Joanna
Jerry Monaco wrote:
> I wrote this at my weblog.
>
> _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
>
>
>