I believe that the real prospects for any kind of renewal of the radical left in South Korea,
and I think this is true in virtually every major capitalist country,
is a great internationalization of perspectives,
because the recovery of the South Korean economy since 2008
has largely been based on economic dealings with China.
There are 4,000 South Korean firms invested in China,
and China has now replaced the United States as the main trading partner of South Korea,
and it has replaced the United States as the main trading partner of Japan.
So there's a certain kind of momentum,
I do not want to be over-hasty about this,
but sort of a decoupling, maybe that's not the term I want to use,
from an American-centered, export-oriented kind of economic strategy to something more Asia-centered.
I believe it's in that context that the workers movement itself really has to link up with,
in the Korean case, with Japanese workers,
and now, for example, with these recent very interesting strikes in June in China,
to the extent it's possible with Chinese workers.
That's a difficult road to hoe, because you can't just go to China and say,
where's the nearest union office?
Because the official unions, of course, are almost entirely controlled by the government,
and would frown on such overtures.
But nevertheless, those kinds of connections are developing.
I've been speaking with Lauren Goldner.
He is the author of a number of books, including most recently,
Herman Melville, Between Charlemagne and the anti-Mozart Cosmic Man Race Class,
and The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, an American Renaissance writer.
He's also the editor of a new online journal called Insurgent Notes,
and we also have a link to that.
Thank you so much, Lauren, for being on the program.
Oh, it's been great.
Hello, folks, and welcome to the Antifada.
Today, we have a very special show.
One of our good friends, comrades, and mentors, Lauren Goldner,
has passed away this previous weekend.
A legend within the communist milieu,
a theorist inspired by left-wing extremists,
a
by many others, as we'll be talking about on this episode-
and the last of the professional revolutionaries.
A man who lived all over the globe,
a man who was part and parcel of the theorization of struggles
from California to New York to South Korea, to China, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere.
Lauren Goldner was an incredible figure.
And as you'll see it on this episode,
We're gonna have a bunch of his friends together here to reminisce to talk about his thought
to talk about his theory and how they helped all of us with our development and also just to celebrate the life of a man who was
truly kind and generous with his own time and
Just a good friend to us all so welcome to the Antifada
Lauren Goldner Memorial episode and do you want to talk a little bit about the goings-on on this episode?
Sure, so I didn't know Lauren as well as you did Sean
But I had seen him talk a couple times and I've read a lot of what is available on his site break their haughty power
And on libcom and he's one of the best writers of our milieu. He puts things very clearly
very emphatically and
Just going over some of his stuff in the last few days after I heard the news
It's already been incredibly refreshing and helpful
He was very incisive about social movements. He's got a great essay about
Seattle in 99 about occupy
like you said he was writing about the strikes in South Korea about the
more recent labor movements in China and this is just
Some of his work over the last 10 20 years and he had been working
Since the 60s as far as far as I know, I think he deboard mentions him at some point
He had been relevant for that long
So I'm gonna probably hang back on this episode since I didn't know him quite as well as everybody else
but we have some of his friends and comrades from insurgent notes from capital reading groups and other places and
really glad you could all join us and tell us more about Lauren and
Point our listeners in the direction of getting acquainted with his work. Yeah, if I could start with my reminisces
Reminiscences I first met Lauren. I think at around the same time. I met a lot of the folks who are gonna be on this podcast
which was the immediate aftermath of the great financial crisis a moment in time where
There was a real rebirth of the critique of political economy aspect of Marx's thought
Whereas before you know was very academic. It seemed very very real to all of us
Lauren was living in New York City at the time and I believe Billy might have been at this meeting and Jared might have been too
But he called a meeting and we all met at the Brecht forum rest in peace, which was like a sort of popular front
Stalinist
Meeting center that existed
I think going all the way back to the boomer period on the west side of Manhattan and we sat down and
Lauren kind of led the discussion and we
other a reading list and the idea of this group was to kind of have a
recomposition of
Marxist forces within New York City that could try to do a reading group and do theory to try to take from the past what was
Necessary to understand in that present Lauren and I
After that group we had had some meetings
We had crossed each other's paths many many times after that. He was always very kind to me. He
No matter how advanced you were. I think with your theory or your history or whatever
He was always very very generous with his time and with his energy
If you ever had a question you can email him if you ran into him at a party or something like that
He would be glad to talk your ear off about whatever subject
It was that you were interested in that particular time and so in a social sense interpersonal sense
Just an extremely lovely man and a great friend. I would say and
As a mentor and a comrade just somebody who who lasted through some of the toughest times
I think on the and on the left communist or ultra left Mill you a man who kind of
You know cut his teeth in the heyday of boomers 60 radical at 60s radicalism and
Spent the rest of his life carving a different path from the sort of third worldest
Marxist Leninist Maoist way that much of his generation went all the way back in the 60s and 70s
He was already critiquing that and kind of bringing to earth and holding on to important nuclei of
communist theory like Bordiga like Kamat translating things and making sure that this
current of
Marxist theory and practice
Which we call the ultra left Mill you or we call left communism councilism Bordigas
I had a life in the English speaking world
Far but far in in times like way previous to when we all know like the Bordiga means and stuff
Lauren Goldner was working with this heavy theory and making it accessible to everybody so in terms of
You know how how I would summarize his legacy to me. It was somebody who is a real exemplar. I think of
What a true revolutionary should be which is a kind of gloomy
revolutionary should be which is a kind of glue that holds people together a
Mentor that will bring people along help them to understand the world and also an open-minded person who could go everywhere from
volume two of capital to understanding the works of Herman
Melville in terms of the birth of the modern world the 1848
Revolutions and and everything like that. So a real Renaissance man on the communist left and that's what I have to say
So we've got a bunch of people on the call. A lot of people our listeners will be familiar with
from past episodes and that's no coincidence because Lauren was a mentor and you know had
brought together a lot of the people who are influential to Sean and I and
Of course who we've had on the show for that reason
So what he who would like to to speak first and maybe give us a little bit of a background on either how they know
Lauren or or Lauren's life or his thought? John, I think you had a like a biological
Series of biographical sketches right that you had found earlier
Yeah, I you know like everybody like on on here and just I got got a lot of texts actually from folks
Being in shock that Lauren passed away
You know, he was ill for some time
but I think it's a shock because as
You know Andy and Sean have talked about it. I think you know Lauren was a big mentor for a lot of us
You know younger revolutionaries. I use younger broadly
We're all
But kind of that post occupy
Generation well the occupied generation right who were really shaped by a very particular
Very particular material conditions that being the rise of what you know Lauren spent a lot of time talking about was
Fictitious capital right and why that was really important to understand in terms of you know, how that would
Reflect the kind of struggles we would see the kind of struggles we could anticipate participating in
Why a lot of the social movements that you know, the old socialist parties
Kept, you know hitting their head against was no longer working right? So I think you know Lauren was a really indispensable
Mentor for all of us and like many of that generation really
Really friendly very much approachable someone who always made a lot of time
For you know for us, but yeah to just give a brief
Like biographical sketch. So Lauren was 76. His birthday was in October. He was a Libra, which we texted about at one point
But he was also a revolutionary right brought born in October
He was born in Berkeley, California. His dad was a professor and I think at some point he also lived in Bowling Green, Ohio
But he you know, he really kind of grew up in the Bay Area
So he was really involved in you know, a lot of the
You know political upheavals of the late 60s
And I think you know, he has this really interesting article that I sent to Sean as well
That hopefully readers will check out that talks a little bit about his political upbringing
But he says, you know, he went to Berkeley to pursue his studies and he found himself in the middle
Of all of these movements right and having to deal with um, you know
Kind of the Maoist left, uh the broad socialist left and at that time, you know
People were in that sense choosing sides and um, this was also the time of a lot of
You know like black people who were in the middle of the movement
And so he had a lot of
You know like black radicalism the panthers, right?
