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What is most striking in these emotionally charged scenes is that the struggle transcends a simple plant election. The people who are politically in motion are people who work on the line every day, people who drive their own cars, people who own homes, people who have families, people who may even own the proverbial color television set. These same people are very obviously and very enthusiastically supporting an anti-capitalist revolutionary organization. Workers viewing such footage can identify with the kind of people participating and with the kind of action being taken. They can see that being a radical does not require becoming an incredible, gun-slinging hero who defies the police with every breath. A union election is one of the lowest levels of mass action, but it is mass action nonetheless, and not elite action, just as the strike and the boycott are mass actions in which the people serve themselves rather than relying upon a group of elite warriors.
Our objectives: 1. Workers' control of their places of work -- the factories,
mines, fields, offices, transportation services and communication facilities -- so
that the exploitation of labor will cease and no person or corporation will get
rich off the labor of another person, but all people will work far the collective
benefit of humanity.
-Black Workers Congress manifesto, 1971
The Forman idea of revolutionary theory and practice, "Formanism," reflected a precise, if restricted, sense of organization and an amalgam of popularized theoretical tendencies of the 1960s. The major organizational form was the umbrella group operating with a popular front strategy. The organizations had plans for becoming mass-membership groups; but more important than gaining members were the immediate goals of organizing conferences, workshops, and lectures and producing documents. This procedure would attract outside funding and prepare the ground for political education classes. The end product of this program was supposed to be the creation of Frantz Fanon Institutes. In effect, Formanism substituted ideological struggle for struggle over material conditions. The focus had to remain ideological because people were recruited into study groups and organizing commissions rather than action groups prepared to deal with immediate issues. Reduced to study groups and organizing commissions, politics was effectively separated from the problems of work and daily life. The education itself was anticolonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist, but ideas were not presented in the context of a serious class analysis of the roles blacks play in America or of the state of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Unlike the economically grounded and disciplined organizational approach of Marxism-Leninism, the approach of Fanon-Formanism was exemplified by loosely structured groups stressing psychological interpretations of social reality and the accumulation of technical skills. Formanism was less a program for moving toward power than a defensive tactic for dealing with oppression.
A typical example of a runaway plant was the Briggs Manufacturing Corporation. Once an independent giant in the auto parts industry whose owner also owned the Detroit baseball team and ran the ball park as a kind of civic duty, Briggs was purchased by Chrysler in 1953. Nineteen years later, Briggs workers learned that their factory was to be moved to Tennessee within a year. The workers were told that they were guaranteed a job if they moved to Tennessee, too, but their wages would be $2.40 an hour instead of the Detroit rate of $4.30. The stunned workers also learned that Tennessee had a "right-to-work" law which hampered union activity and that the state was granting Chrysler an interest-free loan of $6.5 million. The Detroit workers discovered that they would lose their pensions, group insurance benefits, job security, workman's compensation claims, and numerous other "fringe" benefits. The affected workers were not the "new" workers written about in scholarly journals, but people whose average age was 45 and who had an average of 20 years' seniority. Many of them came from white ethnic groups. One hundred and fifty of these workers organized to fight the company. The insurgents could get no action from the union, so they turned to radical labor attorneys John Taylor and Ron Glotta, who promptly took legal action to protect the workers' financial interests.
What distinguished the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was that we were able to engage masses of black workers at a time when people didn't know how to approach or mobilize them. We learned to speak plainly in a language workers understood, but we did not talk down to them. We understood you had to speak with passion. You had to feel that passion. You had to have the courage to expose yourself as a person with revolutionary ideas and be willing to face the consequences.
from Michael Hamlin
[...] Balzac was intensely interested in psychological study, and his preoccupation with it is obvious in all his novels, but it is not the complexities and subtleties of men's minds, the discordant elements that fight for mastery in one human being, as the modern novelist sees them, that Balzac depicted. His characters are all of a piece, but represented with such power in their simplicity, or rather single-mindedness, that they become vehicles for the expression of universal truths, and the story of their lives has often an epic quality, or sometimes the direct working out of their apparently inevitable destiny seems to borrow from classical tragedy.
[...] Balzac's chief characters are capable of development, and visibly change under he impact of circumstances in the course of the novel, as people alter in real life. It is even possible to say that this development of the characters is one of the principal things the novels, and especially this novel, are 'about'. And yet all these characters in all the vicissitudes and changes through which they pass hold fast to their dominant idea, to the inner dream by which they live. In Grandet it is gold, in Madame Grandet God, in Eugenie her love of Charles. [...]
The tides that are sweeping France send their wash into the remote provincial town of Saumur. We watch the forces and passions that are changing the entire social scene in action in this backwater.
It is a more serious accusation against him that his pleasant likable characters are so invariably the victims of his wicked ones, though it may be thought that this is not really too great a simplification of what is true in life. Mauriac speaks of 'the fundamental manichaeism of Balzac, for whom darkness and light divide the kingdom between them': and it is true that Balzac's wicked characters go to and fro upon the earth unchecked, like incarnations of Satan, and the virtuous characters have no defences against them. The self-abnegation which these virtuous characters nearly always practise has a spiritual significance, as well as a social one, though because Balzac was less interested in this aspect than he was in the power of the evil forms opposed to them, the radiance and grandeur of their sublimity' is not so overwhelmingly revealed to us that we forget the crippling restrictions imposed on their earthly development and happiness, which Balzac, in fact, takes care to emphasize. And these restrictions are, of course, their tragedy. Not for Balzac's heroines the terrible splendour of Desdemona's tragedy, nor the crashing finality of Tess of the D'Urbervilles' catastrophic end, but the continued narrow colourless existence of a wealthy ageing woman in a provincial town, which we see prolonged into the future beyond the confines of the book.
[...] Pity had taken root in Grandet's heart and the lonely girl found it entirely acceptable, but there was something revolting in it. It was a vile miser's pity which cost the old cooper nothing and warmed his heart agreeably, while it was Nanon's whole sum of human happiness. Who can refrain from repeating 'Poor Nanon'? God will know his angels by the tones of their voices and the sadness hidden in their hearts.
i love the shift in the last line