The starting point for Korsch’s life as a socialist was the reformist wing of prewar German Social Democracy associated with Eduard Bernstein and the Fabian Society in Britain. After his studies in Jena, a provincial city and university hub then undergoing a modernist transition, Korsch spent time in London with the Fabians, where he adopted a pragmatic and technocratic orientation to politics that betrayed a certain enlightened elitism.

The outbreak of World War I plunged Korsch into its constellation of barbarism; the first total war on the European continent produced technological massacres like an everyday commodity. Korsch was a cosmopolitan and humanitarian internationalist in his outlook at the time. Conscripted into the German military, he opposed the war from the start. His soldiering career ended almost immediately, wounded by shrapnel that killed members of his unit and consigned him to the infirmary.

Throughout the war years, Korsch firmed up a kind of politics of courage and truth, while his wife Hedda Korsch had joined the antiwar Independent Social Democrats (USPD), inspired by the Zimmerwald Conference. Hedda was the granddaughter of the well-known feminist campaigner Hedwig Dohm, who had polemicized against the war in Franz Pfemfert’s publication Die Aktion. Dohm’s “Auf dem Sterbett” [“On Her Deathbed”] denounced the patriotism that drove millions of young people to “march themselves to their own graves.”

In 1918, Korsch saw the November Revolution, which began with the Kiel mutiny of German sailors, as a revolution of the Fourth Estate and an effort to end the total war. One could contrast the revolution of the Fourth Estate with that of the bourgeois Third Estate, exemplified by the French Revolution of 1789. Its novelty for Korsch consisted in the combination of — indeed the unification of — intellectual and manual laborers, who were able to rise up and overturn the form of social modernity inaugurated by the Third Estate’s earlier revolution. This bourgeois modernity had not only led to the total war, but also entrenched the domination, subordination, and oppression of those who sold their ability to labor.

For Korsch, the revolution of the Fourth Estate was about liberating labor from such commodified exploitation. Korsch’s ideas about socialization underwent a transformation: having gone into the revolution with a technocratic orientation to socialist change inspired by Fabianism, political events and deliberations on bodies like the Socialization Commission showed him that plans were worth nothing without the power of workers to implement them.

After joining the USPD, Korsch successfully campaigned for a merger with the Communists alongside other notable figures like Werner Scholem. After participating in the mass struggles against the right-wing Kapp Putsch of 1920, Korsch recognized the need to build a powerful communist movement inspired by the Russian Revolution.

Inside the KPD, Korsch initially defended the united front tactic that called for campaigning alliances with reformists around defined goals. He formed a bloc with party leaders like August Thalheimer in the run-up to a planned insurrection in October 1923. Korsch’s commitment was the immediate political background to Marxism and Philosophy.

Korsch joined a short-lived coalition of Communists and left-wing Social Democrats in the state of Thuringia as justice minister. Soon the government collapsed and the would-be German October Revolution missed its chance. Korsch went into hiding as the authorities fired him from his post at Jena University and declared him to be an enemy of the state.

Shortly afterward, Korsch moved to Berlin. An industrial center of class struggle, the German capital was also home turf for the KPD’s left-wing tendency — figures such as Scholem, Arthur Rosenberg, Arkadi Maslow, and Ruth Fischer — who rejected the previous leadership of Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler. Korsch joined them, although he was not fully committed to their perspective, and became for a time editor-in-chief of Die Internationale, the KPD’s theoretical organ.

At the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, Grigori Zinoviev attacked Korsch, claiming that he understood nothing of Karl Marx, and called for his removal from the editorship of Die Internationale. As a KPD member of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, Korsch had a platform to denounce the Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the USSR as an undue compromise by the Soviet regime with the system of bourgeois nation-states. This initial criticism developed into a much broader argument against nascent Stalinism and the Soviet model of development, which Korsch saw as a form of state capitalism. He was eventually expelled from the KPD for these heretical positions.

Korsch was close to the dissenting Bolshevik tendency led by Timofei Sapronov, known as the Democratic Centralists. Although Sapronov and his followers joined the Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky, they disagreed with Trotsky’s characterization of the Soviet system, viewing it as state capitalist rather than any form of workers’ state. Korsch also rejected Trotsky’s insistence on working for reform of the Bolshevik Party, arguing by the late 1920s that a new party would have to be built based on working-class independence.

Korsch initiated the First Marxist Workweek, held on May 20, 1923, in Ilmenau, Thuringia. It was a significant regroupment of some two dozen communist intellectuals, including some of the most incisive left-wing thinkers of the twentieth century. It marked the birth of the Institute for Social Research, later popularly known as the Frankfurt School, with Felix Weil’s funding and support.

The event had a partisan, though independent, orientation to the renewal of Marxist theory. The three items on the agenda demonstrate the scope of this project. First, Eduard Alexander, a supporter of Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments about economic crisis in her work The Accumulation of Capital, introduced the problem of capitalist transformation and theories of crisis, against the backdrop of hyperinflation and the Ruhr crisis.

The second item to be addressed was the problem of dialectical method. This discussion centered on the presentation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which had just appeared, and the draft of Korsch’s own Marxism and Philosophy. Both authors were encountering each other for the first time. According to Detlev Claussen, the ideas Lukács put forward in History and Class Consciousness were the focus of attention at the event, although Korsch was the only one there competent to debate with Lukács.

Third, Béla Fogarasi, an ally of Korsch who was working as an editor of the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne, introduced the organization of Marxist research. The combination of Forgarasi’s practical experience in the Hungarian Revolution and his radical critique of bourgeois science confirmed the early objective of the Institute for Social Research to function as a collective committed to the sharpening of Marxist theory.

