Loren Goldner
Loren Goldner, activist and writer [for New Politics, among other publications — NP eds.], passed away in Philadelphia on April 12, 2024. We first met through exchanging letters in July 1997 after he was laid off from his position as librarian for the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. On a whim, he decided to travel around East Asia for three months. He was fifty and I was a thirty-five-year-old itinerant radical who had been living in Seoul, South Korea since 1994, teaching English and living out of a backpack, but more importantly making contact with Korean revolutionaries and working-class militants. This is where Loren and I found instant affinity.
In September, when I arranged to meet him at the airport, he told me to look for an “old guy in a blue windbreaker,” a seemingly trivial description that defined my lifelong image of Loren’s humbleness and lack of pretense. He literally had no interest in the spectacular consumer frenzy for commodities and lived a life of extreme frugality. In that spirit, I helped him find a cheap, tiny room in an old-style inn, called a yo-in-sook, in the historic and ungentrified center of Seoul, replete with sliding doors under a tiled roof supported with exposed log beams, that would be fitting for the most ascetic Buddhist monk. He loved it!
Loren was fascinated by Seoul, so I took him on long walks and introduced my militant Korean friends, many of whom were veterans of the Great Strike of 1987. We found “gritty” workers’ districts, where during long talks over sumptuous – but cheap – dinners we discovered we had both been radicalized in Berkeley, albeit a half generation apart. We contrasted his experience of the tumultuous sixties with my coming of age in the Reaganite eighties. The highlight of his brief first stay in Seoul was attending the annual Jeon Tae-il rally, in honor of the garment worker whose self-immolation in 1970 sparked the modern Korean labor movement.
Prior to the event in a massive sports arena, we sat on the ground outside, eating snacks and drinking with younger Korean militants. We marveled at a huge contingent of Hyundai auto workers — most of whom had just been driven across the country in charter buses from the company town of Ulsan — marching into the event with such swagger and confidence from their recent strike successes that it felt like watching a conquering army of larger-than-life heroes coming home to celebrate a decisive victory. Loren dubbed them the “workers’ 82nd Airborne,” an insider reference — about the most militant elements of the working class — that we shared for the rest of his life.
When I left Korea in 1999, both Loren and I had left our marks. I worked with comrades to translate and print as a pamphlet Loren’s Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today. It was very well received because our Korean friends knew next to nothing of this tradition, to the point that some had assumed Bordiga was a Stalinist. Due to our influence, these comrades were translating texts from other unorthodox radical perspectives, like Italian left communism, Dutch-German council communism, and the Situationist International, and publishing them for the first time. South Korea’s military dictatorships, which only ended in 1993, drove political radicals underground and the comrades we met were hungry to learn about revolutionary ideas that had been censored for decades.
Our paths crossed again in 2001 in Berkeley, when I moved back and Loren was staying for a few months to take care of his elderly mother who was in poor health. When my mom, who was also living in Berkeley, died unexpectedly in her early sixties, Loren saw how hard I had taken it. He borrowed a car and we drove down Highway 1 along the California coast and simply talked. It was the best therapy for grieving imaginable. Several hours later, when we got to Big Sur, we bought burritos, a six-pack of beer and spent the afternoon at the beach, sitting on the sand, eating, drinking, and talking, and finally watching the sun set over the Pacific. There is no remedy that makes the process of mourning easier, but Loren really, really helped me get through that painful and emotionally difficult period.
Since I knew Loren could not get the memory of those legendary Hyundai autoworkers out of his head, the “workers’ 82nd Airborne,” I was not surprised when he found an English teaching job at Yonsei University in Seoul in 2005. But before leaving, he needed to transport his library of over 10,000 books from California to his new U.S. base in New York City and I agreed to be co-driver. When we had met in 1997, we also bonded over a love of Beat Generation literature, especially Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, so we lived out our Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty fantasy in our four-day cross-continental road trip (albeit in a huge rental truck). We even stopped in Chicago to visit Forest Home Cemetery to pay tribute to the Haymarket Martyrs. Loren remained in Seoul until 2009 and wrote several excellent accounts of class struggle in East Asia, especially about his visit to the 77-day occupation of the Ssangyong Motors factory at the end of his stay.
I did not get to see him as often, except for a few short trips to New York City or during his infrequent visits to the Bay Area, but he was one of the only true friends and comrades with whom I have shared so many common interests and passions. We could talk into the wee hours – or for the entirety of a 2,900-mile drive – about anything under the sun, literally. I deeply miss those discussions, yet they have forever shaped my character. Loren’s keen intellect and passion for fighting for a better world will be missed by all who had the good fortune to know him.
