Can You Be His Friend?* II

 published February 4, 2009

Article of the Day: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1138673/Vince-Cable-Bring-guillotine--bankers.html

Leon Berger - "The Grand Tinkerer of the Age of Reason"

This the story of a man making a better mouse trap, or possibly, rat trap would apply even better. A man who saw improvement in an everyday appliance could help liberate society.

The Olde Rusty Razor just wasn't getting the job done well enough in late 18th century France. A dull blade and a worn and frazzled channel after ten years of use could do an uncompleted job, and when the action is chopping off a head, that is not acceptable in Revolution management. The decent thing in class war is a clean cut.

After the Republic was established and the Patent Office opened, drawings were presented for approval for manufacture. Helping gravity do the job more efficiently, the guillotine now called for ball bearing glides, grease fittings, self sharpening blades, and block and tackle lifting design for ease. Leon Berger had a better idea.

As the call goes out to reestablish French Revolutionary justice, let's not forget the man who saw an oppurtunity to speed up the line. Let's give him his due.

Are there more friends of Leon Berger out there?

A Belated Happy Bastille Day from the Friends of Leon Berger!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/13/france-workers-car-factory

Staff at bankrupt car parts maker New Fabris are threatening to blow up the plant if they do not receive compensation from the companies that provided most of the firm's business.

Friday, April 30, 2010

Ye Shall Know Us By Our Sign

Friends of Leon Berger Society

Communique #1: May Day weekend 2010

Reference: https://escapedwageslave.blogspot.com/2009/02/can-you-be-his-friend.html

Persons wishing to see the fulfillment of Mr Bergers' plans have swelled the membership to unprecedented levels. As we attend May Day ceremonies, festivities and events let's all recognize each other with a unifying symbol - a red thread tied around your neck will identify you as a friend and show gratitude to an innovative man. Time does not forget good ideas.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

I awoke this morning with a txt proclaiming the End of the World (as we know it) from a stalwart Green Party activist in SW Chicago. His guy for State Rep, Ochsenfeld, a very decent man got 15%. Locally Greenies clocked in at anywhere from 7 - 15%. The top of the ballot for Governor, Rich Whitney - a very credible presentation to be a candidate in the land of Mutt and Jeff politics - got 3.4%. The showing by Rich Whitey (as the ballots prepared by the Chicago Election Commission printed last week) denies him funding (correction: 11072010, ews... creates position for GP to gather exorbitant number of petition signatures) for the next election. The misspelling of his last name blamed on bureaucratic error. I can't get enough of Chicago politics.

If it was so easy...

As Paris burns, ... reporting from the front lines... holding the barricades

- friend of Leon Berger 11032010

**************************

**************

Alt Reality

Ron Coleman Has an Epiphany: We Live in Different Moral Universes, and We Are No Longer Even Close to Being One People

I guess I had an epiphany. It is funny how we think we're "based now," but are, really, still stuck in old mindsets.

On the way to my new office I drive past the office of a relative whose law office I once worked in as an intern, many years ago. He was kind and generous.

Though we never grew close, I was always grateful for his early guidance and exposure to law practice. He is pretty successful. We have lived nearby, and stay in touch a bit.

But politics... politics, like sex, changes everything.

He is a committed Clintonite.

And as my public persona has become more and more political in recent years, we have clashed.

I have tried to avoid personal conflict with him, but above all I have been astonished at his intellectual dishonesty about the people and causes he supports.

And what I am often trying to do is justify myself, show him his attacks on my views (say, on Facebook, where they are mostly likely to be found) are based on mistaken premises, etc.

I always liked him. But now I am driving by his office regularly, and I don't stop in.

And I thought about this, and another relationship came to mind - one with a former college professor of mine whom I respect and like a lot. He is a liberal, too, but he is also fighting an important public cultural fight against a particularly ugly LW myth that is about.

We recently renewed our relationship when Mrs. C picked up his book on this topic, and we attended a public lecture of his nearby, and it was really very pleasant.

(This is why you go to the great universities, by the way.)

And we started corresponding.

And I should have known trouble was brewing because at this lecture, involving a topic in American history, there was a Q&A session, and inevitably Trump came up, and inevitably he reassured the audience that Trump was awful and deserved to be removed.

