Kopkind Colony

Again, Kopkind is bringing its annual end-of-year newsletter to you digitally.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Let’s start with Forward. As 2021 comes to a close, Kopkind is looking ahead to resume our signature summer seminar/retreats at Tree Frog Farm. We’re not under illusions that we’ll wake up one day and the coronavirus will have disappeared; having put the summer project on pause for the past two years of the pandemic, we’re simply determined to deal with new realities. Like the incongruous flowering in Asam Ahmad’s garden, above, we’re pushing up jasmine; like the rocky soil or soft woodlands of southern Vermont, we’re pushing up forsythia and forget-me-not, pushing up morels, anything but metaphorical daisies. Nature is real for Kopkind, part of why the project is not Zoomable. Kopkind is a social and sensory experience as much as an intellectual, political and creative one. Embedded in life, embedded in history and a feeling for freedom. So, to regeneration! That is our wish, for Kopkind, for you our friends and supporters, for our collective radical energies and our world. Come July and August of 2022 we expect to welcome back our ‘camps’ of political journalists, activists and documentary filmmakers, as we have done for twenty years. Please help us make that happen. There’s a Donate button at the bar up top on this site; we welcome every gift with open arms.

As to looking back, Kopkind wasn’t idle this year, and the hundreds of people who have been participants in or guests of the project since 1999, along with our network of members and advisers, are rocking in the world. Some of them contributed to “Scenes From a Pandemic,” the weekly series of short essays that Kopkind commissioned and edited, a collaboration with The Nation that was manifest on the magazine’s website and this blog from 2020 into ’21. Some of them released films, including one that was workshopped ten years ago at Film Camp and had its Vermont premier at an outdoor public screening at Tree Frog Farm in August. One alumna made national headlines.

In June, India Walton and her campaign stunned a four-term incumbent and the broader political establishment by winning the Democratic Party primary for mayor of Buffalo. A lot of people said she came out of nowhere, but they hadn’t been paying attention. When she came to Kopkind in 2019, she had recently started a community land trust aiming to secure permanent affordability in a black neighborhood threatened by gentrification. Long before that, a social movement infrastructure had been growing in Buffalo that helped her find her people and add to the struggle for a more equitable city. Our theme in 2019 was Democratizing the Economy. The experience, she says, made her feel like a “wild woman,” which is another way of saying a free woman: it helped build political and personal confidence. This year she put together a new kind of rainbow coalition to contest electorally. The subsequent general election campaign was long and ugly, and India didn’t prevail. (For more on the background and aftermath, see here and here, respectively.) Her campaign did succeed, though, in putting inequality at the center of the table in a city whose media and dominant political class have been too busy touting ‘Renaissance’ to bother much about the people left out. (Now the mayor is talking about them.) The campaign cross-pollinated with the young workers in Buffalo who in December won the first union drive in the country at Starbucks. It provided a real-world testing ground for Our City Action Buffalo, a new multiracial organization that aims to build power through electoral change. It created a sense of possibility, and drew in new people, breaking longstanding barriers. Those are themes close to Kopkind’s heart—how the left engages in every area of struggle, and how it expands the realm of participation, thought and action.

* * *

Some primary voters in Buffalo said it was the pandemic that convinced them there needed to be a change in priorities at the top. As the crisis hit, the city’s social movement infrastructure had organized to meet people’s needs when little else would. That was a familiar story around the country.

Two years in, the pandemic continues to structure the spirit of the time. Somehow it seems darker now, the uncertainties of last year compounded by the normalization of distance and the gulf between social solidarity and bloody-mindedness. (Let alone the latest variant.) “Scenes From a Pandemic” continued with songs of experience, but the tone seemed different. Endurance formed the base line, the improvisations of the period conveying hopes for regeneration refracted in multiple ways across time.

Asam: On the cusp of another surreal spring, I have never felt simultaneously more at home and more afraid of being unmoored.

At the start of the pandemic, Asam and his boyfriend had been evicted. They’d found a place far from the center of prohibitive Toronto and planted a garden, whose bounty Asam catalogued lavishly, the flower and vegetable names cascading one on top of another like poetry, the garden revealed as, at once, a balm, a distraction, a point of connection with neighbors, an anchor and warning amidst precarious life. The day his story appeared on The Nation’s site, Asam learned that the landlord was selling the house, and they were being evicted again.

At the start of the pandemic, Angela Ards, who was a Kopkind camper in 2000, a mentor in 2015 and has been an ongoing adviser, made a local dog park a respite from isolation together with other dog owners in Newton, Massachusetts. Diversion became something deeper, both nourishing and more complicated in 2021.

