"Learning From Comrade Helen Keller"

 (Originally published at Jacobin as "Helen Keller Was One of the Great American Socialists")

In March 1915, the Workers’ Chronicle ran an article syndicated by Appeal to Reason, the most popular socialist newspaper in the United States, titled “Learning From Comrade Helen Keller.” The Chronicle was a weekly newspaper representing “the center of Socialism” in Kansas, a state in which Eugene Debs had won 7 percent of the vote in the previous presidential election on the Socialist Party of America (SPA) ticket.

Occasioned by a recent lecture Keller gave to the Central Teachers’ Association in Oklahoma City, the article praised the message being spread by “Comrade Keller” as both orator and example. In the lecture, Keller reiterated the stock tale of her journey from an uneducated blind and deaf seven-year-old to a world-famous college graduate, scholar, and author thanks to the innovative pedagogy employed by Anne Sullivan (of latter-day Miracle Worker fame).

She then proceeded to a brief discourse on the subject of happiness: “Not the pleasant things alone that one can get out of life, but the things that can be done for others are the ones worth striving for.”

“Her whole story,” reflected the Chronicle, “speaks eloquently of what can be done for all children everywhere, when sane economic conditions give them a chance to develop.”

This point was more than intimated by Keller herself during the lecture. When an audience member asked if it was true that she was a socialist, Keller — who had publicly accepted an offer of honorary membership in the Pittsburg, Kansas, local chapter of the SPA the previous year — quickly replied: “Oh, yes, because it is the only way out of the muddle humanity is in at the present time.”

Keller’s accomplishments, the Chronicle argued by way of conclusion, ought to both reproach and inspire

those of us who are sometimes discouraged by the seeming great odds against the Socialist movement. When but a fraction of the same willpower and determination that has characterized Helen Keller’s life is infused into the Socialist movement, the Co-operative Commonwealth will not be far distant.

Contradictions at Noontide

Aside from providing a glimpse into the breadth of popularity enjoyed by the socialist movement in the early twentieth-century United States, this vignette captures many of the contradictions that characterized the lives of both Helen Keller and the socialist movement during this period.

These contradictions orbit around questions of disability and the role of disabled people within social movements and society at large; ideology and theoretical conceptualizations of how social transformation occurs; political organization and the role of party formations in bringing about the socialist “commonwealth”; and, finally, intersectional tension and disjuncture in the person of Keller herself along lines of class, gender, disability, politics, and economics.

For many in the SPA during this era, the path to socialism in the United States was a simple, almost ineluctable, matter. They assumed that socialism was a perfectly rational conceptual model of society in contrast to that of capitalism, and that most people would ultimately accede to rational solutions when they were convincingly articulated (hence the title Appeal to Reason). Victory was thus merely a matter of spreading the gospel through an ever-expanding base of members, voters, newspapers, electoral candidacies, and government officeholders.

In this schema, the timetable of socialism mainly depended upon the degree of willpower exerted by its adherents. To this end, one could effectively deploy the archetype of Helen Keller as an impelling challenge to socialist activists. Of course, the unspoken premise behind such inspirational (or reproachful) appeals was that the readership of the Workers’ Chronicle, for instance, did not share Keller’s “endowed” deficits and therefore had little excuse for inactivity.

In a way, this inspiration-laden use of the persona of Helen Keller — as “she who overcame” disability — represents a mere conversion of the disability trope so often instrumentalized in a bourgeois framework: “If this unfortunate handicapped person can succeed in life, then you have no excuse!”

In the context of the socialist movement, such canards are even more jarring, as it is precisely among the lower and working classes of society that rates of disablement are disproportionately high. Moreover, working-class disabled people are far more likely to be impoverished, lacking advanced education and the kind of material resources that made such “miracles” as Helen Keller’s success possible.

While Keller explicitly and conscientiously recognized the difference between her own social circumstances and those of most disabled people, she nonetheless tended to lean into her “branding” as a sort of Wonder of the World. This in turn readily lent itself to such awe-inspired sentiments as were expressed by the Workers’ Chronicle.

It is important to note, however, that Keller had been virtually trained from childhood to play such a role — if not on behalf of the socialist movement, then at least on behalf of the progressive-reformist variant of bourgeois liberalism, which swelled between the 1880s and 1910s.

Review of "Class War: The Jacobin board game"

The Continuation of Politics by Other Means

(Originally published at Tempest)

“Why,” you may be wondering, “is a socialist magazine doing a review of a board game?” Perhaps it is for the same reason that a socialist magazine would create and merchandise a board game. Announced on social media by Jacobin magazine in November 2021 as a crowd-funded Kickstarter project, Class War: The Jacobin Board Game was officially released for individual and retail distribution in May 2022.

Class War not only boasts the Jacobin imprimatur, but its design team comprises some of the primary names behind the magazine itself, including Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara,. As stated in relevant materials and publicity, Jacobin views the game as both an entertainment and a “pedagogical” medium. “The gameplay is so addictive,” Jacobin asserts, “that even your libertarian uncle won’t be able to resist the world-historic struggle unfolding in the deck of cards before him.” At the same time, unwitting players “just might see, for the very first time, what a socialist perspective on our society’s class antagonisms really looks like.” 

Moreover, the act of buying and playing the game is intended to “support Jacobin’s important socialist journalism and analysis,” an effort aided by the penultimate page of the included Rule Book, which contains more information “About Jacobin” and on “Further Reading” (comprising a short list of mainly Jacobin-published texts such as The ABCs of Capitalism, The ABCs of Socialism, and The Socialist Manifesto).

Given the game’s explicitly dual character—as play and as propaganda—this review will examine Class War in detail on both counts, perhaps leaning in a bit harder on the political analysis. As it turns out, both the strengths and weaknesses of Class War as play and propaganda are immanently related to the strengths and weaknesses of Jacobin’s ideological approach to questions of socialist theory and strategy, reform and revolution, state power, and workers’ power.

