Working Class Traditions and Faith: Solidarity or Despair

Working Class Traditions and Faith: Solidarity or Despair	Jan. 24th, 2008 @ 01:56 pm

New York is a union town. Or at least it used to be.


During the transport workers' strike in December 2005 the most common type of response I heard from those who opposed the strike was, "They have health care benefits and a decent salary. I work hard at my job. I work sixty hours a week and they call me a temp and I don't have health care benefits. Why shouldn't they pay more for their health care? Why should the transit workers get more when I won't get more?"


The response could have been: "Maybe if I had a union I'd get good benefits and a half-decent salary also. I'm glad they got some of theirs; I wish I could get some of mine."


Both responses share a similar ignorance about the world. Both responses reveal an unawareness of history and how difficult it is to fight for one's self, for and with other people. The reality is that it is always easier to lose than to win and when you win you never win as much as was given in blood, sweat, and thought. It is not easy to win a good union and a strong union that will fight for all and still hear the voice of the individual. It is hard work, and both responses are ignorant of this work and the risks involved.


And here is the crossroads of these two ways of thinking. Ignorance cannot be the only reason for a person to articulate the first response rather than the second. There is something deeper in the current cultural conjuncture that makes the first response common, even among working people.


The followers of Marx would claim that the above two responses show the level of class consciousness. I do not want to deny the essential truth of this even on an elementary level but I think that a traditional Marxist analysis can only take me halfway into my essay on the reasons for the above two responses. When I was in Norway many years ago I heard doctors and lawyers insist that they were part of the broad working class. For sure, these doctors and lawyers were socialists but it was not an unusual response among the professional classes in Norway to look at themselves as workers and think of themselves as involved in the same struggles as factory workers. Here in the United States everybody from Donald Trump to the unemployed who live in the worse slums claim that they are "middle class." These are simple matters of cultural identification yet they are significant because they articulate in the form of broad-brush self-labeling a level of cultural awareness. Working class traditions and middle class traditions are not the same. The tradition of working class solidarity, the sense that "we are all in this together and must stick together against the bosses" is much different from the tradition of middle class striving and individuality. I do not mean to idealize either tradition. Working class solidarity often enough turns into a suspicion of individuality and into forced conformity. On the other side, middle class striving and individuality often enough turns into social-climbing and selfishness. I do not believe that solidarity and individuality are mutually exclusive but there is a certain tension between the two. But what I am saying is that there is something deep in our culture, beyond even class consciousness, that brings people to identify with values of social striving and individuality, over and against solidarity and cooperation, and this is part of the reason why people will prefer to self-identify as middle class rather than working class.


The lack of solidarity with fellow workers only partially covers the reason why so many people prefer the first kind of ignorance as opposed to the second kind of ignorance. It should be obvious that I prefer the second kind of ignorance to the first. I believe the second response allows for the possibility of learning about others; it fosters curiosity into ways of thinking and doing of other grooups that the first kind of response blocks from view. I want to emphasize here that this is a matter of "mere belief," a secular faith, that is rational but cannot be proved. In short the second response shows a generosity of the heart, a lack of narrowness and meanness when regarding ones' fellow humans that the first response does not show.


And this "generosity of the heart" is also a matter of "faith."


In my leftist and atheist way I come in this essay to an insight made by radical religions. The opposite of faith is despair, and neither of these responses are opposed to rationality or are necessarily irrational.


I think a deep individualism of despair is part of the social consciousness of our time. I believe that examples of this despair are everywhere. It can be seen in the lack of generosity of the heart in most fundamentalist "faiths." I think it can be shown that "fundamentalist" religions of all kind are not reactions of the "faithful" but reactions of the despairing. They are social expressions of despair. This is the opposite of the faithful and solidaristic reaction of many religions during the rise of Protestantism, for example. Fundamentalist religions are the inside-out expression of resentment and individualism, a collective focus on narrow salvation and a deep belief in the end of the world.


