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File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Ben Tracy, Climate Central

If you feel like your electricity bill just keeps climbing, you aren’t imagining it. Since 2020, U.S. residential energy prices have surged by about 30%, making power the largest household energy expense behind gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But for residents like Alex Curtis, the days of feeling powerless against rising costs are coming to an end. Curtis is waging a war on his electric bill, and his new weapon of choice is a lightweight, thin-film solar panel.

“Oh, it’s super light too,” Curtis remarked as he unboxed the kit on the balcony of his condo in Sunnyvale, California. It weighs just about 10 pounds. 

The ‘plug-and-play’ revolution Unlike traditional rooftop solar, which requires thousands of dollars in upfront costs, specialized mounting hardware, and professional electricians, this system is designed for the everyday consumer. It’s a $400 kit from Bright Saver, a non-profit advocating for “plug-and-play” solar that works for renters and homeowners alike.

The setup is deceptively simple: you hang the panel on a balcony or prop it up in a backyard and plug it directly into a standard wall outlet.

“I did some rough math and this might save me like $30 to $50 a month,” Curtis said.

The magic happens behind the scenes. Once plugged in, a small inverter syncs the solar energy with the home’s existing electrical infrastructure. It took about 15 minutes to get it all set up. Bright Saver’s Rupert Mayer then pointed to a light on the inverter: “Ah, here it is, it’s blue.”

“This is it. Easy,” Curtis replied. Within minutes, he was generating his own clean energy. He estimates it will be enough to power an appliance like his refrigerator. 

Small panels, big impact

Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, believes this technology is key to democratizing the green energy transition. It not only cuts an individual’s planet-warming pollution but also their electric bill. 

“Clean energy actually is the cheapest form of energy around,” Stryker said, “and we the consumers should be benefiting from that.”

While these panels won’t take a home entirely off the grid, Stryker says the units can trim monthly costs by 10% to 25% depending on how many panels a user installs. More savings can be had if the panels are paired with batteries that can store excess solar energy. 

“They cover a part of your energy bill and then you do need to draw the rest from the grid as you do now,” Stryker explained. 

The “Balkonkraftwerk” trend

While the technology is just gaining a foothold in the U.S., it is already a cultural phenomenon in Europe. In Germany, these systems are so common they have a specific name: Balkonkraftwerk, or “balcony power plant.”

An estimated 4 million balcony solar units are currently installed in Germany. The U.S., however, has been slower to adopt the tech, largely due to a patchwork of utility regulations and bureaucratic red tape. Utilities in some states have pushed back against the use of these systems citing potential hazards to the safety of the grid and line workers. 

“And that is patently ridiculous for these little systems,” Stryker said. “Those laws were intended for rooftop systems 5 to 20 times as large.”

A changing legal landscape

The tide is quickly turning. In 2025, Utah became the first state to officially authorize plug-in solar. Overall, 34 states and Washington, D.C., have introduced legislation to allow for use of the technology. It has passed in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Virginia. 

For advocates like Stryker, it’s a matter of personal liberty: “It’s kind of like ‘don’t tell me what to do in my own backyard and on my own balcony.’”

As for Alex Curtis, he knows his Sunnyvale neighbors might have questions when they see the sleek panel hanging from his railing, but he’s focused on his newfound taste of energy independence. 

“I think that’s what gets me excited,” Curtis said. “Being able to power my own stuff and be self- sufficient like in baby steps which is pretty cool.”

Climate Central is an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives. It is a policy-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

The scales fall from our eyes Channel Comment brendan 17th June 2026 Teaser Media

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Maryland county allows dense development over fire training area

By Pat Elder
June 16, 2026

This map shows PFAS contamination in surface waters downstream of the former Montgomery County Public Safety Training Academy in Rockville, Maryland, where firefighting foams containing PFAS were historically used during training exercises. The striped corridor marks the Maryland water-contact advisory area along Muddy Branch Creek, while sampling locations MB8 and MB9 document contamination extending through a residential watershed near the former training grounds.

NBC4 Washington recently reported that PFAS contamination has been discovered in a creek and pond system near the former Montgomery County Public Safety Training Academy in Rockville. The report included a map showing contaminated surface waters, sampling locations, and a water-contact advisory area. The contamination has been traced to historical firefighting activities at the former academy, where firefighting foams containing PFAS were used during training exercises for decades.

