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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RADIOACTIVE RADICALS!  
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Paul Buhle
July 6, 2024
Portside
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_ Radioactive Radicals is a vivid, galvanizing portrait of two young
radicals thrust into the whirlwind of revolutionary working-class
politics from the 1960s to the present. Here is a whopper of a novel
by any estimation. _

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I am scratching my head trying to think of another US leftwing
novel—not a trilogy—of this length. And failing.

But length is one of the least important things about this intriguing
book.

I beg the indulgence of the reader for a little patience in my
exploration of some near-archeological history or political lineage,
both of this work and of its author. Once explained, it helps a lot.

Way back when, that is near the end of the 1920s, the CPUSA underwent
a series of splits (more like expulsions). The consequences
permanently shaped the party’s opposition from the Left. Most
prominent among the expellees, the followers of Leon Trotsky attempted
furiously to assemble a revolutionary alternative…and never got much
beyond several hundreds of members in any of their assorted factions.
Vigorous, more lower middle class than working class and
disproportionately Jewish, they developed a large handful of vigorous
Marxist intellectuals.

Suffice it to say that this particular tribe of faithful has continued
on, ever opposed to capitalism and its opposite number (Russia, China,
etc.) but faithful to working class hopes. In a variety of labor
reform movements, they have played notable roles and still do. Not to
mention the very large handful of good writers, fine scholars, and so
on. Even as parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, they have
often—not always!—been patient and helpful toward toward younger
generations of revolutionaries.

_Radioactive RadIcals_ has one important precursor _novel_ in this
tradition: _Standing Fast_. Its author, Harvey Swados, was in the
group at its 1940s apex, and made himself notable during the 1950s by
writing about working class alienation. It was a popular topic, as
interest in Marx, during these years, tended to lose out to Freud (not
yet discredited by then-future social movements and thinkers). Swados
had one magnificent fictional worker-protagonist, novel after novel,
based upon the very real-life Stan Weir—who happens to have been a
close friend of the reviewer and sometime editorial collaborator. 

Radioactive Radicals [[link removed]]
By Dan La Botz
Booklocker; 738 pages
Paperback:  $29.99; E-book:  $4.99
May 30, 2024
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1958892416
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1958892411

 
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_Radioactive Radicals_—I am hoping the author will forgive me—has
a principal lead character, Wes, who seems a lot like that very
fictionalized and very real Weir. La Botz did not personally know Weir
beyond the legend. He has nevertheless caught the persona of
activities in political circles, factory work and  various shipping
trades, teaching in Labor Studies at the University of Illinois (in my
hometown) to publishing a  handful of books at his own little press
in San Pedro, CA. Weir’s live updated blends into the author’s own
experiences, and for good reasons. After his teen years mostly in
imperial Beach,  CA, La Botz got a degree of San Diego State, where
he was able to study with Fredrick Jameson and audit some classes with
Herbert Marcuse. Lucky fellow!

He earned a PhD at the U. of Cincinnati  on war resisters in the
First World War, some of them escaping to Mexico and active in that
revolution. La Botz joined “IS,” the International Socialists, in
1969 and seems to have been with them, body or at least spirit, more
or less ever since. Like so many others, he spent decades determinedly
“industrializing,” a nice word for the dedicated young people who
since the early 1920s have been leaving behind the job prospects
created by their college degrees to “make the revolution.” Thus he
joined a veritable Children’s Crusade (the phrase taken from an
earlier generation of Russian idealists) into the 1970s blue collar
world. Except that he was already there.

Suffice it to say that La Botz’s activity has crisscrossed a score
of movements, including Teamsters for Democracy, most notable and
sometimes successful in its struggle against the bureaucracy as much
as  against the employers. His  long record of blue collar jobs
gave him a lot of material for a novel.

He has perhaps for that reason created  a book longer than,
probably, it needs to be. There are so many details of work, personal
life, romance, sex, friendship, so many stories of movements rising
and falling, people rising and falling, that it can, at times, become
a bit much. So, of course, is life itself. The potential reader is
advised to take on a chunk at a time, something easier perhaps for the
leftwing reader a century ago, before Smartphones and similar
distractions.  Or: persist and you may enjoy it more.

The stories are rich and mostly very convincing. I say this partly
because so many names are familiar to me: I knew the named
personalities of the 1960s Chicago new left at a distance and
sometimes up close. His take on, say, Jesse Lemisch, Paul Booth, Bob
Ross, Dick Flacks and other notables in and around the Movement and
early SDS, is real-to-life and convincing. My personal knowledge of
the novel’s characters pretty much ends there—except for Stan
Weir, who is in a sense always present, a shadow figure of the rank
and filer. 

“Wes” becomes the particular breed of Trotskyist described above,
via the Young Peoples Socialist League, a Socialist Party offshoot
going back to the 1920s. By the time he joins, in the middle 1960s, as
a college student from Iowa, it has one last heroic moment before a
split finds the official franchise in the hands of the labor
bureaucracy, and the membership notables around a now-forgotten Social
Democrats USA en route to becoming neo-conservative savants with
intelligence agency connections.

