The Age of the Informer An Anthology
Coser, Lewis
Such is the nature of the operations of the Communist party that all evidence about its key work must necessarily come from in formers—that is, from those who have seen it from the inside....
...that in order to protect us from the threat of totalitarian spies and agents we must discard squeamish considerations of decency...
...That is why the folklore of every culture includes spies and informers among its most abhorred types, why the popular imagination has always regarded the informer from Judas to Azev with a particularly horrified fascination...
...Suppose we grant that under certain circumstances it might be necessary to deviate from the employment of strictly "moral" means in order to prevent the infiltration of totalitarian espionage agents...
...concentrate on the sport page of their daily paper far more diligently than on the policy statements in their union paper...
...So serious have layoffs become in some auto plants that not only young workers are hit, but also employees with up to 25 years of service...
...In his union he feels a sense of protection, a sense of belonging in an otherwise hostile world...
...He has, in short, made standard for the armed services that pattern of behavior which first aroused such indignation when it was discovered to exist in Russia...
...Labor costs are also cut by mean, petty chiseling tactics—such as shifting a man out of a work group and demanding that the remaining men perform the regular amount of production...
...The awareness and firmness of this loyalty (other things being equal) surpass those of persons who have belonged to the party all along...
...tr...
...Yet what matters for an understanding of the mood of the nation is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, cannot be sure that they will be working next month...
...Friedrich Nietzsche has correctly cited a passage in Tertullian as an extreme formulation of this apostate's ressentiment: according to Tertullian a main source of bliss for those in heaven is said to consist in seeing the Roman persecutors burning in hell...
...1 (Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen), 1922, P. 84.] Mr...
...If Budenz knew of any actual spies and could offer some credible evidence that they were spies, then surely no one but Stalinists and their dupes could complain, or even be interested in complaining...
...And it is just this latter that has recently been happening in America—to the point, indeed, where the informer, formerly a shabby shady figure in the political underground, has been raised to the level of a national hero, a Representative Man...
...Some will say that there are times when they must, like it or not, be used by others as well...
...Let's take care of our own people before we save the world...
...But the longer these motives survive, and the less seriously the power of the pure form alone (of the relationship itself) is put to test, the more energetic and certain is the effect of faithfulness...
...One reason so many American liberals turned against the Stalin regime was the revelation that it had developed a universal spy system in which children were called upon to inform on their parents and husbands on their Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 251 wives...
...The change from boom to recession is harassing workers unfortunate enough to be laid off, and is rapidly altering the attitudes and feelings of those still lucky enough to have jobs...
...To get something off his chest, a worker will lambast the union leadership from top to bottom, and later in a conversation he will relate gleefully how he demolished the anti-union arguments of some dumb neighbor...
...We make the informer into a morally superior creature, we set him up as a model for our children, we employ him in our educational institutions and teach our children to admire him...
...Wilson, who apparently knew about the possibility of assimilating informing into information before Mr...
...Free Press, 1950, pp...
...Victim of a semantic confusion so obvious it is hard to believe that he, a distinguished literary critic and professor of English, could be unaware of it...
...What distinguishes our age, however, is that the informer has now, for the first time, been extolled as a model whom others should emulate...
...there is a strong feeling in the air that once again we are being shaped by those mysterious forces of capitalist society which can bring misery or sometimes plenty, but never a sense of human autonomy and decision...
...It's less difficult to get workers to run for precinct delegates in the Democratic Party, and to get volunteers to do ward and precinct duty, to get petitions signed, and so forth," a PAC official said, and then added, "We can safely predict 260 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 Democratic victories in all Michigan auto centers this Fall...
...The argument is familiar, though most of the time it is attributed to Bolsheviks: you can't make an omelette...
...In so far, for example, as the problem is one of espionage and counter-espionage, it does not, in any significant way, involve anyone but those people in government concerned with planting and/or catching spies...
