Save Earth Now (poster designed in the 1960s by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat)
I was fortunate to recently make contact with a Milwaukee librarian and scholar of labor history, who generously shared information he’d uncovered on my grandmother Josephine Nordstrand.
Josephine was born at home in Brooklyn. Her mother, Raïssa, was of the generation of idealistic, secular young Jews who were already radicalized when they left the Western regions of what was then Russia; in contrast, her father, Abraham, was a poor artisan and observant Jew who embarked on a number of get-rich-quick schemes in the New World, all of which failed. Abraham and his five brothers fled Belarus for Pitkin Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn, were won over in the 1920s by a fellow emigré who had traveled back east to encourage migration into the interior, and decamped for Wisconsin together with their families en masse. Eventually, Josephine became, as the scholar told me, “one of the most active progressive activists in the city’s history.” He shared a letter with me that the young Josephine had written to the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1933:
Josephine’s impassioned credo, with its basis in motherhood, made me ponder the direction taken by progressive activists over the past 100 years. Perhaps one of the few things the progressivism of the 2020s has in common with that of 100 years ago is the guiding belief that people are naturally good at heart. In the 1920s, this idealistic notion dramatically rearranged the politics and economy of one of the world’s largest land masses and set the course for the ensuing years of the century. In the 2020s, it has led some of the most highly educated people in the west to defend looting and the establishment of anarchist micro-cities patrolled by civilians with long guns, and to advance the abolition not only of policing but also of the family. Progressives on both ends of this century-long spectrum believe that the human spirit tends toward a kind of moral progress, such that both the withering away of the state predicted by Marx and Engels, and the violent destruction of it promoted by some modern-day anarchists, will usher in Utopia. As a recent anonymously-written anarchist pamphlet notes:
Authority . . . is not just ugly, sullen faces attached to miserable bodies decorated with suits and ties . . . Authority is a social relationship. Authority is born even in our friendships, in our meetings, in our love, in our daily lives. . . . we have to cast it out of our relations. Of course, this is done only through a belligerent/armed confrontation with the existent, as our searches are not a hippie inner meditation but practical wishes best expressed when our fingers fill magazines with bullets and our hands arm our weapons to “talk.”
While the idealists who created the Soviet Union were hardly police abolitionists, in our own time some advocates of abolition have extended the meaning of “police” to encompass other professions too. As some members of Portland Antifa explained in 2017:
First, we want to expand the definition of police to include doctors, midwives, and psychologists who violently police gender and sexuality at the point of birth . . . Second we want to expand the definition of police to include teachers, social workers, and parents; those who police our social roles . . . and who punish our first forays into criminality.
Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952)
We can find more agreement across the hundred-year gap on the abolition of the family. Lenin’s Commissar for Welfare in the early Bolshevik state, Alexandra Kollontai, wrote in a widely read 1920 essay, “Communism and the Family”:
The workers’ state will come to replace the family . . . the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity. The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable: the family distracts the worker from more useful and productive labour. The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children which was formerly theirs is passing more and more into the hands of the collective. . . . The woman in communist society no longer depends upon her husband but on her work. . . . She need have no anxiety about her children. The workers’ state will assume responsibility for them.. . . . Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it.
One hundred years later, however, this utopian prediction has failed to materialize. The state has not come to care for children; one wonders whether, if it had, women of the late-capitalist intelligentsia would have seen children as less of a burden than the beleaguered women of the early Bolshevist proletariat. The “free union[s] strong in comradeship” likewise seem to have been shunted aside for temporary unions of a transactional nature. Sex is a commodity, and so are people — babies included.
Of course, where people become a commodity, it is only to be expected that children — those provisional workers as yet unable to contribute to the growth of the state — will follow. Lenin made abortion legal in 1920 as a means toward achieving what Kollontai called “the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries,” but fear of a demographic freefall led Stalin to reverse this policy in 1936. (After his death, abortion became legal again, and was widely practiced in the remaining years of the Soviet Union).
It’s interesting to me that my grandmother’s passionate advocacy in the Sentinel for a world without war was intimately connected not only with her motherhood, but also with her acknowledgement of the economics of labor. In contrast, the utopian politics of the present tend towards the abolition not only of policing and the family, but also of work itself.
My grandmother was described by a colleague as “a very dynamic woman, a great fundraiser, and a good organizer.” She was a leader in a number of Communist front organizations, most prominently the Civil Rights Congress. In my own small city, the self-proclaimed Communists organize events like “Smoke Weed in Front of the Police Station,” and children’s activities in impoverished neighborhoods featuring giveaways of Marxist literature.
Arrests were made at the recent “Smoke Weed” event, not for smoking weed, which is legal, but for vandalism. One of the event organizers, a self-proclaimed Communist, had his charges increased from a misdemeanor to a felony when he attempted to free himself from his cuffs in an interview room, wrecking a chair in the process.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly Father Zosima relates the story of a man who sought spiritual guidance for his inability to love:
“I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular . . . In my dreams,” he said, “I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,” he said. “On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.”
It’s fair to assume that most politics, of any persuasion, view the individual as an abstraction to be tolerated or dealt with in the interest of saving humanity. This flattening out of the human person is the basis for arguments such as Sophie Lewis’s for abolishing the family:
Even the happiest families, in the words of the writer Ursula Le Guin, are built upon a “whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater or lesser evils”. If we abolish the family, we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatisation and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.
. . . It’s true that family abolition, like other abolitionist movements, presents certain discomforts. Maybe you love your family! . . . Lewis . . . asks us to imagine beyond [this discomfort]. The family isn’t actually any good at creating intimacy, Lewis argues; the family creates, in fact, a dearth of care, with shreds and scraps of intimacy fought out between overworked parents and totally dependent kids, hidden behind the locked doors of private property.
The liberatory project of the new New Left presumes that the abolition of all received structures will lead to a kind of revelatory joy. But I doubt it.
That is a very scary sort of thinking. It is a dangerous madness. I am reminded of a verse from Bob Dylan's song, Gates of Eden:
"With a time-rusted compass blade, Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks, sidesaddle on the Golden Calf.
In all their promises of paradise you will not hear a laugh ..."