ElementsofRefusal

Acknowledgements
Many people provided valuable support or assistance for the publication
of this book, including: Jean Heriot, Kirkpatrick Sale, Kathan Zerzan, Alice
Parman, John Parman, Herb Werner, John Roberts, Lawrence Jarach, Jean
Marie Apostolides, Kathryn Longstreth-Brown, Carolyn Wayland, Lorraine
Perlman, Gary Rumor, Mary Roberts, Gary Brown, James Diggs, Drake
Scott, Alex Trotter and A. Hacker.

2nd, Revised Edition

Anti-copyright @ 1999 John Zerzan

1st Edition originally published by Left Bank Books (Seattle, 1988).

This book may be freely pirated and quoted.

The author and publisher would

like to be informed at:

C.A.L. Press/Paleo Editions

Columbia Alternative Library

POB 1446

Columbia, MO 65205-1446 USA

A.A.A.

POB 11331

Eugene, OR 97440 USA

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Zerzan, John.

Elements of Refusal / John Zerzan. Columbia, MO : C.A.L. Press, 1999

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-890532-01-0

1. Social History. 2. Social Problems. 3. Prehistoric Peoples. 4. Labor 5
Work Ethic. I. Title.

301.09
10 987654321

CONTENTS

7 Preface to the Second Edition

9 Introduction to the First Edition

PART ONE

15 Beginning of Time, End of Time

31 Language: Origin and Meaning

45 Number: Its Origin and Evolution

63 The Case Against Art

73 Agriculture

PART TWO

91 Industrialism and Domestication

105 Who Killed Ned Ludd?

113 Axis Point of American Industrialism

133 The Practical Marx

145 Origins and Meaning of WWI

165 Taylorism and Unionism

171 Unionization in America

185 Organized Labor vs. "The Revolt Against Work'

A NOTE ABOUT CA.L. PRESS/PALEO EDITIONS

The publication of. Elements of Refusal under the imprint of Paleo Editions by the
Columbia Alternative Library signals yet another salvo from this new book publishing
collective. This publishing project is dedicated to bringing to the discerning public not
only the newest and most devastating critiques of the awful mess we call society, but
also to keeping in print those "classics" which have lapsed into publishing oblivion.

We welcome proposals for further books or pamphlets. No manuscripts, please. If
you have an idea, contact us at:
C.A.L. Press, POB 1446, Columbia, MO 65205-1446

Jason McQuinn
Paul Z. Simons
John Zerzan

Elements

of
Refusal

John Zerzan

Paleo Editions

An imprint of the

Columbia Alternative Library

I'l IMINIS (i| U|-|.| isAI

lw New Ytiik, New York

203 The Refusal of Technology

207 Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control

PART THREE

217 The Promise of the '80s
245 The '80s So Far
255 Present-Day Banalities
261 Media, Irony and "Bob"

265 Afterword Commentary on Form and Content in
Elements of Refusal

273 Notes

297 Author's Bibliography

301 Index

310 Appendix: Excerpts from Adventures in Subversion:

flyers & Posters, 1981-85

I'KI I ACB TO THE SECOND EDITION

I'll is collection of offerings was published by Left Bank in 1988, and
we nl out of print fairly quickly. 1 believe most of it holds up rather well,
in part because of a totality that keeps giving us new evidence, on every
level, of its fundamental destructiveness. The magnitude of these
challenges, created by such a depth of peril and falsity, is the strongest
impetus behind efforts to question every component of our truly
frightening reality.

Unfortunately, stark reality has far more often brought the opposite
response, based on fear and denial. More and more we are immersed in
a postmodern ethos of appearances, images, and veneers. Everyone can
feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday
routines and securities. How tempting, apparently, to avoid asking why,
thus elevating the superficial as the only appropriate, indeed the only
possible response. The fragmentary, the cynical, and the partial define an
extremely pervasive postmodern stance — if such a cowardly, shifting
outlook even qualifies as a stance.

It is hardly surprising that the high-tech juggernaut, embodying all the
bereft features of the social order as a whole, rushes into this intellectual
and moral vacuum with an increasing acceleration.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, where I was born and where the final
traces of the natural forests are being systematically eradicated. The vista
of cloned humans looms, as we struggle to maintain some undamaged
humanness in a bleak, artificialized panorama. The group suicide of
techno -occultists at Rancho Santa Fe (March 1997) is too faithful a
reflection of the desperation generated by engulfing emptiness. One of
the would-be UFO voyagers spoke for so many others: "Maybe I'm crazy
but I don't care. I've been here thirty-one years and there's nothing for
me here."

The first five essays in this volume, written during the mid-1980s, are
the basis for more recent efforts such as "Future Primitive" (1992) and
"Running on Emptiness" (1997). The question of the origins of our
estrangement is refused by a reigning culture that recognizes neither
origins nor estrangement. I feel that this question must be explored, in
the face of this stunning, still-unfolding enormity: the entire absence of

I KM A( t in Mil M ■< < »NI> i r U I l( »rv

hit* m wlioli* lift*.

lime, language, number, art, agriculture. On the other hand, maybe
there are no foundations of alienation to be found in these categories, or

anywhere else. Certainly these five explorations, and the others that
followed, have elicited some very negative reactions. When they were
published in Fifth Estate in the '80s, FE never failed to run accompanying
commentaries rejecting their conclusions. This line of originary studies
has been called absolutist, moralistic, religious, paralyzing, even
anti-pleasure*, among other things. To me they are none of the above.
In trying to put forth the most cogent lines of thought, I may have
written essays that seemed definitively closed to other perspectives. If so,
I regret it.

"Industrialism and Domestication" and "Who Killed Ned Ludd?"
appear later in the book, but were written earlier. Discovering the
intentional social control built into industrial technology and the factory
system was part of a questioning that led not only to a re-appraisal of
technology itself, but also to a search for the remote origins of our
present captivity, all the way back at the beginnings of symbolic culture.

Many of the remaining contributions deal with anti-work phenomena
and other recent evidence of the erosion of belief in society's dominant
values. These writings often implied that a collapse of the transcendent
order was all but imminent. Here I was obviously a bit too sanguine. The
onrushing impoverishment of daily life, not to neglect contracting
economic pressures, has led many to cling to any semblance of content
or meaning, even when found in the context of work. Thus trends of
social and workplace alienation that some of us saw as promising have
yet to move to the stage of significant resistance, even if the method of
being attentive to barely-concealed indices of disaffection remains valid.

I hope that aspects of Elements of Refusal may be useful to those who
are appalled by the nightmare we face, and who are determined not to
go along. This edition I dedicate to the Unabomber. As Arlecn Davila
put it, "He tried to save us. "

*\n Millennium (1997), Hakim Bey even claimed that I "wrote an essay
against humor." Bey is a partisan of the postmodern renunciation of
truth and meaning, which often simply makes up reality as it goes along;
no such essay exists.

INTRODUCTION
TO THE FIRST EDITION

laments of Refusal is the first comprehensive collection of John
/cram's writings. Appearing over the past decade in primarily marginal
or ^underground" publications, this collection is long overdue.

No less than as they appeared, these essays arc provocative and
important For me John's writings have always contained that critical
spirit which best characterized both the old "Frankfurt School" and the
Situationists— but are more radical, and without the debilitating despair
of the former or the disgusting love affair with technology and "progress

afflicting the latter.

Present-day "reality," as constituted by those with vested interests in
maintaining this domination, is touted as the "best", if not the only
possible reality. Accordingly, history is shaped like a monstrous land-fill
to legitimize this contemporary high-rise shill. .,,,.. u

Still the designated social straitjacket ill-fits and the social fabric isn t
so smooth as appearances dictate. Daily life, as John makes clear with
its increasingly intensifying alienations, schizophrenia and psychopa-
thology becomes more spectacular and bizarre. No, all is not wcU in
Utopia' It is a weird and peculiar world where the growing destruction
of the earth is touted as "progress," an advance for humanity. Every
technological innovation promising to bring us closer together drives us
farther apart; every revolution promises to liberate us from want, but

leaves us more in need. t

We grow more dependent on glitter and distraction to till the voia
where all that is human is gutted. Our noses are shoved to the window
of consumption (a display of lies) and we are told that here is life. Lite
is reduced to a game where, for a price, anyone can play; but there is
nowhere to play. Indeed, the word "survive" replaces the word life
more and more in our everyday speech, as if they were equivalent. A
kind of social terror permeates everything, becoming a commonplace in
our lives. Because, contrary to the glib, superficial aura (desperately and
massively touted by mass media), this "work-buy-consume-die' paradise
teeters on the brink of collapse and dissolution.

Iliil il is not riuiugh l*> siisptrl stmirthhij* awiy. in buy bicycles instead
of cms, 01 fill moiv grain, less meal. II is noi enough to affirm the
coherency of our feelings or insights through alternative groupings,
structures, cultures, and so forth. We must go much further. Failure to
press coherently to the sources of our malaise simply leave us carrying
this offal about, endlessly failing to understand anything, repeating
forever the stupidities trapping us here, reducing everything to a cynical
charade. We will be continually victimized, our best insights nothing if we
are not to become visionaries, insisting more of life than a never ending
series of computer gadgets, new "causes," new mysticisms or re-runs of
Dr. Strangclove ad nauseam.

John's essays make all this abundantly clear. Here it is axiomatic that
time, technology, work and other aspects of our social lives— hailed as
the liberators of humanity— are, in fact, the co-conspirators of domestica-
tion and domination. Today, more than ever— as you will see from this
modest collection—they stand exposed. If some think these efforts are
simply a theory of spontaneity they will fail to understand anything, much
less the end of illusion, how to separate the authentic from the corrupt
and recupcrable.

If de-mystification is difficult, finding those prepared to listen or to
undertake the necessary doings is more so. The blat of everyday survival
threatens to drown out some important voices of our time. A few I would
point out, for example, are Fredy Perlman, Frederick Turner, Jacques
Camatte, Pierre Clastres, Marshall Sahlins, Richard Drinnon, Stanley
Diamond, Howard Zinn and the lively, changing groups of people who
have been involved in marginal and periodical publications, such as the
Fifth Estate in Detroit. These people constitute no school or homoge-
nous group. They are diverse individuals whose disagreements,
oppositions and arguments are as integral to their activity as the
commonality of their projects. At the core we see much of what is vital
to any authentic revolution: to have done with the "civilizing" myths
destroying us.

Much of their work is necessarily "anthropologically" grounded. The
importance of this digging cannot be underestimated. It isn't a rooting
about for Utopia or silly sociological role-models. We are so locked in
mentally and physically to "what is" that we fail to recognize that our
kingdom is a prison. The overwhelming power of present-day ruling
notions and the requirements of sheer survival leave many of us virtually
incapable of recognizing how diverse are the possibilities of life.

It is not the power of the State, of capitalism, mass media, nationalism,
racism, sexism, work routine, class, language, schooling, or culturalization

• lump us in, but the total ensemble that must be attacked. John's writings
;,k- an important part of this effort— divested of the dross always
mulct-mining the best-intentioned movements— to begin anewrather than
on or within the ash-heaps of the old society, for we are not rid of a
plague while trucking its diseased baggage all about.

Elements of Refusal is the result of one person's pursuits, musings,
concerns, discoveries, possibilities, researches and clarifications where so
little is understood. The ideological landscape is insidious in its need to
prevail. Everywhere this is confirmed. Even the suspicious, the
marginalized or the refusers have few places to turn. This small book is
not a how-to manual nor a blueprint of an alternative future, but begins
where we must all begin: by questioning the whole in each of its parts.
And it reflects the attendant problems of rummaging and researching
where so little is understood. This is, ultimately, a book of on-going
explorations— not equations.

These articles are loosely grouped in three sections: the first encom-
passes the more fundamental, sweeping, speculative searches for the
sources of our contemporary malaise— origins so deep as to require
digging into pre-history; the second group is oriented to events and
movements over the past 100 years or so, debunking certain mythologies
surrounding technology, the origins of WWT, a variety of "breakdowns,"
and industrialism with its concomitant actors and movements; and the
last section, focused on the 1980s, draws especially upon mass media's
own disparate materials, helping us to understand present-day diversions
and the radical contexts of its "breakdowns."

Every pocket of refusal gives us hope and every element of refusal
keeps this hope burning: in the "past," as we are the legatees of those
before us; "presently," amongst each other; to the "future," absolutely.
Of some primitive past, some so-called "Golden Age," we cannot and do
not want to re-implement its time or character; but we can, now, recover
and cleave to its temper. And here, lastly, if John's tone is often
apocalyptic, so be it; indeed, it is in this spirit Elements of Refusal is

presented— as a series of provocations and challenges.

David Brown

Left Bank Books

tEGINNING OF TIME, END OF TIME

Just as today's most obsessive notion is that of the material reality of
lime, self-existent time was the first lie of social life. As with nature, time
did not exist before the individual became separate from it. Reification
of this magnitude — the beginning of time — constitutes the Fall: the
initiation of alienation, of history.

Spengler observed that one culture is differentiated from another "by
the intuitive meanings assigned to time, 3 Canetti that the regulation of
time is the primary attribute of all government. 2 But the very movement
from community to civilization is also predicated there. It is the
fundamental language of technology and the spirit of domination.

Today the feverish acceleration of time, as well as the failure of the
"solution" of spatializing it, is exposing it as an artificial, oppressive force
along with its corollaries, Progress and Becoming. More concretely,
technology and work are being revealed by the palpable thrall of time.
Either way, the pressure to dissolve history and the rule of time hasn't
been so strong since the Middle Ages, before that, since the Neolithic
revolution establishing agriculture.

When the humanization of technology and work appear as dubious
propositions, the humanization of time itself is also called into question.
The questions forming are, how can basic oppressions be effectively
controlled or reformed? Why not abolished?

Quoting Hegel approvingly, Debord wrote, "Man, 'the negative being
who is only to the extent that he suppresses Being/ is identical to time." 3
This equation is being refused, a situation perhaps best illumined by
looking at the origins, evolution and present status of time.

If "all reification is forgetting," 4 in Horkheimer and Adorno's pregnant
phrase, it seems equally true that all "forgetting" — in the sense of loss of
contact with our time-less beginnings, of constant "falling into time" — is
a reification. All the other reifications, in fact, follow this one. 5

It may be due to the huge implications involved that no one has
satisfactorily defined the objectification called time and its course. From
time, into history, through progress, and so to the murderous idolatry of
the future, which now kills species, languages, cultures, and possibly the
entire natural world. This essay should go no further without declaring

Hi iiiNN!N<, < )] Timi; I : nm u\- I'imi

an in lent ami strategy: t cell no logical society can only he dissolved (and
prevented from recycling) by annulling time and history.

"History is eternal becoming and therefore eternal future; Nature is
become and therefore eternally past," 6 as Spengler put it. This movement
is also well captured by Marcus e's "History is the negation of Nature," 7
the increasing speed of which has carried man quite outside of himself.
At the heart of the process is the reigning concept of temporality itself,
which was unknown in early humans.

Levy-Bruhl provides an introduction: "Our idea of time seems to be a
natural attribute of the human mind. But that is a delusion. Such an idea
scarcely exists where primitive mentality is concerned...." 8 The Frankfurts
concluded that primeval thought "does not know time as uniform
duration or as a succession of qualitatively indifferent moments." 9
Rather, early individuals "lived in a stream of inner and outer experience
which brought along a different cluster of coexisting events at every
moment, and thus constantly changed, quantitatively and qualitatively." 10

Meditating on the skull of a plains hunter-gatherer woman, Jacquetta
Hawks could imagine the "eternal present in which all days, all the
seasons of the plain stand in an enduring unity." 11 In fact, life was lived
in a continuous present, 12 underlying the point that historical time is not
inherent in reality, but an imposition on it. The concept of time itself as
an abstract, continuing "thread," unravelling in an endless progression
that links all events together while remaining independent of them, was
completely unknown.

Henri-Charles Puesch's term "articulated atcmporality" is a useful one,
which reflects the fact that awareness of intervals, for instance, existed
with the absence of an explicit sense of time. The relationship of subject
to object was radically different, clearly, before temporal distance
intruded into the psyche. Perception was not the detached act we know
now, involving the distance that allows an externalization and domination
of nature.

Of course, we can see the reflections of this original condition in
surviving tribal peoples, in varying degrees. Wax said of the nineteenth
century Pawnee Indians, "Life had a rhythm but not a progression." 13
The Hopi language employs no references to past, present or future.
Further in the direction of history, time is explicit in Tiv thought and
speech, but it is not a category of it, just as another African group, the
Nuer, have no concept of time as a separate idea. The fall into time is
a gradual one; just as the early Egyptians kept two clocks, measuring
everyday cycles and uniform "objective" time, the Balinese calendar
"doesn't tell what time it is, but rather what kind of time it is." 14

1 I 1 Ml NTS i )]■ l< I -I I ISA I

! /

In lei ins of the original, hunter-gatherer humanity" generally referred
lo above, a lew words may be in order, especially inasmuch as there has
been a "nearly complete reversal in anthropological orthodoxy" 16
concerning it since the end of the 1960s. Life prior to the earliest
agricultural societies of about 10,000 years ago had been seen as nasty,
short and brutish, but the research of Marshall Sahlins, Richard Lee and
others has changed this view very drastically. Foraging now represents
the original affluent society in that it provided life and pleasures with a
minimum of effort; work was regarded strictly as a social cost and the
spirit of the gift predominated. 17

This, then, was the basis of no-time, bringing to mind Whitrow's
remarks that "Primitives live in a now, as we all do when we are having
fun" 18 and Nietzsche's that "All pleasure desires eternity — deep, deep
eternity."

The idea of an original state of pleasure and perfection is very old and
virtually universal. 19 The memory of a "Lost Paradise" — and often an
accompanying eschatology that demands the destruction of subsequent
existence — is seen in the Taoist idea of a Golden Age, the Cronia and
Saturnalia of Rome, the Greeks' Elysium, and the Christian Garden of
Eden and the Fall (probably deriving from the Sumerian laments for lost
happiness in lordless society), to name but a few. The loss of a paradisal
situation with the dawn of time reveals time as the curse of the Fall,
history seen as a consequence of Original Sin. Norman O. Brown felt
that "Separateness, then is the Fall — the fall into division, the original
lie," 20 Walter Benjamin that "the origin of abstraction... is to be sought in
the Fall." 21 Conversely, Eliade discerned in the shamanic experience a
"nostalgia for paradise," in exploring the belief that "what the shaman
can do today in ecstasy" could, prior to the hegemony of time, "be done
by all human beings in concrete. " 22 Small wonder that Loren Eisely saw
in aboriginal people "remarkably effective efforts to erase or ignore all
that is not involved with the transcendent search for timelcssness, the
happy land of no change," 23 or that Levi-Strauss found primitive societies
determined to "resist desperately any modification in their structure that
would enable history to burst forth into their midst." 24

If all this seems a bit too heady for such a sober topic as time, a few
modern cliches may give pause as to where an absence of wisdom really
lies. John G. Gunnell tells us that "Time is a form of ordering
experience," 25 an exact parallel to the equally fallacious assertion of the
neutrality of technology. Even more extreme in its fealty to time is Clark
and Piggott's bizarre claim that "human societies differ from animal ones,
in the final resort, through their consciousness of history." 26 Erich Kahler

* ' -* I ^ J i ^ I

I u

"Ml , I Nl» i)| | (IN||

has ii that "Since primitive peoples Uavr scarcely any lecliiij* for
individuality., they have tiol individual property," ' a notion as totally
wrong as Leslie Paul's "In stepping out of nature, man makes himself
free of the dimension of time." 2H Kahler, it might be added, is on vastly
firmer ground in noting that the early individual's "primitive participation
with his universe and with his community begins to disintegrate" with the
acquiring of time. 29 Seidenberg also detected this loss, in which our
ancestor "found himself diverging ever further from his instinctual
harmony along a precarious path of unstable synthesis. And that path is
history." 30

Coming back to the mythic dimension, as in the generalized ancient
memory of an original Eden — the reality of which was hunter-gatherer
life— we confront the magical practices found in all races and early
societies. What is seen here, as opposed to the timebound mode of
technology, is an atemporal intervention aimed at the "reinstatement of
the usual uniformities of nature." 31 It is this primary human interest in
the regularity, not the supersession, of the processes of nature that bears
emphasizing. Related to magic is totemism, in which the kinship of all
living things is paramount; with magic and its totemic context, participa-
tion with nature underlies all.

"In pure totemism," says Frazer, "...the totem [ancestor, patron] is
never a god and is never worshipped.*' 32 The step from participation to
religion, from communion with the world to externalized deities for
worship, is a part of the alienation process of emerging time. Ratschow
held the rise of historical consciousness responsible for the collapse of
magic and its replacement by religion, 33 an essential connection. In much
the same sense, then, did Durkheim consider time to be a "product of
religious thought/' 34 Eliade saw this gathering separation and related it
to social life: "the most extravagant myths and rituals, Gods and
Goddesses of the most various kinds, the Ancestors, masks and secret
societies, temples, priesthoods, and so on—all this is found in cultures
that have passed beyond the stage of gathering and small-game hunt-
ing...." 35

Elman Service found the band societies of the hunter-gatherer stage to
have been "surprisingly" egalitarian and marked by the absence not only
of authoritarian chiefs, but of specialists, intermediaries of any kind,
division of labor, and classes. 36 Civilization, as Freud repeatedly pointed
out, with alienation at its core, had to break the early hold of timeless
and non-productive gratification. 37

In that long, original epoch, alienation first began to appear in the
shape of time, although many tens of thousands of years' resistance

I 'I IMI'.NIS < >l H\ 1 ■ii'SAi

l l )

stayed its definitive victory, its conversion into history. Spatiali/ation,
winch i.s the motor of technology, can he traced back to the earliest sad
fflprriciices of deprivation through time, back to the beginning efforts to
offset the passage to time by extension in space. The injunction in
( Jenesis to "Be fruitful and multiply" was seen by Cioran as "criminal." 38
Possibly he could sec in it the first spatialization — that of humans them-
selves — for division of labor and the other ensuing separations may be
said to stem from the large growth of human numbers, with the progres-
sive breakdown of hunter-gatherer life. The bourgeois way of stating this
is the cliche that domination (rulers, cities, the state, etc.) was the natural
outcome of "population pressures."

In the movement from the hunter-gatherer to the nomad we see
spatialization in the form, at about 1200 B.C., of the war chariot (and the
centaur figure). The intoxication with space and speed, as compensation
for controlling time, is obviously with us yet. It is a kind of sublimation;
the anxious energy of the sense of time is converted toward domination
spatially, most simply.

With the end of a nomadic existence, the social order is created on a
basis of fixed property, 39 a further spatialization. Here enters Euclid,
whose geometry reflects the needs of the early agricultural systems and
which established science on the wrong track by taking space as the
primary concept.

In attempting a typology of the egalitarian society, Morton Fried
declared that it had no regular division of labor (and thus no political
power accrued therefrom) and that "Almost all of these societies are
founded upon hunting and gathering and lack significant harvest periods
when large reserves of food are stored." 40 Agricultural civilization
changed all of this, introducing production via the development of
surplus and specialization. Supported by surplus, the priest measured
time, traced celestial movement, and predicted future events. Time,
controlled by a powerful elite, was used directly to control the lives of
great numbers of men and women. 41 The masters of the early calendars
and their attendant lore "became a separate priestly caste," 42 according
to Lawrence Wright. A prime example was the very time-obsessed
Mayans; G.J. Whitrow tells us that "of all ancient peoples, the Mayan
priests developed the most elaborate and accurate astronomical calendar,
and thereby gained enormous influence over the masses." 43

Generally speaking, Henry Elmer Barnes is quite correct that formal
time concepts came with the development of agriculture. 44 One is
reminded here of the famous Old Testament curse of agriculture
(Genesis 3:17-18) at the expulsion from Paradise, which announces work

^M

Ml

Hi t.iNNiNi i or I liyti . Inim >i I imi

l I I MINIS ( )l KM I ISAI

.M

and domination. With the advance of (arming cull in c the idea of time
became more defined and conceptual, and differences in the interpreta-
tion of time constituted a demarcation line between a state of nature and
one of civilization, between the educated classes and the masses. 4 ^ It is
recognized as a defining mode of the new Neolithic phenomena, as
expressed by Nilsson's comment that "ancient civilized peoples appear in
history with a fully-developed system of time-reckoning," 46 and by
Thompson's that "the form of the calendar is basic to the form of a
civilization." 47

The Babylonians gave the day 12 hours, the Hebrews gave the week 7
days, and the early notion of cyclical time, with its partial claim to a
return to the beginnings, gradually succumbed to time as a linear
progression. Time and domestication of nature advanced, at a price
unrivalled. "The discovery of agriculture," as Eliade claimed, "provoked
upheavals and spiritual breakdowns whose magnitude the modern mind
finds it well-nigh impossible to conceive." 48 A world fell before this
virulent partnership, but not without a vast struggle. So with Jacob
Burckhardt we must approach history "as it were as a pathologist"; with
Holderlin we still seek to know "How did it begin? Who brought the
curse

9"

Resuming the narrative, even up to Greek civilization did resistance
flourish. In fact, even with Socrates and Plato and the primacy of
systematic philosophy, was time at least held at bay, precisely because
"forgetting" timeless beginnings was still regarded as the chief obstacle
to wisdom or salvation. 49 J.B. Bury's classic The Idea of Progress pointed
out the "widely-spread belief in Greece that the human race had

decidedly degenerated from an initial "golden age of simplicity" — a
longstanding bar to the progress of the idea of progress. Christianson
found the anti-progress attitude later yet: "The Romans, no less than the
Greeks and Babylonians, also clung to various notions of cyclical recur-
rence in time...." 51

With Judaism and Christianity, however, time very clearly sharpened
itself into a linear progression. Here was a radical departure, as the
urgency of time seized upon humanity. Its standard features were
outlined by Augustine, not coincidentally at one of the most catastrophic
moments of history — the collapse of the ancient world and the fall of
Rome. s2 Augustine definitely attacked cyclical time, portraying a unitary
mankind that advances irreversibly through time; appearing at about 400
A.D., it is the first notable theory of history.

As if to emphasize the Christian stamp on triumphant linear time, one
soon finds, in feudal Europe, the first instance of daily life ruled by a

'iZ^^^ig^mrvmBSizxsiKsaa ML t L nam; x um

Strict time (able: the monastery/ Run like a dock, organized and
absolute , the monastery confined the individual in time just as its walls
confined hint in space. The Church was the first power to conjoin the
Mii.iMiinnnil of lime and a temporally ordered mode of life, a project
ii pursued vigorously/' 1 The invention of the striking and wheeled clock
l>v Tope Sylvester II, in the year 1000, is thus quite fitting. The
liiiirdieritie order, in particular, has been seen by Coulton, Sombart,
Mumlord and others as perhaps the original founder of modern
i ,ipitalism. The Benedictines, who ruled 40,000 monasteries at their
lu'ijvhl, helped crucially to yoke human endeavor to the regular, collective
iiriil and rhythm of the machine, reminding us that the clock is not
merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing
human action? 5

In the Middle Ages, specifically the 14th century, the march of time
met a resistance unequalled in scope, quite possibly, since the Neolithic
involution of agriculture. This claim can be assessed by a comparison of
I he very basic developments of time and social revolt, which seems to
indicate a definite and profound collision of the two.

With the 1300s quantified, official time staked its claim to the
colonization of modern life; time then became fully abstracted into a
uniform series of units, points and sections. The technology of the verge
escapement early in the century produced the first modern mechanical
clock, symbol of a qualitatively new era of confinement now dawning as
temporal associations became completely separate from nature. Public
clocks appeared, and around 1345 the division of hours into sixty minutes
and of minutes into sixty seconds became common/ 6 among other new
conventions and usages across Europe. The new exactitude carried a
tighter synchronization forward, essential to a new level of domestication,
Glasser remarked on the "loss of poetry and immediacy in personal
experience" caused by time's new power, and reflected that this manifes-
tation of time replaced the movement and radiance of the day by its
utilization as a temporal unit? 7 Days, hours, and minutes became inter-
changeable like the standardized parts and work processes they prefig-
ured.

These decisive and oppressive changes must have been at the heart of
the great social revolts that coincided with them. Textile workers,
peasants, and city poor shook the norms and barriers of society to the
point of dissolution, in risings such as that of Flanders between 1323 and
1328, the Jacquerie of France of 1358, and the English revolt of 1381, to
name only the three most prominent. The millennial character of
revolutionary insurgence at this time, which in Bohemia and Germany

persisted even into the early 16th century, underlines the unmistakable

time element and recalls earlier examples of longing tor an original,
unmediated condition. The mystical anarchism of the Hree Spirit in
England sought the state of nature, for example, as did the famous
proverb stressed by the rebel John Ball: "When Adam delved and Eve
span, who then was a gentleman?" Very instructive is a meditation of the
radical mystic Suso, of Cologne, at about 1330:

'Whence have you come?' The image (appearing to Suso) answers
T come from nowhere.' 'Tell me, what are you?' 'I am not. 3 'What do
you wish?' 'I do not wish.' 'This is a miracle! Tell me, what is your
name?' T am called Nameless Wildness.' 'Where does your insight
lead to?' 'To untrammelled freedom.' 'Tell me, what do you call
untrammelled freedom?' 'When a man lives according to all his
caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and
without looking before or after....' 58

The desire "to hold all things in common," to abolish rank and
hierarchy, and, even more so, Suso's explicitly anti-time utterance, reveal
the most extreme desires of the 14th century social revolt and demon-
strate its element of time refusal. S9

This watershed in the late medieval period can also be understood via
art, where the measured space of perspective followed the measured time
of the clocks. Before the 14th century there was no attempt at perspec-
tive because the painter attempted to record things as they are, not as
they look. After the 14th century, an acute time sense informs art; "Not
so much a place as a moment is fixed for us, and a fleeting moment: a
point of view in time more than in space," 60 as Bronowski described it.
Similarly, Yi-Fu Tuan pointed out that the landscape picture, which
appeared only with the 15th century, represented a major re-ordering of
time as well as space with its perspective. 61

Motion is stressed by perspective's transformation of the similarity of
space into a happening in time, which, returning to the theme of
spatialization, shows in another way that a "quantum leap" in time had
occurred. Movement again became a source of values following the
defeat of the 14th century resistance to time; a new level of spatialization
was involved, as seen most clearly in the emergence of the modern map,
in the 15th century, and the ensuing age of the great voyages. Braudel's
phrase, modern civilization's "war against empty space," 62 is best
understood in this light.

"The new valuation of Time, which then broke to the surface, actually
became one of the most powerful agencies by which Western thought, at
the end of the Middle Ages, was transformed.,.." 61 was Kantorowicz's way

I'.l I MINIS Ol Ull OY\l

M

, . i expressing ihe new, strengthened hegemony of time. II in this
■ rfijeelive temporal older of official, legal, factual time only the spatial
tumid Ihe possibility of real expression, all thinking would be necessarily
.liifted, and also brought to heel. A good deal of this reorientation can
lir found in Lc Goffs simple observation concerning the early 15th
century, that "the first virtue of the humanist is a sense of time," 64
t low else could modernity be achieved but by the new dimensions
ached by time and technology together, their distinctive and perfected
aling? Lilley noted that "the most complex machines produced by the
Middle Ages were mechanical clocks," 65 just as Mumford saw that "the
clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial
Marx too found here the first basis of machine industry: "The

«c;

ii

"06

age.

clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes, and
t he whole theory of production of regular motion was developed on it."
Another telling congruence is the fact that, in the mid-1 5th century, the
first document known to have been printed on Gutenberg's press was a
calendar (not a bible). And it is noteworthy that the end of the
millenarian revolt, such as that of the Taborites of Bohemia in the 15th
century and the Anabaptists of Munstcr in the early 16th century,
coincided with the perfection and spread of the mechanical clock, in
Peter Breughel's The Triumph of Time (1574), the many objects and ideas
of the painting are dominated by the figure of a modern clock.

This triumph, as noted above, awakened a great spatial urge by way of
compensation: circumnavigating the globe and the discovery, suddenly,
of vast new lands, for example. But just as certain is its relationship to
"the progressive disrealization of the world," 68 in the words of Charles
Newman, which began at this time. Extension, in the form of domination,
obviously accentuated alienation from the world: a totally fitting
accompaniment to the dawning of modern history.

Official time had become a barrier both palpable and all-pervasive,
filtering and distorting what people said to each other. As of this time,
it unmistakably imposed a new distance on human relations and restraint
on emotional responses. A Renaissance hallmark, the search for rare
manuscripts and classical antiquities, is one form of longing to withstand
this powerful time. But the battle had been decided, and abstract time
had become the milieu, the new framework of existence. When Ellul
opined that "the whole structure of being" was now permeated by
"mechanical abstraction and rigidity," he referred most centrally to the
time dimension.

All this bloomed in the 1600s, from Bacon, who first proclaimed
modernity's domination of nature, and Descartes' formulation regarding

• II II -Y 1 fvt I f )J

tlir nuiittvs ft possr.ssi'ttrs tit- ht ummr, which "pi rtlictftt llir imperialistic
routrol t-rf nature which clmraetei"ize,s modern science, " fifl including
Galileo and the whole ensemble of the century's scientific revolution.
Life and nature became mere quantity, the unique lost its strength, and
soon the Newtonian image of the world as a clock-like mechanism
prevailed. Equivalence— with uniform time as its real model — came to
rule, in a development that made "the dissimilar comparable by reducing
it to abstract quantities." 70

The poet Giro di Pers understood that the clock made time scarce and
life short. To him, it

Speeds on the course of the fleeing century,

And to make it open up,

Knocks every hour at the tomb. 71

Later in the 17th century, Milton's Paradise Lost sides with victorious
time, to the point of denigrating the timeless, paradisiacal state:

with labour I must earn

My bread; what harm?

Idleness had been worse. 72

Well before the beginnings of industrial capitalism, then, had time
substantially subdued and synchronized life; advancing technology can be
said to have been borne by the earlier breakthroughs of time. "It was the
beginning of modern time that made the speed of technology possible," 73
concluded Octavio Paz. E.P.Thompson's widely-known "Time, Work-
Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" 74 described the industrialization of
time, but, more fundamentally, it was time that did the industrializing,
the great daily life struggles of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
against the factory system 75 notwithstanding.

In terms of the modern era, again one can discern in social revolts the
definite aspect of time refusal, however inchoate. In the very late 18th
century, for instance, the context of two revolutions, one must judge,
helped Kant see that space and time are not part of the empirical world
but part of our acquired intersubjective faculties. It is a non -revolutionary
twist that a new, short-lived, calendar was introduced by the French
Revolution — not resistance to time, but its renewal under new
management! 76 Walter Benjamin wrote of actual time refusal vis-a-vis the
July revolution of 1830, noting the fact that in early fighting "the clocks
in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from
several places in Paris." He quoted an eyewitness the following verse:

Who would have believed? We are told that new Joshuas at

the foot of every tower, as though irritated with time

itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.

I 'I I Ml N IS i 11 Kl I DSAf ."■>

Nt il Ili.il nioiueuls <>l iiisurgcuec iltt * "ic only occasions of sensitivity In

time's Iviaiuiy. Am m ling to Poult* t, no one fell more grievously the

metamorphisis of time into something quite infernal than did Baudelaire,

ivlni wrote of the malcontents "who have refused redemption hy work,"

«ht> wauled "to possess immediately, on this earth, a Paradise"; these he

termed "Slaves martyred by Time," 78 a notion echoed by Rimbaud's

denunciation of the scandal of an existence in time. These two poets

suffered in the long, dark night of capital's mid- and late-19th century

ascendancy, though it could be argued that their awareness of time was

made clearest via their active participation, respectively, in the 1848

revolution and the Commune of 1871.

Samuel Butler's Utopian Erewhon portrayed workers who destroyed

ilirii machines lest their machines destroy them. Its opening theme

Jet ives from the incident of wearing a watch, and later a visitor's watch

e, lather forcibly retired to a museum of bygone evils. Very much in this

'.pint, and from the same era, are these lines of Robert Louis Stevenson:

You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is almost as if

t lie millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and

watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no

more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live

forever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly

long is a summer's day, that you measure only by hunger, and bring

to an end only when you are drowsy. 79

Referring to such phenomena as huge political rallies, Benjamin's "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" made the point
that "Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of
masses...." 80 But one could go much further and say simply that mass
reproduction is the reproduction of masses, or the mass-man. Mass
production itself with its standardized, interchangeable parts and wage-
labor to match constitutes a fascism of everyday life long predating the
fascist rallies Benjamin had in mind. And, as described above, it was
time, several hundred years before that, which provided the categorical
paradigm to mass production, in the form of uniform but discrete quanta
ordering life.

Stewart Ewen held that during the 19th and early 20th centuries, "the
industrial definition of social time and space stood at the core of social
unrest," 81 and this is certainly true; however, the breadth of the time and
space "issue" requires a rather broad historical perspective to allow for
a comprehension of modernity's unfolding mass age.

That the years immediately preceding World War I expressed a rising
radical challenge requiring the fearful carnage of the war to divert and

77

HH.INNINi. Ol | IM| ,, NJ| ()J

M

li I MINIS ( )l Rl I I IS AJ

7

destroy il is a thesis 1 have argued elsewhere. The tieptii of ihis
challenge can best be plumbed in terms ol (he refusal ol lime. The
contemporary tension between the domains of being and ol' time was first
elucidated by Bcrgson in the pre-war period in his protest against the
fragmentary and repressive character of mechanistic time. 8 ' With his
distrust of science, Bergson argued that a qualitative sense of time, of
lived experience or duree, requires a resistance to formalized, spatializcd
time. Though limited, his outlook announced the renewal of a developing
opposition to a tyranny that had come to inform so many elements of
subjugation.

Most of this century's anti-time impulse was rather fully articulated in
the quickening movement just prior to the war. Cubism's urgent re-
examination of appearances belongs here, of course; by smashing visual
perspective, which had prevailed since the early Renaissance, the Cubists
sought to apprehend reality as it was, not as it looked at a moment of
time. It is this which enabled John Berger to judge that "the Cubist
formula presupposed... for the first time in history, man living unalienated
from nature." 84 Einstein and Minkowski also bespoke the time revolt
context with the well-known scrapping of the Newtonian universe based
on absolute time and space. In music, Arnold Schoenberg liberated
dissonance from the prevailing false positivity's restraints, and Stravinsky
explicitly attacked temporal limitations in a variety of new ways, as did
Proust, Joyce, 85 and others in literature. All modes of expression,
according to Donald Lowe, "rejected the linear perspective of visuality
and Archimedean reason, in that crucial decade of 1905-1915 !" 86

In the 1920s Heidegger emphasized time as the central concept for
contemporary metaphysics and as forming the essential structure of
subjectivity. But the devastating impact of the war had deeply altered the
sense of possibilities within social reality. Being and Time (1927), in fact,
far from questioning time, surrendered to it completely as the only
vantage that allows understanding of being. Related, in the parallel
provided by Adorno, is "the trick of military command, which dressed up
imperative in the guise of a predicative sentence. ..Heidegger, too, cracks
the whip when he italicizes the auxiliary verb in the sentence, 'Death

is.

j»87

Indeed, for almost forty years after World War I the anti-time spirit
was essentially suppressed. By the 1930s, one could still find signs of it
in, say, the Surrealist movement, or novels of Aldous Huxley, 88 but
predominant was the renewed rush of technology and domination, as
reflected by Katayev's Five- Year- Plan novel Time, Forward! or the bestial
deformation expressed in the literally millenarian symbol, the Thousand

Year Reich

Nearer u> our contemporary situation, a restive awareness of time

began -to re (.'merge as a new round of contestation ncared. In the mid-

1950's i lu* scientist NJ. Berrill interrupted a fairly dispassionate book to

fcommi'tii on the predominant desire in society "to get from nowhere to

row he i e in nothing flat," observing, "And still a minute can embrace

eternity and a month be empty of meaning." Still more startling, he cried

out i In I "Tor a long time I have felt trapped in time, like a prisoner

searching for some sense of escape." 89 Perhaps an unlikely quarter from

winch to hear such an articulation, but another man of science made a

similar statement forty years before, just as World War I was about to

ijin-ll insurgence for decades; Wittgenstein noted, "Only a man who lives

noi in time but in the present is happy." 90

( 'hildrcn, of course, live in a now and want their gratification now, if
we arc looking for subjects for the idea that only the present can be
tatal. Alienation in time, the beginning of time as an alien "thing," begins
in early infancy, as early as the maternity ward, though Joost Meerloo is
tftrtect that "With every trauma in life, every new separation, the
.iwureness of time grows." 91 Raoul Vaneigem supplied the conscious
clement, outlining perfectly the function of schooling: "The child's days
escape adult time; their time is swollen by subjectivity, passion, dreams
haunted by reality. Outside, the educators look on, waiting, watch in
hand, till the child joins and fits the cycle of the hours." 92 The levels of
conditioning reflect, of course, the dimensions of a world so emptied, so
exquisitely alienated that time has completely robbed us of the present.
" Uvery passing second drags me from the moment that was to the
moment that will be. Every second spirits me away from myself; now
never exists." 93

The repetitious, routine nature of industrial life is the obvious product
of time and technology. 94 An important aspect of time-less hunter-
gatherer life was the unique, sporadic quality of its activities, rather than
the repetitive; 95 numbers and time apply to the quantitative, not the
qualitative. In this regard Richard Schlegel judged that if events were
always novel, not only would order and routine be impossible, but so
would notions of time itself. 96

In Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot, the two main characters receive
a visitor, after which one of them sighs, "Well, at least it helped to pass
the time." The other replies, "Nonsense, time would have passed
anyway." 97 In this prosaic exchange the basic horror of modern lite is
plumbed. The meta-presence of time is by this time felt as a heavily
oppressive force, standing over its subjects quite autonomously. Very

apfopos is lliis summing up l>v (iroigc Moigan: "A fretful busyness to
'kill lime" and restless movement from novelty to novelty bury an ever
prescnt sense of futility and vaeuousness. In the midst of his endless
achievements, modern man is losing the substance of human life.'"*

Loren Eisely once described "a feeling of inexplicable terror," as if he
and his companion, who were examining a skull, were in the path of "a
torrent that was sweeping everything to destruction." Understanding
Eisely's sensation completely, his friend paraphrased him as saying, "to
know time is to fear it, and to know civilized time is to be terror-
stricken/' 99 Given the history of time and our present plight in it, it
would be hard to imagine a more prescient bit of communication.

In the 1960s Robert Lowell gave succinct expression to the extremity
of the alienation of time:

I am learning to live in history.

What is history? What you cannot touch. 100

Fortunately, also in the '60s, many others were beginning the ^learn-
ing of how to live in history, as evidenced by the shedding of wristwatch-
es, the use of psychedelic drugs, and paradoxically perhaps, by the
popular single-word slogan of the French insurrectionarics of May
1968— "Quick!" The element of time refusal in the revolt of the '60s was
strong and there are signs— such as the revolt against work — that it
continues to deepen even as it contends with extreme new spatializations
of time.

Since Marcuse wrote of "the alliance between time and the order of
repression," 101 and Norman O. Brown on the sense of time or history as
a function of repression, 102 the vividness of the connection has powerfully
grown.

Christopher Lasch, in the late 70s, noticed that "A profound shift in
our sense of time has transformed work habits, values, and the definition
of success." 103 And if work is being refused as a key component of time,
it is also becoming obvious how consumption gobbles up time alive.
Today's perfect spatial symbol of the latter is the Pac-Man video game
figure, which literally eats up space to kill time. 104

As with Aldous Huxley's Mr. Propter, millions have come to find time
"a thing intrinsically nightmarish." 105 A fixation with age and the pro-
longevity movement, as discussed by Lasch and others, are two signs of
its torment. Adorno once said, "As the subjects live less, death grows
more precipitous, more terrifying." 106 There seems to be a new genera-
tion among the young virtually every three or four years, as time, growing
more palpable, has accelerated since the '60s. Science has provided a
popular reflection of time resistance in at least two phenomena; the

[ I I Ml NIS ) >l Km I ISA I

n )

widespread appeal ttl auti time concepts more or less loosely deiivcd
from physical theory, such as black holes, time warps, spaccttme
singularities and Ihc like, and the comforting appeal of the "deep time"

of the »» railed geological romances, such ax John McPhee\s Basin and

Range ( ] OK 1 ).

When Henjamin assayed that "The concept of the historical progress

of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression

iliioiigh a homogenous time," 107 he called for a critique of both, little

realizing how resonant this call might someday become. Still less, of

i «>mse, could Goethe's dictum that "No man can judge history but one

who has himself experienced history" 108 have been foreseen to apply in

such a wholesale way as it does now, with time the most real and

onerous dimension. The project of annulling time and history will have

1. 1 he developed as the only hope of human liberation.

( )f course, there is no dearth of the wise who continue to assert that

msciousness itself is impossible without time and its spatialization, 109

verlooking somehow an overwhelmingly massive period of humanity's

existence. Some concluding words from William Morris's News from

Nowhere are a fitting hope in reply to such sages of domination: "In spite

of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store

lor the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship." 110

n

< )

.-.ndUHB^winai

4

LANGUAGE:
ORIGIN AND MEANING

I :iirly recent anthropology (e.g. Sahlins, R.B. Lee) has virtually
ni>liirrated the long-dominant conception which defined prehistoric
hii inanity in terms of scarcity and brutalization. As if the implications of
l Ins are already becoming widely understood, there seems to be a
Rowing sense of that vast epoch as one of wholeness and grace. Our
i iiiH' on earth, characterized by the very opposite of those qualities, is in
deepest need of a reversal of the dialectic that stripped the wholeness
horn our life as a species.

Being alive in nature, before our abstraction from it, must have
involved a perception and contact that we can scarcely comprehend from
our levels of anguish and alienation. The communication with all of
existence must have been an exquisite play of all the senses, reflecting
(he numberless, nameless varieties of pleasure and emotion once
accessible within us.

To Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim and others, the cardinal and qualitative
difference between the "primitive mind" and ours is the primitive's lack
of detachment in the moment of experience; "the savage mind totalizes," 1
as Levi-Strauss put it. Of course we have long been instructed that this
original unity was destined to crumble, that alienation is the province of
being human: consciousness depends on it.

In much the same sense as objectified time has been held to be
essential to consciousness — Hegel called it "the necessary alienation" — so
has language, and equally falsely. Language may be properly considered
the fundamental ideology, perhaps as deep a separation from the natural
world as self-existent time. And if timclessness resolves the split between
spontaneity and consciousness, languagelessness may be equally
necessary.

Adorno, in Minima Moralia, wrote: "To happiness the same applies as
to truth: one does not have it, but is in it." 2 This could stand as an
excellent description of humankind as we existed before the emergence
of time and language, before the division and distancing that exhausted
authenticity.

32

Lan(..;i.;agi;: Okk;in and M];anin<;

Language is the subject of this exploration, understood in its virulent
sense. A fragment from Nietzsche introduces its central perspective:
"words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the
uncommon common." 3

Although language can still be described by scholars in such phrases as
"the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has
evolved," 4 this characterization occurs now in a context of extremity in
which we are forced to call the aggregate of the work of the "human
spirit" into question. Similarly, if in Coward and Ellis' estimation, the
"most significant feature of twentieth-century intellectual development"
has been the light shed by linguistics upon social reality, 5 this focus hints
at how fundamental our scrutiny must yet become in order to compre-
hend maimed modern life. It may sound positivist to assert that language
must somehow embody all the "advances" of society, but in civilization
it seems that all meaning is ultimately linguistic; the question of the
meaning of language, considered in its totality, has become the unavoid-
able next step.

Earlier writers could define consciousness in a facile way as that which
can be verbalized, or even argue that wordless thought is impossible
(despite counter-examples such as chess-playing, composing music, or
using tools). But in our present straits, we have to consider anew the
meaning of the birth and character of language rather than assume it to
be merely a neutral, if not benign, inevitable presence. The philosophers
are now forced to recognize the question with intensified interest;
Gadamcr, for example: "Admittedly, the nature of language is one of the
most mysterious questions that exists for man to ponder on." 6

Because language is the symbolization of thought, and symbols are the
basic units of culture, speech is a cultural phenomenon fundamental to
what civilization is. And because at the level of symbols and structure
there are neither primitive nor developed languages, it maybe justifiable
to begin by locating the basic qualities of language, specifically to
consider the congruence of language and ideology, in a basic sense.

Ideology, alienation's armored way of seeing, is a domination embed-
ded in a systematic false consciousness. It is easier still to begin to locate
language in these terms if one takes up another definition common to
both ideology and language: namely, that each is a system of distorted
communication between two poles and predicated upon symbolization.

Like ideology, language creates false separations and obj edifications
through its symbolizing power. This falsification is made possible by
concealing, and ultimately vitiating, the participation of the subject in the
physical world. Modern languages, for example, employ the word "mind"

I Ml

|\ < »\ Kl I h'.ai

I <.

,„ Ascribe a thing dwelling independently in our bod.es. compare-,! will.
,„ Sanskrit won I, which means "working within^ involving an active
„,™v of -nsation, perception, and cognition. The logic ot ideology
, active to passive, from unity to separation, ,s similarly reflected in
I ' cav of the verb form in general. It is noteworthy that the much
, ^nd ensuous hunter-gatherer eultures gave way to the Neolithic
, ,osh on of civilization, work and property at the same time that verbs
I S Ito approximately half of all words of a language; m modern
I .■nclish verbs account for less than ten percent of words.

Sugh language, in its definitive features, seems to be complete from
its inception, Its progress is marked by a steadtly debasing process. The
' rvTg up of nature, its reduction into concepts and ^wate""*.
rurs along lines laid down by the patterns of language. 8 And the more
he machtoerv of language, again paralleling ideology, subjects existence
Sthe more blind its role in reproducing a society ot subjugation.
Navaio has been termed an "excessively literal" language, from the
charaXsfe bis of our time for the more general and abstract. In a
11 T*?1 o r time we are reminded, the direct and concrete held sway;
'the e c^e "ieThora of terms for the touched and seen." Toynbee
10 ,cd'he "amazing wealth of inflexions" in early languages and the later
tendency toward simplification of language through the abandonment of
nSs » Cassirer saw the "astounding variety of terms for a particular
aS aiong American Indian tribes and understood that such terms
£Tto eTch other a relation of juxtaposition rather than ot subordina-
tion" But it is worth repeating onee more that while very early on a
sumptuous prodigality of symbols obtained, it was a closure of symbols,
otSaet conventions, even at that stage, which might be thought of as

^nSTe'r^tme paradigm of ideology, language mnst also be
reSnLed al "he determinant organizer of cognition. As the pioneer
S Sapir noted, humans are very much at the mercy ot language
e^neerning what constitutes "social reality." Another seminal anthropo-
S linguist, Whorf, took this further to propose that language deter-
mines one's entire way of life, including one's flunking and ull other
form of mental activity. To use language is to limd onese I o he modes
o£ perception already inherent in that language 1 he tact that language
°s only form and yet molds everything goes to the core ot what ideology

"ft is reality revealed only ideologically, as a stratum separate from us.
In this way language creates, and debases the world. •Human speech
conceals far more than it confides; it blurs much more than it dchncs; it

4

i'i|

tlislnmrs nunc lh;ifi il ctmawK ' M was C.ronv NlciiKi's conclusion.

Mdir concretely, (lie essence of learning a language is learning a
system, a model, that shapes and controls speaking. It is easier still to see
ideology on this level, where due to the essential arbitrariness of the
phonological, syntactic, and semantic rules of each, every human
language must be learned. The unnatural is imposed, as a necessary
moment of reproducing an unnatural world.

Even in the most primitive languages, words rarely bear a recognizable
similarity to what they denote; they are purely conventional. 14 Of course
this is part of the tendency to see reality symbolically, which Cioran
referred to as the "sticky symbolic net" of language, an infinite regression
which cuts us off from the world. ls The arbitrary, self-contained nature
of language's symbolic organization creates growing areas of false
certainty where wonder, multiplicity and non-equivalence should prevail
Barthes' depiction of language as "absolutely terrorist" is much to the
point here; he saw that its systematic nature "in order to be complete
needs only to be valid, and not to be true." 16 Language effects the
original split between wisdom and method.

Along these lines, in terms of structure, it is evident that "freedom of
speech" does not exist; grammar is the invisible "thought control" of our
invisible prison. With language we have already accommodated ourselves
to a world of unfreedom.

Reification, the tendency to take the conceptual as the perceived and
to treat concepts as tangible, is as basic to language as it is to ideology.
Language represents the mind's reification of its experience, that is, an
analysis into parts which, as concepts, can be manipulated as if they were
objects. Horkheimcr pointed out that ideology consists more in what
people are like — their mental constrictedness, their complete dependence
on associations provided for them— than in what they believe. In a
statement that seems as pertinent to language as to ideology, he added
that people experience everything only within the conventional frame-
work of concepts. 17

It has been asserted that reification is necessary to mental functioning,
that the formation of concepts which can themselves be mistaken for
living properties and relationships does away with the otherwise almost
intolerable burden of relating one experience to another.

Cassirer said of this distancing from experience, "Physical reality seems
to reduce in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances." 18 Represen-
tation and uniformity begin with language, reminding us of Heidegger's
insistence that something extraordinarily important has been forgotten
by civilization.

I 'I I MIN IS < )l Kill ISM

V)

Civilization , \s often thought of not as a forgetting Inil as a remember
ing wherein language enables 'accumulated knowledge to he transmitted
forward- allowing us to profit from others' experiences as though they
were mir own. Perhaps what is forgotten is simply that others' experienc-
es are not our own, that the civilizing process is thus a vicarious and
^authentic : one. When language, for good reason, is held to be virtually
tooferminous with life, we are dealing with another way of saying that life
h^ moved progressively farther from directly lived experience.

Language, like ideology, mediates the here and now, attacking direct,
■pnnianeous connections. A descriptive example was provided by a
mother objecting to the pressure to learn to read: "Once a child is
literate, there is no turning back. Walk through an art museum. Watch
the literate adults read the title cards before viewing the paintings to be
dine that they know what to see. Or watch them read the cards and
ignore the paintings entirely...As the primers point out, reading opens
doors. But once those doors are open it is very difficult to see the world
without looking through them." 19

The process of transforming all direct experience into the supreme
symbolic expression, language, monopolizes life. Like ideology, language
conceals and justifies, compelling us to suspend our doubts about its
claim to validity. It is at the root of civilization, the dynamic code of
civilization's alienated nature. As the paradigm of ideology, language
stands behind all of the massive legitimation necessary to hold civilization
together. It remains for us to clarify what forms of nascent domination
engendered this justification, made language necessary as a basic means
of repression.

It should be clear, first of all, that the arbitrary and decisive association
of a particular sound with a particular thing is hardly inevitable or
accidental. Language is an invention for the reason that cognitive
processes must precede their expression in language. To assert that
humanity is only human because of language generally neglects the
corollary that being human is the precondition of inventing language. 20

The question is how did words first come to be accepted as signs at all?
How did the first symbol originate? Contemporary linguists seem to find
this "such a serious problem that one may despair of finding a way out
of its difficulties/' 21 Among the more than ten thousand works on the
origin of language, even the most recent admit that the theoretical
discrepancies are staggering. The question of when language began has
also brought forth extremely diverse opinions. 22 There is no cultural
phenomenon that is more momentous, but no other development offers
fewer facts as to its beginnings. Not surprisingly, Bernard Campbell is far

I< 1 1 li/VJ

Iiom alour in his judgment Itial "VW simply do not know, ;md nrvci wi|

(tow or when language l-K m gtin. ,%M

Many of the theories thai have been put forth as to the origin oi
language are trivial; they explain nothing about die qualitative, intention*!
al changes introduced by language. The "ding-dong" theory maim aim
that there is somehow an innate connection between sound and meaning;
the "pooh-pooh" theory holds that language at first consisted of
ejaculations of surprise, fear, pleasure, pain, etc.; the "ta-ta" theory posits
the imitation of bodily movements as the genesis of language, and so on
among "explanations" that only beg the question. The hypothesis that the
requirements of hunting made language necessary, on the other hand, is
easily refuted; animals hunt together without language, and it is generally
necessary for humans to remain silent in order to hunt.

Somewhat closer to the mark, I believe, is the approach of contempo-
rary linguist E.H. Sturtevant: since all intentions and emotions are
involuntarily expressed by gesture, look, or sound, voluntary communica-
tion, such as language, must have been invented for the purpose of lying
or deceiving. 24 In a more circumspect vein, the philosopher Caws insisted
that "truth, ..is a comparative latecomer on the linguistic scene, and it is
certainly a mistake to suppose that language was invented for the
purpose of telling it." 25

But it is in the specific social context of our exploration, the terms and
choices of concrete activities and relationships, that more understanding
of the genesis of language must be sought. Olivia Vlahos judged that the
"power of words" must have appeared very early; "Surely... not long after
man had begun to fashion tools shaped to a special pattern." 26 The
flaking or chipping of stone tools, during the million or two years of
Paleolithic life, however, seems much more apt to have been shared by
direct, intimate demonstration than by spoken directions.

Nevertheless, the proposition that language arose with the beginnings
of technology— that is, in the sense of division of labor and its
concomitants, as a standardizing of things and events and the effective
power of specialists over others—is at the heart of the matter, in my
view. It would seem very difficult to disengage the division of labor — "the
source of civilization," 27 in Durkheim's phrase— from language at any
stage, perhaps least of all the beginning. Division of labor necessitates a
relatively complex control of group action; in effect it demands that the
whole community be organized and directed. This happens through the
breakdown of functions previously performed by everybody, into a
progressively greater differentiation of tasks, and hence of roles and
distinctions.

1.1 IIVUN IS l H Kill IS.VJ

17

Where as ; Vlahos fell I hill speech arose quite early, in relation to simple
stone h»>K ;iiul their reproduction, Julian Jaynes has raised perhaps a
imore interesting question which is assumed in his contrary opinion that
language showed up much later. He asks, how it is, if humanity had
speech fin i\ couple of million years, that there was virtually no develop-
ment of technology?'^ Jayncs's question implies a utilitarian value

inhering, in language, a supposed release of latent potentialities of a
positive nature/ 9 But given the destructive dynamic of the division of
labor , referred to above, it may be that while language and technology

are indeed linked, they were in fact both successfully resisted for
-thousands of generations.

(\t its origins language had to meet the requirements of a problem that
■existed outside language. In light of the congruence of language and
Myology, it is also evident that as soon as a human spoke, he or she was
separated. This rupture is the moment of dissolution of the original unity
btiween humanity and nature; it coincides with the initiation of division
of Igbor. Marx recognized that the rise of ideological consciousness was
established by the division of labor; language was for him the primary
(uradigm of "productive labor." Every step in the advancement of
* iv ihzation has meant added labor, however, and the fundamentally alien
ic'ility of productive labor/work is realized and advanced via language.
Ideology receives its substance from division of labor, and, inseparably,
its form from language.

Hngels, valorizing labor even more explicitly than Marx, explained the
origin of language from and with labor, the "mastery of nature." He
expressed the essential connection by the phrase," first labor, after it and
then with it speech." 30 To put it more critically, the artificial communi-
cation which is language was and is the voice of the artificial separation
which is (division of) labor. 31 (In the usual, repressive parlance, this is
phrased positively, of course, in terms of the invaluable nature of
language in organizing "individual responsibilities.")

Language was elaborated for the suppression of feelings; as the code
of civilization it expresses the sublimation of Eros, the repression of
instinct, which is the core of civilization. Freud, in the one paragraph he
devoted to the origin of language, connected original speech to sexual
bonding as the instrumentality by which work was made acceptable as
"an equivalence and substitute for sexual activity." 32 This transference
from a free sexuality to work is original sublimation, and Freud saw
language constituted in the establishing of the link between mating calls
and work processes.

The neo-Freudian Lacan carries this analysis further, asserting that the

J

■MBIIHMMtaMi

unconscious is farmed by the primary repression of acquisition of
language. For Lacan the unconscious is thus "structured like a language 1 '
and functions linguistically, not instinctively or symbolically in the
traditional Freudian sense. 33

To look at the problem of origin on a figurative plane, it is interesting
to consider the myth of the Tower of Babel. The story of the confound-
ing of language, like that other story in Genesis, the Fall from the grace
of the Garden, is an attempt to come to terms with the origin of evil.
The splintering of an "original language" into mutually unintelligible
tongues may best be understood as the emergence of symbolic language,
the eclipse of an earlier state of more total and authentic communica-
tion. In numerous traditions of paradise, for example, animals can talk
and humans can understand them. 34

I have argued elsewhere 35 that the Fall can be understood as a fall into
time. Likewise, the failure of the Tower of Babel suggests, as Russell
Fraser put it, "the isolation of man in historical time." 36 But the Fall also
has a meaning in terms of the origin of language. Benjamin found in it
the mediation which is language and the "origin of abstraction, too, as
a faculty of language-mind." 37 "The fall is into language," according to
Norman O. Brown. 38

Another part of Genesis provides Biblical commentary on an essential
of language, names, 39 and on the notion that naming is an act of
domination. I refer to the creation myth, which includes "and whatsoever
Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." This bears
directly on the necessary linguistic component of the domination of
nature: man became master of things only because he first named them,
in the formulation of Dufrenne. 40 As Spengler had it, "To name anything
by a name is to win power over it." 41

The beginning of humankind's separation from and conquest of the
world is thus located in the naming of the world, Logos itself as god is
involved in the first naming, which represents the domination of the
deity. The well-known passage is contained in the Gospel of John: "In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God."

Returning to the question of the origin of language in real terms, we
also come back to the notion that the problem of language is the
problem of civilization. The anthropologist Lizot noted that the hunter-
gatherer mode exhibited that lack of technology and division of labor
that Jaynes felt must have bespoken an absence of language: "[Primitive
people's] contempt for work and their disinterest in technological
progress per se are beyond question." 42 Furthermore, "the bulk of recent

I 'I I Ml N I". <H Kill ;SAI

I't

,"*% 'fij*;/'

AjLlM.

i.A2L:M

M.

'A

m ...m

tm

studies, in Lee "s wouls of I'/KI, shows the hunter gatherers to have been
well nourished and to have ] liact | abundant leisure time.'" 1 '

Early humanity was not deterred from language by the pressures of
constant worries about survival; the time tor reflection and linguistic

devolpment was available, but this path was apparently refused for many
i thousands of years. Nor did the conclusive victory of agriculture,
civilization's cornerstone, take place (in the form of the Neolithic revolu-
tion ) localise of food shortage or population pressures. In fact, as Lewis
JJiTT^ori has concluded, "The question to be asked is not why agriculture
landfill storage techniques were not developed everywhere, but why
rli«LY were developed at all." 44

"T ht ( l« mtinancc of agriculture, including property ownership, law, cities,
in. ii hematics, surplus, permanent hierarchy and specialization, and
wTtttug, to mention a few of its elements, was no inevitable step in
human "progress"; neither was language itself. The reality of pre-
Ntohihic life demonstrates the degradation or defeat involved in what
has been generally seen as an enormous step forward, an admirable
rraiTsx-ending of nature, etc. In this light, many of the insights of
Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (such as the
linking of progress in instrumental control with regression in affective
experience) are made equivocal by their false conclusion that "Men have
.1 1 ways had to choose between their subjugation to nature or the subjuga-
tion of nature to the Self." 45

"Nowhere is civilization so perfectly mirrored as in speech," 46 as Pei
enmmented, and in some very significant ways language has not only
reflected but determined shifts in human life. The deep, powerful break
I hat was announced by the birth of language prefigured and overshad-
owed the arrival of civilization and history, a mere 10,000 years ago. In
the reach of language, "the whole of History stands unified and complete
in the manner of a Natural Order," 47 says Barthes.

Mythology, which, as Cassirer noted, "is from its very beginning
potential religion," 48 can be understood as a function of language, subject
to its requirements like any ideological product. The nineteenth-century
linguist Muller described mythology as a "disease of language" in just this
sense; language deforms thought by its inability to describe things
directly. "Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity
of language... [It is] the dark shadow which language throws upon
thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely
commensurate with thought, which it never will. " 4<J

It is little wonder, then, that the old dream of a lingua Adamica, a
"real" language consisting not of conventional signs but expressing the

iliiecl, iiiiirU'iluiU'tl tneamrif,* of limits, has been an riilrgiiii pail liF
humanity's longing lor a lost primeval slate. As remarked up(H\ above,
the Tower of Babel is one of the enduring significations of this yearning k
to truly commune with each other and with nature.

In that earlier (but long enduring) condition nature and society formed
a coherent whole, interconnected by the closest bonds. The step from ]
participation in the totality of nature to religion involved a detaching of
forces and beings into outward, inverted existences. This separation took i
the form of deities, and the religious practitioner, the shaman, was the
first specialist.

The decisive mediations of mythology and religion are not, however, f
the only profound cultural developments underlying our modern r
estrangement. Also in the Upper Paleolithic era, as the species Neander-
thal gave way to Cro-Magnon (and the brain actually shrank in size), art (
was born. In the celebrated cave paintings of roughly 30,000 years ago is J
found a wide assortment of abstract signs; the symbolism of late
Paleolithic art slowly stiffens into the much more stylized forms of the
Neolithic agriculturalists. During this period, which is likely either
synonymous with the beginnings of language or registers its first real
dominance, a mounting unrest surfaced. John Pfciffer described this in
terms of the erosion of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer traditions, as Cro-
Magnon established its hegemony. 50 Whereas there was "no trace of
rank" until the Upper Paleolithic, the emerging division of labor and its
immediate social consequences demanded a disciplining of those resisting
the gradual approach of civilization. As a formalizing, indoctrinating
device, the dramatic power of art fulfilled this need for cultural
coherence and the continuity of authority. Language, myth, religion and
art thus advanced as deeply "political" conditions of social life, by which
the artificial media of symbolic forms replaced the directly- lived quality
of life before division of labor. From this point on, humanity could no
longer see reality face to face; the logic of domination drew a veil over
play, freedom, affluence.

At the close of the Paleolithic Age, as a decreased proportion of verbs
in the language reflected the decline of unique and freely chosen acts in
consequence of division of labor, language still possessed no tenses. 51
Although the creation of a symbolic world was the condition for the
existence of time, no fixed differentiations had developed before hunter-
gatherer life was displaced by Neolithic farming. But when every verb
form shows a tense, language is "demanding lip service to time even
when time is furthest from our thoughts." 52 From this point one can ask
whether time exists apart from grammar. Once the structure of speech

I I I MI'N IS ( >| Kill ISA!

II

incorporates finur and is Iht'ivby animated by it at every expression,
division ' "' labor lias conclusively destroyed an earlier reality. With
Derrida, , one can accurately refer to 'language as the origin of history." 53
t anj'.it.ij'.f itself is a repression, and along its progress repression
finders as ideology, as work — so as to generate historical time. Without
IfHtgiuj'.c ;itl of history would disappear.

Pic history is pre-writing; writing of some sort is the signal that
Mvili*;ifion has definitively arrived. "One gets the impression," Freud
wrote in The Future of an Illusion, "that civilization is something that was
iinjn.iM'd on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to
obtain possession of the means of power and coercion." 54 If the matter
«»i ume and language can seem problematic, writing as a stage of
l.inr.uage makes its appearance contributing to subjugation in rather
n.ikcit fashion. Freud could have legitimately pointed to written language
as? i he lever by which civilization was imposed and consolidated.

Kv about 10,000 B.C. extensive division of labor had produced the kind
• il social control reflected by cities and temples. The earliest writings are
M cords of taxes, laws, terms of labor servitude. This objectified domina-
nt m thus originated from the practical needs of political economy. An
increased use of letters and tablets soon enabled those in charge to reach
new heights of power and conquest, as exemplified in the new form of
jv ivernmcnt commanded by Hammurabi of Babylon. As Levi-Strauss put
if. writing "seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment
«>! mankind.. .Writing, on this its first appearance in our midst, had allied
1 1 self with falsehood." 55

I .anguage at this juncture becomes the representation of rcpresenta-
Ijoii, in hieroglyphic and ideographic writing and then in phonetic
alphabetic writing. The progress of symbolization, from the symbolizing
of words, to that of syllables, and finally to letters in an alphabet,
imposed an increasingly irresistible sense of order and control. And in
I he reification that writing permits, language is no longer tied to a
speaking subject or community of discourse, but creates an autonomous
field from which every subject can be absent/ 6

In the contemporary world, the avant-garde of art has, most noticeably,
performed at least the gestures of refusal of the prison of language. Since
Mallarme, a good deal of modernist poetry and prose has moved against
the taken-for-grantedness of normal speech. To the question "Who is
speaking?" Mallarme answered, "Language is speaking. " v/ After this
reply, and especially since the explosive period around World War I
when Joyce, Stein and others attempted a new syntax as well as a new
vocabulary, the restraints and distortions of language have been assaulted

imifa

aar.

wholesale in ifU'ralOff. Russian futurists, Dada [c.y,. Ilujyi Hall's c-f loi

in | he WOs to create "fxieliy without winds"), Aitaud, I he Surrealist:
and letlristes were among the more exotic elements of a genera
resistance to language. 38

The Symbolist poets, and many who could be called their descendants,
held that defiance of society also includes defiance of its language. Bui
inadequacy in the former arena precluded success in the latter, bringing
one to ask whether avant-garde strivings can be anything more than
abstract, hermetic gestures. Language, which at any given moment
embodies the ideology of a particular culture, must be ended in order to
abolish both categories of estrangement; a project of some considerable
social dimensions, let us say. That literary texts (e.g. Finnegan's Wake, the
poetry of e.e. cummings) break the rules of language seems mainly to
have the paradoxical effect of evoking the rules themselves. By permit-
ting the free play of ideas about language, society treats these ideas as
mere play.

The massive amount of lies — official, commercial and otherwise — is
perhaps in itself sufficient to explain why johnny Can't Read or Write,
why illiteracy is increasing in the metropolc. In any case, it is not only
that "the pressure on language has gotten very great," 59 according to
Canctti. but that "unlearning" has come "to be a force in almost every
field of thought," 60 in Robert Harbison's estimation.

Today "incredible" and "awesome" are applied to the most commonly
trivial and boring, and it is no accident that powerful or shocking words
barely exist anymore. The deterioration of language mirrors a more
general estrangement; it has become almost totally external to us. From
Kafka to Pinter silence itself is a fitting voice of our times. "Few books
are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white
sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible," 61 as R.D. Laing put it so well.
Meanwhile, the structuralists and post-structuralists — Levi-Strauss,
Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida — have been almost entirely occupied
with the duplicity of language in their endless exegeticalburrowings into
it. They have virtually renounced the project of extracting meaning from
language.

I am writing (obviously) enclosed in language, aware that language
reifies the resistance to reification. As T.S. Eliot's Sweeney explains, "I've
gotta use words when I talk to you," One can imagine replacing the
imprisonment of time with a brilliant present — only by imagining a world
without division of labor, without that divorce from nature from which
all ideology and authority accrue. We couldn't live in this world without
language and that is just how profoundly we must transform this world.

Ill mi-n is hi Kim isai

• I \

Vv^mK bespeak a sadness; they arc used to soak up | hi- emptiness of
unbnVlIrd li.ti.i-t-. We have all had the desire to go further, deeper than
V«rd s .. the feeling of wanting only to be done with all talk, knowing that
bpin,: allowed to live coherently erases the need to formulate coherence.

I lute is :i profound truth to the notion that "lovers need no words."

I it. pi tint is that we must have a world of lovers, a world of the face-to-

fa^. in which even names can be forgotten, a world which knows that

enchantment is the opposite of ignorance. Only a politics that undoes
hiH'.naj'e and time and is thus visionary to the point of voluptuousness
has. any meaning.

NUMBER:
ITS ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION

I he wrenching and demoralizing character of the crisis we find
• mi selves in, above all, the growing emptiness of spirit and artificiality of
iiuMtT, lead us more and more to question the most commonplace of
"/•jvcns." Time and language begin to arouse suspicions; number, too, no
tiiiii-cr seems "neutral." The glare of alienation in technological civiliza-
tion is too painfully bright to hide its essence now, and mathematics is
i lie schema of technology.

I I is also the language of science — how deep must we go, how far back
in reveal the "reason" for damaged life? The tangled skein of unneces-
-.;iry suffering, the strands of domination, are unavoidably being unreeled,
hy the pressure of an unrelenting present.

When we ask, to what sorts of questions is the answer a number, and
1 1 y to focus on the meaning or the reasons for the emergence of the
quantitative, we are once again looking at a decisive moment of our
estrangement from natural being.

Number, like language, is always saying what it cannot say. As the root
of a certain kind of logic or method, mathematics is not merely a tool
but a goal of scientific knowledge: to be perfectly exact, perfectly self-
consistent, and perfectly general. Never mind that the world is inexact,
interrelated, and specific, that no one has ever seen leaves, trees, clouds,
animals that arc any two the same, just as no two moments are identical/
As Dingle said, "All that can come from the ultimate scientific analysis
of the material world is a set of numbers," 2 reflecting upon the primacy
of the concept of identity in math and its offspring, science.

