The Dem Alternative
Watch and listen to the noxious Eric Alterman (the first speaker shown) in this ad for Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man. The mentality he exhibits here shows how and why his book about Springsteen, It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive, managed to so perversely take one of my favorite artists and a lyric that changed my life and trivialize them.
http://brickburner.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/02/ralph_nader_an_.html
But what really bothers me here is the mindset that blames the past six years on anyone who might be trying to build some real alternatives to our current political system. That's not just dumb; it's suicidal.
What do we know about what the Gore presidency would have been? Aside from aspects of the Gore track record that people love to overlook, like the way he took the helm steering the Democratic Party to the right with the DLC, launched the bi-partisan culture war to control popular music and urged Clinton to slash welfare in half, what can we point to as significant concrete evidence of what he would have done as president?
Maybe pick a Vice Presidential running mate? The man who would have taken his place? Pick a man who is such a staunch defender of the Iraq war that he broke with his own party over it in order to maintain his congressional seat? Joe Lieberman--this was Gore's decision, a fellow culture warrior and an unwavering supporter of the Iraq war.
Of course, until very recently, Hillary Clinton chose to support the war as well. What a team those two might make for President in '08! Both veteran culture warriors, they can silence the immorality (and the happy byproduct of protest) in popular music and take the fight to the Caspian Sea with the support of everyone who's just glad we don't have W around to embarrass us anymore.
This is what I'm dreading. 4 or 8 years of apology for policies that aren't that much different from those the Bush/Cheney Administration would have given us. I am certain there will be a facelift, and I am certain there will be some kinder, gentler efforts toward reform, but I am also certain that the country will continue to move its center to the right with little to no resistance once the Democrats are in office.
If I sound tired and angry today, it's because I am. With all the things going on in the world, particularly that daily death toll from Iraq, the news is full, hour after hour, with Anna Nicole Smith and before she died, astronauts gone wild and no new news but more lurid details of the Missouri kidnappings.
Meanwhile, on television, only the comedians are coming close to the truth. See the following link, under Stephen Colbert's The Word and "Silence" in particular for one of the better efforts to get at our current political condition.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=&ml_collection=&ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=23786&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=%2Fshows%2Fthe_colbert_report%2Findex.jhtml&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true
Friday, February 09, 2007
Monday, January 29, 2007
Looking for the Perfect Bool?
In Stephen King’s new book, Lisey’s Story, the voice of the story is, largely, a couple’s intimate language. In that language, a game of intrigue with a surprise waiting at the end is called a “bool.” It can be a joke, an adventurous ploy, a scavenger hunt, or maybe most important for the bool I’m chasing right now, a book. It’s a bit of foolishness that promises some reward, but the best part is really in the playing along, and one of the things that drives the bool player forward is the risk that makes your stomach flutter. As 3 of the 4 letters suggest—if only because you never know what’s waiting between you and the next station of the bool--it’s scary.
This fresh take on what fiction is all about is one reason I read just about everything Stephen King writes. Because he focuses on effect over affect, on the bool of the story over the significance, a deep journey into a marriage like Lisey’s Story comes off no more pretentious (and probably more fun) than last year’s much more situationally driven zombie tale, Cell.
King recognizes one of the central paradoxes we talk about in my lit classes. Plain old prose fiction became a self conscious art form (famously defined by Edgar Allan Poe about 170 years ago) at the same moment it quit trying to justify itself as a story with a moral—an essay or a fable—and allowed itself to become a good “bool.” Poe was talking about the short fiction, which he said should be a) readable in one sitting, b) waste no words and c) have a singular effect. He didn’t define that effect, but it is very clear that it is as much emotional as intellectual, right brain as left.
That’s why what we call “horror” is not only as old as prose fiction itself, but it’s the genre title that fits King closest. In truth, “horror” seems insufficient to describe what King’s been up to since 1992’s Gerald’s Game kicked off 16 novels that I think comprise the strongest run of his career. Still, nothing else will do. Terms like “magic realism” and “surrealism” don’t suggest King’s unswerving allegiance to the good “bool,” and that’s the quality that keeps him one of the very few unifying forces among everyday people in our culture. That alone would make him important. The fact that he also manages to apply a sharp intellect to virtually every issue in our society in the process makes him, quite frankly, great.
