Portside

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

 

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.]