Photo by Shaira Dela Peña

Like James Baldwin, [Audre Lorde] thought social revolution required a reckoning of all relationships, including the individual’s relationship to herself….: ‘If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppression is not enough … we must recognise the despair oppression plants within each of us.’

–Audre Lord, quoted in review by Keeyanga-Yamahtta Taylor, LRB, October 2025

The believers in activism grow impatient with me…the idea of self-transformation… is… at variance with the perfect self-satisfaction of my class, the middle class..

–Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

“Italian worker, he think America is free countree, good countree—he think he make Italy be countree like America! He do not know what happen to poor wop in Massachusett, he not read in paper how Department of Joostice agent take poor seeck printer, torture heem, beat heem, to make him tell what Joostice agent want tell-ed!”

–Bartolomeo Vanzetti, speaking in Boston: A Documentary Novel, by Upton Sinclair

Currently Orin and I are reading Upton Sinclair’s “documentary novel,” Boston, about the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. For those who look at the record, that the two good men were executed for being anarchists, that is, for being on the side of the suffering working class in the cataclysmic labor struggles of that day, and not for the actual crime of which they were accused, cannot be in doubt. That they had found America to be a mean place, not entirely a “free countree, a good countree,” also cannot be in doubt. (Sinclair’s choice to replicate Italian English was risky. But reading the book aloud, as I’m doing, the choice feels right. If it seems demeaning, well, that’s exactly the point – does a person’s failure to speak the language like a native-born, let alone skin color or other signs of social inferiority, determine their right to respect?)

In the early 1960’s, in Rome, NY, a headline in the Daily Sentinel proclaimed a local man named Michael Jimenez to be “a Communist.” In fact, in 1939, he had been arrested and interned in the camp at Gurs, France, along with his father and brother for taking part in the republican insurgency in Spain. But in Rome, its pre-eminent employer Griffiss AFB, proud home of a B-52 bomber squadron, Jimenez’s s family lived under the taint of this label, as if it meant something other than simply being on the side of the poor and the working class against the ruling class. Few bothered to unpack the word, to understand what it was, its’ history, its original high idealism, etc. or even that it had largely lost its appeal to people on the left after Stalin had turned Communism into an autocracy. Was this just an instance of “the bad old days?” Or, looking how easily the word “socialist” is turned into an epithet in recent elections, or, living where I do, in upstate New York, and having no idea where I might go to hear Socialist ideas ( perish the thought of anarchist ideas!) in any kind of public space today, or in the mass media, can we agree little has changed?

A little after the denunciation of the good man as a Communist, in 1967, Orin, age 18 and a group of his teen-age friends involved in pot-smoking and LSD experimentation in that same city were arrested for “sale of an illegal substance.” The entire “crime” had been set up by a guy working with the police (a “narc.”) Most of the young people, with their parents’ help, were able to get off without serving jail time. Orin and David Jimenez, their families having no resources, Jimenez the son of an infamous........

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