Maryland maintains a statewide firefighter training network through the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute (MFRI), which operates six regional training centers serving every part of the state. In addition to these state-supported facilities, many counties operate their own fire academies and public safety training centers, including facilities in Montgomery, Carroll, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Prince George's, and Washington counties. These facilities have trained generations of firefighters and emergency responders, often using live-fire exercises and, historically, firefighting foams containing PFAS.

Dozens of firefighter training grounds, burn pits, foam-training areas, airport fire-training facilities, and military fire-training sites have operated throughout Maryland over the last fifty years. These facilities routinely discharged aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), the same PFAS-laden foam responsible for widespread contamination at military bases throughout the state.

Military Poisons has documented PFAS contamination at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Joint Base Andrews, Fort Meade, Fort Detrick, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Webster Field, the Naval Research Laboratory Chesapeake Bay Detachment, Forest Glen Annex, and several former military facilities throughout Maryland. At the same time, the organization has repeatedly warned that firefighter training academies, airports, and other non-military facilities have also created contamination patterns similar to those found on military bases.

The Maryland Department of the Environment has been reluctant to investigate, publicize, regulate, or clean up any of this. Maryland is behind many states in this regard.

Mongomery County planning documents provide disturbing details.

The former Montgomery County Public Safety Training Academy property consisted of approximately 44.84 acres at 9710 Great Seneca Highway in Rockville, Montgomery County, approved the disposition of essentially the entire site for private redevelopment as "The Elms at PSTA," (Public Safety Training Academy) a project containing roughly 630 residential units plus retail and open space. The academy closed in 2016, and the county subsequently sold or agreed to sell the property to the developer.

Montgomery County still owns land immediately adjacent to the former academy. Planning documents identify a 6.25-acre county-owned parcel south of the redevelopment site, currently occupied by the County Innovation Incubator and the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. The county also retained and received additional land associated with a potential future school site (Parcel V), which planning documents describe as approximately 6.5 acres.

‍Hundreds of homes are being built on property that served as Montgomery County's primary police and firefighter training facility for roughly forty years. The question that now demands an answer is whether Montgomery County or MDE investigated the property for PFAS contamination associated with historical firefighting activities before approving the redevelopment.

Given the well-established association between firefighter training facilities and PFAS contamination, it is difficult to understand how a comprehensive PFAS investigation was not publicly discussed before the site was approved for redevelopment. Firefighter training centers have been recognized nationwide as major PFAS source areas for years.

The planning documents note that a stream and approximately 3.35 acres of stream buffer run through the eastern portion of the former academy property and drain toward Muddy Branch.

The Maryland Department of the Environment recommends that all private well owners, regardless of location, have their well water tested at least once a year to ensure that their water is safe to drink and to include PFAS in that testing. The agency ought to be identifying well owners much further away and it ought to be providing these services. They dropped the ball.

‍It is important that the public be provided with the analytical results for each PFAS compound detected in the creek, pond, groundwater, and air. This is precisely the type of information the Maryland Department of the Environment has been hesitant to release at other severely contaminated PFAS sites around the state.

Although most PFAS compounds are not volatile, several compounds, especially PFOS, which is likely to dominate the chemical signature here, can attach to soil particles and become airborne. The carcinogens saturate the banks of the creek. When the water recedes, the toxins dry in the sun and are lifted by the wind into our lungs and into our homes as dust. The dust is a major PFAS pathway to small children. People living nearby should have their houses tested and they should change their air conditioner filters regularly. Sweeping and vacuuming ought to be traded for wet-mopping.

