Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

GOALS AND VISIONS
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It is intriguing (Q see how such elementary points cannot be understood,
and (Q observe the reanion (Q anempts (Q explore the issue, which also cannor
be understood. The exercise offers some useful lessons aboll( the ideological
systems of the free societies. 12
What is happening now in much of Eastern Europe in part recapitulates
the general record of regions of the world that were driven (Q a service role, in
which many remain, with exceptions that are instructive. It also falls into place
alongside of a long, interesting, and important strand of the hiS(Qry of the
industrial societies themselves. Modern America was "created over its workers'
prOtests," Yale University labor historian David Montgomery points Out,
protests that were vigorous and outspoken, along with "fierce struggles." There
were some hard-won victories, interspersed with forced accommodation to "a
most undemocratic America," notably in the 1920s, he observes, when it
seemed that "the house of labor" had "fallen."
The voice of working people was clearly and vividly articulated in the labor
and community press that flourished from the mid-19th century until World
War II, and even beyond, finally destroyed by state and private power. As
recently as the 1950s, 800 labor newspapers were still reaching 20-30 million
people, seeking-in their words-to combat the corporate offensive (Q "sell
the American people on the virtues of big business"; to expose racial hatred and
"all kinds of antidemocratic words and deeds"; and to provide "antidotes for
the worst poisons of the kept press," the commercial media, which had the task
of "damning labor at every opportunity while carefully glossing over the sins
of the banking and industrial magnates who really control the nation ." 13
VOICES OF RESISTANCE
The popular movements of resistance to state capitalist aU(Qcracy, and their
eloquent voices, have a good deal (Q teach us about the goals and visions of
ordinary people, their understanding and aspirations. The first major study of
the mid-19th century labor press (and (Q my knowledge still the only one) was
published 70 years ago by Norman Ware. It makes illuminating reading today,
or would, if it were known. Ware focuses on the journals established and run
by mechanics and "factory girls" in industrial towns near Boston, "the Athens
of America" and home of its greatest universities. The towns are still there,
largely demoralized and in decay, but no more so than the animating visions
of the people who built them and laid the foundation for American wealth and
power.
The journals reveal how alien and intolerable the value systems demanded
by private power were (Q working people, who stubbornly refused (Q abandon
normal human sentiments. "The New Spirit of the Age" that they bitterly condemned
"was repugnant to an astonishingly large section of {he earlier
American community," Ware writes. The primary reason was "the decline of
the industrial worker as a person," the "psychological change," the "loss of dig-