What King gets is the direct way prose fiction takes us on journeys through the dim recesses of each others' minds. (In On Writing, he calls it a kind of mental telepathy.) The romantics recognized this and zeroed in on hypocrisy and madness as central themes. The realists recognized this and explored the infinite shades of ambiguity. King draws on all of this, but in a world far more unmoored in its self image, he fixes his aim on the epiphany of the good scare. Those dim recesses are, after all, very ugly, scary and fear-filled places. You don’t go there, you don’t get to what’s most intimate about the human experience.
I think what makes Lisey’s Story a particularly great bool among King’s great bools is that it works this psychological territory in such an elemental way (although not unprecedented—Gerald’s Game, Rose Madder and the first thirds of Bag of Bones and Insomnia come to mind) that it’s easy to understate just what a horror story it is. They simply seem like great character-driven stories with people you want to read about as long as you can.
But the horrors here are rich, varied, and cut deep wounds in our self serving models of the universe—on every subject from the ideals of marriage and family to the trade off between individual and collective growth. It’s a book about the connections between mothers, fathers, singles and couples without children, and it’s a book about the interplay between grief and recovery and fighting for survival, for each other and for one’s soul (a place that seems, at once, the loneliest in the universe and just as likely that one big soul Tom Joad tells us about).
As in life, this bool reckons with all of these concerns at once. The bool behind the bool is that it took the “master of horror” to do it so well.
(Thanks to Dave Marsh for all of the thoughts I can’t quite separate from my own here.)
Monday, January 15, 2007
Reckoning with Dr. King
Speaking of "C words" tainted by history, it's hard to imagine any word with more blood on it than Christianity. From the slaughter of Jews and Arabs in the crusades to the inquisitions and countless witch hunts (a non-stop line from the middle ages through the Protestant Reformation, a part of all American history from the Puritans through at least the Red Scare), from 300 years of chattel slavery and 100 years of institutionalized racism rationalized by racist Christian doctrine to the initial support for fascism leading up to World War II to the current support for the war in Iraq, "Christianity" as a useful term for a set of benevolent ideas should be bankrupt.
If it's not, I think it's largely because of the torch carried by the Civil Rights Movement. In some ways, being demonized by history may be only mildly worse than being simplistically idealized, as Dr. King has been. Just about every year on Dr. King's day, I read the following speech as a reminder of what this man and that movement were really about, and I don't pick and choose what parts of it I have to reckon with; I reckon with every word. I think it's as necessary for us today as it was then.
Remember, this comes from a man who has already seen the declaration of a War on Poverty compromised, and this comes from a man who would die just a few months later fighting for the rights of garbage workers. We haven't been that close to the mountaintop again, but King's words are still here to offer the vision. --Danny
Martin Luther King's address to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the S.C.L.C. in Atlanta on August 16, 1967. Dr. King projected in it the issues which led to Poor People's March on Washington. (From: Foner, Philip S.; THE VOICE OF BLACK AMERICA; New York, 1972)
Now, in order to answer the question, "Where do we go from here?" which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.
In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, 75 percent hold menial jobs.
This is where we are. Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.
Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least 60 of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child 60 ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.
The tendency to ignore the Negro's contribution to American life and to strip him of his personhood, is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning's newspaper. To upset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro's freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.
No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation or Johnsonian Civil Rights Bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own Emancipation Proclamation. And, with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, "I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history. How painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents and I am not ashamed of that. I'm ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave." Yes, we must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.
Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From old plantations of the South to newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of this white power structure. The plantation and ghetto were created by those who had power--both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness.
The problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power-confrontation of the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, "Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say 'Yes' when it wants to say 'No.' That's power."
Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites--so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.
We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.
We've come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In I879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:
The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the task, by the taskmaster, or by anirnal (sic) necessity. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.
Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes who have a double disability will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated .
Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.
Now, let me say briefly that we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with their causes. Today I want to give the other side. There is certainly something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you can even see a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.
Occasionally Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.
When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard and, finally, the Army to call on--all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few if any violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the nonresistant majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him up in the hills, but he could never have overthrown the Batista regime unless he had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people.
It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves. This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don't solve, answers that don't answer and explanations that don't explain.
And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country. And the other thing is that I am concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice. I'm concerned about brotherhood. I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love.
And I have seen too much hate. I've seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here," that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?"
And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked.
Now, don't think that you have me in a "bind" today. I'm not talking about Communism.
What I'm saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit - One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn't get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, "Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying." HE didn't say, "Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that." He didn't say, "Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery." He didn't say, "Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively." He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic - that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, "Nicodemus, you must be born again."
He said, in other words, "Your whole structure must be changed." A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them - make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"
So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a "divine dissatisfaction."
Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.
Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.
Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.
Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home.
Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education.
Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.
Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin.
Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God.
Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.
Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout "White Power!" - when nobody will shout "Black Power!" - but everybody will talk about God's power and human power.
I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs.
Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?
We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.
When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: "Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, "We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome."
Speaking of "C words" tainted by history, it's hard to imagine any word with more blood on it than Christianity. From the slaughter of Jews and Arabs in the crusades to the inquisitions and countless witch hunts (a non-stop line from the middle ages through the Protestant Reformation, a part of all American history from the Puritans through at least the Red Scare), from 300 years of chattel slavery and 100 years of institutionalized racism rationalized by racist Christian doctrine to the initial support for fascism leading up to World War II to the current support for the war in Iraq, "Christianity" as a useful term for a set of benevolent ideas should be bankrupt.
If it's not, I think it's largely because of the torch carried by the Civil Rights Movement. In some ways, being demonized by history may be only mildly worse than being simplistically idealized, as Dr. King has been. Just about every year on Dr. King's day, I read the following speech as a reminder of what this man and that movement were really about, and I don't pick and choose what parts of it I have to reckon with; I reckon with every word. I think it's as necessary for us today as it was then.
Remember, this comes from a man who has already seen the declaration of a War on Poverty compromised, and this comes from a man who would die just a few months later fighting for the rights of garbage workers. We haven't been that close to the mountaintop again, but King's words are still here to offer the vision. --Danny
Martin Luther King's address to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the S.C.L.C. in Atlanta on August 16, 1967. Dr. King projected in it the issues which led to Poor People's March on Washington. (From: Foner, Philip S.; THE VOICE OF BLACK AMERICA; New York, 1972)
Now, in order to answer the question, "Where do we go from here?" which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.
In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, 75 percent hold menial jobs.
This is where we are. Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.
Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least 60 of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child 60 ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.
The tendency to ignore the Negro's contribution to American life and to strip him of his personhood, is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning's newspaper. To upset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro's freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.
No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation or Johnsonian Civil Rights Bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own Emancipation Proclamation. And, with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, "I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history. How painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents and I am not ashamed of that. I'm ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave." Yes, we must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.
Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From old plantations of the South to newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of this white power structure. The plantation and ghetto were created by those who had power--both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness.
The problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power-confrontation of the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, "Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say 'Yes' when it wants to say 'No.' That's power."
Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites--so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.
We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.
We've come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In I879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:
The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the task, by the taskmaster, or by anirnal (sic) necessity. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.
Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes who have a double disability will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated .
Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.
Now, let me say briefly that we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with their causes. Today I want to give the other side. There is certainly something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you can even see a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.
Occasionally Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.
When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard and, finally, the Army to call on--all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few if any violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the nonresistant majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him up in the hills, but he could never have overthrown the Batista regime unless he had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people.
It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves. This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don't solve, answers that don't answer and explanations that don't explain.
And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country. And the other thing is that I am concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice. I'm concerned about brotherhood. I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love.
And I have seen too much hate. I've seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here," that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?"
And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked.
Now, don't think that you have me in a "bind" today. I'm not talking about Communism.
What I'm saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit - One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn't get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, "Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying." HE didn't say, "Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that." He didn't say, "Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery." He didn't say, "Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively." He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic - that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, "Nicodemus, you must be born again."
He said, in other words, "Your whole structure must be changed." A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them - make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"
So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a "divine dissatisfaction."
Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.
Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.
Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.
Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home.
Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education.
Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.
Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin.
Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God.
Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.
Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout "White Power!" - when nobody will shout "Black Power!" - but everybody will talk about God's power and human power.
I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs.
Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?
We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.
When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: "Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, "We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome."
Monday, January 08, 2007
Reason #15--Human Rights Deserve A Chance
I went to see DeNiro's CIA movie The Good Shepherd this afternoon, and one thing I think it captures very well is the way the unwritten laws of a system can overshadow and ultimately obliterate whatever we think it stands for. By the end of the movie, whatever ideals motivated Matt Damon have become worse than empty abstractions and worse than lies; they've become ruses for a force that can only be described as inhumane. After all, whether he realizes it or not, his loyalty to his ideals has pretty deliberately destroyed his own family.