I only use fundamentalist religion as one outward expression of social despair, because these religions are not the problem I wish to focus upon. I think that the generation of despair is an ignored factor of why solidarity is not a value among us. Many people have stopped believing that their actions can make things better. They don't believe that they can cooperate with others in ways that can improve the lives of all. They believe that the world will get worse and individual lives will get worse so that the only way to improve one's own life is by holding on against others. This despair is not new or unique in history. But I think that one reason it is so strong is that there is a material basis for it in everyday reality. It is despair fostered by social conditions, this is true, but environmental conditions and the possibility that humans are destroying themselves on a global scale also fosters such despair. There is not only a lack of revolutionary optimism -- the belief that society will improve with the radical transformation of the whole -- but also a lack of simple capitalist optimism -- the belief that the economy will bring prosperity and that this will mean that individual lives will improve. I think that this despair is fundamentally a lack of faith in collective betterment and in the possibility of working with others. If I am correct then this means that despair is independent of individual psychology. A person can be personally optimistic about his or her life and still exhibit this fundamental lack of faith.


New York was once a union town. When workers were on strike, anywhere, there was a knee jerk reaction among working class New Yorkers that the strikers should stick it to the bosses because if the strikers lives improved there was a better possibility that every one's life would improve. The reaction was local and personal.


When Mike Quill, one of the founders of the Transit Workers Union, was served with an order that found the 1966 Transit Worker strike illegal his response was, "The judge can drop dead in his black robes." Many fellow New Yorkers accepted the inconvenience of the 1966 transit workers' strike and admired the audacity of Mike Quill. This was partially because most of these workers had memories as deeply rooted in tradition as Quill. Quill remembered the "illegal" strikes in Ireland during the struggle for independence. Probably the single most important action leading to Irish independence was the illegal sympathy strike action by the transport workers union in Ireland in the period of 1919-1921. The railroad workers refused to carry arms or troops, thus depriving the British of a safe way of bringing troops to bear on rebellions through out Ireland. The demonstrable strength of unions to improve lives, to act together for political and social ends, was obvious to Mike Quill and most of his fellow workers. It was obvious because, even when specific historical details were not known, this kind of solidarity was a living tradition. It was also obvious to many New Yorkers of every background that solidarity was preferable to despair and that those were the two choices, because many had memories similar to Mike Quill's in their own experiences in life.


Such memories either become living traditions that are practiced or else they disappear. Once such traditions disappear then they are felt as a hole, as something lacking, as a longing, and often the response to this "hole" is helplessness and despair.


We have reached a state that even on the left such traditions of simple solidarity are not obvious. It is this observation about the left that inspired these thoughts in the first place.


I have written a lot about the writers' strike in my journal. In doing so my original intention was to try to explain to some of my fellow leftists why this strike was of some importance. I assumed that leftists would hope for the best for the WGA strike, but might not see that this was a crucial strike for the labor movement. I assumed that most leftists would not know the history of the writers' union or the importance to Southern California of the Hollywood unions in general. I assumed that they would not know the broader issues of this strike that made it different from any strike in Hollywood for the last 60 years. I did not expect them to reject the writers because they are supposedly well-off and "middle class." I did not expect reactions from leftists along the lines of "I hate television so I really don't give a damn about this strike." Such reactions are more than ignorant when expressed from a supposed leftist. They show a certain amount of despair along similar lines of the first reaction above. This reaction is also the most common reaction I find posted in the readers' comments sections on the websites of papers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. The sense of such comments is: "The issues that these workers care about are nothing to me, can be nothing to me, since I don't get anything out of them myself." I simply did not expect some leftists, even if they are a small minority of our tribe, to echo the corporate controlled media on the writers' strike. Basically, this is the same kind of solipsistic despair that I expect from non-leftists.

Recently I watched the Ken Loach and Paul Laverty film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film that I highly recommend to all. It fascinated me greatly so I listened to the commentary given by Ken Loach and an historian. At one point Loach said (I can only paraphrase) that it is extraordinary how much hope, faith, and belief in others that people can bring to a cause, even under extreme circumstances. He continued, by saying that it is in the interest of rulers to hide from people the very fact of their collective power, and especially the power of workers when they stick together for the future benefit of all. His example was the very same transport workers strike in Ireland that Mike Quill experienced as a teenager. The lesson for me was that history, memories, and traditions are the living integument of faith and hope. One cannot live with them alone. These traditions are not locked in one's brain. The kind of faith in collective action and the possibility (never the certainty) of change for the better comes, at some point in one's life, from doing, and can come from nowhere else. The rulers and owners of our society are the ultimate enemy. But to some great extent it is the politics of despair that we confront everyday when we ask people to rebel. In a phrase he borrowed from Erich Fromm, Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Why I Oppose the War In Vietnam" speech in 1967, called for "a revolution of hope." He did not leave the notion of this revolution unspecified and abstract. He spelled out how hope and solidarity must go hand together and must be built and lived and remembered.

