Communism

Communism in the novel is not confined to a program or a set of predictions: it takes shape in the choices workers make together, the strikes they join, and the risks they accept for opposing war and capitalist power. The Russian Revolution gives this politics an international horizon, while arrests, blacklisting, and violence show how employers and the state resist it. Through Ben Compton’s movement from hopeful witness to prosecuted organizer, Communism appears as both an ideal of shared freedom and a costly practice of solidarity.

Revolution as an International Horizon

When the Russian February Revolution arrives, Ben and the Steins buy every edition of the newspapers for weeks and read the reports with intense attention. For them, the news means more than a change of government abroad: it suggests that revolutionary change could spread outward through Europe and eventually reach the United States. The excitement is communal. On the East Side and in Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the atmosphere takes on a carnival quality, while older people are moved by what the upheaval might mean for people and places from Austria to England. Ben’s own prediction ends closer to home, with the prospect of change in the United States.

That hope collides with the American entry into war. Fanya Stein has just returned from a women’s peace delegation in Washington, where the delegates were driven from the White House lawn and some were arrested. When Woodrow Wilson declares war, her distress is immediate. Ben answers by treating the war not as a common national purpose but as a conflict that might turn workers against the system sending them to fight. His commitment becomes personal when he registers for the draft as a conscientious objector and refuses to stop agitating, even as that refusal costs him employment and ends his immediate plan to study law.

The news of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd intensifies rather than resolves this tension. Ben and Helen Mauer read that the Maximalists have taken the government under the slogan All Power to the Soviets. Helen sees the moment as confirmation that workers elsewhere may recognize the war’s class interests; Ben, who had feared that he might flee to Mexico, decides instead to remain and continue the struggle. The scene links revolutionary belief to a changed practical decision: political commitment means staying to organize, not simply celebrating events at a distance.

Solidarity in the Workplace

The novel gives revolutionary language a material setting in labor disputes. During a New Jersey textile strike, Webb Cruthers takes Ben to a meeting where workers are kept from a hired hall despite there being room inside. Ben speaks from a lamppost, calling the exclusion an insult to the working class and urging the crowd to stand its ground. Police drag him away as the crowd protests. The meeting’s disruption makes the limits of formal access visible: workers have gathered to speak, but the authorities control the door and the street outside it.

The pressure continues on the picket line. Webb brings Daughter back to the mills before dawn, where women and men face police as strikers sing and call out against strikebreakers. When the crowd scatters, a woman falls; a policeman kicks her in the face, and Daughter strikes at him before she is hit and forced into a police wagon. The strike is not an abstract illustration of class conflict. It is a confrontation over who may gather, who is protected by the police, and whose body bears the cost when workers resist.

Ben’s later construction-camp strike makes the same conflict explicit through his alliance with Nick Gigli. Nick tells him that the bosses have cheated the men on their time and that the workers intend to strike. Ben says he will join them. When the construction boss orders him to hitch up a team, Ben refuses because he is on strike; the boss mocks him with an ethnic slur, threatens violence, and fires him. Company representatives then appear with revolvers and warn the laborers that anyone absent when work resumes will lose his job and may be treated as a vagrant. Ben’s decision to stand with the workers crosses the divisions the employer tries to enforce, but solidarity does not remove the employer’s power to punish them.

Organizing and Repression

The Industrial Workers of the World supplies another setting for this politics of collective action. Ben and Bram Hicks travel to Everett after reading about the shingleweavers’ strike and free-speech struggle. At the dock, armed deputies arrest arriving organizers and beat those who resist. The workers’ stated demand is the right to speak; the authorities answer with rifles, clubs, and confinement. This episode places repression not only in the courtroom but at the point where organizers attempt to assemble and address the public.

The Empire Casino meeting, organized after the Bolshevik victory, brings the conflict into a more overtly political arena. Federal agents sit in the front row taking notes, police close the doors after a few hundred people enter, and officers break up the crowd outside. Soldiers and sailors enter the gallery as the meeting begins. The chairman announces that the gathering will send greetings from America’s oppressed workers to the victorious workers of Russia. When Ben speaks, he argues that capitalist governments and profiteers are driving people into a war that serves bankers and munitions makers rather than its working-class participants. The authorities converge on the speakers, arrest Ben and others, and require men of conscription age to show their registration cards before leaving.

After his arrest, officials offer to quash the charges if Ben agrees to report for military training. He refuses to promise silence about capitalist war, and is released on substantial bail on the condition that he do no agitating until trial. The distinction between release and freedom is important: he may live outside jail, but his political activity remains constrained, and the people who financed his bail are not identified. At trial the jury finds him guilty and the judge sentences him to twenty years. Ben’s prepared speech falters at first, then gathers strength as he concludes with the final words of The Communist Manifesto, invoking a society in which each person’s freedom depends on the freedom of all. The revolutionary ideal becomes his courtroom answer to a sentence imposed by the existing order.

Communism and the Meaning of Work

The novel measures revolutionary claims against the conditions of labor rather than leaving them at the level of political slogans. In the timber industry, loggers, shingleweavers, and sawmill workers are described as a subordinated workforce within a timber empire. The Industrial Workers of the World’s vision of industrial democracy includes specific demands: public ownership of the forests, wages in money rather than company scrip, dry clothes, decent bunkhouses, wholesome food, and an eight-hour day. The list gives collective liberation a daily scale. It concerns control of resources, compensation, shelter, food, and time—not only who holds political office.

The narrative also sets those demands against the patriotic claims of timber owners, whose profits rise sharply during the war as lumber prices climb. In this contrast, patriotism does not erase the distribution of wartime gains: owners prosper while workers remain exposed to exhausting and insecure conditions. A wartime image of casual laborers handling mountains of scrap iron, under the slogan to keep soldiers fit to go home, similarly places bodies and discarded equipment inside a vast system of military work. Such scenes make the material world of production and war part of the argument over who benefits and who pays.

Communism therefore links international revolution to local disputes over wages, working conditions, speech, and the right to organize. Its promise is expressed most plainly in the manifesto’s movement from class antagonism toward shared development; its difficulties appear in the repeated gap between that promise and workers’ actual power. Strikes are broken up, organizers are beaten or arrested, and dissent is met with dismissal and imprisonment. Yet the novel repeatedly returns to people choosing collective action despite those consequences. In that recurrence, Communism is both a hoped-for transformation of society and the stubborn practice of refusing to face exploitation alone.