REVIEWS
The Myth of the Super-Mom
Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels
The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women
Free Press, 2004
336 pages $26.
Review by JENNIFER ROESCH
EARLIER THIS year, the New York Times Magazine ran an article called "The Opt-Out Revolution." The author, Lisa Belkin, argued that there was a massive exodus of women from the workforce–the liberated children of the women’s movement who were choosing the pleasures of home and family over paid work. Shortly after, Time ran a similar piece called "The Case for Staying at Home."
In The Mommy Myth, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels drive a Mac truck through the idea that there’s a new "feminist revolution" of women freely choosing to leave the world of work and return to the nuclear family. They show how the idealization of motherhood–and the pressure this puts on women–is part of a backlash against the gains of the women’s movement.
Douglas and Michaels point to the massive contradiction between the expectations raised by the women’s movement and the reality of most women’s lives today. They point out that at its height, the women’s liberation movement demanded real changes in women’s lives, such as equal pay for equal work and extensive quality child care. They describe how "some women staged ‘child-ins’: Together they brought their kids to work to dramatize their need for day care."
The women’s movement did have a lasting impact on women’s lives. Large numbers of women, including women with young children, entered the workforce on a permanent basis. However, the authors point out, the accompanying policy reforms never materialized.
In 1971, a Comprehensive Child Development Act passed Congress that would have made child care available to all children at a cost of $2 billion. Nixon vetoed it, and subsequent child care bills failed.
With no system of publicly funded child care, women were left to patch together often fragile, costly, and deficient arrangements for their children. At the same time, social services were cut and families had to work longer hours just to make ends meet as Corporate America held down wages.
This left most women struggling to combine paid work, motherhood, and the unpaid work at home. Instead of genuine equality and real change, women were fed the myth of the "super-mom."
With anger and humor, Douglas and Michaels show how the backlash against women has fed on the guilt and insecurity women feel as a result of their new position.
For instance, they take apart the media scares about the dangers of day care. While acknowledging that quality day care remains inaccessible to most women, they show that the media play up stories of abuse and ignore research about the positive impact of day care on children.
At the same time, they describe the unattainable ideal of the women who can "do it all"–exemplified by the celebrity mom profile. This ideal tells women that their difficulties juggling work, family, and housework are a result of their personal failure rather than the lack of adequate support for working women.
The flipside of the idealized mother has been a racist attack on poor women, notably "welfare mothers." They show how the image of the bad mother–usually Black or Latina, always poor–was used as a scapegoat for people’s anger and fear about their lives.
By painting women on welfare as "lazy cheats," the debate about welfare helped to define work and child care as issues of personal responsibility rather than social reform. This had a devastating impact on millions of poor women and their children. And it also made it harder to win the kinds of reforms that would make life better for all working women.
The Mommy Myth very convincingly shows how the so-called post-feminist revolution is a product of this backlash against women. They put the dynamic well:
The mythology of the new momism now insinuates that, when all is said and done, the enlightened mother chooses to stay home with the kids. Back in the 1950s, mothers stayed home because they had no choice. Today, having been to the office, having tried a career, women have…"found it to be the inferior choice to staying at home. It’s not that mothers can’t hack it (1950s thinking). It’s that progressive mothers refuse to hack it.
Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of women work because they have to. And the traditional nuclear family is the experience of only a minority today.
In an era of privatization, economic insecurity, and declining social services, the backlash against women has served up a powerful dose of moralism and personal responsibility. The Mommy Myth is a funny, angry, and powerful antidote.
Unfortunately, it is weak on solutions–ending with a call for women to "talk back" to the new momism. But their early descriptions of a movement that fought for child care, equal pay, and structural changes to the workforce offer a different possible ending. It’s that kind of a fight that will be necessary to reverse the backlash and win the real changes necessary to deliver on the expectations and promises raised by the women’s liberation movement.
