Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Poles Apart? Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Nelson Algren

2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mfs.2001.0008

1080-658X

Ian Peddie,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

"There is NO RACE in the class war," Mike Gold declared in 1934. This sobering conclusion, which Gold drew from years of experience living in the slums of New York's Lower East Side, might simply have been forgotten had it not come from the hard Left's most prominent spokesperson. Gold had seen "negro landlords shoot down negro tenants with the aid of white police." "White bosses," Gold continued, "shoot down white workers. In the New York garment strike, Jewish bosses kill and maim Jewish workers by the aid of Italian gangsters and Irish cops" ("A Word" 136). Gold's activism offered perhaps the Left's most powerful call for a broad movement that subsumed race and ethnicity in favor of a class-based activism that would appeal equally to all. That it was near-utopian in its idealism and wholly unworkable in practice was not, however, something to deter those on the Left for whom some kind of proletarian populism meant the importation of the worst Soviet ideals.