Yes, boys and girls, that's our discussion question for today. I need explanations!
First, let us study this pertinent excerpt of historic text:In 1922, the Nikowsskis moved to the Polish section of Chicago, and Dick went to work in a slaughterhouse where he worked six days a week, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, making just enough to exist on, never enough to save anything. Nikowsski's description of this slaughterhouse in 1922 evokes for me an image of men in hell, condemned to shovel coal onto their own doom-fires.
Excerpted from The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick.
One of the men who worked in the slaughterhouse was a socialist, a thin, burning-eyed man in his thirties. Dick Nikowsski was twenty years old. This socialist worked beside Dick, and became his friend. He talked endlessly, obsessively about "the bosses" and "the working stiffs." Half the time Dick couldn't follow the socialist, didn't know what the hell he was talking about, thought only that he was going to get them all in trouble. But he liked the socialist because behind the rage he sensed something wild and wounded in the man, and besides, whenever there was a dispute between the foreman and a worker, the socialist was the only one who stuck his neck out for the worker.
Then, one day in summer, when it was so blistering hot in the slaughterhouse the sweat was pouring down into the men's eyes, blinding them, the socialist suddenly turned to Dick and said to him: "Do you know where the owners are now? Right now while you and I are here sweating like pigs?" No," Dick replied, "where?" The socialist took a folded page of newspaper from his pocket. "There!" he thundered. "At the coast!" Dick stared blindly at the picture of a group of men and women lying languidly by the sea. The blue eyes of the seventy-year-old Nikowsski stare at me, fifty years disappearing in their wide gaze. "I didn't even know what the coast was," he says in wonder as fresh as that of the twenty-year-old still alive inside him.
"Something happened to me then. I just stared and stared at that picture. Suddenly it was as if everything that socialist had been saying all those months clicked into place somewhere in my head, and I saw me behind that picture, I saw me knee-deep in blood and shit my whole life so that that picture could be taken. I don't know how to describe it to you, I don't think I even knew what it was that was happening, I certainly couldn't have put it into words, but something came rising up in me, so swift and so strong, it nearly took the breath out of my body. I can still feel it, the way I felt it then. As if it was coming right out of the center of me, as if it had been waiting there all that time, all my life, and now it had--just that fast!--run out of time."
~*~
I like that story because a similar thing happened to me. Very similar, and although I wasn't stuck in a slaughterhouse, I was doing some nasty work, scrubbing toilets and such. And I was significantly younger than Dick.
I soon learned what else was happening with this corporation around the same time I was working for them. My eyes were opened.
And my question is, why doesn't this happen now? Why has the right-wing Tea Party movement been so successful in cashing in on class resentment?
Where is the Left in these harsh economic times?
I have decided the Left is largely IN ABSENTIA because the American Left now comes from the elite class itself; their political convictions are basically a reflection of the warmed-over liberalism they obediently ingested while attending Good Colleges. They believe what they believe out of a sense of common decency, fairness and goodness. But not because most American Leftists have experienced classism themselves.
In fact, most have NOT.
The Left is therefore doing it FOR the poor bedraggled working classes... not for themselves. (They do not feel personally disenfranchised, they feel they are speaking up FOR the disenfranchised.)
And this is why they keep getting it wrong.
~*~
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.Keeping this statement in mind, we see why feminism, disability and gay activism (and other types of identity-based activism) has been so successful in the past few decades, whereas the American Left, no longer an actual product of the working classes, can no longer claim success.
--Combahee River Collective, 1977
The identity of Lefty is now that of the more educated person, someone who can afford to buy organic, who listens to NPR, who has the room to start composting. They read the New York Times, not the New York Daily News.
When an ignorant person is just becoming politically aware for the first time... can they look to the socialist working next to them on the job? No, because there aren't any. So, where do they look? They look to the TV, as always... and carefully segregated on certain channels, they see the people who are like them, and the people who aren't. They look around and see common working people going to church to pray they can make it through another tough, back-breaking working week, as they watch the televised coastal elites make fun of church-going, ascribing religious belief to simple weakness and stupidity.
They attempt to get hired, and find that jobs have evaporated. Where did they go?--asks the worker. (And who has the ready answer for that? The right or the left?) Why are we bailing out rich Wall Street greedheads when I can't pay my mortgage due to unemployment?--asks the worker. (And who has the ready answer for that? The right or the left?) Why am I working harder and getting poorer, while Paris Hilton has time to make porn and waltz around in designer clothes and officially do nothing for a living? (And who has the ready answer for that? The right or the left?)
People join the group that is most like them. And this means that these days, American working people seem to be joining the Tea Party, the group that most LOOKS like them.
The American Left is no longer synonymous with "the workers"... It was once, but has changed dramatically. I now think of the American Left as the primary participants in identity politics, but not as the workers.
~*~
Discussion? Agree? Disagree? Although I'd like this to be a multi-part series, I am unsure of which direction I'd like to take this next... so COMMENTS PARTICULARLY WELCOME. (note guidelines for commenting; trolls will get the trap door!)
