Author, Bruce Lerro, Co-Founder and Organizer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
Orientation
What are the characteristics of a hero? Do you have to be famous to be a hero? How valuable or counter-productive is it for celebrities to be our heroes? Some feel that even having heroes at all is a concession to hierarchical social relations and we are better off without them. As I write this Luigi Mangione, alleged murderer of a Healthcare CEO, is a hero to many. Is this the beginning of rebellion against capitalism or is it a distraction from it? What about heroes and class? Since I am a socialist, I expect my heroes to be among the working class. How might working class heroes be different from famous people or celebrity heroes? Is Luigi Mangione a working-class hero? Lastly, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell has made a cross-cultural study of heroes. What can we use and what must we discard when it comes to a working class hero?
I'm going to begin this article with the lyrics of two songs from popular music. The first is John Lennon's song "Working Class Hero". The second is Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero". Both of these will be analyzed from the point of view of the difference between fame and celebrity. Then we will touch on the prospect of assassins as heroes. Then we will look at the three characteristics of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Lastly, we will examine the life of radical socialist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in order to extract what the characteristics of a working-class hero might be.
John Lennon's Working Class Hero
As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
'Til you're so f*cking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still f*cking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me
If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me
Why Should We Follow John Lennon?
Lennon's depiction of making a working class person feel small because they have no time is all too typical. Perhaps that means that you are doing chores around the house all the time and having to have to compete for your parent's attention. Eventually we are socialized to believe we are not worth anyone's attention. Being hit in Catholic school is a continuation of being hit at home by parents whom psychologists claim are "authoritarian". This affects the kind of work we do. If a great deal of your parents' job is to take orders and not give them, then their children are expected to obey their parents in order to be good workers when it is their turn. The boy or girl will be socialized, when it is time, to pick a job (rather than a career) which will also involve being obedient. But as Lennon says, you can't really function, you are so full of fear. What he is missing is talking about life at the factory or office under wage slavery. Nothing is included about Marx's theory of being alienated from the working process, other workers, the products produced, the method of producing them or nature from which raw material comes from.
However, in spite of all this we are told a working class person is something to be? Why? Lennon mentions nothing either individually or collectively that would give us any hope as a working class person. Nothing is included about strikes, revolutions, workers' councils or the free association of producers to make us proud to be working class. Yet we are told if you want to be a hero, "come follow me". Why should we follow John Lennon?
John Lennon is a celebrity. As I pointed out in my article Fame vs Celebrity celebrities arose towards the end of the 19thcentury - first in movies, then later in music and sports. Celebrities arose in part because of a decline of religious and political authorities. Whereas famous people were usually from the upper classes or religious, political (kings) or military authorities (aristocrats or generals), some movie and music celebrities were drawn from the working class. Working class people had more access to these heroes and heroines through mass communication such as newspapers photography, cinema and radio.
Celebrities were idolized, not just because of their competencies, but more because of their charisma and sexual power. While famous people got their fame over generations, celebrities could come out of nowhere and disappear just as fast. What working class people could not achieve through strikes or revolutions they could live vicariously through titillation, gossip and fantasy through these entertainers. What kind of relationship did they have with celebrities? It was very minor reciprocity through attendance at concerts, films or sporting events, whether they cheered or booed. For working class people a few go off the deep end by stalking celebrities or threatening to kill themselves when a celebrity dies or falls from stardom.
Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero"
Somewhat paradoxically Tina Turner, a celebrity, tells us we don't need another hero.
