Sweet and Sour Notes: on Workers and Intellectuals

...For if each performs distinctive functions which the other cannot, they also overlap in their interests and work...

...The point should not be overstressed, if only because it might make things too easy for both sides...

...Again, a one-sided picture, drawn deliberately, to stress why the suspicion that even sympathetic intellectuals have toward official union policies is not without some basis in reality...

...the kind of independence of thought and statement that the academy allows professors...

...Not a pretty list—though one that could easily be extended...

...It disturbs their sense of symmetry...

...Though not myself directly involved, I have been able to watch the experience of such intellectuals for some years now, and so far as I can see, it has by no means been without strain and disappointment...

...Looking for a proletariat where none is to be found, the radical intellectuals suffer disillusionment...

...Or proved incapable of fulfilling the assignment...

...Across chasms, people do not quarrel...

...not the working class itself, indeed, almost anyone but the working class...

...They feel, whether or not they say, that if those economists, writers, and other experts work "for us," then they had better toe the line in public...

...And then there's the record, spotty in general and disgraceful in some particulars, of the unions regarding internal democracy...

...Surviving in the minds of intellectuals can sometimes endow that idea with great power and thereby transform it into a new social reality...

...The problem is this: very few union leaderships 268 are prepared to recognize that the intellectuals whom they employ must be allowed— at least if they are to remain intellectuals (and if not, what use can they be even as technicians...

...By no very subtle methods, this elite takes over or "replaces" both the working class as it SWEET AND SOUR NOTES is and the proletariat as it should be but is not...

...Or suppose, again, that the working class in the advanced countries chooses the path the neo-Marxists call "embourgeoisement," a phrase that has never been known to frighten a single worker in the entire world...

...Nowhere, neither West nor East, has the liberation of the working class yet occurred in the sense that Marxists envisaged...

...Beyond that, it might be useful to recognize that—apart from the rightness or wrongness of the points made by either side—some of the conflicts between intellectuals and unionists are not only unavoidable but even fruitful...

...These two outlines of caricature— unionists toward intellectuals, intellectuals toward unionists—have the value of rendering sharply feelings that are sometimes suppressed for reasons of tact...

...But suppose the working class refused the honor...

...SWEET AND SOUR NOTES...

...History refuses to perform by blueprint...

...The advice of the radical intellectuals to unions has often been disastrous, quite as their tone has been arrogant...

...that pureSWEET AND SOUR NOTES and-simple unionism is as obsolete as laissezfaire in economy...

...The most bitter experiences have been required to teach the unions that they had to confront the larger social issues...

...But his famous "voluntarism," in History and Class Consciousness, is not merely a persuasive rebuke to the passivity of the old-line European Social Democrats who acquiesce in the status quo by ceding socialism to the automatic laws of history...

...in others, more delicately...

...If so, it will have no need for commissars who would discipline it or enrages who would terrorize it...

...On questions of foreign policy, many unions remain locked in a cold-war rigidity, victims of Lovestoneism...

...Surely, not for purposes of mutual dissociation...

...In social reality, the process that provokes this term of excoriation is the gradual strenghtening of the independent institutions of the working class within the welfare state, a society retaining essential elements of capitalism yet steadily modifying them...

...With respect to major new constituencies— the young, the academics, the "new class" of technicians, the middle-class reformers—the unions often take a hardbitten attitude, as if intent on driving off potential allies...

...The working class is a reality, the proletariat an idea...

...Yet, once stated, of what use are they...

...Let's turn now to the case that the intellectuals could make against the unionists, often valid and sometimes devastating...

...The reality occupies physical and social space, the idea survives in the minds of intellectuals...

...A few decades ago, those ideas and sentiments were enthusiastic, out of sympathy for the dramatic struggles of the unions, and sometimes misguided, out of a wish to gratify socialist expectations...

...The social class or group that remains most attached to the idea or potential of the proletariat, to the hope that it will yet appear in heroic and transfiguring guise, is...

...266 I turn to a narrower theme, but no less abrasive: the relations between intellectuals and unionists...

...perhaps a shock administered to the sullen flesh of the working class...

