FE and UPWA became marginalized. The
question now: how to prevent another unraveling?

Bloch’s concepts of synchronous and nonsynchronous contradictions,
developed not just to understand but to engage the enemy, anticipated
the subsequent direction of anti-fascist politics. The shape this
would take was proclaimed by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov,
tried in Leipzig at the end of 1933 by the newly installed Hitler
government after the Reichstag fire. Instead of an expected defense of
revolution, however, Dimitrov confronted prosecutors by asserting the
right of Communists to continue to advance their worldview and
commitment to socialism illegally as part of a defense of civil
liberties and rights then in the process of being eliminated. His
spirit of defiance, joined to a clear-cut legal and political
argument, was a spark needed to overcome the demoralization that
followed mass repression. Thereafter, the Nazis held no more public
trials.

Dimitrov galvanized calls for a popular front – an alliance across
political divides, across class lines – to unite all opponents of
fascism around a program to defend democracy by expanding its content.
My grandfather was one so influenced. A furrier by trade, a member of
the SPD, the _Reichsbanner_
[[link removed]], and a
Jewish workers circle in Leipzig, he attended a mass rally in support
of Dimitrov and imprisoned KPD leader Ernst Thälmann along with my
father, then in his early teens .  Arrest, privations, and multiple
border crossings followed, but a commitment to Popular Front politics
remained.

Franz Dahlem [[link removed]], who oversaw
the banned Communist Party’s organizing in Germany until his arrest
in France, noted that workers in Frankfurt-Main initiated the first
unified project by Communists and Social Democrats after Hitler’s
assumption of power through contacts developed by surviving illegal
factory committees. These committees built ties with Nazi supporters
disappointed after the 1934 purge of Storm Troopers, which meant the
promised “Second Revolution” (against big business) would never
take place. This was not conceived as a coalition rooted in least
common denominator politics, but rather as a movement asserting
democratic rights to protect basic needs.

Such forms of resistance were too little too late. Nonetheless, they
reflected an undercurrent that always existed within the working-class
movement. More to the point, it provides a point of departure for
understanding how democratic initiative around shared interests can,
even in the harshest times, develop transformative politics by
addressing the multiple “Nows” within which people live.

In “_Demokratie als Ausnahme_” (Democracy as Exception), Bloch
maintained this perspective even as conditions became bleaker. Writing
in 1939 after Germany occupied the remnant of Czechoslovakia still
“independent” after the Munich Agreement, he argued that this
defeat did not invalidate the strategy:

“The strength of the Popular Front lies in the spirit of struggle
and is the foundation of the mass basis of the anti-fascist
movement….Munich was a lost battle but the basis of that defeat lies
in there having been too little, not too much, Popular Front
politics….for it is not enough to set store by bourgeois freedoms,
we must use these freedoms to make a better world….The Popular Front
needs to take into account that war is the normal state of class
society, not democracy.”

 

Turning back to the US, the civil rights movement, organizing under
conditions of murderous repression, exemplifies how a democratic ethos
can enable a movement to simultaneously become broader and more
radical. Jack O’Dell developed his politics as a merchant seaman and
member of the National Maritime Union, which was once a left-wing CIO
union like FE and UPWA. He played a critically important role in the
Black Freedom movement, working with King in the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and Jesse Jackson in the Rainbow Coalition.
Looking back on those events, he articulated this process
[[link removed]]:

“Beginning with the events of Montgomery in 1955 when the
Afro-American community of fifty thousand citizens stood as one in a
bus boycott and extending to 1969 with the Vietnam Moratorium in which
an estimated four million people participated…our movement created a
dual authority in the country. There was on the one hand the
established authority: the citadels of institutionalized racism, the
masters of war, the apparatus of government – state, local and
federal; and those chosen to do the dirty work of suppression of our
movement…This established authority acted out a way of life that was
rooted in custom, tradition, and dictated by class interests. The
other center of authority was the Civil Rights – Anti-War Movement
which represented a continuum of protest action during this period.
The authority, the Movement, represented the people’s alternative to
institutionalized racism and colonialist war.

“As the new authority in the country, our movement drew on the best
traditions of the Negro church, organized labor, and popular
radicalism. This was reflected in the musical themes that we made
popular such as “This Little Light of Mine,” “All We Are Saying
Is Give Peace A Chance,” “We Shall Not Be Moved.” And the most
famous, “We Shall Overcome.”

“The spirit and commitment to the goals of our struggle enabled our
Movement to keep on moving while sustaining the wounds inflicted upon
peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, Selma, the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago and the tear gas routing of the Poor People’s
Encampment in Washington, D.C.

