A World Which Is Lost

I HAVE A FRIEND named Paul, whose father works at a blast furnace at a steel mill in Gary. Indiana Paul relates this story: at least five times a week his father comes home from work sometime after midnight, having done his time on the middle shift 1 p.m. to midnight at the mill. Apparently he cannot bring himself to go to bed; the heat, the lean and the tension of his work do not allow him to sleep, but instead compel him to turn on an all night local country music station, which he plass so loud that no one else in the house is able to sleep either. Finally, usually around dawn, Paul's father drops off to sleep in a chair, even though the music from she radio is at least loud enough to stifle out the leaguing sounds of the mill's machines, which make conversation below a scream impossible, and the sensation of the blast furnace's heat, which would melt human flesh were it not for specially made suits that the workers facing the ordeal-wear.

Paul tells me that these moments between midnight and dawn are probably his father's happiest his "tree time." They are certainly the only time when he can escape from the human being transformed into machine existence of the factory and listen silently while other people sing to him about divorces, unhappy love successful love rural roots, homesickness, and dreams. Perhaps Paul's father listens to Merle Haggard sing.

Where I've been or where I'm going didn't take a lot of knowing, but I take a lot of pride in what I am

The music is his escape front permanent relegation to the world of things: as a steelworker, he is less efficient--less "productive"--than the machines and-furnaces that define most of his life. But in the volume of music that drips with sentimentality and remembrances of good things past--which may never have happened in his lifetime, but perhaps in his father's or grandfather's world, he believes--he can overcome the life of the present. The sound of the music, for him, is louder than the sounds of the factory. And it is even possible that the music which speaks of a rural, better past simultaneously holds but the promise of a free, decent community oriented future.

When I was in the West last summer, there was one song that people requested from country bands at just about every bar I went to. It is a bad song: John Denver's "Country Roads." Still, the words express the yearnings of many American workers:

Country roads, take me home to the place where I belong West Virginia...

The music is not repressive in itself, just as other elements of popular culture, such as sports. Hollywood movies and TV situation comedies are not wholly repressive. These parts of American culture do not lie but symbolize the American worker's image of himself and his life situation: they are the evidence of a wish to run away from a present which does not recognize human needs for community, communication and creativity in work as legitimate. They are a protest--however submerged--against the life of the factory, the sales counter, and the office. Yet, the way the escape is made is the symbol of a history, which can explain both the distorted American view of social liberation and the traditionalism that is misunderstood as conservatism among the working class.

THIS HISTORY encompasses the period from the nation's founding to at least the 1930's, and if the ideology based on this historical experience is no longer valid, it still exerts a powerful hold--as an idea which does not jibe with present reality--on working class consciousness. This ideology is the myth of escape from industrialization, an escape from the industrial city to the pre-industrial country, and by its nature is an individualist wish for self-reliance and liberation.

This liberation did once exist: workers--for example, in the middle and late nineteenth century--could accumulate some money, and hope to purchase and farm land in the open frontier of the Midwest and West. American workers were confronted with the same brutal present as workers in every Western country--and lately, many Third World Countries--have been faced with. The critical difference is that other nations' workers saw no real hope for escape in recovering the past: for them, present-day reality could only be challenged by a belief in a glorious future free from capitalism. Socialism, anarcho-syndicalism and communism were the direct denials of the disciplined rhythm of the machine which characterized factory life. For other countries' workers, socialism and the future meant freedom.

Freedom in America, however, has been represented by the past. This is not difficult to see think of constant references to the liberties handed down by the Founding Fathers--the definition of freedom in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, which Jefferson himself believed was based on a nation of small, freeholding farmers. Virtually every group in American politics--including workers believes that the past contained a great measure of true freedom, and that the degree of liberty present now can be calculated by our distance from the idea of the Constitution.

THE IDEAL for Americans is a rural members characterized by individual family farms and unrestricted right to political participation through voting. Social movements for liberation--leftist movements of the sixties, for example--have always harkened to the pre-industrial past to protest the development of capitalism in its various stages inevitably, mass protests of the dissatisfied and dispossessed have used the values of the past, and movements insisting that the past is gone and cannot be relived--such as the Socialist and Communist movements--have never found much support from American workers.