And we chalked this up to, well, the social milieu. He "has to say that." He even has to believe it.

Everyone can have his blind spots, and politics is, well, funny. After all, his generation was raised to believe that Nixon was the antichrist.

Nixon was not the antichrist.

But in the course of our correspondence about the culture war, in which we agreed about just about everything, the politics crept in, inevitably.

And rather than excerpt his comments, presumably meant to be private, let's just say what I hoped was not the case, is the case:

We do not live in the same moral universe.

This cannot be a matter of how we understand or perceive facts. The way people on the left describe facts is a manifestation of an outlook that is a set of choices.

These choices are not defensible any more, if they ever were.

And I was writing in this mode of trying to find common ground - and to his credit, he was, too... except that his "factual" premises (merely political conclusions) were just absurd. They were no more reasonable or measured, in and of themselves, than a Twitter exchange.

Although, again, the tone was, and this is not for nothing.

And I thanked him for this thoughts, and promised I would write back.

I have not written back.

I guess am tired of doing the work with ... these people.

"These people" who I like, as people. Who have been generous to me, who have extended themselves personally, who are humane and generous... but in the hyper-politicized world we all live in, it is I who have to prove to them, constantly, that no, I'm still ok!

I am certainly not going to go out of my way to antagonize "these people." I at least owe them that much.

But I guess I am tired of going out of my way to assuage them, reassure them, be the moderate one, pretend to think their takes could be reasonable.

To pretend.

Why I am pretending to tolerate people who believe I am in league with Literal Nazis and that in supporting Trump I am supporting, as another academic I have known for years said of him on Facebook, "the worst person who ever lived"?

He has tenure, and he wrote this publicly.

You can't go home again.

I don't know if I can ever stop in at that office halfway between my home and my work where I had my summer internship 35 years ago. I like my dad's cousin, because I like most people.

But I do not respect him. He does not respect me.

Is this a proper epiphany, though? Should we be as Marxists and indeed politicize everything and every relationship, even when there are common and human reasons to want to maintain them?

Or is it just rational to avoid inevitable conflict and inevitable retreat?

http://ace.mu.nu/

I Will Not Obey

I WILL NOT OBEY - transcribed from the performance at the 

Haymarket Monument Forest Lawn Cemetery Forest Park, IL 

by Utah Philips.

November 1986

... the habit of reasoned disobedience.

***********

The new ruling party is holding the Aces

The rest of the cards are all missing faces

I'm sorry, I can't know you today

What can one say?

I will not obey.

Give us your sons, give us your daughters

No one is safe or immune from the slaughter

How indifference makes them rage

What can one say?

I will not obey.

National Guard or freedom fighters

All houses belong to cigarette lighters

But who hides in the smoke?

What can one say?

I will not obey.

Better, perhaps, to perish outside of the bunkers

Where our Generals hide

I turn away and spit

What can one say

I will not obey.

Give us the minds of your children to learn

The substance of books of which

We have not burned

But can they see the sky for rain?

What can one say?

I will not obey.

Soon all tyrants will feel our impatience

We choose to make our own combinations

I was always willing to agree

What can one say?

I will not obey.

The essence of contract is agreement

Not coercion or obedience

And agreement is sacred.

What can one say?

I will not obey.

There are so few wars of peoples' liberation

The people have so seldom risen

Only the armed faction

Listen, the armed faction lies

They recreate the State through their action

When the People rise

It is not they 

But the State which dies

I sing this song for the prisoners release

Most of all now for the new State police

You see the guns have changed hands. Again.

What can one say?

I will not obey.

**********************************

Sunday in Detroit

The Ford Hunger March of 1932

By Martha Grevatt

Published Mar 25, 2009 3:45 PM

March 7 was the 77th anniversary of one of the bloodiest chapters in Detroit labor history: the Ford Hunger March of 1932.The stock market crashed in October of 1929. By 1930 millions were without work. Nowhere was the pain felt more deeply than in Detroit, where the auto industry’s promise of prosperity had turned into its opposite. When the Trade Union Unity League, the Communist Party, theYoung Communist League and the newly formed Unemployed Councils called a coast-to-coast demonstration on March 6, among the millions of participants were 100,000 at a rally in the Motor City. Detroit police broke up the protest, clubbing and arresting scores of participants.Two years later the crisis had deepened; one statistic showed four Detroiters dying of hunger every day. Unemployment compensation did not exist. With two-thirds of his employees laid off, Henry Ford, then the richest man in the world, said the unemployed created their own misery by not working hard enough.