Korsch’s contribution to Marxist theory has led to him being described as one of the founders of Western Marxism, a term that was only formulated at a later stage. It is more useful to read Korsch with the understanding that he sought to clarify Marx’s critique of political economy, revolutionary politics, and the status of philosophy within Marxism, all within the context of his hope for a revolutionary transition to communism.

Korsch’s thinking about Marxist theory operated at two interrelated levels. First of all, there were the pedagogical contributions he made, intended to educate workers and the KPD’s rank-and-file members as well as younger communist intellectuals and friends of the movement. Second, he was engaged in a scientific and philosophical effort to resolve substantial problems and lacunae within so-called orthodox Marxism.

This second level is apparent in Marxism and Philosophy, a remarkable essay whose opening lines speak about resolving the question of the relationship Marxism has to philosophy. Marxism and Philosophy was part of a much larger but ultimately unfinished project, drawing out the philosophical consequences of Marxism, as well as the character of the critique of political economy and the Marxist conception of law and the state. Korsch changed his plans for this project several times without completing it.

Texts in the history of Marxism like Marxism and Philosophy resist immediate reading; their complexity requires an attention to the overloaded arguments of the text, even if we can reconstruct these arguments. Yet one can discern a simplicity from which a complex problem arises. The simplicity is the questioning of the relationship that ideology has to workers’ revolution.

It is a question of a materialist dialectic. In the classical terms of base and superstructure, ideology is part of the superstructure. However, ideology is also a feature of any revolutionary transformation of the base, if the capitalist mode of production is to be superseded and living labor liberated. A dialectic must be able to reckon with the role of class consciousness in the transformation of history. This is the basic theme of Marxism and Philosophy.

To identify ideology and social revolution as a question meant trying to think about the conditions for a successful revolution in the West, thus posing  the connection such terms have to politics. Hence if Marxism and Philosophy is a “philosophical” work, it is also indubitably political.

After his expulsion from the KPD, Korsch was not reelected to the Reichstag. He now turned afresh to problems of Marxist theory. Korsch experienced a new beginning, exploring different fields of research.

We can find many of the provisional results Korsch arrived at in this period in his theses on the crisis of Marxism, G. W. F. Hegel and revolution, fascism and counterrevolution, and the partisan character of science. Korsch also published a critique of Karl Kautsky’s work The Materialist Conception of History and an updated edition of Marxism and Philosophy with a new Anti-Critique.

In the course of these theoretical explorations, Korsch came into contact with some of the most brilliant intellectuals who were active during the late Weimar years. He took part in discussions at Bertolt Brecht’s flat involving the novelist Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, among others. He gave talks at a philosophical group convened by Erich Unger and Oskar Goldberg, debating Hegel’s legacy and thought with figures such as the historian Arthur Rosenberg, who had also been a communist MP. These were years of creative ferment, snuffed out by the rise of Nazism.

After a last attempt to resist the Nazis as they came to power — his final letters before departing the country are signed “from house to house” — Korsch left Germany. He initially joined Brecht in the Danish town of Svendborg. In the urgency of defeat, he spoke about working on a book which is now thought to have been lost. A letter to Friedrich Pollock, written from Brecht’s farmhouse, suggests that his study was going to address revolution and counterrevolution since the July revolution of 1830 in France, examining German Nazism and Italian Fascism, and undertaking a critical revision of the Marxist-Leninist conception of revolution.

Korsch’s most elaborated and accomplished work from this phase of his life is his book Karl Marx, organized around a systematic reconstruction of Marxist theory. Herbert Levy suggested that Karl Marx “will in future times be regarded as one of the (few) essential Marxist works of the first half of the twentieth century.” Levy compared its significance to the work of figures such as Georgi Plekhanov, Antonio Labriola, and Rosa Luxemburg. However, there were only a few hundred copies of the book sold, and the London stock went up in flames during a German bombing raid in 1940.

After years on the move, going from Svendborg to London and Paris, Korsch made his way to the United States with assistance from Sidney Hook. Hedda was already teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts when he arrived in the country. Korsch’s time in the US was tragic in many ways, though not devoid of insights and partial victories. As Hook later wrote:

Korsch was never at home in America. Like most refugees, he was consumed with impatience, tinged with some contempt, at American naïveté and provincialism. The pragmatic re-evaluation of the past from the standpoint of the present, and the piecemeal approach to social reform, he dismissed as eclecticism.

Korsch was intimately engaged with the council communist journals of Paul Mattick. In Chicago and New York, those who worked on the journals were working class, and they were not oriented to intellectuals, but rather to activists in workplaces. Many of those who bought the journal were militants from groups like the Industrial Workers of the World and veterans of sit-down strikes. Korsch often spoke at meetings in New York organized by the council communists.

Reading Korsch’s letters during the war years is a moving and informative experience. Through them, one is able to track the fate, and the escapades, of his circle as they fled the extension of Nazi occupation across Europe, and the tense relations they had with the Frankfurt School under Max Horkheimer. Paul Partos, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and Heinz Langerhans, interned and deported to Southern France, were on the move to escape the Nazi onslaught, along with others who were supporters of Kommunistische Politik.

Korsch tried to raise funds and campaign for the refugees, and Hedda was involved with the Quaker refugee support. Karl joined her in this work, while acknowledging “there is not much I can do, as the present group of campers are not much interested in theoretical questions.” As a theoretician, though one engaged with the political conjuncture, Korsch constantly worked on the theoretical issues raised by Marx’s scientific work, writing for Dwight Macdonald’s Partisan Review. Throughout the war, Korsch defended an internationalist line of working-class and anti-fascist solidarity.