So he found his home in these independent socialist sects that were quite critical of Stalinism
And even though he would remain critical of Trotsky throughout his life
I think he appreciated a lot of Trotskyist critique of Stalin
So this is all to say he kind of really comes out of that 68 arc
Berkeley that he found the situationist,
the kind of like the French left
and was really beginning his political developments,
kind of become a main ultra leftist.
And I thought what was interesting about Goldner's life
is that he had this really cushy job
at the Harvard Center for European studies,
which I think at the time had its own library.
So he really spent his day like reading,
talking about books, writing until the mid 90s.
And then when he got laid off,
he had to figure out what to do, right?
So at this time he makes his way to South Korea
to teach English.
And for a few years he's back and forth to South Korea
and he's also traveling to other parts of the world.
And what I got from talking to some folks
is that wherever he went,
he was really clear about making connections
with working class struggles.
And those were connections and comrades
that he would maintain relationships for his entire life.
And then afterwards when he returned,
he kind of settled into Brooklyn and in New York.
A very short story, my personal,
and I'll give it up to other people
is I met Goldner in 2015, I believe.
This was during around post like occupied time.
And this was, I don't know if you guys remember
this is when he was giving those talks at Wendy's.
I know, right?
Like what a place.
So I met him through folks in the New York scene
and I was really taken by Lauren
because he was not somebody
that could just talk to you about politics.
He could talk to you about anything.
So we talked a lot about music, art, his life, the world.
And I think he took special interest
because being Albanian,
we were really the last existing socialist country
and quite Stalinist.
So I know he had a lot of stuff to say about that,
but yeah, I'll give it to other folks to share.
Yeah, thank you for that.
Who wants to go next?
Yeah, thank you, Jonah.
That's really eye-opening.
I remember Lauren telling me a story
about being in Berkeley in the 60s.
Of course, I'm Billy O'Connor, long time,
New York Capitol reading group alumni, law alumnus.
And Lauren told me a story
about being in Berkeley in the 60s,
wheat pasting posters to a wall and getting arrested.
The posters he was wheat pasting said,
CPUSA are police informants.
And the cops were like, wait, what?
He's like, wheat pasting these posters that say,
the American communist party are police informants.
So just by way of a slight, a short biographical anecdote
and to establish his left-com bona fides, I guess.
But that was an excellent biography, Jonah, thank you.
I met Lauren around the same time as Sean.
I was at that Brecht meeting
and I remember going to him shortly after that
and telling him, yeah, I had gone down to Katrina
with the disaster relief and I just was very disillusioned
by the whole scene here in the US, frankly.
And I told Lauren, I just don't have any faith
in this American working class anymore.
I just don't think they're ever gonna
get anything done revolutionary wise.
And he told me a story about this Catholic priest
who went to his Bishop and said,
I just don't believe in any of this stuff anymore.
I don't believe any of it.
And I have parishioners who count on me, who look up to me.
What am I gonna do?
And the Bishop leaned into him and he said, fake it.
And from then on, I always called Lauren the Bishop
and addressed him as your grace
whenever nobody else was listening.
But you're not recording any of this, are you?
God all-polling.
So that was that, I don't care.
He looked at me like, I don't care if you believe in it.
Just keep coming to the readings.
It was a real turning point in my life.
And I'm still out here thinking it less,
but I'll always think of Lauren as the Bishop
for that reason.
The following year, 2009, a small auto parts plant
south of Seoul called Sangnyong announced
1,500, 2,000 layoffs out of a workforce of 6,000.
And they had already been downsized
from about 8,000 a few years before.
Interestingly, this firm was ultimately owned
by a Chinese automotive company.
The general idea was that the Chinese automotive company
really just wanted to shut down Sangnyong
and take the equipment and move it to China.
They were restructuring, laying people off,
and then they announced these massive layoffs
and those who were on the list to be laid off occupied.
And they held the factory for 77 days.
Some workers who were not laid off also joined them.
And the local union president stayed in
for the entire 77 days.
And they, after about four weeks, the police attacked
and then finally even units of the army were involved
in the final assault of Sangnyong.
If you do, if you search it on the internet,
I presume you can still find these video clips
of military helicopters flying over the plant,
dropping tear gas that had a special chemical element
that burned the skin.
They had cut off the water and finally even the electricity.
They were very concerned because there was
a huge paint department.
And once they turned off the electricity,
there was a greatly increased possibility of fire
in that part of the factory.
And the workers just sort of fought tooth and nail
right up to the end until they were all trapped
in one part of the factory, surrounded by thousands
of riot police and soldiers, and they finally caved.
Yeah, I'd studied in, not studied, but taught
in South Korea.
And one thing about Lauren is, you could never tell him
you went to a place or wanted to go to a place
or thought about a place, unless you wanted him
to get you involved in some revolutionary work
at that place.
Because I told him, yeah, I used to study Korean
and for some reason, when I was in the military,
the Korean language.
And he said, oh, that's fantastic.
And he had a whole list of groups and people
in South Korea, South Korean communists
who have to remain nameless.
I think they still have the death penalty on the books
in South Korea for being a communist.
But they need some help.
They need some help setting up their website
and this and that.
And he knew I had done a lot of computer work,
software development work in the 90s.
So you never told Lauren you knew about a place
or you thought about a place,
because you're working in that place.
As soon as you told him.
He'd send you to Brazil, South Korea, and he did.
And I met a lot of people and learned a lot of languages
hanging around with Lauren Goldner, as you would.
Greetings.
Yeah, I'll go.
Me, my name is Ari Azahedi.
I known all of you for quite some time.
And yeah, I've been really trying to think
since I got the news, how to sort of organize my thoughts.
Lauren Goldner was a very big influence on my thought
and in a number of ways that I'll talk about.
I think first off, just to say that he will certainly
be missed and that his presence and now him being gone,
there's definitely a kind of a void, at least for me.
He was sick for a while.
So just his kind of pulling back as things started
to get worse was already a bit of a empty space.
And I think that it just reminds me also again,
and apart from him personally, like how I'll miss him
personally besides his intellectual and revolutionary
and all of that, just on a personal friend level,
I'll certainly miss him.
I think getting back to this political level,
he was very much of or cut his teeth on the 1968 generation.
Janna just really, I think pointed out a lot of things
like that, that we have to really appreciate
that connection and I think as time goes on,
those kind of connections are sort of breaking a bit.
Like many people of that generation,
he became politicized as Janna said at Berkeley,
but through SDS, Students for a Democratic Society,
which in the late 1960s was the largest campus organization.
And then I think he was involved
with the International Socialist Faction of SDS,
which is Trotskyist faction that didn't accept
the Soviet Union as a socialist country.
They had their own sort of version of kind of
some kind of state capitalists thesis.
Somebody else might be able to fill in the blanks
on that for me, then went into that.
And something really interesting,
he selected to point out about how he was always
sort of wrong place at the wrong time.
He was in Paris in April of 1968,
Martin Luther King is assassinated.
He says, the revolution is about to kick off
in the United States, I need to get back.