A little further on I will attempt an "anthropology" of number and
explore its social embeddedness. Horkheimer and Adorno point to the
basis of the disease: "Even the deductive form of science reflects
hierarchy and coercion... the whole logical order, dependency, progres-
sion, and union of [its] concepts is grounded in the corresponding
conditions of social reality — that is, of the division of labor." 3

If mathematical reality is the purely formal structure of normative or
standardizing measure 4 (and later, science), the first thing to be measured

.j*-. .

4dfll

NlJMHl-R: ITS (JKUilN AND I.VC)| I Ml

( >N

1 1 Ml NIS ( )| Kill

/

at all was time. The primal connection between time and number
becomes immediately evident. Authority, first objectified as him-
becomes rigidified by the gradually mathematized consciousness of thuc
Put shghtly differently, time is a measure and exists as a reification or
materiality thanks to the introduction of measure.

The importance of symbolization should also be noted, in passing for
a further interrelation consists of the fact that while the basic feature of
all measurement is symbolic representation, 6 the creation of a symbolic-
world is the condition of the existence of time.

To realize that representation begins with language, actualized in the
creation of a reproducible formal structure, is already to apprehend the
fundamental tic between language and number. 7 An impoverished
present renders it easy to see, as language becomes more impoverished
that math is simply the most reduced and drained language. The ultimate'
step in formalizing a language is to transform it into mathematics-
conversely, the closer language comes to the dense concretions of reality'
the less abstract and exact it can be. W

The symbolizing of life and meaning is at its most versatile in language
which, m Wittgenstein's later view, virtually constitutes the world'
further, language, based as it is on a symbolic faculty for conventional
and arbitrary equivalencies, finds in the symbolism of math its greatest
refinement. Mathematics, as judged by Max Black, is "the grammar of all
symbolic systems.

The purpose of the mathematical aspect of language and concept is the
more complete isolation of the concept from the senses. Math is the
paradigm of abstract thought for the same reason that Levy termed pure
mathematics 'the method of isolation raised to a fine art." 9 Closely
related are its character of "enormous generality," 10 as discussed by Par-
WhLhead e - U ° f limitati ° nS ° n Said generality, as formulated by

This abstracting process and its formal, general results provide a
content that seems to be completely detached from the thinking
individual; the user of a mathematical system and his/her values do not

tT'uTl SySt ^- Th ° Hegelian idca of the autonomy of alienated
activity finds a perfect application with mathematics; it has its own laws
of growth, its own dialectic, 12 and stands over the individual as a separate
power. Self-existent time and the first distancing of humanity from
nature .t must be preliminarily added, began to emerge when we first
enSled° "^ D ° mination of nature > and then of humans, is thus
In abstraction is the truth of Heyting's conclusion that "the character-

(Mi- ■•! mathematical thought is thai it does not convey truth about the
t »i> 1 1 1. 1 1 world." 11 Its essential attitude toward the whole colorful move
im< ni «>t hie is summed up by, "Put this and that equal to that and this!" 14
\lt .ii.uiion ;uid equivalence or identity are inseparable; the suppression
■ •I iln world's richness which is paramount in identity brought Adorno
!•• i all il "the primal world of ideology." 15 The untruth of identity is
■iiinjilv I hat the concept docs not exhaust the thing conceived. 16

Mathematics is reified, ritualized thought, the virtual abandonment of
id inking. Foucault found that "in the first gesture of the first mathe-
in.iiirian one saw the constitution of an ideality that has been deployed
ihiMughout history and has been questioned only to be repeated and
I nir ilied. 1 ' '

Number is the most momentous idca in the history of human thought.
Numbering or counting (and measurement, the process of assigning
numbers to represent qualities) gradually consolidated plurality into
quantification, and thereby produced the homogeneous and abstract
• luraeter of number, which made mathematics possible. From its
inception in elementary forms of counting (beginning with a binary
division and proceeding to the use of fingers and toes as bases) to the
< neck idealization of number, an increasingly abstract type of thinking
developed, paralleling the maturation of the time concept. As William
.lames put it, "the intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his
a i Institution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his
experience originally comes." 18

Boas concluded that "counting does not become necessary until objects
;ire considered in such generalized form that their individualities are
entirely lost sight of." 19 In the growth of civilization we have learned to
use increasingly abstract signs to point at increasingly abstract referents.
On the other hand, prehistoric languages had a plethora of terms for the
touched and felt, while very often having no number words beyond one,
two, and many. 20 Hunter-gatherer humanity had little if any need for
numbers, which is the reason Hallpike declared that "we cannot expect
to find that an operational grasp of quantification will be a cultural norm
in many primitive societies." 21 Much earlier, and more crudely, Allicr
referred to "the repugnance felt by uncivilized men towards any genuine
intellectual effort, more particularly towards arithmetic." 22

In fact, on the long road toward abstraction, from an intuitive sense of
amount to the use of different sets of number words for counting
different kinds of things, along to fully abstract number, there was an
immense resistance, as if the objectification involved was somehow seen
for what it was. This seems less implausible in light of the striking,

IN

Nmmmi-k. I is ()K), i

IN AND |\ o| i]

ION

BaVrfl h ° f B " tiSh archeol °gi« Clivc Gamble,

provide r^Ta^l^i 8 ,? 11 P^ 8 ' » » « n <> to

Tr,,t„v ,« „, „ u , ' ot m terms ° f separab c attributes 25

tlattLL • e " a ' arge family sits down to dinner and it i, no feed

harvested In H^L? , WlW CrCatUreS becamc P roduct * to be

" to,d 2 2 J"™?" " T ""'"• I"""- — b

i»— • M\„T .. * ^arjac^

I I IMI'NTS t II Kill i.'.M

i-. I he ■■[imdif.'.jility," "the liberal customs tor which hunters are properly
I. munis," "(heir inclination to make a feast of everything on hand," 31 ac-
i i.nlinj'. lo Sahlins.

Sliiiiinj', ami counting or exchange are, of course, relative opposites.
Wlicic articles are made, animals killed or plants collected for domestic
u\r and not for exchange, there is no demand for standardized numbers
.11 measurements. Measuring and weighing possessions develops later,
.ilnng with the measurement and definition of property rights and duties
in ;mihority. Isaac locates a decisive shift toward standardization of tools
.mil language in the Upper Paleolithic period, 32 the last stage of hunter-
jNiiherer humanity. Numbers and less abstract units of measurement
derive, as noted above, from the equalization of differences. Earliest
exchange, which is the same as earliest division of labor, was indetermi-
nate and defied systcmatization; a table of equivalencies cannot really be
formulated. 33 As the predominance ot* the gift gave way to the progress
of exchange and division of labor, the universal interchangeability of
mathematics finds its concrete expression. What comes to be fixed as a
principle of equal justice — the ideology of equivalent exchange — is only
t he practice of the domination of division of labor. Lack of a directly-
lived existence, the loss of autonomy that accompany separation from
nature are the concomitants of the effective power of specialists.

Mauss stated that any exchange can be defined only by defining all of
the institutions of society. 34 Decades later Belshaw grasped division of
labor as not merely a segment of society but the whole of it. 35 Likewise
sweeping, but realistic, is the conclusion that a world without exchange
or fractionalized endeavor would be a world without number.

Clastres, and Childe among others well before him, realized that
people's ability to produce a surplus, the basis of exchange, does not
necessarily mean that they decide to do so. Concerning the nonetheless
persistent view that only mental/cultural deficiency accounts for the
absence of surplus, "nothing is more mistaken," judged Clastres. 36 For
Sahlins, "Stone Age economics" was "intrinsically an anti-surplus
system," 37 using the term system very loosely. For long ages humans had
no desire for the dubious compensations attendant on assuming a divided
life, just as they had no interest in number. Piling up a surplus of
anything was unknown, apparently, before Neanderthal times passed to
the Cro-Magnon; extensive trade contacts were nonexistent in the earlier
period, becoming common thereafter with Cro-Magnon society. 38

Surplus was fully developed only with agriculture, and characteristically
the chief technical advancement of Neolithic life was the perfection of
the container: jars, bins, granaries and the like. 39 This development also

S(

NliMKI-k; lis ORIGIN AND UvoUJTKJ

N

I I I'MIN IS ( )l Kit USA!

gives concrete form to a burgeoning tendency toward spatialization the
sublimation of an increasingly autonomous dimension of time into spatial
forms. Abstraction, perhaps the first spatialization, was the first
compensation for the deprivation caused by the sense of time
Spatialization was greatly refined with number and geometry. Ricoeur
notes that "Infinity is discovered... in the form of the idealization of
magnitudes, of measures, of numbers, figures," 40 to carry this still further
This quest for unrestricted spatiality is part and parcel of the abstract
march of mathematics. So then is the feeling of being freed from the
world, from finitude, that Hannah Arcndt described concerning mathe-
matics.

Mathematical principles and their component numbers and figures
seem to exemplify a timelessncss which is possibly their deepest
character. Hermann Weyl, in attempting to sum up (no pun intended)
the lite center of mathematics," termed it the science of the infinite 42
How better to express an escape from reified time than by making it
limitlcssly subservient to space— in the form of math.

Spatialization— like math— rests upon separation; inherent in it are
division and an organization of that division. The division of time into
parts (which seems to have been the earliest counting or measuring) is
itself spatial. Time has always been measured in such terms as the
movement of the earth or moon, or the hands of a clock. The first time-
indications were not numerical but concrete, as with all earliest counting
Yet, as we know, a number system, paralleling time, becomes a separate
invariable principle. The separations in social life-most fundamentally'
division of labor— seem alone able to account for the growth of
estranging conceptualization.

In tact, two critical mathematical inventions, zero and the place system
may serve as cultural evidence of division of labor. Zero and the place
system or position, emerged independently, "against considerable
psychological resistance," 43 in the Mayan and Hindu civilizations. Mayan
division of labor, accompanied by enormous social stratification (not to
mention a notorious obsession with time, and large-scale human sacrifice
at the hands of a powerful priest class) is a vividly documented fact
while the division of labor reflected in the Indian caste system was "the

most complex that the world had seen before the Industrial Revolu-
tion.

The necessity of work (Marx) and the necessity of repression (Freud)
amount to the same thing: civilization. These false commandments turned
humanity away from nature and account for history as a "steadily
lengthening chronicle of mass neurosis/' 45 Freud credits

^g^gtuum

ic^iitific/uuithciiiaticalachievementas the highest moment of civilization,
and this seems valid as a function of its symbolic nature. "The neurotic
tutu-ess is the [Mice we pay for our most precious human heritage, namely
mir ability to represent experience and communicate our thoughts by

means of symbols.' 146

The triad of symbolization, work and repression finds its operating
principle in division of labor. This is why so little progress was made in
accepting numerical values until the huge increase in division of labor of
l he Neolithic revolution: from the gathering of food to its actual produc-
tion. With that massive changeover mathematics became fully grounded
;md necessary. Indeed it became more a category of existence than a

mere instrumentality.

The fifth century B.C. historian Herodotus attributed the origin of
mathematics to the Egyptian king Sesostris (1300 B.C.), who needed to
measure land for tax purposes. 47 Systematized math— in this case
geometry, which literally means "land measuring"— did in fact arise from
the requirements of political economy, though it predates Sesostris'
tigypt by perhaps 2000 years. The food surplus of Neolithic civilization
made possible the emergence of specialized classes of priests and
administrators which by about 3200 B.C. had produced the alphabet,
mathematics, writing and the calendar. 48 In Sumer the first mathematical
computations appeared, between 3500 and 3000 B.C., in the form of
inventories, deeds of sale, contracts, and the attendant unit prices, units
purchased, interest payments, etc. 49 As Bernal points out, "mathematics,
or at least arithmetic, came even before writing." 50 The number symbols
arc most probably older than any other elements of the most ancient

forms of writing. 51

At this point domination of nature and humanity are signaled not only
by math and writing, but also by the walled, grain-stocked city, along with
warfare and human slavery. "Social labor" (division of labor), the coerced
coordination of several workers at once, is thwarted by the old, personal
measures; lengths, weights, volumes must be standardized. In this
standardization, one of the hallmarks of civilization, mathematical
exactitude and specialized skill go hand in hand. Math and specialization,
requiring each other, developed apace and math became itself a specialty.
The great trade routes, expressing the triumph of division of labor,
diffused the new, sophisticated techniques of counting, measurement and

calculation.

In Babylon, merchant-mathematicians contrived a comprehensive
arithmetic between 3000 and 2500 B.C., which system "was fully
articulated as an abstract computational science by about 2000 B.C,"- In

'if

Hi

1 1

> >

; tl

\>

Numhi-k: lis OkitiiN and I a « »t

H )N

succeeding centuries the Babylonians even invented a symbolic algebra,
though Babylonian-Egyptian math has been generally regarded as
extremely trial-and-error or empiricist compared to that of the much
later Greeks.

To the Egyptians and Babylonians mathematical figures had concrete
referents: algebra was an aid to commercial transactions, a rectangle was
a piece of land of a particular shape. The Greeks, however, were explicit
in asserting that geometry deals with abstractions, and this development
reflects an extreme form of division of labor and social stratification.
Unlike Egyptian or Babylonian society, in Greece, a large slave class
performed all productive labor, technical as well as unskilled, such that
the ruling class milieu that included mathematicians disdained practical
pursuits or applications.

Pythagoras, more of less the founder of Greek mathematics (6th
century B.C.) expressed this rarefied, abstract bent in no uncertain terms.
To him numbers were immutable and eternal. Directly anticipating
Platonic idealism, he declared that numbers were the intelligible key to
the universe. Usually encapsulated as "everything is number," the
Pythagorean philosophy held that numbers exist in a literal sense and are
quite literally all that does exist. 53

This form of mathematical philosophy, with the extremity of its search
for harmony and order, may be seen as a deep fear of uncertainty or
chaos, an oblique acknowledgment of the massive and perhaps unstable
repression underlying Greek society. An artificial intellectual life that
rested so completely on the surplus created by slaves was at pains to
deny the senses, the emotions and the real world. Greek sculpture is
another example, in its abstract, ideological conformations, devoid of
feelings or their histories. 54 Its figures are standardized idealizations; the
parallel with a highly exaggerated cult of mathematics is manifest. '

The independent existence of ideas, which is Plato's fundamental
premise, is directly derived from Pythagoras, just as his whole theory of
ideas flows from the special character of mathematics. Geometry is
properly an exercise of disembodied intellect, Plato taught, in character
with his view that reality is a world of form from which matter, in every
important respect, is banished. Philosophical idealism was thus estab-
lished out of this world-denying impoverishment, based on the primacy
of quantitative thinking. As C.I. Lewis observed, "from Plato to the
present day, all the major epistemological theories have been dominated
by, or formulated in the light of, accompanying conceptions of mathemat-

ics.

It is no less accidental that Plato wrote "Let only geometers enter"

l.l I'MINIS ( >l Kill ISA!

iivn 1 1n- door In his Academy, than that his totalitarian Republic insists
thai years of mathematical training are necessary to correctly approach
i h<- most important political and ethical questions. 56 Consistently, he
ilc nied that a stateless society ever existed, identifying such a concept
willi that of a "state of swine." 57

Systematized by Euclid in the third century B.C., about a century after
Plato, mathematics reached an apogee not to be matched for almost two
millennia; the patron saint of intellect for the slave-based and feudal
societies that followed was not Plato, but Aristotle, who criticized the
former's Pythagorean reduction of science to mathematics. 38

The long non-development of math, which lasted virtually until the end
oi the Renaissance, remains something of a mystery. But growing trade
began to revive the art of the quantitative by the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. 59 The impersonal order of the counting house in the new
mercantile capitalism exemplified a renewed concentration on abstract
measurement. Mumford stresses the mathematical prerequisite to later
mechanization and standardization; in the rising merchant world,
"counting numbers began here and in the end numbers alone counted." 60

Division of labor is the familiar counterpart of trade. As Crombie
noted, "from the early 12th century there was a tendency to increasing
specialization." 61 Thus the connection between division of labor and
math, discussed earlier in this essay, is also once more apparent: "the
whole history of European science from the 12th to the 17th century can
be regarded as a gradual penetration of mathematics." 62

Decisive changes concerning time also announced a growing tendency
toward re-establishment of the Greek primacy of mathematics. By the
fourteenth century, public use of mechanical clocks introduced abstract
time as the new medium of social life. Town clocks came to symbolize a
"methodical expenditure of hours" to match the "methodical accountancy
of money," 63 as time became a succession of precious, mathematically
isolated instants. In the steadily more sophisticated measurement of time,
as in the intensely geometric Gothic style of architecture, could be seen
the growing importance of quantification.

By the late fifteenth century an increasing interest in the ideas of Plato
was underway, 64 and in the Renaissance God acquired mathematical
properties. The growth of maritime commerce and colonization after
1500 demanded unprecedented accuracy in navigation and artillery.
Sarton compared the greedy victories of the Conquistadors to those of
the mathematicians, whose "conquests were spiritual ones, conquests of
pure reason, the scope of which was infinite.' 165

But the Renaissance conviction that mathematics should be applicable

Numki-k: Its(>ki, ;in AN1 , lv.Hi;,,

< IN

ko er Bacon s 13th century contribution toward a strictly matl.enntir-,1

S:c;r e to the magnitude of ----•«;;•:.'

Tnl»r gh /T ""f S °° n edipsed ^ other ad ^ncc S of the 1600s
Johannes Kepler and Francis Bacon revealed its two most important an d
closely related aspects early in the eentury. Kepler, who Zn S the
Copernican transition to the heliocentric model, saw the reTworid as

Ze P °of ed „ u lr" tc" ^TT ^ * «*££££&
tnose ot number. Bacon, m The New Atlantis (c. 1620) deoicted an
deaUzed , tlfic ^^ ^ ^ ( ZviZnZn of

S" J f P CTS P , Ut !t ' " MaStC,y ofnature " ■ knowledge is powe has
been the watchword since Bacon " 67 puwtr, nas

relocation of human activity proved pivotal

objective, modified units oTZ^Z^Z^Z
ub.qu.tous clock reached a real domination in the seventeenth cent!
as correspondingly, "the champions of the new science" manfeS
avid interest in horological matters " 69 maniiestcu an

Thus it seems fitting to introduce Galileo in terms of just this strong
interest in the measurement time; his invention of the f rs mechS

X"af nerh Z^T ^ T^^ ° bjeCtified or "^ me
wo r Ga L toTinct, » 6ePe ^ f increasin «'y alienated social

of !^ss: was the reduction ° f the worid » - <**<*

iJ^!!".? * fCW yCarS bef0re World War « ^d Auschwitz Husserl
Galileo as with Kepler, mathematics was the "root grammar of the

I I'MIN'IS i >l l\l I I ISA1

new philosophical discourse thai constituted modern scientific method.' 1 ' 1
I lc riuiMciiiled the principle, "to measure what is measurable and try to
i ruder what is not so yet." 77 Thus he resurrected the Pythagorcan-
I Mil ionic substitution of a world of abstract mathematical relations for the
i r;il world, and its methods of absolute renunciation of the senses' claim
lu know reality. Observing this turning away from quality to quantity, this
plunge into a shadow- world of abstractions, Husserl concluded that
modern, mathematical science prevents us from knowing life as it is. And
l Ik- rise of science has fueled ever more specialized knowledge, that
stunting and imprisoning progression so well known by now.

Collingwood called Galileo "the true father of modern science" for the
success of his dictum that the book of nature "is written in mathematical
language" and its corollary that therefore "mathematics is the language
of science." 73 Due to this separation from nature, Gillispie evaluated,
"After Galileo, science could no longer be humane." 74

It seems very fitting that the mathematician who synthesized geometry
and algebra to form analytic geometry (1637) and who, with Pascal, is
credited with inventing calculus, 75 should have shaped Galilican
mathematicism into a new system of thinking. The thesis that the world
is organized in such a way that there is a total break between people and
the natural world, contrived as a total and triumphant world-view, is the
basis for Descartes' renown as the founder of modern philosophy. The
foundation of his new system, the famous "cogito, ergo sum," is the
assigning of scientific certainty to the separation between mind and the
rest of reality. 76

This dualism provided an alienated means for seeing only a completely
objectified nature. In the Discourse on Method Descartes declared that
the aim of science is "to make us masters and possessors of nature." 77
Though he was a devout Christian, Descartes renewed the distancing
from life that an already fading God could no longer effectively
legitimize. As Christianity weakened, a new central ideology of estrange-
ment came forth, this one guaranteeing order and domination based on
mathematical precision.

To Descartes the material universe was a machine and nothing more,
just as animals "indeede arc nothing else but engines, or matter sett into
a continual and orderly motion." 78 He saw the cosmos itself as a giant
clockwork just when the illusion that time is a separate, autonomous
process was taking hold. Also as living, animate nature died, dead,
inanimate money became endowed with life, as capital and the market
assumed the attributes of organic process and cycle s. ?,) Lastly, Descartes'
mathematical vision eliminated any messy, chaotic or live elements and

.*><>

Niimmi-k: lis ouu

IN AND lAOII H'lON

ushered in an attendant mechanical world-view that was coincidental wilh
a tendency toward central government controls and concentration ol
power m the form of the modern nation-state. "The rationalization of
administration and of the natural order was occurring simultaneously "
in the words of Merchant. 80 The total order of math and its mechanical
philosophy of reality proved irresistible; by the time of Descartes' death
m 1650 it had become virtually the official framework of thought
throughout Europe.

Leibniz, a near-contemporary, refined and extended the work of
Descartes; the "pre-established harmony" he saw in existence is likewise
Pythagorean in lineage. This mathematical harmony, which Leibniz
illustrated by reference to two independent clocks, recalls his dictum
"There is nothing that evades number." 83 Responsible also for the more
well-known phrase, "Time is money," 82 Leibniz, like Galileo and Des-
cartes, was deeply interested in the design of clocks.

In the binary arithmetic he devised, an image of creation was evoked-
he imagined that one represented God and zero the void, that unity and
zero expressed all numbers and all creation. 83 He sought to mechanize
thought by means of a formal calculus, a project which he too sanguinely
expected would be completed in five years. This undertaking was to
provide all the answers, including those to questions of morality and
metaphysics. Despite this ill-fated effort, Leibniz was perhaps the first to
base a theory of math on the fact that it is a universal symbolic language-
he was certainly the "first great modern thinker to have a clear insight
into the true character of mathematical symbolism." 84

Furthering the quantitative model of reality was the English royalist
Hobbes, who reduced the human soul, will, brain, and appetites to matter
in mechanical motion, thus contributing directly to the current concep-
tion of thinking as the "output" of the brain as computer.

The complete objectification of time, so much with us today was
achieved by Isaac Newton, who mapped the workings of the Galilean-
Cartesian clockwork universe. Product of the severely repressed Puritan
outlook, which focused on sublimating sexual energy into brutalizing
labor, Newton spoke of absolute time, "flowing equably without regard
to anything external." 85 Born in 1642, the year of Galileo's death, Newton
capped the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century by develop-
ing a complete mathematical formulation of nature as a perfect machine
a perfect clock.

Whitehead judged that "the history of seventeenth-century science
reads as though it were some vivid dream of Plato or Pythagoras ,m
noting the astonishingly refined mode of its quantitative thought Again

111 Ml N

( )l

■11 :v\l

/

Hit- eoncspnndemr with a jump in division of labor is worth pointing
,,„!; as Hill described mid-seventeenth century England, "...significant
specialization began to set in. The last polymaths were dying out...." '
The songs and dances of the peasants slowly died, and in a rather literal
malhematization, the common lands were enclosed and divided.

Knowledge of nature was part of philosophy until this time; the two
parted company as the concept of mastery of nature achieved its
definitive modern form. Number, which first issued from dissociation
from the natural world, ended up describing and dominating it.

Fontenellc's Preface on the Utility of Mathematics and Physics (1702)
celebrated the centrality of quantification to the entire range of human
sensibilities, thereby aiding the eighteenth-century consolidation of the
breakthroughs of the preceding era. And whereas Descartes had asserted
that animals could not feel pain because they arc soulless, and that man
is not exactly a machine because he has a soul, LeMettrie, in 1747, went
the whole way and made man completely mechanical in his L'Homme

Machine.

Bach's immense accomplishments in the first half of the eighteenth
century also throw light on the spirit of math unleashed a century earlier
and helped shape culture to that spirit. In reference to the rather
abstract music of Bach, it has been said that he "spoke in mathematics
to God." 88 At this time the individual voice lost its independence and
tone was no longer understood as sung but as a mechanical conception.
Bach, treating music as a sort of math, moved it out of the stage of vocal
polyphony to that of instrumental harmony, based always upon a single,
autonomous tone fixed by instruments, instead of somewhat variable with

human voices. 89

Later in the century Kant stated that in any particular theory there is
only as much real science as there is mathematics, and devoted a
considerable part of his Critique of Pure Reason to an analysis of the
ultimate principles of geometry and arithmetic. 90

Descartes and Leibniz strove to establish a mathematical science
method as the paradigmatic way of knowing, and saw the possibility of
a singular universal language, on the model of numerical symbols, that
could contain the whole of philosophy. The eightcenth-centuiyEnUghtcn-

ment thinkers actually worked at realizing this latter project. Condillac,
Rousseau and others were also characteristically concerned with
origins—such as the origin of language; their goal of grasping human
understanding by taking language to its ultimate, mathematized symbolic
level made them incapable of seeing that the origin of all symbolizing is
alienation.

")S

NlJMIilK: llsOKKilN AND I ! V < >l .1 J |[

( IN

Symmetrical plowing is almost as old as agriculture itself, a means of
imposing order on an otherwise irregular world. But as the landscape of
cultivation became distinguished by linear forms of an increasingly
mathematical regularity— including the popularity of formal
gardens — another eighteenth-century mark of math's ascendancy can be
gauged.

With the early 1800s, however, the Romantic poets and artists, among
others, protested the new vision of nature as a machine. Blake, Goethe
and John Constable, for example, accused science of turning the world
into a clockwork, with the Industrial Revolution providing ample
evidence of its power to violate organic life.

The debasing of work among textile workers, which caused the furious
uprisings of the English Luddites during the second decade of the
nineteenth century, was epitomized by such automated and cheapened
products as those of the Jacquard loom. This French device not only
represented the mechanization of life and work unleashed by seventeenth
century shifts, but directly inspired the first attempts at the modern
computer. The designs of Charles Babbage, unlike the "logic machines"
of Leibniz and Descartes, involved both memory and calculating units
under the control of programs via punched cards. The aims of the
mathematical Babbage and the inventor-industrialist J.M. Jacquard can
be said to rest on the same rationalist reduction of human activity to the
machine as was then beginning to boom with industrialism. Quite in
character, then, were the emphasis in Babbage 's mathematical work on
the need for improved notation to further the processes of symbolization;
his Principles of Economy, which contributed to the foundations of
modern management; and his contemporary fame as a crusader against
London "nuisances," such as street musicians! 91

Paralleling the full onslaught of industrial capitalism and the hugely
accelerated division of labor that it brought was a marked advance in
mathematical development. According to Whitehead, "During the
nineteenth century pure mathematics made almost as much progress as
during the preceding centuries from Pythagoras onwards." 92

The non-Euclidean geometries of Bolyai, Lobachevski, Riemann and
Klein must be mentioned, as well as the modern algebra of Boole,
generally regarded as the basis of symbolic logic. Boolean algebra made
possible a new level of formulated thought, as its founder pondered "the
human mind... an instrument of conquest and dominion over the powers
of surrounding Nature," 93 in an unthinking mirroring of the mastery that
mathematized capitalism was gaining in the mid- 1800s. (Although the
specialist is rarely faulted by the dominant culture for his "pure"

in minis <>i Ki l USAl

v>

m-iilivilv, Ailnriui adroitly observed thai L Mhe mallicmaliciairs resolute
mu-uiiscinusncss testifies to the connection between division ot labor and

P Ifmath is impoverished language, it can also be seen as the mature
form of that sterile coercion known as formal logic. Bertrand Russell, in
I act determined that mathematics and logic had become one Discard-
ing unreliable, everyday language, Russell, Frcge and others believed that
in the further degradation and reduction of language lay the real hope
for "progress in philosophy." 9 '

The goal of establishing logic on mathematical grounds was related to
an even more ambitious effort by the end of the nineteenth century, that
of establishing the foundations of math itself. As capitalism proceeded
to redefine reality in its own image and become desirous ot securing its
foundations, the "logic" stage of math in late 19th and early 20 h
centuries, fresh from new triumphs, sought the same. David Huberts
theory of formalism, one such attempt to banish contradiction or error
explicitly aimed at safeguarding "the state power of mathematics tor all
time from all 'rebellions.'" 97

Meanwhile, number seemed to be doing quite well without the philo-
sophical underpinnings. Lord Kelvin's late nineteenth century pronounce-
ment that we don't really know anything unless we can measure it
bespoke an exalted confidence, just as Frederick Taylor's Scientific
Management was about to lead the quantification edge of industrial
management further in the direction of subjugating the individual to the
lifeless Newtonian categories of time and space. _ *,*■.„

Speaking of the latter, Capra has claimed that the theories of relativity
and quantum physics, developed between 1905 and the late 1920s
"shattered all the principal concepts of the Cartesian world view and
Newtonian mechanics." 99 But relativity theory is certainly mathematical
formalism, and Einstein sought a unified field theory by geomctnzing
physics, such that success would have enabled him to have said, like
Descartes, that his entire physics was nothing other than geometry That
measuring time and space (or "space-time") is a relative matter hardly
removes measurement as its core element. At the heart of quantum
theory, similarly, is Heisenbcrg's Uncertainty Principle, which does no
throw out quantification but rather expresses the limitations of classical
physics in sophisticated mathematical ways. As Gillispie succinctly had it,
Cartesian-Newtonian physical theory "was an application of Euclidean
geometry to space, general relativity a spatialization ot Riemann s
curvilinear geometry, and quantum mechanics a naturalization of
statistical probability." 1 ' 00 More succinctly still: "Nature, before and atter

()()

Ncmhik: lis Oku ;in and I'Aui.i ii k>n

the quantum theory, is that which is to be comprehended mathematical-
ly." 101

During these first three decades of the 20th century, moreover, the
great attempts by Russell and Whitehead, Hilbert, et al., to provide a
completely unproblcmatic basis for the whole edifice of math, referred
to above, went forward with considerable optimism. But in 1931 Kurt
Godel dashed these bright hopes with his Incompleteness Theorem,
which demonstrates that any symbolic system can be either complete or
fully consistent, but not both. Godel's devastating mathematical proof of
this not only shows the limits of axiomatic number systems, but rules out
enclosing nature by any closed, consistent language. If there are
theorems or assertions within a system of thought which can neither be
proved nor disproved internally, it is impossible to give a proof of
consistency within the language used. As Godel and immediate succes-
sors like Tarski and Church convincingly argued, "any system of
knowledge about the world is, and must remain, fundamentally incom-
plete, eternally subject to revision." 102

Morris Kline's Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty related the "calami-
ties" that have befallen the once seemingly inviolable "majesty of
mathematics," 103 chiefly dating from Godel. Math, like language, used to
describe the world and itself, fails in its totalizing quest, in the same way
that capitalism cannot provide itself with unassailable grounding. Further,
with Godel's Theorem not only was mathematics "recognized to be much
more abstract and formal than had been traditionally supposed," 104 but
it also became clear that "the resources of the human mind have not
been, and cannot be, fully formalized." 105

But who could deny that, in practice, quantity has been mastering us,
with or without definitively shoring up its theoretical basis? Human
helplessness seems to be directly proportional to mathematical
technology's domination over nature, or as Adorno phrased it, "the
subjection of outer nature is successful only in the measure of the
repression of inner nature." 106 And certainly understanding is diminished
by number's hallmark, division of labor. Raymond Firth accidentally
exemplified the stupidity of advanced specialization, in a passing
comment on a crucial topic: "the proposition that symbols are instru-
ments of knowledge raises epistemological issues which anthropologists
are not trained to handle," 107 The connection with a more common
degradation is made by Singh, in the context of an ever more refined
division of labor and a more and more technicized social life, noting that
"automation of computation immediately paved the way for automatizing
industrial operations." 108

I .1 I'MIN IS ( >!■ Kill ISA I

Thr heightened led i urn of computerized office work is today's very
visible manifestation of mathematized, mechanized labor, with its nco-
T;iylorist quantification via electronic display screens, announcing the
"in formation explosion" or "information society." Information work is
now the chief economic activity and information the distinctive
commodity, 109 in large part echoing the main concept of Shannon's
information theory of the late 1940s, in which "the production and the
transmission of information could be defined quantitatively." 110

From knowledge, to information, to data, the mathematizing trajectory
moved away from meaning— paralleled exactly in the realm of "ideas"
(those bereft of goals or content, that is) by the ascendancy of
structuralism and post-structuralism. The "global communications
revolution" is another telling phenomenon, by which a meaningless
"input" is to be instantly available everywhere among people who live, as
never before, in isolation. 111

Into this spiritual vacuum the computer boldly steps. In 1950 Turing
said, in answer to the question "can machines think?", "I believe that at
the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion
will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines
thinking without expecting to be contradicted." 112 Note that his reply had
nothing to do with the state of machines but wholly that of humans. As
pressures build for life to become more quantified and machine-like, so
does the drive to make machines more life-like.

By the mid-'60s, in fact, a few prominent voices already announced that
the distinction between human and machine was about to be
superseded— and saw this as positive. Mazlish provided an especially
unequivocal commentary: "Man is on the threshold of breaking past the
discontinuity between himself and machines... We cannot think any longer
of man without a machine... Moreover, this change... is essential to our
harmonious acceptance of an industrialized world." 113

By the late 1980s thinking sufficiently impersonated the machine that
Artificial Intelligence experts, like Minsky, could matter-of-factly speak
of the symbol-manipulating brain as "a computer made of meat." 114
Cognitive psychology, echoing Hobbes, has become almost entirely based
on the computational model of thought in the decades since Turing's
1950 prediction. 115

Heidegger felt that there is an inherent tendency for Western thinking
to merge into the mathematical sciences, and saw science as "incapable
of awakening, and in fact emasculating, the spirit of genuine inquiry." 116
We find ourselves, in an age when the fruits of science threaten to end
human life altogether, when a dying capitalism seems capable of taking

NliMlil-K; ||\ ()kk;i|sj ANn | . Vn , ,

It )N

everything with it, more apt to want to discover the ultimate origins of
the nightmare. ^

When the world and its thought (Levi-Strauss and Chomsky come
immediately to mind) reach a condition that is increasingly mathematized
and empty (where computers are widely touted as capable of feelings and
even of life itself), 11 ' the beginnings of this bleak journey, including the
origins of the number concept, demand comprehension. It may be that
this inquiry is essential to save us and our humanness.

. M-ak.a^m- MMi

THE CASE AGAINST ART

Art is always about "something hidden." But docs it help us connect
with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.

During the first million or so years as reflective beings humans seem
to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that
"unfallcn social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools
were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of
form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible
components of the human mind is invalid.

The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure
or blown pigment — a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later
in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the
rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like
Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often
breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such
as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized.
Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede
domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or
hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that
nature was bountiful rather than threatening.

The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt
before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment
of perception." Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of
discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping
away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels
the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments
of the moment of "the beginning," the primordial paradise of the
timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling
loss, the belief in coercion itself.

And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-
human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into
opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and
nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already
prefigured.

The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in

M

Till': Cash A<;ainst Art

reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of: senses,
with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its
completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace
the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Levi-Strauss discovered, to
his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus' in
daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were
also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the
objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an
intellectual sense: reality was removed in favor of merely aesthetic
experience. Art anesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural
world from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never
compensate for the disability.

Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian
principles that characterized hunter-gatherer life show up now. The
shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the
point here being that the artist-shaman was the first specialist. It seems
likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the
shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further
alienation and stratification.

Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces
exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a
community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstoy's
statement that "art is a means of union among men, joining them
together in the same feeling," elucidates art's contribution to social
cohesion at the dawn of culture. Socializing ritual required art; art works
originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of art and the
artistic production of ritual are the same. "Music," wrote Scu-ma-tsen,
"is what unifies."

As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony;
art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely
following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of the
caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other
symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective memory.
Nietzsche saw the training of memory, especially the memory of
obligations, as the beginning of civilized morality. Once the symbolic
process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception,
putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that
one person's action could be compared with that of another, including
portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled.
Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the
property of the subject.

.1 1M1NIS ( )]■ Km I ISAl

(>'->

Ait I urns Hie subject into object, into symbol. The shaman's role was
to objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity alike
because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of
conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from
nature and dominated, at the deepest level, socially. Art's ability to
symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we
were led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in
nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic world, the

I ; all of Man.

The world must be mediated by art (and human communication by
language, and being by time) due to division of labor, as seen in the
nature of ritual. The real object, its particularity, does not appear in
ritual; instead, an abstract one is used, so that the terms of ceremonial
expression are open to substitution. The conventions needed in division
of labor, with its standardization and loss of the unique, are those of
ritual, of symbolization. The process is at base identical, based on
equivalence. Production of goods, as the hunter-gatherer mode is
gradually liquidated in favor of agriculture (historical production) and
religion (full symbolic production), is also ritual production.

The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, en route to priesthood, leader
by reason of mastering his own immediate desires via the symbol. All
that is spontaneous, organic and instinctive is to be neutered by art and
myth.

Recently the painter Eric Fischl presented at the Whitney Museum a
couple in the act of sexual intercourse. A video camera recorded their
actions and projected them on a TV monitor before the two. The man's
eyes were riveted to the image on the screen, which was clearly more
exciting than the act itself. The evocative cave pictures, volatile in the
dramatic, lamp-lit depths, began the transfer exemplified in Fischl's
tableau, in which even the most primal acts can become secondary to
their representation. Conditioned self-distancing from real existence has
been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the category of
audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art has striven
to make life itself an object of contemplation.

As the Paleolithic Age gave way to the Neolithic arrival of agriculture
and civilization— production, private property, written language,
government and religion — culture could be seen more fully as spiritual
decline via division of labor, though global specialization and a mechanis-
tic technology did not prevail until the late Iron Age.

The vivid representation of late hunter-gatherer art was replaced by a
formalistic, geometric style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to

(U)

IHI' ( 'ASJ- Ac.AINM AK r

N IAVIN1S > H Kill ISM

<i/

.symbolic shapes. This narrow styliza.ion reveals the arli.sl sltulli.... himself

verse. The aridity of linear precis.on is one of the hallmarks „r lid.
S- POm ™ al,m8 t0 mind the Y °™^ who associate line w

Y oba ^V ITT haS beC ° me CWilizCd " Iiteral| y ™«- • »

afcnttl o * S ne l UP ° n " S faCC '' The infIexibIc for ™ «f ""IV

alienated society are everywhere apparent; Gordon Childe, for example

referring ,0 his spirit, points out that the pots of a Neolithic villaee „•'

£S££tt warfare in thc form of «- — "*" * ^

The work of art was in no sense autonomous at this time; it served
society in a direct sense, an instrument of the needs of the 7cw
collectivity. There had been no worship-cults during the PaleoIhMc btd

o'year 'art's " "'' ^ " * W ° rth —Bering that for thou Ld
of year art s function wtll be to depict thc gods. Meanwhile, what Gluck

stressed about African tribal architecture was true in all o her cuhures

as well: sacred buildings came to life on the model of those o the

het* Gre^n "^ ™? ' CVen the firSt si « ned w <>^ show up b for
the late Greek period, it ,s not inappropriate to turn here to art's
realization, some of its general features.

Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic part
of thc symbolic matrix of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said that ■
docs not imitate life, bu, vice versa; which is to say that life foUow
symbolism, not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that produce

&£, * \7 m t m ' a Tf ng t0 T - s - Eliot ' * " an -^ SS

inarticulate. Upon thc unsvmbolizcd, he should have said

anf wiZ"^"' 1 r, 6 ' h3Ve 3l r yS Wamed t0 reach thc silence b ^°
and withm art and language, leaving the question of whether the

iTtde Z '"h R ° Pting thCSe m ° deS ° f eXprCSSi0n ' didn,f setU * ^ f- 00
httlc. Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without

symbols, such a breakthrough seems impossible outside our acdve
undoing of all the layers of alienation. In the extremity of revolution^
sanations, immediate communication has bloomed, if briefly °' Utl ° na,y
I fie primary function of art is to objectify feeling, bv which one's own
monvattons and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor In
art, as symbohzat.on, is rooted in the creation of substitutes surrogate
or something else; by its very nature, therefore, i, is fadsSn Und
thc guise of ^nnchtng thc quality of human experience," we accen
v canons symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, tra ned to Ted

sxssr of sentiment that rituai art and ^ « C fo —

w

I

L.

? »

lUKftwtirttjfr-^Bfa

i

Life in civilization is lived almost wholly in ;i medium of symbols. Not

only scientific oi technological activity but aesthetic form arc canons oi

j-tiffilM.li/aliou, often expressed quite unspiritually. It is widely averred, for

1 " , 1 hat a limited number of mathematical figures account for the

efficacy ni ;trt - ' ncre is ^zanne's famous dictum to "treat nature by thc

cylinder , the sphere and the cone," and Kandinsky's judgement that "the

impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle produces an effect no

luyj powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in

Mn hclangelo." Thc sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its

-translation into another symbol, thus an endless reproduction, with the

r^sil always displaced.

though art is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to
uwtl nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons.
Moonlight is sculpture," wrote Hawthorne; Shelley praised thc "unpre-
meditated art" of the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more
hiautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes,
1 lowers, etc., beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact,
ki mc d "the most perfect picture" nothing more than "warty, threadbare
.ipproximation, a dry porridge."

Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and
Palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and
.li sallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, "One gives to one's art
what one has not been capable of giving to one's own existence." It is
hue for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatis-
fied desire.

Art should be considered a religious activity and category also in thc
sense of Nietzsche's aphorism, "We have Art in order not to perish of
Truth." Its consolation explains the widespread preference for metaphor
over a direct relationship to thc genuine article. If pleasure were
somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the antithesis
of art. In dominated life freedom docs not exist outside art, however, and
so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is welcomed. "I
create in order not to cry," revealed Klec.

This separate realm of contrived life is both important and in
complicity with the actual nightmare that prevails. In its institutionalized
separation it corresponds to religion and ideology in general, where its
elements are not. and cannot be, actualized; the work of art is a selection
of possibilities unrealized except in symbolic terms. Arising from the
sense of loss referred to above, it conforms to religion not only by reason
of its confinement to an ideal sphere and its absence of any dissenting
consequences, but it can hence be no more than thoroughly neutralized

hS

I'll] ( AM A i i A INS I Alt I

critique at best.

Frequently compared to play, art and culture like religion have
more often worked as generators of guilt and oppression. Perhaps the
ludic function of art, as well as its common claim to transcendence,
should be estimated as one might reassess the meaning of Versailles: by
contemplating the misery of the workers who perished draining its
marshes.

Clive Bell pointed to the intention of art to transport us from the plane
of daily struggle "to a world of aesthetic exaltation," paralleling the aim
of religion. Malraux offered another tribute to the conservative office of
art when he wrote that without art works civilization would crumble
"within fifty years," becoming "enslaved to instincts and to elementary
dreams."

Hegel determined that art and religion also have "this in common,
namely, having entirely universal matters as content." This feature of
generality, of meaning without concrete reference, serves to introduce the
notion that ambiguity is a distinctive sign of art.

Usually depicted positively, as a revelation of truth free of the
contingencies of time and place, the impossibility of such a formulation
only illuminates another moment of falseness about art. Kierkegaard
found the defining trait of the aesthetic outlook to be its hospitable
reconciliation of all points of view and its evasion of choice. This can be
seen in the perpetual compromise that at once valorizes art only to
repudiate its intent and contents with "well, after all, it is only art."

Today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity. The
situation is understood inadequately as the product of a centralized
culture industry, a la Horkheimer and Adorno. We witness, rather, a
mass diffusion of culture dependent on participation for its strength, not
forgetting that the critique must be of culture itself, not of its alleged
control.

Daily life has become aestheticized by a saturation of images and
music, largely through the electronic media, the representation of
representation. Image and sound, in their ever-prcsence, have become a
void, ever more absent of meaning for the individual. Meanwhile, the
distance between artist and spectator has diminished, a narrowing that
only highlights the absolute distance between aesthetic experience and
what is real. This perfectly duplicates the spectacle at large: separate and
manipulating, perpetual aesthetic experience and a demonstration of
political power.

Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avant-garde
movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art any

I I IMINI'. i I] kill ISM

<>')

mote I haii orthodox tendencies have. In tact, one could argue that
Arsthelicism, or "art lor art's sake," is more radical than an attempt to
mj-agc alienation with its own devices. The late 19th century art pour
Wirt development was a self-reflective rejection of the world, as opposed
Id the avant-garde effort to somehow organize life around art. A valid
moment of doubt lies behind Aestheticism, the realization that division
,,r labor has diminished experience and turned art into just another
specialization: art shed its illusory ambitions and became its own content.
The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a
leading role denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as a
social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prizes
novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be

constantly updated.

But avant-garde culture cannot compete with the modern world s
capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically). Its demise
is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt.

Dada was one of the last two major avant-garde movements, its
negative image greatly enhanced by the sense of general historical
collapse radiated by World War I. Its partisans claimed, at times, to be
against all "isms," including the idea of art. But painting cannot negate
painting, nor can sculpture invalidate sculpture, keeping in mind that all
symbolic culture is the co-opting of perception, expression and communi-
cation. In fact, Dada was a quest for new artistic modes, its attack on the
rigidities and irrelevancics of bourgeois art a factor in the advance of art;
Hans Richter's memoirs referred to "the regeneration of visual art that
Dada had begun." If World War I almost killed art, the Dadaists
radically reformed it. .

Surrealism is the last school to assert the political mission ot art.
Before trailing off into Trotskyism and/or art-world fame, the Surrealists
upheld chance and the primitive as ways to unlock "the Marvelous"
which society imprisons in the unconscious. The false judgement that
would have re-introduced art into everyday life and thereby transfigured
it certainly misunderstood the relationship of art to repressive society.
The real barrier is not between art and social reality, which are one, but
between desire and the existing world. The Surrealists' aim of inventing
a new symbolism and mythology upheld these categories and mistrusted
unmediated sensuality. Concerning the latter, Breton held that "enjoy-
ment is a science; the exercise of the senses demands a personal
initiation and therefore you need art."

Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in
that it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its

/I I

in ( am Aii.MNsi Aim

l.l I'MI'NIS < tl kill ISAI

/I

field of vision could art survive. Will, Hie least strain ol embellishment
eprc^nt llLTm" , ™ h ° Sti ' e to narrativC ' G ™a<«eed not to

SMKS pa,ntmg is "^ nothing m ™ than •

on me work of art as an object in its own right in a world of obiects
proved a virtually self-annihilating method. This "rauS physS"

in i s I,T rS "' n t0 , aUth ° rity th0Ugh if was ' »™ amoantedtomoT;
m its objectiveness, than simple commodity status. The sterile grins of
Mondnan and the repeated all-blaek squares of Reinhard echo M

Modern' Z '!"" hide ° US 2 ° th CM ^ -chitectoe in gc „era
Modernist self-liquidation was parodied by Rauschenberg's 1953 FnJd

"r^t 1 *? WS m ° nth - l0n8 CraSUre 0t a de Kooningdrfrng
rhe very incept of m> Duch >s showj i awmg_

exhibition notwithstanding, became an open question in he 5 fe and hal

grown steadily more undefinable since S

Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media

loot t fZ oOn^lTT diSS0 ' Ving ' " S PerfUnCto ^ and -ass-prolced
w»i i i u ° le S0Ciety and the detached, blank quality of a

Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless deperscn

stis Si y ma t ui r by a *»-»«x

stratagem the nothingness ot modern art and its world revealed

The pro hiera ion of art styles and approaches in the >60s-CW D tual
Minimalist, Performance, etc.-and the accelerated obsolescence of Cost
^ughtthe -postmodern" era, a displacement of the SS

™ er ™ * aneclec ^ ™* from past stylistic achievements Ths"
tha th Vev*!™ 1 ; ' f?**** " f used -«P fragments, annonn ng
h symbol ZrZ ¥■" at a " 6nd - AgainSt the g' obal d ^'"ing of

«S rkra^Lrtrrso 5 of generating new *■** a - d

Occasionally critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art's curren t inahilitv
to stimulate the growth of a realty troubling d^S^

culture. But this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden ideology is

-.1 vi n it'll hv its refusal to consider origins or historical causation, an
.ivrisiou it inherited from structuralism/poststructuralism. Dcrrida,
I )romslruc(ion's seminal figure, deals with language as a solipsism,
ron signed to self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in
wi iiing about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality,
i Ins approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Litera-
ture, like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its
own surface.

Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them
in a gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm, and crucified
lo a Volkswagen, we sec in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such
as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi — with his eyes closed. "Serious"
music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry ncars collapse
and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the Absurd to Silence,
is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as the only way to write
seriously.

Tn a jaded, enervated age, where it seems to speak is to say less, art is
certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet's dignity in a society
which had no more dignity to hand out. A century and more later how
inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more threadbare
the consolation or station of "timeless" art.

Adorno began his book thusly: "Today it goes without saying that
nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation
to society, even its right to exist." But Aesthetic Theory affirms art, just as
Marcuse's last work did, testifying to despair and to the difficulty of
assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of culture. And although other
"radicals," such as Habermas, counsel that the desire to abolish symbolic
mediation is irrational, it is becoming clearer that when we really experi-
ment with our hearts and hands the sphere of art is shown to be pitiable.
In the transfiguration we must enact, the symbolic will be left behind and
art refused in favor of the real. Play, creativity, self-expression and
authentic experience will recommence at that moment.

«"*i*fc«ffla

AGRICULTURE

Agriculture, the indispensable basis of civilization, was originally
encountered as time, language, number and art won out. As the
materialization of alienation, agriculture is the triumph of estrangement
and the definite divide between culture and nature and humans from
each other.

Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential
features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself
becomes an instrument of production and the planet's species its objects.
Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul
of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and
impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier
oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno
recognized in the "assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the
beginning of history," which Freud felt as "something imposed on a
resisting majority," of which Stanley Diamond found only "conscripts, not
volunteers," was dictated by agriculture. And Mircea Eliade was correct
to assess its coming as having "provoked upheavals and spiritual
breakdowns" whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine.

"To level off, to standardize the human landscape, to efface its
irregularities and banish its surprises," these words of E.M. Cioran apply
perfectly to the logic of agriculture, the end of life as mainly sensuous
activity, the embodiment and generator of separated life. Artificiality and
work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture:
in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated

himself.

Historical time, like agriculture, is not inherent in social reality but an
imposition on it. The dimension of time or history is a function of
repression, whose foundation is production or agriculture. Hunter-
gatherer life was anti-time in its simultaneous and spontaneous openness;
farming life generates a sense of time by its successive- task narrowness,
its directed routine. As the non-closure and variety of Paleolithic living
gave way to the literal enclosure of agriculture, time assumed power and
came to take on the character of an enclosed space. Formalized temporal
reference points — ceremonies with fixed dates, the naming of days, etc. —

/I

A< .!■:]< I i( 1 1 1 i-r i

iiR' crucial d» llit' ordering of Ihe world ol production; ;is ;i schedule of
production, llic calendar is integral to civilization. Conversely, not only
would industrial society be impossible without time schedules, the end of
agriculture (basis of all production) would be the end of historical time.

Representation begins with language, a means of reining in desire. By
displacing autonomous images with verbal symbols, life is reduced and
brought under strict control; all direct, unmediated experience is
subsumed by that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language.
Language cuts up and organizes reality, as Benjamin Whorf put it, and
this segmentation of nature, an aspect of grammar, sets the stage for
agriculture. Julian Jaynes, in fact, concluded that the new linguistic
mentality led very directly to agriculture. Unquestionably, the crystalliza-
tion of language into writing, called forth mainly by the need for record-
keeping of agricultural transactions, is the signal that civilization has
begun.

In the non-commodified, egalitarian hunter-gatherer ethos, the basis of
which (as has so often been remarked) was sharing, number was not
wanted. There was no ground for the urge to quantify, no reason to
divide what was whole. Not until the domestication of animals and plants
did this cultural concept fully emerge. Two of number's seminal figures
testify clearly to its alliance with separateness and property: Pythagoras,
center of a highly influential religious cult of number, and Euclid, father
of mathematics and science, whose geometry originated to measure fields
for reasons of ownership, taxation and slave labor. One of civilization's
early forms, chieftainship, entails a linear rank order in which each
member is assigned an exact numerical place. Soon, following the anti-
natural linearity of plow culture, the inflexible 90-dcgree gridiron plan of
even earliest cities appeared. Their insistent regularity constitutes in itself
a repressive ideology. Culture, now numberized, becomes more firmly
bounded and lifeless.

Art, too, in its relationship to agriculture, highlights both institutions.
It begins as a means to interpret and subdue reality, to rationalize
nature, and conforms to the great turning point which is agriculture in
its basic features. The pre-Neolithic cave paintings, for example, are vivid
and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The
neolithic art of farmers and pastor alists, however, stiffens into stylized
forms; Franz Borkenau typified its pottery as a "narrow, timid botching
of materials and forms." With agriculture, art lost its variety and became
standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull,
repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-
patterned life. And where there had been no representation in Paleolithic

I 1 1 mi m i". < >i Km i !■-. \i

/■,

.„! ,,| men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation
In- 1 wee 11 people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles
becoming common.

Time, language, number, art and all the rest of culture, which predates
ami leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as autonomy
preceded domestication and self- domestication, the rational and the

social precede the symbolic.

Food production, it is eternally and gratefully acknowledged, "permit-
ted the cultural potentiality of the human species to develop." But what
is this tendency toward the symbolic, toward the elaboration and
imposition of arbitrary forms? It is a growing capacity tor objectification,
by which what is living becomes reified, thing-like. Symbols are more
than the basic units of culture; they arc screening devices to distance us
from our experiences. They classify and reduce, "to do away with," in
Leakey and Lcwin's remarkable phrase, "the otherwise almost intolerable
burden of relating one experience to another."

Thus culture is governed by the imperative of reforming and subordi-
nating nature. The artificial environment which is agriculture accom-
plished this pivotal mediation, with the symbolism of objects manipulated
in the construction of relations of dominance. For it is not only external
nature that is subjugated: the face-to-face quality of pre-agricultural life
in itself severely limited domination, while culture extends and legitimizes

It is likely that already during the Paleolithic era certain forms or
names were" attached to objects or ideas, in a symbolizing manner but in
a shifting, impermanent, perhaps playful sense. The will to sameness and
security found in agriculture means that the symbols became as static and
constant as farming life. Regularization, rule patterning, and technologi-
cal differentiation, under the sign of division of labor, interact to ground
and advance symbolization. Agriculture completes the symbolic shift and
the virus of alienation has overcome authentic, free life. It is the victory
of cultural control; as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts it, "The
amount of work per capita increases with the evolution of culture and
the amount of leisure per capita decreases."

Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least "economi-
cally interesting" areas of the world where agriculture has not penetrated,
such as the snows of the Inuit or desert of the Australian aborigines. And
yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in adverse settings, bears its
own rewards. The Hazda of Tanzania, Filipino Tasaday, IKung of
Botswana, or the Kalahari Desert !Kung San- who were seen by Richard
Lee as easily surviving a serious, several years' drought while neighboring

/'' A< . i c 1 1 i ii ii 1 1.: i

fanners starved also testily to I Idle ami I lamuiy's summaiv (IkiI "No
group on earlh has more leisure time Mian hunters and gal Mutts, who
spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing." Service righlly
attributed this condition to "the very simplicity of the technology and
lack of control over the environment" of such groups. And yet simple
Paleolithic methods were, in their own way, "advanced." Consider a basic
cooking technique like steaming foods by heating stones in a covered pil;
this is immemorially older than any pottery, kettles or baskets (in fact, is
anti-container in its non-surplus, non-exchange orientation) and is the
most nutritionally sound way to cook, far healthier than boiling food in
water, for example. Or consider the fashioning of such stone tools as the
long and exceptionally thin "laurel leaf" knives, delicately chipped but
strong, which modern industrial techniques cannot duplicate.

The hunting and gathering lifestyle represents the most successful and
enduring adaptation ever achieved by humankind. In occasional pre-
agriculturc phenomena like the intensive collection of food or the
systematic hunting of a single species can be seen signs of impending
breakdown of a pleasurable mode that remained so static for so long
precisely because it was pleasurable. The "penury and day-long grind" of
agriculture, in Clark's words, is the vehicle of culture, "rational" only in
its perpetual disequilibrium and its logical progression toward ever-
greater destruction, as will be outlined below.

Although the term hunter-gatherer should be reversed (and has been
by not a few current anthropologists) because it is recognized that
gathering constitutes by far the larger survival component, the nature of
hunting provides salient contrast to domestication. The relationship of
the hunter to the hunted animal, which is sovereign, free and even
considered equal, is obviously qualitatively different from that of the
farmer or herdsman to the enslaved chattels over which he rules
absolutely.

Evidence of the urge to impose order or subjugate is found in the
coercive rites and uncleanness taboos of incipient religion. The eventual
subduing of the world that is agriculture has at least some of its basis
where ambiguous behavior is ruled out, purity and defilement defined
and enforced.

Levi-Strauss defined religion as the anthropomorphism of nature;
earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural
values or traits upon it. The sacred means that which is separated, and
ritual and formalization, increasingly removed from the ongoing activities
of daily life and in the control of such specialists as shamans and priests,
are closely linked with hierarchy and institutionalized power. Religion

1.1 I Ml 'Ml'- ( ll '*' ' ' l - ,A1

//

, I,.,,;);,,,;,,- culture, by means of a "higher order

:^:r?£££zu * ** Vr of T intaimns thc

,, ,.,..;',.. bv thc unnatural demands of agriculture.
"tr «of Catal Huyuk in Turkish Anatolia, one of
,vrv tec "ooms was used for ritual purposes. Plowing and sowing can
,. seen as ritual renunciations, according to Barker^ a form °'^emat-
c , enrestion accompanied by a sacrificial element. Speaking ot sacrifice
which is the killing of domesticated animals (or even humans) tor ritual
which is tnc kii k a „ r i C ult U ral societies and found only there.

''Tf; tL mator NeoSc religions often attempted a symbolic
, r f fhf^ricuUnral n,nture with nature through the mythology of
S: ^XwhlcnlX to say does nothing to restore the lost
unitv FerriUty myths are also central; the Egyptian Osiris he Greek
Penephone Baal of thc Canaanites, and the New TestamenUcsns gods
S death and resurrection testify to the perseverance o the sou, not
to mention the human soul. The first temples signified the me of
«>smoCes based on a model of the universe as an arena of domestica-
tion oi halyard, which in turn serves to justify the suppression o .human
autonomy Wicrcas precivilized society was, as Redt.eld put ,t held
toXTby largely undeclared but continually realized ethic^d concep-
tion^ rehgion developed as away of creating citizens, placing the moral
nrdpr under public management.

Domestication involved the initiation of production, vastty increased
dMstons ottabor, and the completed foundations of social stratification.
Th amounted to an epochal mutation both in the character of human
Listen" and its development, clouding the latter with ever more
2 f'ZZ work. Contrary to the myth of hunter-gatherers as violent
violence anu wo j cvidence shows that existing non-

"IT S h as t e tbSU") -died by Tnrnbull apparently
doThat Sling they do without any aggressive spirit even with a sort of
fegnet Warfafe and the formation of every civilization or state, on the

0t p Cr ^t^XS^t^ - *>** ^^ eronp* might
JS^SSf*! hunting. At least "territorial" struts
2e not part of the ethnographic literature and they would seem even less
lieW to have occurred in pre-history when resources were greater and

°Z^!^^^^ of private property and
R lean's fignrative'udgment, that divided -iety wa, tou^M ^ he
man who first sowed a piece of ground, saying This land is mine, and
"others to believe" him, is essentially valid. "Mine and thine, the

vx

At IKK

'UKI'

seeds of all mischief, have no place with them," reads Pic tin's I Ml
account of the natives encountered on Columbus' second voyage.
Centuries later, surviving Native Americans asked, "Sell the Earth? Why
not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?" Agriculture creates and
elevates possessions; consider the longing root of belongings, as if they
ever make up for the loss.

Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until
agriculture. The human capacity of being shackled to crops and herds
devolved rather quickly. Food production overcame the common absence
or paucity of ritual and hierarchy in society and introduced civilized
activities like the forced labor of temple-building. Here is the real
"Cartesian split" between inner and outer reality, the separation whereby
nature became merely something to be "worked." On this capacity for a
sedentary and servile existence rests the entire superstructure of
civilization with its increasing weight of repression.

Male violence toward women originated with agriculture, which
transmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children.
Before farming, the egalitarianism of foraging life "applied as fully to
women as to men," judged Eleanor Leacock, owing to the autonomy of
tasks and the fact that decisions were made by those who carried them
out. In the absence of production and with no drudge work suitable for
child labor such as weeding, women were not consigned to onerous
chores or the constant supply of babies.

Along with the curse of perpetual work, via agriculture, in the
expulsion from Eden, God told woman, "I will greatly multiply thy
sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and
that desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
Similarly, the first known codified laws, those of the Sumerian king Ur-
Namu, prescribed death to any woman satisfying desires outside of
marriage. Thus Whytc referred to the ground women "lost relative to
men when humans first abandoned a simple hunting and gathering way
of life," and Simone de Bcauvoir saw in the cultural equation of plow
and phallus a fitting symbol of the oppression of women.

As wild animals are converted into sluggish meat-making machines, the
concept of becoming "cultivated" is a virtue enforced on people, meaning
the weeding out of freedom from one's nature, in the service of
domestication and exploitation. As Rice points out, in Sumer, the first
civilization, the earliest cities had factories with their characteristic high
organization and refraction of skills. Civilization from this point exacts
human labor and the mass production of food, buildings, war and
authority.

lnMlNIS<»!'KH"VM

/'»

. Hid notliinn else. Their name tor
To the (i,vcks, work was a curst* m Uu t£ .^ ^^

il ponos has the same root as the Utm ^' n f[Qm Paradisc
Old Testament curse on "gricuUua «; P ^ [u

(Genesis 3:17-18) reminds us ot the onynot wo ^ ^ hic]

"Conformity, repetition, patience , £« J md [vRy of

culturc.the patient capacity for work . In tom J ^ , g

tending and waiting is born, f cor ^ e ° of ^ titud e and heaviness, and
"deep, latent resentments, crude m^f s ^ sensitivity and lack of
absence of humor." One might also * dd .^™ / nd suspic ion

imagination inseparable from religious faith, ^™"y & '
amo 8 ng traits widely attributed to <*^^m1S» far

Although food production bj Mts <^™ culture was from the
political domination and although crvuiz vcr inyolvcd a

beginning its own propaganda "^ m J* U vmthan! Against His-

monumental struggle. Fredy ^*^^ bce 's attention to the
Story! is unrivaled on this, vas ly enrichm yn ^ ^^

"internal" and "external proletariat , ~ digging stick farming to
civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis tram u hb b
plow agriculture to fully differentiated ™^^££
genocide of gatherers and hunters was , necess y ^ domcsticating

The formation and storage ot sur^se a p ^ sym bolize.

will to control and make static, an aspect o

A bulwark against the flow of n^^X rf equiva -
animals and granaries. Stored gran ^ app earance of wealth in

lence, the oldest form of ^tak On y wit vi ^^

the shape of storable grains do the g ^~ n f bcforc all this (and wild
proceed. While there were certainly wna^rduis Der cent for

wheat, by the way, is 24 percent g£££^d£££S*i~
domesticated wheat), the bias ^^°^ t ag * sym bolization.
tion and its cities rested as ™^ ° n g " v tl more impenetrable in
The mystery of agriculture . o^^l, thc P pre vious era
light of the recent reversal ot long-s andin ,no ^ ^ ^

was one of hostility to nature and an ^absence ^^ p ^ and

longer _ assume," wrote Arme, tha ^ ^ ^^

ammals to escape drudgery and sUrvat ^ .^^ „ For

appeared true and the advent o^mmg a( , tcd much

a long tune, the question was ^^ we know that agriculture, in
earlier in human evolution '^ercccnUy.w ^ ^ ^

Cohen's words, «,s not easier than hunt n fe an^ ^ ^ ^ „

provide a higher quality, more paUtabk or ^ ^

Thus the consensus question now is, vvny wa

so

A< ;ki< i nil jki

Many thcor.es have been advanced, none convincingly. (hildc and
others argue that population increase pushed human societies into more
inornate contact w.th other species, leading to domestication and the
need to produce in order to feed the additional people. But it has been
shown rather conclusively that population increase did not precede
agnculture but was caused by it. "I don't see any evidence anywhere in
the world," cone uded Flannery, "that suggests that population^ "
was responsible tor the beginning of agriculture." Another theory ha." rt
hat major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, about
Sv y ^ ag °' L UPSSt the °' d hun ter-gatherer life-world and led

method, h, \ Cl ! T, " °f. f^ SU ™ vin « sta P' es - Rece « da«ng
methods have helped demohsh this approach; no such climatic shift

happened that could have forced the new mode into existence. Besrtes
ZfZr- SC ° reS ° f eXampleS 0f a g ricu »^e being adopted^

ll£t~ m SVCry T ° f Climate ' Another ma J° r hypothesis is that
agnculture was introduced via a chance discovery or invention as if it had

food" ^""f t0 th£ SPCdC ; bef ° re a C6rtain m0ment th «> t™ cxlple,
food grows from sprouted seeds, ft seems certain that Paleolithic

manvTn w^ tl "^ T xhaustiblc knowledge of flora and fauna for

wh7h t, 1 I"" 8 ° f yCarS bef ° re the Cultivation of P' a « S began,
which renders this theory especially weak

Agreement with Carl Sauer's summation that, "Agriculture did not

originate from a growing or chronic shortage of food" is sufficient, in

tact, to dismiss virtually all originary theories that have been advanced

A remaining idea, presented by Hahn, Isaac and others, holds that food

srx se as a religious activity - ™ s hypothesis —

Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known to
have been widely used in religious ceremonies, and to have been raLd
in enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes. Before they were domesti-
cated, moreover sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes The
mam use of the hen in southeastern Asia and "the eastern
Mediterranean-the earliest centers of civilization-"seems to have
been according to Darby "sacrificial or divinatory rather than alimenta-
ry. Sauer adds that the "egg laying and meat producing qualities" of

WUd catTe arC f rdative V? te cons «es of their dtmesti atLn "
Wild cattle were fierce and dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor
the modified meat texture of such castrates could have been foreseen
Cattle were not milked until centuries after their initial captMty and
representations mdicatc that their first known harnessing was to wagons
m religious processions. b wagons

'I I 'Ml 'NTS » >!■ Rl 'II ISA I

SI

Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit, similar backgrounds so far as is
known. Consider the New World examples of squash and pumpkin, used
originally as ceremonial rattles. Johannessen discussed the religious and
mystical motives connected with the domestication of maize, Mexico's
most important crop and center of its native Neolithic religion. Likewise,
Anderson investigated the selection and development of distinctive types
of various cultivated plants because of their magical significance. The
shamans, I should add, were well-placed in positions of power to
introduce agriculture via the taming and planting involved in ritual and
religion, sketchily referred to above.

Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture has been
somewhat overlooked, it brings us, in my opinion, to the very doorstep
of the real explanation of the birth of production: that non-rational,
cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of time, language,
number and art, to ultimately colonize material and psychic life in
agriculture. "Religion" is too narrow a conceptualization of this infection
and its growth. Domination is too weighty, too all-encompassing to have
been solely conveyed by the pathology that is religion.

But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of
religion are certainly part of agriculture, and from the beginning. Noting
that strains of corn cross-pollinate very easily, Anderson studied the very
primitive agriculturalists of Assam, the Naga tribe, and their variety of
corn that exhibited no differences from plant to plant. True to culture,
showing that it is complete from the beginning of production, the Naga
kept their varieties so pure "only by a fanatical adherence to an ideal
type." This exemplifies the marriage of culture and production in
domestication, and its inevitable progeny, repression and work.

The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in the
domesticating of animals, which also defies natural selection and re-
establishes the controllable organic world at a debased, artificial level.
Like plants, animals are mere things to be manipulated; a dairy cow, for
instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass to milk.
Transmuted from a state of freedom to that of helpless parasites, these
animals become completely dependent on man for survival. In domestic
mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively smaller as
specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and less to
activity. Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most
domesticated of herd animals; the remarkable intelligence of wild sheep
is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social relationships
among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest essentials. Non-
reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is curtailed,

A<;ki< i it ii jki .

ami (he annual's very capacity to recognize its own species is impaired

'/"'"""f s,,so crt ' alctl thc Potential for rapid environmental destruction

I;" ,,U ' dm ; iina ^» over nature soon began to turn the green mantle

lh:il covered the birthplaces of civilization into barren and lifeless areas

Vast regions have changed their aspect completely," estimates Zeuner'

always to quasi-dner condition, since the beginnings of the Neolithic »

Vscrts now occupy most of the areas where the high civilizations once

lour. shed, and there is much historical evidence that these early

formations inevitably ruined their environments.

Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and in the adjoining Near East
;«nd Asia, agriculture turned lush and hospitable lands into depleted, dry
and rocky terrain. In Critias, Plato described Attica as "a skeleton wasted
>y disease, referring to thc deforestation of Greece and contrasting it
to its earlier richness. Grazing by goats and sheep, the first domesticated
aunmants, was a major factor in the denuding of Greece, Lebanon, and
North Africa, and the desertification of the Roman and Mesopotamian

v. II I I'll C/^,

Another, more immediate impact of agriculture, brought to light
increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well-being of its
subjects. Lee and Devorc's researches show that "the diet of gathering
peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that
ineir health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower
incidence of chronic disease." Conversely, Farb summarized, "Production
provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much
less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much
more costly in terms of human labor expended "

The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic
conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the "sharp decline in growth and
nutrition caused by the changeover from food gathering to food
production. Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised
Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the sixteenth century tell of
Honda Indian fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away
it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30s and 40s
Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity
with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring
injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries
During tne industrial age only fairly recently did life span lengthen for
the species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times
humans were long-lived animals, once certain risks were passed DeVries

l LZT Xi £ hi V ud ? ment that duration of life dropped sharply upon
contact with civilization. F y F

■MI'N IS ( )!■

■I ISA I

S^

" I ill ic i miosis and diarrhea! disease had to await the rise of farming,
measles anil bubonic plague the appearance of large cities," wrote Jared
Diamond. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, and
in aily all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture.
Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of
domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental
i aries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture;
previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain.

People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported
K.I I. Post, have heard a single-engine plane while it was still 70 miles
away, and many of them can see four moons of Jupiter with the naked
eve. The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to "an overall decline
in the quality—and probably in the length— of human life among farmers
as compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups," is understated.

One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once
a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance,
referred to the "life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits
unbribed by toil." Eden was clearly the home of the hunter-gatherers and
the yearning expressed by thc historical images of paradise must have
been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and
relative ease.

The history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature
from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food
choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric peoples found sustenance in
over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas "All civilizations," Wenke
reminds us," have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just
six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes."

It is a striking truth that over the centuries "the number of different
edible foods which are actually eaten," Pyke points out, "has steadily
dwindled." The world's population now depends for most of its subsis-
tence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are
replaced by artificial hybrids and thc genetic pool of these plants be-
comes far less varied.

The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as thc propor-
tion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of
diet are distributed worldwide, so that an Inuit Eskimo and an African
may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen
fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big multinationals such
as Unilever, the world's biggest food production company, preside over
a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish
or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricat-

84

AliKK'lU.TUkl

cd, processed products upon the world.

When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation
of matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from
nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial
Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingered in the
person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France's Museum of Natural History,
who pronounced that our species, "because of intellect," can no longer
re-cross a certain threshold of civilization and once again become part of
a natural habitat. He further stated, expressing perfectly the original and
persevering imperialism of agriculture, "As the earth in its primitive state
is not adapted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human
destiny."

The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating
again that at base all mass production is farming. The natural world is to
be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid- American prairies
where settlers had to yoke six oxen to plows in order to cut through the
soil for the first time. Or a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by
Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like "a great column of
field artillery" across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once.

Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis
of a few petrochemical corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides,
herbicides and near-monopoly of the world's seed stock define a total
environment that integrates food production from planting to consump-
tion. Although Levi-Strauss is right that "Civilization manufactures
monoculture like sugar beets," only since World War II has a completely
synthetic orientation begun to dominate.

