Email is very clumsy for this, so let's start with the Le Monde article you sent me offlist. It will follow under its own title. What follows will be the opening of answers and the connection will seem very thin at first. Try to stick with it.
I agree with just about everything you wrote. I should note I intented to title the post meditations, but mediations will have to do.
Where to start? First, most of my concepts of serious activism comes from watching too much AJE on Egypt. These blended with following the US journalist and writers. Neither is anywhere near the kind of radicalism that Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were. Hopefully, that is coming in some form in very hopefully an ensuing struggle with international dimensions.
I always over reacted so just turn the volumn down.
Now, awareness of the depth of badness of industrial capital didn't happen overnight, to much of a degree within a wider public (bourgeois) consciousness until it was already too late. I judge these things within art, particularly painting. I am no historian of politics, literature and letters.
In my not very well reflected or informed mind, that point of public arousal came in France slowly from the post-revolution as it dawned particularly among the artists and writers as they realized what post-revolution modernity might mean. It would not hail the new day and the sunlight of liberity, equality, and fraternity.
In my imagination, it would be impossible not to see something terrible in the development of industry based on steam, iron, steel, and great machines built to service the needs of society. But until that flithy, toxic, and brutal way of life became the dominant form for the great mass, it could perhaps be ignored. Such was more or less the state of affairs from about the 1820s to the1840s. The idealism and refinement of early bourgeois painting rarely noted the changing conditions.
Then a new generation who were not of the revolutionary time, came into a different life that increasingly bore little resemblence to life under the ancien regime.
In the opening pages of Flaubert's Sentimental Education written in the 1860s, our hero (anti-hero) Frederic all of about eighteen, gets on the steam boat on the Seine headed to Paris from somewhere in Normandy. He is headed into the maw of a city filled with struggle, not doubt miserable conditions for most, but also the promise of a great life, wealth, and women. Everything a teenager could want, although technically he was off to university.
I won't fill in the rest, except to say the main narrative of the novel ends in the 1848-51 revolution and the stunning reversals, failures and fall. There is a coda from 1860s of extraordinary beauty at the close, looking back. (I should also note Baudelaire and Paris Spleen. This collection corresponds roughly to the tough minded realism of Stephan Crane in Maggy and his NYC stories and later notes from Mexico...)
At the moment I am reading Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. The fantastic sarcasm and derision on the people and events of 1848-51 makes me laugh out loud. Where are the heros?
I don't want to make too much of this but Flaubert was born in 1821 and Marx was born in 1818. The absolute ice and yet impressionistic beauty of Flaubert's rendition of Frederic and Paris, and Marx's derision share a deep sensibility of romantic reactions to the events of 1848-51. The point is that both men see as if for the first time what modernity and industrial society might portent and it was not a nice future.
Now switch to Courbet, born 1819. (Read the wiki if you don't know about him.) He is most famous for his painting the Stone Breakers. What he represents is the turn to Realism, the painting school of mid-century Paris where a modern sense of social critique was dawning among the diseffected painters who could still gain some bourgeois support, in effect successful, much like the current cultural, social and political critcs of our day, those mentioned in the posted La Monde essay.
The important point is that some collective (we?) of writers, artists, political and social activists-ism have been to this or a very similar juncture before and the works from those previous breaks probably compose our own sources---well they do mine. We (I) have been here before once in distant memory in the late 60s and now just recently. Not precisely so, but near enough to recognize eachother over time.
So too with Trotsky. He was fully versed in most of the above, along with the classic works of Russian Literature certainly from Gogol to Gorky.
I'll close this section with a quote from John Ross who I never read and will later. He said in some video, ``Revolution is always leaking out and you can't call a plummer to fix it.'' I hope it has strung a big leak and that leak is not going to be stunched precisely because big finance capital is going to be washing the rest us into the abyss if we don't stop it soon.
Point 2) from your post was the most important, at least for us in the US. But just because those vast wastelands of post-industrial US are empty now doesn't mean that they are entirely lost and forgotten to historical conscieousness. For one thing, you can always get in the car and go visit, which is what Chris Hedges did recently. Michael Moore is another. Hedges calls them sacrifice zones. Arun Gupta went to Youngstown and recently noted that before there was Detroit there was Youngstown.
In my own memories are the vast industrial tracks of Los Angeles and to a lesser extent Guadalajara. The latter is more exotic so I'll sketch it first. Our downstairs neighbor had a family were I used to hang out, welcome or not. One Sunday, Jorge, the big dad took his kids and me to the sugar factory were he worked as a foreman. He took us in a sequence tour to where the cane was processed into mush and then through the refining process and series of buildings and giant vats. The vats were made of wood and resembled huge iron strap barrels. We were on the gangways above. Each step in refinement was a different color. The stench was overwhelming and primordial. It joined the category of raw sewage and death-rot. The smell was near intoxication. Dolores pinched her nose. I didn't want to breath.
Now to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. The smog was so bad, some days I could not play at all on the playground. One of the places my stepfather worked was in a steel factory in deep South Central somewhere in whats now called City of Industry or something like that. We drove through a truly vast parking lot to get near the giant doors where the shift came outside and waited to pick up my stepfather with his black steel lunch bucket dressed in blue workshirt and black jeans in steel toed boots. He was filthy, hot and sweaty. He quit as soon as he could and certainly never did that kind of work again.
My `real' father worked at the LA Examiner downtown in the old fancy building that is now an LA classic. I could paint the whole picture, but I'll leave with a simple tour he took me on to the Lino room to have my name cast in lead, and then to composing rooms and down to the ground floor and over to a heavy wired glass window to watch the presses. The earthquake like rumble and din was astounding.
My last stepfather worked in the new aerospace industries who merged with the vast WWII aircraft factories in Los Angeles that fed the war machine in the Pacific and later Cold War ICBM and nuclear war industries. He himself was a pacifist and only worked in domestic electronics. As a teenager out in the Valley, I could hear the deep throated distant roar of the big Atlas rockets going off in the distant eastern hills.
These impressions of the vastness of modern life and the geography of urban industrial life have really never been given their proper proporitions. Billions of Chinese and South Asia kids will carry even more vast impressions in their minds...
Retuning to my memories. It was something very much like the scale that Trotsky worked and depicted. In any case, the words were certainly enough for me to form picture memories while I read. They rolled by like black and white movies of the late 40s and early 50s where I spent Saturdays in a big old fashion movie palace on So. Vermont. I also remember the hum long after midnight coming from my open bedroom window, and wondering where the sound came from, and then knowing it was the city itself.
So then all of these were evoked in Trotsky. But you are certainly right, it is a more rare thing these days in the US, but not elsewhere. Until Trotsky I didn't know you could evoke this scale with mere words. It's proper medium is film, and now video. As Trotsky went around to presses with his typed essays (did he use a copy typist to get the double spaced cheap newsprint paper ready for mark up? Was it like the piles on my fathers desk with his deep black copy editor pencils?) ... I could smell the ink and newsprint.
There is a documentary on AJE called Iron Crows. Look around for it. In the meantime there is also a large format book of photos by Sebastiao Salgado called Labor. (Thanks to Joanna I saw it.) Salgado visited the same terrible labor conditions of dismantling giant ships featured in Iron Crows... The hulls I've seen heading out of San Francisco bay were towed by huge barges. They were headed for schuttle out near the Farallones. Well unless they just go further out in the deep water.
The next post will cover that last paragraph of 3) the connection or lack with the industrial or otherwise working class by the current intelligencia that I watch and listen to almost daily...
CG