My own view is that the best way for unions to grow is to combine the strengths of these different strata of the working class. SEIU has tried this, in a way. From its base of hospital workers and janitors (middle-stratum jobs), the union has made incursions up and down, attempting to organize adjunct professors and fast-food workers. The challenge of these campaigns is that the workers are spread across an entire metropolitan labor market. These groups don’t necessarily feature in one another’s lives in any way other than as consumers; they are unlikely to live next to one another, or play sports together, or get drunk together, or share spaces of worship. Their kids aren’t friends or even classmates. The union’s ability to throw its existing weight into new workplaces is thus limited by the social distance separating the organization’s existing base from its areas of expansion.

Our registered nurse, custodian, and fast-food worker, in other words, aren’t necessarily going to take risks on one another’s behalf. The union wants them to understand their fates as intertwined, but given hierarchies of race, economic position, and social status, that understanding is not going to come easily. Such an approach might work incrementally, as SEIU has found with its success in adjunct organizing campaigns — funded by janitors, organized by professionals. But to produce significant results, the labor movement needs to focus on where it can maximize whatever strategic resources it still has.

The members themselves are the most underused resource. America once had factories where thousands toiled together. Though divided by race, ethnicity, and skill, the great plants and mills were hothouses of proletarian consciousness. While such work sites are now extremely rare, their lesson should be remembered. The most promising targets for campaigns are employers large and multifarious enough to implicate workers of many different kinds, as well as the broader community. Hospitals, school systems, and universities leap out as potential targets. These are the institutions where the RN, the custodian, and the fast-food worker are under the same roof. They might actually know one another. The meaning of their alliance might cut across lines of race, gender, and status.

OUR ACCOUNTS OF HEROIC social movements tend to begin at the moment of insurgency, when the cameras show up. The years of bitter, lonely, and seemingly futile struggle get the Ken Burns treatment less often. Even of the heroic age of SNCC in Mississippi, the historian Charles Payne writes, “Field reports are filled with stories of spending day after day dragging from house to house without a single positive response to show for it. Most people were simply afraid and confused but reluctant to admit it.” One organizer reported in 1962 that for every hundred people they spoke to, ten agreed to register to vote, three showed up, “and those three were frightened away from the courthouse by the sheriff.” This is not the epic narrative we are taught. But it is the marrow of movement work.

Here’s another story. In the wake of the First Red Scare of 1919–20, the unions were ruined. Their militants were arrested, blacklisted, and deported. Labor’s most prominent political leader, Eugene Debs, was imprisoned for political crime — opposing the war — only a few years after receiving 6 percent of the vote in a presidential election; he ran for President in 1920 from his Georgia cell. The coal miners of West Virginia were gunned down and bombed from the air in 1921. For those who kept the faith in the factories, mills, and mines, fifteen years of ostracism followed. They had no hint that a moment was coming like the 1930s, when small cells of old believers across the country led millions of workers — many of whom had spent years shunning them — to victory.

[...]

The organic integration of the working-class social world is gone. To remember, and keep remembering, now happens only on purpose. Memory looks like an office, with file cabinets and framed pictures from past victories. It smells like printer ink and sounds like bitter narratives of defeat often repeated, with lessons learned. It costs money to keep, and it takes sustained and uninterrupted time to accumulate. To remember and renew is itself an act of defiance: each dollar in dues money, each hour spent in some interminable meeting, passes the tradition on, despite constant efforts to extinguish it.

Just because a political project is difficult, in other words, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it wrong. It could just be that it’s hard — that the opposition is fearsome and you haven’t cracked it yet. Some kinds of success are bought with a dozen or a hundred failures. The key is to be there for the next round, and to know a chance when you see it.

you know how sometimes you want to write about the working class
you go to the factory district
but there is no working class
just a bunch of hipsters drinking coffee
when you see out of the corner of your eye a giant shadow
it must be a representative of the working classes
you think
and you prepare to write about
how the working class still lives and breathes
when the shadow comes out from around the corner
and puts its finger in your face
don’t write about me, it says,
I know your kind
you make things up that can never happen
then the rest of us spend a century cleaning up the mess

why don’t you write instead
about how with your elegant thin white fingers
that have known neither factory machines nor farm implements
(although, you know what, you can skip that part)
you break off a piece of delicious biscotti

yeah. that would be a lot more realistic
after all you’re so interested in realism

so why don’t you write about how on a sunny May afternoon
you pour yourself a glass of rich red wine
and it sends sparks off your glass, like a snow globe

and as for me I think I can live without
another poem about me, by you,
and anyway what new thing can you say about me?
I know everything about myself already
whereas about a sunny May afternoon
about how ineffably sad one sometimes feels
and how she has such enormous crystal eyes
this you know far better than I
write it. Write about
how a vase full of flowers
wakes up
and pours a child out of itself, with the water

just don’t write about a day in the life of the workers of AvtoVAZ3
and don’t write about young Lenin

write, like Mandelstam, about the yearning for world culture
put yourself somewhere between the bedroom and the chapel

just don’t write anymore about the foundation pit
and try to keep yourself from mentioning solidarity

I think you understand what I’m saying
go and write it
and we’ll read it when we have a break
or maybe we’ll go fishing
or to the bathhouse for a sauna
or maybe to pick mushrooms, the mushrooms are coming up you know
or maybe we’ll go to the theater with our wives using our union cards
or maybe we’ll see the football game, Spartak is coming on, who do you root for?

