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David Roediger invoked both personal histories and the history of the socialist movement over the past two centuries.
Roediger described the distinct nature of “Writing Socialist History” in a talk sponsored by the Department of Philosophy as part of its Socialist and Marxist Studies Luncheon Series Thursday in the Coe Room of the Memorial Union.
Roediger is the Kendrick Babcock Chair of History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a long time activist and scholar of the socialist movement.
The speaker wrote several books about the subject and helped write the autobiography, titled “Fellow Worker,” of Fred Thompson, a mentor and fellow socialist writer and activist who passed away in 1987. Roediger frequently referenced Thompson’s work and often cloistered personal life as an example of what distinguishes the writing of socialist history from that of other movements and perspectives.
Roediger spoke particularly of Thompson’s emphasis on the importance of inclusiveness in writing socialist history and not just writing for “you and me and half a dozen other people.” This emphasis on inclusion was reflected in Thompson’s axiom, “Let’s make the world a good place to live,” which Roediger described in retrospect as “exceeding [his] personal bounds of generalization,” as well as Thompson’s major frustrations with the socialist movement.
“He’d get very agitated . about the fact that there was an Earth Day and a May Day and that they were two separate holidays,” Roediger said. “He couldn’t understand how we got to this pass where there was a green holiday and a worker’s holiday within a week . of each other. He regarded it as a failure of the left to imagine its project big enough to encompass sustainability and the like.”
Disagreements within the socialist movement are what the movement’s history often ends up being about, according to Roediger.
“Part of it is always writing about debates and conflicts among socialists,” he said, “so there’s not [just one] socialist history, but many.”
Roediger described Thompson as being different on a number of points from other socialists. This included his diminished view of the economist Karl Marx. But he was similar in that “he very seldom talked about himself.”
Roediger said many socialist organizers and writers are reluctant to discuss their pasts, “rejecting personal context” and focusing on political strategy instead. Noting that “Fellow Worker” was published after Thompson’s death. Roediger said, “he would’ve killed me if he knew I was billing it as his autobiography.”
In a question-and-answer session following his talk, Roediger received a number of inquiries that brought the conversation to modern day.
Stefano Tijerina, a Ph.D. student studying Canadian culture and Latin American history, asked Roediger to reflect on the state of “education of the left or the education of ideas at the left,” particularly at the university level. This led Roediger to comment broadly on the evolving role of leftist philosophy.
“The decline of the labor movement has diminished what kind of questions we can ask, what issues we want to raise,” he said. But that the failure of education about labor issues is the fault of both students and educators who both sometimes view the labor movement as “antiquarian.”
However, Roediger, in his role as an educator and an activist, advocated for continued scholarship in the arena of socialist history, noting that with the movement’s evolution, “many of these people [who have been a part of socialist history] whose lives we want to record may not be around for much longer.”