Angela: It’s been almost a year. Wildlife is back in hiding; smog in New Delhi and Los Angeles has returned; yet, we still gather … The Vizsla’s dad, who was laid off and then rehired at a much lower salary, says the pandemic has changed his mind about a lot. Perhaps “building wealth” sounded more like a scam after losing his job. Following the January 6 insurrection, he asked if I thought Trump supporters would have a change of heart having seen the violence. I doubt it. I think it’s more like the Shih Tzus’ dad. He does work harder now to make small talk, to connect, but he persists in showing up without a mask despite a statewide mandate. Standing on the hill by the oak trees, he wishes “Good morning” to the rest of us, masked, standing below. He seems to want to show us that he’s not like those people who stormed the Capitol.

Globally, a year with Covid coincided with the tenth anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. From Kyoto, Lisa Torio (Kopkind 2016) began with the image of a spring market, lush, luscious; and the hushed manner in which some continued to speak of calamity.

Lisa: Coming of age in the years following the nuclear disaster, I learned from the way adults spoke in measured tones, from their pauses and awkward glances, that talking about tragedies has an expiration date. On March 11, at 2:46 pm, people across the country prayed in silence, remembering those who lost their lives in the Tohoku earthquake-tsunami and those still missing … The government’s promise of recovery in the wake of that disaster meant erasure. It meant covering up the full extent of radiation and lifting evacuation orders without proper evaluation and evidence. It meant cutting subsidized housing for tens of thousands of people who were simply dropped from the “official count” of evacuees. Two years after the disaster, the Japanese prime minister declared, “Japan is back.” With that, mourning became something reserved for official days only. We traded reflection for a version of recovery that requires a finite past. Fukushima became a tragic thing that once happened but that we overcame, a testament to our resilience as a nation. Such recovery requires us to reconstruct our lives around the official narrative, to draw a line between those who bore the brunt of the disaster and the rest of us, their world and ours. It requires our silence—we repress the dismay, fear, rage and sorrow we feel to go on as if everything is back to the way things were, the way things always are. It becomes harder and harder to remember—what is happening, what it feels like, what is being erased. The current of all the unsaid things running beneath the silence

Another spring with Covid coincided with more agony in Gaza. Writing from Lahore, Hira Nabi (Kopkind 2011): “There is nothing else to talk about but Palestine. There is nowhere else to look but Palestine. There is everything in the world but hope. There is nothing in the world without hope.”

Another September with Covid, another hurricane season, another year since an uncle of Joël Díaz (Kopkind 2015) had gone missing after trying to escape devastation in Dominican Republic by sea.

Joël: No one is certain about what actually unfolded. The tale goes that, either begrudged or wary of his companions, my uncle split from the group once he reached shore. Unfamiliar with that part of the island, he went into the forest to make his way toward the closest inhabited town. During one of the police searches, a pair of shorts were found. They are believed to be his. When I asked for updates, all details amounted to nothing, some wispy trace, deteriorating in an instant … One rumor was that he’d been taken by Haitian kidnapés, who would soon request ransom, said to be stalled because of police searches. It is uncertain if those claims are rooted in anti-blackness or in the realities of the kidnappings plaguing Haiti and neighboring towns in Dominican Republic. Legend will say that there is a man who roams the town in his underwear, searching for his family. And there he stays, neither fully clothed nor whole. Just a memory. A rumor. A hope.

* * *

To paraphrase Andrew Kopkind, then writing of the war in Vietnam, what the pandemic has done to the society—quite apart from the cost in lives and health—is only beginning to be understood. Its presence as background rather than subject in so many stories speaks less to the ways that Covid is becoming endemic than to a pattern of crises in the neoliberal order that made that inevitable. How the roots of this reality are perceived and what anyone does with the knowledge is a point of politics. That in the US some see a cabal of Satanic pedophiles and others see systems of exploitation, that the elite are split between advancing versions of the welfare state and hoarding the goodies while they can, indicate the volatility of the situation. On one level, the nonchalance toward mass death (1 out of 100 elders cut down) is stunning, though we’ve been throwing granny away for some time now, not to mention soldiers and foreign populations. Yet the shock of Covid remains so profound on an individual and systems level that however much one might want to turn away from the numbers, and however normalized some pandemic routines may have become (working from home, alone, wearing pajamas all day), the now-ordinary incapacitations (of bodies, hospitals, supply chains) call into question so much else that’s been taken as normal. Disposability is hardly new, just harder to ignore.

Worker revolts (including the wave of resignations), uprisings against police violence, electoral campaigns like Walton’s, all represent a rejection of devalued life. In different ways, Malkia Devitch-Cyril (Kopkind 2002) and Bri M. (Kopkind 2018) wrote about this.

Malkia: It was the fact that before the pandemic ever hit, complex and long-term bereavement resulting from a pattern of premature and traumatic death was already an utterly routine experience for the 46.8 million people who identified as black in the 2019 census. As the pandemic heightened the overlapping crises of resurgent white nationalism, unfettered police violence and the discriminatory distribution of climate disaster impacts, it also split open a vein deep in our collective body politic to reveal a truth black folks have been living with for generations: grief is endemic to the black experience in America, and the effects of living inside a shared context of grief, one in which loss is not simply an experience but a mechanism of racial disadvantage, are often disregarded. The injury is profound—socially, economically, culturally; it can accelerate your own death. In the pandemic, we have started to talk more about it.