...What characterizes the renegade is the continual chain of acts of revenge which he directs against his own past...
...the Communist Parties are international conspiracies...
...Too many women working while their husbands are working too...
...After calling upon the union to "concentrate collective bargaining strength toward winning the guaranteed annual wage in 1955," the resolution urges mobilizing "Maximum political strength toward electing those representatives whose attitudes and actions will reflect a desire to building peace and plenty for all the people...
...Or he can nod assent and applaud vigorously when his union officers tee off on the Eisenhower Administration for its do-nothing policies and its trickle down economic theories "which favor the rich at the expense of the poor...
...While it is true that one must guard against too hasty generalization, nevertheless anyone who has been around a UAW hall for the past several years can easily detect a distinct change in the mood and temper of union members...
...The union cannot, to be sure, solve all his economic problems, but it usually can mitigate some of them by persuading the creditor to hold off for a spell, by finding a way to get around welfare red tape— and so on...
...During this long stretch of "permanent war economy" auto workers had prosperity, except for relatively short spells marked by strikes, rapid production conversion, and the recession in 1949...
...There's no sense letting guys work till they're 68 when thousands of younger men are out of work...
...Cain, the murderer of his brother, and Judas, the betrayer of his brother, are excoriated in the Christian imagination precisely because their acts strike at the very root of community...
...He cannot face himself, he hates himself and therefore— denounces his former associates...
...We have been able to stem the tide of repossessions of homes, furniture, and other items of workers' ownership on which payments have not been met...: In addition to having to cope with the vexing problems that beset jobless workers, local union officers and especially shop committeemen and stewards must stay on guard to protect working conditions in the shop...
...that many more can be sure they will not be working full weeks...
...Yet, those most opposed to "informers" are often intellectuals whose profession it is to inform and be informed, and who fight for freedom of inquiry in every direction but this...
...Writing to his local union, a foundry worker said: "I have been out of work for more than two months now and for the time being I am up in my rent, but I don't know how long it will be before I get behind...
...they don't like what is going on at present and they fear the future...
...We have met with the governor of the state and the mayor of our town...
...Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 261...
...In characteristic American fashion, auto workers are "pragmatic unionists" not too much concerned about their union as a "design for progress," but rather regarding it as an organization to which they pay dues and from which they expect returns in the form of better wages, a greater degree of job security, improved working conditions...
...You always see the same people at meetings—the same officers, shop committeemen, chief stewards, and the same union politicians...
...The reasons for this are obvious enough...
...Just as without a minimum of solidarity and consensus among the citizens no political structure could possibly be maintained...
...Not even when he worked overtime or held down two jobs did the auto worker feel a sense of long-range security...
...the card carriers don't attend, and they are in the vast majority," a shop reporter wrote in his union paper in 1950...
...people who are made to suffer for their mistakes —and yes, for their idealism—of years ago...
...The feeling that the boom would some day end in a bust was general...
...everyone dreads it...
...The glorification of the informer, as the excerpts from Tacitus may further illustrate, presages the decline and fall of liberal civilization...
...Addressing a meeting of unemployed members, a union officer said: "Your union officers have tried every way to get the ball rolling to help our unemployed and needy members...
...Actually, attitudes vary among workers in the same local, and for that matter, in the same shops or departments...
...Without asking our fellows for help and information we could not carry on social living...
...Since the war we bought a washing machine, a refrigerator, television...
...But the overwhelming majority of the members seem to have only the vaguest notion of what the union's program is, for the majority never go to conventions and conferences, never or seldom attend meetings...
...383-384...
...In one breath workers will denounce war, and in the next breath advocate more defense work for Detroit...
...To judge union moods and attitudes one must see more than meets the eye...
...But considering all the bills that had to be paid, the weekly pay check lasted only till the next one was due, and often not that long...
...IV There is no malice like the malice of a renegade...
...Bills and installment payments geared to full pay checks can't be met with unemployment benefits equal to less than half of a week's pay...
