Our Hands Are Empty Save For History

or: when the moment and movements fade

I’ll be tabling at Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in Asheville, September 27 and 28 with Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

This week’s Cool People episodes discusses the anarchist who invented foosball and the socialist who invented air mail. They’re fun episodes. On Cool Zone Media Book Club, which has its own feed now (with art by the amazing Jonas Goonface), I’ve been reading Hermetica by Alan Lea.

This week I finally joined the crowd and read the first two Murderbot books by Martha Wells and they’re great, short reads. I see what all the fuss is about. I’ve been watching Pokerface and enjoying it.

Our Hands Are Empty Save For History

When I was a baby anarchist, nineteen years old and full to overflowing with a lust for life, I couldn’t imagine getting lost in the past. The media we consumed (zines, mostly) kept admonishing us all to not get hung up on the “glory days” of anarchism a hundred years in the past. That was good advice, but completely unnecessary. What would I care about the Spanish Civil War when I was busy spending my nights breaking into buildings to sleep without rent, when I was helping organize protests that shut down major cities, when I was chased by cops and occasionally—when we got really lucky—chasing them right back?

These days, of course, I read history books for a living and I think about the Spanish Civil War more days than I don’t. But I’m not interested in history as dry facts, nor am I interested in it as pure nostalgia. I’m interested in how the understanding of history places me so directly and firmly in the present. History tells me that I’m part of something that is more than a flash in the pan. I’m part of a movement that has existed as long as there has been oppression.

Not being a flash in the pan is important to me. When I was first caught up in protest and rebellion, time stopped for me. The first summer I dropped out of college to hitchhike and fight cops lasted longer than a lifetime. The first year after that was another eternity.

It’s strange that lifetimes, that eternities, eventually end. When the endless time ended, when the alterglobalization movement and the antiwar movement petered out, I looked around and wondered what was left for me. I had given the movement all of me, every fiber of me, and yet it was gone and I was still there.

All of that is to say, the end of a movement is a hard thing to cope with. It’s true for people who survived the late 60s, it’s true of people of my generation, it’s true of the people who cut their teeth in 2020.

It was true for the veterans who survived the Spanish Civil War, and it was true for the people who saw the global leftist movements of the early 20th century fall apart in bits and pieces. It was true for the people who saw Bolshevism betray the communist ideal and use the language of liberation used to murder and imprison and starve millions. It was true for people who saw fascism sweep across Spain and crush the revolution. It was true for the people who saw the labor movement in the US co-opted into a nearly meaningless, toothless thing.

Now, to be clear, we’re not in a lull right now, not even in the US. The movement against ICE is growing. The Palestinian liberation movement is alive and well. In Indonesia, anarchists alongside others are in all-out revolt.

But movements and moments of revolt are not purely isolated things. We are all part of a grand narrative that is as old as humanity, and our power will ebb and it will flow, and we we have always been here and always will. Remembering that helps us understand who we are when this or that moment passes, when some of us survive and some of us don’t.

Nothing has helped me understand that flow like studying history, like reading the words of people who’ve experienced this themselves.

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Lately I’ve been researching the history of radio, for a couple of upcoming episodes of my podcast. One week is going to be on pirate radio, one week is going to be on public radio. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find anarchists involved in both.

During my research I lost myself on a side quest, learning about an anarchist poet who helped start public radio. Kenneth Rexroth. He’s usually remembered as “the godfather of the beats,” because it was his literary circle—the San Francisco Anarchist Circle—who helped birth the beats, but old Kenneth wasn’t particularly happy about how the beats turned out.

Rexroth is not exactly an obscure figure, but I wish I’d read him instead of Ginsberg as an alienated suburban teen. Ginsberg just didn’t do it for me. I was reading him and the rest of the beats because I was desperate for something that offered a real alternative to the mundanity of white American culture. But the beats were more style than substance, if you ask me. There’s this pattern I’ve seen again and again, where cultural movements are started by political radicals and soon colonized by people who adopt the pose without adopting the meaning, and I don’t think Kenneth Rexroth was wrong when he called the beats hipsters, derogatorily.