Global War for Freedom (of the Market)
Arundhati Roy
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire
South End Press, 2004
200 pages $12
Review by LEELA YELLESETTY
AUTHOR AND activist Arundhati Roy’s latest book, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, is well deserving of its title. With her characteristic compassion, humor, and poetic style, Roy cuts through the smokescreen of lies and distortions to expose the true colors of the new American empire. Many of the essays and speeches featured in this collection will be familiar because they have circulated through the Web and various progressive publications.
Several of the essays are focused on the brutal U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which she notes is "more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees." She exposes the corporate media’s role in pumping up the hysteria to go to war while ignoring the reality that "for most people in the world, peace is war–a daily battle against hunger, thirst, and the violation of their dignity."
Roy tears apart the U.S. claim of wanting to bring "democracy" or "freedom" to Iraq, asserting "Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism." She exposes the absurdity of the Bush administration’s claims by juxtaposing their own rhetoric with stark reality:
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "It’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder–did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in prison right now?
Roy argues that the war in Iraq is part of the same process of neoliberalism that has been unleashed around the globe over the past thirty years. "Only the weapons used against them differ: In the one case it’s an IMF checkbook. In the other, the cruise missiles." For this process to continue, the state, far from being irrelevant, becomes all the more necessary. She explores the role of the state in the lead-up to the Indian elections between the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress Party, both of which are dedicated to the neoliberal project.
The Free Market (which is actually far from free) needs the State, and needs it badly. As the disparity between the rich and poor grows in poor countries, states have their work cut out for them. Corporations on the prowl for "sweetheart deals" that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and administer those projects in developing countries without the active connivance of state machinery.… When we vote, we chose which political party we would like to invest the coercive, repressive power of the state in.
Despite the overwhelming power held by the world’s wealthy and protected by the state, Roy’s message is ultimately one of hope.
Being poor is not the same as being weak. The strength of the poor is not indoors in office buildings and courtrooms. It’s outdoors, in the fields, the mountains, the river valleys, the city streets, and university campuses of this country. That’s where the negotiations must be held. That’s where the battle must be waged.
Roy argues urgently that the Left must begin to develop effective strategy. It is not enough to "allow nonviolent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theater." Nor can electing progressive leaders such as Lula–President Luis Inacio da Silva of Brazil–who is now
busy implementing IMF guidelines.… [T]o imagine that a leader’s personal charisma and a resume of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works, or for that matter how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.
She counterposes this to Gandhi’s Salt March, in which thousands of Indians marched to sea and made their own salt in defiance of British tax laws. "It was a direct strike at the economic underpinnings of the British Empire. It was real." She argues that today similar, internationally coordinated actions must take place.
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons.
In the short term, agreeing on a "minimum agenda" which can lead to some small victories can help move the resistance forward. She suggests that we choose a few of the most odious U.S. corporations to expose, picket, and boycott.
Whether or not this will be the most effective strategy is open for debate. However, Roy’s insistence on raising the level of the debate on the Left from criticisms to strategies is important. For all those who are interested in the project of unmasking and dismantling the empire, this book is a good place to start. Then the real work begins.
Building the Power of the Slave South
Garry Wills
Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power
Houghton Mifflin, 2003
256 pages $14
Review by PAUL D’AMATO
MUCH HAS been made of the fact that the man who wrote "all men are created equal" was himself a slaveowner, and that he kept a slave mistress. But there is less light shed on the impact of Thomas Jefferson’s position as a Southern plantation owner on his political career after the American Revolution.
In this slender book of loosely connected essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills sets out to show "the pervasiveness of slavery’s effects on our early history." Wills’ premise is that Jefferson not only owed his victory in the 1800 presidential election to the infamous clause in the U.S. Constitution that allowed Southern planters to count their slaves as three-fifths of a person–hence the term "negro president" used by his opponents in the Federalist Party–but that his subsequent career was often directed at strengthening the "slave power" in the U.S. South at the expense of the North.
