The Historical Gastonia Textile Mill Strikes Are Not Forgotten

By Gaither Stewart

(Rome) When in the early part of this millennium I was writing a rather surrealistic novel, ASHEVILLE, about the town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where I started out my life, I ran into the story of the Asheville-based self-professed Communist writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, of whom I had never heard before. Visiting then her gravesite in the little known Green Hills Cemetery in West Asheville and researching her and her activities I fell into a gossamer review of early 19th century labor struggles in the good old U.S. South.

Here I want to share this bit of labor history—its passion, its shortcomings and failures, to shed some light on what might be the future. But first some words by and about Dargan. Back during one of the fervid witch hunts of native Communists, she wrote this in a novel:

A young black Harvard graduate makes a speech at a Fourth of July celebration:

“Suppose that some great disaster were to sweep ten million families out to sea and leave ‘em on a desert island to starve and rot. That would be what you might call an act of God, maybe. But suppose a manner of government that humans have set up and directed, drives ten million families into the pit of poverty and starvation? That’s no act of God. That’s our fool selves actin’ like lunatics. What humans have set up they can take down….Whoever says we’ve got to have a capitalist government when we want a workers’ government, is givin’ the lie to the great founders of these United States….”—A Stone Came Rolling, page 161, Olive Tilford Dargan

A widely traveled Radcliffe graduate, Olive Tilford Dargan lived most of her life in Asheville, NC. Acclaimed poet and novelist and in Who’s Who, she was blacklisted during the McCarthy Communist Scare in the 1950s. Not only authorities and witch hunters labeled her writing propaganda, but also other writers because, they charged, she hobnobbed with Communists. She said she lost her friends because of her red novels and that during the McCarthy scare she had to hide out.

This was off the pages of Asheville history as I knew it. No relation to Thomas Wolfean Asheville. In a 1935 interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, Dargan said unequivocally: ‘I am more interested in humanity than literature. My interest in literature is probably in my effort to put humanity into it.’

Writing about the workers’ struggles in the South last century Dargan claimed that, for her, literature was secondary to social commitment—‘They lie closer to real experience than the flutter of an eyelid which has occupied bourgeois writers for years and is considered by standpat critics as art.’

Her first book, Call Home the Heart, published in 1932 by Longmans, Green and Company under the pseudonym of Fielding Burke—was ‘a proletarian novel depicting the role of mountain folks in the Gastonia, North Carolina mill strike’, a novel which became a milestone in the history of the American labor movement:

Gradually she became possessed of a secret. Every sordid and ugly life had its hidden war in the service of a dream; its struggle behind drab matter-of-fact; its timidity and pride, fearing to be found out. That was the mystery she had so often seen in chilled, coffined faces. Dead lips drawn over life-long, unconfessed defeat; curved with the triumph of concealment; the dream safe from life’s insolences and surprises. But suppose it could be released into life?

Word after word Dargan crept along the filaments of my brain straight into my conscious. Because we both were in Asheville. And because I had to learn of her long after she was gone. To the end of her life at 100 years of age she fought with conflicting feelings about being a poet and being socially responsible. She felt stymied by guilt because she wrote poetry when the real issues of the day called her to another job. She even saw good in a violent and brutal and scheming mountain folk lacking in any kind of class consciousness who were no protection against the capitalism she detested.

Call Home the Heart told the story of the role of mountain folks in the Gastonia, North Carolina cotton mill strikes,’ today largely forgotten as is the wave of violent textile worker strikes that swept through much of North Carolina in 1929.

The number of spindles in Gaston County, N.C., grew from 3000 in 1848 to 1,200,000 in 1930, making it first in the state and the South, and third in the nation. The town of Gastonia swelled from 236 in 1877 to 30,000 in 1930, primarily from the influx of mountaineers exchanging their exhausted land for jobs in the new factories. Although blacks made up 15 per cent of the population of the county, few were allowed to work in the mills.

The Loray Mill, Gastonia’s largest, was the first in the county to be owned and operated by Northerners seeking the benefits of a “poor white” labor pool. In 1926, a southern textile worker, some of whom were children of 10 and 11, earned an average of $15.81 for a 55-hour week compared to the $21.49 for a 48-hour week earned by his or her New England counterpart. The Loray Mill was also the first in the South to undergo new “scientific management” techniques designed to fully exploit this labor savings. The “stretch-out” (increasing the work-load per operator by speed-ups rather than technology) was introduced in the Loray Mill in 1927, and soon became as widespread as the northern ownership of southern mills. In early 1929, the anger and bitterness of thousands of textile workers exploded in mill towns throughout the region. Five thousand workers, mostly women, in Elizabethton, Tennessee, led the wave of walk-outs in March, 1929, that quickly spread to the Carolinas. The Gastonia strike at Loray Mills is the most famous of that movement.

