Class Conflict

Yesterday Catalina and I took Cosmico for a hike in the woods. We went out to McConnell's mill, an old wooden framehouse on the bank of a small river about an hour north of Pittsburgh. Built in the 1800's, the mill was active until the 1940's, at which point it was closed, refurbished, and turned over to the state as a tourist destination. These days, visitors can walk freely among the old machines, following little signs that explain how, e.g., the function of the Thresher differed from that of the Crusher, and why this rust covered medieval device in front of you, with its seven gears and five pulleys, is of such supreme historical, technological, and economic relevance. It's a tight space; you have to duck to avoid getting clocked by beams that run at crazy angles, and at every turn there is a gear or a chute or a piston, ready to smash fingers and devours hands. One sign said that the mill had been run by a black man named Moses Whorton, who was paid $14/month for his services and had to supplement his income by grooming horses at 5 cents a hoof.

Benjamin was unimpressed by the mill, so we left and hit the trail. But as we made our way through the woods, with leaves of every color luminous against the sun, wildflowers rioting on the hillsides, and lichen-tufted rocks preening in the stream, my mind was not so much on the beauty of my surroundings as on the industrial icon we had just left. How many fingers had those gears swallowed up, back in the day? How many arms? Moses was reputed to be a 'merry fellow, much loved by all.' Was that because he was willing to work 60 years at slave wages, supporting with his one meager portion of life a system whose basic inhumanity runs so deep that it becomes as invisible to us as the air we breathe?

Horrible working conditions are much on my mind these days: I'm reading Howard Zinn's classic People's History of the United States, and finding it a fascinating lens through which to look at some of the basic suppositions, ambitions, and lifestyle choices of my contemporaries. The basic tenant of the book is that the history of America has been one long story of capitalist aggression, with Have's squeezing Have-Nots with the consistent, merciless brutality that is the antithesis of the egalitarian humanism that we (mistakenly) associate with the essence of the country. Zinn's thesis is that reforms have been introduced grudgingly, at a great price of blood and suffering, wrung from the ruling class again and again by a class so oppressed that death and defeat became welcome alternatives to perseverance in the status quo; he claims that the middle class was constructed as a protective buffer between the leisure classes and the explosive discontent of the labor classes.

Zinn writes with fervor. He believes (correctly) that he is saying something true and important. "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is", he quotes, and his book becomes a long litany of these cries, the cries of tortured slaves, of indentured servants, of workers and natives and woman and children. His objective: to keep sharp the memory of suffering, not in the abstract form in which it finds expression in periodicals and government documents, not even in the subdued objectivity of the scholar, but on the level of story, of a narrative with engaging characters. "My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is...that we must not accept the memory of the states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been." What Zinn is really writing about is collective, community memory.

One of the pleasures of reading indiscriminately is that one is always surprised when things link up, i.e. two authors who should have nothing in common end up saying something similar, which then becomes a kind of personal key, a gift from the heavens, a sign that you should go away and reflect that this matter and not come back until it has cracked and yielded its secrets. In this case, it was Ernesto Sabato, writing from a very different perspective in a very different place, who provided an echo to the message I was getting from Zinn. In an essay on fascism, Sabato notes that "individual memory can be good or bad, but collective memory is bad," and goes on to connect the development of fascism with a strongly capitalist agenda, ultimately claiming that "one can... legitimately sustain that far from being an anti-capitalist movement, fascism began as the most brutal and cynical manifestation of a regime in bankruptcy." Writing in 1947, Sabato was alarmed that the world had already forgotten that at the heart of the holocaust lay a crude and cynical capitalism.

Sabato sees socialism as a solution. "Socialism", he claims, "is something more than the nationalization of production and consumption. It is a profoundly moral movement, destined to ennoble man and raise him from the physical and spiritual mud in which he has been submerged during the course of his slavery. In some ways, perhaps, it is the secular interpretation of Christianity." In light of Soviet abuses, Sabato eventually abandoned this stance, just as I suspect Zinn rejects it, recognizing, as Camus does, the fluid, universal interchange between Victim and Executioner. Still, here we have two men ruminating on capitalism, who agree that the central problem is one of memory, either of its absence, or, perhaps worse, its standardization, wherein the grave injuries to body and spirit that are the necessary counterpoint to institutionalized self-interest get reduced to a few buzzwords, or glossed in headlines like "Bomb kills 10", "Strike turns violent", or "30% of all black men are in prison."