And he comes back to the United States
and May 68 is just a few weeks later,
and he had a number of stories like that.
For me personally, I met Lauren Goldner,
sure it was right after I moved to New York City,
which was around 2007, I moved to New York City
and I met Lauren, I would think it's sometime around the crash.
So shortly after that, but it was certainly before Occupy
around maybe 2008, 2009.
And first time I met him was at a talk he gave
on fictitious capital at the CUNY Grad Center.
And then shortly afterwards,
I heard he had a capital reading group.
And I don't remember, it was so long ago,
this capital reading group,
Billy, I think that's where we may have met.
You may have been in that one,
which was in, I don't even know,
it was some union hall in Midtown somewhere
that you had to take a freight elevator up and go in,
couldn't point it out now.
And it was out of that reading group
that the basis of what became Insurgent Notes came out of.
And I know Insurgent Notes existed when Occupy happened
because we already had literature for it and all that.
I get the sort of dates if somebody can fill it out.
So, you know, I was, from then on,
I mean, from the time we had the capital study group,
he and I just kind of really hit it off
in terms of friendship, intellectual interests,
things of that nature.
And a few ways that I think he really influenced me
and we really kind of clicked on,
I've tried to just sort of collect my thoughts.
One thing is that we have to remember the era
before the 2008, 2009 crash
and after the fall of the Soviet Union
was not very encouraging for the study of capitalism
generally, let alone Marxist theory.
And Lauren was one who really was a bit immune
from whatever was the intellectual fashion at the time,
for better or for worse sometimes.
But it was his insistence that this is just temporary.
Once again, the critique of political economy
will see the importance,
and his insistence on the importance
of the critique of political economy as he believed,
and I think he was correct in his analysis
and Marx understood it, was still the key
for us to understand the world around us.
Not the only one, it is not in and of itself sufficient,
but it is indispensable.
And his insistence on that and Marxism as a critique,
not as an ideology, was something that really attracted me
to his way of thinking at a time when,
I mean, people who held that view,
a lot of them were dead, they were thinkers
of the critical theory of the past
and of the sort of communist tendencies,
minoritarian communist tendencies of the past.
And stemming from that is the insistence
that alienation is the pillar on which
that critique of political economy is based.
That's something he and I really used to talk about
all the time, and I'm sure all of you can affirm this
of how he could just open chapter, verse, capital,
and be like, here it is, this is the it.
And that was always easy, because he was such a source.
I'd be like, Lauren, this is what I'm doing,
and he would just open the book,
and be like, this is the quote you need right here.
And then even more directly in terms of my own work,
I think two things that were key that I built upon,
even though, by the way, we did have our disagreements,
but these were the things that I felt
we both really were trying to develop theoretically,
and what was a basis of our intellectual relationship,
at least, was one was the theory of imperialism
and how to understand imperialism today,
and the critique of what we call
the ideology of anti-imperialism,
not the struggle against imperialism,
what we call the ideologies, and its various offshoots.
Lauren's essays, one on the Turkish Communist Party,
and the other on the influence
of this German anti-modernity thought on Third Worldism,
which I think is even more relevant today,
and his essay on Bolivia.
So those were key for me.
We did a panel together at the first New York,
no, it might not have been the first.
I don't remember what year it was.
It was 2011, HMNY, Historical Materialism Conference,
on this question.
And that's when I first really started to develop
what is today, what I work on a lot is this sort of critique
in terms of how it applies to Iran in various ways.
And related to that, and I think what is a really important
also sort of theoretical achievement of his
is reaffirming the importance of Rosa Luxemburg
in the theory of imperialism
and the critique of anti-imperialism
as both the basis of that critique,
but also a new way of understanding imperialism
in this, whatever we wanna call it,
neoliberal late capitalist era.
And then another point that's connected to that
is his interest, would put it mildly,
in the struggles of the Third World in the global South.
I mean, the struggles of the proletariat in the global South.
Sorry, get out of there.
As seeing that as being one of the major developments
of capitalism since the 70s,
the push of manufacturing the global South.
So he's always interested in what the proletariat
was doing, not just in the kind of core capitalist nations,
but also even in the far peripheral aspects
of international capitalist production.
And so related to all of that is an essay I would point to,
I've already mentioned his,
I wanna sort of pitch these essays to people,
perhaps maybe younger people who might be listening.
I'm making a list.
So they can go look these up.
Yeah, I'm gonna make a list
so that they can all go on the show.
The San Bolivia essay on Turkey,
and another one that was really influential to me
is a fictitious capital for beginners
or the continued relevance of Rosa Luxembourg.
That's an essay that was really sort of influential to me
and kind of set me along further down
the kind of rabbit hole of this.
Basically emphasizing the continued relevance
of the idea of a primitive accumulation,
the continuance of,
and that being the basis of understanding
capitalism, imperialism today.
So on a personal more kind of just to kind of talk about
him as a person, sometimes I think,
and this was, I think no small part of his own doing,
his insistence on the critique of political economy,
particularly at a time at the sort of high period
of postmodern theory, sometimes may have given
the impression that he was sort of dogmatic
or that he was only concerned with this one kind of
key aspect of capitalism,
which sometimes that could be the issue.
I think it's because of who he was trying
to sort of struggle against so much,
but on a, you know, outside of that,
he was very much a cosmopolitan thinking person
who saw capitalism as this much more dynamic totality.
And a couple of aspects of his thought that I think really
go under the radar was that as much as he was a,
very much a critic of what we would call
postmodernist theory,
he was not simply a Marxist apologist of modernity
and kind of 19th century materialism.
He had, he believed that Marx was neither the kind of,
and I think correctly, the materialism
of the 18th, 19th century thinkers,
nor this kind of rejection, but he did believe
that it was a possibility of there being another way.
And his writings on Kepler, for example,
he would always posit Kepler to Newton
and say Kepler was the kind of alternative
that could have provided a sort of more holistic view.
And a kind of anecdote,
one time I remember him telling me that he had by himself
traveled to Amish country in Pennsylvania
to scour really obscure bookshops in order to find
the writings of Jacob Burma, the German mystic philosopher,
which have a connection to those communities.
So he really would go deep, just to show,
give an idea of sort of his interests
in terms of thought and philosophy.
Did he find it?
Not just, I believe, yeah, he would tell these stories
like you gotta go check it out, these bookstores,
they're like Marx's bookstores with all their divisions
and they have a whole section on 16th,
19th century mysticism, you gotta check it out.
And he knew German and they spoke,
he could kind of make this medieval German up.
And so just to give you a kind of idea.
And so I think I've spoken enough,
but just to say that I hope to sort of do justice
to his memory, he will be missed.
There will be a place which won't be able to be filled
with his loss.
So rest in peace, Lauren Goldner,
and your commitment to what he called
a true material human community,
I hope will sort of continue particularly.
I hope that, yeah, I'll just sort of leave it at that.
Rest in peace, Lauren Goldner.
Great words, man, thank you so much for that.
Those of you who are familiar with Hegel
know about his glorification of the Prussian monarchy
and the Prussian civil service
as the embodiment of the world spirit.
These German romantics and Fichte in particular
had a variance on one, I think,
without too much violence to history,
you can draw a line from Fichte's notions
of the autonomization of the aesthetic,
a revolt against Kantian philosophy,
which we don't have time to talk about,
and his idea of what he called the closed mercantile state,
the Schloss in the Handelsstadt in German,
which we find in the 1920s and 1930s,
culminating in German Nazism,
a literal closed mercantile state
headed by a failed artist named Adolf Hitler,
who devoted a tremendous amount of his time
and power to art, aesthetics, and sought culture
as central to Nazism.