The game mechanics and rules of Class War are relatively straight forward and make for a gradual learning curve, with a relatively moderate complexity level (closer to Exploding Kittens than Magic: The Gathering). As the game box states, 

“In Class War, you are a collective entity: a social class—either the Capitalists or the Workers. You’ll fight for social dominance in an unstable constitutional democracy… Classes will use money generated by workplaces to build their social power in society, using cards drawn from their deck. Then they will confront their opponent with a dice roll—in the economy, to win a greater slice of the economic pie, or in the state, to build political power. Ultimately, both classes aim to make their demands into law, permanently changing the rules of the game in their favor.”

I was initially very excited when the Kickstarter project for this game was announced. As a game enthusiast and socialist, I have long thought about how great it would be to have a game that coherently and effectively combined enthralling gameplay with the satisfaction of a simulated conquest of workers’ power over the forces of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Gaming, after all, is a medium that lends itself by design to the freest flight of imagination—to either escape from the misery of the real world in an excursion to another time, place, and even personality, or to embrace the hopes, dreams, and struggles of the real world in a fanciful glimpse of what it might entail to entirely change present society in the construction of a brighter future.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but Class War sadly falls short of such lofty imaginings and even its own potential. However, let us start with what is good about the game, and why I would nonetheless recommend it for play with friends and comrades.

BDS the Police

 Originally published at Rampant magazine.

A central strategy of the Palestinian struggle for liberation is rich with potential for abolitionist movements. It’s time to boycott, divest, and sanction the police.

Keith Rosenthal · July 14, 2021

This past spring saw the explosion of protests, demonstrations, and even workers’ strikes in Palestine, the United States, and around the world in response to the latest Israeli assault on the people of Gaza. Three insights emerged from this uprising: 1) the depth and scale of the popular outpouring of solidarity with Palestine demonstrates the extent to which the hegemony of the pro-Israel Zionist discourse was being substantially eroded; 2) the international Palestinian struggle has gained a new degree of political potency, as the uprising arguably played a role in bringing the Israeli assault to an early cessation; and 3) significant ideological headway has been won in terms of popular acceptance of the related notions that Israel is an oppressive apartheid state and that boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) is an efficacious movement strategy.

Over the past year or so, the connections between the struggles for Palestinian liberation in the Middle East and Black liberation in the US have been expansively drawn and highlighted by markedly increased numbers of people. The massive, historic uprising for Black lives that erupted in the wake of the high-profile police lynching of George Floyd in May of 2020 saw protests, rebellions, and riots break out in a sustained fashion across the country. This social struggle not only led directly to significant local reforms in policing across numerous communities, schools, and cities but also played a major role in changing the public discourse around the police and advancing radical demands long touted by social movements. In particular, the slogan “Defund the Police,” raised by certain sectors of the movement as an end in and of itself and by others as a transitional element of an abolitionist program, was elevated to a place within the mainstream lexicon.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the growth and maturation of the struggles for Palestinian and Black liberation, the socialist and broader political left has found itself in a position to reevaluate the prevailing demands and tactics of these struggles, to take stock of the fact that the slogans of the movements have gained increased popular circulation, support, and criticism. For some, the inevitable pushback and revanchism exhibited by the political center of the US ruling class (expressed in both ruling political parties, the Democrats and Republicans), has occasioned a degree of caution, retreat, and conservatism. Kay Gabriel, writing for the Verso Books blog, notes:

Maybe because it is actually a radical demand—that is to say, targets some of the real causes of racial dispossession in the present—the center- and far-right have propagandized against Defund [the police] in increasingly shrill tones. These relentless attacks have caused some queasiness on the left. In April, Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day appeared as a guest on Doug Henwood’s podcast to suggest that Defund’s weak favorability in poll numbers suggests a strategic miscalculation. “I worry about the present standing of [Defund] a little bit,” she said, “because it seems that ‘defund the police’ has come to be conflated with ‘abolish the police’ in the minds of the majority . . . its popularity seems to have tanked. . . . The number one demand coming out of the largest protest movement in American history should be more popular than that.”

Whereas almost exactly one year ago, Day was arguing that “Bernie Sanders should embrace the demand to defund the police,” it now seems that Day is rather embracing Sanders’s conservatism on this score.

It is perhaps not coincidental that certain radical and abolitionist demands that imply a direct assault on the (bourgeois) state, and threaten a diminution thereof, elicit consistent hesitancy from certain left-wing currents and forces. Notwithstanding the inarguably eminent role played by Sanders’s recent electoral campaigns in, at the very least, translating the latent anticapitalist sentiment brewing in the United States into the political mainstream, Sanders opposes the Defund demand and has long included the institution of the police in his list of already existing “socialist institutions” in America. He has likewise publicly distanced himself from the BDS movement and the movement to abolish the state of Israel as a de facto apartheid system.

In contrast, a thoroughly anti-oppression, emancipatory, revolutionary, and, indeed, more effective strategy, would embrace the advantageous paradigm embedded within the Defund and BDS struggles, and, moreover, seek to further develop the manifest connections between the two struggles. In the words of Khury Petersen-Smith, cofounder of Black for Palestine:

The US, which is a colonial-settler state and an imperial power, looks at Israel, which is a colonial-settler state, and, from the start, says, “Okay, well, we’ve got something in common, and we should compare notes. We should help each other out.” And that relationship is extensive. On the one hand, it involves the billions of dollars in terms of military aid that the US gives to Israel. The bombs they’re dropping on Gaza are American bombs. . . .

But it’s not a one-sided relationship. American police departments in the United States train with Israel. . . . It’s not an exaggeration to say that every major police department in this country and a lot of police departments in small cities have relations with the Israeli military . . . and there are Israeli weapons that get deployed on the streets here against Black people rising up against racism. . . .

In so many ways, our oppressions are linked. But our resistances are also linked.