Agriculture takes more organic matter out of the soil than it puts back,
and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals. Regarding the
latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along with
cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state is
totally dependent on agriculture for its existence, is especially bad.
J.Russell Smith called it "the killer of continents.. .and one of the worst
enemies of the human future." The erosion cost of one bushel of Iowa
corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general large-scale
industrial destruction of farmland. The continuous tillage of huge
monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no application of
manure or humus, obviously raises soil deterioration and soil loss to
much higher levels.

The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil needs massive infusions
of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose overriding goal is to
maximize production. Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this

[1 I-MI-N1S <>i Kiii ISM

Muilnok cliniiiiuk- the need tot the complex life of the soil and indeed
mnvrrl it into a mere instrument of production. The promise of
irrlinulogy is total control, a completely contrived environment that
•.imply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere.

Hut" more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural
vickls that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination
„f the soil, ground water and food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
-;ays that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two
billion tons of soil a year. The National Academy of Sciences estimates
I hat over one third of topsoil is already gone forever. The ecological
imbalance caused by monocropping and synthetic fertilizers causes
enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop
loss due to insects has actually doubled. Technology responds, of course,
with spiraling applications of more synthetic fertilizers, and "weed" and
- l pcst" killers, accelerating the crime against nature.

Another post-war phenomenon was the Green Revolution, billed as the
salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and
technology. But rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution
drove millions of poor people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and
Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms. It
amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependen-
cy on capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian communal-
ism, requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting nature on
an unprecedented scale.

Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been steadily
increasing. Each year, a total area equivalent to more than two Belgiums
is being converted to desert worldwide. The fate of the world's tropical
rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this desiccation: half of them
have been erased in the past thirty years. In Botswana, the last wilder-
ness region of Africa has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle
and almost half of the rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise
cattle for the hamburger markets in the U.S. and Europe. The few areas
safe from deforestation are where agriculture doesn't want to go. The
destruction of the land is proceeding in the U.S. over a greater land area
than was encompassed by the original thirteen colonies, just as it was at
the heart of the severe African famine of the mid-1980s, and the
extinction of one species of wild animal and plant after another.

Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genesis in
which God said to Noah, "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall
be upon every fowl of the air, upon all that movcth upon the earth, and
upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered." When

S(>

A(;ri< i ii. n :ki

newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guard ol
production, as a wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals and
birds showed no fear whatsoever of the explorers. The agriculturali/.cd
mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical passage, projects an
exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild creatures, which follows from
progressive estrangement and loss of contact with the animal world, plus
the need to maintain dominance over it.

The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that agricultural
technologists continually look to factories as models of how to refine
their own production systems. Nature is banished from these systems as
increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout their
deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial environments
Billions of chickens, pigs, and veal calves, for example, no longer even
see the light of day much less roam the fields, fields growing more silent
as more and more pastures are plowed up to grow feed for these
hideously confined beings.

The high-tech chickens, whose beak ends have been clipped off to
reduce death from stress-induced fighting, often exist four or even five
to a 12" by 18" cage and are periodically deprived of food and water for
up to ten days to regulate their egg-laying cycles. Pigs live on concrete
floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism are endemic
because of physical conditions and stress. Sows nurse their piglets
separated by metal grates, mother and offspring barred from natural
contact. Veal calves are often raised in darkness, chained to stalls so
narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal posture adjust-
ment These animals are generally under regimens of constant medica-
tion due to the tortures involved and their heightened susceptibility to
diseases; automated animal production relies upon hormones and
antibiotics. Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the kind of food that
results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself and every form of
enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or model.

Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural
environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependent on a techno-
logical production system in which finally even our senses have become
redundant; taste, once vital for judging a food's value or safety, is no
longer experienced, but rather certified by a label. Overall, the healthful-
ness of what we consume declines and land once cultivated for food now
produces coffee, tobacco, grains for alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs
creating the context for famine. Even the non-processed foods like fruits
and vegetables are now grown to be tasteless and uniform because the
demands of handling, transport and storage, not nutrition or pleasure

I 'I 1 MINI'-. < )l Kill 'V\l

.in- llir highest considerations.

Inlal war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions of acres in
'...uilK-iisi Asia during the Vietnam War, but the plundering of the
l ... .sphere proceeds even more lcthally in its daily, global forms. Food as
., lunclion of production has also failed miserably on the most obvious
1,-vrl: half of the world, as everyone knows, suffers from malnourishment
nuking to starvation itself.

Meanwhile, the "diseases of civilization," as discussed by Eaton and
kniiner in the January 31, 1985 New England Journal of Medicine and
contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless,
■iickly world of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the
manufacturers of medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food. Domestica-
lion reaches new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering,
with new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived microorgan-
isms and plants. Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate
of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it
degrades and deforms every other natural system.

The project of subduing nature, begun and carried through by
agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions. The "success" of
civilization's progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes
more and more like ashes. James Serpen summed it up this way: "In
short we appear to have reached the end of the line. We cannot expand;
wc seem unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc,
and the planet is fast becoming a wasteland."

Physiologist Jared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture "a
catastrophe from which we have never recovered." Agriculture has been
and remains a "catastrophe" at all levels, the one which underpins the
entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us.
Liberation is impossible without its dissolution.

PART TWO

INDUSTRIALISM
AND DOMESTICATION

The modern definitions of division of labor, progress, ideology, and the
workers' movement were inscribed by the coming of industrial capitalism
and the factory system. The dynamics of what Hobsbawm termed "the
most fundamental transformation of human life" in written history —
specifically the reasons why it happened — explain the legacy and value
of these institutions. Not surprisingly, much at the core of Marx's thought
can also be evaluated against the reality of the Industrial Revolution.

Eighteenth-century England, where it all began, had long since seen
the demise of feudalism. Capitalist social relations, however, had been
unable to establish a definitive hegemony. Gwyn Williams (Artisans and
Sans- Culottes) found it hard to find a single year free from popular
uprisings; "England was preeminently the country of the eighteenth-
century mob," he wrote. Peter Laslett (The World We Have Lost)
surveyed the scene at the beginning of the century, noting the general
consciousness that working people were openly regarded as a proletariat,
and the fact, as "everyone was quite well aware," that violence posed a
constant threat to the social order.

Laslett further noted that enclosure, or the fencing off of lands
previously pastured, ploughed, and harvested cooperatively, commenced
at this time and "destroyed communality altogether in English rural life."
Neither was there, by 1750, a significant land-owning peasantry; the great
majority on the land were either tenant-farmers or agricultural wage
laborers. T. S. Ashton, who wrote a classic economic history of 18th
century England, identified a crucial key to this development by his
observation that "Enclosure was desirable if only because rights of
common led to irregularity of work," as was widely believed. Britain in
1750, in any case, engendered a number of foreign visitors' accounts that
its common people were much "given to riot," according to historian E.
J. Hobsbawm.

The organization of manufacture prevailing then was the domestic, or
"putting out" system, in which workers crafted goods in their own homes,
and the capitalists were mainly merchants who supplied the raw materials

92

Industrialism and Domj-sti cation

and then marketed the finished products. At first these era its men
generally owned their own tools, but later came to rent them. In eitliei
case, the relationship to the "means of production" afforded great
strategic strength. Unsupervised, working for several masters, and with
their time their own, a degree of independence was maintained.
"Luddism," as E.P. Thompson (Making of the English Working Class)
reminds us, "was the work of skilled men in small workshops." The
Luddites (c. 1810-1820), though they belong toward the end of the period
surveyed here, were perhaps the machine-breakers par excellence — textile
knitters, weavers, and spinners who exemplify both the relative autonomy
and anti-employer sentiment of the free craftsman and craftswoman.

Scores of commentators have discussed the independence of such
domestic workers as the handloom weavers; Mugger idge's report on
Lancashire craftsmen (from Exell, Brief History of the Weavers of the
Country of Gloucester), for example, notes that this kind of work
"gratifies that innate love of independence... by leaving the workman
entirely a master of his own time, and the sole guide of his actions."
These workers treasured their versatility, and their right to execute
individual designs of their own choosing rather than the standardization
of the new factor)' employment (which began to emerge in earnest about
1 770). Witt Bowden (Industrial Society in England Towards the End of the
Eighteenth Century) noted that earlier processes of production had indeed
often "afforded the workers genuine opportunities for the expression of
their personalities in their work," and that in these pre-specialization
times craftsmen could pursue "artistic conceptions" in many cases.

A non-working class observer (Malachy Postlewayt, c. 1750), in fact,
expressed the view that the high quality of English manufactures was to
be attributed to the frequent "relaxation of the people in their own way."
Others discerned in the workers' control over time a distinct threat to
authority as well as to profits; Ashton wrote how "very serious was the
almost universal practice of working a short week," adding a minister's
alarm that "It is not those who are absolutely idle that injure the public
so much as those who work but half their time." If anything, Ashton
understated the case when he concluded that "...leisure, at times of their
own choice, stood high on the workers' scale of preferences." William
Temple's admonition (1739) that the only way to insure temperance and
industry on the part of laborers was to make it necessary that they work
all the time physically possible "in order to procure the common
necessaries of life," was a frequent expression of ruling-class frustration.
Temple's experience with the turbulent weavers of Gloucestershire had
thus led him to agree with Arthur Young's "everyone but an idiot knows

i imin r. ' n Kiii i:..\ i

«; \

th.ii ihr lower classes inusl be kept poor or they will never be induslri-

* ni-i" dictum.

Among the era Its men of cloth, the insistence on their own methods—
including, at times, the ingenious sabotage of finished goods was matched
l»v another weapon, that of embezzlement of the raw materials assigned
m i hem. As Ashton reports, "A survey of the measures passed to
Mippress embezzlement and delay in returning materials shows a
impressive increase in penalties." But throughout the 18th century,
according to Wadsworth and Mann (The Cotton Trade and Industrial
Lancashire, 1600-1780), "the execution of the anti-embezzlement
.icls...laggcd behind their letter." Their effectiveness was limited by the
' resentment of the spinners and workpeople," which prosecutors incurred
.uul by the difficulty of detection without regular inspection. James'
History of the Worsted Manufacture echoes this finding: "Justices of the
l'eace...until compelled by mandamus, refused to entertain charges
against or convict upon proper evidence, embezzlers or false reelers."

Wadsworth and Mann perceived in the embezzlement issue the

relationship between the prevailing "work ethic" and the prevailing mode

i) I' production:

The fact is simply that a great many... have never seen eye to eye with

their employers on the rights and sanctity of ownership. The home

worker of the eighteenth century, living away from the restraints of the

factory and workshop and the employer's eye, had every inducement

(to try) to defeat the hard bargain the employer had driven.

The independent craftsman was a threatening adversary to the

employing class, and he clung strongly to his prerogatives: his well known

propensity, for instance, to reject "the higher material standard of the

factory towns," in Thompson's phrase, to gather his own fruits, vegetables

and flowers, to largely escape the developing industrial blight and

pollution, to gather freely with his neighboring workers at the dinner

hour. Thompson noted a good example of the nature of the domestic

worker in "the Yorkshire reputation for bluntness and independence"

which could be traced to what local historian Frank Peel saw as "men

who doffed their caps to no one, and recognized no right in either squire

or parson to question or meddle with them."

Turning to some of the specifics of pre-factory system revolt in
England, Ashton provides a good introduction:
Following the harvest failure of 1709 the keelmen of the Tyne took to
rioting. When the price of food rose sharply in 1727 the tin-miners of
Cornwall plundered granaries at Falmouth, and the coal-miners of
Somerset broke down the turnpikes on the road to Bristol. Ten years

l '-l

!N1)I

IS IK] A I. ISM AND I )( )MI .NIK A I ION

later the Cornish tinners assembled again at Falmouth to prevent the
exportation of corn, and in the following season there was rioting ;il
Tiverton. The famine of 1739-40 led to a "rebellion" in
Northumberland and Durham in which women seem to have taken ;i
leading part: ships were boarded, warehouses broken open, and the
guild at Newcastle was reduced to ruins. At the same time attacks on
corn dealers were reported from North and South Wales. The years
1748 and 1753 saw similar happenings in several parts of the country;
and in 1756 there was hardly a county from which no report reached
the Home Office of the pulling down of corn mills or Quaker meeting-
houses, or the rough handling of bakers and grain dealers. In spite of
drastic penalties the same thing occurred in each of the later dearths
of the century: in 1762, 1765-7, 1774, 1783, 1789, 1795, and 1800.
This readiness for direct action informs the strife in textiles the
industry so important to England and to capitalist evolution, where, for
example, "discontent was the prevalent attitude of the operatives engaged
in the wool industries for centuries," said Burnley in his History* of Wool
and Woolcombing. Popular ballads give ample evidence to this, as does
the case of rioting London weavers, who panicked the government in
1675. Lipson's History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries provides
many instances of the robustness of domestic textile workers' struggles
including that of a 1.728 weavers' strike which was intended to have been
pacified by a meeting of strike leaders and employers; a "mob" of
weavers "burst into the room in which the negotiations were taking place
dragged back the clothiers as they endeavored to escape from the
windows, and forced them to concede all their demands." Or these
additional accounts by Lipson:
The Wiltshire weavers were equally noted for their turbulent character
and the rude violence with which they proclaimed the wrongs under
which they smarted. In 1738 they assembled together in a riotous
manner from the villages round Bradford and Trowbridge, and made
an attack upon the house of a clothier who had reduced the price of
weaving. They smashed open the doors, consumed or spoiled the
provisions in the cellar, drank all the wine they could, set the casks
running, and ended up by destroying great quantities of raw materials
and utensils. In addition to this exploit they extorted a promise from
all the clothiers in Melksham that they would pay fifteen pence a yard
tor weaving.... Another great tumult occurred at Bradford (Wiltshire)
in 1752. Thirty weavers had been committed to prison; the next day
above a thousand weavers assembled, armed with bludgeons and
firearms, beat the guard, broke open the prison, and rescued their

■I rivii'N is i n Kim isai

'>'>

Similarlv -I P. Kay was driven from Leeds in 1745 and from Bury in
I M. as outbreaks of violence flared in many districts in response to his
invention, the flying shuttle for mechanizing weaving.

Wadsworth and Mann found the Manchester Constables Accounts to
have reported "great Riots, Tumults, and Disorders" in the late 1740s,
ami that "After 1750 food riots and industrial disputes grow more
I .cement," with outbreaks in Lancashire (the area of their study) virtually
every year. These historians further recount "unrest and violence in all
pil rts of the country" in the middle to late 1750s, with Manches er and
I Liverpool frequently in alarm and "panic among the propertiedcltoses

After sporadic risings, such as Manchester, 1762, the years 1764-68 saw
rioting in almost every county in the country; as the King put it in woo
"a spirit of the most daring insurrection has in divers parts broke tortn
in violence of the most criminal nature." Although the smashing ot
stocking frames had been made a capital offense in 1727, in a vain
attempt to stem worker violence, Hobsbawm counted 24 incidents ot
wages and prices being forcibly set by exactly this type ot riotous
destruction in 1766 alone. . . . ;„„„„

Sporadic rioting occurred in 1769, such as the anti-spinning jenny
outbursts which menaced the inventor Hargreaves and during wfticn
buildings were demolished at Oswaldthistle and Blackburn in order to
smash the hated mechanization. A whole new wave began in \.tu.
Sailors in Liverpool, for example, responded to a wage grease proposal
in 1775 by "sacking the owners' houses, hoisting 'the bloody flag, ana
bringing cannon ashore which they fired on the Exchange," according to

Wadsworth and Mann. ,*„,„+;„„

The very widespread anti-machinery risings of 1779 saw the destruction
of hundreds of weaving and spinning devices which were too large tor
domestic use. The rioters' sentiments were very widely shared, as
evidenced by arrest records that included miners, nailrnakers, laborers,
ioiners-a fair sample of the entire industrial population. Th e worKers
complaint averred that the smaller machines are "in the Hands ot the
Poor and the larger 'Patent Machines' in the Hands of the Rich, ana
"that the work is better manufactured by small [textile machines] than Dy

^TtaUst very incomplete as it is, could be easily extended into the
many early 19th century outbreaks, all of which seem to have enjoyea
great popular support. But perhaps a fitting entry on which to close tms
sample would be these lines from a public letter written fcy
Gloucestershire shearmen in 1802: "We hear in Formed that you got

!

1

<>(,

Indus trim ism and Domisihai ion

Shear in mce sheens and it" you Don't Pull them Down in ;i lorght
Nights Time we will pull them Down for you Wee will you Da mil
infernold Dog."

This brief look at the willfulness of the 18th century proletariat serves
to introduce the conscious motivation behind the factory system. Sidney
Pollard (The Genesis of Modem Management) recognized the capitalists'
need of "breaking the social bonds which had held the peasants, the
craftsmen and the town poor of the eighteenth century together in
opposition to the new order." Pollard saw too the essential nature of the
domestic system, that the masters "had to depend on the work performed
in innumerable tiny domestic workshop units, unsupervised and
unsupervisable." Such "incompatibility," he concluded, "was bound to set
up tensions and to drive the merchants to seek new ways of production,
imposing their own managerial achievements and practices in the
productive sector."

This underlying sense of the real inadequacy of existing powers of
control was also firmly grasped by David Landes (The Unbound
Prometheus): "One can understand why the thoughts of employers turned
to workshops where the men would be brought together to labour under
watchful overseers, and to machines that would solve the shortage of
manpower while curbing the insolence and dishonesty of men." Accord-
ing to Wadsworth and Mann, in fact, many employers definitely felt that
"the country would perish if the poor — that is, the working classes — were
not brought under severe discipline to habits of industry and docile
subordination."

Writing on the evolution of the "central workshop" or factory, historian
N. S. B. Gras saw its installation strictly in terms of control of labor: "It
was purely for purposes of discipline, so that the workers could be
effectively controlled under the supervision of foremen." Factory work
itself became the central weapon to force an enemy character into a safe,
reliable mold following the full realization that they were dealing with a
recalcitrant, hostile working class whose entire morale, habits of work,
and culture had to be broken. Bowden described this with great clarity:
"More directly as a result of the introduction of machinery and of large-
scale organization was the subjection of the workers to a deadening
mechanical and administrative routine."

Adam Smith, in his classic Wealth of Nations, well understood that the
success of industrial capitalism lies with nothing so much as with the
division of labor, that is, with ever-increasing specialization and the
destruction of versatility in work. He also knew that the division of labor
is as much about the production and allocation of commodities. And

ll l-.MI-N'IS C)l- Kl I USAI

«)/

n-ilniiily Hit- new order is also related to consumption as to the need to
guarantee control of production; in fact, there are those who see its
. ii igin almost strictly in terms of market demand for mass production, but
who do not see the conscious element here either.

In passing, Bishop Berkeley's query of 1755, "whether the creation ot
wants be not the likeliest way to produce industry in a people? is
eminently relevant. As Hobsbawm pointed out, the populace was
definitely not originally attracted to standardized products; industnaliza-
lion gradually enabled production "to expand its own markets, if not
actually to create them." The lure of cheap, identical goods succeeded
essentially due to the enforced absence of earlier pleasures. When
independence and variety of pursuits were more possible, a different kind
of leisure and consumption was the norm. This, of course, was in itselt
a target of the factory system, "the tendency, so deplored by economists,
to work less when food was cheap," as Christopher Hill put it.

Exports, too, were an obvious support of the emerging regime, backed
by the systematic and aggressive help of government, another artificial
demand mechanism. But the domestic market was at least as important,
stemming from the "predisposing condition" that specialization and
discipline of labor makes for further "progress," as Max Weber observed.
Richard Arkwright (1732-1793) agreed completely with those who saw
the need for consciously spurring consumption, "as to the necessity of
arousing and satisfying new wants," in his phrase. But it is as the
developer of cotton spinning machinery that he deserves a special word
here; because he is generally regarded as the most prominent figure in
the history of the textile industries and even as "the founder of the
factory system." Arkwright is a clear illustration of the political and social
character of the technology he did so much to advance. His concern with
social control is very evident from his writings and correspondence, and
Mantoux (The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century) discerned
that "his most original achievement was the discipline he established in

the mills." . .

Arkwright also saw the vital connection between work discipline and
social stability: "Being obliged to be more regular in their attendance on
their work, they became more orderly in their conduct." For his
pioneering efforts, he received his share of appropriate response; Lipson
relates that in 1767, with "the news of the riots in the neighborhood of
Blackburn which had been provoked by Hargreaves' spinning jenny, he
and his financial backer Smolley, "fearing to draw upon themselves the
attention of the machine-wreckers, removed to Nottingham." Similarly,
Arkwright's Birkacre mill was destroyed by workers in 1 779. Lipson ably

I

<)}\

INI II IM KIAI ISM A NO I >< >MI M l«

A I l< »N

Miunii.il i/cs his managerial colli I iluilion:
In coordinating all I hi* various pails of his vast industrial struct urcs; in
nij'.jiuisin^ and disciplining large bodies (if men, so lhat each man filled
into his niche and the whole acted with the mechanical precision of a
trained army.. .in combining division of labour with effective supervision
IVo m a common centre... a new epoch was inaugurated.
Andrew L J re's Philosophy of Manufactures is one of the major attempts
a I an exposition of the factory system, a work cited often by Marx in
( tipiutl. Us revealing preface speaks of tracing "the progression of the
Ifiilish system of industry, according to which every process peculiarly
nice, and therefore liable to injury from the ignorance and waywardness
of workmen, is withdrawn from handicraft control, and placed under the
/■uidancc of self-acting machinery." Examining the nature of the new
system, we find, instead of domestic craft labor, "industrial labor... [which J
imposes a regularity, routine, and mono tony... which conflicts... with all the
inclinations of a humanity as yet unconditioned into it," in the words of
I lobsbawm. Factory production slowly supplanted that of the domestic
system in the face of fierce opposition, and workers experienced the
feeling of daily entering a prison to meet the new "strain and violence of
work," as the Hammonds put it. Factories often resembled pauper work-
houses or prisons, after which they had actually often been modeled;
Weber saw a strong initial similarity between the modern factory and the
Russian serf-labor workshops, wherein the means of production and the
workers themselves were appropriated by the masters.

Hammonds' Town Labourer saw "the depreciation of human life" as
l he leading fact about the new system for the working classes: "The
human material was used up rapidly; workmen were called old at forty."
Possibly just as important was the novel, "inhuman" nature of its
domination, as if all "were in the grasp of a great machine that threat-
ened to destroy all sense of the dignity of human life." A famous
characterization by J. P. Kay (1832) put the everyday subjugation in hard
lo forget terms:
Whilst the engine runs the people must work — men, women and
children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal
machine — breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of
suffering — is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no
suffering and no weariness.

Resistance to industrial labor displayed a great strength and persis-
tence, reflecting the latent anti-capitalism of the domestic worker "the
despair of the masters" — in a time when a palpable aura of unfreedom
clung to wage-labor. Lipson gives us the example of Ambrose Crowley,

I'l 1 MINIS ( H Kill INAI

')')

perhaps I he very first, factory owner and organizer (from 1691) who
displayed an obsession with the problem of disciplining his workers to
"an institution so alien in its assumptions about the way in which people
should spend their lives."

I .ewis Paul wrote from his London firm in 1742 that "I have not half
my people come to work today and I have no fascination in the prospect
lhat T have put myself in the power of such people." In 1757 Josiah
Tucker noted that factory-type machinery is highly provocative to the
populace who "never fail to break out into Riots and Insurrections
whenever such things are proposed." As we have seen, and as Christo-
pher Hill put it, "Machine-breaking was the logical reaction of free
men... who saw the concentration of machinery in factories as the
instrument of their enslavement."

A hosiery capitalist, in admitting defeat to the Committee on Woollen
Manufacture, tells us much of the independent spirit that had to be

broken:
I found the utmost distaste on the part of the men, to any regular
hours or regular habits.... The men themselves were considerably
dissatisfied, because they could not go in and out as they pleased, and
go on just as they had been used to do... to such an extent as complete-
ly to disgust them with the whole system, and I was obliged to break

it up.

The famous early entrepreneurs, Boulton and Watt, were likewise
dismayed to find that the miners they had to deal with were "strong,
healthy and resolute men, setting the law at defiance; no officer dared
to execute a warrant against them."

Wedgwood, the well-known pottery and china entrepreneur, had to
fight "the open hostility of his workpeople" when he tried to develop
division of labor in his workshops, according to Mantoux. And Jewitt's
The Wedgwoods, exposing the social intent of industrial technology, tells
us "It was machinery [which] ultimately forced the worker to accept the
discipline of the factory."

Considering the depth of workers' antipathy to the new regimen, it
comes as no surprise that Pollard should speak of "the large evidence
which all points to the fact that continuous employment was precisely
one of the most hated aspects of factory work." This was the case
because the work itself, as an agent of pacification, was perceived
"precisely" in its true nature. Pollard later provides the other side of the
coin to the workers' hatred of the job; namely, the rulers' insistence on
it for its own (disciplinary) sake: "Nothing strikes so modern a note in
the social provisions of the factory villages as the attempts to provide

A

1(1(1

Inihmkiai ism and Domi-mk a

K )N

continuous employment."

Reluming to the specifics of resistance, Sir Frederic I xlcn in his SW,
<>l the Poor (1797), stated that the industrial lah<,rers of M anehe e
rarely work on Monday and that many of them keep holiday wo o
"nnltT, m ^ W ,f k ' ThUS Ure ' s tiradcs abou ' *e employee '

£Z\lr™l ^^ tl ; e i r -" aVerSi0n t0 the *> «* contin^ o
factory labor are reflected in such data as the fact that as late as 181X1

spinners would be missing from the factories on Mondays and Tu sday '
Absenteeism as well as turnover, then, was part of the syndrome of
striving to maintain a maximum of personal liberty

Max Weber spoke of the "immensely stubborn resistance" to the new
work disaphne, and a later social scientist, Reinhard Bendix, saw al™
that the drive to establish the management of labor on "an imperial

S^T opposed " at eveiy point " Ure > in * ~«

TkSs ^er^ 8 " 8 thC Bght t0 maStef th£ W ° rkerS in *™ of
The main difficulty [he faced was] above all, in training human beings

^/h T,T their desul , 0ly habits of work - and t0 AtS

with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation. To devise and
administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to toe
necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise^ noble
achievement of Arkwright. Even at the present day, when he system
is perfectly _ organized, and its labour lightened to the utmost it £
found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age o^ertl

rlc^handT fr ° m ""* ° f fr ° m handiCratt °W ti ™> '"to usS

f Jo e rvth n e r r UDter |, in 'J 1 ' 8 SdeCti ° n fr0m Ure the reas ™ why early
factory labor was so heavily comprised of the labor of children, women

and paupers hrcatenedwith loss of the dole. Thompson quotes a wTess

Z oth™ »°H ^ T 1 ^ 11 ^ * »>«* "ecause they cannot erist
any other way. Hundreds of thousands clung to the deeply declinine
nr£Z S f f h hand - l0 « m .^aving for decades,* a classicise o thf

notes defied the operation of simple economic incentives " What Hilt
termed the English craftsmen's tradition "of self-bJXTj-rl™

^stzz:! y popuii r u which denied «*

» ZTnt^LT™™ ,hat —^^""oafactorywas

Thompson demonstrates that the work rules "appeared as unnatural

and hateful restraints" and that everything «bo»H»S£r li "an

I J IMI NTS <>!■ kllllSAI

l!ll

insult. "To slaml at their command" this was the most deeply resented
indignity, lor he felt himself, at heart, to be the real maker of the
cloth....

This spirit was why, for example, paper manufacturers preferred to
train inexperienced labor for the new (post-1806) machine processes,
lather than employ skilled hand paper-makers. And why Samuel
( rompton, inventor of the spinning mule, lamented, relatively late in this
period,
To this day, though it is more than thirty years since my first machine
was shown to the public, I am hunted and watched with as much never-
ceasing care as if I was the most notorious villain that ever disgraced
the human form; and I do affirm that if I were to go to a smithy to get
a common nail made, if opportunity offered to the bystanders, they
would examine it most minutely to see if it was anything but a nail.
The battle raged for decades, with victories still being won at least as
late as that over a Bradford entrepreneur in 1882, who tried to secretly
install a power-loom but was discovered by the domestic workers. "It was
therefore immediately taken down, and, placed in a cart under a convoy
of constables, but the enraged weavers attacked and routed the consta-
bles, destroyed the loom, and dragged its roller and warp in triumph
through Baildon." Little wonder that Ure wrote of the requirement of "a
Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of work-
people." Without idealizing the earlier period, or forgetting that it was
certainly defined by capitalist relationships, it is also true, as Hill wrote,
"What was lost by factories and enclosure was the independence, variety
and freedom which small producers had enjoyed." Adam Smith admitted
the "mental mutilation" due to the new division of labor, the destruction
of both an earlier alertness of mind and a previous "vivacity of both pain
and pleasure."

Robert Owen likewise discussed this transformation when he declared,
in 1815, that "The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a
country generates a new character.. .an essential change in the general
character of the mass of the people." Less abstractly, the Hammonds
harkened back to the early 19th century and heard the "lament that the
games and happiness of life are disappearing," and that soon "the art of
living had been degraded to its rudest forms."

In 1819 the reformer Francis Place, speaking of the population of
industrial Lancashire, was pleased to note that "Until very lately it would
have been very dangerous to have assembled 500 of them on any
occasion.... Now 100,000 people may be collected together and no riot
ensue." It was as Thompson summarized: gradually, between 1780 and

i

ID.' INDI IS'I KIAl.lSM AND l)OMI STI< ,YH< >N

1 830, "the 'average' English working man became more disciplined, inmc
subject to the productive time of the clock, more reserved and methodi
cal, less violent and less spontaneous."

A rising at the end of this period, the "last Labourers' Revolt," of
agricultural workers in 1830, says a good deal about the general change
that had occurred. Similar to outbreaks of 1816 and 1822, much rural
property had been destroyed and large parts of Kent and East Anglia
were in the rebels' control. The Duke of Buckingham, reflecting tin-
government's alarm, declared the whole country as having been taken
over by the rioters. But despite several weeks' success, the movement
collapsed at the first show of real force. Historian Pauline Gregg
described the sudden relapse into apathy and despair; they were "unused
to asserting themselves," their earlier tradition of vigor and initiative
conquered by the generalized triumph of the new order.

Also concerning this year as marking a watershed, is Mantoux's remark
about Arkwright, that "About 1830 he became the hero of political
economy." Absurd, then, are the many who date the "age of revolution"
as beginning at this time, such as the Tills' Rebel Century, 1830-1930.
Only with the defeat of the workers could Arkwright, the architect of the
factory system, be installed as the hero of the bourgeoisie; this defeat of
authentic rebellion also gave birth to political ideology. Socialism, a
caricature of the challenge that had existed, could have begun no other
way.

The German businessman Harkort, wrote in 1 844 of the "new form of
serfdom," the diminution of the strength and intelligence of the workers
that he saw. The American Colman witnessed (1845) nothing less than
"Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature, lying in
bleeding fragments all over the face of society." Amazing that another
businessman of this time could, in his Condition of the Working Class
glory that the "factory hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution,
have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the
Labour Movement." But Engels' statement at least contains no internal
contradiction; the tamed, defeated factory operative has clearly been the
mainstay of the labor movement and socialist ideology among the
working class. As Rexford Tugwell admitted in his Industrial Discipline
and the Governmental Arts: "When the factory came into existence... work
became an indignity rather than a matter for pride.... Organized labor
has always consented to this entirely uncreative subjection."

Thus, "the character structure of the rebellious pre-industrial labourer
or artisan was violently recast into that of the submissive industrial
worker," in Thompson's words; by trade unionism, the fines, firings,

|\l I'MI'N IS ( >!■ l-tl't"

A I

KM

I,,-, tint's fin-lory rules, Methodism, the education system, the diversion
L.nown'iis ideology the entire battery of institutions that have never
.ii- 1 He veil unchallenged success. , .. ... „

Thompson recognized the essentially "repressive and disabling
,l ls ,i P line of industrialization and yet, as if remembering that he is a
Marxist historian, somehow finds the process good and inevitable. How
, , mid the Industrial Revolution have happened without this discipline, he
,sks and in fact finds that in the production of "sober and disciplined
workers "this growth in self-rcspectf!] and political consciousness to
have been the "one real gain" of the transformation of society.

If this appears as insanity to the healthy reader, it is wholly consistent
with the philosophy of Marx. "Division of labor," said the young Marx,
"increases with civilization." It is a fundamental law, just as its concomi-
tant, the total victory of the capitalist system.

In Volume I of Capital, Marx described the inevitable and necessary
"movement of the proletariat":
In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the action ot
the natural laws of production, i.e. to his dependence on capital, a
dependence springing from, guaranteed, and perpetuated by the very
mechanism of production.

Until as he says elsewhere, on the day of the Revolution the proletari-
at will' have been "disciplined, united, and organized by the very
mechanism of production." Then they will have achieved that state
whereby they can totally transform the world; "completely deprived of
■iny self-activity" or "real life content," as the young Marx prescribed.
' To back-track for a moment, consider the conservative historian
Ashton's puzzlement at such workers as the west-country weavers who
destroyed tenter frames, or of the colliers who frequently smashed the
nit gear, and sometimes even set the mines on fire: they must have
realized that their action would result in unemployment, but their
immediate concern was to assert their strength and inflict loss on
stubborn employers. There seems to have been little or no social theory
in the minds of the rioters and very little class consciousness in the

Marxist sense of the term. w. irv »«

This orthodox professor would certainly have understood Marxs
admonition to just such workers, "to direct their attacks, not against the
material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they
are used." Marx understood, after all, that "the way machinery is utilized
is totally distinct from the machinery itself," as he wrote in 1846
Similarly, Engels destroyed the logic of the anarchists by showing that the
well-known neutrality of technology necessitates subordination, authority

A

INDI IS I KIAI.ISM AND I )< IMI.S I |( A' I K >N

and power. How else, he asks, could a factory exist? In fact, Marx and
Engels explain worker resistance to "scientific socialism" largely in terms
of the survival of artisan-type jobs; those who are the more beaten and
subordinated resist it the least. It is historical fact that those closest to
the category artisan ("underdeveloped") actually have felt the most
capacity to abolish the wage system, precisely because they still exercise
some control of work processes.

Throughout nearly all his writings, however, Marx managed to return
to the idea that, in socialist society, individuals would develop fully in and
through their work. But by the third volume of Capital his attitude had
changed and the emphasis was upon the "realm of freedom" which "only
begins, in fact, where that labor, which is determined by need and
external purpose, ceases," lying "outside the sphere of material produc-
tion proper." Thus Marx admits that not even under socialism will the
degradation of labor be undone. (This is closely related to the Marxist
notion of revolutionary preservation, in which the acquisitions and
productivity of the capitalist economic system are not to be disturbed by
proletarian revolution.) The free creation of life is hence banished,
reduced to the marginalia of existence much like hobbies in class society.
Despite his analysis of alienated labor, much of the explicit core of his
philosophy is virtually a consecration of work as tyranny.

Durkheim, writing in the late 19th century, saw as the main social
problem the need for a cohesive social integration. Much like Marx, who
also desired the consolidation and maturation of capitalism, albeit for
different reasons, Durkheim thought he found the key in division of
labor. In the need for coordination engendered by division of labor, he
discerned the essential source of solidarity. Today this grotesque
inversion of human values is recognized rather fully; the hostility to
specialization and its always authoritarian expertise is strongly present.
A look at the recent opinion polls, or decades of articles like Fortune's
"The Senseless War on Science" (March, 1971) will suffice.

The perennial struggle against integration by the dominant system now
continues as a struggle for dis-integration, a more and more consciously
nihilist effort. The progress of "progress" is left with few partisans, and
its enemies with few illusions as to what is worth preserving.

WHO KILLED NED LUDD?

I A vaoier-macU likeness of Ned Ludd is one of the] symbols of the days
laZTgZ, a reminder of .hat the workers' attoude to the ne W tdeas
,nhht be if the unions had not grown strong and efficient.

Trade Union Congress magazine labour, at the time of the Produc
lion Exhibition, 1956.

In Eneland the first industrial nation, and beginning in textites^

rita?" &st and foremost enterprise there, arose the widespread

evolution^ m vement (between 1810 and 1820) known as Luddism

npcrtSo the subsequent course of ^rn soa^^^

±x. «,.w« .^f Fnrnen and Aix-la-Chapelle who aestroyeu tne
W ™, rooted 1 WoA theTpmners of Schmollen and Crimmitsehau
'%S££££* tJns, and eountless others at the dawn of

"r^ssTw^the English doth workers-knitters, weavers
spfnnTrs eroppers, shearmen, and the like-who initiated a moveme nt)
E«m'hTer in urreetionary fury has rarely been more widespread i„

Enlh hi toiy/' » Thom P SOQ wr0te > in What iS Pr ° bably an 7

men ThoScnerally characterized as a blind, unorganized, reaction-

Z limited and ineffective upheaval, this "instinctive" revolt against the

aims It was strongest in the more developed areas the con tral and
northern parts of the country especially. The Times ot Fe W 11,1812

Wood wrote to Fitzwilliam in the government ;<m. une 17 ^ 2 th *
"except for the very spots which were occupied by Soldiers, the Country
was virtually in the possession of the lawless.

Wilt) Kll I I -|» Nl I) I. HDD?

Till- Luddites indeed were irresistible at several moments in the second
decade of I he century and developed a very high morale and sclf-con-
seiousness. As Cole and Postgate put it, "Certainly there was no stopping
the Luddites. Troops ran up and down helplessly, baffled by the silence
and connivance of the workers." Further, an examination of newspaper
accounts, letters and leaflets reveals insurrection as the stated intent; for
example, "all Nobles and tyrants must be brought down," read part of a
leaflet distributed in Leeds. Evidence of explicit general revolutionary
preparations was widely available in both Yorkshire and Lancashire, for
instance, as early as 1812.

An immense amount of property was destroyed, including vast numbers
of textile frames which had been redesigned for the production of
inferior goods. In fact, the movement took its name from young Ned
I ,udd, who, rather than do the prescribed shoddy work, took a sledge-
hammer to the frames at hand. This insistence on either the control of
the productive processes or the annihilation of them fired the popular
imagination and brought, the Luddites virtually unanimous support.
I lobsbawm declared that there existed an "overwhelming sympathy for
machine-wreckers in all parts of the population," a condition which by
IXI3, according to Churchill, "had exposed the complete absence of
means of preserving public order." Frame-breaking had been made a
capital offense in 1812 and increasing numbers of troops had to be
dispatched, to a point exceeding the total Wellington had under his com-
mand against Napoleon. The army, however, was not only spread very
thin, but was often found unreliable due to its own sympathies and the
presence of many conscripted Luddites in the ranks. Likewise, the local
magistrates and constabulary could not be counted upon, and a massive
spy system proved ineffective against the real solidarity of the populace.
As might be guessed the volunteer militia, as detailed under the Watch
and Ward Act, served only to "arm the most powerfully disaffected,"
according to the Hammonds, and thus the modern professional police
system had to be instituted, from the time of Peel.

Required against what Mathias termed "the attempt to destroy the new
society," was a weapon much closer to the point of production, namely
t he furtherance of an acceptance of the fundamental order in the form
of trade unionism. Though it is clear that the promotion of trade
unionism was a consequence of Luddism as much as the creation of the
modern police was, it must also be realized that there had existed a long-
tolerated tradition of unionism among the textile workers and others
prior to the Luddite risings. Hence, as Morton and Tate almost alone
point out, the machine-breaking of this period cannot be viewed as the

l.i I Ml N IS ( )]■ K I.I USA I

in/

despairing outburst of workers having no other outlet. Despite the
(on i hi nation Acts, which were an unenforced ban on unions between
I /*)*) and 1824, Luddism did not move into a vacuum but was successful
loi a time in opposition to the refusal of the extensive union apparatus
lo compromise capital. In fact, the choice between the two was available
and the unions were thrown aside in favor of the direct self -organization
\)i workers and their radical aims.

During the period in question it is quite clear that unionism was seen
as fundamentally distinct from Luddism and promoted as such, in the
hope of absorbing the Luddite autonomy. Contrary to the fact of the
( ombination Acts, unions were often held to be legal in the courts, for
example; and when unionists were prosecuted they generally received
light punishment or none whatever, whereas the Luddites were usually
hanged. Some members of Parliament openly blamed the owners for the
social distress, for not making full use of the trade union path of escape,
'['his is not to say that union objectives and control were as clear or
pronounced as they are today, but the indispensable role of unions vis-a-
vis capital was becoming clear, illumined by the crisis at hand and the felt
necessity for allies in the pacification of the workers. Members of
Parliament in the Midlands counties urged Governor Henson, head of
the Framework Knitters Union, to combat Luddism — as if this was
.needed. His method of promoting restraint was of course his tireless
advocacy of the extension of union strength. The Framework Knitters
Committee of the union, according to Church's study of Nottingham,
"issued specific instructions to workmen not to damage frames." And the
Nottingham Union, the major attempt at a general industrial union,
likewise set itself against Luddism and never employed violence.

If unions were hardly the allies of the Luddites, it can only be said that
they were the next stage after Luddism in the sense that unionism played
the critical role in its defeat, through the divisions, confusion, and
deflection of energies the unions engineered. It "replaced" Luddism in
the same way that it rescued the manufacturers from the taunts of the
children in the streets, from the direct power of the people. Thus the full
recognition of unions in the repeal laws in 1824 and 1825 of the
Combination Acts "had a moderating effect upon popular discontent,"
in Darvall's words. The repeal efforts, led by Place and Hume, easily
passed an unreformed Parliament, by the way, with much pro-repeal
testimony from employers as well as unionists, with only a few reactionar-
ies opposed. In fact, while the conservative arguments of Place and
Hume included a prediction of fewer strikes post-repeal, many employers
understood the cathartic, pacific role of strikes and were not much

IDS

WlH > Kill 1 '.!> Nil) I ,1 1 1 >|)':'

dismayed by the rash of strikes which attended repeal. The repeal Acts
of course officially delimited unionism to its traditional marginal wages
and hours concern, a legacy of which is the universal presence of
"management's rights" clauses in collective bargaining contracts to the
present period.

The mid- 1830s campaign against unions by some employers only
underlined in its way the central role of unions: the campaign was
possible only because the unions had succeeded so well against the
radically of the unmediated workers in the previous period. Hence,
Lecky was completely accurate later in the century when he judged that
"there can be little doubt that the largest, wealthiest and best-organized
Trade Unions have done much to diminish labor conflicts," just as the
Webbs also conceded in the 19th century that there existed much more
labor revolt before unionism became the rule.

But to return to the Luddites, we find very few first-person accounts
and a virtually secret tradition mainly because they projected themselves
through their acts, seemingly unmediated by ideology. What was it really
all about? Stearns, perhaps as close as the commentators come, wrote
"The Luddites developed a doctrine based on the presumed virtues of
manual methods." He all but calls them "backward-looking wretches" in
his condescension, yet there is a grain of truth here certainly. The attack
of the Luddites was not occasioned by the introduction of new machin-
ery, however, as is commonly thought, for there is no evidence of such
in 1811 and 1812 when Luddism proper began. Rather, the destruction
was leveled at the new slip-shod methods which were ordered into effect
on the extant machinery. Not an attack against production on economic
grounds, it was above all the violent response of the textile workers (soon
joined by others) to their attempted degradation in the form of inferior
work; shoddy goods — the hastily-assembled "cut-ups," primarily — was the
issue at hand. While Luddite offensives generally corresponded to
periods of economic downturn, it was because employers often took
advantage of these periods to introduce new production methods. But it
was also true that not all periods of privation produced Luddism, as it
was that Luddism appeared in areas not particularly distressed. Leicester-
shire, for instance, was the least hit by hard times and it was an area
producing the finest quality woolen goods; Leicestershire was a strong
center for Luddism.

To wonder what was so radical about a movement which seemed to
demand "only" the cessation of fraudulent work, is to fail to perceive the
inner truth of the valid assumption, made on every side, of the connec-
tion between frame-breaking and sedition. As if the fight by the producer

!■] I 'Ml N IS t)l Kill ISA!

Id'J

to, the integrity of his work-life ean be made without calling the whole
.if eapilalism into question. The demand for the cessation of fraudulent
work necessarily becomes a cataclysm, an all-or-nothing battle insofar as
it is pursued; it leads directly to the heart of the capitalist relationship

and its dynamic.

Another element of the Luddite phenomenon generally treated with
condescension, by the method of ignoring it altogether, is the organiza-
tional aspect. Luddites, as we all know, struck out wildly and blindly,
while the unions provide the only organized form to the workers. But in
fact, the Luddites organized themselves locally and even federally,
including workers from all trades, with an amazing, spontaneous
coordination. Eschewing an alienating structure, their organization was
neither formal nor permanent. Their revolt tradition was without a center
and existed largely as an "unspoken code"; theirs was a non-manipulative
community, organization which trusted itself. All this, of course, was
essential to the depth of Luddism, to the appeal at its roots. In practice,
"no degree of activity by the magistrates or by large reinforcements of
military deterred the Luddites. Every attack revealed planning and
method," stated Thompson, who also gave credit to their "superb security
and communications." An army officer in Yorkshire understood their
possession of "a most extraordinary degree of concert and organization.
William Cobbett wrote, concerning a report to the government in 1812:
"And this is the circumstance that will most puzzle the ministry. They can
find no agitators. It is a movement of the people's own."

Coming to the rescue of the authorities, however, despite Cobbett's
frustrated comments, was the leadership of the Luddites. Theirs was not
a completely egalitarian movement, though this element may have been
closer to the mark than was their appreciation of how much was within
their grasp and how narrowly it eluded them. Of course, it was from
among the leaders that "political sophistication" issued most effectively
in time, just as it was from them that union cadres developed in some

cases. . „

In the "pre-political" days of the Luddites— developing in our post-
political" days, too— the people openly hated their rulers. They cheered
Pitt's death in 1806 and, more so, Perceval's assassination m 1812. These
celebrations at the demise of prime ministers bespoke the weakness of
mediations between rulers and ruled, the lack of integration between the
two The political enfranchisement of the workers was certainly less
important than their industrial enfranchisement or integration, via
unions; it proceeded the more slowly for this reason. Nevertheless, it is
true that a strong weapon of pacification was the strenuous effort made

1(1

Who Kii.i.i.i) Ni:d 1 .1 n >i >7

to interest the population in legal activities, namely the drive to widen
the electoral basis of Parliament. Cobbett, described by many as the must
powerful pamphleteer in English history, induced many to join 1 lampden
Clubs in pursuit of voting reform, and was also noted, in the words ol
Davis, for his "outspoken condemnation of the Luddites." The pernicious
effects of this divisive reform campaign can be partially measured by
comparing such robust earlier demonstrations of anti-government wrath
as the Gordon Riots (1780) and the mobbing of the King in London
(1795) with such massacres and fiascos as the Pentridge and Peterloo
"risings," which coincided roughly with the defeat of Luddism just before
1820.

But to return, in conclusion, to more fundamental mechanisms, we
again confront the problem of work and unionism. The latter, it must be
agreed, was made permanent upon the effective divorce of the worker
from control of the instruments of production — and unionism itself
contributed most critically to this divorce, as we have seen. Some,
certainly including the Marxists, see this defeat and its form, the victory
of the factory system, as both an inevitable and desirable outcome,
though even they must admit that in work execution resides a significant
part of the direction of industrial operations even now. A century after
Marx, Galbraith located the guarantee of the system of productivity over
creativity in the unions' basic renunciation of any claims regarding work
itself. But work, as all ideologists sense, is an area closed off to perma-
nent falsification. Thus modern mediators ignore the unceasing universal
Luddite contest over control of the productive processes, even as every
form of "employee participation" is now promoted.

In the early trade union movement there existed a good deal of
democracy. Widespread, for example, was the practice of designating
delegates by rotation or by lot. But what cannot be legitimately demo-
cratized is the real defeat at the root of the unions' victory, which makes
them the organization of complicity, a mockery of community. Form on
this level cannot disguise unionism, the agent of acceptance and
maintenance of a grotesque world.

The Marxian quantification elevates productivity as the summum
bonum, as leftists likewise ignore the ending of the direct power of the
producers and so manage, incredibly, to espouse unions as all that
untutored workers can have. The opportunism and elitism of all the
Internationals, indeed the history of leftism, sees its product finally in
fascism, when accumulated confines bring their result. When fascism
could successfully appeal to workers as the removal of inhibitions, as the
"Socialism of Action," etc.— as revolutionary — it should be clear how

l-'i 1 minis ni Ki i-ns.-\i

much was bin k-d with the Luddites.

I here arc those who already again fix the label of "age of transition"
< mi today's growing crisis, hoping all will turn out nicely in another defeat
lot l he Luddites. We see today the same need to enforce work discipline
as in the earlier period, perhaps even the same awareness by the
population of the meaning of "progress." Quite possibly we now can re-
mjmize all our enemies the more clearly, so that this time the transition
can be in the hands of the creators.

ik

AXIS POINT OF
AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISM

The 1820s constituted a watershed in U.S. life. By the end of that

.-.cade, about ten years after the last of the English Luddite risings had
he en suppressed, industrialism secured its decisive American victory; by
I he end of the 1830s all of its cardinal features were definitively present.

The many overt threats to the coherence of emerging industrial
capitalism, the ensemble of forms of resistance to its hegemony, were
blunted at this time and forced into the current of that participation so
vital to modern domination. In terms of technology, work, politics,
sexuality, culture, and the whole fabric of ordinary life, the struggles of
an earlier, relative autonomy, which threatened both old and new forms
of authority, fell short and a dialectic of domestication, so familiar to us
today, broke through.

The reactions engendered in the face of the new dynamic in this epoch
of its arrival seem, by the way, to offer some implicit parallels to present
trends as technological civilization likely enters its terminal crisis: the
answers of progress, now anything but new or promising, encounter a
renewed legitimation challenge that can be informed, even inspired, by
understanding the past.

American "industrial consciousness," which Samuel Rezneck judged to
have triumphed by 1830, 1 was in large measure and from the outset a
virtual project of the State. In 1787, generals and government officials
sponsored the first promotional effort, the Pennsylvania Society for the
Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts. With Benjamin
Franklin as the Society's official patron, capital was raised and a factory
equipped, but arson put an end to this venture early in 1790.

Another benchmark of the period was Alexander Hamilton's Report on
the Subject of Manufactures, drafted by his tirelessly pro-factory technolo-
gy assistant secretary of the Treasury, Tench Coxe. It is noteworthy that
Coxe received government appointments from both the Federalist
Hamilton and his arch-rival Jefferson, Republican and career celebrator
of the yeoman free -holder as the basis of independent values. While
Hamilton pushed industrialization, arguing, 2 for example, that children

!

1

i II

Axis Point or Ami-khan Indusikiaiism

were better off in mills than at home or in school, Jefferson is i emem
bercd as a constant foe of that evil, alien import, manufacturing.

To correct the record is to glimpse the primacy of technology over
ideological rhetoric as well as to remember that no Enlightenment man
was not also an enthusiast of science and technology. In fact, it is fitting
that Jefferson, the American most closely associated with the Enlighten-
ment, introduced and promoted the idea of interchangeability of parts,
key to the modern factory, from France as early as 1785. 3

Also to the point is Charles V. Hagnar's remark that in the 1790s
"Thomas Jefferson... a personal friend of my father... indoctrinated him
with the manufacturing fever," and induced him to start a cottonmill. 4 As
early as 1 805, Jefferson, at least in private, complained that his earlier
insistence on independent producers as the bedrock of national virtue
was misunderstood, that his condemnation of industrialism was only
meant to apply to the cities of Europe. 5

Political foliage aside, it was becoming clear that mechanization was in
no way impeded by government. The role of the State is tellingly
reflected by the fact that the "armory system" now rivals the older
"American system of manufactures" term as the more accurate to
describe the new system of production methods. 6 It is along these lines
that Cochran referred to the need for the federal authority to "keep up
the pressure," around 1820, in order to soften local resistance to factories
and their methods. 7

In the 1820s a fully developed industrial lobby in Congress and the
extensive use of the technology fair and exhibit — not to mention
nationalist pro-development appeals such as to anti-British sentiment
after the War of 1812, and other non-political factors to be discussed
below — contributed to the assured ascendancy of industrialization, by
1830.

Ranged against the efforts to achieve that ascendancy was an
unmistakable antipathy, observed in the references to its early manifesta-
tions in classic historical works. Norman Ware found that the Industrial
Revolution "was repugnant to an astonishingly large section of the earlier
American community," 8 and Victor S. Clark noted the strong popular
prejudice that existed "against factory industries as detrimental to the
welfare of the working-people." 9

Later, too, this aversion was still present, if declining, as a pivotal force.
The July 4, 1830 oratory of pro-manufacture Whig Edward Everett
contained a necessary reference to the "suffering, depravity, and
brutalism" 10 of industrialism — in Europe — for the purpose of deflecting
hostility from its American counterpart. Later in the 1830s the visiting

l.i iminis < >r Kit i isai

l.*i

relish liberal Harriet Martineau, in her efforts to defend manufactur-
ing, indicated that her difficulties were precisely her audiences' antago-
nism to the subject."

Yet despite the "slow and painful" 12 nature of the changeover and
especially the widespread evidence of deep-seated resistance (of which
the foregoing citations are a minute sample), there lingers the notion of
an enthusiastic embrace of mechanization in America by craftsmen as
well as capitalists. 13 Fortunately, recent scholarship has been contributing
lo a better grasp of the struggles of the early-to-mid-nineteenth century,
Merritt Roe Smith's excellent Harpers Ferry Armory and the New
Technology™ for example. "The Harpers Ferry story diverges sharply
from oft-repeated generalizations that 'most Americans accepted and
welcomed technological change with uncritical enthusiasm,'" 13 Smith
declares in his introduction.

Suffice it to interject here that no valid separation exists between anti-
technology feelings and the more commonly recognized elements of
contestation of classes that proceeded from the grounding of that
technology; in practice the two strands were (and are) obviously
intertwined. This reference to the "massive and irrefutable" 16 class
opposition of early industrialism or to Taft and Ross' dictum that "the
United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any
industrial nation"; 17 finds its full meaning when we appraise both levels
of anti-authoritarianism, especially in the watershed period of the 1 820s.
In early 1819 the English visitor William Faux declared that "Labour
is quite as costly as in England, whether done by slaves, or by hired
whites, and it is also much more troublesome." 18 Later that year his
travel journal further testified to the "very villainous" character of
American workers, who "feel too free to work in earnest, or at all, above
two or three days in a week." 19 Indeed, travelers seemed invariably to
remark on "the independent manners of the laboring classes," 20 in slightly
softer language.

More specifically, dissent by skilled workers, as has often been noted,
was the sharpest and most durable. Given the "astonishing versatility of
the average native laborer," 21 however, it is also true that a generalized
climate of resistance confronted the impending debasement of work by
the factory.

Those most clearly identified as artisans give us the clearest look at
resistance, owing to the self-reliant culture that was a function of autono-
mous handicraft production. Bruce Laurie, commenting on some
Philadelphia textile craftsmen, illustrates the vibrant pre-industrial life in
question, with its blase attitude toward work: "On a muggy summer day

Axis Poini <>i Ami-kkan In mi isi kiai ism

in August 1828 Kensington's hand loom weavers announced a holiday
from their daily toil. News of the affair circulated throughout the district
and by mid-afternoon the hard-living frame tenders and their comrades
turned the neighborhood avenues into a playground. Knots of lounging
workers joked and exchanged gossip.... The more athletic challenged one
another to foot races and games... (and) quenched their thirst witli
frequent drams. The spree was a classic celebration of St. Monday." 2 "'

It was no accident that mass production — primarily textile factories
first appeared in New England, with its relative lack of strong craft
traditions, rather than in say, Philadelphia, the center of American
artisan skills. 23 Traditions of independent creativity obviously posed an
obstacle to manufacturing innovation, causing Carl Russell Fish to assay
that "craftsmen were the only actively dissatisfied class in the country." 24

The orthodox explanation of industrialism's triumph stresses the much
higher U.S. wage levels, compared to Europe, and an alleged shortage
of skilled workers. These are, as a rule, considered the primary factors
that produced "an environment affording every suggestion and induce-
ment to substitute machinery for men," and that nurtured that "inven-
tiveness and mechanical intuition which are sometimes regarded as a
national trait," in the descriptive phrases of Clark. 25

But the preceding discussion should already be enough to indicate that
it was the presence of work skills that challenged the new technology; not
their absence. Research shows no dearth of skilled workers, 26 and there
is abundant evidence that "the trend toward mechanization came more
from cultural and managerial bias than from carefully calculated marginal
costs." 27

Habakkuk's comparison of American and British antebellum technolo-
gy and labor economics cites the "scarcity and belligerency of the
available skilled labour" 28 and we must accent the latter quality, while
realizing that scarcity can also mean the ability to make oneself scarce —
namely, the oft-remarked high turnover rates. 29

It was industrial discipline that was missing, especially among crafts-
men. At mid-century Samuel Colt confided to a British engineering
group that "uneducated laborers" made the best workers in his new
mass-production arms factory because they had so little to unlearn; 30
skills — and the recalcitrance accompanying them — were hardly at a
premium.

Strikes and unionization (though certainly not always linked) became
common from 1823 forward, 31 and the modern labor movement showed
particular vitality during the militant "great uprising" period of 1833-
1837. 32

1 j I 'Ml 'NTS <>l Kill ISA I

However, especially by the 1830s, these struggles (largely for shorter
ho ins, secondarily over wages) were essentially situated within the world
,.l ;i standardizing, regimenting technology, predicated on the worker as
.i component of it. And although this distinction is not total, it was the
unorganized" workers who mounted the most extreme forms of
opposition, luddite in many instances, contrary to the time-honored
wisdom that luddism and America were strangers.

( Jary Kulik's excellent scholarship on industrial Rhode Island deter-
mined that in Pawtucket alone more than five arson attempts were made
against cotton mill properties, and that the deliberate burning of textile
mills was far from uncommon throughout early nineteenth century New
I '.ngland, declining by the 1830s. 33 Jonathon Prude reached a similar
eonclusion: "Rumors abounded in antebellum New England that fires
suffered by textile factories were often of 'incendiary origin.'" 34 The same
reaction was felt in Philadelphia, albeit slightly later: "Several closely
spaced mill burnings triggered cries of 'incendiarism' in the 1830s, a
decade of intense industrial conflict." 35

The hand sawyers who burned Oliver Evans' new steam mill at New
Orleans in 181 3 36 also practiced machine-wrecking by arson, like their
Northeastern cousins, and shortly later Massachusetts rope makers
attacked machine-made yarn, boasting that their handspun 37 product was
stronger.

Sailors in New York often inflicted damage on vessels during strikes,
according to Dulles, who noted "the seamen were not organized and
were an especially obstreperous lot." 38

Though its impact, as with resistance in general, declined after the
1 820s, luddite-type violence continued. The unpopular superintendent of
the Harpers Ferry Armory 39 was shot dead in his office in early 1830 by
an angry craftsman named Ebenezer Cox. Though Cox was hung for his
act, he was a folk hero among the Harpers Ferry workers, who hated
Dunn's emphasis on supervision and factory-type discipline, and "never
tired of citing Dunn's fate as a blunt reminder to superintendents of what
could be expected if they became overzealous in executing their duties
and impinged on the traditional freedoms of employees." 40

Construction laborers, especially in railroad work, frequently destroyed
property; Gutman provides an example from 1831 in which about three
hundred of them punished a dishonest contractor by tearing up the track
they built. 41 The destructive fury of Irish strikers on the Baltimore and
Ohio Canal in 1834 occasioned the inaugural use of federal troops in a
labor dispute, on orders of Andrew Jackson. And in the mid-1 830s anti-
railroad teamsters still waylaid trains and shot at their crews from

IS

A MS I'OINI (>l AmIKK AN INNI I.MK1AI I'.M

ambush.' 1 ''

In the Philadelphia handloom weavers' strike of IK4.', sh iking artisans
used machine breaking, intimidation, destruction of unwoven wool and
finished cloth, house wrecking, and threats of even woise violence.
During this riotous struggle, weavers marched on a water powered, mass
production mill to burn it; the attack was driven off, with two constables
wounded. 43

Returning to the New England textile mills and incendiary luddism.
Prude describes the situation after 1840: "Managers were rarely directly
challenged by their hands; and although mills continued to burn down,
contemporaries did not as quickly assume that workers were setting the
fires." 44

Looking for social-political reasons for the culture of industrialism, one
finds that official efforts to domesticate the ruled via the salutary effects
of poor relief led Boston officials to put widows and orphans to work,
beginning in 1735, in what amounted to a major experiment to inculcate
habits of industry and routine. But even threats of denial of subsistence
aid failed to establish industrial discipline over irregular work habits and
independent attitudes. 45

Artisanal— and agricultural— work was far more casual than that
regimented by modern productionist models. Unlike that of the factory,
for example, it could almost always be interrupted in favor of an
encounter, an adventure, or simply a distraction. This easy entry to
gaming, drinking, personal projects, hunting, extended and often raucous
revelry on a great variety of occasions, among other interruptions, was a
preserve of independence from authority in general.

On the other hand, the regulation and monotony that adhere to the
work differentiation of industrial technology combat such casual,
undomesticated tendencies. Division of labor embodies, as an implicit
purpose, the control and domination of the work process and those tied
to it. Adam Smith saw this, and so did Tocqueville, in the 1830s: "As the
principle of the division of labor is ever more completely applied, the
workman becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent.... Thus,
at the same time that industrial science constantly lowers the standing of
the working class, it raises that of the masters." 46

This subordination, including its obvious benefit, social control, was
widely appreciated, especially but not exclusively, by the early industrial-
ists. Manufacturers, with unruliness very visible to them, came quickly to
identify technological progress with a more subdued populace. In 1816
Walton Felch, for instance, claimed that the "restless dispositions and
insatiate prodigality" of working people were altered, by "manufacturing

I I Ml 'NTS < ))■ Kill ISA I

t i''

.ill ci ula nee," into patterns of regularity and calmness." Another New
l'.nglaml niillowner, Smith Wilkinson, judged in 1835 that factory labor
imposed a "restraining influence" on people who "are often very
(j-norant, and too often vicious." 48 The English visitor Harriet Martineau,
introduced above, was of like mind in the early 1840s: "The factories are
found to afford a safe and useful employment for much energy that
would otherwise be wasted and misdirected." She determined that unlike
the situation that had prevailed "before the introduction of manufac-
tures... now the same society is eminently orderly... disorders have almost
entirely disappeared." 49

Kli Whitney provides another case in point of the social designs
inhering in mechanization, namely that of his Mill Rock armory, which
moved from craft shop to factory status during the period of the late
1790s to Whitney's death in 1825. Long associated with the birth of the
"American System" of interchangeable parts production, he was thor-
oughly unpopular with his employees for regimentation he developed via
increasing division of labor. His penchant for order and discipline was
embodied in his view of Mill Rock as a "moral gymnasium " where
"correct habits" of diligence and industry were inculcated through
systematic control of all facets of the work day. 50

Andrew Ure, the English ideologue of early industrial capitalism,
summed up the control intentionality behind the new technology by
typifying the factory as "a creation designed to restore order," while
proclaiming that "when capital enlists science into her service, the
refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility." 51

As skill levels were forcibly reduced, the art of living was also
purposefully degraded by the sheer number of hours involved in
industrial work. Emerson, usually thought of in terms of a vague
philosophy of human possibilities, applauded the suppression of potential
enacted by the work hours of 1830s railroad-building: he observed the
long, hard construction shifts as "safe vents for peccant humors; and this
grim day's work of fifteen or sixteen hours, though deplored by all
humanity of the neighborhood, is a better police than the sheriff and his
deputies" 52 A hundred years later Simone Weil supplied a crucial part of
the whole equation of industrialization: "No one would accept two daily
hours of slavery. To be accepted, slavery must be of such a daily duration
as to break something in a man." 53 Similar is Cochran's more recent (and
more conservative) reference to the twelve-hour day, that it was
"maintained in part to keep workers under control." 54

Pioneer industrialist Samuel Slater wondered, in the 1830s, whether
national institutions could survive "amongst a people whose energies are

i

l-'O AXIS 1*1 UN I ( )] AMIKH AN INDI IS1KIAI ISM

not kept constantly in play by the pursuit of some incessant productive
employment.'* 5 Indeed, technological "progress" and the modern wage-
slavery accompanying it offered a new stability to representative
government, owing essentially to its magnified powers tor suppressing i In-
individual. Slater's biographer recognized that "to maintain good order
and sound government, [modern industry] is more efficient than the
sword or bayonet." 56

A relentless assault on the worker's historic rights to free time, self
education, craftsmanship, and play was at the heart of the rise of the
factory system; "increasingly, a feeling of degradation spread among
factory hands," according to Rex Burns. 57 By the mid-1 830s a common
refrain in the working-class press was that the laborer had been debased
"into a necessary piece of machinery." 58

Assisted by sermons, a growing public school system, a new didactic
popular literature, and other social institutions that sang the praises of
industrial discipline, the factory had won its survival by 1830. From this
point on, and with increasing visibility by the end of the 1830s, conditions
worsened and pay decreased. 59 No longer was there a pressing need to
lure first-time operatives into industrialized life and curry their favor with
high wages and relatively light duties. Beginning before 1840, for
example, the pace of work in textile mills was greatly speeded up,
facilitated also by the first major immigration influx, that of impoverished
Irish and French Canadians. 60

Henry Clay asked, "Who has not been delighted with the clockwork
movements of a large cotton factory?" 61 reminding us that concomitant
with such regimentation was the spread of a new conception of time.
Although certainly things did not always go "like clockwork" for the
industrialists — "punctuality and absenteeism remained intractable
problems for management" throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century, 62 for example — a new, industrial time, against great resistance,
made gradual headway.

In the task-oriented labors of artisans and farmers, work and play were
freely mixed; a constant pace of unceasing labor was the ideal not of the
mechanic but of the machine: more specifically, of the clock. The largely
spontaneous games, fairs, festivals, and excursions gave way, along with
working at one's own pace, to enslavement to the uniform, unremitting
technological time of the factory whistle, centralized power, and
unvarying routine.

For the Harpers Ferry armorers early in the century, the workshops
opened at sunrise and closed at sunset but they were free to come and
go as they pleased. They had long been accustomed to controlling the

.1 |-MI-NI'S <»!■ K 111 ISA!

(lui.ihnn and scheduling of their tasks, and "the idea of a clocked day
-.re mod not only repugnant but an outrageous insult to their self-respect
.mwI freedom."" 1 Hence, the opposition to 1827 regulations that installed
,i rlock and announced a ten-hour day was bitter and protracted.

I 'or those already under the regimen of factory production, struggles
.uMinst the alien time were necessarily of a lingering, rear-guard
. I u meter by the late 1820s. An interesting illustration is that of
Pawtuckct, Rhode Island, a mill village whose denizens built a town clock
l»v public subscription in 1828. 64 In their efforts to counter the monopoly
nf recording time which had been the mill owner's factory bell, one can
see that by this time the whole level of contestation had degenerated: the
issue was not industrial time itself but merely the democratization of its

measurement.

The clock, favorite machine of the Enlightenment, is a master device
in the depiction of American political economy by Thoreau and others.
Its function is decisive because it links the industrial apparatus with
consciousness. 65 It is fitting that clockmaking, along with gun manufac-
ture, was a model of the new technology; the U.S. led the world in the
production of inexpensive timepieces by the 1820s, a testimony to the
encroaching industrial value system and the marked anxiety about the
passage of time that was part of it.

Though even in the first decades of the Republic there was a perma-
nent operative class in at least three urban centers of the Mid-Atlantic
seaboard, 67 industrialization began in earnest with New England cloth
production twenty years after the Constitution was adopted. For example,
forty-one new woolen mills were built in the U.S., chiefly along New
r.ngland streams, between 1807 and 1813. 68 The textile industry selected
the most economically deprived areas, and with cheery propaganda and,
initially, relatively good working conditions, enticed women and children
(who had no other options) into the mills. That they "came from families
which could no longer support them at home," 69 means that theirs was
essentially forced labor. In 1797 Obadiah Brown, in a letter to a partner
regarding the selection of a mill site, determined that "the inhabitants
appear to be poor, their homes very much on the decline. I apprehend
it might be a very good place for a Cotton Manufactory, Children
appearing very plenty." 70 "In collecting our help," a Connecticut
millowner said thirty years later, "we are obliged to employ poor families
and generally those having the greatest number of children." 71

New England factory cloth output increased from about 2.4 million
yards in 1815 to approximately 13.9 million yards in 1820, and the shift
of weaving from home to factory was virtually completed by 1824. 72

'■'■' Axis I'oin'i <>i Ami kit an Inih isi kiamsm

Despite arson, absenteeism, stealing, and sabotage persislin^, wilh
particular emphasis into the 1830s," the march of industrialization
proceeded in textiles as elsewhere. If, as lnkeles and Smith 71 (anions
others) have contended, a prime element of modernity is the amount of
time spent in factories, the 1820s was indeed a watershed.

"Certainly by 1825 the first stage of the industrialization of the United
States was over," 75 in Cochran's estimation. In 1820, factories were
capitalized to $50,000,000; by 1840, to $250,000,000, and the number of
people working in them had more than doubled. 76 Also by the 1820s the
whole direction of specialized bureaucratic control, realized a generation
later in such large corporations as the railroads, had already become
clear. 77

As the standardizing, quasi-military machine replaced the individual's
tools, it provided authority with an invaluable, "objective" ally against
"disorder." Not coincidentally did modern mass politics also labor to
implant itself in the 1820s: political hegemony, as a necessary part of
social power, had also failed to fully resolve the issue in its favor in the
struggles of the early republic. 78 Conflict of all kinds was rampant, and
a "terrible precariousness," 79 in Page Smith's phrase, characterized the
cohesion of national power. In fact, by the early 1820s a virtual break-
down of the legitimacy of traditional rule by informal elites was underway
and a serious restructuring of American politics was required.

Part of the restructuring dealt with law, in a parallel to the social
meaning of technology: "neutral" universal principles came to the fore
to justify increased coercion. Modern bourgeois society was forced to rely
on an increasingly objectified legal system, which reflected, at base, the
progress of division of labor. It must, in David Grimsted's words, "elevate
law because of what it is creating and what it has to destroy." 80 By the
time of Jackson's ascendancy in the late 1820s, America had become
largely a government of laws not men (though juries mitigated legality),
despite the unpopularity of this development as seen, for example, in the
widespread scorn of lawyers. 81

Along with the need to mobilize the lower orders into industrial work,
it was important to greatly increase political participation in the interests
of legitimizing the whole. Although by the mid-1 820s almost every state
had extended the franchise to include all white males, the numbers of
voters remained very low during the decade. 82 By this time newspapers
had proliferated and were playing a key role in working toward the
critical integration achieved with Jackson and new, mass political
machinery.

In 1 826, a workingman was chosen for the first time as a mayoral

I .1 I Ml N IS < >l l\ll I ISA I

.M

• .mdidalr in IJallimoie, explicitly in order to attract workingmen's
I mi iuipation, Kt an early example of a necessary part of moving away from
ii.d tow based, old-style rule.

However, John Quincy Adams, who had become president in 1825,
■Jailed to comprehend that voters needed at least the appearance of
. . msu llation and participation in making decisions." 34 A conservative and
.i nationalist, he was at least occasionally candid: as he told Tocqueville,
i he re is "a great equality before the law... [which] ceases absolutely in the
habits of life. There are upper classes and working classes." 85

I'ollowing Adams, the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 symbolized
and accelerated a shift in American life. At the moment that mechaniza-
iion was securing its domination of life and culture, the Jacksonian era
signalled the arrival of professional politics and a crucial diversion of the
i emaining potentially dangerous energies. Embodying this domestication
m his successful appeal to the "common man," the old general was in
leality a plantation owner, land speculator, and lawyer, whose first case
in 1788 defended the interests of Tennessee creditors against debtors.

He reversed the decline in executive strength that had plagued his
three predecessors, essentially renewing state power by a direct appeal
lo the working classes for the first time in U. S. history. The mob at the
1829 White House inaugural, celebrated in history text-books with its
smashing of china and trampling of the furniture, did in fact "symbolize
a new power," 86 in Curti's phrase— a power tamed and delivering itself
to government.

Jackson's "public statements address a society divided into classes,
invidiously distinguished and profoundly antagonistic." 87 And yet, employ-
ing the Jeffersonian argot, he regularly identified the class enemy in
misleading terms as the money power, the moneyed aristocracy, etc.

By the presidential contest of 1832 the gentleman-leader had certainly
been rendered an anachronism, 88 in large part via the use of class-
oriented rhetoric. In Jackson's second term, after he had been over-
whelmingly re-elected on the strength of his attacks on the Bank of the
United States, 89 he vetoed the rechartering of the bank in the most
popular act of his administration.

