Description
PREORDER
What remains of revolutionary socialism after eighty years of defeats, compromises, and missed opportunities?
John Reimann has spent his life attempting to answer that question in practice. Born into the world of New York’s anti-Stalinist Left, he encountered the political legacy of Trotskyism, the civil rights movement, and the New Left before becoming a union carpenter and revolutionary socialist organizer.
Born to Rebel follows Reimann through the great transformations of postwar American politics: the decline of labor militancy, the employers’ offensive against the building trades, the accommodation of union leadership to capital, and the fragmentation of the socialist movement. His participation in the 1999 Bay Area carpenters’ wildcat strike—and his subsequent lifetime expulsion from the union—forms the dramatic center of a history told from within the working class.
But Reimann’s memoir is more than a chronicle of battles fought and lost. It is a polemic against the socialist Left’s abandonment of working-class political independence, its accommodation to union bureaucracies, and its recurring apologies for authoritarian regimes abroad. Against both nostalgia for the old labor movement and resignation to its disappearance, he insists that the history of these defeats must be understood if socialism is to become a political possibility again.
At once personal testimony and political provocation, Born to Rebel invites readers to reconsider the relationship between Marxism, the labor movement, and the unfinished struggle for socialism.