Petersen-Smith goes on to point out that the BDS movement “takes inspiration from other boycott movements throughout history, including the movement to boycott South African apartheid, as well as the boycott movements that were key parts of the Civil Rights Movement here and the Black freedom struggle in this place called the United States.” The struggles for Palestinian liberation and Black liberation have been mutually inspiring and edifying.  For the present, regarding the question of the struggle to defund the police, we should allow ourselves to be guided by the trajectory and radical perseverance of the BDS movement.

In fact, BDS is an entirely apt slogan and strategy to scaffolded the defund the police movement:

• The police should be boycotted. Police should not be relied upon, solicited, or collaborated with. For instance, they should not be invited to participate in LGBT Pride or other events that will serve to whitewash, pink-wash, or otherwise woke-wash them.
• The police should be divested from. State and private institutions should be called upon to withdraw financial and budgetary support from the police, and to redistribute that wealth to non-police, non-carceral social programs and services that benefit BIPOC and working-class communities.
• The police should be sanctioned. Governments should be pressured to hold police accountable for the violence, injustice, and oppressions they wreak. Progressive and nonprofit organizations and institutions, such as labor unions and universities, should suspend membership and collaborative agreements with the police where they exist, and codify nonparticipatory censure of the police where they do not.

To be sure, a BDS movement aimed at the police would be just as protracted and difficult as the BDS movement against Israeli apartheid has been; public support and backlash can be expected to ebb and flow. But the wending nature of the struggle does not make it any less desirable or effective. Indeed, for those of us who view anti-oppression reform as a constitutive and necessary element of revolutionary abolition, a BDS movement aimed at the police is a strategy pregnant with material and ideological potential.

===

Keith Rosenthal lives in New York City and is the editor of Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell from Haymarket Books.

The Intersections & Divergences of Disability & Race: From the 504 Sit-In to the Present

Originally published at Spectre Journal on 7 June 2021

The twenty-six-day mass sit-in of April 1977 at the San Francisco headquarters of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was a watershed moment in U.S. history.[1] Not only did this struggle over Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 directly lead to the promulgation of the first seminal piece of federal disability anti-discrimination legislation – without which the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 would not have been possible – but it also marked the advent of the modern disability justice movement. “Second to the signing of the [504] regulations the way we wanted them to be signed,” stated sit-in leader Kitty Cone on the occasion of the group’s declaration of victory on April 30, 1977, “the most important thing that came out of this is the public birth of a disabled movement.”

People all over the country, not just people shut in convalescence homes, but everyone in this country has learned that disabled people have a tremendous amount of strength, that we are capable of leading a struggle that has won major gains from the government. There’s a great deal of self-confidence, a great deal of pride, that we have given to ourselves and to disabled people all over the country. But we’ve also shown that if you wage a really effective struggle and you don’t give up, you can win a victory. (“Handicapped,” 1977, p. 6)

As one of the central organizers of the near-unprecedented feat of political strategy and collaboration that went into the victory of the struggle, Cone knew well the historic import of their achievement. With 120 disabled activists and supporters occupying the federal building inside, hundreds more regularly rallying in support on the outside, and crucial extensions of practical assistance forthcoming from sundry other social movements – including that of labor unions, LGBT activists, feminist groups, and racial justice organizations – the 504 victory was a paradigm of cross-movement, cross-cultural, and collaborative solidarity in the fight against social oppression. Of particular note in this vein, though reported and theorized to a lesser extent at the time, was the intersectional positioning of Blackness and disability as mutually reinforcing matrices of the struggle (Connelly, 2020; Erkulwater, 2018; Lukin, 2013; Schweik, 2011).

The Pre-History of 504 and the Politics of Solidarity

San Francisco in the 1970s was a seething ferment of radical, emancipatory unrest. Activism against the U.S. war on Vietnam was widespread on the campuses and amongst war veterans; disabled students at Berkeley College were agitating against structural impediments to their equality; gender and sexual liberation groups were challenging ingrained norms and roles; and the mass struggle for Black freedom – personified by the movements associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and others – was upending virtually all pre-existing relations of American society.

This was the crucible that shaped the personages, politics, and characteristics of the 504 movement. Linkages made, lessons learned, and leaderships forged amidst the general social upheaval preceding the 504 sit-in ultimately proved indispensable to its success. Figures like Cone, who through her experience as an organizer with the Socialist Workers Party, had spent many years involved in campaigns against racial segregation and had developed a sense of the utmost importance of building coalitions and networks of solidarity across social struggles (Dash, 2009; Landes, 2000).

Another key figure was Donald Galloway, one of the first Black people to occupy a leading position within the Berkeley Independent Living Center (ILC) movement in the mid-1970s. Galloway had long been pressuring the ILC to take a more active role in the politics of racism and the life of the Black community. Galloway was keenly aware of the fact that disability activism surrounding the ILC had been negligent toward the specific experience of Black disabled people in San Francisco and nearby Oakland. This negligence, Galloway argued, was to the detriment of both the ILC and the Black disabled population who could benefit from the resources, politics, and activist opportunities offered by the former (Erkulwater, 2018; Lukin, 2013; Pelka, 2012, pp. 218-222).

I didn’t see very many black people. I was the first black person that I knew of at the Center, hired on the staff full-time. I was the only black, and I started bringing black people into the center as drivers and attendants, and bringing in professional types.... There was just a handful of us that came in, but we came together and decided that we needed some input into this system....

    We were in a predominantly black community.... The movement was predominantly white. We needed to reach out to the black community in Oakland, get the Black Panthers involved, and any other group that would like to be involved. (Pelka, 2012, p. 220)

Although Galloway ultimately felt frustrated in his attempts to establish overt connections between the disability movement and the local Black population, his efforts were not without significant posterior effect. As Galloway later recalled:

There was a severely disabled man in the Black Panther Party[2] named Brad [Lomax], and Brad was our link to the Black Panthers. We would go and provide him with attendant care and transportation because we had a small transportation system going, a fleet of vans going out to the community. Ed [Roberts, the ILC director] made a decision that he wanted us to get more involved with the Black Panthers and with Oakland. So we would go to some of their meetings and explain our programs. Because Brad, one of their members, had a severe disability, we were quite accepted. (Pelka, 2012, pp. 221-222)

This connection with Bradley Lomax and the Black Panther Party (BPP) would prove to be eminently pivotal in the 504 struggle to come.