Although many conservatives feared that Jackson's policies and
conduct would result in a "disastrous, perhaps a fatal," revolution* that
the Jacksonians "had raised up forces greater than they could control," 91
the bank proved a safe target for the Jacksonian project of deflecting
popular anger. As Fish noted, "hostility was merely keenest against
banks; it existed against all corporations." 92

Thus, the "Monster" Bank, which did reap outrageous profits and

\M

Axis Point ni- Amiuk an Inih inikiai.ism

openly purchased members of Congress, was inveighed against as the
incarnation of aristocracy, privilege, and the spirit of luxury, while,
missing the essential point, Daniel Webster and others warned against
such inflaming of the poor against the rich. 93 Needless to say, the growth
of an enslaving technology was never attacked; rather, as Bray Hammond
maintained, Jackson represented "a blow at an older set of capitalists by
a newer, more numerous set." 94 And meanwhile, along with the phrase-
making of this "frontier democrat," class distinctions widened, and
tensions increased, minus the means to successfully overcome them.

In the mid-1830s various workers' parties also sprang up. Many were
far from totally proletarian in composition, and few went much further
than Jacksonian Democracy, in their denunciations of the "monopolists"
and such demands as free public schools and equality of "opportunity."
This political workerism only advanced the absorption of working people
into the new political system and displayed, for the first time, the now
familiar interchange ability of labor leader and politician.

But integration was not accomplished smoothly or automatically. For
one thing, political insurrection was a legacy of the eighteenth century:
from Bacon's Rebellion (1675) in Virginia, by 1760 there had been
eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments, 95 and
more recently there had appeared Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts
(1786-1787), the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania (1794), and
Fries' Rebellion in eastern Pennsylvania (1798-99).

Twenty-five years after the Constitution was signed, extensive anti-
Federalist rioting in Baltimore seemed to connect with this legacy, rather
than to less authentic political alternatives to the old informal means of
social control. Significantly, over the course of the summer 1812
upheavals, the composition of the mob shifted toward an exclusively
proletarian, unpropertied make-up. 96

Moving into the period under particular scrutiny, the depth of general
contestation is somewhat reflected by a most unlikely revolt, that of a
"vicious cadet mutiny" at West point in 1826. On Christmas morning in
that year, "drunken and raging cadets endeavored to kill at least one of
their superior officers and converted their barracks into a bastion which
they proposed to defend, armed, against assault by relieving Regular
Army troops on the Academy reservation." 97 The fury of this amazing
turn of events, though detailed in much Board of Inquiry and courts -
martial testimony, remains a little -known episode in U.S. history; it can
be seen to have introduced a whole chapter of wholesale tumult,
nonetheless.

By the late 1820s group violence had reached great prominence in

1.1 1MIN is i >i Kii> isa i

l.'-i

American lite, such that within a tew years "many Americans had a
Mrong sense of social disintegration. 9 " The annual New York parade of
iiitisans in November 1830 was another incident that told a great deal
iibiuil the mounting unruliness. Printers, coopers, furniture makers, and
;. great many other tradesmen assembled at the culmination of the
procession, to hear speeches expressing the usual republican virtues. But
mi this day politicians mouthing the same old ritual phrases about
political freedom and the dignity of labor were suddenly confronted by
curses, scuffling and a defiant temper. "As the militia tried to quiet the
militants, the dissatisfied crowd knocked out the supports jf the
scaffolding, causing the entire stage to crash to the ground," 99 and
bringing the ceremonies to an undignified end.

The public violence of the 1830s was more a prolonged aftershock,
however, than a moment of revolutionary possibility. For the reasons
given above, the triumph of industrial technology was a fact by the end
of the 1820s and the ensuing aftermath, though major, could not be

decisive.

But it is true that, by Hammett's reckoning, "A climate of disorder
prevailed... which seemed to be moving the nation to the edge of
disaster." 100 As Page Smith described urban life in the early 1830s, "What
is hard to comprehend today is the constant ferment of social unrest and
bitterness that manifested itself almost monthly in violent riots and civic
disorders." 101 Gilje's research revealed "nearly 200 instances of riot
between 1793 and 1829 in New York City alone," 102 for example, and
Weinbaum counted 116 in that city just in the period of 1821 to 1837. 102
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston witnessed outbreaks on a similar
scale, often directed at bankers and "monopolists."

Michael Chavalier wrote a chapter entitled "Symptoms of Revolution"
against the backdrop of four days of rioting in Baltimore over exploit-
ative practices of the Bank of Maryland in the summer of 1835. 104 Also
in that year, disorders that caused Jackson to increasingly resort to the
use of federal troops, occasioned William Ellery Channing's report from
Boston: "The cry is, 'Property is insecure, law a rope of sand, and the
mob sovereign.'" 105 Likewise, the Boston Evening Journal pondered the
"disorganizing, anarchical spirit" of the times in an August 7, 1.835

editorial.

February, 1836 saw hundreds of debtor farmers attack and burn offices
of the Holland Land Company in western New York. 106 During 1836 and
1837 crowds in New York City broke into warehouses several times,
furious over high food, rent, and fuel prices. The Workingmen's Party in
New York, known as the Locofoco Party, has been linked with these

Axis I'm nt or Ami kh an Indumki.m r.M

"flour riots," but, interestingly, at the February 1X37 outburst most
closely tied to Locofoco speech -making, of fifty- three rioters anvslrd
none was a party member. 107

Despite the narrow chances for the ultimate success of 1830s uprisings,
it is impossible to deny the existence of deep and bitter class feelings, ol
the notion that the promise of equality contained in the Declaration of
Independence was mocked by reality. Serious disturbances continued: the
1 838 "Buckshot War," in which Harrisburg was seized by an irate, armed
crowd in a Pennsylvania senatorial election dispute, for example; the
"Anti-rent" riots by New York tenants of the Van Rensselaer family in
1839; the "Dorr War" of 1842 (somewhat reminiscent of the independenl
"Indian Stream Republic" of 1832-35 in New Hampshire) in whicli
thousands in Rhode Island approached civil war in a fight over rival state
constitutions; and the sporadic anti-railroad riots in the Kensington
section of Philadelphia from 1840 to 1842, were among major hostilities.

But ethnic, racial and religious disputes began fairly early in the decade
to begin to supersede class-conscious struggles, though often disparate
elements co-existed in the same occasions. This decline in consciousness
was manifested in anti-Irish, anti-abolitionist, and anti-Catholic riots
largely, and must be seen in the context of the earlier, principal defeat
of working people by the factory system, in the 1820s. Cut off from the
only terrain on which challenge could gain basic victories, could change
life, the upheaval in the 1830s was destined to sour. Characteristically,
the end of the 1830s saw both the professionalization of urban police
forces and organized gang violence in place as permanent fixtures.

If by 1830 virtually every aspect of American life had undergone major
alteration, the startling changes in drinking habits shed particular light
on the industrialism behind this transformation. The "great alcoholic
binge of the early nineteenth century," 108 and its precipitous decline in
the early 1830s, have much to say about how the culture of the new
technology took shape.

Drinking, on the one hand, was a part of the pre -industrial blurring of
the distinction between work and leisure. On up into the early decades
of the century, small amounts of alcohol were commonly consumed
throughout the day, at work and at home (sometimes the same place);
reference has been made above to the frequent, spontaneous holidays of
all kinds, and the wide-spread observance of "Blue Mondays" or three-
day weekends, "which run pretty well into the week," according to one
complaining New York employer. 109 Drinking was the universal accompa-
niment to these parties, celebrations, and extended weekends, as it was
to the normal work-day.

I .1 l-MI'N is < >i Kill 'VM

/

I Ik- lavmi oi r.'og simp, with its "unstructured, leisurely, and wholly
, ,,,|, i H.luclivc, even anli -productive, character," 110 was a social center well-
,„,!,-< I to a iidii mechanized age, and in fact became more than ever the
uM.kmgmaivs club as modernization cut him off from other emotional

.-otitis.

Hut drunkenness— binge-drinking and solitary drinking, most
in.poi -lantly -was increasing by 1820; significantly, alcoholic delirium, or
I iT/s, first appeared in the U.S. during the 1820s. 112 Alcoholism is an
obvious register of strains and alienation, of the inability of people to
i opt- with the burden of daily life which a society places on them.
( I rally, there is little healthy or resistant about the resort to such
id inking practices.

Temperance reform was a part of the larger syndrome of social
disciplining expressed in industrialization, as irregular drinking habits
were an obstacle to a well-managed population. Not surprisingly, factory
..wners were in the forefront of such efforts, having to contend with
noublcsome wage-earners who had little taste for such dictums as "the
Mcady arm of industry withers from drink." 113 Tyrell's examination of
Worcester, Massachusetts also found that "the leading temperance
i dormers were those with a hand in the work of inventions and of
innovations in factory and machine production." 114

While at one point workers considered a daily liquor issue a nonnego-
tiable right and an emblem of their independence, increasing reliance on
alcohol signified the debility that went along with their domination by
machine culture. The Secretary of War estimated in 1829 that "three-
quarters of the nation's laborers drank daily at least four ounces of
distilled spirits," 115 and in 1830 the average annual consumption of liquor
exceeded five gallons, nearly triple the amount 150 years later. 116

The anti-alcohol crusade began in earnest in 1826 with the formation
of the American Temperance Society, and other local groups such as the
Society in Lynn (Massachusetts) for the Promotion of Industry, Frugality
and Temperance. In the same year Beecher wrote his Six Sermons on
Intemperance, the leading statement of anti-drinking of the period, which
pronounced tippling to be politically dangerous. In Gusficld's excellent
summation, Beecher's writings "displayed the classic fear the creditor has
of the debtor, the propertied of the propertyless, and the dominant of
the subordinate— the fear of disobedience, renunciation, and

rebellion." 117

Temperance exertions in the 1820s revealed in their propaganda the
tenuous influence that the respectable held over the laboring classes
during the height of the battle to establish industrial values and a

,'S

Axis I 'mini or Ami km an Ini »i i\i kiai i\m

predictable work- force. As this battle was won, drinking suddenly leveled
off at the end of the 1820s and began to plummet in the early 1830s
toward an unprecedented low. ns As working people became domestical
ed, the temperance movement shifted toward the goal of complete absti-
nence, and in the 1840s a "dry" campaign swept the nation. 119

The other major reform movement, also arising in the mid- 1820s, was
for a public school system, and like the temperance campaign it was
explicitly undertaken to "make the dangerous classes trustworthy." 120 The
concept of mass schooling had arrived by the early Jacksonian period,
when innovative forms of coercion were demanded by deteriorating
restraints on social behavior, and auxiliary institutions came to the aid of
the factory.

The "willingness of early nineteenth century school promoters to
intervene directly and without invitation in the lives of the working
class" 121 was a consequence of the notion that education was something
the ruling orders did to the rest to make them orderly and tractable.
Thus "the first compulsory schools were alien institutions set in hostile
territory," 122 as Katz put it, owing largely to the spirit of autonomy and
egalitarianism that parents had instilled in their children. Faux noted, in
1819, the "prominent want of respect for rule and rulers," which he
connected with a common refusal of "strict discipline" in schools; 123
Marryat's diary reported that students "learn precisely what they please
and no more." 124

Drunkenness and rioting occurred in schools as well as in the rest of
society and educators interpreted the overall situation as announcing
general subversion; in an 1833 address on education, John Armstrong
declared, "When Revolution threatens the overthrow of our institutions,
everything depends on the character of our people." 125

Industrial morality — obedience, self-sacrifice, restraint, and order —
constituted the most important goal of public education; character was
of far greater importance than intellectual development. 126 The school
system came into existence to shape behavior and attitudes and thus
reinforce the emerging world. The belief that attendance should be
universal and compulsory followed logically from assumptions about its
importance. 127

Moral instruction was also amplified by the churches during the 1820s
and 1830s, an antidote to that tendency to "rejoice in casting off
restraints and unsettling the foundations of social order," 128 woefully
recorded by the Reverend Charles Hall. Sunday School and the society
for diffusion of religious tracts were two new ecclesiastical contributions
to social control in this period.

t'.l I Ml NTS «>!■ Kill ISA I

I . H )

The .Jacksonian period is also synonymous with the "Age of the
Asylum," a further development in the quest for civic docility. The
i rgularity and efficiency of the factory was the model for the penitentia-
i ics, insane asylums, orphanages, and reformatories that now appeared.
I '.m bodying uniformity and regularity, the factory was indeed the model,
;is we have seen, for the whole of society.

Religious revivalism and millenarianism grew in strength after the mid-
1 820s, and one of the new denominations to appear was the Millerites
(today's Seventh-day Adventists). On October 22, 1844 the group
gathered to await what they predicted would be the end of the world.
Their expectation was but the most literal manifestation of a feeling that
began to pervade the country after 1830; 130 without unduly elevating the
p re-industrial past, one can recognize the lament for a world that was
indeed ended.

The early stages of industrial capitalism introduced a sharpened
division between the worlds of work and home, male and female, and
private and public life, with large extended families eroding toward small,
isolated nuclear families.

Along with this process of increasing separation and isolation came a
focused repression of personal feelings, stemming from new requirements
for rationalized, predictable behavior. As planning and organization
moved ahead via the progress of the machine model of the individual,
the range of human sentiments became suspect, a target for suppression.
For example, whereas in 1800 it was not considered "unmanly" for a man
to weep openly, by the 1830s a proscription against any extreme
emotional display, especially crying, was gaining strength. 131 Similarly, in
child training this tendency became very pronounced; in the widely-
distributed Advice to Christian Parents (1839), the Reverend John Hersey
emphasized that "in every stage of domestic education, children should
be disciplined to restrain their appetites and desires." 132

The seventeenth century Puritans were hardly "puritanical" ^ about
sexual matters, and eighteenth century American society— especially in
the latter part of the century— was characterized by very open
sexuality; 133 during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, moreover,
much emphasis was placed on the arousal, pleasure, and satisfaction of
women. Aristotle's Master Piece, for example, was a very popular work of
erotica and anatomy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
predicated on the sexual interest of women. There were at least one-
hundred editions of the book prior to 1830— and no known complaints
about it in any newspapers or periodicals. 134
In 1831, the year that the last edition of Aristotle's Master Piece was

\M\

Axis Point oi- Amikk an Inimimkiai ism

published, J.N. Bolles' Solitary Vice Considered appeared, an anli
masturbation booklet of a type that would proliferate from the early
1830s on. 135 While the advice books on sex of the early part of the
century could be quite explicit concerning women's sexual satisfaction,
the trend was that "medical, biological, instructional, and popular
literature contained countless defenses of extreme moderation and self-
control." 136 The turning point, again, in this area as elsewhere, was the
1820s. By the 1840s the very idea of women's sexuality was becoming
virtually erased. In the middle years of the century Dr. William Acton's
Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs was a popular
standby; it summed up the official view on the subject thusly: "The
majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with
sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only
exceptionally." 137

Among working and non-white women (not exclusive categories,
obviously) this ideology had less impact than among those of higher
station, for whom the relentless quelling of the recognition of "animal
passions" caused vast physical and psychological damage. 138 The cult of
female purity, or cult of the lady, or "true womanhood," emerged among
the latter in the 1830s, stressing piety and domesticity. 139 This American
woman was now exclusively a consumer of her husband's income, at a
period when advertising developed on a scale and sophistication unique
in the world.

Not surprisingly, national expansionist policy came into its own now,
too. The hemispheric imperialism proclaimed in late 1823 — the Monroe
Doctrine — coincided with the beginnings of real Indian genocide, both
occurring, of course, against the backdrop of a gathering industrial
cancer. The Seminoles and Creeks were crushed at this time, an answer
to the "especially menacing" specter of a combined Indian and runaway
slave coalition: the First Seminole War was in large part undertaken "to
secure Indian lands and therewith deny sanctuary to runaway slaves." 140

From 1814 to 1824, Jackson had been "the moving force behind
southern Indian removal," 141 a policy inherited from Jefferson and one
which he completed upon becoming president in 1828. Indian destruc-
tion, surely one of the major horror talcs of the modern age, was more
than an ugly stain on American politics and culture; indeed, Rogin's
argument that its scope "defines for America the stage of primitive
capitalist accumulation," 142 is at least partly true. At the very least it
presaged the further acquisitiveness that blossomed in the Manifest
Destiny conquest spirit of the 1840s. But the more monstrous perhaps is
ils moral dimension, committed under Jackson's description of "extend-

l.i I Ml N IS i >l Kill ISAl

W

iih<. I lie area of freedom. " Mt .. wfllJ( . »

Tin: Red Man, as Noble Savage, had to disappear; he was savage
llu . t - a || The Dead Indian is obviously a more apt symbol tor the
'„ :ii cxtory of industrial capitalism, though the romantic use of the Indian
, c-aehed its height at the moment of capital's victory, when, by the 1830s
Nanue truly became an evil to be subdued, while the machine was the
Inuntainhead of all values that counted.

Nevertheless, voices and symbols of opposition survived Johnny
Appleseed (Jonathan Chapman), for instance, who ™ ^P e ^ ™
Indians during the first forty years of the ™^>™*^^^*
riches of a wholly non-productionist, ^^^^^'ZTu^Zt
such doubters of the period as Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, and . Mdwl£
Lee Clark Mitchell, among other contemporary scholars, has found, m
letters, diaries, and essays, the record of a popular sense of .deep
foreboding about the conquest of the wilds by technological progres
The victories of the dominant order have certainly never ^tely
erased this alternative spirit of refusal, a spirit renewing itself today.

THE PRACTICAL MARX

Karl Marx is always approached as so many thoughts, so many words.
Hut in this case, as for every other, there is a lurking question: What of
real life? What connection is there between lived choices — one's willful
lifetime — and the presentation of one's ideas?

Marx in his dealings with family and associates, his immediate relations
to contemporary politics and to survival, the practical pattern and
decisions of a life; this is perhaps worth a look. Despite my rejection of
basic conceptions he formulated, I aim not at character assassination in
lieu of tackling those ideas, but as a reminder to myself and others that
our many compromises and accommodations with a grisly world are the
real field of our effort to break free, more so than merely stating our
ideas. It is in disregarding abstractions for a moment that we see our
actual equality, in the prosaic courses of our common nightmare. A brief
sketch of the "everyday" Marx, introducing the relationship between his
private and public lives as a point of entry, may serve to underline this.

By 1.843 Marx had become a husband and father, roles predating that
of Great Thinker. In this capacity, he was to see three of his six children
die, essentially of privation. Guido in 1850, Francesca in 1852, and Edgar
in 1855 perished not because of poverty itself, so much as from his desire
to maintain bourgeois appearances. David McLellan's Marx: His Life and
Thought, generally accepted as the definitive biography, makes this point
repeatedly.

Despite these fairly constant domestic deficiencies, Marx employed
HeleneDemuth as maid, from 1845 until his death in 1881, and a second
servant was added as of 1857. Beyond any question of credibility, it was
Demuth who bore Marx's illegitimate son Frederick in 1851. To save
Marx from scandal, and a "difficult domestic conflict" according to Louis
Freyberger, Engels accepted paternity of the child.

From the end of the 1840s onward, the Marx household lived in
London and endured a long cycle of hardship which quickly dissipated
the physical and emotional resources of Jenny Marx. The weight of the
conflicting pressures involved in being Mrs. Marx was a direct cause of
her steadily failing health, as were the deaths of the three children in the
'50s. By July 1858 Marx was accurate in conceding to Engels that "My

1

u

Tiir I'kAriH ai Makx

wife's nerves are quite ruined...."

In fact, her spirit had been destroyed by 1856 when she gave birth to
a stillborn infant, her seventh pregnancy. Toward the end of that yi-at
she spoke of the "misery" of financial disasters, of having no money for
Christmas festivities, as she completed copying out work toward l'hv
Critique of Political Economy. Despite several inheritances, the begging
letters to Engels remained virtually non-stop; by 1860 at the latest,
Jenny's once very handsome make-up had been turned to grey hair, bad
teeth, and obesity. It was in that year that smallpox, contracted after-
transcribing the very lengthy and trivial Herr Vogt diatribe, left her deaf
and pockmarked.

As secretary to Marx and under the steady strain of creditors, caused
pre-eminently by the priority of maintaining appearances, Jenny's life was
extremely difficult. Marx to Engels, 1862: "In order to preserve a certain
facade, my wife had to take to the pawnbrokers everything that was not
actually nailed down." The mid-'60s saw money spent on private lessons
for the eldest of the three daughters and tuition at a "ladies' seminary"
or finishing school, as Marx escaped the bill collectors by spending his
days at the British Museum. He admitted, in 1866, in a letter to his
future son-in-law Paul LaFargue, that his wife's "life had been wrecked."

Dealing with nervous breakdowns and chronic chest ailments, Jenny
was harried by ever-present household debt. One partial solution was to
withhold a small part of her weekly allowance in order to deal with their
arrears, the extent of which she tended to hide from Marx. In July, 1869
the Great Man exploded upon learning of this frugal effort; to Engels he
wrote, "When I asked why, she replied that she was frightened to come
out with the vast total (owed). Women plainly always need to be
controlled!"

Speaking of Engels, we may turn from Marx the "family man" to a
fairly chronological treatment of Marx in his immediate connections with
contemporary politics. It may be noted here that Engels, his closest
friend, colleague and provider, was not only a quite notorious "womaniz-
er," but from 1838 on, a representative of the firm of Engels and Erman;
in fact, throughout the 1850s and '60s he was a full-time capitalist in
Manchester. Thus his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
was the fruit of a practical businessman, a man of precisely that class
responsible for the terrible misery he chronicled so clearly.

By 1846 Marx and Engels had written The German Ideology, which
made a definitive break with the Young Hegelians and contains the full
and mature ideas of the materialist concept of the progress of history.
Along with this tome were practical activities in politics, also by now

I \l I Ml NIS < »l- Kill ISAI

l i*>

„ ..-ivinp Ihrir characteristic stamp. In terms of his Communist Corre
....mhU-iuv Committee and its propaganda work Marx (also in .1846)

■ i ,ir<|- "There can be no talk at present of achieving communism; the
LouMH-oisie must first come to the helm." In June of the same year he
-,-„i instructions to supporters to act "jesuitically," to not have any
i , , r sc imc moral scruples" about acting for bourgeois hegemony. _

The inexorable laws of capitalist development, necessarily involving the
■,„■! itice of generations of "insufficiently developed" proletarians, would
l..iu L < capital to its full plentitude-and the workers to the depths of
enslavement. Thus in 1847, following a conference of professional
.-mnomists in Brussels to which he was invited, Marx publicly noted the

■ hsjistrous effect of free trade upon the working class, and embraced this
development. In a subsequent newspaper article, he likewise found
mlonialism with its course of misery and death to be, on the whole, a
r nod thing: like the development of capitalism itself, inevitable and
progressive, working toward eventual revolution.

In 1847 the Communist League was formed in London, and at its
second Congress later in the year Marx and Engels were given the task
<>{ drafting its manifesto. Despite a few ringing anti-capitalist phrases in
its general opening sections, the concrete demands by way of conclusion
: irc gradualist, collaborationist, and highly statist (e.g. for an inheritance
lax graduated income tax, centralization of credit and communications)
Ignoring the incessant fight waged since the mid-18th century and
culminating with the Luddites, and unprepared for the revolutionary
upheavals that were to shake Europe in less than a year, the Communist
Manifesto sees, again, only an "insufficiently developed" proletariat.

From this policy document arises one of the essential tactical mysteries
of Marx that of the concomitant rise of both capitalism and the
proletariat. The development of capital is clearly portrayed as the
accumulation of human misery, degradation and brutality, but along with
it grows, by this process itself, a working class steadily more "centralized,
united, disciplined, and organized."

How is it that from the extreme depths of physical and cultural
oppression issues anything but a steadily more robotized, powerless, de-
individualized proletariat? In fact, the history of revolts and mihtance ot
the 19th and 20th centuries shows that the majority do not come from
those most herd-like and deprived, but from those least disciplined and
with something to lose.

In April of 1848, Marx went to Germany with the Manifesto plus the
utterly reformist "Demands of the Communist Party in Germany." The
"Demands," also by Marx and Engels, were constituent of a bourgeois

I IN I'KA( I l( A I MAKX

revolution, not a socialist one, appealing to many of the elements thai
directly fought the March outbreak of the revolution. Considering Marx's
position as vice-president of the non-radical Democratic Association in
Brussels during the previous year, and his support for a prerequisite
bourgeois ascendancy, he quickly came into conflict with the revolution-
ary events of 1848 and much of the Communist League. Marx helped
found a Democratic Society in Cologne, which ran candidates for the
Frankfurt Parliament, and he vigorously opposed any League support for
armed intervention in support of the revolutionaries. Using the opportun-
ist rationale of not wanting to see the workers become "isolated," he
went so far as to use his "discretionary powers," as a League official, to
dissolve it in May as too radical, an embarrassment to his support of
bourgeois elements.

With the League out of the way, Marx concentrated his 1848 activities
in Germany on support for the Democratic Society and his dictatorial
editorship of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In both capacities he pursued
a "united front" policy, in which working people would be aligned with
all other "democratic forces" against the remnants of feudalism. Of
course, this arrangement would afford the workers no autonomy, no
freedom of movement; it chose to see no revolutionary possibilities
residing with them. As editor of the NKZ, Marx gave advice to
Camphausen, businessman and head of the provisional government
following the defeat of the proletarian upsurge. And further, astounding
as it sounds, he supported the Democratic Society's newspaper despite
the fact that it condemned the June, 1848 insurrection of the Paris
proletariat. As politician and newspaper editor, Marx was increasingly
criticized for his consistent refusal to deal radically with the specific
situation or interests of the working class.

By the fall of 1848, the public activities of Marx began to take on a
somewhat more activist, pro-worker coloration, as the risings of workers
resumed in Germany. By December, however, disturbances were on the
wane, and the volatile year in Germany appeared to be ending with no
decisive revolutionary consequences. Now it was, and only now, that
Marx in his paper declared that the working class would have to depend
on itself, and not upon the bourgeoisie for revolution. But because it was
rather clearly too late for this, the source of revolution would have to
come, he divined, from a foreign external shock: namely, war between
France and England, preceded by a renewed French proletarian uprising.
Thus at the beginning of 1849, Marx saw in a Franco-British war the
social revolution, just as in early 1848 he had located it in war between
Prussia and Russia. This was not to be the last time, by the way, that

I I I Ml N IN < >!■ Kl I USAI

I W

M;nx saw in the slaughter of national wars the spark of revolution; Ihi:
Wl n-kei-s as subject again fails to occur to Marx, that they could act— and
,1.(1 act on their own initiative without first having to be sacrificed, by
i hr generation, as factory slaves or cannon fodder. There were radicals
who had seen the openings to revolution in 1848, and who were shocked
hv the deterministic conservatism of Marx. Louis Gottschalk, for
example, attacked him for positing the choice for the working class as
between bourgeois or feudal rule; "What of revolution?" he demanded.
And so although Marx supported bourgeois candidates in the February
(1849) elections, by April the Communist League (which he had
abolished) had been refounded without him, effectively forcing him to
leave the moderate Democratic Association. By May, with its week of
street fighting in Dresden, revolts in the Ruhr, and extensive insurgency
in Baden, events— as well as the reactions of the German radical
community continued to leave Marx far behind. Thus in that month, he
closed down the NRZ with a defiant— and manifestly absurd— editorial
claiming that the paper had been revolutionary and openly so throughout

1848-1849.

By 1 850 Marx had joined other German refugees in London, upon trie
close of the insurrectionary upheavals on the continent of the previous
two years. Under pressure from the left, as noted above, he now came
out in favor of an independently organized German proletariat and
highly centralized state for the (increasingly centralized) working class to
seize and make its own. Despite the ill-will caused by his anything-but-
radical activities in Germany, Marx was allowed to rejoin the Communist
League and eventually resumed his dominance therein. In London he
found support among the Chartists and other elements devoted to
electoral reform and trade unionism, shunning the many radical German
refugees whom he often branded as "agitators" and "assassins." This
behavior gained him a majority of those present in London and enabled
him to triumph over those in the League who had called him a "reaction-
ary" for the minimalism of the Manifesto and for his disdain of a
revolutionary practice in Germany.

But from the early '50s Marx had begun to spend most of his time in
studies at the British Museum, where he could ponder the course of
world revolution away from the noisome hubbub of his precarious
household. From this time, he quickly jettisoned the relative radicahty of
his new-found militance and foresaw a general prosperity ahead, hence
no prospects for revolution. The coincidence of economic crisis with
proletarian revolt is, of course, mocked by the real history of our world.
From the Luddites to the Commune, France in 1968 to the multitude of

w

Till' I'kAl IK Al. MAKX

struggles opening on the last quarter o I the 201 h century, insurrection has
been its own master; the great fluctuations of unemployment or inflation
have often served, on the contrary, to deflect class struggles to a lower,
survivalist plane rather than to fuel social revolution. The Great
Depression of the 1930s brought a diminished vision, for example,
characterized by German National Socialism and its cousin, the American
New Deal, nothing approaching the destruction of capitalism. (The
Spanish Revolution, bright light of the '30s, had nothing to do with the
Depression gripping the industrialized nations.) Marx's overriding
concern with externalities — principally economic crises, of course — was
a trademark of his practical as well as theoretical approach; it obviously
reflects his slight regard for the subjectivity of the majority of people, for
their potential autonomy, imagination, and strength.

The distanciation from actual social struggles of his day is seemingly
closely linked with the correct bourgeois life he led. In terms of his
livelihood, one is surprised by the gap between his concrete activities and
his reputation as revolutionary theorist. From 1852 into the 1860s, he was
"one of the most highly valued" and "best paid" columnists of the New
York Daily Tribune, according to its editor. In fact, one hundred and
sixty-five of his articles were used as editorials by this not-quite-rcvolu-
tionary metropolitan daily, which could account for the fact that Marx
requested in 1855 that his subsequent pieces be printed anonymously.
But if he wanted not to appear as the voice of a huge bourgeois paper,
he wanted still more — as we have seen in his family role — to appear a
gentleman. It was "to avoid a scandal" that he felt compelled to pay the
printer's bill in 1859 for the reformist Das Volk newspaper in London. In
1862 he told Engels of his wish to engage in some kind of business:
"Grey, dear friend, is all theory and only business is green. Unfortunate-
ly, I have come too late to this insight." Though he declined the offers,
Marx received, in 1865 and 1867, two invitations which are noteworthy
for the mere fact that they would have been extended to him at all: the
first, via messenger from Bismarck, to "put his great talents to the service
of the German people," the second, to write financial articles for the
Prussian government's official journal. In 1866 he claimed to have made
four hundred pounds by speculating in American funds, and his good
advice to Engels on how to play the Stock Market is well authenticated.
1874 saw Marx and two partners wrangle in court over ownership of a
patent to a new engraving device, intending to exploit the rights and reap
large profits.

To these striking suggestions of ruling-class mentality must be added
the behavior of Marx toward his children, the three daughters who grew

.1 I'MI'NTS <)l Kill ISA!

W

In uKilurily under his thoroughly Victorian authority. In 1866 he insisted
mi economic guarantees for Paul LaFargue's future, criticizing his lack
<il "diligence" and lecturing him in the most prudish terms regarding his
intentions toward Laura, who was almost twenty-one. Reminding
I .aT'argue that he and Laura were not yet engaged and, if they were to
lie come so, that it would constitute a "long-term affair," he went on to
express very puritanical strictures: "To my mind, true love expresses itself
in the lover's restraint, modest bearing, even diffidence toward the
adored one, and certainly not in unconstrained passion and manifesta-
lions of premature familiarity." In 1868 he opposed the taking of a job
by Jenny, who was then twenty-two; later he forbade Eleanor from seeing
I .issagaray, a Communard who happened to have defended single-handed
the last barricade in Paris.

Turning back to politics, the economic crisis Marx avidly awaited in the
'50s had come and gone in 1857 awakening no revolutionary activity. But
by 1863 and the Polish insurrection of that year unrest was in the air,
providing the background for the formation of the International
Workingman's Association. Marx put aside his work on Capital and was
most active in the affairs of the International from its London inception
in September 1864. Odger, President of the Council of all London Trade
Unions, and Cremer, Secretary of the Mason's Union, called the
inaugural meeting, and Wheeler and Dell, two other British union
officials, formally proposed an international organization. Marx was
elected to the executive committee (soon to be called the General
Council), and at its first business meeting was instrumental in establishing
Odger and Cremer as President and Secretary of the International. Thus
from the start, Marx's allies were union bureaucrats, and his policy
approach was a completely reformist one with "plain speaking" as to
radical aims disallowed. One of the first acts of the General Council was
the sending of Marx's spirited, fraternal greetings to Abraham Lincoln,
that "single-minded son of the working class."

Other early activities by Marx included the formation, as part of the
International, of the Reform League dedicated to manhood suffrage. He
boasted to Engels that this achievement "is our doing," and was equally
enthusiastic when the National Reform League, sole surviving Chartist
organization, applied for membership. This latter proved too much even
for the faithful Engels, who for some time after refused to even serve as
correspondent to the International for Manchester, where he was still a
full-time capitalist. During this practice of embracing every shade of
English gradualism, principally by promoting the membership of London
trade unions, he penned his famous "the proletariat is revolutionary or

10

Till I'KACIICAI M,\K\

it is nothing 31 line, in a letter to the German socialist Ferdinand l.assallr.

Lassallc and his General Union of German Workers (AIMV)
harbored transparently serious illusions about the state; namely thai
Bismarck was capable of genuinely socialist policies as Chancellor of
Prussia. Yet Marx in 1866 agreed to run for the presidency of the ADAV
in the hopes of incorporating it into the International. At the same time,
he wrote (to a cousin of Engels): "the adherence of the ADAV will only
be of use at the beginning, against our opponents here. Later the whole
institution of this Union, which rests on a false basis, must be destroyed."

Volumes could be written, and possibly have, on the manipulation of
Marx within the International, the maneuverings of places, dates and
lengths of meetings, for example, in the service of securing and centraliz-
ing his authority. To the case of the ADAV could be added, among a
multitude of others, his cultivation of the wealthy bourgeois Lefort, so as
to keep his wholly nonradical faction within the organization. By 1867 his
dedicated machinations were felt to have reaped their reward; to Engels
he wrote, "we (Le. you and I) have this powerful machine in our hands."

Also in 1867 he availed himself publicly once more of one of his
favorite notions, that a war between Prussia and Russia would prove both
progressive and inevitable. Such a war would involve the German
proletariat versus despotic Eastern barbarism and would thus be salutory
for the prospects of European revolution. This perennial "war games"
type of mentality somehow manages to equate victims, set in motion
precisely as chattels of the state, with proletarian subjects acting for
themselves; it would seem to parallel the substitution of trade union
officials for workers, the hallmark of his preferred strategy as bureaucrat
of the International. Marx naturally ridiculed anyone such as his future
son-in-law, LaFargue— for suggesting that the proper role of revolution-
aries did not lie in such a crass game of weighing competing
nationalisms. And in 1868 when the Belgian delegation to the
International's Brussels Congress proposed the response of a general
strike to war, Marx dismissed the idea as a "stupidity," owing to the
"underdeveloped" status of the working class.

The weaknesses and contradictions of the adherents of Proudhon and
Bakunin are irrelevant here, but we may observe 1869 as the highwater
mark of the influence of Marx, due to the approaching decline of the
Proudhonists and the infancy of Bakunin's impact in that year. With mid-
1870 and the Napoleon ill-engineered Franco-Prussian War, we see once
more the pre-occupation with "progressive" vs. "non-progressive" military
exploits of governments. Marx to Engels: "The French need a drubbing.
If the Prussians are victorious then centralization of the working

I I IMIN IN ( »)■ Kill INAI

<-l;iss... I In- superiority of the Germans over the French in the world arena
would mean at the same time the superiority of our theory over
I'roudhon's and so on."

By July 1870 in an Address endorsed by the International's General
( ouncil, Marx added to this outlook a warning: "if the German working
el ass allows the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and
degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will
prove alike disastrous." Thus the butchery of French workers is fine and
K ood— but only up to a point. This height of cynical calculation appears
almost too incredible— and after the Belgians and others were loudly
denounced for imagining that the proletarian could be a factor for
themselves in any case. How now could the "German working class"
(Prussian army) decide how far to carry out the orders of the Prussian
ruling class— and if they could, why not "instruct" them to simply ignore
any and all of these class orders?

This kind of public statement by Marx, so devoid of revolutionary
content, was naturally received with popularity by the bourgeois press. In
fact, none other than the patron saint of British private property, John
Stuart Mill, sent a message of congratulations to the International for its
wise and moderate Address.

When the war Napoleon III had begun turned out as a Prussian
victory, by the end of summer 1870, Marx protested, predictably, that
Germany had dropped its approved "defensive" posture and was now an
aggressor demanding annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine provinces. The
defeat of France brought the fall of Louis Napoleon and his Second
Empire, and a provisional Republican government was formed. Marx
decided that the aims of the International were now two-fold: to secure
the recognition of the new Republican regime in England, and to prevent
any revolutionary outbreak by the French workers.

His policy advised that "any attempt to upset the new government in
the present crisis, when the (Prussian) army is almost knocking at the
doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly." This shabby, anti-revolution-
ary strategy was publicly promoted quite vigorously— until the Commune
itself made a most rude and "unscientific" mockery of it in short order.
Well-known, of course, is Marx's negative reception to the rising of the
Parisians; it is over-generous to say that he was merely pessimistic about
the future of the Commune. Days after the successful insurrection began
he failed to applaud its audacity, and satisfied himself with grumbling
that "it had no chance of success." Though he finally recognized the fact
of the Commune (and was thereby forced to revise his reformist ideas
regarding proletarian use of existing state machinery), his lack of

Ill]' l'KA( I K Al. M\K\

sympathy is amply reflected by the fact that throughout the (bniniuiu-'s
two-month existence, the General Council of the International spoke not
a single word about it.

It often escapes notice when an analysis or tribute is delivered well
after the living struggle is, safely, living no longer. The masterful
polemicizing about the triumphs of the Commune in his Civil War in
France constitutes an obituary, in just the same way that Class Struggles
in France did so at a similarly safe distance from the events he failed to
support at the time of revolutionary Paris, 1848.

After a very brief period — again like his public attitude just after 1848-
49 outbreaks in Europe — of stated optimism as to proletarian successes
in general, Marx returned to his more usual colors. He denied the
support of the International to the scattered summer 1871 uprisings in
Italy, Russia, and Spain — countries mainly susceptible to the doctrines of
anarchism, by the way. September witnessed the last meeting of the
International before the Marx faction effectively disbanded it, rather than
accept its domination by more radical elements such as the Bakuninists,
in the following year. The bourgeois gradualism of Marx was much in
evidence at the fall 1871 London Conference, as exemplified by such
remarks as: "To get workers into parliament is equivalent to a victory
over the governments, but one must choose the right man."

Between the demise of the International and his own death in 1881,
Marx lived in a style that varied little from that of previous decades.
Shunning the Communard refugees, by and large — as he had shunned
the radical Germans in the '50s after their exile following 1848-49, Marx
kept company with men like Maxim Kovalevsky, a non-socialist Russian
aristocrat, the well-to-do Dr. Kugelmann, the businessman Max
Oppenheim, H. M. Hyndman, a very wealthy social democrat, and, of
course, the now-retired capitalist, Engels.

With such a circle as his choice of friends, it is not surprising that he
continued to see little radical capacity in the workers, just as he had
always failed to see it. In 1874, he wrote, "The general situation of
Europe is such that it moves to a general European war. We must go
through this war before we can think of any decisive external effective-
ness of the European working class." Looking, as ever, to externalities —
and of course to the "immutable laws of history" — he contributes to the
legacy of the millions of World War I dead, sacrificed by the capitulation
of the Marxist parties to the support of war in 1914.

Refusing throughout his lifetime to see the possibilities of real class
struggles, to understand the reality of the living negation of capitalism,
Marx actively and concretely worked for the progress and fullness of

l.i i minis <>i kr.iusAi

I \

( apilalisl development, which prescribed that generations would have to
be sacrificed lo it. I think that the above observations of his real life are
important and typical ones, and suggest a consistency between that life
and his body of ideas. The task of moving the exploration along to
encompass the "distinctly theoretical" part of Marx, is expressly beyond
i lie scope of this effort; possibly, however, the preceding will throw at
least indirect light on the more "dis-embodied" Marx.

ORIGINS AND MEANING OF WWI

:|

,,|fji

World War I, in Jan Patocka's words, "That tremendous and, in a
sense, cosmic event" 1 was a watershed in the history of the West and the
major influence on our century. Regarding its causes, nearly all the
discussion has concerned the degree of responsibility of the various
governments, in terms of the alliance system (ultimately, the Triple
Entente of England, France and Russia and the Triple Alliance of
Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy) which, it is alleged, had to
eventuate in worldwide war. The other major focus is the Marxist theory
of imperialism, which contends that international rivalry caused by the
need for markets and sources of raw material made inevitable a world
war. Domestic causes have received remarkably little attention, and when
the internal or social dynamics have been explored at all, several
mistaken notions, large and small, have been introduced.

The genesis of the war is examined here in light of the social question
and its dynamics; the thesis entertained is that a rapidly developing
challenge to domination was destroyed by the arrival of war, the most
significant stroke of counterrevolution in modern world history. If the
real movement was somehow canceled by August 1914, it is clear that the
usual reference (in this case, Debord's) to "the profound social upheaval
which arose with the first world war" 2 is profoundly in error.

Some observers have noted, in passing, the prevalence of uncontrolled
and unpredictable violence throughout Europe prior to the war, perhaps
the most telling sign of the haunting dissatisfaction within an unanchored
society. This could be seen in the major nations — and in many other
regions as well. Halevy, for example, was surprised by the 1913 general
strikes in South Africa and Dublin, which "so strangely and unexpectedly
cut across the feud between English and Dutch overseas, between
Protestant and Catholic in Ireland." 3 Berghahn saw that Turkey as well
as Austria-Hungary "were threatened in their existence by both social
and national revolutionary movements."" Sazonoz's Reminiscences refer
to the sudden outbreaks of rioting in Constantinople, and to the
Dashnaktzutium, Armenian radicals, of whom it was "difficult to discern"
if they were more directed against Turkey or intent on fomenting a
revolution at home. 5 And Fierre van Paasen's memoirs tell of a social

, " > ( UilCilNS ANli Ml ANINii ()l WWI

peace disinlegialing in prewar Holland: "A new sjmil invaded Ihc
community, For one thing, the shipyard workers no longer drilled home
at nights in small groups or singles. They came marching home all of
them singing, singing as if they wanted to burst their lungs, so that the
windows rattled. What had come over these fellows*'" 6

Instead of analysis of this telling background, the coming of war is
typically trivialized by a concentration on the assassination of the
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the nature and duration of the
ensuing carnage falsified as a surprise development. In fact, neither of
these approaches to the meaning of the war hold up under a moment's
scrutiny.

a ^*? 6 I*? ° f *' thC SerWan militant who shot the Hapsburg
Archduke did not so simply plunge Europe into hostilities; this can be

See Au rSt A ° f aU by the fact that six weeks P a ssed between the June act
and the August mobilizations. Zeman writes of this: "Indeed, in all the
capitals of Europe, the reaction to the assassination of the heir to the
Hapsburg throne was calm to the point of indifference. The people took
little notice; the stock exchange registered hardly a tremor " 7

As for the "surprise" as to the length and design of the war itself, it
must be stressed that trench warfare-the hallmark of World War I was
anything but new. Employed 50 years before in the American Civil War

^f 1 Q04 n? 1 ? ' a ?l at Pale T na (1877 - ?8) ' aS in the R ^o-Japanese Ww
o 1904-05, it is little wonder that military authorities predicted it. Ivan

Bloch s six-volume The Future of War emphasized trench warfare and the

son* £L° der , n War; thC WOrk WaS discussed in rulin S circ ^ from the
lH90s on. The adjustment of the record brings us closer to the thesis of
war as a needed discharge of accumulated tensions, requiring a form and
duration equal to the task of extinguishing radical possibilities

L. T Hobhouse viewed domestic problems in Europe as successively
more clamorous, creating a crescendo of urgency. "Thus the catastrophe
ot 1914 was...the climax of a time of stress and strain." 8 Similarly, Stefan
Zweig wrote of the outbreak of war: "I cannot explain it otherwise than
by this surplus force, a tragic consequence of their internal dynamism
that had accumulated...and now sought violent release." 9 The scale and
conditions of the war had to be equal to the force straining against
society, in order to replace this challenge with the horror and despair
that spread from the battlefields to darken the mind of the 20th century

Beyond the initial value of war in promoting centralization and
acceptance of authority, a far larger objective can be seen. In Wells'
words, greater happiness, and a continual enlargement of life, has been

'.! I Ml - N IS <>!■ Kl'HI.SAI

1-1/

checked violently and perhaps arrested altogether. 31 m Vibrant before the
four years of death was the desire and expectation of significant change,
not to be confused with the bourgeois ideology of positivism, ossified and
insipid, which was being challenged in popular life. 11

The monotonous, uniform present of industrial society, complete with
Weberian forecast of increasing bureaucratization, was indeed becoming
more and more miserably palpable. And leftist ideology seems just as
increasingly threadbare as measured against this reality. War provided an
escape from both daily life and the chance of its transcendence. By 1914,
whatever emancipatory visions Marxism might once have represented
were moribund; with the war, anarchism, which had seemed to Laurence
Lafore "imposingly vigorous" 12 was also demolished.

To examine the generalized internal crisis and the means by which it
was successfully deflected and destroyed by World War I, the various
countries — beginning, in rough order, with the less developed and ending
with Germany and England — are surveyed here.

The act that eliminated the would-have-becn Emperor of Austria-
Hungary was by no means an atypical one: Russian Prime Minister
Stolypin had been assassinated in 191.1, as was Canalejas, Premier of
Spain in 1912, and King George of Greece in 1913, to cite other
prominent fatalities. In fact, there were several attempts upon the lives
of Hapsburg royalty during the imminent prewar years, and even more
than one against Franz Ferdinand on that particular notorious summer
1914 afternoon. All the more suggestive, then, that the Archduke paid his
state visit on the anniversary of Kossovo, the national day of that restive
vassal nation of the Hapsburgs. Similar in provocation would have been
a visit by the British royalty to Dublin on Easter Sunday in, say, 1916.
And in passing, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the universally
agreed upon figure for this and other Balkan dramas, the nationalist (or
nationalist student, more exactly), is rather too readily typecast. Valiani
noted the revival of anarchist affiliation and influence in Serbia and
Bosnia, 13 and it is well established that Franz Ferdinand's assassins were
hardly exclusively nationalist. War, of course, always requires a good
excuse, especially when the state's real enemies are, more clearly than
usual, its own citizenry; the Sarajevo outrage was tailor-made to the
needs of the ailing regime.

The latifundist system of feudal rule on the land, allied with a quite
usurious brand of capitalism, provided the background for a very potent
social revolutionary dynamic that outweighed even the nationalist-
separatist stresses of the exceedingly polyglot empire. In the ancient
capital, a descending lassitude mirrored the crumbling rule; the leitmotif

II

(>Kll.lN\ ANII Ml ANlNii <M VVWI

of countless works is Vienna's sinner atmosphere ..I ' soniethti.,. amuiw
visibly to an end.' 1 Hofsthmannlhars Klektra cries, ' ( an one cleeay like
a rotten corpse?" His striking play of the same name is the pc.fecl
artifact of imperial Vienna, in its vision of disaster. In fact, the drama is
an extremely apt allegory of Europe at large, portraying the obsessive
need for a bloodletting out of a terror of death

As Norman Stone put it, "Official circles in Austria-Hungary calculated
general conflict m Europe was their only alternative to civil war ■" Thus
the ultimatum served on Serbia, following the death by Serbians of Fran/
Ferdinand, was merely a pretext for war with Russia and that general
conflict. War was declared on Serbia, with the corresponding involvement
of Russia, despite the acceptance of the ultimatum; Serbia's capitulation
widely hailed as Austria's "brilliant diplomatic coup," therefore meani
nothing. The immense significance of Austria's internal problems
demanded war and a more complete reliance on its perennial school of
civic virtues, the Hapsburg army.

Very critical to the success of this tactic was the organizational
hegemony of the Marxian mass party over the working classes The
Austrian Social Democratic Party, most degenerate of the European left
was actually committed to the maintenance of the monarchy and its'
tederative reorganization. 15

When war came, it was billed as an unavoidable defense against the
menacing eastern behemoth, Russia. The left, of course, cast its
parliamentary votes in favor of war and immediately instituted war
measures against work stoppages and other forms of insubordination
Although some Czechs threw down their arms upon being ordered
against Russia, hostilities were initiated without serious resistance 16 But
in the worlds of Arthur May, "Disaffection and discontent among the
rank and tile" took only months before the prosecution of the war was
seriously affected."

Food riots were common by 1915 and had spread to the heart of
Vienna by late 1916. Professor Josef Redlich's journal recorded that the
population seemed pleased when Prime Minister Strugkh was shot to
death by a renegade Socialist in October 1916. The Social Democratic
Party was completely dedicated, meanwhile, to the "cooperation of all
classes, and it organized scores of peace meetings-not of an antiwar
variety^ but to restrain the masses from breaches of the "domestic

PC3CC.

With people wearied, bled dry by four years of apocalypse, rule was
preserved fohowing the collapse of the dynasty by the remaining servants
ot power. The Social Democrats continued their basic role with the

I .[ l-MI'NTS <>l Kll USAI.

■iv>

equally ant i revolutionary Christian Democrats and were to govern

Austria tor 15 years, paralleling in many ways that postwar prelude to
< irrman National Socialism, the Weimar Republic. In Hungary, six
months of Social Democratic rule was followed by the bureaucratic-
lolalitarian efforts of BelaKun's Hungarian Soviet Republic (with Lukacs
as Commissar of Culture); four months of this Leninist failure were
enough to usher in the Horthy regime, what was to be a quarter-century

of reaction.

War, in the case of Russia, did not prevent a revolution from occur-
ring, but its mammoth ravages dictated the instant deformation of that
revolution—the victory of the Bolshevik project. The class structure of
Romanov society was too bankrupt to avoid demise; Z.A.B, Zeman
wrote, for example, of the "amazing ease of the dynastic collapse in
Russia." 1 " But the unparalleled destruction and suffering of the millions
of combatants (and non-combatants) in itself rendered a whole, breathing

revolution impossible.

The Austro -Hungarian declaration of war on small, Slavic Serbia
enabled a barely sufficient response to the Kremlin's consequent call to
arms; Pan-Slavism, not Czarism, was the last pro-war chord that could be
successfully struck by a doomed regime. Russia's war with Japan had
been a clear attempt to direct internal ferment into calmer, patriotic
channels; defeat set off the 1905 revolution. In 1914, only a victorious
war could conceivably offer hope for the status quo. Barring war, "within
a short time," as Germany's Prince von Bulow wrote, "revolution would
have broken out in Russia, where it was ripe since the death of Alexan-
der III in 1894." 20

From 1909, various international incidents and crises, mainly in North
Africa and the Balkans, arose with regularity to try to divert popular
attention in Europe from the gathering social crisis. Throughout the
West, authority was deeply on the defensive in this final period, and
Russia is not an exception: since at least 1909 state weakness was a
glaring constant. By then the memories of post-1905 repression were
fading and "the temper of the factory workers was turning revolutionary
again," according to Taylor. 21 And discontent was rising even faster due
to the more reactionary policies of the regime following Stolypin's
assassination in 1911. When the workers of the Lena gold fields were
attacked by troops in April 1912, this act of savagery not only failed to
cow the oppressed, but in fact it aroused workers all over Russia to a
new wave of challenge. 22 In the two years before the war, the curve of
social disorder steadily mounted, meaning that another year of peace
would surely have seen new and even more serious upheavals.

•-ill

OkK.INN AND Ml AN INI. Ol WWI

Ldmund Wilson observed thai "by 19U a .ul l«JM there was a sl.ikr
wave even bigger than that of 1905." By the spring and early summr. o|
1914, a movement, initiated especially by the Baku oil workers ,„kI

ZlZT7° Per f W ^i St Petcrsbur S' ^ brought "the proletary
again to the barricades." 23 As Arno Mayer succinctly put it, "during the

m!Ur n T^ V^ indUStriaI UnreSt reachcd ""Paralleled

intensity, much of it politically and socially motivated." 24 Thus the ku„n

of August roared, the timing all but unavoidable. '

The war to save oppressed and threatened Slavdom, launched with a

momentary enthusiasm, was soon flagging. Meriel Buchanan's biography

of her father, the British ambassador to Russia, bemoaned "how brier

and trail was that spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice, how soon doubi

and despair, impatience, lassitude, and discontent crept in " 25 Widely

recounted was the lament of state ministers by mid-1915: "Poor Russia'

bven her army, which in past ages filled the world with the thunder of

its v,ctones...turns out to consist only of cowards and deserters'" 2 "

Certainly by the widespread mass strikes of January and February 1916

the civil truce had been definitively broken "

The anarchist tide rose swiftly during the war for a time, despite the
general draining effect of the gigantic bloodshed and the specific
disillusionment caused by the pro-war position of Kropotkin. This latter
accommodation to state power, widely seen of course as a betrayal of
principle, was in fact shared by a majority of Russian anarchist
ideo ogues, especially in Moscow. 27 The capitulation at the top led to the

£rf? ^ SS ? Syndicalism amon S ™«y anti-authoritarians, a more
practical, less "utopian" ideology. Another moment of the dimming of
radical perspectives. b

fnr^ tk ^ 1 ! k ^ R0Cker ~ i0Cated the reason for war ' m th e competition

ZZ^T th f- 'r 1 f ° r f^^' ignorin & with the MaixL, the
overarchmg domestic dynamic for an external, mechanistic etiology. And

, l 2 g r ? !°. Urge ° n thC tr °° pS 0f the Entente *> thefreater
killing of the Central Powers' counterparts evokes Marx and Engcls, who

could always be counted on to identify the more "progressive 1 state to
support in a given war.

th J^l COlIa ^ e ? f ^ Romanov autocracy in March 1917 demonstrated
hat the spiritual exhaustion of the proletariat was not so advanced as to
allow the greatly overdue dynasty any further borrowed time. Lenin, who
t m^ivTf l by ^ revolutionar y outbreak in Russia, 28 could see
n™ t t ° d T 1 T smte g ration of ^e provisional government was

soon to be a reality. His victory in that maimed dimension and the
consequent Bolshevik counterrevolution is an all too familiar tale in its

l 1 IMIN IS ( »!■ KlIHSAI

5 I

tlc-hiils.

Idly, lurlmlent through the 1890s and the first decade of the century^
;n lived at the prewar years in a volatile state. Propaganda in favor of
e< mquest and expansion had failed to distract the submerged classes from
I he essential; at the elections of 1913 only three Nationalists were elected
in the chamber. 29

The months preceding the war were marked by rioting and strikes on
a wide scale, culminating in the famous Red Week of early summer.
1 during demonstrations by anarchists and republicans, violence broke out
on the Adriatic coast; this week of June 1914 was to see its quick spread,
into a general strike and countrywide riots. F. L. Carsten provides
particulars: "In the Romagna and the Marches of Central Italy there
were violent revolutionary outbreaks. Local republics were set up in
many smaller towns, and the red flag was hoisted on the town hall of
Bologna. Officers were disarmed; the military barracks were beseiged in

many places." 30

The populace displayed, in outlook and methods, an anarchic,
autonomous temper that found its reflection in the anti-war position of
the whole left. In this moment the syndicalist discovery of the myth of
the nation seemed far away; that a national syndicalism was but a year
off could hardly have been forecast with practical results. An overwhelm-
ing sentiment for neutrality canceled Italy's alliance with Austria-
Hungary and Germany, and rendered war far too dangerous a card to be
played in hopes of defusing class war— for the time being.

By the spring of 1915, every major European nation had been at war
for over half a year, with Italy being drawn steadily toward the abyss
despite popular resistance. A friend of von Bulow states in May, "how
the [Italian] Minister of the Interior had said to him that if there were
a plebiscite there would be no war." 31 Zeman, likewise speaking of May
1915, observed that "Rome came to the verge of civil war." 32 Foreign
elements engineered, with paid demonstrators, pro-interventionist riots
against the neutralists— who received no police protection and suffered
a vicious pro-war press. Rennell Rodd and others who thought they saw
spontaneous enthusiasm for war there were largely deceived.

In mid-May the Turin workers declared a general strike, while the
Socialist Party debated its position regarding Italy's apparently imminent
participation in the war. "All the factories were closed, all public services
completely paralyzed. The strike was total among all categories of
workers," according to Mario Montagna's memoirs, quoted by John
Cammett. Cammett continues the narrative: "The entire working force
of the city gathered before the Chamber of Labor, and then slowly

''"*-' <)K K. INS AND M I AN INC i < >l WW I

marched -without the urging of speeches toward the Prefecture to
protest the war."" lighting ensued but the strike came to an end on May
19, chiefly due to the isolation and demoralization brought on by the
Party's refusal to support this self-authorized initiative. Meanwhile, the
"revolutionary" syndicalists had become the first section of the Italian
left to advocate war, arguing that reactionary Austria must not be
allowed to defeat progressive France. On May 23, Italy entered the war.
Mussolini's radically rightward shift, in full swing at this time, is a
particular symptom of the intense frustration caused by the left's inaction
and betrayals. The young Gramsci, in fact, showed a passing sympathy for
Mussolini's new pro-war position and his disgust with the passivity
enforced on the proletariat. 34 When oppositional ideology and its arbiters
assume such a renunciation of movement, the way is prepared for
steadily more backward forms for thwarted class energies to assume.
Forward avenues seem completely blocked and there was thus little
alternative to the channel and dictates of war.

Giampero Carocci, among others, noted that after three and a half
years of war, "the majority of workers and some of the peasants
(particularly in the Po Valley, in Tuscany and in Umbria)" still "longed
for revolution" 35 — but the pervasive postwar discontent was of an
anxious, pessimistic kind.

_ The occupation of the factories, in the fall of 1920, bears the full
imprint of a proletariat cheated and blocked by the left and battered by
war. Despite the enormous scale of the takeovers, both the industrialists
and the government simply let the neutered movement take its course,
without state interference. In early September, the apparent conquests
provoked some alarm, to be sure, but the ever more weary and confused
workers stayed politely in the factories under control of the unions and
the left; 36 "communist leaders refrained from every initiative," reported
Angelo Tasca. 37 The restless and anxious occupiers saw neither the outlet
to expand their action nor the energies by this point, to forge new ones.
The seizure of virtually the entire industrial plant of Italy— not to
mention the extensive land takeovers— simply died away, leaving a feeling
of total defeat. 38 Mussolini's accession to power followed this fiasco by
less than two years.

Recent historical analysis, especially that of A. James Gregor, has
demonstrated the substantive continuity between Italy's most militant
socialism— syndicalism— and fascism, with the war serving as essential
mode of transition. The career of Mussolini, from activist and major
theoretician of syndicalism to activist and architect of fascism, by way of
World War I, is only one connection. 39 Syndicalism, then national

I '.I I MINIS (>!■ KllMSAI

IM

syndicalism, provided the core social and economic content of ascendant
fascism. 'I 'he congruence begins with a common mass-mobilization,
industrialization basis but does not end there; the essentials of nascent
fascism were, in Gregor' s words, "the product of syndicalist lucubrations,
syndicalist sentiment, and syndicalist convictions." 40

At the end of the century, French socialists and anarchists were swept
into the mainstream of controversy over the legal treatment of Dreyfus,
an army officer convicted of espionage. The arms of the republican
family hence embraced new elements, whose integration had been open
to question; in Dreyfusism we see an early appearance of the popular
front, the recuperative answer to reaction, real or otherwise.

The depths were quickly plumbed. It is here that the Socialist
Millerand, scandalizing the slow, became the first of his ideological brand
to enter a government. A government, by the way, that had been recently
disgraced by the infamous Panama finance scandal and which counted as
its minister of war General Gallifet, butcher of the Commune. Minister
of War Millerand would be the most chauvinist of prewar officials, later
joined by his Socialist colleague, Albert Thomas, wartime minister of

munitions.

It is not a surprise that so-called revisionism led to nationalism, nor
that this course and its electoral methods would alienate the oppressed
with its crass opportunism. In fact, there were many signs of a wide-
spread disinterest in politics; Clemenceau's seventeen-point social reform
program of 1906, for example, elicited no popular response. 41 An acute
Cabinet instability began to emerge, due in part to the fact that the
enrages of the far left made it increasingly harder for Marxists to
cooperate with the center left. Oron Hale averred that the working class
movement drifted away from parliamentarism toward radicalism in the
five years before 1914. 42 And it was just before this period that Sorel,
with customary acidity, warned: "A proletarian violence which escapes all
valuation, all measurement, and all opportunism may jeopardize
everything and rule socialistic diplomacy." 43

But even in terms of orthodox political maneuvering, light is shed upon
the threat to the existing order. An order, one might add, exhibiting such
signs of decay as persistent financial scandals. The amazing murder of
the editor of Figaro by the finance minister's wife brought these to new
heights in March 1914.

The April elections, whose chief issue was the 1913 law prescribing
three years' military service, returned "the most pacific chamber the
country had ever known," in the words of Alfred Cobban. 44 The conscrip-
tion law, by the complete failure of nationalist-rightist candidates, had

I>|

OKKilNS AND Ml ANING HI WWI

Sk'

1 j l-Ml-INTN (»l Kl 1 IJVM

1,1

been clearly repudiated.

Albrccht- Carre, Taylor, and others have spoken of this shift away from
militarism at a time when France, according to von Bulow, "was the only
European country in which in certain influential quarters, not in the
people, it was justified to talk of 'war fever/" 45 Prince Lichnowski,
German ambassador to England, provided a still more complete picture
in a diary entry of April 27: he described the French people's calm and
"thoroughly pacific mood," while noting the difficulties which internal
affairs presented to the governments. 46

The April polling "proved," in Cobban's words, "that even in the
existing state of international tension French opinion was profoundly
pacific and non-aggressive." 47 President Poincare, in June, was forced to
appoint a left-wing regime under Viviani. Reversal of the conscription
law was the first order of business; nevertheless, the radical and socialist
deputies agreed not to press for this in exchange for vague promises
regarding future passage of an income tax law, an obvious betrayal.

When the war crisis was played out in early August and Juares, dean
of the left, was assassinated by a chauvinist fanatic, it was Viviani who
issued the left's call for nationalist unity; at this moment of spontaneous
anti-war demonstrations, he announced that, "in the serious circumstanc-
es through which our country is passing, the government counts on the
patriotism of the working class."

That the proletariat would have been the object of fear is evidenced by
its growing militancy. Whereas in the 1890s there had been hundreds of
small, local strikes, there were 1,073 in 1913, involving a quarter of a
million workers. A good deal of alarm was generated by the scale and
persistence of the strikes, seen by many as "symptoms of a profound
unrest and social sickness," according to David Thomson. 48 Strikes of
postal and telegraph workers in Paris called the loyalty of state employ-
ees into question, while agricultural workers' strikes often led to riots and
the burning of farm owners' houses.

Radical tendencies on the terrain of work cannot, however, be
attributed to prewar syndicalism with much accuracy. Syndicalist ideology
proved an attraction for a time, due to revulsion with the dogma of
socialist reformism, but there was— according to Stearns and others — no
positive correlation between syndicalist leadership and strike violence, for
example. 49 In fact, syndicalist leaders had to combat violence and
spontaneous strikes just like any other brokers of organized labor.
Syndicalist unions served the same integrative function as the others and
manifested the same movement toward bureaucratization. It is hardly
surprising that after 1910 there was growing talk of a "crisis of

.viuliralism."

During the first decade of the century, Gustave Herve's doctrine of
liilal military insurrection against the officer class became quite popular.
I lie Ualevy saw that "no sooner conceived, it spread like wildfire to
many countries outside France." 50 He added that on the eve of war it was
"still rampant in the rank and file of the French army." 51

Herve, editor of La Guerre Sociale, had called for revolution as the
response to mobilization for war. But increasingly the socialist statesman,
when war came he climaxed his anti-war career by begging to be allowed
to serve in the army. Recalling Viviani's pro-war speech over the bier of
Juares, we find a fast evaporation of internationalist verbiage and observe
how thin some of this rhetoric had been all along. The young males of
the nation marched, leaving behind debasing contradictions of the left

with a sense of relief.

By the end of 1916, however, desertions were occurring at a rate
estimated at 30,000 a year, Spring 1917 saw wholesale desertion replaced
by outright mutiny, causing open panic among the military high
command. Whole divisions from the Champagne front were involved, for
example, amid cheers for world revolution, for firing on the officers, and
for a march on Paris. 52 But exhaustion and a sense of futility, built up of
the war's mammoth violence and the long list of confusions and
disillusionments that predated the war, were joined by the universal
united front of unions and the left, to enforce the war and s^guard

class society.
France was the grand mutilee of the war: 1,400,000 (dead, one of every

24 in the land. Out of all this, not even the post-war parodies of
revolution would visit France.

Although the United States stands apart from Europe's traditions and
conditions, it is also true that revolution, or iits approach, is a >Jorld
phenomenon as of the era under scrutiny. Taking a very few words'
detour, many features paralleling prewar Europe are discernible in the

American situation.

Henry May found that "During the prewar years, passion and violence
seemed to many observers to be rising to the surface in all sorts of
inexplicable ways."" And as in Europe, organized ideology could not find
its vehicle in this upsurge. The tame Socialist Party was ebbing after
having reached its peak in 1912, and the I WW, syndicalist alternative,
failed to have much impact at any point.

The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, sitting between 1910
and 1915, concluded that unionization was the answer to a violence, in
Graham Adams' words, "which threatened the structure of society." 54

A

I.M.

ORKilNS AND MlANINd <)l WW!

This recommendation was hailed by moderate and radical unionists
alike, 53 and brings to mind the advice of a few that the 1 WW's industrial
unionism was the specific brand needed to stabilize American capital
relations. In fact, government-sponsored unions established the con t ml
apparatus of scientific management, under the War Industries Board, and
survived long enough to administer the crucial blows to the three major
post-war strikes, those in coal, steel, and Seattle, in 1919.

John Dewey had predicted that the war would introduce "the begin
nings of a public control," and defended it thusly as a needed agency of
socialization. 56 But America's entry was far from basically popular; Ellul
concluded that U.S. participation "could be produced only by the
enormous pressure of advertising and total propaganda on the human
psyche." 57

Zcman quotes a far from atypical, if anonymous, historian: "We still
don't know, at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful
decision to bring the U.S. into the First World War." 58 John Higham
provides an acceptable if understated reply: "Perhaps a vigorous assertion
of American rights functioned... to submerge the drift and clash of
purpose in domestic affairs." 59

Before examining the two most developed countries, Germany and
England, something of the depth of the prewar turmoil— and its pacifica-
tion — can be seen in even the briefest glimpse at cultural changes.

Stravinsky, whose Le Sucre du Printemps virtually incarnated the
promise of a new age, reminds one that the new music was noticeably
supranational in its composition and appeal. 60 Between 1.910 and 1914,
more precisely, nationalism receded as a force in music, as it had in other
fields. In painting, the movement toward pure abstraction emerged
simultaneously and independently in several countries during the five
years preceding the war. 61 Cubism, with its urgent re-examination of
reality, was the most important element of the modern school and by far
the most audacious to date — notwithstanding the frequent and entertain-
ing accusation, in Roger Shattuck's words, that it was "an enormous hoax
dreamed up by the hashish-smoking, pistol-carrying, half-starved
inhabitants of Montmartre." 62

Alfred Jarry's nihilistic anarchism, especially in his Ubu plays, 63
constituted a one-man demolition squad, over a decade before Dada. In
Apollinaire, the new freedom and urgency in poetry, especially in French
poetry, is obvious. Apollinaire, however, can also be viewed as an art-
historical metaphor: having reached his height from 1912 to 1914, he
volunteered in 191.4 and was wounded in 1916. His passion and spontane-
ity were drained away, replaced by patriotism and a sense of artistic

I '.I IMl'N IS <)l kill ISAI

!Y/

discipline; he died of his head wound in the last month of the war,
November l l M8. Apollinaire recalls vividly the condition of Jake in
I lemingway's The Sun Also Rises, emasculated by the war.

Shortly before the war, a group of young players, eventually known as
i he "hypcrmodcrn" school, revivified chess in practice and principle, as
exemplified most brazenly by Breyer's "After 1. P-K4, White's game is in
Hie last throes." 64 This arcane case aims at underlining the point that
throughout culture, in every area, an unmistakable daring, straining at
limits was underway. "More freedom, more frankness, more spontane'*
had been regained (in the decade before 1914) than in the prev'
hundred years," as Stefan Zweig looked back on it. 65

The war drew a terrible dividing line across the advance of all this.
first battle cry of Dada in 1916 was already really the end of it, and i
modernist movement of the 1920s acted out a drama conceived,
dedicated and developed before the war.

The most anti-bourgeois moments of futurism, all of which were
certainly pre-war, prefigured Dada in content and also stylistically (e.g.,
the use of incendiary manifestos). "In postwar Dada, the Futurist
enthusiasm had been pacified, ironized and introverted," according to R.
W. Flint. 66

Shattuck mentions the "disintegrating social order" and a "sporty
proletarian truculencc" inspired by the avant-garde. 67 The lines of
inspiration and energy were probably flowing, most importantly, the other
way around but the connection itself is valid.

In H.G. Wells' Joan and Peter the younger working class generation is
described as "bored by the everlasting dullness and humbug of it all." 68
If Paul Ricoeur could ask, over 50 years later, "if there is not, in the
present-day unrest of culture, something which answers correlatively to
the fundamental unrest in contemporary work," 69 his question also fits
the earlier world perfectly. For that previous unrest of work, the
technological speedup of 1914-18 gave the answer; the "struggle against
idiosyncrasy," toward completely standardized tools and tasks, received
its final, critical impetus from the war. 70 "The time of full mechanization,
1918-1939," to use Siegfried Giedion's phrase, 71 was inaugurated.

Getting back to culture, a revolution of art forms gave clear testimony
to the social crisis — not that the revolt against the rule of forms was
always confined there.

German expressionism, a pinnacle of pre-war cultural revolt, aimed not
only at shattering conventions but at the construction of a "utopian
order, or disorder, believed to be freer and more life-enhancing than any
to be found in the advanced industrial world just then approaching a new

OKKilNS AND M|.,\NIN(. ()| VVVVI

hcjshl ofdevdopmcm," in ihc judgment ofllilu,,, Kramer '

Jnc aspirations and innocence cif th,.«,» .-, •

-tar 1907, aired •^ZSTS'S^'rSS

March 1909 was the war a Wn**- , P t- Alreac ty m

«£HK525£S£5s

resistance to a b" a ^

aboard the S s wl ! \7 * th,s context the na ™I indiscipline

ret"!?™ re Sd s^fr n " *? ^ ° f 19t4 iS Siil
forced an immediate and „r h v ? aCh ° n ° f the 1 ' 300 crcw ™n

T „i„ g *pK r res sw their d — s >

Arthur Rosenberg described the political and social tension of

r.l.l.Mf'N'IS ( >]■' K 11' I ISA I

y

Germany as "typical of a prerevolutionary period," concluding that
without war in 1914, "the conflict between the Imperial government and
the majority of the German nation would have continued to intensify to
a point at which a revolutionary situation would have been created." 80
Chancellor Bcthmann-Hollweg on the eve of war complained of the
absence of nationalist fortitude in the land, lamenting this as a "decline
of values," and a "spiritual degeneration." Complaining further of what
he saw as the ruling classes' "solicitude for every current of public
opinion," he defined his war policy to Riezler as a necessary "leap into
the dark and the heaviest duty." 81

At the same time, it is rather clear that this rising crisis, requiring tl.
war to stem it, was not at all the doing of the left. Of the Socia.
Democrats and their millions of adherents a hollowness was manifest.
DA. Smart wrote of the "widely felt stagnation in the party" 82 in 1913;
Spengler, in the introduction to his Decline of the West, saw both the
approaching world war and a "great crisis... in Socialism." Far from
inconceivable, then, is the notion that the rulers feared a breakdown of
their dependable official adversaries, not the party or unions themselves,
especially given the signs of uncontrolled movement.

Industrial anger, in the shipyards, for example, was on the upswing and
was most often directly combatted by the unions. The alienation of trade
union membership, which was to characterize the latter part of the war,
was strongly developing: local groups were breaking away from the
central confederation in textiles, paint and metals. 83

The Social Democratic Party, a function of the trade unions, was a
loyal handmaiden of the state; its support of government tax bills made
possible the military alternative, guaranteeing a harvest of proletarian
cynicism. In 1914, Austin Harrison put it another way: "All kinds of men,
German bankers, for example, often voted for the Socialists." 84 The
workers' penchant for "sudden, unorganized" strikes, which has puzzled
many commentators, underlined the contradiction and its threat.

