"Effete Snobs," Workers, & Walt Whitman (was Re: Labor: Menial vs. Noble)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Kelley says:

>the rest are striving, effete leftists who disingenuously disavowed 
>that path....
>
>yeah.

*****   _What do you do weekends?_

Drink beer, read a book.  See that one?  _Violence in America_.  It's 
one of them studies from Washington.  One of them committees they're 
always appointing.  A thing like that I read on a weekend.  But 
during the weekdays, gee...I just thought about it.  I don't do that 
much reading from Monday through Friday.  Unless it's a horny book. 
I'll read it at work and go home and do my homework.  (Laughs.) 
That's what the guys at the plant call it -- homework.  (Laughs.) 
Sometimes my wife works on Saturday and I drink beer at the tavern.

I went out drinking with one guy, oh, a long time ago.  A college 
boy.  He was working where I work now.  Always preaching to me about 
how you need violence to change the system and all that garbage.  We 
went into a hillbilly joint.  Some guy there, I didn't know him from 
Adam, he said, "You think you're smart."  I said, "What's your 
pleasure?"  (Laughs.)  He said, "My pleasure's to kick your ass."  I 
told him I really can't be bothered.  He said, "What're you, 
chicken?"  I said, "No, I just don't want to be bothered."  He came 
over and said something to me again.  I said, "I don't beat women, 
drunks, or fools.  Now leave me alone."

The guy called his brother over.  This college boy that was with me, 
he came nudging my arm, "Mike, let's get out of here."  I said, "What 
are you worried about?"  (Laughs.)  This isn't unusual.  People will 
bug you.  You fend it off as much as you can with your mouth and when 
you can't, you punch the guy out.

It was close to closing time and we stayed.  We could have left, but 
when you go into a place to have a beer and a guy challenges you -- 
if you expect to go in that place again, you don't leave.  If you 
have to fight the guy, you fight.

I got just outside the door and one of these guys jumped on me and 
grabbed me around the neck.  I grabbed his arm and flung him against 
the wall.  I grabbed him here (indicating throat), and jiggled his 
head against the wall quite a few times.  He kind of slid down a 
little bit.  This guy who said he was his brother took a swing at me 
with a garrison belt.  He just missed and hit the wall.  I'm looking 
around for my junior Stalin (laughs), who loves violence and 
everything.  He's gone.  Split.  (Laughs.)  Next day I see him at 
work.  I couldn't get mad at him, he's a baby.

He saw a book in my back pocket one time and he was amazed.  He 
walked up to me and he said, "You read?"  I said, "What do you mean, 
I read?"  He said, "All these dummies read the sports pages around 
here.  What are you doing with a book?"  I got pissed off at the kid 
right away.  I said, "What do you mean, all these dummies?  Don't 
knock a man who's paying somebody else's way through college."  He 
was a nineteen-year-old effete snob.

_Yet you want your kid to be an effete snob?_

Yes.  I want my kid to look at me and say, "Dad, you're a nice guy, 
but you're a fuckin' dummy."  Hell yes, I want my kid to tell me that 
he's not gonna be like me...

If I were hiring people to work, I'd try naturally to pay them a 
decent wage.  I'd try to find out their first names, their last 
names, keep the company as small as possible, so I could personalize 
the whole thing.  All I would ask a man is a handshake, see you in 
the morning.  No applications, nothing.  I wouldn't be interested in 
the guy's past.  Nobody ever checks the pedigree of a mule, do they? 
But they do on a man.  Can you picture walking up to a mule and 
saying, "I'd like to know who his granddaddy was?"

I'd like to run a combination bookstore and tavern.  (Laughs.)  I 
would like to have a place where college kids came and a steelworker 
could sit down and talk.  Where a workingman could not be ashamed of 
Walt Whitman and where a college professor could not be ashamed that 
he painted his house over the weekend....

...This is gonna sound square, but my kid is my imprints.  He's my 
freedom....You know what I mean?...This is why I work.  Every time I 
see a young guy walk by with a shirt and tie and dressed up real 
sharp, I'm lookin' at my kid, you know?  That's it.

(Mike LeFevre, a steelworker, whose oral history is collected in 
Studs Turkel, _Working_, NY: Ballantine Books, 1972, pp.7-9)   *****

Yoshie

Postscript:

*****   This class [proletariat] cannot begin the construction of a 
new culture without absorbing and assimilating the elements of the 
old cultures.  This does not mean in the least that it is necessary 
to go through step by step, slowly and systematically, the entire 
past history of art.  Insofar as it concerns a social class and not a 
biologic individual, the process of absorption and transformation has 
a freer and more conscious character.  But a new class cannot move 
forward without regard to the most important landmarks of the past....

...There is no revolutionary art as yet. There are the elements of 
this art, there are hints and attempts at it....

...The powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has 
the character of market competition, will not disappear in a 
socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will 
be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form. 
There will be the struggle for one's opinion, for one's project, for 
one's taste.  In the measure in which political struggles will be 
eliminated -- and in a society where there will be no classes, there 
will be no such struggles -- the liberated passions will be 
channelled into technique, into construction which also includes art. 
Art then will become more general, will mature, will become tempered, 
and will become the most perfect method of the progressive building 
of life in every field.  It will not be merely "pretty" without 
relation to anything else.

All forms of life, such as the cultivation of land, the planning of 
human habitations, the building of theatres, the methods of socially 
educating children, the solution of scientific problems, the creation 
of new styles, will vitally engross all and everybody.  People will 
divide into "parties" over the question of a new gigantic canal, or 
the distribution of oases in the Sahara (such a question will exist 
too), over the regulation of the weather and the climate, over a new 
theatre, over chemical hypotheses, over two competing tendencies in 
music, and over a best system of sports.  Such parties will not be 
poisoned by the greed of class or caste.  All will be equally 
interested in the success of the whole.  The struggle will have a 
purely ideological character.  It will have no running after profits, 
it will have nothing mean, no betrayals, no bribery, none of the 
things that form the soul of "competition" in a society divided into 
classes.  But this will in no way hinder the struggle from being 
absorbing, dramatic and passionate....

(Leon Trotsky, _Literature and Revolution_, at 
<http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1924/lit_revo/ch07.htm>) 
*****