Since 2019, I have been writing about Maryland’s PFAS contamination associated with firefighter training activities. In 2021, when elevated PFAS levels were discovered in drinking water wells serving Westminster and Hampstead, I publicly questioned whether the Carroll County Public Fire Training Center was contributing to the contamination. At the time, I argued that Maryland should move beyond testing drinking water wells and begin identifying actual contamination sources through groundwater and surface-water investigations. My concern was that firefighter training facilities had used PFAS-containing foams for decades and were being overlooked as potential contributors to contamination. I sent all of my work to the Maryland Department of the Environment. They know the score.‍

The analytical data collected from Muddy Branch are essential for a host of reasons, but mostly because PFAS compounds can accumulate in fish. The EPA has reported that PFOS may bioaccumulate in fish up to 4,000 times the amount in the water. Streams and retention ponds near firefighter training facilities have been documented with PFOS concentrations in the hundreds and thousands of parts per trillion. Under such conditions, fish may contain PFAS concentrations in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of parts per trillion. One fish outside a fire training area in Michigan had 10 million parts per trillion in its filet.

‍The county health department must strive to identify those who have consumed fish from these waters. The county should also offer blood testing to individuals who may have been exposed to PFAS through consumption of the fish. The state will not do it.‍ ‍

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has established guidance for PFAS blood levels and recommends clinical follow-up for individuals with more than 2 parts per billion of seven different PFAS compounds. Residents should not be forced to pay out of pocket to determine whether they have been exposed to chemicals released from a government-operated facility. But, government agencies may balk at the idea, so If people living in these nice new homes ought to know a PFAS skin prick test is available for $279 from Empower DX.‍ ‍

We must demand complete transparency. The state and the county should release the full analytical results for every PFAS compound detected at each sampling location, including surface water, groundwater, sediment, fish tissue, and any other environmental samples collected during the investigation. The public cannot adequately assess the risks posed by this contamination without access to the underlying data.

The contamination discovered near the former Montgomery County Public Safety Training Academy is not an isolated incident. It is the predictable consequence of decades of PFAS use at firefighter training facilities throughout Maryland. The question is no longer whether these facilities contaminated groundwater, streams, ponds, fish, and nearby communities. The question is how many sites remain uninvestigated, how many people have been exposed, and why state regulators failed to act sooner despite years of warnings.‍‍ ‍

——————————

I’ve written 80 articles on PFAS contamination emanating from fire training areas in Maryland. Here are two:

Bad News for Westminster (MD) and the Surrounding Region – February 2, 2021

Here, I identified the Carroll County Public Fire Training Center as a potential PFAS source and asked, "Where's the PFAS coming from in Westminster?"

https://patelder.weebly.com/westminster-md--pfas.html?utm_source=

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Small Naval Facility in Southern Maryland Causes Massive PFAS Contamination - April 15, 2021

This article connected extremely high PFAS concentrations to a naval fire station and historical firefighting foam use.

https://www.militarypoisons.org/latest-news/small-naval-facility-in-southern-maryland-causes-massive-pfas-contamination?utm_source=‍ ‍

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Abolition, as Angela Davis reminds us, is based on the radical notion that institutions like the police, courts, and prisons are not isolated problems that might be fixed by reforming away their most harmful and violent elements. They are constitutive of capitalism, so can only be undone through a complete transformation of society. It is only through such a process of revolutionary change that real alternatives to punitive and carceral forms of justice might be created. In the process of political struggle different ways of relating to each other begin to develop, new social forms of organization are produced, and qualitatively different alternative futures begin to emerge as material possibilities. Abolitionism, in this sense, is a negative resistance to the oppressive and exploitative relations of the present as well as a positive force capable of expanding the horizon of what a future society might look like.

Revolutionary Forgiveness: Beyond Moralism, Toward Liberation by D. K. Renton begins from the abolitionist position that recognizes that “if every intimate harm is to be met with the incarceration of the perpetrator, then a series of abuses will follow” (1). Of course, an abolitionist stance does not mean ignoring immediate social harms both within left-wing movements and in society more broadly. Revolutionary Forgiveness insists that leftists must begin to create meaningful alternatives to the carceral system and that one possibility is to be found in revolutionary forgiveness. More than a moral commitment to magnanimity, revolutionary forgiveness for Renton is a political and ethical practice in which perpetrators of social wrongs are only forgiven once the social relations that allowed those harms to occur have been (or are in the process of being) transformed. Only then will the victims have gained the social power necessary to actively choose to forgive the offenders, allowing them both to reintegrate fully into society.

