CLR Gainz argues that the left needs physical as well as mental strength if we are going to be victorious in making revolution and defeating reaction. Reading: Cliff Connolly.
Our world is one governed not only by social but physical forces; this is a lesson reinforced by the experience of class struggle. Because enough ink continues to be spilled on the topic of social forces, the purpose of this article is to address the more overlooked aspect of physical force, or strength, that is, our primary means of mediating with nature. In the early chapters of volume one of Marx’s Capital, we learn that what makes humanity essentially different from the animal kingdom is that we are not only able to formulate complex ideas and models in their minds, but also apply these designs physically. Labor in this way could be described as that kinetic chain of applied strength involving the full cooperation of our central nervous system which recruits our joints, ligaments, and muscles to literally materialize the world around us. It is no wonder that throughout the latter half of the 19th century in Czarist Russia, both the early socialists and liberals paid significant attention not only to humanity’s mental development but its physical faculties as well. Sadly, it remains less of a wonder—perhaps more of a frustration—as to why we modern-day socialists are apt to neglect the development of our bodies. Three brief themes will be touched upon as an appeal to get readers to consider strength training as a political activity, its historic importance, and its lost legacy in the Soviet Union.
Strength training is not only a significant means of becoming healthier but, by reorganizing the composition of bodies to make them less fat to more muscle, also represents the physical manifestation of a disciplined person. One of the important principles I’ve taken from my involvement as an organizer and party socialist into strength training and bodybuilding has been a willingness to accept the shortcomings of my analyses and actions. In bodybuilding in particular, in order to tack on lean mass, you have to come to grips with your muscular deficiencies and train hard until you reach the correct size and proportions. The sport also requires you to be patient with yourself and have the humility to ask others what they think you’re lacking. Building muscle is achieved by the correct execution of form in every exercise for the purposes of causing micro-tears in the fibers of the targeted muscle group; you train through your own exhaustion—especially when it begins to hurt the most. The same approach goes for the struggle over correct political lines as we commit ourselves to understand dense German texts. Any socialist who has made the journey through the volumes of Marx’s Capital can recall how much our heads hurt and the number of times we had to occasionally put down Volume II to rub our eyes, but we nevertheless got through them by sheer force of will grounded in the desire to comprehend the world around us. We mastered it until we were able to communicate all of its nuances in a direct manner for the purpose of becoming better organizers and better comrades. Had we let our frustrations overwhelm us, we would never have been able to grow intellectually. The same goes for training, as the failure to be consistent will simply leave our muscles to atrophy. A disciplined mind will work best with a disciplined body. We should begin to balance our desire to read Marx and Engels with a similar aggressiveness when we train.
Little is written by Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the importance of physical strength. There are several passages written by Marx which decry the ways in which the labor process depletes the physical health of the worker, but that’s about it. As previously mentioned, an existing Russian fascination with physical development did exist, which lent itself to the presence of “indigenous” forms of Russian strength training. Interestingly, these Russian exercises were molded in some ways as a response against the more synchronic movements on display in Western European gymnasiums (think CrossFit). Yet ultimately some of these Western methods and styles of training did penetrate Czarist lands. Russian bourgeois society, however, generally frowned upon strength training and gymnastics as “unproductive” activities, and thus discouraged Russian youth from participating in them. Kinesiology and strength theory quickly fell into the domain of subversive activity in the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution. One of the chief founders of theoretical anatomy, Piotr Franzevich Lesgaft, whose Society for the Encouragement of the Physical Development of Student Youth (est. 1892) engaged in outreach and recruitment of the children of the poor to strength training and gymnastics. The Society’s working-class orientation allowed it to make strong inroads in the industrial centers of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa where it also began to cross-fertilize with socialist ideas. Eventually, Czarist authorities targeted the Society and banned it after unrest began to emanate from its floors. Lesgaftian theories and practices, however, were rehabilitated and found acceptance among Bolsheviks, especially when it came to the importance of the defense of the early Soviet state under siege from external and internal enemies.