At the end of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad says,

I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too.

This is an echo of Eugene Debs' statement to the court upon being convicted and sent to jail for opposing World War I.

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

The faith in others and the hope for the future it takes to believe such statements is not merely a matter of what the "religionists" call "grace." It is a matter of daily work and lived experience.


Jerry Monaco
24 January 2008
New York City






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Tags: capitalism, cinema, despair, eugene debs, faith, history, hope, ideology, ken loach, mlk, organizing, propaganda, responsibility, socialism, solidarity, strikes, unions, wga, writers, writers' strike

Anti-Union Cliches: A clearly written example of self-contradiction

Anti-Union Cliches: A clearly written example of self-contradiction	Jan. 18th, 2008 @ 03:42 pm

I usually don't reply to posts such as the one below. But the writer at The Word Wrangler in his weblog entry, Why I Don’t Support the Writer’s Strike, states his position so clearly that it is easy to see through the usual cliches. There is the usual cliche that somehow joining a union is a way to get around "personal responsibility". There is the cliche that we live in a competitive market, on a level playing field and all you have to do is go out and create your own business to compete with the corporations.

On the other hand there is the usual fatalistic notion that people shouldn't cooperate to change their situation. The corporations set the rules and all you can do is follow their rules or go out and create similar rules that others follow. The Word Wrangler writes in his post , "For those that think they’re getting screwed by the corporations - which they probably are - go off on your own. Start your own company. Make your own future instead of crying about your present." Basically, this reduces to the following choice, "Screw or get screwed," either get exploited or do some exploiting yourself. There is no perspective that the basic situation might be changed, or at least made better for those who come after. ( Another possibility of course is that you will hope that your business will be somehow "different." Many have tried, through cooperatives, share-alike business organizations, etc. These forms are good, but unfortunately in our society very unstable.)

There is also the usual silliness, and yes it is silliness, that people that are out on strike, fighting for themselves and others are somehow "cry babies." Having known people who have gotten beaten up by company goons while on picket-lines, I find it kind of childish that a person compares a picket line "to a child holding his breath until he gets what he wants." Union haters are mired in self-contradiction, in this respect. If the picket lines are old fashion sorts of affairs that people won't cross, they blame unions for being thugs. If picket lines largely act as a moral reminder that people should stick together for the good of all who work, then the picketers are called cry-babies or people who are not serious. The conglomerates have said this about the current WGA picketers over and over again. The anti-union types will often go back and forth between these two complaints depending on the strike and the type of picket line.

I use the above phrase "anti-union type" gingerly, but I don't want to be too mean to The Word Wrangler because it seems to me that he doesn't see that his cliches are such and are in many ways self-contradictory. He writes clearly, and not like a hardened intellectual who can hide the contradictions in his thought. For this precise reason his expressions are useful.

So after this post I reply at length: (Note: I left a shorter and non-proofread version of my reply at The Word Wrangler. Word Wrangler replied very politely.

Why I Don’t Support the Writer’s Strike
Posted in January 18th, 2008
by The Word Wrangler in Rant

I’ve been avoiding talking about the writer’s strike for a couple of reasons. The first one being that I don’t support strikes, nor do I support unions. The second one is that I believe that people should take responsibility for their own lives. If you think you’re getting a raw deal at your job, then change jobs. Change careers if you want. But don’t stand around with a sign on a picket line, which is the adult equivalent of a child holding his breath until he gets what he wants.

Anne Wayman from the Golden Pencil posted a link to a piece on the Writer’s Resource Center giving three reasons to support the strike.

So I’m giving my reasons why I don’t support the strike.

The rules are set by the corporations - If I went to work at Marvel Comics as a writer or artist, I know going in that the company is pretty much going to own whatever it is I create. If I create the next Superman - and Marvel makes millions of dollars in TV, toys, movies and comic books - chances are I’m still going to be compensated based on our original agreement with Marvel coming out on top. And Marvel certainly isn’t going to give me the rights to the character that’s earning them that much scratch. I know this going in. If I don’t want to play by those rules, I can choose not to.

It’s their game so don’t whine about it when you come out on the bottom of a deal.