The Loray plant, owned by the Manville-Jenckes Company of Rhode Island, went out on strike. The strike in Gastonia reflected the tensions rising from the industry’s rapid development in the South after World War I when northern capitalists took over the southern mills to exploit cheap labor, an early form of the exportation of jobs. Since Gastonia was the epicenter of the phenomenon, mountaineers from the Smokies swept into town to work in the mills. The Loray Mill (pronounced Low-Ray) was the first in the South to undergo the new speed-up techniques forced on the worker. That exploitation of labor ignited the anger of textile workers in the region until walkouts began. The strike in the Loray Mills was the most famous and the most violent: scabs, arrests, beatings, workers’ evictions from plant-owned houses, and court trials of leaders.

I remember the red brick buildings, the chain-link fences and the little houses in Loray Village in West Gastonia that we passed each time we arrived in Gastonia where my grandparents lived. At that point my father always said, “Well, we’re at Loray, so we’re nearly there.”

Mill owners and state law enforcement officers crushed those strikes so viciously that subsequent attempts to organize labor in the North Carolina textile plants were unsuccessful. Yet the history of the strike remains, recorded in novels like those of Dargan and in the writings of one of the organizers of the Gastonia strike, Vera Buch Weisbord, a Communist and member of the National Textile Workers Union, NTWU. No less than Marxist writings, such histories of the battles for social justice throw light on the eternal struggle between labor and capital.

The history of the clash in Gastonia offers the perfect setting for an epic film or a social play of an insurrection. I underline the word insurrection, not a revolution. All the classic characters are present: evil capitalist mill owners, exploited workers in hot dusty factories, tiny ragged children and their emaciated mothers in the square wooden houses, strikers, scabs and strike-breakers and both dedicated and corrupt union leaders.

The textile strikes continued for some years in a disorganized manner. I found this eloquent testimony in the book by John A. Salmond, The General Textile Strike of 1934, From Maine To Alabama, University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London.

“WE DIDN’T HAVE NO BACKING…. WE SHOULDN’T
have done it. The South hadn’t even begun to organize
well by then, ” remembered Kasper Smith, former textile
worker and striker. “What happened in 1934 has a whole lot to do with
people not being so union now.” The veteran organizer, Solomon Barkin,
made much the same point at a 1984 symposium commemorating the
strike’s outbreak. The strike’s leaders had had little “experience with lead–
ing large strikes,” he asserted. There was no money to sustain the effort;
organizational preparation was practically nil; there was little support
from other unions, the federal bureaucracy or the President, “preoccu–
pied” as he was “with recovery rather than labor relations.”

Moreover, the AFL generally had failed its local union bases, especially those
“which had been spontaneously formed” in the wake of the NIRA’s pas–
sage. They were essentially left to their own resources during the strike.
There was no national direction, no widespread public or union support.
This wave of strikes did not create a national strike at all, but rather it was the sum of thousands of essentially local efforts, often with differing impulses and aims. This was especially true of the cotton textile South, the strike’s epicenter, where the workers’ sacrifices were the greatest, the repression the most severe, and the consequences of failure the most long-lasting.

One objects that times have changed. That the world and society have become so complex and multilayered and people’s interests so diverse that old ‘class’ categories no longer apply and that only in certain places and under certain circumstances are old class divisions clear. Some critics maintain that such labels as proletariat and bourgeoisie and capitalists are obstacles to the message such words offer because they alienate a section of the population such as the middle class in the USA today, who might comprehend their shared identity with the traditional working class if addressed in a different language.
Though those masses once personified by the term proletariat constitute a class, they themselves are seldom aware of it. To become a class of action the proletariat, i.e. wage earners, require leadership, something those furious, hungry, striking textile workers did not have.

The proletariat however is complex. The term is confusing. Who makes up the proletariat? For it comprises much more than the elusive industrial proletariat of the Russian Revolution. Today it comprises any wage earner, the property-less class, which sells its labor to the class of property, money and power. Capitalism too is complex though the exploitation by one class of the other remains. Of course enterprise needs capital and it needs employees. One asks therefore if anyone who employs someone else a capitalist? In the long run, yes. Inevitably, history shows, they will clash. For the simple reason that greed is inherent in man.
Thus those two classes—those who work and those who exploit the wage earner—stand face to face on the stage of life, interdependent, but forever at war with each other. The capitalist understands instinctively this eternal dichotomy dividing men since the Persians, Mesopotamians and the Greeks.

But the super-indoctrinated American working class dulled by the “American dream” does not get it. Moreover, the middle class in America and Europe has not even grasped that they too are now part of the proletariat. In that respect I find that old and criticized word quite adequate.