Helen Keller's Socialism: Review of 'Her Socialist Smile' | New Politics

Originally published in New Politics Vol. XVIII No. 2, Whole Number 70 (Winter 2021)

Her Socialist Smile

By: John Gianvito

Traveling Light, 2020.

“The seeds of socialism are being scattered far and wide, and the power does not exist in the world which can prevent their germination.”

—Helen Keller

“There is a pertinence and connection between [Helen’s politics and] our current historical moment (even one hundred years later). She has a lot of things to say to us. … She had belief in the power of the young to move us a few steps closer to the kind of world we’d like to live in. So I hope this film speaks to new generations of activists and gives them some nutrition for the good fight.”

—John Gianvito, Q & A with the director, Her Socialist Smile (2020)

A director would normally balk at the prospect of making a movie about an historical subject on whom there is an extreme dearth of extant audio or visual material. In fact, director John Gianvito did precisely that twenty years ago when he first began exploring the possibility of making a movie on the under-appreciated socialist politics of Helen Keller. Gianvito had originally discovered Keller’s radical political history within the writings of the influential “people’s historian,” Howard Zinn, about whom Gianvito would later make an award-winning documentary (Profit Motive and the Whispering Mind, 2007).

Unfortunately for Gianvito, the primary medium by which Keller (who was blind and deaf) communicated her voluminous thoughts was, of course, that of the written rather than aural or visual word. Additionally, much of Keller’s personal archive of photographic and recorded content was destroyed over the years in a series of tragedies (a house fire in 1946 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001).

Recently, however, Gianvito decided to revisit the project. The renewed popularity of socialist ideas following the 2008 global crisis of financial capitalism, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, the historic campaigns of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party primaries, and the meteoric growth of Democratic Socialists of America—all these signs pointed to a revivified relevance of socialism in the United States.

In this light, Gianvito adopted a different conception of the Keller vehicle. The scarcity of primary audio and visual source material was inescapable, Gianvito recognized; but perhaps this was quite metaphorically fitting for a subject who made use of neither the sense of sight nor sound.

The resultant, imaginative oeuvre is the documentary Her Socialist Smile (2020), which recently received a limited run through the 58th New York Film Festival (held entirely online this year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic). The 1 hour, 33 minute movie is an interesting bricolage of white text against a black background; an eclectic selection of thematic music; scenes of nature in states of change and at rest; topical clips from newsreel and other secondary historical sources; professional narration and voice acting performed by Carolyn Forché; and the rare gem offering firsthand recordings and photographs of Keller speaking, writing, working, and playing.

All of this makes the documentary appear as an unlikely combination of worlds. With its text-on-screen format overlaid by musical and narrative accompaniment, one experiences the anachronistic universe of silent film; its interspersed shots of icicles melting in springtime or a slug making a herculean pilgrimage across the face of a boulder strike one as eminently modernist in form.

This latter aspect of the movie may not be quite so eagerly met by those whose primary attraction to the title stems from a desire to learn more about Keller’s socialist thought. There are odd stretches of long minutes in which on-screen bees pollinate flowers and flies buzz around an animal carcass. There is also an odd exception to form when the viewer is presented with the lone instance of political analysis, not by an interviewee discussing Keller’s politics, the various U.S. social movements of which she was a part, or the complexities of disability political theory in Keller’s time and now. Rather, the movie is given over to a four-minute clip of Noam Chomsky speaking at an event in 1989 on the ideological repercussions of the Cold War and the differences between the “opportunistic … Leninism” of the 1917 Bolshevik “coup” in Russia (an event which Keller, incidentally, viewed as a revolutionary beacon of socialist hope to the world) and the “mainstream Marxist movement” represented by the German Social-Democratic Party and the likes of Anton Pannekoek.

However, leaving aside questions of appropriate analyses of the social nature of Russia over the seventy-plus years between workers’ revolution and “the fall of Communism,” the central political content of Her Socialist Smile is both inspiring and edifying. Keller lived during the tumultuous years spanning 1880 to 1968; she identified as a socialist for sixty of those years, and was heavily involved in all of the major socialist and radical movements and organizations in the United States for roughly fifteen of those years, beginning in 1908 when she joined the Socialist Party.

Throughout this period she participated in protests for women’s equality and Black freedom. She organized in solidarity with workers strikes and anti-imperialist initiatives. She toured and gave speeches on behalf of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World. She offered her prestige to movements affiliated with the American Communist Party. She supported the struggle against nuclear weapons and the anti-communism of Cold War McCarthyism. She wrote prolifically on the topic of social revolution, workers’ power, socialist strategy, the injuries of economic inequality, the violence and opposition to democracy of the capitalist class, the oppression of the disabled and the economically marginalized, and the hope of a society reimagined around the principle that “the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all.”

Gianvito provides us with a taste of this all—a taste of Keller’s political genius. There are certainly elements of the documentary that are wanting. For instance, Gianvito inexplicably leaves out any discussion of Keller’s association with the anti-colonial movements of the 1940s and 1950s; the concomitant Non-Aligned Movement, whose leading figures, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Josip Tito, drew the keen interest of Keller; or the affection with which Keller regarded Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign for U.S. president. Further, Gianvito’s documentary does not include any analysis of the politics of disability, which were of course integral to Keller’s lifework.

Nonetheless, Her Socialist Smile is a welcome contribution to the contemporary proliferation of socialist-educational materials. If the movie does nothing more than whet the audience’s appetite for more of Keller’s politics, and socialism in general, then it can be considered a great success.

Disability and the Soviet Union: Advances and retreats (Part 2 of 2)

This article originally appeared in ISR #103.

Part two of a two-part article (see part one here).

