LETTERS

...I do not take its need for self-defense lightly, but it has always worried me that innocent people are sometimes killed—and that more terrorists are created...

...When and if Saturn opens, it will be only a rather small drop in the auto bargaining bucket...

...ROBERT M. BLAIR Wheaton, Md...

...we need to spend our time worrying about more important things...

...The new team system of production at Saturn represents an institutionalization of quality-of-work-life circles, which have been shown to encourage close monitoring of individual performance, competition among workers, and, as Guillermo Grenier wrote in the Summer 1986 issue of Dissent, a "misplaced loyalty to the corporation...

...Walzer says, "To aim at such targets...

...It can also, as at Hormel, sabotage even the best attainable settlements...

...These values are not spatially derived nor do they have meaning only for those living and working in urban places...

...The mining of Nicaraguan harbors could be seen as American hubris via the CIA, but was it not also terror in respect to the nonmilitary casualties we may have caused in a country that has not attacked us...

...ANTHONY BORDEN New York, N.Y...

...But this is surely the case with the landscape as well...

...Or we can fight terrorism by refusing to repeat it, that is, by aiming only at the terrorists...

...q The Saturn Agreement Editors: Patricia Cayo Sexton's birthday praise of the United Automobile Workers [Dissent, Fall 1986] carefully places the Saturn agreement with General Motors in the context of a concessionary period, and in this way excuses without rebutting the serious charges against this pact...

...It was one more example of American hubris: an arrogant overconfidence in our own technology...

...These are powerful words—all the more so because they seem to apply to some of the acts and attitudes of our own or other Western governments...

...But I would argue that one choice we have to make is never to kid ourselves when terror is used to fight terror...

...q On Public Space: A Rejoinder Editors: Without exception the articles (on public space, Dissent, Fall 1986) are articulate and revealing...

...Not bad for a union and an industry caught in a defensive world trade posture...

...All in all, Howe's essay is, or so it seems to me, a plea to the dwindling ranks of democratic socialists/liberals to struggle bravely onward—criticize, criticize, criticize...

...And what can it mean when GM refuses to co-sign or otherwise recognize that rider...

...It is critical that we try to understand and appreciate why so many Americans (and increasingly others as well) find in the suburban pattern meaning and quality...

...Though Saturn's location in Tennessee was announced a few days after the agreement was signed, its southern locale was in fact known to the union well before the signing...

...Country things, then, must surely be premodernist...

...Industrial and public-policy supports to prop up the temporarily lame (as Chrysler), stimulate conversion among the seriously ill, and subsidize the birth of new and healthy industries...

...Would not our government's refusal to accept the decision of the World Court on this issue—and lying about the composition of that court—suggest that it knows it cannot defend itself against not only the term, but the fact, of terror...

...MICHAEL WALZER Replies Jeremy Lamer and I have no disagreement with regard to Nicaragua, so let's focus on the Libyan raid...

...Thompson on precisely that topic: Resolved that there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the U.S...

...Thompson was asserting in his debate with Weinberger...

...While I will grant that many who have fled to the suburbs did so to avoid paying the costs which Berman mentions, he must be aware that the process of suburbanization has been stimulated by several decades of federal policy, both Democratic and Republican...

...To the degree that Howe's essay serves as a model for (and not just a goad to) political criticism, it is terribly disappointing...

...We can fight terrorism by repeating it, that is, by striking indiscriminately at the people the terrorists claim to be defending...

...Freedom, choice, a society built upon reciprocity and caring must exist for all...

...My notes, however, were much less about Saturn than about the state of the union, the undeserved badmouthing of unionism by friend and foe, and the resulting drift of public opinion toward dangerous and undemocratic political options...

...Saturn aside, however, many workers want more say about work management and, over the long haul, if it is industrial democracy we seek, we will all need many more lessons in self-management and workplace democracy than we are getting...

...The neocons prefer to mutter this darkly—here, for instance, is Roger Kimball in the New Criterion, January 1986, accusing the fiercely anti-Communist Czech emigre writer Milan Kundera of believing "that freedom and man's privacy are threatened as much in Western democracies as under Communism...

...MARK B. LAPPING, Dean, College of Architecture and Design, Kansas State U. q • Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...

...Lamer suggests a more severe test: that no civilians are ever put at risk...

...Be it tax write-offs for home ownership, the extension of the interstate system and infrastructure investments, or any of the other numerous subsidies to growth and development, we have chosen as a society to do this...

...Their debate focussed on foreign policy, and if I understand Thompson (which isn't the same as agreeing with him), he would maintain that while democratic society is greatly preferable to Soviet dictatorship, nevertheless the foreign policies of both sides threaten the peace of the world equally...