Unfortunately, Korsch’s life ended in 1961, at the age of seventy-five, just before the global student movements and the New Left kicked off. A figure of the old generation, he had continued to reflect on Marx’s theory and questions of global politics, in dialogue with some of the fascinating thinkers of his time who would go on to make substantial contributions in different fields, including Roman Rosdolsky, Daniel Guérin, and Harry Braverman. He remains a thinker who showed what it means to reflect theoretically, and with political principle, on the liberation of living labor.

Eastern Kentucky coal country is one of American history’s great crucibles of class struggle. The southernmost point of Robin Webb’s district is only seventy miles from Harlan County, home to the “Bloody Harlan” labor battles of the 1930s. A 1963 article in the Harvard Crimson captures, with a characteristic flourish of condescension, the drama of this unacknowledged civil war, which churned well into the latter half of the twentieth century:

They have a saying in eastern Kentucky — “Wait ’till the bushes grow green.” It is a password, an admonition, and a desperate expression of hope among coal miners fighting for a lost prosperity. For in summer, when the bushes are green, a man can hide with a rifle, and in the rolling hills of Kentucky, a rifle has often had a persuasive effect on coal operators.

Trapped by circumstances they only dimly understand, the miners take a very simple view of their situation. One grizzled old miner put it this way at a meeting of strikers: “I’ll tell you something boys, and I’m gonna tell you the truth now. There will be blood coming from the mines — not coal — unless we get a union contract. And if you try to get by my picket line you’re gonna smell copper and lead, copper and lead.”

In the 1930s, coal miners in Eastern Kentucky fighting for a union were subjected to a years-long “reign of terror” by the sheriff’s department and coal company thugs that included “dynamiting, shooting into homes, and homicides.” In September 1935, two months after Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) guaranteeing workers the right to organize, the beleaguered miners lined up for a vote. Earlier that same week, a union organizer had been blown to smithereens by a car bomb.

Thereafter union coal miners in Appalachia voted blue as a matter of course. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson launched his War on Poverty with a visit to the Eastern Kentucky coalfields, just south of Robin Webb’s district, where he was greeted warmly. While Kentucky was politically mixed, coal country was socially oriented around unions and remained reliably Democrat-dominated for decades after conservative Southern Democrats began to exit the coalition.

How did the Democrats lose a constituency so deeply intertwined with the party? Two co-occurring processes: declining union membership and Democrats’ turn away from working-class voters. After peaking in the 1950s and a promising uptick in the 1970s, coal employment — threatened by automation and global competition — began a steep and unending decline. As coal jobs diminished in the 1980s, so did union density, and the institutions that transmitted working-class political identity began to wither away.

The Democratic Party was undergoing a neoliberal transformation that left it enthralled to many of the very forces destroying coal miners’ livelihoods. Party leaders, distracted by the pursuit of urban and suburban middle-class professional voters, neglected to repair fraying connections. Democrats’ shifting class allegiances left industrial labor politically friendless, hastening its decline.

Amid these changes, politicians from both parties became chiefly interested in fostering a good “business climate,” which meant loosening pro-worker regulations. Meanwhile, neoliberal governance initiated the unwinding of the War on Poverty welfare programs, intensifying poverty in Eastern Kentucky throughout the 1980s. The institutions that had once made sense of such economic misery through the lens of class conflict had disappeared or lost relevance. In their absence, the consensus opinion promoted by both parties was that the coal companies needed pampering or else the misery would continue.

Into this new political climate, the Right deployed a devastatingly effective strategy. Where there had once been coal operators and coal miners, it proposed a different bifurcation: friends of coal and enemies of coal.

Democrats, by pursuing environmental regulations, were enemies of coal. Large mining companies waged an aggressive propaganda campaign to popularize this narrative. Having lost the ability to speak in the language of class conflict themselves, and with no remaining culturally embedded institutions, Democrats lacked a satisfying response to this attack.

Republicans used this framing to batter Democrats in the region — and it worked, even in places where coal wasn’t a primary employer. In their article “Seeing Red in the Bluegrass: How the Democratic Party Lost Kentucky’s Voters,” D. Stephen Voss, Corrine F. Elliott, and Sherelle Roberts observe:

Coal shapes Kentucky politics well beyond mining communities. Businesses in outlying counties supply the mines. Businesses outside of mining territory rely on the inexpensive energy coal provides. Many Kentuckians consider coal mining a central part of the state’s identity, as demonstrated by the many automobiles bearing license plates declaring the owner a “Friend of Coal” (of which the Commonwealth sold 50,000 in just the first three years after their release, at a time when the number of mining employees was less than half that). Andy Barr, now Republican incumbent in the 6th Congressional District, took down an incumbent Democrat in 2012 after they waged an advertising war about the coal industry — even though the 6th does not include coal-mining territory!

In the 2010s, the narrative that Barack Obama was destroying the coal industry through climate policy percolated alongside persistent realities of poverty, unemployment, and now a raging opioid epidemic. In the new framing, the latter bundle of problems owed to the former — despite the long history of poverty and ill health caused by coal companies, which working-class people fought against their employers to rectify. It didn’t matter that Obama was actually quite friendly to the heads of extractive industries; what mattered is that his administration and the Democratic Party failed to communicate to coal workers that they were on their side, that their communities’ well-being was important, that they had a plan to help people land on their feet.

