Year 501 (54 page)

Authors: Noam Chomsky

Tags: #Politics, #Political Science

In the US, strikers were depicted as “brigands,” “blackmailers whom all the world loathes” (
Harper's Weekly
), a “Mob Bent on Ruin” (
Chicago Tribune
), “anarchists and socialist[s]...preparing to blow up...the Federal building and take possession” of the money in the treasury vaults (
Washington Post
). Eugene Debs was a “lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race,” who should be jailed (he soon was), “and the disorder his bad teachings has engendered must be squelched” (
New York Times
). When Governor John Altgeld of Illinois wired President Cleveland that press accounts of abuses by strikers were often “pure fabrications” or “wild exaggerations,” the
Nation
condemned him as “boorish, impudent, and ignorant”; the President should put him in his place forthwith for his “bad manners” and “the bad odor of his own principles.” The strikers are “untaught men” of “the lowest class,” the
Nation
continued: they must learn that society is “impregnable” and cannot allow them to “suspend, even for a day, the traffic and industry of a great nation, merely as a means of extorting ten or twenty cents a day more wages from their employers.”

The press was not alone in taking up the cudgels for the suffering businessman. The highly respected Reverend Henry Ward Beecher denounced “the importation of the communistic and like European notions as abominations. Their notions and theories that the Government should be paternal and take care of the welfare of its subjects [
sic
] and provide them with labor, is un-American... God has intended the great to be great, and the little to be little.” How much has changed over a century.
18

After its victory at Homestead, the company moved to destroy any vestige of workers' independence. Strike leaders were blacklisted, many jailed for lengthy periods. A European visitor to Homestead in 1900 described Carnegie's “Triumphant Democracy” as “Feudalism Restored.” He found the atmosphere “heavy with disappointment and hopelessness,” the men “afraid to talk.” Ten years later, John Fitch, who took part in a study of Homestead by urban sociologists, wrote that employees of the company refuse to talk to strangers, even in their homes. “They are suspicious of one another, of their neighbors, and of their friends.” They “do not dare openly express their convictions,” or “assemble and talk over affairs pertaining to their welfare as mill men.” Many were discharged “for daring to attend a public meeting.” A national union journal described Homestead as “the most despotic principality of them all” in 1919, when the 89-year-old Mother Jones was dragged “to their filthy jail for daring to speak in behalf of the enslaved steel workers,” though some were later “allowed to speak for the first time in 28 years” in Homestead, Mother Jones recalled. So matters continued until the movements of the 1930s broke the barriers. The relation between popular organization and democracy is vividly illustrated in this record.
19

We cannot really say that the current corporate offensive has driven working class organization and culture back to the level of a century ago. At that time working people and the poor were nowhere near as isolated, nor subject to the ideological monopoly of the business media. “At the turn of the century,” Jon Bekken writes, “the U.S. labor movement published hundreds of newspapers,” ranging from local and regional to national weeklies and monthlies. These were “an integral part of working class communities, not only reporting the news of the day or week, but offering a venue where readers could debate political, economic and cultural issues.” Some were “as large, and in many ways as professional, as many of the capitalist newspapers they co-existed with.” “Like the labor movement itself, this press spanned the range from a fairly narrow focus on workplace conditions to advocacy of social revolution.” The socialist press alone had a circulation of over 2 million before World War I; its leading journal, the weekly
Appeal To Reason
, reached over 760,000 subscribers. Workers also “built a rich array of ethnic, community, workplace and political organizations,” all part of “vibrant working class cultures” that extended to every domain and retained their vitality until World War II despite harsh government repression, particularly under the Wilson Administration. Repression aside, the labor press ultimately succumbed to the natural effects of the concentration of wealth: advertisers kept to capitalist competitors that could produce below cost, and other market factors took their toll, as happened to the mass working class press in England as late as the 1960s. Similar factors, along with federal government policy, undermined efforts in the 1930s to prevent radio from becoming, in effect, a corporate monopoly.
20

Left intellectuals took an active part in the lively working class culture. Some sought to compensate for the class character of the cultural institutions through programs of workers' education, or by writing best-selling books on mathematics, science, and other topics for the general public. Remarkably, their left counterparts today often seek to deprive working people of these tools of emancipation, informing us that the “project of the Enlightenment” is dead, that we must abandon the “illusions” of science and rationalityâa message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use. One recalls the days when the evangelical church taught not-dissimilar lessons to the unruly masses, as their heirs do today in peasant societies of Central America.

It is particularly striking that these self-destructive tendencies should appear at a time when the overwhelming majority of the population wants to change the “inherently unfair” economic system, and belief in the basic moral principles of traditional socialism is surprisingly high (see p. 106). What is more, with Soviet tyranny finally overthrown, one long-standing impediment to the realization of these ideals is now removed. However meritorious personal motives may be, these phenomena in left intellectual circles, in my opinion, reflect yet another ideological victory for the culture of the privileged, and contribute to it. The same tendencies make a notable contribution to the endless project of murdering history as well. During periods of popular activism, it is often possible to salvage elements of truth from the miasma of “information” disseminated by the servants of power, and many people not only “consult their neighbors” but learn a good deal about the world; Indochina and Central America are two striking recent examples. When activism declines, the commissar class, which never falters in its task, regains command. While left intellectuals discourse polysyllabically to one another, truths that were once understood are buried, history is reshaped into an instrument of power, and the ground is laid for the enterprises to come.