Connecting forgiveness with social justice goes beyond individual accountability. However, as Renton emphasizes, the perpetrator taking responsibility for the harm they have caused is an integral part of revolutionary forgiveness. Justice at the individual level is directly tied to revolutionary transformation, the complete reorganization of all social relations, and the creation of new revolutionary institutions. Importantly, though, Renton is not content to wait until after the revolution for the process of forgiveness to begin or new ways of dealing with harm to develop. Instead, he insists that alternative and truly democratic ways of dealing with social injustice can – and must – be developed in the present, in concert with resistance against capitalist exploitation and oppression. Drawing from the writings of György Lukács, Renton argues that “the means chosen to achieve socialism [must be] indivisible from the ends” (64).

No forgiveness without justice

Stressing the necessary relationship between means and ends need not reduce politics to an attempt to create a post-revolutionary future in the present. At its worst, prefigurative politics places change at the individual level above social transformation. But prefiguration does not mean living exactly as we would like to in a post-revolutionary situation while ignoring the social relations of the present. Instead, Renton rethinks prefigurative politics through a revolutionary lens by emphasizing that through the process of struggling against present conditions, people begin to create new ways of relating to each other and the world. Revolutionary transformation occurs through what Alan Sears, in his recent book Eros and Alienation, calls concrete utopian practices. By engaging in political movements, people begin to become aware of their own collective power and, in the process, start to create new forms of democratic organization, new forms of revolutionary infrastructure, and new political institutions.

As Renton reminds us, Marx saw political experimentation with new ways of organizing society’s life activity as an essential part of the revolutionary process. Critical of the utopian socialists of his time who tried to create an ideal society based on a preconceived vision of the future, Marx states in The Civil War in France that the working class will have to “work out their own emancipation” for themselves, a project which requires them “to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes, transforming circumstances and men.” Revolution, for Renton as for Marx, is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing and non-linear process which includes political experimentation, defeats, and discovering new practices along the way.

Revolutionary forgiveness represents a distinct approach, one which Renton clearly differentiates from other theories of forgiveness, including those of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt. Derrida’s notion of forgiveness is based on the moral claim that forgiveness is the right thing to do regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. Such an unconditional view of forgiveness is, as Renton describes it, a “wager on the possibility of the offender’s redemption, prior to the moment when the perpetrator has changed heart” (27). While revolutionary forgiveness is also a wager in the sense that it is part of a broader revolutionary process, the outcome of which cannot be certain, Derrida’s wager is completely disconnected from justice as it does not depend on either a commitment to individual change by the perpetrator or broader social transformation. Renton insists that the decision to forgive must rest with the victims, including the ability to refuse forgiveness.

As a case in point, the book examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, an attempt to respond to the great social harm of apartheid with accountability and forgiveness. Those involved in the crimes of the apartheid state met with victims and listened to them describe the harm they endured. The Commission implored perpetrators to come forward and victims to begin to forgive. All of this occurred as a part of a process of forming a post-apartheid state grounded in multi-racial democracy. However, as Renton argues, post-apartheid South Africa left racial and class inequality largely in place: “It is a story of what happens when you tell a people to forgive, but without granting them in return the social revolution whose victory would dull the acrid taste of seeing culprits go free” (40). While the post-apartheid state has granted formal equality, South Africa remains a class society and so continues to be segregated along class and racial lines.

As Massimiliano Tomba demonstrates in Insurgent Universality, a truly democratic society cannot emerge from formal rights granted from above by a nation-state, as this will always exclude the most marginal elements of society. Instead, a politics of universality must be directed by self-organized activity and struggle from below. Renton shows that this process was blocked by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where the state prompted victims to forgive their oppressors without granting them the true social equality needed for the people to dictate their own terms. Of course, there is no guarantee that former oppressors will not betray their promises to change and attempt to retake their positions in power if given the chance. But unlike Derrida’s unconditional moral claim, Renton insists that forgiveness can only truly occur as part of a broader process of social transformation, where the victims hold the social power necessary to ensure reconciliation actually takes place.

