This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

Criticism of the Left, from the Left, was for a long time the kind of thing my generation did for graduate degrees and coffee dates. Then History – the kind that takes a capital “H,” the kind that the American political class can’t spin as a Red-Blue identitarian flare-up, the kind we can’t help but see direction in – started happening again. The hard, patient slog of organized labor from Cairo to Madison laid the groundwork for something genuinely new in the second decade of the 21^st century: people realizing that neoliberalism was only working out for the people in charge of it, and that it made sense to get together and do something about it.

Maybe it can only seem bathetic to say that this History was what conducted me to a stretch of 8^th Street sidewalk last Thursday, straining to make out the names of speakers and reporters over the Aretha Franklin Greatest Hits being piped to a loudspeaker from an SEIU intern’s Ipod. But these are strange and wonderful times, the kind when a single burning man can topple an autocracy, and political metonymy on the order of “Big Business vs. Little People” sparks Midwestern prairie fires. I went downtown last week, like everyone else in the crowd, to deliver letters demanding that Wal-Mart sign a binding Community Benefits Agreement before they move into DC. Like everyone else in the crowd, I’ve seen enough in the past few months  to know that working Americans deserve, and are capable of, a lot more.

The people at Respect DC and the dozens who showed up in support of the campaign, comrades to the last man and woman, did a fine job by the standards of the Left. The problem is those standards themselves – they’re the marriage vows of a battered wife, after all, bleary and diminished expectations we had to content ourselves with in the few decades between the end of the Cold War and the present moment, when class struggle was a matter of damage control and no one could afford to question the the free market fundamentalism that elite economics departments were paid very well to evangelize. Brushfire, strong winds, the clearing of dead wood: those of us the capricious hand of Capital equipped with structural underemployment and time to read and write have our work cut out for us.

The criticism of the Left, at even its most poetic, doesn’t have room for tragedy these days. We aren’t writing elegies for a bound political titan anymore; ours are war hymns for a waking giant.

***

We are the frumpenproletariat: young people overgrown and half-feral, figures and minds spindly and tough like unpruned rosebush on the brick scree of the grouphouses we go home to at night. A neonate underclass just starting to recognize we’ll be worse off than our parents, midwifed by the labor organizers who’ve showed up this day outside Wal-Mart DC’s corporate headquarters, now passing out buttons, now collecting signatures, now adjusting sound equipment, now exchanging political war stories with young people hungry for a sense of momentum. The musk of vintage clothes and body odor mix with the saline tang of a Chinatown spring. “This is what democracy smells like” – a more precise slogan than any I’ll hear in the next hour, much more likely to horrify the people we’ve come here to make angry.

In the windows, equal parts curiosity and contempt, the faces of Wal-Mart corporate types. Reasonable solid button-ups in light colors, jacketless, loose in air conditioning turned on too soon this season. One gropes a baseball, menacing vaguely. They all look like ex-frat business school types, jaws indistinct from beer and red meat. Unremarkable, probably, the kinds of guys whose greatest regret in a given week is getting drunk enough for karaoke in Foggy Bottom.  Guys are probably convinced they’re doing the right thing, getting people jobs and cheap orange juice, putting up with the idle whining of some layabout hipsters with nothing better to do.

Of course this is their first and biggest mistake, the kind as likely to be made in less imaginative circles on the Left: we’re not here because we have nothing better to do, but because there is nothing better to do. Because 21^st century American capitalism hasn’t been able to distract or employ enough angry young people to keep us from coming. Because we are poor and this is our fight. Because Wal-Mart can only bring down the quality of life in our neighborhoods. Because, things as they are, any one of us could have to take a part-time job stocking pork sausage and instant mashed potatoes, and we want to make sure that  the wages we get will be enough to pay rent and eat. There was a time when kids fresh out of college came to these kinds of things for the sake of something called “social justice.” At our weaker moments we are nostalgic for such luxury.

There are clergymen, too many clergymen: another problem with the Left. A black one in a green suit whose words are exciting if you don’t pay attention to them, a white one, maybe Catholic, who shows up late and is content to scowl beatifically. Makes it seem like the big mistake of the corporate types looking down on us is that they didn’t pay close enough attention in sunday school, like it’s just a matter of finding the right New Testament moral allergen, goading some teary pity reflex, and having the yuppies rush downstairs into open arms and a chorus of gospel music. “Wal-Mart: You have a moral obligation …” says Reverend Greensuit, in tones that sound like either seduction or blackmail. More dignity, all told, in touching hearts with hot lead than with saccharine buckshot of conscience-baiting, if and when it comes to that. We are not errant Children of God, toiling in ignorance against a greater harmony we’re too proud to recognize, that will someday be set aright. We are soldiers on a cratered, barbwired, landmined social field that is broken, was always broken, that we all fight on whether or not we know it and that most of us lose on (so far, at least) whether or not we care.

The ways we choose to live and think about our lives have consequences – something thoughtful conservatives have always been better at talking about than we have – and we demand be treated like this is the case. “I don’t mean it, I’m just getting paid to write and talk like that, just a way to pay bills, you understand…” Cowardly words, debasing words. The men and women sneering through the windows chose to throw their lot in with the corporate class, chose to get up this morning and do the work that will bring grindingly efficient working poverty to new parts of DC, chose to be up there in collars and ties instead of down here ragged and stubbly. And they deserve much more hounding, derision, and violence than we’re permitted in a sidewalk protest. And this is a matter of respect, because they are not cogs in an economic machine but free beings who could have done otherwise, whose dignity cries out for the kind of recognition only punishment can bring.

Then the worst: “We’re not here to oppose you, Wal-Mart… we’re here to partner with you, to show you your true self-interest.” Reverend Greensuit again, and I spasm. The true self-interest of the people in the office building is exactly what they think it is, to keep people like Ernestine Bassett, the Maryland cashier operator who spoke earlier in the afternoon, working three jobs at minimum wage, busting any attempts at organizing so they cart home more wealth than ever off the backs of the people who actually produce it. From a man of the cloth, the spiritual torpor is jarring: “Get thee behind me, Satan!” is the tortured cry of the Son of Man in the desert, not “Ah, well, so long as you’re here, we might as well try to manage your evil for everyone’s benefit.” Labor and Capital are not broken fragments to be fit together with  the right spiritual glue; as in Revelations, one must end gnashing teeth in the Lake of Fire and the other in a tearless New Jerusalem.

“We come with an olive branch, but that olive branch has a time limit”- as impolite a threat as a man in a clerical collar is allowed, I guess, when private security guards are watching him. Some whistles and applause, the kind you might hear after a Bible Camp play when the kids forgot most of their lines but damn if they’re not adorable in their little robes and you have to anyway. Then, unconvincingly, as late lunch hours run out and the young people nearest the street begin to fumble with their bike locks: “We’re not willing to be stepped on. We will come back.”

The thing ends messy. The Wal-Mart people have locked their offices and mailboxes and the letters come back unopened. A thinned and sunstricken crowd disperses into the glass-and-steel wage slavery of downtown Washington. I walk across G street and through a revolving door and around the squat stone arsenal cool of the National Portrait Gallery. In a corner, suddenly, the manic chiaroscuro of John Brown, feral and Penteteuchal against the bourgeois (or worse) composure of writers, engineers, false Mormon prophets flanking him. His eyes kilns of a fire too hot for a God of Mercy. A Great fucking American. The kind who knew how to get things done. The kind who, when he said he’d come back, did.

 

 

 

---

First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...

---