Out of the ruins
Out from the wreckage
Can't make the same mistake this time
We are the children
The last generation
We are the ones they left behind
And I wonder when we are ever gonna change
Living under the fear, 'til nothing else remains
We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
Looking for something
We can rely on
There's gotta' be something better out there
Ooh, love and compassion
Their day is coming
All else are castles built in the air
And, I wonder when we are ever gonna change
Living under the fear 'til nothing else remains
All the children say
We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
So what do we do with our lives
We leave only a mark
Will our story shine like a light or end in the dark
Give it all or nothing
We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome
Why don't we need another hero? Because heroes know the way home. Apparently being released from the hopes of a clearly defined end goal we may find life beyond Thunderdome. But for Tina this "we" is not a social we. It is a collection of individuals whose light will either shine or end in dark. Tina, like John Lennon, was born working class. But having risen as a celebrity she had little to offer working class people other than to rise from the ashes of a difficult life which included growing up in poverty and suffering abuse from her husband Ike Turner to become her own person. But unlike Lennon, Tina doesn't admit she was working class so her exhortations are not for working class people to rise as a class. It is for individuals to rise from the ashes. But how? What's the method? Neither John Lennon nor Tina Turner offer any help in getting there for working class people. It may be temporarily titillating to tear down the idols, but what comes after that?
Is Luigi Mangione A Working Class Hero?
The death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met with either indifference or joy which shocked Mordor media. All mainstream media did not see fit to publish Luigi's manifesto. It took an independent Substack journalist to publish it. Amazon and other corporate sources have tried to block the sale of t-shirts and baseball caps using the phrase, "Deny, Delay, Depose." In New York City the names of nine other heads of healthcare CEOs appeared on posters throughout the city. Songs celebrating Mangione's assassination of Brian Thompson have gone viral on the internet. "Free Luigi" has become a meme. So, is Luigi a working-class hero?
Luigi is not a hero according to some of the socialist left. Various Trotsky groups have lectured whoever is listening that Luigi's act is not to be celebrated. Why? First because it was an individual act of violence. Proper socialist procedure begins with working class collective action such as walk-outs, union forming or strikes. Secondly, Luigi was a member of the wrong social class. He was upper middle class, or upper class, not a proper proletarian. Had a working-class person assassinated the CEO, Trotskyists would still be lecturing on the importance of working class organization. Lastly, Mangione was a conservative who respected the FBI and the police. So three strikes you're out, according to Trotskyite wisdom. This schoolmarmish moralizing is coming from an isolated sect of the most anemic left of the Western world. Their theoretical mastery of strategy is so incisive that in one hundred years no head of state in the Western world has ever been a Trotskyist.
Whether they are Trotskyists, social Democrats, Maoist or other varieties of socialism, they cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. It is either you assassinate a hated banker, CEO or general or you organize around social class. The notion of doing both makes revolutionary strategy too unpredictable and out of the control of a socialist party that has all the answers. Luigi can be a hero to both left and right wingers because corporate capitalism has become so out of control that even right-wingers who are sympathetic to capitalism can finally draw the line. But for leftists accustomed to the linear political spectrum it is a mortal sin to consider joining with right wingers.
No, Luigi is not a working class hero because killing capitalists alone will not change a working class person's life. Luigi's manifesto offers working class people or any social class a collective strategy. It is simply a statement that excessive profits made at the cost of thousands of lives denied healthcare insurance has gone too far. Luigi didn't even attack the process of the detectives' investigation of the cases of health care clients. As Michael Moore points out in the movie Sicko - the capitalists of healthcare are searching for reasons not to cover the patients.
Is Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces a Working Class Hero?
In his great book The Hero With a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell argues that regardless of cross-cultural differences, a hero figure can be extracted from world mythology. This hero goes through three phases. First, the hero is embedded in the conservative milieu in his culture. Second, a social or personal crisis drives the hero out of the community into exile where he goes through some kind of ordeal. He experiences a type of dark night of the soul in which he brushes with death. Lastly, he survives and returns bearing gifts, enriching his community.
Joseph Campbell's hero is not a working-class hero. As far as I can recall, Campbell never discusses social class. In fact, the hero is usually well-bred, a spiritual seeker of the Holy Grail. There is a dialectical movement from conservative culture to exile, to renewed culture at a higher level. There is nothing socialist in this higher culture. The hero gives us a recipe for how to survive the crisis at an individual level but there is no collective organizing. In real life Campbell was a conservative, anti-communist who threatened to fail any of his students who participated in the civil rights movement.
