Steve Kindred and U-C SDS
The shock of losing Steve hasn’t yet worn off…for me and I suppose for many of us. So many memories.
As Ann Thompson aptly put it, meeting Steve was more like “encountering” him. When I first encountered Steve and a few other members of University of Chicago SDS in Fall 1965, I didn’t suspect it would set my life course. I wasn’t coming from a background in activism or any Movement experience. Aside from some limited reading and radical sympathies, everything political was essentially new to me and it was quite some time before I said much of anything in the weekly SDS chapter meetings.
Jesse Lemisch’s beautiful piece (see http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pdf/announcements/RSIX-steve-kindred-obituary.pdf) has captured the atmosphere of the time and place, and I couldn’t really add to it. But what was especially important to me, something that struck me from the outset, was at the core of the politics of Steve and the SDS chapter – I call it revolutionary common sense, which I came to understand is really the heart of a lot of Marxist politics.
In that turbulent time, of course, we had inflated expectations of rapid change (just as the rulers, indeed, had exaggerated fears). In fact I once heard Jean Tepperman once remark that “everyone in America is crazy,” which struck me as true, and in fact the whole society was crazy if you think about everything that was going on (war, urban rebellion, assassinations). And it was a time when so much of the old socialist Left had simply crapped out – people like Irving Howe who had become liberal social democrats at best, and many others much worse, all wrong on the Vietnam war, wrong on Black Power, wrong on the new student radicalism, wrong on everything.
In that situation there were so many traps to fall into, which the politics of Steve and the SDS chapter helped us avoid. Steve called it “independent revolutionary Third Camp Socialism.” Those politics in a nutshell stated that fundamental change comes about when ordinary people in massive numbers – the working class and oppressed peoples – take their own liberation and their future intro their own hands.
Thanks to that orientation I was never caught up in the delusions of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, Castroism, of ending war by permeating the Democratic Party on the one hand or imagining that revolution would happen by some kind of elite vanguard pushing the right buttons. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Steve often said that “patience is a revolutionary virtue” but he showed through his enormous energy that impatience is, as well – you need both. He did that from his days on campus through Teamsters for a Democratic Union and all his other activism.
Some of us took those politics with us, after SDS and New Left lost its mind, when we joined the Independent Socialist Clubs and then the International Socialists (IS) which was just forming as a new national organization.
The politics and vision that Steve embraced throughout the five decades I knew him were centered on working people organizing to free themselves from bosses, bureaucrats and oppressors of all kinds. I learned from his example that if you keep that principle at the center, you won’t go too far wrong.
David Finkel
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Steve Kindred was my oldest political friend, all the way back to 1965-’66 at the University of Chicago. Jesse Lemisch’s beautiful tribute has captured the spirit of that time and place, but for me it was all brand new. Steve, along with a few fellow SDSers like Jonathan Kaplan, Ron Tabor and Chris Hobson, recruited me to the U of C chapter where I learned what’s meant by “Socialism from Below.” Through the years and the upheavals that followed, we certainly held many of the inflated revolutionary expectations of those times, but thanks especially to Steve I was never ensnared in the ruinous delusions of Maoism, Castroism, theories of some new vanguard supplanting the working class movement, or all kinds of liberal elitism.
Steve’s contributions to the Teamster rank and file movement were even greater. He was not only an instinctively brilliant organizer, but amazingly connected to the real lives of working people.
In recent years I’ve had the great enjoyment of Steve and Ellen’s hospitality on visits to New York. A couple of summers ago, my family – Amy Good, our two kids Ann and Justin, and I – came to NY on vacation, stayed with Steve and Ellen, and got a fantastic driving tour of the city with Steve at the wheel, from Times Square all the way to Coney Island. It’s something we won’t forget.
As Steve’s friends know, a conversation with him was an adventure in itself. Because his mind was always racing so far ahead, sentences branched off on multiple unpredictable tangents – from current struggles, to historical events, new scientific discoveries and more -- and it could require considerable mental energy to keep up with him. But I can say it was always worth the effort.
I wish Steve had written a lot more. His piece for LABOR NOTES immediately after the 9/11 tragedy, recounting his delivery job at the World Trade Center – from which he had been recently laid off – is powerful indeed. He had a lot more to tell us, some of which I hope we can collectively recapture through searching our own recollections. To say he will be missed is the understatement of the year.
David Finkel
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Thanks for your input to the Steve Blog. Learning about him through one another's stories is something we can continue to enjoy, beyond his passing. May his vision, work and passions live on through our paths, and be invigorated by our stories, sharings, and dialogues.
Thanks, from niece Audrey Kindred