During July, various Party leaders met with Bethmann-Hollweg,
enabling him to reassure the Prussian Ministry of State on July 30 as to
the left's abject loyalty: "There would be no talk of a general strike or of
sabotage. " 8S Utilizing the socialist tradition of defending war by advanced
powers against less developed ones as progressive, "opposition" and
government were in agreement on anti-czarism as the effective public
banner.

While making plans for preserving the Party machinery, Social
Democracy voted unanimously for war credits on August 4, with an
accompanying statement which stressed imperialism as inevitably

<)KK.|N.S AND Ml AN IN(, < >| WW I

generating war mid explicitly refused any lespnu.sibiliiy for the war
Robert Looker aptly termed this "a depth of political and moral
bankruptcy...ot such enormity that it went far beyond the crimes of
particular leaders or parties." 86

Rosa Luxemburg in early 1915 wrote that "the collapse itself is without
precedent in the history of all times." 87 But it is interesting that she
uphed the war (as legitimized by its enemy of autocratic Russia) for
literally years until public pressure was overwhelmingly against if
similarly, she was neither in the lead of the rising of November 1918*
which released her from prison, or of the Spartacist revolt, which she'
grudgingly backed. The Social Democrats— and the unions— were co-
responsible with the army for managing the war effort in general. Their
police role most importantly was the investiture of all the military
authorities' security measures with a fading aura of "socialism" toward
the prevention of popular uprisings. When Luxemburg wrote in 1916 that
■i WOrl( L war has de cimated the results of 40 years' work of European
socialism," it would have been far more accurate to say that war
revealed those results. And as if this role, in bringing on and protecting
the process, were not enough, the Social Democrats, as the effective
agency of state power surviving the war, drowned the abortive postwar
rebellions in blood. Of course, the road to new horrors was wide open
As Lukacs recorded, "I witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany and I
know very well that very many young people at that time adhered to
fascism out of a sincere indignation at the capitalist system." 89

Returning for a moment to the actual arrival of war, there was indeed
a sincere "indignation" reigning in 1914. Part of this was a nihilist
dissatisfaction by many of ruling class backgrounds. Hannah Arendt
detected, among those most permeated with the ideological outlook and
standards of the bourgeoisie, a common absorption— with "the desire to

r! C * C , mm ° f thiS Wh ° lc WOrld of fake securit y> fake cul *ure, and fake
lite. Lrnst Junger expressed an exuberant hope that everything the
elite knew, the whole culture and texture of life, might go down in
storms of steel." 91

At the brink there was a certain relief, as well, caused by the decision
itself War gave a release to the exhausted nerves caused by the tension
ot weeks ol wa .ting-followed, commonly, soon afterward by a confused
despair. - J

In October 1 9 1 4, the diary of Rudolf Bindung, a young calvary officer,
already contained virtually the whole lesson of the war: "An endless
reproach to mankind...everything becomes senseless, a lunacy, a horrible
bad joke ot peoples and their history...It was the end of happy endings

I 'I IMIN IS ( >!■ Kill ISAI

iii hie ;is in ai 1/"'

Never before, and nowhere more so than in England, had power —
■ i hi mm ic, political, administrative, military — achieved such a high degree
nl consolidation. Yet at this apogee its actual fragility was becoming
lulpable, in the tendency, in England and across Europe, toward
unlettered and unpredictable mass opposition. That there existed a
widespread challenge to the cohesion and integrity of nationalist states
i', unmistakable.

The crises since 1909 regarding North Africa and the Balkans, above
.ill, have been mentioned; "foreign affairs" progressed into a much closer
parallel to its "domestic" counterpart; with a much larger qualitative
diversion finally needed to transcend the mounting social disharmony.
The Agadir, Morocco, crisis of July and August 1911 exemplifies this
development. During the seamen and dockers' strike, which was marked
by unprecedented violence, especially in the ports of Liverpool and
London, the arrival of the German gunboat Panther in Agadir became
l he occasion for growing official furor. When railway workers joined the
strike, troops were called out and fighting ensued. The clash at home was
settled on emergency terms, thanks to the Moroccan issue. Thereafter,
domestic industrial warfare and foreign crisis both seemed to grow with
equal intensity.

Another area of outbreak in England was a reaction to bourgeois
suffocation, as seen in the strange physical fury of the votes for women
cause. The mad fortitude exhibited by feminists in the period of 1910-
1914 — including pitched battles with police, and arson of cricket
pavilions, racetrack grandstands, and resort hotels — certainly belied the
utterly tame objective of female suffrage, an obvious reason for
characterizing the movement as an outlet for suppressed energy.
Reverend Joseph Bibby wrote of the suffragettes, "who set fire to our
ancient churches and noble mansions, and who go about our art galleries
with hammers up their sleeves to destroy valuable works of art." Having
felt this explosion and the growing proletarian resolve, Bibby in 1915
welcomed the "chastening" effects of the war on these passions. 94

The prewar Edwardian epoch was an age of violence wherein,
according to Dangerfield, "fires long smoldering in the English spirit
suddenly flared, so that by the end of 1913, Liberal England was reduced
to ashes." 95 The memoirs of Emanuel Shinwell also testify to this
quickening time: "The discontent of the masses spread, the expression of
millions of ordinary people who had gained little or nothing from the
Victorian age of industrial expansion and grandiose imperialism." 96

The seeding time of 1914, in its ferment and fertility, seemed more

Id. !

( )KI( .INS AND Ml-ANINC 1)1 WWI

than ripe for increasingly radical directions. k.C.K. l-nsor fell (hal an
undistractcd concentration upon home issues may well have brought a
revolution, especially, he thought, as reflected by the "prewar loss ol
balance about home rule." 97

The social and parliamentary impasse over self-determination lor
Ireland—whether it should encompass the whole of the country or
exclude Ulster in the north— boiled over in the summer of 1914 The
south was ready to fight for a united Irish home rule, the loyalty of
English troops was crumbling, and it looked, to R.J. Evans, for instance
as if Britain was at last breaking up through her own weakness and'
dissension.

Colin Cross wrote, apropos of the crisis over Ireland— and the
industrial strife and suffrage violence as well— that "Had there been no
European war in Summer 1914, Britain might well have lapsed
into...anarchy." As Irish workers and peasants moved toward revolt a
divided England appeared "nearer to civil war than at any time since the
16th century," according to Cross."

The whole English party system began to founder at the time of the
Irish dilemma, especially given the split in the army. James Cameron
summed up this moment with some eloquence: "From a hundred obscure
places in Britain, from small-time barbers and ice-cream dealers and
Diplomatic Secretaries the message went back to the European Foreign
offices: the United Kingdom, if you could call it such, is riddled with
dissension; indeed, there is the considerable likelihood of civil war " 1(W

io^ NiCOlSOn MW thC back S round of th e industrial upheavals of
1910-1914, with its unfolding "revolutionary spirit," as creating veritable
panic among the upper classes; this "incessant labor unrest" plus the
home rule clash brought the country, in his view, "to the brink of civil
war. 01

Plainly, class tensions were becoming unbearable, "too great to be
contained in the existing social and world setting," in the words of Arthur
Marwick. 102 In 1911 William Archer had conjectured that some "great
catastrophe might be necessary for a new, viable world social order " 103
For England, as elsewhere, the whirlpool of contestation had grown
critically turbulent over the four years leading up to mid-summer 1914
The cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-
minded of my people" George V warned participants of a Buckingham
Palace conference on July 21, 1914. 304

Indeed, it can be argued that to look more closely at the attitudes
assembling the social crisis is to see nothing less than a nascent refusal
against the whole miasma of modern organizational mediation.

I'.l I Ml NIS < )!■ Kill IN.AI

1(.l

A major social welfare enact men I, for example, the National Insurance
Ai-I of 1911, served only to increase the discontent of the laboring
classes. 1 "' And it was this act that accounted for growth in the trade
unions, as the union bureaucracies provided functionaries needed for its
administration. More distance from the workers, a greater closeness
between unions and government. A 1912 bill proposing to greatly extend
the franchise met with universal indifference. 306

The Labor Parry, voice of the unions and proponent of social
legislation, likewise struck no chord with the populace; owing largely to
the repulsion its bureaucratic nature evoked among the young especially,
it engendered no enthusiasm at all.

But the voracious appetites at large could be clearly seen in the many
major labor battles from 1910 on— and in their propensity for arson,
looting, and violence, as well as the strong preponderance of unautho-
rized, anti-contract wildcat work stoppages. Halevy saw the unrest as
"verging at times on anarchy," and determined that it was a "revolt not
only against the authority of capital but against the discipline of trade
unions" 107 — as if union discipline was not an essential element of capital's
authority.

By 1912, syndicalism, and its close cousin, guild socialism, were
attracting much attention. But popular excitement was actually a bit more
elusive, not surprising since these projections, staffed by union officials
and based on union structures, were all but indistinguishable from
industrial unionism itself.

Unexceptionally, English unions, too, were strengthened by the war,
but worker rebellions managed to continue, against high odds. The whole
summer of 1916, for instance, featured much resistance throughout the
provinces in England and along the Clyde to the north. By this time, and
versus the disabling wartime array of forces, the struggles were not only
against the state and the employers but especially in opposition to the
union administrations. New mediation was called for and provided by the
shop steward movement of union reform, a diversion essential to the
containment of the workers. The Whitely Councils, a form of co-
determination which increasingly emphasized the role of unions, was
another wartime development aimed against proletarian autonomy. The
parliamentary committees at work on a council formula recognized that
the constant strife was the doing of the "undisciplined," not the unions.
They "wanted to find a cure for the malaise that, before the war, had
every year weighted more heavily on industry, and, in consequence, on
all of English politics." 108
A "Triple Alliance" among the miners', transport workers', and

' <>KH;iN\ AND M| ,\NIN(. or VVWI

archies of e tht AlLn" e H f "^ ** ^^ ^ ™^ '-'-■

niSSvlto A ' Ut m '^ CaSC broke out ^^ally and

unotticidlly. The Alliance was not, according to GA Phillips ■■
concession to the pressures of rant a „* n ■?■/ rniuips, n

create effeefve and complete control of the respective bodL -°
It took 50 years for Crecov^to fe W " reVOlUt '° n "" SmaShed -

TAYLORISM AND UNIONISM

Jenkins has observed that "The impression has begun to get about that
the Industrial Revolution is not going to work out after all." 1 In light of
the profound malaise of blue and white collar workers, the decline of
output per worker since 1973, and increasing signs of a pervasive anti-
union sentiment complementing anti-management restiveness, Jenkins'
remark does not seem so shocking. The 1973 Health, Education and
Welfare report, Work in America, remarked, in a similar vein, that
"absenteeism, wildcat strikes, turnover, and industrial sabotage (have)
become an increasingly significant part of the cost of doing business." 2

The location of this quote from the HEW report in the section titled,
"The Anachronism of Taylorism" is suggestive. Because of many
mistaken notions about scientific management's historical role, much of
industrial society is misunderstood. The genesis of Taylorism as
"scientific management," and the developing relation of this system to
trade unionism are especially crucial.

When Taylor began his efforts at the Midvale Steel Company in the
1880s, several members of the American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers were likewise interested in labor management. Industrial capitalism
was running up against renewed resistance from the growing ranks of
labor, still committed to a sense of work integrity and craftsmanship.
Task management, or scientific management as it came to be called,
began to take shape in the eighties as the way to break the worker's
threatening resistance. The heart of this approach is the systematic
reduction of work into discrete, routinized tasks, totally separated from
any policy decisions about the job. Taylor realized that employees exert
a vital influence because they possess crucial talents needed in any
productive process. As he put it in his Principles of Scientific Manage-
ment, "foremen and superintendents know, better than anyone else, that
their own knowledge and personal skill falls far short of the combined
knowledge and dexterity of all the workmen under them." 3 For capitalism
to be firmly in control, it must monopolize information and techniques
as surely as it controls the rest of the means of production. The worker
must be permitted only to perform certain specific narrow tasks as
planned by management.

(,(>

AVI.OHISM AND I IN |c»N ISM

Naturally, it made sense to publiely promote scientific management as
geared directly to problems of profit and productivity, although is,

mdceT o Pr ° d r i0n - '"J ^ ^ that time C « P«*'^ «
Antr 1 fr™ * 1 °" e ° f P roductivit y- Giedion's comparison of

American and German industry shows that Germany's greater reliance
on worker sk,U was cheaper than the American tendency to mechanic

poiwdf ^ ° dUCti0n v,° f T , ayl ° riSm W3S P™ aril y a »<="> "-T ev-

fechnl » Th ? Se ' " th f. a matt6r ° f CCOnomics or "™™"
technology. The proponents of the new regimentation sought to invest it

SST 2 fJKr* t0 evoke a theorefal ***** -3"

,h. D n SP M e these P s <= ud °-S"entific apologies for the Taylorist approach
the public rapidfy developed a very negative view of it. As the Talr

wh^ P f t W f SUrprking Candor > scientif - management was
widefy seen as "the degradation of workmen into obedient oxen under
the direction of a small body of experts-into men debarred from
Sn r partlClpatlon in thdr work '' 6 The public's accurate evaluation of
T?t ^Wf^tPnwto finds its source in the contempt in which

aethlchem Steel Taylor desenbed the iron handler he encountered as
stupid phlegmatic, and ox-like.' Yet, despite attempts to downgraded*?
subjects^ saentific management tracts are full of admonitions to proceed

~e U n fed?/ "" """^ " ""» "**>* '«<* tha ™
bas^ The T» f % re ° rgamZe a Pkm ° n the scientific management

satota J i n^?; r c s; wamed empioycrs to ^ s « k « ««>

sabotage, to proceed with cunning so as to infiltrate under false
appearances, and to expect opposition at every step.' The Strugs e
concerned progressive attempts to debase work "> Sg

detr'thTlvntT ^ ° f management «*» P e ™nncl Journals" makes it
c car that scientific management is the foundation of work organization
everyday expenences bring the point home with painful clanrl

TZ7n7Thf tront ^

laylor and it has engendered serious opposition. The works of

Braverman Marglin, and others since the mid-70s disluss the

ocal/pohbca, control essence of Taylorism. What is less unde tood

andT/role of "^ * - ""*** ^^ ™ k ™ and C «S

ana tne role ot unionism in it.

The two standard works on the subject, McKelvcy's AFL Attitudes

Unions (m5) argue that organized labor switched from a hostile attitude
toward Taylorism before WWI, to a warmly receptive one thereafter

I .1 I -Ml NI.S ( )l Kl'H ISM

l<>7

litis jtul^t'iiK-nl is mistaken. The error stems from the perennial
confusion of union attitude with rank and file attitudes. It would be much
more accurate to say that workers seem to have opposed scientific
management all along, while the unions seemed only briefly opposed, but
have never really been against it.

Turning first to the union attitudes toward Taylorism in the pre-War
period, we find anything but concerted opposition. In 1889, for example,
when Taylor first presented his ideas to the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, John A. Penton, ex-president of the Brotherhood
of Machine Molders, joined the discussion of Taylor's paper. This former
union official, speaking "as a workman," was more lavish in his praise
than any of the others. Urging that the paper be put into the hands of
every employer and employee, Penton termed it "perhaps the most
remarkable thing of its kind I ever heard in my life. I can sympathize
with every word. His paper, I think, is a landmark in the field of political
economy." 12

In 1907, David Van Alstyne of the American Locomotive Company
secured an agreement with the molders' and blacksmiths' union for the
introduction of Taylorism in the company's U.S. and Canada shops.
Though the molders and blacksmiths thus were prevented from fighting
the degrading methods, the unorganized machinists in Pittsburgh walked
out, "seething" with anger. 13

Commons provided the cardinal reason for the unions' absence of
hostility to Taylorism: "...the unions have generally come to the point of
confining their attention to wages — that is, to distribution — leaving to
employers the question of production." 14 If either McKelvey or Nadworny
had examined collective bargaining agreements reached prior to World
War I, 15 they would have most likely discovered the "management's
rights" clause found in every U.S. union contract until the early 1980s.
This clause vests the sole right to set work methods, job design,
assignments, etc. with management; this is of fundamental importance in
understanding why unionism could not oppose scientific management or
any other kind of management system. If is easy to see why, when
Taylorism became a public issue in 1911, AFL officials could not have
found historical grounds for opposition. 16 Thus, when Nadworny
mentions the arrangement made between Plimpton Press and the
Typographical Union in 1914, whereby the union agreed to accept
scientific management in return for closed shop recognition, or the
arrangement between the New York garment industry and the Interna-
tional Ladies Garment Worker's Union in 1916, involving the same
exchange, these arc not aberrations.

K.S

T.\ VI ( )«[.SM AN I » I in

H 'NI'.M

lii tiK-t, well before ilu- War Ihe idea l>e/-;m spi ending that uninniza-
t iuii, with its standard "management's rights" da use contracts, was the
best approach for fitting the Taylorist yoke on the workers. The efficacy
of I Ins "trojan horse" tactic of union mediation led Thompson to
prescribe industrial unionism over the AFL's craft unionism as the best
way the secure the Taylor system in industry. Describing "one plant
where scientific management was fully developed and in complete
operation, the management has itself authorized and aided the organiza-
tion of its employees," Thompson went so far as to urge recognition of
I he Industrial Workers of the World, to secure "the necessary unanimity
of action" in linking all the workers, not only the skilled ones, to
Taylorism. 17

The ostensibly radical IWW might seem an unlikely candidate for the
job of Taylorizing workers, but several Wobbly spokesmen actually saw
in scientific management much of value toward stabilizing and rationaliz-
ing production "after the Revolution." And from the rest of the
American Left, many other sympathetic voices could be heard. Enthusi-
asm for the system seemed to cut across ideological lines. Lenin's support
ol Taylorism is well-known, and John Spargo, an influential American
Socialist, denounced everything about the Bolshevik Revolution save
1 -enin's adoption of scientific management. 18

While the official union and radical spokesmen for the workers were
finding no fault with scientific management, the workers were acting
against it on their own. An attempt to introduce Taylorism at the huge
Rock Island government arsenal in 1908 was defeated by the intense
opposition it aroused. It is interesting that these "unorganized" workmen
did not appeal to a union for help, but confronted the setting of piece
rates and the division of tasks by themselves— and immediately demand-
ed that the method be discontinued. Likewise, the beginnings of
Taylorism at the Frankford arsenal were defeated by the hostility of the
("unorganized") employees there in 1.910 and 1911. In October, 1914, the
3,000 garment workers of Sonnenborn and Company in Baltimore walked
out spontaneously upon hearing that Taylorism was to be installed. 19

The case of Taylorism at the U.S. arsenal at Watertown, Massachusetts
in 1911 clearly demonstrates the need for not confusing unions with
workers, "organized" or not. If this is as close as unions came in practice
to opposing the new system, it is safe to say that they did not oppose it
at all. When the idea of Taylorizing Watertown first arose in 1.908,
Taylor warned that the government managers must have the complete
system. "Anything short of this leaves such a large part of the game in
the hands of the workmen that it becomes largely a matter of whim or

I'.l I MINIS < »!■ Kll I ISAI

Hi l >

caprice on their pari as to whether they will allow you to have any real
results or not."'"

It is clear that Taylor himself mistook the quiescence of the AFL
unions, which represented various arsenal workers, for passivity on the
part of the employees. He counseled a Watertown manager in 1910 "not
to bother too much about what the AFL write (sic) concerning our
system," and in March, 191 1, just before the strike, he tried again to allay
any management fears of worker resistance by pooh-poohing any AFL
correspondence which might be received in the future. 21 He knew the
unions would not seriously interfere; his elitism prevented a clear
appraisal of worker attitudes.

When the time-study man, Merrick, openly timed foundry workers with
a stop-watch, action was forthcoming immediately. Although union
members, they did not call the union, but instead drew up a petition
demanding the cessation of any further Taylorist intrusions. Being
rebuffed, they walked out. Joseph Cooney, a molder in the foundry,
testified early in 1912 to the Congressional committee examining Taylor's
system, that there had been no contact between the workers and any
union official and that the strike had been completely spontaneous. 22
Though an overwhelming majority of Watertown employees questioned
by a consultant (hired by a group of workers) felt that the unions had no
interest in agitating against scientific management, 23 the International
Association of Machinists publicly proclaimed union opposition to the
system shortly after the 1911 strike. Because this public opposition by the
IAM in 1911 is practically the sole evidence supporting the thesis of pre-
War union hostility in Taylorism, 24 it deserves a closer look.

In 1909, as McKelvey notes, the initial features of scientific manage-
ment were installed at Watertown, without the slightest protest from the
unions, including the IAM. 25 At about this time, the National League of
Government Employees began to make inroads on the IAM, due to the
dissatisfaction of the latter group's members. The rival organization had
drawn away many members by the time of the 1 911 strike, 26 and the IAM
was thus forced to make a show of opposition if it wished to retain its
hold among the workers. In similar fashion, the International Molder's
Union had to give grudging support to a strike of Boston molders which
had occurred without so much as informing the local union. The union
leaders involved frequently made statements showing their actual support
of Taylorism, and a careful reading of the 191 1 AFL Convention record,
also cited as evidence of anti-Taylorism by the unions, shows that Samuel
Gompers avoided attacking directly the new work system in any
substantial way.

I AVI OKISM AN! i I JlNIUNlNM

I he l< )> s, with uinimism's public embrace ol scientific mii.m^ii.nil
and the tailing away of union membership, was a victorious period to.
raylonsm. The age of the consumer began from the systematic <lcsh uc
tion of much of the last autonomy of the producer. With the invaluable
aid of unions, a healthy share of the content of work lives had bee.

th?r, ^ "^ the laCk ° f militanCy and initiative f™ workers in
the early 1930s stemming directly from the technological processes to
which they were enslaved.- The recent re-awakening of the'struggle tor
a he of quality and meaning is informed with the knowledge that work
itself is the major issue. It is unfortunate that the confusion about
laylonsm and unionism continues, inasmuch as it bears heavily on an
understanding of what trade unions really are 2S

UNIONIZATION IN AMERICA

Throughout the Left there is a wrong impression of the labor struggles of
the Depression, which obscures our understanding of the nature and origin
of the increasingly anti-union "revolt against work" of today.

Trade unions in the 1920s were generally in a weak and worsening
position. While union membership constituted 19.4% of non-agricultural
workers in 1920, only 10.2% were organized by 1930. The employee
representation plans, or company unions, of "welfare capitalism" were
being instituted as substitutes for unionism, in an effort at stabilized,
peaceful industrial relations.

There were some, however, who even before the Crash realized that
independent unions were essential for effective labor-management
cooperation. In 1925, for example, Arthur Nash of the Golden Rule
Clothing Company invited Sidney Hillman's Amalgamated Clothing
Workers to organize his employees. Mr. Nash explained it this way: "I
had a job that I could not do, and 1 just passed the buck to Mr.
Hillman." Gerard P. Swopc, president of General Electric, tried as early
as 1926 to persuade the AFL to organize a nation-wide union of
electrical workers on an industrial basis. Swope believed that having an
industrial union might well mean "the difference between an organization
with which we could work on a business-like basis and one that would be
a source of endless difficulties." In 1928 George Mead wrote "Why I
Unionized My Plant," describing in glowing terms his bringing the paper
makers' union to his Wisconsin employees. Also in 1928, Secretary of
Labor Davis asked that year's AFL convention to eliminate jurisdictional
squabbling and get on with the kind of mass organizing that business
desired. Another example of the pacifying, stabilizing possibilities of
unionization followed the spontaneous strike movement of Southern
textile workers in 1929. Commenting on AFL efforts to organize the
union-less and uncontrolled mill workers, the Chicago Tribune in early
1930 expressed its support: "The effort of the Federation to organize the
mill workers of the South deserves the endorsement of far-seeing
businessmen throughout the country."
But with the onset of the Depression, the weakness of the AFL and its

' INHINI/AIIUN IN Ami ki< a

»;'Jill "»'un ;i IM ik, : ,cIi luvanir rvrn .11,11c obvious. With the (rend towaid
fewer skilled workers, the federations attempts to sell itself lo indusliy
:.s a frank y peace-keeping institution were increasingly out of touch will,
■is canabiht.es. The Crash, moreover, did not awaken the craft union

aiders to a new awareness of the changing industrial order. Noted
businessman Edward Louis Sullivan classified the AFL as simply

read 10 nary." • -'

In the early 1930s, some labor leaders became involved with a group
ol lar-sighted businessmen who saw the need for mass unionization John
K Lewis and Sidney Hillman, destined to play major roles in the
ormulation of the National Recovery Act of 1933 and the formation of
Mic ( IO, came to realize by 1932 that government and business might be
enlisted in the cause of industrial unionism. Gerard Swopc, the above-
mentioned president of GE, unveiled his Swope Plan in 1931 with the
help of employers like Chamber of Commerce president Henry I
I larnman Self-government in industry, via extended trade associations
which would operate outside anti-trust laws, was the basis of the plan An
essential facet was to be the unionization of the basic industries with
""ions possessing the same kind of disciplinary power over the workers
;is ihc trade associations would exercise over individual firms

In their enthusiasm for a controlled, rationalized corporate system,
Ihese abor and business leaders were as one. "Lewis and Hillman, in the
c-.nl differed little .from Gerard Swope and Henry I. Harriman," in the
words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. President Hoover labeled these plans
sheer fascism. By 1932, in fact, the government stood committed to
abors right to organize. Pre-dating the NRA by a year, the Norris-
LaGuardia Act not only outlawed the "yellow-dog" contract and certain
kinds ot injunctions but fully sanctioned the right to collective bargaining
Section 7a of the NRA became the focus of attention after i£
enactment in June 1933, however, and the reason seems two-fold The
guarantee in 7a of labor's right to collective bargaining had the weight
of a strong resurgence of labor unrest in 1933, as compared to the
relative quiescence of 1932. Fully 812,000 workers struck in 1933
whereas only 243,000 had struck in 1932.

The second reason for the utilization of Section 7a was that it was part
of a whole stabilization program, which embodied the Swope Plan-type
thinking on the need for a near-cartelization of business and X
eurtailment of much competition. Swope, not surprisingly, was one of the
NRA s main architects— along with John L. Lewis

With the NRA, the full integration of labor into the business system
came a step closer to fruition. In the context of a continuing depression

I'.l I'MIN'IS < )!■ Kilt ISA1

I'M

.Hid increasing worker hostility, the need for industrial unionism became
more and more apparent to government leaders. Donald Richberg, an
author of both Norris-LaGuardia and NRA, decried craft unionism's
lailure to organize more than a small minority, and saw industrial unions
.is the key to industrial stability. As labor writer Benjamin Stolberg put
il in his "A Government in Search of a Labor Movement," "The old-
fashioned craft leader is through, for he is helpless to express the
increasing restlessness of American labor." And Stolberg knew that
President Roosevelt saw the need for unions, in order to safely contain
I hat restlessness: "NRA was wholly an administrative measure.... It shows
that Mr. Roosevelt believes that what American industry needs desper-
ately is the recognition and extension of the trade union movement."

Concerning FDR, there is ample evidence that Stolberg is correct and
that Roosevelt consistently held to a basic belief in collective bargaining.
As Assistant Secretary to the Navy, he sat on the executive board of the
National Civic Federation, that early and important organization of heads
of business and labor formed to promote amity through contracts and
close communications. As Governor of New York, Roosevelt had been
impressed by Swope's arguments and "had talked to John Sullivan of the
State Federation of Labor in New York about the possibility of unions
being organized in plants like General Electric," according to Frances
Perkins.

Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor, recounted the President's advice to
a group of businessmen: "You don't need to be afraid about unions....
You shouldn't be afraid to have them organize in your factory. They
don't want to run the business. You will probably get a lot better
production and a lot more peace and happiness if you have a good union
organization and a good contract."

It was not surprising that Roosevelt's choice to head the NRA, General
Hugh Johnson, "appreciates that industry cannot function without
organized labor," in the judgment of Stolberg. Nor is the opinion of
Fortune, that most prestigious of business periodicals, surprising as
regards the NRA as vehicle for unionization. In December 1933 Fortune
implied disapproval of the Ford Motor Company as being "ruled
primarily by fear," while noting that firms unionized under NRA's 7a had
the joint strength of both NRA and union officials to limit strikes. The
phony, staged strike became a safer bet at this time, owing to the NRA
presence. In August 1933, for example, the ILGWU staged a strike of
New York dressmakers, carefully arranged by union and NRA officials
to last exactly four days and bring the unorganized dressmakers into the
union and under an NRA code.

I Ink >n I/a hon in Ami i.: n \

VVI , . v ,,. All.,,,, ,„„ ;,„<•„,,„ ,„,,. „ ,, s|ljk ;

k-lcal lc«, nmUcwaikou.s. Louis Ada.nk- «,.k-I...I,-,1 lha, "The IV ,
hon as a wh ( ,lc... S abota i! cd or suppressed all important ,„,
I""" 1 m(,wmcnts in 1«33 and ,934, especially tho in ,

far rnm el " I™*™ T the Bfidges cement on the coast"

Under lot'i T™/ 2* ^ ° ne exCe P tion occu "^-

Under the leadership of Harry Bridges, the organizing of West Co .si

and ne™.» ' "* bargaimng ' the Strike was both unavoidable

The settlement of the 1934 strike marked the beginning of a chanee in
c nse 10 s f San Frandsco c 8 waterfront s 8 trie

c nt.nued sporadically until 1937, the employers had begun to see hat
• II umon officialdom really wanted waS the closed shop with the due
oon„f?r r r r membershi P " starts. And for this, unfon dtipline

,m the,. T t0 thC Se ™ Ce ° f »*™g an absenee of t c'uMe
<>m the longshoremen. Roosevelt, as indicated above, learned this

Z 1 earlie ^ ^ SeCTetaiy 0f ^ n °«"S the ack of ^

House alarm over the SF general strike, commented on the nower of

m on officials over union members: "Sensible labor leatolffl^

he men to get back to work, that this was no time for an uCnside ed

sympathetic stnke, even if it was also in their own interest

wielC leSs J A^f " ' " ^ ° f ** " giflCd > tc "™ental, po^r-

^S^rf^STT""^ ' ab0r With ° Ut Wh0Se fiance
no decrees of the Maritime Commission are likely to keep the peace "

I he pro-Bridges article praised him and other labor leades for their

—on of stable, regularized labor relations to shipped other

Z'rcSs Th P e e r de "* FT" » j ° in fa a ~2

i honW be added h ^ te ****<•■" The union chiefs declined,

■should be added, because they feared membership reaction to

I I I Ml N IS ( >]■ Kill ISA!

/^

institutionalized labor management collusion of this kind. Hernslein
cm in ucs: "Uul the C Committee served a purpose— to commit San
1-uiMcisoi's employers to collective bargaining." And it was those with
experience with Bridges and the ILWU, notably the two leading owners
.if steamship lines, Roger Lapham and Almon Roth, who led the way,
loaning the SF Employers council which had as its purpose "the
recognition and exercise of the right of the employers to bargain

collectively."

Given the effective control over workers that only unions can manage,
it: was not at all out of place that San Francisco employers should have
strived for collective bargaining, nor that the promotion and coordination
of contracts quickly spread up and down the Pacific Coast.

Meanwhile 1934 and 1935 saw a deepening trend toward labor
militancy and violence. The bloody Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo
and the street warfare of striking Minneapolis truck drivers were among
the most spectacular of 1934, a year in which 40 strikers were killed. In
less than eighteen months, between the summer of 1933 and the winter
of 1934, troops were called out in sixteen states. The important point is
that the AFL could not control this activism; though it might stall and
sell out the workers, it could not provide the kind of organization that
could enroll all of a firm's workers into a single, industry-wide union and
bring peace under collective bargaining. Workers resisted the conserva-
tive craft form of organization and the constant jurisdictional bickering
that accompanied it and began to experiment with new organizational
forms. For example, union locals in Hudson and Oldsmobile plants
seceded from the AFL in August, 1934, to elect representatives from
their own ranks and negotiate democratically. The Wall Street Journal
discussed speculation as to the radicalism of the independents for several
days, in articles such as "More on the Secession" and "Disaffection
Spreads." Labor partisan Art Preis provides some revealing figures: "By
1935, the membership of the AFL federal auto locals had dwindled from
100,000 to 20,000. When the Wolman Board of the NRA took a poll in
1935 to determine 'proportional representation' in a number of plants in
Michigan, of the 163,150 votes cast, 88.7% were for unaffiliated
representatives; 8.6% for leaders of AFL federal locals."

If the NRA and its Section 7a were intended to fix labor "into a semi-
public unionism whose organization was part of a government plan," in
Stolberg's words, Washington in 1935 yet hoped to make good on the
1933 beginning. From the point of view of industrial peace, the impetus,
as we have seen, was certainly stronger by 1935, when the Wagner bill
was being considered. Supporters of the measure, like Lloyd Garrison

/(,

I 'NKiNl/AIJoN in Ami tu

I \

iiiid Harry MilJis, put forth the 'Vii;.ii, ... •• ,

together in concert with government bUS ' nCSS to W< " k

people had helped and was always very grateful to them » w, r 1

I I IMIM'I'. ( H kl I < IS.\1

//

i oiitain Hit* nation's workers.

John 1,. Lewis, the conservative and ruthless head of the United Mine
Workers, was lo lead the move toward industrial unionism. A Republican
up to and during the 1932 presidential campaign, he ruled the often
i esistant miners by dictatorial methods. The servility and corruption of
i he union begat constant revolts from the ranks against Lewis. A miner
interviewed by Studs Terkel testified to this state of affairs when he
spoke of a UMW field representative being tarred and feathered "for
tryin' to edge in with management," and declared that the "chairman of
the local was thick with the superintendent of the mine." In October
1933 Fortune related the miners' hatred of Lewis during the 1920s and
the "Lewis Must Go" campaign of 1932. Generally quite pro-Lewis, the
article mentioned "his repressive tactics in the union," and concluded
with the judgment that the prospect of organizing 30,000,000 workers did
not frighten Lewis— nor, by very strong implication, should it frighten

business.

With Lewis' famous— and no doubt calculated— punch to the jaw of
Bill Hutcheson, boss of the Carpenters Union and a major craft unionism
spokesman, a split from the AFL was signaled. The blow, at the 1935
AFL convention, enabled Lewis to represent himself to the bitter and
distrustful industrial workers as a new kind of leader. "By attacking
Hutcheson, he was attacking the trade unionism these workers so bitterly
hated.... Hutcheson symbolized to millions of frustrated workers that
craft-unionism policy that had defeated their spontaneous organizations,"
in the words of Saul Alinsky.

Within a month of the October convention, the Committee for
Industrial Organization was formed by Lewis and a few others in the
Federation who headed industrial-type unions. By early 1937, locals of
those unions affiliated with the new CIO were expelled from all city and
state AFL councils, making the break final and official.

The CIO began with a feudal structure in which all officers were
appointed by Lewis, giving it an important advantage over its AFL
predecessors. Whereas the AFL officials needed decades to emasculate
the fairly autonomous city and state central councils and establish
centralized national power, the CIO chiefs established complete control
over collective bargaining and strike sanction almost from the outset.
Leaders of both the AFL and CIO were "agreed on the necessity for
circumscribing the increasing militancy in the basic industries.... No one
in the AFL or in the CIO was under any illusions that Lewis, Murray,
Hillman, and Dubinsky were out to build a radically new kind of
movement," as Sidney Lens put it.

I /H

I INIONI/AIIDIN IN AMIKI

( A

I'hc presence i>l" Communists and other leftists williin U u - (It) does
not alter the picture, and not a lew business leaders understood the ami'
radical character of the new organization. For example, "when the CIO
was organized and the left-led United Electrical Workers began to
organize GE, Gerard Swope rejoiced," noted Ronald Radosh. Swope the
NRA architect, informed one of his GE vice-presidents that "if you can't
get along with these fellows and settle matters, there's something wrong
with you. The UAW was praised by Swope as "well-led, the discipline
good. Radosh, in fact, concludes that "it was the more politically radical
unions that led the integration of labor into the corporate structure "

Worker action continued to develop, however, in the relative absence
of unions throughout 1935 and 1936. New forms of struggle and
organization were adopted which deeply frightened business, government
and union superiors alike. Employee-run independent unions sprang up'
often employing radical tactics which challenged the traditional rights of
management to define the nature of the job. The "skippy," f or instance,
was a very effective form of defiance that was spontaneously adopted by
he man on the assembly line. Workers might quietly agree to skip every
fifth tender or leave untightened every sixth bolt to protest intolerable
job conditions. Rapidly the line would come to a halt in complete
contusion, with enraged but helpless foremen at a loss to single out the
participants.

The most threatening device and the one to become very widely
utilized was, of course, the sitdown strike. Like the skippy it more often
than not was employed by the "unorganized," in fact, the sitdown reflects
worker suspicion of union structure and control. As Louis Adamic put it
so well: "Most workers distrust— if not consciously, then unconsciously-
umon officials and strike leaders and committees, even when they have
elected them themselves. The beauty of the sitdown or stay-in is that
there are no leaders or officials to distrust. There can be no sell-out
Such standard procedure as strike sanction is hopelessly obsolete when
workers drop their tools, stop their machines, and sit down beside them
I he initiative, conduct, and control come directly from the men
involved.''

The sitdown seems to have first become an established tactic in the
rubber factories of Akron. Between 1933 and 1936 it became a tradition
in Akron, developed largely because the union had tailed to resist the
speed-up.

The speed-up appears to have been the chief single cause of discontent

hroughout mass production. A 1934 study of the auto industry revealed

that the grievance "mentioned most frequently... and upper-most in the

I I IMINl". i»l Kill IV\1

N

minds ol those who testified is the speed -up." Tactics like the sitdown
were taken up when workers felt they had to challenge the employer s
absolute right to control the work process, in the absence ot union
interest in questioning management prerogatives. The challenge to the
speed-up came not only out of the sheer fatigue felt over the absolute
rate of production, then, but also because the production worker was not
free to set the pace of his work and to determine the manner in which
it was to be performed. In the factories was joined the battle over who
was to control the workers' life on the job. This was the real issue; as
Mary Vorse put it, "the auto workers' discontent came in about equal
parts from the speed-up and the absolute autocracy of the industry

The struggle was waged not only by the auto workers, ot course, but
it was GM workers who waged one of the most important fights. And the
role of the union as conservator of existing relationships, rather than as
challenger of them, may be clearly seen in the context of the great GM

sitdown strike. . . . ,

Actually the sitdown movement that was beginning to spread rapidly
by late 1936 was anything but a part of CIO tactics. It "sprang spontane-
ously from an angered mass of workers. All American labor leaders
would have been shocked, scared, and instinctively opposed to the
initiation or approval of this disorderly revolutionary upheaval,
according to Saul Alinsky.

The 44-day GM sitdown began on December 28, 1936, when some
7 000 at Cleveland's Fisher plant struck. Two days later workers in Fisher
Body No 2 in Flint sat down and the spontaneous movement quickly
spread throughout the GM system, bringing it to a standstill.

The former Harvard economist J. Raymond Walsh stated flatly that the
CIO had certainly not called the strike: "The CIO high command... tried
in vain to prevent the strike." As Wellington Roe wrote: "To the public,
at least, Lewis was its originator. Actually Lewis had no more to do with
the sitdown strike than some native of Patagonia." Although, as James
Wechsler, Lewis' biographer, recorded, "he gave a superb imitation of a
man who had worked everything out in advance."

Again it was the lack of control over the assembly line that produced
the sitdown among auto workers. Henry Kraus's book on the GM strike
expressed it this way: "It was the speed-up that organized Flint, as it was
the one element in the life of all the workers that found a common basis

of resentment." .

Though union officialdom feared the undisciplined sitdown movement,
Lewis and the CIO realized that they must move fast if they hoped to
keep up with and establish control over it. Hence Lewis declared on

I SI]

I Ink ini/.vhi in in Ami im \

Drtviiiln-i .11, wry early in llu- slrikr, th;il Hie CIO stands squarely
behind the sitdowns."

I'll is tactic was essential at the time, though approval of sitdowns was

revoked just as soon as the CIO could get away with it. Len DeCaux,

editor of the CIO's Union News Service, stated that "as a matter of fact,'

the first experience of the CIO with sitdowns was in discouraging them."

When the GM strike began, very few employees belonged to the CIO-

affiliated United Auto Workers; in Flint only one in 400 belonged to the

DAW. It was not, apparently, an easy matter for the CIO to achieve

control over the strike. Kraus's account contains several instances of the

difficulties encountered, including "the strike committee had not yet

completely established its authority and there were accordingly some

resistance and friction at first with a tendency to anarchy of action."

Wyndham Mortimer, another very pro- union source, admitted that "a

very disturbing factor on the union side was that several members of our

negotiating committee were convinced that no one in the leadership

could be trusted, from John L. Lewis down."

Before centralized authority was effected, many radical possibilities
remained open. Sidney Fine's authoritative Sitdown recognized the
sitdowners' resistance to hierarchical procedures, commenting on the
"fierce independence" displayed by the workers. The situation prompted
Thomas Brooks to assay that "for a brief time, the CIO teetered on the
brink of the revolutionary industrial unionism of the Wobblies." Alinsky
states similarly that "the General Motors strike bordered on revolution."
The sitdowns in rubber, which had occurred, from Louis Adamic's
observation, "without encouragement from any rank-and-file organizer,"
much less from any union, and which were almost invariably successful,
reached a very important climax at GM. And inasmuch as the GM
sitdowners were so vitally concerned with controlling the assembly line
as the key issue, basic antagonism between workers and union was
implied from the start. The CIO had to attach itself to the sitdown
phenomenon and, at least initially, make a show of supporting the
workers' actions, but there existed a vast chasm between the attitudes of
that movement and the respect for management's rights of the CIO.

CIO leaders tried from the beginning to find a way to squelch the
occupation of GM property. In a revealing passage, Secretary of Labor
Perkins tells us: "The CIO came to support the automobile workers,
although I know for a fact that John Lewis and Sidney Hillman and Lee
Pressman, CIO counsel, made great efforts to get the men to leave the
plant.... But they would not publicly desert them."
CIO officials had no interest in taking up the issue of speed-up.

1 ',11 'Ml -NTS <>!■ Kl-HISAI

INI

Hernial inn of the speed of the line was listed as eighth of eight demands
submitted by the UAW to GM on January 4. Predictably, the February
1 1 settlement dealt almost exclusively with union recognition and not at
all with speed-up. The union had been granted sole-bargaining-agent
status for six months in the 17 struck plants and looked forward to
consolidating its position in the enforced absence of any rivals.

When Bud Simons, head of the strike committee in tnsher Body No.
1 , was awakened and told the terms of the settlement, he said, "That
won't do for the men to hear. That's not what we've been striking for."
And when the union presented the settlement to the strikers, distrust
mounted in relation to the unanswered questions as to speed of the line,
authority on the shop floor, and working conditions.

The workers' forebodings were borne out by the negotiations which
followed the evacuation of the plants. GM's policy was "above all, to
preserve managerial discretion in the productive process, particularly over
the speed of the line." The fundamental demand of the strike — to the

strikers had been "mutual determination" of the speed of production,

but under the contract signed March 12 local management was ensured
"full authority" in these matters. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., GM president,
became satisfied that the union was not out to challenge management's
rights, and reported "we have retained all the basic powers to manage."

In addition, the union became the effective agency for suppressing
workers' direct action against speed-up or other grievances, pledging that
"there shall be no suspensions or stoppages of work until every effort has
been exhausted to adjust them through the regular grievance procedure,
and in no case without the approval of the international officers of the

union."

Workers were plainly dissatisfied with the outcome of their sitdown, a
fact usually ignored in the many accounts of the "victorious CIO
breakthrough" of the GM occupation. William Knudsen, GM vice-
president, said that there were 170 sitdowns in GM plants between
March and June 1937, as workers who had become conscious of their
great power did not automatically submit to union-management
hegemony. Union officials scurried from place to place to quell these
stoppages, which they considered a very serious threat to union authority.
A New York Times article called "Unauthorized Sit-t)owns Fought by
C.I.O. Unions" described the drastic efforts used to end the sitdowns,
including the dismissal of any union representative sympathetic to them.
The same April 12, 1937 article ascribed the sitdowns to "dissatisfaction
on the part of the workers with the union itself," and reported that "they
are as willing in some cases to defy their own leaders as their bosses."

"NH.NI/.WIMN IN Ami. K„ v

, ' n,rirs """« l .v. IlKM-.HMHmMislswi-.r i„ s( ,,

'°' ,n ■»«!" via l«-»cliiH, l1sl i union slrJ „ m " a '" ,r<l *'""' «•«!.«--.«
'-en I^cnc Lyons' hysterica 7^T n^ ;' ny0l,c ^ il] '^('K)

si ^ ~r^^^

and business in the spring %n£?T* 2***** *° * ^ cs <* ^ustry
strikes of the Woolworth'and Gram ZuT " **" * "^ that "^
to their employers and to the workfaf ctf ' StUDning SUrprisc both
seamstress interviewed by StudsTeS tn ST?*" ^'^ Finn > «
involved in: "The boss w£ gotnW T h, •° f thC S ' td ° wn she was
They went crazy, too. It was\ hiS day " m ° n "^ camc down -

en gi „:e:e n dZyl™; c 7nirBeforeb 1 " be ***** an<J "^
formulate a solution the unfo 'ifadersr'h '"^ ^ * ove ™™nt could
sitdowns. An industrial relations Spe r o . Z u- *" m thc lid on
too easy a tactic for good d serine I Je< * The si,do ™ «

gnevance settlement by interruDnanr^r 1186 WOrkers ca " secure
may eventuaily think, L^ZZ KST ^ * 8MowB - th ^
■f we ^ get wha( we ^ ^ weof jommg a umon and paying dues

mtentton of helping employees tak/1 a>Urse the CI ° h ad no

official Mike Widman C't'Su^lT- ^ ° W " j ° bs ' As CIO
dnecton of the working force iVlZdl^T"^ *°* t "* ** the
not abndge that right, to long « ^ there i s noT™ 1 " " ^ Uni ° n shaU
ness." g "" tner e >s no discrimination or unfair-

Walter Lippman, in the spring of 1QV7 „
men "that the more they treat Mr r T Ded recalc itrant business-

[<' be resisted at ah eS ts he mor "mno^ Sf T M PUbUc ene ^
-cwis to develop discipline and a senseTf * ey makc ft f <* Mr.
^ this time, however, many more emnln reSponsibl % «n the ranks...."
with the CIO. y m ° rC em Ptoye« were peacefully signed up

r^^^Ssr^^-r^ us s ^

. .anymdustrialists imprt^wft^^^^%^ 8 - *»8 the
'*** reported that "two financier, T f ,' TheA ^^r* ffW
""-ests said they had oT^lt* '"f^ with M °'gan
'^,s..ap pa rentIythoroughlyinL3 r d ntht . ad «n fo r Mr .
"'lustnal organization was 4^^Z^T^ ^^P*"
'— -y be just . receptivc ^SfjJ*

1 I'MIN i:

Kill ISA I

i;-u

Mvion ( '. Taylor, chief of Hig Steel."

'['he critical C ■!() role in quelling or preventing sitdowns was certainly
not lost on employers. In the steel industry, the ClO's Steel Workers'
Organizing Committee found many willing customers, due to
management's inability to control its employees unassisted. Charles
1 taines, producer of steel-making equipment and a member of one of the
pioneering steel families of America, was representative of this manage-
ment awareness. Stability was desired and hence the employers "were
asking the SWOC to straighten out their labor difficulties," in Mary
Vorse's words.

The bloody "Little Steel" strike was clearly an exception to the
quickening trend of the employer acceptance of unionism. Concerning
the Little Steel strike, by the way, the CIO could have been successful,
at least could have avoided the score of dead, had it not been so opposed
to the use of the sitdown. Labor commentators Preis, Levin son, Lens,
and others agree that the killing of pickets and demonstrators would
have been obviated by the use of the sitdown tactic. And more than one
writer has wondered if the whole "Memorial Day Massacre" march of
unarmed strikers — and the likelihood of their being shot — was not
planned by union leaders to produce union martyrs.

A contract with SWOC was a safeguard against work actions, and
employers were appreciative. For example: "Major officials of thc U.S.
Steel Company have repeatedly and publicly attested to the satisfactory
character of their contractual relations with the unions," reported Robert
Brooks. John L. Lewis was to the point when he said in 1937, "A CIO
contract is adequate protection against sitdowns, lie-downs, or any other
kind of strike."

Professor of labor relations Benjamin Selekman observed that "union
leaders have sought to calm down thc new members with their seemingly
insatiable demands." Likewise, Carroll Dougherty judged that "Thc
induction of large numbers of raw recruits untrained in unionism made
guidance from the top necessary," adding, almost as an afterthought, "yet
there was danger that such guidance would develop into permanent
dictatorship."

It did not prove easy for the unions to impose discipline on the many
new members. As we have seen, their "seemingly insatiable demands"
were never uppermost in the minds of the union leaders; labor leaders
must appear to support worker demands, if they are to initially interest
them in union representation. "Only later does the union seek to instruct
the individual member in his responsibilities, and such education is a slow
process.... Individual members must come to realize that they cannot take

in.ilfriN itiln tlwii own IuhkIs." wmli' John Dtmlop.

Rsvinsive kiigiiimii}*, a^'cut slalus, or the closed shop, is the primal y
institution by which flu- union enforces control of the workers. Golden
Mild Kiflfcuher& two SWOC officials, candidly argue in The Dynamics of
Industrial Democracy that unions need power and responsibility to
maintain discipline. With the closed shop, the union acquires, in effect,
I he power to tire unruly members; if a member is dropped from the
union, he is dropped from his job. Golden and Ruttenberg, as so many
other union spokesmen, point out that the union is likely to make noise
until it gains the closed shop arrangement, and that management rapidly
comes to see the need for a strong (closed shop) union, in the interest
«>(' a contained work force. The price of cooperation is thus the closed
shop, and it satisfies both union and management.

Hy 1938, according to Brooks, only a ''small minority" of employers
opposed collective bargaining as guaranteed by the Wagner Act. It
lu-eomes easy to sec why. Union leaders were "anxious to demonstrate
to the management their responsibility, and their willingness to accept
Hie burden of 'selling' the contract to the rank-and-file and keeping the
dissidents in line," according to consultants Sayles and Straus.

As business came increasingly to the awareness of unions as indispens-
able to the maintenance of a relatively stable and docile labor supply, the
ranks of labor exhibited more and more dissatisfaction with "their" new
organizations. The 1945 Trends in Collective Bargaining study noted that
"by around 1940" the labor leader had joined the business leader as an
object of "widespread cynicism" to the American worker. Similarly,
Dougherty reported that workers were chafing under the lack of
structural democracy in the unions: "There was evidence, by the end of
I l )40, that the rank and file were growing restive under such conditions."

Workers, after some initial enthusiasm and hopefulness regarding the
CIO, were starting to feel the "closed system" nature of compulsory
unions. In discussing union-management cooperation in the steel
industry, CIO officials Golden and Ruttenberg admitted, for example,
i hat "to some workers" the cooperation only added up in practice to "a
vicious speed-up."

Thus we return to the issue uppermost in the minds of industrial
workers in the 1930s struggles. And Richard Lester seems to be quite
correct in concluding that "the industrial government jointly established"
possesses "disciplinary arrangements advantageous to management,
rendering worker rebellions more and more difficult."

s

i

-■

ORGANIZED LABOR VS.
"THE REVOLT AGAINST WORK"

Serious commentators on the labor upheavals of the Depression years
seem to agree that disturbances of all kinds, including the wave of sit-
down strikes of 1936 and 1937, were caused by the "speed-up" above all. 1
Dissatisfaction among production workers with their new CIO unions set
in early, however, mainly because the unions made no efforts to
challenge management's right to establish whatever kind of work
methods and working conditions they saw fit. The 1945 Trends in
Collective Bargaining study noted that "by around 1940" the labor leader
had joined the business leader as an object of "widespread cynicism" to
the American employee. 2 Later in the 1940s C. Wright Mills, in his The
New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders, described the union's role
thusly: "the integration of union with plant means that the union takes
over much of the company's personnel work, becoming the discipline
agent of the rank-and-file.'"

In the mid-1950s, Daniel Bell realized that unionization had not given
workers control over their job lives. Struck by the huge, spontaneous
walk-out at River Rouge in July, 1949, over the speed of the Ford
assembly line, he noted that "sometimes the constraints of work explode
with geyser suddenness." 4 And as Bell's Work and Its Discontents (1956)
bore witness that "the revolt against work is widespread and takes many
forms," 5 so had Walker and Guest's Harvard study, The Man on the
Assembly Line (1953), testified to the resentment and resistance of the
men on the line. Similarly, and from a writer with much working class
experience himself, was Harvey Swados' "The Myth of the Happy
Worker," published in The Nation, August, 1957.

Workers and the unions continued to be at odds over conditions of
work during this period. In auto, for example, the 1955 contract between
the United Auto Workers and General Motors did nothing to check the
"speed-up" or facilitate the settlement of local shop grievances. Immedi-
ately after Walter Reuther made public the terms of the contract he'd
just signed, over 70% of GM workers went on strike. An even larger
percentage "wildcatted" after the signing of the 1958 agreement because

■ !;i

: ■.!

■^MM

IX(>

()!<(., \NI/.I I) l..\lti)k VS. "111! Kl'VOI.lAl.AINM W>)Klv"

the union had again refused to do anything ahoul the work itself. loi tin-
same reason, the auto workers walked oft' their jobs again in I%],
closing every GM and a large number of Ford plants."

Paul Jacobs' The Slate of the Unions, Paul Saltan's The Disenchanted
Unionist, and B.J. Widick's The Triumphs and Failures of Unionism in the
United States were some of the books written in the early 1960s by pro-
union figures, usually former activists, who were disenchanted with what
they had only lately and partially discovered to be the role of the unions.
A black worker, James Boggs, clarified the process in a sentence:
"Looking backwards, one will find that side by side with the fight to
control production, has gone the struggle to control the union, and that
the decline has taken place simultaneously on both fronts." 7 What
displeased Boggs, however, was lauded by business. In the same year that
his remarks were published, Fortune, American capital's most authorita-
tive magazine, featured as a cover story in its May, 1963 issue Max Way's
"Labor Unions Are Worth the Price."

But by the next year, the persistent dissatisfaction of workers was
beginning to assume public prominence, and a June 1964 Fortune article
reflected the growing pressure for union action: "Assembly-line monoto-
ny, a cause reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's Modem Times, is being
revived as a big issue in Detroit's 1964 negotiations, 3 ' 8 it reported.

In the middle-1960s another phenomenon was dramatically and
violently making itself felt. The explosions in the black ghettoes appeared
to most to have no connection with the almost underground fight over
factory conditions. But many of the participants in the insurrections in
Watts, Detroit and other cities were fully employed, according to arrest
records. 9 The struggle for dignity in one's work certainly involved the
black workers, whose oppression was, as in all other areas, greater than
that of non-black workers. Jessie Reese, a Steelworkers' union organizer,
described the distrust his fellow blacks felt toward him as an agent of the
union: "To organize that black boy out there today you've got to prove
yourself to him, because he don't believe nothing you say." 10 Authority
was resented, not color. 11

Turning to more direct forms of opposition to an uncontrolled and
alien job world, we encounter the intriguing experience of Bill Watson,
who spent 1968 in an auto plant near Detroit. Distinctly post-union in
practice, he witnessed the systematic, planned efforts of the workers to
substitute their own production plans and methods for those of manage-
ment. He described it as "a regular phenomenon" brought out by the
refusal of management and the UAW to listen to workers' suggestions
as to modifications and improvements in the product. "The contradic-

I'l I -Ml NTS < )!■ Kill ISA I

IK/

l 1( ,ns ol planum}.', and producing poor quality, beginning as the slut I ot

|.»kes, eventually became a source of anger... temporary deals unfolded
In- 1 we iMi in si lection and assembly and between assembly and trim, each
willi planned sabotage... the result was stacks upon stacks of motors
a waiting re pair... it was almost impossible to move... the entire six-cylinder
assembly and inspection operation was moved away— where new workers
were brought in to man it. In the most dramatic way, the necessity of
taking the product out of the hands of laborers who insisted on planning
the product became overwhelming." 12

The extent and coordination of the workers' own organization in the
plant described by Watson was very advanced indeed, causing him to
wonder if it wasn't a glimpse of a new social form altogether, arising
from the failure of unionism. Stanley Weir, writing at this time of similar
if less highly developed phenomena, found that "in thousands of
industrial establishments across the nation, workers have developed
informal, underground unions," due to the deterioration or lack of
improvement in the quality of their daily job lives.

Until the 1970s— and very often still— the wages and benefits dimen-
sion of a work dispute, that part over which the union would become
involved, received almost all the attention. In 1965 Thomas Brooks
observed that the "apathy" of the union member stemmed from precisely
this false emphasis: "...grievances on matters apart from wages are either
ignored or lost in the limbo of union bureaucracy." 14 A few years later,
Dr. David Whitter, industrial consultant to GM, admitted, "That isn't all
they want; it's all they can get." 15

As the 1960s drew to a close, some of the more perceptive business
observers were about to discover this distinction and were soon forced
by pressure from below to discuss it publicly. While the October, 1969
Fortune stressed the preferred emphasis on wages as the issue in Richard
Armstrong's "Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive" (while
admitting that the rank and file was in revolt "against its own leadership,
and in important ways against society itself"), the July, 1970 issue carried
Judson Gooding's "Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line: Young auto
workers find job disciplines harsh and uninspiring, and they vent their
feeling through absenteeism, high turnover, shoddy work, and even
sabotage. It's time for a new look at who's down on the line."

With the 1970s there has at last begun to dawn the realization that on
the most fundamental issue, control of the work process, the unions and
the workers are very much in opposition to each other. A St. Louis
Teamster commented that traditional labor practice has as a rule
involved "giving up items involving workers' control over the job in

ss

t>L<t;AN.t/.|.|il.AIH»H VS I III klVi.n A..AINM VVnKK

exchange for cash and Irit^c benefits."'" Acknowledging flic disciplinary
function of the union, he elaborated on this lime-honored barg'ii„i„ K -
Companies have been willing to give up large amounts of money to the
union in return for the union's guarantee of no work stoppages." Daniel
Bell wrote in 1973 that the trade union movement has never challenge,
the organization .of work itself, and summed up the issue thusly "The
crucial point is that however much an improvement there may have been
in wage rates, pension conditions, supervision, and the like, the condi-
gn a n7£ th ' mS f elve r the C ° ntro1 ° f padng ' the alignments, the
himself P work-are still outside the control of the worker

Although the position of the unions is usually ignored, since 1970 there
has appeared a veritable deluge of articles and books on the impossible
to ignore rebellion against impossible work roles. From the covers of a
tew national magazines: Barbara Garson's "The Hell With Work "

rZ \ J T A 1972 j ,4 ' e magazine ' s " Bored ° n the J°°: Industry

m> »n , W '«i P »^ y 3nd Ang6r °" the AsSerab 'y Line '" September 1,
1972, and Who Wants to Work?" in the March 26, 1973 Newsweek

Other articles have brought out the important fact that the disaffection
« de mitdy nrit confined to industrial workers. To cite just a few: Jud son
Gooding s "The Fraying White Collar" in The Nation of Seotember 11
1971, Marshall Kilduffs "Getting Back at a Boss: The New Und Aground
Papers, in the December 27, 1971 San Francisco Chronict, and
Seashore and Bamowe's "Collar Color Doesn't Count," in the August,
ly72 Psychology Today. 6 '

In 1971 The Workers, by Kenneth Lasson, was a representative book

worked rl r\ 'TT d, ' s ?° ntem ™ Pomdta of nine blue-collar
workers. Ihe Job Revolution by Judson Gooding appeared in 1972 a

!X 8 ^r, 0riented , diSCUSSi0n ° f Uberalizin S work management' in
order to contan, employee pressure. The Report of the Special Task

Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare on the

problem, titled Work in America, was published in 1973 Pase 19 of th P

study admits the major facts: "...absenteeism, wildcat strikes, turnover

Z cc^Tfj T ge lh ' d lt " eC ° me an incrc ^in g l y significant part o
the cost of doing business." The scores of people interviewed bv Studs
Terkel in his Waritog: People Talk About What They Do All Day and H ow
They Feel about What They Do (1974), reveal a depth to the work revolt
that is truly devastating. His book uncovers a nearly unanimous contempt
for work and the fact that active resistance is fast replacing the qui
desperation silently suffered by most. From welders to editors to former
executives, those questioned spoke up readily as to their feelings o

| j ] Ml N'l'i <<i Kl-l-t ISA*

K«)

I)

h illation and frustration. .

tfmosl of the lilcalutr of "the revolt against: work has Lett the unions
ou. n\ thru discussions, a brief look at some features of specihe worker
arnoiis from 1970 through 1973 will help underline the comments made
jb«vc concerning the necessarily anti-union nature ot this revolt

l »,irhi« March, 1970, a wildcat strike of postal employees, in defiance
, ., anion orders, public employee anti-strike law, and federal inunctions,
, P u-ad across the country, disabling post offices in more than 200 cities
„.<! towns 18 In New York, where the strike began, an effigy of Gus
Johnson, president of the letter carriers' union local there, was hung at
,, tumultuous meeting on March 21 where the national union leaders
were called "rats" and "creeps/' 19 In many locations, the workers decided
,o not handle business mail, as part of their work action, and only the
use of thousands of National Guardsmen ended the strike major issues
>r which were the projected layoff of large numbers of workers and
ncthods of work. In July, 1971, New York postal workers tried to renew
I heir strike activity in the face of a contract proposal made by the new
letter carrier president, Vincent Sombrotto. At the climax of a stormy
meeting of 3,300 workers, Sombrotto and a lieutenant were chased from
the hall down 33rd Street, narrowly escaping 200 enraged union
members, who accused them of "selling out" the membership.

Returning to the Spring of 1970, 100,000 Teamsters in 16 cities
wildcatted between March and May to overturn a national contract
signed March 23 by IBT President Fitzsimmons. The ensuing violence in
the Middle West and West coast was extensive, and in Cleveland
involved no less than a thirty-day blockade of main city thoroughfares
and 67 million dollars in damages. 21

On May 8, 1970, a large group of hard-hat construction workers
assaulted peace demonstrators in Wall Street and invaded Pace College
and City Hall itself to attack students and others suspected of not
supporting the prosecution of the Vietnam war. The riot, in fact, was
supported and directed by construction firm executives and union
leaders, in all likelihood to channel worker hostility away from them-
selves Perhaps alone in its comprehension of the incident was public
television (WNET, New York) and its "Great American Dream
Machine" program aired May 13. A segment of that production
uncovered the real job grievances that apparently underlay the aftair.
Intelligent questioning revealed, in a very few minutes, that commie
punks" were not wholly the cause of their outburst, as an outpouring of
gripes about unsafe working conditions, the strain of the work pace the
fact that they could be fired at any given moment, etc., was recorded.

live head oi (he Now York building hades union, IVfer Biciiiihn, ami his
union official colleagues were feted al (he While House on May £6 ftii
their patriotism --and tor diverting the workers? and ttrennun was later
appointed Secretary of Labor.

In July, 1970, on a Wednesday afternoon swing shift a black auto
worker at a Detroit Chrysler plant pulled out an M-l carbine and killed
three supervisory personnel before he was subdued by UAW committee-
men. It should be added that two others were shot dead in separate auto
plant incidents within weeks of the Johnson shooting spree, and that in
May, 1971, a jury found Johnson innocent because of insanity after
visiting and being shocked by what they considered the maddening
conditions at Johnson's place of work. 21

The sixty-seven day strike at General Motors by the United Auto
Workers in the Fall of 1970 is a classic example of the anti-employee
nature of the conventional strike, perfectly illustrative of the ritualized
manipulation of the individual which is repeated so often and which
changes absolutely nothing about the nature of work.

A Wall Street Journal article of October 29, 1970 discussed the reasons
why union and management agreed on the necessity of a strike. The
UAW saw that a walk-out would serve as "an escape valve for the
frustrations of workers bitter about what they consider intolerable
working conditions" and a long strike would "wear down the expectations
of members." The Journal went on to point out that, "among those who
do understand the need for strikes to ease intra-union pressures are
many company bargainers.... They are aware that union leaders may need
such strikes to get contracts ratified and get re-elected." 24 Or, as William
Serrin succinctly put it: "A strike, by putting the workers on the street,
rolls the steam out of them— it reduces their demands and thus brings
agreement and ratification; it also solidifies the authority of the union
hierarchy." 25

Thus, the strike was called. The first order of the negotiating business
was the dropping of all job condition demands, which were only raised
in the first place as a public relations gesture to the membership. With
this understood, the discussions and publicity centered around wages and
early retirement benefits exclusively, and the charade played itself out to
its pre-ordained end. "The company granted each demand [UAW presi-
dent) Woodcock had made, demands he could have had in September." 26
I lardly surprising, then, that GM loaned the union $23 million per month
during the strike. 27 As Serrin conceded, the company and the union are
not even adversaries, much less enemies. 28

In November, 1970, the fuel deliverers of New York City, exasperated

I I I1IIN l\ i K R] I I ISA I

'J

■

I

bv (licit union president's resistance (o pleas for action, gave him a public
heating. Also in New York, in the following March the Yellow Cab
di ivers ravaged a Teamsters' Union meeting hall in Manhattan in
i espouse to their union officials' refusal to yield the floor to rank and file
speakers.

In January, 1971, the interns at San Francisco General Hospital struck,
solely over hospital conditions and patient care. Eschewing any ties to
organized labor, their negotiating practice was to vote publicly on each
point at issue, with all interns present.

The General Motors strike of 1970 discussed above in no way dealt
with the content of jobs. 29 Knowing that it would face no challenge from
the UAW, especially, it was thought, so soon after a strike and its
cathartic effects, GM began in 1971 a coordinated effort at speeding up
the making of cars, under the name General Motors Assembly Division,
or GMAD. The showplace plant for this re-organization was the Vega
works at Lordstown, Ohio, where the work-force was 85% white and the
average age 27. With cars moving down the line almost twice as fast as
in pre-GMAD days, workers resorted to various forms of on the job
resistance to the terrific pace. GM accused them of sabotage and had to
shut down the line several times. Some estimates set the number of
deliberately disabled cars as high as 500,000 for the period of December,
1971 to March, 1972, when a strike was finally called following a 97%
affirmative vote of Lordstown\s Local 1112. But a three-week strike failed
to check the speed of the line, the union, as always, having no more
desire than management to see workers effectively challenging the
control of production. The membership lost all confidence in the union;
Gary Bryner, the 29-year-old president of Local 1112 admitted: "They're
angry with the union; when I go through the plant I get catcalls." 30

In the GMAD plant at Norwood, Ohio, a strike like that at Lordstown
broke out in April and lasted until September, 1971. The 174 days
constituted the longest walkout in GM history. 31 The Norwood workers
had voted 98% in favor of striking in the previous February, but the
UAW had forced the two locals to go out separately, first Lordstown,
and later Norwood, thus isolating them and protecting the GMAD
program. Actually, the anti-worker efforts of the UAW go even further
back, to September of 1971, when the Norwood Local 674 was put in
receivership, or taken over, by the central leadership when members had
tried to confront GMAD over the termination of their seniority rights.

In the summer of 1973, three wildcat strikes involving Chrysler facilities
in Detroit took place in less than a month. Concerning the successful
one-day wildcat at the Jefferson assembly plant, UAW vice president

I'M

l)K«iANI/l-l. | .AIM ll< VS. ' I I tl K| -V, ,1 I A, iAINS ! VV. IKK"

Doug fiasc, said ( l.-ysk-. ha<l made a critical mistake in "appeasing ,!,<■
workers and the Mack Avenue walkout was effectively .suppressed when
a crowd or-UAW loca! union officers and committeemen, armed ! wed,
wort" to ret:""'' 8 ' *<" ° UtSide of ^ ^ *** <° 'urge' the

October 1973 brought the signing of a new three-year contract
between Ford and the UAW. But with the signing appeared fresh
evidence that workers intend to involve themse.vefin dWsfons ; concern
ng their work hves: "Despite the agreement, about 7,700 workers left
thetr jobs at seven Ford plants when the strike deadline was reached
agreement - * "^ **"*" "*" thC SCCrCCy surroun ding the new

With these brief remarkson avery small number of actions by workers
let us try to arrive at some understanding of the overall temper of
American wage-earners since the mid-1960s

Sidney Lens found that the number of strikes during 1968, 1969, and
1971 1 was extremely high, and that only the years 1937, 1944-45 and 1952-
.3 showed comparable totals* More interesting is the growing tendency
of strikers to reject the labor contracts negotiated for them In thoZ
7Z«T , thC f Cderal Mediati0n and Concfflatfon Service took

roSm 8 7^of?r ^Sf* ™ SmiStks) < COntract re i ecti ° n *
rose from 8.7% of the cases in 1964, to 10% in 1965, to 11% in 1966 to

an amazing 14.2% in 1967, levelling off since then to abou 12%
annually- And the ratio of work stoppages occurring daring the perfod
when a contract was in effect has changed, which is especially signmdnt
when it is remembered that most contracts specifically forbid strikes
Bureau of Labor Statistics figures reveal that while about one-third of an
S;' 9 "*^ 1 « nder 6XiSting a « reements > "■» alarming

17c n' effm" nT973 A *?> * ^ "** P ^ WhUe ""*
were in ettect. In 1973 Aronowitz provided a good summary "The

configuration of strikes since 1967 is unprecedented in the hSory f

iS^ T he number ° f ^ as a whole, as well as rLk-
and-f le rejections of proposed union settlements with employers, and

™i- And a r S , aS TTn^ i0 *■* Similar P CTiod ^ 'he modern
era. And a Sennett and Cobb, writing in 1971, made clear, the period

^involved "the most turbulent rejection of organized anion antho J
among young workers. m '

The 1970 GM strike was mentioned as an example of the usefulness of
nartoT S H T 6 k Safely rdeaSing pent - U P em P'°y ee resentment The

anTtL ffe,t e e ^ neW ° rke M' S,rike ° f My ' 1971 is another ^mple!
and the effects of the rising tide of anti-union hostility can also be seen

I '.I IMI NIN I U Kl'H''.Al

I'll

,„ i, Kciccli,.,. a Hell System offer ol a 30% wage increase ewer Ihrce
, s Communication Workers' unkm called a strike, puhhdy

() „,Hng that the only point at issue was that "we need 31 to 32 per

""a union president Joseph Beirne put it. After a sjx-day walkout

! % was grants, as was a new Bell policy requiring all employee so

.t^nion and remain in good standing as a condition of employ-

" , But whSe the CWAwas gVanted the standard "union-shop" status

thcrnece saw step for the fulfillment of its role as a discipline agent

I', 1 w ", thousands of telephone workers refused to retunito

their jobs, in some cases staying out for weeks in det.ance ot CWA

0r Thecalling of the 90-day wage-price freeze on August 15 was in large
nart a response to the climate of worker unruliness and independence,
wmedTthe defiant phone workers. Aside from related economic
^derations, the freeze and the ensuing controls were adopted because
r u n!on needed government help in restraining the workers. Sham
"clearly lose their effectiveness if employees ^usc to play their
Jskmed roles remaining, for example, on strike on their own.
a Xge Meany, headrf the AFL-CIO, had been calling^ wage-pnc
freeze since 1969" and in the weeks prior to Angus 15 had held a
numbe of ve" private meetings with President Nixon" Though he wa
!!L, to nubliclv decry the freeze as "completely unfair to the
woTkV an "a tonLt to^big business," he did not even call for *n
Xss profits tax; he did come out strongly for a permanent wage-pnee

r^^X^Z^^o, the need tor govern
f ^L„ in Sentember, a Fortune article proclaimed that A
*"^iS« is the best hope for breaking the
^st-push momentum that individual unions and employers have been
Powerless to resist."' 3 As workers try to make partial compensation for
Sack of autonomy on the job by demanding better wages and
bTnemf the only approved concessions, they create ^ obvous economy

Km^^/re^rK^ bT^orluf ia,

SS wage-price freeze, many labor leaders were calhng for
stabilization if only to get themselves off the hook.
IS editorial of January (1972) predicted that by the ^
national "wave of wildcat strikes" might well occur and the labor
members ofThc tripartite control board would resign." In tact, Meany

ami Woodcock quit the l*av Hoard much eailin in (lie year than tti.it.
due precisely to the rank, and tile's refusal to support the plainly
antilabor wage policies of the board. Though l'it/simmons of the
Teamsters stayed on, and the controls continued, through a total of lour
"Phases" until early 1974, the credibility of the controls program was
crippled, and its influence waned rapidly. Though the program was
brought to a premature end, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave its
ceiling on wage increases much of the credit for the fact that the number
of strikes in 1972 was the smallest in five years. 46

During "Phase One" of the controls, the 90-day freeze, David Deitch
wrote that "the new capitalism requires a strong, centralized trade union
movement with which to bargain." He made explicit exactly what kind of
"strength" would be needed: "The labor bureaucracy must ultimately
silence the rank and file if it wants to join in the tripartite planning, in
the same sense that the wildcat strike cannot be tolerated." 47

In this area, too, members of the business community have shown an
understanding of the critical role of the unions. In May 1970, within
hours of the plane crash that claimed UAW chief Walter Reuther, there
was publicly expressed corporate desire for a replacement who could
continue to effectively contain the workers. "It's taken a strong man to
keep the situation under control," Virgil Boyd, Chrysler vice-chairman,
told the New York Times. "I hope that whoever his successor is can exert
great internal discipline." 48 Likewise, Fortune bewailed the absence of a
strong union in the coalfields, in a 1971 article subtitled, "The nation's
fuel supply, as well as the industry's prosperity, depends on a union that
has lost control of its members." 49

Despite the overall failure of the wage control program, the govern-
ment has been helping the unions in several other ways. Since 1970, for
example, it has worked to reinforce the conventional strike— again, due
to its important safety-valve function. In June 1970, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that an employer could obtain an injunction to force
employees back to work when a labor agreement contains a no-strike
pledge and an arbitration clause. "The 1970 decision astonished many
observers of the labor relations scene," 50 directly reversing a 1962
decision of the Court, which ruled that such walkouts were merely labor
disputes and not illegal. Also in 1970, during the four-month General
Electric strike, Schenectady, New York, officials "pleaded with nonunion
workers to refrain from crossing picket lines on the grounds that such
action might endanger the peace." 51 A photo of the strike scene in
Fortune was captioned, "Keeping workers out — workers who were trying
to cross picket lines and get to their jobs—became the curious task of

I I'MI'NIN Ol Ki | 1ISAF

[US

\< lirnrcladv policemen.

