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Today's
Stories
October 29
/ 30, 2005
Peter Linebaugh
The
Wedges of Hephaestus
October 28,
2005
Jared Bernstein
Inflation
Up; Wages Down: Fastest Decline in Wages on Record
Virginia Tilley
Embracing
the Anti-Aparthied Movement in Israel/Palestine
Phil Gasper
The
Race to Execute Tookie Williams
Jennifer Matsui
It's Mardi Graft Time!
Manual Garcia,
Jr.
Is the US Really Against Torture?
Monica Benderman
In the Name of Justice
Jason Leopold
Fitzgerald
Focuses on the Forgeries
Dave Lindorff
Suddenly, Bush Endorses Right of Fair Trials
Otober 27, 2005
Saul Landau
The
Scandal Isn't the Leak, But the Illegal War
Stuart Hodkinson
Bono
and Geldoff: "We Saved Africa" Oh No, They Didn't!
Ingmar Lee
Stop
the Troops!: No Glory or Honor in Iraq
Lila Rajiva
License
to Bill: Gates Does India
Ilan Pappe
The
Last Moment of Hope
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Waiting for Fitzgerald
Michael Donnelly
Look Who's Talking Now: the GOP on Perjury
Ron Jacobs
Escape the Weight of Your Corporate Logo
Cockburn / St. Clair
White House in Meltdown
October 26,
2005
Kathy Kelly
For
Whom They Toll
Gary Leupp
Dialectics
of the Plame Affair
Mike Marqusee
Empire of Denial
Eric Ruder
War Crimes in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Constitutionally Divided Nation
Joshua Frank
Fitzgerald v. the Bushies: Hold Your Elation in Check
J.L. Chestnut, Jr.
The Legacy of Rosa Parks
Website of
the Day
Decent Work in America: the 2005 Work Environment Index
October 25,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Condi
and Syrian Regime Change: Could Somebody Recommend a President?
Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn
Attack on the Palestine Hotel
Conn Hallinan
Sleight of Hand: Iran, India and the US
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Pulling the Court Strings
Jackie Corr
Barbara Bush: Poster Gorgon of the Houston Astros
Robert Day
Talk to Strangers
John Sugg
Judith
Miller and Me
October 24,
2005
Dave Lindorff
Revoke
Judy Miller's Pulitzer
Michael Donnelly
Shades of Iran/contra
Patrick Cockburn
A Nation Stands on Trial
Mike Whitney
Apres Rove
Norman Solomon
Iraq is Not Vietnam, But...
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Palestine
October 22
/ 23, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
When
Divas Collide: Maureen Dowd v. Judy Miller
Billy Sothern
Letter
from the Circle Bar, New Orleans
Saul Landau
Bush, an Assessment
Ralph Nader
An
Open Letter to Bush on Harriet Miers
Behrooz Ghamari
Whose Justice Does Saddam's Trial Serve?
Brian Cloughley
Bush the Strategist: Pyrrhus Without a Victory?
Diana Barahona
Venezuela's National Workers' Union
Fred Gardner
Dershowitzed!
Lee Sustar
What the War on Terror is Really About
Patrick Cockburn
Murder of Saddam Trial Defense Lawyer
Laura Carlsen
Mexico City Seamstresses Recall 1985 Quake
James Petras
China Bashing and the Loss of US Competitiveness
Joshua Frank
Invading Iran: Who is to Stop Them?
Manuel Garcia,
Jr.
Disasters are Us
Michelle Bollinger
When Abortion Was Illegal
Missy Comley
Beattie
CSI: Iraq
Kona Lowell
Intelligent Design: Making High School Fun
Ben Tripp
Tanks for the Memories
Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening To This Week
Poets' Basement
Albert and Engel
Website of
the Day
Indictment Watch
October 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
The
Democrats' Abortion Hypocrisy
Winslow T. Wheeler
Paying for Their Mistakes: Incompetence, Deception and the Defense
Budget
Col. Dan Smith
The Destruction of the National Guard
Norman Solomon
Media at Crossroads: 25 Years After Reagan's Triumph
Madis Senner
Abusing Katrina
Michael Donnelly
Richard
Pombo: DeLay in Cowboy Boots
October 20, 2005
Dave Lindorff
Impeachment
Comes to NYC
Ray McGovern
16
Fatal Words: Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost
Jeremy Brecher
/
Brendan Smith
Attack Syria? Invade Iran?: By What Constitutional Right?
