Aaron R. Aarons 1940 - 2024: Longtime Berkeley resident, political activist

Aaron died of cancer on January 19, 2024 at his apartment in Berkeley. Aaron was born Roger Aarons. I met Aaron in 1971 at the SWP bookstore on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley. He told me at the time that he was one of the founders of the Spartacist League. He was obviously from New York and I believe he said he grew up in Manhattan. I know his mother had an apartment adjacent to Central Park-- I had been there once in the early 1990s to meet up with his sister, Susan, who in later years had become a real estate broker. She lives on the East Coast. Aaron was usually a night person and woke up late; Susan told me the story of when she, Aaron and their mother were in Mexico and Aaron couldn't get up early enough to accompany them to see the ruins. Aaron traveled to Mexico City on numerous occasions to be connected to the leftist movement there; he spoke Spanish fluently. I remember meeting someone from Mexico years ago who was staying at his place in Berkeley. Aaron told me recently that he had donated all his Spanish-related materials to La Peña Cultural Center.

I quote here an excerpt of a comment I made recently on YouTube regarding Orwell in Spain during the Spanish revolution (Letters and Politics: 'George Orwell's Flowers', 2 years ago) "...it's important to have a culture to replace the capitalist bourgeois culture that dominates. What's needed in my mind is a political leadership in conjunction with the people, who can enrich and use culture in the service of political transformation i.e. a people's revolution" to which Aaron replied: "I would take issue with the use of the classless term, "the people". While, in Spanish-speaking tradition, "el pueblo" is more like "the masses" in English-language discourse, "the people" does not have that classist, plebeian connotation". Aaron had told me in the past that the best author on the subject of the Spanish Civil War period is Burnett Bolloten (He had written to me in an email in 2014: "I've attached the final, posthumously published, version of Bolloten's work. It's much more useful than Grand Camouflage, which is basically the first draft, written almost 30 years earlier"). He recommended a great book on working class history in the US but, unfortunately, the information is lost for now (Maybe one of his surviving friends knows of this and will leave the information here or contact me). He was well-read and had titles of books at his fingertips.

Aaron had mentioned when I met him that he had attended the Yeshiva University in New York. He studied linguistics, math and science during those years and he was awarded a Master's Degree from the Yeshiva in 1969 before having graduated. He described himself on X as "an older-than-boomer guy with a background in math, science, linguistics and radical left politics" and on Facebook: A "left-wing globalist subversive since 1956". He became involved with anarchist ideas over the years but I wasn't involved with him enough after the 1970s and 80s to know the extent of his encounter with anarchism (He indicated to me recently that he had been getting away from anarchist ideas). However, his extensive political views and writings are readily discoverable at Disqus and other websites. Notably, his conversations at the WSWS are at Disqus; he had remarked to me that they had banned him from posting anything on their website. He was impacted by that and seemed to appreciate that I contacted the SEP to inquire about it; there was no response (I recently suggested that he submit writing to a socialist newspaper; he said he wasn't interested in waiting for something to be published).

Aaron ran for a seat on the Berkeley City Council in 1986 as "a communist candidate", endorsed by the Peace and Freedom Party and UPROAR, a Berkeley activist group. The election leaflet which contains his political program can be found at the Bolerium Books website. I recently discovered that the Houghton Library archives of Harvard University has Aaron's substantial collection of ephemera related to leftist film and theater in the San Francisco Bay Area, of which he was an aficionado over many years. According to the Houghton website, Aaron gave the bulk of his papers to The Long Haul, an anarchist resource center and community space in south Berkeley. Regarding leftist culture, Aaron admired the work of Bertolt Brecht and appreciated the Dadaists (The Dadaists wouldn't have considered their expressions as 'work'). One of his email addresses began with 'artless200@....' etc. He loved wearing outrageous t-shirts; they audaciously and graphically propagandized for rebellion and revolution.

Aaron was a flaming atheist. If he heard the word "god" spoken, depending on the context, he would likely be visibly disgusted. His argumentative nature really put people off yet he had many friends. At one point he became emotional when recounting to me that his father had abandoned the family and had taken off to Canada; apparently, this was long before I knew him. He would at times address me affectionately as "Glenda-kins". I wasn't involved with him very much for the last 30 or so years but at the end of 2005 when I was dealing with extremely hard times i.e. homelessness and the loss of someone close to me-- he took me in, he would spoon-feed me, he gave me a floor to sleep on for 2 or 3 months, and brought me back to life. I also had to deal with an unexpected medical issue while I was there which required major surgery (a benign ovarian cyst). I can still visualize how, from behind the back of his desk, I would look up at him as he was sitting at his computer into the wee hours of the morning, from my vantage point on the floor, and he made everything okay.

One of the last things he said to me when I saw him in January: "Money should be given to the Palestinian people". He was an unequivocal and adamant sympathizer of the Oct. 7th Hamas action in occupied Palestine. He recently exclaimed, "Excellent!" after reading a letter I wrote which was published in the UK's Weekly Worker, the newspaper of the CPGB, where I said basically that Hamas should be supported but not uncritically; that was amazing coming from him because he rarely complimented me. His aggressively contentious persona could obscure the fact that he really cared; he was driven to challenge and oppose the corrupt capitalist system at every possible opportunity and expected all of us to do the same.

Glenda "GG"