Bri: I have never been normal. As a black, disabled trans person, my life exists on the margins of society. So when I hear people talking about “getting back to normal” I want to ask, What exactly are we expecting to return to? … I long ago gave up on the idea of being conventionally employed. As with so many disabled people, that hasn’t stopped me from doing cultural work … tell[ing] the rich stories of disabled people of color through my podcast, “Power Not Pity.” When doing that work, I feel I am never alone. Yet the experience of the pandemic leaves me with a bitter question: Would I have been more employable if accessibility had been prioritized in the same way it is today? Virtual spaces are now more easily accessible because they have to be. It only took a pandemic to change the way we conduct accessible communication. It only took a pandemic to realize that our collective survival is wrapped up in societal change. Normal has always been controlled by the systems that keep my communities without the resources that we need to live and thrive. “Going back to normal” would mean going backward.

Malkia’s and Bri’s stories were ultimately about culture as a necessity—personally, politically, reflecting and shaping the Zeitgeist.

* * *

As noted, a couple films that were workshopped in Kopkind’s Film Camp, a collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary, premiered this year. WBCN and the American Revolution, by Bill Lichtenstein (Kopkind/CID, 2014), aired on PBS in the fall, documenting the relationship between left media and left movements through the story of a radio station that grew out of the sixties-era counterculture in Boston. (John Scagliotti and Andy Kopkind, who both appear in the film, worked in the news department at BCN in the 1970s and also created the first gay and lesbian commercial radio show there, “The Lavender Hour.”) The Faithful, by Annie Berman (Kopkind/CID 2010), was released in March, taking an innovative approach to open streaming sponsored by Grant for the Web, which aims to seed a digital ecosystem that is equitable, inclusive, attentive to privacy and creative control. (It’s notable that Malkia, as the founding executive director and now senior fellow of MediaJustice in Oakland, has spent more than twenty years fighting for digital rights, conscious of the Internet’s “troubled terrain” but also of its connective power, using it in the pandemic to create a weekly meeting place called Pandemic Joy, among other online groups.) We screened Annie’s film, a meditation on cultural icons and popular devotions, along with a sneak peak of Chuck Light and Daniel Keller’s Far Out: Life On & After the Commune, under a late summer sky, in an open tent, after a repast of marvelous dishes brought by community members whose delight at gathering again in person was palpable.

The Bonuses or main posts on this site from across the year contain many samples of the cultural work of some of Kopkind’s alums and friends: Daniela Broitman’s doc on the great Brazilian composer Dorival Cayymi. Jon Crawford’s archive of lgbtq experience, Tell Me a Memory. Tracy Heather Strain’s PBS film on The Wizard of Oz. Marsha Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s doc on two Cuban-born virtuosos, Los Hermanos/The Brothers, now up for Oscar consideration. Suchi Branfman’s account of making Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic and, as a bonus to the same post, Katja Esson and Ann Bennett’s film-in-progress on the struggle over Miami’s historic Liberty City. Divad Durant’s account of transnational collaboration in making his short film Goodnight Sun. David Ferry’s haunting translations and observations on the “lamenting pleasure” of writing and reading poetry in relation to grief.

Alex Halkin (Kopkind/CID 2014), whose wonderful collaborative work with Cuban artists we featured as a Bonus to Nos. 5 and 19 of “Scenes From a Pandemic,” in May and August of 2020, respectively, has sent along a new collaborative video. Like the earlier works, this one is part of the Americas Media Initiative (AMI), which Halkin directs and which is focused on community-based media in the hemisphere. We gladly share it here:

As Alex writes: “To this date there are still no means for Cubans living in the US to send money to their loved ones on the island. AMI Is sending royalty payments to Cuban filmmakers with two friends who are traveling there.” Behind the lighthearted form of superhero animation is serious business: the obligation of US citizens to object to our government’s proclivity to wield suffering as a weapon.

* * *

“What kinds of coalitions, of we‘s, are possible in this protracted, still expanding historical moment of catastrophe?” Asam asked in closing his dispatch from Toronto. “What kinds of routes are available to make one another’s lives less vulnerable? Like Gramsci, I keep reminding myself that it is painful to be alive at the time of a new birth; that it is painful to witness newness being born.”

India Walton called her experience at Kopkind “transformational.” We’ve heard that a lot over twenty years from people who work every day to change conditions, to change consciousness, and we think it has to do with the combination of people, political discussion, setting, history, culture, pleasure. Finding pleasure in ideas, in human company, in nature and attention. It has to do with everyone who believes in this project and has contributed to it in any way—with appreciation for all that it means to love life, as our chef Mary Lewis suggested in her post to “Scenes From a Pandemic.”