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Refuses to Recognize Court
Kevin Zeese
Was the Iraqi Constitution Vote Fixed?
Ross Eisenbrey
Millions Would Lose Pay and Protections Under Enzi Amendment
Randy Shields
James McMurtry Makes It in Dayton
Justine Davidson
Prosecuting Bush in Canada for Torture: a Small Victory
After Lucas
Cranach
Judy and Holofernes
Joe Allen
The
Scandalous History of the Red Cross
October 19,
2005
Christopher Reed
Koizumi and the Rape of Nanking
Stephen Soldz
Bush
and Avian Flu: the Excuses Begin to Fly
Chet Richards
War
and Intelligence
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam on Trial
Scott Richard
Lyons
Multicultural
Columbus?
Ralph Nader
An Interview with Rev. William Sloane Coffin
Website of
the Day
Shocking Video: Why Birds May Be Taking Viral Vengeance on Humans
October 18,
2005
Chet Flippo
Merle
Haggard: "Let's Get Out of Iraq"
Ron Jacobs
Dual Devotions: the Catholic Church and the US Flag
Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor
A Tale of Two Cities: From DC to Toledo
Dave Lindorff
Judy Miller: Little Miss Run Amok
Virginia Rodino
A Winter Patriot: Reflections on the Antiwar Movement
Thomas Healy
The Weather in Goshen: Still Radical After All These Years
Ralph Nader
A New New Orleans
Stephen Lendman
The Sorrows of Haiti
Patrick Cockburn
On the Eve of Saddam's Trial: a Divided Iraq
October 17,
2005
Peter Linebaugh
Spinoza
and the Black Limos
Norman Solomon
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
Cockburn /
Sengupta
"If
the Sunnis Don't Like It, That's Their Problem"
Mike Whitney
Miller's Confession: Last Gasp Before Indictments?
Uri Avnery
Iraq Now: What Awaits Samira?
Harold Pinter
Torture & Misery in the Name of Freedom
Website of
the Day
Al Joudi v. Bush
October 15
/ 16, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ayatollahs
of the Apocalypse
Patrick Cockburn
"This Constitution Won't Get Me a Job"
Saul Landau
Two Terrorists and a Lush: Osama, Posada and Bush's Drinking
Neve Gordon
"Beyond Chutzpah": Exposing Grave Moral Distortions
Moshe Adler
Poverty in New York City
Christopher Brauchli
Lynndie England's Burden
Diane Farsetta
The Emperor Doesn't Disclose: the Fight Against Fake News
Sam Husseini
Notes on Current Reporting About Judith Miller
Monica Benderman
From Chaos to Conscience to Peace
Mickey Z.
POW Abuse by US: Nothing New Going On Here
Douglas C.
Smyth
George W. Bush, the Honorius of Our Time
Lee Sustar
Will Delphi Bust the UAW?
Fred Gardner
Cannabinoids Arrive in Realm of Established Fact
Elizabeth Schulte
A Former Panther's Georgia Campaign: an Interview with Elaine
Brown
Joshua Frank
Will the Democrats Save Harriet Miers?
David Vest
Down with Formalism! Up with Values!
Ben Tripp
Epistle II: the Reawakenign
Poets Basement
Engel, Albert, Ford and Louise
Website of
the Weekend
The
Hidden Canyon
October 14,
2005
Farrah Hassen
A
Somber Ramadan in Syria
Ron Jacobs
The
Black Panthers: They Haven't Forgotten; Neither Should We
Sasha Kramer
USAID
and Haiti: the Friendly Face of Imperialism?
Katrina Yeaw
The Student Struggle in Italy
Nicole Colson
Bird Flu: Militarizing Health Care
Raúl Zibechi
Survival and Existence in El Alto
Nikolas Kozloff
Hugo
Chávez and the Politics of Race
Website of the Day
LA Filmmakers Cooperative
October 13, 2005
Jeremy Scahill
Mr.
