Peter Frase

Sent on a whim while I was killing some time in Troy, New York, [this](https://twitter.com/pefrase/status/807339363155791872) appears to be my most popular tweet of all time. (Not that there's much tough competition.) Explaining a tweet seems sort of like explaining a joke, but I'm going to make a run at it anyway.

"Class war trumps hate."

The reference, of course, is to those squishy liberal "Love Trumps Hate" bumper stickers. As though warm feelings are enough to combat the bigotry of the Right.

As for my alternative slogan, maybe part of its appeal was its ambiguity. In one reading, I'm saying that the way we respond to the haters is not by embracing them, but by fighting them in the streets. And when it comes to hipster fascists like [Richard Spencer](https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html) and his ilk, I couldn't agree more. We should all admire anti-fascist street fighters like [this guy](http://www.spunk.org/texts/antifasc/sp000832.html), my favorite of Keith Ellison's clients from his days as a leftist lawyer in the Twin Cities. (And that's a story I hope I can tell at greater length sometime in the future.)

But that wasn't actually what I was thinking about when I wrote that tweet. What I *was* thinking about was the picket line I had just visited with Jon Flanders, near Troy in upstate New York. Jon is a veteran socialist, a veteran unionist (former Machinist local president), and the mastermind of the wonderful [James Connolly Forum](https://jamesconnollyforum.wordpress.com/), a non-sectarian lecture series that I visted for a discussion of my book.

Jon took me to see the workers who have been on strike at [Momentive](http://labornotes.org/blogs/2016/11/thanksgiving-picket-lines-momentive), a chemical manufacturer and former GE subsidiary where the workers have suffered a decade of brutalization from the company's private equity owners. "Picket line" isn't even the right word; the vast Momentive complex stretches on for perhaps a half mile, and each entrance is staffed by a small crew of workers, with a tent for shelter and a large pile of broken-up pallets to be burned for warmth.

They were a range of ages, but mostly men, mostly white. Some of them, Jon told, me, would have voted for Trump: "Drain the Swamp", he said, was a sign he had seen from some younger strikers. But out here, they were just union brothers and sisters, so I said to them what I would say to anyone fighting a similar battle: *solidarity with your struggle*, the verbal equivalent of the stream of supportive honks from the passing truck drivers. The little spark of joy I noticed whenever I said that was heartwarming, but also a depressing indicator of just how little solidarity these workers have received.

Which brings me to the inspiration for that tweet. Jon told me a story about a particular form of strike support that he had helped facilitate. The Capital District Coalition Coalition Against Islamophobia organized a visit to the strikers by three women from the local Islamic Center. They brought food, and introduced themselves to the workers on the picket. Jon himself was apprehensive beforehand, concerned about potential bigotry and Islamophobia coming from the strikers.

In the end though, the strikers were grateful for the support--they know they are in a fight for their lives, and they know better than to refuse an ally. And their visitors learned something about a labor struggle that had been obscure to them. "I can't honestly say that I knew much about strikes or have ever visited a picket line, so I learned a lot today", one of them wrote on Facebook. "I'm pretty sure most of the strikers had never met a Muslim before but they all thanked us profusely for taking the time to give them some support."

It's a small thing, this one little act. But small acts like that are the elements of any sustainable reconstruction of the Left, one that is "intersectional" in practice, not just in rhetoric. So that was what I was thinking when I wrote that tweet, just after getting my picture taken with the statue of Irish revolutionary legend and onetime Troy resident [James Connolly](https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/): class struggle trumps hate. That is, a solidarity forged in struggle can overcome the abstract indoctrinations of race hatred. Which is not to say that the realities of imperialism or white supremacy can simply be ignored or left in the past. Merely that the overcoming of those systems begins where people are thrown together in common struggle.