Asad Haider on Acceptable Men
Asad Haider’s reviewed Acceptable Men for The Baffler. Read an excerpt of his thoughtful reflections on the book and Ignatiev’s work, “Molecules and Vectors: Noel Ignatiev’s radical commitments” here:
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“READ NOEL IGNATIEV’S LIFE STORY AS HISTORY: a chronicle of capitalism and industrial decline, of work and labor organization, of the composition of class and race. But read it also as a story of militancy, of the coming together of vectors which, if we have any prospect of awakening from the nightmare of history, will have to become all of us. “By the time I began working at Gary Works I considered myself a communist revolutionary,” writes Ignatiev in his posthumously published memoirs Acceptable Men. “Going to work in the mill itself was for me a political act.”
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This revolutionary tradition was, in some part, inherited; as Ignatiev recounts, his grandparents arrived as immigrants in the United States just after 1905 as the mechanization of agriculture drove millions from Eastern Europe. On his mother’s side, his grandparents were communists who read the Party newspaper in Yiddish. His father was “a bohemian radicalized by the Depression,” who made his living delivering newspapers “seven days a week for eighteen years without a day off, not even a Sunday.” Both of Ignatiev’s parents were communists and autodidacts. Nevertheless, it was not inevitable that he would take the revolutionary path; noting that his siblings, who grew up in the same home and in similar conditions, chose otherwise, Ignatiev muses: “I sometimes think of myself as the product of an accidental coming together of molecules and vectors.”
Such, too, is the nature of the revolutionary struggle to which he was dedicated: there is the everyday continuity of ordinary people’s capacity, but for politics to take place the daily must be punctuated by exceptional moments which turn accidents into events…
Order Acceptable Men by us this summer and available now via AK Press https://www.akpress.org/acceptable-men.html.