Those who see us as merely a political movement
understand nothing about national socialism,
as he told the British ambassador
just before the outbreak of World War II.
Next, Ross, do you wanna jump in?
Ross Wolfe.
Yeah, so this is Ross.
I've been on the Antifada a couple of times.
But yeah, Lauren, I came to know a little bit later
than some of you on here.
I'd read a couple of his essays,
but when I first began to really engage with his writings,
in earnest, I was actually a member
of the Platypus Affiliated Society,
and we were organizing this talk
on radical interpretations of the present crisis.
This is 2012, early 2012, we began organizing this
and began corresponding
with different prospective panelists.
So Lauren was one of those panelists,
Paul Maddock was also there, David Harvey,
and Andrew Kleiman of the Marxist Humanist Initiative.
And it was a huge event.
I think some really interesting exchanges.
But I found myself most impressed
by Lauren's remarks, as well as Paul's.
And then in the years after that,
I found his website, I devoured his writings,
really, which had a huge influence on the way that I thought.
I mean, it was already resonant
with so many of the influences that I had prior to that,
Marx, Hegel, Kant, the entire patrimony
of Western philosophy.
His, I mean, going over some of the essays
that had a huge influence on me,
his two-part essay for Race Trader
on race and the enlightenment is just phenomenal.
He had a very early critique of post-colonial thought
in the universality of Marx, some of his review
of Max Albaum's book, Revolution in the Air,
his own reminiscences of the 60s at Berkeley.
And in fact, you're right, Aria,
when you were talking about some of his criticisms
at the time, again, it's crazy to think how early on
he was sticking it to the postmodernists,
the French post-structuralists.
I mean, he was conversant with all that stuff,
doing reviews of these obscure books in French
that were challenging these currents of thought.
So his book, The Vanguard of Retrogression,
like I was rereading parts of it today,
just in preparation for this memorial that we're doing here.
And I was struck by, I mean, there were parts of it where,
yeah, he comes off a little bit dogmatic perhaps,
but dogmatically, specifically dogmatically,
like Marxist Hegelian, Hegelian Marxist.
Again, I love it.
Jared's holding up The Vanguard of Retrogression,
great book.
His book on Herman Melville that I have,
Jake Blumenfeld posted about it on Twitter.
It really is unclassifiable.
It's genre-defying.
It's so erudite.
It's going across the entire gamut of Melville's writings
from beginning to end, it's incorporating reflections
on state of science in the 19th century,
revolutionary movements in Europe.
It's just incredible.
And so he could range from that,
this incredibly erudite work of literary
and social criticism and deliver these very accessible
sort of rundowns of revolutionary history.
Wendy's really, like listening back to them,
reading the transcripts of them,
he was just going off the top of his head.
These were just like, I mean, he would occasionally
get a couple of the details here and there wrong,
but that's because he was going entirely from memory.
Really just one of a kind figure.
It's funny to think of him too,
in terms of the New York revolutionary milieu
that I found him in, obviously,
he lived in these other places as well.
He had all these kind of funny interactions
with various others in the ultra left milieu
throughout New York.
I met up with him probably four or five times individually,
we corresponded a lot via email.
And I did those couple of events,
the one on interpretations of the present crisis.
I did another event at Woodbine
about class struggles in China,
which he was really devoted to up to the end
of his real intellectual output.
But he would tell me another figure
who sadly passed during the pandemic,
Macintosh of internationalist perspective,
who was an outstanding and incredible figure
in his own right.
They would have these little spats or disagreements.
I remember this was 2014 or 2015,
we met up in Washington Square Park
and he and Macintosh had just had some disagreement
over the character of ISIS,
which at the time was very much in the news.
And they both agreed that ISIS
was an essentially modern phenomenon,
that it was not just the recrudescence
of this past barbarism,
that it was like there was something very new
and perverse about it.
But they were disagreeing about
whether to characterize it as multinational,
which I think Macintosh was
because of all the foreign fighters
who were joining ISIS or transnational
because it spanned these different
existing national entities.
And I couldn't for the life of me see
what was at stake with this,
but he was very exercised about this exchange
and he just kept coming back to it
when we were having a conversation.
So I found that that really summed up
his interesting friendship slash rivalry
with Macintosh and some of the others.
I remember, and this involves another good friend,
he was very close of course with Noel Ignatiev,
rest in peace to him as well.
But Noel would call me a lot,
he would just phone me at weird hours of the day.
And it was usually talking about arguments
that he'd been having on Facebook or whatever,
stuff that was just bothering him.
But Noel would call me to,
because he said basically having me act
as a surrogate for Lauren Goldner
about questions of national liberation
because he said Lauren refused to talk to him
about this after a while because they just had
the arguments so many times,
for years and years and years.
And he was like, you've got basically the same
position on this as Lauren's,
I just wanna talk this over once more.
And I would just be like, all right, fine,
and we would talk for an hour or whatever.
So I mean, again, it's a story about Noel,
but I think it also involves Lauren
in this kind of indirect way.
So I mean, just a hell of a guy,
a true giant, like completely one of a kind,
intellectual, just completely sui generis too,
like self-made, like auto-didact,
like with all these incredible connections,
just, you know, it's a huge loss.
Ross, thank you for that.
I think next maybe, I hate to do this,
but Jonna, do you wanna jump back in?
Do you have more to say after the biographical sketch
or should we move on to Jared or Joe?
In the interest of not taking too much time,
maybe I could just add that at the end.
But I think Jared, did you,
did it look like you were about to say something?
He wants you to go off according to chat.
Oh, sorry, I can't see the chat.
No, I was just gonna say, I think, I mean,
I think to go back to like the 68,
I just wanna say that I think Lauren was like
very emblematic of this like nascent ultra left
of a time when, you know,
and I think the essay Ross that you alluded to
where he like critiques that guy's like take on China,
you know, it's like the anti-war movement
in the sixties against Vietnam was like very unable
to have a critique of Stalinism, you know,
as much as I have so much respect for Noel, even Noel,
you know, he like Noel didn't really have a critique
of like Stalinism until much later.
So I think, you know, Lauren in that sense
was part of that wave of, you know,
this critique of Stalinism.
He was in this like, you know, sort of Trotskyist sect
that was able to say like, hey, like, you know,
the Soviet Union is not a socialist country, you know,
also to have a critique of China, of Mao
and to kind of bring in, you know,
to kind of look at May 68 in France and say, you know,
and other parts of the world and say like, okay,
that's what we should be aiming for, right?
So I think to kind of have that critique of Stalin
as early as 68 in the US is really important, you know,
I think contribution of Lauren of the 68 generation.
And I just wanna add that I think our discussion here
is that Lauren had what we should hope
for any revolutionary to have, right?
This like very global outlook
where he really took seriously struggles everywhere, right?
I mean, when he went to South Korea,
he was like meeting with workers and there, you know,
like the working class struggles were not,
were very much connected to working class people, right?
Not like in the US where it was mostly a lot of academics
and he learned Korean, right?
I think his most recent project
that he didn't get to finish about China, right?
I mean, he was learning Chinese.
He was very much, you know,
in order to understand like the struggles
that were happening, he really immersed himself in them.
And he was, I think really tried to connect himself
to revolutionaries elsewhere.
There's a sense that the massive kind of police crackdown
on demonstrations and strikes
that was very typical of the government,
just we're not going down well.
