First, catching up, I found the two anarchist websites Micah Bales had sent: http://www.crimethinc.com and [Dead link deleted. - Editor] Thanks to John Madziarczyk, who sent me the title of Maurice Isserman's book on the New Left - "If I Had A Hammer". Unhappily I still can't find my copy and it doesn't seem to be in print; check your library or used book stores. Because of the Iraq situation I'll plug the War Resisters League website once more - it has downloadable material on it for local actions: www.warresisters.org

LOOKING FOR THE MOTOR FORCE OF HISTORY

As I start this second part of the second part, I'd remind all of you that whatever your reason for asking to be on this discussion of "what is socialism", my reason for committing to writing it is that I want to help in the process of changing history. It was Marx who said that the issue wasn't to explain history but to change it. I hope this series is a contribution to resistance "to that which is", and toward actions that can help create "that which ought to be". For this reason, by all means email any of these pieces to friends and let them know they can get back copies as well.

One of the most important aspects of a Marxist approach to history is that the future is "evitable" - we can change it. We are not helpless observers, objects upon which the force of history works its way. We are not damp clay being molded by others. We are able, even if to a very small degree, to affect the very shape of our time and place.

In the last installment I mentioned the extreme difficulty of moving toward utopia, of the failure of the utopians to realize that merely to offer something better to people doesn't mean they will reach for it. There is always the problem of making an effort, and the deeper problem of those who profit greatly from insuring you don't want to make that effort. I had mentioned my personal struggle to stop smoking - far better if I had focused on the fact that from the beginning of the current plague of smoking we have seen private profit contribute to "wrong decisions". The tobacco firms paid a great deal of money to Hollywood in the old days to get cigarettes used in the movies - particularly used by women. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising - propaganda to encourage "bad decisions".

When one thinks of the millions of lives cut short by cancer and heart attacks from smoking it is shocking to realize how much impact private profit capitalism has in undermining our health! The "motor force" of trying to quit smoking (or even not to start) is based on things such as better health, while the "motor force" to get us to smoke, or to continue to smoke, is based on powerful drives of being told it is sexy, it is adult, it will help us lose weight, etc. (Those, like myself, who have stopped smoking have found that it is harder to meet people in bars - in the old days we could say "have you got a light" or "would you like a cigarette" and now what can we say? "Like a piece of chewing gum"?).

I'm not trying to give a moral lecture - to smoke or not to smoke is your decision. I am only trying to focus on how society can move from one place to another, and how our "free decisions" are often made for us by social and cultural conditions. The utopian approach is to suggest "how much better things could be" if only we reorganized society. This has some value. It is very important for "alternative visions" to be raised. But again and again we find that moral appeals are not enough.

The great motor force of social change is always, and simply, those who have much to gain from that change. Who organized trade unions? Workers. Who challenged Jim Crow? Blacks. Who started the feminist movement? Women. Who marched for the rights of gays and lesbians? Gay and lesbians. Yes, there were some from the middle class who supported workers or even helped to lead the movement, some men who supported women's rights, etc. But the power of these movements came directly from those most oppressed by the system.

Thus it was not an accident that the force of the early socialist movement came from the working class. The very fact of the Industrial Revolution had created this class, in a form which had not existed before. The working class were not slaves, but "independent agents" who - in capitalist theory - offered their services in exchange for wages. But as Marx pointed out, business was organized, and able to drive down wages, while the workers were not organized and in no position to bargain. A boss who made a bad bargain might not have champagne with his dinner. A worker who made a bad bargain might not have dinner.

It was this weakness of working people which drove them toward organizing trade unions, so they would have some equality in dealing with the bosses. There is a wonderful labor history, rarely taught in our public schools. (The task of education is not, after all, to change society but to replicate it). The process of building unions met with sharp resistance by the ruling class - nowhere more than in the United States, where the process of organizing labor was fought with great violence by the bosses. Only radicals are aware of the great struggles, the many shot dead in the coal fields, in the efforts to organize the steel mills, the auto industry, in mining. Terrible and bloody were these battles, almost invariably finding the churches, the press, and local, state, and federal officials on the side of those committing the murders. (There were some exceptions - the late AJ Muste, who was in many ways my mentor, was a Lutheran pastor who took the side of labor).

In the United States our labor force has, to a great extent, been bought out by the success of capitalism. In Europe the old class system was quite rigid. Those in the lower class had no illusions of "rising out of their class". The aristocracy was made up entirely of people born into it - you couldn't apply to join. You certainly had the occasional member of the ruling class and/or aristocracy who would join the workers - Tony Benn in England is an excellent example. But he is an exception. The clarity of the class lines kept the structure rigid, not only in Great Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution, but in all of Europe. Workers did not need to be reminded that they were workers, and that the best they could hope for was "to rise with their class, not out of it".

However the United States never had the same kind of clear class divisions. This is a good thing in many ways. It made the US vastly freer than Europe. In addition, we had "the myth of the frontier" - that the oppressed might not actually go west, but they always felt they could if they wanted to. As millions of immigrants poured in from Europe, settling in the cities along the East Coast and in the Midwest, tens and tens of thousands of Americans set out for the West, for the open farm land. There is no question that - for white Americans - the United States really was a land of opportunity, where hard work could pay off and a man could make something of himself. Here it seemed possible to "rise out of your class", to aspire much higher than to simply be a better paid worker.

This made it a great deal harder to build the union movement. It also - and this is a question we will have to come back to - made it harder to build a political voice for working Americans. Very early in the Industrial Revolution workers in Europe began to organize themselves into social democratic parties and contest for power. In the United States there has never been a comparable "party of the workers". Nor has the trade union membership managed to reach out to most workers - today the number of working Americans who belong to unions is only a small part of the total number of people in the working class.