Wills focuses on a series of conflicts between Jefferson and Thomas Pickering, a New England Federalist who opposed the three-fifths rule and the extension of slavery into new territories, and who coined the phrase "negro president." He finishes with a couple of essays on the later abolitionist career of John Quincy Adams, a future president who Wills considers to be a political heir of Pickering–though in their early careers, the two were opponents.
The book isn’t always satisfying. The narrative tissue connecting different parts is weak, and some of the detail can be tedious, especially the discussion about the political maneuverings surrounding the 1800 election crisis. That year, the Electoral College vote for president split evenly between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. It took several congressional sessions and threats of violence by Jefferson’s party to squeeze him into the presidency.
And the book often seems to be more about Pickering than Jefferson. Nevertheless, Wills introduces an important historical correction to what he argues is often a complete absence of the central significance of slavery to American politics before the Civil War.
By giving the South one-third more seats in Congress, the three-fifths clause gave the South "a permanent head-start for all its political activities." As a result, the slave power had the edge on many contentious issues.
In truth, the U.S. government’s entire existence was based on an unstable compromise of the founding fathers that allowed slavery to continue in the South and ensured that the Southern planters had disproportionate political power. The issue was so heated that Congress had to continually try to prevent slavery from coming to the surface and exploding the compromise.
Wills notes that in politics prior to the Civil War, there was a "gentleman’s agreement not to push the slavery issue in ways that would embarrass the South." Wills digs up some good historical nuggets here.
In his early political career as a senator, diplomat, cabinet member, and president, John Quincy Adams’ record in office hardly placed him in the antislavery camp.
But as a member of Congress in his waning years, he became an antislavery crusader, tirelessly finding creative ways to force the discussion of slavery onto the floor.
In the 1838—1839 congressional session alone, Adams presented 693 petitions against slavery in the District of Colombia–which earned him a string of death threats.
Another nugget is a chapter on Jefferson’s shameful role in opposing the slave rebellion in St. Domingue (later to become Haiti) that established the first independent Black nation.
As secretary of state, Jefferson "arranged for three shipments of funds to the beleaguered white minority on the island" and urged France to do more to secure the colony, calling the situation of white planters forced to flee the island a "tragedy."
As secretary of state under Jefferson’s predecessor, John Adams, Pickering was supportive of Haitian independence and worked to open trade relations between the two countries.
When Jefferson became president, the policy was reversed. Jefferson set out to supply Napoleon’s army that was sent to crush the new republic and reduce the island back to slavery. Later, after Napoleon’s defeat, Jefferson embargoed the island and refused to grant Haiti diplomatic recognition.
Jefferson normally receives uncritical adulation. Wills’ book is a healthy antidote.
Insights of an Antiwar Army Ranger
Stan Goff
Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century
Soft Skull Press, 2004
192 pages $14
Review by PHAM BINH
IT’S NOT every day a former Special Forces Master Sergeant slams American imperialism and argues that we need a revolution to get rid of capitalism.
The author, Stan Goff, spent twenty-five years in the U.S. military, much of it in Army Special Operations (Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces). He participated in the invasions of Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia, and Haiti; taught military science at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; wrote the book Hideous Dream about his experience of the Haitian invasion; and founded the Bring Them Home Now! campaign. His new book blends political analyses, polemics, and personal stories that cover a huge range of topics such as the Colombian civil war, the early years of the Communist International, the Vietnam War, and political strategy for opposing the system.
As a former Special Operations soldier, Goff has hard-won insights into the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare. He recounts how the poorly-armed Somali National Alliance (SNA) outsmarted his Ranger team simply by observing them. Thanks to the arrogance of his commanding officers, his team used the same operating procedures night after night for many raids. The SNA noticed the lack of variation and planned accordingly. The militia ambushed Goff’s team at night and the Rangers retaliated, firing into the darkness; in doing so they revealed their position and were fired upon from multiple directions.