...Finally, it is a matter of principle— the point Herman Benson brilliantly argues in his article--that if unions are to be persuasive in their claims to constitute a major defense of democracy, they must show themselves to be democratic within their own life...

...Bastard descendents of Sorel, they live by visions of final conflagration...

...There, indeed, some collective discipline seems appropriate...

...As our society grows more complex and intractable, unionists discover that they have to double as intellectuals and intellectuals that they have to involve themselves in immediate problems...

...reality is so cruel as to deny it...

...Suppose that the Leninist option is false and that we need not choose between the working class as proletarian savior and the working class as supine victim...

...Marxism declared that history, having presumably been subjugated once and for all to scientific law, has assigned to the working class the task of creating itself as a proletariat and thereby liberating all of humanity...

...If they had, they could not seriously have supposed that unions in the United States can be expected to behave according to models drawn from the European experience...

...Only rarely do intellectuals make good union leaders, or union leaders good intellectuals...

...Often, the two deal with problems different in character and scope, so that the strengths of one may well be the weaknesses of the other...

...Mostly, it's a gut feeling owing partly to the proprietary sense that union leaders develop toward their organizations, but also to the rough-and-tumble tradition, not exactly conducive to intellectual nuance, that has dominated many unions...

...The run-of-the-mill union leadership has usually been trapped in a crude pragmatism, according to which it confined itself to the rituals of collective bargaining, and has failed to see that external social events might undermine or undo even the best of contracts and that there were many critical problems affecting workers that no contract could even begin to cope with...

...If unionists had listened to the Stalinist intellectuals, they would have committed suicide, first through "dual unionism" and the theory of "social fascism," and then in another dozen ways...

...Why this notion should appeal to deracinated intellectuals who propose to substitute guerrilla terrorism for the self-activity of the masses needs no elaboration...

...Where the working class has refused to accept the historical role of recreating itself as a revolutionary proletariat, a phalanx of disabled theoreticians, intellectuals, and functionaries searches desperately for a connection, some way of linking their idea with the reality...

...In Sweden, where not a large enough portion of the means of production has been nationalized, or in China, where too large a portion has been nationalized...

...But the reality proves intractable, the connection is not found, and some, in the sardonic words of Brecht, begin to wonder whether it might not be better to create a "new" proletariat...

...It is the job of unionists to grapple with urgencies, gain rapid tangible advantages for their constituents, hold firmly to the obligations of the present...

...it is also a counsel of desperation, and sometimes a signal for desperadoes, since it rests on a tacit recognition that the working class has indeed failed to elevate itself to a proletariat, or at least shows little aptitude for doing so by itself...

...Sons of millionaires, Hegel-stricken professors, street desperadoes, Latin guerrillas—none of whom have the slightest connection with the working class as it exists—they are caught up with the idea of the proletariat...

...they are social engineers, candidates for tomorrow's politburo, in search of a revolutionary motor by which to start up the quest for power...

...Not, to be sure, because they have much interest in or sympathy with the actual experience of the discrete human beings who compose the working class...

...If, let us say, a trade union is engaged in a bitter strike, it surely has a right to expect that its economist will not at that moment issue a public statement denouncing the strike strategy or the bargaining demands...

...and it is good that they should be asked...

...By and large, both because of tight employment conditions and the submissive idealism of some labor intellectuals, the leadership has had its way...

...For the labor intellectuals themselves, the problem has always been difficult: they usually lacked any "mass base" in a local or other segment of the union for which they worked, so that they were totally dependent on the goodwill of the leadership...

...What they will attract will be time-servers and yes-men, of whom there is already no shortage in the ranks...

...But the proletariat as agent of revolution—this remains a problem, an enigma, perhaps a delusion...

...I draw a one-sided picture, deliberately, to stress why the suspicion with which even sophisticated unionists look upon leftwing intellectuals is not without some basis in reality...

...If not dismissed en masse as "one-dimensional" (a complaint from which you and I do not, of course, suffer), the workers are sneered at as overfed slobs named Joe and Archie...

...only seldom have they understood what is distinctive about the role of unions in American society...

...On a whole range of social (as distinct from economic) issues, the unions are tongue-tied or retrograde...

