On Revolutionary Sobriety
In the United States, there exists a prevalent culture of drug use. Within this culture are varying subcultures. Each drug, drink, or intoxicant carries a signifier of class, race, sexuality, tradition, or segment of society. Heroin and cocaine carry class signifiers. Martinis and Budweiser differ in their own implications. The use of inebriating substances is so prevalent that there was a well-known “War on Drugs” within the latter part of the twentieth century.
This “War”, declared by the ruling class that was at the time largely White, was still embraced by many non-White facets of American society. Black and Brown Leaders called for harsh legal crackdowns on substances, due to the devastating effects drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin caused on urban neighborhoods nationwide. This drug use caused an intergenerational malaise across these communities. As we know, Presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton that positioned themselves as tough on crime and drugs carried out these policies far less out of empathy, and moreso for opportunist means of dividing and conquering marginalized and working-class Americans. This War on Drugs could be far more aptly described as one of many historical wars on the working-class, in which lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, especially those who are Black and Brown, were locked up on minimum sentencing and zero-tolerance laws.
While former segregationist and other racist politicians knew what they were doing in targeting Black and Brown young men, funneling them into the bloated prison system for decades of their lives, many people that supported it did not. As former figures of the Nixon administration admitted the War on Drugs was a means to crack down on Left-Wing organizers and Black people, even many Black leaders such as Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson supported the measures at the time, unaware of the societal aftershocks.
Leaders within the Black community dug their heels into enabling a criminal justice system that is racist to its core, but not because they sought out the mass imprisonment of Black and Brown youth in America. Rather, because they saw firsthand the devastation that drugs and other substances, flooded into urban communities by the FBI and CIA, and were understandably desperate to see its end at any cost.
Trapped in a vicious cycle of ignorance, poverty, disease, sickness and death, and there seems no way out. There seems to be no way of escape. And because there seems to be no hope, no way out, no means of escape, we turn to wine, we turn to whiskey, heroin, morphine, cocaine, opium, poison, nothing but poison.”
— Malcolm X
Conversely, many revolutionary organizations within the Black and Brown communities enforced some form or another of sobriety. Instead of allowing a racist and bourgeois state such as the United States to address the issue of addiction, they relied on their own institutions to seek discipline in combatting these epidemics. Naturally within the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad enforced traditional Sharia, which required a refusal to use alcohol, illicit drugs, and tobacco. Within the first Rainbow Coalition, groups such as the Young Lords and the Black Panthers set up clinics that would help treat those, among other ailments, suffering from addiction. Shirley Williams of the Black Panthers published The Black Child’s Pledge in 1968, which among other things, required Black youth to pledge the following:
“I will keep myself physically fit, building a strong body free from drugs and other substances which weaken me and make me less capable of protecting myself, my family and my Black brothers and sisters.”
However, while they promoted such temperance within the ranks of their youth, this was not the case within even many leaders of the BPP. In retrospect, we see many practical errors through the Panthers’ leniency on the topic of intoxication. While they considered drug and alcohol addiction “chemical warfare” enacted on behalf of the FBI to impair working people, and provided the aforementioned clinics within communities they were organizing, they fell prey to the same Fed-fueled narcotization within their ranks. Trumped-up drug-related charges were leveled on individual Panthers. Their prolific and ingenious leader Huey P. Newton tragically descended into cocaine addiction and was murdered by a crack dealer in 1989. Eldridge Cleaver met a similar fate.
A Path Forward
Now, while many socialists may see an appeal to sobriety as lame or nanny-like, some socialists argue otherwise. Graham Harrington of the Communist Party of Ireland, remarks the following on the subject within the Party’s newspaper:
The use of drugs, including alcohol, only pacifies resistance to capitalism. It is a barrier to working-class struggle and the strengthening of workers’ power. It is a victory for individualism in its worst form. Rather than relying on drugs to allow our people to scrape a living under capitalism, revolutionaries should instead be working to smash the system and in so doing break the source of people’s dependence on drugs.
An individualized act of drinking a bit too much or using illicit drugs may seem harmless, and those like yours truly giving people grief about it may seem to be overpolicing individual behavior. Yet if socialists are to understand and respond to the conditions of the working-class, they must understand the conditions relating to the plague of addiction.
Around 6 million American youths aged between 12–25 suffer from substance abuse. Concerningly, fatal drug abuse overdoses have increased to around 20% during the COVID pandemic within the United States, and we are witnessing a 54% increase in sales of alcohol during the pandemic. Both of these phenomena are already on top of a national opioid epidemic in itself. Ask virtually any young working-class American, and they will tell you of at least one school colleague that has overdosed on opioids. This crisis, at times characterized as diseases of despair, is entirely normalized, to the point where the opiate of the masses have become opiates themselves. In the typical US fashion, at least some of the blame lay on oligarchs. In this instance, the Sackler family, whose drug enterprise Purdue Pharma pushed the overprescription of oxycontin, leading to immense increases in opioid addiction among the American working class. By the late 2000’s emergency room visits regarding opioid overdoses ballooned by 98 percent. Through this example, we know that the bourgeoisie profits off of the death of our class brothers and sisters on a daily basis.
Knowing this, what is the role of the American Socialist with regard to illicit and intoxicating substances? In the United States, there is at times a rebellious, libertine, and sophomoric approach to organizing. As we are alienated from all our forms of labor, we seek means to relate to others, and in social spaces, many require the use of alcohol or illicit drugs. Simultaneously, because socialism has been regarded as an isolated political ideology for the past half century in America, many are attracted to it in a countercultural sense. They occupy the space in order to validate their neurodivergences, their vices, or both. We see this within many metropolitan chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America. Occupied by many upper-middle class intellectuals, they use Marxism as a premise for hosting loft parties or at dive bars in which they get intoxicated to their delight.
Set aside the likelihood they are not engaging with Marxism for the benefit of the working-class in the first place, what good does this serve their own interests? Austrian social democrat illustrates how this decadent behavior presents a destructive path:
“I don’t consider the fight against alcoholism necessary because it harms the health of the individual, but because it harms the workers’ movement by demoralizing, corrupting, and bourgeoisifying many good workers who could be great representatives of the workers’ movement otherwise. Anyone has the right to harm his own health if he considers the indulgence in certain pleasures worth it; but nobody has the right to encourage indulging in pleasures that hamper the development of the workers’ movement by rendering thousands of good comrades incapable of doing their duty”
-Otto Bauer
If something presents harmful capabilities to the working-class or even the organization of the working-class, we should cast it into the flames. Our aim for a socialist future is difficult enough as it stands, and to jeopardize it further by placing organizing liable to personal vices only further complicates our conditions. With this in mind, we must also recognize all the lives of working people lost due to the efforts of the Sacklers and the the FBI. The bourgeoisie loves seeing us imbibing rather than organizing! As Marxists, let’s fight for a world in which our happiness, our labor, and our lives in their entireties are fulfilled without substances.
Our natural God-given strengths are eroded through the commodification of labor, and to maintain any form of self-discipline or sobriety is resistance to capital in and of itself. Let us not only seek a future in which we mustn't numb our reality through substances but let us practice this discipline in the effort to maintain the workers' movement strength in the present day. It is up to the workers and their movement to establish an actual people’s war on drug use. Of course, not one that punishes working people for coping with the material conditions they dread, but one that builds up productive forces and liberates workers from these chains of exploitation and leads to addiction. One that disciplines the self to be (at the least) responsible and tempered in their use of alcohol, and abstain from illicit drug use entirely. Fight for a sober, socialist future.