...He seldom had time for a union meeting, and since he was not beset by problems about which the union could help him, he saw no reason to attend meetings or other union affairs, except maybe the annual dance or picnic...
...Robert Gorham Davis, president of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, seems to desire a certain modification of this 250 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 tradition...
...Older workers never got over the "depression psychosis" developed back in the awful days when Detroit was known as "The City of the Dead...
...New workers attracted to Detroit by high wages also had misgivings about the boom, fearing that "this is too good to last...
...The union's top leadership seeks to channel that discontent and militancy behind the CIO's political pro -gram...
...Yet it is a little appalling that a man like Robert Gorham Davis—a good and sensitive man, a man who likes democracy—should feel called upon to defend informing on grounds other than the most desperate expediency...
...Also Tertullian's dictum "credibile est, quia ineptum est, certum est, quia impossibile est—credo quia absurdum...
...How well does the UAW succeed in "educating" its more than one million membership to the union's over-all policies...
...Pretty soon some little engineering change is made on the job and supervision calls for a new time study and ups production out of all proportion to what the engineering change should call for," said the president of a Chrysler local...
...Thus what Secretary Wilson has set up as the guiding standard for the army and what the administration legislates to be desirable behavior in civilian life is indeed behavior which must corrode the very basis of social and political relations...
...No system of police has ever functioned without the aid of informers...
...As Burnham points out, the pejorative connotations of that word, much exploited by the Communists, are completely inappropriate in this case...
...But Mr...
...At the bargaining councils, at national, regional, state and local educational conferences: by means of the union's monthly educational organ, Ammunition, and its monthly publication The United Automobile Worker, plus a steady stream of pamphlets, news releases and policy statements— the UAW leadership seeks to indoctrinate its members with official policy and program...
...We paid down on a home, and have a car that's less than five years old," a Chrysler worker said...
...By representatives who "desire to build peace and plenty for all the people" the UAW means labor-endorsed Democratic Party candidates...
...we have talked to the banks as well Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 257 as to the loan sharks...
...With this opinion we do not, at present, wish to argue...
...Renegade loyalty is so strong because it includes what loyalty in general can dispense with, namely, the conscious continuance of the motives of the relationship...
...Davis wrote for The New Leader, now declares that it is the duty of every sailor, soldier and airman to spy and inform on his buddy...
...For almost a full decade living standards were geared to full pay checks, often with plenty of overtime thrown in...
...Last week when that happened the men stopped working and just stood there, watching the foreman buck 258 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 production...
...watch their favorite television show instead of participating in union classes...
...Now a man may honorably grow out of beliefs and attitudes he form erly held—it is certainly good, for example, that many people who were once Stalinists no longer are...
...Davis would have us believe that since intellectuals are interested in information they should be sympathetic—or at least more sympathetic than they previously have been—to informing...
...They were the most loyal and energetic subjects...
...Huckleberry Finn observed that...
...Rather is the apostate a man who, even in his new state of belief, is spiritually living not primarily in the content of that faith, in the pursuit of goals appropriate to it, but only in the struggle against the old faith and for the sake of its negation...
...New "loyalty regulations" just announced by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson...
...It may be doubted whether Napoleon's rule could have been maintained without Fouche's army of spies and informers...
...Naturally the guys resent this because every hour of work done by a foreman means an hour of work lost to a production worker...
...Yet back in the local union which elected those delegates, there will be department meetings called to straighten out seniority tangles, each group fighting to erect a seniority fence around their jobs to keep out other workers...
...It has to do only with the fact that some young people were once moved by the miseries of the depression era to act politically...
...They come because they are out of work and hope to learn from the union officers when they might be called back to their jobs...
...Thus, delegates attending a UAW conference will applaud vigorously when they hear Walter Reuther say: "We of the UAW have said many times over that we are not a narrow economic pressure group trying to get something for ourselves at the expense of the rest of the community...
