From: jaske@abacus.bates.edu (Jon Aske)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Chomsky (Z, 11/92): The 3rd world at home (1 of 1, 730 lines)
Date: 15 Nov 92 15:27:57 GMT
Article-I.D.: mont.1992Nov15.152757.3391
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: ?
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu

The following article by Noam Chomsky appeared in:
 
     Z Magazine, November 1992
 
and is reprinted here with the magazine's permission.
 
Z is an independent, progressive monthly magazine of critical
thinking on  political, cultural,  social, and economic life in 
the United States.  It sees the racial, sexual, class, and
political dimensions of  personal life as fundamental to
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=================================================================
 
The Third World at Home
=======================
 
1. "The Paradox of '92"
-----------------------
 
The basic theme of the 500 year conquest is misread if it sets
Europe--broadly construed--against the subject domains.  As
Adam Smith stressed, the interests of the architects of policy
are not those of the general population; the internal class war
is an inextricable element of the global conquest.  One of the
memories that reverberates through the 500 years is that
"European societies were also colonized and plundered," though
the "better-organized" communities with "institutions for
economic regulation and political self-government" and traditions
of resistance were able to retain basic rights and even extend
them through continuing struggle.
 
The end of the affluent alliance and the onset of the "new
imperial age" have intensified the internal class war.  A
corollary to the globalization of the economy is the entrenchment
of Third World features at home: the steady drift towards a
two-tiered society in which large sectors are superfluous for
wealth-enhancement for the privileged.  Even more than before,
the rabble must be ideologically and physically controlled,
deprived of organization and interchange, the prerequisite for
constructive thinking and social action. "The paper has taken us
one at a time and convinced us `how good the times' are," Wobbly
writer T-Bone Slim commented: "We have no opportunity to consult
our neighbor to find out if the press speaketh the truth." A
large majority of the population regard the economic system as
"inherently unfair," look back at the Vietnam war as not a
"mistake" but "fundamentally wrong and immoral," favored
diplomacy not war as the US prepared to bomb Iraq, and so on. 
But these are private thoughts; they do not raise the dread
threat of democracy and freedom as long as there is no systematic
way "to consult our neighbor." Whatever the individual thoughts
may be, collectively we march in the parade.  No presidential
candidate, for example, could possibly say "I opposed the Vietnam
war on principled grounds and honor those who refused to obey the
order to fight a war that was `fundamentally wrong and immoral'."
 
In any system of governance, a major problem is to secure
obedience.  We therefore expect to find ideological institutions
and cultural managers to direct and staff them.  The only
exception would be a society with an equitable distribution of
resources and popular engagement in decision-making; that is, a
democratic society with libertarian social forms.  But meaningful
democracy is a remote ideal, regarded as a danger to be averted,
not a value to be achieved: the "ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders" must be reduced to their spectator status, as Walter
Lippmann phrased the theme that has long been common coin.  The
current mission is to ensure that any thought of controlling
their destiny must be driven from the minds of the rascal
multitude.  Each person is to be an isolated receptable of
propaganda, helpless in the face of two external and hostile
forces: the government and the private sector, with its sacred
right to determine the basic character of social life.  The
second of these forces, furthermore, is to be veiled: its rights
and power must be not only beyond challenge, but invisible, part
of the natural order of things.  We have travelled a fair
distance on this path.
 
The rhetoric of the 1992 election campaign illustrates the
process.  The Republicans call for faith in the entrepeneur,
accusing the "other party" of being the tool of social engineers
who have brought the disaster of Communism and the welfare state
(virtually indistinguishable).  The Democrats counter that they
only intend to improve the efficiency of the private sector, its
dictatorial rights over most of life and the political sphere
unchallenged.  Candidates say "vote for me," and I will do
so-and-so for you.  Few believe them, but more important, a
different process is unthinkable: that in their unions, political
clubs, and other popular organizations people should formulate
their own plans and projects and put forth candidates to
represent them.  Even more unthinkable is that the general public
should have a voice in decisions about investment, production,
the character of work, and other basic aspects of life.  The
minimal conditions for functioning democracy have been removed
far beyond thought, a remarkable victory of the doctrinal system.
 