“If one participated in any of these demonstrations or was merely
aware that such activity was going on in one’s city, one knew as
Martin [Luther King] said so eloquently in his last speech.
“Something is happening in our world. The people everywhere are
demanding freedom. Whether in Johannesburg, South Africa, New York
City or Memphis, Tennessee…”

 

The combination of elements this entails, drawing upon numerous
traditions, the self-activity of countless communities, hinged around
programs that were concrete – ending segregation, protecting voting
rights, ending the Vietnam War and aspirational – though as
inexpressible as the hope contained in spirituals that grew out of the
lives of the enslaved.  It was the combination which proved
transformative. This doesn’t mean racism lost its grip on millions
of people, or that militarism was banished from our culture. Far from
it. But it did mean that both were marginalized within the public
sphere and were forced to speak in ever more coded language. Whereas
the first civil rights demonstrations and the first anti-Vietnam war
protests were often confronted by even larger crowds of right-wing
counter protests, those eventually gave way. Repression had to be
carried out ever more exclusively through police power and those who
do the violent, disruptive work of reaction in the shadows.

“Alternative power” meant reaching far beyond the sphere of
supporters and opening eyes to countless people to challenge their
prior ways of thinking. Common sense that accepts what is as
unchangeable had for millions of individuals given way to critical
thinking that saw the possibility of a just world, reflecting how the
ideas of those seeking to transform our country’s politics had
gained hegemony.

O’Dell was writing in the late 1970s, when the Movement became
narrow through either a self-limiting pragmatism or by a retreat into
revolutionary rhetoric – each a pathway to ineffectiveness and
isolation. A serious attempt to overcome that weakness by building an
organizational framework for the broad expanse of activism and by
directly engaging in electoral action, was thereafter developed by the
Rainbow around Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential election
campaigns. This too was rooted in a look back and forward, creating a
unity in diversity, addressing politics but also human hearts framed
by a worldview embedded in US history. Sheila Collins, an activist
within and chronicler of the Rainbow, explained
[[link removed]]:

“The Constitution itself is a product of heroic struggle against
hereditary privilege and imperialism. As such, it incorporates the
most revolutionary notions known to humankind: the principle of the
equality and dignity of all human beings and their inalienable right
to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”… Yet the
contradiction at the heart of U.S. history is that to guard their own
privilege the Founding Fathers who enshrined this principle were not
prepared to apply it to everyone. Thus they read out of the notion of
humanity everyone who was not a white property-owning male.

“Such is the genius of the Constitution, however, that the ideal
remained to be striven for and the subsequent history of social
struggle and constitutional reform has been the struggle of successive
groups of the locked-out to apply that ideal to the vast majority…

“What the Rainbow Coalition platform suggests is that that principle
[inalienable rights] must now become universal…compromises were
always a violation of the original norm.”

 

This concept of “the original norm” has deep roots in rebellions
throughout history, as expressed in spiritual and secular form.
Dissenting Christianity, the Black church, traditional Native beliefs,
and other religious lineages that reject institutionalization have
consistently expressed the oneness of humanity in opposition to
hierarchies that take bread away from those who toil, impose wars on
those who live in peace, and rationalize power from above while
denying “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to those they
wish to subjugate. Radical enlightenment, with deep roots in a secular
materialism, rejected “natural” hierarchies and notions of a
personal God in favor of a naturalism that asserted the connection of
all living beings. Separately or combined, these formed the backdrop
to how colonial revolutionaries and slave rebellions sought to
understand and change the world – providing the language within
which popular radicalism has consistently expressed itself.

At the same time, such influences consistently face pushback. The
capitalist system recreates divides between people, reinforcing
prejudices and fears of equally long lineages; reflected in the
intractability of instituional racism and patriarchy. That is overlaid
on top of structural pressures that tend to always seek to lower
wages, increase hours, and restrict the rights people use to address
their needs. The heyday of the radicalism of CIO unions like FE, the
NMU, UPWA, of the rank-and-file rebellion and wave of bottom-up
organizing in the 1960s-1970s were relatively brief.

Similarly, connections the Rainbow and prior movements began to build
came undone. The neoliberal consensus, alongside a sharp partisan
divide that became sharper after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992,
seemed to leave little room for independent working-class movements or
politics. The legacy of such initiatives survives in numerous forms,
but out of the disappointment of defeat, there also came a revival of
narrow, parochial

 

PRESENT PAST, PRESENT FUTURE

Where does all this leave us in our time?