Personal responsibility - I admit that I lean pretty far to the conservative side of the political spectrum. My father is a no-nonsense guy and an extremely hard worker. He always preached about controlling your own destiny instead of it controlling you. Make choices - both good and bad - and live with the consequences. And if you’re in a situation you don’t like, pull yourself up out of it and move on.

I realize we live in a society that doesn’t like to hear that. We don’t want to work hard for what we want. We think we’re entitled to everything and when we don’t get it, we whine. We think the companies we work for owe us all. Well, I got news for y’all, it ain’t like that.

For those that think they’re getting screwed by the corporations - which they probably are - go off on your own. Start your own company. Make your own future instead of crying about your present.

The marketplace has changed drastically over the past decade. There are more opportunities than ever for creative people to get noticed, make money AND keep the rights to their material than ever before.

Instead of trying to change someone else’s rules, why not just go and make up your own?

Word Wrangler,

We have so little common ground between us, that a discussion between us would probably be difficult. But because you state your view so clearly it is also easy to see the alternatives that you leave out.

You say that there are a couple of reasons you don't support the WGA strike: "The first one being that I don’t support strikes, nor do I support unions. The second one is that I believe that people should take responsibility for their own lives."

You state this right out without giving reasons. You also seem to connect "personal responsibility" and being anti-union. Later you say that corporations set the rules. So let me ask you the following questions.

1) What is a corporation but a state-sanctioned and legally protected union of investors and owners? Why do you support the kind of union of owners that is a corporation, but not a union of employees? The business institution we call a corporation was not created whole cloth and neither is it a "natural phenomena" that has always been with us. In your post you in effect assume that both of these situations are true, both that corporations suddenly appeared as arbitrary institutions and that they are natural phenomena that no one can change. The rules are the rules. But corporations were created through heavy state intervention and enabled by laws created by lawyers and judges. Why should you support laws and state-intervention to enable corporations but be opposed to people getting together in unions? My suspicion is that you believe in corporations and not unions because the business institutions are the dominant form in our country and as John Dewey said, business is simply the political air we breath.

So this is the first contradiction that I find in your post: You are in favor of unions of owners and investors, corporations that are the height of the lack of personal responsibility because this lack of personal responsibility is encoded in the law under the guise of "limited liability." But you are opposed to cooperation between employees in collective bargaining.

2) If people cooperate with each other to get things done, do you consider this something that is counter to "personal responsibility"? Why shouldn't employees cooperate to bargain with their employer? Why shouldn't employees try to improve the work situation that they are in? Why is cooperating with others to improve your situation, or the situation of your industry, somehow an abnegation of personal responsibility? I don't really understand how personal responsibility and cooperation with others contradict each other. In fact, I consider the idea that "personal responsibility" and self-help through cooperation with others are mutually exclusive another example of how you fall into self-contradiction.

3) You state "the rules are set by corporations", as if this is something we should just accept. (Are you always advocating the same kind of acceptance? A slave says: "The rules are set by slave owners. Accept it.") What rules are you talking about in this case?

Well, in the next breath you speak of copyright rules. You point out correctly that the people who created Superman for Marvel DC comics were little compensated for their creativity. The Marvel DC company made millions and the creators made very little. Then you say that writers can choose not to cooperate with the company or go do something else. In the case of the actual creators of Superman and others of that generation [from what my friends tell me of their lives] this was not exactly much of a choice. They could have been accuntants, lawyers and doctors instead but they chose to be creative. In their case, and in many cases, doing something else usually means simply giving up on their own creative ideas.

Maybe in giving up on working with a corporation that can help to distribute your creations you will have other ideas, or maybe you will just put all ideas in a drawer. I have known many poets, some of the with money and jobs and some of them living catch as catch can. But I have rarely met a poet with business sense. The same is true of many artists. Why should we construct a scoiety where the only people who have decent lives ar those that run their own businesses? Are these the only choices you wish to offer? Why isn't participating in a union also a choice?

Why not expand your choices through trying to cooperate with others in changing the rules to a system that would be better for workers and creators? Corporations changed the rules because they cooperated with investors and hired lawyers and twisted the arms of judges and bought politicians to get the copyright laws that favor them and not the creators. One reason why writers need a union is so they can get together and higher people who are expert in bargaining and twisting arms of judges and lobbying to get copyright laws favorable to individuals. There was nothing inevitable about the copyright rules we have now. Why shouldn't they be changed by us all in favor of the creator. I look at this as a minimal reform.