Detroit’s network of Unemployed Councils had grown into one of the strongest in the country, saving untold numbers of families from a life on the streets. A citywide meeting of the councils—there were more than 80 neighborhood-based chapters in metropolitan Detroit—decided to march on the Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Mich.The march, called by the Unemployed Councils and the United AutoWorkers, had 14 demands: “Jobs for all laid off Ford workers; immediate payment of 50 per cent of full wages; seven-hour day without reduction in pay (bold by EWS); slowing down of deadly speedup; two fifteen-minute rest periods; No discrimination against Negroes in jobs; relief [welfare], ; free medical aid in Ford hospital for employed and workers and families; five tons of coal and coke for the winter; abolition of Service Men [Ford’s hated private army of spies and thugs, led by the notorious Harry Bennett]; no foreclosures on homes of Ford workers; immediate payment of lump sum of fifty dollars for winterrelief; full wages for part time workers; abolition of the graft system of hiring; and the right to organize.” (Philip Bonosky, Brother Bill McKee: “Building the Union at Ford”)

The protest brought out thousands of workers. Beyond the immediate 14 demands, signs connected issues affecting workers around the world. They called for freedom for the Scottsboro Nine, a group of Black youthsfalsely accused of raping two white women. They said “hands off China,”a reference to the sale of scrap iron to Japan, which used it in attacking the Chinese people.The march began and proceeded without incident in Detroit. Dearborn, however, was Ford’s personal fiefdom; his cousin Clyde Ford was the mayor. Marchers were attacked with tear gas at the city’s border, but forced police to retreat with a barrage of stones and clumps of frozen mud. Police regrouped, only to have the scenario repeated.

At the entrance to Ford’s complex, Dearborn police were reinforced by the Dearborn Fire Department, Detroit police, and Ford’s own “Service Department.” The firefighters turned their hoses on the unarmed marchers, while police fired a hail of bullets. Coleman (also spelled Kalman) Leny, Joe DiBlasio, and Joe York—the 19-year-old district leaderof the YCL—were killed. Fifty more were wounded. When Unemployed Council leader Alfred Goetz attempted to lead an orderly retreat, machine-gun fire, this time from Ford’s own finest, began anew. The auto magnate’s right-hand man, Harry Bennett, was immediately recognized and injured by stone-throwing workers. Bennett emptied hisown gun and then a police officer’s revolver into the workers. He and his goons killed 16-year-old YCL member Joe Bussel and left many more injured. Forty-eight workers, some in their hospital beds, were arrested. More repression followed, with hundreds fired if they possessed left-wing literature or donated to the martyrs’ funerals. Membership inthe CP was cause for arrest.At the funeral, Ben Bussel spoke loudly: “In the name of my murdered brother, I call upon you to organize and fight. Long live the workers of the world.”

As a band played the International—the lyrics “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” particularly fitting—some 80,000 joined the march to the cemetery.In June a Black worker, Curtis Williams, died of wounds suffered during the march. Segregation policies kept him from being buried with his comrades; the funeral committee hired a plane and scattered his ashesover the cemetery—or by some accounts over the Rouge. Attorney Maurice Sugar had written two months earlier that police brutality “grows out of the institution of private property under which one class in society lives in luxury at the expense of the great mass of workers who are compelled to live in a state of poverty, wretchedness,and despair.” (EWS) (Christopher H. Johnson, “Maurice Sugar, Law, Labor and the Left in Detroit, 1912-1950”) Although Sugar was able to convince the grand jury not to indict any of those arrested, no one was ever indicted for the Ford massacre.

In 1941, after years of sacrifice and struggle, the Auto Workers union finally won recognition from the Ford dynasty. In 1992 UAW Local 600 retirees bought five headstones—including one for Williams—and placed them by the four graves. On each is carved the words, “He gave his life for the union.”As workers begin again to fight evictions, foreclosures and the layoffs that cause them, the unyielding courage of the Ford hunger marchers is an inspiration.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.