I met a Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) organizer, a late hippy, with ponytail, moccasins, and a Health Care Workers District 1199 T-shirt at the Fall 1981 University of Connecticut student activity club night. He and others at a busy table invited students to join the AFL-CIO Solidarity Day bus trip to the nation’s capital later that month. I got on that bus. And the next bus to the one million person disarmament rally in Central Park on June 12, 1982. The August 1983 March on Washington to demand a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr was my last mass action bus trip as a student before becoming a CCAG organizer myself. 

The splits and splinters of the left were evident in the leaflets and newspapers I gathered up from organizational tables or took from activist hawkers. Repetition of a party line and negativity toward other leftist groups—“spit most venom on those most proximate” —is a fair characterization for much of this. But there were chestnuts in my piles, and roses, too. Bus trips back home from these mass demonstrations were a good reflective time for activist students and newly found organizational allies and movement elders. Which group has the rose? I wanted to know. 

“We want bread and roses, too”—a distinctly new left style remained foundational to the New America Movement (NAM) in the 1970s. Women leaders would fill at least half the seats on national bodies, while “program and political work will integrate a women’s political perspective.” The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) began the 1970s with more partisan aspirations. DSOC sought the rose and fully grasped it with recognition from the Socialist International as the USA representative. By the time the bus got back from the August 1983 March on Washington, the NAM and DSOC merged into Democratic Socialists of America. At UConn the student Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) office placed Democratic Left on the rack with The Nation, Dollars and Sense, and NACLA Report on the Americas. 

Hartford was among the early chapters receiving a charter from the DSA.  Michael Harrington spoke to a meeting of 30 DSA members in Hartford in November 1982. Later that day Harrington went to New Britain and the picket line “led by our friends at CCAG,” fighting against the electric utility raising rates to finance a nuclear plant. “Remember when capitalists risked their own capital?” he reminded us. That message moved people. I was there and recall the chant to the regulators. “A public utility – privately owned?” “DPUC! Who do you work for them or me! Wesleyan students organized a chapter styled jointly affiliated as Democratic Socialists for Citizen Action (DSCA) in the early-mid 1980s. They hosted a 1984 Harrington public lecture in Middletown

Connecticut DSA had a more public face, and DSA Youth directed much of that, in the early 1990s. We organized a panel discussion at University of Hartford Museum of American Political Life exhibit entitled “Voices of the Left: A Forum Exploring the Contributions and the Future of the American Left.” At this event, panelists described and represented a spectrum of experience with left activism, criticism, ideology, and organizational forms since the 1930s. Veteran DSA activist Paul Buhle wrote the catalog essay and helped organize the panel. 

The final audience question to the panelists was a good one: “Can you define ’the left’ in three words?” DSA Vice Chair, the influential social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, had the last words. They are dazzling and easily remembered.  “Our values are egalitarian. Our affinity is with the powerless. We act beyond witness.”  

I had a chance to speak with Ehrenreich at a labor teach-in— “Challenging Corporate Control”—at Yale later in the 1990s. The Yale graduate workers union Graduate Employees and Student Organizations (GESO), now a recognized local among the other militant Yale unions, and District 1199 hospital workers were embattled with the university. Barbara was a Yale College parent at the time and endeavored to make visits to push liberal Yale trustees. “Barbara, your definition of ‘the left’ has stayed with me since the panel at University of Hartford.” Great, what did I say? So, I told her. “That is pretty good. Write it down, it’s yours now.” 

650 District 1199 home health care workers were on strike over pay and benefit reductions in the summer of 1992. DSA Youth members in the union helped organize strike support and some worker education. They hosted a lecture by David Montgomery (1927-2011), the late prominent professor of history at Yale and member of the DSA Connecticut Organizing Committee. Montgomery thanked the DSA Youth for “taking the opportunity” and “meeting our obligation” to provide forums where “socialists and non-socialists can publicly discuss new strategies, programs, and forms of organization.”   