In 2017, the new Donald Trump administration repealed Obama’s climate policy with a declaration: “The war on coal is over.” So too was any vestige of loyalty to Democrats in the Appalachian coal country.

Robin Webb has professed faith in the Republican Party to represent the interests of rural Kentuckians. She is wrong.

Republicans have no intention of expanding Medicaid to cover more uninsured rural residents, preserving the rural hospitals and health clinics that serve as lifelines for isolated communities, or maintaining robust funding for public education and postal services that rural residents depend on. They won’t fight for higher wages, stronger workplace safety protections, or a just transition program designed to replace dwindling fossil fuel jobs with even better green energy jobs.

The GOP’s vision of helping coal country extends little beyond rolling back environmental regulations — a symbolic gesture that will enrich increasingly international coal operators, harm the health of rural residents, spoil the planet for their children, and won’t bring back good union jobs or restore the economic foundations that once sustained these communities.

But Webb is right about one thing. “While it’s cliché, it’s true: I didn’t leave the party — the party left me,” she explained.

Taking a historical view, it’s clear that she has a point. The Democratic Party abandoned Kentucky coal country before coal country abandoned the Democrats. Webb’s defection marks not just the end of Democratic representation in rural Kentucky but the completion of a decades-long political realignment that began when the Democratic Party lost interest in the working class.

If anything, Bandung served as a moment of postcolonial spectacle. In our present-day parlance, it was a public relations move for many of the leaders who attended, a number of whom would achieve global prominence. Journalists and especially photographers were omnipresent, creating a rich visual archive of the meeting that captured airport arrivals, delegate speeches, working groups, motorcades, crowd-lined streets, banquet dinners, and cigarette breaks. Though there were certainly private discussions during the conference, Bandung was not a meeting held in secret. It was a coming-out party for the Third World.

Five countries sponsored the meeting — Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma (now Myanmar), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) — though the political figures who garnered the most attention were not exclusively from these states. As president of the host country, Sukarno reveled in the attention the conference brought to Indonesia, positioning it and himself as key power brokers in Southeast Asia and the postcolonial world more generally. Other leaders, however, also put themselves in the diplomatic limelight.

India’s Jawaharlal Nehru was among the more senior leaders present: his attendance nearly three decades previously at the 1927 League Against Imperialism meeting in Brussels was one of the credentials that gave him an intergenerational perspective and flair. Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), similarly garnered attention for representing China’s recent transformation under Mao Zedong, which was still precarious at the time. Zhou survived an assassination attempt on his way to Bandung, orchestrated by the Taiwanese Kuomintang, when the plane on which he was originally scheduled to travel blew up.

Zhou consequently used Bandung as an opportunity to normalize the PRC’s relations with countries in Africa and Asia — indeed, the Sino-Indian Agreement of 1954, also known as the Panchsheel Treaty, provided a set of principles that Bandung’s Final Communiqué would replicate. On a separate front, Gamal Nasser of Egypt had recently come to power in 1952 through the Free Officers Movement, and he similarly perceived Bandung as an opportunity for legitimation on the world stage. Only thirty-seven years old, Nasser could stand shoulder to shoulder with a figure like Nehru, who was sixty-five.

These diverse agendas and personal histories contributed to the meeting’s postcolonial aura as well as its underlying tensions. The connections of those in attendance to liberation struggles and to an ethos of anti-colonial revolution and decolonization also imparted a mystique to Bandung. Scholars have criticized this mythology and the misleading impression it gives about what was achieved at the conference. However, it is important to note that the participants themselves actively constructed the myth of Bandung and promoted it for decades after.

Sukarno’s opening address is the ur-text for this willful mythmaking. Part historical séance, part rallying cry, and part vociferous warning, his speech wandered far and wide, invoking the League Against Imperialism meeting of 1927 but also the name of Paul Revere, whose legendary ride had taken place on the same day as the start of the Bandung Conference, 180 years previously. Sukarno called the American Revolution “the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”

Elsewhere in his speech, Sukarno cautioned about the problem of political complacency in the face of ongoing colonialism in Africa and Asia — Sudan and the Gold Coast, which both sent delegations, would not attain independence until 1956 and 1957, respectively — as well as the new dangers posed by the Cold War and the deployment of nuclear weapons. He spoke about how certain parts of Asia and Africa were still “under the lash” and noted that colonialism “appears in many guises.”

Referring to “the weapons of ultimate horror” that had been used against Japan, a conference attendee, Sukarno warned his audience about the danger of their future employment and how “the food that we eat, the water that we drink, yes, even the very air that we breathe, can be contaminated by poisons originating from thousands of miles away.”

For the Indonesian leader, the bulwark against these pending political, technological, and environmental threats was collective solidarity among the delegate countries present and Asia and Africa more generally. Sukarno gestured toward his audience with a repeated refrain of “sisters and brothers,” underlining a sense of rhetorical kinship at the conference.

He subsequently urged those in the room to mobilize what he called the “moral violence of nations” against continued militarism, explaining that while Asia and Africa might lack strategic and technological resources in comparison to emergent Cold War powers, their mutual continents retained a “greater diversity of religions, faiths, and beliefs than in the other continents of the world. . . . Asia and Africa are the classic birthplaces of faiths and ideas, which have spread all over the world.”

Indeed, this interfaith spiritual element was integral to the Bandung Spirit as Sukarno defined it, although discussions of Bandung cite this aspect less frequently, typically understanding the expression in secular terms. He went further to impart his Indonesian vision of the Third World through his country’s motto of “Unity in Diversity” (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika). Sukarno viewed the differences among those present at Bandung as a source of strength, not weakness.