Whenever the working class rises up, with militant strikes or factory occupations, or people fight back against exploitation and oppression anywhere, I will remember Loren, raise my fist in solidarity, and cheer them on in the spirit of those Hyundai “82nd Airborne” auto workers we saw when our paths first crossed in 1997.
On April 19, 2024, I facilitated a workshop called “Striking to Win: Identifying Chokepoints Along Supply Chains” at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. The room was packed with rank-and-file workers from various logistics sectors, like railroad, longshore, maritime, warehouse, and other related industries. I began the session by honoring my fallen comrade; in unison, all ninety of us chanted:
“Loren Goldner — ¡Presente!”
A highly censored recollection.
The reminiscence of Loren described aspects of his personal life I hadn’t known though I’ve followed his writing and had occasional personal contact since meeting him in Berkeley in the 70s. Thanks to the author and NP for reminding us of comradeship’s many manifestations.
Funeral Oration for Loren Goldner
Left communism, or ultra-left Marxism, is a form of 20th century radical politics that opposes the ideas and practices of Leninists, social democrats and anarchist subculture ding-a-lings from what its partisans maintain to be an aggressive and authentically Marxist perspective. From the 1990s onward Loren Goldner came to be generally seen as “the leading left communist in the United States.” Goldner, age 76, died at his home in Philadelphia, PA this past April 12.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Loren Goldner, “the leading left communist in the United States” initiated a series of meetings of some supposed ultra-left Marxists in Berkeley. I took part. My understanding was that we would act fast, come up with an analysis of the 9/11 events, and make our analysis public in a high-profile way. 9/11 was the first major battle of the twenty-first century, it was the first time that US government-style mass civilian casualty attacks had been inflicted on civilians in the US, and it was a horrific consequence of decades of malignant antics by the United States in Afghanistan. My memory is that the normally voluble San Francisco Bay Area protest ghetto was uniformly and uncharacteristically silent – people were understandably too floored to say anything. It was a unique moment in history – and it was a unique historical opportunity.
Politics is about communication. It was time to communicate. My preferred low-budget mass communications method takes the form of posters on walls – this may be a function of the limits of my imagination but posters had been very effective in the recent past. With this in mind I acquired a paperback book with a color image of Ronald Reagan and his jack-o’-lantern grin on its cover. A recent cover of Time or Newsweek had a photo-shopped image of both World Trade Center towers going up in explosive flames, and my thought was to do 11 x 17-inch color posters of Reagan’s smiling visage in front of the burning and collapsing buildings, captioned in big yellow letters with red lines around them: ‘If you want to find the man responsible for 9/11, go to Bel Air and wake him from his nap!’ – highlighting the fact that the 9/11 attacks were blowback from Reagan and Jimmy Carter’s efforts to get armed Islamic fundamentalism up and running in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. It was just a gesture and since it said nothing about capitalist exploitation and working-class self-activity it was not terribly radical, but it was simple, it could be done quickly, and it was very much to the point. To do anything public at this point would have been unique and possibly even shocking, and this could have been a rude foot in the door for a more complex and ambitious subsequent message. If anyone had come up with anything better we could have gone with that instead. Time was of the essence in this matter – we had to act fast.
The group met and talked. We talked and met. In compulsively inadequate ultra-left Marxist style we met and talked some more. Nothing happened. Grad student pedantry and incapacity were in a neck-and-neck race here. Our talk had drifted to plans for a ‘Capital’ reading group by the time I stopped attending the meetings; apparently those who can, do, and those who can’t form ‘Capital’ reading groups. Even this inwardly directed proposal went nowhere. The group folded. A unique historical moment had come and gone and with it a significant opportunity was squandered. This failure to act is consistent with all experiences I have ever had with people who like to call themselves ultra-left Marxists in the US going back to when I became an ultra-left at the beginning of the Reagan era.
In this and subsequent encounters with “the leading left communist in the United States” I was struck less by Loren Goldner’s voluminous abstract erudition than I was by his complete lack of the practical political smarts that we are forced to develop when we assert unusual ideas in the complex world outside of our comfort zone. Loren had been a left communist for 30-plus years and all he had to show for it was a collection of his writings that are equally unreadable in seven languages on a website. In the 20-plus years since our 9/11 group’s belly button fingering sessions he continued to dabble in his hobby in the form of a website called Insurgent Notes, whose identity with a nebulous “revolutionary left,” clarion calls for “building a radical left in the age of Trump” and paucity of accounts of sustained real-world action add up to a politics of Lite Rock Trotskyism. A few fiery ultra-left “positions” on unions, nationalism and the Bolsheviks after Brest-Litovsk don’t elevate Insurgent Notes out of and away from the harmless left fringe of academia. These putative ultra-leftists don’t even appear to be decisively opposed to electoral politics, in the country that leads the industrialized world in mass abstention from voting and where mass abstention is in effect the number one vote-getter in every Presidential election.