As the Soviet experiment makes clear, of course, this memory loss (which may in fact be a perceptual loss) is by no means limited to capitalism, which makes me wonder to what extent economics ends up being the scapegoat for the raft of spiritual and intellectual ailments whose real roots lie elsewhere. There is no doubt that conditions of state affect conditions of mind, but to subsume the basic moral disposition of a people to a structure of government seems reductionist and dangerous. Avarice does not require wide margins to thrive. Cruelty rides the coattails of social service. "Without enthusiasm, we have chosen enthusiasm over truth", says Benjamin Lerner in his recent book of poems 'Angle of Yaw', an obscure, kabbalistic verbal blitzkrieg over the boarders of syntax into the black heart of modern America. I am part of this we: it seems reasonable to ask when and what have I chosen?

A friend of mine writes a blog for the Handord Sentinel, and he recently adressed the increasingly trendy issue of acedia, which is a latin term that refers to the ossifying of spiritual energies, a terminal sloth in matters of the soul. He quotes an article citing Walker Percy, one of my favorite American novelists, saying what concerned him most about the future of America was "probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom… gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated...by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems." Acedia is nothing new, of course, but I begin to see how it plays itself out. I look around and I see how Pittsburgh has been messed up by attention to the bottom line, how what could have been a beautiful city ended up with gray industrial bridges, a massively polluted river, little pedestrian space, narrow roads with no margins for bikes, and, at least in the poorer areas, no trees. I see my friends that live in million dollar houses, and my other friends that live hand to mouth, and I ask, who has chosen what, and how consciously? I contemplate my soulless job for the DOD, with its ridiculuously high paycheck, and my current job, with its medium size paycheck, and the job I would like to have, with its vanishingly small paycheck, and I wonder if my shifting relation to liquid capital can have any bearing on my relation to the dynamics of class conflict? Did I choose something bigger than I knew when I chose to take a salary cut and get back to teaching? How many of our allegiances are accidental? And might it not be this very sense of accident that lies at the root of our acedia, a sense of being beset by forces so large and ungraspable that we seek refuge in our own small burrows, cashing out to support the dream of The Family, building our retirement accounts with the dumb industry of beavers?

These were dark thoughts for what was undoubtedly the most spectacular day of the year. As I waded through the thick piles of leaves, capered with sun motes, chased salamanders, and rattled pleasantries at every oogling mother in the grip of my son's charms, it occured to me that perhaps it would behoove me to enter into the spirit of my surroundings, to accept graciously what limited reprieve nature has to offer, to set aside these ponderous and intractable issues of social utopia and find meaning in natural beauty. Perhaps I should just focus on my son, take notes on his quirky behaviors and put them in my blog?

But maybe the real question is this: in twenty years, will Benjamin want to be reading about how he clenched his tiny fingers around a leaf and stared riveted at the river, or about how his father came to grips with some of the basic issues of living in a capitalist society? Probably neither. But within the framework of doomed writing, let me suggest the following: that when I write about him, I do so for my own pleasure, in order to create a register of facts and benchmarks that I can later hold up against normative elements in babybooks and help answer the question "who is this guy, and what's his relation to me?"; and when I write about myself, perhaps I do so for him, so as to create a register of thoughts and impressions that he can hold up much later, when he is an adult and casting about for meaning, setting it against the backdrop of the World as he has come to know it and using it to gain perspective on the same difficult question.

I tried to run all this by Benjamin, but he wasn't interested. He was also unimpressed by the trail, unfortunately, except for one brief moment by the river when we stopped for lunch, at which point he woke to roar his anger at the trees, poop, snack, and roar one more time before falling once again into a milk coma. The boy has no real feel for class conflict.