While I’d heard of Rexroth before, “the anarchist precursor to the beats” is about all I knew of him. I had assumed—arrogantly, rudely—that he was a poet who happened to sort of consider himself an anarchist. Maybe he’d read some books about it.

I had him wrong.

Kenneth Rexroth grew up poor in Chicago in the 1910s and 20s, joined the IWW, traveled and worked as a hobo, and was actively an anarchist organizer. During World War II his wife and he spent endless hours helping the victims of Japanese internment, working alongside imprisoned folks to help them meet their needs (like getting them books and medical care), and helping dozens of people directly to evade internment completely.

I had him so, so wrong.

He also survived the end of the classical era of anarchism, and he wrote about the accompanying sense of loss in ways that reach across the intervening century to cut directly into my heart.

He wrote in gendered language that doesn’t look great today, and I’ve read an awful lot about how he interacted with women without reaching a conclusion. I know he supported the feminist movement and he dedicated his life to translating women poets into English. He was also bisexual with an emphasis on the sexual. He once apparently complained about having potentially damaged his mouth and throat with all the oral sex. One of his ex-wives accused him of abuse before she divorced him to marry the couple’s therapist they were seeing together, and I don’t know as much about how his other marriages ended. I’ve read people who call him sexist, I’ve read people who call him actively feminist. I don’t know.

Anyway, here’s the poem.

For Eli Jacobson

1952

There are few of us now, soon
There will be none. We were comrades
Together, we believed we
Would see with our own eyes the new
World where man was no longer
Wolf to man, but men and women
Were all brothers and lovers
Together. We will not see it.
We will not see it, none of us.
It is farther off than we thought.
In our young days we believed
That as we grew old and fell
Out of rank, new recruits, young
And with the wisdom of youth,
Would take our places and they
Surely would grow old in the
Golden Age. They have not come.
They will not come. There are not
Many of us left. Once we
Marched in closed ranks, today each
Of us fights off the enemy,
A lonely isolated guerrilla.
All this has happened before,
Many times. It does not matter.
We were comrades together.
Life was good for us. It is
Good to be brave — nothing is
Better. Food tastes better. Wine
Is more brilliant. Girls are more
Beautiful. The sky is bluer
For the brave — for the brave and
Happy comrades and for the
Lonely brave retreating warriors.
You had a good life. Even all
Its sorrows and defeats and
Disillusionments were good,
Met with courage and a gay heart.
You are gone and we are that
Much more alone. We are one fewer,
Soon we shall be none. We know now
We have failed for a long time.
And we do not care. We few will
Remember as long as we can,
Our children may remember,
Some day the world will remember.
Then they will say, “They lived in
The days of the good comrades.
It must have been wonderful
To have been alive then, though it
Is very beautiful now.”
We will be remembered, all
Of us, always, by all men,
In the good days now so far away.
If the good days never come,
We will not know. We will not care.
Our lives were the best. We were the
Happiest men alive in our day.

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It is good to be brave. Nothing is better.

One more poem, from 1936. One whose title references events I think about so often.

From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion

Remember now there were others before this;
Now when the unwanted hours rise up,
And the sun rises red in unknown quarters,
And the constellations change places,
And cloudless thunder erases the furrows,
And moonlight stains and the stars grow hot.
Though the air is fetid, conscripted fathers,
With the black bloat of your dead faces;
Though men wander idling out of factories
Where turbine and hand are both freezing;
And the air clears at last above the chimneys;
Though mattresses curtain the windows;
And every hour hears the snarl of explosion;
Yet one shall rise up alone saying:
“I am one out of many, I have heard
Voices high in the air crying out commands;
Seen men’s bodies burst into torches;
Seen faun and maiden die in the night air raids;
Heard the watchwords exchanged in the alleys;
Felt hate speed the blood stream and fear curl the nerves.
I know too the last heavy maggot;
And know the trapped vertigo of impotence.
I have traveled prone and unwilling
In the dense processions through the shaken streets.
Shall we hang thus by taut navel strings
To this corrupt placenta till we’re flyblown;
Till our skulls are cracked by crow and kite
And our members become the business of ants,
Our teeth the collection of magpies?”
They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.

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Our hands are empty save for history.

I’m glad to be in this fight with all of you.