Unlike Derrida’s, Arendt’s notion of forgiveness centers the experiences of victims by arguing that it is only through forgiveness that a victim of harm is able to move beyond their feelings of shame, guilt, anger and resentment. By forgiving the perpetrator, the victim transfers the burden of the past from themselves to the offender, allowing themselves to begin to fully heal while also permitting the perpetrator to reintegrate into society. However, like Derrida’s, Arendt’s view of forgiveness does not require any substantial transformation, either socially or on the part of the offender. As Renton states, “Forgiveness in Arendt’s terms does not require that an offender make reparation, not even that the wrongdoer restore the victim at least to the nearest available approximation of their lives before the pattern of social harm began” (242).

Once again, forgiveness is disconnected from justice. This lack of justice is unacceptable on an individual level as Renton shows in the case of Eleanor Marx’s abuse at the hands of socialist Edward Aveling. Subject to a pattern of emotional abuse, Eleanor Marx continually forgave Aveling but remained committed to their relationship. But her forgiveness did not allow her to move on from the past. Instead, she remained trapped in a situation of unequal power and abuse. On March 31, 1898, Eleanor Marx committed suicide by cyanide. According to all accounts by biographers of Marx, Aveling “was the effective but not the immediate cause of her death.” While Aveling, by most accounts, did not murder Marx (though, as Renton shows, the biography of Aveling written by Deborah Levin states that Aveling murdered Marx), he was culpable in her suicide.

Eleanor Marx was never able to achieve justice. Her death was a result of a pattern of abusive behavior that she was not able to escape from. Her attempts to forgive Aveling did not protect her. Separated from justice, forgiveness is not possible. Despite Marx’s efforts to forgive Aveling, a meaningful process of forgiveness could not have occurred unless she removed herself from the abusive relationship and began to heal. That process never happened.

The lack of justice is even more unsupportable at the social level. For example, demanding that Palestinians forgive those who have enacted genocidal violence without any reparations or justice “would be a cruel joke” (245). As Renton argues, the struggle for a free Palestine requires going beyond the reparations given to the victims of South African Apartheid. Palestinian liberation will only be fully achieved through a complete transformation of the capitalist system that underpins settler colonialism and imperialism today. Moving on from the past can only occur once revolutionary justice has been achieved.

The need to forgive

It is for this reason that Renton stresses that “the sequence is crucial: I want the oppressed to be compassionate after they have destroyed the citadels of the rich and removed those who occupy them” (2). However, at other moments Renton insists that forgiveness can (and, indeed, must) be a part of the process of social change. There is an undeniable tension here, between the need for revolution to occur prior to forgiveness and the notion that forgiveness must be a part of social transformation. Rather than eliding this tension, Renton defines revolutionary forgiveness as a process that must be combined with social struggle if it is to be at all. But it can also be an integral part of the process of social change, transforming relationships between people in a way that strengthens our movements by beginning to mend the harm done by violent and oppressive behaviour internal to our communities.

He draws on the example of Prisoners Against Rape (PAR), a Black collective composed of prisoners convicted of rape at Lorton Reformatory in Virginia in the late 1970s to early 1980s, to demonstrate the possibility that forgiveness can occur in the present, if it is a part of our political practice. Members of PAR contacted the DC Rape Crisis Center as part of an effort to change both themselves and society. They read feminist and anti-racist theory, wrote letters for feminist newsletters in which they defined rape as a systemic form of violence emerging from unequal power relations between men and women, and called for non-carceral forms of dealing with acts of violence. Their commitment to meaningful change is what convinced feminist activists to take them seriously and begin to forgive them. But this process of forgiveness was only possible because society as a whole was beginning to change. Feminist struggles had begun to win meaningful victories, such as the recognition of marital rape beginning in 1978. As Renton states, “In that context, women activists could afford to be more generous – because they could imagine a world after rape” (202).

Rather than an act that occurs only after the revolution, forgiveness represents an essential component of our movements. This must be the case because individual and social change are not mutually exclusive processes. As Hannah Proctor argues in Burnout, finding new and non-carceral ways of dealing with oppressive behavior in leftist movements cannot wait. Pushing individual and collective change off to a post-revolutionary future allows for the reproduction of oppressive behavior in left-wing spaces. But while Proctor insists that we confront oppressive relations in our organizing, she maintains that we must do so in a way that recognizes the contradictions internal to social movements attempting to overcome oppression and exploitation while still bound up in the social relations of capitalism.

