Rad twitterers stuck on gestural politics have missed what might turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of America’s class struggles. While nobody with any sense is proclaiming a New Millennium for this country’s workers, there may be a new conjuncture around the corner. Thanks to the UAW, as well as Teamsters at UPS, who have won the largest victories for American labor in a half-century. It’s imperative that would-be leftists NOTICE what’s happened in factories and warehouse (and delivery trucks). With a little help from Labor Wave radio, you can listen below to an interview with historian (and former UAW staff organizer) Erik Baker, who has addressed the UAW’s recent wins in Jewish Currents, “Revaluing the Strike.”
Grindstone
Peter Linebaugh’s “Great Act of Historical Imagination”*
“A commonist manifesto for the 21st Century…”
High praise for Peter Linebaugh’s 2014 collection of essays, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, went right by me. I missed the book when it came out and only grabbed it last month to pass time on the subway. My commutes went FAST! Though I didn’t ride the book into the ground. I savored the essay “Meandering at the Crossroads of the Commons and Communism” with a Negroni at an Upper West Side joint that does a damn good job of cultivating commons. (Fam style Italian dishes bring in big parties — happy b-day sung every 15 minutes…) A meet spot to muse with Linebaugh even if dollarism is in the equation. I finished his book as I rolled around the city gathering Thanksgiving provisions. A perfect read in the run-up to a fam-and-friends fête. I’m sure you’d’ve been swept away too as Linebaugh limns (with a feeling) one-for-all-all-for-one struggles to preserve people’s rights and resist privateers and hierarchs.
The late Mike Davis’s summative graph is on point:
From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, who advocated communizing industry and agriculture, to the twentieth-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital “commonist” tradition. He traces the red threat from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensable collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, “Stop, Thief!”
The Invisibility of the Commons
What follows is the concluding essay in Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance PM Press, 2014.
The View from Above (and Down in the Groove)
There’s the thought, maybe I should grow out of my MacGowan loving phase anyway… for my own good. Grow up, as my brother tells me sometimes.
This is about living, and open mic nights, and playing “Rainy Night in Soho.” Not knowing when the song will end, or what lies next…
Wednesday night, after changing mom for the second time, always a protest, an insult, a scoff, a sarcasm, “you’re such a prince…” huff, a mumble as I leave her room, I got down to the open mic night. It’s a straight shot down the road. I’ve had one beer. Have eaten earlier. It’s a straight shot, except for two corners close to the house, streets for driving 25 mph, quiet. I’m not even going to play anything. But I’ll bring the guitar, putting it in the back corner of the large banquet room of Bridie Manor overlooking the wide churning Oswego river, dark in the night like motor oil reflecting the streetlamps of the bridge.
“We are sweet since we are born”
Six Miles Out isn’t La Terra Trema, but this short film about fishermen gently brings home the truth talked up by its Palestinian sponsors: “we are not numbers.”
Click on “Read more” for a bigger screen…
Breakdown
The rich take a plane or hire a car,
but our power is only waiting hour
after hour at the cancelled
bus station, waiting for the backup bus
to heave its way down from Tampa,
while the driver in cigarette-
stained undershirts waits with us,
repeating over and over, he “didn’t
f-up.”
Honey
My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law “honey.” One afternoon in the early 1930’s, when I bloodied my head by pitching over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me and knew that a human life is murder. They weren’t fighting about Paul’s love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one’s life. I don’t say a good life.
I say a life.
With Resolve, Paul
Sisters and Brothers,
Here’s an early musical warm-up for the Labor Day Weekend.
Yes, the United Auto Workers union, led by their new president, Shawn Fain, has edged closed to a strike against the Big Three automakers upon contract expiration on 14 September. And with that in mind, here is a “Rockin’ Solidarity,” originally arranged Dave ‘Redd’ Welsh circa 1985. It’s packed with spirit, and it features Reed Fromer on piano and a vocal chorus from the Freedom Song Network.
The updated and highly relevant images were posted just a couple of days ago by Saul Schniderman, editor of his great weekly, Friday’s Labor Folklore. Enjoy these 3 minutes and 22 seconds of solidarity:
Crystallize It
A mind so fine no idea could violate it? Midway through Tori et Lokita – the Dardenne Brother’s latest film – there’s a sequence that brings home the flaw in T.S. Eliot’s noble praise-line. The Dardennes crystallize an idea that’s suffused with feeling. What happens on screen isn’t a reduction or an abstraction or a violation. It’s an act of imagination.
Seventy-five cents okay with you?
Green Street in 1969
The first loft I lived in was on the north side of Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette. I sublet it for the summer of 1969 from an artist by the name of Jack Whitten.