The SNA also fired at them from a crowded stadium. When his team returned fire, they ended up killing mostly homeless civilians, feeding opposition to American presence. The U.S.-engendered opposition culminated in a bloody firefight that left eighteen American GIs and hundreds of Somalis dead after an American Black Hawk helicopter was downed in the streets of Mogadishu. Goff’s Somalia story is a taste of what’s going on right now in Iraq.
Using the example of the Zapatistas in Mexico, Goff argues that revolution is necessary:
The Zapatistas have always been a reformist movement. They never sought military victory or state power.… This accounts for their incremental destruction as a movement.… [W]hen a people or a movement is the target of [absolute] destruction, it must employ the same cold pragmatism in its defense, or it will drown in its own blood.
Yet his argument for revolution is undermined by his view that the American white working class benefits from the oppression of minorities. Socialism–the democratic rule of the working class–is impossible without white workers, who make up the majority of the American working class. To overcome the racism that does exist inside the working class–and achieve the unity that’s really possible–the socialist movement has to make class-based antiracist arguments to show how an injury to one is indeed an injury to all.
Throughout the book, Goff also asserts that U.S. imperial power is in decline. He points out that the U.S. "cut and ran" from Somalia, that Latin America has been engulfed by rebellions against neoliberalism, and that U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined.
While these facts are indisputable, he ignores the fact that the U.S. economy expanded faster than its main competitors’ in the 1990s because worker productivity grew considerably as wages were held down. In the wake of the USSR’s collapse, American imperial power grew with a flurry of trade agreements, the establishment of a large permanent military presence in the Middle East, and new military bases in the former USSR in Central Asia. These are the underlying reasons for the overconfidence of the American ruling class that has led to the debacle in Iraq.
Goff’s extensive military experience and the insights in Full Spectrum Disorder make him a valuable asset for the revolutionary Left. We need more active-duty soldiers, veterans, and military family members who share Goff’s uncompromising opposition to American imperialism and the capitalist system as a whole.
Bipartisan Assault on the Environment
Jeffrey St. Clair
Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature
Common Courage Press, 2004
407 pages $20.
Review by JOHN GREEN
JEFFREY ST. Clair, co-editor of CounterPunch, has delivered his hard-hitting book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me just in time to stem the amnesia over the Democratic Party’s environmental record.
In this collection of essays, St. Clair pulls no punches criticizing big corporations, Democrats and Republicans alike, and "institutionalized environmentalist" groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Many essays deal with the Republicans running roughshod over the environment. St. Clair skewers nutcases such as Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who famously defended super-exploiting the environment by declaring, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."
But St. Clair is careful to remind the reader that "an equal threat comes from the leadership of the Democratic Party...and enviro bureaucrats." Bill Clinton and toadies like his interior secretary, Bruce Babbit, receive no quarter for giving a go-ahead to logging of old-growth redwoods (in the Headwaters Forest deal), relaxing cancer-risk standards for pesticide residues in foods (by repealing the Delaney Clause), and routinely ignoring the Endangered Species Act whenever developers asked for a break.
Many on the Left argue that the giveaways by Clinton–while bad–were preferable to George W. Bush’s handling of the environment. But, as St. Clair explains, not only is it often hard to tell who’s worse, but Clinton’s actions set the stage for his successor’s assaults.
Take the recent spate of blackouts on both coasts. St. Clair explains:
The electric power safety net, erected after the power company scandals of the 1920s, was giddily cut loose during Clintontime. Like welfare, once the regulatory framework is dismantled it’s gone for good. Score another one for Bill.
St. Clair also takes issue with the leading Democrats’ hypocritical "free market" approach to environmentalism. Their foremost theoretician, Al Gore, "stresses environmental discipline for the Third World, while gliding over corporate looting of North America’s forests, rivers and mountains."
Nor do mainstream environmentalists escape scrutiny, whose betrayals show up in essay after essay. Acting as "political pimps for the Democratic Party," groups like the Sierra Club provide green fig leaves for the terrible legislation and backroom "compromises" that actually hurt the environment.