...Only when they are, or once were, close to each other do they grow heated in debate...

...This argument has a certain plausibility, but the more you think about it, the more inclined you are to consider it specious...

...that they needed intellectual help and guidance on a range of problems from trends in employment to foreign policy...

...If, however, the unions continue to display their traditional attitudes toward intellectuals, they simply are not going to attract the brighter and more gifted young people, the kind they urgently need in a variety of posts...

...But if an intellectual employed by a union writes in his own name to express views on economic policy, political candidacies, and the Vietnam war that are at variance with those of his union's leaders, he should be able to do so in complete freedom and without jeopardizing his job...

...To all the neo-Marxists, with or without Hegelian trim, this is the one possibility that seems most irritating...

...they were not, as a rule, much good at intra-union politics, so that they could seldom maneuver between one group of leaders and another: and sometimes they were themselves half-persuaded of the rationales that were improvised for depriving them of public independence...

...Perhaps, they speculate, all that is needed is patience...

...Lukacs remains, apparently, an orthodox Marxist...

...The working class may yet find its own images of potentiality, surely less dramatic than those assigned to it by Marxist intellectuals but also, one may suppose, less bloody, less apocalyptic, less sacrificial...

...By now there is hardly a union leadership that doesn't recognize the need for economists, writers, time-study experts, and the like...

...The unions, to be sure, have become major agencies for social reform within the welfare state, but by now the limitations of that policy, essential though it remains, are becoming evident...

...Consequently, Lukacs places an enormous stress on the "voluntarism" of the revolutionary vanguard, that is, the self-appointed intellectual elite of the Communist parties...

...The workers choose their own path...

...With time there remains the possibility that, envisaging new goals and finding new allies, it will move beyond the incremental politics to which it is committed in the welfare state and toward its own version of socialism...

...Yet they are not as far apart as might seem...

...The working class becomes more firmly established within the society, gaining greater control over the terms and conditions of its life than it has ever had in the past—certainly, greater control than any working class enjoys in a Communist country...

...Even to make such a comparison would strike many union leaders as absurd...

...No one can question the place of the workers in the industrialized countries: their politics, their role in the work process, their ways of life...

...They are being asked to respond to a social and moral pressure that— fitfully, erratically, but significantly—extends throughout our society...

...They exist, they constitute a distinctive class, they are a force...

...The future society interests them less than do visions of power, and visions of power less than does the brilliant apocalypse of revolution...

...Confronting this possibility, Trotsky said that in such an event it would be necessary for socialists to remain partisans of the enslaved, even if the latter could never throw off their enslavement...

...From disillusionment, they turn savagely against the workers, condemning them for a failure to be what they, the workers, never dreamed of becoming...

...They, too, enjoy the positing of inflexible alternatives: either the working class performs the tasks assigned to it by history (that notorious scold) or it shows itself to be a historical nullity, a class doomed never to fulfill its potentiality through a conquest of power...

...Suppose it persists in finding its own ends and its own way, neither the precise ends of Marx nor the fixed way of Lenin...

...Valuable as the unions' achievements have been in regard to domestic legislation, they have sadly failed to cope with the kinds of problems that arise after the welfare state is instituted...

...Marxists had always said, "the liberation of the working class is the task of the workers alone...

...for others a burned-out disappointment...

...Little wonder that idealistic youth, only a few decades ago so warmly inclined toward unions, now feels a mere indifference toward them...

...It is the job of intellectuals to speculate, generalize, try to see problems from some imagined moment in the future...

...Intellectuals have always nourished abstract ideas and sentiments about the people who lead or belong to unions: they have never been willing to see unions as they actually are...

...Perhaps, then, there is something wrong with the idea...

...In some unions, with heavy hand...

...A reviewer of Lukacs's book makes the point neatly: Certainly when Lukacs effects his divorce be tween an abstract proletarian class-conscious ness, whose concrete embodiment is the au thority of the Communist Party, and the empirically observed thoughts and feelings of proletarians submitted to that authority, he opens the door wide for a return to a regime of "reified" laws and institutions, in the form of the party and its discipline, im posing a false consciousness or ideology on the mass of workers.—London Times Liter ary Supplement, June 6, 1971 Must we accept the categorical either/ or...