Dargan claimed the sequel to her first novel—A Stone Came Rolling, same publisher, same pseudonym—was even more proletarian. She claimed that she strove not to write propaganda while she fought with conflicting feelings about writing poetry and her social responsibility. Can one combine the two? Or are fiction and social reality destined to take separate paths?
Having a mortgaged home, a car and a TV does not change the proletarian’s status because his very lifestyle depends on wages determined by the capitalist class which controls property, power and money. The wage earner depends on money lent him by the capitalist bank to buy his home, his car and his TV. The subprime crisis demonstrates eloquently that those loans make the wage earner a prisoner of his employer, be it industry or banks or the state bureaucracy.

Though the man who works for wages, blue collar or middle class, is a member of the working class, his wage earner status does not make him automatically a class-conscious revolutionary. He can be anything, from a priest to the blackest reactionary, which unfortunately is often the case in the USA.

Modern history shows that the American wage earner—the potential proletarian—is in reality the staunchest flag-waving defender of the same capitalist system that exploits him, does nothing for him except pay him unfair wages, sends him to war to defend capitalist interests, and throws him aside at will. American wage earners are so amorphous, so blunted in their ballyhooed ignorance, so unstructured and ill-organized that they do not even constitute a class in the political sense of the word. Their ignorance and their acceptance of their situation represent one of the great victories of capitalism.

The arrangement doesn’t make any sense at all.

In contrast, many Europeans workers are still class-conscious. Divided but class conscious, though now a shrinking minority. But not the reactionary American workingman. The absence of class-consciousness of the American workingman exemplifies Marx’s statement that “the working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing.”

A forewarning: The day a group of young and dynamic leaders capable of inculcating a sense of class consciousness in the entire wage earner class and organizing it for nationwide coordinated action steps forward and takes the reins of guidance in its hands, then Capitalism should tremble and run for shelter for the movement will be unstoppable. Such a movement in North America can stop capitalism as we know it in its tracks.

¶

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FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Articles you missed the first time around.

For most Americans, the defense of “Americanism” is indistinguishable from the defense of capitalism, aka “the free enterprise system”—its favorite euphemism. Only in America can a citizen opposed to capitalism be denounced as “un-American.”

By Gaither Stewart  &  Patrice Greanville
Originally published on 2 August, 2008

The dismal demise of the American Dream (if it ever really existed), the dream not of what we believe it was but of what we wanted to believe it was.  “It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude.” (Aldous Huxley in a 1962 speech at Berkeley)

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Dateline: (Rome) July 31, 2008  [print_link]

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PHOTO: (Left) JFK, long enshrined as one of America’s best presidents, was a plutocrat in his own right, and a de facto propagandist for the superiority of the “American Way of Life.” No US president could govern (or get elected) on a platform that disparaged individualism, or the core values of capitalism.

IT’S UNDENIABLE THAT THE AMERICAN SOCIAL MODEL (the vaunted “American Way of Life”) is a paradox in the world. All you have to do is look around at other nations and the difference is clear as the Rome sky in July. Even today at the nadir of its profound social crisis because of its flagrant, outright failure, America continues unabashedly to hammer away at its people how fortunate they are, while simultaneously proposing itself to the world as the paradigm, the quintessence, the very epitome of western civilization.

There is the image of our leaders exuding goodness and, above all, good feelings. Sentimental feelings for the oppressed handed down to the good people of the Republic. I have read that sentimentality implies a lack of real feelings. That might be true. But I don’t want it to be true. I mean how often are we sentimental about some touching scene or memory that we want to hold. Yet, are we all lacking in genuine feelings? Because feelings often do escape us, fleeing, hiding, vanishing, then reappearing, stepping forward and backward into … into what? Into unreality? Into nothingness? I don’t want to believe so. But is our history not carrying us there, straight back into the faded American Dream?

PHOTO: (Right) For generations emigré ideologue Ayn Rand spread virtually unopposed her brand of aggressive libertarian individualism in America, where her views found a fertile soil. That she openly defended selfishness as a virtue scarcely caused a stir in a nation awash in Christian religiosity.

Ah, the American Dream! To the degree the model appears to the rest of the world as honeycombed and as full of holes as Swiss cheese, the more America’s ideological operation morphs into a contest between good (the US model) and evil (the rest). America’s private struggle between good and evil becomes in turn the ideological platform and the inspiration-justification of puritanical, individualistic and greedy America’s age-old universal crusade against the rest of the world. Moreover, lest one forgets or believes the doctrinal crap, the American social system is all the more insidious for human society today because it has become the social model for the world of capitalist globalization.