Revolutionary extremism is what it does: if it does nothing, it is nothing. It must be readily visible in the larger society around us. A measure of its credibility is that it will be taken seriously by friend and foe alike. Ultra-left Marxism is supposedly an intransigent form of revolutionary analysis – and ongoing collective public action – focused on class conflict in advanced capitalist societies. Outside of the United States it sometimes is. The efforts of somewhat related to ultra-left Marxism workers’ inquiry tendencies like Wildcat in Germany, people associated with them in China and India, and comrades I’ve met in Europe and South America are the real deal. But in the United States ultra-left Marxism only attracts café militants who should have become tenured professors and who missed their life’s true calling and hobbyists who expect the world to accommodate their timidity and incapacity. They are the easily ignored local expression of a Planck-scale global archipelago of socially maladroit pedants who lack the vision and nerve to establish a readily visible public presence for what they claim to be about.
The United States is in accelerating irreversible decline. This social order is circling the drain. The once large expanding aspirational middle class, a bulwark of political torpor and social peace, is fast disappearing. With the exception of the U.K. the U.S. has a more extreme inequality of wealth distribution than what’s seen in other advanced industrialized nations and in this serves as a model for a relentless upward redistribution of wealth for the exploiter classes of other First World nations. We endure mass impoverishment and attendant social ills on a scale not seen in other industrialized societies. No political or economic mechanisms of the reigning market order will slow this down or reverse this. The United States is owned and ruled by an awe-inspiringly incompetent, venal and short-sighted elite and more importantly than anything else liberal democracy no longer commands the political and emotional allegiance of the vast majority of the populace. In abolishing historical consciousness among the people they exploit and rule, the rich and their political, academic and media servants have also largely abolished it among themselves. This will soon pay substantial negative dividends. A decades-long relentless upward redistribution of wealth has not been an intelligent long-term survival strategy for the owners and rulers of the United States. Some of the sharpest among them know this. In a lengthy piece in the January 2017 New Yorker, the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, valued at that point at 600 million dollars, is quoted as being “concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest.”
“…awkward conversations have been unfolding in some financial circles. Robert H. Dugger worked as a lobbyist for the financial industry before he became a partner at the global hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, in 1993. After 17 years, he retired to focus on philanthropy and his investments.
“Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution…” (“Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, January 30, 2017)
These are optimal circumstances for the emergence of something akin to what the IWW of one hundred years ago was at its best: an anti-wage labor social movement of the wage-earning class. Unfortunately, with a breathtaking and bizarre monolithic consistency, all the ultra-leftists that I’ve ever crossed paths with in the U.S. since I became an ultra-left forty years ago have made it unmistakably clear that they have nothing to contribute on this score.
Many Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist militants I have known, in particular Trotskyists, offer a striking contrast to this. Members of the “smash-ist-and-fascist,” Stalinist group Progressive Labor and militants of various Trot organizations often get jobs in strategic sectors, as transit system operators, longshore or hospital employees, and spend decades asserting their perspectives among co-workers. They structure their lives around the fight for what they believe in. Their politics are no good, but the long-term personal commitment they display in fighting for their convictions is superb. Far from being “alienated” this “militant attitude” is a wholly admirable and necessary thing. There is no reason that people with better politics than Stalinism and Trotskyism can’t do this as well. People attracted to ultra-left Marxism in the contemporary United States are incapable of asserting what they claim to be about outside of airless small spaces. Ultra-left Marxist fanboys will hold a meeting, at which they may decide to hold another meeting, and if by that point they haven’t completely run out of energy they may courageously decide to hold another meeting. They and their passively held opinions add up to nothing.
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…”
A vast gulf separates passive spectators from the implacable minority who are hell-bent on imposing their will on the world. What we need requires commitment. It takes nerve. It means taking risks. It requires patience. It takes time. It means trying something new because there is no credible opposition now and new measures are required to build one. People who holler about boredom are bores. Mankind does not seek entertainment – only the American does. The revolutionary struggle can be exhilarating. It can bring us companionship, laughs and joy – but these are fleeting collateral benefits of what must for the most part be ardent effort in the face of setbacks. Thomas Mann defines a fanatic as an individual who, on recognizing the impossibility of his cause, redoubles his efforts. Mann may have a point. An ability to dust yourself off and keep going in the face of endless setbacks may also be the hallmark of a disinterested public spirit; you do what you do not for kicks or to accrue subcultural capital but because you know it must be done.