For example, on the day I visited Jongsaek,
it just happened that about a thousand scabs and thugs
had held a demo just outside the plant gate.
And there were about 400 cops there as well.
And to everyone's surprise, certainly to my surprise,
the police declared their demonstration to be illegal
and dispersed it.
Not of course because they didn't sympathize with it,
but because they were worried that the workers inside
were going to come out and attack it.
Just a short story, he, you know,
he was one of the people that put me in touch
with like revolutionaries in Spain when I visited, you know,
the socialism or barbarism folks in France, right?
So he was, I think, very connected and, you know,
in this effort of, you know,
what it really would take to build like a global, you know,
working class movement.
Absolutely.
Jared, I think you're next on deck.
What's up, everyone?
It's great to see all of you.
Welcome back.
Many time guests, Jared.
You know, as Engel said at the grave site of Marx, you know,
he was before all else a revolutionist.
And I think that that's really important to emphasize
because he was such a magnificent intellectual, right?
Ross pointed out some of my favorite of his work actually,
race and enlightenment is, it's magisterial.
And the Melville book, which I'm actually, I've just started
to read since he passed and I really wished
that I had read it before
so that we could have talked about it, right?
It's just, I agree with Ross, it's unclassifiable.
He was such a towering intellectual figure
capable of synthesizing 19th century art and science
and politics and class struggle,
all coherently within the same thread.
And simultaneously, he spoke at least six languages.
And I believe most of those, he just, he taught himself
or he would participate in these language sharing programs
with people in New York City.
And so it's easy to lose sight of the fact
that probably the smartest person that I've ever met
was not somebody who was dedicated to publishing
as many books as possible on arcane intellectual topics
or rising to the top of their, some academic bureaucracy,
but was very much engaged in just the practical exegesis
of class struggle.
And that's how he oriented his thought.
That was the reason why he did all of the things that he did.
I mean, he was not without ego,
but it wasn't the kind of academic ego that you find
among Marxologists and among the kind of people
that he kind of delighted in taking down in his writing.
And I think an important part of his dedication
to the struggle was to what some other folks
have already emphasized,
was the sheer amount of time that he put into mentorship.
You know, I was in my mid 20s when I met him,
Ari as a heady, my oldest friend in the left,
introduced me to Lauren at the time when I was growing
dissatisfied with the kind of like chic postmodernism,
kind of radical liberal anarchism
that I had just kind of fallen into in my teenage years.
And I'm amazed now looking back at the amount of time
that Lauren was willing to set aside for me
and for other people.
And I've been reading his writing over the last couple of days
just rereading some of these essays.
I just feel like, man, the amount of patience
that it must have taken for this guy to talk to me
when I was like in my mid 20s and didn't know shit
about any of this stuff, but thought that I did, right?
There's kind of just this kind of patience and humility.
And he wasn't getting anything out of that, right?
He wasn't a wealthy man.
He did have the senior citizens discount Metro card,
which I called the Insurgent Notes membership card.
Oh, no.
But he wasn't a wealthy man, but he just made,
he made so much time for basically somebody
who he judged would be important to reach.
The listeners might think that we're making
some kind of joke about the Wendy's lectures,
but no, I was present and I helped organize some of these.
There were in fact, there was a series of lectures
in the basement of a Wendy's in Midtown Manhattan
because we just couldn't get space to do it anywhere else.
And so like,
it was in the basement of a Wendy's.
Like where they stock the secret sauce
and stuff like that?
No, no, no, no, no.
There was a basement eating area,
but it was, there's a ground level entrance
on Fifth Avenue.
And then, so there will be a plaque there someday,
assuming that we don't abolish restaurants
in the revolution.
There will at least be a plaque to commemorate.
We can really be a set piece.
We can keep it just as it was
when Lauren Goldner gave his 20 lectures.
No, those were very, they were very much,
it was a very serious set of lectures delivered
in the basement of a Wendy's
as like Rihanna blasted in the background.
And the interesting part is that one of the organizers
had basically had been goading Lauren to do this series
of all the different revolutionary tendencies
as a means of inoculating younger comrades
against the different groups
that they were meeting in New York.
And so the idea was that Lauren was gonna explain to them
why it was stupid to be a Maoist
or why it was stupid to be a Trotskyist.
And therefore they would inevitably see the infinite wisdom
of whatever the fuck we all are, you know?
And I remember, it was really funny,
during the Trotsky one,
this is when Lauren was supposed to be convincing
all these younger people
that there was nothing for them in Trotskyism,
he would just go on these like really poetic tangents about,
and the real military genius of Trotsky,
he's like, now think about this for a minute,
this is somebody who had never served
in the military before, he had no prior experience
and he was leading battalions,
he was routing the white army left and right
and just good as rapsidizing about Trotsky
and about the kind of begrudging admiration
that he had for Lenin, right?
And the comrade who had imagined
that this was going to just be one polemic
after another, right?
Realized that Lauren was not somebody who thought that way,
he could write very polemically,
but he engaged in the revolutionary tradition
in a very dynamic and dialectical way.
And that was like around the time
when I was trying to make sense of all these different,
these different traditions that bear proper names
and Lauren really helped me realize
that people like Lenin and Trotsky and Mao
were actually very dynamic and original revolutionary thinkers
in their time who were responding
to the rapid unfolding of world events
and trying their best to figure out
how to take meaningful action in it.
And the fact that these names have been appended
to these stale, ossified traditions over the years
is no discredit to them, right?
If any of those people were still alive today,
imagine how disgusted that Trotsky would be
if he came back and found out that his adherents
were still presenting the transitional program
as if it was a document relevant to the 21st century, right?
And so it was this kind of dynamic engagement
that Lauren really modeled for a lot of us.
I could go on and on and probably will at some point,
but I guess I just wanna say in closing
that it's really scary to think that, you know,
we're losing this generation, the 68er generation, you know.
Ignatiev passed a couple of years ago.
He was like our Gramsci.
We've lost Lauren.
He's our Bordiga, right?
If anybody's in New York,
please bring some chicken soup to John Garvey.
John Garvey must be defended at all costs.
It's going to be a crushing blow
when this generation is just a memory to us, you know?
We asked John Garvey as a side note,
and he's obviously mourning
one of his great friends right now.
So maybe sometime in the future,
we can have John Garvey on to speak more.
I'm sorry, go on, Jared.
Oh, no, no, that's fine.
And I was just gonna say, just in closing,
like it's actually like, there's a lot of responsibility,
you know, I think that falls on those of us
who had the privilege of interacting with this,
with this older generation.
And I'm not sure, like I feel like conflicted
that I could even, you know, rise to the challenge
of just being for a new generation
what Lauren was to us, right?
And it's like, it's almost a burden or a challenge, right?
But I think that the good news is that this is,
somebody like Lauren has modeled this for us
in a very clear way,
and will kind of shine a path forward,
especially for those of us
who might be a little bit isolated
from day-to-day struggles.
I mean, as Noel liked to point out,
Lauren in his life was never involved in an issue-based,
demand-based political campaign.
And it didn't fucking matter
because he was able to exert so much influence
on people engaged in struggles all over the world, right?
And so I think that there's all kinds of ways
that people can interface with the movement,
and there's all kinds of responsibilities
for people who understand
that the communist revolution actually needs to happen,
right?
And Lauren, it was just a wonderful example
of something that's really necessary.
And it's like Arya was saying, it's just an,
it's an absence now,
and I worry that his absence just can't be filled.
