_Working Class Traditions and Faith: Solidarity or Despair_ http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/80413.html
New York is a union town. Or at least it used to be.
During the transport workers' strike in December 2005 the most common type of response I heard from those who opposed the strike was, "They have health care benefits and a decent salary. I work hard at my job. I work sixty hours a week and they call me a temp and I don't have health care benefits. Why shouldn't they pay more for their health care? Why should the transit workers get more when I won't get more?"
The response could have been: "Maybe if I had a union I'd get good benefits and a half-decent salary also. I'm glad they got some of theirs; I wish I could get some of mine."
Both responses share a similar ignorance about the world. Both responses reveal an unawareness of history and how difficult it is to fight for one's self, for and with other people. The reality is that it is always easier to lose than to win and when you win you never win as much as was given in blood, sweat, and thought. It is not easy to win a good union and a strong union that will fight for all and still hear the voice of the individual. It is hard work, and both responses are ignorant of this work and the risks involved.
And here is the crossroads of these two ways of thinking. Ignorance cannot be the only reason for a person to articulate the first response rather than the second. There is something deeper in the current cultural conjuncture that makes the first response common, even among working people.
The followers of Marx would claim that the above two responses show the level of class consciousness. I do not want to deny the essential truth of this even on an elementary level but I think that a traditional Marxist analysis can only take me halfway into my essay on the reasons for the above two responses. When I was in Norway many years ago I heard doctors and lawyers insist that they were part of the broad working class. For sure, these doctors and lawyers were socialists but it was not an unusual response among the professional classes in Norway to look at themselves as workers and think of themselves as involved in the same struggles as factory workers. Here in the United States everybody from Donald Trump to the unemployed who live in the worse slums claim that they are "middle class." These are simple matters of cultural identification yet they are significant because they articulate in the form of broad-brush self-labeling a level of cultural awareness. Working class traditions and middle class traditions are not the same. The tradition of working class solidarity, the sense that "we are all in this together and must stick together against the bosses" is much different from the tradition of middle class striving and individuality. I do not mean to idealize either tradition. Working class solidarity often enough turns into a suspicion of individuality and into forced conformity. On the other side, middle class striving and individuality often enough turns into social-climbing and selfishness. I do not believe that solidarity and individuality are mutually exclusive but there is a certain tension between the two. But what I am saying is that there is something deep in our culture, beyond even class consciousness, that brings people to identify with values of social striving and individuality, over and against solidarity and cooperation, and this is part of the reason why people will prefer to self-identify as middle class rather than working class.
The lack of solidarity with fellow workers only partially covers the reason why so many people prefer the first kind of ignorance as opposed to the second kind of ignorance. It should be obvious that I prefer the second kind of ignorance to the first. I believe the second response allows for the possibility of learning about others; it fosters curiosity into ways of thinking and doing of other grooups that the first kind of response blocks from view. I want to emphasize here that this is a matter of "mere belief," a secular faith, that is rational but cannot be proved. In short the second response shows a generosity of the heart, a lack of narrowness and meanness when regarding ones' fellow humans that the first response does not show.
And this "generosity of the heart" is also a matter of "faith."
In my leftist and atheist way I come in this essay to an insight made by radical religions. The opposite of faith is despair, and neither of these responses are opposed to rationality or are necessarily irrational.
I think a deep individualism of despair is part of the social consciousness of our time. I believe that examples of this despair are everywhere. It can be seen in the lack of generosity of the heart in most fundamentalist "faiths." I think it can be shown that "fundamentalist" religions of all kind are not reactions of the "faithful" but reactions of the despairing. They are social expressions of despair. This is the opposite of the faithful and solidaristic reaction of many religions during the rise of Protestantism, for example. Fundamentalist religions are the inside-out expression of resentment and individualism, a collective focus on narrow salvation and a deep belief in the end of the world.
I only use fundamentalist religion as one outward expression of social despair, because these religions are not the problem I wish to focus upon. I think that the generation of despair is an ignored factor of why solidarity is not a value among us. Many people have stopped believing that their actions can make things better. They don't believe that they can cooperate with others in ways that can improve the lives of all. They believe that the world will get worse and individual lives will get worse so that the only way to improve one's own life is by holding on against others. This despair is not new or unique in history. But I think that one reason it is so strong is that there is a material basis for it in everyday reality. It is despair fostered by social conditions, this is true, but environmental conditions and the possibility that humans are destroying themselves on a global scale also fosters such despair. There is not only a lack of revolutionary optimism -- the belief that society will improve with the radical transformation of the whole -- but also a lack of simple capitalist optimism -- the belief that the economy will bring prosperity and that this will mean that individual lives will improve. I think that this despair is fundamentally a lack of faith in collective betterment and in the possibility of working with others. If I am correct then this means that despair is independent of individual psychology. A person can be personally optimistic about his or her life and still exhibit this fundamental lack of faith.
