Revolutionary
or something like it
It was probably in 1979 that my video production partner Jan joined a Marxist Leninist study group and I went with her to an initial meeting, half out of observational curiosity and half to decide if it was worth participating myself. Jan, still riding the emotional high of a successful drive to organize her fellow employees at the Yale Coop, which was the university’s big fancy bookstore, had been devouring the literature that circled around Marx and tangled with him — Frankfurt School, feminist critiques — but hadn’t taken on the source material, and she thought it was time. I’d had no exposure to political theory other than some Hannah Arendt in college. My view of how societies could organize themselves was that of an emerging anthropologist, layered over with speculative political fiction — The Dispossessed, The Female Man, Stand on Zanzibar — and lots of work that explored the intersection of art and technology —Raindance’s Guerrilla Television, Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, Douglas Davis’s Art and the Future, Ant Farm’s This is AutoAmerica. Maybe we were looking for a common base that would bridge our respective reading lists.
We drove up from our home in Derby CT and gathered in an apartment somewhere near the state capital, Hartford. Two friends of ours, Bobby and Lisa, were there and in fact might’ve been the ones who invited us. They had thrown themselves fully into the role of vanguard intellectuals embedded in the working class to hasten the socialist revolution. I think they were both Wesleyan grads, and I suspect their working class creds were pretty shallow; in retrospect, one could judge their decision to do the Maoist thing as condescending and naïve, but they seemed as sincere about it as anyone could be about anything.
The fact is, nobody knew what move to make next. As politically progressive people dragged their way through the 1970s, besieged by all the rotating disco balls and platform shoes, there was an undercurrent that carried discontents left over from the previous decade and that pointed toward conflicts to come. The country’s industrial centers were hollowing out, globalization and financialization were starting to reshape economies, Christian white racism was making a comeback, and Jimmy Carter kicked off the deregulation boom that Reagan later took up with relish. When workers went on strike, it was more to protect against losses than to fight for new gains, as their employers scrambled to merge and downsize their way to continued profitability.
The urge to blow it all up seemed to be in the air, perhaps even more than in the 60s, because the contradictions were sharpening. At least that’s how it felt around our kitchen table as we slugged down our 6-packs of Beck’s Beer — still only $3.99 at the supermarket up the road. Spurred by a gun-toting auto mechanic who took care of our two Saabs, Jan and I joined the NRA to get a discount on lessons in pistol-shooting and gun safety; that was one of the perks of membership. We fairly quickly dropped the idea of arming ourselves, but for a year the NRA’s magazine The American Rifleman arrived in our mailbox every month. We gleefully picked apart the semiotics of its advertisements, rife with symptoms of masculine anxiety.
Lisa, our revolutionary acquaintance, worked on an assembly line at the Pratt & Whitney jet engine factory in East Hartford and was active in the Machinists Union local there; I don't remember what Bobby did; he might’ve been in grad school. The four of us took a vacation together in Nova Scotia but I wouldn’t say we were close. I never quite understood what drove them, individually or as a pair. But there we were.
I also don’t remember exactly what was discussed at that early study group meeting I attended, but it was most likely the usual mishmosh of ideas held by people who stop reading Capital somewhere around the middle of Volume One. To the group, the validity of the underlying ideas wasn’t in question, and was not to be questioned; that was for dilettantes. Their goal was to grasp and then apply the work in all its world-historical importance. The convener also made it known that he was to be acknowledged as the leader, and not just because he’d mastered the lesser-known works of Mao and Lenin, which he probably hadn’t. He certainly fancied himself a political cadre, in the trenches; we were to think of ourselves as an underground cell with him as commander. The form of Marxist emotional flagellation known as “criticism/self-criticism” was to be a standard feature of the group. In the US in the 1970s that would often entail charges of revolutionary impurity based on disagreements about what the “primary contradiction” is: racism, classism or sexism. Everyone was trying to identify the primary contradiction, believing that whichever it was, it had to be dealt with first and then every other contradiction would resolve itself gradually as the whole capitalist system collapsed. That illusion was getting tougher in a world that was on the verge of recognizing intersectionality, and it was one of the internal dilemmas that helped blow the Left apart in the age of Reagan. Things were so much easier in 19th-century Europe!
At some point toward the end of this get-together, the leader solicited everyone’s commitment. The unspoken subtext was that someday the group might be called upon to do more than just discuss revolutionary classics; as Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
When it was my turn to profess the faith, it didn’t take much courage for me to say the meeting so far reminded me of a religious cult: unquestioning devotion to sacred texts assumed a priori to be correct, insistence on submitting to the discipline of a self-appointed male leader, emphasis on confessing personal flaws and errors of behavior that reveal lack of perfect alignment with the teachings as propounded by that leader, and violent discouragement of contrary opinions.
The others seemed caught off guard; I don’t recall how the meeting ended and I’ve expunged all memory of what they said to me in reply, but I’d certainly thrown a wet blanket over the thing. I hoped it would help them see that this group would accomplish little, and that it was not the political act they thought it was but rather a ritual of dominance and submission. At the same time I couldn’t help being inwardly self-congratulatory for possessing a perspective that accurately named their game when no one else wanted to admit what was obvious.