Well, it's up to us to try, I suppose.
Joe Lombardo, do you wanna introduce yourself
and say some words?
Yeah, sure.
So my name is Joe.
I first emailed Lauren probably in 2009.
I was in Turkey at the time,
and I was coming back to the US to New York.
And he wrote, you know,
had his article on Turkey and stuff,
and I just found it very enlightening at the time.
I found myself in this weird, you know,
hodgepodge of Leninism and Stalinism,
and you know, things that I kind of picked up,
I guess, along the way.
And so 2010, I came back,
and I think it was at the second meeting of IN
where I joined,
and I think it was at some bakery,
I think in the Lower East Side, I can't remember,
but I remember, yeah, Arya's shaking his head, yeah.
So I remember that's where I met Arya.
Sean, I don't know if you were there at the time, maybe.
Definitely both John's, Johnny and John were there.
Yeah, I'm trying to think who else.
Jacob?
No, I don't think Jacob was there.
But anyway, I think I met, yeah, definitely met,
you know, Sean and Jake and Arya,
I think at Spain at one point, maybe even Jared was there,
I'm not sure, but that restaurant apparently closed down.
I was like, that was kind of like my dinner most nights
because of the-
That was a huge loss.
That was one of, that was like the main meeting place.
We're trying to have a commie meeting next week,
and I was like, oh, let's go to Spain.
Oh damn, it's gone.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly, I think there might've been a fascist,
but I'm not sure.
But anyway, you know, I can't speak intelligently.
It's been years really since I've sort of been
out of the movement now, but so certainly, you know,
folks like Arya definitely can, I think,
speak to Lauren's legacy in a very intellectual way.
Lauren, for me, was, I'll always remember him,
you know, kind of tottering, you know,
somewhere down, you know, 4th Street in Manhattan,
you know, with his big oversized headphones,
this backpack, this ill-fitting clothing.
And, you know, I remember asking him,
what are you listening to all day?
And he's like, oh, it's Mandarin lessons.
So I said, okay.
And so we would be at this diner,
and some folks have already spoken about this,
but he was such an omnivorous reader.
I mean, you know, really one of the few, I think,
on the left that just wasn't, you know, fixated
on every emotion of what Lenin said, or Trotsky,
or even Marx, for that matter.
I mean, I think half the time we'd speak about his interest
in French poetry, art, certainly language for sure,
his readings into science.
And I remember being about, I guess, maybe 25, 26,
and like, my God, I'm such a dumbass.
Like, what is this guy even doing?
Bother talking to me, I can't contribute.
Like Jared said, it's like, what am I gonna contribute
to this conversation?
And I think we would spend maybe like three hours,
and we would meet almost every week until I left New York.
So yeah, so I knew him for, you know, a good decade or so.
And I just remember the I.N. meetings,
it was maybe only six or seven folks,
sometimes different people come through and talk.
And, you know, Lauren, he was also someone who was not,
even though he might've been maybe dogmatic in some ways,
you know, he always pointed you
in the direction of other people.
And I think for me, what was interesting
is I got to know Walter Down,
you know, he was a sort of left-wing trot.
McIntosh was one person I met with,
a couple other folks, these names are now slipping me.
You know, they weren't necessarily even empathetic to,
I'd say, Lauren's view,
but he would still kind of point you in the right direction.
And yeah, just one hell of a listener.
You know, I think for me, at least to I.N.,
I was definitely the slower one of the group.
I don't think I really contributed too much
to the intellectual development out here, Arya,
or Lauren Tager, Garvey.
And I'm like, oh man,
it's like, I'm just gonna sit here and eat some dip
and just listen to these guys.
But it was always a good time.
And you know, the one person I kind of,
I wish was here was probably Shaman,
because I think Shaman also was someone
who was very fluent,
who could really speak to Lauren's level
and had a huge influence on him as well.
And it was working with Shaman
with some of these kids from Queens, I remember,
for a while.
And Lauren was, you know,
we're always pointing the direction of Lauren.
If these kids had some big theoretical question,
I'm like, I can't answer value theory.
You know, talk to Lauren Gold or something like that,
you know, and Lauren would be there.
He would just, he would come to you, you know?
And I think that's very unique, you know,
where I think a lot of folks in this generation
have been sort of in sort of brittled
and just wanted to kind of talk and give you a party line.
I think Lauren was kind of a mix of the two.
So I just remember him, you know,
just telling all these anecdotes,
but just maybe to make it, to sort of lighten it up,
I remember, at least I laugh at this, you know,
two stories he tells.
One was maybe it was during the Nixon administration
with price controls and he was out
as a steel worker strike.
It might have been in New York.
I think he even mentioned DC, I can't remember.
But I mean, you know, Lauren,
as some of you may know on the call,
it was not a very big man.
And so he was somehow,
he was pushing his way through the steel workers
and he had a sign says, you know,
for socialist revolution.
At one point, you know,
there's two steel workers look over
and the one guy nudges each other.
It's like, yo, that's some wacko shit right there.
So, and the other one was,
he was never a fan of industrialization,
the policy that I think a lot of people like Hal Draper
and the IS tradition have,
this is when he was still in Northern California.
But I guess at one point in the summer,
they were doing like these brief,
almost like internships,
industrializing in local Bay area factories.
And he was on the assembly line, I guess,
and there was one of his comrades was next to him
and he was next to another worker.
And they're always trying to find, you know,
a way to kind of talk to these guys
and all that stuff, a little nervous.
And so his friend, you know, goes to this one worker.
It's like, hey, it's like,
who said workers of the world unite?
The guy looks over and he says, I don't know, Ralph?
So, you know, just things like that,
that were kind of like fun.
And then the last story I could tell,
that was also kind of fun as well.
It might've been during this period too,
was, you know, when these guys are industrializing,
it wasn't just the IS,
it was some sort of proto Maoist faction or Stalinists.
It was a whole hodgepodge of kids from Berkeley basically.
And all of them were trying to like,
sort of stay silent,
see who's trying to fill each other out a little bit.
And I guess at one point, some of the workers sort of,
you know, caught wind of what they were,
the literature that they were passing out.
And one of the guys, this poor worker says,
well, why did the Soviet Union degenerate?
All of a sudden an explosion of all of these comments.
Well, it was because of Stalin,
the Stalinists are going to Trotsky's for it, you know,
all that stuff.
So he just had this institutional knowledge,
these anecdotes that I don't really think my generation,
I guess our generation,
we're probably all relatively the same age, you know,
really had, I think Occupy was pretty formative.
But when you look back at what Goldner had to go through
in the eighties, for example, I mean, man,
that must've just been, you know, awful.
And, you know, he was someone who, you know,
I think about some of those reading groups
and trying to keep up and then, you know,
I'd always lie to him, I was like,
oh, did you read volume two?
Yeah, and I was like, yeah, yeah, I read it.
And, you know, of course I never did,
cause I couldn't get past the first 50 pages.
But, so yeah, you know, my kind of commentary
is sort of everywhere.
It's just sort of remembering the guy.
It was sort of strange though,
cause I had texted Sean maybe about a week ago,
or I don't know how long ago, just saying,
hey, you know, what's, has he ever heard from Lauren?
Because I know in 2014 or so, when we had met up,
he had said he had cancer.
And he was very stoked about it.
And I don't think he really wanted to hear me, you know,
so how are you, blah, blah.
I think he just wanted to, you know, put it out in the ether.
So I would have kind of,
I don't know how public he was with that.