How did it come about that the ballyhooed “American Dream” turned out to be nothing more than institutionalized social injustice? And cheapness and tackiness, to boot. Like the banal dialogue of an unreal, real-life sitcom. The self-righteous social trajectory described in the glowing terms of “freedoms” in the Bill of Rights (e.g. the right to have arms) is undermined by a social philosophy of niggardly, tight-fisted individualism implying the right to individualistically shoot down fellow students or foreigners called terrorists who resist. Thus the poisonous combination of that individualism (personal avarice and fuck-the-rest) and the glaring absence of an incisive workers’ movement (I have in mind a genuine popular political opposition) is the original sin that has led the nation and the world at large under its sway into the blind alley of entire unprotected social classes, irrational environmental hostility and pre-emptive, perpetual war.

The great paradox is that the list of declared, claimed and proclaimed—but not guaranteed—fictitious rights for Americans have deflated and become non-rights for others.

What do I have mind, specifically? We see it all around us. In places the world shrinks. In others, it expands. Things change and shift around. But America Land of the Free, part of the shrunken world, tries not to see its shattered dream. Dazzle their minds with impossible dreams. Implant in their mindsets visions of triumph. Then, mask the inevitable loss of hope by the masses. Feebly, old dreams try to resurface and again vanish. The glamorous glitter of once-upon-a-time has been reduced to a tacky faint flicker of the lonely used-car lot or the mottled colors of empty Burger Kings blinking in the night. Begrudgingly, struggling for former space and bickering and resisting, cars get smaller. Houses peel and run down. Legions of “Walmarters” experience a new sense of abandonment while new sets of beautiful celebrities look out of TV screens soothingly and travel around the world and buy villas on Lake Como. More and more American megacelebs like Madonna, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, launched by the US mediaplex, are now world celebrities, but their acquired, discerning multimillionaire taste makes them spend a substantial part of their time in Europe and in other spots favored by the rich and famous.  Even Depp, despite his hip non-materialist image, is in fact a very rich bourgeois married to a similarly rich French actress, who enjoys more than five big residences in various continents, and the dilettante pleasures of playing winemaker and restaurateur in Paris.  He naturally prefers year-round residence in France. The point here is that for those who, as a result of wealth, leave behind their American provincialism, America is no longer the only game in town.

So what is happening elsewhere in the world?

PHOTO: (Left) The “European Idea” is catching on even in stubbornly conservative America.

Well, though Europe’s one hundred year old social state based on a spirit of solidarity is weakening and ceding ground to the brash, selfish American capitalist-individualistic-everyman-for-himself society and its neo-liberal allies of the European Union, the European Idea of the social state hangs on and resists. Europeans, as a rule, understand the idea of class better than Americans, where class is the dirty family secret. Thus, there is still a veritable abyss between on one hand the American market model based on individualism (that is the hosanna-ed American Dream), with a high (albeit slowing down) rate of mobility at the cost of a low level of protection of its people, and on the other the European system based on the social state, which is the European Idea.

The absence of a solid and stable workers movement in the USA (let’s just list it as the number one truant)—which should be this nation’s third party, (or in actuality, its legitimate second party, as Democrats, conceits aside, totally belong with the Republicans in the current single party system representing the corporatocracy)—is responsible for America’s anti-social answer to what is in essence a central social issue. Once-upon-a-time workers’ movements and trade unions in America chalked up some important achievements, once. That was a long time ago. The day of the Wobblies, for example. On the east side of the ocean the diverse histories of workers’ movements had a close relationship and connection with the rise of the nation states and the effects of the industrial revolution and the eventual emergence of the social state.

PHOTO: (Right) France’s workers are on the move to resist neocon Sarkozy’s policies designed to shred the nation’s social contract.

America’s dissonant, reactionary voice is instead the anti-social divergence of the model projected by the USA. Therefore the pernicious halo surrounding propagandistic Americanism. Therefore, the transformation of the American Dream into nightmare, which, intrinsically always was. That impossible dream, that at the very most dream-gone-wrong, that incubus, has in turn provided the foundations for an enduring Corporatism-Fascism, in America stubbornly referred to only as individualism.

The same individualism, the nightmare, the Americanism that has transformed our “duly elected” leaders into terrorists.

PHOTO (Left) ABC’s popular Marcus Welby, M.D. (in private practice) was one of many shows on the US media system that took privatized medicine for granted, and presented a flattering, near-mythical vision of the national healthcare system.

It should be clear that at the root of America’s social evil lies the truancy of an organized workingman’s movement, a stable and permanent nationwide movement that would provide the framework and structure for a workingman’s political party and an accompanying representative trade union to serve as a genuine balance of power in our one-sided, non-representative criminal political system. Who for example represents working people today? Who? Our millionaire congressmen? Our billionaire presidents? Or perhaps our corrupt, sellout political parties, the fundraisers necessary to elect our non-representatives?