While we should all strive to live up to the political and ethical ideals we hold, it is important to recognize that individual change is often slow, imperfect, contradictory, and non-linear. Proctor asks: “Can political movements make space for psychic ambivalence, inconsistency and contradiction rather than viewing them as antithetical to their goals?” (102). Instead of responding to any violent or oppressive behavior with ostracization or incarceration, Renton, like Proctor, allows for the possibility of redemption as part of a project of achieving justice. The refusal to forgive despite meaningful commitment to change on the part of the perpetrator results in unjust outcomes for all. Indeed, it reproduces the moralism of the carceral state, which views all acts of crime as punishable and labels those who commit crimes as deviant criminals, regardless of the historical, economic, or political circumstances which led them to those actions.

Of course, this does not mean that instances of abuse should be ignored or minimized in order to avoid fragmenting an already relatively weak Left. Renton himself has been a consistent critic of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for their cover up of rape in the party and the role of party leadership in attempting to minimize the effects of the ensuing organizational crisis. While he does not interrogate the specifics of the SWP in detail here (Comrade Delta, Renton’s account of the events is forthcoming in September 2026), Renton shares an interaction with a party member who supported the leadership against the oppositional movement – including Renton – demanding accountability. This party member approached Renton, suggesting that the offender be removed from his role in the leadership of the party. However, he would remain a member of the party, paid by party-led campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, Renton was unconvinced that this would be a way forward, either for the victims or for the party. But what would have allowed for a process of forgiveness to occur? Renton does not specify exactly, but proposes that a statement of guilt from the perpetrator and an admission by the party for its role in the cover up, accompanied by meaningful attempts by the perpetrator to mend the harm done to the victims and by the party to ensure that similar incidents in the future would be handled in a way that prioritized the interests of the victims, would perhaps have allowed for a process of forgiveness to occur. However, without such attempts to achieve a just outcome for the victim, Renton insists that forgiveness could never occur: “When it comes to rape, just as with any other violent crime of a similar seriousness, the instinct to choose a punishment acceptable to an unrepentant perpetrator is both wrong and offensive” (11).

Renton’s notion of revolutionary forgiveness is not an easy thing to achieve. But a process of healing and forgiveness will be necessary in order to move forward with our vision for a different future. Rather than viewing the past as a static and finished entity, Proctor argues that our relationship to our history shapes how we will act in the future. Instead of using forgiveness as a way to forget the past as Arendt would have us do, revolutionary forgiveness – understood as part of a broader movement for radical social transformation – allows for the redemption of the past. By remaining committed to a vision of a different future, past actions which caused harm or trauma might be forgiven, political mistakes might be overcome, and wrongs might be righted. Through the process of revolution both the past and the future are made to be qualitatively different.

The redemption of the Left

The redemption of the past will occur, as Daniel Bensaïd argues in Marx for our Times, through the realization of the future our ancestors struggled for. But revolutionary forgiveness redeems our past in another way. As Renton points out, the history of communism is stained with the blood of the Stalinist purges in Russia, the repression, expulsion, and murder of anti-Stalinist dissidents. But instead of turning away from revolutionary politics, Renton insists on a renewed commitment to the possibility of socialism from below, which would realize the emancipatory promise contained in the Russian Revolution. Of course, there is no guarantee that we will live to see such a future and in this sense Renton’s notion of revolutionary forgiveness is, like Derrida’s and Arendt’s, a wager on the possibility of a different future. But unlike the other two, Renton links forgiveness with revolutionary change and maintains that it is only through the process of revolution that our past might be fully redeemed.

Renton follows Lukács in describing Soviet Russia under Stalin as a society based on political violence, ongoing oppression, and class domination. He argues that rather than abandoning revolutionary politics, Lukács remained committed to a view of communism that did not separate means and ends. A liberatory society, for Lukács, could never be achieved through non-liberatory means. This commitment resulted in Lukács being jailed in Moscow by the People’s Commissariat for State Security. Despite the repression of the Soviet State, Renton argues that Lukács consistently criticized Stalinism against his own material interests and safety. Renton states that “it was Lukács’s tragedy that – by living long enough to see Stalin replacing Lenin as the leader of the USSR – his jailers came from the ranks of his comrades” (69). Remaining committed to revolutionary communism resulted in Lukács’ imprisonment.

