This talk by Richard Levins' daughter took place at a memorial at the Center for Marxist Education in Boston shortly after Levins' death on January 19, 2016. A video of the entire event can be found on youtube at https://youtu.be/l9seZXXQMdg.
I want to talk a little bit about his background, his early life, and the multiple generations of radicalism which had a great deal to do with the fact that mistakes, betrayals and things that didn't work never touched his revolutionary commitment. He was not somebody who became cynical when principles didn't match practice. He was somebody who had a really long historical view. This was, in part, because he came from multiple generations of revolutionaries who had struggled in different countries and in different contexts over a long period of time.
My father was a product of the Jewish radicalism of those villages and small cities in southern Ukraine. He was raised by his grandmother, Leah. She was the primary political influence of his early life. He grew up in an extended family home in Brooklyn with his grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles. Writing in the 1930s, Leah said it was her own grandmother who had, quote, "planted the revolutionary spark in her." That grandmother, whose name we don't know, was the wife of a rabbi in the city of Kremenchuk, which was the center of the Jewish Enlightenment movement in the Ukraine that advocated greater social integration for Jews, secular education, and the education of women. This woman was a better scholar than her husband and was a local wise woman. People came to her to resolve disputes, and she was really pissed off that she couldn't be a rabbi herself. She said so in temple. The response was, this is God's law. And she said, "Your God is a man," got up and walked out and took her husband, the rabbi, with her.
My great grandmother Leah grew up in a small Jewish agricultural settlement called Yasir, or Israeliska, which basically means "Jew Town." It was part of the area that the Russian Empire conquered the southern Ukraine. It became the border area with the Ottoman Empire, and so Jews and other minorities were given land there. In other parts of the empire, Jews were not allowed to own land, but they created a Jewish string of agricultural settlements on that frontier area as a buffer against the Turks, and for a while they offered draft exemption which brought German mennonites and other groups into that area as well. But by the time my great grandparents were living there, the draft exemption had disappeared. My father says that there were three basic perspectives on oppression that existed in the shtetl and that were transferred intact to the boardwalk in Brooklyn [laughter]--the orthodox people who said, "God will resolve it," the Zionists who were seeking Jewish territory to build a separate Jewish society, and then the Communists and socialists who were organizing on the basis of class solidarity. And he said that Communist organizers would come through the villages secretly handing out pamphlets that would then be passed from hand to hand within the village and discussed in people's homes, including the home of my great grandparents.
In 1904, when the war of the Russian-Japanese War broke out, my grandfather left in order to avoid being drafted. My great grandmother with her mom and siblings and my young grandmother came two years later. By 1906 that side of my family was settled in New York.
Like most Jewish immigrant women, Leah became a garment worker and very quickly a garment worker organizer. At one point she apparently organized a shop where her husband was the forman. [laughter] She was also a feminist. She worked with Margaret Sanger teaching immigrant women about birth control in the tenements. She'd go hear Emma Goldman speak and was a great admirer of Rose Schneiderman, the feminist socialist labor leader who was the one who actually first said that women needed bread and roses. She was the main source of my father's early political education. She would expose him to all kinds of thinkers. They used to listen to Bad Bishop Brown on the radio--a radical bishop, I don't know what denomination he was, but he was a radical bishop who got expelled from the church for his politics. And she would question him and elicit his own thinking about things. So she would ask him about a particular thing-- "How is this good for workers?" "How is this good for the Jews?" and she really encouraged him to develop his own thinking at a very early age.
The other main political influence on his early life was his father, whose family was also Ukrainian Jews. By the time he was in his teens he had become a leader of the Communist Youth League and was instrumental in the split with the Socialist over support for World War One, which the Socialists supported and the Communists didn't. When he turned 18, he ended up registering for the draft because the war was about to end and he didn't think it was worth going to jail over a symbolic gesture. Also, as a historian and archivist I really appreciate this, he loved new technology and had a home movie camera in the 1930s. We have footage of my father marching in the Mayday parade of 1934 the waving a sign around--"Defend the Soviet Union!" So we actually have documentation of his early life. He grew up in a home full of political discussion and active participation in the movements of the time. When his grandfather objected to his father teaching him some Torah, saying "that's what we fought against in the old country." Reuben replied that a good organizer needed to understand the beliefs of his community and that's why he was studying it.