By the end of October 1917, the Bolshevik Party had won a clear majority of workers and peasants within the nationwide network of soviets (revolutionary councils) to their program of the overthrow of the capitalist, or provisional, government which had replaced the deposed tsar. Almost immediately after carrying out the revolution, the Bolsheviks began reshaping all of Russia. To be sure, their ambitions in these first optimistic years far outstripped the limited means which Russia’s backward economy put at their disposal. Yet, hopeful as they were in the spread of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries of Europe—bringing with it the promise of direct international aid and an end to the economic siege organized by said capitalist countries—the Bolsheviks began reordering society in a truly revolutionary direction. There were three major areas in which the revolution effected significant change in the area of disability: law and policy; labor and the economy; and health and education. Changes in law and policy were discussed in part one of this article. The present article will address the impact of the revolution on the latter two categories.

===

Labor and the economy

The dramatic nature of many of the legal decrees notwithstanding, it is important to note that the Soviet government’s maximum agenda in the first years after the revolution remained largely aspirational. From its inception, the revolution had been fettered by the underdeveloped economic conditions inherited from tsarist feudalism and a disastrous world war; the inception of a counterrevolutionary civil war backed by the imperialist Allied countries of Europe and the United States; and a debilitating economic blockade placed upon Russia by an alliance of imperialist countries. As a result, it was estimated that by 1919 industrial production had declined to a mere one-fifth of its prewar high.¹

At best, the revolutionary government could set for itself the initial task of dividing up equally amongst the population the existent accumulated domestic wealth of the landowners and capitalists. Such a measure could provide immediate relief to the population, but could not stave off hunger and the generalization of want for more than a brief period. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware that the eventual success of socialism in Russia hinged entirely upon the spreading of revolution to the wealthier capitalist nations of the world, from whom Russia could obtain substantial economic aid and favorable relations of trade. Failing that, the Russian people were doomed to either remain mired in relative poverty or else face a growing compulsion to proceed down the road championed by the Bolsheviks’ conservative detractors: namely, to act as a kind of surrogate bourgeoisie committed to wealth accumulation via the exploitation of labor. As Engels had long before noted in The Peasant War in Germany, 

The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realization of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence. . . . Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practiced, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.² 

For the time being, however, the working class of Russia was simply determined to enjoy the immediate fruits of its victory. The experience of the revolution itself had thoroughly imbued Russian society with seemingly unbounded feelings of hope, solidarity, and comradeship. The watchword of the day was that the welfare and well-being of all trumped all other concerns.

Naturally, the reorganization of the economy proceeded along lines informed by this prevailing mood. Initially, this was done largely spontaneously as workers and peasants took matters into their own hands. They were not waiting for Soviet decrees, but simply proceeding to reorganize their lives, knowing that the soviets—their soviets—would invariably codify their actions after the fact. To this end, a massive wave of factory and workplace takeovers directly succeeded the revolution. The lowest strata of the peasantry likewise engaged in mass seizures and occupations of the former estates and mansions of the landed aristocracy.

Having thus placed the means of production under their own cooperative control, the workers immediately began to freely adapt and accommodate the labor process to their abilities, needs, and desires. This took the following forms: slowing down the pace of work; decreasing the length of the workday; prioritizing the implementation of safety precautions and measures; creating substantially more flexible work schedules; exerting more direct control over the flow and process of the work; and allowing for greater flexibility in the division of labor within the production process. 

The promise of such a socialist reorganization of the economy was, as Lenin wrote in December 1917, to draw “the majority of working people into a field of labor in which they can display their abilities, develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundant among the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed, and strangled in thousands and millions.” 

Every factory from which the capitalist has been ejected, or in which he has at least been curbed by genuine workers’ control, every village from which the landowning exploiter has been smoked out and his land confiscated has only now become a field in which the working man can reveal his talents, unbend his back a little, rise to his full height, and feel that he is a human being.³

Reminiscing decades later on the practical changes which the revolution in the factories had initially wreaked, the Bolshevik leader Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote, “The revolution had done away with the bullying, swearing and driving class of foremen and bosses, and the worker was glad to be rid of them, glad to be able to sit down and have a smoke when he was tired without anyone driving him. At the beginning the factory organizations readily released the workers to attend all kinds of meetings.” She continues by relating a particularly illustrative anecdote which occurred in early 1918: 

I remember a woman worker coming to me once at the Commissariat of Education to receive some certificate or other. During our conversation I asked her what shift she was working in. I thought she was working in the night shift, otherwise she would not have been able to come to the Commissariat in the daytime. “None of us are working today,” [she said]. “We had a meeting yesterday evening, everyone was behindhand with her domestic work at home, so we voted to knock off today. We’re the bosses now, you know.”⁴

Another aspect of the revolution that immediately expressed itself throughout the economy was the desire for equality between all sectors of the working class. For instance, whereas in August 1917 the ratio between unskilled and skilled workers’ wages was 1:2.32, by 1920 it had become 1:1.04.⁵ Historian Marcel Liebman notes that for Lenin and the Bolshevik party, the impossibility of achieving the complete equalization of wages was in fact seen as “one of the constraints imposed by the crisis and by the country’s economic backwardness, and [Lenin] regarded the necessity of giving specialists specially favored rates of pay as nothing less than a setback for the revolution. In the draft program he put before the Eighth Party Congress [March 1919] he repeated: ‘our ultimate aim is to achieve . . . equal remuneration for all kinds of work.’”⁶

The spirit of equality that attended the democratization of the production process also applied to issues that existed at the intersection of workplace accommodation and gender. For instance, some workplaces established free on-site childcare spaces for the benefit of working mothers, while others implemented regulations allowing working mothers to take off up to two hours out of their normal workday for the purposes of feeding their children.⁷ 

Perhaps one of the most popular new accommodations that Russian workers now enjoyed was the ability to take a near-unlimited number of paid sick days and respites away from work. Because the new revolutionary healthcare system was controlled by the workers, patients, and local soviets—and because the health system was free, universal, and removed from the dictates of market profitability and finance capital—it became easy for a worker suffering from injury or ill health to obtain authorization from a nearby medical center excusing them from work for a given period of time or indicating the necessity of a change in their workload or workflow.⁸ 