Taken together, Sukarno grasped the opportunity at hand in his speech, and he recognized the challenge of establishing solidarity, which required a calibrated sense of imagination and pragmatism at once. Regarding the latter element, the creation of North and South Vietnam through the 1954 Geneva Accords and the crisis that ensued in Southeast Asia had acted as a catalyst for the Bandung meeting. Europe was still deciding the destiny of Asia from afar — a neocolonial approach that regional leaders like Sukarno sought to undermine.

The founding of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in February 1955 further marked the renewed encroachment of former imperial powers like Britain and France into Asia and the Middle East, as well as the United States as part of its policy of containment. States like the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Turkey that belonged to these organizations sent delegations to Bandung, adding an underlying sense of suspicion and uncertainty. Turkey had also joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) several years prior in 1952.

There was no innocence at Bandung. That said, the Final Communiqué endorsed at the end of the meeting did map out a shared vision of the future, however provisional. It foregrounded agreements to foster political, economic, and cultural cooperation, while granting special attention to the problem of apartheid in South Africa and the rights of the Palestinians. The communiqué concluded with ten principles, known as Dasa Sila Bandung, which reflected elements of the Panchsheel Treaty, including respect for sovereignty and noninterference, and the UN Charter, including respect for human rights and a commitment to settle disputes through peaceful means.

Unresolved tensions therefore remained in the final document between the rights of the individual, the sovereign rights of the nation-state, and the aspiration for a broader Third World solidarity. The communiqué also concluded by recommending a second meeting — a test that would soon expose the latent limitations already present in 1955 and the development of unanticipated factors in the years that followed.

Sukarno was not the only political leader or intellectual invested in the Bandung myth. The novelist Richard Wright was an observer at the conference and wrote the most influential account of its proceedings, The Color Curtain, published in 1956. Wright was no stranger to the politics of decolonization, having visited the Gold Coast in 1953 through an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of what was still a British colony at the time.

Wright’s work of reportage, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, offered a frank and circumspect perspective about the prospects for the country that would become independent Ghana, as well as his own relationship with the African continent. In contrast, The Color Curtain is more celebratory in tone. Wright dwelled on the united racial front that the meeting put forward and the future possibilities of Afro-Asian solidarity.

Indeed, his choice of title posed an alternative to the better-known Iron Curtain that separated the Soviet Bloc from Western Europe. It also genuflected toward W. E. B. Du Bois’s remark in The Souls of Black Folk, published decades earlier in 1903, that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. Wright’s project therefore placed Bandung against a dominant US foreign policy framework, as well as within a genealogy of black American thought.

The issue of racial justice was not limited to Wright’s contribution. Moses Kotane, the secretary general of the South African Communist Party, returned to apartheid South Africa after attending Bandung as an unofficial delegate, enthusiastic about the support the anti-apartheid struggle had garnered. In his report on the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in September 1956, James Baldwin noted how Alioune Diop, editor of Présence africaine, referred to the Parisian event as a “second Bandung,” and how Senegal’s Léopold Senghor invoked the “spirit of Bandung” as a source of inspiration for a black cultural “renaissance.”

Elsewhere Frantz Fanon wrote in the pages of El Moudjahid, the periodical of Algeria’s Front de libération nationale (FLN), of the “Bandung pact” — in contrast to the Warsaw Pact — which symbolized “the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation.” In 1963, during his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in Detroit, Malcolm X similarly referred to Bandung as a moment when Asian and African nations came together against their common enemy: “the white man.”

The afterlives of Bandung were not purely symbolic however. A new set of institutions and networks was established in the decade that followed. Indeed, though the majority of countries at Bandung were Asian, the destination of Afro-Asianism proved to be Africa.

Nasser sought to build upon the momentum of Bandung by founding the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) at a conference in Cairo in December 1957 and January 1958. As a historical and political crossroads between Africa and Asia, Egypt remained committed to the idea of Afro-Asianism and Third Worldism, with AAPSO being central to this aim.

On the cultural front, the Afro-Asian Writers Association held its inaugural meeting in 1958 in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. This arts organization sought to counterbalance the effects of Western acculturation through the promotion of national literatures in the former colonial world. It held meetings across Africa and Asia and published the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings.

Larger in scale and representation, the most important endeavor that came in the wake of Bandung was the founding of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, in 1961. Though clearly drawing from the initiative of Bandung, it also marked a break from its predecessor’s political configuration due to the exclusion of the PRC. During the intervening period, tensions had resurfaced between India and China, exacerbated by the Sino-Soviet split and later resulting in the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

At Belgrade, former Bandung participants like Nehru and Nasser were joined by Ghana’s Nkrumah and the host country’s Josip Broz Tito. Zhou was notably absent. The NAM benefited from the wave of decolonization that swept across Africa during the early 1960s, though these growing divisions spurred an acrimony that ultimately sabotaged the proposed “Second Bandung” to be held outside of Algiers in 1965, canceled only days before its scheduled occurrence.

The upshot is that there was no single Third World project. There were many Third World projects, many alignments, and many nonalignments. Indeed, it is important to stress that NAM members did, in fact, have relations and agreements of various sorts with the United States, the PRC, and the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, following the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966, Cuba played an indispensable role in defining Third Worldism through the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), adding yet another dimension to the politics of the majority world.