Toward the more totalitarian end of the spectrum, self-styled
"conservatives" seek to distract the rascal multitude with
jingoist and religious fanaticism, family values, and other
standard tools of the trade.  The spectacle has elicited some
bemused commentary abroad.  Observing the 1992 Republican
convention, from the pre-Enlightenment God and Country Rally on
opening day to the party platform crafted by evangelical
extremists, and the fact that the Democratic candidate "mentioned
God six times in his acceptance speech" and "quoted from
scriptures," the _Economist_ wondered at a society "not ready
yet for openly secular leaders," alone in the industrial world. 
Others watched with amazement as a debate between the
Vice-President and a TV character occupied center stage.  These
are signs of the success in defanging democratic forms, to
eliminate any threat to private power.
 
Contemporary right-wing discourse can hardly fail to bring to
mind earlier denunciations of "liberalism," with its call
"for women's equality" and denial of the ancient truth
that a woman's "world is her husband, her family, her
children, and her home" (Adolf Hitler).  Or the warning, from
the same voice, that it is "a sin against the will of the
Almighty that hundreds upon thousands of his most gifted
creatures should be made to sink in the proletarian swamp while
Kaffirs and Hottentots are trained for the liberal
professions"--however the current version may be masked in
code words.  The resort to "cultural" themes and
religious-jingoist fervor revives the classic fascist technique
of mobilizing the people who are under assault.  The
encouragement of religious "enthusiasm," in particular,
has a long history within what E.P. Thompson called "the
psychic processes of counter-revolution" used to tame the
masses, breeding "the chiliasm of despair," the desperate
hope for some other world than this one, which can offer little.
 
Studies of public opinion bring out other strands.  A June 1992
Gallup poll found that 75% of the population do not expect life
to improve for the next generation of Americans--not too
surprising, given that real wages have been dropping for 20
years, with an accelerated decline under Reaganite
"conservatism," which also managed to extend the cloud
over the college-educated.  Public attitudes are illuminated
further by the current popularity of ex-presidents: Carter is
well in the lead (74%) followed by the virtually unknown Ford
(68%), with Reagan at 58%, barely above Nixon (54%).  Dislike of
Reagan is particularly high among working people and "Reagan
Democrats," who gave him "the highest unfavorable rating
[63%] of a wide range of public officials," one study found. 
Reagan's popularity was always largely a media concoction; the
"great communicator" was quickly dismissed when the farce
would no longer play.
 
The Harris polling organization has been measuring alienation
from institutions for 25 years.  Its latest survey, for 1991,
found the numbers at an all-time high of 66%.  83% of the
population feel that "the rich are getting richer and the poor
are getting poorer," saying that "the economic system is
inherently unfair," Harris president Humphrey Taylor comments. 
The concerns of the overwhelming majority, however, cannot be
addressed within the political system; even the words can barely
be spoken or heard.  The journalist who reports these facts sees
only people who are angry at "their well-paid politicians" and
want "more power to the people," not "more power to the
government." We are not allowed to think that government might be
of and by the people, or that they might seek to change an
economic system that 83% regard as "inherently unfair."
 
Another poll revealed that "faith in God is the most important
part of Americans' lives." Forty percent "said they valued their
relationship with God above all else"; 29% chose "good health"
and 21% a "happy marriage." Satisfying work was chosen by 5%,
respect of people in the community by 2%.  That this world might
offer basic features of a human existence is hardly to be
contemplated.  These are the kinds of results one might find in a
shattered peasant society.  Chiliastic visions are reported to be
particularly prevalent among blacks; again, not surprising, when
we learn from the _New England Journal of Medicine_ that "black
men in Harlem were less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in
Bangladesh."
 
Also driven from the mind is any sense of solidarity and
community.  Educational reform is designed for those whose
parents can pay, or at least are motivated to "get
ahead." The idea that there might be some general concern for
children--not to speak of others--must be suppressed.  We
must make "the true costs of bearing a child out of wedlock
clear" by letting "them be felt when they are
incurred--namely at the child's birth"; the teenage
high-school dropout must realize that her child will get no help
from us (Michael Kaus).  In the rising "culture of
cruelty," Ruth Conniff writes, "the middle-class
taxpayer, the politician, and the wealthy upper class are all
victims" of the undeserving poor, who must be disciplined and
punished for their depravity, down to future generations.  
 
When the Caterpillar corporation recruited scabs to break a
strike by the United Auto Workers, the union was
"stunned" to find that unemployed workers crossed the
picket line with no remorse, while Caterpillar workers found
little "moral support" in their community.  The union,
which had "lifted the standard of living for entire
communities in which its members lived," had "failed to
realize how public sympathy had deserted organized labor," a
study by three _Chicago Tribune<D> reporters
concludes--another victory in an unremitting business campaign
of many decades that the union leadership refused to see.  It was
only in 1978 that UAW President Doug Fraser criticized the
"leaders of the business community" for having
"chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country--a
war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the
minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the
middle class of our society," and having "broken and
discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing
during a period of growth and progress." That was far too
late, and the tactics of the abject servant of the rich who soon
took office destroyed a good bit of what was left.
 