In addition to paid sick leave, revolutionary Russia also became the first country in the world where all workers, without exception, had the right to an annual paid vacation of two to four weeks. ⁹ Moreover, the Soviet government took the added measure of facilitating the widespread enjoyment of this right by seizing the beautiful seaside palaces and country estates of the former aristocracy and bourgeoisie and opening them up to peasants and workers to use for free as therapeutic resorts and communal vacation homes.¹⁰

Outside of the immediate sphere of relations pertaining to the workplace, there were a number of broader noteworthy social changes that improved the accessibility of general economic and civic life to all. For instance, important services such as public transit, electrical power, and postal and parcel delivery were provided free of charge to the populace at government expense.¹¹ 

Another significant development was the national campaign to establish free communal kitchens, laundries, childcare, and the like; the primary aim being to lift the many tasks of social reproduction off the shoulders of the individual family unit in general, and women workers in particular. Though the scale of these communal experiments was unfortunately limited by overall economic constraints, it is clear that those who especially stood to benefit from such measures were mothers with disabilities and mothers who had children with disabilities. Additionally, with the complete socialization and universalization of many tasks associated with individual daily living, all people with disabilities would be able to more easily obtain all manner of personal (i.e., communal) assistance necessary for meaningful self-development and realization.

Ultimately, a fully accurate depiction of the labor and economic situation in revolutionary Russia cannot be complete without recognition of the exigencies that stymied all but the most halting progress. By the end of 1918, sabotage, economic blockade, and open civil war on the part of the capitalist class and its international imperialist backers was well underway. From 1918 to 1921, the area under Soviet control was a society literally under a state of siege. Famine, unemployment, and the near-total breakdown of railroad transport plagued the cities and countryside alike. This was the period of so-called War Communism (a horribly inexact appellation), in which every nerve and fiber of Soviet society was marshaled toward the fortification and defense of the revolution. In many regards, it marked a significant retreat (or at the very least, an austere detour) from the path of democratic, cooperative, and post-coercive socialist development. As Trotsky put it in retrospect, “War Communism was the regime of a beleaguered fortress.”¹²

At the war’s conclusion, the peasant-worker alliance which had made the tsar’s overthrow possible began to break down under the weight of generalized scarcity, postwar exhaustion, and industrial collapse. The breakdown of transportation and the outbreak of the civil war crisis prompted the new government in August 1918 to begin sending detachments of workers and poor peasants into the countryside to forcibly requisition grain in order to sustain the Red Army and to forestall the depopulation of Russia’s cities. In 1921, with socialist revolution having failed (at least for the moment) to spread internationally, the Bolshevik government initiated a New Economic Policy (NEP) premised upon the limited introduction of capitalist forms of economy. If the policy of War Communism was one of retreat, then NEP marked a retreat from a retreat. Nonetheless, it was deemed a necessary concession to the demands of the peasantry and even elements of the working class, not to mention the very historical economic conditions obtaining in an isolated, dilapidated, and underdeveloped society.

As the decade of the 1920s wore on, the NEP saw the gradual reintroduction of privatized production, the commodities market, wage determination according to the labor market, social and economic inequality, and regularized unemployment. The Bolsheviks who ran the government during this period often felt that they were hostage to circumstances beyond their control in their implementation of NEP. Lenin, for example, remarked at the 1922 party congress: “It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both.”¹³

In reflecting upon the limitations and characteristics of Soviet Russia during these years, it is worth returning to Karl Marx, who in one of his more expansive descriptions of communism, wrote of a society in which, 

After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!¹⁴

And yet, how far Russia of the 1920s was from a society in which such conditions even remotely obtained. If, as Marx wrote, a political superstructure “can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby,”¹⁵ then we are compelled to return to the original Bolshevik assertion that a workers’ state that remained isolated in an underdeveloped Russia would be simply unable to conjure into being a genuine communist, classless society. 

Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that in certain key respects, the genuinely socialist aspirations of the Bolshevik government and the advanced sections of the working class remained evident even during these years of retreat and dissolution. For instance, the 1920s witnessed, inter alia, the emergence of three important labor-oriented disability advocacy organizations that enjoyed the support of both a large number of disabled Russians as well as the Bolshevik government. 

The All-Russian Cooperative of Disabled People (VIKO), All-Russian Union of the Blind (VOS), and All-Russian Union of the Deaf (VOG) were established in 1921, 1923, and 1926, respectively. Insofar as these three organizations were controlled by their members and yet operated with the support and under the aegis of the national government, they were quite without precedent. In fact, it has been argued that VIKO represents the first national pan-disability advocacy organization in modern history.¹⁶ VIKO was directly established in December 1921 by a vote of the Council of People’s Commissars.

The structure of VIKO was [that of] a national umbrella disability organization. All decisions were made democratically (in the early ’20s it was still allowed), and only people with disabilities had voting power at VIKO . . . VIKO focused its efforts on providing work opportunities for people with disabilities by creating special production lines, kindergartens, resorts, health retreats, vocational schools and sport centers.¹⁷ 

Along with VOS and VOG (which operated under the purview of the Commissariat of Social Services), these groups set for themselves the task of integrating disabled Russians into society by helping them find “socially useful work; helping them complete secondary and higher education and find suitable employment; and drawing them into the ranks of active builders of Communist society.”¹⁸ Describing the activities of VOS in the mid-1920s, historian Bernice Madison writes, “The effort to do away with illiteracy among the blind began . . . with a cultural revolution of sorts. Clubs, houses of culture, red corners, and libraries multiplied. Night schools were developed; records became available.”¹⁹ Of work amongst the deaf, disability studies scholar Sarah Phillips writes, “Thanks to the VOG, which enjoyed the approval of Party functionaries, deaf people were able to nurture a deaf culture and improve the social standing of people with disabilities.”²⁰

Disability and the Russian Revolution (Part 1 of 2)

This article originally appeared in ISR #102.