3. “To Consult Our Neighbor”

“The men and women who fought for hearth and home in 1892 provided a lesson as important for our age as it was for their own,” labor historian David Montgomery writes in summarizing a collection of reports on Homestead. “People work in order to provide their own material needs, but that everyday effort also builds a community with purposes more important than anyone's personal enrichment. The last 100 years have shown how heavily the health of political democracy in a modern industrial society depends on the success of working people in overcoming personal and group differences to create their own effective voice in the shaping of their own futures. The fight for hearth and home is still with us.”
21

The community of labor in Homestead was destroyed by state violence “mobilized to protect the claims of business enterprises to undisturbed use of their property in their pursuit of personal gain,” Montgomery writes. The impact on workers' lives was enormous. By 1919, after organizing efforts were broken once againâin this case, with the help of Wilson's Red Scareâ”the average compulsory work week in American steel mills was twenty hours longer than in British ones, and American hours were longer than they had been in 1914 or even 1910,” Patricia Sexton observes. Communal values disintegrated. When Homestead was a union town, large steps were taken towards overcoming traditional barriers between skilled and unskilled workers, and the rampant anti-immigrant racism. Immigrant workers, bitterly despised at the time, were in the forefront of the struggle, and were saluted as “brave Hungarians, sons of toll, ...seeking which is right.” “Such praise from âAmerican' workers was seldom heard” in later years, Montgomery points out.
22

Democracy and civil liberties collapsed with the union. “If you want to talk in Homestead, you talk to yourself,” residents said; outsiders were struck by the atmosphere of suspicion and fear, as we have seen. In 1892, the working class population was in charge of local politics. In 1919, town officials denied union organizers the right to hold meetings and barred “foreign speakers”; and when forced by court order to tolerate meetings, placed state police on the platform “to warn speakers against inflammatory remarks or criticism of local or national authorities” (Montgomery). The experience of Mother Jones outraged others, but few could speak about it in Homestead.

Forty years after the crushing of the union and freedom, “the establishment of rights at work through union recognition and the reawakening of democracy in political life appeared hand in hand” in Homestead, Montgomery continues. Working people organized, democracy revived; as always, the opportunity to consult our neighbors in an ongoing and systematic fashion is decisive in establishing democracy, a lesson understood by priests in El Salvador as well as labor organizers in Homestead, and understood no less by those who use what means they can to keep the rabble scattered and bewildered. The struggle continues along an uneven path. During the past several decades, the institutions of power and their priesthood have gained some impressive victories, and sustained some serious defeats.

The tendencies towards the new imperial age heralded by the international financial press are obvious and understandable, along with the extension of the North-South divide to the habitations of the rich. There are also countertendencies. Throughout the North, notably in the United States, much has changed in the past 30 years, at least in the cultural and moral spheres, if not at the institutional level. Had the quincentennial of the Old World Order fallen in 1962, it would have been celebrated once again as the liberation of the hemisphere. In 1992, that was impossible, just as few can blandly talk of our task of “felling trees and Indians.” The European invasion is now officially an “encounter,” though large sectors of the population reject that euphemism as only somewhat less offensive.

The domestic constraints on state violence that are fully recognized by the US political leadership are another case in point. Many were depressed by the inability of the peace movement to prevent the Gulf war, failing to recall that perhaps for the first time ever, large-scale protests actually preceded the bombing, a radical change from the US assault against South Vietnam 30 years earlier, in that case without even the shreds of a pretext. The ferment of the â60s reached much wider circles in the years that followed, eliciting new sensitivity to racist and sexist oppression, concern for the environment, respect for other cultures and for human rights. One of the most striking examples is the Third World solidarity movements of the 1980s, with their unprecedented engagement in the lives and fate of the victims. This process of democratization and concern for social justice could have large significance.

Such developments are perceived to be dangerous and subversive by the powerful, and bitterly denounced. That too is understandable: they do threaten the vile maxim of the masters, and all that follows from it. They also offer the only real hope for the great mass of people in the world, even for the survival of the human species in an era of environmental and other global problems that cannot be faced by primitive social and cultural structures that are driven by short term material gain, and that regard human beings as mere instruments, not ends.

Glossary

Periodicals/News Organizations

AP
Associated Press

BG
Boston Globe

BMJ
British Medical Journal

BW
Business Week

CAHI
Central America Historical Institute

CAN
Central America Newspak

CAR
Central America Report

CIIR
Catholic Institute of International Relations

COHA
Council on Hemispheric Affairs

CSM
Christian Science Monitor