Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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"Dirty Industrial Dawn": Alienation and Its Discontents in Harvey Swados's On the Line / Robert Niemi
<1> Rankled by mid-Fifties media cant that characterized American blue-collar workers as essentially and happily middle class in situation and outlook, radical novelist/labor journalist Harvey Swados wrote an angry retort entitled "The Myth of the Happy Worker" (The Nation, August 17, 1957). Therein Swados sardonically noted that "there is one thing the worker doesn't do like the middle class: he works like a worker. The steel mill puddler does not yet sort memos; the coal miner does not yet sit in conferences; the cotton mill-hand does not yet sip martinis from his lunch box. The worker's attitude toward his work is generally compounded of hatred, shame, and resignation." [1]
<2> Swados knew about physically punishing, degrading work first-hand. A member of Max Shachtman's Trotskyist Worker's Party from 1940 to 1942, Swados sounded out the ranks of the industrial proletariat by working as a riveter at a Bell Aircraft plant in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, and later toiled at a sprawling Brewster Aeronautical plant in Long Island City, Queens. In the spring of 1956, after a long hiatus from factory work, Swados took a job as a metal finisher at a huge, newly opened Ford Auto Assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, fifteen miles west of his home in Valley Cottage, New York. [2] Swados's stint at Mahwah only lasted a few months but he had undergone considerable maturation as a political thinker since his earlier factory forays and was now able to see blue-collar work for what it truly was—not as a blank canvas for anti-capitalist radicalism but as a spiritual wasteland as devoid of human dignity as it was of revolutionary potential. While at Mahwah, Swados wrote his second book, a proletarian Winesburg, Ohio of eight interrelated short stories. Entitled On the Line (1957), the book is the literary counterpart to "The Myth of the Happy Worker" in that it movingly depicts the treadmill of industrial work and consumer culture as a soul destroying grind with no discernible exit.
<3> In his magisterial history, The New York Intellectuals (1987), Alan Wald provides an overview of Harvey Swados's life and literary career that includes the suggestion that the factory vignettes in On the Line "dramatize the four characteristics of alienated labor elaborated by Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844." [3] Without quoting Marx (or Wald) at great length, suffice to say that the four characteristics of working-class alienation can be broadly summarized as: (1) alienation from the product of one's labor leading to (2) alienation from the work itself, which in turn leads to (3) alienation from one's self, which finally leads to (4) alienation from others. Wald goes on to cite some examples of how these forms of alienation play out in On the Line. One purpose of this paper is to extend and articulate Wald's thesis by applying Marx's categories of alienation to On the Line in a more thoroughgoing manner. More centrally, though, my goal is to examine the various psychological stratagems that Swados's workers employ to try and make their lives bearable. These stratagems amount to ideology, not as false consciousness but in the Althusserian sense - avant la letter - as socially necessary illusions, more specifically as compensatory illusions that allow these desperate men to hold onto some last vestige of self-respect, fellow feeling, sense of purpose, or hope for a better life in a world that offers only anomie, powerlessness, and degradation.
Alienation from Product
<4> For Marx, the industrial worker confronts "the product of [his] labor as an alien object that has power over him. The relationship is, at the same time, the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien world confronting him, in hostile opposition." [4] In On the Line, the product of labor, i.e., the automobile, is a stubbornly intractable object on the factory assembly line, its interminable iterations constantly and voraciously demanding attachments, adjustments, repositioning, muscling, welding, fitting and refitting, pounding, filing, spraying, fixing, and a thousand other ministrations great and small before it comes off the line in presentable working order. The assembly line runs the workers; never vice versa: an exquisite emblem of worker alienation from product (and process) at its most fundamental.
