I want to take a moment and treat two famous quotes from figures in the history of the U.S. labor movement as sort of aphorisms.
Joe Hill is famously quoted, “Don’t mourn, organize.” Mother Jones, on the other hand, is quoted “Mourn for the dead, fight like hell for the living.” Hill and Jones agree on what they would like people to do about problems in the present, assuming “organize” and “fight like hell” are synonyms. It’s not clear if they agreed or nto about mourning. It’s implausible that Hill meant “never mourn.” It’s more likely that Hill was referring to how he wanted people to respond to his own execution by the state of Utah, that he didn’t want the mourning of his death and memory of his life to impede “fight[ing] like hell,” to use Jones’ phrase.
What is further unclear is the function of mourning as expressed in these two quotes. Let me offer a provisional definition of mourning, perhaps too broad for other uses. Let’s say mourning is the emotionally charged recall of some incident(s) of death and injury which took place in the lifetime of the mourners and which the mourners had some experience of or affective tie to. On this definition, mourning is a subcategory of memory, and is a collective activity. The two quotes suggest that mourning is not organizing. This is reasonable, in that clearly some mourning is not organizing and some organizing is not mourning.
Ralph Chaplin’s poem “November” suggests some tie between mourning and organizing or at least the motivation to organize. Chaplin writes of “Labor’s martyrs, Labor’s heroes, Labor’s dead” and asks, “Who are we not to remember?” The poem refers to “the pledge we made,” and exhorts the collective implied in the pronoun ‘we’ to remember that pledge and remember the evoked dead “until the fight is ended, (…) until the debt is paid.” (Big Red Songbook, 256.) The final phrase of the poem, “until the debt is paid,” posits a tie between the past events to be mourned as unjust. The line further proclaims the existence of a future moment of restitution, presumably tied to Chaplin’s vision of a new society a “Commonwealth of Toil.” (Big Red Songbook, 198.) Chaplin’s poem’s link between mourned past and hoped-for future suggests more of a tie between mourning the past and acting in the present than in the Hill and Jones quotes. [This relates to Benjamin’s remark in his 12th thesis on the philosophy of history that “the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.” This knowledge is part of “the sinews of [the working class’s] greatest strength,” one of which is “its hatred,” which is “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”]
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[This is a bit of preliminary stuff to get wheels turning in my head about a topic I really want to think more about (I’m like a hermit crab, approaching a point by lateral motion), which is the representation of injury, particularly fatal injury as evidence of the destruction of persons, among workers’ and radical movements in the US pre-WWI. What use did images of Wesley Everest and Frank Little have, for instance, or descriptions of women killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire? I’m particularly interested in looking at these representations from a gendered standpoint. Little’s murderers certainly intended to make a point with his lynching and the way they carried it out, as did Zane Grey in his approving and only thinly fictionalized account of the murder.]
I think it’s probably not too far a stretch to point out that Joe Hill grew up in the shadow of extravagant mourning practices - clothing, jewelry, etc…. Mourning was commonly seen as the preserve of the wealthy elite, a ’superstructural’ waste of time, in vulgar marxist terms, and different from the genuine feelings of loss and grief that one feels on losing a loved comrade. In that context (which is also an anthropological one, stemming from Mauss’ observation that mourning is an obligatory practice and has nothing necessarily to do with emotion), we can see Joe and Mother Jones as yelling at their comrades to refuse the temptation to treat their fallen sisters and brothers in ways approximating the upper classes: silly memorials and expensive clothing symbolic of loss, and obviously, asking for a more substantial sacrifice: the sacrifice of organization against the upper classes.
Comment by Errico — February 28, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
Funny I was thinking of that Benjamin essay (?) right through your post, then you mention it. I’d say the whole thing is relevant, although I can’t say I really know what to make of it. I recently picked up Michael Lowy’s little book Fire Alarm at remainders price. (Usually I hate how Verso puts a little essay in hardback and charges heaps but I got it for $4.) It’s a reprint and exegesis of Benjamin’s Theses and you might enjoy it.
Comment by Mike B — February 28, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
hey you two,
Thanks for the comments. There’s a point of resonance between them, in what I didn’t quote from that Benjamin passage. Benjamin suggests two source of class power - hate and a willingness to sacrifice.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 28, 2008 @ 8:49 pm
just to add something by mao,
death can be as tall as mount tai (one of the highest mountains in china) or light as a feather
I think he puts life and death in a kind of order, which is to say that death is the definitive mark of a life, the termination as it were, which of course it is. So, in death, what we see is the life.
I see creation in Mao’s quote in the red book, whether death, in view of the life that it is the termination of, marks the positive dimension of struggle. Mao goes on to talk about the importance of the cook in the Yenan army (if I remember correctly), there is only contribution and its lack. all else is irrelavant.
in this, hate and willingness to sacrifice are a bit lacking, in my view, insofar as it does not hit the mark of what the consequences of a life (and its termination). I guess in that sense, mourning must be written out.
some immediate reflections in the above, I don’t know if I will agree with myself tomorrow but I think Mao goes to the heart of what Hill is saying while Jones gives some provision for human habits.
Comment by tzuchien — February 28, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
also, perhaps “debt” is literal, insofar as exploitation is the appropriation of profit and not, an existential debt in the sense of harm.
Comment by tzuchien — February 28, 2008 @ 11:31 pm
hey Tzuchien,
There’s a third option implied in the Chaplin poem and the Benjamin piece, which is collective memory as part of present organization. That’s the one I’m going to try and explore a bit in the next while…
Re: debt, I think the point is not just surplus value given the poem’s reference to labor martyrs. It’s not the capitalists’ gain that is the primary crime but the workers’ loss. Capitalists appropriate a certain quantity of time as wealth, but there’s some loss of time which workers really do lose but which don’t appear as wealth to the capitalists, a dead time if you will - like the loss of the futures of child laborers, that’s a theft of time which does not enrich the capitalist (though the capitalist’s enrichment may result from that theft). Put another way, the surplus value which becomes part of capital accumulation is not the totality of surplus time expropriated, particularly if one thinks of time qualitatively as well as quantitatively (as with experiences which one might get paid for but still feel that no amount of money could make the experience truly worthwhile).
Okay, I’m off to bed, fighting a bad cold…
mad love,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 28, 2008 @ 11:44 pm
This reminds me, Chaplin’s papers are archived in Washington. I’d really like to out there sometime and poke around. Need to get better at doing that sort of work first.
http://www.wshs.org/wshs/research/finding_aids/Ms71.htm
http://www.wss.org/wshs/columbia/articles/0201-a1.htm
Comment by Nate — February 28, 2008 @ 11:53 pm