Millions took part in the November 2022 elections, providing a mixed
result. The forces of democratic humanism made some gains, yet were
unable to turn the tide.  Reaction fell short of its goals but
retained enormous strength  – the fascist danger is with us still.
What would a politics look like that could overcome this threat?

Voting rights is a way to begin. This serves an obvious purpose for
the legal basis by which a minority, such as Trump supporters, can
take power is by disenfranchising their opponents. Historically, the
struggle for universal suffrage has been long and bitter, the path
toward it becoming truly universal only emerging with passage of the
Voting Rights Act in 1965. Claims that the 2020 presidential election
was stolen touch on an unstated argument: votes are illegitimate when
cast by immigrants or Black Americans in numbers that make a
difference to the outcome. Fundamentally, the right to vote is a core
right of citizenship, a marker of equality that challenges the
inequality structured in capitalist society and our political system
as it has evolved.

Not incidentally, voting rights has become a particularly salient
political dividing line. On one side, a minority is increasingly
forced to drop the pretense of commitment to majority rule. On the
other side, a contradictory and heterogenous majority seeks to protect
and expand the vote, either to better defend the existing system,
secure incremental changes within it, or radically transform our
political and economic structures.

The challenge is to develop a politics that strives to maintain mutual
support within the wide range of shared and divergent interests,
without losing sight of the need to use the vote as a step to build a
politics that mobilizes those core communities inclined toward an
egalitarian social justice perspective, reaches those millions who
don’t vote or vote on an ad hoc basis, and connects with some of
those who have been captured by reaction. Turning pro-democratic
engagement into a positive force organizing around needed alternative
public policies is central to anti-fascist engagement.

Weimar provides a clear example of what happens when election results
fail to translate into measures that respond to social need. Social
Democratic policy became paralyzed after 1928 in the face of a dire
political and economic crisis. Wholly dependent on parliamentary
action, the SPD was without direction once parliament became
dysfunctional, defending the shell of a state system without content.
Trade unions, in turn, became ever more parochial, distancing
themselves from the SPD.  They eventually attempted an accommodation
with the Nazis, reinforcing rather than overcoming weakness.
Communists sought to combine mobilization on issues with legislative
action, but without a strategy to coalesce with other political
actors. Acting without allies, they were unable to break out of a
left-wing cul-de-sac. And independent socialist/democratic forces had
neither a base nor a political vehicle, hence their sharp critiques of
the rising danger of fascism and calls for unity failed to translate
into meaningful public support. Whereas sharp legislative battles took
place through the mid-1920s, by 1930 the government was run by
executive decree and parliamentary debate had become largely pro
forma.

Undermining legislative institutions was in the Nazis’ interest. It
didn’t matter that they were responsible, what mattered was the
image of failure by elected leaders which gave credence to demands for
a strong hand. This has its analogue in Republican policy since
Obama’s election, for their goal has been to block not pass
legislation, an orientation on full display during Trump’s
presidency and continuing into our present.

Therefore, using elections and elective office is crucial if we are to
defend existing democratic rights and freedoms, as Bernie Sanders’s
2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns demonstrated, as he gave voice to
millions seeking an egalitarian social justice answer to the misrule
of the “1%.”.  The growing bloc of genuinely progressive and
socialist elected representatives in Congress has increased that
visibility. Although small in and of itself, as part of the larger
House Progressive Caucus or associated with organizations such as
Working Families Party, Our Revolution, National People’s Action,
DSA and others, they have avoided the dangers of isolation while being
strengthened by the simultaneous election of similarly inclined
legislators to state and municipal offices. This combination provides
a basis for defending the vote not as an abstract right, but as a
right that can be used practically.

But the limitations on that possibility are also real.
Corporate/Pentagon dominance within the Democratic Party continues,
just as developers, business associations, big money and “law and
order” interests maintain disproportionate power in local government
irrespective of the party in office. Moreover, every political
initiative from the Democratic side runs into the gauntlet of
Republican obstruction backed by their corporate benefactors and by
millions of conservative voters. Our capacity to use elected office to
enact egalitarian reforms is limited by undemocratic structures within
our constitutional framework, and by the imbalance of power between
concentrated wealth and working people.

Thus, critically important as elections and legislative action are, by
themselves they are incapable of overcoming entrenched power. The
reason is not because of the stance of one or another legislator.
Rather, it lies with the relative weakness of popular movements
organizing for more fundamental change. Here we return to Bloch and
the recognition that we can best defend existing democratic rights and
freedoms by organizing to extend them, which is to say organizing at
workplaces, in communities, and around defined issues outside the
framework of elections, which creates different alliances than those
that exist in partisan politics.