We cannot attribute this wide range of institutions and political formations entirely to Bandung. Yet many did reference Bandung as a point of orientation and origin — a politics of citation that has continued into the present.

For understandable reasons, the symbolism of Bandung receded after 1965, though without disappearing completely. The diplomatic failures of Bandung — including those already mentioned, as well as the advent of the Vietnam War — contributed to this decline. In many ways, this trend reflected a general shift away from the postcolonial optimism that animated the 1950s and the early 1960s as Cold War interventions, neocolonial extractivism, coup d’états, and one-party states came to define the politics of Africa and Asia in the decades after.

However, since the end of the Cold War, the Bandung moment has reemerged once more as a key historical reference point. Bandung has been cited as a baseline for the post-2000 economic relationships between the PRC and its African partners, while some have framed the BRICS group as part of a non-Western, counterhegemonic genealogy that descends from Bandung. This latter interpretation ignores the inconvenient fact that it was a British economist for Goldman Sachs who originally coined the BRICS acronym.

These recent allusions to Bandung constitute a hijacking of its memory, providing a gloss of Afro-Asianism that emphasizes economic solidarity geared toward global capital from and for the Global South. Having said that, we should remember that Bandung was no more a gathering of liberal democracies than the BRICS summits. The 1955 conference was an assembly of elite figures, all of whom were men and a number of whom represented authoritarian states.  They were all looking out for their own interests in different ways.

Returning to Bandung after seventy years requires us to exercise critical judgment without being overly dismissive. Some decolonial theorists have compared Bandung to the French Revolution, which is a wildly overblown analogy. More reasonably, legal scholars have drawn parallels with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which also affirmed state sovereignty, while some historians have argued that we should see Bandung as a counterpoint to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which validated the European colonization of Africa.

Other scholars have been entirely dismissive toward Bandung and the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity generally, which neglects the most significant point raised by the meeting as expressed in Sukarno’s opening address — namely, the common history of Western imperial aggression shared by both continents and the bond that history provided.

Such present-day cynicism, which comes primarily from US academics, largely concentrates on examples of racism between Asians and Africans. True, one need only read the reportage of V. S. Naipaul to grasp the existence of anti-black racism among some prominent Asian intellectuals. However, it is historically and politically inaccurate to overemphasize the internal frictions of Afro-Asianism.

More damningly, such skepticism has the effect of reinstating an intransigent imperial worldview centered on racial and continental differences that Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, and Afro-Asianism struggled against. A political imagination of human liberation is lost in the process.

It is unusual for a single event, especially a diplomatic meeting, to develop the kind of mythology that has grown up around Bandung. Still, for a fleeting moment, the Asian-African Conference sought to address the future of humanity. It lay at the confluence of competing narratives and ideas about the world, where the ambitions and aspirations of a handful of people, representing many, confronted the forces of history over which they had little control, but nonetheless felt they had a moral obligation to address.

Recently, a debate has emerged between the left-labor scholars Kim Moody and Eric Blanc, (see “How to Unionize One Million Workers Every Year,” by Blanc) on this precise question. In his book, On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War, Moody argues that the logistics revolution in the United States has resulted in massive concentrations of logistics workers in certain clusters, roughly on the scale of workplace concentration in the mid-century industrial geography.

Blanc, by contrast, believes that increasing decentralization and downsizing trends in workplaces and in residential life mean that “we can’t copy 1930s union targeting strategies.” He is particularly skeptical of Moody’s proposal that logistics organizing today presents the same possibilities as manufacturing organizing in the 1930s. As he contended in an interview with Doug Henwood:

There is a line of argument from various people who suggest that logistics is essentially like the new manufacturing or the new auto. In the same way as organizing General Motors sort of turned everything around for labor in 1937 and the 1930s generally, the idea is if you could organize Amazon, that would provide a similar leverage point.

The difficulty is that logistics isn’t actually as central as manufacturing was. And its mechanism of functioning, its production process, doesn’t lend itself to the same level of centralized targeting and disruption. . .. [This is] not to say that logistics isn’t important. It is—it seems to me clearly strategically central for labor, but it just doesn’t have the same level of centralization and disruptability as factory work did in the 1930s.

To make this claim, Blanc engages in a somewhat surface-level analysis of the United Parcel Service’s (UPS) organizational structure that makes it appear that there is far less concentration in its system than there is. On the other hand, Moody does something similar in exaggerating the concentration in logistics clusters: at one point, he points to Memphis as an air, rail, and trucking hub employing 220,000 workers, but that number appears to be derived from the number of both full- and part-time jobs generated by the Memphis cargo airport for the entire state of Tennessee.

The truth is somewhere in the middle: there are some organizing targets out there (like the Memphis cargo airport itself, which employs about 13,000 FedEx workers) that constitute huge opportunities for the labor movement, according to the traditional perspective of industrial unionism. But in many key logistical hubs, there is far less spatial concentration than there was in the CIO period. And in any event, where there is workplace concentration, it is often spread over multiple companies, which themselves utilize a maze of subcontracting relationships.

There is a difference, however, between the raw numbers of potentially organizable workers in a particular place and the economic importance of that place (and thus the leverage that might be gained through its control). There are far fewer longshore workers at the ports than there were in the 1930s, but they are still able today to command the respect of the carrier industry because they can shut down facilities of massive economic importance. This is to say that a particular node in a supply chain might be worth targeting not because it will net a certain number of workers, but because it affords a great deal of leverage over companies that care much more about the flow of their goods than the actual places that they flow through.

