When I decided to undertake my Wanderjahr, I thought it would involve my participation in a few of the national cultures of Europe in the waning days of capitalism. The reaction of the various governments to the collapse of the bubble economy of the credit boom has uniformly been through austerity measures or “cuts,” so the strikes and demonstrations that are now occurring are the predictable response of a working-class that has not entirely lost its class-consciousness. Indeed, I started writing the blog in the expectation of events that would begin on September 7.
I had, however, to begin my report on European moods and actions from my perch on Revere Beach, looking across the Atlantic but not seeing that distant shore. What I have written is not the report of an eye-witness, and it is thus far filtered through theory rather than being experienced. I have been largely invisible. Such writing may serve some purpose, but it will hardly engage the reader as would news of a first-hand confrontation with pepper gas and snarling police crowd-control dogs such as opponents of the Iraq war ran into February 15, 2003, in New York City.
Let me introduce, therefore, the “subject” in what I still plan as a more subjective account of this historical phase: that’s me, Victor Paananen, 72 years old, portly, with bad eyesight. I am not going to begin to write an autobiography here, and there will be no substantial attention given to my life as student, family man, professor and academic administrator (or “bureaucrat,” if you prefer). Instead, I propose to account for the socialist outlook that has been evident in my first-three blog entries.
Socialist Alternative, of which I am a member, regularly runs in its newspaper Justice a feature titled “Why I am a Socialist.” This blog is of that kind, but I will accept that the reasons why I am a socialist may be more evident to a psychologically acute observer than to me. I was not born into a time when the USA was hospitable to socialism, and my socialism had to be worked out over a long period and was not really assisted by the two excellent universities that I attended. “My Long Crawl toward Socialism “ might be a more apt title for this blog rather than “Why I am a Socialist.”
I was born into a working-class family in the Harbor area of Ashtabula, Ohio. The Harbor is the part of this Lake Erie iron ore port that was largely settled by Finns. My parents had had a hard time in the Great Depression, but by 1938 my father had found work, as my birth certificate says, as an oiler on the New York Central Railroad. Finnish-Americans are often divided into Lutheran Finns and Red Finns, and my parents were on the Lutheran side but not by a large margin. My father and his brothers were also active in the Temperance movement which organized sport and music for the Finns in the hope of providing an alternative to alcohol.
The Depression had made my parents Roosevelt Democrats, but both had a class-consciousness that ran deeper than that. All Finnish-American communities had a socialist presence, and Finns made up a large percentage of the membership of the Communist Party and the IWW. I remember seeing the Finnish-language IWW newspaper Industrialisti a couple of times as a child even though my parents were not members, and the IWW had its hall in my neighborhood. There was no escaping the awareness that resistance to the system that produced the Great Depression could run deeper than that put forth by Roosevelt.
Before her marriage, my mother, who was born in Finland, worked as a domestic servant, beginning in her teens. The employment of Finnish maids was not unusual in the years between the two wars: the one who appears in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was by no means unique. My mother received very bad treatment from her employers, and was at times denied both proper food and needed medical attention.
I dedicated my book British Marxist Criticism to my mother, saying that her class-consciousness was formative--”formative” being a favorite word of the critic Raymond Williams, who used it to describe shaping forces within an individual or culture. To put it simply, my mother detested with a passion the people that Finns call herrat, a word which very literally would mean something like “those whom we must call ‘mister.’” They are the Big Shots, the bosses, our Superiors, or in a phrase that I’ve more recently preferred Our Masters. Some of these feelings about herrat she brought with her from Finland, where the class encompassed landowners, clergy, and government officials.
My grandfather Otto Paananen had been seriously injured in a mining accident in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but after moving to Ohio did hard manual work on the iron ore docks of Ashtabula Harbor. He had left Finland to avoid conscription into the Czar’s army, Finland being then a semi-autonomous part of Russia. His four sons, my father the youngest, struggled through the Depression, working at times in CCC camps or on WPA projects. After that, as a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, my father advanced from “oiler” to “car inspector and repairer” and did some union work. I have early memories of attending union meetings with him, and being half-suffocated in cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke. We received the union paper, titled simply Labor, in the mail, and I not only read it as a child but continued a subscription to it as a freshman at Harvard. My father died aged only 46 while I was still in high school.
(I’ll stop here for now. There are several sections yet to come of the particular blog entry. My crawl toward socialism is perhaps of interest as the experience of someone NOT of the 60s New Left but one of the last of the children of the 1930s, caught between Stalinism on one side and McCarthyism on the other. Or not.)
No comments:
Post a Comment