St. Clair is at his best in "Dioxin for Dinner," a look at Dow Chemical Company’s herculean efforts to hide its gravest threats to people’s health. Thanks in large part to Dow, incinerators in Texas poison Wisconsin milk and cheese products with carcinogens that are eaten in Chicago.
Don’t call St. Clair a cynic, however. He also covers successful challenges to despoliation and anecdotes of poetic justice. Take for example, the University of Arizona’s modern-day theft of Native American land to construct an observatory for the Vatican...on a cloudy mountain.
This book largely focuses on the destruction of the great outdoors, and more could be said about the problems facing urban and suburban ecologies where most people live. Despite this, Been Brown So Long is a refreshing look at the politics of nature in America today. This is an eye-opening choice for anyone intending to vote Democrat in 2004 out of concern for the environment.
Voices for Global Justice
Tom Mertes, ed.
Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible?
Verso Books, 2004
265 pages $19
Review by NIHAR BHATT
Last December’s protests in Miami at the hemispheric talks on the Free Trade Area of the Americas brought the global justice movement back to the U.S. in a dramatic way. The protests took place despite police use of tasers, stun-guns, plastic bullets, and armored cars–and they featured the re-emergence of American unions into the thick of the movement.
Although it seems that mass activism is now channeled into establishment party politics for the election season, there’s a book that reminds us that the movement is ongoing and truly global. Movement of Movements, a collection of interviews and essays by some of the world’s leading figures in the fight against neoliberalism, provides background on key organizations and an introduction to the issues that activists are grappling with.
One of the pioneers of the movement is the MST–the Sem Terra Movement of landless Brazilian peasants. João Pedro Stedile traces the development of the MST from a wave of land occupations in the late-seventies, through perilous confrontations with the military dictatorship, to its evolving but independent relationship with the Workers Party of Brazil.
In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) formed out of mass civil disobedience campaigns in the 1980s against "big dam" projects that threatened to displace indigenous communities and privatize water facilities. NBA activist Chittaroopa Palit echoes other contributors when she discusses the challenges of state repression and grinding poverty that activists face at the grassroots.
Besides describing their history, these activists also outline their analyses of neoliberalism and their theories of social change.
One recurring question is the alternative to corporate globalization. Everyone agrees that the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO) are key to enforcing free-market orthodoxy around the world. But do we need to abolish these institutions, or can they be reformed to serve human need? Walden Bello, director of Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, criticizes U.S. trade unions for arguing that the WTO would be stronger if it were to take up tariffs and labor rights. He writes:
That’s a very short sighted response. Beneath the surface rhetoric about human rights, this is essentially a protectionist movement, aimed at safeguarding northern jobs.
He calls instead for "de-globalization," a drive to weaken or eliminate institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and the WTO–and to allow national governments, regional financial mechanisms, and regional trade blocs to set economic policies.
José Bové, a French farmer and global justice activist, argues for an international trade tribunal under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) as an alternative to the WTO. Unfortunately, it is unclear how this type of body would be fundamentally different from the WTO, given the dominance of the U.S. within the UN.
A common assertion in these interviews and essays is that the role of nation-states has been diminished by the globalization of capitalism. Michael Hardt, one of the most widely read theorists of the global justice movement and a contributor to the book, has famously rejected the idea that the U.S. or any other state plays a key role in dominating the multinational system. Editor Tom Mertes and other contributors take this idea head on and argue that, on the contrary, the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate the necessity to see U.S. imperialism as the driving force behind the neoliberal project.
Trevor Ngwane, a leading figure in the South African Anti-Privatization Forum, highlights another pitfall of this type of thinking:
Many in the movement attack the idea of targeting state power. The argument that globalization undermines the role of the nation-state becomes an excuse for avoiding the fight with your own bourgeoisie.
