Truth and Revolution and Parenting
Nate Hawthorne writes about the issue of parenting in the Sojourner Truth Organization and his own experience in current groups. This piece is by Nate Hawthorne, a friend and comrade to many of us in Black Orchid Collective. He’s a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and is one of the editors of a web site called Recomposition. He writes on his own at this libcom blog.
Truth and Revolution and Parenting
A central character in John Dos Passos’ novel The 42nd Parallel is Mac, a working class man who gets radicalized and joins the Industrial Workers of the World. At the same time that Mac becomes a radical organizer, he begins a relationship with a young woman named Maisie. While making plans to marry her, Mac repeatedly doubts his relationship with Maisie, seeing the relationship as a source of pressure that might lead him to “selling out to the sonsofbitches” who run and profit from capitalist society. Mac proclaims his love for Maisie in a letter where he tells her he has left for a long-term trip to Goldfield, Nevada to help an IWW organizing drive. While Mac is in Goldfield, Maisie writes to him asking him to come back home because she is pregnant. Mac tells a comrade that he plans to return to Maisie, but the other man tell him that his first duty is to the working class and that as a revolutionary he should not have a wife and kids. Mac agrees to stay even longer than he planned. Dos Passos’ depiction of Mac’s involvement in the IWW is well researched and sympathetic, but he doesn’t flinch from depicting these ugly realities. Unfortunately, this dynamic was not just fiction.
I thought of this moment from Dos Passos recently while reading Mike Staudenmaier’s excellent new book Truth and Revolution A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986. (Buy it, it’s great. You can get it here.) There’s a lot to recommend the book; it gives an overview of important aspects of mid-to-late 20th century U.S. political and social movement history and the radical left; it provides a detailed account of the working of a small radical group that’s about the size of many of the groups on the left today and there’s a lot we can learn from reading about a group like the ones we’re part of; it gives a good overview of important theoretical points with regard to race, marxism, and organization. In this review I want to take the book as a jumping off point for a discussion of politics and parenting.