When people act on their own behalf, be it to defend abortion rights,
stop mass deportations, end mass incarceration, support public
education, protect Social Security, establish health care as a right,
protect homeowners from banks and tenants from landlords, they act on
the basis of understood shared needs apart from political
identification. Whether the demand is for student debt relief, child
tax credits, affordable housing, or a living wage, every initiative
that makes a difference in daily life creates the space for
legislation to pass, which in turn can provide impetus for encouraging
greater public engagement to expand the realm of justice, opening
people to rethink what had previously been accepted.

The Black Lives Matters protests that followed the police murder of
George Floyd demonstrated that process. While specifically addressing
the racism that denies fundamental human rights to African Americans,
the mass demonstrations became a generalized protest against all forms
of oppression in the United States, against Trump and what he
represents. Flowing out of a spontaneous upsurge (without forgetting
decades of community organizing that set the stage) was a
reaffirmation of the truism that fighting for the particular needs of
one segment of working people is a necessity for fighting for the
needs and rights of all – the specific and general are not opposed
to each other but are mutually dependent.

That upsurge was decidedly non-electoral, which is what gave it its
breadth. At the same time, it limited the movement’s effectiveness
as, without legislation, it has proved impossible to enact public
policy to implement demands for police accountability, let alone the
more far-reaching goals of those who took to the streets. And in the
space between demonstrators’ exhaustion and political stalemates,
police advocates with the aid of established power regained much of
the initiative.

Understanding that need doesn’t argue for prioritizing one mode of
organizing over another, let alone counterposing them (i.e. fearing a
given demand might lose votes for a progressive candidate or,
alternatively, fearing inevitable legislative compromises will
undermine militancy). Rather, it entails recognizing that organizing
to get out the vote, running campaigns to defeat right-wingers and
elect the most progressive candidate possible, and working with those
in office to push an agenda that focuses on human needs – together
with building unions, neighborhood associations, organizing street
protests, public actions, civil disobedience, community forums, town
halls around concerns that arise out of felt need – is the only way
to protect and expand democratic rights. Even if these are not
coordinated, it is only through the flowing together of multiple
streams of engagement that the kind of alternative power generated by
“the Movement,” as O’Dell described it, can be developed.

 

CHALLENGING FASCISM AT ITS CORE

Corporate power remains powerful, lines in the sand are not easily
crossed, and neo-fascist movements serve as a counter to union
strength within our multiracial, multiethnic working-class, composed
of people with different sexual identities, different cultures,
different ways of seeing and living. Desire for change, coupled with
frustration at the lack of change, leads many to listen to the siren
song of demagogues.

It is a conjuncture which returns us to the relevance of Bloch’s
concepts of synchronous and non-synchronous contradictions, of
concrete utopia, to developing an anti-fascist political strategy that
speaks to the moment as part of a politics of transformation.

When looking at the political strategies above, most of the basic
economic, political, and social issues addressed grew from
contradictions of our time. These flow from the development of
capitalism, which since the post-World War II era has developed in a
way that has made precarity a way of life for society at large,
causing misery and insecurity without resolving the system’s basic
contradictions. It is that reality that has led to social explosions
across the world in recent decades, including the United States, and
has created the possibility of foundational change that would enable
society to address basic human needs as a central question.

But those nonsynchronous contradictions remain and show up more
forcefully in the domain where precarity expresses itself as an
existential problem: war and climate change. War was the precondition
for fascism’s mass base in Germany and Italy, it lays the mass base
for reaction in the United States. The arms industry embodies
capitalism’s dependence on destruction, while the growth of the
military is held up as a model of authoritarian efficiency contrary to
democratic norms. Many veterans and those still in the military can
see how it uses and abuses people and that its self-perpetuating myths
are just that. But many – perhaps like that guy at the laundromat
— found a purpose there that civilian life doesn’t offer and so
clings to its myths. More insidious is how this suffuses our culture,
from film to football to countless localized commemorations, military
service has become a powerful cultural force distorting our history
and place in the world.