The sad reality is that the workers’ movement in the USA never matured. It was never powerful enough to mark a permanent direction of the social organization of civil society. It never succeeded in creating permanent low cost cooperatives and mutualities, social clubs and educational societies and other forms of political-social expression to confront the Corporatist system of a nation that today hardly “makes” anything yet exports … it exports what? Democracy? Or terrorism?

In fact, the word “social” in the title of this essay is misleading, illusory. It is a travesty to use the word “social” in reference to the form of American society under a government that as Gore Vidal once said does nothing for its people. And it gets away with it! People don’t revolt. We should label this individualistic, eternally atomized, lift-yourself-up-by- your-bootstraps and to hell with everybody else society “anti-social” and rebel against it.

UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE – One Aspect of a Just Society

In recent days I went to my local Universal Health Plan doctor in Rome for a health problem. I called the nearby office for an appointment, fixed for the next afternoon. When I arrived there was one patient ahead of me already in the doctor’s office. I was admitted after a five-minute wait. My wife and I had chosen this doctor rather than another as our primary doctor because she is young, dynamic and scrupulous and besides will also make home visits. I keep home visits by doctors in mind because when my father in North Carolina was paralyzed for years after a stroke, each time he had some new problem such as influenza he had to hire an ambulance to carry him the few blocks of the one-half mile to the office of this “good Christian man” who had been his doctor for many years. The Rome universal health care doctor examined me, asked the right questions about my medical history and sent me to a nearby radiological center for x-rays. Two days later I picked up the analysis, made another appointment with my primary doctor who after looking over the x-rays, prescribed the appropriate medication which I immediately picked up at the pharmacy. Within a period of four days, including two medical visits, the x-rays and analysis and medicine, my problem was resolved: Total costs to me: ZERO.

PHOTO: Typical waiting room in US metro hospital. Contrary to the received wisdom, patient care is certainly not superior to that found in many countries around the world.

That is Italy’s universal health care at work, which despite cuts by today’s extreme rightwing, neo-liberal government still offers its people (both citizens and residents) universal health care. And, it bears mentioning, France’s system is even better, in fact, even today, under attack by Sarkozy, the French Bush clone, the best in the world.

The Italian social state—by far not the best in Europe—guarantees most workers one-month vacations, retirement at between 57 and 60 years, months-long maternity leave for both mother and father, unemployment pay, national category contracts, pensions, housing, food and other “social” benefits. That is a social system!

In Italy, in all of Europe, no political party, no candidate for public office, no politician at any level, would even dare run on an anti-social program. Budgetary cuts, savings, reforms, yes, but never the adoption of the American anti-social system. The American system is not even imaginable to most other peoples. Not in Europe. Not in Latin America or Canada or Iran or in any industrialized nation of the world. ONLY in the United States of America. That lack is enough reason for revolution. And that is just reason enough to refuse one’s vote for anyone less than a defender of social justice.

PHOTO: (Left) Italian students demonstrate against the government’s attempts to roll back social benefits gained after decades of continuing struggles.

I don’t know what a universal health service for the USA would cost. Certainly only a minimal part of conducting perpetual wars or building a space shield or financing vassal states around the world or a fraction of the advertising costs for junk foods and products that make us obese and ignorant. In any case the point is not the cost. It is not an economic problem of the nation. We have to keep that in mind. The problem is the power of the greedy vested interests of medical associations, the pharmaceutical industry (the manipulative “Big Pharma” so eloquently shown in Michael Moore’s SiCKO), hospitals, and related medical care organizations. The problem is the power of money!

However, foremost and above all it is a problem of the a priori negation of anything smacking of a social state (as present in much of the world) in opposition to the concept of the capitalistic market economy of America which does less for its people than do Canada in the north or Mexico to the south, or France or Italy or Russia or Bulgaria, in fact less than every European country. (I can almost hear at this point the knee-jerk chauvinist programmed reaction of many American readers: “Go live in Bulgaria, then!”  To which I reply: My point is that Bulgaria gives its citizens, in proportion to its resources, wealth and potential, much more than America. Do not compare absolutes here as you have been misleadingly taught to do; keep things in proportion.)

The creation of a receptive atmosphere for the “social idea” should/would be the major role of a nationwide, organized workers’ movement. That lack, that default, that truancy, is methodically destroying the health of our nation. For workers everywhere represent the average national interest. What affects them affects the vast majority of the nation. What benefits them, benefits the vast majority of the nation. The decoupling of the workers’ interests from the interests of the “average citizen”, “middle class” America, etc., its portrayal as a corrupt, self-seeking “special interest”, is one of the all-time victories of capitalist propaganda in the United States. It needs to be debunked.

