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Month July 2024

Remembering Loren Goldner

On April 12, Loren Goldner died in Philadelphia. For the author of these lines, he was an intellectual discussion partner and a friend, and though living in different countries, we managed to get together on a number of occasions.

It’s often occurred to me that when you write in memory of someone we’ve lost and you mention your relationship with that person as well as events you experienced together, you run the risk of talking more about yourself than about the one you’re supposed to be remembering.

In this case, however, I believe a couple of anecdotes should offer a glimpse into a few of Loren Goldner’s traits that may help explain his political and theoretical development. Once when he stopped in Turin a number of years ago, my partner and I did the customary thing, which was to show him around town. But instead of asking to see the city’s most beautiful monuments and areas, he wanted to go to proletarian neighborhoods like Le Vallette, Mirafiori, and Barriera di Milano, evincing placid indifference to esthetics or, to put it another way, showing esthetic preferences that kind of knocked me for a loop.

When I traveled to the U.S. years later, he and I went to a restaurant in an area I can’t quite recall. It seemed to me like a run-of-the-mill place; what I wasn’t so crazy about was that you weren’t allowed to smoke (this was before the current wave of health fanaticism had reached Italy) and they didn’t serve alcohol.

But what Loren strongly objected to — though it left me entirely unmoved — was that all the patrons were white, that there were no African Americans, Asian Americans or Latinos eating there. This incident highlights his intense focus on the presence or absence of proletarians in the places he went to, an indication of how central the issue of class was to him. And while I’m far from indifferent to such problems, I sensed that for Loren they took on a near-existential significance that I found peculiar, and perhaps unique.

Loren’s radical political education began in the early 1960s, when he joined in many demonstrations demanding racial integration in the workplace.

Those were years of rapid growth for the new left, both in the United States and elsewhere.

In the U.S. in particular, the issue of race was crucial at the time. The key players in the drama were the blacks, of course, but along with them was the white left, the liberals who still believed to a large extent in the Democratic Party and President Lyndon Johnson, a figure viewed as a continuator of the Roosevelt’s party and the New Deal after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Johnson bombed North Vietnam and invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, the liberal milieu split, giving birth to a new left that no longer identified with the Democrats. The party went into a steep decline, finding itself out of power for two decades, and when it finally returned to power, there wasn’t much of the Rooseveltian tradition left.

Opposition to the Vietnam War generated an extraordinary degree of radicalism. It’s worth recalling that between 1966 and 1973, about half a million young Americans became draft dodgers. This was a mass movement, or rather a mass revolt, with unprecedented impact that went largely unnoticed in Europe. In other words, the U.S. experienced what I see as its own 1968 before the French did in May ’68.

Loren was acquainted with the Black Panthers, and in 1967 joined the Independent Socialist Clubs, renamed the International Socialists in 1970. Back then, the group offered a left critique of Stalinism, Maoism, and Third-Worldism, which held sway in the U.S. new left. Broadly speaking, Loren, still under age 20, could be termed a Trotskyist at that point.

Yet he wasn’t really satisfied with that outlook. He started reading texts from Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International and found the latter group’s positions stimulating, though his own class-based analysis kept him from endorsing them.

Back around then, he also became acquainted with the writings of Amadeo Bordiga, Jacques Camatte and the broader Bordigist current.

I suspect that this wide variety of references is what has led a number of comrades to describe Loren as a “Luxemburgian Bordigist.” Aside from the fact that such a definition strikes me as a theoretical oxymoron and that an orthodox “Bordigist” would find it non-sensical to align him with their current, I maintain that Loren’s use of Bordiga’s writings was utterly non-“Bordigist.” Viewing Bordiga as an original, non-Leninist thinker, he made use of specific individual texts without treating them as components of the author’s own system — an approach that would be anathema to any Bordigist.

In subsequent years, Loren got familiar with the work of comrades like the libertarian Marxist and thought-provoking critic of “Marxism” Maximilien Rubel, Henri Simon, a radical critic of party communism, and others whose works he greatly appreciated. In any case, what I find so noteworthy was Loren’s ability to connect up with a wide range of milieus, positions, and experiences that are usually considered incompatible with each other.

That attitude was interwoven with two characteristics of Loren’s experience:He was multi-lingual. As I recall, he learned French, German, and Italian early on, also studied at least Arabic and Korean, and worked as a translator from French and German.

  • He traveled widely abroad, contacting milieus and comrades in many countries and often working outside the U.S. In addition to Italy, France, and Germany, he also spent time in Spain and Portugal, and, once again if I remember correctly, subsequently in the Arab world and South Korea.

The breadth and scope of his knowledge and his inexhaustible curiosity were ultimately what most relevantly defined him.

What now comes to mind are his writings and above all the conversations I had with him, especially on the question of “class/race” in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the reality of South Korea, and many other topics.

Allow me to end this paper with a long quote that I find both stimulating and problematic, covering the cycle of struggles in the 1970s and current outlook. It’s taken from a book that may in a sense be viewed as Loren’s autobiography.1

“All power to the international workers’ councils” was seemingly the best “universal” of that era, and there were ephemeral moments when its realization did not seem that far off.

The capitalist counter-offensive involved a direct attack on the “visible” dimension of the movement toward “generalized self-management”: breaking up the big factory into cottage industry and isolated rural “greenfield” sites, further de-urbanizing workers into sprawl and exurbia, the casualization of labor, outsourcing to the Third World, and “high-tech” intensification of production. The resulting “de-socialization” of the workers of the 1968–1977 rebellion achieved in these ways was deep and thorough. It was a textbook illustration of the way in which technology—in this case, first of all, new telecommunications and improved transportation—is inseparable from its capitalist uses; not since the mass production of the automobile did an innovation have such an initial impact of isolating and dispersing the universal class which the proletariat IS. That such telecommunications and transportation may tomorrow contribute to the practical unification we advocate is another matter, and remains to be seen….

The programmatic question can obviously not be one of rebuilding the old mass production factories as such. No one misses the assembly line, and automobile-centered production and consumption has already ravaged enough “social” space. It has been pointed out often enough that, despite the creativity of the wildcat movements from the 50s to the 70s, most of the left (myself included) theorized the factory worker as worker, and not as the leading force in a striving to break the logic of factory work to accede to a Grundrisse-like “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption,” i.e. communism. Nonetheless, while recognizing that mass production seemed to produce something much closer to class consciousness and class action than what we have seen since, we can also recognize that breaking the old “social contract” of the post-World War II period also broke the conservatism built into attachment to one job, a mortgage, etc. that must have inhibited as much solidarity as it fostered, in one factory, in one industry. This has led, in some countries such as France and Italy, to movements of working-class youth, who will never have the stability their parents had, using this precarious mobility as a way of building city-wide “flying picket” movements centered on whole cities as opposed to one big factory or industry.

In short, Loren was engaged in an ongoing, tireless quest for a possible breaking-point in the current productive and social order, drawing on both study and field work, on encounters with activists and workers in struggle—a quest that in the varied ways in which it manifested itself, was far from his alone.

This, then, was a human, political, and intellectual undertaking by someone we can consider an “unconventional” revolutionary in a counter-revolutionary phase in history.

Translated from Italian by Larry Cohen

1 Revolution in our Lifetime – Intervista a Loren Goldner sul lungo Sessantotto, Loren Goldner (author), Emiliana Armano (editor), Raffaele Sciortino (editor), Colibrì Edizioni, 2018. Original version: “The historical moment that produced us: global revolution or recomposition of capital?” Loren Goldner, Insurgent Notes, June 2010.