Part one of a two-part article.

Although there is scant available literature specifically addressing the topic of disability in the context of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, disability issues, nonetheless, figured quite prominently in it. As evidenced by the demands raised and literature produced by the revolutionary masses and parties in the years leading up to the revolution, disability seems to have been a significant contributing factor to the upheaval. Disability was an explicit component of the Bolshevik party program and propaganda between 1903 and 1917; after 1917, it was an area subject to much social and legislative reform on the part of the revolutionary government, which was in turn a product of the disability politics raised explicitly by the revolutionary soldiers, workers, and peasant masses.

Owing to the distortions of both Stalinist and Western capitalist ideologues, this history has largely been hidden or ignored. To be sure, the fate of people with disabilities in Russia after the turn toward forced industrialization, capital accumulation, and exploitation of wage labor in the late 1920s, followed essentially the same oppressive historical trajectory as that of all newly industrialized and industrializing capitalist societies. Nevertheless, just as Stalinism represented the negation of the emancipatory and socialist character of the Russian Revolution in its first years, so too did the worsening conditions of people with disabilities under Stalinist Russia represent a negation of what had been obtained in revolutionary Russia. 

The 1917 Russian Revolution marked a turning point in the history of the world socialist movement and, indeed, the history of humanity. It was the first time that a revolutionary party founded on the principles of Marxism—that is, the Bolshevik Party—was able to lead the majority of the working class in rising up, defeating the political rule of the capitalists and landowners, and instituting a form of government organized around the democratic self-rule of the exploited and oppressed.¹ 

While the full scope of the changes that the Bolshevik revolution effected was necessarily limited by the overwhelmingly underdeveloped and internationally isolated nature of Russia’s economy and society, nonetheless what we find in revolutionary Russia is a society that proceeded as far, if not farther, down the road toward the overcoming of disability oppression than any other society before or since. Moreover, this history is arguably proof of the Marxist-derived principle that the liberation of people with disabilities is impossible without the liberation of the entire working class, and the liberation of the entire working class is impossible without the liberation of people with disabilities.²

Russia before the revolution

The Russian economy at the turn of the century was largely agrarian and impoverished, combined with small but growing advanced pockets of industrial capital. Roughly 80 percent of the population was rural and consisted of small farmers, or peasants, working for semi-feudal landowners, while urban wageworkers, or proletarians, comprised roughly 15 percent of the population. What existed was an incipient capitalism, overshadowed by pre-capitalist feudal relations, all under the autocratic hand of the tsarist monarchy. The peasants and workers had virtually no rights, either at work, at home, or in civil society, and there was no apparatus in place for the provision of such basic public services as health care, social security, or unemployment assistance.

It was in this context that mass struggle began to emerge between the years 1900 and 1905. This struggle ultimately set the revolutionary overthrow of the tsar as its central demand, but it also raised an entire range of social and economic demands in the process. Though the 1905 uprising was violently repressed by the tsarist state, it nonetheless had a profound and lasting impact on the whole of Russian society. The demands raised in 1905, as well as the revolutionary methods of organization and struggle—the soviet (council) and the mass strike—would be brought even more forcefully to bear in 1917. 

In relation to the issue of disability, a number of these demands and struggles were of particular note. These include a demand for the development of a national system of social security, and in particular, for comprehensive disability insurance; a demand for the reform and extension of the wholly inadequate health care system; and a demand for the liberation of psychiatry from the tight grip of the tsarist police state, as well as the decriminalization of mental illness. 

Finally, as an addendum of sorts, it is worth exploring briefly the issue of workplace democracy and control as it emerged in the lead up to 1917, and its relevance to certain vital questions pertaining to disability.

Pioneers in the fight for disability rights: The League of the Physically Handicapped

This article was originally published in ISR #90.



IT IS commonly held that the inception of the modern US disability rights movement occurred amidst the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, two major developments figure prominently in this narrative.

The first is the rise of the Independent Living Movement in Berkeley, California. This movement was born of the efforts of a group of disabled University of California students. Politicized by the civil rights struggles of the period, they became active on their Berkeley campus and later established the first independent living center in the United States in 1971. The aim of the center, of which hundreds of others would soon spring up across the country, was to create a space where disabled people could exercise control over all aspects of their lives—professional, medical, social, civic—rather than remain marginalized by a paternalistic society constructed around their exclusion.

The second major landmark of the new disability rights movement was the formation of the group, Disabled In Action (DIA) in New York City, in 1970. Like the independent living centers, DIA sought autonomy for disabled people, but was more explicitly political and organized confrontational protests against discriminatory laws, attitudes, and institutions.

Out of and alongside these two organizations flowed countless springs of disability rights awareness, activism, and organization. This all played a fundamental role in changing the way that society—and most importantly, disabled people themselves—viewed the question of disability. This transformation is best expressed in the articulation of what has come to be known as the social model of disability. In sum, this model explains disability oppression as a phenomenon which limits the self-determination and life opportunities of people with impairments, and which arises primarily from social and political—rather than medical or personal—factors.

In other words, it is not the existence of a physical or mental impairment itself which diminishes one’s life, but rather the systemic unemployment, poverty, discrimination, segregation, etc., imposed upon people with impairments by an inaccessible and unaccommodating society. As Judy Heumann, founder of DIA, put it, “Disability only becomes a tragedy for me when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.”¹

The disability rights movement of today can trace its immediate lineage—directly or indirectly—to these 1960s-era progenitors. Yet, it is possible to look even further back in US history to the Depression era of the 1930s, to see the very first emergence of a self-conscious movement for disability rights, organized by disabled people themselves, and promoting a view which closely foreshadows that of the social model.

