Review of Fighting Times
MARCH 23, 2022
What About the Workers? Notes on Class and Class Consciousness
Jonah Raskin | Counterpunch
All leftwing groups are divided by factions. Not right away but before long. The seeds of division are usually sowed early. Think of the French, Russian and American revolutionaries. Maybe rightwing groups are also riven by factions. My own experience is with left groups in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980. Jon Melrod, a lawyer who lives in northern California, has just written and published a memoir titled Fighting Days (PM Press) which focuses on his life as a union organizer in the midwest mostly in the 1980s.
More recently, Melrod has been a lawyer for people messed up by the police. The murder, in 2013, by a Sonoma County sheriff of a 13-year-old Latino named Andy Lopez—who was carrying a toy gun—was the catalyst that brought Melrod back to the courtroom after a long absence. He has also helped political asylum seekers.
Like me, Melrod belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organization that opposed the war in Vietnam, and that came apart in 1969, with one faction going into factories to organize workers, and the other faction going underground to make bombs, or to lend support to the bomb makers. For a time, I supported the bomb makers, who were known as the Weather Underground. I used to say “I’m married to the underground.”
My wife, who had also been in SDS, was underground in the underground. That is, she was there, but not widely known. If I could go back in time, I’m not sure what I would do: perhaps avoid all the factions and do what I knew best how to do: write. In the Weather Underground, factions multiplied year after year. I did write about life underground, but I romanticized it. That was a big mistake. If I could rewrite what I have written I would do so.
In 1969, Jon Melrod and I were in opposing camps. We might have traded punches. I remember SDS members battling PL members, broken glass and bloody noses.
Today, Melrod and I are on the same side of history, two aging radicals with memories. Reading Melrod’s book, Fighting Times, I came to appreciate his drive and dedication to the working class which nearly cost him his life. Jobs in toxic environments led to pancreatic cancer. He beat it, but it was a big struggle that took all his grit and gumption, plus chemotherapy, radiation, herbs, diet and exercise.
Born into a middle class family, Melrod attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a hotbed of radicalism, where he opposed ROTC and the war in Vietnam and supported the Black Panthers, and the Black student strike of 1969. Then he dove into the working class in places like Racine, Wisconsin, and joined the United Auto Workers (UAW).
In Fighting Days, Melrod describes the jobs he held, the workers he encountered, some of whom were anti-Semitic, racist, sexist and anti-communist. Melrod took shit from no one. He handed out leaflets, spoke at meetings and talked to everyone. Also, he was one of the editors of the newsletter “Fighting Times,” published by Local 72 of the UAW and that targeted scabs and finks and corrupt union leaders. Not all white workers were racists and sexists, he learned.
