“Unexpected Sledgehammer: Noel Ignatiev’s Communist Education” — LA Review of Books

Side by side covers of Acceptable Men & Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity

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For the third anniversary of Noel Ignatiev’s passing, Dylan Davis & Patrick King reviewed both Acceptable Men, his memoir from CHK in 2021, and Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity, a collection of his writing released this year from Verso.

“NOEL IGNATIEV (1940–2019) died three years ago today. We learned of his death on a picket line; here we trace how he grappled with the informal networks of struggle developed by fellow workers during his own time as a laborer in heavy industry.

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Whether on factory floors or through economic ebbs and flows, Ignatiev presented class struggle as a sequence of enigmatic forms of conflict, accommodation, and rapprochement. He traced, in microcosm, how the revolutionary processes initiated through the daily activities of ordinary people constituted important “outposts” of a future socialist society in the present. Given the political history and trajectory of capitalist development in the United States, capitulation to the color line and the “poison” bait of white-skin privilege was an overriding possibility. But in the actions of workers in motion, their deeds rather than words, Ignatiev perceived a genuine alternative.”

Read the full review here.