The Readers’ Corner:
From James A. Stevenson:
I think that your new format and additions to the Center's web site
are great. Could I suggest, however, that the newsletter references to
articles on the site be linked to those articles or workshops so the reader
can simply click and get there?
Concerning the statement by Jay Gould in Newsletter Number 5, I rather think that Gould had a point, in that the old divide-and-conquer technique works. And, of course, workers have to become profoundly class conscious to avoid being manipulated by those who would use every device, scam, prejudice, tactic and means to render them, or keep them, socially powerless and politically impotent. Anyway, as we know there is no off-the-shelve, ready-made working class, and elites bend every effort to prevent the emergence of this class-for-itself..... [For contemporary illustrations of the capitalist social class-for-itself (i.e. behaving as an active historical agent), as opposed to a class-in-itself (i.e. behaving as a passive object of manipulation) readers are invited to visit atelier no.16, article no.6. The working class acting as a class-for-itself can be identified in atelier no.8, article no.7, and for a discussion of class conscious demonstrations in Quebec this week, against corporate dictatorship see atelier no.19, article no.27.]
I am reading a book by Jack Mitzgar right now (Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000) Mitzgar, the son of a working class steel worker, points out that there were more strikes in the 1950s than in the 1930s and 1890s. He maintains that these sorts of facts have been generally overlooked by historians and the professionals from the middle class who are generally not aware that there are other classes "unless those classes become problems."
It reminds me of the line by Harvey Goldberg at Wisconsin, that "privilege only listens when misery speaks back."....
Anyway, Metzgar notes that U.S. historians may acknowledge that there were tremendous labor upheavals in the 1890s and 1930s, but once workers became empowered through their unions in the 1940s and 1950s, the liberal middle class, including its writers, no longer saw workers as credible victims, but rather saw them or portrayed them as one of us. This outlook, therefore, has submerged and hidden the 1950s history of the U.S. working class to the point that they became virtually invisible. Or, alternatively, middle class writers and professionals portrayed workers and unions as the perpetrators of racism, sexism, and narrow-mindedness in American society. With such a latter view now dominating so much of the outlook and history on U.S. labor and unions, the labor movement's contributions to social justice and as a foundation for the civil rights and women’s movements gets obliterated.
Reading Metzgar’s comments reminded me of an event that I witnessed which confirmed his point that the diversity of U.S. history and the diversity of the U.S. working class has been seriously damaged by even well meaning historians. When Metzgar commented that "our national culture, and therefore our national memory, is shaped by the professional middle class," it made me think of a labor conference that I attended in Atlanta many years ago. At one session in it, an elderly CIO organizer rose to denounce the findings of a young academic who had just finished reciting the facts, figures, and data on CIO organizing in Atlanta during the 1930s. The academic, unaware of the presence of the former CIO organizer, had been describing history in quantifiable terms and he had mention the activities of the former CIO organizer in only favorable terms. Yet, the old gentleman challenged the professor by saying that he (the organizer) did not recognize himself in the history just presented. And the reason he didn't was because the young guy had missed the most important historical thing that the CIO organizers had done in Atlanta. And his story went like something like this:
We, he said, called our first union meeting (1935 or 1936) and the white and black workers came but the whites sat on one side of the room and the blacks sat on the other. They also drank at segregated water spouts. And we set out to change all that. So, for several meetings we arranged the chairs in new ways but nothing worked. Then, finally, we eliminated the chairs altogether and made black and whites stand until they eventually mingled. This process took weeks and weeks. We also took the "Whites Only" and "Negro Only" signs down from the water fountains in the hall way, but the guys segregated themselves and still drank at the original fountains (the black one being lower). So, after we took down the signs to no avail, we raise the black fountain to be level with the white one. But they still segregated themselves. Then, we tore out the fountains and they had no place to drink. Now, he finished, how do you measure that? How can you measure what happened in those white and black families after that? Can you measure what happened to those people's outlooks, to their children's attitudes, to their lives? I know some of those children in Macon, in Atlanta and elsewhere that joined the Civil Rights movement. That's what we really accomplished, and it wasn't measured by your data."
Well, that was one occasion when someone from the U.S. working class had a chance to disrupt a professional middle class historians about what would be remembered and what would be forgotten, what accounts would be told and which wouldn't. I rejoiced.
One of the points that I was making in my earlier email to you about Mitzgar's book is that his observations seem to suggest that the strategy for social control of workers in the aftermath of the 1950s included even rendering the whole U.S. industrial working class invisible. Hence, the story of the labor organizer whose most important role in history was obliterated by a middle class scholar who focused on the wrong issues. [A discussion of this epistemological error can be seen in the preface of James Green’s book, The World of the Worker, Labor in Twentieth-Century America. See atelier no.8, article no.8.]
*******
There is a scene from Stanley Kubric’s controversial film, Paths of Glory, in which a French soldier finds himself on the front-line fighting the Germans in trench warfare. The period is the First World War, and pacifist flyers (les papillons) are circulating on the battle field at Verdun (sabotage at the point of production, so to speak). The young soldier is accused by his superior officer of distributing pacifist literature. In fact the charge is untrue. He is obviously one of the millions of French peasants who had been successfully indoctrinated by the Third Republic, prepared as a school child to give his life for La Patrie. Nevertheless, he had been seen by the officer looking at a pacifist flyer. He was court-martialed and sentenced to death before a firing squad.