In the early stages of Wage, Labor & Capital, this is precisely what Marx wants to show. The overall story of capitalism, the arc of the story, is defined at its molecular level. The injustice starts with the first lie. Yes, capitalism allowed producers to rise to the level of the old ruling class, the aristocracy, but it not only allowed slavery; it demanded that the majority of people be subservient to a class of business owners. While industrialized nations have seen great increases in the standard of living for most, real equality slips further from our grasp on a worldwide scale. Most of us know that corporations may have all the rights of individuals, but individuals don't have the same rights as corporations--recent changes in bankruptcy laws are just one example. Marx wants to show why that inequality is part of the DNA of the capitalist system.
As with the serenity prayer, Marx would say we need to know and accept what we can't change before we have any real hope of seeing what we can.
From Monsters, Marx & Music:
In Wage, Labor & Capital, Marx starts with our paychecks. In the main, a business owner is only going to pay us what’s necessary to keep the business running, what the market demands. In any meaningful sense, our humanity doesn't enter into the equation.
If you take the human costs out, this point is obvious with all other business expenses. Any grocery chain wants to install the cheapest, most effective automated check-out machines available. Companies like Wal-Mart, that make enough money to cut expenses in every way possible as soon as the technology is available, have an edge on their competition.
So why do we think Wal-Mart (or any competitive company) would treat the cost of workers any differently? You may build in exceptions for uniquely talented individuals and you can allow for some elbow room for some degree of loyalty or quality or whatever, but it is simply bad business if companies pay their workers any more than the market says they are worth.
And how much is a checker worth, for instance, when he or she is in competition with a machine that does the same job for only its upfront price and occasional maintenance? Wages get determined by aggregate costs based on such comparisons.
The bottom line is pretty crude and discomforting when it’s looked at this way. Wal-Mart only has to pay workers enough to keep a staff showing up each day to keep the business open and profitable. Just like it needs to calculate the cost of replacing an automated checker when the parts wear out, a seriously competitive company needs to factor in the costs of replacing necessary workers.
This means they do need to figure in enough to keep families reproducing and raising their kids, but even those numbers go lower all the time. Anyone who’s worked in a factory knows that story well, but anyone who’s been in a Wal-Mart since the millennium just has to reflect on how automated check out machines have caught on. Every year, less workers are needed to keep those doors open. Every year less workers are needed period. Though the worldwide tapping of new markets can change this in terms of sheer numbers, it doesn’t change the direction obvious in the ratios or slow the widening gap between the rich and poor.
When I took Economics 101 in school, my teacher insisted on the fundamental democracy of supply and demand. Producers need well-paid consumers to demand their products, and workers will choose to work for one company versus another because one company supplies a better work environment than another.
How does this apply to a company like Wal-Mart, a company that has virtually put every form of retail and service oriented industry in places like my hometown out of business or on notice? The prices are dirt cheap and the worldwide production costs to stock those shelves gets cheaper all the time.
Supply and demand may have democratic qualities, but they sure don’t have to be concerned with the interests of any individual or his or her family.
In fact, for all of Wal-Mart’s talk about family values, the value of the family is being weighed against the cost of doing business, and the time families spend together isn’t even part of the equation. The boss buys that automated check-out machine with a guarantee of so-many hundreds of thousands of bags it should check for free after it is paid for. In the same way, the boss pays wages based upon a concept of the average worker’s maximum potential output. The harder we work in our 8 hours, the boss makes more money for the same investment. In truth, our boss is not simply paying us to work 8 hours but in fact buying our potential for increasing profits every 24 hours.
When a friend managed a team of workers for a national floor cleaning business, he was praised for making profits in excess of the year before, and then he was immediately handed a higher goal for the following year. I’ve seen more nods than I can count when I’ve told his story to others in similar positions.
A basic law of business is that companies that aren’t growing are dying [a big part of Wage, Labor & Capital is showing why that’s true], but what that means for the average worker is that success means heightened expectations and harder work the following year than the year before. On that level alone, it’s reasonable to begin to suspect that keeping a job potentially means giving up more and more family time and energy.
With the almost complete destruction of the labor movement over the past few decades, we’ve seen precisely this tendency toward increased overtime and less family time for those who want to stay vital in the workforce. Wage, Labor & Capital tackles the essence of that inertia and where capitalism’s blind momentum is sure to take us. And, once again, we’re back on the runaway train.
I went to see DeNiro's CIA movie The Good Shepherd this afternoon, and one thing I think it captures very well is the way the unwritten laws of a system can overshadow and ultimately obliterate whatever we think it stands for. By the end of the movie, whatever ideals motivated Matt Damon have become worse than empty abstractions and worse than lies; they've become ruses for a force that can only be described as inhumane. After all, whether he realizes it or not, his loyalty to his ideals has pretty deliberately destroyed his own family.