"V

A Supreme Court decision in 1972 indicated how far state power will
jhi in protect the spectacle of union strikes. Four California Teamsters
win- ordered reinstated with five years' back pay as "a unanimous
Supreme Court ruled (November 7, 1972) that it is unfair labor practice
l<>i an employer to fire a worker solely for taking part in a strike." 5 "
( lovernment provides positive as well as negative support to approved
walkouts, too. An 18-month study by the Wharton School of Finance and
Commerce found that welfare benefits, unemployment compensation,
and food stamps to strikers mean that "the American taxpayer has
assumed a significant share of the cost of prolonged work stoppages." 54
But in some areas, unions would rather not even risk official strikes.
The United Steelworkers of American— which allows only union officials
to vote on contract ratifications, by the way— agreed with the major steel
companies in March, 1973, that only negotiations and arbitration would
be used to resolve differences. The Steelworkers' contract approved in
April, 1974, declared that the no-strike policy would be in effect until at
least 1980. 55 A few days before, in March, a federal court threw out a suit
filed by rank and file steelworkers, ruling in sum that the union needn't
be democratic in reaching its agreements with management. 56

David Deitch, quoted above, said that the stability of the system
required a centralized union structure. The process of centralization has
been a fact and its acceleration has followed the increasing militancy of
wage-earners since the middle-1960s. A June, 1971, article in the federal
Monthly Labor Review discussed the big increase in union mergers over
the preceding three years. 57 In a speech made on July 5, 1973,
Longshoremen's president Harry Bridges called for the formation of "one
big, national labor movement or federation." 58

The significance of this centralization movement is that it places the
individual even further from a position of possible influence over the
union hierarchy— at a time when s/he is more and more likely to be
obliged to join a union as a condition of employment. The situation is
beginning to resemble in some ways the practice in National Socialist
Germany, of requiring the membership of all workers in "one big,
national labor movement or federation," the Labor Front. In the San
Francisco Bay area, for example in 1969, "A rare— and probably
unique—agreement that will require all the employees of a public agency
to join a union or pay it the equivalent of union dues was reported in
Oakland by the East Bay Regional Park District." 59 And in the same area
this process was upheld in 1973: "A city can require its employees to pay
the equivalent of initiation fees and dues to a union to keep their jobs,

!«>(>

OK.iAIMI/.H, I.AIIOK VS. "Til.. Kl-V(»| T Al JAINSI Wi.KK"

i c ! , '; "n ,as rulwI "' a P^^nt-»ctlin«c-asr involving

he c y o! Ilayward.""' ITiis direction is certainly not limited to public
employees, according to the Department of Labor. Their "What I lapncns
When Everyone Organizes" article implied the inevitability of total
unionization. y '

thJt°n U n P h ,tft CUSSi ° n ° f th£ absence °f democracy in unions is outside
the scope of this essay, it is important to emphasize the lack of control
possessed by the rank and file. In 1961 Joel Seidman commented on the
subjection of the typical union membership: "It is hard to read union
consto lons without being struck by the many provisions dealing wilh

man nfnT S T *• ^^ of memb ^ « against the relatively
small number of sections concerned with members' rights within the
organization.'*' Two excellent offerings on the subject written in the

, f 6 A " tocrac y and Insurgency in Organized Labor by Burton Hall 62

&$%££&£"* &pelling the Union D ™ *«
Relatively unthreatened by memberships, the unions have entered into
ever-closer re ations with government and business. A Times-Post Service
story of April, 1969, disclosed a three-day meeting between AFf!cro
he Z I r ' 0P k k ° n administrati °" officials, shrouded in secrecy at

arrant I i ™ ^ " Kg Ubor and Wg P^ermMnt have quStly
arranged an mtngumg tryst this week in the mountains of West

melr r ;-4Tf te ^^^ T' Ving at leaSt half a dozen cabine '
members Similarly, a surprising New York Times article appearing on

the last day of 1972 is worth quoting for the institutionalizing of

government-labor ties it augurs: "President Nixon has offered to put a

dtartZnt ^PTT^ !? ,' high levd " «** fcderaI government
department, a well-informed White House official has disclosed. The

offer said to be unparalleled in labor history, was made to union

members on the National Productivity Commission, including George

oTaT™^ 1 -™' and Frank R Fi ^mons, president

" "P' * *™ lte House meting last week...labor sources said that

hey understood the proposal to include an offer to place union men a

he SSK 7t " *" re ' eVant 8 ° Vernme " t asencie,..shouM
he President s of f er be taken up> ft wouM mark a

the tradttional relations between labor and government '"*
In Oregon the activities of the Associated Oregon Industries

reflected 71 g "I"" 8 T* the ° reg0n ^^^ * «* °«
reflected a close working relationship between labor and managementon

practically everything. Joint lobbying efforts, against consumer a^d

environmentalistproposals especially, and other forms of cooperation led

I IMIN'IS < >l Kill ISAI

l<)7

h. an exchange of even speakers at each other's conventions in the Fall
..I |')7I. On September 2, the president of the AOI, Phil Bladine,
.uhhessed the AFL-CIO; on September 18, AFL-CIO president Ed
Wlialen spoke before the AOI. 66 In California, as in many other states,
i In- pattern has been very much the same, with labor and business
working together to attack conservationists in 1972 and defeat efforts to
i dorm political campaign spending in 1974, for example. 67

Also revealing is the "Strange Bedfellows From Labor, Business Own
Dominican Resort" article on the front page of the May 15, Wall Street
Journal by Jonathon Kwitney. Among the leading stockholders in the
l\0()() acre Punta Cana, Dominican Republic resort and plantation are
( ieorge Meany and Lane Kirkland, president and secretary-treasurer of
the AFL-CIO, and Keith Terpe, Seafarers' Union official, as well as
leading officers of Seatrain Lines, Inc., which employs members of
Terpe's union.

Not seen for what they are, the striking cases of mounting business-
labor-government collusion and cooperation have largely been over-
looked. But those in a position to see that the worker is more and more
actively intolerant of a daily work life beyond his control, also realize that
even closer cooperation is necessary. In early 1971 Personnel,^ the
magazine of the American Management Association, said that "it is
perhaps time for a marriage of convenience between the two [unions and
management]" 68 for the preservation of order. Pointing out, however, that
many members "tend to mistrust the union." 6

The reason for this "mistrust," as we have seen, is the historical refusal
of unions to interfere with management's control of work. The AFL-CIO
magazine, The American Federations, admitted labor's lack of interest
and involvement in an article in the January, 1974 issue entitled "Work
is Here to Stay, Alas." And the traditional union position on the matter
is why, in turn, C. Jackson Grayson, Dean of the School of Business
Administration at Southern Methodist University and former chairman
of the Price Commission, called in early 1974 for union-management
collaboration. The January 12 issue of Business Week contains his call for
a symbolic dedication on July 4, 1976, "with the actual signing of a
document— Declarationof Interdependence "between labor and business,

"inseparably linked in the productivity quest."

Productivity— output per hour of work— has of course fallen due to
worker dissatisfaction and unrest. A basic indication of the continuing
revolt against work are the joint campaigns for higher productivity, such
as the widely publicized US Steel-United Steelworkers efforts. A special
issue on productivity in Business Week for September 9, 1972, highlighted

'I\» '■ H1U I 1* 1 ,#111' N\ V . >

i I li l\r\ui.i /\li.\IIN.M VY>H<K

IliV problem, pointing oiil also I he opposition workers had tor union
backed drives of this kind. 7 " Closely related to low productivity, it seems,
is the employee resistance to working overtime, even during economic
recession. The refusal of thousands of Ford workers to work overtime
prompted a Ford executive in April, 1974 to say, "We're mystified by the
experience in light of the general economic situation." 71 Also during
April, the Labor Department reported that "the productivity of American
workers took its biggest drop on record as output slumped in all sectors
of the economy during the first quarter.*' 72

In 1935 the NRA issued the Henderson Report, which counseled that
"unless something is done soon, they [the workers] intend to take things
into their own hands." 73 Something was done: the hierarchical, national
unions of the CIO finally appeared and stabilized relations. In the 1970s
it may be that a limited form of worker participation in management
decisions will be required to prevent employees from "taking things into
their own hands." Irving Bluestone, head of the UAW 5 s GM department,
predicted in early 1972 that some form of participation would be
necessary, under union-management control, of course. 74 As Arnold
Tannenbaum of the Institute for Social Research in Michigan pointed
out in the late 1960s, ceding some power to workers can be an excellent
means of increasing their subjection, if it succeeds in giving them a sense
of involvement. 73

But it remains doubtful that token participation will in any way assuage
the worker's alienation. More likely, it will underline it and make even
clearer the true nature of the union-management relationship, which will
still obtain. It may be more probable that traditional union institutions,
such as the paid, professional stratum of officials and representatives,
monopoly of membership guaranteed by management, and the labor
contract itself will be increasingly re-examined 76 as workers continue to
strive to take their work lives into their own hands.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

%

"Amid All the Camaraderie is Much Looting this Time; Seeing the City
Disappear. " -Wall Street Journal headline, July 15, 1977

The Journal went on to quote a cop on what he saw, as the great
Hustille Day break-out unfolded: "People are going wild in the borough
of Brooklyn. They are looting stores by the carload." Another cop added
later: "Stores were ripped open. Others have been leveled. After they
looted, they burned."

At about 9:30 p.m. on July 13 the power went out in New York for 24
hours. During that period the complete impotence of the state in our
most "advanced" urban space could hardly have been made more
transparent.

As soon as the lights went out, cheers and shouts and loud music
announced the liberation of huge sections of the city. The looting and
burning commenced immediately, with whole families joining in the
"carnival spirit." In the University Heights section of the Bronx, a
Pontiac dealer lost the 50 new cars in his showroom. In many areas, tow
trucks and other vehicles were used to tear away the metal gates from
stores. Many multi-story furniture businesses were completely emptied by
neighborhood residents.

Despite emergency alerts for the state troopers, FBI and National
Guard, there was really nothing authority could do, and they knew it. A
New York Times editorial of July 16 somewhat angrily waved aside the
protests of those who wondered why there was almost no intervention on
the side of property. "Are you kidding?" the Times snorted, pointing out
that such provocation would only have meant that the entire city would
still be engulfed in riots, adding that the National Guard is a "bunch of
kids" who wouldn't have had a chance.

The plundering was completely multi-racial, with white, black and
Hispanic businesses cleaned out and destroyed throughout major parts
of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Not a single "racial
incident" was reported during the uprising, while newspaper pictures and
TV news bore witness to the variously-colored faces emerging from the
merchants' windows and celebrating in the streets. Similarly, looting,
vandalism, and attacks on police were not confined to the City proper;

I *N I V\

1 * l*> I\ , 1 ^ I \\ 1 1 MV I\

Mount Vim 'lion, Y( Hikers anil White Plains were among suburbs in which
the same things happened, albeit on a smaller scale.

Rioting broke out in the Bronx House of Detention where prisoners
started fires, seized dormitories, and almost escaped by ramming through
a wall with a steel bed. Concerning the public, the Bronx District
Attorney fumed, "It's lawlessness. It's almost anarchy."

Officer Gary Parlefsky, of the 30th Precinct in Harlem, said that he
and other cops came under fire from guns, bottles and rocks. "We were
scared to death. ..but worse than that, a blue uniform didn't mean a thing.
They couldn't understand why we were arresting them," he continued.

At a large store at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue, the doors were
smashed open and dozens of people carried off appliances. A woman in
her middle 50s walked into the store and said laughingly: "Shopping with
no money required!"

Attesting to the atmosphere of a "collective celebration," as one
worried columnist put it, a distribution center was spontaneously
organized at a Brooklyn intersection, with piles of looted goods on
display for the taking. This was shown briefly on an independent New
York station, WPIX-TV, but not mentioned in the major newspapers.

The transformation of commodities into free merchandise was only
aided by the coming of daylight, as the festivity and music continued.
Mayor Beame, at a noon (July 15) press conference, spoke of the "night
of terror," only to be mocked heartily by the continuing liberation
underway throughout New York as he spoke.

Much, of course, was made of the huge contrast between the events of
July, 1977 and the relatively placid, law-abiding New York blackout of
November, 1965. One can only mention the obvious fact that the
dominant values are now everywhere in shreds. The "social cohesion" of
class society is evaporating; New York is no isolated example.

Of course, there has been a progressive decay in recent times of
restraint, hierarchy, and other enforced virtues; it hasn't happened all at
once, Thus, in the 1 960s, John Leggett (in his Class, Race and Labor) was
surprised to learn upon examining the arrest records of those in the
Detroit and Newark insurrections, that a great many of the participants
were fully employed. This time, of the 176 people indicted as of August
8 in Brooklyn (1,004 were arrested in the borough), 48 percent were
regularly employed. (The same article in the August 9th San Francisco
Chronicle where these figures appeared also pointed out that only "six
grocery stores were looted while 39 furniture stores, 20 drug stores and
17 jewelry stores and clothing stores were looted.")

And there are other similarities to New York, naturally; Life magazine

H i mi wis < h K.i-l-i iv\i

Mil

..»-,

<jK-\uj',usl -1, 1%7 spoke ol the "carnival like revel of looting" in Detroit,
...id 1'iolfssoi l.dward Baiifield commented that "Negroes and whites
u.mj-U-d in the streets (of Detroit) and looted amicably side by side...."
I 'he main difference is probably one of scale and scope— that in New
\ oi k virtually all areas, even the suburbs, took the offensive and did so
hum the moment the lights went out. Over $1 billion was lost in the
thousands of stores looted and burned, while the cops were paralyzed.
During the last New York rioting, the "Martin Luther King" days of
l l K>N, 32 cops were injured; in one day in July, 1977, 418 cops were

injured,

Ihc left— all of it— has spoken only of the high unemployment, the
police brutality; has spoken of the people of New York only as objects,
;ind pathetic ones at that! The gleaming achievements of the
unmediated/un-ideologizedhave all pigs scared shitless.

w^^^^^***

II IE REFUSAL OF TECHNOLOGY

Of course everybody had to be given a personal code! How else could
•rnment do right by its citizens, keep track of the desires, tastes,
Inferences, purchases, commitments and above all location of a
roniinentful of mobile, free individuals?

So don't dismiss the computer as a new kind of fetters. Think of it
rationally, as the most liberating device ever invented, the only tool capable
of serving the multifarious needs of modern man.

Think of it, for a change, as him.

-John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

i'0\'(

Upon the utter destruction of wage-labor and the commodity, a new
life will be situated and redefined, by the moment, in countless,
unimagined forms. Launched by the abolition of every trace of authority
and signified by the delights and surprises of an infinity of gift-creations,
freely, spontaneously expressed by everyone.

Concepts like "economy," "exchange," "production" will have no
meaning. (What is worth preserving from this lunatic order?) Perhaps
mobile celebrations will replace our sense of cities, maybe even language
will be obsolete.

But there are those who see revolutionary transformation in rather a
different light; for them the Brunner quote is, tragically, not much of a
burlesque.

Consider — if your stomach is strong — the following, from a 1980 ultra-
leftist flyer, typical of the high-tech approach to the revolutionary
question:

The development of computer technologies, now a threat to our job

security, could be used to develop a network of global communications.

In this way, our needs can be directly coordinated with the available

labor-power and raw materials.

Leaving aside the pro-wage-labor concern for our job security, we find
human activity treated (electronically) as so much "available labor-
power." Is this the language of desire? Could freedom, love and play
flourish along such lines?

This computerized prescription is filled by taking "control of the global

MU

I Ml Kl | -l JSAI ()| Tl-t IINOI IMiY

I ,| MM I IN "< K« ' I,VSI

.'» I •

social reproduction network...." Capitalism, it need hardly be iukltul, can
be defined with some precision as the global social reproduction network.
Looking at the foundations of "advanced" technology— whieh our u Itra
leftists, in their instrumentalist, always wish to ignore— even the most
visionary of intentions would founder. High-tech as a vehicle, far from
aiding a qualitative regeneration, denies the possibility of visionary
development. The "great height made possible" by computers and the
like is, alas, only an expression of the perverse logic of historical class
rule.

Technology has not developed neutrally, as if in the right hands it
could benignly transform reality into something importantly different.
The means and methods of social reproduction are necessarily in keeping
with the stability of a social order. The factory system expressed the need
for a disciplined proletariat; more modern modes progressively extend
this "civilizing" process via specialized, usually centralized, technologies.
The individual is everywhere reduced by the instruments of capitalism,
as surely as by its wage-labor/commodity essence.

The purveyors of "alternative technology," it should be noted, promote
a different illusion. This illusion lies in ideologizing fragments of possibly
acceptable technology while ignoring that which will shape all of the
future, class struggles.

Simple techniques (see Fukuoka, Mollison, etc.) for growing a huge
amount of food in a few hours per year, for instance, arc fraught with
extremely significant implications; they present, in fact, some of the
practical possibilities of living life exquisitely— as in a garden. But they
can only become real if linked to the gigantic, necessary destruction of
a world which impedes every Utopian project.

Cioran asks, "If 'progress' is so great an evil, how is it that we do
nothing to free ourselves from it without further delay?" In fact, this
"freeing" is well underway, as seen in the massive "turn-off" felt toward
its continuance.

General Dynamics \ic& president Veliotis gave vent to a bitter ruling
class frustration on the subject (summer 1980): I, for one, would be
delighted if our vocational schools would bring us graduates who, if not
trained, were simply trainable— who could understand basic manufactur-
ing processes, who could do shop math, who could use standard tools
and gauges.

More fundamental yet is a growing refusal to participate in education
at all, given its direct linkage to "progress." The drop-out rate in NYC
high schools is now over 50 percent. The drop-out rate for all California
high schools has risen from 12 percent in 1970 to 22 percent in 1980,

;

iKvasioniin» picdiclimis of "augiY FiitUlY workers and Itigh" juvenile mine
i .iles.

The relationship between technology and education is also apt mm lite
n-.tson thai the latter provides, in its progression, such a useful, it
..bvious, analogy to the former. The fragmentation of knowledge inlo
separate, artificially constructed fields constitutes the modern unive i sifv
and social intelligence in general — in its ridiculous division of labor. Hits
is the perfect analog to technology itself; rather, it is more, inasmuch as
both clearly work in tandem toward the ever-shrunken individual,
dominated by a contrived, fraction alized scale of "information." The
ignorance thus engendered and enforced reminds us of Khayati\s allusion
Ui the university: "Everything is said about our society except what it is."

Government thinker Willis Harman writes of the coming "informal ion
society," based on "revolutionizing everyday life with microcomputers."
A horrible history surfaces on these words, as well as a forewarning ol
our future as cast by all similar techno-junkies, benevolent and otherwise.

Finally we return to the personal, which is of course the real terrain of
the revolutionary axis. A character in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Pkmrt

wonders:

And what is "common" about the "common life"? What if [we] were

to do with "common life" what Einstein did with matter? Finding its

energetics, uncovering its radiance.

The radiance and the energetics will be there when we are all that
"Einstein": when every productivist, standardized separation— and every
other mediation ("coordinated" or not)— is destroyed by us forever.

Everything in the past and present is waiting, waiting to detonate.

ANTI-WORK AND
THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL

The debacle of the air controllers' strike and the growing difficulties
unions are having in attracting new members (and holding new ones —
decertification elections have increased for the last 10 years) 1 are two
phenomena that could be used to depict American workers as quite
tamed overall and adjusted to their lot. But such a picture of conserva-
tive stasis would be quite unfaithful to the reality of the work culture,
which is now so un-tamed as to be evoking unprecedented attention and
countcrmeasures.

Before tackling the subject of anti-work, a few words on the status of
business might be in order. Bradshaw and Vogel's Corporations and Their
Critics sees enterprise today as "faced by uncertainty and hostility on
every hand." In fact, this fairly typical book finds that "latent mistrust has
grown to the point at which lack of confidence in business's motives has
become the overwhelming popular response to the role of the large
corporation in the United States/' 2 An early ; 81 survey of 24,000
prominent students, as determined by Who's Who Among American High
School Students, showed a strong anti-business sentiment; less than 20
percent of the 24,000 agree, for example, with the proposition that most
companies charge fair prices. 3 Not surprisingly, then, are Peter Berger's
conclusions about current attitudes. His "New Attack on the Legitimacy
of Business" is summed up, in part, thusly: "When people genuinely
believe in the 'rightness' of certain social arrangements, those arrange-
ments are experienced as proper and worthy of support— that is, as
legitimate... American business once enjoyed this kind of implicit social
charter. It does not today." 4

Within business, one begins to sec the spread of work refusal. Nation's
Business strikes what has become a familiar chord in its introduction to
Dr. HJ. Frcudenberger's "How to Survive Burn-Out": "For many
business people, life has lost its meaning. Work has become mere
drudgery, off-hours are spent in a miasma of dullness." 5 Similar is
Datamation's "Burnout: Victims and Avoidances/' because this disabling
trauma "seems to be running rampant" among data processors. 6 Veninga

,1JH

An n Work ani> rut Sno k.i.i j i < m ( 'nwiw >f

and Sf)ai tllry's tftv Work Stress ( otuHtUm: thnv to ( tip? with Job Burnout'
was condensed by the December 1981 Reader's Digest.

To continue in this bibliographic vein, it is worth noting that the sharp
increase in scholarly articles such as Kahn's "Work, Stress, and Individual
Well-Being, " Abdel-Halim's "Effects of Role Stress-Job Design-
Technology Interaction on Employee Work Satisfaction," and Behling
and Holcombe's "Dealing with Employee Stress." 8 Studies in Occupation-
al Stress, a series initiated in 1978 by Cooper and Kasl, dates the formal
study of this facet of organized misery.

There is other related evidence of aversion to work, including this
reaction in its literal sense, namely a growth of illnesses such as job-
related allergies and at least a significant part of the advancing industrial
accident rate since the early '60s. Comes to mind the machinist who
becomes ill by contact with machine oil, the countless employees who
seem to be accident-prone in the job setting. We are just beginning to
see some awareness of this sort of phenomenon, the consequences of
which may be very significant.

And, of course, there is absenteeism, probably the most common sign
of antipathy to work and a topic that has called forth a huge amount of
recent attention from the specialists of wage-labor. Any number of
remedies arc hawked; Frank Kuzmits' offering, "No Fault: A New
Strategy for Absenteeism," 9 for example. Deitsch and Dill's "Getting
Absent Workers Back on the Job: The Case of General Motors," puts
the annual cost to GM at $1 billion plus, and observes that "Absenteeism
is of increasing concern to management and organized labor alike." 10

There are other well-known elements of the anti-work syndrome. The
inability of some firms to get a shift working on time is a serious
problem; this is why Nucor Corp. offers a 4 percent pay hike for each ton
of steel produced above a target figure, up to a 100 percent pay bonus
for those who show up as scheduled and work the whole shift. The
amount of drinking and drug-taking on the job is another form of
protest, occasioning a great proliferation of employee alcoholism and
drug abuse programs by every sort of company, 13 Tersine and Russell
confront the "staggering" employee theft phenomenon, observing that it
has become "more widespread and professional in recent years." 12
Turnover (considered as a function of the quit rate and not due to
layoffs, of course), very high since the early 1970s, has inched up
further. 13

All of these aspects come together to produce the much publicized
productivity, or output per hour worked, crisis. Blake and Moulton
provide some useful points; they recognize, for example, that the

I'll I'MI'NIS < «]• Kl I I ISA I

.W

declining productivity rate and the erosion of quality in industry have
caused grave concern in this country" and that "industry is pouring more
money than ever into training and development," while "the productivity
rate continues to fall." Further, "attitudes among workers themselves,"
including, most basically, an "erosion of obedience to authority," are seen
as at the root of the problem. Unlike many confused mainstream
analyses of the situation— or the typical leftist denial of it as either a
media chimera or an invention of the always all-powerful corporations—
our two professors can at least realize that "Basic to the decline in
productivity is the breakdown of the authority-obedience means of
control"; this trend, moreover, "which is one manifestation of a broader
social disorder., .will continue indefinitely without corrective action," they

14

say.

Librarian R.S. Byrne gives a useful testimonial to the subject in her
compendious "Sources on Productivity," which lists some of the huge
outpouring of articles, reports, books, newsletters, etc., from a variety of
willing helpers of business, including those of the Work in America
Institute, the American Productivity Center, the American Center for the
Quality of Work Life, and the Project on Technology, Work and
Character, to name a few. As Byrne notes, "One can scarcely pick up any
publication without being barraged by articles on the topic written from
every possible perspective." The reason for the outpouring is of course
available to her: "U.S. productivity growth has declined continuously in
the past 15 years and the trend appears to be worsening." 15

The August 1981 Personnel Administrator, devoted entirely to the topic,
declares that "Today poor productivity is the United States' number one
industrial problem." 16 Administrative Management reasons, in George
Crosby's "Getting Back to Basics on Productivity," that no progress can
occur "until all individuals begin viewing productivity as their own
personal responsibility." 17 "How Deadly Is the Productivity Disease?"
asks Stanley Henrici recently in the Harvard Business Review}* An
endless stream, virtually an obsession.

Dissatisfaction with work and the consequences of this have even
drawn the Pope's attention. John Paul II, in his Laborem Exercens
(Through Work) encyclical of September 1981, examines the idea of work
and the tasks of modern management. On a more prosaic level, one
discovers that growing employee alienation has forced a search for new
forms of work organization. 19 The December 1981 Nation's Business has
located a new consensus in favor of "more worker involvement in
decision-making." 20 James OToole's Making America Work 21 emphasizes
the changed work culture with its low motivation and prescribes giving

'Ill An ii Wnuk anii mi Stkii,;,;,,. ,.,,„ ( •,inthiii.

workers the freed.,™ to design their own jobs, set (heir own work
schedules and decide their own salaries.

The productivity crisis has clearly led to the inauguration of worker

participation in a burgeoning number of co-determination arrangements

mce the mid-70s. The May 11, 1981 Business Week announced the

report, The New Industrial Relations." Proclaiming the "almost
unno iced ascendancy of a "fundamentally different way of managing
people, it claimed that the "authoritarian" approach of the "old, crude"
workplace ethos" is definitely passing, aided "immeasurably" by the
grow.ngcollaborat.ons of the trade unions. "With the adversarial
approach outmoded, the trend is toward more worker involvement in

proTctivity - P fl °° r ~ and m0IC j ° b SatisfaCti0n > tied to

Shortly after this analysis, Business Week's "A Try at Steel-Mill
Harmony" recounted the labor-management efforts being made between
the O.s. steel industry and the United Steelworkers "create a cooperative
hrbor climate where it matters most: between workers and bosses on the
mfdel ofs arraDg 7 e f ts ' which «» essentially production teams

fbMn i Q«n ? T T' £" r° n ° fficiaIS ' and workers > were Prided
tor in 1980 contracts with the nine major steel companies, but not

implemented until after early 1981 union elections because of the

unpopular^ ot the idea among many steelworkers. "The participation

team concept...was devised as a means of improving steel's slLish

fn^S 8 ratC ' thS 0bVi ° US reaS ° n f ° r a * matC of ^or

In a series of Fortune articles appearing in June, July and August 1981

'ShnT^h 7,? mdUStrial or S anization * discussed in some depth!

Shocked by faltering productivity," according to Fortune, America's

corporate managers have moved almost overnight toward the worker

involvement approach (after long ignoring the considerable Northern

f™ P TJ^u le T } ' Which " challen g« a system of authority and
accountability that has served most of history." 24 With a rising hooeful
ness big capital's leading magazine announces that "Companies which
have had time to weigh the consequences of participative management
arc finding that it informs the entire corporate culture." Employee
no longer just workers, they become the lowest level of management "*
T^'hon 01 ^ f CC , ntb0 ° kS dS ™y™' ^V Employee a Manager*
oflork hfe ™ ? Ch Pr u° gr r S ' Which *° 8° ^ the name -qu-Mtjr

TRW Co™ n T T S ' gh \ 0t GR StrippoU ' a P' ant manager of the
TRW Corp., provides the gu.dmg principle: "The workers know that if

I .1 l-MI-N IS < >l Kill ISA1

I IV el I Ik: re's no payback to the company in the solution they arrive at,
there will be a definite no. I'm not here to give away the store or run a
country club." 2 '

In effect, in about 100 auto manufacturing and assembly plants, co-
management replaces the traditional, failed ways of pushing productivity.
Auto, with virtually nothing to lose, has jumped for the effort to get
workers to help run the factories. "As far as I'm concerned, it's the only
way to operate the business — there isn't another way in today's world,"
says GM President F. James McDonald. 28 United Auto Workers
committeemen and stewards are key co-leaders with management in the
drive to "gain higher product quality and lower absenteeism." 29 Similar
is the campaign for worker involvement in the AT&T empire, formalized
in the 1980 contract with the Communication Workers of America.

The fight to bolster output per hour is as much the unions' as it is
managements'; anti-work feelings are equally responsible for the decline
of the bodyguards of capital as they are for the productivity crisis proper.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer T.R. Donahue has found in the general
productivity impasse the message that the time has come for a "limited
partnership — a marriage of convenience" with business. 30 Fortune sees in
formal collaboration "interesting possibilities for reversing the decline"
of organized labor. 31

Business Week's "Quality of Work Life: Catching On" observes that
shop-floor worker participation and the rest of the QWL movement is
"taking root in everyday life." 32 Along the same lines, the October 1981
issue of Productivity notes that half of 500 firms surveyed now have such
involvement programs. 33

William Ouchi's 1981 contribution to the industrial relations literature,
Theory Z, cites recent research, such as that of Harvard's James Medoff
and MIT's Kathryn Abraham, to point out the productivity edge that
unionized companies in the United States have over non-union ones. 34
And David Lewin's "Collective Bargaining and the Quality of Work Life"
argues for a further union presence in the QWL movement, based on
organized labor's past ability to recognize the constraints of work and
support the ultimate authority of the workplace. 35

It is clear that unions hold the high ground in a growing number of
these programs, and there seems to be a trend toward co-management
at ever higher levels. Douglas Frazer, UAW president, sits on the board
of directors at Chrysler — a situation likely to spread to the rest of auto —
and the Teamsters union appears close to putting its representative on
the board at Pan-American Airways. Joint labor-management efforts to
boost productivity in construction have produced about a dozen

> I >

An 1 1 Work anhtim- Sjkik;.;i j.. |. ((K (untk.h

important local collaborative setups involving the building trade unions
like Columbus MOST (Management and Organized Labor Striving
Together), Denver s Union Jack, and PEP (Planning Economic Progress)
in Beaumont, Texas. Business Horizons editorialized in 1981 about "the
newly established Industrial Board with such luminaries as Larry Shaprin
of DuPont and Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO" as a "mild portent" of
he growing formal collaboration. 36 The board, a reincarnation of the
Labor Management Board that expired in 1978, is chaired by Kirkland
and the chairman of Exxon, Clifton C. Garvin Jr

The defeat in 1 979 of the Labor Law Reform Act, which would have
greatly increased government support to unionization, was seen by many
asalmost catastrophic given labor's organizing failures. But the economic
crisis, perhaps especially in light of generous union concessions to the
auto, airlines, rubber, trucking and other industries, may provide the
setting for a revitalization" of the national order including a real
institutionalization of labor's social potential to contain the mounting
anti-work challenge. 3, 5

There is already much pointing to such a possibility, beyond even the

^Th^rT^r^" ^ movementw *h ^s vital union compo-
nent. The 1978 Trilateral Commission on comparative industrial relations
spoke in very glowing terms about the development of neo-corporatist
institutions (witf .German "co-determination" by unions and management
as its mode I)* Business Week of June 30, 1980, a special issue on "The
Reindustnahzation of America," proclaimed that "nothing short of a new
social contract" between business, labor and government, and "sweeping
changes m basic institutions" could stem the country's industrial decline *
Thus, when the AFL-CIO's Kirkland called in late 1981 for a tripartite
National Reindustnahzation Board, a concept first specifically advanced
by investment banker Felix Rohatyn, the recent theoretical precedents
are well in place One of the main underlying arguments by Rohatyn and
others is that labor will need the state to help enforce its productivity
programs in its partnership with management.

Thus would spreading "worker involvement" be utilized, but shepherd-
ed by the most powerful political arrangements. Wilber and Jameson's
Hedonism and Quietism" puts the matter in general yet historical terms
Ways must be found to revitalize mediating institutions from the bottom
up A good example is Germany's efforts to bring workers into a direct
role in decision-making." 40

A change of this sort might appear to be too directly counter to the
ideology ot the Reagan government, but it actually would be quite in line
with the goal of renewed social control minus spending outlays

I I I Ml 111'. ' >l Ul I M'.AI

I <

Washing-Ion, alter all, lias hern Hying to reduce its instrumentalities
because 'this giant network ol" programs is past its ability lo coherently
.Manage, just as its cutbacks also reflect the practical failure ot govern-
ment social pacification programs.

Meanwhile, the refusal of work grows. One final example is the
extremely high teenage unemployment rate, which continues to climb
among all groups and is the object of a growing awareness that a very big
element is simply a rejection of work, especially low-skill work, by the
voung. 41 And legion are the reports that describe the habits of teenagers
who do work as characterized by habitual tardiness, a chronic absentee-
ism disrespect for supervisors and customers, etc. Which recalls the
larger picture drawn by Frederick Herzberg in his "New Perspectives on
the Will to Work": "the problem is work motivation— all over the world.
It's simply a matter of people not wanting to work." 42

The gravity of the anti-work situation seems now to be approaching an
unprecedented structural counter-revolution. Tripartism dates back to
World War I, to Coolidge in peacetime, but the addition of a mass-
participation schema is just beginning to emerge as a national hypothesis.
Of course, this nascent reaction intersects with a political tide of non-
participation (e.g., declining voter turnout, massive non-registration for
the draft rolls, growing tax evasion). The larger culture of withdrawal,
from the state as from work, will make this integration effort highly
problematic, and may even produce a more effective exposure of capital's
organization of life, given that organization's heightened dependence on
its victim's participation.

Part 3

THE PROMISE OF THE '80s

F ° r many ' the 1970s wer e— and the 1980s bid fair to continue— a kind
Of "midnight of the century," an arrival at the point of complete
demoralization and unrelieved sadness. What follows is one attempt to
gauge the obviously unhappy landscape of capital's American rule and
see whether there indeed exists no prospect for the ending of our
captivity.

To begin with the obvious, the public misery could hardly be less of a
secret; the evidence is legion. The March 1979 Ladies Home Journal
featured "Get a Good Night's Sleep," in which epidemic insomnia is
discussed. Psychology Today for April '79 is devoted to the spreading
depression, asking rhetorically, "Is this the Age of Depression?" A month
later, the UN's International Labor Organization reported that "mental
illness affects more human lives than any other disabling condition,"
adding that the number of people suffering such disorders is "growing
dramatically."

In terms of the young, the May 17, 1979 Wall Street Journal described
authority's concern over the dimensions of teen-age alcohol abuse and
cited the raising of the legal drinking age in an increasing number of
states. Matthew Wald's "Alarm Over Teenage Drinking" echoed the
point in the New York Times for August 16, 1979. U.S. News and World
Report in the same week talked about drug use among the very young:
"Increasingly, grade school pupils are being drawn into the ranks of
narcotics users — often paying for their habits by taking part in crimes."
Robert Press, in the August 17, 1979 Christian Science Monitor bemoaned
the general ineffectiveness of parents' organizing efforts aimed at
curtailing rising drug use. A two year study of Texas counties by Dr.
Kenneth Nyberg, published in September 1979, indicates a universality
to this problem, namely that kids' drinking and drug use among urban
and rural areas is tending to occur at similarly high levels. Another
noticeable aspect of the phenomenon was its reflection in the many
dramas and "Afternoon Special" type television programs on young
alcoholics, during the winter of 1979-80.

Of course, these references by no means exhaust the ways by which
youth show the pain of living through this world. Nor do the young all

.'IK

II II f'UOMLSl «>l II!) 'HO*.

make it. Scott Spencer's "Childhood's End," in May 1979 Harper's, tells
us that the rate of childhood suicide is increasing radically. The scope of
Spencer's concern is reflected in the subtitle: "A hopeless future inclines
the young toward death." Nor should we neglect to include a staggering
social fact dealing with the other end of the age spectrum, before turning
our survey toward the adult majority. Senility, according to several
doctors interviewed in Newsweek for November 5, 1979, is affecting
millions, at far earlier ages and in a recent upsurge that qualifies it as
epidemic.

The mountain of tranquilizers consumed in the U.S. each day is not a
new situation, but by the late '70s the pressures against humans became
more intense and identifiable. In general, this may be characterized by
the Harvard Medical School Health Letter of October 1979: "...the concept
of stress — a term that has become the banner designation for our human
condition...." 1978 saw an unprecedented appearance of full-page ads in
national magazines for such products as "STRESSTABS," a "High
Potency Stress Formula Vitamin/' In the first half of April 1979, the Wall
Street Journal ran a four-part, front-page series on stress and its
mounting, and seemingly inescapable toll on health and sanity. On May
1 ABC-TV's "World News Tonight" began a highly advertised four-part
scries of their own, called "STRESS: Is it killing you?" The November
1979 American Journal of Nursing's cover story was Smith and Selye's
"The Trauma of Stress and How to Combat It."

Ouite naturally, stress and wage-labor emerges as a pressing topic just
at this time. The first volume in a scries of Studies in Occupational Stress
appeared in 1978, Cooper and Payne's Work and Stress. Articles on the
subject, too, seem to fairly burst forth in the literature of industrial
relations from 1978 and continue without let-up, through New Develop-
ments in Occupational Stress, published by UCLA's Center for Quality of
Working Life in early 1980. That work is becoming viscerally unbearable
is an idea reflected in the popular press, as well as in academic writings.
Marcia Kramer's "Assembly-line hysteria— a fact, not fiction" recorded
the incidence of stress-releasing mass psychogenic illness often occurring
in monotonous work scenes, in the May 31, 1979 Chicago Sun-Times.
Nadine Brozan's "Stress at Work: The Effects on Health," surveyed
changing values and reactions toward work in the New York Times of
June 14, 1979. Another topical piece was seen in the July 13 San
brancisco Chronicle, in which Joan Chatfield-Taylor's "Job Burnout"
described its timely subject as "a profound and lasting dread of
work... mental and physical depletion ranging from fatigue to full-fledged
nervous breakdown."

l.i I mi n is or Ki i ■hsai

>i l J

In late February 1979 United Auto Workers Vice President Fat
Greathouse told a Senate Subcommittee that occupational alcoholism
alone may be draining the economy by $25 billion per year. He spoke of
the widening use of drugs and alcohol, a growing menace to business and
industry, which has motivated recovery programs being conducted jointly
by union and management. "More Help for Emotionally Troubled
Employees" Business Week, March 12, 1979, and an August 13, 1979 Wall
Street Journal article by Roger Ricklef which described the boom in all-
inclusive counselling services being set up for firms' employees, are but
two stories on the new measures needed to try to cope with the massive,
physically-registered alienation.

It is clear that we not only feel a higher level of everyday unhappiness,
but that what many social psychologists observe as a very high degree of
suppressed rage prevalent is surfacing in terms of conscious disaffection
with the social system. U.S. News and World Report, February 26, 1979,
registered alarm in its..."'The Doubting American'— A Growing Breed."
The article, like perhaps hundreds of others recently, noted the decline
of "faith in leaders, institutions and the U.S. future," going on to state
that "many Americans doubt the strength and even the validity of old
values— and are skeptical about the quality of their lives...." A case in
point was the public attitude concerning the spring 1979 disaster at the
Three Mile Island nuclear plant; as the Manchester Guardian correctly
assayed: "...in the country at large, people were overwhelmingly certain
that the authorities were lying."

The May 1979 Gallup Opinion Index featured a poll measuring
confidence in ten key institutions, and depicting a general decline from
the already low degrees of trust these institutions attracted in 1973. Only
one was the object of "a great deal of confidence" from more than 25%
of the public, and the three most distrusted— organized labor, congress*
and big business— could muster this rating from an average of only 12%.
May 15 provided a specific example when the Los Angeles Times an-
nounced that the l£ Los Angeles Police Department has suffered a serious
decline in public support...." according to their own Times poll. And May
21 unveiled a Gallup Poll which disclosed that "despite the best efforts
of the Carter administration, energy experts and the oil companies," only
14% in the nation believed that a real gasoline shortage existed while
77% felt it to be artificial, contrived by the oil companies. The poll
results had been finding their practical expression as well, as evidenced
by the dismay voiced on March 11 by Energy Secretary Schlesinger:
record levels of gas and oil consumption had been reached despite all the
"energy crisis" appeals for restraint.

,>A\

IfJJ' I'komisi- m MM SON

1 I I Ml N I S < Jl Kl I I IV\1

) >

Coinciding with long lines at the gas pumps in 1979, Time's June (H

issue included "Hoarding Days" in which the incidence of hoarding olhei

goods—and the likelihood of its increase in the '80s— is caused principal

lyby public distrust of government and its statements. "A Summer of

Discontent" by Walter Annenberg decried the American unwillingness

to sacrifice; the essay appeared in the June 16, 1979 issue of IV Guide

and was a full-page reprint in the New York Times of June 14. Donald

Winks' "Speaking out— with a forked tongue" was an editorial in the July

2 Business Week, which reminded that "rising mistrust of big government"

is matched by strong public mistrust of business. On July 3 President

Carter's popularity was assessed by an ABC News-Harris Poll; his job

performance rating was 73% negative, lower than Nixon received as he

left office in disgrace, the lowest for a president since modern polling

began. There followed the exhaustively reported mid July 79 crisis of the

Carter regime, including the Camp David "domestic summit" from which

talk of the mounting sense of "malaise" abroad in the land issued. His

nationally televised July 15 speech included the following on the "crisis

of confidence": "It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and

spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt

about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose

for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening

to destroy the social and political fabric of America."

Allegedly, the source for much of Carter's remarks in this vein was an
April 23 memo from his pollster Patrick Caddell, dealing with a growing
cynicism and pessimism in society. As 1979 drew to a close the general
outlook was not seen to have changed, though the Iran situation
provided a temporary deflection. Edward A. Wynn, writing in the
October 4 Wall Street Journal ("Why Do We Expect Too Much?"),
carped that "utopian" expectations lead to cynicism and disengagement'.
Calling for disciplinary efforts, he warned that a social order does not
regenerate itself if the young generation is not socialized. A New York
TimesJCBS News Poll published November 12 found that two thirds in
the U.S. feel that the nation is in worse shape than it was five years ago,
while holding on to the belief that their personal futures look reasonably
good. Significantly, the young are most optimistic about their personal
future. A survey by U. S. News & World Report for the week of November
12 reported extremely similar findings.

From late 78 through mid-79 the conclusions of a major study by the
Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan attracted much
public attention. Primarily seen as a study of job satisfaction, "a marked
and significant decline" in specific satisfactions was registered between

responses of Hie 19/7 workers and those queried in 1% ( > and I TO. The
June 4, 1979 ftimness Week discussed the results of this third national
<5R( survey as "a warning that worker discontent is rising," a typical

MMiimation.

Coineidentally, however, the next day's June 5 Wall Street Journal noted
a further interpretation of the poll data of even wider significance. It was
reported that the survey's director, Graham Stines, had recently drawn
attention to the "life satisfaction" responses, indicating that the dissatis-
t.ution in this area (e.g. overall health, happiness) was even greater than
in terms of job discontent, and the workers tended to see less separation
between work and non-work desires for satisfaction. The appearance of
Robert Ogger's/4 Little White Lie: Institutional Division of Labor and Life
also suggests that life— and society— is a totality which should provide all-
.nound fulfillment. That an authentic life is absent is more consciously
< .hvious, as individuals demand more from all spheres of living.

Concerning work, a few examples should suffice to indicate the general
range of disaffection. Wright and Hamilton's "Education and Job
Attitudes Among Blue Collar Workers," in the February 1979 Sociology
t>f Work and Occupations, demonstrated that "education and job
satisfaction are not significantly related." In other words, contrary to
stereotypes, it is not only the more highly educated who are discontented.
Neither, apparently, do the "seniors" fit the cliche image of docility,
aecording to the 1 979 publication by Action for Independent Maturity,
entitled How Do You Motivate the Older Worker*} Edward Harrison's
^Discipline and the Professional Employee "from The Personnel Adminis-
trator for March 79 announced the increasing need of management to
discipline professional workers, as opposed to the "rather rare" instances
in the past. The March 26, 1979 U.S. News & World Report depicted
labor's "Big Crusade of the '80s: More Rights for Workers" projecting
the "mountain of complaints and litigation brought by workers against
their bosses— court suits, grievances, arbitrations and charges brought to
federal agencies." An April Wall Street Journal article on food service
jobs, "Burger Blues," reported extremely high turnover and quoted a
counter employee in Texas as to his loyalty to his bosses: "We have all
learned how to successfully steal enough money...." Anxiety and
resentment at AT&T, the nation's largest employer, was discussed in the
May 28 and June 25 issues of Business Week. Similarly, US. News &

World Report for July 30 and September 3, 1979 features articles which
further elucidate the decline of the work ethic. In "Why 'Success' Isn't

What It Used To Be" (July 30), it counsels that "employers will have to

re-examine the traditional techniques for managing and motivating

i

.^ mm

winkers because prop]? luive a itilli'iviil way ol looking aJ life. " The
September J "New Breed of Workers" was a covet story in which the
cardinal adjectives were "restless" and "demanding."

Moving from the general to more specific cases on the "anti-work "
front, consider the role of the He-detector in industrial relations. Ike
Federationist (AFL-CIO) discussed the fact of hundreds of thousands of
psychological screenings and polygraph examinations using an increasing
variety of devices, in its January '79 "The Intimidation of Job Tests/' The
piece cited the claim of Dr. Alan Strand, Industrial psychologist and
president of Chicago's Personnel Security Corporation, that 100% of
drug store employees steal with 80% stealing "significantly." Benson and
Krois' "The Polygraph in Employment: Some Unresolved Issues,"
Personnel Journal September 79, also examined this new development.
Booming employee theft and falsified job applications have drastically
increased lie detector usage, calling for some controls or standards, in
their view. In the same month, the Washington Post's John A. Jenkins
discussed the controversial voice stress analyzers, wireless lie detectors
used more and more by businesses "concerned about the honesty of their
employees."

In Lawrence Stressing "Employees Don't Take Anti-Theft Moves
Lightly" (New York Times, March 4, 1979), resistance based largely on
right-to-privacy grounds is seen, with the larger point that greater
surveillance of workers has done little to stem "inventory drain." The
April 16 Forbes cover story "The Game Where Everybody Loses But
Nobody Gains," by Richard Phalon, finds big business bewailing the
staggering figures involved: theft has surpassed the $40 billion a year
mark, increasing at a compound rate of 15% annually. More rational
than its title, the article goes on to credit the Department of Commerce
with the observation that "Businessmen mistakenly assume that most
inventory losses are caused by shoplifters when actually employees
account for the major portion of inventory shrinkages." Commenting on
the "horrendous" statistics involved, the piece notes also that "the
security industry.. .is now grossing $23 billion a year." This last datum is
clearly reflected in the full-page and even two-page ads by such firms as
GTE ("Industrial Security") and INA Corporation ("Coping with White
Collar Crime") appearing in business periodicals from mid-1979 on.

While the technical ingenuity of "computer criminals" is often mildly
surprising to us, what is a real jolt to business is the great diversity of
people robbing them. Associated Press w f riter Charles Chamberlain's
"Spy TV turns Up Surprises in Watching Industrial Plants" (June 24,
1979) US. News & World Report interview with Professor W.S. Albrecht,

I I (MINIS ol RKHISAI.

' ' V

expert t)ii employee crime," was revealingly entitled "Surprising Profile
i if the White Collar Crook;" the "typical offender turns out to be
someone just like the normal citizen,..."

Another aspect of the anti-work trend is the most obvious one; the
current and emerging ways by which the "labor force" breaks away from
work as much as possible. Late January 1979 provided a most extreme
case of rage in the person of Chicago snowplow driver Thomas Blair.
After smashing some forty cars, killing one person, Blair was arrested
screaming "I hate my job! I want to see my kids!" On a more widespread
level are the findings of Caroline Bird's The Two Pay-Check Marriage,
that men are losing their ambition and seek jobs which allow them more
time with their families. Although inflation has forced a situation in
which there are now more couples in which both parties work than those
in which the woman stays home, Bird has observed "a definite decline in
the work ethic, with men coming in late or telling the boss to go to hell
if they don't like what is happening or even quitting." Another book in
1979 takes this theme further; Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine
to Five World, by Bernard Lefkowitz, saw "average people" dropping out
in protest "against a work culture whose values they no longer trust."
Breaktime described the phenomenon as constituting a "quiet revolution
taking place in the mainstream of American culture."

"Time Wasting at Work" in the March 5, 1979 U.S. News & World
Report is representative of the recent outpouring of attention on "time
theft." In mid-April, Robert Half of the placement service Philadelphia
Inc. reported that the deliberate misuse and waste of on-the-job time was
costing the economy $80 billion a year.

A further facet of work avoidance is the growth of part-time employ-
ment. Barney Olmsted's "Job Sharing: an emerging workstyle" {Interna-
tional Labour Review, May- June 79) explored the "innovative U.S. work
pattern" of two people splitting one full-time job. In the same issue of
the ILR, Olive Robinson found that the number and proportion of part-
time workers in Europe has been rising for twenty years. "Big Market for
Part-Time Help" by Lloyd Watson (San Francisco Chronicle, October 25,
1979) points up the same tendency in the U.S. What gives added
significance to this trend can be grasped in studies like Miller and
Terborg's "Job attitudes and Full-Time Employees" (Journal of Applied
Psychology, Fall 79), which found that "Part-time employees were less
satisfied with work, benefits, and the job in general." The plight of the
mass occupation of secretary is a reminder that antipathy to work has its
more specific targets. "Help Wanted: a shortage of secretaries" (Time,
September 3, 1979) took note of national aversion to the job. this severe

•'■'' 1 I III I'komi.si- 01 mi - 8()s

undcr-supply despite a 6% unemployment rate and the most openings tor
secretarial positions of all the 300 Department of Labor classifications.
The 20th Century Fox movie Nine to Five, which appeared in early 1 980
reinforced the image of such corporate work as degrading and empty '
The four-day week, touted in the mid-'70s, produced no improvement
in worker attitude or performance, beyond a sometimes seen initial
welcome. Talk of the three-day week, logically or illogically, has emerged
from this failure. It is the scheduling of work time that has, most
recently, occupied perhaps greater attention in management's hopes to
quell the anti-work syndrome. "Flextime," or the choosing by employees
of which hours in the day they will devote to wage-labor, has not
however, achieved results much dissimilar to working fewer days in the
week. Similarly, it leads to an extension of its basic idea— in this case to
that of "flex-life"! "Live Now, Work Later"— though it may sound like
a parody— was the quite serious article appearing in the Financial Times
of London, early October 79. The idea of flex-time, already introduced
in many firms, is simply extended to offer "the same kind of flexibility"
to the entire work-life's scheduling. Worker disaffection is likewise
behind this concept's appearance, introduced by no less a figure than
Francis Blanchard, director general of the International Labour
Organization.

Work, to which we will return at length further on, is of course only
part of the arena of public disenchantment and withdrawal. The steady
decline of voting, as discussed in books like E.C. Ladd's Where Have All
the Voters Gone? (1978) and Arthur Hadley's The Empty Polling Booth
(1979), is bringing popular support of government to lower and lower
lewis. Nor, by the way, does this phenomenon seem confined to the
U.S.; the June and October 1979 elections in Italy and Japan, respective-
ly, attracted the lowest turnouts since World War II.

And the participation of the young is the strongest portent for the
future of the electoral diversion. Only 48% of the newly-enfranchised 18
to 20-year olds voted in 1972, 38% in 1976, and 20% in 1978 Fall '79
saw the inauguration of new efforts by national groups to reverse this
downward spiral, including that of the National Association of Secondary
School Principals. A United Press International story of October 23
reported that registration is "down throughout the country for all voters
but most notably for those 18 to 20," and described attempts to registe^
high school seniors in the schools plus provide a new "voting education
curriculum" Time (September 3) had also remarked on the steady decline
ot young voters and the consequent registration drives in high schools
as typified by the new state laws deputizing school principals and

ll I Ml NIS ( )l Kill ISA1

k;icliers ;is registrars. Nonetheless, November 79 elections produced, in
many places, such as San Francisco, the lowest turnouts in their histories.
As T. W. Madron put it in the December 79 Futurist, the downward
(rend threatens "the entire American political system."

Without its re-creation by the citizenry, the modern political network
indeed collapses. When Ralph Nader urges that voting be made
mandatory, he is recognizing this essential need for participation.
Bernard-Henri Levy, in his Barbarism with a Human Face, fleshes out
this point a bit further: "There can be no successful dictatorship without
the establishment of procedures through which people are invited or
forced to speak."

The great socializer, education, is also beset by an advancing resistance,
which exhibits both passive and active forms without precedent in their
magnitude. Avoidance of school is seen, for instance, by a January 79
Oakland, California School District report, which discussed "the growing
number of truants" and the various costs of such "unexcused absences."
The May 79 Educational Press Association convention heard school
officials term the 25% high school drop-out rate "a national disgrace."
The Lalls' "School Phobia: It's Real and Growing," in which children
experience panic and often severe physical symptoms in growing numbers
{Instructor, September, 1979), is another example of passive resistance to
school on an important level.

This withdrawal, no matter what form it takes, is obviously a major
cause of the continually declining academic test scores. The precollege
Scholastic Aptitude Test, which measures high-schoolers' verbal and
mathematical reasoning abilities, showed lowered scores for the tenth
year in a row, it was announced on September 8. The average scores for
the million high school seniors taking the SAT in 1979 are thus part of
the downward current that began in 1969. The National Assessment of
Educational Progress, a non-profit organization which monitors students'
achievements in math and science, reported 79 declines comparable to
those of the SAT scores. The July 3 U.S. News & World Report, in its
"Science Skills Skidding in U.S. Schools," and "Problems!: Math skills
are down again," in the September 24 Time registered these diminishing
levels.

Carl Tupperman's The Literary Hoax, dealing with "the decline of
reading, writing, and learning," suggests an even more widespread
tendency of aversion from society's "knowledge." With Hunter and
Harman's Adult Illiteracy in the United States: A Report to the Ford
Foundation, this turning away becomes more obvious. Made public in
September 79, the two-year study states that reading and writing

=£73 C r=

Hr 6

sC c
03

= £

~ 4=

g ~ o

o

<

c

O

5?

CD

(U

u
rs 43

< B

CD

£

o
£

43

<D

43

43 .3

<

O ON

>!

73

G

o3
G

SO

03

73

(D

CD O

*a >>i-

7= S4- ^

* S 9
g p

=i.

D 03
1^

U

43

3

43

CD

o

•£

<d

03

as
. *

4-1

G-
<D
1-1

"o

-i-T
3

o
-a
o

£

73

O

o

o

— o
o R
o

J!
O T3

G 03

3 73

-o

73
CD

03
•SO

.c

"S
o

43

£ 73

. P -2

03

<U

€/5

CD

J3

*- o

l- .CO

= 73

73
G

44

Ooj3

s _*

3 5

03 CD

03 a,

^ £

G °3

.2 "

=3 "o3

<D O

O

o3

73

42 3
CD

43
O

X

49 3

G °

« 2

03

3
_cd

V-
u

CD

G
C

o
U

43

43"
43

.2 *

o >>

00 <d
■~» -B

a ^

CD

£

CD

3? J

^ od

^£
2 -a

as

g o

o Om

<d cd

2 0^

&•£ J

p-S c

73

Q

o
o

43

o

in

T3

(U
; 43

'S

c

■ 03

3
'— 1

C

03 '
C/3

1)

43

H

d

o

»0 G
C 4)

« S
03 4=)

cu

o3
1)

c

CO

c

03

£

v,

o

rt -B

-a

03

43

P ..„ <»

O G <U

qj

E2 CO
50 t^

43

o

03
O

O 3 73

>-c

03 m
G "

Is

CD 03

C
<

o a\
u oh

ex
S

Q

5. P <J •=

T3 T3

rH

•G O

^3

h .S o

c
4^

CO
43
t-'

Sh
>

o

44
o3

* 43
03 03

CO

■S «

42 ^

e 3

° Q

•D

o

CD

T3
u,
3

s ^

4-1

o ^

C rH

o C<1

■a

CO

3^-5

>

03
U

.G

o3 CO

"s- G

03 3

P O

CD

G
3

K- 3

gl

>, b

o3 CD

3
CJ

c

43
C

o

e

o3

G
43

O

c

43
o
1/5

CD
43

ClO 03

G "T

CD
o3

s

od

-a

43
to

3

o ,

O 03 *S

43
43

o3

U
1—

CD

43

o3
T3
G
03
>

-a

G

«

C

o

<D
CD G
G O

~ a

caO t»
G »-«

fa 4=

a 03

CD

E-

CD
43

s

O

CD

a o

G

C

£W

ce

CD

G

03

G

CD
3

G

c
to.

CD
43

>, to <;

>> CD

c
o

CJ

3

- CD

£

> >i-

O

Q

G

u

3
O

<d"

c

CD r^.

.G ct\

N *-<
03

ofS

CD
4=

e

CD
CO

G

03
O

3

w

G

z

CD
43

43
"o3

a,
<

_CD

3
3

Qh

G

03

CD
CJ ■

C
CD i

CD
43

G

-O

*-j

43

3

03

<

O

u,

UJ

4J

C3

z

T3

in

!Z3

44

>

_^-i

03

45

0-,- v-i

o >

S 2

CD
43

e

CD

D-

CD t»

43 03

s s

H -

a, o

u X

CO G

. CD
43

CD
43

OhQ

o aT

3

a

o

o

^ -r-j a a

Q,

«3

O 03 <

•a fa

CD
43

xn

CD

CD —

*-• 3 "B

2c3|

o

>

CD
13

w o

c B
.3 *-<

3
&0 43)

G ^

S CD

.ti 'B

G O

R CD

43

CJ

CD
43
CD
c3
CD
•*->

CD

G
O

73

CD
T3

_3

"CD

,G

13
od
43

T3
G
o3

On

3
o

G
1-1
3
42
i~
CD
43
CD
03
CO

43
CJ

Ih

3
CO

(30 t»

G 43

43

p.

73

OJ

rS

CD

'S

CD

CJ
43

CJ

•03

CJ

H
>-,

43

73

G
03

O
G

4^

C 3

C j-

OO -

P ^

■CD
73

G

3

O
43

73

CD
C

3

42

03
S=

<D

.9 < ^ s °° Q

03 G

o ,5 o

III

•■■ < "■ <r\ir\i < ,| , N(

Kl I'.

I I I Ml 'N IS <)| Kl'lUSAI

}. n )

A liulhcr pcrspeclive mi (J. I. alidades was offered in llu* July 7 ( >
American Journal i>j SodoUtgy x also a reminder of the point noted above
on the blurring of work and non-work areas of tile, Segal, Lynch, and
Blair's contribution to the AJS, "The Changing American Soldier: Work ■
related Attitudes of U.S. Army Personnel in World War II and the
1970s," observed a comparable level of dissatisfaction between WWII
AWOLs and typical soldiers in the all volunteer force. Within the '70s
job satisfaction was seen to fall even more between February 1974 and
the end-point of their data, August 1977. Aside from a suggested decline
in military values between the 1940s and the '70s, it must also be
recognized that there has been a "secular decline in job satisfaction in
American society generally." Seth Cropsey's article in December '79
Harper's laments the severe shortage of volunteer troops, and makes a
similar connection between the condition of the services and a larger
trend in society: namely, that there exists a strong anti-military, anti-draft
sentiment which shows no signs of changing.

A more vivid illustration of anti-military hostility could be seen from
within the Navy. Blaine Harden, writing for the Washington Post in late
June '79, chronicled the many fires aboard the carrier John F. Kennedy,
believed to have been set by disgruntled sailors. In July, Naval officials
announced that the period of April-July 79 contained twice as many
suspicious fires aboard Atlantic Fleet ships as there had been during all
of 1977 and 1978 on both Atlantic and Pacific vessels. At the beginning
of November the Los Angeles Times' Robert Toth noted the almost $5
million fire damage to ships during 1979, postulating "deeper morale
problems" involved.

Leaving the subject of national service and the desperately ailing
military, the above cases of arson bring to mind that it is the nation's
fastest growing crime, up "900% over a 16-ycar period," according to San
Francisco Fire Chief Andrew Casper in September '79. August 31 had
seen a $20 million apartment complex arson in Houston, the worst fire
in the city's recent history. And less than a week later, an 18-year old was
arrested for starting a 5,000 acre fire in California's Los Padres National

Forest.

Sabotage, too, seems to be providing spectacular and unprecedented
examples of anti-society urges, and not only in the U.S. The St.
Catharine's Standard of December 9, 1978 carried, complete with photo,
"Man Drives Truck Through Stores in Shopping Plaza." The story
recounted the systematic destruction wreaked by a man who drove an
armored truck through 35 stores in the Montreal area's Carrefour St.
George, costing nearly $2 million. Cresrview, Florida was the scene of a

derailment nn April \ l K l l W of two dozen cars on the Louisville and
Nashville Railroad; sabotage was strongly suspected due to track damage
caused by rifle bullets. On June 2, 1979 Los Angeles County Museum of
Art officials said that eight paintings, including two by Picasso, had been
slashed by someone using a metal object. A bulldozer smashed five cars
in the parking lot of a Houston plastic firm June 13; the driver, finally
halted by a collision with a railroad boxcar, had been recently fired from
his job. Southern Pacific Railroad investigators announced on October
8, 1979 that saboteurs had derailed a 101 -car freight train the day before
near Santa Barbara; a barricade of lumber and concrete caused the
crash, which closed the main rail line between Los Angeles and San

Francisco.

If 1978 was a time when much national attention was given the fiscal
survival chances of New York City as a public corporation, 1979 could
perhaps be commemorated as the year in which its hope to survive as a
coherent social entity became an open question. As the highest point of
American urbanism, it deserves at least the following few, random
readings from the front pages of the New York Times. March saw NYT
stories covering the alarming jump in subway crime and the consequent
decision to station police on every nighttime train. March 15 disclosed
that "New York's Illegal Garbage Dumping Gets Worse," as some roads
in the Bronx and Brooklyn are "completely blocked" by mountains of
unauthorized trash. "Graveyard Vandalism Continues," was another
featured March topic. In May the Times front page for the 7th featured,
"Vandals Ruin $80,000 Sculpture Outside A Madison Ave. Gallery." On
the 10th Mayor Koch, in a "public safety" move eliciting mostly laughter
from New Yorkers, was announced to have banned the drinking of
alcohol in public places, such as street corners. The next day found a
woman reportedly attacked by rats near NY's City Hall; officials closed
off the area to battle the rodents. May 21, 1979 disclosed the high
monetary and psychological cost of vandalism; it had already reached a
dollar price-tag of 8 million by the end of 1978, to the Education and
Parks Departments alone. "Tens of Thousands of Derelicts Jam New
York's Criminal Courts" appeared on the June 7 front page, within days
of news stories on the description of drug abuse in city schools as
"critical" by a congressional investigating committee. Narcotics Abuse
Committee Chairman Lester Wolff said the New York problem "reflects
the state of affairs in all major metropolitan and suburban areas
throughout the nation."

Turning to the subject of contemporary forms of violence in society at
large, we encounter the "sniper." Lately it almost seems that every

mi

Till 1'KOMISI (»! Till SUS

newscast includes a story on someone who has "flipped out" into a
posture of lethal behavior, such as a man firing away from inside his
barricaded apartment. A well-known case was that of Brenda Spencer,
16, who surrendered to police after shooting at an elementary school
across the street from her San Diego home, killing its principal and
custodian and wounding nine students; "I hate Mondays" she offered
following the January 29, 1979 attack. In late April, a 64-year-old man
opened fire on a group of seven police, wounding six of them and then
killing two women and injuring more than 30 others who were present
watching a San Antonio parade. A 30-ycar-old social worker shot and
killed two FBI agents in their El Centro, California office on August 9,
1979 and then killed himself.

As un-reasoned as these suicidal acts may be, they are clearly a part of
the syndrome of (often ill-defined) anger at authority, discussed
throughout this essay. Marilyn Elias, in her June 1979 essay "Freelance
Terrorists," lends a judgement that applies: "People seem willing to
resort to drastic acts in an era marked by ebbing faith in such institutions
as the family, the church, our economic system and the government."
Despite an everyday reality that enforces the calm of isolation and
entropy, acts of collective as well as individual violence mount. Outbursts
shatter the facade and contain mixed elements in their released rage; the
'80s will, for a time, most likely bear this varied imprint as seen in a scan
of some of 1979's group violence.

A Wichita rock concert "just broke into warfare," said a radio station
director, when police shut off the power at the April 15 event. Hundreds
of police firing shotguns and tear gas required three hours to quell the
riot, which saw squad cars destroyed by tire irons and four officers
injured. San Francisco's "Dan White Riot" of May 21 caused over $1
million in damage to Civic Center buildings and looted stores and banks.
A largely gay crowd of 5,000 also injured 60 police and burned 13 squad
cars in an all-night explosion which laid siege to City Hall; begun as a
protest against the extremely lenient legal treatment of a reactionary
County Supervisor who had murdered a gay Supervisor and the mayor,
the riot included many other elements and quickly transcended concern
with legality or politicians. On the same night, a crowd of 1500 attacked
firemen and police with rocks and bottles at the scene of a million-dollar
factory fire in Redwood City, 25 miles south of the San Francisco
outbreak. Also at the same time, end-of-semester vandalism at the
University of Connecticut left smashed furniture and burning debris
across the campus, in a rampage apparently caused by nothing so much
as boredom.

I I IMhN IS (■>!■ kl'.I'liSAI

\\

■

Two days of rioting occurred in the famous Philadelphia suburb of
l.cvittown a name once synonymous with suburban conformity and
1 1 anquility— in late June, involving 3,000 people and 200 arrests. Truckers
blockaded the area and joined teenagers and motorists in burning gas
pumps and vehicles, throwing objects, including molotov cocktails at
police and demanding more and cheaper fuel.

Four further examples from summer '79 demonstrate continuing non-
individual violence in an array of forms. The Chicago White Sox annual
teen half-price night, July 11, was billed as "Disco Demolition Night,"
but the anti-disco theme proved the excuse for 7,000 rioters to overrun
and destroy the playing field. Red Lake Indian Reservation experienced
two nights of arson and gunfire, including a three-hour firefight between
Indians and federal police, on July 21 and 22. One man was shot to
death during a July 27 rock concert in Cleveland which was marked by
vandalism and rock and bottle throwing at police. An August UPI
newswire from Slatington, Pennsylvania points out that even hamlets are
not immune; it read: "The mayor of this tiny Lehigh County community
Saturday declared a state of emergency and imposed a midnight-6 A.M.
curfew in an attempt to break up street corner crowds. Mayor David
Altrichter said the groups were at times, urinating and defecating on
Main Street!.... Curfew was also imposed on the central Connecticut city
of Meriden on September 6, 1979 following a teen-age gang's rock-
throwing attack on a police station. Mayor Walter Evilia said the assault
came from "Hispanics, blacks and whites" living in and around a
downtown housing project; "It's going to get like New York City soon,"
he told a reporter.

Dozens of melees could be cited involving people vs. police, but it is
also true that a brutalized population is quite capable of brutalizing itself,
as with gang violence or the tragic storming of a Cincinnati rock concert
entrance on December 3, 1979 which resulted in 11 youths trampled to
death. With both its liberatory and its backward aspects, however, we do
appear to be embarking on the '80s in an increasing current of discom-
fort with passive spectator ship. Steven Jenkins, in his mid-April '79
Newsday piece "The Growing Spectre of Fan Violence in Sports," points
to the mounting fragility of all types of sports spectacles, for example.
Almost any large gathering seems vulnerable, as if physical closeness
reminds us, bitterly, how far away real community is in this buy-and-sell
existence.

Turning to specifics of the less graphic, everyday plane of the job, an
unchecked tendency to stay away from it as much as possible is seen.
U.S. News and World Report for July 3, 1978, in its "World Business"

i

i

■'-J-' Tin-: I'komim-. («■ mi 'Wis

column, observed that in the United Kingdom, bonuses are oil e red loi
coming to work in an effort to check rising absenteeism; "Missing
workers are an old problem, but it's getting worse." Allen and Biggins'
"The Absenteeism Culture," in the January-February 79 Personnel,
typifies a flood of interest in the subject by specialists. Similar was the
March 14, 1979 Wall Street Journal article by James Robins, "Firms Try
Newer Way to Slash Absenteeism As Carrot and Stick Fail: All Cures
Seem Temporary." And the 1979-82 United Auto Workers contract
increased the number of "paid personal holidays" to 26 from 12 provided
under the previous covenant, bowing to auto workers' refusal to maintain
attendance. Concerning the phenomenon in Canada, the November 13,
1979 Wall Street Journal noted Manpower, Incorporated's report of
absenteeism's $8 billion per year price-tag there, plus the "growing
tendency for workers to take a day off just because they don't feel like
working"; their perspicacious psychologists opined that "frequent
absentees may be trying to withdraw from life's tensions."

The frequency of people quitting their jobs is a related, and growing,
matter. Characteristically, this is seen in the literature: Farrell Bloch's
"Labor Turnover in U.S. Manufacturing Industries" {Journal of Human
Resources, Spring '79), H. Kent Baker's "The Turnover Trap" (Superviso-
ry Management, June '79), and Robert Kushell's "How to Reduce
Turnover" (Personnel Journal, August 79), for example. At the end of
April 79 the Labor Department disclosed that job tenure of American
workers decreased to an average of 3.6 years per job in 1978 from 3.9
years in 1973, with the tenure apparently shrinking at an accelerating
rate. The October 10, 1979 Wall Street Journal announced an Adminis-
trative Management Society survey which observed that turnover among
office employees averaged 20% in 1978, up from 14% in 1976.

In an early November 79 Princeton Features piece, "Revolution in the
Workplace," Carper and Naisbett declared that a "growing demand for
more satisfaction from life" has brought dissatisfaction with work to the
point where "workers refuse to produce and even deliberately sabotage
the products they make." This point may be highlighted by a few of the
more sensational acts of employee sabotage, such as the November 79
damage to three of the world's largest electrical generators at Grand
Coulee Dam in Washington state. In what investigators called "an inside
job," 19 of the generator's coils had been broken with a crowbar,
resulting in "millions of dollars" of damage. On February 15, 1979 a
strike by mutucl clerks at New York's Aqueduct Race Track got out of
control and all 550 mutuel betting machines were put out of action by
sabotage. On May 7, 1979 it was discovered that lye had been poured

I I IMIN IS < (I Rill ISAI

n

into h?. uranium I'uel elements at the Surrey nuclear plant in Richmond,
Virginia; two employees were later arrested and convicted for the act.
Dining September 21 and 22 of the same year, 4,000 Chrysler workers,
anticipating a two-week shutdown of their factory, ripped the vinyl tops
of the new cars, broke the windows, tore out dashboard wiring and
started small fires throughout the plant.

