I’ve been more interested in writing these slightly longer pieces lately, and they take more out of me. So I might only post 2-3 times a month instead of every week, we’ll see. Thanks for your support, it means the world to me.
This week’s piece is about my trip to Baltimore last weekend, to interview the author Molly Crabapple on stage about her book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, which you can buy from this affiliate link to a queer-owned, worker-owned bookstore. Or get from your library.
The Greatest City in Baltimore
Baltimore is verdant in September, or maybe you’d just say it’s overgrown.
The concrete sound barrier walls that grow up around the freeway are overgrown with ivy. When you drive in from the west, you drive through twisty gullies and the street lamps are overgrown with ivy. The bridges are overgrown with rust and graffiti and ivy. It’s a beautiful city, shockingly so.
Last Sunday, I was in town to give a talk with Molly Crabapple at the Baltimore Book Festival. After our talk, I was eating a vegan sloppy joe from Red Emma’s and talking to old friends when someone pointed out the public works people who were planting trees along the sidewalk. According to my friend, if you own a house in Baltimore, you can just call up the city and they’ll plant trees in front of your house.
Tree cover is one of the most important parts of climate resilience for cities (and cities, with their higher population density and lower per-capita greenhouse emissions, are essential for mitigating climate change more broadly). Concrete, unshaded cities create their own microclimate and heat dome. Cities with tree cover are much, much cooler and handle storm runoff better.
Of course, thanks to environmental racism and classism, it’s mostly wealthier cities that maintain tree cover.
Baltimore has never, in my lifetime at least, been the kind of place anyone would call “a wealthier city.” Most of its reputation is for poverty and violence. When the city adopted the nickname “Charm City” in the 1980s, people started calling it Harm City. When it took on the slogan “the city that reads” and put it on the park benches and the bus stops in 1988, people started saying “the city that bleeds.”
In the early 2000s, the mayor decided that Baltimore suffered from an overabundance of modesty and changed the slogan and the benches to “Baltimore: the greatest city in America.” Most people looked around at the poverty and at the murder rate and thought “well, that’s just obviously not true.”
I’ve spent a lot of time in Baltimore, and I love it, but I always liked the rendition of it as “Baltimore: the greatest city in Baltimore.”
Baltimore is not wealthy, but it’s verdant. Trees retake the outskirts and the city plants more trees in the sidewalks, and Baltimore is currently ranked 19th in the country for tree cover, and it’s got twice as many trees per people as Portland, Oregon.
Baltimore is a poor city, but it’s a city that asks the question “why can’t we have rich people shit anyway.” Why can’t we have trees, why can’t we have social programs, why can’t we have access to the arts. Why can’t we be become the city that reads?
And that’s what social movements, real social movements, the kind that can turn into revolutions, do. They give poor people rich lives.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the city’s book festival takes place in the street next to Red Emma’s, the bookstore named after Emma Goldman, an anarchist that the US deported in the first red scare. Because real social movements run book festivals, and real social movements don’t sit outside of society, they participate in it. They shape it.
It’s easy to romanticize Baltimore for me. I grew up about an hour away from the city, and it’s where I learned about what it means to be a person. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my girlfriend and I used to take a bus to a subway to a light rail in order to stomp around the inner harbor without shoes on (my parents eventually had to set the rule that I was not allowed to leave the neighborhood without shoes). When I was seventeen, I started taking art lessons from the goth couple that became my mentors, Steven Archer and Donna Lynch of the band Ego Likeness, and I drove to the city every Saturday to learn about life and art.
When I was 19, I dropped out of art school and wound up a street kid squatting in Towson, Baltimore’s suburb that later became famous as the birthplace of St. Luigi Mangione.
I learned how to be a punk by catching rides into the city and going to shows in the basement of the Love Not Bombs house.
When I was 22, I wrote my first theory zine, subtitled “feminist theory for anarchist men,” sitting in the first Red Emma’s, a dimly lit but lovingly adorned basement cafe on St. Paul Street. An anarchist iron worker had built the place out with beautiful industrial wrought iron and repurposed gears. I sat on the couch and used their bookstore as a reference library. I never bought anything, and they never kicked me out.
Baltimore held me when I came crawling back to her from the west coast in my mid-twenties, broken-hearted. One freezing winter, I walked Falls Road from Fells Point to downtown every day, the saddest I’ve ever been in my life. Every time, I stopped in front of the Edgar Allan Poe statue to commune with another sad writer. If he made it to 40, I told myself, then surely I could too.
Last Sunday, I couldn’t linger too long after my talk. Dog care had fallen through, and Rintrah was at home alone, so it was a whirlwind trip. As I headed out of the city, driving north on 83, I got lost in thought. I got onto the beltway going the wrong way, and I drove past the stretch of 695 where my friend Darkstar had bled out twenty-three years ago.