...The recent pronouncements on national security policy issuing from the left wings of the British Labour party and Germany's Social Democrats (to say nothing of the Greens) seem to entail beliefs similar to those expressed by the minority at Oxford...

...Mere criticism, as opposed to silence, may appear to challenge the status quo—but as long as it identifies no feasible alternatives it is sterile negativism...

...Moral men and women, concerned to avoid civilian deaths, should not put their faith in smart bombs...

...Revolution...

...Weinberger's 271 to 232 victory does not suggest that Howe's optimism is warranted...

...foreign policy (although one wishes Howe would have provided examples), but Howe is clearly wrong when he labels the neocon's concerns "groundless" and asserts that "no sensible person believes anything of the sort...

...But few, including Sexton, look at what cooperation with GM means for workers...

...Criticism is, of course, required in the process of developing alternatives: the sort of problem-centered criticism that carefully investigates the basis of social and economic problems, not the person-centered criticism that delights in castigating political adversaries...

...This is the kind of decision the Israeli government faces all the time...

...What, then, should we say...

...I hope this will soothe Mr...

...2. Nicaragua serves as another case where these questions arise...

...Limits on capital exports such as other countries have...

...Protection of endangered domestic markets, through the various devices used in most other countries...

...Since that pay cut can potentially be earned back through a profit-sharing system, unionists are faced with the conflicting impulses to protect workers or their pay...

...We have consistently seen its destructive force in the countries of the developing world, for example...

...One can only hope, with Walzer, that "Sometimes these days the world looks like that, but as long as we have arguments and choices to make, it is not wholly like that...

...I know I have cited cases presenting different choices, and that sometimes very ugly measures may be the best or only defense...

...In reality, many such communities have grown into some very attractive and nurturing kinds of places...

...Besides being drastically outnumbered in the groups, the unionists must now assume a burden generally reserved for management...

...Saturn's approach to compensation, labor process, work rules, and worker participation is experimental...

...Marx spoke of the "idiocy" of rural life, and Walzer falls into this same trap...

...Cooperation can mean capitulation, as in the relation of Soviet labor unions to management, or it can amount to a more productive balance of naturally contending yet mutually dependent parties...

...Talk to any workers in endangered industries and they will tell you emphatically that this is what desperately troubles them...

...Purity is not much of a help...

...One need look no further than the February 27th, 1984 debate at the Oxford Union to see that Howe is in error...

...it is unproductive, elitist, and inconsistent with our need to treat seriously a neighborhood selection so many have made...

...Walzer's urban bias reflects the values of the larger consumerist and materialist culture of the times...

...Blair...

...By invoking at length an unproductive ideological factionalism from the union's past, and centering that discussion around Victor Reuther, who also happens to be the main critic of the contract, Sexton discredits opposition within the union to Saturn...

...Thus, in a most condescending and exploitative way, the Saturn contract "allows" workers to use their creativity to benefit the company, and then, in effect, charges them for it...

...The union cannot have it both ways, and Saturn-type arrangements have already been introduced in other plants, but Sexton refers to this rider and other defenses from the leadership without comment...

...In fact, not much is riskier for labor than being permanently shut out of the South, and certainly fear of risk-taking will not help labor to break in...

...Both Walzer and Berman tell us, ultimately, that urban values are socialist ones...

...Regrettably, Anthony Borden focuses on this non-agenda topic and says nothing about the admirable proceedings that did issue from the Constitutional Convention...

...Suburb bashing" must cease...

...IRVING HOWE Replies Neoconservative writers have not, to my knowledge, tried to develop in a sustained way their charge that liberals and leftists are guilty of "moral equivalence" theory, namely, the idea that Soviet totalitarianism and Western democracy are equally bad or repressive...

...There are, however, many different ways of losing one's purity, and some of these are preferable to others...

...Borden touches the problem when he mentions massive GM cutbacks, but that's as far as he goes...

...Experience shows that, with a peculiar intensity, American managers have been loathe to engage in harmonious relations with labor for very long and that their cooperation soon turns to conflict and their olive branches into switchblades...

...Let the hostility between city and country and suburb end...

...Whether Saturn will encourage or retard such positive growth remains to be seen...

...No good at all to say, as some do, that these heavy, male industries may after all be good riddance and that, in effect, blue-collar workers should go study typing...

...But the actual optimal size of a city may not be fundamentally at issue...

...what is of importance is the very notion of human scale...

