What Keeps Us Going?
Walzer, Michael
EDITOR'S PAGE What keeps us going? Max Weber's famous definition of politics as "the slow grinding of hard wood" seems to apply especially to us, the men and women of the Left. For the powerful and...
...They organized meetings and stood up at the meetings and argued about what ought to be done...
...the union is no longer a presence in Johnstown...
...its report condemned the mayor and members of the City Council: they had been in the pay of the steel company...
...People previously passive and inarticulate began to act and to speak...
...that moment of intense activism didn't last...
...And that's what keeps us going...
...And there probably isn't any union at all where the steel is currently produced...
...The LaFollette Committee launched an investigation into what had happened in Johnstown...
...But the fight continued, with help from Democrats in the state capital and liberals in Washington...
...And finally they won, established a union, and elected some of themselves as its officers...
...But the passive voice isn't right...
...Okay, their kids inherited the union and didn't have to fight for it...
...Johnstown was a Bethlehem Steel town, and it was the place where the Little Steel Strike of 1937 was broken, the attempt to organize a union decisively defeated...
...Let me tell a story about my hometown, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where I lived from the time I was nine years old until I left for college...
...But left politics is also something else...
...For what really happened in Johnstown, on the ground, starting in the late 1930s, was a political mobilization...
...they saw right through the wood...
...they wrote leaflets, ran picket lines, negotiated with the police, encouraged each other, remonstrated with workers who held back...
...Tyrants and warlords don't grind at all...
...It includes those wonderful moments when human capacities are suddenly revealed and we get a glimpse of what is possible...beyond what is possible right now...
...So why do we continue to hope for and work for that next step forward...
...It will happen again...
...And now the mills are closed and empty...
...Even the word "slow" seems an exaggeration for us, since it implies "steady," whereas our experience of politics—as in, say, 2008 and 2010—is more like one step forward, two steps back...
...It doesn't matter that it isn't permanent, so long as we understand that it is recurrent...
...MICHAEL WALZER...
...Still, that moment of political creation, those years when men and women came alive as passionate and articulate agents of their own destiny—that is a time of supreme human value...
...For the powerful and the rich, and for the demagogues and charlatans who serve their interests, the wood has always been softer...
...If they do build, if the benefits of political action accumulate over time, that is the slow grinding...
...It will bring important social gains, which may or may not build toward greater gains...
...Organizers came from outside, but it was the men and women who responded to their efforts who counted—and who should count for us, still today...
...And during the war, with help from the federal government, a union was organized...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