He also shared his favorite book, Fatherland, by Carl Billinger, a German communist who'd been imprisoned in a labor camp from 1934 to 1935. It included a formative story that my father then passed on to me. Hitler had called a referendum on his foreign policy and prisoners were expected to vote. The leaders of the different left groups met in latrines at midnight to discuss what they were going to do about the situation. The Communists said if we all vote no, they're just going to throw out the ballots. If some of us vote no and some of us vote yes, it upholds the illusion that we're actually free to express our politics here. The only way we can actually communicate to the outside world is if we all vote yes. And the Nazis will probably not throw those away, and we will have communicated to the outside world who --this is right after the Communist Party was outlawed in Germany.--know who we are. It's going to be our way of sending a message. He said that some people really responded emotionally to that by saying, "how can you possibly ask us to vote yes on such a horrible thing?" The Communist group was thinking strategically about the actual impact of their actions. Although that camp didn't manage to get a unanimous vote, a number of camps did, and it was a very successful strategy. So that was some of the early teaching to him of the difference between reactive and strategic thinking--something that he then passed on to me when I was young.
Reuben died when my father was 16. I'm not sure at what age exactly my dad joined the party, but he was certainly a member by the time he started college at 17. He had left home by then, and a year later he met my mother--a Puerto Rican, born in the United States (just barely as her parents were immigrants in 1929)--at a Communist social evening. They fell for each other instantly. They were sitting around listening to classical music and talking politics. And although he does admit that her gorgeousness was a factor, he said that she asked the best critical questions, and that was true for her entire life. Their first date was a movie, but their second date was a lecture by the black feminist communist Claudia Jones on the woman question, after which my mother asked how this applied to their relationship and my father proposed. [laughter] What he actually said was, "let's be faithful for 88 years and then review the situation." [laughter] Their next date was the Peekskill Riot when white supremacists tried to stop Paul Robeson from performing.
They were married in June, of 1950, as they were both turning 20 and they went to live in Ithaca where my father was in college at Cornell. When he graduated, it was made clear to him that he was unemployable as a Communist. The Korean War had just started and they were uncertain what was going to happen when he refused to fight. So they decided to go to Puerto Rico, get to know my mother's country and have some time together before a possible separation if he was jailed. My mother talked about a famous conversation on a park bench in Ithaca where they decided, that's what they were going to do. So they ran off to Puerto Rico without really knowing anything about what they were going to encounter there, and tried to find their Communist Party contacts, which turned out to be really difficult. They would ask, where can I get a copy of the Communist party paper, and people would go "shh" and disappear. So it took them many weeks to actually find the people who were supposed to be orienting them. In the meantime, they stayed with an aunt of my mother. The next door neighbor came to my father, identified herself as a member of a secret nationalist cell, and told him that the FBI was following him around, warning each place that he applied for work not to hire him.
When they finally found their CP context, it included Jane Speed, who was a white Alabama communist. She had run the only integrated bookstore in Birmingham, had made Alabama too hot to hold her, and had ended up going to some party training thing in Pennsylvania where she met César Andreu Iglesias, who was a party leader, a journalist, and had led a successful dock strike in the '30s. Jane said, "buy land, at least you won't go hungry," and introduced them to a family friend who was farming in the mountains and helped them find the farm that they bought for $5,000. They got 90 acres. This was the beginning of my father's long relationship with the actual land of Puerto Rico.
At that time, he was still a geneticist. It was my mother's questions that turned him into an ecologist. She asked him, "but what do the flies do the rest of the time?" She continued to ask questions like that--"but what's happening when we aren't looking?" And "what about this?" and "how is that?" She was always asking larger context questions, and so he became an ecologist as a result. But in the meantime, he was a tropical farmer, conducting fruit fly experiments between trips to market to peddle vegetables and eggs.
Jane and her husband César then moved to the mountains and built a home on my parents farm. Together with a small handful of others, they were the entire CP presence in the rural mountain central mountain region in the west of Puerto Rico. My father joined forces with a local agronomist to organize a cooperative of small coffee farmers. My mother organized rural women through the 4H clubs, using the opportunity of teaching sewing and other home skills to get them talking about their lives. The Puerto Rican CP was uncritically applying Soviet ideas to Puerto Rico and assumed that rural coffee laborers and farmers were peasants aspiring to own land rather than workers seeking workers' rights. But my parents could see that what their neighbors wanted were better wages and working conditions, just like other workers, and that land ownership was a survival strategy, but not their main economic goal. Jane encouraged my young parents to push the party leadership, and they wrote a proposal for a new rural organizing strategy, which largely because the leaders didn't care about the mountains, ended up being approved. [laughter] They were very much focused on organizing sugar cane workers on the coast.