...Operating within such a theoretical mode, numerous nations have been persuaded to abandon their rural and agricultural sectors to support rapid industrialization and urbanization, with largely catastrophic results...

...q Thumbs Down Editors: Irving Howe's recent essay on the evils of Reaganism ("The Spirit of the Times: Greed, Nostalgia, Ideology and War Whoops," Fall 1986) was disappointingly light on economic analysis and heavy-handed on demonology...

...It has drawn Donald Ephlin, of the union's GM division, to Nashville to lecture on "Building Bridges Instead of Walls," and encouraged the New York Times to brand critics of this approach "reactionary...

...The second strategy is morally better than the first, even if some civilians are killed when it is put into effect...

...It appears to be one of those political sermons aimed at raising the morale (and perhaps the consciousness) of the shrinking choir—but I doubt that it achieves even that limited aim...

...126 Howe is so intent on excoriating President Reagan, Lee Iacocca, Saul Bellow, Yuppies, the Fortune 500, and the editors of Commentary that he lets himself get carried away to the point of wildly overshooting the mark...

...But that would make it impossible to fight terrorists hiding among civilians—and it would guarantee that all terrorists would hide in that way...

...An effort, made without damaging compromises, to help make our industries more competitive in world markets...

...This will not be achieved solely by organizing ourselves into cities, though those we do live in and we do create must be great, safe and supportive of the very best things which life has to offer...

...127 At Saturn, workers will be organized into a team production system, which will allow them to give suggestions toward improving the efficiency of the plant and quality of the product...

...I very much appreciate Rustin's sensitivity to the built environment, "[P]eople's identity and sense of the world is expressed and reflected in the buildings they know...

...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...

...The political options are not so limited as to resolve into a simple choice between silence or criticism...

...If there is, for example, precedent at the NUMMI plant in California for "prenatal" agreements, sealed before workers are hired, this makes the Saturn pact more worrisome, not less...

...It can keep leadership on its toes and it can also be a valuable union chip in negotiating good settlements...

...We are using terror to fight terror and ought not to "kid ourselves...

...Saturn workers may like it, or parts of it, and they may not...

...Hence, and this was the point of my article, we need a language in which to communicate our moral preferences...

...For example: the neoconservative clan may indeed overreach reality in its criticisms of the doctrine of Moral Equivalence espoused by some leftist critics of U.S...

...It need not happen in this case, but it probably will, which may please some critics who apparently prefer conflict and the blade whatever the occasion...

...Saturn was not on the agenda of the UAW Constitutional Convention, but it will be at the 1987 Collective Bargaining Convention, though as an item of diminishing importance...

...The test of the second strategy is the willingness of the antiterrorists to take risks themselves in order to reduce the risks they impose on innocent civilians...

...This seems to me significantly different from what the neocons charge leftists with saying...

...Thus even the main point of specific praise that Sexton has for the UAW—maintaining high membership—is jeopardized by Saturn and the possibility for similar contracts in the future...

...After all, it is not Franklin Roosevelt's rhetorical attacks on Herbert Hoover that he is remembered for, but the pragmatic alternatives he offered and the hope those alternatives instilled in a demoralized nation...

...UAW critics will go their way without leave from me, but if their interest is in workers rather than class conflict (which will persist without their aid) then they might turn more attention to the larger-than-Saturn universe of problems, including most prominently the political question of how to restore our basic industries and the jobs in them...

...In reality, of course, both are really lambasting the suburbanization of America...

...Michael Rustin is correct that suburban living reflects the values of many people at particular stages in the family life cycle and that such communities reflect genuine choices...

...Likewise, they are flawed and reflect the problems inherent in any discussion of something as value-laden as community planning...

...But this piece of seemingly tough-minded reasoning makes it impossible to distinguish an attack on terrorists hiding among civilians from an attack on civilians simply...

...The search for a vision of society which is regenerative, progressive, and meaningful is the quest for an institutional and community life which is scaled to human and humane proportions and reflects the need of individuals, families, communities, and even nations to participate more fully and more directly in a full-bodied and rich cultural, social, economic and political life...

...In short, Moral Equivalence theory is a real issue...

...Also, the union has a toehold in Tennessee, but it may be dangerous to attempt such a controversial arrangement in a right-towork state, which by definition could dismantle instead of strengthen the union, and as a defense from the UAW board this point seems after the fact, since the contract was negotiated before the plant site in Tennessee was chosen...

...The Saturn agreement is—and not very arguably—the best in the South, which is a center of crippling hostility to unionism...

...Still, I don't want to be churlish about this and am ready to admit I should have written, "Few sensible people" etc...

