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Author Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. Photo credit: Karen Mainenti

Reading Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s painful and moving childhood memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (Dial Press) reminded me of a time many years ago when Harry Ring explained why he never had children.

"My commitment is to the party," he said. "It would not be right."

Ring was a veteran of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and I was a young, new recruit. I never asked Ring what he would advise prospective members who already had children.

This is the situation facing the parents of author Sayrafiezadeh, as they join the SWP in the 1970s as idealistic college students with young children in tow. For them, the answer became: The party supersedes everything.

Although Sayrafiezadeh's writing style is understated, every page of Skateboards rings with his childhood anguish.

His parents have no clue who he is. His father leaves his mother when Sayrafiezadeh is just nine months old, taking Saïd’s older sister and brother with him and going on to become an SWP leader. Meanwhile, his emotionally troubled mother sacrifices herself to a party culture in which dedication is measured by how much personal life one is willing to neglect.

The SWP of Sayrafiezadeh's parents was not the distinguished party of earlier years, when being a dedicated revolutionary in the SWP was life-affirming, not life-denying. However degenerated, the SWP cannot be blamed for all that Sayrafiezadeh suffered as a child. But for the young Saïd, the self-denial experienced by his mother in the party is replicated in their lonely home.

An isolated mother and a neglected child. Sayrafiezadeh's story is a personally tragic one (although punctuated by dark humor). For a socialist reader, there's another tragedy: the thought that readers who are unfamiliar with revolutionary parties will mistake the gloomy, anti-humanistic SWP that Sayrafiezadeh describes for a typical left organization.

While his mother spends endless hours at meetings and Militant newspaper sales, she leaves young Sayrafiezadeh to fend for himself, without so much as the television to keep him company. Deprived of material goods by his downwardly mobile mother, he longs for a skateboard; his mother tells him he will get one after the revolution, when skateboards will be free.

The disconnect is relentless. Sayrafiezadeh's mother has absolutely nothing to say when she learns that he is harassed at school because of his Iranian background. When his father, long out of the picture, finally schedules time for his adult son, he substitutes the sale of a Militant subscription for conversation about his son's life.

On top of neglect, Sayrafiezadeh's childhood is a jangle of contradiction: political concepts that have no real meaning for him clash with life experiences. The police are our enemy, he's told - but what about the one who treats him to ice cream when his mother loses him in Manhattan?

The author's most gut-wrenching memory is of abuse as a young child by a party member, an apparently rare visitor to the household. When his mother complains of the abuse to a party leader, Sayrafiezadeh reports, he successfully brushes her off by saying, essentially, "Under capitalism, nobody's perfect."

A party gone haywire. Some socialists, including some former SWP members, condemn the book. They question the general truth of Sayrafiezadeh's description of the SWP during the 1970s and early 1980s, as well as specific parts of his story.

But for other firsthand witnesses of the SWP's degeneration, the characterization and the episodes ring true. I personally had to listen to one branch leader castigate comrades for spending money - any money - on personal recreation. I was "advised" that I would one day have to choose between the party and my wife.

How did the once-healthy party fall so far?

After emerging from the isolating years of the McCarthy era, the SWP held fast to a vision of the vanguard U.S. worker as a straight white man in a hard hat employed in heavy industry. Meanwhile the world, and the demographics of the working class, was changing drastically around it.

The SWP's "turn to industry," which required comrades to leave their current jobs and find jobs in mines and factories, separated the party from the full range of working-class struggles. It was accompanied by an inconsistent, opportunist, and often dismissive perspective on the developing movements of women, Blacks, and other oppressed workers.

To keep members motivated, the party fostered an artificial sense of urgency. The revolution could be right around the corner, Sayrafiezadeh's parents believed. Intoxicated by the promise of imminent revolution, it seems that for them it was only a short step to acting as though nothing else mattered - not even their child's welfare.

A party that has no room for members with children, or elderly parents, or personal friends and outside interests, will never know how to connect to real people.

Feminism: the recipe for health. Outside the scope of Sayrafiezadeh's memoir is the story of socialists who, unlike the SWP, did move and change with the times - who continued to move forward.

In 1966, one whole branch of the SWP, the Seattle branch, broke away from the SWP to form the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP). The FSP realized that a failure to recognize the importance of women's issues and women's leadership was holding back the socialist movement and every movement for liberation. It challenged the sexism of leaders in the mobilization against the Vietnam War and other movements.

The SWP, which had major influence in the anti-war movement, did not do the same - much to the movement's detriment. The party that could criticize the Communist Party during World War II for subordinating the fight against racism to the fight against fascism, as the SWP did, had turned into a different entity.

The key to a healthy socialist movement is feminism. Feminism demands a focus on the most oppressed. It sets one's political life in the context of one's humanity. It makes clear that only whole human beings can be fully in tune with the working class. Feminism makes revolution possible.