Given the repressive times, my parents got through the McCarthy period relatively unscathed. I was born in late February 1954. On March 1, Puerto Rican Nationalists attacked the US. Congress and there were massive roundups on the island, beginning with the Nationalists and then the Socialist and the Communists. Relationships between Puerto Rican communists, Socialists and Nationalists were interesting. There was a fair amount of movement between parties and overlap of the same people at different points. People belonged to different parties and, while they argued ferociously about analysis and strategy, they got each other's backs in terms of facing repression and they shared information with each other. When the roundups of Communists began in the western part of the island my father went to warn the city comrades, but his truck was stuck in reverse. He drove backwards on winding mountain roads until he could reach the nationalist-owned garage in Arecibo, where the owner lent him a car while he fixed the truck. So my dad was able to get to the city to warn people. At that point. Cesar and Jane were in San Juan. The police did show up and the went to their house and to arrest Cesar. But Cesar and his wife had had a fight the night before and he was in the little guest house in the back so they couldn't find him. For several weeks he continued writing columns for the paper while the police were looking everywhere for him and he was in his own house.
They asked my father who he was and they said, "yes, you're on the list, but you have to return to your own municipality to be arrested." My father did get arrested, but was released the same day. César and Jane spent six months in jail, and many nationalists got long sentences. At the time of his arrest, my father says they underestimated my mother and left her alone. They took a lot of books from our house and never did return the first volume of Capital, so we have volumes two and three, but not one. Also, in a spirit of inherited mischief, he filled a small address book with writings he copied out of Peking Review and out of Russian genetics books, and just put some random characters in there so that the police would spend a lot of time trying to crack the code. In my childhood, they used to come by with really bizarre questions to the neighbors, like were they sure there wasn't a secret floor under our house? When we bought a shortly radio as a present for my father, they were sure we were communicating with offshore Soviet submarines.
My parents left the Puerto Rican CP in 1956. It was over internal conflicts within Puerto Rico. During that same time, my father had had access to some labs at the university in order to conduct experiments even though he wasn't working there. Gustavo Gondelas, who was the head of the biology department and really wanted to expand the scope and the quality of the biology education, approached him and said that they were going to have a position that he was suited for. My dad said, "well, I don't have a graduate degree." He said, "well go get one. The job will be around when you come back." So my parents did leave, not because of Gondelas, but they did go to New York for my dad to get a graduate degree at Columbia and my mother finished college at the same time. So for four years we all lived in New York City. By the time he returned in 1961 the political situation had eased and it was possible for Gondelas to hire him at the University of Puerto Rico.
Times were very different than they had been earlier. The triumphant Cuban revolution was a major factor. Within weeks of that event, the Movimiento pro Independencia had been founded in Puerto Rico. And as soon as my parents got back, my father joined. The rural organizing of the '50s was no longer taking place. The movement was really centered in the cities and around the universities and urban labor unions and against the Navy bombing of Culebra and Vieques. My mother and us children lived on the farm and my father spent three days a week in the city teaching officially and unofficially.
My mother was pretty fed up by that point with the sexism of the Puerto Rican left. And, although she participated when there were meetings in our home, she really had had enough. She was not engaging in that way. While they lived in New York, she had been exposed to some young radical anthropologists at Columbia and had become interested in the potential of that field for somebody with left politics. So she was studying anthropology on her own in summer courses in the States while raising us and making art. And my father was doing the commute.
The university where he taught was the main campus of the system and it was a focus for both anti-war and pro-independence organizing. While here in the US you had one or two people at a time burning draft cards at demonstrations, in Puerto Rico hundreds of people were burning their draft cards at the same time. It was a year or two after we left that the ROTC building was burned down at the University of Puerto Rico. And, there was a growing identification with anti-colonial struggles in the rest of the world, particularly in Latin America and very strongly with the Cuban revolution. So there was a lot of travel back and forth.