Bush Goes to Tikrit (Sort Of)
Jeff Birkenstein
A
Thoreau for Our Time: Why Cindy Sheehan Matters
Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher
Harriet Miers: Bush or the Constitution?
Stan Cox
Did You Know This About Iraq?
Anis Memon
The Curious Case of Russ Feingold
Gary Leupp
Miller, Libby and the June Notes
Dave Zirin
A Tribute to August Wilson
Matthew Koehler
America's Endangered Forests
Werther
The
Two-Headed Monster
Website of
the Day
Hurricane Song
October 12, 2005
Omar Waraich
Britain
and the Quake: Mean and Stingy
William Cook
Voices
Behind the Entombment Wall
Phil Gasper
Countdown
to a Legal Lynching
Dave Lindorff
Impeachment Now and Then: Clinton, Bush and the Polls
Matt Vidal
Capital, Power and Class
John Gautreaux
New Orleans will Never be the Same
Diana Johnstone
Srebrenica
Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for War
Mark Weisbrot
The IMF Has Lost Its Influence
Brian J. Foley
Gitmo Tribunals Endanger Public Safety
Website of
the Day
Columbus Day Lies
October 11,
2005
Roger Morris
/ Steve Schmidt
Strategic
Demands of the 21st Century
Lila Rajiva
Live from New Orleans: Abu Ghraib
Bill Quigley
New
Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again
Paul Craig Roberts
Natural Born Liars
Dave Lindorff
Recruiters in Schools: No Lie Left Untried
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Suspect Thy Neighbor
Mitchel Cohen
Showdown at Chuck E. Cheese
Tariq Ali
Pakistan will Never Forget This Horror
Website of
the Day
L'Heure Americaine
October 10,
2005
Cindy and Craig
Corrie
Rachel's
Words Live
Joshua Frank
Washington's War Dems
Gideon Levy
The Beautiful Life Without Arafat
Alan Wallis
The Fight for Free Speech at Union Square
Mickey Z.
In Defense of Liars
CounterPunch News Service
Vermont Independence Convention
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Police State is Closer Than You Think
Website of the Day
Dylan's Chronicles
October 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Rhetoric
and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People
Ralph Nader
Katrina
and the Growls of Greed
Jennifer Van Bergen
New American Law: Legal Strategies in the Dharfir Case
Saul Landau
An Oily Religious Dream
Jeff Halper
Setting Up Abbas
Lenni Brenner
The Millions More Movement and Zionism
Nikolas Kozloff
Bird Flu and Bush
Brian Cloughley
Training Soldiers in Iraq
Alice Slater
A Nobel Prize for Chernobyl?
John Gautreaux
A View from Cajun Country
Fred Gardner
Does the Controlled Substances Act Mean What It Says?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Leveethan Approach
M.G. Piety
Rot in the Ivory Tower: Collusion, Cover-Up and Kierkegaard
Tom Gorman
The Hitchens Doctrine
Mike Whitney
Bunker Days with George
Aseem Shrivastava
Beyond the Wasteland: Lessons from Afghanistan
Ben Tripp
Religion, an Epistle
Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Ford
October 7,
2005
Larry Johnson
The
Plame Case: the Real Issues
Will Youmans
Why
Do We Hate Our Freedom? Recruiters and Thugs on Campus
Dave Lindorff
Bird Flu: Evolution or Intelligent Design?
Judith Scherr
Haiti's Children's Prison
Russell D. Hoffman
Nukes for Peace, Revisited?: Nobel Prize Debacle
Jared Bernstein
Katrina and Jobs
Jennifer Van
Bergen
New
American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir
Website of
the Day
FBI Witchhunt
October 6, 2005
P. Sainath
"Take
That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal
Idol Again
Scott Parkin
When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged
Paul Craig
Roberts
Blundering
into Syria
Andréa Schmidt
Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion
Dave Lindorff
Easy
Money in the Big Easy
Joshua Frank
In Defense of Lew Rockwell
M. Junaid Alam
Jackboots at George Mason
Matthew Koehler
Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot
Robert Pollin
Is
the Dollar Still Falling?
October 5,
2005
Heather Gray
Militarization is Not an Answer for
Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines
Robert Jensen
Is
Bush a Racist?
Ramzy Baroud
Bush's Final Choice: America or
the Empire
Col. Dan Smith
Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything
is Bad"
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds Laughs Last
Paul Craig Roberts
Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons
Took Over
Alan Maass
Doing
the Right Wing's Dirty Work
October 4, 2005
Nikolas Kozloff
Shocking the Two Party System:
a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt.
Mike Roselle
Houston,
You've Got a Problem
Joshua Frank
The Scoop on Harriet Miers
John Chuckman
War
Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say
Alan Farago
Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers,
Hurricanes and the Keys
Mickey Z.
An
Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski
Christine & Ethan Rose
Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims
Gary Leupp
An
Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History
Website of the Day
Rodney
Crowell on Bob Dylan
October 3,
2005
Vijay Prashad
Desperation at Holyoke
Paul Craig
Roberts
Condi
Rice: Gunslinger
Joshua Frank
An Interview with Cindy Sheehan
Seth Sandronsky
The
Hiring Crisis for Black Teens
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Great Green Scare
|
Weekend Edition
October 29 / 30, 2005
Who
Are the Real Brownshirts in Toledo?
The Wedges of Hephaestus
By PETER LINEBAUGH
Who
are the brownshirts in Toledo? A few carloads of the Nazi white
supremacists pulled into north Toledo, Ohio, on 10/15, maybe
two dozen. Shortly thereafter, a vast, heterogeneous, and youthful
crowd assembled and sent them packing. The police liked to take
the credit. Credit? Folks naturally wondered who were the police
policing, since after the brownshirts were shooed out of town,
the police stuck around, the crowd believing that they were protecting
the Nazis. The police declared curfew and arrested 114 people
from a crowd between six hundred and one thousand. That was the
Toledo affray.
Yet, those with ears could
hear the wedges chaining Prometheus to the rock begin to rattle,
and those with eyes might see him stir.
Prometheus became the patron
saint of the proletariat. He was the son of Gaia, the earth goddess.
All the arts and crafts the alphabet, numbers, ships, mining,
therapy, intelligence, healing came from him. He was also
a rebel, because he defied Zeus and the established order. Zeus
punished him by chaining him to a rock with wedges forged by
Hephaestus, the god of the forge. Finally, Prometheus is destined
to rise.
There are two questions:
1) What do the youth want?
2) What is the business of
the Nazis?
For young people career planning
must involve competition for a few "jobs," or failing
that, then perhaps soldiering in Iraq or some other American
colony-to-be, but even then with the most careful adherence to
protocols of these career routes, one must be prepared that one's
resourcefulness can at any moment become criminalized and thus
a third option, prison, become realized. Not to mention a disaster,
such as Katrina. Thus young people seem to have on offer four
options in which violent death is, if not inevitable, then distinctly
possible in each of them.
What young people saw after
Katrina was not poor people in desperate straits but rich people
in malign neglect. They saw a city submerged, a city sunk. And
left to sink more. Even the competitive ethos, 'sink or swim,'
gets you nowhere. Meanwhile the authorities appeal to the "nature
gods" - the weather, the winds, the climate. But we saw
fools, incompetents, sadists, shooters, who call themselves "government"
and who would not, and will not, cast a rope to the drowning.
Educators, politicians, newshounds,
corporate execs, &c. delude themselves if they think that
young people do not know this. Journalists may complain the "mob"
is drugged, drunk, or dangerous; property owners may wring their
hands about their trampled front lawns; pastors and politicians
may raise the hoary head of the "outside agitator,"
and all parties in their dizziness may attempt to find stability
in an old, old wedge of Haphaestus, racism, and complain about
"black gangs" or "white anarchists." And
yet none of it is convincing at all. People gathered on 10/15
just a few blocks from the huge factory, DaimlerChrysler AG,
in the conviction that the violent, genocidal and slave ridden
history of the Nazi past is connected somehow to their future
prospects. All evidence says their future is near to nugatory,
negative, or nill.
So, like the impoverished agricultural
laborers of the depressed districts of England during the 19th
century, as reported by the Medical Officer of the Privy Council's
7th Report on Public Health (1865) the youth of Toledo
may as well say nihil habeo nihil curo, I have nothing,
I care for nothing.
