The Internationale

The Internationale is a revolutionary anthem whose appearance in a conversation between Antonio Ulises Jones and Oscar Fate turns political history into a personal act of remembrance. Jones sings it after discussing the collapse of socialist regimes, then sets the song against the dwindling history of Brooklyn’s Communist cells and his own decision to remain active when he is the last member.

The song in Jones’s interview

During Fate’s first visit, Jones discusses Stalin, Lenin, and Marx, distinguishing his condemnation of the first two from his admiration for Marx. When Fate asks about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialist regimes, Jones says he had predicted the change ten years earlier. He then opens the window and sings the opening lines of The Internationale in a deep voice, catching Fate by surprise.

After singing, Jones asks whether the anthem sounds as though it was made especially for Black people. Fate admits that he had never considered it that way. The exchange places the song in a particular interpretive frame: Jones does not present it merely as a relic of European revolutionary politics, but as a song whose language of the oppressed can speak to Black experience as well.

A movement reduced to a cell

Jones follows the performance with an account of Communist life in Brooklyn. He recalls more than a thousand Communists during World War II, a rise to thirteen hundred after the war, and a fall to about seven hundred at the beginning of McCarthyism. By the time that period ended, he says, scarcely two hundred remained. The numbers continue to contract: half as many in the 1960s, no more than thirty scattered across five cells in the 1970s, and ten by the end of that decade.

By the early 1980s, only four were left. Two died of cancer, and another disappeared without explanation; Jones speculates that the absent comrade may have gone on a trip and died along the way, or perhaps moved to Florida to live with a daughter. By 1987, Jones says, he was the sole remaining Communist in Brooklyn. The song’s collective call thus stands beside a history of political organization shrinking almost to a single person.

Persistence and the song’s significance

When Fate asks why he remains, Jones hesitates, considers his answer, and looks Fate in the eye: “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” The statement gives the song’s performance its consequence. The Internationale evokes a movement larger than any one singer, while Jones’s answer locates its continuation in the practical obligation of maintaining even a nearly empty organization.

The episode holds historical defeat and individual persistence together without claiming that one cancels the other. Jones’s song is followed not by a promise of renewed numbers or imminent victory, but by an account of losses and a modest explanation for staying. Its force in the interview lies in that contrast: the anthem retains a collective horizon even as its local community has dwindled to one member.