Mary: I think of myself as Kopkind’s culinary artist, but the art of the meal involves more than the balance of flavors, nutrients and visual pleasures. It has to do with the truest meaning of sustenance, a holding up of what’s needed to be fully alive. Andy Kopkind, The Nation’s brilliant political writer from the 1980s and early ’90s for whom Kopkind is a living memorial, could whip up a fragrant pesto as deftly as he delivered a canny pun in print. His kitchen table swirled with lively conversation, amusing banter; ideas were born there, for stories and projects. Deep in the pandemic, when friends or family texted me photos of a dish they’d just made, I recalled the pictures and menus pasted in scrapbooks that Andy and John had made; the handwritten recipes left by their friends, some, like Alexander Cockburn’s chicken bastilla, complete with drawings; the digital images of dinners prepared by Dave Hall or me and memorialized by new generations of guests engaged in the political life of their communities.

“We love life whenever we can,” as the poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Every word captures the truth of the thing: there’s nothing fainthearted about love.

“Scenes From a Pandemic” has been a series of love offerings, written under trying circumstances, with intention. For a holiday treat, you can find Mary’s salmon recipe here, and can scroll down for all sixty-one essays from the pandemic series (including Scot Nakagawa’s 2020 kimchee recipe here, for another treat) plus Bonuses. We are so grateful to everyone who put in the effort. We are grateful to The Nation‘s Katrina vanden Heuvel and Don Guttenplan, our friends, who made it possible for people to earn a little money while opening windows onto experience. (And to everyone at the magazine who worked to put it up every week, especially Robert Best, Ricky D’Ambrose, Anna Hiatt and Sandy McCroskey.) We are grateful to our readers, to you right now, and we really need your help. The Donate button is a click away.

The political moment presents challenge and opportunity, and we’re going forward, baby.

Here’s to you, with every warm wish. Here’s to a new year. Here’s to solidarity.

JoAnn Wypijewski, for everyone at Kopkind

PS: anyone who would prefer to write a check may surely do so. Please make it out to Kopkind and mail to John Scagliotti, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301. John is having the mail forwarded to his winter HQ, so it may take a bit longer to receive an acknowledgment. Gifts to Kopkind are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Thank you!

This piece, by JoAnn Wypijewski, first appeared on New Left Review‘s blog, Sidecar, for December 7, 2021. It is reprinted here with a different title and additional photos.

Socialism is a story on the streets of the twenty-first century city. A lot depends on the teller. There was a mayor’s race here on November 2. One of the candidates called herself ‘a proud socialist’, a ‘democratic socialist’. Her opponents called her a ‘radical leftist’ and ‘dangerous’. An editorial cartoon in the daily newspaper in June, shortly after she upset the four-term incumbent mayor of this Democratic city in the Democratic Party primary, depicted her benevolently extending City Hall to a throng of outstretched arms. By October, the incumbent having decided to run a write-in campaign premised on the unique peril posed by this upstart, the newspaper decided that it too found her a ‘threat’. She is four feet eleven inches tall. In her pitch to voters, socialism amounted to advocating an economy and society that worked for everyone; she seldom used the term. Leftish commentators nationally rhapsodized about socialism taking the reins of power in Buffalo, and got almost everything wrong. The Erie County Democratic Party chair said talk of radicalism was ridiculous: ‘she sounds like FDR’. ‘Write-In’ came out ahead on November 2, an indistinguishable heap that didn’t officially return the incumbent mayor to City Hall until late November, once his votes were separated out from those for Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, the Buffalo Bills’ quarterback and a few candidates who also ran as write-ins, though mostly invisibly. Election night returns were robust enough, though, to relieve some contributors to the newspaper’s letters section that Buffalo had been spared from becoming North Korea on Lake Erie.

Words are pesky when they have no agreed-upon meaning.

Young woman waiting for the bus: ‘Socialism? I heard that word back in school, in history class, but …  I can’t remember.’

Young man waiting for the bus: ‘I know exactly what it means. To be sociable, you know, just socializing, talking with people, over the internet, just everywhere, everywhere.’

Old man getting on the bus: ‘I wish you’d asked me first. [gruffly] I’ll tell you: Joe Biden.’