Happily, the other factions were better and besides, he is long gone
when the worst of the rightward drift happens. After political
adventures and youthful romance/sex, Wes leaves behind Chicago, SDS
(crashing in 1969), YPSL and a cab driving job (having been thrown out
of the University of Chicago) to go on the road. And it’s almost
pages 150 already!

Now we turn to another protagonist, Dirk, a Chicagoan by birth. Here
we find a real socialist family heritage, including a Dutch-American
socialist grandfather, north of Chicago and presumably close to
Holland, Michigan, once the home of a little ethnic socialist movement
in the Dutch language. Dirk himself grows up near Hyde Park, in the
middle class section of Chicago next to the heart of the black ghetto.
He takes off for California, with the family, where life as a teen
eventually finds him in a community college, an aspiring poet and
fervent reader of literature. And again: a new left activist. And
then, after a youthful marriage, back to Chicago.

Some of the encounters with the Left and Famous do not come off. He
strikes up a relationship, for instance, with the
to-become-very-famous Shulamith Firestone, a writer with great
flare—her _Dialectic of Sex_ was a best-seller— but little
intellectual depth.He takes classes with Bruno Bettelheim, a famed
German exile and psychological theorist turning rightward as students
went into revolt. Neither is pursued far enough, however, to be
interesting. Nor is a lapse into the author’s personal reflections
about the passing decades quite helpful: we would wish, at least in
this point of a lengthy novel, to hear more. Or perhaps less.

Tales of romantic associations and breakups, sometimes marriage
breakups, strike a more vivid note and occupy many pages. Any Baby
Boomer activist will recall this as a real phenomenon of the 1970s in
particular. The Big Change, the big social transformation sweeping
away class society, obviously did not happen. Frustrations with a
disappointing personal or romantic life prompted more complications,
if sometimes usefully complicated, in the midst of vast cultural
changes including, of course, feminism and gay liberation. In brief, a
generation of activists was thrown back upon itself. The previous
generations of disappointed leftists self medicated with alcohol,
while we found marijuana or it found us. None of this was likely to
keep marriages or seemingly stable relationships together. Quite the
opposite.

The most convincing sections in the rest of this long, long novel
treat the teamsters and the author’s deep connections with teamster
reform movements. The Teamsters for Democracy of legend become the TfD
of the novelist’s own life, with fact and the author’s fiction
usefully meshed. The struggles of Trotskyists to act within TfD might
actually have been more extended, and are returned to later in the
novel, but the thread is tenuous.

We re-enter the world of Harvey Swados (updated), following the
Trotskyist movement or rather the people of movement through events in
Detroit and Chicago. After the air controllers’ failed strike in
1981, Dirk feels the drift of his life. The  great industrial
centers of the East and Midwest lost their industries, but the
protagonist, still under 40, doggedly finds things to do via activism
in the health sector,  new allies and a new romantic partner.

Dirk also notably becomes an activist in and around the United Farm
Workers. In one of the most engaging chapters, he finds a way to make
himself useful, and gains admiration for Cesar Chavez’s ability to
bring people together. In a mixture of Catholicism and Mexican or
Mexican-American nationalism, with a mystical touch, “La Causa”
gains great national attention and swells. But a limit is reached. Our
protagonist sees up close that the famous Boycott, conducted
nation-wide, sometimes actually supplants the always difficult
unionization of farmworkers. In the end, union dependence upon
political connections with California Democrats and LBJ’s poverty
projects comes to epitomize the powerlessness of the workers
themselves. Chavez expels the Left and turns his inner circle into a
consciousness-raising cult of sorts. The union staggers downward and
the social movement around it disperses.

Dirk, cut adrift,  becomes a radical intellectual, and eventually a
professor.The remainder of the novel teases out the further lives of
these two hard-bitten lefties facing up to the reality that dramatic
change is no longer on the agenda. They do their best, through further
adventures of TDU in particular, to work for union reform and support
social movements up against ever-more-trying conditions. They also
have tumultuous personal lives, more than occasional regrets at not
settling into permanent relationships earlier, but unable or unwilling
to resist the lure of new lovers and the associated excitements.

By the end, we find ourselves grateful to the author for so much depth
in the lives of these very particular lives of American left wingers.
Are they so different from those  who passed through other
Trotskyist alternatives, or Maoism, or even the fragmenting but never
quite collapsing Communist Party? Not so much, according to this
reviewer, and that is not a bad thing. 

Are Wes and Dirk, or the activists around them, so different from
leftwingers of the 1960s who became instead radical social workers.
lawyers, scholars, even comic book creators, settling in early and
remaining with the tasks before them?  Yes, at least possibly,
because the author has created lives so chaotic and so closely related
to rumbles at the base as to be more interesting than many others
living lives on the Left. And then again, we are, as a generation, in
the same bucket of capitalist social decay together,  remembering
our younger selves and hoping to be of assistance to those who follow.

Get this book, dig in, spend the time and you will find settings and
people who seem so familiar, they will bring back chunks of the past,
usefully.

_[PAUL BUHLE remains engaged in bringing out non-fiction graphic
novels about radicals and radical history.]_
 

* 1960s
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* 1970s
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* Baby Boomers
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* radicals
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* Teamsters
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* Rank and File
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* Mafia
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* Left Politics
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* Trotskyism
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* Harvey Swados
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* left literature
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* Dan La Botz
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