This book will broaden the horizons of anyone who has only been exposed to the North American global justice movement. While some of the contributors applaud the "horizontal" and consensus-based decision-making structures of some of the North American networks such as the United Students Against Sweatshops or the Direct Action Network, Mertes points out that organizations such as the MST, NBA, or the South African Anti-Privatization Forum–which organize people on a far more massive scale and are often dealing with issues of life and death–would have a difficult time using such decision-making systems. In their interviews, activists from these organizations describe how they have no choice but to adapt regional and national leadership structures that operate on a democratic basis to coordinate their activities.
Lurking behind these organizational questions is a larger debate on how to build a kind of movement that can take on global capitalism. Subcommandante Marcos of the EZLN (Zapatistas) of Chiapas, Mexico, explains that, rather than attempting to link their struggle up with other sectors of Mexican society, the EZLN has chosen to remain a minority. As Marcos puts it, "To believe that we can speak on behalf of people beyond ourselves is political masturbation." In contrast, Stedile of the MST questions whether this method of struggle can produce victory for the Zapatistas and contrasts it to the MST’s own experience: "If there is a criticism of their strategy, it is that the slowness of their advance has been due to their inability to broaden it into a class struggle, a national one."
This type of political friction makes Movement of Movements valuable to global justice activists–especially now that the "war on terrorism" has raised the political stakes. The U.S. global justice movement has suffered from its relative disconnection from the massive antiwar movement of the past few years. The more opportunities activists get to debate their ideas, strategy, and goals, the stronger the movement will be to face these challenges. Movement of Movements is an excellent contribution to that process.
Exposing U.S. Support for Terror Abroad
Frederick H. Gareau
State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism
Clarity Press, 2004
254 pages $17
Review by TRACY MCLELLAN
FREDERICK GAREAU’S State Terrorism and the United States is an enlightening exposition of the state terror in which the U.S. has been engaged and complicit during and since the Cold War.
When the world’s oppressed have organized to better their living conditions, the U.S. has often rushed to help the local government to repress those movements–branding them as "communist" or "terrorist" insurgencies.
U.S. military doctrine has defined insurgency as illegal opposition to any existing government‚ so the scope of subversive activities ranges from passive resistance, illegal strikes and demonstrations, to large-scale guerrilla operations.
During the Cold War, the communist enemy was pictured as being pernicious, powerful, and perverted–something that had to be annihilated. By extension, opposition to the status quo was put in the same bag to be crushed as well. The world of counterinsurgency is thus a stark and bipolar one with no middle ground. The "war on terrorism" resurrects this paradigm.
Gareau presents six case studies–the School of the Americas and El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Indonesia. Using information collected by a series of "truth commissions," he looks at three basic questions. Did the government commit state terrorism? How much of the terror was committed by the state, and how much by private guerrillas? And was the country that perpetrated terror upon its own citizens supported by the United States?
Truth commissions, operating under a "two-devils principle," have examined atrocities and violations by both liberation and counterinsurgency movements. But as Gareau shows, they generally discover that the local states are guilty of vastly more–and more monstrous–terrorism. And in this, they’ve been helped by the United States.
Much of U.S. foreign policy, says Gareau, including its wide support for right-wing dictators during the Cold War, has been predicated on the Root Doctrine. Elihu Root, a Nobel Prize winner and secretary of war under presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, said in 1922 that a sovereign state had a right to "prevent a condition of affairs in which it will be too late to protect itself." According to Root, this right of preemptive self-defense–articulated eighty years before the Bush Doctrine–justified support of dictators because the populations in those countries were incapable of democracy.
Gareau also briefly examines U.S. support for state terror in Cambodia, Iraq, Colombia, Nicaragua, Congo, Iran, and elsewhere. No state was too vicious or brutal to receive U.S. aid so long as it opposed the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Such countries even got labeled "democratic." Gareau detects similar propaganda in the "war on terror," in which terror is, by definition, something that "they" do. When the U.S. or its allies–such as Israel, Colombia, and Uzbekistan–engage in the same activity, often to an aggravated degree, it is called something else entirely.