* * *

Socialism is a history in fragments in a fragmented city. Walking distance from my natal home there is an empty lot. There are many, actually, but 1644 Genesee Street, next to Ike and BG’s BBQ and across from Island Food Mart, a bodega defenced by door and window grates, once denoted the East Side Labor Lyceum. The building is said to have survived until 1991, though I don’t remember it. A stone’s throw away, a small but handsome brick structure where I checked out books as a girl has not been a library for decades, but the central library downtown yielded a few details. A Sanborn map from 1939 is allusive: a deep, narrow building; a ‘Hall’ on the second floor. A squib from the Buffalo Courier in 1915 announces that the lyceum’s cornerstone would be laid on April 11 of that year, a Sunday. ‘Preceding the ceremony there will be a parade of children and men and women interested in the project.’ A ‘Socialist organizer of Buffalo’ got top billing among the speakers, who also included a Presbyterian clergyman and Mrs. Frank J. Shuler, representative of the Woman Suffrage party. A reminiscence in the Courier Express from 1950 mentions ‘the old time Socialist soapboxes … They used to hold forth regularly, orating from improvised stands at Main and Mohawk, Main and Genesee and other points throughout the city’. The card catalogue in the local history reference room discloses little more, but the librarian found regular announcements of meetings, socialist lectures and card parties at the East Side Labor Lyceum while scrolling through a news database. A dissertation on the role of interior spaces in the formation of working-class consciousness reports that Buffalo had a kind of floating lyceum, a regular lecture series or salon under various roofs, as early as 1904. A sentence in a Daily Worker story from 1924 mentions a Labor Lyceum in another part of the city’s East Side, this one at 376 William Street, near Jefferson, the commercial drag of black Buffalo by the time of my youth. That address today is also an empty lot.

Nothing marks the radical past. Labor Lyceums, typically the undertakings of socialist German immigrants, replaced saloons as primary spaces for union meetings, educational events and working-class entertainments in many industrial cities around the US in the early twentieth century, but I hadn’t thought about their existence in Buffalo until I stepped into a saloon, sort of – the Eugene V. Debs Hall, a former Polish bar, beautifully restored last year and, once the state approves its liquor license, one of two taverns that remain in an East Side neighbourhood that used to be thick with them. People, some my relatives, once crowded the streets of this area; wildlife is common now. A deer loped across the street toward my car the night I visited the Debs Hall to talk with its founder and principal manager, Chris Hawley. The flock of wild turkeys that also frequent the neighbourhood must have been sleeping or shy.

Hawley is a senior planner for the City of Buffalo. He lives in the back of the tavern with a cat named Sputnik, whom he rescued from certain death on the street, and bikes to City Hall, fifteen minutes away. As an avocation he researches the histories that have been erased in what, in so many other ways, is a landscape of memory. Ten years ago, thousands of preservationists from across the country gathered for a conference in Buffalo, marvelling at the works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, at the daylight factories and grain elevators that had inspired Le Corbusier but, even in those cases, abstracting the architecture from the lives that had built and animated it. Hawley wasn’t in his present job at the time. He was born here forty years ago, into a family that, on one side, traces its early twentieth century heritage to skilled work and upward mobility from the beginnings of the once-gargantuan Bethlehem Steel works; and that, on the other side, preserved the silences of a working class left to fend for itself – the railroad worker killed on the job, his widow with eleven children, the rough boarders to whom she’d rent out the children’s beds, the violence of everyday life. Hawley’s parents were part of the migration out of Western New York to the Sun Belt. He began unearthing labour histories when he moved to Buffalo after university, piecing together the shards of experience that help decipher a project like the Eugene V. Debs Hall today.

Workers associations were numerous when the building was erected in the Broadway/Fillmore district not far from the city’s vast railyard and stockyards in 1899. It was always a bar, and because, according to a 1901 report by Temperance advocates, all but six of Buffalo’s sixty-nine labour organizations met in saloons or halls connected to saloons, it’s possible that the proprietors of this place augmented their income by renting space to unions. In any event – even allowing for the contradictions of the saloon as a male space, a white ethnic (here specifically Polish) space, a drinking and so potentially disabling space – the bar would have been a communal hearth, locus for workers to forge bonds against the fragmenting processes of industrial capitalism. Especially once it was spruced up in 1914, it likely played the social role of so many taverns, as a site for small wedding parties or funeral repasts, christening fetes and other celebrations. By then, Hawley says, ‘Buffalo was a hotbed of the Socialist Party. Debs had come here in 1898 to form the first local. There were twelve locals in the city, several in the outlying towns; mainly they met in taverns or other halls.’ The East Side Labor Lyceum was a step up, built by the Socialist Party specifically for socialists. He has a picture of its drum corps, a cartoon from 1917 of ‘The Regular Meeting of the Branch’, a reproduction of its mission statement: ‘Dedicated to intellectual advancement of working people and to prepare them for the abolishment of the system of exploitation and profit.’

Graduate student, political philosophy, 30-ish [coolly]: ‘Socialism is the first stage of state control of all means of production and distribution. It’s command central … Socialists are communists.’

Firefighter, middle-aged: ‘Socialism is the practice – the practice – of equality.’

* * *

Whatever else it was, the recent mayor’s race was a public confrontation with inequality. The dominant boosterist story of contemporary Buffalo is abbreviated as ‘Renaissance’. In the miserablist press the story is typically abbreviated ‘disaster’. Neither suits the whole.