Still, it is not quite true to say that these rules were set by corporations. The rules for copyright were set, not by corporations, but by Congress as enabled by the U.S. constitution. These rules of copyright are a state-granted monopoly for a limited amount of time (supposedly "limited", but not if Disney keeps getting its way) giving the creator use and disposal of the creative work. There is nothing natural or inevitable about these rules and what is certain is that the founders of our country only envisioned patents and copyrights being owned by individual people and not by corporations. The idea that fictional people (corporations) could own fictional property (copyright and patents) is a very recent phenomena in history. It is a recent phenomena that we allowed to happen because we have neglected the public domain and allowed corporations and states to run rough-shod over (in this case) individual rights. The reason this phenomena came about in the first place was through acts of judicial activism, i.e. supreme court decisions argued by corporate lawyers in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. The situation where most writers don't control their own copyrights was only codified in law by congress in the 1970s. And it was only through lobbying by corporations to pass new copyright laws that we are in the current mess we are in.

So once again back to unions. If creators of songs, stories, movies, and comic books had as much bargaining power as corporations in the early part of the 20th century the situation would have been different. In other words, back then the best way to protect individual rights would have been through forming a union or some sort of cooperative organization to save individual control of copyright. Later in the century if individuals had as much political influence over congress as rent-seeking businesses, "for hire" ownership of copyright would never have come about.

Personally, I think that it is the epitome of personal responsibility to risk some of one's own personal comfort to form collective organizations to cooperate to make better rules in this part of the world

Jerry Monaco

P.S. Word Wrangler's reply:

The Word Wrangler said,
in January 18th, 2008 at 12:53 pm

Thanks for the comment Jerry. First, let me start out by stating that I don’t have the level of education regarding copyrights and their history that you do, so I really can’t address that issue.

One question you asked was: “Why is cooperating with others to improve your situation or the situation of your industry somehow an abnegation of personal responsibility?”

The answer is: It isn’t.

I’ll go back to my Marvel Comics example. Back in the 90s, when comics were hot, there were a few very talented creators who worked either for Marvel or DC. These creators became sick of the ‘work for hire’ business practices at the big corporations and - rather than forming a union, striking or picketing - they went off and formed their own company Image Comics.

Image’s business model was based on the notion that creators could publish under the Image umbrella, but still retain all rights to their characters and maintain independent studios.

That’s a good example of people cooperating to change the way business works. Image became so successful that Marvel and DC started treating their talent better because they didn’t want them going off on their own.

Instead of trying to hold a company hostage in order to get what they wanted, they went out and got what they wanted on their own. They changed the rules by making their own rules.

The world is changing in such a way that offers global opportunities for creators. I think we’re moving towards a time where creative types won’t need unions or corporations to find success. And I think that’s in everyone’s best interest.

My reply to this was to say was that a cooperative model for creative writers and a union of employees are not mutually exclusive. (You can read my full comment at The Word Wrangler's site.)

Postscript: Because of the WGA strike I have read comments by Brian K. Vaughan who believes that the comic book industry would be much better if the comic book creators had a decent union.

This brings up another subject -- the issue of industry customs and standards. The reason that companies that make movies and comic books in general control the copyrights of the creative workers is a matter of industry custom and standards.

Consider the following:

In the industries that were created before modern copyright existed the creators have substantial control of their copyrights. In many of the industries created in the 20th Century creators lost control of their copyrights. This was mainly because of economic "power", and the rise of vast networks of distribution. Historically, if a creator did not have access to the networks of distribution, which were usually held as oligopolies by three or four companies, then the creator lost control of the uses and reuses of his creation.

The division between creative workers and ownership was especially true in industries where several creators worked on one product. More often than not the company would try to maintain a high-level of competition between creators and category of creators. Thus in the movie business editors were set against directors, set designers against the wardrobe designer, wardrobe designers against make-up artists, writers against directors and unit producers, and directors were set against every one. It was precisely such situations that unions were meant to resolve. Unfortunately, because of manipulation by the bosses and defeats on the line the unions often exacerbated this situation. All of this is part of a longer story....

Jerry Monaco

Tags: anti-union, blogs, cliches, corporations, ideology, organizing, picket lines, propaganda, strike tactics, strikes, unions, wga, word wrangler, writers, writers' strike