...This can be seen from the resolution drawn up by the UAW's General Motors Council...
...The fact that many of the replies were incongruous with UAW policy in no way detracts from the auto workers' loyalty to their union...
...You know how it is with workers in the shop—in time they learn how to cut corners, how to get the work out faster so that they can take maybe ten minutes out of the hour to loaf and find relief from job monotony...
...Although our agreement allows chief stewards all the time they need to investigate and settle grievances, supervision is forever trying to reduce the time needed to process grievances and to keep the steward working on the job...
...Recently nearly a hundred members of a UAW local were asked what aims they thought the union should pursue to combat unemployment...
...We got promises from politicians for public works and we know that such public works are coming soon...
...He [the renegade] exhibits a characteristic loyalty to his new political, religious, or other party...
...During the boom he was usually too busy after working hours watching his television, taking his family out for a drive, or having a bull session with his cronies in the neighborhood beer garden...
...Local unions with a membership as high as 25,000 would sometimes have to suspend business meetings for lack of a quorum-150 members constituting a quorum...
...But the renegade frequently attributes to him self motives even worse than those he actually had: he makes himself his own scapegoat...
...The highly dangerous Communist conspiracy is "neither a loyal company of Robin Hood nor a cheap gang of petty crooks...
...As the boxed excerpts from two distinguished German sociologists, Max Scheler and Georg Simmel, make clear, one does not become a renegade simply by changing one's opinions, even if one does so in an abrupt fashion...
...Get rid of the women in the shops...
...a body can see and don't see at the same time...
...In these days of inflated prices, the effects of a layoff are felt immediately...
...WHAT WITH THE STRUGGLES IN THE SHOP and the tribulations of the unemployed, discontent is mounting in the ranks of the auto workers...
...Our agreement clearly says that a foreman is not to work on production but should only supervise production, yet time after time foremen do jobs that ought to be done by production workers...
...The affirmation of the new content is, with him, not undertaken for its own sake, but is only a continual chain of acts of revenge against his spiritual past—a past which actually keeps him in fetters and with respect to which the new content functions merely as a possible point of reference from which he negates and rejects the old one...
...Reduce the number of chief stewards, or, if that can't be done, reduce the time allowed for processing grievances—this is one of management's perennial objectives...
...Labor costs are cut not only by the installation of expensive automation equipment—like, for example, the General Motors 70-foot-long machine tool operated by one man which will perform 12 different jobs on an engine block—work ordinarily done by 10 men...
...Renegades and informers are useful to policemen...
...that unemployment compensation checks are terminating at the rate of about 2,500 a week...
...I have been pawning my clothes, trying to carry on...
...Last week one of our stewards got fired for taking up a legitimate grievance and when the men in his group—about 30 of them protested, they were given a two-day layoff penalty," a local union vice president wrote in his shop column...
...Few governments have dispensed with the services of spies and stool pigeons...
...Philbrick recently had a Day accorded him by the state of Massachusetts...
...people who have frequently left it years ago...
...We need more defense contracts...
...not even if this change occurs not in a continuous manner, but suddenly and in a rupture-like fashion...
...Davis and other liberals who think along his lines have gone far beyond any expedient measures of self-defense...
...that many other plants are not working full weeks...
...that, finally, the auto manufacturers were far off the beam last December when they predicted prosperity would return with Spring and the robins...
...one can only face it...
...and that then they made the tragic mistake of thinking that Stalinism had something to do with socialism (a misidentification, by the way, that a good many people do their best to keep alive...
...Asked what happens to the members of his union when they are out of work for four months or more, the president of a UAW-CIO local replied: "Slowly but surely the majority of them go broke...
...We begged and pleaded, pleaded and begged for the sake of our unemployed workers...
...For that they got a disciplinary layoff," a chief steward explained...