The period that I know the most about is our last few years in Puerto Rico. In 1964, my parents were invited to Cuba for the first time. My father was asked to reorganize the biology department at the University of Havana which was still teaching in a very rigid 19th century style where you memorized list of species. This was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to the human revolution and to the development of Cuban science. His scientific work at UPR certainly was innovative and brought a lot of interesting perspectives such as bringing mathematical analysis to complex ecosystems in the Caribbean, changing the way science was being taught at UPR and he certainly participated in left scientific work there. But it was really in Cuba that he was best able to integrate his science and with politics to help develop a revolutionary science put into practice. I's really different to be developing that work in the colonial regime than to be doing it in a place where you can actually impact policy and see if things implemented and experimented and have an impact.
In addition to biology courses at UPR, my dad taught classes on Marxism in people's homes in the city. He came to have an immense influence on both his peers and the emerging generation of student leaders. Groups of younger activists would make a long drive up into the mountains to talk about the political situation with my father. After they left both my parents would explain to us what the conversation was about, so our own political education was very active and intentional.
In the fall of 1965 students in fact we organized a teach-in on the war, but the university administration had forbidden them to hold it on campus. So they propped a ladder against the outside of the campus fence and spoke from there while students sat on the grass. And that incident gave its name to the new journal that my father and a group of others started that year. La Escalera [Ladder in Spanish] was a high-quality independent journal of political analysis. It had covers by prominent left artists and my father's contributions included political satire. For anybody who doesn't think my father was a silly, silly man, [laughter] when some people in the movement raised suspicions that he was a US agent at the same time that the right was saying that he was a Communist spy, he wrote a confession that he worked for the CIA, the KGB and Chinese intelligence and claimed work expenses for all three that were written down in three books [laughter]--the Blue Book, the Yellow Book and the Red Book. [laughter] He also said that Ricardo and I were specially-trained Russian dwarfs and not children at all. [laughter]
In 1966 he wrote his most influential essay "From Rebel to Revolutionary." It's a work that's still deeply relevant today. In it he laid out the necessary evolution from reactive to strategic thinking, from rebellion to revolution by using a rich array of examples from the anti-colonial struggle of that time. He wrote about the need to embrace complexity to understand that figures like the then-rector of the University could be allies on some issues and opponents on others, and about the complicated relationship between reform and revolutionary organizing. It was a parting gift. That same year he was denied tenure at the university, supposedly for incompetence which was completely laughable, and lost a legal battle to keep his job.
In June of 1967 we moved to Chicago and the focus of his political work changed. The MPI had become the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) and he was a member of the Chicago chapter. He was an expert witness in the case against the US Navy in Vieques and testified at UN hearings on decolonizing Puerto Rico and taught a course on Puerto Rican history and politics for the Young Lords of Chicago. He continued to follow Puerto Rican politics closely and right up until his death he subscribed to Claridad, the weekly paper of the PSP. His commitment to his work in Cuba grew and he traveled there more often, eventually going every year. He also went to Hanoi on the science delegation in 1970, and came back to found Science for Vietnam, which did scientific research on behalf of mostly people in the North that included finding microorganisms that could break down Agent Orange in the soil and species of mud-dwelling fish that could be put into the bomb craters and prevent the mosquito borne diseases by eating the larvae. And very practical kinds of research that were then transmitted and which I, as a high school student, was hired on to help with.
Although he stopped going to Puerto Rico, he never lost his love for the land, the people and the possibility of liberation. In 2009, I visited a forest reserve and research station that scientists he had mentored and worked with for 35 years had established there. On the first page of the guestbook, they had pasted in a letter from him that talked about how Cuba was the place on earth where he felt most a Communist and most a scientist. And then he said that someday he hoped to invite them to a similar ecological research station in the liberated Puerto Rico. At his main memorial, which is coming up next week on the 6th, I will talk more about who he was as a person and tell some stories about what he was like as a parent. But I want to end by saying that for my father, being a revolutionary included infinite curiosity and kindness. He loved exploring how other people think--understanding the roots of their ideology--and thinking about why and how we make mistakes. One day when I was ten, I asked him some questions about our quote/unquote enemy and he said "there are no bad people, only bad choices." That as much as any theoretical treatise, expresses the way my father approached the world.