The Life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as a Working Class Hero (Heroine or "Shero")
Early years to seventeen
In her book Iron in Her Soul, author Helen Camp informs us that Flynn's iron was forged in the tales of the Molly McGuires told by her militant father (a stone cutter) around the kitchen table in their Bronx apartment. His stories also went deep into the history of the Irish defiance of the English. At twelve years of age she wrote an essay on the coal miners' strike. Two years later she won a debating medal at her school. In 1905 at the age of 15 she stood on her first soap box rallying workers. The only public training she had was what she learned from a seasoned socialist speaker who spoke on the corner of 7th avenue and 125th Street in Harlem, right around the corner from where the "uptown socialists" held their meetings. She was expelled from school when she and her father were arrested in a demonstration. Like most socialists I've met, she was self-educated.
Years with the Industrial Workers of World
At the age of 17 she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and became their national chair. Between 1910 and the Russian Revolution she was involved in virtually all the Wobbly workers' strikes. She held her own with some of the great Wobbly organizers like Big Bill Hayward and Joe Hill. Hill later wrote a song about her called "Rebel Girl". In 1910 she bore her second son, Fred, but her first marriage could not survive her radical commitment to organizing. Her first son died at birth. Her mother had the wisdom to understand her daughter was destined for bigger things than just being a mother and she raised Fred herself. In 1912 at the Patterson Strike she became involved with the anarchist Carlo Tresca. For fourteen years she tried to make the relationship work but they finally ended it in 1926. He was her great love. More about what these relationships had to do with why Elizabeth was a working-class hero later.
As the rulers of Yankeedom became more and more threatened by the Russian Revolution, she spent a number of years defending workers with the Workers Defense Union against the Palmer raids and the deportation of radicals. When the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were framed for murder she spent many years along with other radicals defending their case. She continued to work with the IWW though their forces were weakening as all socialists were under attack in the 1920s. Finally in 1926 she collapsed on a train heading for a speaking engagement and as she put it, her "first life" was over. For 10 years she was taken care of by a radical doctor in Portland Oregon for a heart lesion and strep infection.
Years with the Communist Party USA to World War II
Even as far back as 1926 Elizabeth felt IWW's greatest weakness was how they ignored politics. In 1926 just before her health collapse she applied to become a member of the Communist Party. In 1936 she returned to New York City to a heroine's welcome and threw herself into working with the Communist Party. Between 1936 and 1938 she became a national organizer for them and wrote regular columns for their newspaper. The Daily Worker. She weathered the storms of the Communist Party's international affairs. She neither followed the party blindly nor did she become an anticommunist like some socialists. She would raise questions privately, but never criticized the party publicly. She worked for a number of years defending radicals for the ACLU as one of their few working class contributors. In 1940 she was expelled from the ACLU for being a Communist.
Post-World War II Communist and two-year prison term
After World War II Elizabeth rode out the Communist Party's ups and downs. In 1947, in great part because of the heroic feats of the USSR in World War II against the Nazis, the Party's ranks swelled to 73,000 members. Then the attacks began. In 1947 the entire CP membership was arrested under the Smith Act. Soon after the Soviet Union was characterized by former ally Winston Churchill as having an "Iron Curtain". Then came the McCarthyism of the early '50s.
Between 1951-1953 Elizabeth went to trial and was convicted. At the age of 65 she spent 1955 and 1957 in a women's maximum-security penitentiary. During that time, she spent a great deal of time helping poor black and latina women fill out paperwork to receive necessities and some privileges. The Khrushchev "revelations" did not turn her against the Soviet Union. A year after she got out of prison the Daily Worker folded. However, between 1961 and 1964 she happily visited the Soviet Union and was especially impressed with the improvement of the conditions for women. She died in 1964 at the age of 74 and was given a state funeral along with John Reed, Bill Haywood and William Z. Foster. However, her ashes were brought back to Chicago where she was buried alongside Emma Goldman, Bill Hayward and the Haymarket martyrs.
What Are My Grounds for Classifying Elizabeth a Working Class Hero?
