The Library Is a Commons
A socialist former president of the American Library Association on why defending libraries is fighting capitalism.
The Montana State Library Commission voted 5-1 (with one abstention) in July 2023 to rescind its membership in the American Library Association because of the ALA’s then-president: a self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian, which is to say, me. Despite their claims, that does not mean the entire field is socialist, nor is the professional association, which is nonpartisan and dedicated to advocating for libraries and the professional development of library staff. Who knows how many of us are card-carrying socialists (probably not too many, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a total 140,000 library workers while membership in the Democratic Socialists of America stands at about 80,000, most of whom likely don’t work in libraries — yet), but there’s a reason the Right is suspicious of libraries as an institution. I ran for ALA president in 2022 on an openly socialist platform, and at least 54% of the 10,000-plus librarians who voted were at least socialist-curious enough to elect me.
For many library workers, the material consequences of unchecked capitalism are the stuff of everyday life. Often we are the only indoor public space in our communities and provide the only accessible public bathroom. We provide broadband internet to people who can’t access it otherwise, and assistance with the email addresses and online forms required to access public welfare programs. Extreme poverty, unaddressed mental illness, the opioid crisis — all of it walks through our doors and makes itself at home.
Public libraries were not always part of the American landscape; private libraries long circulated books among a paying elite. Between 1885 and 1919, Andrew Carnegie donated more than $40 million to establish nearly 1,700 library buildings across the country. (He left it to municipalities to fund the staff and book collections.) Carnegie pointed to his own working class roots as part of the reason libraries were a priority for his philanthropy. As a child working in the textile industry in Allegheny City, Pa., Carnegie could not afford the $2 fee to join a subscription library. This story about the lack of access to information for working people is part of Carnegie lore, an inspirational tale of what good rich men can do when they act out of benevolence. Of course, Carnegie also called out the Pinkertons, an anti-union militia for-hire, to break a strike at his steel plant in Homestead, Pa., resulting in a violent attack on that same working class. As one striking worker put it, “What good is a book to a man who works 12 hours a day, six days a week?”
For Carnegie, libraries were mostly about those books — getting the right ones into the hands of restive workers who would then be both civilized and disciplined through their engagement with literature. Ironically, as industrialists imagined they could use libraries to mollify populations subject to the ravages of capitalism, library buildings stood as temples to democratic access to ideas.
The materiality of public libraries were clear examples of the state’s commitment to public ownership of the public good, to circulating public resources equally among the people, to access for everyone to everything. Public libraries may have emerged from a grotesque concentration of wealth in the hands of a few industrial magnates, but they also established what we might call the closest thing to a socialist institution in the contemporary United States.
In most communities, the public library is funded by a mix of federal, state and mostly local coffers — our taxes. Public sector employees manage and staff libraries, and pool these public funds to purchase materials to be held in common by the public and shared among members of the public. Everyone can share in resources that far exceed what any average individual could collect for their own use.
As exemplars of what the state can provide to the public when it chooses, libraries are wildly popular. More than 17,000 public libraries now stand across the country — in urban and rural communities, as branches and bookmobiles — a number that has held mostly steady for decades. Once a community has a library, it tends to keep it. More than half of the population has a library card and more than 125 million people attended a public library program in 2019. In a 2018 survey of U.S. voters by the ALA and OCLC (a global library cooperative), 58% saw libraries as contributing to public education and 55% saw them as “essential.”
And for good reason. Librarians spend public resources in ways that benefit the public, making highly local decisions that reflect engagement with the communities they serve. In Valley County, Idaho, Sherry Scheline circulates bicycles in the summer and sleds in the winter. Down the road in Cascade, Idaho, Maria Guest circulates bike repair kits and time slots in a private meeting room equipped with a computer and camera for telehealth visits. In Warwick, R.I., you can check out a Dungeons & Dragons beginner kit and pick up free Narcan, the drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Lauren Ginsberg, a school librarian in New York City, teaches electric composting to students, aligning library use with the school’s environmental sustainability curriculum. Libraries across the City University of New York system circulate laptops among its nearly 250,000 students.
