Alex M., Co-Editor, Garnet Oak
My origin story feels like I am a contradiction in terms. Communist and Catholic—really? Looking back, my journey to communism is not one I ever imagined.
Growing up in the comfortable white settler community of East Lansing, Michigan, I certainly was not exposed to oppression.
Yet my privilege was interrupted. Every summer my family travelled to Oxford, Connecticut to visit my Russian grandparents who annually shared their story of escaping serfdom. They walked hundreds of miles from their village in Western Belarus with barely anything on their backs to get to the bottom of a ship to make it to New York. My grandmother teared up when she related how on a dark, moonless night she was standing on a dock but could not see the boat. Would she risk stepping forward and fall into the sea? Someone’s hand reached out and pulled her into the boat. That was God’s hand for my grandmother. I would not exist without that hand. That story of faith grounds my commitment as a religious socialist.
My grandfather told a story of revolution. My grandparents were born sometime before 1896 and so would have experienced the revolts of 1905. My grandfather shared how his brother was assassinated for revolting against the tsar. I only remember the assassination. While I don’t remember how my grandfather’s brother became radicalized, I have wondered about revolution ever since.
I learned about the 1967 Detroit rebellions from my parents who shared how they watched the fires from the bell tower of the Franciscan seminary, Duns Scotus College. All I remember is a disconnect between what I heard from my parents and what I have learned about the rebellions since. Clearly, my parents assumed that we were innocent. I don’t recall any sense of compassion for what people were experiencing in Detroit. That moment pierced my insouciant white supremacy.
Meanwhile, Maryknoll sisters carried stories of anti-colonial movements into our home. The Maryknoll Sisters are a missionary order of Catholic sisters who devote their lives to service to oppressed communities throughout the world. Their understanding of “mission” was turned upside down by liberation struggles. “Mission” was about bringing Christianity to “pagan” others but became a way of being with and for people in their own struggles for freedom. So I learned about liberation theology as it was emerging in the Base Communities (las communidades de base) from Sister Bernice Kita, author of What Prize Awaits Us: Letters from Guatemala and other Maryknoll sisters who were living in those communities (see their story in The Same Fate as the Poor).
Leap forward to late 1988; I had been active in the Nuclear Freeze and South African anti-apartheid movements. My inspiring divinity school classmate Mev Puleo—see The Book of Mev—invited me to attend a talk by John Cort, who had just published Christian Socialism. Mev’s moving photography and stories of Latin American Base Communities is found in her The Struggle is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation.
John C. Cort was a pioneer both in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker in New York City and helped to form the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists in 1937. His powerful origin story is found in Dreadful Conversions: The Making of a Catholic Socialist. As soon as I heard John present his new book, Christian Socialism, which included a personal invitation to join the newly founded Democratic Socialists of America, I signed up. I have been a DSA member ever since. John’s passion for the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), the forerunner of DSA, convinced me of its primary constitutional statement: “The realization of humanity’s potential requires basic changes, among which are the social ownership and democratic control of the decisive means of production and distribution” (emphasis in original).
That statement endures in my heart and soul. Michael Harrington, who designed DSA’s original vision, also lived with Dorothy Day and published the now famous The Other America. Harrington’s original vision of DSA has been lost in DSA’s attachment—or better, fetishism—with the Democratic Party and elections. John Cort helped to initiate the Religion and Socialism Commission that began the same year as DSOC in 1977. I would later serve Religious Socialism as co-editor in the late 1990s until 2002 when I was kicked out for being pro-Palestinian by my Zionist co-editor (who abandoned DSA).
The most compelling moment of radicalization, however, was not with DSA, but the initial protest of the acquittal of the four police officers who nearly beat Rodney King to death. Black colleagues at my workplace, Saint Anthony’s, the largest social service agency in the Bay Area, invited me to join them in a street protest on April 29, 1992. We found ourselves immediately surrounded by a battalion of San Francisco police fully decked in protective armor and loaded for battle. I felt terror in seeing the willingness of police who were ready to kill. Black comrades urged me to stay with the feeling because that is their daily reality.
Since joining Connecticut DSA and re-reading Capital from the perspective of the Black radical tradition, decolonial movements, and Pope Francis’s environmental pastoral letter, Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), I perceive convergences of thought and praxis that I never imagined. I have become a degrowth communist, which means deceleration of economic growth through the democratic reform of labor and production so that the earth’s metabolisms may renew and thrive. Only communes on the model of Cooperation Jackson or Venezuela’s socialist movement will facilitate the radical abundance of degrowth communism. Here I am. My journey of contradictions between uber privilege and fomenting the “next American revolution,” to recall Grace Lee Boggs, continues. Unless we take up the contradictions in society and in us there will be no future. As they say in Venezuela’s communal movement—communo o nada—the commune or nothing, echoing Rosa Luxemburg’s (and Karl Kautsky’s) call to transition to socialism or regress into barbarism (see origin). Now is the time: the commune or nothing!