Deer are not wandering everywhere in the city, and even where they tread, the grassy plots represent progress from the thousands of firetraps, shooting galleries and condemned hulks that a working class stripped of its livelihood – by the collapse of steel and then domino-like deindustrialization – had once called home. Buffalo’s population was 532,759 in 1960; it is now 278,349, a bit higher than in 1890. The latest census reflects an uptick, driven most dramatically by new migrants. On the East Side, which for decades has been predominantly black with a Polish remnant, the newcomers include at least 10,000 (possibly 20,000) Bangladeshis, many who fled the high costs of New York City and then encouraged relatives from the old country to join them, transforming some abandoned Catholic churches into mosques and community centers. Not far from the Debs Hall, a Spanish-speaking enclave has taken root, climate refugees from Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Rita.

The bones of the walkable city have not been obliterated. Housing is typically two-story, two-family wood-frame residences, ‘the Buffalo double’ in the vernacular, like my grandfather built a bit farther east in 1924; or the lower profile, extended ‘telescope cottage’. Until the pandemic-fueled real estate price boom, a house could be had here for $25,000 to $50,000, often less. Residential lots tend to be long and narrow, and as in every poor urban district I know, what people call ‘good blocks’ might be a cross-walk away from blight; ‘good houses’, alongside vacant or tumble-down properties; side streets intact with contiguous houses whose owners are trying, bracketed on each end by broad stretches of near-nothingness – the radial commercial streets that lead downtown and are mute testimony that for sixteen years the city’s first black mayor, incumbent Byron Brown, has not tried very hard for what is considered the black side of town.

Supporters of his challenger, India Walton, pointed out that the mayor’s enthusiasm for bulldozing vacant buildings was excessive (his five-year plan of ‘a thousand a year’ ultimately totaled 8,000); in any case, it had no second act beyond some incongruous suburban-style housing here and there. The city’s poverty rate – about 30 percent, persistent across his tenure – is most starkly visible on the East Side (though hardly unique to it). Among black city residents the rate is 35 percent, three points higher than their rate of home ownership. A stinging report by the University of Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies comparing the state of black Buffalo in 1990 and the present, called ‘The Harder We Run’, concludes: ‘Everything changed, but everything remained the same.’ For some of us crossing town on broken pavement or riding laggardly buses, low-boil rage is a familiar emotion.

And yet, and yet …

Man in a wheelchair, on disability, in front of his group home off Broadway: ‘I don’t know about socialism, but I think the mayor’s done a good job. You look at the Medical Campus, it’s beautiful. Look at the waterfront, it’s beautiful.’

Retired housing cop, East Side homeowner: ‘I’ve got nothing against India Walton or her campaign. I’m for the mayor for three reasons: affirmative action (I remember what the police department was like before, okay?); property values (I bought my house fifteen years ago for $30,000, someone offered me $170,000 the other day, that’s $140,000 of wealth); and the waterfront (I mean, it’s beautiful).’

Less than two miles from the Debs Hall, the university’s Medical Campus and the expansion of hospitals and other medical facilities have generated jobs, optimism and angry battles over displacement and disrespect in the nearest, largely black residential community. On Main Street and its downtown environs, long-abandoned hotels, department stores and office buildings have been repurposed or are in the process, with apartments priced and designed mainly to attract a niche public: empty-nesters sick of their suburban baggage, young professionals attracted to the city’s craft beer and arts scene, medical workers and students, a few pro football players, notable because they’ve long been associated with suburban residency. The transformation is by turns welcome and aggravating: welcome because no one yearns for the time when a plastic bag blowing across Main Street could symbolize downtown; aggravating because of the revivalists’ apparent contentment with the clichés of inequity. Years of official rhetoric notwithstanding, there remains the reality of the child growing up in a landscape of destitution, crossing over to one of increasing plenty. Farther west on the lakefront, the Canal district offers the city a glimpse of its long-obscured Erie Canal history along with myriad pass-times. The Outer Harbor is for now a relatively unspoiled stretch of nature trails, parkland, marina and beach where on any given summer weekend Buffalo shows up in rainbow streaks: women in plaid shirts and cutoffs towing boats from the water, latin families grilling skirt steak, mixed couples kissing, black elders watching the sun set from folding chairs, women swathed in black reclining under trees with their children.

All of this development has been accomplished with public money on what in large part was or is public land. ‘Socialism for the rich’, Walton’s supporters sometimes said breezily. The bon mot is inadequate when socialism for everyone is ill defined; it seemed especially counterproductive here, given its note of derision in a political context where ‘socialism’ was deployed most often only to deride.

What the phrase discounted, grievously, was not only the full experience of people and place but also the shape-shifting emotional aspect of urban life, the feeling for the city, which doesn’t resolve the contradiction represented by the man in the wheelchair exalting the nice new things while foot-padding along a street deprived of any of them, but does help explain it. ‘I’m Josh’, he said twice to be sure I remembered his name. His friend Marcus was more critical of the incumbent mayor but similarly admiring of the waterfront. What their expressed pride tacitly acknowledged was a sense of ownership: the lake as ‘the wealth of the people’, in Chris Hawley’s phrase, once befouled, effectively privatized by steelworks, now recovered as a zone of pleasure.