Labor History Happening Now
Your editor forwarded on the following passages from an informative piece by Michael Tomasky to First‘s…labor caucus:
Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of their workers paid sick days.
Everybody remembers what happened last December. The workers threatened to strike over such days, among other issues. President Biden, generally very friendly toward labor, made it illegal for the workers to strike. He was criticized by unions and workers and fellow Democrats and liberal media outlets, this one included.
None of that criticism was wrong at the time. But it wasn’t the end of the story.
“Structuring Participation”: Class Matters Podcast with Jane McAlevey
Forget Succession. If you want drama (and spicy talk), listen in to the latest Class Matters podcast. Episode 12 (link below) features Jane McAlevey who is prompted by Katherine Isaac, Gordon Lafer, and Adolph Reed Jr. to explain (1) how the work of organizing jumps off in earnest AFTER a union wins a certification election. (Getting to a first union contract is hard.) (2) how the health of any union depends on constant engagement with workers as a collective body, not as atomized figures in one-on-one grievance proceedings (3) how real democracy in a union or anywhere rests on “structuring participation.”
Dialectical Imagination (Prerequisite)
Tom Conway, President of the United Steelworkers, and Rabbits, a 21st C. Wobbly from Northumbria, offer incongruous angles on labor struggles in the American South and the UK.
Bread and Freedom
This talk was included in the collection, Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1961), published after Camus’s death. It originally appeared (per the Anarchist Library) as “Restaurer la valeur de la liberté” (“Restoring the value of freedom”) in the September 1953 issue of La Révolution Prolétarienne, a French syndicalist journal. The title was changed when it was reprinted later the same year. “Bread and Freedom,” incidentally, was also the title of the Russian translation of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.
You Made Beauty a Monster to Me
..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.
The City of Brotherly Love’s Brotherly Union: Ben Fletcher and Local 8
Anatole Dolgoff tried to give the great labor organizer, Ben Fletcher, his due in this First post. Dolgoff, who’s in his mid-eighties, worried that Fletcher’s legacy was at risk of being lost. Perhaps this next post, by a twenty-year old, will help put Dolgoff’s mind at ease…
Mayday Duo: “How I Became an Anarchist” and “A Theory of Everything”
Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art, by the late Peter Lamborn Wilson is a book in two parts. First comes reminiscences, rants and raps about anarchist theory and (in)activism. The second half of the volume consists of essays on Symbolism, alchemy and anarchism in the arts. (Your editor is hot to run the pages on Gauguin!) What follows are two chapters from the first swatch of Heresies…
How I Became An Anarchist
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I worshiped Krazy Kat, greatest of all comic strips: surrealist, mystical, Romantic slapstick about perverse love (across not only gender but species) and criminal anarchy: quantum weirdness and genderfuck written in slang poetry and drawn with slapdash-taoist panache by African-American artist George Herriman.
Union
They’ll fire us after we’ve been
at the company a certain amount of time,
to bring in fresh employees who haven’t been
ground up yet, who haven’t been sliced up
and turned into meat with plastic covers
over us to feed to their customers yet,
who haven’t burned out yet, as if the job were
a kind of fire, and we were the kindling, or as if the job
were a kind of crop circle and we were the corn
that teenage aliens doodle their graffiti on for a purpose
that’s beyond us, for a purpose we are told
to believe in, and I too am angered by employees
who tend too slowly to my needs, who peer
mole-y eyed at me from stacks of paperwork at the
DMV, or who squeak mole-y voiced at me from
burrowing too long into the twisted tunnels of a phone,
angered at them for not being paid enough
to know English, or how to turn on my
cable, so I can watch rich beautiful people
with no problems fail to fix their personalities,
or watch an exposé on how people are
already hard at work doing nothing to fix
problems much bigger than mine, like wrestlers
paying for their own brain damage,
or a community developing cancer trying to
blow out their favorite flaming river,
but it’s easy to be bitter, and it’s hard to join
a union, to show up to the meetings,
sign your name to the list, stick your neck
far, far out from its shell, so others
will stick out their necks from their shells,
until we are a field of necks too numerous to
chop all at once without making a mess,
or until we are a field of throats blooming all the
same words at the same time, the way people
join together to pray—as if God were a
little deaf and can only hear us if we’re all
speaking at once, and a little nearsighted,
so he can only see us if we stand on each
other and form a human pyramid in the exact
shape of a person struggling to build a pyramid.
Wound Up Wrong
“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)
The Organization Man: Franz Kafka, Risk Insurance, and the Occasional Hell of Office Life
Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908-1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe.