{"id":3941,"date":"2026-08-01T08:37:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T08:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=3941"},"modified":"2026-08-01T08:37:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T08:37:40","slug":"before-mamdani-there-was-john-reed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=3941","title":{"rendered":"Before Mamdani… There was John Reed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

John Reed was one of the foremost left-wing leaders during America\u2019s early 20th-century Progressive Era and had much in common with today\u2019s Democratic Socialists.<\/p>

Read more Cash is a fundamental freedom<\/a><\/p>\n

John Silas \u201cJack\u201d Reed was a Zohran Mamdani of his era. Both rose in left-wing American politics in their late twenties and early thirties, embraced socialism, and framed politics through class struggle and oppressor\/oppressed themes. Both believed America\u2019s political and capitalist systems had to be radically transformed — or dismantled — for working-class liberation. Were he alive today, Reed would likely see eye to eye with the NYC mayor.<\/p>\n

Reed and his contemporary comrades might view today\u2019s street demonstrators and DSA as their progeny — the great, great-grandchildren of their own cadre of anarcho-socialist rabblerousers. They would be impressed with the \u201cblack bloc\u201d street takeover approach Antifa and aligned groups have used, fomenting revolutionary change through performative street demonstrations, defacing monuments, and clashing with police. They would have been pleasantly stunned by the reach and effectiveness of social media to organize and spread revolutionary propaganda. They would have viewed ICE with the same contempt they held for the Secret Service, who jailed and deported many of them for espousing the overthrow of the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

Jack Reed\u2019s life was greatly romanticized even during his own time. In an introduction to a collection of his writings, he is characterized as \u201c[an] adventurer, playboy, Bohemian, lover, radical, anti-war activist, revolutionary agitator.\u201d\u00a0Indeed, Reed can be looked upon as a godfather of modern American radical socialism, whose views and fervent activism would be embraced by today\u2019s DSA. Class distinctions and conflict (today add in race and gender identity) defined everything. It was an authoritarian ideology that imposed greater controls over private property, as Mamdani has proposed with rent freezes and policies to remove property owners from controlling what they own. As Mamdani once revealingly opined, such policies might even lead to \u201cseizing the means of production,\u201d a Marxist concept found in the Communist Manifesto <\/em>and Capital<\/em> that Jack Reed knew well.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/figure>\nLike Mamdani, the privileged son of a Columbia University professor and a wealthy film producer whose parents paid for his private school education, Reed was a child of privilege, the grandson of a leading Portland, Oregon industrialist and son of a machinery manufacturer whose parents sent him to elite private preparatory schools. He enrolled at Harvard, where his path to left-wing radicalism began with attending Socialist Club meetings by his senior year, whose purpose was \u201cthe study of Socialism and all other radical programs of reform which aim at better organic development of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paired with youthful vigor, both Reed and Mamdani understood the need to communicate their messages effectively, the former as a persuasive journalist\/activist who used the written and spoken language to communicate the cause of socialism to workers, union bosses, and his radical friends who lived nearby in New York\u2019s Greenwich Village. He grasped what it took to organize politically and sell a message. Similarly, Mamdani is aware that he is a gifted communicator, using visual production techniques he acquired as a rapper to sway gullible New Yorkers to the socialist cause, whether by offering \u201cfree\u201d bus service, standing before the high-rises of wealthy New Yorkers to condemn their excesses, pandering to his base by suggesting Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s arrest, or most recently by standing before stocked shelves in a Soviet-style government grocery store. Mandani prefers dismantling the system from the inside. Reed, on the other hand, who never held political office, preferred to agitate for the overthrow of the system from the outside, once declaring in a speech that \u201ca civil war would be necessary to take the government of the United States away from the plutocracy [today\u2019s \u201coligarchy\u201d] and restore it to the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the reformist, pro-regulatory, and even anti-capitalist strains running through Progressivism in Reed\u2019s time — much like today\u2019s adrift Democratic Party — it could not satisfy the demands for wholesale revolutionary change pushed by Reed and a stew of radical unionists, anarchists, socialists, and communists with whom he collaborated. After all, Marx did not simply mean to come up with another good anti-trust law.<\/p>

Read more MAHA: Bobby Kennedy launches a great new food show<\/a><\/p>\n

As correspondent for the socialist magazine The Masses<\/em>, in August 1917 Reed sailed to Russia and supportively covered the Bolshevik insurgency, publishing what he saw in a book, Ten Days That Shook the World<\/em>, which Lenin \u201cunreservedly\u201d recommended in its preface as \u201ca truthful and most vivid exposition\u201d of the first successful communist revolution.4 More confirmed in his views than ever, Reed naively wrote that after the Bolshevik coup \u201cone hundred and sixty millions [sic] of the world\u2019s most oppressed peoples suddenly achieved liberty.\u201d After returning to the U.S., in 1919 he co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America, the predecessor to the Communist Party USA.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t have time to deep dive into Jack Reed\u2019s involvement in early 20th-century American political radicalism, stream the 1981 epic film Reds<\/em>, produced, directed, co-written, and starring Warren Beatty as Reed with\u00a0a stellar cast featuring Jack Nicholson as radical labor advocate\u00a0and playwright Eugene O\u2019Neill and Maureen Stapleton as anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman. Beatty tells Reed\u2019s political story around his loosely committed and rocky romance with his wife, feminist artist Louise Bryant, portrayed by the late Diane Keaton. I saw the three-hour, twenty-minute picture as a young political science and Russian studies major and was struck by its attention to detail, accurate sets, and captivating character portrayals of radicals during the Progressive Era, down to Reed\u2019s Proudhon-quote \u201cProperty is Theft\u201d sign hanging on his apartment door.<\/p>\n

After returning to Russia to represent America\u2019s communists at the Communist International, or Comintern, Reed discovered that the workers\u2019 democracy he thought was coming into being had crashed against the reality of socialist absolutism. When he meets with Emma Goldman, who had been deported by the U.S. to Russia for sedition, he has a passionate debate with the older anarchist. Exasperated, Goldman explained to Reed that power thought to be given over to the people, instead had been put into the hands of a few men, that every newspaper had been shut down or taken over by the Bolsheviks, and that anyone even suspected of being a counterrevolutionary was either arrested or executed. People were not dying from war, but \u201cfrom a system that cannot work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reed never got out of Soviet Russia. Reds<\/em> concludes with the revolutionary on his deathbed dying of typhus at 33, Louise Bryant at his side, his life culminating with a dashed, flawed, and unfulfilled vision of a socialist utopia. Ironically, he was buried as a hero by the Soviets outside the Kremlin Wall.<\/p>\n

For today\u2019s Democratic Socialists and those who passively support them, Reed\u2019s story provides a cautionary note. When looking to upend institutions to build what you believe will be a more just and perfect society, in the end you may not like what you find.<\/p>

Read more An admiral is now leading the U.S. Army Europe and Africa command<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Public Domain<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Reed was one of the foremost left-wing leaders during America\u2019s early 20th-century Progressive Era and had much in common with today\u2019s Democratic Socialists. Read more Cash is a fundamental freedom John Silas \u201cJack\u201d Reed was a Zohran Mamdani of his era. Both rose in left-wing American politics in their late twenties and early thirties, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1595,2],"tags":[1596],"class_list":["post-3941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-john-reed","category-politics","tag-related-topics-john-reed-bolsheviks-leftism"],"yoast_head":"\nBefore Mamdani... 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