The USA with its individualistic everyman-for-himself society today ranks poorly among other industrialized countries in health care, 23^rd in infant mortality, 20^th and 21^st in life expectancy for women and men respectively. Yet the USA spends more per capita for health care than other countries. Where does that money go? We all know the answer: it goes to a greedy health care system of doctors, hospitals, private health insurance and pharmaceutical giants and to their related inflated and inefficient bureaucracies, to their powerful respective lobbyists and into the hands of our “democratically” elected representatives.

So deeply engrained is the anti-social nature in the “American republic” that the brainwashed people themselves have been conditioned to believe that universal health care is contrary to their best interests. It just doesn’t make sense. The reality is vastly different than in the popular imagery.

America is a walk in and out of a world of shadows. Images and contrasts are strong, overpowering, and confused and bizarre. Drinking beer from bottles and cans but martinis from elegant crystal, parks with manicured paths patrolled by policemen on horseback but streets without sidewalks walked at the risk of loitering fines in hopes of finding a bus shelter rest station. How quickly in America you pass from light to shadow. And you wonder if you will get the chance to try again and do better next time.

No. It doesn’t make sense to continue whacking our way through this jungle of the world’s most bizarre and costly medical care system. Some twenty years ago I covered the American presidential elections for a European newspaper in the state of North Carolina where I grew up. The first question I posed to a cross-section of the population of that one state concerned universal health care. Not one single person at the time came out strong in favor of it. The most favorable response was “well, if they want to give it to me.” Most did not even know what universal health care meant. After my explanation, the knee jerk reaction of the great brainwashed citizenry was “We couldn’t choose our doctors!” or  “The Canadian system doesn’t work.” As if they knew! It does work!

Health costs continue to soar, care is compromised and quality is in free fall as obese Americans die of coronary disease. The health care world lies in the shadows. Health care for profit does not work. It cannot work. It is not a solution now and can never be a solution. Profit and greed stand in the way. No matter what the industry explains, health care will always be a right and a necessity, not merchandise like a Blackberry or an i-phone. It is estimated that a single payer (the state) universal health care system would save 100-200 billion dollars a year, it would cover everyone and it would guarantee more medical visits and hospital days to all. Now a recent encouraging poll shows that some 75% of Americans favor universal health care.

Many of “our” representatives say health care is not the domain of the state. That’s right! You heard me. HEALTH CARE IS NOT THE DOMAIN OF THE STATE! Bullshit! What can they mean? If health care is not the domain of the state, in what domain should health fall? Or was health care always intended for the world of shadows? It makes you wonder? Why can’t the USA treat its citizens at least as well as other countries do???

PHOTO: (Below, right) Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), a physician, is certainly no friend of the idea of universal health coverage. A multimillionaire, he has held substantial interests in Humana, one of the nation’s greediest and largest publicly traded health insurers.

Part of the answer: a nation led by terrorists is not likely to care for its people, either. Health care is one of the great mysteries. But what about the other social issues our government holds prisoner in the shadows? What about month-long paid vacations? What about more job security and a tiny bit less mobility? What about more taxes—make that simply fair taxes— for the super rich? What about a little less individualism and much more social solidarity? What about a third and a fourth political party? What about a workingman’s movement?

PHOTO: The Wobblies’ charter. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) waged a heroic struggle to organize American labor at the turn of the 20th century. They were defeated by the combined forces of government and corporate repression, and the class betrayal of the movement by “business unionists”, who by the 1950s had become an integral part of the corporate-sponsored “American Way” and its ideology of fierce anti-communism.

The headlines in this Sunday’s edition of Italy’s major daily newspaper, La Repubblica reflect the mood of the moment in only one of Europe’s social states:

“Precarious workers (workers without contracts) in revolt”

“Trade Unions in revolt against raising the pension age to 62!”

“Create conditions for a general strike!” (an exhortation)

“Fear is an invention.” (to keep the Left under control)

“Farewell to the future” (of our children if capitalism continues unimpeded)

“The Left failed, we need a new start from a workers position”

“The Left has nothing to lose but its chains”  (sic!)

As they say in Italy, “La lotta continua.” The struggle goes on. But when will the American masses truly join in?

Based in Rome, Gaither Stewart is Cyrano’s Journal’s European correspondent. A veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture, have been published (and translated) on many leading online and print venues. Patrice Greanville is Cyrano’s Journal’s founding editor.