Ready...Aim...Fire! An officer approached the dying youth to confirm the execution. But he was not yet dead. He lifted his head from the dirt to face the officer: I’m sorry, Sir! whispered the soldier in shame. I didn’t mean to disobey your order and survive." The officer forgave him, and the soldier died.
This dramatic depiction of reification, a human being mistaking himself for an abstraction --an idea or a label-- and failing to recognize any difference between the representation and the reality is the stuff of everyday life. Eating at McDo, wearing Nike shoes, driving a BMW is as much the consequence of indoctrination today as military strategies were at the time of the First World War.
In such a state, the human targets of successful indoctrination are turned in-side-out: the external is internalized, and any authentic sense of self appears to no longer exist. This is the finished product of indoctrination --both for military and commercial ends. Such alienation is the sine quo non of consumer society today, where the market attempts to dictate human needs that can best be fulfilled by shopping for a Mercedes-Benz instead of a Toyoto, a Cartier watch instead of a Timex, Ralph-Lauren shirts and Nike shoes instead of a tee-shirt and sneakers.... [For more on this subject, readers are invited to visit atelier no.13, article no.1, an excerpt from Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, and atelier no.3, article nos.13 & 14, for reviews of Naomi Klein’s recent book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.]
In his recent book, The New Century (Abacus Books, 2000), Eric Hobsbawm rejects the notion of a post-industrial era:
It
is a mistake ... because in reality those goods and services
that
were produced in the industrial era are still being produced
today.
Although they are produced in greater quantities and are
more
widely distributed, this occurs with a lower labor input. The
novelty
of the situation is that, of all the factors of production, the
need
for human beings is constantly diminishing. This is because,
relatively
speaking, they don’t produce as much as they cost.
Human
beings were not created for capitalism.
Hobsbawm fails to mention, however, that the term, post-industrial was originally coined by American social scientists who sought to conveniently ignore that labor-intensive industries were relocating, out of sight, to so-called Third-World countries.
Despite this selective ignorance, from time to time, and for a variety of reasons, labor does become momentarily visible. This week the mainstream media reported on a lost slave ship, with a cargo of between 180 and 250 children reportedly at sea, somewhere off the coast of Benin. The children had been sold into slavery by their parents for as little as 14 dollars, then the children were resold to work on cocoa and cotton plantations for as much as $340 in countries such as Gabon and Ivory Coast. Some were taken to serve as prostitutes and domestic workers in the cities. [See atelier no.8, article no.10.]
In a parallel story on contemporary labor exploitation, the International Herald Tribune reported on a factory fire in Narsingdi, Bangladesh, where American multinational corporations, such as Wal-Mart, and Gap, are accumulating gigantic profits in sweatshops at the expense of the local population, who are expected to live on one dollar a day.
The
factory's 1,250 workers scampered for their lives, most of
them
hurrying to the stairway that led to the main exit. There, at the
bottom,
was a gate. It was locked.
That
is how nearly all of the fire's 52 victims died, their
final
breaths trampled out of them on the hard concrete of the
teeming
steps. Most were young women; 10 were children.
Bangladesh is the home of some of the world's cheapest labor. The $4.3 billion apparel industry descended on this country years ago, and today some 3,300 inadequately regulated garment factories are operating at a feverish pitch.
The
fire last November at Chowdhury Knitwears interrupted
a
frantic
production schedule. Finished sportswear was due at stores
in
Britain.
The
workers, used to a 12-hour day, were ordered to toil as long
as
18 hours. They were given a lunch break at 1 p.m., then a
shorter
breather at 10 p.m., when each received a piece of bread
and
a banana.
Overtime
pay, a legal requirement, was a myth. Most wages
ranged
from $25 to $50 a month - or as little as 6 cents an hour.
Children
earned less.
The mainstream press can run human-interest stories such as these occasionally.
The focus being on "will the ship be found with survivors?" Or "was the
fire due to criminal negligence?" But any understanding of the larger pattern
here --of who is doing what to whom and why-- is sufficiently obfuscated
to prevent any conclusions beyond a regret for these isolated tragedies.
The mainstream press must take responsibility for "dumbing down" the population,
by re-producing entertaining, and essentially fragmented and incoherent
reports on an economic system that feeds from human sacrifice. [For a fuller
description of the Bengladesh tragedy, see atelier
no.8, article no. 9.]
Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts in his classic book on human psychosis, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, how a brain-injured patient lost his ability to perceive patterns. Bertell Ollman uses this account to explain the effects selective ignorance in the media has on society:
[Sacks’
patient] could see aspects of things well enough, but
he
couldn’t put them together. [He couldn’t recognize the face
of
his wife, for example.] Because most things only make sense
as
parts of something larger than themselves, he couldn’t tell
what
anything was.
"The malady that Sachs uncovered is far more widespread than he feared," writes Ollman, "except for most people the cause is neither biological nor psychological but rather sociological and historical."
The
social sciences reinforce this tendency, first, by breaking up
the
totality of human knowledge into the specialized learning of
competing
disciplines, each with its own distinctive language, and,
second,
as part of their stress on quantitative techniques, by con-
centrating
almost exclusively on the bits and pieces of our experience
that
permit statistical manipulation.
[For an entertaining and yet informative discussion of social class consciousness, see Bertell Ollman’s new book, How 2 Take an Exam ... & Remake the World (Black Rose Books, 2001)
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