He died drinking and driving, like an asshole, like an idiot. He wasn’t always either of those things, but one day he was both and it was his last day. He died in 2003 on his way home from scamming copies of his anarchist zines from Kinkos. He wrote Irish-inspired folklore, and we lost someone special when we lost him to idiocy and assholery. He’d been given probation after spending about a month in jail for defending himself from some frat boys in Michigan. He’d been shipped back to Maryland and wasn’t allowed to leave, and that traveler struggled to live in one place, and he coped with it badly.
As I have it, when he overturned on the freeway, coming in off the onramp, zines and natty bo (the local shitty beer) scattered out across the lanes at two in the morning.
Edgar Allan Poe died drunk in the gutter in Baltimore, and Darkstar died drunk on the pavement of Baltimore, and they both wrote beautiful stories, and I’ve looked up to both of them, and I’m older now than either ever managed to be.
My friend’s father also drank himself to an early death in Baltimore. One time, during one of his many stays in the hospital downtown, he got up and left. This guy, in his medical robe, dragging along an IV stand, walked the few blocks to Edgar Allan Poe’s grave. That’s where the hospital staff caught up with him, smoking cigarettes and communing with the patron saint of goth. They dragged him back to his bed. He died a few years later.
I don’t know if he wrote, but his kid is one of the best authors I know.
Used to be, someone was killed in Baltimore about once a day. The past few years, it’s been dropping fast, down to a third of that. Best I can tell, this is because of the rise of non-police solutions to problems, including community intervention and outreach and therapy. The police are taking credit, of course, but it’s never a good idea to take the police at their word, and Baltimore has one of the most famously corrupt departments in the entire country.
Baltimore is also co-op city. Worker-run cooperatives are popping up all over (here’s a list of 30 of them), working to end the economic extraction that poor communities face. Baltimore has two different worker-owned, Black-owned ice creameries. It has a worker-owned piercing studio. Worker-owned cafes can serve coffee roasted by a worker-owned roaster. A worker-owned construction company fixes up and moves their own workers into abandoned properties, like what I used to do as a squatter but taken up a step.
And I can trace the explosion of worker-owned businesses in Baltimore to the crew that opened the first Red Emma’s location in that basement on St. Paul Street more than two decades ago. They’re on their fourth location now, but they own the building thanks to the financing work of the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED, as in “get that bread.”) These days, Red Emma’s has a full cafe and restaurant, a two-story bookstore, and a free school in the walk-out basement. Last I checked, it’s majority POC-owned.
They’re a big tent Leftist bookstore, at the end of it, rather than specifically and only anarchist, but they’ve always had the goal of creating a space that is both welcoming and radical. And they do it.
The Baltimore Book Festival, the city’s official festival, happens in the street next to Red Emma’s. More than anything else, this is what I love about Baltimore. I love a city where the Left doesn’t see itself as separate from the people.
I can’t paint you a utopia. While I was there, I told my friend “Baltimore is so fucking beautiful” and she looked at me concerned. “Spiritually or physically?” she said.
She was an organizer, and she’d been beating her head against the city and its politics and its government for decades. The economic extraction of the city continues, and even its dramatic drop in crime still puts it far more dangerous than the average American city.
“I meant physically,” I said. “But I suppose both.”
The anarchists of Chicago of the 1880s and the Bundists of Poland of the first decades of the twentieth century would have agreed on some important things (yes to socialism, no to kings) and disagreed on others (the role of governmental structures in the revolution).
Both, importantly, worked tirelessly to bring culture to the poor, the impoverished, the struggling. That is to say, to themselves. When I read about the Chicago anarchists, I’m struck by how much they valued culture. Here were people working 12 or 14 hour days, six days a week, and still they insisted that they deserved culture, that they deserved education.
Broke people financed newspapers that put them in touch with radicals literally around the world. Immigrant factory workers in Illinois could read about the anarchist movement in South America, in Asia. They put on theater and festivals. They had picnics and parades. They taught one another. And they trained in the use of firearms and they marched together, and many of them died together.
I could change almost nothing about that paragraph and be talking about the Bundists, or about social movements worth their salt all over the world.
We build culture, then defend it.
So I went to Baltimore on Sunday to speak at the book festival and to get lost in nostalgia, and I succeeded at both of those things. Though to be fair, speaking about radical history and getting lost in nostalgia are two of the things I’m best at.
I was there to speak with my friend Molly Crabapple, who put out a book called Here Where We Live is Our Country, a history of the Jewish Labor Bund. No one, certainly not the publisher, expected this anti-Zionist book of eastern European history to become a bestseller. Everyone underestimated just how ready people were to hear the story of one of the largest groups of anti-Zionist Jews in history.