8 comments:
Hey, I want as much of this as you can post! (I have certain disagreements with folks on the left, but that doesn't mean that full spectrum left shouldn't be out there!)
if we keep going in the direction we are going most american leftists I believe will become disenfranchised eventually, because any protections workers have are being worn away to nothing.
I think there's more going on than people just identifying with those that look like them. I do think that is part of it.
lefties need more creative, visible and repetitive advertisements of our ideas/ policy changes. i think they had that in the 60's (i could be wrong) lefties are longwinded and the people dont like to listen
The working class now rails against the welfare class for taking all their hard earned taxpayer dollars, while groveling to big business because they mistakenly think that will land more jobs in America, instead out outsourced over seas, while the CEOs do the beach thing.
We have our own dysfunctional teabagger running for governor in NY, but yet the left/progressive side (especially here in Buffalo)is coming off so poorly (Elite) as to drive regular ol' people who normally wouldn't entertain a thought of voting for him to rally to his defense...conflicting.
Where am I going with this? Don't know...have been tossing thoughts around for weeks. A semi-related something else that I just read, from Colorado:
http://tallnthin.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-dont-want-to-vote.html
I would tend to say the American left came unmoored from workers as early as the 1960s. SDS, anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, women's liberationists - none of the various offshoots of the New Left included many working-class people. By 1980, many working-class folks rejected everything smacking of the New Left, and many voted for Reagan. (The story is surely more complicated than this, but it definitely predates identity politics.)
I too am looking forward to the next installment!
I think the Left has always had this problem, one way or another. Most of the thinkers we associate with developing communism and socialism throughout their history were not themselves working class but from privileged backgrounds and lifestyles.
I think that the Left has generally shown a tendency to slip from concrete practical principles into ephemeral ideals, and in so doing the immediacy of the movement has slid away from practical workers and towards the educated and privileged people.
This certainly happened during the 1960s in Britain, and continued since (the 1970s and early 1980s saw the workers trying to cling onto the Left, even as the leaders wriggled away into these fairyland ideals). I think that, looking from the outside, the same seems to have occurred in the USA as well.
The final conclusion of this can be seen by comparing the practical approach of the original Clause IV of the British Labour Party and the idealism of the revised version introduced before "New Labour" came to power in 1997. (Wikipedia entry with the texts here.)
Again, looking from the outside, it seems to me that a similar disconnection has occurred in the US Left as well.
I recall I was trying to help someone with their mathematics homework once, and I got into the theory about why something worked (I forget the exact part of maths that I was helping with - something to do with ratios, I think). The child I was helping was struggling to get it, not being naturally inclined towards maths. Someone pointed out to me, "you need to keep it simple, focus on the practical outcome. All [X] needs to know is, "how many boxes do you need to pick up?" (or whatever the problem was about). I think a lot of folks on the Left forget about the "how many boxes" part of socialism/progressivism and try to preach the background theory (e.g. "stupid churchgoers!" seems to come from that). A nice theory on its own never broke any chains.
there are some good comments here, and I'll come back and read them again. My take on the problem is that there is no left. There are a few well off do gooders who think they're the left. Historically they were hangers on to the left but not the left itself. Comes down to it I'm a trade unionist. I'm for labor, and I don't just mean white men in hard hats. If there was a left I'd be in that too but there's nothing but atomized leftist individuals and self righteous rich kids. Non white workers never turned their back on the left. They don't act the way some of us with a boho background think they should but Black and Latin workers are real stand up folks when it comes to real issues.
If there's ever going to be a left in this country it will probably be imported from Mexico. Here in my small California city, over 10,000 people turned out for the May Day immigrants rights march. No accident that it took place on May Day. The march was called by the United Farm Workers. Marchers carried signs in Spanish saying "May Day is the day of the workers". Of those 10,000 plus marchers, a few hundred were white. Yet, when the Peace and Justice center holds their annual fair, a few hundred white people show up and refer to themselves as "The Left". I am living in one of the most "left wing" areas in the country. We have our progressive radio stations. We watch Democracy Now. We have our left wing bloggers and literary people and most of those people are completely oblivious to the masses of hispanic workers all around them. If they talk about the working class it's mostly to complain that hundred thousand dollar a year operating engineers don't support their campaign for more bicycle trails. Nothing against well paid operating engineers but puh leez.
In my last couple of years before retirement I quit management and went back to a union position, it was a better fit. But i could see the "the Left" at the university where I worked was completely out of touch with the unionized working staff. Many of the staffers were beginning to get slurped up by the Tea drinkers -- there was no Pete Seeger, no The Weavers to make the connections. We may be having this conversation 40 years too late.
I think there was a coup in November 1963 and the Left has been shadow-boxing ever since. The current political realities in the U.S. are about Eisenhower Republicans fighting the John Birch Society. And losing that fight, slowly, over time. I don't know of any solutions near term.
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