There ought to be more books like this, until the record that’s already known around the world is exposed here at home.
They’ve Been Watching Us
Christian Parenti
The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slave Passes to the War on Terror
Basic Books, 2003
273 pages $14
Review by ALAN WALLIS
UNLIKE MOST mainstream coverage of surveillance, The Soft Cage defies the temptation to marvel at high-tech wizardry. Instead, Christian Parenti puts surveillance in a historical context that is both terrifying and illuminating.
He explains, for example, that pre-Civil War plantation surveillance relied on three "information technologies"–the written slave pass, armed slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways. George Washington’s monitoring and punishment of his own slaves shows that examples of repression in the U.S. are no further away than the man on the one-dollar bill.
Popular resistance is a driving force behind this history. Despite laws against teaching them to read, many runaway slaves–like the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass–learned to forge travel passes.
Authorities later replaced handwritten passes with stamped metal badges, which were harder to forge, and these became the first American ID cards with serial numbers. "Function creep" is one of the overarching themes emerging from this examination of surveillance as it advances through history.
Just as numbered ID cards have, since the days of slavery, become fairly universal, the information-sharing system launched in the 1980s to stop immigrants from illegally collecting welfare is now used by social workers to check up on U.S. citizens as well. So the news that terrorist watch lists have expanded to include antiwar activists is no surprise.
Soft Cage pulls together a wealth of examples, past and present, and links them into a gripping history of state and corporate repression.
A letter from George Washington complains that a slave named Caroline made "only" five shirts for him in the previous week.
A UPS driver tells of being fired after his Global Positioning System detected an unauthorized eighteen-minute rest stop.
And a student notes that at school, "Everywhere you go, there’s a camera right above you...If you’re, like, with your boyfriend or something they’re constantly watching you."
The Difference that Reds Made
Left Out: Reds and American Industrial Unions
Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin
Cambridge University
Press, 2003
392 pages $27
Review by MATT NICHTER
OVER THE past generation, historians have steadily chipped away at the Cold War caricature of the U.S. Communist Party (CP) as merely a tool of Moscow, highlighting the complex, contradictory character of an organization whose record of militant activism attracted some two million radicals to its ranks at one time or another.
Left Out is a major contribution to this literature. Authors Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris demonstrate beyond doubt that CP-led unions–precisely the ones that were later purged from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the McCarthy-era witch hunts–were more democratic, more deeply committed to fighting racism and sexism, and more militantly opposed to management’s prerogatives on the shop floor than were unions led by other forces. This history is crucial for making sense of the crisis that engulfs the U.S. labor movement today.
The authors are sociologists, and their quantitative, statistical approach enables them to distinguish the impact of multiple causal factors–allowing them to draw general conclusions about the CP that are not readily warranted on the basis of narrative case studies alone.
For example, in their analysis of union sexism, the authors examine contracts signed by unions in California during the CIO’s heyday. Looking at several indicators of gender equality (whether the contracts had equal pay clauses, whether the unions had women represented on their executive bodies, and so on), they find that the CP-led unions consistently outperformed the others. They also find that internal union democracy (again measured using a variety of criteria) is generally associated with greater gender equality.
Finally, by "controlling" for the level of union democracy, the authors find that Left-led unions were more likely to secure equal pay clauses in local contracts than were those led by other forces, whatever their degree of internal democracy.
Throughout the book, Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris reject fatalistic models of union development and class conflict, such as the "iron law of oligarchy," a phrase coined by German sociologist Robert Michels in 1911 to explain the top-down functioning of his country’s Social Democratic Party and party-affiliated unions. During periods of working-class upheaval, they conclude, groups of committed activists can decisively shape the course of events from below if they have earned the trust and respect of their fellow workers. As they put it bluntly: Politics matters.