<5> Yet, outside the factory where it is made, the automobile can take on the aura of a most desired object, at least for those naïve in the ways of American capitalism. In "Fawn, With a Bit of Green," Kevin, a young Irish immigrant bachelor "fresh off the boat," decides that he wants to own one of the cars he helps to manufacture. Having an automobile will increase his mobility and social status and perhaps augment his love life but mostly he wants to own a new car so that he can feel he has discarded his foreignness and "become an American" (37). After buying a car on the installment plan, Kevin suddenly sees "with bitter clarity that he would be chained to the line for years, chained to the drudgery, the monotony, the grinding labor - all of which lost their novelty and certainly their glamour when you had won your prize - literally until the prize itself had become valueless and demanded that you replace it with another, shinier one" (40). Realizing that he has made a devil's bargain, Kevin puts the car up for sale and buys a one-way ticket home. Even though his hometown in Ireland is, in his words, "a dull and stagnant place," it still surpasses the empty promise of the American Dream that compels a man to trade his life for overpriced and soon obsolete consumer items as if they amounted to something of transcendent value. Formerly a magical object for Kevin, the automobile, once attained, instantly loses its symbolic value, a rapid depreciation analogous to the monetary loss in value a new car sustains as soon as it is driven off the dealer's lot. Transmogrified into an emblem of an exploitative system, Kevin's shiny prize becomes "an alien object that has power over him." Happily, the young Irishman has the good sense to reject the object and the system. He returns to his more "backward" corner of the world: a rare escapee from the American industrial-consumerist juggernaut, no doubt aided by the fact that he was a foreigner to begin with.
Alienation from Work
<6> Marx's second definition of alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts concerns the relationship of the worker to his own work "as something which is alien and does not belong to him, activity as passivity, power as impotence, procreation as emasculation, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life - for what is life but activity? - as an activity directed against himself, which is independent of him and does not belong to him." Virtually all the workers in Swados's book experience, and express, profound alienation from their work. For example, Leroy, the protagonist of "The Day the Singer Fell," is "often dark with frustration and impotence" at the long, exhausting hours he must put in at the plant, rather than practice his real passion, music, or spend time with his wife. He feels that "his lungs are being choked with dust and his spirit with mindless monotony" (8). Kevin, the Irish immigrant, is surprised and troubled to discover "that his fellow workers were not merely indifferent, they were actively hostile to their surroundings and to what they did with their own hands. Their talk was continually seasoned with contemptuous references to the factory, to their work, and to the lives they led. Almost everyone who discussed it with him hated the work and admitted frankly that the only incentive to return from one day to the next was the pay check" (28). Joe, the protagonist of the third story, "Joe, the Vanishing American," (and quite obviously Swados's mouthpiece) describes alienation not merely as a feeling but as an objective situation. When his young protégé, Walter, asks why the workers stay at the auto plant, Joe replies: "They're trapped, that's why. They say everybody's supposed to be, one way or another, but it's worse to be stuck here. Spending your life on the production line means counting out the minutes, being grateful that Monday's go fast because you're rested, and hating Tuesdays because the week is so long. It means that you're paying off forever on all the things you've been pressured into buying by getting up every day in order to do something you'd never, never think of doing if it was a matter of choice. It means never having anything to look forward to in all your working life" (63).
<7> Thrust into a highly regimented, monotonous, and exhausting work routine building junky, overpriced cars to enrich the stockholders of a giant, faceless corporation, the workers in On the Line spend most of their waking hours living lives they do not own: a debilitating existential dilemma that requires each man to invent mythic reasons for continually submitting to an intolerable situation. The appalling oppressiveness of the factory is no revelation; what makes On the Line fascinating is its imaginative exploration of the psychological gambits workers employ to retain some vestige of dignity, personal integrity, and meaningfulness in a cruel, absurd environment.
Alienation from Self
<8> According to Marx, "estranged labor ... turns man's species-being - both nature and his intellectual species-power - into a being alien to him and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human existence." All of the characters in On the Line experience alienation from self as a product of their alienation from work but two stories of self-alienation stand out: "On the Line" and "One for the Road."