Once the United States is upheld as a global force capable of
upholding human rights (normalizing our treatment of Korea, Vietnam,
Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan) it becomes easy to accept the notion
that those whom we “oppose” are irrational, intrinsically evil, an
“Other” unlike us. This reinforces the image of our society as a
model of rectitude and the narrow nationalism that makes the Pentagon
budget sacrosanct. It is also the logic behind the “ourselves
alone” nationalism of Trump – itself an outgrowth of right-wing
nationalism of long lineage. Conflicts between these two are real, and
function within the dividing line over our country’s political
direction, yet also reflect wide commonalities. That complicates the
movement for peace, but does not limit its necessity. The descending
line from a militarized society to a militarized border to a
militarized police force to militarized vigilantes is a bumpy one, but
it could be seen on January 6th – while the ease of othering people
abroad stems from and reinforces the othering of racism. The broad
basis of neo-fascist outlooks identifies the decline we see around us
with decline in “our” power – and makes it imperative to counter
the entire world view behind militarized nationalism.

Something similar is at play when it comes to climate change. Oil,
coal, and other corporations in extractive industries are major
funders of the extreme right wing. Through advertisements and public
relations, they are able to present themselves as exemplars of the
spirit of hard work, and the economic progress that once seemed to
have characterized the United States which has now vanished.
Overcoming environmental destruction means breaking through a
different kind of barrier – the barrier between jobs and a way of
life on one side and a commitment to our future and a different way of
life on the other. As we have seen time and again, environmental
justice is one of the sharpest dividing lines within the working
class, and is one in which different conceptions of freedom and
democracy come into play. What we need is a reframing of the issue.
Not“reframing” as a clever tool to manipulate people, but as a
process which emphasizes that unacceptable choices can be rejected –
that people have the ability to think and act to pose alternative
choices and alternative solutions.

Essayist and poet Maggie Nelson puts her finger
[[link removed]] on the nature of the
issue which cannot be resolved simply by talking about global warming
or job creation:

“The divide between those who want to drill, baby, drill and those
who want urgent action on climate, often gets posed as a conflict
between those who want freedom…and those who value obligation…The
problem with this binary is that it risks reducing “obligation” to
moral hectoring and “freedom” to a cheap, self-serving hedonism.
Neither helps us seize the moment to shed some of freedom’s more
exhausted – and toxic – tropes and myths, or to experiment with
its next iterations. We could imagine, for example, restraint as a
choice, as in the restraint needed not to extract the 80 percent of
the fossil fuel underground, in order to maintain the conditions of
possibility for on-going human life.”

 

What matters here is getting past sterile divides that lead to
inaction and promote paralysis, and instead reach to another way of
thinking and acting. After all, thinking of “restraint as choice,”
means to exercise control over choice – which is ultimately where
freedom and democracy intersect rather than collide. And it provides a
way to understand how to break down that opposition by engaging those
parts of the workforce and those communities most impacted and most
threatened by loss as the world they have known comes undone. People
need to see a tangible path forward in a world they are helping to
create, a future they are part of, if they are to engage with the
future that could be.

The same goes for peace. War has come to appear as being in the
natural order of things. Decisions as to when, why, and to what
purpose are taken outside the realm of popular discussion and
consideration. At the same time, value is ascribed to the profession
of war that few other professions hold (especially, but not only, for
those whose opportunities are otherwise limited). Proving oneself in
the military, like a job on an oil rig, creates the illusion of
meaning, of value in work that elsewhere is hard to find. But then,
when service is over, when a job disappears, there is too little left
around to choose from. With economic well-being so dependent on forces
of destruction, social conditions seem ordained from above, appearing
as if by magic. Thus, the appeal of conspiracy theories fixated on the
machinations of a “deep state” and the need for a “strong man”
with an iron will who will fix what needs fixing by conjuring up
enemies – much as peasants of old turned on “witches” and
outsiders, as forces that can be attacked instead of those who
actually made their lives miserable.

Yet there is a kernel of truth here – our society _is _undemocratic
in many ways. Decisions that make us go to war or to channel job
growth toward destructive ends are made not in the public sphere, but
reflect political decisions that flow from the capitalist system as it
exists at present. To challenge the false path of thinking that gets
lost in the world as it never was, requires – as Bloch noted –
challenging the economic ignorance that explains the rational basis
behind the irrationality of our system. It also means reasserting
popular forms of mobilization and organization that assert democratic
power against undemocratic structures, in both cases shifting the
focus away from personalities to the basic contradiction between
social means of production and the private appropriation of what is
produced. Recreating such democratic forms allows space to reassert
the individuality and sense of self-worth so many are seeking, but
embedded in a broader community together with other working people.

