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Sunday, June 29, 2008
What I’m Reading Now
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
“A bleeding country, a stifled science, an idiotic art--finance and gangsterism in the saddle!"
This begins an occasional series. Tomorrow’s post will feature The Other USC: Graduate Students on Food Stamps in South Carolina.
Thomas Boyd, In Time of Peace (1935). “Hicks’s voice was sharp as he swung around. ‘Except when I was in the army, people have tried to make me feel like that all of my life--that, if things went wrong, it wasn’t that there was something the matter with the system, but that there was something the matter with me. Well, I don’t fall for it any more. And I don’t want you to think that I’m just going to lie down and take it, either, because I’m not.’”
Veteran Hicks returns to a job at a metal lathe, acquiring conciousness of his expendability. Becomes a reporter for the labor newspaper. Disillusioned by opportunistic labor bureaucrats, joins a liberal tabloid and marries. Buys a home on rent-to-own terms. Begins an affair with a woman of the leisure class. Wife becomes an advertising writer, and they hire a nanny. Through his lover’s connections, he writes a lucrative column pimping a radio company. They build a nicer home, keeping the first as an investment. “Everyone” is making money in the stock market. Mortgage crisis and depression ensue. Their wages are cut and their home is repossessed. Hicks repudiates professional-managerial opportunism:
“I’m just not going to kid myself any more. I’m sick of being jerked around like a monkey on a stick, dancin’ around on top of the workers’ shoulders till the shakedown comes and then trying to scramble up again. That’s what your father’s been doing all his life--and look at him! That’s what we’ll be doing, too, till we wake up and realize that the only way we’ll ever get anywhere is with the workers.”
Albert Maltz, The Underground Stream: An Historical Novel of a Moment in the American Winter (1940). A communist union organizer, an auto plant personnel manager, and a small businessman at the head of fascist cell meet fatefully over a three-day period in February 1936. Auto is not yet unionized, membership in the Communist Party is not illegal, and fascist terror is on the rise.
“‘...We know the power of capitalism in this country. When it comes to a test, the progressive forces in this country are going to be smashed. The trade union movement will be smashed. And the Communist Party will be smashed first of all, to pave way for the others.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Man, be serious! You don’t have to keep up face for me. I’m not someone you need to convert.’
Princey shrugged.
‘Fascism will take power here, and you know it.’
With no idea where this conversation was leading, he asked, ‘Suppose it does?’
Grebb reacted with astonishment. ‘Can a Communist ask that so casually? You know what it will mean: Generations of suffering, increasingly lower standards of living for the mass of people, a bleeding country, a stifled science, an idiotic art--finance and gangsterism in the saddle!’
‘Well?’ Princey managed.
‘I know the way to overthrow Fascism quickly!’
‘How?’
‘By working inside it! Listen to me, Princey. I beg you to listen seriously. This is a tragic time for the world. Those who hold back from new political paths will be judged by history to be as guilty as those who openly opposed the working-class movement. ...It would have been so easy for me to leave my job, to denounce finance capital, to give every cent of money I have to the Communist Party. That’s what I should have liked to do. The harder thing is what I’ve decided to do: To remain within the ranks of capital. To gain power in the growing Fascist movement! ...Then, when the time is ripe, you and I will be in command. We’ll be able to act for Socialism from within the camp of its enemies.‘“
In the next installment of this series I’ll feature Upton Sinclair, The Industrial Republic: A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence. (1907), including Sinclair on Brooks Adams’s The New Empire. Adams: “Institutions are good when they lead to success in competition, and bad when they hinder.”
Comments
“I’m just not going to kid myself any more. I’m sick of being jerked around like a monkey on a stick, dancin’ around on top of the workers’ shoulders till the shakedown comes and then trying to scramble up again. That’s what your father’s been doing all his life--and look at him! That’s what we’ll be doing, too, till we wake up and realize that the only way we’ll ever get anywhere is with the workers.”
Does it change the reading of the book at all to read this and realize that historically, this guy is going to be wrong?
Depends on whether you think that the present, recent past, and near future suggest that he’s wrong.
I’d think that right about now journalists, culture workers, college faculty, etc, might be feeling he’s kinda right. The novel’s a tale of failed attempt at “escape” from the working class via professionalism.
White collar proletarianization is by now an old, old story--observed all too slowly by those for whom “white collar” has become an ideology enabling their further exploitation, rather than a description of enhanced material rewards…
I guess that I’m not sure if I believe in white collar proletarianization. “The workers” had a historical meaning that didn’t include journalists, culture workers, college faculty etc. So much of that old-time rhetoric had a sort of cult of workerism attached to it, by which what the upper classes did wasn’t really work. Which seems flatly wrong to me, now. I’m more interested in a Bob Black style post-work kind of ideology.
But I don’t think it’s arguable that for that character, speaking in 1935, he was wrong. Whatever the uncertain benefits of professionalism, that guy would have died of old age still hoping for “the workers” to get anywhere. That doesn’t impeach his ideals, necessarily—people can struggle for centuries at some really long-term social goal—but the “I’m tired” language suggests something more immediate.
Hi, Rich. I don’t want our exchange to be talking past one another, or to become a dialogue down a rabbit hole, instead of a larger conversation.
But maybe we have very different notions of the given in labor history. I don’t think white collar proletarianization is debatable, especially among college faculty, and it’s just not true that a character in the 1930s “would have died of old age hoping for the workers to get anywhere.” There’s a lot of debate about the meaning, extent, durability, and agencies in the enormous working-class gains between, say, FDR and Reagan, but it’s really hard to dismiss them--even with three decades of reaction, many of those gains survive into what one hopes may be a period of further working-class gains.
I do agree that some of the material in the 30s that related writers, journalists, teachers and college faculty to other workers had a “sort of cult of workerism attached to it,” if what you mean by this is that there’s a sort of “mental labor exceptionalism” in those cases.
But what interests me in particular is the often overlooked extent to which, by contrast, many writers pushed beyond that exceptionalism.
In Boyd’s case, for instance, despite traces of the language of cultural workers as superstructure in the passage I quoted, there’s a wonderful scene in which the journalists accept wage cuts and working without wages from the newspaper, while the unionized pressmen continue to receive their salary.
Among other moments, it’s this realization, of professionalism as a vector for superexploitation, that leads the story’s hero to the final scene of being machine-gunned as he tries to get a job in an auto plant--going full circle from his start at the metal lathe, through the failure of professionalism to deliver the promised escape.
If the 1935 worker was thinking of unions, he was absolutely correct. By 1939, in the US, of nonagricultural workers, over 20 percent were unionized, with the accompanying generally better pay, working conditions, and bargaining ability - up from less than 10 percent in 1928. By 1947, over 30 percent were unionized. And as late as 1975 more than 25 percent were still unionized and benefitting from their collective strength.
Moreover, those unions, unionization, gained change not only for their own members, but forced indirectly many employers of nonunion labor to improve wages and conditions, and forced the government in the same general direction, in many ways. (In Canada, the unions won universal health care for everyone.)
Over the most recent decades, some of those gains have been eroded, but far from all, very far.
Great post, Marc. Looking forward to more.