This is perhaps the biggest conceptual hurdle in thinking through the organization of the large employers today. Big manufacturing companies rely on key sites of value extraction; the big logistical companies rely instead on key flows. Organizers at mid-century had their work cut out for them, but strategically, things were quite simple: go after the big factories and try to shut them down. There was some thinking through of supply chains even in that era — for instance, when communists were dynamiting segments of railroad track to prevent the movement of steel — but the organizing purview was predominantly place-based.

Organizers today often still think in these same terms, asking questions like, “What are the individual facilities where there’s interest in action?” or “How do we build support for a recognition campaign on that individual facility?” If they’re thinking outside the box, maybe they will also consider how community support can be marshaled.

All of this is fine and well in certain cases, but it operates by a logic that does not suit the task of organizing employers for whom place is much less important than it used to be. To tackle a company like Amazon, organizers will have to find the pain points in its goods circulatory system and think about themselves not primarily as organizing individual workplaces but about disrupting the companies’ operational flows to the end of organizing the workers who make them possible.

If we look at important logistical nodes from the standpoint of a traditional union, that is, how many new union members at a particular facility might be produced from a certain organizing expenditure, then some of the time such places will look like they are not worth the hassle. From this perspective, Blanc is probably right to say that logistics is not as “central” as manufacturing was in the 1930s.

If we look at such nodes in terms of what it is possible to leverage from their disruption, however, then the proposition looks altogether different. The problem then is not that opportunities to “wound capital,” in historian John Womack’s phrasing, are less crucial than they were in the 1930s, but rather that we lack the strategies and institutions necessary to meet their networked structure and scale; that the key targets today are not too small and diffuse, as Blanc would have it, but simply difficult to reckon with given existing organizational purviews.

To stick with the CIO moment, I believe the issue of organizational purview was the fundamental problem with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the 1930s. The AFL had many problems, but by the 1930s, its top leaders very much wanted to meet the moment in organizing the basic industries. The key thing that separated the AFL’s John Frey from the CIO’s John L. Lewis was not whether the basic industries should be organized but how they should be.

The AFL had persisted for half a century at that point on the principle that the best means of ensuring solidarity organizationally was to unite workers by craft. Thus, their strategy was to issue federal organizing charters to capture all workers in a plant on the front end who would then be hived off into different crafts on the back end. James Matles, director of organizing for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, complained at one point that the AFL wanted to split up the workers in one General Electric plant into seventeen different unions.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that industrial, wall-to-wall unionism was the path forward and that the craft orientation of the AFL was hopelessly outmoded. But at the time, with the prior failures of industrial unionism efforts in mind, it was an unthinkable waste of resources for the AFL leaders. They were dead wrong in their assessment of the situation. And the essential problem again was one of institutional separation and limited organizational purview.

The idea that demands could be made regarding the entirety of the practices of a company or industry (rather than on behalf of different trades) by workers of disparate job classifications, races, and ethnicities just was not a viable option for the AFL.

From the standpoint of strategic chokepoint analysis, I believe that the labor movement today is somewhat like the AFL in the 1930s. Now, as then, a structural transformation in the economy has rendered the traditional modes of organizing not obsolete by any means (even craft unionism is still alive and well today), but inadequate to take advantage of the new geographies and chokepoints of production and distribution.

What would a labor movement geared toward disrupting flows instead of organizing individual places look like? It would not be radically transformed in practice, but it would have a different organizing orientation and a willingness to experiment with new tactics. In what follows, I review four features of this orientation.

Targeting key nodes at which disruptive labor actions have maximal system-wide impacts
There were many flaws in the OUR Walmart campaign initiated in 2011, but the key one was that it went after Walmart stores instead of its distribution centers. This lesson must be internalized by any union that wants to take on the big retailers or parcel companies. Since then, there is also increasing sophistication and differentiation within distribution center networks to contend with.

To my mind, the basic criteria for choosing a good distributional node to target are twofold:
1. The node serves a critical role in the larger distributional system
2. Labor is capable of impacting it through disruptive action

The Amazon Fulfillment Centers, where orders are selected and boxed up, are a good example of number 1 but not number 2: their efficiency and size are absolutely central not just to Amazon’s distributional capacities but also to their overall business model. But these facilities are tremendously difficult to disrupt, given the redundancy Amazon has built into its system.
By contrast, the Amazon Delivery Stations, where packages are picked up to be delivered to your doorstep, are a good example of number 2 but not number 1: last-mile delivery is the most costly segment of a package’s journey, and it is very labor-intensive. Delivery stations also tend to be much smaller than other distributional nodes, making them easier organizing lifts.

But for that very reason, shutting one down would not have broader impacts on Amazon’s network. A strike at a delivery station would be visible in a particular metro region, but it would be contained, and Amazon would raise throughput at other nearby delivery stations to compensate.

As I have argued elsewhere, the sortation centers, the “middle-mile” facilities where packages are sorted by zip code, check both boxes. In the case of the sortation centers, they are rooted near metro areas to serve a set number of delivery stations, and so are place-based in a way that fulfillment centers are not. In the traditional “hub-and-spoke” logic of parcel operations, in which a number of smaller spoke facilities route packages through central hub facilities, they are more crucial as distributional “hubs” than the delivery station “spokes” to Amazon’s overall operation, and they are fewer in number than either the fulfillment centers or the delivery stations.

There are other facilities in Amazon’s system that potentially satisfy both numbers 1 and 2 (I am thinking in particular of their new network of national inbound cross docks, which serve as key storage facilities for Supply Chain by Amazon), and perhaps the sortation centers are not the targets I am making them out to be, given aspects of their operation of which I am currently unaware. The important point for my present purposes is that a labor movement interested in disrupting flows will be locked in on this question of which nodes tick both boxes.