...It now seems, however, that many of these Marxists intended a secret codicil: "yes, but only if that liberation occurs within the delimited avenues to which we, mentors of the working class and creators of the proletariat, have assigned it...

...Perhaps one value in bringing these feelings out into the open is to clear the air a little, and thereby begin the slow work of reknitting cordial relations...

...All officials and office holders, including those in unions, yearn for stasis...

...What obsesses them is, above all else, the image of revolution, revolution as act and will, revolution apart from, perhaps against, the laws of history or the inertia of the masses...

...He should feel as free as a professor...

...Because of the difficulties in which they found themselves, a good many labor intellectuals—I'd guess, the more gifted ones—have gradually and quietly drifted away from their union posts and moved into the academy...

...perhaps a new strategical policy...

...These days young people, whatever their other merits or demerits, tend to cherish the right of independence and to be very skeptical about claims for organizational discipline...

...Morally admirable, his answer is politically unsatisfying because it depends on a refusal to consider any middle term between absolute revolution and unending oppression...

...If they had listened to the left-socialist intellectuals, they would have been persuaded that the Wagner Act was a step toward "fascism," thereby refraining from the organization of the millions of workers that in fact occurred during the 1930s...

...Perhaps what they envisaged must now be seen as a historical limit to be approached, rather than a fixed goal to be achieved...

...Only seldom have intellectuals bothered to look closely at the lives of workers or the workings of unions...

...Among more sophisticated unionists— those who don't just content themselves IRVING HOWE with telling you who's boss—there is often heard the argument which asserts that unions are combat organizations requiring a degree of discipline that precludes complete freedom of public speech for any of its officers or employees...

...Let's rehearse the case against the radical intellectuals as an intelligent unionist can make it, a case often valid and sometimes devastating...

...One understands their motives: they are genuinely attached to the idea of unionism and have worked hard in its behalf, yet they wish to enjoy the autonomy that intellectuals attached to universities command...

...A process of petrifaction has set in, and while the unions continue to do well in their own province, they cannot be hailed as they were only a few decades ago...

...For some it is still an indestructible hope...

...The working class in the West is neither promethean nor servile...

...but in truth, he seldom does...

...Lukacs seems to believe the assignment will yet be completed, Marcuse that the date for completion has long since past...

...Suppose it chooses to be neither the agent of world-transformation nor the eternally crushed victim of exploitation...

...For what the use of this phrase, "embourgeoisment," really signifies is a contempt for the daily experience and aspirations of the workers...

...Some intellectuals have wanted, during the last two or three decades, to participate directly in the life of the unions, mostly as technicians and staff men who put special skills at the service of the leadership...

...Yet this seems least likely in the advanced capitalist countries, the portion of the world Marxism declared to be center-stage for the proletarian drama...

...This refusal is perpetuated, though seldom with Trotsky's grandeur or purity, by those neo-Marxists who have recently discovered Lukacs and Marcuse...

...On the whole, that's fine...

...The disputes occur between the small number of intellectuals still attached to the idea of unionism and the small number of unionists still concerned with what intellectuals say...

...Marcuse has given up on the working class —it has disappointed him—and he scoffs at it as "integrated," "one-dimensional," and worse...

...If they had listened to the Trotskyist intellectuals, they would have remained indifferent to the outcome of World War II on the ground that it was "imperialist" on both sides...

...Socialists, no matter how critical of unions, want to remain their partisans...

...This is the stereotype, even caricature, favored among many leftist intellectuals during recent years and it surely is enough IRVING HOWE to sour even the most imaginative unionists against intellectuals as a group...

...In any case, it is useful to ask: where, to use a Marxist category, do the workers come closer to constituting "a class for itself"— where do they have more independence, assertiveness, dignity, and a greater sense of their potential: in England, not yet visited by the revolution, or Russia, 50 years after it has occurred...

...Most intellectuals and most unionists neither know nor care much about the other...

...In its own way, the union leadership has been as ideological as any of the radical intellectuals—only theirs has been an unacknowledged and inadequate ideology...

...It was a vision of great power: the "chosen" class...