...Some workers will shout that "the union has no business messing around in politics," and later, when attending a meeting, will demand to know why the CIO does not organize a caravan of the unemployed and demonstrate before the State Capitol...
...Reprinted by permission.] 254 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 DETROIT LETTER ANXIETY COMES TO THE AUTO CAPITAL Frank Marquart In the Spring number of DISSENT Lewis Coser wrote: Granted that we are not soon likely to repeat the catastrophe of the 1930's...
...The special loyalty of the renegade seems to me to rest on the fact that the circumstances under which he enters the new relationship have a longer and more enduring effect than if he had naively grown into it, so to speak, without breaking with a previous one...
...Mr...
...It is credible because it is useless, is certain because it is impossible—I believe because it is absurd") is a typical expression of his apostatic ressentiment...
...Naturally, the union's international representatives, local officers and many active secondary leaders in the shops—in sum, those members who regularly attend conventions, conferences and meetings—know in general what the Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 259 union's program is about...
...Earlier systems of rule utilized the informer, yet never veiled their contempt for him as a person...
...From Georg Simmel, "Faithfulness and Gratitude," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff, ed...
...Getting welfare is not pleasant and most workers resort to the ordeal only when driven to do so by sheer need...
...But no man can obliterate his own biog raphy...
...This continuance here fuses more permanently with the formal power of the relationship itself than in cases without contrasting past and without absence of alernative paths, of return, or in other directions...
...With bills on all sides, and most of my clothes gone, you can see where I stand...
...But that is not the issue...
...This hostility stems from fear, the fear that we are being caught up in some dangerous drift—a drift of which short work weeks, layoffs, overstocked sales rooms, automation, McCarthyism, the H-bomb, and Indochina are ominous signs...
...we have talked to the Detroit Welfare Department, and to the Salvation Army...
...One could fill pages listing examples of the guerrilla warfare which goes on in the shops today—and which should provide a rich field of exploration for industrial sociologists, if they ever get around to it...
...by taking away long established smoking and other privileges...
...It shall be the duty of every member of the armed forces, to report to his commanding officer any information, coming to his attention which indicates that the retention of any member of the armed forces is not consistent with the interest of national security...
...III But Stalinism is a special problem...
...coercion and discipline do indeed characterize all modern army organizations yet without a minimum of solidarity even the most rigid discipline could not insure cohesion...
...The Mogul emperors reinforced their system of rule with an army of informers who entered the houses of citizens twice daily in the guise of scavengers...
...by refusing stewards the right to leave their job in order to investigate a grievance...
...Over 90 per cent of the replies were emphatic in declaring support to the union...
...Although no survey was ever made to estimate how many workers held down two jobs, the number was not inconsiderable...
...but younger workers, those "last hired and first laid off," found it more difficult to meet their financial committments regularly and consequently were eager to work all the overtime they could get...
...Military doctrine has always stressed that the essential basis for the effectiveness of an army is a feeling of solidarity on the part of the men...
...Robert Gorham Davis in The New Leader, May 10, 1954...
...Or they come because they have some pressing personal problem of the kind that mushroom during an economic turndown: repossession of consumer items, garnishments, payment delinquencies on cars and appliances, rent evictions, mortgage foreclosure on homes...
...11 Mr...
...it is an apt summing up of his method of defending Christianity, a defense which is but a continual revenge against the values of classical antiquity...
...But that is quite another matter from making a virtue out of a necessity—from raising informing to the honored status of information...
...But what can one conclude from this...
...Davis must be aware that there is a world of difference between asking a man for information and reporting one's knowledge of a man's opinion to the police, knowledge one has acquired in a relationship based on an implicit assumption of mutual trust...
...the workers know what a mess the Republicans have made of things...
...The term "apostate" is not properly applied to a person who, in the course of his development, is rapidly changing his religious or other (political, juridical, philosophical) convictions...