Condescension towards unemployed
youth is matched by the delusions foisted upon those with jobs.
They cling with the force of desperation to that constant submission
to the demands of the ruling class for lower wages, longer hours,
speed-up, and removal of health insurance that may save their
"jobs" for another day until "economic development"
resumes. Helping to secure this delusion are the apparent alternatives,
i.e., war, prison, disaster.
That old figure of the IWW,
Mr. Block, the completely normal idiot, is told, "Just look
at the rioting young people!" "Look, an egg was thrown!"
And everyone puts signs in their front yards or taped to their
windows, "tax breaks for Jeep," or whatever. And Mr
Block falls back into his LazyBoy in belligerent passivity exhausted
by the effort.
But, jeepers Mr. Block, the
people who own us, lock, stock, and barrel live in Stuttgart,
company headquarters of DaimlerChrysler AG. They're the ones
who ruin our neighborhoods; poison earth, air, and water; make
pretty "landscapes" where we used to live; obtain only
the most advanced medical assistance; put their feet on the desk
of the West Wing, and bank at the World Bank, after admitting
to $963 million in profits so far this year, for, despite the
tone of The Toledo Blade and a city-wide habit of narcissistic
provincial self-pity, Toledo is a major point in the world automobile
industry and the locus of vast amounts of profiteering/exploitation.
The absolute law of capitalist
accumulation is this: the greater the social wealth, the greater
the relative surplus population, because what develops the expansive
power of capital also develops the labor power at its disposal.
Karl Marx explained it this way.
all the means for the development
of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become
means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort
the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the
level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content
of his labor by turning it into a torment; they alienate from
him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the
same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent
power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject
him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful
for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time,
and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut
of capital. In proportion as capital accumulates, the situation
of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Finally,
the law which always holds the relative surplus population or
industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy
of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than
the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes
an accumulation of misery a necessary condition corresponding
to the accumulation of wealth.
Apply this to Toledo as follows:
On the one hand, increasing ignorance as schools close, more
criminality as police and prisons expand, greater insecurity
for children and dangers of violence at home, and prospects of
war; then on the other hand, mandatory overtime in the plants,
destruction of union contracts providing health benefits for
the golden years, privatization by sub-contracting, insecurity
by employing temporary workers, and speed-up driving some people
to death. All this is called "lean production." This
is the local "equilibrium," part of the state and the
national, indeed, the global "equilibrium."
What
about the business of the Nazis?
Though its headquarters is
in Stuttgart, Germany, DaimlerChrysler AG is not a Nazi company,
but the parent company, Daimler-Benz most certainly was a principle
prop to the Nazi war regime of the Third Reich. They employed
slave labor; they gave Adolf Hitler a free Mercedes every Christmas;
the Swastika and Mercedes star embraced in pointed intimacy.
Ford Motor Company had a plant
in Cologne; it employed slave labor from Rostov, no wages, little
food, work till they drop. A U.S. Army investigator in 1945 concluded
Ford served as "an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military
vehicles." Henry Ford in 1938 accepted the highest medal
Germany could bestow, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Everyone
knows what an anti-Semite Henry Ford was. For his own Mein
Kampf, Hitler plagiarized from Henry Ford's The Dearborn
Independent; Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office;
Hitler proudly proclaimed, "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration."
Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors defended in March
1938 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia their German
operations as "highly profitable." James Mooney, GM
director of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler
two weeks after the invasion of Poland. GM manufactured
the trucks that invaded Poland; the truck was called the Blitz.
They re-tooled their Russelsheim plant to make the engines for
the fighters of the Luftwaffe. French and Belgian prisoners comprised
the labor force.
In this way it came about that
when the Toledo Jeeps carried U.S. soldiers into Nazi Germany,
they met German soldiers driving General Motor's Opel. Whichever
which way the war went the capitalist class was going to win.
The relative surplus population
is a disposable population. The history of capitalism is also
a history of planned morbidity, triage on a demographic scale,
and racist genocide. Far from being exceptional, the Nazis brought
these methods from the colonies, which all European empires
employed, into Europe itself, with the regime of slave labor
and death camps using the most modern "production"
methods.