<9> "On the Line" features Orrin, a World War II combat veteran turned fanatically intense auto worker despised by his co-workers as a "Company man" and nicknamed "The Gravedigger" by the younger workers for his dour, anti-social mien. Orrin's sense of self is predicated upon a grim, clenched stoicism that valorizes endurance above all things. As Orrin puts it to line-mate, "Very few people take anything seriously but their own little pleasures. But it's the few that count. They're the ones that win the wars and keep production going" (109). Orrin's Spartan, hyper-masculine approach to the job is partly a matter of innate character structure, partly a desperate way to keep his embattled ego buoyant, but also stems from crushing disappointments sustained before he took a job at the auto plant. Bent on having a son, Orrin and his wife, Edith, have produced three daughters. Hoping to make it as service station-restaurant owner-operators, Orrin and Edith's hopes are dashed when the state diverts the main road away from their fledgling business. Debt-ridden, his dream of being his own boss shattered, Orrin has no choice but to go into the factory. To keep rank despair at bay, Orrin has reverted to a last ditch ideology that narrowly focuses on his own physical strength and will power on the job - the only forces he can control. The strategy works until he contracts tenosynovitis ("trigger finger"), an inflammation of the sheath that surrounds the finger tendons. After hand surgery to correct the problem, Orrin is taken off his usual job as a metal finisher and put on less strenuous assignments until he is two-handed again. Temporarily emasculated by the injury, Orrin is further humiliated when the company demands that he accept a pay cut for the time he was not working as a metal finisher. The company's miserly stance forces Orrin to acknowledge to himself that his extraordinary efforts on the job count for nothing, that his sense of himself as exceptional and indispensable is a pathetic delusion. He bitterly complains to his foreman, Buster, "I might just as well have worked like all the others all year - nobody cares that I did my best" (137). In the end, though, Orrin signs "his unconditional surrender" and accepts the pay cut. In so doing he also accepts his dehumanization and insignificance.
<10> Harold, the protagonist of "One for the Road," has also experienced severe self-alienation well before his stint at the auto plant and also uses work as an escape from that troubled self but does so in a more deliberate way than Orrin. A former commercial artist but more essentially a self-confessed alcoholic, Harold has taken a job at the auto plant to neutralize his addiction by keeping himself numbed and exhausted. As he puts it to his foreman, Buster, "The longer I stay on the line ... the more I knock myself out, the less chance there is of my falling off the wagon. I might as well get paid for taking the treatment" (142). In the back-story supplied by Swados we learn that Harold's father was an alcoholic and that Harold began drinking in his pre-teen years. Married in his early twenties to a woman named Marie, Harold is unable to get his alcoholism under control. He runs through a series of commercial art jobs and eventually runs through his marriage when Marie finally reaches the limits of tolerance and compassion and kicks him out. His stint at the auto plant is a last-ditch attempt to get and stay sober with the hope that Marie will take him back. After nine months of sobriety Harold begins corresponding with Marie and eventually proposes a meeting and possible reconciliation but the day of the proposed meeting Harold is seized with terror and ends up in a bar contemplating falling off the wagon as the story ends. Harold's discomforting epiphany is that the working grind somehow went from a purgatorial discipline to an indefinite, fearful postponement of his day of reckoning with Marie and with himself: "The answer was dreadfully clear. He knew it was as soon as he admitted to himself that he was afraid to leave the factory, afraid to exchange its impersonal, endless subjection for the ministrations of the kindly keeper who waited for him with love and patience" (163). In his attempt to use the un-freedom of the factory as a means of personal redemption, Harold underestimated its power to absorb and transcend his private concerns and render him less fit than ever to function as a self-determining individual.
Alienation from Others
<11> Regarding the fourth kind of alienation experienced by the worker under industrial capitalism, Marx writes:
"An immediate consequence of man's estrangement from the product of his labor, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man's relationship to his labor, to the product of his labor, and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labor and the object of the labor of other men."
Ultimate alienation from others is the clear theme of "A Present for the Boy," the fourth story in the collection. The story's protagonist is a white-haired veteran of the plant nearing retirement with the unpronounceable name of Casimir Sczytakiewicz (conveniently nicknamed "Pop"). A stolid, emotionally stunted man in an unhappy marriage, Pop secretly exults when his wife dies after a long illness: "Now at last, he felt, he was entitled to live without the rack of economic pressure or physical torment, and to enjoy his life with the one human being he adored - his son" (76). When Pop's son, Rudy, graduates from high school, Pop uses all his savings to buy the boy a new car as a graduation present: a gesture of vicarious pleasure and sacrifice not untypical of a certain kind of working-class father. Suddenly and gloriously mobile, Rudy goes out every night to drink and carouse - until the Saturday night after graduation, when he crashes the car and is killed (and a young passenger is crippled). Self-conditioned never to confront painful truths, Pop unconsciously absolves himself of the guilt, sadness, and anger associated with Rudy's death by displacing it upon the young workers at the plant, whom he sees as careless and lazy. Soon his irritation turns to a gnawing paranoia; he suspects that the younger workers are sabotaging his own efforts on the job - another example of psychological displacement. Pop's real fear, however, is the terrible loneliness his impending retirement will bring. In the end, Pop solves his dilemma with a final, pathetic act of displacement and reification; he acquires a pet dog he names Rudy and speaks to it as if it were a human being. Betrayed and dehumanized by the destructive commodity to which he has given his life, Pop retreats into an enduring alienation from himself and the rest of humanity.