Molly is a social democrat. I’m an anarchist. And we sat on stage and we talked about the Polish city of Bialystok, where a hundred years ago the Bund (who were Jewish social democrats) and Black Banner (who were Jewish anarchists) were only technically on the same side of the fight against anti-semitism and the rule of the Tsar. They’d been two groups fighting for an ownership stake of the revolution, for turf. (Spoiler: the Bolsheviks used both as useful idiots, betrayed both, and killed fucktons of Bundists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks alike.)
And I care about the differences between Black Banner and the Bund and I also don’t care about those differences. It’s easy, as I get older, to accidentally want to re-litigate the conflicts of a bygone era, but history research isn’t a competition to see who can dredge up the best evidence to support their own current position. That’s not what’s important about history.
What’s important about history is that it helps us see where we’re from, and where our problems are from. You can’t map trajectory with only a single point of reference. If you only know what’s happening now, you have no sense of where things are going (and if you only know the past, you have nothing useful at all).
It’s by knowing the past that we can notice patterns and trends. You can’t have a social movement without, well, movement. Without trajectory. You can’t have trajectory without history.
What Molly’s book does really well, besides being an approachable but serious piece of history writing, is offer a counternarrative to the Zionists. It offers Jewish history that isn’t wrapped up in some ethnonationalist genocidal project.
I’m not Jewish, but so many people I love, both family and friends, are. The first few years of my podcast, I focused a lot on Eastern Europe, and Leftist history is interwoven with Jewish history since the founding of the modern Left.
Many of the first Leftists of every tendency were antisemitic, or at least started their Leftist careers as antisemites. See, for centuries, Jews had been the scapegoats of the wealthy. David Graeber talks about this in the introduction to his book Debt: basically, moneylending was a sin for medieval Christians, so Jews, who were prevented from most other work, were among the only people who could lend money. And they were banned from most other careers. Then, whenever the poor started grumbling about being poor, the royalty would say “blame the Jews” and there would be horrendous violence against the Jews. The real class enemy, the royalty, would remain unchallenged.
Then, in the early 19th century, the European Left was swept up by (and essentially invented) nationalism. You have these big empires all over the place that are multicultural (though not exactly egalitarian). The Ottomans, the Russians, they’re happy to take your taxes whatever ethnicity you are, whatever faith you practice. So a lot of early Leftist movements were nationalists who wanted “Poland for the Poles” or whatever because it sounded like a good alternative to imperial rule.
But the Jews were a people without a homeland, so the nationalist project didn’t make as much sense to them. They’d been living in these various places for centuries, and many of them thought, well, Here Where I Live is My Country. Thus, just by existing, they complicated the nationalist project of dividing the world into ethnostates. Zionism was essentially a willingness to go along with that project, to surrender to the antisemitic urge of European nationalism.
Anti-Zionist Jews, like the Bund that Molly writes about, said instead: “what if no one gets an ethnostate? What if we just continue to live multiculturally but without an extractive, tyrannical empire?”
Leftist nationalism was the nascent form of Leftism. Internationalism was its mature form. And for Leftism to grow up, it needed to be informed by one of the groups of stateless people of Europe—it needed to be informed by the Jews.
Zionism and ethnonationalism could have been thought up by anyone (and indeed, many early Zionists were not Jewish, just wanted the Jews to leave Europe). Anti-Zionism, and internationalism, those were ideas that came from the unique Jewish experience.
It was good to be on stage with Molly and to interview her about the Bund, to talk about history and why it matters to us now. The tent was packed, and half the questions were about the direct influence of the Bund on modern American politics.
The past is alive, and it matters.
It was good to stand on the sidewalk afterwards, on the street that had been shut down next to the bookstore named after Emma Goldman (an eastern European Jew herself), and feel like I’m part of the continuation of a grand and longstanding project, the project of giving ourselves culture.
That’s all we can do, in the end of it. We can insist that we can have nice things, and we can make nice things for ourselves, and we can try to defend those things. And I ate my sloppy joe and caught up with old friends, and watched Baltimore plant trees, then I drove off west into the mountains where I don’t have to think much about other people at all. My dog was happy to see me.
"You can’t map trajectory with only a single point of reference"--this right here 100%. If we don't value, create, and protect oral/ hard copy histories--meat world accounts of what happened before, and what's happening now--well, at this point nobody trusts digital technology, least of all the folks who are at the bleeding edge of expanding it.
I love this description of Baltimore and internationalism/finding a home wherever you are. I'm not Jewish, but I did move a lot growing up and have the experience of "I'm from <insert town I currently live in, even if I moved there 3 months ago>." Most recently I've made my home in similarly underdog cities (St. Louis, Memphis) that are similarly tree covered. It's inspiring to find people with the same experiences across space and time.