He referred warmly to the Oak Hill strikers: “no people are more justly entitled, or potentially more qualified, to direct any social activity than those immediately involved in it.” It took all summer, but the seven week Oak Hill School strike resulted in a victory for the workers. All strikers returned to their jobs with pay and benefits restored and future raises bargained in a new contract.

As important as building union power in “struggles at the point of production,” he continued, it is in our communities that “remedies based on market forces most clearly fail to meet human needs.” “As socialists in our everyday lives” we make commitments to childcare, public health, schools, public transit, and housing. “We observe the conduct of the police, the administration of justice, and the provision of social welfare.” 

It is here that we “develop sufficient constituencies to become decisive forces.” “In this country, where the talents needed to run a humane society are all around us what we need is not a single party, but many self-activated centers of popular struggle and a variety of political initiatives.” All these centers of activity, he added, “need to learn from history.” He began with a signature theme of his work in teaching history: “The question of how, and within what limits, collective action has shaped history, has a bearing on every part of this discussion.” 

“The concerted action of millions of people checked the upward spiral of nuclear weaponry,” put the “Cold War epoch to a close,” and “opened prospects” for free societies in Eastern Europe and South Africa. Meanwhile “the solidarity and organization needed to win long strikes in coal, telecommunications, armaments, aircraft, higher education” was an evident factor in major victories at Pittston Coal, Colt Firearms, Boeing Aircraft, and Yale. 

Even so, this was a time when employer demands for “concessions, privatization, and wage theft still dominate the scene.” And this scene was global, witnessing the “dismantling of the public sector” and a new liberalism in power to “subject all our social activities to buying and selling.” And the “most important of all socialist ideals, internationalism, was swept away” offering no “effective resistance to a resurgence of aggressive nationalism and racism.”   

It is something of relief—a shared moment of historical consciousness—to be reminded that “this isn’t the first time socialists have suffered a devastating defeat.” That a “comfortable and comradely society might emerge under working people’s own direction” seemed possible in parts of the world the 1920s. “What followed was fascism.”   

“Precisely because many unionists are keenly aware of their movement’s declining strength, the beleaguered condition of union movement confronts DSA with a task—to encourage participation of union activists in coalitions with other progressive organizations to resist reactionary tide of contemporary political life.”  And that is pretty much exactly what we were up to. Montgomery was a bona fide Connecticut labor leader, who lifted up—for analysis and celebration؅—the local activism he took part in. 

“Well organized persistent joint effort of labor, civil rights, feminist, and environmental groups lead a democratic upheaval” that is changing the “political complexion” of the Connecticut legislature. The UAW, Jobs with Justice, Naugatuck Valley Project, Connecticut Citizen Action Group, the Yale unions and community allies, the UE, and his hosts New England Health Care Workers District 1199 were recognized for specific campaigns. “Widespread initiatives in worker ownership, community preservation projects, corporate campaign strategies, solidarity campaigns, and direct union intervention in state budget crisis. This prefigures the political alliance and society we wish to create.” This Connecticut coalition work features in several of the fine essays in BUILDING BRIDGES: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community (1990) a collection from life-long labor activist/intellectual notables. Co-editors and contributors Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello were on the scene participating and observing, like no others, then or since.

What would Montgomery say to the same group today?  He would note that this group of “strikers, radicals, organizers, and intellectuals” is considerably more diverse than it was 35 years earlier. In 1992 we mostly all agreed with him that “socialist vision excites little enthusiasm in the United States today.” And further that socialists did not “come to their present beliefs through workplace struggles.” This seems to no longer be the case. What else has changed?

Occupy Wall Street, Movement for Black Lives, Bernie Sanders campaigns, and DSA’s emergence on the national scene, of course. Union organizing in higher education, public service, retail, food services, media, and health care contributed to a renewal, a “re-radicalization of labor.”  The Zohran Mamdani victory would certainly be part of the discussion, part of the necessary analysis.

Brooklyn College political theorist Corey Robin remarked on how “fluid and fluent Mamdani is in a certain vision of American history” adding that “he read his Eric Foner when he was very young.” Zohran was 15 years old when the first edition of “Give Me Liberty!” was getting assigned to the brightest high schoolers by the best teachers in NYC. Now in the 8^th edition the Foner text is the most widely adopted book at all collegiate levels. 