By Gaither Stewart / SPECIAL FOR THE GREANVILLE POST

 

[ Dateline: Rome ] It’s an accumulative kind of thing, the demise of capitalism worldwide: at first the waning and the dwindling, now the rapid corkscrew-like downwards spiraling, of greedy, vicious, cannibalistic capitalism busily devouring itself. Today, one can only conclude the imminence of its just demise.

Just as one once said in Italy during the agony of the death of the Italian Communist Party, just as one once spoke of the loss of the propulsive force of the French Revolution, current events show that also capitalism, the capitalist system itself, has lost its self-proclaimed propulsive force. Today, for a growing number of capitalists it is a case of si salvi chi puo, every man for himself. No one can logically claim that capitalism as an economic-social-political idea propels forward world society.

In the face of the current disaster of the capitalist system, one can logically determine that capitalism’s ideology, its promises for societal well-being, were false from the start. One can no longer defend capitalism in good faith. Marx was right, over a century and a half ago: capitalism has hung itself in its excess, in its greed for more and more and more.

Underlying what I prefer to call the Mediterranean Spring rather than the European Spring are a host of symptoms of a highly infectious pandemic of rejection of the capitalist system. The movement of the movements infecting Spanish youth camping on the plazas of their nation today is transversal. Its common denominator is anti-system, which, though they might not yet realize it, I believe translates into anti-capitalism.

Rejection of what is and what has been in Europe. The fever has spread across all of southern Europe, from Portugal to Greece. The Spanish-Portuguese mood is almost identical in Greece, where working people, especially youth, refuse to pay for the greed of capitalism. Also some similarities are visible in the overturn of systems in Tunisia and Egypt. Now today also in Italy, the grass roots—youth and workers. the unemployed and the underpaid underemployed—demand the same rights claimed by protesters in Spain and Portugal and Greece.

It has become contagious. A fever. The Mediterranean world is burning: the demand is economic democracy, political justice and peace. In Spain, Real democracia ya! Real democracy now. The time of indifference seems over and past. Society has awakened. Spain’s indignados, modern Don Quixotes, have occupied sixty plazas across the Spain. The Indignant Ones movement in Portugal is the same. The movement is hailed and imitated by Greeks and Italians. In France, they occupied for a brief time the Bastille. Capitalism should tremble. For when indifference ends, social activism takes over. Revolution is in fact already underway.

It is clear that capitalism cannot change its very nature. Reform has become an obscene word since it today means change so that nothing changes. Reform has come to mean shifting gears so that the strain of economic crisis shifts ever more onto the backs of the socially weak and undefended.

Who then are the weak and undefended? As always in social history of the over one hundred years of rampant, unbridled, excessive capitalism, they are the working class. As an irony of history that class today is bigger than it has ever been. It now includes also a great part of the former middle class. Simultaneously however, the ruling capitalist class has shrunken in numbers to that infamous one per cent who hold and use the social wealth to crush and humiliate the weakened classes.

In Italy, the symptoms of the socio-political revolution underway have suddenly, overnight, exploded onto the scene. Everything has been commented on in Italy: the lowest salaries, the highest prices, the lowest pensions, the hardest workers, the greatest insecurity, the highest real unemployment, the highest number of precarious workers, the highest emigration from Italy of qualified university graduates in search of better lives elsewhere.

Wherever you look in southern Europe you hear the same cries of indignation. While financial collapse threatens Mediterranean Europe, the cries of the indignant ones are rising in intensity. What at first seemed like just another protest movement similar to 1968 has changed gears and entered a slow-motion period of still non-violent but constant, unrelenting dissidence which is also becoming an accelerated socio-political catastrophe. In Spain and Portugal, in Italy and Greece, while the political elite struggles with economic recovery from the disaster it created, everyday life is worsening: economically, politically, and socially. Today’s non-violent protest seems on the verge of violence.

Debt defaults, impossible state sales, hopeless bailouts and failed debt restructuring threaten. In this eschatological atmosphere, suddenly appeared the indignados. As if from nowhere, university-educated, networked youth, especially in Italy and Spain many still living with their parents, all acutely aware that their post-bubble nations have little or nothing to offer them as unemployment soars, precarious part-time employment becomes the norm and health benefits are reduced,

Until now their demands have been restrained: they have aimed at making the political elite accountable, called for new electoral laws geared to end the fake two-party system in Spain and the stale political systems in Italy and Greece. Electoral reform is a modest demand for what in south Europe is widely labeled a lost generation.

On the other hand, in Eurolandia, as in the USA, politicians and bankers are joined at the hip in their response to the economic crisis.

Therefore, one is surprised by protester statements such as: “We are not against the system, but we want a change in the system. We want change— not in the future; we want a change in the present. We demand a change, and we want it now.” But not even that voice of the people is heard.