Just as communities are different, the libraries that serve them are different. What these public institutions have in common is their circulatory function. Libraries move public resources around, and they work to enable equal access to those resources for everyone in the community.
In the context of more than four decades of neoliberal disinvestment in public institutions, the persistence of public libraries is surprising. The ALA has taken a clear and consistent position against the privatization of public services, stating that “publicly funded libraries should remain directly accountable to the public they serve.” The last 20 years did see privatization efforts make some inroads through outsourcing companies like Library Systems and Services, but when LS&S pitched cost savings as a reason for the Prince William Public Libraries in Virginia to outsource its management, for example, the library board balked at the company’s plan to cut staff by 20%. By and large, public libraries have stayed public.
One reason is that the private sector is hard-pressed to find a library substitute. Neoliberals gut public school budgets with the promise of so-called independent and charter schools, but in the case of libraries, personal books in private homes can’t approach the scale of what a library can offer, and no private infrastructure exists that could absorb the public work of the library. Beyond books, libraries offer storytime and play groups, film screenings and knitting classes, English language lessons and literacy training — all of it open to anyone in the community, all of it free at the point of use and participation. The programs are always changing and tightly linked to the changing needs and interests of the public. There is simply no private-sector mechanism for the production of public services at the scale of the library.
Of course, libraries are not immune to attacks on the public sector. The current spate of book bans is partly a struggle against the public institution, though couched in terms of a moral panic: children need protection, parents have rights. In Jamestown Township, Mich., voters cut the library’s funding by 84%, ostensibly because the collections included Maia Kobabe’s memoir, Gender Queer. After a federal judge ordered the library in Llano County, Texas, to return books about racism and queer experience to the shelves, library commissioners there considered shutting the library down. When the ACLU and the Missouri Library Association challenged a law criminalizing librarians who provide “explicit sexual materials,” the Missouri House voted to strip all state funding for libraries. (This budget was restored by the Missouri Senate, but the fear continues to reverberate.) The pretext may be child safety, but the effect is to dismantle these much beloved public institutions, among the last in many American communities.
Ibram X. Kendi cast library workers as “freedom fighters” in his address to a library audience at the ALA’s Right to Read rally in June 2023, stating that “the freedom fight has chosen you. The freedom fight has chosen every single library professional in the country.” Kendi was directly addressing the fight against organized censorship attempts. After all, library workers are the people who decide whether to pull a book with gay characters from the shelves in response to a challenge. We are the people who host the Drag Queen Story Hour and collect books about Black history, even when such actions produce a storm of public controversy. Such actions secure the right to read, book by book, reader by reader.
For those of us committed to broader political projects, the fight must be conceived more broadly. Library workers secure the right to read Gender Queer, but they also secure public institutions, public resources and public ownership of the public good. When library workers open the door in the morning, they give the public access to public space. When library workers check out a book or check it back in, they circulate public resources. When library workers screen movies and run book clubs, they produce a public good, again and again, every day the library is open. Library workers must be at the heart of the fight for the world we want.
Library workers know this fact and are organizing in great numbers, from East Lansing, Mich., to Claremont, Calif., to Salt Lake City. We’re a hot sector. That freedom fight that has chosen us? It’s a working conditions issue, requiring collective bargaining to ensure that librarians are protected and supported as they select and circulate books in the face of violent extremists. Library workers in Ferndale, Mich., organized partly in response to the havoc organized censorship played in Jamestown.
It’s also an issue of democratic control. In El Paso County, Colo., a union drive followed the controversial appointment of two conservatives to the library board. As John Jarrell, president of the newly formed union, said at its launch, “Who knows better how the library should be run than people who actually work at the library and have dedicated their lives to it?”
Library workers understand that we are on the front lines of the movement for public ownership of the public good.
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Emily Drabinski is an associate professor of library studies who ran a socialist campaign to be elected president of the American Library Association. She believes in a densely organized library sector.