However, Renton does not comment on what Michael Löwy views as the true tragedy of Lukács: the repudiation of his own commitment to revolutionary socialism in 1926 resulting in a turn towards a “realist” politics and an acceptance of Stalinism. In an essay on “Lukács and Stalinism,” Löwy shows that Lukács began to accept the relative stability of global capitalism, causing him to modify his theoretical and political views, including agreeing with Stalin on the need for socialism in one country. According to Löwy, Stalinism from Lukács became “a ‘necessary phase’, ‘prosaic’ yet with a ‘progressive character’, in the revolutionary development of the proletariat seen as a unified whole.” While critical of some elements of Stalinist Russia, Lukács was unwilling to fully endorse the Left Opposition, unlike others within the movement. While he did not uncritically accept the Stalinist political line he nevertheless stood by its basic tenets.

While Renton presents the fact that “Lukács remained loyal to the state that had imprisoned him” as evidence of his ongoing commitment to communism, Löwy highlights the ways in which Lukács turned away from his earlier views on revolution in favor of the more “realistic” project of reconciling bourgeois culture with Soviet Communism. This shift to realism represented a break with his original commitment to revolutionary socialism. While he did not abandon communist politics entirely, he nevertheless accepted that if revolution was not imminent the best course of action was to support Stalinism.

However, as both Renton and Löwy show, Lukács returned to his revolutionary commitments in 1968, supporting the Czechoslovakian workers’ resistance to Soviet rule. As Löwy demonstrates, Lukács’ post-1968 writings show a renewal of his earlier work and devotion to revolutionary socialism from below, including support for the growing student movement and anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam, as well as a critique of Soviet bureaucracy. In doing so, Lukács was able to redeem his own past, restoring the hope in a revolutionary future despite the many defeats of the communist movement.

Hope in forgiveness

Incorporating a fuller examination of Lukács’ political trajectory helps to situate revolutionary forgiveness as part of a project of total transformation, both individual and social. As Renton argues, an ongoing relationship with past movements like the Russian Revolution is important so as to avoid repeating the errors of our forebearers. But remaining open to a relationship with the past also reveals the ways in which our ancestors like Lukács, while not free from contradiction, committed themselves to revolutionary socialism. By renewing that commitment in the present, we might redeem the failures and defeats of the past, allowing for the full realization of the future that the Russian Revolution was not able to fulfill.

It is only by completely transforming the world that forgiveness can be finally tied to justice. Revolutionary forgiveness can only occur when the oppressed have seized control of the power necessary to ensure that their former oppressors cannot restore the unequal power relations of capitalist society. But revolution is not simply a final event, a moment in the future that we wait to come to us. It is a process of transformation. If it is to be truly revolutionary, forgiveness must occur as a part of that revolutionary process. It cannot wait until after the revolution because it is a necessary part of the social and individual changes that we enact as we struggle to transform the world. We must be able to forgive ourselves, our comrades, and our ancestors for the mistakes we have all made so that we can continue to participate in the social movements we are a part of. If we cannot forgive ourselves, our commitments to revolutionary politics might waver, causing us to accept either Stalinist realism (as Lukács did for a time) or reformist realism. And if we do not forgive ourselves, we certainly will not be able to forgive those who acted in the interests of capital. In order to move towards a different world, we need to insist on the possibility of a completely new and non-carceral future, one where all people begin to relate to each other not as boss and worker, colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, but as human beings committed to a collective project of human freedom and self-realization. Revolutionary Forgiveness represents an important contribution to that process and will be valuable to anyone committed to truly revolutionary theory and practice.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Haymarket Books; modified by Tempest.

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Editor’s Note: That’s my friend and favorite mechanic Adam Griego in the bottom photo reaching across from prisoner to prison guard. He’s been involved in all kinds of prison reform projects and prisoner reentry into society. He’s also helped set up a facility for homeless people living in cars to spend the night.  While doing all  this he owns and runs a garage and is an expert Subaru  mechanic. He invites everyone to come to the showing of  this documentary at the Museum of International Folk Art.