I guess he probably told all of you to a certain extent,
but he really struggled with that for, you know,
several years, I guess.
I don't know if he succumbed to it,
but that was something that did not stop him.
He was still an intellectual powerhouse.
He would still read, he would still learn languages.
I mean, you know, just an incredible figure.
So I'll stop my ramble now, but, you know,
he was a friend too.
You know, we talked a lot about personal stuff too,
in the 10 or so years that I knew him.
And the last time I talked to him was probably in quarantine.
And, you know, I called him up and see how he's doing.
And, you know, he just talked about China and his, you know,
his big work on financialization of American capital.
And, you know, at the time I'm sitting there unemployed,
I'm like, oh, cool.
But, you know, so I don't know, rest in peace, man, you know.
Thank you, Joe, so much.
To close out this Lauren Goldner Memorial episode,
I'm not gonna say anything particularly original.
I was taking notes on what everybody said
and a lot of the points converged.
So collectively, what we've said about Lauren Goldner
is that his critiques of fictitious capital
and the critique of political economy,
this thread of critique that he kept alive
all the way back from the 1960s was essential.
His understanding of alienation, his critique of ideology,
whether that be the ideology
of post-colonialist anti-imperialism
or the ideology of dogmatized Marxisms of the past
that had been handed down to us.
He was a constant critic of the dogmatization of theory.
He offered and proffered a dynamic and dialectical,
non-dogmatic Marxist vision,
the one that was grounded in the principle
of real working class struggle
and the lives of working class,
of the proletariat across the globe.
I guess the last thing I'd say is that
we should all be inspired by Lauren's life
and we should all hold his legacy close to us.
And of course, as you all know,
this isn't just a memorial for one man.
This is also, of course, his life and legacy
is a call to action for all of us.
I'm not saying that you need to learn six languages
in the next few years or so.
I'm not saying that you need to be
a positive revolutionary influence
on absolutely everybody you meet
for the entirety of the rest of your life,
that you have to live all over the globe
and meet people all over the globe
and engage with the working class struggle
day in and day out, always and everywhere.
But that is what Lauren Goldner did.
And he did that for us.
He did that for the working class.
He did that for the world.
He did that for humanity.
Because above all things, being a revolutionist,
being a critic and being a theorist,
he was a lovely and dear human being
and a dear friend to us all.
So everybody, thank you so much for coming out
this episode to say your words for Lauren.
Lauren Goldner, rest in peace.
But I'll tell you one thing, Sean.
Yeah.
For people that are just maybe just starting
to listen to the podcast and never knew Lauren,
if you never knew him, if you never knew him,
well, your life is poorer for that.
But he knew you.
And you were the sole focus of his life's work.
Absolutely.
Your struggle.
This is work that we will ensure goes on.
No one can fill his shoes.
But the work will continue.
I mean to see that it does.
And Lauren himself would tell you, I can fake it.
So.
Yeah.
That was great.
We will break their haughty power.
Break their haughty power.
Absolutely.
Rest in peace, your grace.
Hasta la victoria siempre.
I just found this email that he sent me at like,
I sent him some email like, oh man,
I'm really getting disillusioned
with all this Fico I've been reading.
And he just responded at like 2.47 in the morning.
The direction will make you whole.
Legend.
Absolute legend.
So Joe Lombardo says he was,
it's hard to fit in with the In Charge of Notes
and all these intellectual powerhouses.
I was the typesetter.
Oh, no, no.
Look, I don't want to misrepresent.
I was also a bougie academic from the new school too.
Don't, I don't want to misstate myself here.
Although I remember Ari and I had one class together
and I remember I think we were the lone Marxists
and Ari was going hard against the professor
on misinterpreting Hegel.
So I always remember that.
You don't remember the name of that coffee shop, do you?
I don't remember that.
I remember being at the meeting,
first In Charge of Notes meeting with Garvey.
Yeah, this coffee shop we sometimes had meetings at
was an old mafia hangout, like in the 40s.
I forgot one of the famous,
it was in the East Village, right?
It was like on Avenue A or First Avenue
or something like that.
But I don't know.
Allen Street.
I think it was down.
Going back.
Everywhere that was cool in New York is closed, it seems.
Going back into his writings,
over the last several days since I heard of his passing,
I was reading a bunch of stuff
that I haven't read in 15 years.
You guys ever have this experience
where you're going back and reading something
and you're like, oh, that's where I got this from.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like part of the spirit of the Antifada
was always like, we would bring up several times
the kind of jokey thing that Lauren said,
where it's like back in the 70s,
you could figure out what somebody's political tendency was
by the year that they thought
the Soviet Revolution had degenerated.
You kind of use that as like a quip or whatever.
But I went back and read the article.
It's an article about Ordega
and it's about the agrarian revolution.
And within that kind of jokey thing
that we've been using is like a whole theoretical apparatus
for understanding the degeneration
of actually existing socialism and understanding.
And as like a developmentalist project,
which comes out of like a bourgeois problematic
of like capitalization of agriculture.
Like the whole thing is fucking great.
So I'm sure this is still gonna go in the episode.
We're gonna make a whole,
I have a whole list of the articles that people mentioned
and we'll put more into,
but like even if it's been years and you were like,
I read Lord Goldner back 10 years ago or whatever,
pick it up again, man.
It just formative, formative stuff.
Yeah, that quip.
Go on, sorry.
I was gonna say like,
I mean, there's a German writer, Bini Adamzak,
who wrote a book called Yesterday is Tomorrow
that quotes that section of, yeah, she's great.
And that book is amazing too.
And yeah, it's almost like she develops a theory.
She spins a theory out of that entire, just that premise.
I remember too, like, yeah,
one of the first articles I read by him was his review
of Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination,
because I'd been a student of Postone.
I was so impressed by it as one of the few really,
I think, compelling criticisms of Postone
that wasn't just trying to write him off as just like,
oh, he's not interested in class struggle or whatnot.
Coming at it from a very deep,
like sort of Hegelian Marxist understanding,
I was just, yeah, very impressed by it.
With that one in the notes too.
All right, Andy, what do you think?
We got ourselves a podcast, a memorial podcast?
Yeah, sure, I mean, the anecdotes are great.
I'm down to keep hearing those,
but I'll leave it up to you guys.
Oh yeah, we got, there's billions of those.
Joe was talking about Lauren and his ill-fitting clothes
with his big backpack full of books all the time.
I think the backpack's the only thing
that kept him warm in the winter,
because I always used to say,
Lauren Goldner would give you this shirt off his back,
but he really only had that one shirt.
He wore it everywhere.
I just remember-
He wore that fucking thing everywhere.
Winter, summer, that was his wardrobe.
He was awesome, an absolute miser when it came to clothing.
He was not a victim of intellectual fashion
or fashion in general.
At the very worst, coldest days of the winter,
he might have a thin jacket or something, but nah, man.
He had that one shirt, he wore it all the time.
Yeah, and something I was thinking about,
I think all of us are saying this,
it's like, I think that generation of 68, ultra left,
I don't know, I think this is why this podcast
is so important, right?
It's like, how do we keep memories alive?
How do we build some type of institutional memory?
I felt kind of sad about thinking
what's going to happen to all of Lauren's work?
Some of it is on that website.
I'm sure a lot of it has not been published.
And when we look at the right or the liberals,
they're so good at building these institutions
and keeping those memories, but I don't know.