All this would be plenty for one book, but there’s more. For instance, an early chapter of Left Out seeks to explain the pattern of communist leadership in the CIO. Here’s the gist: Those unions that split from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) due to an insurgency from below (such as the United Furniture Workers) and those that were formed without much CIO organizing committee oversight (such as the United Auto Workers) were more likely to become "Red" unions than those formed as a result of a decision by top officials to secede from the AFL (such as the United Mine Workers) or those organized under the auspices of a CIO organizing committee (even where communists were hired as organizers–such as the United Steelworkers of America).
Pushing things back a step, Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris find that in industries in which communists had sunk roots in the pre-CIO era (such as auto), AFL unions were more likely to secede as a result of a workers’ insurgency than as a result of a decision by top leaders.
This is important stuff, and it only scratches the surface of Left Out. Another chapter focuses on the effect of radical union leadership on shop floor militancy. The authors show that Red-led unions signed shorter contracts, had stronger grievance procedures, and were less willing to entrench managerial prerogatives in contract language.
This relationship between radical leadership and militancy even held during the Second World War, while the CP leadership was advocating an ultra-patriotic policy of class collaboration in order to maintain unity with "progressive capitalists" in the fight against Nazi Germany. Rank-and-file CP activists selectively interpreted–or disregarded–the party line when it contradicted their better judgment.
The chapter on antiracism in the unions confirms that the CP led the way in the fight against discrimination in the workplace, setting a tone for the CIO more generally. Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris attempt to refute the argument, advanced by former NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill among others, that the CIO’s apparent anti-racism was really just a pragmatic response to the presence of large numbers of Blacks in industries or plants where a union was attempting to organize the white majority.
Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris measure union antiracism in terms of guarantees of Blacks’ right to join, the number of segregated locals, the frequency of black representation on executive bodies, etc. For starters, they point out that the AFL’s handful of industrial unions rarely accepted Black members, regardless of the percentage of Blacks employed in the industry. And among CIO unions, they find that having a larger Black membership did greatly increase the likelihood that unions led by non-Communists would take anti-racist positions–but communist-led unions stood out in their anti-racist practices even where black membership "was small and might otherwise not have been able to win racially egalitarian policies and practices."
In the final chapters, the authors consider what might have happened if the Left-led unions had formed a "third federation" of their own after their expulsion from the CIO. They speculate whether a new grouping could have "served, at the least, as a gadfly on the left…as a spur in the side of an indolent and declining AFL-CIO" or "at best…a pole of attraction for dissidents and rebels everywhere in labor’s ranks."
Unfortunately, the communists’ response to the postwar crackdown bordered on incoherence. As the Cold War was beginning to take shape, the CP leadership pushed its trade union activists and officials to support the 1948 third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace–guaranteeing a head-on collision with the non-communist CIO bureaucracy, which backed Truman.
When the collision came and the Left-led unions were expelled, the CP top brass refused to consolidate a "third federation." Instead, they repeated William Z. Foster’s old formula of "boring from within" existing organizations, vilifying as "sectarian" those activists in the Left-led unions who wanted to cut their losses and strike out on their own with the resources those unions still commanded. Meanwhile, with its leadership facing legal prosecution, the party sent many of its cadres "underground" and became embroiled in a series of paranoiac internal purges.
Zeitlin and Stepan-Norris devote considerable space to criticizing the CP’s support for Wallace. But it is unlikely that the Left-led unions would have been able to remain within the CIO during the early 1950s in any event, given the willingness of most non-communist union leaders to go along with the anticommunist provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act.
And the authors have curiously little to say about "what might have been" if the CP had pushed consistently to form a broad labor party during the rise of the CIO, when sentiment in favor of such a party became quite widespread. Though Wallace was trounced in 1948, Truman’s subsequent use of Taft-Hartley to crush strikes by some of his most faithful union backers underscored the need for workers to break free from the stranglehold of the Democrats. Labor’s failure to firmly establish a political party of its own–and the purge of the far Left from the unions–together constitute the great tragedies of the CIO era, for which American workers are still paying the price.