Hephaestus was the Greek god
of the forge. He fashioned the wedges which sap our potential,
dividing us between the relative surplus populations and the
employed. In Roman mythology we know Hephaestus as Vulcan. Yes,
Vulcan that club of neo-cons which have sent us to war. Yes,
Vulcan who gave his name to vulcanization, the process of applying
heat to rubber rendering it impervious to heat or cold, preserving
its elasticity, and enabling it to resist solvents. Hence, tires.
If this story bears similarity to the Greek tragedies of old,
then the youth of north Toledo provides the chorus bearing witness.
Delphi is the GM parts manufacturer
which declared bankruptcy at the beginning of the month. Like
the oracle of the Greeks, at the temple of Delphi, the wealthiest
shrine of the ancient Mediterranean, serving at the same time
as the treasury to ancient Athens. this bankruptcy presages the
future for the industry as a whole. The maker of steering systems
and fuel injectors is demanding reduction of wages from $25 an
hour to $9, plus the power to hire non-union temporary and contract
workers. They can't get this in collective bargaining, so they
plan to get it in bankruptcy court.
Lean production drives some
workers mad. Some are beginning to kill. First, there is the
mechanical violence, or the violence of the machines,
such as the robot in the new DaimlerChrysler AG Jeep plant which
mangled Larry Fuetes to death on 17 May 2000. Second, is the
grudge violence, such as that of Myles Meyers who during
second shift lunchbreak on 26 January 2005 opened fire with his
shotgun killing his supervisor, wounding two fellow workers,
and then killing himself. Third, there is suicidal road
violence, as when on 28 May 2005 Jad Jamra drove north
on the southbound lane of I-75 colliding head-on with an eighteen
wheel tractor-trailer. Fourth, there is gender violence
as when Archie Cox, a worker on the Jeep assembly line, entered
Barney's convenience store in north Toledo on 17 June 2005, and
with two semi-automatic handguns shot his estranged wife and
her girl-friend, before shooting himself.
Get shot or become a shooter.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole and accumulation of misery
at the other pole, slavery, brutalization and moral degradation.
Besides the Greek, Karl Marx
also refers to the Hindu mythology. The bosses "deform the
conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor
process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they
transform his life-time into working time, and drag his
wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital."
The juggernaut is from India.
It was a huge float on wheels, heavy and high, a vast machine,
representing an avatar of Vishnu, "the preserver."
In 1790 28 Hindus were crushed under its wheels. The British
blamed the victims saying they hurled themselves in superstitious
devotion. Postcolonial scholarship suggests otherwise. The juggernaut
rolls down the roads; knocking over all in its way, mutilating
wayfarers, squashing them flat, indifferent to their hollering.
It rolls through the neighborhoods ready to flatten the relative
surplus population. Roadkill. Marx does not claim that the man
with the job sacrifices his wife and children. He says it is
the despotism of capital. Thus the juggernaut is not a mythic
idol of destruction, it is the actuality of 'going postal,' and
sending wife and child under the wheels first. As unsafe as an
SUV roll-over
There is a capitalist gender
game: deny the wife any wage, money, or power; force her to an
invisible 24-hour working day, responsible for the reproduction
not only of the next generation but of her husband, licking the
wounds he daily receives from the boss. And if she refuses? Then
he turns on her, transferring to the weakest, the humiliations
he cannot resist at the "job." By himself he sees only
suicide, homicide, familycide: production and reproduction alike
are his enemies. He obeyed, why cannot she?
Bang! slams
the hammer of Hephaestus.
Rebecca Harding Davis told
the story of the man at the furnace in Life in the Iron Mills
(1861). She imagines gender violence as integral to industrial
production. The iron worker driven to desperation, to crime,
to suicide, had carved a statue of a weeping woman. How is it
different now at DaimlerChrysler AG?
These men, going by with drunken
faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society
or God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no
reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and
I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible
dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of
death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness,
the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope
to come.
The engines shriek and groan.
The fiery pools of metal boil and surge. The furnaces break forth
with fury. The story is wrenching, because this proletariat is
used up, consumed, and discarded on the ash-heap. It too is unaware
of the massive flight from the plantation by the African American.
Thus Hope is a mystery, Hope is art. She describes the struggle
and with it formulates the perspective of history from the bottom
up while denouncing trickle down economics.