...What can it possibly mean for the UAW to attach a rider to its most important agreement in years claiming that the contract will not be used as a precedent for other negotiations...

...PATRICIA CAYO SEXTON Replies My UAW notes were not meant to "discredit" Saturn critics, for in this case and all others dissent can be very useful, at least when it isn't simply crazed by malice, fanaticism, or bravado...

...If they don't, they will do the usual thing, change it or vote it out...

...Let's hear them...

...He suggests that if we attack terrorists who are "hiding among civilians," the attack is terroristic in character for those civilians who are injured and killed...

...But there is criticism and there is criticism...

...I have, however, a few questions about his objection to calling the American bombing of Libyan civilians "state terror...

...They also receive a 20 percent pay cut...

...Hence the need for labor to count far more on political than collective bargaining solutions to get what it wants...

...Walzer argues—about the bombing of Libya—that there are many options in fighting terrorism, "none of them pretty"—but that to apply the vocabulary of terrorism "serves the terrorists...

...1. Suppose the decision was not one of "hubris" or "faith," but, as I think more likely, a simple calculation that the risk of civilian deaths was acceptable...

...I would not myself write it off simply because the word "cooperation" crops up...

...And what about the contras—in the name of free institutions—plundering, raping, attacking medical personnel...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...If the UAW doesn't have all the answers, what are those of its critics...

...It is unarguable, as Reuther charges, that these contracts are antidemocratic...

...The main precedent that the Saturn pact has not so much set as unleashed, and which is written into the agreement, is a "philosophy of total cooperation...

...In collective bargaining they seek the optimal possible settlement 128 and they use what legal means they can to get it, including threats and sweet-talk, carrots and sticks, cooperation and conflict...

...Unions are to members what lawyers are to clients, advocates...

...And perhaps in trade for this, the union has reduced the presence of full-time officials in the plant by 80 percent...

...To say, as Borden does, that initiating a controversial agreement in a right-towork state will be too risky is tantamount to abandoning the South, since all union agreements are controversial there...

...It seems to me that, if one wants to defend attacks on terrorists hiding among civilians, one has to recognize that, for the civilian population, the result is still terror, i.e., "the indiscriminate or random" deaths of innocents...

...The agreement reduces "base compensation" from the standard GM agreement (to $13.45 per hour for "technicians"—the unskilled and semiskilled—and $15.49 for "skilled technicians" during the first year— not too bad for the South), but the effective wage rate, including various add-ons, is expected to equal that of the standard contract...

...Now, that is not what E.P...

...I certainly agree with his contention (in "What's Terrorism—And What Isn't," Dissent, Summer 1986) that sloppy terminology can be used to confuse issues and excuse the inexcusable...

...On that occasion, Caspar Weinberger debated E.P...

...JEREMY LARNER Berkeley, Calif...

...because it suggests that terror is all there is, the only real option, with every other policy a mask for the attack upon innocence...

...These days, getting a good settlement is rough because the times are rough and because Reagan's NLRB is sitting hard on labor...

...Much of Rustin's argument revolves around the matter of the optimal city size...

...As such they are basically adversaries of employers—not enemies, out to close the company down and destroy it, nor partners, getting an equitable share of what counts, power and profits...

...Lamer, it seems to me, makes a common mistake here: He describes a morality so pure as to be ineffectual, and he insists that political effectiveness must always be immoral, brutal—in this case, terroristic...

...The increased job security that GM promises at Saturn translates into job cutting, as the company now plans to close nine factories in Michigan, California, and elsewhere, firing 32,500 blue-collars...

...The other much-touted result of cooperation places union officials on business committees that monitor the efficiency of the plant...

...But the chief purpose of moral argument is to help us choose among alternative paths to the effects we aim at...

...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...

...The Saturn plant will employ 6,000 at full swing, and recent news from Spring Hill suggests that that time is much farther away than GM originally stated...

...As for the spill-over issue and UAW President Bieber's rider informing GM that the agreement was not "a precedent regarding the Union's policy at any other facility," it is true that GM did not "approve" this rider, but then it does not usually approve union intentions or bargaining goals, especially not for future agreements covering other plants...

...Rather, we need to evolve a program which sees the integrity of various settlement options...

...The problem of scale is the essential problem of democratic theory and the essence of the democratic socialist argument...

...may have been wrong, but the wrong was not terroristic in character...

...The choices are between current trends (a dynamic status quo) and all the feasible alternatives that can be produced...

...Only workers in those other plants, which in GM are separate entities from Saturn, will decide on intentions and spill-over...

...A further lowering of the dollar's value in order to stimulate exports and decrease imports...