There's a review of a new book titled “Killing for Coal” by Thomas G. Andrews in the latest New Yorker magazine that is worth reading even if the reviewer Caleb Crain draws the rather perplexing conclusion:
>>In the end, though, government was the redneck’s [miner's] ally and even his salvation. Without the intervention of federal troops, trusted by both sides to behave neutrally, the coal war would almost certainly have lasted longer and taken even more lives. It was a federal bureaucrat who praised the miners’ effort as “a strike of the twentieth century against the tenth-century mental attitude.” After a journalist was murdered for trying to expose the Ludlow sheriff ’s political corruptions, a federal district attorney called it “a political killing,” and the Colorado Supreme Court deposed the sheriff, writing of his vote rigging that “no more fraudulent and infamous prostitution of the ballot is conceivable.” In other words, the lesson of Ludlow may be that, in the pursuit of energy and in combats between capital and labor, there is one more force to reckon with. When a representative democracy wins people’s trust, it is capable of moderating disputes among corporations, the market, and the individual.<< I have to laugh at this summary, especially with the memory of a movie titled "Cautiva" fresh on my mind. This Argentine movie with a plot similar to "The Official Story" (a desparacido's baby is adopted by a junta-supporting cop) ends with text on the screen indicating that not a single cop or military officer involved with torture or disappearances has ever been brought to justice in Argentina. Barack Obama has apparently been studying the Argentine example since he has just announced that he is not interested in legal proceedings against the lawbreakers of the previous administration. Meanwhile, following the Ludlow massacre, not a single militia member or national guardsman in Colorado ever was punished for having killed 66 miners and their family, nor did they get trade union recognition. The author of the New Yorker article is also the guy who wrote the piece on radical children's literature from the NY Times book review section that I forwarded yesterday. Taking a second look at his article, I now notice this: "After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years — to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism. But fewer parents wish for their children to carry all these virtues into adulthood. It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers’ collective." I don't know quite how to put this to Caleb Craine, who apparently is bright enough to have garnered a PhD from my employer Columbia University, but Marx never advocated donating "the family home" to a workers collective. He was far more interested in seizing the means of production like auto plants, etc. Included in the means of production, of course, are newspapers and magazines like the NY Times and the New Yorker who are bent on keeping their readers mystified about who creates wealth in this society and how that wealth is a product of unpaid labor. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
