Born to Rebel: My 80 Years as a Revolutionary Working Class Socialist

$30.00

How did the American working class lose its power—and why did the socialist Left fail to stop it?

In Born to Rebel, John Reimann recounts a lifetime of working-class struggle, from the civil rights movement and the New Left to decades of rank-and-file organizing in the Carpenters Union, culminating in the 1999 Bay Area wildcat strike and his expulsion from the union for life.

Part memoir, part political reckoning, Born to Rebel challenges conventional accounts of organized labor’s decline and confronts the socialist Left’s accommodation to union bureaucracies and authoritarian regimes abroad. Reimann asks what can be learned from these defeats—and what it would take to make socialism a political possibility again.

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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.

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