Chicago Socialism

How about Angela Davis and Naomi Klein under one roof? A Chicago village modelled on Saltaire, where Eugene V Debs cut his teeth? The origin of workers’ Mayday? Mask-wearing at a socialist festival?

Yep, this is the politics chapter. ...but isn’t every chapter?!

So one of the ways Nancy has influenced this trip, was a comment that I could volunteer at the Haymarket literature festival ‘Socialism 2023’. So last week, in return for a festival ticket, I spent 6 hours on Thursday transforming books in crates into fine displays, sat at the

door of three of the 100+ sessions to check people in, and spent 3 more hours packing up those books after the festival ended on Monday afternoon.

There were hundreds of good speakers. The sessions were often moderated conversations between a handful of activist and organiser thinkers for an hour, followed by a half hour of questions from the floor. Think The World Transformed at its height. I wasn’t in the mood for non-stop sessions, but was glad to be in the ones I attended. It is an annual event that literally thousands of people look forward to – a record 2,090 attended this year.

Three sessions stick most in my mind. One described the successful campaign to elect a progressive trade union organiser as Chicago Mayor this April, Brandon Johnson. I was taken with a comment that a progressive administration needs to co-govern with the people, and another comment that this shouldn’t be too difficult since past administrations had experience of co-government, with the corporates. What does co-government with the people look like? Probably – this is me speculating – a lot of hard work by community organisers sitting on the dozens of education and transport and police

and planning boards and committees, to make sure the Mayor has support for every move to overcome inertia and opposition.

The two other sessions standing out… well I wasn’t the only one who felt grateful to witness Angela Davis on Friday and Naomi Klein on Sunday. They both happened in a huge room with nothing else scheduled at the same time, Angela’s so full that a lot of people were sitting in the aisles.

I knew of Angela when I was in Cuba at the time of her 1972 trial in California for murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. The international campaign for her freedom made it hard for the evidence not to be listened to, and she was released, not guilty on all charges. She has remained influential through her writing and campaigning on race class feminism and abolition of the jail system. She still speaks frequently, often live-streamed. Look for her!

Angela was in a panel of four introducing their book ‘Abolition.Feminism.Now.’ The session was begun by a Black Lives Matter chant-leader. Each time Angela spoke there was complete silence, hanging on her words. I wrote down “I urge you all to collaborate, to engage in collective work. You will find new common ground, not across differences but emerging out of your analysis of your

differences.” Doesn't she often say things that you instinctively agree with but have to think about?

There was an equally respectful attention for Naomi Klein, who talked through her ‘Doppelganger’ book. She made a case that populist right-wing politics comprise a left lookalike, that talks about things the left doesn’t address, uses left phrases, and poses conspiratorial analysis and fascist solutions. “We are through the portal of COVID, though it’s still with us, and I think we would agree we don’t much like the scenery.”

Saltaire and Pullman

I rode the elevated 'L' to the September 4th Labor Day parade and festival, following a lead from Bob Jones to look up the Illinois Labour History Society. The festival turns out to be in Pullman, a company town that’s now a suburb of Chicago but was built for the train magnate George Pullman (carriages, for instance). I get given a booklet whose first page talks only of Saltaire which Pullman probably visited before having his own town built in the 1880s. It had running water, brick-built properties, away from the miserable conditions and rebellion in the city. I keep telling people here about that Chicago-Bradford link, but when they don’t know about Pullman it falls flat!

Pullman ran every service at 6% profit – from rented rooms to

laundry to stores. When he reduced wages across the board but insisted on rents being paid, a strike movement responded. Though the US president sent troops to crush the strike in 1895, it propelled its courage-ful leaders to national influence, including Eugene V Debs. He was then of the American Railway Union and later a founder of the American Socialist Party, who went on to get a million votes standing for president from jail in 1920.

Labour Day in the USA is the beginning of September, but Chicago also has the honour of successfully promoting May 1st as the international day of worker solidarity, after 5 anarchist worker organisers were hung in 1886 on invented charges. They were eventually pardoned, but that wasn’t consolation to them or their families or the movement. That's the Haymarket Martyrs, and it's Haymarket Books that organises the literature festival.

The Columbia World Fair, Mother Jones, … I took photos: (a) of the houses next to the 'L' rails. (b) Why does a memorial for police dogs have a hammer and sickle on it? I don’t know. I scratched the surface of Chicago. (c) And I have books to show for it.

Masks

I've just tried to make sense of COVID vaccination rates in the USA and the UK. Its not always easy to tell what's comparable but they seem to agree on a fully vaccinated rate of 76% in the UK and 68% in the USA. In the UK the proportion with three doses varies a lot between districts - from over 80% in most of the south and west and rural areas, through 69% for Bradford, 61% for Birmingham and below 60% in inner London. It's lower where you might expect most poor and hard-to-reach people.

In the USA the highest 'fully vaccinated' states are on both coasts and the least vaccinated are the more rural areas, and they match fairly closely to the usually Republican areas, including Wyoming, Mississippi, Alabama. In the USA vaccination rates are associated as much or more with political affiliation as social marginalisation. It's a

Trump phenomenon, a divisive tribalism that continues far more deeply than Boris-idealism in the UK.

So it's not surprising that the places that require masking have been left-anarchist bookshops, and the socialism literature festival. The festival insisted on it, and reminded every session, and had door-checkers like me ask anyone without a mask to get one from reception and wear it. I cant think of anywhere insisting like that in the UK. I have no idea whether the levels of vaccination and the strains of COVID that are going the rounds make the risk worse in the USA than the UK, or the mask-wearing effective. I cant see anything written that assesses those things.

Mask wearing must make things safer for everyone and that's especially important to those who are most likely to be severely affected by viral illnesses. Wearing them can be a demonstration for more caring public health policies. Here's Nancy at the Socialism festival. She and Mariamne were two of a dozen who wore them on the Alaska cruise, but they both got home and tested COVID positive. No irony there that they hadn't got COVID for 3 years of staying very careful, and the Alaska cruise was a first collective outing.

Just writing this is making me wonder if I should wear one always in company, even though I find the wearing uncomfortable and I don't see a campaign that asks me to . I'm only doing it when asked.

Now in Madison, watching Oppenheimer and Barbie. Next stop: train journey via the Grand Canyon to San Francisco to meet Merle.