I just, it makes me a little sad sometimes
and grateful also for this podcast,
for us to talk about Lauren's contributions
to newer generations and to hopefully continue
that legacy of building with younger folks,
because I think that's really important.
Otherwise it gets kind of lost,
especially in the digital age, right?
Like how do we keep that memory alive?
Like all those correspondences, like all those debates,
like the trajectory of ultra leftism,
like what is it, what does it mean?
And especially now, I think when it's so easy to claim
to be like a revolutionary, right?
But to maybe have some like liberal reformist politics.
And I think Lauren was very critical
of a lot of reformist strategies today.
So I don't know, I just think it's really important
to have this podcast and these conversations.
Well, thank you for that.
Oh yeah, and you can punch this in or discard it,
but I just really wanted to emphasize
that Lauren was a really great example
of somebody who had a very serious
anti-system revolutionary line
that was nonetheless faithful to Marx and Marxism.
Something that I love about the antifada
and the work of everybody I'm looking at
on the screen right now is really the earnest attempt
to kind of square this circle,
to hold aloft kind of the promise of Marxism
without succumbing to reformism or nihilism.
And there's a great passage that I wanted
to just pull real quick from the Vanguard of Retrogression,
my favorite book cover of all time.
And you actually can judge this book by its cover.
He basically, he has this theory
of the middle-class radical.
And I just, to call back something
that a few of you have said,
just imagine Lauren having lived through
the promise of 1967, he had to suffer
through the 80s and 90s and everything's just a tax
and Marx is an old heterosexual white man
and all the rest of that.
He's talking about the middle-class radical.
For the middle-class radical view,
the problems are hierarchy, authority, domination,
and power.
For the Marxian communist view,
the problems are the project of the abolition of value,
commodity production, wage labor, and the proletariat.
The latter of course being the commodity form
of labor power within capitalism.
I mean, it's simple on paper,
but I find like trying to make sense
of the political terrain today,
like the point of what we're doing
is the realization of communism.
It's not a destructive act.
It's a creative act.
And it's latent within capitalism,
albeit in all kinds of really ugly,
nasty one-dimensional ways.
And I just really wanted to put that out there for,
specifically for these younger folks
that we're imagining listening to the Antifada,
though I'm not sure if they actually exist.
There's really necessary work to be done
to really take seriously the anti-state,
anti-system approach in a way that just does not succumb
to just destruction, nihilism, and all the rest.
And Goldner really shines the light forward for that.
As I said, the movement was running out of steam
in the early 90s.
And the Soviet Union, it was very surprising to me
to hear this from various people that I met 15
and some years later.
It was experienced like the death of God
in the 19th century in the West.
Anyone who was around in the 60s and 70s in the US
or the United States knows that there were
pro-Soviet elements, but the critique of Stalinism,
of the Trotskyist form, the anarchist form,
the left communist form was in the air and widely debated.
Whereas in Korea, because of its different position
in terms of overall capitalist development,
much more open to the Stalinist forms I mentioned earlier,
the Soviet Union just loomed large,
even for people who were pro-China
or pro-North Korea in a way that was,
we just didn't experience it here.
So I met people who just went into seclusion
when the Soviet Union collapsed.
They just said, well, I guess socialism, communism
is a myth after all, and it's just not possible.
And there was incredible demoralization.
And in a way that happened in the United States
around 1970, a little later in Europe,
people with middle-class credentials
that they could cash in, cash them in,
and became professionals and sort of privatized.
And it was also at that very time
that post-modernism in different forms,
Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, you name it,
suddenly started massively being translated into Korean,
not from French, mind you, but from English.
I can only imagine what Derrida sounds like in Korean.
One of the things when you read his writing,
going back to the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the aughts,
certainly before the great financial crisis,
is the parlous state of the Anglophone and Western left,
whether, as you said, those are reformists,
or whether they are some flavor of Marxism,
Leninism, Maoism, Hoxhaism, whatever.
And unfortunately, what Goldner's critiquing
in the 60s and 70s,
it's maybe even worse right now.
And so I'm not trying to make this a dour thing.
It's actually kind of a hopeful thing.
He was really alone for many decades,
not alone as a person,
because he gathered people around him,
but alone as a dynamic thinker, as a critical thinker,
as Jared said, somebody with a counter-systemic analysis
that was real and vibrant and attuned to the moments
and the time.
Despite being alone in that,
through large swaths of decades,
he pushed forward and he fought through it.
And in a very real sense, when the financial crisis comes
and there is a return to the critique of political economy,
people start taking the proletariat seriously again.
He was there.
So he went through the muck and the mire of those decades
of the Jesse Jackson campaign,
of voting for Walter Mondale,
or whatever shitty thing was happening in American politics.
And his time did come.
And we here on this panel are evidence
that his time did come.
So if you're out there listening,
if you're one of these apocryphal young people, right?
And you feel like, well, everybody around me
is just trying to say that Hamas is the key
to proletarian revolution.
And I feel out of step with everybody in the world,
ba ba ba, just know that that can be your reality
for a period of time.
But Lauren Goldner, by and large, was right about things
for the last 50 years or so.
And he found his people at the end and he kept his voice
and he fought and he struggled to the end of his life
to gift all of us the knowledge and his legacy
that we're carrying with us.
So it's a hopeful note.
Yeah, I will say too, Lauren,
and I'm sure that the article's probably still available
in his interview with South Korean communists,
they asked him,
well, would you have done anything differently in 1917?
He says, no, I would have probably made
the exact same mistakes as Lenin did.
And I think that's a certain humility
that you're not gonna find,
at least in my forays with the ultra left,
that no one would ever wanna admit.
And so I think that there is part of Lauren
where, as some folks had said,
he might've critiqued Trotsky,
might've critiqued Lenin,
but I think also too, he kind of understood
some of those stomach blocks that he himself
probably would have made
had he been back in that time as well.
And I think that's tough for a lot of folks
to wrap their heads around in certain millions.
So for what it's worth.
Two things that Lauren used to say a lot
that I think kind of represent how he was,
but they're very different.
One was from a simple scratch, you can get gangrene,
which he meant if you let stupid, sloppy ideas in,
they can soon kind of degenerate.
He was like with the movement generally.
And then another that's, I think about a lot,
he says, it is often those who think revolution
is right around the corner in high points of struggle
that think revolution is impossible
in low periods of struggle.
So I'll end it on that for me.
All right, do we have a quorum to break up this meeting
of the Lauren Goldner Appreciation Society
slash Memorial Podcast?
Like you said, we'll all meet at the end of the week.
Thank you to everybody for listening to us and our thoughts.
And we're gonna, as I said before,
put a whole bunch of links in the show notes.
You should really check out Lauren's entire archive,
which will live on as well as thoughts and his memories.
Thank you everybody for listening.
["Memorial Podcast"]
They have taken on told millions that they will
never toil to earn.
But without our brains and muscle,
not a single wheel can turn.
We will break their haughty power,
gain our freedom when we learn
that the union makes us strong.
Of course, in solidarity forever.
Solidarity forever.
Forever, for the union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded goal,
greater than the might of atoms
multiplied a million fold.
We will give birth to a new world
from the ashes of the old,
for the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.
It is we who plough the prairies,
built the cities where they trade,
dug the mines, built the workshops,
endless miles of railway laid.
Now we stand outcast and starving
amid these wonders we have made,
for the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.
When the union's inspiration
through the workers' blood shall run,
there can be no power greater
any well beneath the sun.
Yet what on earth is weaker
than the feeble strength of one
that the union makes us strong?
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.