Populism--with a clear rural social base and back-to-the-land rhetoric--sprang up in the late nineteenth century to challenge the growing capitalism which was to destroy its social powers. The Communist movement in politics and culture in the 1930's depression days tried to integrate this American remembrance with a future-oriented Marxism consider Grandpa Joad's line in The Grapes of Wrath "I' m stickin' with my farm until Idie"), and Woody Guthrie's "Roll On Columbia." In which he applauds "Tom Jefferson's vision" which "could not let him rest"--that vision being the endless expansion of American farmland westward.

Even the counterculture of the '60s--which was genuinely in opposition to advanced, bureaucratized capitalism and the stilted, unspontaneous him in beings it created--could not transcend this vision of the past. The hip Left's retreat into rural communalism and undisciplined, leaderless opposition was essentially in keeping with America's Jeffersonian traditions. In American style, a large part of the '60s Left could not make a virtue of organized planned collectivism but instead tried to create a vision of society which was small scale, often rural, and largely anarchic. In a society and economy as interdependent and complex as U.S. society is such a social program is hopelessly utopian--as utopian as similar plans put forth by Leftist anarchists and Rightist libertarians--and could not be achieved. In America, revolutionary opposition to capitalism often takes on a largely reactionary content, a desire to return to a simpler past rather than advance into an uncertain future. So, capitalism progresses while oppositions to it sporadically break out--but these oppositions posit a chance for return to a dream and a world which is lost.

THIS BACKGROUND to Andrew Levison's The Working Class Majority helps explain both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Most important, Levison is decisive on a central matter: is the present-day working class potentially revolutionary or only potentially liberal? Ultimately, Levison says liberal in the short run and perhaps socialist and revolutionary in the long run. This point is significant, because Levison is a McGovern liberal, and through the book's serialization in The New Yorker it might come to have high currency among the middle-class Left. As a whole. Levison attempts to provide the basis for a worker-affluent liberal alliance; his advocacy of socialism as the completion of American democracy shows the response of a good portion of the liberal intellectuals presently confronted with economic and cultural crisis (Pete Hamill's "Socialism in America" in recent Village Voice is further evidence of some liberal Democrats' left-ward movement.)

Levison sees revolutionary possibilities in American workers--he does not fall into a moronic "classless society" argument. For Levison, workers are a progressive force in the present, capable of fighting for redistributive taxation, a full employment economy, national health reform, representation in the workplace and workers' control. All of these issues are part of working-class self-interest, and Levison sees the potential to go beyond this advanced welfare-state liberalism:

The ultimate issue that has always been at the base of the progressive vision is genuine democracy, the rule of the people in all aspects of society, political, social, and economic. It is, in a way, the crimination of the job one does, or the income one receives, as a criterion of power or merit. It is the democratic vision in its fullest from.

Levison strikes down many of the misconceptions taken so seriously by a lot of radicals: that the American labor movement is a totally integrated, quiescent partner of the ruling class (it isn't: except for the Vietnam War, labor has consistently pushed for socially liberal legislation, and only two types of unions--the leadership of the Teamsters and the building trades--have really taken the side of capitalism): that workers are more militarist and racist than other Americans (they aren't, but they are angry when upper class students support a foreign army that is attempting to kill their own children: or when upper class liberals take it upon themselves to devise busing and housing schemes that will leave urban workers and their communities to deal with integration: while wealthier people--who supposedly support black people's struggles--remain safely out of reach in the suburbs.)

Levison also creditably debunks the recent nonsense we have been hearing, from both "Left" and "Right," about the post-industrial character of the modern work force: of how blue-collar work is declining in magnitude and importance, and service and technical-professional work is replacing it. Levison shows how shoe-shine workers, street sweepers, janitors, mailmen, milkmen, cleaning women, typists, and department store clerks are all placed in the "clerical and sales" or "service" categories of the census, and when both occupational and standard of living factors are taken into account, "working class people" across for all least 60 per cent of all those employed--a very far cry from an economy oriented around a "technostructure" or a "post-industrial" society.