...Such is the nature of the operations of the Communist party that all evidence about its key work must necessarily come from in formers—that is, from those who have seen it from the inside...
...An increase in information suggests an increase in the capacity of human beings to order their collective life in rational terms...
...SIMILARLY, THE AUTO WORKERS can be counted on to support PAC-endorsed candidates...
...When a former member of the Communist Party identifies a college professor as some one who belonged to the party fifteen years ago, what has that to do with espionage or conspiracy...
...Encouraged by the surplus labor market, management "cracks down" by ordering supervision to cut labor costs, with the result that foremen and superintendents use all the old tricks and think up new ones to "increase output per man hour"— the stock phrase for speedup...
...Moreover, attitudes change, and what they happen to be at any given period depends on whether or not the worker has a job, how much he can earn in a week, the policies of supervision in the plant, and finally, what future prospects the worker thinks are in store for him and his family...
...Malenkov may indeed nod approvingly and repeat—the devil quotes scripture—Marx's saying: "well done, old mole...
...Therefore the apostate, considered as a religious type, is the extreme opposite of the "reborn" for whom the new content of faith and the corresponding new central life-process as such are significant and valuable...
...Such chiseling is always stepped up during a slump, when commercial competition sharpens and unemployment grows...
...And what is true of this man's family holds for Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 255 thousands of other auto workers' families in the metropolitan Detroit area...
...that 140,000 workers are unemployed here...
...Why should two people in a family work when a lot of guys who are the sole support of their families can't find jobs...
...Very well, it is true, you can't make an omelette...
...But today many union members who a year ago did not even know where their union hail was located, are attending meetings...
...Moreover, many wives got jobs in factories for the first time, not because they yearned for the assembly line or the punch press, but because, as one of them related: "My husband and I want to get our things paid for before the depression comes...
...Davis, as well as his co-thinkers on the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, may reply that these are extraordinary times...
...It is as if he were repelled by the old relationship and pushed into the new one, over and over again...
...But then this kind of support was demonstrated again and again in NLRB elections for the union shop...
...We do not apply the term indiscriminately to all former members of the Stalinist (or any other) movement, nor to those who having broken write political attacks upon it...
...Not all informers, of course, are renegades, nor are all renegades informers...
...that, to cite but one example, the Dodge plant now employs only about 10,000 workers as compared to 30,000 last year...
...In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Turkey, this went so far that very often born Turks were not allowed to occupy high government positions, which were filled only by Janizaries, that is, born Christians, either voluntarily converted to Islam or stolen from their parents as children and brought up as Turks...
...by eliminating five minutes wash-up time before the whistle blows...
...By now it is widely known that this motor city is listed by the Labor Department as a "distressed labor area...
...If a survey were conducted today it would show that the auto workers overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party, and that they will vote for Democratic Party candidates this Fall...
...Yes, the majority of the UAW members will, without a doubt, vote for Democratic Party candidates this Fall...
...Or he can sound off at his union officers for allegedly not getting him back to work in line with his seniority, ending his castigation with, "What the hell am I paying my dues for, anyway...
...256 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 WHEN A JOBLESS WORKER HAS DIFFICULTY getting on Welfare or drawing his unemployment benefit check, or is faced with any other pressing hardship problem, he goes to his union for help...
...To attest to his present trustworthiness he must betray his own history...
...Make automobile companies stop bringing more labor to Detroit by advertising for help in other states...
...For it must be remembered that during the past ten or twelve years auto workers have by and large enjoyed boom times, thanks to the war, the huge post-war backlog demand for cars, and later, Korea...
...Moreover, the union serves as a place where the worker can find some release from his frustrations...
...A chief steward will enforce the union's FEPC provisions against discrimination in the shop, but back in his community he might be seen serving on the Property Owners Association, seeking to devise a way to keep members of some minority group from moving into the neighborhood...
...Workers with considerable seniority, and therefore less subject to short layoffs, could continue their payments and even accumulate a little nest egg...