Unlike the general charade/catharsis nature of strikes — though it may
be noted that strikes appear to be more often taking illegal and violent
forms— workers obviously are opposing work in a thousand ways, from
purely visceral reactions against it to the most calculated attacks. This
opposition registers itself most fundamentally in terms of productivity, or
output-per-hour-worked.

The history of modern civilization is, in an important sense, a story of
the steady growth of productivity. Unbroken for centuries, the foundation
of industrial capitalism, rising productivity has now gone the way of the
work ethic. And for the same reason: the falseness of trading away one's
life in order to purchase things is a transparently barren death-trip.

1974 saw this reversal surfacing really for the first time, as that
recession year's overall output-per-hour showed a gain of virtually zero.
Since then, those who have attempted to manage the fate of the capital
relationship have witnessed brief periods of small productivity gains being
out-numbered by those of often substantial decreases. The Bureau of
Labor Statistics announced a .3% productivity rise for private business
in 1978, a tiny advance clearly reversed in 1979.

"Sharp Drop in Worker Productivity" read the May 30, 1979 Associat-
ed Press release, in which Labor Department analysis of first quarter
figures showed "the steepest decline since 1974." A July 31 Washington
Post story announced that "productivity of U.S. businesses fell more
rapidly in the second quarter (of 1979) than it has since the government
began keeping records in 1947." AP for November 29 proclaimed
"Productivity in U.S. Still Declining," explaining that the third quarter
drop was the first time since 1974 that three consecutive quarters had
shown declines.

The overall trend has engendered countless articles, as society's
defenders look desperately for solutions and the future of worker
"efficiency" seems ever dimmer. February 5, 1979's Time featured "Perils
of the Productivity Sag," while the March issue of The Office began to
look at Northrup's plant design, "The continuing decline in productivity
is considered a major problem in this country...." Campbell McConnell's
"Why is U.S. Productivity Slowing Down?" discussed the "unsatisfactory
gap between output and hours worked," in the April/May Harvard

M

III! I'KOMISl <>l IMI "K(|S

Business Review; the May-J Line 1 1 BR ca rricd " Product ivi ty I he Problem
Behind the Headlines" by Burton Malhiel. Industry Week of May M
spoke of "a new emphasis on office productivity," in its "Removing the
Cages from the Corporate Zoo."

Meanwhile, unions and the left publicly exhibited their delusion, if not
callousness, on the subject. Befitting their roles as champions of "honest
tod" and the "good worker," the entire crisis is denied by them! The May
79 AFL-CIO Federationist and the June 79 Monthly Review, in "Bringing
Productivity into Focus" and "Productivity Slowdown: A False Alarm,"
respectively, disputed the facts of diminishing work output and ignored
the individual's primacy in productivity.

Returning to reality, Lawrence Baytos offered "Nine Strategies for
Productivity" in the July 79 Personnel Journal, John Niler wrote of
"Diagnosing and Treating the Symptoms of Low Productivity" in
August's Supervisory Management, and the August 7 Wall Street Journal
front-paged "White Collar Workers Start to Get attention in Productivity
Studies: Employees Resist."

On June 4 and September 10, 1979 Time editorialized on the plight of
America, in "The Weakness that Starts at Home" and "The Fascination
of Decadence." Considering the mass circulation involved, we glimpse
here the growing awareness of how critical the changing work posture is.
The June essay deals with "a damaging slackness... in U.S. society at
large" and locates a key part of the problem in "the state of American
productivity, which after several years of declining growth has in recent
months actually dipped below zero progress." September's opinion piece
declared that "the work ethic is nearly as dead as the Weimar Republic,"
citing "the last business quarter's alarming 3.8% decline in productivity"
as a symptom of decadence. It is a certainty that the '80s will see even
more on capital's productivity dilemma, inasmuch as it cannot be
"solved" without the destruction of that wage-labor/commodity relation-
ship which is capitalism. Business Week of October 1, 1979, fretted over
"Why It Won't Be Easy to Boost Productivity," and in mid-October
Theodore Barry & Associates (management consultants) reported their
findings that the average worker is productive during only 55% of
working hours. James Fields, of the Barry firm, said this compares with
80 to 85% spent productively working around the turn of the century;
"the implications of that are staggering," declared Fields. The "team
concept" of work improvement received a most negative judgement by
Latane, Williams, and Harkins' "Social Loafing." Their November 79
Psychology Today article concluded that output-per-hour actually declines
in groups. And so on, into the new decade.

I I | MINTS < >l Kill ISA I

lite pmlil'naliun ol organizations like the American Productivity
( Vnter and Human Productivity Institute shows the demand by business
lor help. Similarly, Sylvia Porter's column, "Hot Careers for the 1980s"
lists the top two fields as "management information systems" and
"human resources" in which improving productivity is the "fundamental

challenge" of each.

Corporate management has recently been forced toward a restructur-
ing, as restive workers create more difficulties for their bosses. Personnel
Journal, February 79, indicated this in Lawrence Wangler's "The
Intensification of the Personnel Role: The personnel executive of the
1980s, with increased responsibilities and new challenges, will be viewed
as a key decision-maker (and part-time magician)." This major expansion
is also seen in "Personnel Widens its Franchise," which appeared in the
February 26, 1979 Business Week; Personnel Journal for March reported
a "new era" in federal industrial relations, due to revised laws and
organization which put personnel administration on a par with financial
management; publicized in Julius Draznin's "Labor Relations" column,
this development was another spur to the private sector in the area.
Donald Klingner's "Changing Role of Personnel Management in the
1980s" (The Personnel Administrator, September 79) pointed out that a
fundamental change in the nature of the profession must follow the
major shift of values underway at large. In mid-October Information
Science, Inc. disclosed that a survey of 2,000 executives showed almost
twice as many of them devoting from five to 20 hours a week to
personnel matters as was the case five years ago; the respondents also
indicated that pay for personnel execs has risen significantly.

Of personnel chiefs surveyed at a November 79 meeting of the
American Society for Personnel Administration, 85% felt unions will
have increased difficulty controlling their members during the '80s,
according to the November 20 Wall Street Journal. It is this sense of
union infirmity which is bringing on the great bolstering of personnel
departments, and, more importantly, pushing increased union-manage-
ment collaboration.

Whether or not unionism is seen as weakening, its vital, disciplinary
role is unquestioned by America's corporate leadership. The appreciation
of this role is exemplified by a May 21, 1979 Fortune article by Lee
Smith, entitled "The UAW Has Its Own Management Problem." It
focuses mainly on the auto companies' worries about the top Auto
Workers' official who will be replaced by the end of 1983: "What the
companies dread is a power vacuum created by a weak, inexperienced,
and indecisive leadership." Noting "sullenness," a shift of values, and

I IIMI N'lS 111- KMUSAI

1/

general distrust of institutions amour, the woikeis, a sln>n;\ union is
prcseribcd as the best defense against *' chaos." Manufacturers "want to
know whether or not the DAW leadership ran deliver a manageable
labor force," inasmuch as "a fundamental problem not just for the 1 1 AW
but for most unions in this epoch has been the increasing disaffection of
the rank and file, and with that, an erosion of discipline."

In the September/October '79 Harvard Business Review's ""Arc Unions
An Anachronism?" UAW and Communication Workers of America co
management programs with General Motors and AT&T, respectively,
were adduced as joint efforts to effectively control the workplace (hat
succeeded where neither party alone could have. The piece speaks o\
"the new discontents" creating the "post-industrial workplace problems"
which have been growing "for over a decade" and concludes that
authority must be shared in order to motivate "this kind of employee to
produce."

Shared responsibility is the urgently needed cure for a "growing sense
of social entitlement" which threatens to destroy wage-labor and society
with it, according to James O'Toole's "Dystopia: The Irresponsible
Society" in October '79's Management Review. Similar was R. M. Kanter's
fear of an "authority vacuum" and his prescription, "to expand power,
share it," in the Harvard Business Review for July/ August '79 ("Power
Failure in Management Circuits").

Management and unions have been advancing toward greater
institutionalized collaboration, whereby joint management programs-
labeled "worker participation," "job enrichment," "quality of work life"
projects — aim at increased worker motivation. Business periodicals see
the need for strong union partnerships in these developing set-ups, just
as they have, for example, bemoaned the "anarchy" in the coalfields
produced by a weak United Mine Workers Union, or applauded the
United Steelworkers' partnerships with steel companies in pursuit of
higher productivity.

Workers seem generally distrustful or cynical about such programs, like
the major UA W-GM one at Tarrytown, New York, or the UAW-Harman
International program in Bolivar, Tennessee which dates from 1973 and
is discussed in an early 1980 University of Michigan study by Macy,
Ledford, and Lawler. But unionists show a greater enthusiasm, as
evidenced by Ponak and Fraser's finding of strong support for union-
management cooperation in a study of middle-level union officials,
entitled "Union Activists' Support for Joint Program" (Industrial
Relations, Spring 1979).

The highest levels of power also see clearly the stakes involved, the

nerd lor new tonus tit contain the individual. In 1979 the Trilatcial
Commission published Roberts, Okamoto, and Lodged l'olfa(t\*
lUirgaining and Employee Participation in Western Europe, North Annum,
tjnd Japan, a Task Eorce Report to the Commission. Its summary called loi
labor-management cooperation, lest "the marvels of modern technology
and raised expectations lead to disaster." The reason for capital's
embrace of the joint approach movement and workers' distrust (as shown
by unchanged "performance" figures) is the same, of course. The
September 4, 1979 Wall Street Journal quoted University of Michigan
researchers that "the most common response that this country's labor
unions make to the introduction of new technology is willing aecep
tancc." This quote, from the "Labor Letter" of the WSJ certainly
provides some of the reason for the opposition of interest felt by rulers
and ruled in the unions.

The union-management committees and the other forms of "quality of
work life" co-determination seem "on the brink of important growth in
the U.S.," according to Business Week, September 17, 1979, which noted
that representatives of 32 unions attended a Spring '79 American
Productivity Center meeting aimed at such programs. The biggest top
level change, billed "a major breakthrough in U.S. labor history," was the
UAW trade-off of $500 million in contract concessions for a seat on
Chrysler's board of directors. Agreed to in October 79 and consecraled
by the federal government in December, UAW president Douglas Frasei
will obtain the directorship in May 1980, prompting such editorials as
"Are Unions Knocking at Boardroom Doors?" (Industry Week, November
12, 1979). The move also sparked discussion of a possible shift toward
the "social contract," in which unions and government agree upon and
attempt to enforce various social programs at the national level; Frasei,
for one, has declared himself quite interested in this direction for
American unionism, following European examples.

Certainly there already exist labor-management bodies with broader
social objectives than has generally been the ease before. California's
Council on Environmental and Economic Balance, or CEFB, was
founded in 1973 and is composed of bankers, oil eompany executives,
nuclear power industry representatives, land developers and the like, plus
the heads of the state Building and Constitution hades I )nion Council,
the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers A p,mti power in (he stale
capitol, CEEB characteristically has dotie iriucli toward lowering
environmental laws and nuclear saUy.uaul stand aids. Investigative
reporting by David Kaplan in the Sununrt ol '/** Iwtlvei uncovered thai
this "form of Fascism" intends a national mrani/ahou with ( I I Hs set

.MS

Tnr I'komim- ui mi \sth

I I Ml N IS (>l Kill 'VM

V)

up across the counlry. Collaboration of (his soil recalls the Golden
Colorado pro-nuclear rally on August 26, 1979 organized by Local KIMl"
of the United Steel Workers and paid for by Rockwell International
which operates the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Golden.

Institutionalized cooperation at the local level is incisively discussed by
Urban Lehner, in his August 8, 1979 Wall Street Journal piece, "Commit-
tees of Labor and Management Enjoying Resurgence in Communities "
The Evansville (Indiana) Area Labor-Management Committee, formed
m 1975 and comprised of the local ALCOA, Whirlpool and Inland
Container managements plus the local union chieftains, is portrayed as
one of a growing number of joint bodies which try to solve communities'
m-plant and at-large social problems. Plant vandalism was one of
Evansville's biggest sore points; joint efforts at boosting productivity and
general morale, and union-managemcntplanning for industrial expansion
are other examples of such groups' functions. "In just the past year or so
new areawide committees have sprouted in Scranton, Pa., Portsmouth!
Ohio, and St. Louis, and a longstanding committee in Pittsburgh has
begun expanding its operations...They're really flourishing' says John
Stepp, an official of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
which has helped set up a number of the committees." Government help
for unionism, in fact, has recently been increasing, especially in the form
ot helpful court decisions defending the power of unions over their
members and extending their roles; this tendency is an invaluable aspect
of the class collaboration directions indicated above.

Congress failed to pass the "Labor Reform" bill,' or "common situs
picketing" measure, in the late 70s prompting many to interpret this as
a major shift away from appreciation of unions' benefits to the state and
business. The bill, designed to greatly strengthen the leverage by which
unions could corral new members and gain new jurisdictions, retains its
importance in light of continued and growing worker restiveness against
management and unions. D. Quinn Mills' "Flawed Victory in Labor Law
Reform" {Harvard Business Review, May- June '79), suggested that the
victory was a pyrrhic one, that business really requires this "reform" to
avoid soured "labor relations" in the '80s, as Labor must have help to
unionize.

Denied for a time, this help becomes a must as will be discussed below
Meanwhile, there has been a steady increase in government assistance to
unions on a more day-to-day level. In early January '79 the U S Court
of Appeals upheld the dismissal of an action brought by members of
Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1547 in Alaska against the internation-
al union for its refusal to submit terms of a national contract to a

mrmlHM-ship ratification vote in 1977. The court decided that IHI'-W
,,irsi(lrnt I'illard was justified in interpreting the union's constitution in
, (M -h a way as to negotiate and implement the agreement without

"I'arly March '79 found a federal Appeals Court deciding against a
membership suit in St. Louis, that the UAW could give union funds to
whatever causes or organizations the "officers' discretion" dictated. At
the same time a New York Court of Appeals sided with the Communi-
.■at ion Workers of America executive board who fired shop steward Dave
Newman merely for criticizing union policy; the judgement concluded
that a steward's duty is to represent the policies of the "management ot
the union" and not the views of the members who elect them. The
Supreme Court, in the summer '79 IBEW vs. Foust case, ruled that a
union member could not recover damages over the failure of the union
to fairly process his grievance. Although the right of fair grievance
representation is guaranteed by law, and the individual was denied an
opportunity to grieve his firing because the union would not represent his
grievance within a time deadline, the Court decided that interference
would antagonize the union, would "disrupt peaceful labor relations.

The state has also slowly but steadily expanded the purview of union
authority. In March '79 the National Labor Relations Board reversed a
1971 decision and placed employees of condominiums and cooperatives
within collectivcbargainingjurisdiction. This policy changewas supported

not only by unions but by New York's Realty Advisory Board, an
employer bargaining association representing over 1,700 apartment
buildings. On May 14, 1979, the Supreme Court declared the availability
of food to employees during working hours and its price to be subject to
union bargaining. Next day the Wall Street Journal's "Labor Letter said
"Unions win expanded rights to picket and organize at shopping centers,
noting that recent NLRB decisions have virtually overturned a 1976
Supreme Court denial of First Amendment protection to private
shopping center access. And a continuing development is the setting up
of collective bargaining systems for public employees; 1979 saw Califor-
nia, for instance, add local government workers to the list ot those
subject to "agency shop" set-ups requiring them to pay dues to a union,
along with state employees, University of California workers, and others
already served up to unions by state legislation.

The unions themselves are moving toward structures and policies aimed
at more effective bureaucratic control of their members. Thus in early
March '79 the merger of the 25,000-member United Shoeworkers ot
America with the 510,000 Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers

i

M r

i i i i

I F\> MVII M

I at •MINI'S <>!• kl.MiSAl

211

Union wijs cttVclunUd, ami in June I he* Kcl.nl ( Inks am! Amnlgmii'ilrtl
Meat Cutters unions merged to form lilt" \.. } million-member United
Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the largest in tin*
AFL-CIO. Business Week of March 5, 1979 wrote of the impending
Clerks and Meat Cutters consolidation, noting that the Retail Clerks
president stated that his highly centralized union would bring most
importantly, "structure" to the operations of the new body. Arnold
Weber's May 14, 1979 Wall Street Journal article, "Mergers: Union Style"
disclosed that 57 mergers involving 95 unions and employee associations
took place between 1956 and 1978; of this 57, 21 took place since 1971,
evidence of the quickening incidence of trade union amalgamation.
"Labor stability" is thus promoted— which is logical on the part of Weber-
due to the diminished voice of the individual brought about by making
union bosses more powerful and more distant. In the July 30, 1979
Business Week's "An AFL-CIO Without Meany" the Kirkland-era
Federation is said to be committed to a policy of spurring more mergers:
"One official predicts that the federation's 105 current unions will shrink
to 70 by 1990." In late 79 AFL-CIO president Kirkland publicly invited
the Teamsters and the UAW to re-affiliate with his umbrella body.

These few words on directions in unionism's structure bring to mind
the European situation and its possible relevance to American develop-
ments. In England a strong parallel suggests itself from these comments
by James Prior, Prime Minister Thatcher's minister responsible for union
relations, interviewed in Business Week, April 16, 1979: "We have too
many unions. And a lot of them are much too weak in administration, in
ability to get a message across. The unions have lost a lot of control to
the shop floor." The steady movement toward global unions, discussed
for example in John Windmullcr's 1980 work, The Shape of Transnational
Unionism, has already been felt here. Paul Shaw had discussed it is his
May ? 79 Personnel Administrator offering, "International Labor Relations'
Impact on Domestic Labor Relations," in which he saw its number-one
influence as pressure toward "much more industry-wide bargaining on a
national basis."

Working people, policed by the unions and aware of their ever greater
collusion with employers and the government, exhibit a rising anti-
unionism. The flood of workers' charges against unions is being deflected
by public rulings that are outrageous for their contempt of members'
rights and their naked defense of unions' anti-worker activities. Some of
the cases were cited above; another tactic is to simply not process worker
complaints. NLRB members Pennello and Truesdale, for example, both
spoke out in '79 against "peering over the shoulder" of the unions in the

s

ri§uig number of charges brought against them by their members.

" Trucking Turmoil," a front-page Wall Street Journal article of March
■>. 1 w, stressed the "undercurrent of discontent" among Teamsters. The
Nl .RB's 43rd annual report, released in mid-March, revealed that Board-
i .inducted elections gave unions victories 46% of the time, for the second
vc:ir in a row. The percentage of union victories has been declining: from
91% for 1968, to below 50% since 1975. Drupman and Rasin's "Decerti-
liration: Removing the Shroud" in the April 79 L^bor Law Journal,
lound that "In the past ten years, there has been a dramatic increase in
I he number of employees seeking to decertify their collective bargaining
representatives and become union-free." Further, these efforts are
succeeding: "The rate at which unions are being decertified has increased
continually over the last decade." Noting that a decertification petition
may not be filed by an employer, it was delicately suggested that "today's
employees do not consider unions to be a panacea for their concerns or

desires."

Underlining this point further was "Approval of Labor Unions Sinks
to Lowest Point on Record," featured in the June 79 Gallup Opinion
Index. The Gallup measurement showed a decline of about 15% among
both union and non-union families since June 1965. The downturn has
been a steady one since '65, having reached in 79 the lowest point of
public approval in Gallup's 43 years of polling. The August 27, 1979
Fortune carried A. H. Raskins's "Big Labor Strives to Break Out of Its
Rut," with a subtitle which observed that Labor's ways "don't appeal to
younger workers." An interesting specific of the article dealt with
General Motors' 1 979 decision to grant union workers preferential hiring
rights for jobs at any of 12 non-union plants, all but one of which were
in the South. UAW President Fraser conceded that only this GM policy
gave the union its edge in representation elections at the plants.

Besides the charges filed (e.g. three times more NLRB grievance
complaints than 10 years ago), and negative vote results, unions are also
being hit by work actions as never before. Richard Sennett, in "The
Boss's New Clothes," New York Review of Books, February 22, 1979,
stated rather mildly that "During the last decade, the number of wildcat
strikes has risen— strikes as much against the union bureaucracy, for
example that of the United Mine Workers, as against the managerial
bureaucracy." The Supreme Court decided in December 79 that unions
are not liable for losses caused by their members' wildcats, a finding very
consonant with Sennett's observation, recognizing that such acts are not
an extension of union activity but antagonistic to it.

As with its denial of the productivity crisis, the left sees in this internal

[J

I in Tkomisi <>i iiii HOs

I I I Ml MP. t >1 Kl 1 MSAI

M I

weakening of unionism another evidence of llie hopeless nalure <>l out
era. Fortunately close to extinction, ground away as a separate force like
so many other illusions, the left now more than ever shows its congi u
ence with the world we must shatter. Like the basic rule of authority, it
seeks to demoralize, confuse and divide that which proceeds past
ideology, the painful-enough progress of the autonomous social move
ment. Insignificant in itself, we may use its typical viewpoints to chart,
then, the difference between lived truth and those in general who fear it.

The image of ever-more security-conscious consumers, happily
supporting the rules of the economy, is one maintenance of that
economy — though this lie is so rapidly eroded by reality. In fact, as being
uninsured vies with the filing of personal bankruptcy as the greater
commonplace, and "wrathful jurors' demands" push damage suit
settlements against wealth "sky-high," respect for the commodity is
obviously ebbing. Almost weekly, the assessments of the "subterranean
economy" of "illegal" and/or unreported income seem to include more
millions of people and billions of dollars; former Treasury Secretary
William Simon said in November '79 that the refusal to pay taxes had
reached the level of notorious Italy, and reflected Americans' "thumbing
their noses at the system." Meanwhile, '79 saw epidemics of bank
robberies with records set in the major cities, looting to the point of
requiring the National Guard after every hurricane or sizable tornado,
and unprecedented, soaring shoplifting.

And the "rightist trend" seen in the "Ku Klux Klan rise" scenario is
also at strong variance with the fact that people increasingly feel "in it
together," all sorely mauled by increasingly visible sources. Taylor,
Sheatsley, and Greenley's "Attitudes Toward Racial Integration," in
Scientific American for June '78; the February '79 National Conference
of Christians and Jews' massive survey; and the August '78 and '79
Gallup Polls, among other data, showed "dramatic" drops in race bias,
a "markedly" growing toleration for persons of other races and creeds,
The myth of impending economic doom, finally, is a favorite diversion
among those who wish to keep the struggle to live contained on the
already-won plane of survival. The March '79 Supreme Court decision
upholding unemployment benefits for strikers and extending them to
students typify the guarantees in effect, and, in light of the collapsing
capital relationship, lend more plausibility to the thesis that post-
survivalist struggles occur with the stakes of total revolution much more
accessible. In 1970 Herman Kahn predicted a frenzy of social travel
developing in the new decade. Ten years later, Stephen Papson's Futurist
article, "Tourism: Biggest Industry in the Twenty-First Century?" sees its

li

<ltll val "with the- growth „| Htflucncer as emblematic of the need "to get
,wav from all routine, not just one's work."

tut "getting away' 1 isn't that easy and the frustration corrodes. A way
M death * dyin/but it may survive us. Arming ourselves ^h an
K r mate sense of our inter-subjectivity in its complex tight with this alien
place is necessary to help us strike hard and well.

■M^^BHi

■Ml

tm ^ mm |

H

THE '80s SO FAR

I ■ rom new levels of boredom and the digital/TV screen mentality of the
high technology onslaught, to mounting physical pollution and economic
decay, only the incidentals of alienation have changed at all in the past
lour years. A climate of (often mis-directed) violence is also greatly in
evidence; as so many elements of modern life cheapen living, the tragic
relevance of "life is cheap," once thought applicable mainly elsewhere,
emerges around us. In the mid-'80s the potential promise lies solely in
the conclusion that this world is even closer to collapse.

Society's negation has moved forward; and in the decomposition of the
old world it is increasingly accurate to speak, with Sanguine tti, of that
"false consciousness which still reigns, but no longer governs." As the
century runs down, so does, faster and faster, its store of effective
illusion.

There is no guarantee how much humanness will survive to replace
repressive emptiness with an unfettered life spirit. For an agonizing toll
is being registered on all our sensibilities. As the refrain of John
Cougar's best-selling record of 1982, "Jack and Diane," put it, "Oh yeah,
life goes on/Long after the thrill of living is gone."

The supermarket tabloids also reflect the rampant sense of generalized
pain and loss, with their weekly parade of features on depression, fear of
pain, stress, and the like; and similarly, a flow of advertising for
Stressgard, Stress Formula vitamins, etc. A September 21, 1981 Time
essay, "The Burnout of Almost Everyone" reads: "Today the smell of
psychological wiring on fire is everywhere.... Burnout is preeminently the
disease of the thwarted; it is a frustration so profound that it exhausts
body and morale." In the mid-'80s this condition seems to be even more
widespread, if possible; for example, Procaccini and Kiefaber's popular
1983 work, Parent Burnout, and Time's June 6, 1983 cover story, "Stress,"
introduced by a contorted, screaming face.

A prior psychological and social stability is giving way to an assault
upon the young by the realities of dominated life. Marie Winn's Children
Without Childhood (1983) describes a fundamental shift away from the
condition of children as innocents protected from the world, from a
conception of childhood that was the norm until just a very few years

A

.'■Id "I'lll- 'HIK '.o |ak

ago. Intimate awareness of dru^s and violence a I very early ages, loi
example, is a brutalizing consequence of the awareness of the falseness
of such institutions as the nuclear family, religion and government.

Not only is the traditional family continuing to fall apart, but love itself
seems to be worn down more quickly by the strains and deprivation of
the twilight of capitalism. The 1980 census figures reveal a marked trend
toward the one-person household, to the accompaniment of articles such
as "The Reasons Men and Women are Raging at Each Other All of A
Sudden" {Cosmopolitan, November, 1982).

Naturally, many of the young seem profoundly horrified by what they
are expected to live under. "Suicide Among Preschoolers On the Rise"
was the topic of a May 15, 1983 UPI feature, while the U.S. News and
World Report's June 20, 1983 "Behind a Surge in Suicides of Young
People" discussed the suicide trend among youth. Newsweek for August
15, 1983 reported that the 15- to 24-ycar-old age group is the only
segment of the population whose death rate has increased in recent
years, and that among 15- to 19-year-olds, suicide is now the second
leading cause of death, after traffic accidents — many of which, in fact, are
suspected suicides.

Anorexia nervosa (self-induced starvation) and bulimia (a pattern of
gorging followed by vomiting) are rapidly spreading phenomena among
women. First registered in the popular media in the mid-'70s, the growth
of these afflictions has been discussed in such articles as "The Binge-
Purge Syndrome" {Newsweek, November 2, 1981) and "Anorexia: the
'Starvation Disease' Epidemic" {U.S. News and World Report, August 30,
1982). The October 1983 Ms. asks, "Is the Binge-Purge Cycle Catching?"
while noting that "At least half the women on campus today suffer from
some kind of eating disorder."

A sudden surge in heroin use among various social classes, from blue-
collar workers to Kennedy offspring, drew much media attention during
the second half of 1983. '

Continued growth in the dimensions of alcohol abuse has brought a big
turnabout from the 70s, namely, the tendency of states to raise the legal
drinking ag&.ARedbook (June 1982) survey "revealed the startling news
that problem drinking is increasing dramatically among women who are
under the age of 35." The Wall Street Journal of February 8, 1983
addressed the connection between brawling, failing grades, and drinking
in "Colleges Try to Combat Rampant Alcohol Use, But With Little
Effect." The first federally funded study on the subject in fifty years,
Alcohol and Public Policy: Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition, attracted
attention in summer 1983 with its recommendation of a national

l '1.1 .Ml NTS <>i Ki 1 1 l-^AI

i-anipaign to slash alcohol consumption.

At the same time, the report of the National Commission on Excel-
lence in Education, issued in May, had been causing more of a stir by its
devastating indictment of the American education system; the 18-month
study warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very
future as a nation and a people," as kids have perhaps never been so
turned off by school. .

Gambling has been multiplying so rapidly as to be measured m
fractions of the national economy and to cause some social critics to
refer to it as a curse that reflects basic changes in public attitudes toward
work and money. "Gambling Rage: Out of Control" {U.S. News and
World Report, May 30, 1983) depicts a growing popular "urge to buck the
odds and take a chance— on anything."

Another development receiving scrutiny in the early and mid-'80s is
massive avoidance of taxes. "The Tax-Evasion Virus" {Psychology Today,
March 1982) employed a medical metaphor to opine that "In the
epidemiology of cheating, there is... contagion— and no vaccine in sight."
Featured in Business Week for April 5, 1982 was "The Underground
Economy's Hidden Force," a lengthy discussion of the "startling growth"
of the refusal to report income for the purpose of avoiding taxes, which
posits distrust of government as its central element. Time's March 28,
1983 cover story, "Cheating by the Millions," also focused on the
growing, open acceptance even of blatant tax evasion. Time noted that
tax revenue lost to fraud tripled from 1973 to 1981 and project that '83
losses (possibly $300 billion) may entail a ten-fold jump over those of

1973 - ■

In the military, reports of sabotage and the near-universal use of drugs

continue to appear routinely, along with articles indicating the unreliabili-
ty of enlisted persons as mindless instruments of destruction. The total
fiasco of the April 1980 mission to rescue the American embassy
hostages in Iran reflected, to many, the combat unreadiness of* armed
services personnel as a whole. During the following two years, political
commentators of every stripe were astonished by the wholesale non-
compliance which met a pre-draft registration law, as about one million
19- and 20-year olds ignored the federal requirement to sign up. (In the
spring of 1982 an annual reserve duty call-up in the Ukraine had to be
canceled when too few reported.)

If the "New Nationalism" component of the still-born New Right
movement of the early '80s seemed to exist mainly as a media creation,
like the Moral Majority, the alleged rise of the Ku Klux Klan also proved
non-existent. In 1925, 40,000 had marched in a Washington, DC rally; at

IS

Till- "X()s SO I ; A|(

their next Washington show of strength, on Novi-mlu-r .'/, 19K2, fewer
than 40 appeared. And the thousands of counter- demonstrators on hand,
breaking the confines of leftist ritual provided for them, used the
occasion to riot, looting shops and injuring ten police.

The election of Reagan produced no social or ideological results for
the Right; its efforts in favor of school prayer and creationism, and
against abortion and conservation, clearly failed. A Louis Harris poll of
January 1983 expressed Americans' desire for tougher anti-pollution laws,
counter to the Reagan administration's hopes to use the depth of
recession for a severe weakening of environmental statutes. Meanwhile,
articles like "Behind the Public's Negative Attitude Toward Business"
{U.S. News & World Report, July 12, 1982) and "A Red Light for
Scofflaws" {Time Essay, January 24, 1983), which editorialized about the
"extreme infectiousness" of the current spirit of generally ignoring laws
of all kinds, are published frequently.

In a February 1983 Louis Harris poll on alienation, a record 62%
registered a bitter estrangement from the idea of the supposed legitimacy
of the rich and powerful, and leadership in general. "Clearly, alienation
has cut deeper into the adult population of America than ever before,"
concluded Harris. Robert Wuthnow, "Moral Crisis in American Capital-
ism" {Harvard Business Review, March- April 1983), analyzed an unprece-
dented "fundamental uncertainty about the institutions of capitalism."
And as the percentage of voters declines still further, young people are
demonstrating an utter disinterest in politics. "Civics Gap: Alarming
Challenge" {U.S. News & World Report, April 25, 1983) featured former
Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer, who spoke of an "upsurge
of apathy and decline in public understanding" of government among
students.

In the world of work, or should one say anti-work, the '80s continue
to evidence a deepening disaffection. The reports and studies fuel
countless stories on high turnover, the chronic "productivity crisis,"
growing "time theft," and the sharp increase (since 1974) of people
interested only in part-time work, as well as on-the-job stress, unemploy-
ment insurance "abuse," etc. — the aspects of work refusal are virtually
countless and unabating. Dun's Business Month for October 1982 dealt
with the $40 billion a year "High Cost of Employee Theft," describing it
as a "major cause of business failures," while in June 1983, followed with
"How to Foil Employee Crime: Inside Thefts Can Destroy a Business—
And Often Do." The continued strong growth in the use of lie detectors
by employers is one obvious corollary to this facet of the vanishing work
ethic.

1 1 mi n is <>i Kin ISA)

.'.■!'»

A no I her prominent part of 1 lie syndrome, in terms of mid -'80s
emphases, is referred to in Business Horizons' "Employee Substance
Aln.se: 1 Epidemic of the Eighties" (July/August 1983), and by Newsweek's
"Taking Drugs on the Job" cover story (August 22, 1983), which outlined
its "enormous" dimensions and cost to the economy.

The movement toward worker participation as a stabilizing principle
gains ground against the backdrop of anti-work phenomena. The
recession of 1981-83 was used by managers as a pressure to seek the best
terms for the new rules; it did not prevent their institution, contrary to
most predictions. Authority relations, in this area as elsewhere, will have
to be increasingly participationist or they will collapse all the sooner.

In mid-September 1982, the first nationally sponsored conference on
labor-management cooperation was held, with some 900 union, company,
and government officials taking part. The Labor Department announced
it would promote and encourage shop floor collaboration, a new U.S.
policy aimed of course at undercutting worker indiscipline.

Chrysler Corporation Chairman Lee Iacocca, in a December 1982
speech to the Commercial Club of Boston, spoke of the crucial need to
"get everyone on the same team— labor, management, and the govern-
ment." He repeated this idea on June 30, 1983 to enthusiastic union
representatives as the first businessman to address Michigan's AFL-CIO
convention in its 25-year history. Similarly, the "Let's Work Together
series of spots by the radio and TV networks' Broadcasting Industry
Committee to Improve American Productivity were widely aired, and
Ford's two-page ad entitled "A Breakthrough in Labor Relations Has
Helped Create the Highest Quality Vehicles in America" appeared
prominently in 1983.

Since the '70s the new organizational model, at all levels, has been
steadily moving forward. The spring 1982 Journal of Contemporary
Business focused on "Theory X, Y, Z, or ?: Reshaping the American
Workplace." John Simmons and William J. Mares' "Reforming Work
{New York Times, October 25, 1982) reported a "dramatically increased
employee participation in management and ownership" aimed at reducing
alienation and reversing the productivity decline, and amounting to "a
quiet revolution.. .taking place on shop floors and in offices across
America." The shift to tripartite negotiations in auto, steel and construc-
tion were examples of a tendency toward collaboration that must^ be
expanded, according to "Ideology Revisited: America Looks Ahead" by
David A. Heenan (Sloan Management Review, Winter 1982). Its stress on
implementing a "one nation indivisible" solution reflects the powerful
disintegrative energies at large and points in the direction of a fascist

>-

111

I III Hlh ,« t I Af<

I'.l IMI NIS <)1 Ul-l-HSAl

£> I

choice of alternatives.

Among the many olliei irithierilial references in fairly recent
publications arc Donald N. Scolvl's "Business and J.abor from
Adversaries to Allies" in the November December 1982 Harvard Business
Review, and D. Quinn Mills' March 1983 Monthly Labor Review offering,
"Reforming the U.S. System of Collective Bargaining" which concludes
that a new, official collaborative set-up is essential to avoid a high degree
of "economic and social unrest" which would be counter to the interest
"of the Nation as a whole."

Meanwhile, by the middle of 1983, the newsweeklies and monthly
magazines had devoted much space to Harvard's Robert Reich, a
Democratic Party advisor, whose "The Next American Frontier"
advocates tripartite planning as an alternative to Reagan's neo-free
market failures and beyond. The August 28, 1983 New York Times
Magazine discussed an emerging national policy emphasis in this area,
centering on the Industrial Policy Study Group made up of bankers,
union officials, politicians, and high-tech corporation heads, and meeting
at the AFL-CIO national headquarters. This corporatist tendency (see
I 'rank Hearn, "The Corporatist Mood in the United States," Telos No.
56, useful for its bibliographic notes) is not confined to the U.S.; on
August 1, 1983 a new USSR "Law on Work Collectives," featuring
worker participation, was enacted under the direction of Andropov, who
came to power in late 1982 expressly to combat a severe Soviet work
refusal.

Of course before the '80s there were digital watches, pocket calcula-
tors, and Star Wars. But easily the biggest social impact of the early to
middle years of the decade, occurring with the developing changes in
work organization, has been that of the high-tech explosion with its
promise of video games and computers for every business, dwelling and
school.

1 982 was the full inauguration of this blitz, as observed by such articles
as "Computers for the Masses: The Revolution Is Just Beginning" early
in the year {US. News & World Report, January 3, 1982), and Time's
January 3, 1983 cover story, "A New World Dawns," which proclaimed
the computer Man of the Year for 1982.

The outlines are well-known to everyone, even though the meaning of
this latest technological wave has been publicly discussed almost not at
all. Suddenly we are in the Information Age, its benign — and inevitable —
consequences to be merely accepted as facts of life. A two page IBM ad
announced the "new era" under the heading, "Information: There's
Growing Agreement that It's the Name of the Age We Live in." A TRW,

.::-

Inc. ad of l*)K3 began, "There was a time when there was time. Once we
oanUI spend time with a new piece of information," proceeding to boast
$f the speed with which its computer systems can deal with "trillions of
bits of information." But the processing of data — "information" — has
[milling to do with understanding, and what comes to mind here is the
social affliction just around the corner suggested in Tom Mooney's 1982
novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, that of "information sickness."

It is also becoming ever more obvious that technology renders each
succeeding generation more technology-dependent, further separated
I mm nature, more fully colonized by the inauthentic and empty. The
notion of people as appendages of machines, evoked in terms of 19th
i-entury industrialism, is even more relevant today. Apple Computer
offered its product to the late 1983 consumer with the counsel, "Think
of It as a Maserati for Your Mind," in a debasement of individuality and
creation echoed by the claims that typing an instruction on a computer
results in art or that word processors enable one to write. We become
weaker, reduced, infantilized.

Meanwhile this barren future's dawning is heralded, especially for the
young who may be expected to have been prepared for this contrived
world, by the ugliness and boredom of today's. "Computer Camps for
Kids," reveals a July 19, 1982 Newsweek article, followed by a look at
education in that magazine's December 27, 1982 issue, entitled "The
Great Computer Frenzy." The Apple Company announced in July 1983
its plan to provide free computers for every public school in California
that asked for one, as colleges began to require that students purchase
computers as part of registration. Howard Rheingold's "Video Games Go
to School" {Psychology Today, September 1983) discussed the "profound
transformation" of education represented by the introduction of
classroom computers.

Benjamin Compain's "The New Literacy" {Science Digest, March
1983) matter-of-factly states that the ability to manipulate a computer
will soon be the criterion of literacy. One can perhaps already see some
of the products along this line of high-tech culture, such as the vacuous
USA Today, "the Nation's Newspaper via Satellite," which arrived in
1983. The irony in the contrast between the claims of fulfillment and
empowerment as promised by further "progress" and its real sterility and
impoverishment is stunning. And occasionally it is almost funny, as in the
case of CBS-TV's July 7, 1983 presentation, "1984 Revisited." The
program zeroed in on the rise of the computer state and the consequent
loss of privacy, etc. and was sponsored by Exxon Office Systems, whose
frequent commercials featured a view of endless video display terminals

AS.*

1 1 IE- MOs so I ,\K

I I I Ml N IS « U Kill INAl

'l I

lined up in a huge, faceless office, which eoukl have graced the cover of
any dystopian novel.

Amitai Etzioni's An Immodest Agenda: Rebuilding America Before, the
21st Century (1982) takes aim at an individualism that in the view of this
sociologist, has disastrously advanced since the '60s to the point of
threatening American society itself. The search for self-fulfillment, which
involves a "retreat from work" and an "inability to defer gratification,"
affects 80% of the population and, according to Etzioni, is crippling
virtually all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the
state. While this "Immodest Agenda" is essentially a warning and a wish
by one hoping to preserve and even renew the present order, others can
see in high-tech the tools of uniformity and "objective" restraints
necessary to do precisely that.

Computer entrepreneur Steven Wozniak staged an "Us Festival" in
Southern California over the 1982 Labor Day weekend, intended to help
transcend the threatening forces of the "me generation" by introducing
the 400,000 music fans to a giant computer pavilion and such high-tech
wonders as fifty-foot video screens. Steven Levy's "Bliss, Microchips and
Rock & Roll" {Rolling Stone, October 14, 1982) called this effort "the
marriage of rock and computer technology." The efficacy of this
spectacle may be doubted, however, especially considering the fate of the
second Us Festival, also held in San Bernardino county, during Memorial
Day weekend, 1983. Several injuries occurred, and part of the crowd tore
down fences, threw bottles at sheriffs deputies and rammed their cars
into police cruisers.

Certainly the project of computerizing work in the neo-Taylorist
direction of quantifying and tightly regulating employee output, is a
major part of technology's combat with troublesome and capricious
humanity. John Andrew's "Terminal Tedium" {Wall Street Journal, May
6, 1983) is typical of many articles describing the strong antipathy to
computer-systematized work. Workers in a Blue Shield office in
Massachusetts, for example, denounced the electronic set-up as simply
an unbearable sweatshop and told Andrew they wouldn't be there long
In the May 15, 1983 New York Times, Richard McGahey ("High Tech,
Low Hopes") wrote of the oppressive, low-paid work, such as computer
assembly, that underlies the clean, dazzling facade of the new develop-
ments and warned of "increased class tensions."

With industrial robotics one detects high technology's wishful thinking
that capital could reproduce itself while dispensing with an undependable
proletariat. The growing number of "telecommuters," or those perform-
ing piece-work at home before computer screens, expresses some of this

i,' ■

i

urge and is also pail of a more general, isolating impulse at large. From
the jump in one -person households lo increased emphasis on "home
©mVi lainment center" equipment, portable music headgear and the like,
we seem to be shrinking away from our social selves. High technology
.Kvrlcrates a sense of false self-sufficiency; an early 1983 ad for the
< >regon Museum of Science and Industry cited new breakthroughs in
home computers, including the not wholly unserious prediction that
"Soon your refrigerator will talk to you even if no-one else will."

And yet despite the great barrage of enticements of all kinds (not
lorgetting economic pressures) in the schools, the media and elsewhere,
much popular resistance to the computer age exists. Since Harold
Hellman's 1976 work, Technophobia, more recent works have sounded
the same theme, for example, Blaming Technology (1981) by Samuel C.
I lorman and Science Anxiety (1981) by Jeffrey V. Mallow. More recently,
lots of articles have shown that girls still avoid mathematics, as well as
video games, and detail a probably sharply growing distrust of technology
among various groups throughout society. September's Science '83 asked,
"Are Kids Afraid to Become Scientists?" and wondered why more than
half of U. S. high school students drop out of science and math by the

10th grade.

Behind all the ways work and technology can be reformulated and
repackaged stands their basic domination and the resultant weariness and
frustration felt so universally today. A world is faltering. It is defined by
absurdities and so draining that our participation must be demanded if
it is to continue to exist The "issue" of "quality of life" is spurious. If as
Courier said, "Civilization becomes more odious as it nears its end," we
at least can see not only the odium but more prospects for its end.

PRESENT-DAY BANALITIES

When contestation publicly re-emergedin the '60s, after virtually a half
century of dormancy, its militancy often betrayed a very underdeveloped
sense of vision. Since World War I and subsequent depression and wars,
hot and cold, this explicit renewal of the negative found itself on a new
terrain and the spirit of revolt only scratched the surface before being
diffused by a variety of factors.

From the end of that decade a significant deepening in the erosion of
the dominant values and orientation has taken place, escaping the notice
of those who forget that political struggles are predicated on more
inchoate (even spontaneous!) social developments. Hence, a few words
are in order regarding that which should be taken for granted as the
minimum intelligence for any understanding of the '80s. To those whose
comprehension of the "Reagan Era" is limited to lamenting the demise
of the '60s, an apology for disturbing their slumber.

By way of introduction, two sets of contrasts. In November 1965 a
power failure darkened New York City but the law-abiding restraint of
its citizens was evident and widely praised by authority; internalized
repression seemed to be wholly intact. When a similar blackout occurred
there in 1977, however, "the party began from the minute the lights went
out," as one participant described it. Massive and inter-racial looting
commenced, even to the point of the setting up of distribution centers of
free goods, and the only reported violence was suffered by those few
police foolhardy enough to try to restore "order."

When John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 the immediate reaction of
many was shock and tears. Upon Reagan's shooting in 1981, when it
wasn't yet known whether he would survive, the laughter of children
became the topic of scores of journalists' commentaries.

Even anecdotally, then, the superficiality of the notion of a real
ascendancy of Reaganism is immediately suggested. The efforts to
introduce prayer and a biblical anti-evolution doctrine into the schools
and to do away with abortion and environmental protection are, of
course, in their failure, one measure of that, as is the November 1985
Roper poll which found that only 4 percent respect "Moral Majority"
Falwell.

I'KI 'INI I ) \\ || \

ri\i 1 1 ii

Who,. Ihr tendency is lowaid a dccpc, .,..<! drcpr, disillusionment will,
he America., | Dream, a picture ( ,| Amcnea that was invented in
Hollywood half a century ago cannot he successfully promolecl and will
only emphasize the extent of disaffection by its effort. The slightly mo. c
modern angle of the Right's propaganda is the re-invention and elevation
ot the acquisitive, middle-class careerist, the Yuppie, whose cultural
dominance has been loudly trumpeted. But already the articles detailing
the dissatisfaction, anxiety, and physical problems" ("Life of a Yuppie
Takes a Psychic Toll," U.S. News & World Report, April 29 1985) of the
upwardly-mobile are deflating this tiresome success image'

Likewise, the once-touted return of martial spirit under Reagan has
largely been exposed. Most important in this context was the vast
noncompliance of young men in the early '80s to the instituting of pre-
draft registration requirements. The failure of the military to attract
enlistees is seen m the enormous recruiting campaigns currently needed
and m artic es like "Honeymoon Over for Volunteer Armed Forces?"
{US. News& World Report, June 10, 1985). Another conservative source
columnist George Will, also spoke (August 19, 1 985) of this vulnerability
by an important conclusion: "The more complex the military organization
and the more sophisticated the technology, the more the success of the
system depends on morale."

A crucial parallel involves the world of work, where the use of
po ygraph or "lie-detector" tests by employers has now passed the one
million per year mark. A 1984 survey of merchants by American
Hardware Mutual Insurance found that "80 percent of store owners think
tar employees are more likely to steal than ten years ago." Ward
Howell International, a national employment agency, disclosed that false
resumes and misrepresentation of job qualifications in general, based on
their 1985 study, is very widespread and on the rise. Meanwhile, fast food
chains are reportedly recruiting older workers at retirement homes
because they can't find enough teenagers to fill shifts-despite the fact
that 17.7 percent of U.S. teens are out of work. Along with these data
are reports that drug use in the workplace has never been more
prevalent and a November 1985 announcement by the Labor Depart-
ment of the largest single year increase in work-related injuries and
illnesses since such figures began to be reported in 1973; the 1 1 7 percent
jump resumes an earlier trend and can be reasonably linked to refusal of
work as a major factor.

The vitality of the revolt against work syndrome is seen in the
steadily growing popularity of participative management systems, which
recognize that the "workers themselves must be the real source of

I '"i iminis < >i Rim is.-m

AS 7

discipline, 1 ' as a July August 1 1 >K5 Harvard Business Review offering put
il. The industrial relations literature is lull of evidence that capital
ici|uires the voluntary participation of employees for its stability, if not
survival. The unions, of course, provide the most important agency for
this cooperation; the "landmark" 1984 contract between the United Auto
Workers and General Motors-— Toyota, for example, increased "access
in plant decision-making" {Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 1985), and
was also the first time a UAW dues increase was negotiated with the
boss rather than voted by union delegates, which infuriated auto workers.
I'rom a social control perspective, the judgement that the management
of information will be more efficient than what prevails in a non-
computerized economy establishes the foundation of the Information
Society. But the Scientific Management movement of the '80s, a neo
Taylorist monitoring of typists, phone operators and all the rest by
computers, is providing no easy road to a satisfactory productivity. The
overwhelming response is one of anger, as humans resist fitting into the
new, rationalized future and Silicon Valley, its new mecca, offers less a
picture of gleaming success than one of pollution and lay-offs. The
possibility that the impoverishment of daily life might even render work
relatively satisfying, due to the vacuum of substance elsewhere, is
rendered unlikely by technology's progressive degradation of work. There
is no area of authenticity, no place to hide, and no one can miss this
commonplace. The bumpersticker, "The worst day fishing is better than
the best day working," remains true, as does the also popular "Different
day, same bullshit."

Anguished commentaries about declining civic virtue are not confined
to such data as the declining percentage of registered voters who do so,
or to miscreants on the job, but also draw their content from a most
irresponsible consumer culture. One favorite in this vein deals with
increasing shoplifting, including the stories of the complete non-
involvement of shoppers presented with very visible incidents of stealing.
The near-universal placement of electronic alarms on store exits testifies
to the extent of the phenomenon, as high tech vies with eroding
allegiance to the work-and-pay rules. The present record level of the
prison population, the growing state lottery mania, and the unchecked
growth of the "underground economy" all testify to the shift in values.
Concerning the latter subject, figures from the Internal Revenue Service
show that tax cheating now costs the government over $100 billion as
compared to less than $20 billion at the end of the '60s.

A deeper, visceral disaffection can be detected among the young, in
terms of remarkable behavior patterns. Psychology Today's January 1985

\1K

I'uimni Dai Manai mi

l.l IM1N IS < H Kill ISA1

,'.VJ

cover story asked, "Why Are MiddU'-C 'lass ( liildicn Selling Their Worlds
on Fire?" The alienation registered by widespread child arson is also
evident in two November 1.985 Gallup polls which showed thai I.'
percent of teenage girls suffer symptoms of anorexia nervosa (sell
starvation) or bulimia (binge-and-purge syndrome), a much higher figure
than had been previously estimated. In June 1985 national Center loi
Disease Control statistics were released that demonstrated a jump of 50
percent in the suicide rate of young men aged 15 to 24 from 1970 to
1980.

A September 1984 Gallup poll had found that only 23 percent of U.S.
teenagers do not drink, the lowest figure recorded by the Gallup
Organization, and Family Circle and the Parents' Resource Institute for
Drug Education reported in September 1985 that their four year study
indicated a spread of drinking and drug abuse into the grammar schools.

During the same week of September 1985 Bishop James Malone,
president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, declared that
new emphasis on the teaching of sexual morality is "urgently needed,"
and U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett urged conservative
activists to join him in a fight to restore a "coherent moral vision" to
America's public schools.

Reality offers little or nothing to support the idea that even during the
high noon of Reaganism has there been any renewal of faith in the
promise of American life; quite the contrary, the increased enrollment
in college business courses not withstanding. The idealist illusions of the
'60s are mainly dead, and the failed counter-revolution of the Right is
equally irrelevant. If the future is unclear, it at least seems obvious that
a corrosive skepticism has dissolved much of the old foundation for
repression and lies.

One could reply that this negation has only left us even more
miserable; look at the growing levels of emotional disability, as reported
not only by the National Institute of Mental Health but by a glance at
the covers of the supermarket tabloids, with their continuing attention to
depression, loneliness and stress or the great numbers of TV commercials
devoted to pain relievers, alcohol treatment centers and the like. There
is even a refusal of literacy taking place, with about 30 million illiterate
adult Americans, and some have discussed this in terms of an intentional
aversion to the whole of modern life. Horkheimer's later pessimism could
be cited to echo current references to entropy and despair, "the feeling,"
as he put it, "that nothing further can be expected, at least nothing that
depends on oneself."
And yet the psychologists seem to agree that we all have much rage

inside, iiiul I here is, arguably, less than ever for authority to rely on for
u ii r continued suppression. A senescent order seems to have no cards left
i.) play, beyond more technology; nothing in its ideological pocket,
mil him; up its sleeve. As Debord wrote in the late '70s, "it no longer
promises anything. It no longer says: 'What appears is good, what is good
appears.' It simply says 'It is so.'"

MEDIA, IRONY AND "BOB

">•>

It is not my purpose here to lament the fact that culture has been
liquidating itself for some time now. Artists no longer want to tell us
anything — they have nothing left to say. With postmodernism the idea of
style itself enters a stage of bankruptcy; its incoherent banality turns
postmodernism into the fast-food chain of expression and reflects the
exposed condition of representation in general.

In its enervated, late capitalist decline, art is increasingly no more than
a specialized colony of the media. The vapid acquiescence of, say, a
Warhol has made it easier for corporations like Mobil and Xerox to
understand that all art, at base, serves authority. Thus their sponsorship
of culture for the masses exists not only to improve their negative public
images but also to promote the artistic for its own qualities. Philip
Morris, to cite a most instrumental use of art, employs oversized graphics
at the world's largest cigarette factory to create a culturally valorized
workplace, in order to motivate and pacify workers. Media-style art uses
symbols to drown out the employees' alienation and argue the existence
of a shared cultural unity between owners, managers, and workers. This
intention brings to mind perhaps the deepest function that Muzak
attempts; one of its foremost psychologists and advisors, James Keenan,
explained that "Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it
massifies symbolism in which not a few but all can participate." Reaching
80 million people a day, Muzak is one of the grosser tactics in power's
struggle against the global devaluation of symbols.

The Surrealists, among other avant-gardes, set themselves the goal of
aestheticizing life. Today this goal is being realized at a time when avant-
gardism is nearing extinction; the ubiquity of art as manipulation is
achieving this aestheticization, and is no more than advertising and styles
of consumerism. The fact that the world's best photography is expressed
as TV commercials is a perfect illustration of the technologized,
commodified culture striving to reach everyone.

This would-be conquest by media easily puts all the goods of culture
in its service, as it must when there are so many signs that the whole
spectacle of simulated life is running out of gas.

If the spiritless melange in painting known as postmodernism implies,

.'.<).'. Midia, Ikony and "Hon"

by its recycling of elements from earlier eras, thai development is at an
end, so the tired current of "instant nostalgia" indicates a similar
condition for massified art, media and the spectacle in general. The
successful representation of life now relics, for its last resource or energy,
on the re-use of ever more recent cultural memories. Occasionally the
mass media themselves even make this recycling explicit, as in a TV
commercial for lemonade: "Look what's happened to way back when.
Now everything old is new again."

It is among responses to this manipulated life, of course, that the
deepest interest must lie, our weighing of the movement and meaning of
responses. Irony, for example, was possibly always disconnective or
defusing, in its tendency to substitute an easy joke for a too direct
response to a loaded conversation or other critical situation. But if it was
always in that sense "a form of appeasement," in Bill Berkson's phrase,
for this undermining of dialogue, irony is now automatic and establishes
complicity in a deeper sense. So much is "camp," and whatever subver-
sive potential that once might have resided there is long dead. An ironic
or sarcastic response to the world is nearly always present today; it is a
cliche, a convention rather than a sign of independence.

Skepticism — or at least its image — is built into the parade of images
and roles, though the reasons why it is needed cannot be comforting to
those who do not wish to give up the synthetic. If "nihilism" is as close
to everyone's grasp as rock music or the seven hours of television
consumed on average per day, one can see, equally, that such "nihilism"
is not enough and that the spectacle's strength is being strained. The
further alienation must be represented and sold to us — consider "Miami
Vice," for example, (and that it features cops is mostly irrelevant) with
its ultra-hipness and angst — the more careful we must be to avoid its
cultural-political recuperation and the more depth is required to do just
that.

The rock videos of MTV at times seem to threaten the very integrity
of the subjective; their frequent surrealism projects more powerful
images than the Surrealists achieved, with more power to colonize
imagination. David Letterman mocks the TV industry and his own format
while enriching media; who would really be surprised to see explicitly
"radical" angles presented there?

Meanwhile, the Church of the Subgenius is virtually a cultural industry
in itself and its digs at religion, work, etc. pack no more punch than
Letterman. In fact, culture needs such farce to pep up its dying appeal.
Not surprisingly, '"'Rev." Ivan Stang, Subgenius founder, writes regularly
for High Performance: A Quarterly Magazine for the New Arts Audience to

MV1I NISI )]■ Kill ISAI

>h.\

help meet Hie art-head demand for new antics by his Church. The radical
edge of the very popular Subgenius ensemble is not far from that of
'Saturday Night Live," or that ot'Arlforum, in which ready references to
Adorno and Baudrillard can be found immediately following dozens of
pages of gallery ads.

But if media, following art, and culture in general, tend to swallow up
the critical and blunt the negative, that negative is not to be lost sight of.
Despite the best efforts of hip, cynical substitutes reality certainly
remains problematic, eluding media's grasp. To cite just one area of
apparent non-colonization, the refusal of work continues and deepens.
Time for April 28, 1986 bemoaned "A Maddening Labor Mismatch," in
which growing worker shortages coexist with continued unemployment.
The rejection of jobs by the young stands out most of all, especially
considering the higher teenage and young-adult jobless rates. The May
20, 1986 Fortune cover story announced a shocking failure, that of the
zero impact computers have had on output-per-hour in the office: "U.S.
business has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on them, but white-
collar productivity is no higher than it was in the late Sixties." And blue-
collar productivity has presented an equally dismaying picture to
authority; Wickham Skinner's "Productivity Paradox" {Harvard Business
Review, July/August 1986) revealed that "American manufacturers' near-
heroic efforts" have simply not gotten more work out of industrial

workers.

Irony and images of estrangement, neutered as they are by the limits
of culture, do not contain our disaffection. That disaffection undermines,
as it must, the very basis of the ironic and artistic points of view.

. i!
'14.-

■i

i

■•,\

'■■■■:

AFTERWORD COMMENTARY ON
FORM AND CONTENT IN
ELEMENTS OF REFUSAL

Paul Z. Simons

a.

| In the event that the powers that be ever re-institute book burning, it

fi is my considered opinion that Elements of Refusal will be consigned,

immediately and with extreme prejudice, to the pyre.

Elements of Refusal (EoR) broke onto the anarchist scene like a
bombshell. In the fall of 1988 the book had been making the rounds of
the milieu in New York, with some extremely mixed reviews, and after

J a Libertarian Book Club Forum I found myself in temporary possession

of a copy. I finished the volume, cover to cover, in a single sitting of
some fourteen hours and then re-read it in a more deliberate, careful
fashion over the course of the following week. I recall distinctly the
feelings associated with my first engagement with Zerzan's work,
something like drowning in honey, inexorable, deliberate, overwhelming.
At the time of the publication of EoR the state of anarchist theory was
dismal, particularly the North American variant. My time was spent

I digging up dead authors espousing simplistic theories criticizing social

categories that had ceased to exist. Re-worked syndicalism, martyrologies
of every stripe and description (a one-woman show called "Emma"!), and
social ecology, if you had enough money to earn the degree. Further, by
this time many of us had begun to see through the situationist con; their
lack of rigor in ascribing an immense array of social and cultural
phenomena to "the spectacle," the ludicrous use of the most retrograde
Marxist categories, the childish example of their practical activity, and
finally, their embrace of the Enlightenment project (the appropriation of
Nature) without recognition nor discussion of the historical dialectic
contained therein. As if to drive the point home, North American
adherents of situationist ideas plunged head first into the same mistakes
listed above and tore themselves and their various organizations and
journals to theoretical shreds before they could effectively publicize their
ideology.

.»<)(>

I'dkM AND CiiNII-NI "IN III Ml NIMH |{|.

A I

hlcmrnis of Kr.fimtl (hen, was something new; /.ei/.an had pullrd out
all the stops and followed his theoretical assumptions to their logical
conclusion. In the process he introduced three innovations that now form
the foundation of much of the theoretical discussion in North American
anarchist circles. 1) Zerzan developed a method of dialectical critique
which is both immanent and extraneous to the phenomena that he is
examining. One of the sequelae of the application of this method has
been the reinvigoration of the project of philosophical anthropology. 2)
EoR raises the issue of criteria as regards insurrectionary subjects
Zerzan's thesis that those who have the most to lose invariably make the
deepest and most radical insurrectionary breaks with the past while
empirically sound, jettisons two centuries of bad social philosophy, and
3) Zerzan argues consistently throughout the volume that violence (riot
insurrection) has been (or could be) an effective and vital force for social
change, in direct contradistinction to Leftist ideology whose general
stance on the issue has been a puritanical prohibition, justified by either
moralism or cowardice (your choice).

In a letter I received recently, a correspondent described the critical
method employed by Zerzan as an example of immanent critique. This
statement, while minimally accurate, misses the mark as to where Zerzan
has taken the method. Horkheimer in The Eclipse of Reason— immanent
critique confronts, "the existent, in its historical context, with the claim
of its conceptual principles, in order to realize the relationship between
the two and thus transcend them." Conceptually almost intuitive, and not
a particularly new nor sophisticated critical strategy, it has been
employed by theorists as disparate as Marx and Voltaire. The first
generation of critical theorists merelyrefined the technique and provided
it with a philosophical and historical foundation. There are limitations to
immanent critique, however, and part of Zerzan's innovative manipula-
tion of the technique stems directly from these parameters. Immanent
critique, as the name implies, situates itself firmly on the terrain of the
system it seeks to examine. It is maintained by partisans of immanent
critique that this is the method's greatest strength. It may also be its
greatest flaw. For while holding a system to its own claims produces (or
should produce) a relatively high standard of consistency and rigor, it
also forces the theorist to avoid any criteria arising either from the sub-
jective or external sources, put succinctly; in judging what is (the
dominant society) one is restricted from using what is not (utopia).

Another flaw contained within immanent critique is its reliance upon
the conceptual claims of the system as criteria. During the period in time
that the first generation of critical theorists were writing such a mecha-

I .1 I -.Ml -.NTS <)l KlMlSAl

.»»)'/

nism worked, ;n id well. In the current era, and as a result of the lessened
expectations associated with the pronouncements of both neo-conserva-
tives and neo-liberals, the claims of capital have decreased to almost
nothing. Where before the critical theorist had myriad, sweeping
statements from the "best of all possible worlds," "chicken in every pot,"
grab bag to minor, work-a-day promises and statements made by bosses,
politicians, and captains of industry to utilize as criteria with which to
judge the behavior of the ancien regime. Today, even cost of living in-
creases are threatened in collective bargaining negotiations and corporate
downsizing has brought back the good old days of early capitalism
including classic nineteenth century workplace phenomena such as
immediate dismissal and the ten-hour workday. This ideological
retrenchment has been global in scope; no one speaks anymore of the
developing countries, or uses the argument that La Antigua, Guatemala
or Kinshasa will one day be indistinguishable from Hoboken. The global
contraction of capital has meant a concomitant contraction in its
conceptual terrain, which in turn produces a decreased ability to abstract
criteria and utilize them in the implementation of an immanent critical

method.

Zerzan's response to this weakening of the critique has been to
unilaterally expand the method to include empirical data, historical and
anthropological, to strengthen his hybrid of immanent critique. His ex-
pansion has also occasionally included subjective material, which, while
architectonically indefensible, has been justified in the past by a number
of other thinkers. Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization, not only augments
the concept of reason by placing phantasy firmly within its bounds, he
also makes of phantasy a motive conceptual and psychological apparatus
which, for lack of a better name, may best be described as the "will to
Utopia." In spite of the problems, incoherence and confusion associated
with Eros and Civilization, the philosophical construct used in defining
phantasy seems accurate and though with less intelligent or careful
theorists there remains a great possibility of mischief and foolishness, it
provides the serious critical theorist with a powerful tool.

Inclusion of anthropological and historical empirical data isn't
particularly earth-shattering, however, what Zerzan does with these
references is to use the material as a criteria with which to judge capital
and the contemporary state of the human species. Zerzan has been
greatly assisted in this project by developments in anthropology dating
from the mid-1960s. Developments in this area have included discussions
as disparate as the diet of the IKung branch of the San in the Kalahari
to the taxonomic differentiation between Homo sapiens and Homo

MM

I'OHM AND ( 'l IN II Nl IN III Ml NIMH l<

I I I ISAI

i;i.i-.mi:nisoI' Ki-iiisai

2h<)

c cctus. Where all o (his academic work lias led is a complex rcapprais
al o . prc-agriculturai human society; Iron, the classic I lohhesian view of
pre-historical hte as being "nasty, brutish and short," to an understand,,,
of pre-agricuhural humanity as living an existence of singular « Z
harmony, sohdartty and health. The impact that these anthropological'
disensstons have had on critical theory are, and will continue to he
£ nD *- la the ldealist Edition the concept of an original separation
human.ty from nature, individual from society, subject from object) ha
always formed the foundation of its critical etiology, now anthropology

such'an e"? t T^' Ca " y , gr0Unded SpeCulation of «* existence of |^
17™Z T ^P ' ^ has H" Provided critical theorists with a
ghmpse of human hfe and society in that "Golden Age," the Ur-phe
nomena of the species. Zerzan was the first critical theorist to put these

a m'fZ "r^ Dd V» S ° " genefal Categ ° riCal discussi0 -> - we'
as using the Golden Age" to establish a set of criteria with which to

na 'it t f'f^d^^-tof current social and cultural phenom£
nlv 1 V fo " ndatlonwlu <* grounds his discussions of language
number, toe, art and agriculture; which in turn has allowed Zerzan the

herTisS T^ ** T^ "*" eXamination without bsng

aWlfrv to W 1 * ° r 6ffeCtiVe Cr " eria > Ul,imatel y enh ^ing the

ability to level a withering assault on the dominant society

One of the fascinating, and on first glance seemingly tangential

he'Tro^ct OS" " T 1 T" ^^^ haS *» <^S
the project of philosophical anthropology developed by Max Scheler, a

phenomenologist associated with political Catholicism, during the first

two decades of the twentieth century. For Scheler the goal of the work

wo h a ^T\T PredSe *** ^ "»" the Spedfic ^ievementsTnd
works ot man-language, conscience, tools, weapons, ideas of right and

won g , thestate, leadership, the representational mnction of ar^mX

religion, science, tustory, and social life-arise from the basic structures

of human eastence" (Man's Place in Nature, 1928). Of course the

complete of such a task is impossible primarily bLZZ P rojec

assumes a state human nature divorced from historical and otia

c cumstance. For critical theory, however, if the project and problem

statement could be appropriately re-formed there may be much to Te

learned from such an investigation. Horkheimer thought so too and in

liS^T^r ^ ° r PM T PhiCal A * hr °P°4 "e framTs fne
project thus, The project of modern philosophical anthropology consists
in h nduig a norm that will provide meaning to an individual's™ he
world as ,t currently exists." Or to be even more clear in gh into
human nature should, at a minimum, inform those who Kta^

nit iii hopes ot realizing a quantitative break with it. Zerzan's theoretics
address this in a negative, critical manner. Returning to the anthropologi-
i .il data, if the vast majority of human organization and institutions have
not been characterized by language, number, time, and art then these
phenomena must not be associated with satisfying basic needs and desires
( human nature). Such theoretical machinations may never produce a final
answer or series of answers as to what human nature is, but they do
produce an outline of what human nature is not. This is critical theory
fulfilling its promise; not illuminating truth, but excluding falsehood.

One of the basic tenets of the theory of opposition, at least since
Uabeuf s Conspiracy of Equals, has been the uncontested claim of the
proletariat as revolutionary subject. Nineteenth century thought
continued and refined this virtual article of faith. There were a few
wafflers; Bakunin, for instance, discussed the lumpen as holding great
promise as a potential revolutionary subject but in the end, and under
pressure from his Swiss artisan supporters he dropped this line of
conjecture. Suffice it to say that when even apologists for reaction
(Hippolyte Taine comes to mind) accept and include the danger of this
new social class in their writings the point has been made and accepted;
left, right and center. The proletarian gospel continues down to the
situationists, who, unable to distinguish bourgeoisie from proletariat using
the marxist formula based on economic class, redefined the battle lines
so that order-givers morphed into bourgeois and order-takers became
revolutionary subject. The social war of the haves and the have-nots is as
old and accepted as the system that produced them, which should make
one wonder just how accurate the description is. Zerzan has come at the
problem from a very different angle, however, and as one might expect
found the whole discussion lacking in both clarity and scope. The second
section of EoR contains essays dealing with, what one theorist in the
milieu has termed, "lost history." This label seems more than appropri-
ate, if one adds the caveat that "lost" conveys a broad enough definition
to include both misplaced and disappeared into the halls of
academia — never sighted again.

Zerzan's historical essays then deal with examples of riot, insurrection
and physical refusal, generally. In each instance the rioters have primarily
been persons of the middle classes, individuals who are small property
owners, persons of some standing in their communities, and finally,
individuals with a great deal to lose, and very little motive to tear their
respective societies down. This general statement is applicable to partici-
pants in riots and insurrections throughout history; Luddites, Regulators,
Whiskey Rebels, Rebecca and her Sisters, Captain Swing, King Mob, the

A

.'./<) I-iikm ANN CmN'II-NI in I m i-mi-n In cii- Khunai

Paris Commune of 1871, Makhuovists, the New York City boogie till ya
puke party and power outage of 1977, the MLK assassination riots, May
'68 in France and so forth. While not all of the above events arc-
discussed in EoR, investigation into these occurrences reveals similar
findings as to their participants; the vast majority were employed, or
employers, artisans, weavers, farmers, mechanics, sailors, officer cadets,
students, merchants, tavern keepers, local elected officials; they were not
solely nor even conspicuously the industrial proletariat. Throughout the
historical essays in EoR, Zerzan makes this point, implicitly and explicitly
using primary sources. Zerzan isn't the first theorist to uncover this
information. Crane Brinton, a colleague of Marcuse's at the Office for
Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), in a study of the revolu-
tionary milieux during the Terror, found that the Jacobins presented for
a brief period of time the spectacle of men acting without regard for
their own material interests. Brinton, an apologist for the dominant
society with a sneaking admiration for revolution, seems clearly stunned
by this and fails to follow the insight to its logical conclusion.

The potential impact of this thesis regarding the insurrectionary
subject, particularly in the context of a post-industrial economic situation,
is shattering.To enumerate just one development, it provides some
empirical substantiation to Camatte's thesis that humanity, in the years
since the Second World War, has been utterly proletarianized, altering
the insurrectionary project from one of class versus class to species versus
society or specifically, social concept. There are many other implications
of this thesis, to be worked out in the coming years by theorists who have
as yet to find a voice, a method (and a publisher).

Violence, as tool for social change, fell into disrepute in the mid-
twentieth century, and has yet to regain the pre-eminent place it formerly
held in the revolutionary milieux of the nineteenth century. It is
sometimes forgotten just how enamored our political ancestors were of
violence. Albert Parsons' publication of Johann Most's article on
dynamite in The Alarm, indeed Most's popular pamphlet, Revolutionary
Military Science, contained recipes and use instructions for everything
from fulminate of mercury to prussic acid. Beyond the printed word, the
global wave of assassinations, bombings and bank robberies, that virtually
defined anarchist revolutionary activity during the last decade of the
nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries.

Somewhere, however, all this was replaced with the gospel of non-
violence, civil disobedience, non-cooperation, etc. It is only recently that
violence has re-entered serious discussion in anarchist milieux. Zerzan in
many of his essays draws the proper conclusion when he finds that

III Ml III*, i >l Kill I'.AI

71

violence lias been an essential facet of historical refusal. In addition, he
points out that violence seems to have just as great a propensity to
deliver the goods as other methods of redress or refusal. P.M., the Swiss
author of bolo'bolo, an anarchocommune-ist Utopian blueprint, discusses
violence in detail as an integral part of his post-revolutionary society
(requiring its own institutional resolution), framing the argument in
anthropological terms. This seems a proper next line of inquiry and
returns us once again to the project of a philosophical anthropology. The
re-valuation of violence also indicates one of the final breaks with the
"New Left" of the sixties, and its failure to achieve even a single positive
outcome.

Finally, it should be noted that the Unabombcr has focused much
discussion on the debate about the re-valuation of violence. As one might
expect many who once endorsed propaganda by the deed are now
running for cover as fast as their trembling legs can carry them (Fifth
Estate, as an example), while there are those who, in spite of the
problems with the choice of targets and the possibility of collateral
casualties (a handy term provided by the nation-state to justify its
random violence, why not ours?), support FC, in some instances, for no
other reason than the fact that someone, somewhere finally and really
did something. For those who would doubt the efficacy of violence, the
Unabomber also presents a powerful example of just what a political
bombing campaign can produce; the FC Manifesto (Industrial Society and
Its Future) has been translated into dozens of languages and read and
discussed by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of persons.

It should be clear as well that the project that Zerzan has outlined is
far from finished. Indeed, in many of his essays he leaves more unsaid
than explicated, more questions remain than answers given. In some
cases this is unavoidable, in others it indicates a necessary working out
of some of the more basic philosophical questions. An example is the
issue of identity.