Looked at that way, developments that created the mass base for
authoritarian reaction can be turned on their head. These developments
also create the basis for wider forms of solidarity that open up
possibilities for workers’ control and participatory forms of
democracy that were more difficult to achieve in the past. The
combination allows a way to build economic conversion from the ground
up, within extractive industries, amongst workers in arms production,
in which those who do the work and those who live where the work is
done can be authors of new forms of production capable of addressing
those existential social needs. To the extent the labor movement,
socialists, and progressives embrace such a conception, is the extent
to which we can also provide a grounding for liberation embodied in
the notion of an eco-socialist Green New Deal (and makes support for
legislation proposed by Rep. Alesandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed
Markey of critical importance). If working people now set against each
other can be organized to  work for mutually supportive ends, we can
embark upon the liberatory future embedded within but blocked by
current oppressions.

None of this will necessarily reach those caught in the grip of
reaction. Millions of people who are alienated from the present
respond to similar concerns of marginalization, lack of rights, a
world spinning out of control – not by reaching for forms of mutual
support embodied by solidarity, but rather with a violence that that
seeks to return to an imagined past that blocks the just world that
could be. People harboring those views cannot be ignored. That
unemployed war veteran at the laundromat has every reason to be
aggrieved – any anti-fascist movement has to take such grievances
seriously or we will be consumed by them. People who feel out of place
in the present but see nothing that speaks to them as a future, have
needs too. Addressing those needs doesn’t mean compromising the
program outlined above. Rather, it means adding another element that
will strengthen politics that are genuinely transformative.

Therein lies the insight of Bloch’s concept of synchronous and
nonsynchronous contradictions. It is the understanding that while we
are all alive at the same moment, we are not all living in the same
“Now” – so both the rational and irrational impulses that
comprise popular culture need to be addressed. The line between the
two is captured in a particular definition of Modernism
[[link removed]]
set out by Marshall Berman, informed by the political and cultural
turmoil that defined the years when the 1960s bled into the 1970s:

“[Modernism] is to experience personal and social life as a
maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual
disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and
contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid
melts into air.  To be a modernist is to make oneself somewhat at
home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within
its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom,
of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.”

 

This definition provides a way to politically address the abyss
threatening us, by noting that liberation requires freedom and
individual autonomy – demands that have taken on a reactionary hue
but become revolutionary when connected to demands for democracy and
equality.

Those swept up in the CIO organizing wave or the civil rights and
anti-war movements acted upon not only a social critique, but a
self-critique as well. Millions of people who were touched by the
events called into question how they conducted their lives – and in
so doing redefined values. Jimmy Porter, a Black packing house worker
active in the UPWA, encapsulated the contrast between the myth of
“rugged individualism” and individual meaning gained through
collective action using farming as a metaphor: “If you stay on your
side of the fence and respect mine, we can coexist,” he reflected.
If you want to borrow my axe and I borrow your shovel, we don’t have
to dig into each other, but we can dig enough space to grow.”

Far from the world of factory labor and industrial unionism, Maggie
Nelson makes an analogous point about freedom when she argues that
“Insistence on our interdependence or entanglement offers only a
description of our situation; it does not indicate how we are to live
it. The question is not whether we are enmeshed, but how we negotiate,
suffer and dance with that enmeshment.”

If we return for a last time to the laundromat, there can be little
doubt that a man who saw war would have his resentment boil over at
having to wash his toddler’s clothes while his wife brings home a
paycheck because he is unable to find a job. It is a misdirected
response, reflecting the likelihood that he is alienated from himself
– thus he is unable to situate himself in the world as it is,
preventing action that would make finding that union job easier. What
all too many fail to see is a connection British socialist feminist
Sheila Rowbotham [[link removed]]
identified when she posited that “the moment within each of our
daily lives wherein ‘real life inequities’ and desires are
experienced” is the moment that can root radical social change
within society as it exists.

It is the discovery of that “room to grow,” on how we negotiate
our “enmeshment” that lays the basis for a sense of new beginnings
that has the potential widening the scope and reach of the push for
social justice and socialist radicalism in our time. Coalitions, the
building of alliances, the need to work across class lines to defend
rights under threat, begins with building that more organic unity
amongst working people that strives to find the common core of mutual
interest around the notion of shared needs and desires. This doesn’t
contradict the reality of deep divides among people, nor does it
contradict the necessity of making compromises. What it does do is
create a foundation so that necessary compromises do not undermine the
solidarity without which working people are powerless. This was the
legacy of the CIO, the Civil Rights movement, and the Rainbow, today
perhaps best reflected in the Poor People’s Campaign co-chaired by
Bishop William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis and their call for a
Third Reconstruction (now embodied in legislation proposed in Congress
by Reps.. Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee).