Levison further discredits the "affluent worker" thesis--the idea of the working class having been bought off of radicalism by wage rises--by a simple glance at statistics:

The affluent worker, who until recently was supposed to be typical, constitutes 12 to 15 per cent of the working class, white and black. Eighty five per cent are not 'typical.' The average worker earned $9.500 in 1970, much closer to poverty than to affluence.

LEVISON PROVIDES an education for middle-class radicals and liberals: he simply describes the working day of an industrial or blue-collar worker. A worker is forced to submit to military authoritarianism while on the job: he or she must do what the foreman demands. Most factories have rules--despite "job enrichment" programs--which prohibit "cat calls, horseplay, making preparation to leave before the whistle sounds, littering, wasting time, and loitering in the toilets." In addition, some companies have the right to discipline workers for "using abusive language" and 'distracting the attention of other employees." Levison sums up the much-written about boredom of blue-collar work well:

...(A) professor would begin to understand how a factory workers feels if he had to type the same paragraph from 9:00 to 5:00 every day of the week. Instead of setting the pace himself, the professor's typewriter carriage should begin to move at 9:00 and continue at a steady pace until 5:00. The professor's job would be at stake if his typing did not keep up the pace.

These are the strong points of Levison's book: a mass of detail and understanding of working class life, and the upholding of the essentially "progressive" character of the American worker. But there are discrepancies that Levison cannot account for, and he conveniently leaves them out of his book. For example, American workers probably are more patriotic and religious than the middle and ruling class. This goes along with their preindustrial dreams, which still have ideological power. Workers in America seem to oppose capitalism in two ways, and Levison only clearly sees one side of their opposition, and ignores the more complicated side. They oppose it out of a modern sense of injustice--a sense of having an unequal and unfair deal in life (this Levison understands and documents well); and they also oppose the entire disciplined, unfree factory and forced-industrial system, and replace it with the desire for a liberated, complete society (this Levison does not see clearly, but only intuits at various times.) Out of the first characteristic can come reformism and perhaps even a type of democratic socialism: but out of the second comes the most interesting feature of the American working class--its revolutionary opposition to capitalism reflected in a culture that hallows a distant and mythical past existing prior to capitalism, a Jeffersonian past.

Levison sees the part of the working class nature which engenders social change, but he is hard pressed to see the total revolutionary opposition to the system--appearing at times as reactionary--contained in working class consciousness. Considering working class traditionalism--what some would call almost puritanism--and working class liberal reformism one sees that only the former is really opposed to modern, bureaucratic capitalism. American workers may have, up until now, viewed their salvation in the past rather than the future, but the reality of opposition has remained constant: a vote for George Wallace is certainly a vote against the way things are presently done in America.

SINCE WORLD WAR II trends have worked against the continued presence of the American myth--there is no longer much social mobility, no longer a frontier to escape to, no longer the comforting thought that one advances up the social system on his or her own (our lives are too obviously interdependent now for that). But the opposition to the factory system--to being treated like a machine, not a human being--continues. Salvation in the past lives on in working class culture: in music, often in religion, in emotional patriotism, in values, and even in faith in "America." Still, social events are gradually undermining belief in the myth, and workers cannot respond to its possible decline with mere liberalism.

In this country, to this point in history, the worker has opposed capitalism in his dreams--dreams of returning to a better, pastoral, life. Those dreams--made even more unreachable by the worsening economic crisis--will not vanish. The present always is too terrible--the worker must believe in either the past or the future. There are two possibilities: the American dream will stubbornly live on unimpeded in the face of social reality, in which case the existing system will somehow maintain itself; or the dream will recognize its fulfillment in the potential of the present, which will lead to a mass workers' movement. Which possibility will be acted on is uncertain: it is only sure that Levison is entirely right when he implies it is alone the working class's decision to make.