In the early stages of Wage, Labor & Capital, this is precisely what Marx wants to show. The overall story of capitalism, the arc of the story, is defined at its molecular level. The injustice starts with the first lie. Yes, capitalism allowed producers to rise to the level of the old ruling class, the aristocracy, but it not only allowed slavery; it demanded that the majority of people be subservient to a class of business owners. While industrialized nations have seen great increases in the standard of living for most, real equality slips further from our grasp on a worldwide scale. Most of us know that corporations may have all the rights of individuals, but individuals don't have the same rights as corporations--recent changes in bankruptcy laws are just one example. Marx wants to show why that inequality is part of the DNA of the capitalist system.
As with the serenity prayer, Marx would say we need to know and accept what we can't change before we have any real hope of seeing what we can.
From Monsters, Marx & Music:
In Wage, Labor & Capital, Marx starts with our paychecks. In the main, a business owner is only going to pay us what’s necessary to keep the business running, what the market demands. In any meaningful sense, our humanity doesn't enter into the equation.
If you take the human costs out, this point is obvious with all other business expenses. Any grocery chain wants to install the cheapest, most effective automated check-out machines available. Companies like Wal-Mart, that make enough money to cut expenses in every way possible as soon as the technology is available, have an edge on their competition.
So why do we think Wal-Mart (or any competitive company) would treat the cost of workers any differently? You may build in exceptions for uniquely talented individuals and you can allow for some elbow room for some degree of loyalty or quality or whatever, but it is simply bad business if companies pay their workers any more than the market says they are worth.
And how much is a checker worth, for instance, when he or she is in competition with a machine that does the same job for only its upfront price and occasional maintenance? Wages get determined by aggregate costs based on such comparisons.
The bottom line is pretty crude and discomforting when it’s looked at this way. Wal-Mart only has to pay workers enough to keep a staff showing up each day to keep the business open and profitable. Just like it needs to calculate the cost of replacing an automated checker when the parts wear out, a seriously competitive company needs to factor in the costs of replacing necessary workers.
This means they do need to figure in enough to keep families reproducing and raising their kids, but even those numbers go lower all the time. Anyone who’s worked in a factory knows that story well, but anyone who’s been in a Wal-Mart since the millennium just has to reflect on how automated check out machines have caught on. Every year, less workers are needed to keep those doors open. Every year less workers are needed period. Though the worldwide tapping of new markets can change this in terms of sheer numbers, it doesn’t change the direction obvious in the ratios or slow the widening gap between the rich and poor.
When I took Economics 101 in school, my teacher insisted on the fundamental democracy of supply and demand. Producers need well-paid consumers to demand their products, and workers will choose to work for one company versus another because one company supplies a better work environment than another.
How does this apply to a company like Wal-Mart, a company that has virtually put every form of retail and service oriented industry in places like my hometown out of business or on notice? The prices are dirt cheap and the worldwide production costs to stock those shelves gets cheaper all the time.
Supply and demand may have democratic qualities, but they sure don’t have to be concerned with the interests of any individual or his or her family.
In fact, for all of Wal-Mart’s talk about family values, the value of the family is being weighed against the cost of doing business, and the time families spend together isn’t even part of the equation. The boss buys that automated check-out machine with a guarantee of so-many hundreds of thousands of bags it should check for free after it is paid for. In the same way, the boss pays wages based upon a concept of the average worker’s maximum potential output. The harder we work in our 8 hours, the boss makes more money for the same investment. In truth, our boss is not simply paying us to work 8 hours but in fact buying our potential for increasing profits every 24 hours.
When a friend managed a team of workers for a national floor cleaning business, he was praised for making profits in excess of the year before, and then he was immediately handed a higher goal for the following year. I’ve seen more nods than I can count when I’ve told his story to others in similar positions.
A basic law of business is that companies that aren’t growing are dying [a big part of Wage, Labor & Capital is showing why that’s true], but what that means for the average worker is that success means heightened expectations and harder work the following year than the year before. On that level alone, it’s reasonable to begin to suspect that keeping a job potentially means giving up more and more family time and energy.
With the almost complete destruction of the labor movement over the past few decades, we’ve seen precisely this tendency toward increased overtime and less family time for those who want to stay vital in the workforce. Wage, Labor & Capital tackles the essence of that inertia and where capitalism’s blind momentum is sure to take us. And, once again, we’re back on the runaway train.
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