(They do not feel personally disenfranchised, they feel they are speaking up FOR the disenfranchised.)Īnd this is why they keep getting it wrong. The Left is therefore doing it FOR the poor bedraggled working classes. But not because most American Leftists have experienced classism themselves. They believe what they believe out of a sense of common decency, fairness and goodness. I have decided the Left is largely IN ABSENTIA because the American Left now comes from the elite class itself their political convictions are basically a reflection of the warmed-over liberalism they obediently ingested while attending Good Colleges. Where is the Left in these harsh economic times? My eyes were opened.Īnd my question is, why doesn't this happen now? Why has the right-wing Tea Party movement been so successful in cashing in on class resentment? I soon learned what else was happening with this corporation around the same time I was working for them. And I was significantly younger than Dick. Very similar, and although I wasn't stuck in a slaughterhouse, I was doing some nasty work, scrubbing toilets and such. I like that story because a similar thing happened to me. As if it was coming right out of the center of me, as if it had been waiting there all that time, all my life, and now it had-just that fast!-run out of time."Excerpted from The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick. I can still feel it, the way I felt it then.
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I don't know how to describe it to you, I don't think I even knew what it was that was happening, I certainly couldn't have put it into words, but something came rising up in me, so swift and so strong, it nearly took the breath out of my body. Suddenly it was as if everything that socialist had been saying all those months clicked into place somewhere in my head, and I saw me behind that picture, I saw me knee-deep in blood and shit my whole life so that that picture could be taken. I just stared and stared at that picture. "I didn't even know what the coast was," he says in wonder as fresh as that of the twenty-year-old still alive inside him. The blue eyes of the seventy-year-old Nikowsski stare at me, fifty years disappearing in their wide gaze. "At the coast!" Dick stared blindly at the picture of a group of men and women lying languidly by the sea. Then, one day in summer, when it was so blistering hot in the slaughterhouse the sweat was pouring down into the men's eyes, blinding them, the socialist suddenly turned to Dick and said to him: "Do you know where the owners are now? Right now while you and I are here sweating like pigs?" No," Dick replied, "where?" The socialist took a folded page of newspaper from his pocket. But he liked the socialist because behind the rage he sensed something wild and wounded in the man, and besides, whenever there was a dispute between the foreman and a worker, the socialist was the only one who stuck his neck out for the worker.
He talked endlessly, obsessively about "the bosses" and "the working stiffs." Half the time Dick couldn't follow the socialist, didn't know what the hell he was talking about, thought only that he was going to get them all in trouble. This socialist worked beside Dick, and became his friend.
One of the men who worked in the slaughterhouse was a socialist, a thin, burning-eyed man in his thirties. Nikowsski's description of this slaughterhouse in 1922 evokes for me an image of men in hell, condemned to shovel coal onto their own doom-fires. I need explanations!įirst, let us study this pertinent excerpt of historic text: In 1922, the Nikowsskis moved to the Polish section of Chicago, and Dick went to work in a slaughterhouse where he worked six days a week, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, making just enough to exist on, never enough to save anything. Yes, boys and girls, that's our discussion question for today.
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