No two people are better qualified as guides to working-class Pittsburgh life than my weekend hosts, Michael and Karen Yates. Michael's dad was a blue-collar employee of Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) all his life, while Karen's grandmother worked as a cook on the steel-toting boats that plied the "three rivers" that trisect the heart of the city: the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio. Karen's Eastern European family belonged to the Byzantine Orthodox Church, as did the Warhola family. The church's distinctive gold onion-domes proliferate in Pittsburgh's working-class neighborhoods. Andy Warhola dropped the final "a" after moving to NYC, but in many ways he too is a product of the local working-class culture. His father was an immigrant blue-collar worker and Andy's earliest aesthetic influence was Ben Shahn, the left-wing muralist who celebrated proletarian life. So it is appropriate that the Warhol museum is located in Pittsburgh rather than NYC. We visited it on saturday afternoon and just missed crossing paths with Mick Jagger, who had showed up a few days earlier. It was gratifying to see the works in person that I had just read about in David Bourdon's excellent biography of Warhol. For all of Warhol's many justifiable attempts to prick holes in the pretensions of High Art, he was a most accomplished technician whose works continue to compel attention long after the hype about Pop Art has died down. On Saturday evening Paul LeBlanc and John Lacny stopped by. John is a brilliant young socialist activist in his sophomore year at the University of Pittsburgh and a PEN-L'er. Paul teaches history at several Pittsburgh colleges and is the author of "Lenin and the Revolutionary Party," "From Marx to Gramsci: A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics," and several studies of the American working class that are due to appear this year. He is also an ex-Trotskyist who has written extensively about the experience in a critical manner, while attempting to define its positive lessons. He worked closely with a number of the older generation of Trotskyists who were expelled from the party in the early 1980s when they resisted the "Castroist" turn. My own analysis of the problems of the Trotskyist movement have appeared on the Internet and are based on what I see as a dogmatic interpretation of "democratic centralism" brought on by the crisis following the defeat of the German revolution. Now that some of the fervor surrounding attempts to start a new "vanguard" party from scratch has died down, Paul's thinking has begun to take a more reflective direction--at least that's the way it appears to me. He is very much interested in what he calls proletarian subculture, which is generated by a unique combination of social, economic and political institutions at different moments in history. Like many other Marxists who are trying to gain a deeper understanding of such questions, Paul has found himself drawing from the same well: Gramsci and CLR James. In general, Paul does not think that a Marxist party can be built in the United States unless such a subculture comes into existence once again. Furthermore, it has to be grown organically and not sucked out of one's thumb as many "vanguard" groups believe. The next day Michael, Karen and I took a drive along the Monongahela River to see the relics of such proletarian institutions, whose decline is rooted in the collapse of the steel industry. The "Mon Valley" was at one time a hotbed of militant trade unionism and socialist politics. As you drive along the river, it is not to difficult to understand why. On either side of the river there are steep hills that contain working-class towns such as Homestead, Dusquense and Braddock. Rowhouses were built cheek-by-jowl to contain Eastern European immigrants who would walk downhill to the plants owned by Frick or Carnegie. They would return in the evening and stop by the myriad of saloons in these towns where talk about the job, their families, politics or sports could be shared. Few people owned cars, so you were likely to rub shoulders with co-workers long after the factory whistle blew. Also, there were constant reminders of which class you belonged to. Michael pointed out doorways underneath the railroad tracks that stretched along the river. Workers would enter these portals to get to the steel mills on the other side of the tracks. One could practically imagine a sign posted over them: "abandon all hope ye who enter here." Today most of the plants are gone and those that remain, appearing sporadically like a single tooth in an open mouth, are not producing a full range of products. The empty lots from which most of the mills have disappeared have little commercial value, since they are soaked with the toxic residue of over a century of steel production, including arsenic. As you drive along the railroad tracks, you think of the resistance of the railway workers who rose up in a powerful general strike in 1877 from West Virginia to Ohio. In Pittsburgh the local militia refused to fight the striking townspeople, sharing with them a hatred for mayor Tom Scott who ruled the city with an iron hand. When the militia refused to fight, the railroad vice-president Alexander Cassatt called in troops from Philadelphia. "We must have our property," he is quoted in Harvey Wasserman's radical "History of the United States". As the Philadelphia militia crossed the state, their train was stoned by crowds of workers in Harrisburg, Altoona and Johnstown, where Michael Yates teaches economics at the local state campus. In 1892 the workers at the Carnegie Steel plant in Homestead rose up after management led by Henry Clay Frick decided to reduce their wages and break the union. Michael told me that when Pinkerton guards came floating up the river on patrol boats, workers would shoot flaming arrows to try to sink them. A thousand pickets began patrolling a ten mile stretch of the river, while a workers committee took over the town. The local sheriff was unable to raise a posse to fight against them, according to Howard Zinn in "People's History of the United States." During the midst of the strike a young anarchist from New York named Alexander Berkman, who was Emma Goldman's lover, charged into the office of Henry Clay Frick determined to kill him. His aim was poor and he only wounded Frick. His "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist" and Emma Goldman's "Living My Life" give vivid testimony to the anger against the bosses and desire for justice surrounding such labor confrontations at the turn of the century. What combinations of economic and social circumstances can give birth to such fierce resistance in the future? That is a topic that is always close to the people who gathered at Michael's apartment on Saturday evening. Paul LeBlanc has been in touch with such issues since an early age. His father was a Communist Party labor organizer who lived in a town neighboring John Lacny's. In the late 1950s he sensed that there was something "different" about the values his parents held from the rest of the country, but did not really understand them until they explained that they were "socialists". He had to keep this a secret because his family would lose everything if this was made public. Ten years later when Paul was becoming radicalized around the war in Vietnam, he decided to become a Trotskyist and discussed his decision with his parents in the same way other children might discuss where they should go to college. His parents told him that it might be a good idea to visit NYC and consult with Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff to get a different perspective on his pending decision. I only wish I had parents who could have given me such advice. It might have saved me a lot of grief. Oddly enough, the mistakes that our generation made in the 60s and 70s have not been made in vain. John Lacny's generation seems to be much more tuned in to problems of sectarianism than we could have ever been. He spent a year in the ISO after starting his freshman year at U. of Pittsburgh and decided that self-declared vanguards were not for him. In the meantime, he has gathered together a core of activists at the campus who are completely dedicated to defending workers struggles in the United States and opposing imperialist wars abroad. While there is nothing that folks can do to recreate the conditions that spawned working-class revolt in Homestead at the turn of the century, we certainly can strive to sharpen Marxist thought and action. As we near the 21st century, there are grounds for cautious optimism as new signs of willingness to fight capitalist oppression keep surfacing. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