Reform is born of need, not
pity. No vital movement of the people's has worked down, for
good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy
mass. Think back through history, and you will know it. What
will this lowest depth thieves, Magdalens, negroes
do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian
theories, Goethe schemes?
Well nothing. At least nothing
directly from those creeds, theories, and schemes.
DaimlerChrysler AG is the multinational
that has squatted on frog city, a huge German toad whose innards
breathe foul stink and whose outwards seems all profit, dividend,
and progress. It is propped up by fawning, sychophantic municipal
lilliputians, stumbling over each other in the rush to offer
more tax breaks, make more sacrifices, take out more music from
schools, take out schools, to be replaced with jail, prison,
and a futureless tomorrow. Each hammers away at a little nail.
And the rising generation?
What awaits them? Nothing. The plants, or prison, or Iraq. Give
'em a couple years and some other war. Well, at last that relative
surplus population arose last weekend. It said No! to silly white
Nazi boys, knowing very well that the Nazi you could see was
nothing compared to those you can't. At Katrina the point was
not that "we" could see the poor; we could see the
Rich. We could see the deliberate urbanocide. Behind Daimler
is the Nazi past. Ford himself inspired Hitler. Give credit where
credit is due.
"The condemnation of one
part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over-work
of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of
enriching the individual capitalists."
Setting aside the great tyrants
of the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin, those with the most influence
in that century were the great tinkerer, Henry Ford, and the
great thinker, W.E.B. DuBois. Ford found new ways to make people
work the assembly line, and DuBois stated how the worker
was divided against himself, the color line. Ford wielded the
hammer of Hapaestus, DuBois showed the weakness in the wedges.
We can explain it this way. The iron molders started a strike
in America in 1859. W.E.B. DuBois quoted them in "The White
Worker," the second chapter of Black Reconstruction
(1935)
Wealth is power, and practical
experience teaches us that it is a power but too often used to
oppress and degrade the daily laborer. Year after year the capital
of the country becomes more and more concentrated in the hands
of a few, and, in proportion as the wealth of the country becomes
centralized, its power increases, and the laboring classes are
impoverished. It therefore becomes us, as men who have to battle
with the stern realities of life, to look this matter fair in
the face; there is no dodging the question; let every man give
it a fair, full and candid consideration, and then act according
to his honest convictions. What position are we, the mechanics
of America, to hold in Society?
Ah yes, to be sure, let us
look the matter "fair in the face." The white worker
does not say a word about slavery, not a word about the greatest
labor revolution the U.S. ever saw, the civil war. No wonder
he can't get anywhere. This is a mighty wedge of Hephaestus.
You hear them hammering away,
the politicians, the pulpit, the police, union bureaucrats, hammering
the wedges of Hephaestus. Black youth: tap! tap! Lean production:
tap! tap! White anarchists: tap! tap! Afghanistan, Iraq: tap!
tap!
The wedges are: racism, "job"
pride, oppression of women, drugs for children, the patriot game,
religious bigotry, and "praying" without acting.
The "black youth"
on the rampage, the "white anarchists" stirring things
up. These are the old, old tropes, or figures of speech, wedges
of Haphaestus nailing us to the rock of misery. Let the police
chief "take exception" to this and that, let the mayor
observe, "I did the right thing," and the mayor's opponent,
say "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." "We
have no money!" they plead at community meetings. Yes, the
huge surplus value created in Toledo is realized elsewhere. Those
holding the strings know what they're doing in Toledo just as
surely as they know how to make constitutions appear Iraqi in
Iraq. Stuttgart is the headquarters of Toledo; the decisions
made there determine our fate the mayor, the police chief,
the workers, the town just as surely as the decisions in
Washington D.C. determine what happens in Fallujah or Khandahar.
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University
of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite
books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents
in the Garden. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
REFERENCES
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life
in the Iron Mills (1861)
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (1935)
Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business (1973)
Karl Marx, Capital, volume one (1867)
The Toledo Blade, October 2005
George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens (1941)
The Washington Post, 30 November 1998
The Wall Street Journal, October 2005
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Coming in the Fall
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The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz
WHAT'S
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Grand
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by Jeffrey St. Clair
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