I’m finding it hard to say goodbye to someone who was as much a fixture in my life as Jim Berlin was. It’s not just that I miss Jim personally, which I certainly do. It’s that I had come to count on Jim, as I know so many other people did too.

Over the years of talk, correspondence, shared work, and joint projects, I came to understand that Jim’s work, for all the trademark intellectual sophistication that made Jim the leading Marxist rhetorician of our genera­tion, grew out of a deeply-felt commitment to keep faith with the historic moral responsibilities of the left to fight oppression and exploitation and to represent the aspirations and lived experience of ordinary people and their daily struggles to make a living, raise families, and control their lives and conditions of work.

I know this is going to sound corny, but I believe Jim became a Marxist because he was a good man, with a great and generous heart, who delighted to live in this world but could not abide its suffering and heartlessness. Jim believed in the dignity of labor and how the collective efforts of working people could redeem human existence by producing for the common good instead of private profit. Jim aspired to speak, in solidarity with the oppressed and exploited, as a tribune of the people, to call us to our senses and to keep alive and vivid before our minds the unfinished project of democracy and social justice he believed in so passionately.

I am going to miss Jim’s class politics, which were so much a touchstone for me in trying to understand the historical moment in which we are living. I remember, for example, when Jim brought a resolution in support of the faculty strike at the University of Cincinnati to the annual business meeting of CCCC in 1993. I remember too that in 1989—when the Berlin Wall came down, the historic communisms of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe came unravelled, and sectors of the left were celebrating the ostensible triumph of democracy—Jim was worried that working people were about to pay severely for the sins of the Stalinist bureaucracies that had mismanaged the workers’ states. And as usual, Jim was right: the new “freedoms” were those of right-wing demagogues to mobilize the xenophobic communal passions of “ethnic cleansing” and of market economies to precipitate widespread unemployment, runaway inflation, and massive social dislocation—just what you might expect from international capital and a “new world order.”

Most of all, lam going to miss Jim’s generosity, his appetite for work, and his desire to stir others to action. Walter Benjamin says that one of the tasks of the “author as a producer” is to develop “exemplary conditions of production” that “induce other producers to produce” and “put an improved apparatus at their disposal.” In all of this, I think Jim succeeded. I know it’s true for me—and I suspect for a lot of people—that Jim’s energy, his righteous anger, and his dream of a better world inspired us to talk more, to write more, to imagine new projects, to intervene more in the politics of our moment. To think about Jim reminds me—it calls me—to a sense of what it means to be unreconciled to this world, to see how much work needs to be done.

 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, Massachusetts