The _Tribune_ study sees the defeat of the union as "the end of
an era, the end of what may be the proudest creation of the
American labor movement in the 20th century: a large blue-collar
middle class." That era, based on a corporation-union compact in
a state-subsidized private economy, had come to an end 20 years
earlier, and the "one-sided class war" had been underway long
before.  Another component of the compact was "the exchange of
political power for money" by the union leaders (David Milton), a
bargain that lasted as long as the rulers found it to their
advantage.  Trust in the good faith and benevolence of the
masters will yield no other outcome.
 
A crucial component of the state-corporate campaign is the
ideological offensive to overcome "the crisis of democracy"
caused by the efforts of the rabble to enter the political arena,
reserved for their betters.  Undermining of solidarity with
working people is one facet of that offensive.  In his study of
media coverage of labor, Walter Puette provides ample evidence
that in the movies, TV, and the press the portrayal of unions has
generally "been both unrepresentative and virulently negative."
Unions are depicted as corrupt, outside the mainstream, "special
interests" that are either irrelevant or actually harmful to the
interests of workers and the general public, "un-American in
their values, strategies, and membership." The theme "runs deep
and long through the history of media treatment," and "has helped
push the values and goals of the American labor movement off the
liberal agenda." This is, of course, the historic project,
intensified when need arises.
 
Caterpillar decided in the '80s that its labor contract with the
UAW was "a thing of the past," the _Tribune_ study observes:
the company would "permanently change it with the threat of
replacement workers." That tactic, standard in the 19th century,
was reinstituted by Ronald Reagan to destroy the air traffic
controllers union (PATCO) in 1981, one of the many devices
adopted to undermine labor and bring the Third World model home. 
In 1990, Caterpillar shifted some production to a small steel
processor that had broken a Teamsters Local by hiring scabs, "a
swift and stunning blow to the workers, a harbinger" of what was
to come.  Two years later, the hammer struck.  For the first time
in 60 years, a major US manufacturer felt free to use the
ultimate anti-labor weapon.  Congress followed shortly after by
effectively denying railroad workers the right to strike after an
employer lockout that stopped the trains.
 
Congress's General Accounting Office found that companies felt
much more free to threaten to call in "permanent replacement
workers" after Reagan used the device in 1981.  From 1985 to
1989, employers resorted to the threat in one-third of all
strikes, and fulfilled it in 17% of strikes in 1990.  A 1992
study showed that "four of five employers are willing to wield
the replacement-worker weapon," the _Wall Street Journal_
reported after the Caterpillar strike, and one-third said they
would use it at once.
 
Labor reporter John Hoerr points out that the decline in workers'
income from the early 1970s has been paralleled by decline in
strikes, now at the lowest ebb since World War II.  Militant
labor organizing during the Great Depression brought about
labor's first--and last--political victories, notably the
National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, which granted
labor rights that had long been established in other industrial
societies.  Though the right to organize was quickly weakened by
Supreme Court rulings, it was not until the 1980s that corporate
America felt strong enough to return to the good old days, moving
the US off the international spectrum once again.  The
International Labor Organization (ILO), taking up an AFL-CIO
complaint in 1991, noted that the right to strike is lost when
workers run the risk of losing their jobs to permanent
replacements and recommended that the US reassess its policies in
the light of international standards--strong words, from an
organization traditionally beholden to its powerful sponsors. 
Among industrial countries the US is alone, apart from South
Africa, in tolerating the ancient union-busting devices.
 
"Paradox of '92: Weak Economy, Strong Profits." The headline of a
lead article in the _Times_ business section captures the
consequences of the "one-sided class war" waged with renewed
intensity since the end of the affluent alliance. "America is not
doing very well, but its corporations are doing just fine," the
article opens, with corporate profits "hitting new highs as
profit margins expand." A paradox, inexplicable and insoluble. 
One that will only deepen as the architects of policy proceed
without interference from "meddlesome outsiders."
 