Disconcertingly, this store of collective wealth did not figure much in anyone’s electioneering – even though grass-roots action had been critical in determining the shape of the waterfront’s recovery as a public asset; and developers, who’ve already taken their bites, are perched to take more and ruin it.

Kelly, campaign volunteer for Brown, middle-aged: ‘A free for all, that’s what I think when I hear the word, just unrealistic … I think some of it is very fair, like universal health care. But it’s undefined; I think enough people when they use the word don’t know what they’re talking about, including me.’

* * *

A column inch in the Buffalo Morning Express for November 6, 1919, reports that in the steel company town of Lackawanna, just south of the city line, the Socialist ticket’s candidate scored a surprise victory as mayor amidst heavy repression against striking steel workers; his first order of business, ‘re-establish free speech’. Until India Walton’s surprise primary victory, no one remembered John H. Gibbons. Few know anything about Anna Reinstein, whose name graces another library I used as a child, in a town just east of the city line – Anna, a Polish Jew, politically radical, a doctor who came to Buffalo in 1891 and began practicing gynaecology. When she was honoured in 1941 by the Erie County Medical Society for fifty years of practice, a local paper noted: ‘Incidentally, she is the wife of Boris Reinstein, a former Buffalo druggist, now a commissar in Russia.’ Chris Hawley has a photograph of Boris seated at Lenin’s elbow. ‘Incidentally’ is a nice touch. Boris left Buffalo to serve the revolution in 1917, and never returned. Anna was a member of Buffalo’s Communist Party when she was arrested with forty-two other party members in an anti-Red roundup in 1920. When, at the same time, eighty-three mostly immigrant alleged anarchists were arrested on the East Side and in surrounding towns, a left-wing paper ridiculed them for ‘phrase-radicalism’. Confusion about aims and definitions, an undisciplined language, only encouraged a crackdown, it argued. Clarity would unlikely have deterred police raids. The first Red Scare … The second Red Scare … Decoupling words from meaning is a tactic and legacy of hysteria. Anna and Boris’s children climbed the social ladder, the son buying up land and getting into development; they secured her name on the library, but sealed the archive of her letters and papers, which became available only in the 1990s.

Socialism, in the deceptively mystic serenity of the Eugene V. Debs Hall’s setting, is a reclamation project. Of place, first, and, with it, confidence in the neighbourhood’s future; of social bonds, frayed by post-industrial fragmenting processes; of local labour history for workers largely unmoored from it. The professed goal is to make a social space, a political and cultural space. In conviviality – the exchange of knowledge, the appreciation of experience, the practice of economic cooperation and mutual aid – the class might see itself, and begin to act for itself if only, as a start, through that act of seeing. Much depends on who will be seeing whom, and how.

The hall itself has a spare elegance. A high tin ceiling, a leaded glass transom across big front windows hand-painted with the hall’s name and Debsian red banner, the original dark-panelled wainscoting, the original patinaed bar and tables, a refinished floor which Hawley and friends uncovered from beneath layers of asbestos tile whose evidence is burned into a diamond pattern on the wood, the ghost of ages of spilled beer and dirty mop water seeping through the seams. Above the barback mirror a photograph of Debs is flanked by small black busts of FDR and Marx. Atop the gleaming Art Moderne cash register, a purely decorative effect, sits an unassuming cast iron bust of Debs in his prison clothes.

Try not to get nostalgic, I thought. Balancing past and present is a delicate business, not unique in a city where memory has been a balm against so much loss. ‘Sentimentality is the only reason we exist as a city’, Hawley says. ‘There’s no reason it’s survived except that people love the place.’ That is simultaneously true and not. Love may be a bet on the future, but all bets are not equal.

This part of the East Side, where some people clawed to stay alive and others settled because property was a bargain, is now an area ‘in transition’ because others volunteered to save one remarkable architectural landmark – the Central Terminal, whose 1929 Art Deco tower looms above the grassy flats – and still others have drawn up a redevelopment plan around it. After decades in the dark, the tower now lights up the night sky in dramatic colours. The plan for creating a Civic Commons around it strikes all the right notes until you get to the word ‘destination’. If history is a guide, the commons will be contested. Ironically, but that feels like the wrong word, in his official capacity Chris Hawley authored a new rezoning plan for the city that does not have inclusionary mandates for affordable housing. That was supposed to be worked out by the mayor, he says. ‘Development without displacement’, the cry of poor and working-class residents everywhere, may well be raised within shouting distance of the Debs Hall. Stripped of its disguise as a mark of shame, vacant land is also the wealth of the people.

Alexandria, activist, 19, immigrant from southern Sudan: ‘You know the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”; socialism means this to me. Buffalo is the child, and the people are the village who must raise it.’