<12> Alienation from others as a function of the job is the theme of "Just One of the Boys," the seventh story of the collection. Buster, a 16-year veteran of the line, has worked as a foreman for the past nine years. (Indeed Buster, forty-five-years-old, has spent his entire adult working life in auto plants.) Given his lengthy experience on both sides of the labor-management divide, Buster subscribes to a fanciful ideology, casting himself as uniquely positioned to be a fair-minded and trusted liaison between salaried personnel and hourly employees. Also implicit in Buster's view of things is the equally fanciful notion that - despite a pervasively diminishing work ethic - everyone at the auto plant more or less adheres to a commonly held standard of decency and cooperativeness, if for no other reason than that such a code is the most efficient and trouble-free way to get on with work. Anxious to feel positive about himself and his world, Buster wants his sixteen underlings "to like him and respect him, not to fear or mistrust him" (173). Yet he knows that he can never identify with these men or get too friendly with them, lest he compromise his own authority - and chances for further advancement. In sum, alienation from his fellow man is built into Buster's job title.
<13> On a calamitous workday described in "Just One of the Boys," Buster's optimistic ideology is tested to the limit. A young new hire - unnamed but described as "a tall, doughy-faced Italian, with glittering black hair" - exhibits an almost instinctual antipathy toward the hard work involved. After just four hours on the job the young man simply walks away without giving official notice. Worse yet, he sabotages the line, which results in a dreaded stoppage and four car bodies being mangled. If this were not bad enough, Buster is appalled by his cohorts' reaction to the crisis. Management, smugly preoccupied, reacts slowly to the emerging disaster but once it has occurred, the college men and engineers in white shirts and ties are all over Buster's line like swarming flies. Buster's workers are equally useless. They do not bother to tell him that the new hire has neglected to return from lunch. Nor do any of them offer to help Buster as he frantically struggles to fill the gap in the line with the labor of his own two hands. To add insult to injury, Buster's supposedly trusted men react to the whole situation with sadistic glee and shower Buster with sarcastic jibes. So, when the chips are down, Buster is reminded that, as a foreman, he is neither fish nor fowl. Neither workers nor upper management see him as one of theirs but both sides pressure him to uphold their (mutually antagonistic) interests. The personal site of an unending class war, Buster feels isolated, vulnerable, and defeated: "He looked like Before, but he felt like After, long After." He asks himself a question impossible to answer: "And what would you do if you threw it over? Who could tell you to go to hell? Yourself?" (196).
<14> A certain kind of formulaic proletarian novel written in the Thirties reputedly culminates in an epiphanic moment of radicalization, when the scales fall from the eyes of the protagonist and his fellow workers. Apprised of the real nature of the system, they commit themselves to revolutionary struggle, thus inspiring readers to follow suit. Written after the Taft-Hartley Act and the Red Scare, On the Line features no such moment. By the end of Swados's book it is painfully clear that the workers entertain no hope (or imagination) that they will be able to effect sweeping social change through collectivized praxis. In the ominously de-politicized and blandly authoritarian world of the 1950s private, atomized wish-fulfillment fantasies—and the actions and choices that derive from them—have replaced class politics; personal ideologies have supplanted political ideology.
Notes
[1] Swados, A Radical's America. [Reprint ed.] Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1973, p. 112. This paper completed was completed July 2007. [^]
[2] When running at full capacity, the Mahwah plant, which operated from 1955 to 1982, employed 3,500 workers on two shifts. [^]
[3] Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left [SP]. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, p.336. [^]
[4] Karl Marx, "Estranged Labour," Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. First Manuscript. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm. [^]
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