By recognizing indeterminacy, by recognizing that we need to see
beneath the surface, with yearnings that go beyond program and policy,
we can stimulate a different way of seeing and thinking – not being
exhortatory, but rather questioning. An alternative power can only
take place where an alternative way of seeing takes hold, where
individual hopes and desires are bound up with political convictions
rooted in solidarity with others. Therein lies the value of the
concept behind “Abolition Democracy,” put forth by by Angela Davis
and Mumia Abu-Jamal as a positive assertion of our rights as human
beings to live in freedom and equality by “abolishing” domestic
racism, state violence and our global imperial project, posing an
alternative to negative liberal and conservative notions of freedom
rooted in an unjust society.

Success depends on building linkages between centers of activism
rooted in different communities within our heterogeneous
working-class, in a form that allows space for difference, allows for
debate, multiple forms of cultural expression, and critical thinking.
A concrete politics flowing from that vision creates connections, not
divisions. This is what was lacking in the anti-fascist movement as
Weimar went into terminal decline. It is what we need all the more in
today’s fraught times.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS

We are still looking forward to a future of drinking wine from
beautiful glasses. The search for beauty in life is near the center of
social transformation, though rarely addressed as such. We are in
self-exile, which results from the way capitalist society alienates us
from the products of our labor, from ourselves. This alienation can
lead to the destructive and self-destructive violence at the core of
fascist rule, at the heart of a disintegrating society such as we are
facing today.

Thus we are engaged in a search for a return to a “Homeland” that
has never existed, a concept Bloch uses to conclude his three-volume
_Principle of Hope_
[[link removed]] as follows:

“… the root of history is the working, creating human being who
reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself
and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in
real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into
the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.

_Heimat _(the German word for“homeland”) is a word that conjures
images of Nazi violence. But it is not the only meaning it can have.
For all his erudition, Bloch remained in touch with the working-class
movement throughout his life. One way of unearthing other meanings of
the word is to recall the final verse of _Die Moorsoldaten_
[[link removed]] (“Peat Bog
Soldiers”), a song written and sung by inmates of the Börgermoor
Concentration Camp in Germany’s Ruhr valley, one of the camps where
the initial wave of political prisoners were sent in mid-1933:

“But for us there is no complaining,

Winter will in time be past:

One day we shall cry rejoicing,

‘Homeland dear, you’re mine at last.’”

 

My mother, still a child, saw three of her uncles and her grandfather
– all coal miners, all Communists – arrested shortly after the
Reichstag fire in 1933. They were imprisoned at Börgermoor, and I can
imagine them singing while laboring under guard. After all, my Tante
Sophie’s husband was a drummer in the red miners’ chorus that led
their parades. He survived imprisonment by less than a week, beaten
badly, placed in a cell built too small to stand, too narrow to sit
after having misdirected his interrogators searching for buried arms.
Perhaps a measure of a life cut short is that I would visit Sophie
more than 50 years later, a beer, sausage and potatoes in front of me
within minutes of my always unexpected arrival. My mother’s favorite
uncle, Fritz, who was less politically engaged than the others,
enjoyed playing his guitar, flirting with young women, and taking his
bike for long rides in the countryside. He was a hippie before his
time, she would say. He was forced into exile after his imprisonment
and wound up working as a cook with other German anti-fascist refugees
for British troops fighting in Italy. Fritz was killed in a Luftwaffe
bombing raid late in the war. According to one of his comrades who
spoke to my mother’s grandmother after the war, the stray dog that
was his companion in exile refused to leave Fritz’s grave when the
British troops moved on.

Her oldest uncle, Ernst, was most engaged with the KPD. He escaped to
France, where he likely contacted Franz Dahlem, and in 1937 joined the
Thälmann Battalion
[[link removed]] to fight
fascism in defense of the Spanish Republic. He was among the 3,000
German anti-fascists (of nearly 5,000 total volunteers) killed in
battle. Unlike most, we have an account of his final hours: “Company
commander Ernst Wömper and Hermann Drumm, both of the Saar
region…fought their way into an enemy trench and silenced a fascist
machine-gun with hand grenades. The enemy fled in panic, but the two
friends were killed during the pursuit.”

During the years of the German Democratic Republic, whenever in East
Berlin my mother would look at Ernst’s name inscribed on a wall
honoring those who fell in Spain. His son, my mother’s best friend
as a child, was later himself executed for an act of resistance during
World War II. I once met Ernst’s grandchild – the same age as
myself – from his surviving son when we were each about 12 years old
at a family gathering in Westphalia
[[link removed]].