I think during the ride home Jan got mad at me, since she had a soft spot for revolutionary romanticism, but some time afterward she told me she agreed with what I’d said, and may have secretly done so at the time too. To her credit, Jan was more pragmatic than many radicals for whom perfectionism is a chronic disease, with factional infighting as the main symptom. They strive for the absolutely correct analysis of existing material conditions, believing that all analyses that compete with the true one will lead to the incorrect “line”, a deviationist line which will delay the revolution and is therefore a moral abomination. It’s a naive attempt to apply scientific method to a phenomenon — human behavior — that is resistant to theorizing and even less so to prediction. Starting as a search for truth, it quickly falls into dogmatism and magical thinking: if you have the right analysis, reality will bend itself to your beliefs sooner or later.
That group’s leader might’ve fancied himself a potential martyr of the revolution, going down in a blaze of gunfire and then being immortalized in a statue. He had that sort of grimness, and aped the style of Bob Avakian, who was then head of a splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party. Avakian was a fashion icon for white American radical men in the 70s. In public he often sported a necklace made of large-caliber rifle bullets draped carefully over his military jacket. He was a frequent guest of inflammatory late-night syndicated TV talk show hosts — Allen Berg, Joe Pyne — who were precursors of the right-wing media provocateurs who’d come later. Sometimes the interviews would degenerate from insults and red-baiting to fullblown screaming matches, with the host finally banishing Avakian from the set; he’d tromp offstage, his necklace of bullets clattering.
Avakian was still alive as of August 2022, when I ran into a follower of his handing out literature and gathering petition signatures at, of all places, the parking lot of the Los Angeles Convention Center. His revolutionary communist party had predictably degenerated into a cult of personality with a platform you’d struggle to make sense of.
Meanwhile, back at our study group, the leader’s pretensions were on display one day when for some reason he visited Jan and me at home. Maybe we’d invited him to watch some of the video we’d made of a recent strike at a factory in New Haven. First he tried to scope out the contours of our own radicalism, to see if we really deserved his attention and guidance. That left him a bit off-put: we were fans of Wilhelm Reich, the post-Freudian psychiatrist who’d been kicked out of the German Communist Party in the 1930s for insisting on the link between sexual repression and authoritarian politics. (Ouch!) Then he importuned us about the seriousness of his study-group project, pacing up and down in his gray coat as if he were auditioning for the role of Stalin in an amateur political pageant. He just wouldn’t sit still! While Jan parried him with various theoretical gambits, I watched with a mix of discomfort and annoyance. He was wearing heavy boots and we were starting to go shoeless in the house, so that bit of rudeness was one more reason for me to be pissed off. That must’ve been the last time I saw him. Exit stage left.
Jan stuck with the study group for a little longer but drifted away as her political interests came to center more on the women’s movement. As usual, her romantic inclination was probably leading the way; she had a string of brief affairs with women around that time, each of them somehow embodying a dimension of her political ideals. One was a forklift operator at one of the brass mills where we’d done research for our Brass Valley oral history project; another was a politically radical medical student at Yale; there was a third whom I don’t remember very well but I think was involved in social work.
The most radical modes of lesbianism were an influential thing at the time in a lot of East Coast intellectual centers. Jan absorbed the provocative and compelling ideas of its main theoreticians, and displayed her affinity by adopting the look and feel: DIY short hair, overalls, flannel shirts, work boots, no body hair removal, owning a tool box and a speculum. But she didn’t go all-in for the praxis, which at its extreme end — separatism — entailed expunging men from one’s world entirely. Fact is, she still liked men, she always did, until the end of her life. But the separatist ideal was to create a world without men, and they were certain it would be both possible and wonderful.
I could sympathize. From the baseline standpoint of species survival, a human male’s function is to introduce genetic variability into populations. Everything else that humans need to do, I think females can do perfectly well. Most of the uniquely “manly” roles that males have created for themselves since the beginning of time are patently self-justifying inventions, especially when they involve protecting females from harm — most of the harm they’re protecting females from is committed by other males. So I think I understood the separatist dream and its existential underpinnings. “War is menstruation envy”, they proclaimed, turning Freud and the whole patriarchy on its head.
In a way and for a while some of them succeeded, at least in bracketing men out of their field of view enough to feel the blessed relief of our absence. In the city of Bridgeport on Long Island Sound, some of them opened a vegetarian restaurant called Bloodroot. That’s the name of a plant with a peculiarly deep and complex root system, but the word has obvious connotations that are closer to the surface. Eager to construct an alternative to the phallocracy, separatists and the separatist-adjacent were big on menstrual imagery. I found it interesting.
I ate there a couple of times with various groupings of friends and acquaintances; the food was forgettable, but the staff were quite the opposite. By law they couldn’t refuse to serve men, so they’d perfected the art of making male patrons feel nonexistent, adopting that ultra-neutral demeanor which means, “I am obliged to tolerate your presence but I don’t have to pretend I like it”. I appreciated that lesson in social rejection, in being a member of the pejoratively marked category. Some people spend their whole lives at the receiving end of that kind of disdain, so it was good to get a dose of it alongside my Jamaican jerk tofu and kale salad. Yes, they and restaurants like theirs were partially responsible for bringing kale into our lives. The place still exists almost a half century later, and the food’s apparently much better. It may be worth another visit.