In this atmosphere of socio-economic hopelessness, reform seems enough in the immediate future. Still, I believe the still unconscious demand reaches much more deeply into society and that the ante is rising with each passing day. We know that as a rule people don’t rebel easily. People do everything possible to avoid real social convulsion and upheaval, even compromising with a Fascist police state.

On the other side of the fence, today’s government is aware that a spirit of mutiny is brewing. That is why it has armed itself with a set of illegal and anti-constitutional laws to crush it. But the evident reality is that at this point the alternative to ousting today’s corrupt system is a permanent police state, which if it becomes any more fixed than it is now just might last a thousand years.

Acceptance of the legitimacy of Power, indifference to Power’s deviations and passivity in the face of Power’s threats against external enemies at least seem to have peaked. It commonly accepted that Power gone mad has to be put aside. The eventual end of acceptance and passivity could result in a kind of explosion the world has never seen. Clash between people and corrupt systems appears logically inevitable.

At the same time, and on another front, more and more people are losing faith in nonviolence, even though capitalism itself is extremely violent. If you’re not nice and polite, some people consider that violence. But most violence is in business as usual and capitalism grinding on, killing workers, forests and oceans. We’re surrounded by normalized violence and don’t recognize it for what it is. Confronting this normalized violence in a direct way is not violent; it is necessary.

Yet, many people still argue that you have to work within the system, that is, within the capitalist system. But it is a truism that you can’t have it all. You can’t have your air conditioning and not use up limited energy. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that endless economic growth is unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, so drastic change in the field will come about whether we like it or not.

The romantic word Revolution is terrifying to most people. There is just reason to mistrust it. Since the heroic times of the American and French revolutions and the Great Russian Revolution the word has degenerated. The student revolution of the 1960s, though leaving behind many lasting effects, petered out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine comes to mind as an example of a political class abusing the word Revolution.

If we discard the idea of armed revolution, at the same time let’s don’t confuse revolution with mere reform on the one hand or with armed insurrection on the other. Insurrection is a local, usually spontaneous and one-issue matter. Reform on the other hand is adjustment made by the rulers in order to maintain power as happened time and time again in Tsarist Russia. As a rule, reforms are too little and too late, and besides are offset by negative developments in other sectors.

Resistence against oppression causes a rupture between rulers and the ruled. That is the beginning of revolution. The thing about revolution is that it is gradual and elusive. You don’t even realize it is revolution when in fact you are already in it.

Resistence and rebellion against unjust power remains a leitmotiv in the history of mankind. With that tradition in mind the present rulers of Europe must wonder what form the next explosion will take and when it will arrive. For when the gap between rulers and people becomes unbridgeable and the scared people re-learn the sense of social solidarity and widespread Resistance sets in, the revolutionary step is inevitable. In an adult and mature people the passage from one step to the next in the dialectical chain appears historically ineluctable. Once underway, such a process doesn’t just stop.

The masses of the oppressed of America and Europe have thus far appeared surprisingly nonchalant about their lost freedoms. Most snicker at suggestions of rebellion. Of any kind of rebellion. Many still see America and Europe as the cradle of democracy and freedom. But what if, for example, in the United States of America—shaky super power today, in decline and tottering on the brink of disaster—what if the next step by the people was mutiny against the long, gradual counter-revolution in America, as of yet little charted by historians? What if real revolution broke out in Greece and then spread westwards? Is it science fiction, the image of people taking to the streets? Is the idea of revolution really far-fetched?

Globalization has accelerated the crises of traditional, national political systems, reorganizing and transforming the nature of power, relocating it to international political bodies. The institutions of the European Union—the European Commission, the European Council, The European Central Bank—are not democratic representatives requested by popular majorities. Instead they represent the bureaucratic and technocratic structures instituted to permit capitalism to continue to expand its hegemony on a continental and global scale. Within the revolutionary process underway in the world, Europe is attempting to cut its own vital space pointed toward monopolizing planetary resources. The size of this space will be determined by the European Union’s capacity to develop a new regime of  accumulation, integrating territories, capital and consumers/workers. In fact, the real revolution of the unification of world markets is not the vaunted liberal revolution, but instead a financial revolution, affecting all the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea.

Protesters worldwide do not yet realize that the factor that has accelerated the transformation of markets and the degradation of the situation of workers in recent years has been the savage deregulation of the mechanisms governing financial transactions. This deregulation paved the way for the change from an economy based on productivity of industrial systems to a drugged economy based on incomes for the top 1% of the population derived from monetary and financial transactions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GAITHER STEWART is a veteran journalist, world traveler, and novelist. He serves as senior editor and European Correspondent for The Greanville Post and Cyrano’s Journal Today . His latest novel, part of a trilogy, is The Trojan Spy.

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