It was in Spain that the Peat Bog soldiers became world renowned, sung
by Ernst Busch (shipyard worker, actor/singer, Brecht collaborator,
and Spanish volunteer), as well as by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and
countless others. “Homeland dear, you are mine at last,” is a cry
of defiance by those exiled abroad, exiled by imprisonment, those who
feel exiled in the land of their birth. Our struggle, political
programs, organizations, rest on that conviction: we should not be
strangers in our own land. It is a sensibility, however expressed,
that enables people to press forward as we seek to make the world a
place worthy of all who live within it – in confrontation with
fascists for whom “homeland” means license to displace, exploit,
enslave.

Which brings me to my mother’s grandfather. Active in the illegal
KPD, he was rearrested in 1944, imprisoned first at Sachsenhausen then
at Buchenwald, where he was killed on the eve of Germany’s defeat.
His final crime was aiding fellow workers from occupied countries who
were conscripted as slave laborers to work in the mines. A
_Stolperstein _(memorial stone) was placed in front of the home in
Ahlen where my mother was raised, where they all once lived (and at
which I have many fond memories from my own frequent visits through
the years). Those uncles and my mother’s father – blacklisted and
forced to flee, along with my Oma, for revolutionary activity before
the Nazis assumed power – built that house in the early 1920s when
hope for the personal lives each was trying to create, and hope for a
socialist Germany they were striving to bring into being, was still
alive. Such is the story not only of my family, but of a generation.

What can we learn from their sacrifice? The strength of the workers’
movement for socialism lay in the depth of understanding by those
involved, who acted on their own individual awareness in swiftly
changing political times when isolated, and yet saw themselves as part
of a wider collective. What sustained them was a commitment to
justice, not for some working people but for all, the conviction that
the enemy of progress was not other workers but a system that values
things over people. And the weakness? Obviously, there were failures
of program and alliances that afflicted all wings of the labor and
socialist movement. Disunity undermined the possibility of social
transformation at every turn. But behind that lies a deeper cause: the
inability to sustain the broad aspirations for a society of peace,
democracy, and justice that animated the revolution in 1918. Absent an
overarching popular vision of what could be won, working-class unity
could not be built and reaction found the space to grow.

Therein lies the point Bloch was trying to make when he published
_Heritage of Our Times_
[[link removed]]
in 1935, writing:

“If we want to understand and overcome the remedies that are dished
out precisely against genuine revolution to a bourgeois citizen
becoming impoverished, then we must go – diabolically – into the
bourgeois citizen’s land, or rather on to his ship. He has only one
ship left; for it is an age of transition. May this book play its part
in determining the longitude and latitude of the final voyage, so that
it is really a final voyage.”

 

Fascism was defeated but capitalism remained, and with it the threat
of its revival as we see so clearly today. Bloch did as well. In a
postscript written when the book was republished in 1962, he concluded
with the following:

“The Golden Twenties”: the Nazi horror germinated in them, and no
light fell down below here … Hollow space with sparks, this will
probably remain our condition for a long time, but a hollow space
which allows us to walk undisguised, and with sparks which
increasingly model a figure of direction. The paths in the midst of
collapse are layable, right through the middle.”

 

We can see these sparks today. Perhaps if we follow the path they
light we can prevent the fascist threat before us from coming into
being, lay the foundation of a world without exploitation of people or
the environment, take pleasure drinking wine from beautiful glasses
available to all.

 

_[KURT STAND_ joined DSA in 1983 and been part of the labor movement
from the mid-1970s. In 1997, he was arrested and served 15 years in
prison on charges of having committed espionage for the German
Democratic Republic, charges he unsuccessfully contested at trial and
upon appeal. Currently he works at a bookstore, is active in Prince
George’s County DSA, participates in criminal justice
reform/re-entry initiatives, serves as a Portside
[[link removed]]
moderator and works with the Metropolitan Washington AFL-CIO Labor
Council’s Bread & Roses program.]

_ _

·       _Editing corrections and updates made by the author_

* Ernst Bloch
[[link removed]]
* Germany
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* Nazi Germany
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* Nazis
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* Anti-Nazis
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* German anti-fascists
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* socialism
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* Trade Unions
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* CIO
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* Rainbow Coalition
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* Jack O'Dell
[[link removed]]
* left political strategy
[[link removed]]
* coalition politics
[[link removed]]
* KPD
[[link removed]]
* German Communist Party
[[link removed]]
* GDR
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
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