By: Paul S. Marchand
Summary: On May Day (or Beltane, if you prefer) we need to remember Lincon’s reminder that Labor is prior and superior to capital. The bankers at Bain Capital don’t bake bread to feed hungry people. Bakers do that, and today, we need to revive a preferential option for bakers and others who make real things over bankers and speculators who do not.
Happy Beltane.
If you didn’t know that tomorrow is Beltane, don’t feel bad; it’s a Celtic holiday that, until recently, had largely gone unnoticed in Christian and “post-Christian” Europe.
If you did not know that May 1 is Law Day and Loyalty Day in the U.S. you shouldn’t feel bad, either; you are not alone. They are obscure observances at best, and only exist because during the Eisenhower administration, the Federal government, skittish at the “socialist” overtones of the May Day celebrations of work and workers that happen throughout Europe and the rest of the world, metaphorically called out the forces of law and order to prevent a “socialist” holiday from gaining a beachhead on the shores of the New World.
Of course, the historic irony here is that May Day, as an international day of labor, got its start here in the United States, to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, where dozens of labor protesters were gunned down by police. Nonetheless, our almost obsessional fear of “socialism” has put the United States in the company of a number of right-wing governments that, over the years, have sought to repress or eliminate May 1 as a day dedicated to workers.
Now socialism -a concept of which almost no American has even a working understanding- has been, and remains, a bugaboo to most Americans. It is what the late semanticist (and sometime Republican U.S. Senator) S.I. Hayakawa would have called a “snarl word,” raising primitive, inarticulate, and angry passions. Yet, in reality, most Americans would not know a socialist if bit by one.
Names from the socialist pantheon -August Bebel, Jean Jaurès, Keir Hardie, and Eugene V. Debs, to name just a few- are unknown to the vast majority of Americans, who are taught little and care less about the social changes of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that established the social paradigms most of society now regards as normal.
Even today, to call something “socialist” is in many quarters to define it as wrong, perverse, and saturated with nameless evil. Ideologues of the American Right, those Beltway Bourbons who , as Talleyrand once observed of their namesakes, have learned nothing and have forgotten nothing --- “ils n'ont rien appris ni rien oublié” --- have been remarkably persistent and effective in tarring with the brush of socialism any person or school of thought who differs from their often remarkably retrograde -thoroughly Bourbon- ancien régime views of How Things Ought to Be.
One of the fundamental truths our Beltway Bourbons seem not merely to have forgotten, but to have actively rejected, is that “[l]abor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” These were not the words of a bomb throwing agitator; they were the carefully considered phrases of President Abraham Lincoln’s first Message to Congress.
At a time when the Beltway Bourbons and their Tea Party fellow travelers seem intent upon denigrating the dignity of work and workers by any means necessary, Lincoln’s words become all the more important. The American right has busily disseminated a narrative that the Ninety-nine percent of us who do not enjoy the spectacular success of the One Percent are, at best, mere slaves to class envy, and at worst, traitors to what should be the established order.
In fact, what angers the Ninety-nine Percent is not that some in our society have enjoyed spectacular success. Those whose skills or genius have changed the way we do things have earned their success. What the Ninety-nine Percent correctly resent are the sanctimonious and self-congratulatory posturings of those who -- as the late Texas governor Ann Richards once put it -- were born on third base yet believe they hit a triple, and who now seek to pull up the ladder of their vicarious success behind them.
What angers the Ninety-nine Percent is not necessarily that the system, if honest, may nonetheless produce disparate outcomes, but that increasingly, the system appears to be, and is, rigged. When it becomes clear that the deal has been crooked, and some of the players in the game have been unfairly disadvantaged by that crooked deal, those who have been cheated are justified in their anger and outrage.
On this May Day, which some in the party opposite would tar with the brush of “socialism,” or worse, we should ask the Beltway Bourbons and their useful idiots in the Tea Party what outcomes they think they should expect from their ongoing and systematic contempt for the workers who teach our children, walk our beats, fight our fires, harvest our crops, repair our cars, build our houses and offices, defend us at home and abroad, or otherwise do the work with which they themselves would not sully their lily white hands.
Eugene V. Debs used to point out that “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end.” America is what she is today because of the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of millions of workers who laid down their tools and took up arms in her defense. On May Day, we should remember that all of the financial speculation on the floors of all the securities exchanges of all the world will never produce one single tangible, useful object. Not any of the bankers at Bain Capital can perform the simple task of baking bread to feed hungry people.
Yet, the Bain bankers are often the first to express contempt for America’s workers, whom Mitt Romney so airily dismissed as the Forty-seven Percent. Certainly in Cathedral City, our reigning mayor has expressed her contempt for those who work for our city. When the mayor foists off on a colleague responsibility for work, travel, and representing the city because she herself is too lazy or personally obnoxious to others to do that work herself, and when she then attacks that colleague for actually doing the work in question, she demonstrates her contempt for work and workers.
On May Day, at Beltane, let us remember why we should always have a preferential option for the baker over the banker, and for those who work to advance the interests of their community over lazy, ego-driven sociopaths who won’t lift a finger to do any actual work.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily the views of any entity or organization with which he may be associated. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice, though common sense would suggest that if one were marooned on a desert island, one might prefer to be marooned with the baker rather than the banker, anc never with the sociopath. This post is an updated version of one published last year at May Day.
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