To my ear, Mamdani had his Marx in easy reach to help him articulate that “our challenge now, is to study the conditions that allowed Trump to accumulate so much power in a democracy.” Similarly, Marx called us to study the “circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” The 1851 ballot box triumph of a French monarchist dictatorship over the socialists and republicans was a complete rout. 80% of 8 million eligible voters turned out and gave a 90% endorsement of the coup d’etat to discard the liberal constitution and keep Napoleon III as emperor. How did this happen in the first mass democratic election in Europe? 

Marx sets forth to answer that question in 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and in doing so demonstrates a method of doing social and political history while theorizing historical materialism. It really caught on. With this Montgomery invites us to interpret Marx’s rose image and to critique Hegel’s, while we are at it. 

Deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltriness of first attempts. Until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible and the conditions themselves cry out:

Here is Rhodes—leap here! Here is the rose—dance here!

Hegel’s rose landing is the site for German idealism’s redemptive arrival at universal reason-—the completion of the perfect human self, and the end of history, even. “To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight which implies reconciliation with reality.”   

Or, following Marx and a more everyday historical materialist reckoning, the rose is the site of transformation, not reconciliation. A place of new dance moves, a new world through criticism of the old. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)

Montgomery would be gratified to see the Connecticut DSA logo modified by the whale in steady supporting role for the always changing rose. At once the site and the symbol of struggle, of beauty and of socialism, the revolutionary rose only blooms “outside of the whale.” E.P. Thompson’s 1960 essay of that title took aim at Orwell’s 1940 essay yearning for contemplative life “inside the whale.” 1940 was no time to be apathetic and to accept defeat. The Out of Apathy essay collection edited by Thompson was the inaugural volume published by New Left Books in 1960. “New left continuities are every place these days” Montgomery might say, “and worth a closer look.”  “Right. Otherwise,” I might add, “you wouldn’t have been vital and legible in this exercise; thanks for carrying it on. ”

May 1, 2026
Bob Reutenauer, Middletown, CT

Bob Reutenauer is a recently retired labor union organizer and a continues as adjunct instructor of history at Middlesex Community College. Trained as a community organizer at the Midwest Academy and was hired by the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) for most of the 1980s, entered the labor movement 1990. Along the way he helped raise up two kids and finished an MA in US History at Trinity College. He has seen Bob Dylan thirty-six times, consistently reads 50-60 books a year, has visited forty-six of the United States and travelled in twenty-four countries. 

Main Source
David Montgomery “Social Production Controlled by Social Foresight” from lecture at New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199/SEIU during the Oak Hill School strike in Spring 1992. Note taker is Bob Reutenauer, Congress of CT Community Colleges 4Cs/SEIU. 

The essay remains unpublished, typescript in my files, e-mail bobreut@gmail.com.  About 30 people attended. Strikers, radicals, organizers, and intellectuals from 1199, AFT, UAW, AAUP, Trinity, ILGWU, 4Cs/SEIU,CCAG… other

Other stuff, too
Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, BUILDING BRIDGES: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community, Monthly Review Press 1990

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! 1^st-8^th editions 2005-2026

G.W.F. Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1820

Karl Marx A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 1843

Karl Marx 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852

David Montgomery, “Unions and the Control of Economic Activity” Democratic Left, September 1990.

David Montgomery, “Yesterday’s Wisdom, Changing Situations, and New Initiatives in the American Labor Movement” unpublished, 1990. In A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance, Stromquist and Barrett eds, University of Illinois, 2024

David Montgomery, Organization of American Historians (OAH) Presidential Address: “Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform” The Journal of American History, March 2001

E.P.Thompson, “Outside the Whale” in Out of Apathy, New Left Books, E.P.Thompson, editor 1960

https://dlarchive.dsausa.org/issues/
New America Movement, Moving On, January 1972- March 1982
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, Newsletter of the Democratic Left, March 1973 – March 1982
Democratic Socialists of America, Democratic Left, “Toward a New Beginning” March 1982