When Leon Trotsky organized the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army through the Narkom of the Ministry of War in 1918, he did so with the understanding that the defectors from the Czarist military apparatus would not be sufficient to actually win the Civil War. He thus drew upon the tens of thousands of industrial workers and peasants to comprise the Red Army’s main fighting force, allowing much of the thin layer of previous WWI draftees to take command, in addition to former White officers. A working-class base that was ritually brutalized in the streets, as well as in factories and at home, degraded by excessive alcohol consumption, disease, and so on, were able to muster the moral and physical strength to defeat the invading imperialist forces and the Whites. In the years following the decisive Red Army victory, Lenin would stress the importance of the physical health of the working class at times as a passing metaphor. But make no mistake: sabotaged infrastructure, maligned cities, and so on, required the total physical investment of all inhabitants of Soviet territory, not simply its working class.
While much of Soviet society from the 1930s onward were rife with the assorted horrors of Stalinism, there were also some impressive periods of research in the field of kinesiology and exercise science. Beginning in the 1960s but especially in the 1970s, Soviet kinesiologists developed groundbreaking theories and protocols on the biomechanics of the human body. Particularly focusing on the body in its kinetic state in the sport of Olympic-style weightlifting, AS Medvedyev, Pavel Tsatsouline, YV Verkhoshansky, AN Vorbeyev, among others, extensively researched the most efficient ways in which the human body could create explosive dynamic movement in transporting weight from a resting state and over the head. What is arguably more interesting, however, was the dialectical-like system of adaptation to strength gains and recovery. What the Soviets did that was so innovative was to view lifting in the long-term, seeing the body as an organism which requires adequate rest and recovery. In an almost spiral-like pattern, the heaviest lift was quickly proceeded by weeks of building up ground strength by lifting small weights and more of them, until one worked up to what is known as a one-rep max, or one repetition of a lifter’s maximum load. Today, virtually all protocols in the sports of Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting use some variant of these Soviet methods. In contrast, Western-based strength protocols were reflective of a linear progression model which most of us who frequent the gym are familiar with, where a lifter gradually stacks heavier and heavier weights with every workout. Needless to say, there was never much of a science behind it. The Soviets began to quickly surpass their American counterparts in all strength sports due to their scientific approach towards lifting.
It was not until American lifters like Andrew Charniga and later Louie Simmons began to adopt these methods for Anglophone audiences beginning in the 1980s, and with great success. Today, Louie Simmons’ Westside Barbell, based in Columbus, Ohio, is billed as the world’s strongest gym—all due to Simmons’s study of and improvement on the Soviet breakthroughs in human biomechanics. Yet unsurprisingly, Simmons and others were not necessarily apt to take in much of the politics of their Soviet predecessors and colleagues at the time, merely borrowing their methods for the sake of making American athletes more competitive. The irony couldn’t be clearer: groundbreaking strength theories that developed in a state with historic roots in a socialist revolution have been popularized and taken far more seriously by the American far-right than the radical left.
Where does this “strength gap” leave us in the here and now? It is more than just that we have completely ignored the achievements of Soviet science in the realm of strength training, an eminently practical field; we have also deprioritized the enormous potential of untapped strength which lies in our genes. One of the biggest wake-up calls I can remember happened several years again in Queens, NY, when several activists coming out of an event at night were savagely attacked and beaten by one fascist. I wondered then as I do now: how was it possible that three or four people were defeated by one fascist? I was angry, not just for what happened, but at our movement, for not emphasizing training and defense. In times where large numbers of us take the streets to protest, we can’t guarantee the safety of ourselves or our comrades if we refuse to train and adapt our bodies to become stronger than they presently are. Building a strong socialist force ought not to simply be a passing metaphor for successful organizing; it must be interpreted quite literally. For if we’re ever going to hold the red flag over parliaments and congresses worldwide, then we better possess the actual strength to do so.