...CIO Political Action Committee representatives in the Detroit area report that the recession is raising the political receptivity of auto workers...
...Every little gain made in this objective pays off twofold: first by absorbing more of the steward's time on production, and then by diminishing the benefits that accrue to workers by an adequately functioning representation system in the shop...
...And we can only wonder if there will be much dissent from his opinion by his colleagues of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...
...In time supervision sees that the men don't have to work every minute to get out the required production...
...No one wants it...
...His was "dirty work"—necessary perhaps, yet work which entitled him to nothing but pay and contempt...
...But the informer is the anti-social type par excellence because he Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 249 breaks that fundamental law of mutual trust on which society—any type of non-totalitarian society—must rest...
...Far from retaining a certain respect for at least the motives that led him to commit the mistakes of his youth, he must continually besmirch himself as he was and therefore, in a sense, as he is...
...Thomas BabingtonMacaulay...
...Mr...
...As Murray Hausknecht points out in this DISSENT, no human and social relationship is possible without a certain minimum of trust...
...I quote this passage because it is so appropriate to what is taking place in Detroit today...
...Translated from Max Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte, vol...
...but...
...But what is appalSummer 1954 • DISSENT • 253 ling, and a sign of the decay of liberal values, is that informers should have any appeal to intellectuals who speak in the name of cultural freedom...
...but in a society or group in which every man to whom we speak is a potential or actual informer living becomes impossible...
...A recession is a time of stiff competition in the auto industry, and management is engaged in a feverish drive to cut labor costs...
...that slowly the prospect of pink slips and grey faces seems real again...
...In his hour of need, after months of unemployment, when he is broke, pursued by collectors or irritated by some welfare means test, the worker has a place to turn for help—his union...
...How realistic those fears were can be seen today, as old and young line up at unemployment compensation offices...
...The best they can hope for is a handout from the Welfare Department...
...Thanks to the war and the installment plan, "workers never had it so good...
...There is a gulf between expedient recourse in special circumstances to the service of a blackguard and the readiness to attribute desirable qualities to a blackguard...
...an increase in informing connotes the breakdown of social values...
...For what a good many people, Budenz and others, have 252 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 been doing is implicating people who were once, actually or allegedly, involved in the Stalinist movement during the 1930's...
...They have exhausted their savings and their unemployment compensation is fast running out...
...It's so easy to jump to conclusions about "worker attitudes...
...Some of the replies, of which the following are samples, fell far short of the lofty goals incorporated in UAW resolutions: Lower the age retirement...
...But surely Mr...
...Stop giving so much stuff to foreign countries...
...He can take the floor, denounce some welfare official who tried to blackjack him into paying hack rent when he needed his remaining few dollars to buy clothes for the kids...
...Compared to what it was a year ago, the prevailing mood is one of increased hostility toward the erriployers, toward the Eisenhower Administration, toward Republicans generally...
...As far as it concerns us here, faithfulness or loyalty is the emotional reflection of the autonomous life of the relation, unperturbed by the possible disappearance of the motives which originally engendered the relation...
...they are uneasy, resentful, in a militant mood...
...they cannot be fought by the usual political methods...
...Making plane parts, tanks, jeeps and army trucks would take up the slack in employment...
...Yet in a period which has produced the Budenz' and Chambers'—to cite only the cruder types—there seems to be a certain justification in treating informers and renegades in the same context...
...This is particularly true of the renegade because of his sharp awareness that he cannot go back: the old relationship, with which he has irrevocably broken, remains for him, who has a sort of heightened discriminatory sensitivity, the background of the relation now existing...
...Budenz, he of the elastic memory, has become a professor...
...We anticipate this counter-argument, and grant that there is something, but not very much, to it...
...Feuds among workers over how to share overtime tested the ingenuity of those shop stewards and plant committeemen called upon to work out a settlement...
Vol. 1 • July 1954 • No. 3