New York was once a union town. When workers were on strike, anywhere, there was a knee jerk reaction among working class New Yorkers that the strikers should stick it to the bosses because if the strikers lives improved there was a better possibility that every one's life would improve. The reaction was local and personal.
When Mike Quill, one of the founders of the Transit Workers Union, was served with an order that found the 1966 Transit Worker strike illegal his response was, "The judge can drop dead in his black robes." Many fellow New Yorkers accepted the inconvenience of the 1966 transit workers' strike and admired the audacity of Mike Quill. This was partially because most of these workers had memories as deeply rooted in tradition as Quill. Quill remembered the "illegal" strikes in Ireland during the struggle for independence. Probably the single most important action leading to Irish independence was the illegal sympathy strike action by the transport workers union in Ireland in the period of 1919-1921. The railroad workers refused to carry arms or troops, thus depriving the British of a safe way of bringing troops to bear on rebellions through out Ireland. The demonstrable strength of unions to improve lives, to act together for political and social ends, was obvious to Mike Quill and most of his fellow workers. It was obvious because, even when specific historical details were not known, this kind of solidarity was a living tradition. It was also obvious to many New Yorkers of every background that solidarity was preferable to despair and that those were the two choices, because many had memories similar to Mike Quill's in their own experiences in life.
Such memories either become living traditions that are practiced or else they disappear. Once such traditions disappear then they are felt as a hole, as something lacking, as a longing, and often the response to this "hole" is helplessness and despair.
We have reached a state that even on the left such traditions of simple solidarity are not obvious. It is this observation about the left that inspired these thoughts in the first place.
I have written a lot about the writers' strike in my journal. In doing so my original intention was to try to explain to some of my fellow leftists why this strike was of some importance. I assumed that leftists would hope for the best for the WGA strike, but might not see that this was a crucial strike for the labor movement. I assumed that most leftists would not know the history of the writers' union or the importance to Southern California of the Hollywood unions in general. I assumed that they would not know the broader issues of this strike that made it different from any strike in Hollywood for the last 60 years. I did not expect them to reject the writers because they are supposedly well-off and "middle class." I did not expect reactions from leftists along the lines of "I hate television so I really don't give a damn about this strike." Such reactions are more than ignorant when expressed from a supposed leftist. They show a certain amount of despair along similar lines of the first reaction above. This reaction is also the most common reaction I find posted in the readers' comments sections on the websites of papers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. The sense of such comments is: "The issues that these workers care about are nothing to me, can be nothing to me, since I don't get anything out of them myself." I simply did not expect some leftists, even if they are a small minority of our tribe, to echo the corporate controlled media on the writers' strike. Basically, this is the same kind of solipsistic despair that I expect from non-leftists.
Recently I watched the Ken Loach and Paul Laverty film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film that I highly recommend to all. It fascinated me greatly so I listened to the commentary given by Ken Loach and an historian. At one point Loach said (I can only paraphrase) that it is extraordinary how much hope, faith, and belief in others that people can bring to a cause, even under extreme circumstances. He continued, by saying that it is in the interest of rulers to hide from people the very fact of their collective power, and especially the power of workers when they stick together for the future benefit of all. His example was the very same transport workers strike in Ireland that Mike Quill experienced as a teenager. The lesson for me was that history, memories, and traditions are the living integument of faith and hope. One cannot live with them alone. These traditions are not locked in one's brain. The kind of faith in collective action and the possibility (never the certainty) of change for the better comes, at some point in one's life, from doing, and can come from nowhere else. The rulers and owners of our society are the ultimate enemy. But to some great extent it is the politics of despair that we confront everyday when we ask people to rebel. In a phrase he borrowed from Erich Fromm, Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Why I Oppose the War In Vietnam" speech in 1967, called for "a revolution of hope." He did not leave the notion of this revolution unspecified and abstract. He spelled out how hope and solidarity must go together and must be built and lived and remembered.
At the end of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad says,
"I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too."
This is an echo of Eugene Debs' statement to the court upon being convicted and sent to jail for opposing World War I.
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
The faith in others and the hope for the future it takes to believe such statements is not merely a matter of what the "religionists" call "grace." It is a matter of daily work and lived experience.
Jerry Monaco 24 January 2008 New York City
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/