I apologize if I’ve offended you
the working class has a diverse range of entertainment options
we don’t always have a chance to keep up with contemporary poetry

all right
the main thing is don’t get depressed and start thinking of doing something stupid
I know you poets
first thing that happens you go shooting yourselves or tying up a noose
and then after that our kids come home from literature class all pale
like from another world
they start crying and yelling
dying isn’t anything new in this life
fuck it!

sorry
all right, off you go
before I mess up and say anything else
hurt your feelings
and then you’ll get all inward-looking
you’re the one who taught me
a class in itself must become a class for itself
so live for yourself a little bit
relax
take a break
learn to take some pleasure in life
and don’t be so quiet
why are you quiet all the time?
you scare me with this silence of yours
you’re a prophet, after all
so rise up and speak
inflame our hearts
with your elevated verbiage
nothing that is human is alien to us
in fact maybe it’s through you that we see it
otherwise what the fuck do we need you for
if not to tell us things that have never happened
and about paradise here on earth

In 1970, domestic production of crude oil peaked, with an average of nearly 10 million native-born barrels entering the world market every day. Domestic production then steadily declined through the rest of the century — in part because Europe, which had depended on American oil during World War II, began to look toward the Middle East for imports — and bottomed out at 5 million barrels per day in the final year of Bush II’s presidency. The ’70s also saw the beginning of an increase in US oil imports from abroad, especially the Middle East, making for the American economy’s now notorious dependence on “foreign oil.” The aspirations of the average American depended on that oil’s availability: “an unspoken premise underlying that way of life was that there was more still to come.”

There is a lot of truth in Bacevich’s analysis. The oil-focused military campaign of the 1980s did balloon into an attempt at regional transformation. And while Obama quickly abandoned the transformation part of Bush’s agenda, intense US involvement in the region is outlasting the Middle East’s status as an indispensable source of oil. But Bacevich never asks — much less answers — the question that naturally follows: Why hasn’t the declining importance of Middle East oil produced any changes in US military policy? Nor does he ask why American politicians haven’t spent any time celebrating an impending energy independence that they spent more than a decade demanding. Here the limits of Bacevich’s argument come into view. Identifying oil as the long war’s cause allows him to begin his narrative in 1980. This obscures the ideological roots of a commitment to the Middle East that doesn’t look to be disappearing in the foreseeable future.

The US loves to see itself as a noncolonial power. As the country assumed a global leadership role after World War II, it was eager to be viewed as a new kind of leader, a successor to the European colonial regimes that were rightly disappearing. But in many instances, such as its inheritance of the Vietnam War from France, the US simply perpetuated colonial wars. America’s quest for Middle East oil was as predatory as the British Empire’s. During the wind-down of World War II, the US sought an oil concession in Iran, which was England’s largest source of overseas oil, and it sought to keep British oil companies out of Saudi Arabia, which the US considered its own. All the while, the US declared that its entire rationale was “anticolonial.”

[...] even on the narrow terms of maintaining an “American way of life,” American policy abroad has been disastrous, and Bacevich’s is now one of many volumes arguing that the US would have been better off had it abandoned its quest for world hegemony long ago. The paradox of American power is its luxury. The US enjoys, geographically as well as militarily, a form of superiority and safety that has never been truly threatened. Hegemony is now a choice, and the US has indulged that choice extravagantly. Trillions have been spent on mishaps and catastrophes: even Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged that “every gun that is made . . . signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

What would happen if the US were to abandon this rationale — if, for a moment, the dissident counterestablishment occupied the halls of power and began setting policy? The essential prescriptions have been set out by Christopher Layne in his book The Peace of Illusions (2006). Like Bacevich, Layne is a conservative — he is the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University — and a descendant of the Wisconsin School. For Layne, the US’s indispensability is a big problem for the world, and a big problem for the US. Abandoning it begins to set more sensible terms for the world order. Under Layne’s more or less realist rubric, the US could begin by leaving NATO and allowing the European Union to take responsibility for its own interests. It would then terminate its security treaty with Japan and withdraw from South Korea, similarly allowing those countries the ability to set the terms of their own foreign policy.

It was always folly for the US to attempt to secure Middle East oil — even an embargo by a single country would simply mean increased production by another, and in any case the US hegemony over Saudi Arabia has increased, not diminished, the possibility of instability there. But now that the US no longer depends on that oil, its continuing military presence in the region is not only indefensible but dangerous, increasing the threat of Islamist terrorism that it exists to tamp down. It should withdraw entirely, as it should encourage the withdrawal of Israel’s forces and citizens from the settlements, to help foster the creation of a Palestinian state.

The fact that these sensible prescriptions strike the foreign policy establishment as totally insane stems from a persistent belief in America’s exclusive prerogative to reorganize and remake the world, which the members of that establishment euphemistically refer to as the country’s “credibility.” Politicians defend this prerogative just in case someone comes up with a new and better idea for remaking the world somewhere down the line. Solving this problem can’t just be a matter of the US realizing its “true” interests. The country would have to learn to give up the colonial mandate that it took up decades ago, well after the colonial era was already passing into history.

[...] Indiana’s work suggests a spiritual ambivalence that sees love as tethered to the brutalizing character of our society yet holding out some twinkling promise: a “mortal illness,” yes, but also a “rescuer’s flashlight.” He would object to the comparison (Indiana’s is a fitful radicalism, always wriggling out of ideology’s drab uniform), but his orientation to love resembles Marx’s critique of religious faith: love devolves into an opiate of the masses. Religion dreams of utopias, grasps at transcendence, dignifies our slogging trials — and is fastened to the notion, however distant, of redemption. Might the desire for love, too, be an “expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering?” Might love be “the heart of a heartless world,” “the soul of soulless conditions” — or, in Marx’s most swooning, sympathetic formulation, the “sigh of the oppressed creature”?