What the "paradox" entails for the general population is
demonstrated by numerous studies of income distribution, real
wages, poverty, hunger, infant mortality, and other social
indices.  A study released by the Economic Policy Institute on
Labor Day, 1992, fleshed out the details of what people know from
their experience: after a decade of Reaganism, "most
Americans are working longer hours for lower wages and
considerably less security," and "the vast majority"
are "in many ways worse off" than in the late 1970s. 
From 1987, real wages have declined even for the college
educated. "Poverty rates were high by historic
standards," and "those in poverty in 1989 were
significantly poorer than the poor in 1979." The poverty rate
rose further in 1991, the Census Bureau reported.  A
congressional report released a few days later estimates that
hunger has grown by 50% since the mid-1980s to some 30 million
people.  Other studies show that one of eight children under 12
suffers from hunger, a problem that reappeared in 1982 after
having been overcome by government programs from the 1960s.  Two
researchers report that in New York, the proportion of children
raised in poverty more than doubled to 40%, while nationwide,
"the number of hungry American children grew by 26%" as
aid for the poor shrank during "the booming
1980s"--"one of the great golden moments that humanity
has ever experienced," a spokesman for the culture of cruelty
proclaimed (Tom Wolfe).
 
The impact is brought out forcefully in more narrowly-focused
studies; for example, at the Boston City Hospital, where
researchers found that "the number of malnourished, low-weight
children jumped dramatically following the coldest winter
months," when parents had to face the agonizing choice between
heat or food.  At the hospital's clinic for malnourished
children, more were treated in the first nine months of 1992 than
in all of 1991; the wait for care reached two months, compelling
the staff to "resort to triage." Some suffer from Third World
levels of malnutrition and require hospitalization, victims of
"the social and financial calamities that have befallen families"
and the "massive retrenchment in social service programs." By the
side of a road, men hold signs that read "Will Work for Food," a
sight that recalls the darkest days of the Great Depression.
 
But with a significant difference.  Hope seems to have been lost
to a far greater extent today, though the current recession is
far less severe.  For the first time in the modern history of
industrial society, there is a widespread feeling that things
will not be getting better, that there is no way out.
 
2.  "Fight to the Death"
------------------------
 
The victory for working people and for democracy in 1935 sent a
chill through the business community.  The National Association
of Manufacturers warned in 1938 of the "hazard facing
industrialists" in "the newly realized political power of the
masses"; "Unless their thinking is directed we are definitely
headed for adversity." A counteroffensive was quickly launched,
including the traditional recourse to murderous state violence. 
Recognizing that more would be needed, corporate America turned
to "scientific methods of strike-breaking," "human relations,"
huge PR campaigns to mobilize communities against "outsiders"
preaching "communism and anarchy" and seeking to destroy our
communities, and so on.  These devices, building upon corporate
projects of earlier years, were put on hold during the war, but
revived immediately after, as legislation and propaganda chipped
away at labor's gains, with no little help from the union
leadership, leading finally to the situation now prevailing.
 
The shock of the labor victories of the New Deal period was
particularly intense because of the prevailing assumption in the
business community that labor organizing and popular democracy
had been buried forever.  The first warning was sounded in 1932,
when the Norris-LaGuardia Act exempted unions from antitrust
prosecution, granting labor rights that it had received in
England sixty years earlier.  The Wagner Act was entirely
unacceptable, and has by now been effectively reversed by the
business-state-media complex.
 
In the late 19th century, American workers made progress despite
the extremely hostile climate.  In the steel industry, the heart
of the developing economy, union organization reached roughly the
level of Britain in the 1880s.  That was soon to change.  A
state-business offensive destroyed the unions with considerable
violence, in other industries as well.  In the business euphoria
of the 1920s, it was assumed that the beast had been slain.
 
American labor history is unusually violent, considerably more so
than in other industrial societies.  Noting that there is no
serious study, Patricia Sexton reports an estimate of 700
strikers killed and thousands injured from 1877 to 1968, a figure
that may "grossly understate the total casualties"; in
comparison, one British striker was killed since 1911.
 
A major blow against working people was struck in 1892, when
Andrew Carnegie destroyed the 60,000 member Amalgamated
Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) by hiring
scabs--yet another anniversary that might have been
commemorated in 1992, when the UAW was laid low by the very same
methods, revived after a sixty-year lapse.  The leading social
historian Herbert Gutman describes 1892 as "the really
critical year" that "shaped and reshaped the
consciousness of working-class leaders and radicals, of trade
unionists." The use of state power for corporate goals at
that time "was staggering," and led to "a growing
awareness among workers that the state had become more and more
inaccessible to them and especially to their political and
economic needs and demands." It was to remain so until the
Great Depression.
 