* * *

Formally, the Debs Hall is a social club. Unlike taverns, Hawley discovered, non-profit social halls tend to survive their founders; he and the 250 founding members – who each contributed $250 to buy the property and, for that, get $1 off beer for life – take the long view. Membership is $10, ‘open to anyone who has an interest in the labour history of Buffalo or the United States’. There is no political litmus test. Hawley is a member of Democratic Socialists of America, as is India Walton – the plainest explanation for how socialism entered the discourse this political season. An outside wall of the building bears her portrait. (As the only member of city administration who’d backed her publicly, Hawley figured his support ought to be big so that if he were fired that would be big too.) The local DSA chapter meets there, as have the Buffalo Lighthouse Association and neighbourhood koi pond enthusiasts. Any community-based organization can book the hall for free. Walton’s canvassers converged there during the campaign. Volunteer bartenders encourage their networks to come out. Hawley has made presentations around the city about labour history and the hall to groups as obscure as the Greater Western New York Bottle Collectors Association.

It is, he says, an explicitly socialist hall (the Connolly Forum in Troy, NY, may be the country’s only other) ‘because the ideas are still relevant … how to empower everyday working people to better their lives collectively.’ But ‘if you look at the old socialist halls, they weren’t sitting around all the time talking about socialism; they were interested in whatever the working class was interested in’.

Segregation, and not just by colour, splinters the nominative singular. It always has. The Walton campaign lost the election (out of inflated fears of socialism, ‘defund the police’ and inexperience), but in spotlighting poverty, land use and uneven development it succeeded in organizing a coalition that crossed barriers of colour, ethnicity, age, income, geography, education, national origin. It did not juice turnout on the East Side or ‘win the working class’, as some have reported, unless one wants to write out most of the city’s unions and all of Brown’s working-class voters, including the firefighters, police and other city workers in historically Irish South Buffalo, which powered his victory. But it felt like something new, as if the ground might be shifting. The Debs Hall is in a majority-white slice of a district that, overall, is 48 percent Asian (mainly Bangladeshi), 24 percent black, 8 percent latin and 13 percent white. Walton lost the district by about 650 votes. Almost 17 percent of the people in that white slice are officially poor, and as in the rest of the district, and the East Side, and the city, or anywhere actually, what it means to be poor is as open for political redefinition as what it means to be a socialist or even working class.

Back when John Gibbons became the region’s first and only Socialist mayor, to be a steel worker meant all the things it means to be poor today: to live always on edge and to die young, your housing substandard, the rent too high for your income, your education inadequate, your psychic and physical environment unhealthy. At the time of the great strike of 1919, steel work meant compulsory twenty-four hour shifts every other day. Organized labourers changed what it meant to be a worker by challenging and ultimately changing factory conditions. Henry Louis Taylor of UB’s Center for Urban Studies argues that the point of attack now is the set of ‘conditions that make some neighbourhoods the factories that produce low-wage workers’: change the conditions and so too what it means to be poor.

People tend not to recognize that workers died to change their conditions, died to ‘bring you the weekend’, as an old union slogan once put it. Maybe because work still leaves them poor, running behind, or because it’s absurd to think ‘dying for the weekend’ might ever have been meant literally. Maybe because, as for so many in this region who are linked by ancestry to vanished industry, death was normalized but collective struggle was not. My father’s father, who built the house not so far from the Labor Lyceum, was a railroad machinist: his lungs gave out in early middle age; his daughter died at 4 of diphtheria; a son was stillborn. I grew up with pictures of the dead, knowing my father assumed responsibility for the family at 17; it didn’t seem weird. My grandmother seemed happy. I think she was: my father became a tool and die maker and didn’t die young, and nor did his wife or his children, and nor did my grandmother, who was never alone. No one talked about historical context.

A century after the heyday of Labor Lyceums, socialism is fetishized, like democracy. As words, like any other, even the most abstract – ‘God’ comes to mind – they are animated only in practice, experience. It would be interesting to observe an election that prompted discussion about democracy. In Buffalo the incumbent mayor, so intimate with cronyism, might have had a problem with that one.

Hawley often begins telling people about Debs the man by saying he was imprisoned in 1920 for giving an anti-war speech and ran for president from behind bars. He begins telling about the Debs project’s first labour history memorial with the story of Casimer Mazurek, a 26-year-old decorated World War I veteran shot to death when Lackawanna Steel guards opened fire on 5,000 men, women and children on a picket line in the opening days of the great steel strike. In both cases, he reports, listeners are amazed. The many whose family histories intersect in some way with steel often know almost nothing beyond that convergence. A plaque, sponsored by the Debs Hall and the Area Labor Federation, sits propped against a wall in the tavern, awaiting deployment. When it is finally erected to commemorate the violence, the failed strike, and the success, twenty-two years later, of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee at Bethlehem Steel, it will be the first public historic marker to recognize the labour history of Western New York.

Lola, university student, political science/pre-law, 19, at a picket line of striking hospital workers: ‘Socialism? It means you’re for the people.’

Jackie, her mother, gift shop manager: ‘I think the word, … I think it’s evolving.’