From: harelb@math.cornell.edu
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: CHOMSKY: Excerpts from "The 3rd Wor
Date: 18 Nov 92 01:57:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #R:9211180155.AA28954@poly.math.cor:607627281:9211180156.AA28972@poly.math.cor:-957394077:000:3814
Nf-From: math.cornell.edu!harelb    Nov 17 17:57:00 1992


Subject: CHOMSKY: Excerpts from "The 3rd World At Home" (III)
From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)

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[From Z magazine, Nov. 1992; see bottom]


		       =======================
		       The Third World at Home
		       =======================
			   By Noam Chomsky

[...]

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. 
  
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." [..]


[...]

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

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