Theorists currently working the critical fields fall, to my thinking, into
two general categories, those who abhor the identity thesis and those
who uphold it. Adorno in Negative Dialectics forcefully raised the issue
of identity and the conundrum continues unabated. To my knowledge
Zerzan has as yet to wrangle with identity, though it's difficult to
contextualize any critical statement without understanding where the
theorist stands on this most central issue. In addition, Zerzan identifies
division of labor as one of the single concepts responsible for the
dominant culture. This is accurate, however, an examination of division
of labor, particularly in the context of post-industrial society needs to be

>'/.>

I'OKM ANI> ( ONIINI IN I >I I MI-N'IM il KlIUSAI

done. This, not only lo slren^lhen his previous essays, hul also (o provide
a foundation for where other theorists will undoubtedly ^o.

Leaving both innovations and critique behind, however, Hlcmcnts of
Refusal remains a seminal book in the critical tradition. It started many
people thinking and moving in directions where they were loathe to j?o,
it has re-framed virtually the entire critical project as it enters the twenty'
first century, and provided renewed vigor to a dialectical examination of
the dominant culture.

■'?'■'

NOTES

Beginning of Time, End of Time

I. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. I (New York, 1926), p. 131.

/. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York, 1962), p. 397.

V Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1977), thesis 125. ._„,___ lQ47 ^

4. Max Horkheimer and Thcodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklarung (Atnsieruam, h

5. Cioran, not to mention a host of anthropologists, makes this confusion; it is one treason le

could say, "There is no going back to a pre-linguistic paradise, to a supr J
lime based upon some primordial stupidity." E.M Cioran, The **^1™£^%
1970), p. 29. Another reason is the failure to imagine this "going oacK * . ,

social' transformation on the order of the most basic "revolution."

6. Spengler, op. cit., p. 390.

7. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964), p. 326. -primitive

8. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (New York, 1923), p. 93. Paul ^ S n ™L tQ

Man As Philosopher (New York, 1927) is, it should be noted, a. »^£ ^^
Levy-Bruhl's view of early thought as non- individuated and dominate oy y . e

"occult" patterns. Radin demonstrated that individuality, self-expression

mark early humanity. 1Q46) n 23

9. H. and H. A. Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Unca» , hi-

10. Marie-Louise von Franz, Tune: Rhythm and Repose. (London, 1978), p. •

11. Jacquetta Hawks, Man on Earth (I^ondon, 1954), p. 13. Mircea

12. John G. Gunncll, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown, Conn., \*>»h 1 ■ ■ -

Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York, 1959), p. 86.

13. Cited by Thomas J. Cottle and Stephen L. Klineberg, The Present of Thing* future. (New

York, 1974), p. 166.

14. Ibid., p. 168. ffcm^fllifp

15. The hunter-gatherer mode occupied more than 99% of the span of noma .

16. Eric Alden Smith and Bruce Winterhalder, Hunter Gatherer Foraging Strate.gu.s <^ni g ,

1981), p. 4. qV)

17. See, for example, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, u> )•

18. G.J. Whitrow, Along the Fourth Dimension (I.ondon, 1972), p. 119- A „ Hmt

19. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York, 1963), p. 51; E.R. Dodds, '£*"«*"

Concept of Progress (Oxford, 1973), p. 3; W.K.C Guthrie, In the Beginning (Ithaca,

1957), p. 69.

20. Norman 0. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), p. 148.

21. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1978), p. 328.

22. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (Princeton, 1964), pp. 508, 486.

23. Loren Eisely, The Invisible. Pyramid (New York, 1970), p. 113.

24. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1976), p. 28.

25. Grinnell, op. cit., p. 17. . 43

26. Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies (New YorR, ^ hi ■

^ ^^ — — — —

.'/•I

No i is

I I | Ml IMS < H- Kill ISAl

.'7h

27
28
29
30
31
32
33

34
35
36

37
38
39
40

41
42
43
44

45.
46.

47.

48
49

50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.

56.
57.
58.
59.

60.
61.
62.

lirich Kahler, Man the Measure (Nrw York, 1443), p. M).
Leslie Paul, Nature Into History (Jxmdon, 1957), p. 17<J.
Kahler, op. cit., p. 40,

Roderick Seidenberg, Posthhtoric Man (Chapel Hill, 1950), p. 21.
Arnold Gehlen, Man in the. Age of Technology (New York, 1980), p. 13.
Cited by Kahler, op. cit., p. 44.

Cited by Adolph E. Jensen, Myth and Cult Among Primitive. Peoples (Chicago, 196 i)
p.31.

Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (New York, 1965) p. 22.
fcliade, Myth and Reality, op. cit., pp. 95-96.

Elman Service, The Hunters (F.nglewood Cliffs, N.J, 1966) pp. 90-81. Recent work seem*
to bear out this picture; for example, John Nance, The Gentle. Tasaday: A Stone. Age
People in the. Philippine. Rain Forest (New York, 1975).
Perhaps especially Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London, 1949).
. E.M. Cioran, The. New Gods (New York, 1974), p. 10.
. Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit., p. 14.

. Morton Fried, "Evolution of Social Stratification," from Stanley Diamond, ed., Culture in
History (New York, I960), p. 715.

. Gale E. Christianson, The Wild Abyss (New York, 1978), p. 20.

. Lawrence Wright, Clockwork Man (New York, 1968), p.' 12.

. GJ. Whitrow, The. Natural Philosophy of Time (Oxford, 1980), p. 56.

. Henry Elmer Barnes, The History of Western Civilization (New York, 1935), p. 25.

. Richard Glasser, Time, in French Life and Thought (Manchester, 1972), p. 6.
Martin P. Nilsson, Primitive Time-Reckoning (London, 1920), p. L

William Irwin Thompson, The Time. Falling Bodies Take, to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and
the Origins of Culture (New York, 1981), p. 211. Walter Benjamin's well-known "There
is never a document of civilization which is not at the same time a. document of
barbarism," could be said to apply first and foremost to the calendar.
Mircca Eliade, The Forge, and the. Crucible (New York, 1971), p. 177.

There seems to be a striking parallel here to Marcuse's profound valorization of memory
(even including a mutual endorsement of the cyclical view of time). Sec Martin Jay,
"Anamnestic Totalization: Reflections on Marcuse's Theory of Remembrance " Theory
& Society vol. 11 (1982): No. 1.

J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York, 1932), pp. 8-9.
Christianson, op. cit., p. 86,

Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of History (London, 1936), p. 1.

Wright, op. cit., p. 39.

Glasser, op. cit., p. 54.

Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, I922-1972(New York, 1972), p. 271.

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), p. 16.

Glasser, op. cit., p. 56.

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, N.J., 1957), p. 186.

The celebration of the Feast of Fools, which reached its height in Europe at this time,
was a mocking of religious authority. It involved a grotesquely costumed figure
representing the higher clergy, led into church seated backwards on an ass with
garments inside out, and dancing or reversing the order of the liturgy.

Also, it is not inconceivable that the Black Plague, which decimated Europe from
1348-1350, was in a sense a massive, visceral reaction to the attack of modern time.

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston, 1974), p. 78.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place. (Minneapolis, 1977), p. 123.

Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1 800 (London, 1967), p. 60.

r, * 1 insl K.inlnmvviM/, Thr hmy\ /'»■" Hodics (Princeton, \W7), p. *74. Ciustav Billingcr, in
llu- I HMOs, ;ilsn mult tMimul llu- di;mge from the medieval to the modern age as a
ch;inut' in the iiahite nl lime.

M, Jacques I^Goif, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980), p. 51.

r»S. S. Lilley, Men, Machines and History (London, 1948), p. 44.

<]<>, Mumford, Technics and Civilization, op. cit., p. 14.

i,7. Marx to Engels, January 28, 1863, The Letters of Karl Marx (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,

1979) p. 168.
t\H. Charles Newman, introduction to Cioran's Fall into Time, op. cit. y p + 10.
fi9. Arnold Cohen, Man in the Age of Technology (New York, 1980), p. 94.
71). Horkheimer and Adorno, op. ciL, p. 7.

71. Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York, 1962), pp. 310-31 L

72. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1968), X, 1054-5.

73. Octavio Paz, Alternating Currents (New York, 1973), p. 146.

74. E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present

#38 (December 1967).

75. For example, John Zerzan, "Industrialism and Domestication," Fifth Estate, April, 1976.

76. Time re-began for the new Republic on September 22, 1792, Year One of the new

calendar disclosed that the number of no-work holidays had been cut in half, a radically

unpopular idea!

77. Benjamin, op. cit, p. 264.

78. Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time (New York, 1956), p. 273.

79. Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (New York, 1893),

pp T 254-5.

80. Benjamin, op. cit, p. 253.

81. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Roots of the Consumer

Culture (New York, 1976), p. 198.

82. John Zerzan, "Origins and Meaning of World War I," Tdos 49 (Fall 1981), pp. 97-116.

83. Raymond Klibansky, "The Philosophic Character of History," in Raymond Klibansky and

H.J. Paton, editors, Philosophy and History: The Ernst Cassirer Festschrift (New York,

1963), p. 330.

84. John Berger, Permanent Red (London, 1960), p. 112.

85. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken," James Joyce, Ulysses (New

York, 1961), p. 34.

86. Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago, 1982), p. 117.

87. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, 111., 1973), p. 88.

88* For example, Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (New York, 1939) and Time
Must Have, a Stop (New York, 1944).

89. N.J. Berrill, Man's Emerging Mind (New York, 1955), p. 163-4.

90. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, i9i4-79i6(Chicago, 1979), p. 74e.

91. Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Two Faces of Man (New York, 1954), p. 23.

92. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London, 1975), p. 220.

93. Ibid., p. 228,

94. Consider Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (New York, 3980) as to whether it is

time or technology that "comes first." All of the basic, society-dominating traits he
attributes to technology are, more basically, those of time. Perhaps a tell-tale sign that
he is still one remove away from the most fundamental level is the spatial character of
his conclusion that "technology is the only place where form and being are identical/'

p. 231.

95. Service, op. cit., p. 67,

96. Richard Schlegcl, Time and the Physical World (E. Lansing, 1961), p. 16.

MU

Noli

l >7. SjiiiiucI Bcckril, Wantnfif.H i.VWw{N«>w Vu.k I'Jvlj ( > w

98 " G 196!) 5 ^ ^° rW;,n ' ""* ""'""" I '"'< Ji <"»»-»<: IXs*4m,»* and I**,/,,,,,* (IWidr.u,.

99. Loren Eisely, The. Invisible. iy am id, op. tit., p. 1()2.

100. Robert Lowell, Notebook, 1967-68 (New York, 1969), p. 60.

101. Herbert Marcuse, £ras a«rf QvauMrian (New York J955) n 213

102. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn., 1959), pp. 9S 10 1 ,,„
example. ' ' ' ' ' '

103. Christopher Lasch, 7Ae Cutore of Narcissism (New York 1978) p 53

104 ' F^c7i982xt L ^ G " " St0n€d ^^ J ° Umal ''^ H0fStadt " <*"'

ml' H dCiU ? Huxl ey^f CerM any a Summer Dies the Swan, op. cit., p. 117

106. Hieodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973) p 370

107. Benjamin, op. cit, p. 263.

108. Cited by Spengler, op. cit., p. 103.

109. For sample, Julian Jaync, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the.
Bicameral Mind (Boston, 1977), p. 280,

110. William Morris, News From Nowhere (London, 1915), p. 278.

Language: Origin and Meaning

1. Claude Levi-Strauss, The. Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), p. 245.

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London 1974) n 72

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, 77k Will to Power (New York, 1967), p 428

J' ! aUl ^ , G ' £n & ^"^ to ^ ^««>fe „/ Z. fl i gua ^ ' (New York) 1971) j

21 r TIT, FV-w ^ ^*™^ *■***«« £ L;^

anrf the Theory of the Subject (London, 1977) p 1 ^

6. Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1982), p. 340. Also, Susanne K

Unger Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, 1980), p. 103: "language is, without a
doubt, the most momentous and at the same time mysterious product of the human

7. AS. Diamond, The History and Origin of Language (New York, 1959), p. 6. The phvsicist-

»rh o° P H er . 3Vld , B ° hm h3S Pr ° POSed 3 nCW m0dd <* l *W& -L the P ^
rheomodc aimed at reversing this development by re-establishing the primacy of the
verb. His aimis to reduce the subject- object split, so pronounced in the W« sL«

srs t^ ss :::»::i rr on by other such " holistic " — as

V\ K !l ^ lerSh ' ^ SU>ry ° fEady Man < New York ' WW), pp. 106-107
tu. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of Early Man (New York, 1947) p 198

11. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, 1944)' p 135

12. It may be worth referring here to the hermeneutic motto that "Man is language -

expressive of the drift toward a "linguistic" phenomenology with Heidegglr and
Rieoeur. In Being and Time. Heidegger specifically maintains that perception becomes
what ,s only with respect to the fundamental context of language, and Ricoeur fmds
hat all experience is already mediated via a world of symbol" See Don IhT^L
Technics (Albany, 1983), p. 145. ' rjLLSienual

13. George Sterner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York, 1975),

III MINIS <ll Kl 1 MSA!

.>//

I'<

Hi.

! /.
IS.

I'l.

22.

23.
24.

25.
26.
27
28

29

30
31

•...wuhIs. symbol,. whnllv i.nlikr their objects." George Sauli.yaim, J)onu,u,hnns and

rowers (New Ymk, 1'»">I ), p. 143.
KM. Cioraii, 77ir /'"n// //i/« Time (Chicago, 1970), p. 12.

Itnliind Bartlics, "Literature and Signification," Cultural Essays (Evanston 1972), p_27S.
Max Ilorkheimer, "The End of Reason," Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., Ihe

Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York, 1978), p. 47.

Cassirer, op. cit., p. 25.

Mayra. Bloom, "Don't Teach Your Baby to Read" (letter to editor), Co-Sw/unon

Quarterfy (Winter 1981), p. 102.
The fairly extensive literature on the supposed ability of animals to learn language is not
relevant here; the efficacy of training primates or others only demonstrates that it is
possible to domesticate them. The nature and origin of language as domestication is

not thereby addressed. n

Noam Ziv and Jagdish N. Hattiangad, "Essence vs. Evolution in Language, Word.

Journal of the. International Linguistics Association (August 1982), p. 86.
"The beginning of communication by symbolic languages in mankind cannot be dated,
even approximately." Vanne Goodall, The. Quest for Man (New York, 1975), p. 203.
Bernard Campbell, Mankind Emerging (Boston, 1976), p. 193.
"Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts, " Appropriately, this quote is

attributed to Talleyrand, diplomat and statesman (1754-1838).
. Peter Caws, "The Structure of Discovery," Science. No. 166 (1969), p. 1380.
. Olivia Vlahos, Human Beginnings (New York, 1966), p. 140.
Emile Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society (Glencoe, 1960), p. 50.
. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the. Bicameral Mind

(Boston, 1976), p. 130. „,,.<_- , in nnn

Jaynes sees language emerging no sooner than the Upper Paleolithic age (c 40,000
B C ) when stone tool technology experienced an accelerated development. But even
among those whose conception of language puts its emergence at a vastly earlier epoch,
the late Stone Age is understood as pivotal; e.g. "whatever the state of language before
the Upper Paleolithic, it must have undergone spectacular changes afterwards. John b.
Pfeiffer, The. Creative Explosion (New York, 1982), p. 71.
Frederick Engels, The. Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (Peking,

Thh L not to deny there is some division based on sexual differentiation. But ascribing
too great a role to the sexual division of labor would also be a mistake, one which
seems to be routinely made. Consider the apparently contradictory two sentences by
which a leading anthropologist sums up the matter: "The division of labor by sex is
virtually universal. Men hunt and gather; women primarily gather and hunt small game;
both sexes fish and gather shellfish," Richard B. Lee, "Is there a Foraging Mode ot
Production?" California Journal of Anthropology (Spring 1981), p. 15.
. Sigmund Freud, The. Standard Edition of the Complete. Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (London, 1953, 1974), Vol. 15, p. 167.

Jacques I-acan, The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, 1968).

Mircca Eliade, Shamanism (Princeton, 1964), p. 99.

John Zerzan, "Beginning of Time, End of Time", Fifth Estate (Summer 1983).

Russell Fraser, The Language of Adam (New York, 1977), p. 1.

Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, Refactions

(New York, 1978), p. 328.
Norman 0. Brown, Love, s Body (New York, 1966), p. 257.

"A name is the vastest generative idea that was ever conceived." Langer, op. at., p. 142.
Mikel Dufrenne, Language. &. Philosophy 7 (Bloomington, 1963), p. 101.

32.

33.

34
35
36
37

38
39
40

N( )||-N
mil realize (hat wo „«,„„■ ,| u . |n , )r ..,. ,. , ' ,. *'" k ' ' '-'">• !'■ J ' M "A i.ih .1..

fear us." |-;1k W fanctti 7/ VI i T u " :,,,w "• ;,m ' " ,: " »«'V l '<" why «i.r V

a »-^V^

45. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adomo rLi' % , ,

p. 32. Adorno, ^krtfc of Enlightenment (New York, I «J /,>),

46. Mam Pei, 7% P Story of Language (Philadelphia, 1965) p 199

2 £* l^T ^" ^ Ze " (New ^ »#**

50. Pfeiffer, op. cit. f chapters 8 9

55. Claude Uv-Strauss. 7>te* ?««„,, (New York, !%)„„' \X 2M
57. F.ug c „fo Trias Mifa^ a „ rf its shaiim (R

8 - -jar 2£- its cMr?*? s — - • «*

Virginia Woolf rL ! *' J ° yCC * DoS Passos - F»ullcner Gide

2tC WO ° ,f ' B ° r8eS ' am ° n6 ^ *"« •" «*- to challenge the given d imenS ion

6o' n!T ?» eU J- ^ °""*«* <* W ^ds (New York, 1979) p 142
60, Robert Harb.son, Deliberate Russian (New York 1980) p ^

W t u & n********"*** (New York, 967)7'™'
Spectal thanks to Aliee Parman for assistance throughout ? '

(J. 1

li i mi NTs m ki rns.M

;./«>

.vt

Number: Its Origin and Evolution

"T^ P ^ a " d ""*" * Ad ° rm> ' * "** °>^-» P (New Yo*,

5. J.D. Betml, Tht Eaamcn aj Man (London, 1972) n 27

6. H„e yl , * «^ ,«*«*,, ^R^*.. ^^ ^

r/p,^ ™' WttV «» tf &*** (New York, 1933), p. 82 '
10. Charles Parsons, Mathematics in Philosophy {l^ ^L „ ,76

II.
I\

17.
IS.
19.

.».().

21.
;.2.

23.
24.

25.

26.

27.
28.
29.

30.
31.

32.

33.
34.
35.

36.
37.
38.
39.
40.

41.
42.
43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

-All hummi kn.,wlr.l f ,- is either experience m mathematics." 1'tfedridi Nidwchc, //«'

lRH/«> IW» (New Y.iik, 1967), #530 (p. 288).
Arend Ue.yl.inft, quoted in Cllaude Ixvi-Strauss, The Savage. Mmd (Chicago, 1966), p. 248.
Karl Vossler, The Spirit of Language in Civilization (London, 1932), p. 212.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973), p. 148.

MicfJ Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), jp. 188-1 89.

Quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York, 1980), p, 99.

Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive. Man (New York, 1938), pp. 218-219.

Tobias Dantrig, Number The. Language of Science (New York, 1959), p. 5.

C.R. Hallpike, The Foundations of Primitive Thought (Oxford, 1979), p. Zbf.

Raoul Allier, The Mmd of the Savage (New York, 1929), p. 239.

Cited in Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life.

(New York, 1982), p. 153, .

Leslie A White "The Agricultural Revolution," from A Reader in Cultural Change,

v „l 1 edited by Ivan A. Brady and Barry L. Isaac (Cambridge, MA 1975) pp 101-102.
Dorothy Lee, "Being and Value in a Primitive Culture," The Journal of Philosophy,

vol. XLV1, No. 13 (1949), p. 403.
Max Wertheimer, "Numbers and Number Concepts in Primitive Peoples, yj Soira Book

of Gestalt Psychology, edited by Willis D. Ellis (London, 1938), pp. 265-267.
Bryan Morgan, Men and Discoveries in Mathematics (London, 1972), p. 12.
Alex Comfort, I and That (New York, 1979), p. 66.
Erie Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York,

Dorothy L^Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality," Psychosomatic Medicine,

vol. 12, No. 2 (1950), p. 96.
Marshall Sahlins, from "Discussions, Part II," in Man the Hunter, edited by Richard B.

Lee and Irven DeVore (Chicago, 1968), p. 89. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago,

1972), p. 10. . , J ■ ,v

Isaac Glynn L, "Chronology and The Temple of Cultural Change during the

Pleistocene," in The Calibration of Human Evolution, edited by W.W. Bishop and J. A.

Miller (Edinburgh, 1972).
Sahlins, Stone. Age. Economics, pp. 278-279.

Albert Spaulding Cook, Myth and Language (Bloominglon, 1 980), p. 9.
C.S. Belshaw, "Theoretical Problems in Economic Anthropology," in Social Organization,

edited by Maurice Freedman (Chicago, 1967), p. 35.
Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State. (New York, 1977), p. 7.

Sahlins, Ibid., p. 82.

John E, Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York, 1982), p. 64.

Lewis Mumford, The. Myth of the Machine. (New York, 1967), pp. 139-140.

Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserls Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Stony Brook,

NY, 1978), p. 128.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 26!).

Weyl, Ibid., p. 66.

A.L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York, 1948), p. 471.

CarletonS. Coon, The Story c/ Man (New York, 1954), p. 322.

Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New

York, 1980), p. 66. . .

Lawrence Kubie, Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1950),

p 19
Morris R. Cohen and I.E. Drabkin, A Sourcebook in Greek Science (Cambridge MA,

'NO

Nori

48.

49.
50.
51.

52
53.
54.
55.
56,
57.

I 't'l. > (New Ynik. I '«.,').

69

70

71.

72.
73.

74.
75.

76

77,
78.

79.

HW»6), p. 34, „. j j
Joseph^Carnpbcll, ftfe**/ JW^,^. /;„. w ,, A . y „ /( . ^

Richard Olson Science. Deified, Science Defie,l (Berkley, m2 ) „ «,

: 21 " 9 ' ^ ° n ^ ** "^ c «^ (n« yU ,. 7 <», P . f ,

^"?~*£T Jr ; 5 ^ aUd Ge0metry < Camb "<%C 1946), p. 30
otn^p £ **" ^ ^ ^ »*>• P V "

specia.ization and division o f ^™ tlSl2 ^Tr" "T^

. Um, , Mumfart in, ^ o/ ,„ e m,^ (No « y< £ f 3 ■ A »

: £ ^^*""-^«-. «-, «i / (ci^e MA, 196 7), , r„

Lewis Mumford, 7fe a»afc;„„ „f Afo, (New York , 944)
Arnold Paccy, The Ma2e of ,^ enui (Cambrid ^ *£ ™

£E f^"^^""'^^ ^bridge' & 976) p 96

; S5S=»-

. Carlo M.CipoHa.Cfaefc.wrfcWiwn. /JW-^flffCNew York 1967) n 57

K" 2 a,a p" '* 0/M ^ (New York - wm >. P- 31.

Similarly, and more concrete^ nrnh tr^ f W '"J ™ l ° pf ° blems of motion -
with rte y ^^ t |e^?^^ b,,1,y 3nd St3tlSt ' CS °"^d at this time to deal

"z: ss : a ^z:^ e z a i tw °i modern in ~ iife * -

true essence of man Z ir , S^Z^V ^ " to ** inSane ddusion that the
4** M (New S 1 9 Tp t aCtmty '" N ° rman °* Br ° Wn ' Llfe

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco, 1980), p. 288.

58

59
60,
61.

62.
63,
64.
65.
66.

67

Kl.l.MI'.IM IS Ol KlIUSAI

2S1

fin. Ibid., p. 2.05.

M . I'.insl. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, 1957), p. 341.

X.>. ( i.H. Baiilie, Clocks and Watches: An Historical Bibliography (Ixmdon, 1951), p. 103.

NV Kichard Courrant and Herbert Robbins, JWraf Is Mathematics? (Jxmdon, 1941), p. 9.

>vl. iCrnst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, 1944), p. 217.

KY Burtt, op. cit., p. 261.

><(>. Alfred North Whitehead, Science, and the Modern World (New York, 1948), p. 37.

H7. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), p. 245.

SS. I,awrence LeShan and Henry Morgenau, Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky (New

York, 1982), p. 169.
H l ). Paul Bekker, The Story of Music: An Historical Sketch of the Changes in Musical Form

(New York, 1927), pp. 77-114.
')(). John Katz, The Will to Civilization (New York, 1957), p. 85.
*'l. J.M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge, 1978). Douglas

Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York, 1979), p. 25.
( >2. A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modem World (New York, 1931), p. 49.

93. George Boole, Studies (London, 1952), pp. 187-188.

94. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (Cambridge MA, 1983), p. 55.

95. Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (Ixmdon, 1919), p. 194.

96. Paul A. Schilpp, editor, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (New York, 1951). See

especially Russell's "Reply to Criticisms," p. 694.

97. Cassirer, 1957, op. cit., p. 387, quoting Hilbert from the German. 'Hie principal effort

was Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (London, 1910-1913). Another try
is found in Brouwer's intuitionist approach, which claims that numerical thinking stands
at the beginning of all thought and that it should be thought of as "an essentially
languageless activity of the mind having its origin in the perception of a move of time."
D. Van Dalen, editor, Brouwer's Cambridge Lectures on Intuitionism (Cambridge, 1981),
p. 4.

98. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis, 1977), p. 200.

99. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York, 1981), p. 74.

100. Gillispie, op. cit., p. 87.

101. Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit., p. 24.

102. Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind (Boston, 1982), p. 161.

103. Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York, 1980), p. 3.

104. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel s Proof (New York, 1958), p. 11.

105. Ibid., p. 101.

106. Jurgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles (Minneapolis, 1983), p. 100.

107. Raymond Firth, Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca, 1973), p. 82.

108. Jagjit Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory and Cybernetics (New York, 1966), p. 7.

109. Concerning the inevitability of the "information environment," we are told, even
threatened, on all sides. For example: "The sooner this fact and its consequences
become part of our consensual reality, the better for everyone...."

110. Amiel Fcinstcin, Foundations of Information Theory (New York, 1958), p. 1.

111. The sharp rise in the number of single-person households since the 1960s, the fact
(early 1984) that American's daily consumption of television is more than seven hours,
etc.

112. Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind, vol. LIX, No. 256.
(1950).

113. Bruce Mazlish, "The Fourth Discontinuity," Technology and Culture, vol. 8, no. 8.
(January 1967), pp. 14-15.

114. Martin Gardner, Logic Machines and Diagrams (Chicago, 1982), p. 148

.'K.»

Noil

116. Martui Heidegger, Introduction to Metophysic, (New Ibva, 19591 „ 40

117. For example: Hofstadter, op. rir on 677 Ms- l™, a 1 , i '' P '

Erik T. Mueller, "Would An Intelli.ent rl. , I ' ); Robe " '~ M " dlr ' '""I
MeCorduek, -i^^J^^S^^ '" Lift ";:" ; ""'

Axis Point of American Industrial

ism

4. Thou™ C. Cochrau, f-»»fa,.. £W , **««*.. „ ^^ (New ^ , %| (

5. Rezneck, op. tit., p. 38.

6. Hounshell, op. tit., p. 43.

7. Cochran, cp. dr., p. 74.

8. Norman Ware, The Industnal Work,,, 1840-1869'ii™ York 1964) o x

"' P LuSr ^TVolT °l ^V ^ We " (1830 >" ™ Mi <« ™<™> and Steve D

i. ^^^ "

15- /^, p 22 ' * "* ^™^ "* *« """ r «***W (^haca, 1*977). p. 22.

H Fhf^T ?' ^f" C ° m " ° fA & < New York > 1981), p. 795

York, 1969^ 281 ' ^ ^ ™ e "^ / ««*»* « ^-« (New

* ^^3S^£5« «r Gold ~ ed -' ^ —

19. /&rf, (Nov. 6 and 3, 1819), pp. 227 215 '

20. Ja^Ixnnse Mcsick, The English Tracer in America, 1785-1835^ York, 1922),

21. Ibid., p. 152.

n. « t;^^ im, , 33.

24. Carl Russell Fish The R^ofT'r Nat ^ al ^P ena ^ (New York, 1.965), p. 26.

25. Clark, op. ci,, P 401 ' °" Mm (N ™ Y ° rk ' 1927 )> P- «■

1(1 .I'M I '.NTS ()!■' Kl'.l'l JSAI ,

283

.'(i. For example. Robert S. Woodbury, "The 'American System' of Manufacture," Edwin T.

I-aylun, Jr., ed., Technology and Social Change in America (New York, 1973), p. 54.
)1. Cochran, frontiers, p. 135.
?H. II J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for

Labor-Saving Inventions (Cambridge, 1967), p. 128.
19. "The business proprietor's desire to substitute machinery was in large part dictated by

the impatience of the knowledgeable artisan with working for somebody else. A lathe

or drilling machine stayed put while a fine gunsmith might not." Cochran, Frontiers,

p. 55.

30. Hugo A. Meier, "The Ideology of Technology," Layton, op. tit., p. 94.

31. Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America (New York, 1960), p. 32; Philip Foner, History of

the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. I (New York, 1947), p. 101.

32. Foncr, Ibid., p. 108; Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (New

York, 1961), p. 26.

33. Gary Kulik, "Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in

Rhode Island," Radical History Review, No. 17 (Spring 1978), p. 24.

34. Jonathon Prude, "The Social System of Early New England Textile Mills: A Case Study,

1812-1840," Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America:
Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana, IE, 1983), p. 15.

35. Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture in Philadelphia, 1800-1885

(Cambridge, 1983), p. 79.

36. Meier, op. cit., p. 88.

37. Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America (Homcwood, IL, 1967), p. 119.

38. Dulles, op. cit., p. 29.

39. This primary government armory was authorized by Congress in 1798 and conveniently

situated on land belonging to George Washington's Potomac Company. "For more than
a generation it was impossible to impose proper industrial discipline on workers from
the surrounding area." Cochran, frontiers, p. 74.

40. Merritt Roe Smith, op. cit., p. 256.

41. Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York,

1976), p. 58.

42. Page Smith, op. cit., p. 273.

43. Michael Feldberg, "The Crowd in Philadelphia," John J. Turner, Jr., ed., Riot, Rout, and

Tumult (Westwood, CI', 1978), pp. 136-137.

44. Jonathon Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural

Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 225.

45. Gary B. Nash, "The Failure of Female Factory Labor in Colonial Boston," Labor History,

No. 20 (Spring 1979).

46. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (New York, 1966), p. 529.

47. Walton Felch, "The Manufacturer's Pocket Piece," Gary Kulik, Roger Parks, Theodore

Z. Penn, eds.. The New England Mill Village., 1 790-1 860 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 326.

48. Quoted in Introduction, Ibid., pp. xxix-xxx.

49. Ibid., pp. 354-355.

50. Merritt Roe Smith, "Eli Whitney and the American System of Manufacturing," Carroll

W. Pursell, Jr., ed., Technology in America (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 51-53.

51. Quoted in Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1906), p. 477.

52. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I (Boston, 1904), p. 455.

53. "Factory Work," The Simone Weil Reader (New York, 1977), p. 66.

54. Cochran, Frontiers, p. 136.

55. George W. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, The Father of American Manufactures [1836 J

(New York, 1967), p. 122.

= T. &

-So

m

9 E <

°0 H

2^

■Ms

-5

4*

e

<

■ 6

d<

- (U

eT-3

CO

s * s

z a

a -

a-

f]
"«

„ a

a 'c

a* .2

OSfS

SR

fM

B"1

in u

^ Q "2

>

£ »i ~ « &<

■= ~ Q

2 ? | "S 8
I I*

_ r <u 13 "■> Lyi

5 ^ ^ c " ^

Sn'o *

3C

O 73

G

*-.

S. z* ^>
y: J C

a C a

Ha

K Ph Hi

in O

°0

■J

a

3

o

I

z

c

c
o
U

U

d

3 c-

* W CQ O

1*1 I

-^

.& <■

X

•2 ^ S

a n r

oo £ u,

O* -S

E a

- TO **■»

>H

c

Z

&'

r -

o

CI

^

^3

>

&• s

K to

s

uT

X
<

r:

-a

c

tx

<

£>;

« a

* 5

r-

<D

i-g

C/3

si, ^'^

S &£

cu Ph

in a
' d, a

r 3

ff.o oa,

Z a

t ft

-5

o 1 o-

CM
* u -

c
o

c

E

CO

a I

-a .. ^
5 S Al,"

DC

s

^ _

v a

^- o

C 3

If I

-a

^_g a 2

D.Q

«;

^

S .2 » £ 3

iri vd r~^ ao o
o o O o o

■^ a

^

o

JS o

3 r-l

a. .

E P-
9 '-^

•2 CJ

&

E &

J3 djN 5

ra oo
C 2

■O

c w g r-

(U

«

C5

u

"- 1

J

-^

•si

E

C

^

o

&

■u

E

^

c

o

n

Q
a

Z

CO

ST-

o.

t-i

en

-«

^-1

ca

^

^-

'X;

K>.

Q.

^

•~-i

■n

.5 o --

M- C f»

o 5

a o «

a. ps a ^

c

CO

u
E

a.

3^-
3*

o

3

o

or,

•a

a.Z
. E w

c

■a

CO

3 -c

i— !

1j

1

CO

00 H S

^

<4J

o

T3

c

£7'

c e

j=

u

a

d " 3 ^
a r 2 c<

u.

a;

s

1

d,

u

. "<n a

u

S o

N

c:

&
•&

3

^w a

-d"

3

.1

CO

(-

c

c*
C

'E

o

o

d

1»

c -a

a

T^

J3

^&^

a3

t/1

"S c
3 o

« a

"1

"■3

O

a

^i=^

a

^2

IJ

2

5

^f in vo h

s ^:

y 1)
■a St

~ C

=" u

is

-5 M

-a v «

■-, S "

O «o

s & E

? O u

I § £F

3 _ «3

>
O

■a " I «

*" .V «5

-a. ^ ^

^ £ .1 ^ a

^ .S § Z ^

JS -S ^ „

o

^ -^

7 £

-i- . « o S3 Ss -a

. o

■S .3" 5 S M:S >
s''w'^i s ^J3>^lJ SPSS'

s.sagsf 1.11^ ill

3-; if

3 O

•2.^ ^-i

3- E

, 3

y aq

-^ *£ o "a E <5

>p t - a g a ■« ■

^5 m -2 ^ ^ ^^

m P" -E « 13 co 1 * 1 3

Sou

■R §

^E=

« .„

. s) "on cj

§|-§S

& °" >M

S 5

& S w

>^.S

u a

u n o --

3 •

», a

c o 5

c •"

E 'S

Z=^

xi£
I 5

«5 j<(

_^Z

^ V CO

&2 Z ^

O r

CO -™

•a E

o

a

5 Qh

o
&.,- E

^

E E

.a

1

o<

in ^

si

o ^

S!

o,

en
g

a

I

'C

3

f

a

Co

co

l>

~ c_>

a < X

00 o^ c
in in vo

en o j<

ci- 2 -?

a w s

Sill

5? ^ E c

o on U

-i a

u

_i^" if

a ^

u

(3 -J so

— r o ^ »j
-3 r- -c

" 2 K

3 a ^r ^

Q •? S 3

f § ■ ^ It =- " d

. b « o 5 « <t
2 O 3 § £ E 2

d,

d |

o. ^'-5

ra d rr-;

I?

ci O

d ^

t*i ,-

I

C ca

X -3 S

« " «

< a

2Q

•3 !r?

>

3
u

!>' t/3

CL.2
3 " „

5 1
I

o o d

U Ph

Ph D

< "

^^ d

CM E

1^

£?

» ca

" a.

o N

OO ^

,— in

S3

I ^

p^ -

s ^

c 3

o o\

^00
in O

.y >

3 a;

03 00

i2 oo
3 r--

«j en

d

C7i

11 ^ -

!r, oo

IS

~ aj
■is f~H

ex

03 i'S

&

cu

5 ^ -

fU

a

5

o

-I

&■•

ofiC

3 U

,'Ho

Nous

122. Michael H. K;it/, Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, l%S) » xv ii

123. Faux, op. cit., (August 5, 1819), pp. 130-131.

124. Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America (New York, 1962), p. 352.

125. Curti, op. cit., pp. 80-81.

126 ' ^; T Kae ? e ' ^^ ° f tHe Republic: Common Schools ^American Sonety, ,7m
I860 (New York, 1983), pp. 96-97.

127. Katz, et a]., op. cit., p. 90.

128. Clifford S. Griffin, "Religious Benevolence as Social Control," Davis, op. cU., p. 90

129. John F. Kasson, Civilizing the- Machine (New York, 1976), p. 73. Also David J
Rothman's important The Discovery of the Asylum (New York 1971)

130. Rorabaugh, op. cit., p. 213.

131. Page Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land: Women in American History (Boston
1970), p. 64. '

132. Quoted by Cochran, Business, p. 91.

133. Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet and Debility in Jachonian America (Westport, CT, 1980),

134. Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family m America from the Revolution to the
Present (New York, 1980), p. 251.

135. Nissenbaum, op. cit., p. 28.

136. Jayne A. Sokolow, Eros and Modernization (Cranbury, NY, 1983) nn 12-13

137. Degler, op. cit., p. 250. "

138. Page Smith, The Nation, p. 714.

139. Gerda Ixrner, "The Udy and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status Of Women in the
Age of Jackson," Midcontinental American Studies Journal, Vol. X, No. I (Spring 1969)

140. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building
(Minneapolis, 1980), p. 107. B

141. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the
American Indian (New York, 1975) p 165 '

Ul.Ibid., p. 13.

143. Quoted by Major L. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom (Westport, CT 1974) p 12

144. Lee Clark Mitchell, Witnesses to a Vanishing America (Princeton, 1980).

Origins and Meaning of WWI

*' ^^^T' TlT ^ '^ 2 ° th CCntUiy "^ th ° 2 ° th ^^ 3S War '" Td0S 3 °' < Winter

2. Guy Debord, Society of the. Spectacle (Detroit, 1977), thesis 97.

3. Elie Halevy, The World Crisis of 1 91 4-191 8, (Oxford, 1930), p. 17

4. V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York, 1974) p 14
3. S.A. Sazanov, Reminiscences: Fateful Years, 1906-1916(Ix>ndon, 1925), pp 123* 140

6. Pierre van Paasen, Days of our Years (New York, 1946), p. 46.

7. Z.A.B. Zeman, The Gentleman Negotiators (New York, 1971), p. 46.

8. L.T. Hobhouse, The World in Conflict (London, 1915), p. 15. '

9. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (New York, 1943), p. 197.

10. H.G. Wells, The Salvaging of Civilization (New York, 1922), p. 1.

11. This general idea is sometimes mentioned in passing, rarely explored or developed

David Thomson saw that "The established authorities were everywhere subject [by
1J14J to a recurrent challenge which struck at the roots of their power-the challenge
of mass revulsion against the exacting disciplines of industrial urban civilization "

I I I Ml N IS < ))' Kit MSAI

.»M/

■ nwiI / „„,,„■ i f », , Nu,„>U<m (New York, .1962), p. 51)5.

12. Ijhhviht UiUm; The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War

(Philadelphia, 1965), p. 15.
1.3. I*o Valiani, The End of Austria-Hungary (New York, 1973).

14. Norman Stone, "Hungary and the Crisis of 1914," in Eaqueur and Mosse, eds., 1914.

Coming of the First World War (Nevt York, 1910), p. Ul hlir<jRule "

15. Peter F Sugar, "The Nature of the Non-Germanic Societies under Hapsburg Kuie,

Slavic Review, XI: I (March 1963), p. 29.
16 Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Hapsburg (London, 1963), p. 448.
1 1 Arthur J May The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1 91 4 (New York, 1968), p. 492

Adler, in "The Ideology of the War" (1915), warned that "the c ^s standpom^r the
proletariat does not in any way diminish its duty and natural inclination to detend
fatherland."
19. Zeman, op. cit., p. 146. . 14R

20 Hans von Bulow, Memoirs of Prince von Bulow, Vol. 3, (London 1932), p. l*»-
21. Edmund Taylor, The. Fall of the Dynasties (Garden City, N.Y., 1963) M«"
22 Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace (London, 1976), pp. 4 ^ «• "

23. Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station (Garden City, N.Y, 1953), p. 453

24. Arno Mayer, "Domestic Causes of the First World War," Brody and Wright, cds.,

Elements of Political Change (New York, 1967), p. 207.
25 Meriel Buchanan, Diplomacy and Foreign Courts (London, 1923), p. 169.

26. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y, 1959), p. 17.

27. Paul Avrich, The. Russian Anarchists (New York, 1978), pp. 118-119.

28. Zeman, op. cit., p. 10.

29. F.L. Carsten, The. Rise of Fascism (Berkeley, 1971), p. 20

30. Ibid., p. 45.

31. von Bulow, op. cit., p. 254

Si ^^C^LonU, Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Commurusm (Stanford,

34. Gramsd^resscd this attitude in his first signed published article, in October 1914.

James .Toll, Antonio Gramsci (London, 1977), p. 42.
35 Giampero Carocci, Italian Fascism (London, 1974), p. 10.

36: Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the. Factories: Italy 1920 (London, 197,), PP- 74, 76.
37. Quoted by Spriano, Ibid., p. 77.
39'. T^^^ettng Mussol.nl and the Intellectual Origms of Fascism (Berkeley,

40 Grelor^ Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton 1979), p. 90.
41. Oron Hale, The. Great Illusion, 790tf-/9i4(New York, 1971), p. 202

43*. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York, 1941), p. 78.

44. Alfred Cobban, A History of Modem France, Vol. 3 (Middlesex, 1963), p. 1U4.

45. von Bulow, op. cit., p. 173.

46. Prince Lichnowski, Heading for the Abyss (New York, 1928), p. 362.

47. Cobban, op. cit., p. 102.

48. David Thomson, Democracy in France Since 1870 (Oxford, 1969), p. 174.

49. Peter Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor (Rutgers, 1971), p. w.

50. Halevy, op. cit., p. 14.

51. Ibid., p. 20.

>KM

Noil

52.

53.

54.
55.
56,

57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.

73.
74.
75.
76.

77.
78.

79.
SO.
81.

82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.

93.
94.
95.
96.
97.

P-

' Taylor, op. fit., p. 23 S.

Henry K May, The. End of American Innocence (Nrw York, I ''59), p. 334.

Graham Adams Jr., The. Age. of Industrial Violence., 1910 1 9 IS (New York, 1966

Ibid., p. 219.

Christopher Lasch, The. New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963 (New York, 1'Hi.S),

pp. 202-203.
Jacques Ellul, The. Technological Society (New York, 1967), pp. 365-366.
Zeman, op.cit., p. 162.

John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York, 1968), p. 195.
Hale, op. cit., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 153

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York, 1967), p. 283.
Ibid., p. 279.

Harry Golumbek, The. Game of Chess (London, 1954), p. 222.
Zweig, op. cit., p. 195.

R.W. Flint, ed. Marinetti (New York, 1972), p. 14.
Shattuck, op. cit., p. 353.

Discussed by Carolyn E. Playne, The. Neuroses of Nations (London, 1925), p. 49.
Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, 1965), p. 213.
David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (I..ondon, 1.969), p. 316.
Siegfried Gicdion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, 1969), p. 41.
Hilton Kramer, "German Expressionism," San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, October 12,

1980.
Berghahn, op. cit., p. 78.
Ibid., p. 81.

von Bulow, op. cit., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 102.
Playne, op. cit., p. 88.
James Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York, 1.917), p. 75. Gerard saw the

popular reaction to the Zabern incidents as "perhaps the final factor which decided the

advocates of the old military system of Germany in favor of a European war" (p. 91).
John T. Flynn, As We. Go Marching (New York, 1973), p. 81.
Arthur Rosenberg, Imperial Germany (New York, 1970), p. 58.
Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (New York, 1978), p. 337.
D.A. Smart, Pannekoek and Goiter's Marxism (New York, 1.977), p. 20.
Ibid., p. 21.

Austin Harrison, The. Kaiser's War (London, 1914), p. 197
James Joll, The Second International (New York, 1956), pp. 166-167,
Robert Looker, ed., Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings (New York, 1972), p. 40.
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid., p. 222.

Theo Pinkus, ed., Conversations with Lukacs (Cambridge, 1975), p. 148.
Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism (New York, 1968), p. 26.
Quoted by Arendt, Ibid.
Hannah Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle (New Haven, 1948),

pp. 30-32.
Reginald Pound, The Lost Generation (New York, 1964), p. 73.

Joseph Bibby, The War, Its Unseen Cause and Some of its Lessons (London, 1915), p. 12.
George Dangerfield, The. Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1961) p. viii.
Emanuel Shinwell, I've Lived Through It All (London, 1973), p. 12.
R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870-191 4 (Oxford, 1936), p. 557.

I •,!.!■. Mr NTS ()!■ Kl-.l-l ISA1

?.M

«)«. K.J. l-vnir.. The I <cu>rian Age (I mdoii, 1950) p. 46

<W Colin < '.oss, The. Liberals in Power, 1 905-1 91 4 (London, 1963), p. 171.

,00. James Cameron, 1914 (New York, 1959) p. 21.

101. Harold Nicolson, King George the Fifth V"^™*\*™, „„ (Boston 1966)

102. Arthur Marwick, The. Deluge, British Society and the First World War (Boston, Uftbj,

m\i William Archer The Great Analysis (London, 1911), p. 19.
4 £J- and the OHgins of the First World War (New York, 7), p. 153.

105. EHe Haldvy, >4 History of the English People, 1905-1915 (London, 1934), p. 457.

106. Ibid., p. 436.

IS* ^Z^Era of Tyrannies (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), p. l«j .

lot G A Sps, "The Triple Industrial Alliance in 1914," Economic History Renew,

XXIV: 1 (1971), p. 63.
110. Cameron, op. cit., p. 46.

UZ QnSn ££££ "Class and Disillusionment in Wor.d War .,» ,oumal of

Modem History, 50 (December 1978), p- 691.

Taylorism and Unionism

1 navid Tenkins Job Power: Blue and White Collar Democracy (Baltimore, 1974) p. 9.
2. Sfpar^fnt oi Health, Education and Welfare, Work in America (Cambndge, Mass.,

4 s"S GTedTon, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, 1948) p. 38. C Bertrand

4 ' fhlpson made the same point in 1.91.7 when he pointed ™i£ *^ "££

tive pressure behind firms employing scientific management, for the reason that most

"a new kind of authority which stemmed from the unveiling of scient fie law |>es
SarTl Haber Efficiency and Uplift (Chicago, 1964), p. 25] and that it substituted joiot
oSence of employers and workers "to fact and law for obedience to person^
authority " [See Robert Franklin Hoxie, Scientific Management and Labor (New York,
lC p 9. The time-study man, measuring and manipulating the worker w lt h his
stopwi, relies on "unimpeachable data." [Horace D Drury, Scientific Management
(New York, 1915), p. 59.]

7 Sor 3,t* £»• Hi- Gantt, one of Taylor, lending di.cip.es, spoke of
moier^hf task system as "the standard method of teaching and training
hMrennL his ^ «i Profit (New York, IMS), P- 122. Since "*e worte
became an object in Tayte's hands," in Jacques mini's phrase, ,t follow easily that he
would be seen as an anLl ot a child by the Tay.ori.es. Another part of the just ,ca-
Z was Taylor's notion of the "economic man," that a worker's real motivation ,s
mone; and nothing else. |Sce Sndhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Smdy m JVnwkv and
Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) p. 99.]

."Ml

Nnn

*' " Til/ m A .M "'r '" y '"" S ": '" "'"""""'" A,W "" il ' h, ' v - M: "«- '^'J Pi'- "•'"./

i-fu, j.in, K)| ( lor <x;impl<\ '' *

9. Taylor Society, op. cit., pp. 447, 450, 45:1.

10 ' T ^h!£ 5"" l ° C v 0ntr °i; VOrk WaSlhc ,1Cart ° f th(; ™™ «■" »* «<« in such „, , k -|rs «,
Who. Boss m Your Shop?" from the August, 1917 Bulletin of the Taylor f ,

fact, the f.rst effort of Taylor to lay out his theory, in «A Piece-Rate Sy< t, " m «g
underline, that act that the problem to be solved is the antagonism be tw 1

and employers. See Frederick W. Taylor "A Piece Rate W™ - t *'"*<"'

^i™ ^ , of Mechanical Enters (New Y^ A fe, ^ST^f ^ I

11. See, for example, II. Jack Schapiro and Mahmoud A. Wahba's "Frederick WT,!" I

years later, "Personnel Journal, August 1974, which argues that the Conl'ic ^'

1 , T ? -? » m ° ney iS thC pdme motivator - sti » 0*0 obtains.

12. Taylor, A P.ece-Rate System," op. cit. (Discussion: Mr. John A. Penton) pp 888-9

??' ?f' £ 19?; Mi,t ° n NadWOrD * **""& basement and theUnZs
(Cambridge, Mass, 1955), pp. 27-28.

H w' C ° mm<mS ' "^"ctions by Trade Unions," The. Outlook, October 1906

15. Surveymg the notes and bibliography sections of McKe!vey' S and Nadworny' books on

mm^V:^ th3t MCKdVey l0 ° ked 3l ° n, y tW ° ™*«* (-gned n 1925 an
1930) and that Nadworny examined none.

16. Haber, qp. cir., p. 67.

17. Thompson, qp. cit., p. 96 and p. 155.

38 ' t !3 L n Gan r t ' 3 C ° nSerVative Ta y' or ^1*. admired the Uninist dictatorship

e penally of course .ts Taylorist component. And Morris L. Cooke, a liberal Taylor iic
of whom ,t was sa,d in 1915 that "no one has done more to broaden the scope of
wenufic management." was one of the first spokesmen to publicly urge the Taylor
toaegto recognize its natural partner in unionism. Cooke not surprisingly became in

io i , r 3 pr ° minent CI ° «»vocatc. (See Druiy, op. cit, p. 153.)

19. Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), pp. 111-112

20. Taylor Papers, 'Taylor or Ruggles." February 17, 1908

™" ^ ?• J - A j tkcn ' rfl >' /on ' i ™ a < ^toto** ^raairt (Cambridge, Mass 1960) dp 67 68

Sr gS HnT S °. Cial C ° mm, ' ttee ° f th ° H ° USC ° f Represe » ^ '" nve^Zte t h e
R? T , o? h .^ S r temS ° f Sh ° P Mana S e ™"t Under the Authority of Houfe
Reso u , on 90 - Vol. 1, p. 230. Other testimony made it clear, furtheTmo " that
workers resentment was fueled by the anti-workmanship aspects of Taylor sm saac

wTZ "1 T^r CraWf ° rd ' f ° r eXampk ' Sp0ke * the P^^to7^Zir
work and reduce their level of craftsmanship. S

23. Aitken, qp. cit, pp. 223-224.

24. For example, Haber, op. cit., declares that organized labor was solidly against scientific

5s?ir this period (p - 66) ' but oniy dtes iam ---^m~

26.- JSK^^1£' te ^ rOHW * AB *°* B (IthaCa ' 1952) ' P 16 -
II' Sh hard ?' PC,|S A *"**' Visi ° nS andAme *™" Yearns (New York, 1973) p 200

o elm f c ' m !nl SP ^ - 6 192 ° S ' " SharP rCVerSal " the AFL ' S historic opposi ion
ThelTu .r rt , C ;I m ° re reCCnt eff ° rtS repeat the same «™r- James R Green's
fo wJ v T^ eW Y ° rk ' 1980) ^° teS Bernst ™ to ^e same general pofnt

i; Z\f<° , m / ^ cKelvey and Nadworny - Daniei Ne5son>s F"*** * r«ylTi

A. A* ./ W^ c f* ana &™>« (Madison, 1980) likewise repeats the myth of a pre
War confrontation between scientific management and labor" (p. 164) which turned
into truce and then co. lab oration during the 1920s (p. 202). ManageJnt and LT^-

.1 I'M I -NTS (>!■ Kl'.IIISAI

, H >

II ir I <y,in i <>\ tlu- International Scientific. Management by Judith A. Merle le (Berkeley,
1980), :iImi ituikcs this error (pp. 8, 29) without bothering to mention Nadworny in the
text or bibliography. This suggests that the mistaken thesis of union opposition to
Taylor ism has become an axiom. With Peter F. Meiksin's "Scientific Management and
Class Relations," in Theory and Society Vol. 13, No. 2 (March 1984), error on this topic
takes a. quantum leap. On page 184: "...the A. 1'. of L. was one of the earliest oppo-
nents of scientific management, and, while observers disagree as to the extent of worker
resistance, it seems clear that Taylorism did provoke at least some strikes." Unionism is
thus elevated even a bit higher yet, while rank-and-file antagonism is all but liquidated
— an achievement which dispenses with the need for evidence. Sad to say, even Harry
Br aver man's excellent Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century (New York, 1974) falls into this kind of distortion; although the work
admittedly does not deal with workers' struggles, his sole reference to anti-Taylorism
(p. 136) is his judgement that Scientific Management "raised a. storm of opposition
among the trade unions during the early part of this century."

Organized Labor vs. "The Revolt Against Work"

1 . See Herbert Harris, American Labor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), p. 272;

Sidney Fine, Siidown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 55; Mary
Vorse, Labor's New Millions (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), p. 59; Charles
Walker, "Work Methods, Working Conditions and Morale," in A. Kornhauser, et al,
eds., Industrial Conflicts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), p. 345.

2. S.T. Williamson and Herbert Harris, Trends in Collective Bargaining (New York: The

Twentieth Century Fund, 1945), p. 210.

3. C. Wright Mills, The. New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (New York: Har court,

Brace, 1948), p. 242.

4. Daniel Bell, "Work and Its Discontents," The. End of Ideology (New York: The Free Press,

1960), p. 240.

5. Ibid., p. 238.

6. Stanley Weir, USA — The. Labor Revolt (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969), p. 3.

7. James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1963), p. 32.

8. E.K. Faltermayer, "Is Labor's Push More Bark Than Bite?" Fortune. (June, 1964), p. 102.

9. J. C. Lcggett, Class, Race, and Labor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 144.

10. Staughton Lynd, ed., Personal Histories of the Early CIO (Boston: New England Free

Press, 1971), p. 23.

11. Stanley Aronowilz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 44-46.

12. Bill Watson, "Counter- Planning on the Shop Floor," Radical America (May- June, 1971),

p. 78.

13. Weir, op. cit., p.2.

1.4. Thomas R. Brooks, "Labor: The Rank-and-File Revolt," Contemporary Labor Issues,
Fogel and Kleingartner, eds. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1966), p. 321.

15. William Serrin, "The Assembly Line," The. Atlantic (October, 1.971), p. 73.

16. George Lipsitz, "Beyond the Fringe Benefits," Liberation (July-August, 1973), p. 33.

17. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 144.

18. Jeremy Brecher, Strike.! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972), p. 271.

19. Washington Post, March 27, 1970.

20. Workers World, July 30, 1971.

21. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 11, 1.970.

.N.>

l.l

Nun

ll(» I'.llrinls," '//;,■ Niilum (.III lie IS, I '>/()),

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28

29

30

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36

37

38
39.

40.
41.

42.
43.

44.

45.
46.

47.

48.
49

50.

51.

52.
53.

54.

55.
56.

57,

I ''red Cook, "Hard J la Is: Tlie Kamjiaj^iii;

pp. 712-719.
William Serrin, The Company and the. Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, l'»7.1),

Cited by Brecher, op. cit., pp. 279-280.
Serrin, op. cit., p. 4.
JZiML, pp 263-264.
Ibid., p. 202.
AW., p. 306.

Roy B. Helfgott, Labor Economics (New York: Random House, 1974) p 506
Aronowitz, op. cit., p. 43. ■/>*■■

Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1972.

Michael Adelman, in Labor Newsletter (February, 1974), pp. 7-8.
Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1973.
. Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor 1974) p 376

' ^Saf ^T SS." Ub0r 19?0: Angry ' A 8S ressive > Acquisitive," Fc« (October,
1969), p. 144. William and Margaret Westley, The Emerging Worker (Montreal: McGill-
Queen s University Press, 1971), p. 100.
Harold W. Davey, Contemporary Collective. Bargaining (New York: Prentice- Hall, 1972),

Norman J Samuels, Assistant Commissioner, Wages and Industrial Relations, letter to

author, April 19, 1974.
Aronowitz, op. cit., p. 214.

R Knopt ?972)"p a 4 d J ° nath ° n C ° bb ' ^ "^ **'*" ° f °°" (N ° W Y ° rk: A ^ fred A

Remark by CWA president, Joseph Beirne, New York Times, July 18 1971
Aronowitz, op. cit., p. 224.

See Jack Anderson's "Merry-Go-Round" column, August 23, 1971 for example
Robert V. Roosa, "A Strategy for Winding Down Inflation," Fortune (September, 1971),

Arthur M. Louis, "Labor Can Make or Break the Stabilization Program " Fortune
(November, 1971), p. 142.
. Editorial: "Phasing Out Phase Two," Fortune (January, 1972) p 63
. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Work Stoppages in 1972: Summary' Report (Washington:

Department of Labor, 1974), p. 1.
David Deitch, "Watershed of the American Economy," 77* Nation (September 13, 1971),

Quoted by Serrin, op. cit., p. 24.

Thomas O'Hanlon, "Anarchy Threatens the Kingdom of Coal," Fortune, (January, 1971),

Arthur A. Sloane and Fred Witney, Labor Relations (New York: Prentice-Hall 1972)
p. 390. ' ''

From an anti-union article, by John Davenport, "How to Curb Union Power," (labeled

Opinion), Fortune (July 1971), p. 52.
Ibid., p. 54.

Los Angeles 'Times, November 8, 1972.
Armand J. Thieblot and Ronald M. Cowin, Welfare and Strikes-The Use of Public Funds

to Support Stnke.rs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973) p 185
New York Times, April 13, 1974. "

Weekly People, April 27, 1974.
Lucretia M. Dewey, "Union Merger Pace Quickens," Monthly Labor Review (June, 1971),

1 .1 I -Ml N I S ill'' Kl'.l 1ISAI

.'.'M

pp. m /i i

58. New York limes, August 3 and 6, 1972.

59. Confirmed by Harry Bridges, letter to author, April 11, 1974.

60. Dick Meister, "Public Workers Union Win a Rare Agreement," San Francisco Chronicle

(April 13, 1969).

61. San Francisco Chronicle, "Union Fee Ruling on City Workers," October 31, 1973.

62. Joel Seidman, "Political Controls and Member Rights: An Analysis of Union

Constitutions," Essays on Industrial Relations Research Problems and Prospects (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961).

63. Burton Hall, ed., Autocracy and Insurgency in Organized Labor (New Brunswick, N.J.:

Transaction Books, 1972).

64. H.W. Benson, "Apathy and Other Axioms: Expelling the Union Dissenter From

History," Irving Howe, ed., The World of the Blue Collar Worker (New York: Quadran-
gle Books, 1972), pp. 209-226.

65. Times-Post Service, "Administration's Tryst with Labor," San Francisco Chronicle (April

14, 1969).

66. New York Times, "Key Jobs Offered to labor by Nixon" (December 31, 1972), p. 1.

67. Phil Stanford, "Convention Time," Oregon Times (September, 1971), p: 4.

68. See California AFL-CIO News, editorial: "The Convention Caper" (January 14, 1972), for

example.

69. Robert J. Marcus, "The Changing Workforce," Personnel (January-February, 1971), p. 12.

70. Ibid., p. 10.

71. Business Week, "The Unions Begin to Bend on Work Rules," (September 9, 1972),

pp. 106, 108.

72. New York Times, April 27, 1974.

73. New York Times, April 26, 1974.

74. Quoted from Serrin, op. cit., p. 118.

75. David Jenkins, Job Power (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1973), pp. 319-320.

76. Ibid., p. 312.

77. The San Francisco Social Services Union, a rather anti-union union of about 230 public

welfare workers, has emphatically rejected these institutions since 1968. This, plus its
vocal militancy and frequency exposure of "Organized labor's" corruption and collusion
has earned them the hatred of the established unions in San Francisco.

Anti-work and the Struggle for Control

1. William E. Fulmer, "Decertification: Is the Current Trend a Threat to Collective

Bargaining?" California Management Review, Fall 1981, p. 14. Also Dollars and Sense,
"Union Decertification Elections," February 1980, p. 8.

2. Thornton Bradshaw and David Vogel, eds., Corporations and Their Critics (New York,

1981), p. xvi.

3. Nation's Business, March 1981, p. 20.

4. Peter L. Berger, "New Attack on the Legitimacy of Big Business," Harvard Business

Review, September-October, 1981, p. 82.

5. Herbert J. Freudenberger, "How to Survive Burnout," Nation's Business, December 1980,

p. 53.

6. Merrill Cherlin, "Burnout; Victims and Avoidances," Datamation, July 1981, p. 92.

7. Robert L. Veninga and James P. Spradley, 27m Work Stress Connection: How to Cope with

Job Burnout (Boston, 1981).

8. Robert L. Kahn, "Work, Stress and Individual Well-Being," Monthly Labor Review, May

1981: Ahmed A. Abdel-Halim, "Effects of Role Stress- Job Design-Technology Interac-

.'«>■!

Noil

tio.i on l-n.i.luycr Siitislwliim," Arudnnv .*/ Mun.n-rm.n, l.nun.d, June. 1981- O.hiiidu
Hchh.if.rn.cl I-. Douglas lluhombe, "Dealing will, i:„.plo V ee Stress," MSU Basin* vv
Topics, Spring 1981.

9 " ^ May^sT^' " N " laU]V ' A NCW StratCgy f ° r AbSCmeeism Control >" P™nnd Journal,

10. Clarence A. Deitsch and David A. Dilts, "Getting Absent Workers Back on the Job- The

Case of General Motors," Business Horizons, September-October 1981 p 52

11. Robert Holman's "Beyond Contemporary Employee Assistance Plans," Personnel

Administrator, September 1981, notes that more than 2,000 such EAP's were established
in U.S. firms between 1972 and 1978.

12. Richard J. Tersine and Roberta S. Russell, "Internal Theft: The Multi-Billion Dollar

Disappearing Act" Business Horizons, November-December 1981 pp 11-12

13. Malcolm S Cohen and Arther R. Schwartz, "U.S. Labor Turnover! Analysis of a New

Measure, Monthly Labor Review, November 1980.

14. Robert Blake and Jane Moulton, "Increasing Productivity Through Behavioral Science "

Personnel, May-June 1981, pp. 59-60.

15. R.S. Byrne, "Sources on Productivity," Harvard Business Review, September-October

1981, p. 36.

16. Personnel Administrator, August 1981, p. 23.

17. George Crosby, "Getting Back to Basics on Productivity," Administrative Management

November 1981, p. 31. ' '

18. Stanley B Henrici, "How Deadly is the Productivity Disease?" Harvard Business Review

November-December 1981, p. 123.

19. Donald V. Nightingale cites evidence of "growing employee disenchantment," such that

lhe modern work organization faces mounting pressures from within and without to
meet the challenge of employee alienation and dissatisfaction." "Work Formal
Participation, and Employee Outcomes," Sociology of Work and Occupations, August

20. Nation's Business, "Unlocking the Productivity Door," December 1981 p 85

21. James OToole, Making America Work (New York, 1981). Reviews by Amar Bhide Wall

Street Journal, October 20, 1981.

22. Business Week, "The New Industrial Relations," May 11, 1.981, p. 85.

23. Business Week, "A Try at Steel-Mill Harmony," June 29,' 1981,' p. 135.

24. Charles G. Burck, "Working Smarter," Fortune, June 15, 198 1', p. 70.

25. Burck, "What Happens When Workers Manage Themselves," 'Fortune, Julv 27 1981

p. 69. } ' '

26. M. Scott Myers, Every Employee a Manager (New York, 1981).

27. Burck, "What Happens...," p. 69.

28. Burck, "Working Smarter," p. 70.

29. Burck, "What's in it for the Unions," Fortune, August 24, 1981 p 89

30. Burck, "Working Smarter," p. 70. ~ '

31. Burck, "What's in it...," p. 89.

32. Busmen Week, "Ouality of Work Life: Catching On," September 21 1981 p 72

33. Productivity, October 1981. '

34. William G. Ouchi, Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge

(Reading, Mass., 1981), p. 114.

35. David Uwin, "Collective Bargaining and the Quality of Work Life," Organizational

Dynamics, Autumn 1981, especially p. 52.

36. Business Horizons, "The Eighties," January-February 1981, p. 7.

37. Rep Stanley Lundine, in "Congress Takes a Look at Human Innovation and

Productivity," Enterprise, December 1981-January 1982 (pp. 10-11), predicts that

I 'J. I -MUNIS (H- Kll'HSAl

u will try to establish a "cooperative rel;

ationship among guvcriimciii, liibur

r^-^^^^^^r™

« uTZT^ S b C«'«U 8 So Many ,*. te Vcu, h s Go B«" 1— r 23,

42. f££* i. **. "N- r—' te OT lhe Wi " to W ° rk '" i*""""™*

December 1979, p. 72.

Appendix: Excerpts from
Adventures in Subversion:
Flyers & Posters, 1981-1985

The following pages include a small selection of the flyers and posters
Of A nti- Authoritarians Anonymous, produced by Dan Todd and John
Zerzan, which originally appeared in the booklet Adventures of Subver-
sion: Flyers and Posters, 1981-1985, published by Oh! Press, San Francisco.

The word is getting out that folks are no longer interested in continuing to reproduce this brutalized and brutally empy society. An erosion of the core
values necessary for its survival is already far advanced, and the desperate if feeble response of Reagarfism has already flopped.

In recent years the idea that there is a positive value to a lifetime consumed by wage -lab or and shopping seems to have evaporated. Productivity
(output-per-hour worked) has been declining since the mid70's. Unions are unpopular and increasingly a fom-el part of corporate management, called
upon to shoulder more of the combat against the anti-work syndrome of absenteeism, contempt for authority, drugs, turnover, etc.

Since the '60's elections attract fewer and fewer voters; the humiliation of helping to install one's masters is widespread. Shoplifting and all manner of
evading taxes are soaring phenomena. Since @idl980 over 500,000 19- and 20 -year olds have said @no thanks' to mandatory pre -draft registration.
An 80 -year old trend is now reversing itself in the high schools, as the dropout rate climbs,

The anti-human garbage of a rotting system - from factories to computers to freeways to neutron bombs - must be destroyed and will be destroyed.
The riots, lootings, and burning in Zurich, Amsterdam, throughout Britain, and in the cities of Germany in'the past year will come to America. And it
won't come soon enough for us. Breakdown begins at home.

The society that abolishes all adventure makes the abolition of that society the only real adventure.

nuclear madness . . .

violence against womin

. . .rightist murder in

el salvador. . .leftist

fascism in poland

Today there is a sharp escalation of issues that call foi OUJ
protest. There is no doubt that these outrages must be ended.

Jr everyday, unspectacular confinement is also very much ".ii
issue" — - and '■- ■

Ou

wut everyuay, unspectacular conrinement is aiso very mucn ai
issue" — - and is not necessarily confronted by responding to appal
ently separate affronts to decency.

Basically indecent is selling our lifetimes away to purchase
survival, a proposition that is everywhere losing its appeal. It may
even be that militancy over pressing issues is the last, best diversion
from what lies beneath all the issues — the emptiness of daily
routines.

One yawns in the face of a professor, shoplifts instead of paying,
is unable to face another day lost at work ... It is impossible to be
fully diverted from paycheck/price tag captivity. We are steadily
assaulted by it and try to draw away.

The social order becomes more palpably oppressive. All the
marches can't cover it up.

An Outsider's Guide to
Bizarre Local Rites

The organized local images of opposition to the dom-
inant order have this much in common: a complete
poverty of vision, owing to the fact that, understanding
nothing, their boring partisans feel desire for even less.
The Faster? for Life (Dieters for Headlines, more like)
responded to our flyer which imputed to them a public
apology for their lame and pious gesturism, by uphold-
ing, in their counter-flyer, every characteristic we accused
them of. As if to validate our picture of them as well-
behaved sheep who bleat piteously only for one com-
pletely unradical request — survival at any cost— the
pacifist camp exhibited their mellowspeak and lack of
passion by calling us arrogant, negative, judgemental,
etc. and explicitly defending humble, happy-face self-
sacrifice. Apparently there are those who will always
politely supplicate themselves before authority (and TV
cameras) and never have the urge to transform everything

It seems tiresome to remind our well-financed activists
that the nuclear weapons (and only too many of them
at that!) they incessantly salivate over could — with the
destruction of State power, nowhere on their agenda —
be dismantled in a matter of weeks, if that long. This be-
comes a real possibility insofar as their prayers, vigils,
letters to elected officials and boring demonstrations
are seen as laughable submission.

The RCYB, or Really Contused Young Bourgeoisie, as
the punks have aptly put it, are classic Marxist-Leninoid
zombies. Although it's possible that the Brigade, and thdir-
parent, would-be commissars of the RCP. is a govern-
ment project intended to completely discredit the idea
ot revolution, it is more likely thai their rigid ridiculous-
ness is a function of severe emotional disorders.

More successful in their efforts to support the line of
bureaucratic-totalitarian regimes from Cuba to Poland
and Russia is the front group, Eugene Council for Human
Rights (read Stalinisml in Lalin America. A rather large
group of supporters is manipulated with ease by a few
cadre in the know, a situation initiated by an honest de-
sire to help victims of U.S. -backed oppression, and
maintained by the chronic refusal of such volunteers to
acquaint themselves with reality, historical or current.
Front groups of course always depend upon the un-
willingness ot their supporters to possess either rigor or
autonomy, to see past the lie that one must choose be-
tween the grisly terror of military-corporate exploitation
and planned suffocation under socialist democracy, to
act as subjects rather than willingly directed objects.

if^a/ow/

WHAT A
SELECTION!.'

Meanwhile the extremity of alienated life is causing more
people at large to begin to question the validity of all
aspects of everyday life and of technological civilization
itself. The film KdjAwrasjirtsI expresses the critique of the
latter and thereby also exposes the madness of the
former. Al the other pole of cultural offerings was Tilt
Dili- Alia, weak and banal, despite much healed publicity:
no-one noticed the implicit contradiction contained by
the fact that its main sponsor was Commodore Comput-
ers, simply because the drama was so superficial. That
technology is ravaging the earth and its species and di-
minishing us as individuals in devastating ways will
have to be confronted.

Today more than ever only an attack on all forms of
domination is worth the effort: anything less can only
alter details of an increasingly empty and mutilated
societv. if that.

Nothing Less Than Totality

THE OFFICE

AUTOMATION

SYSTEM THAT

RECOGNIZES

PEOPLE WOULD

RATHER

NOT BE

AUTOMATED.

IT WON'T
BE SPARED BY
PEOPLE WHO
RECOGNIZE
THE PRESENT
AUTOMATED
SYSTEM WOULD
RATHER
NOT BE
ABOLISHED.

4rDataGeneral

AS WE JOIN MIDGE AND CINDY, CINDY HAS RELUCTANTLY
AGREED TO CONSIDER JOINING THE WORKFORCE^READON^

Why not get together with some friends soon
and say NO! Say no to the draft, or work, or rel^n,
"authority figures, or school; say no , « » te Jv*«v
oatriotism political ideologies, any of the thousand
S£!S * wh,ch this -^V jeeps vouro.
realizing your own needs and de ,res. You
more you do it, the more you II like it.

jgst sAY"mK orr."
rotm&T

AN APOLOGY I ROM TIIK

PEOPLE WHO STAGED

THE FAST FOR LIFE

It's embarrassing, but we have to admit how right you werl
to laugh at us. The Fast for Life was an insult to your intelli-
gence, and our absurd claim that the Fast has led to a "political
break in the momentum of the arms race" deserves nothing but
contempt.

Most of our support came from institutions — churches
and universities — known for the servility of their members. The
self-satisfied impotence of non-violent protest matches per-
fectly this docility, at a time when so many others are ready to
refuse the miserable roles and conditions allotted them by this
society.

It's true that political hacks at every level listened politely
to our "demands." And at a time when politicians are univer-
sally despised, we reinforced their authority by giving them this
chance to show how reasonable and concerned they are.

More importantly, in using our spectacular sacrifice to
make "demands" on Power, we hid the truth that only by the
real sacrifices everyone makes each day does Power continue to
exist. Now we know that only the demand for an end to all the
sacrifices imposed on daily life is truly radical.

A totally unnatural world of tedium and deprivation,
where love and play do not survive, is crumbling. The Fast for
Life was just another brick in the wall holding it together.

The barbarism of modern times is
still enslavement to technology.

Bon appetit!