The 1892 confrontation at Homestead, commonly called "the
Homestead strike," was actually a lockout by Carnegie and his
manager on the scene, the thuggish Henry Clay Frick; Carnegie
chose to vacation in Scotland, dedicating libraries he had
donated.  On July 1 the newly-formed Carnegie Steel Corporation
announced that "No trade union will ever be recognized at the
Homestead Steel Works hereafter." The locked-out workers could
reapply individually, nothing more.  It was to be "a Finish Fight
against Organized Labor," the Pittsburgh press proclaimed, a
fight "to the death between the Carnegie Steel Company, limited,
with its $25,000,000 capital, and the workmen of Homestead," the
_New York Times_ reported.
 
Carnegie and Frick overcame the workers of Homestead by force,
first sending Pinkerton guards, then the Pennsylvania National
Guard when the Pinkertons were defeated and captured by the local
population. "The lockout crushed the largest trade union in
America, the AAISW, and it wrecked the lives of its most devoted
members," Paul Krause writes in his comprehensive history. 
Unionism was not revived in Homestead for 45 years.  The impact
was far broader.  
 
Destruction of unions was only one aspect of the general project
of disciplining labor.  Workers were to be deskilled, turned into
pliable tools under the control of "scientific management."
Management was particularly incensed that "the men ran the mill
and the foreman had little authority" in Homestead, one official
later said.  As discussed earlier, it has been plausibly argued
that the current malaise of US industry can be traced in part to
the success of the project of making working people "as stupid
and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be," in
defiance of Adam Smith's warning that government must "take pains
to prevent" this fate for the "labouring poor" as the "invisible
hand" does its grim work.  On the contrary, business
called upon state power to accelerate the process.  Elimination
of the mechanisms "to consult our neighbor" is a companion
process in the taming of the herd.
 
Homestead was a particularly tempting target because workers
there were "thoroughly organized," and in control of local
political life as well.  Homestead held firm through the 1880s
while a few miles away, in Pittsburgh, labor suffered severe
defeats.  Its multi-ethnic work force demanded their "rights as
freeborn American citizens" in what Krause describes as "a
workers' version of a modern American Republic," in which workers
would have freedom and dignity.  Homestead was "the nation's
preeminent labor town," Krause writes, and Carnegie's next target
in his ongoing campaign to destroy the right to organize.
 
Carnegie's victory at Homestead enabled him to slash wages,
impose twelve-hour workdays, eliminate jobs, and gain monumental
profits.  This "magnificent record was to a great extent made
possible by the company's victory at Homestead," a historian
of the company wrote in 1903.  Carnegie's "free
enterprise" achievements relied on more than the use of state
violence to break the union.  As in the case of other industries
from textiles to electronics, state protection and public subsidy
were critical to Carnegie's success. "Under the beauties of
the protective tariff system the manufacturing interests of the
country are experiencing unparalleled prosperity," the
_Pittsburgh Post_ reported on the eve of the lockout, while
Carnegie and others like him were preparing "an enormous
reduction in the wages of their men." Carnegie was also a
master swindler, defrauding the city of Pittsburgh in collusion
with city bosses.  Famed as a pacifist as well as philanthropist,
Carnegie looked forward to "millions for us in armor" in
construction of battleships--purely for defense, he explained,
hence in accord with his pacifist principles.  In 1890 Carnegie
had won a large naval contract for his new Homestead plant.
"It was with the help of...powerful politicians and crafty
financiers who operated in the grand arenas of national and
international government--as well as in the backrooms of
Pittsburgh's businesses and city hall--that Carnegie was able
to construct his immense industrial fiefdom," Krause writes:
the world's first billion-dollar corporation, US Steel.
 
The press gave overwhelming support to the Company, as usual. 
The British press presented a different picture.  The _London
Times_ ridiculed "this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through
Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the
wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for his
self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh." The far-right
British press ridiculed Carnegie's preachings on "the rights and
duties of wealth," describing his self-congratulatory book
_Triumphant Democracy_ as "a wholesome piece of satire" in the
light of his brutal methods of strike-breaking, which should be
neither "permitted nor required in a civilized community," the
_London Times_ added.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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 rationality--a
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.  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 wavers
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."
 
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 again--in this case, with the help of Wilson's Red
Scare--"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
toil,...seeking which is right." "Such praise from
`American' workers was seldom heard" in later years,
Montgomery points out.
 
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 '60s 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.
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