The shortcomings of identifying with celebrates or political assassins
Celebrities like John Lennon and Tina Turner offer working class people nothing in the form of living as a class. The best they can do is to invite us to enjoy them, to live vicariously through them. Or they might offer us the American Dream: the idea that anyone can be a rock star if they try hard enough. Luigi is an upper-class conservative who respects law enforcement and probably supports police beating up workers. All he offers us at best is a hope for some kind of reform of the health care industry.
Qualification of identifying with celebrities or political assassins
I am not a purist. In a number of articles I've written, I've felt that identifying with James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Mantle has helped my own development. My key point is to see this identification with celebrities as a means, not an end. Treating celebrities as an end in itself could lead to the pursuit of an "American Dream" which, especially in the last 50 years, grows more and more hopeless. In the case of Luigi, he offers us even less. There is neither vicarious satisfaction in living through him, nor is what he offers part of an American dream.
Socialism offers another system under which working class people can live
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn rises like a phoenix in appealing to the collective creativity of workers in improvising a new system. Socialism is political and economic movement that in both theory and practice has been around since the end of the French Revolution. It has had its different schools, heroes, heroines and its experiments from the Paris Commune through the Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions. Socialism provides a story of the history of primitive communism through the descent into various kinds of class society to revolution that leads to a socialist society. Marx's theory of alienation explains to workers why they are miserable and Marxist crisis theory explains why and how capitalism is falling apart. It promises and sometimes delivers an ideal of how working class life under communism could be. It is a well-rounded life in which people work roughly 20 hours a week, rotating in mechanical collectively creative work. In short, working class life under socialism offers a dream of working class life to which no other system compares. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a working-class hero because she conveyed to workers everything written in this paragraph for over 50 years.
Elizabeth's attitude towards family and lovers
At a very young age of 20 Elizabeth had her second son, Fred, a year after the death at birth of her first son. By this time Elizabeth was a committed national organizer. She did not let her identity as an organizer be compromised by the difficulty of raising a child under these conditions. So she handed off Fred to her mother. Unlike conventional grandmothers, her mother did not chastise Elizabeth or dutifully or resentfully raise Fred, complaining all the way. Her mother understood the importance of Elizabeth's work as an organizer and what she meant to the socialist movement. Both mother and daughter understood that socialist organizing was more important than simply being a mother. She was about to override Darwinian sexual selection strategies and identify first as a social historical being.
As I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth met Carlo Tresca in 1912 at the textile strike in Lawrence. She fell hard for him. While they had some initial good times, he betrayed her many times with other lovers and had a child with her sister, Bina. She was involved with him for fourteen years. Some may say this was not healthy and is hardly a heroic characteristic. I agree. But what I want to emphasize is that this misfortune never broke her commitment to socialism. Carlo was the great love of her life but she managed to continue organizing, going to prison for two years, visiting and dying in the Soviet Union in spite of everything. She wanted a romance but the romance never had her, at least completely.
Emma Goldman, anarchist revolutionary, believed that monogamy was an example of private property and fought against it . However, she had many lovers and much unhappiness trying to overcome feelings of jealously. But that never made her give up the anarchist movement. The Russian left communist Alexandra Kollontai had an erratic lover, Nikolai Bukharin, who broke her heart more than once. That never kept her out of building a socialist society. Red Rosa had Leo Jogiches who was no bargain, but despite his betrayals, she never left the SPD. In short, I've never read a biology of any socialist for whom their love-life was stronger than their commitment to socialism. It is quite a statement of dedication to the working class, many of whom a revolutionary will never know. Jogiches
Elizabeth Was a Very Good Strategic Organizer
Elizabeth had great skills as an organizer. She was so good that she became the national organizer for the Wobblies and later on for the Communist Party. In the course of much of her work defending comrades in jail, she needed money. When she was very young, she attended salons of upper middle-class women like Mabel Dodge who spent many years being sympathetic to socialists. If Elizabeth had been a purist she would have dismissed Dodge as an upper-class liberal do-gooder and snubbed Dodge's efforts to help. But she didn't. She maintained good relations with Mabel and as long as Mabel maintained her interest in socialism, Elizabeth could count on her for financial help. Elizabeth was very class-conscious and she used it to her advantage.
In short, a socialist organizer is the ultimate working-class hero.
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