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To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn’t been hideous, had she sat around and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you. but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it — Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?
aaaaahhh
How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner’s death, people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage — what was courage? She had never figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on, others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever?
To die was merely to go on in another direction.
[...] She had nothing of him at all except his name written on the folder. She hadn’t kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn’t think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years, except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck with that...
Dualizing again. “She” and “it.” Age and illness made one dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, It’s not me, it’s not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.
Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.
Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway — my God, she hadn’t even shut the door while changing her shirt! She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.
You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week’s shirt and last night’s braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.
One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people.
And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.
[...] she could not share his delight. After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory. A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on.
[...] She started up the second flight of stairs, one by one, one leg at a time, like a small child. She was dizzy but she was no longer afraid to fall. On ahead, on there, the dry white flowers nodded and whispered in the open fields of evening. Seventy-two years and she had never had time to learn what they were called.
what an ending
The crucial turning point for nearly all radicals, however, occurred with two historic developments: the New Deal, particularly the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 [...]
The NLRA recognized workers’ right to form unions of their own choosing, to take “concerted action” to win union demands, and to negotiate with employers over wages, working conditions and other issues of mutual interest. The NLRA did not mandate that union labor and employers reach a collective bargaining agreement, but it did make negotiations with a union that had won a representation election compulsory—a matter of law, not voluntarism—if the union showed majority support in a unit deemed by the Labor Relations Board appropriate for collective bargaining. The Labor Relations Board was established by government not only to determine this eligibility but also to administer the representation election; it also adjudicated “unfair labor practices” that might thwart labor’s right to form independent unions. It is worth noting that the ACLU opposed the NLRA, on the grounds that the law granted exclusive bargaining rights only to victorious unions. But most unions wanted exclusive representation because they feared that a plurality of representatives would open the door to the company unions that had been dominant in the 1920s. Exclusive bargaining proved a boon for the formation of a strong labor bureaucracy, but it limited workers’ ability to choose alternatives when the union failed to support their struggles. Even so, the NLRA provided for the possibility of minority unionism, an option few labor organizations took. [...]
Criticisms aside, organized labor is integrated into the prevailing political and economic system; so much so that it not only complies with the law but also lacks an ideology opposed to the prevailing capitalist system. Integration has even led to cooperative relationships between union leaderships and the companies with which they deal. Company-union collaborations are symptoms of nearly all unions’ loss of class perspective. Corporate capital, on the other hand, knows it is a class and acts accordingly. Unions have renounced class warfare, while their adversaries pursue it with a vengeance—against the workers unions are supposed to represent and defend.
[...] For more than seventy-five years, the labor movement by law and by custom has been enclosed by and restricted to collective bargaining, with the goal of achieving a contract that seals in wages, benefits, a grievance procedure and specified work rules. In return for that security, workers and their union agree, crucially, to surrender their First Amendment right to withhold their labor. The penalties for violating these unconstitutional agreements are often severe: stiff fines, imprisonment of union officials and sometimes, as after the three-day walkout by New York City transit workers, a court order barring the automatic check-off of union dues.