% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/chomsky.z.third-world-at-home
% Title:       The Third World at Home
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Z Magazine, November 1992
% Source:      jaske@abacus.bates.edu (Jon Aske)
% Keywords:    Homestead strike
% Synopsis:    
% See-also:    

                     THE THIRD WORLD AT HOME
                          Noam Chomsky
                    Z Magazine, November 1992
 

``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 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.
 

``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.
 

``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.