Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 11: The Third World at Home Segment 6/6
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3. "To Consult Our Neighbor"

"The men and women who fought for hearth and home in 1892 provided a lesson as important for our age as it was for their own," labor historian David Montgomery writes in summarizing a collection of reports on Homestead. "People work in order to provide their own material needs, but that everyday effort also builds a community with purposes more important than anyone's personal enrichment. The last 100 years have shown how heavily the health of political democracy in a modern industrial society depends on the success of working people in overcoming personal and group differences to create their own effective voice in the shaping of their own futures. The fight for hearth and home is still with us."21

The community of labor in Homestead was destroyed by state violence "mobilized to protect the claims of business enterprises to undisturbed use of their property in their pursuit of personal gain," Montgomery writes. The impact on workers' lives was enormous. By 1919, after organizing efforts were broken once again -- in this case, with the help of Wilson's Red Scare -- "the average compulsory work week in American steel mills was twenty hours longer than in British ones, and American hours were longer than they had been in 1914 or even 1910," Patricia Sexton observes. Communal values disintegrated. When Homestead was a union town, large steps were taken towards overcoming traditional barriers between skilled and unskilled workers, and the rampant anti-immigrant racism. Immigrant workers, bitterly despised at the time, were in the forefront of the struggle, and were saluted as "brave Hungarians, sons of toil, ...seeking which is right." "Such praise from `American' workers was seldom heard" in later years, Montgomery points out.22

Democracy and civil liberties collapsed with the union. "If you want to talk in Homestead, you talk to yourself," residents said; outsiders were struck by the atmosphere of suspicion and fear, as we have seen. In 1892, the working class population was in charge of local politics. In 1919, town officials denied union organizers the right to hold meetings and barred "foreign speakers"; and when forced by court order to tolerate meetings, placed state police on the platform "to warn speakers against inflammatory remarks or criticism of local or national authorities" (Montgomery). The experience of Mother Jones outraged others, but few could speak about it in Homestead.

Forty years after the crushing of the union and freedom, "the establishment of rights at work through union recognition and the reawakening of democracy in political life appeared hand in hand" in Homestead, Montgomery continues. Working people organized, democracy revived; as always, the opportunity to consult our neighbors in an ongoing and systematic fashion is decisive in establishing democracy, a lesson understood by priests in El Salvador as well as labor organizers in Homestead, and understood no less by those who use what means they can to keep the rabble scattered and bewildered. The struggle continues along an uneven path. During the past several decades, the institutions of power and their priesthood have gained some impressive victories, and sustained some serious defeats.

The tendencies towards the new imperial age heralded by the international financial press are obvious and understandable, along with the extension of the North-South divide to the habitations of the rich. There are also countertendencies. Throughout the North, notably in the United States, much has changed in the past 30 years, at least in the cultural and moral spheres, if not at the institutional level. Had the quincentennial of the Old World Order fallen in 1962, it would have been celebrated once again as the liberation of the hemisphere. In 1992, that was impossible, just as few can blandly talk of our task of "felling trees and Indians." The European invasion is now officially an "encounter," though large sectors of the population reject that euphemism as only somewhat less offensive.

The domestic constraints on state violence that are fully recognized by the US political leadership are another case in point. Many were depressed by the inability of the peace movement to prevent the Gulf war, failing to recall that perhaps for the first time ever, large-scale protests actually preceded the bombing, a radical change from the US assault against South Vietnam 30 years earlier, in that case without even the shreds of a pretext. The ferment of the '60s reached much wider circles in the years that followed, eliciting new sensitivity to racist and sexist oppression, concern for the environment, respect for other cultures and for human rights. One of the most striking examples is the Third World solidarity movements of the 1980s, with their unprecedented engagement in the lives and fate of the victims. This process of democratization and concern for social justice could have large significance.

Such developments are perceived to be dangerous and subversive by the powerful, and bitterly denounced. That too is understandable: they do threaten the vile maxim of the masters, and all that follows from it. They also offer the only real hope for the great mass of people in the world, even for the survival of the human species in an era of environmental and other global problems that cannot be faced by primitive social and cultural structures that are driven by short term material gain, and that regard human beings as mere instruments, not ends.


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21 Demarest, "River", Afterword.

22 Ibid.; Sexton, War, 87.