Winning over the technicians
In all distribution operations, there is a layer of workers above the baseline pickers, stowers, packers, and package handlers but below management: the technicians. At Amazon, they are reliability maintenance engineering (RME) workers; at UPS, they’re “specialists.” The names will differ from company to company, but these are more skilled workers who fix belts and robots, control package flow, and generally keep the operations humming. They are paid better than the average warehouse worker, but not so well that they could be considered a form of “labor aristocracy.” In the last few years, warehouse automation has taken off, and the importance of these technicians to logistical efficiency is only going to grow.

As with any skilled workers, technicians can be bought off, or they can develop a craft union mentality. But they can also find common cause with all workers at the company, as the tool and die makers at GM plants once joined forces with more unskilled assembly workers. In the latter case, they have a special role to play, given their intimate knowledge of how operations can be disrupted.

Organizing like workplace fissuring is a legal fiction
At many key logistical nodes and clusters, there is aggressive subcontracting, as at Walmart’s facility in Elwood, Illinois.

This workplace “fissuring” described by David Weil, Gerald Davis, and many others has been devastating for unions, in that it makes little sense to try to organize the fly-by-night sub-subcontractors depicted below. But the technical fissuring that has stultified the labor movement obscures an ever greater functional integration: parent-company subcontractors often have access to real-time point of sale data and gear their entire operation to parent company order fulfillment.

Of the many legal fictions under which the labor movement must suffer, the idea that workers at a subcontractor that is so integrated into a parent company’s operations so as to appear in practice as one of its own departments are not functionally employees of that parent company is one of the more egregious — and the labor movement is going to make little headway into such facilities if it does not draw inspiration from recent history to work around the constraints of labor law.

The National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that Amazon is a “joint employer” of its delivery service partners’ drivers, a major win for the Teamsters Delivery Station organizing efforts. In Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) is going to have to keep organizing with the joint employers in their sights, though most likely without the backing of the National Labor Relations Board.

Leveraging the power of already-organized workers to spur new organizing
As organizer Carey Dall has persuasively argued, taking advantage of logistical vulnerabilities today must include internal organizing in longshore, rail, and trucking unions, all of which could exercise enormous structural power to the end of spurring new organizing. A recent example from the ports is illustrative: in 2021, mechanics at P&B Intermodal in Tacoma, Washington, went on strike for recognition, and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 23 supported the strike by refusing to deliver goods to the yard. The union was recognized six hours after it was demanded.

Other port-adjacent intermodal yard workers and on-port drayage drivers would all benefit from similar leverage. And though it would take a great organizational revolution within the longshore unions to transform them from craft unions of longshore workers into industrial unions of logistics workers, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the ILWU, with accurate knowledge of where containers are going from the ports, could once again “march inland” into other parts of logistics networks beyond the ports, as they did in the 1930s.

Amazon Inbound Cross Docks and Walmart Import Distribution Centers are both located close to ports to deal with inbound goods, and workers at either such facility would be greatly aided by support from the longshore workers in something like a recognitional picket. The same basic point holds for railworkers at intermodal terminals. The power is there if those muscles are exercised once again.

The labor movement is not inexperienced in any of the features just mentioned, just as the labor movement of the 1930s had plenty of experience outside of the craft model. It is a question of emphasis and will, not complete overhaul, though pursuing some of the things just mentioned to their logical end might mean some true novelties in practice. As an example, if organizers really set their sights on the key distributional nodes, what about workers organizing at stores and spoke facilities? Could they be organized to travel upstream in the distributional network to picket a feeder facility rather than only take action at their immediate workplace?

As an example, one relevant to present efforts: Starbucks runs five domestic green bean storage and roasting plants and has five regional distribution centers, each of which supplies roughly three thousand stores with coffee and other supplies. Could Starbucks store workers support the organizing efforts of distribution center workers, who in turn could leverage their structural power to win gains for store workers?

Similar examples could be drawn for any of the large retailers. Home Depot has a large rapid distribution center and internal freight consolidation facility at CenterPoint Intermodal Center (CIC) in Joliet, Illinois — together these facilities take up about 2.2 million square feet, roughly the size of the twenty Home Depot stores in the Chicagoland area. If nothing were to move out of Home Depot’s CIC facilities, what would the company be willing to concede to get things moving again? Regional card-check agreements?

Industrial concentration in large factories required an industrial approach; highly integrated networks of facilities require in turn a more “networked” approach.

This is obviously blue sky thinking, but it points in the direction of the kinds of actions that a labor movement interested in flow disruption would pursue. If we are going to go after the big targets, as the labor movement did in the 1930s, we must also figure out ways to disrupt their operations as a means to leverage union recognition.

Today that task involves different spatial dynamics than it did for the CIO. Sometimes it means tackling massive single-employer targets, as in the case of the promising campaign at Amazon’s KCVG air hub. But sometimes it involves fragmented and precarious workforces across multiple companies, where the attraction of the target is partially an organized workforce in one particular location but more importantly the leverage over a network of facilities that the organization of that location brings. Industrial concentration in large factories required an industrial approach; highly integrated networks of facilities require in turn a more “networked” approach.

What this entails, including how precisely such leverage is gained and what kinds of demands can be productively fulfilled by certain entities within those networks, is a tremendously complicated matter. But organized labor is going to have a difficult time making much headway in tackling the corporate behemoths of the day without thinking along these lines.