It goes without saying that the Great Depression that began in 1929 had a devastating impact on the lives of all American workers, with official unemployment rates skyrocketing to 25 percent. But for disabled people the economic crisis hit even harder. One study found that 44 percent of deaf workers who had been employed prior to the crash had lost their jobs by 1935. The overall unemployment rate for disabled people was probably upwards of 80 percent, translating into crushing levels of poverty.²

Finding employment had been extremely difficult for disabled workers even in times of economic prosperity. Industrial capitalism had come to develop a tendency to discard all those whose labor was deemed insufficiently productive or too costly in relation to the amount of profit they could create for an employer.

The years leading up to and during the Great Depression saw a veritable explosion in the popularity of eugenicist ideas among the political, medical, and economic elite of the United States. These ideas posited all disabled people as so much worthless refuse to be cast aside in the “survival of the fittest” struggle that was free-market capitalism. As a consequence, millions of disabled people were subjected to forced institutionalization, sterilization, and/or death at the hands of both private and public officials.

Yet for all its nightmarish features, the 1930s were also marked by a great upsurge in working-class radicalism and resistance against exploitation and oppression. Strikes, occupations, sitdowns, pickets, and demonstrations for jobs, welfare relief, and against evictions, and for many other reasons became commonplace. Millions of workers formed labor unions to protect and extend their rights. Notably, the American Communist Party (CP) also grew during this period into a substantial force on the US left. It ballooned to a membership of approximately eighty thousand, with hundreds of thousands more passing through its ranks.

As a consequence of all this turmoil and struggle, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt had begun implementation of its New Deal program in the mid-1930s. A centerpiece of the New Deal was the creation of millions of federal jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), inaugurated in January of 1935.

Yet even the WPA—as important a victory as it was for the working class—proved to be woefully limited in its scope. Among other flaws, state and federal WPA regulations barred disabled jobseekers from enjoying any of the program’s benefits, categorizing such individuals as “unemployable.” WPA advertisements underlined this point by explicitly stating that “only able-bodied American job-seekers” need apply.

To make matters worse, two additional pieces of New Deal legislation, following on the heels of the WPA, further codified federal discrimination against disabled people. The Social Security Act of August 1935 specifically defined “disability” as “inability to engage in substantial gainful work,” thus precluding anyone receiving any disability insurance from obtaining employment. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a national minimum wage, exempted workers with disabilities from the law’s coverage, thus giving official sanction to the common practice of employing disabled people in “sheltered workshops” where they were paid a mere pittance for their labor.

For one particular group of disabled workers living in New York City, such blatant discrimination on the part of the putatively progressive Roosevelt administration was simply too much to endure passively. On May 29, 1935, six of these individuals presented at the local office of the Emergency Relief Bureau (ERB) and demanded equal access to jobs under the new federal relief program. When told they did not qualify, being “unemployable,” they demanded to speak with the ERB director, Oswald Knauth. When Knauth refused, they began a sit-in right then and there, initiating an indefinite occupation of the ERB office.³

This particular group of protesters was not yet part of any formal organization, but they had come to know each other through their previous involvement with radical politics and labor activism. Most had been at least peripherally involved in the activities of the CP.

Undoubtedly, this prior experience played a role in giving them the confidence to defy the prevailing bigotries regarding disabled people as social and medical “invalids.” Rather, they situated their struggle and their demands on an explicitly political terrain. They forthrightly referred to themselves as “handicapped” rather than “cripples,” “invalids,” or any of the other then-common derogatory euphemisms.

As one participant recalled, “What started it was finding out that jobs were available, that the government was handing out jobs . . .  everybody was getting jobs . . . those of us who were militant just refused to accept the fact that we were the only people who were looked upon as not worthy, not capable of work.”⁴

When the second day of the occupation began, the protesters decided to drastically expand the action. They sent one of their numbers over to a nearby rally being held by the CP in Madison Square Garden in order to appeal for help. Immediately, the emissary returned with several dozen reinforcements. Before long, hundreds of people were picketing outside the ERB office, with thousands more looking on. By the day’s end, the action had drawn the support of members of the local Writer’s Union, the Young Communists of America, and the Unemployment Council. It had also drawn the attention of various media outlets, which reported on the protest in a predictably sensationalized manner.

Over the next several days, Knauth employed a number of tactics designed to break the occupiers’ resolve. Yet the sit-in persisted. A steady group of picketers—disabled and nondisabled—held constant vigil outside. Though the number of picketers slowly dwindled as the days wore on, newcomers continuously showed up to lend their efforts to the fight. This included visits from disabled people throughout the region who had read reports of the action and identified with it.

On the sixth day of the occupation, Knauth finally conceded to a meeting with the group at which point he was informed of their demands. First, they wanted fifty jobs to be immediately given to supporters of their as-of-yet unnamed organization, followed by ten more jobs every week following. Second, the jobs must be at or above minimum wage. Finally, the jobs must not be in segregated “sheltered workshops” or as part of a charity, but rather in an integrated setting with nondisabled workers.

Knauth peremptorily stated that he could not acquiesce and that, furthermore, his policies were merely in compliance with those of the federal government. At this point, one of the occupiers, a man named Hyman Abramowitz, angrily retorted, “That’s not a good enough answer. We are all handicapped and are being discriminated against.” He then proceeded to indict the Roosevelt administration. He accused Roosevelt of “trying to fix things so that no physically handicapped person can get a job, so that all of us will have to go on home relief. . . . We don’t want charity. We want jobs.”⁵

Though few would have been aware of it at the time, the irony was that Roosevelt himself was also disabled. In fact, he was impaired in much the same way as Abramowitz—paralyzed from the waist down due to a childhood bout of polio. The only difference between these two men, one from the working class and one from the ruling class, was that Roosevelt and his presidential entourage were able to develop an elaborate system that kept his impairment all but completely hidden from the public. Thus, while Abramowitz fought for the right of all disabled people to obtain jobs, Roosevelt used the power of his position to deny this right to millions of other disabled people less fortunate than himself.⁶

Nine days after the occupation had begun, the police were finally called in to quell the protest. After roughing up the defiant occupiers and their supporters outside, they dragged away eleven protesters in handcuffs.