By John McKenzie
I first heard of Bill Onasch when I was asked to help catalog his books, which had been donated to the East Side Freedom Library after his death in 2021. ESFL has been blessed with donations of books from a number of individuals, many of them academics. Unlike many of the collection donors to the library, Bill Onasch was not an academic. He was a working man, a labor organizer, and a union official at various times. He was also a socialist political organizer.
Andrew Shils, in an article published shortly after his death, called him “a long term socialist and trade unionist.” He worked as an electrical worker, union organizer, and a bus driver, among other things. His collection of books fills five shelves on the lower level of ESFL. What an interesting collection! It includes Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization, Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution, and Tariq Ali’s The Coming British Revolution. It includes works of history, political thought, and biography. It includes a number of books by Leon Trotsky– not surprising because Bill was a Trotskyist. In addition to the books, Bill’s collection includes a large number of pamphlets, many of them, I suspect, not easily available.
What really got me interested in who Bill Onasch was is a slim pamphlet he published in 1987, Organizing for Socialism: The Fourth Internationalist Tendency – Who We Are, What We Stand For. Bill writes simply and understandably. He makes the case for why socialism should replace capitalism. His definition of socialism is brief and to the point. “To revolutionary Marxists, socialism is a society where a democratically-managed planned economy, designed to meet human needs, has replaced production for profit.” He lays out the situation as he saw it in the United States. He discusses the Russian Revolution, and where it went wrong. He sets out the history of socialist organizations in the United States. Finally, he makes the case for why socialists should organize through the mechanism of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (a Trotskyist organization) to begin the process of transforming to socialism.
The United States has never been one of the countries where socialism has the greatest influence. It probably reached its zenith in the U.S. in the first decades of the 20th century, when Eugene Debs was the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. In 1912, he won 6% of the vote, when other candidates included incumbent president William Howard Taft, former president Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who won the election. Beginning at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the federal government and the leading capitalists have fought tooth and nail against anything that might be considered “socialist.” It only became more difficult for American socialists of any type with the start of the Cold War after World War II. All socialists were equated with the “atheistic communists” of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s Red China. The Socialist movement in the U.S. splintered and each piece had less and less influence.
In recent years, Socialism has made a comeback. Polls show that many young people either identify as socialists or at least are not afraid of the word. A number of people who identify as democratic socialists have been elected to public office, most famously Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. My own county commissioner, Mai Chong Xiong, is a democratic socialist. I don’t know how their socialism compares to Bill Onasch’s Trotskyist revolutionary socialism, but I think he must have been pleased to see people willing to be identified as socialists again. I wish I could ask him.