Today, October 4, a one-day general strike was observed in France. Upon hearing of it on the evening news, I reflexively started reviewing the reasons why such a thing could never happen here. For one thing, so few people are unionized that there’d be no way to mobilize for it. For another, those who are unionized almost invariably have “no strike, no lockout” provisions in their contracts. Those provisions impose stern penalties on anyone who undertakes a labor action when the contract is still in force.

Remember that old song, “I want to live in Andorra?” “I want to live in Andorra, Andorra, Andorra, I want to live in Andorra, it’s a land that I adore. They spent four dollars and fifty cents on armaments and air defense, did you ever hear of such confidence? Andorra, hip, hoorah.”

I want to live in a land where a general strike is possible.

At my New School teaching job, it’s been a full year since we won recognition for our part-timers’ union, ACT-UAW, in the teeth of a strenuous anti-union campaign. We’ve been in contract negotiations ever since, and while some middle-level administrators have extended an olive branch, it’s pretty clear that the top administration never really changed its hostile position—just fell back to higher ground. We’re now fast approaching the time for a serious job action (“withholding our labor power,” as the saying goes) if management doesn’t quickly demonstrate the flexibility required to give us an acceptable contract.

This experience with the union has brought back old thoughts about political and civic participation. I have a long, ambivalent history as an amateur organizer and for the first time, I feel like I’m really working with the pros—people on the staff of the UAW International. Their savvy at the bargaining table impresses me, but it’s their organizing expertise that I really tip my hat to. They are the people who’ve taught me things like, “A flier doesn’t do it, an e-mail doesn’t do it, a poster doesn’t do it—you’ve got to have a conversation with every single member”; also, “Don’t leave voice mail messages. People do not call back. You must keep dialing until they pick up the phone.” I like to say that these professional organizers are like “personal trainers for activists,” and believe me, I’ve been pumping some serious iron on the union front lately.

I’ve loved the union experience because I enjoy the people I organize with, because it’s given me a real “voice at work” (to use the AFL-CIO slogan) of a sort I never had before, because it’s a source of endlessly entertaining high drama, and because we’re actually going to make concrete if limited improvements in the situation of a group of workers—contingent academic labor—whose treatment constitutes a long-term, completely indefensible injustice. Yet my education has left me, in some ways, more politically disillusioned than ever. That’s partly because I now know much more than I ever wanted to about the reactionary nature of this country’s labor laws. I’ve been up close and personal with the sleazy underbelly of the culturally over-capitalized–the presidents and provosts who set terms for knowledge production with about as much regard for creativity and intellectual rigor as if their employees were stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. (How ironic that the corporate university objected to having a part of its faculty unionized by the United Auto Workers on the grounds that “Auto Workers” could never understand such an intellectually sophisticated operation—when it’s the university itself that continually bows down to market norms and wants to treat its educators like interchangeable parts.)

Another fraction of my disillusionment stems from having my nose rubbed on a daily basis in the stinky facts of how damnably difficult it is to get people to take any sort of collective action, even when doing so would personally and directly benefit them. It’s because of this difficulty that I’m once more being exposed to that familiar phenomenon of progressive organizing, the use ’em up, burn ’em out approach. It works like this: the cause, whatever it is, attracts people who are willing to sacrifice huge portions of their lives to it. The nobility of the issue, the beleaguered nature of those it affects, and the obvious lack of sufficient numbers of supporters to make organizing around it a sane exercise—all these factors encourage the martyr complexes of the vulnerable. A tiny cadre of diehards carries most of the weight while others drift in and out as suits them—or simply sit back and kibitz. Given the difficulties of the situation, a sense of one’s own nobility and indispensability becomes the chief reward, and this in turn feeds the martyr complex still further, diminishing incentives to get others to share the work.

Sometime last month, I was approached on the street by yet another person with a clipboard who wanted my signature on a petition to get his candidate on the ballot. Feeling guilty, I told him I didn’t have time. “How can a person like you not be an activist?” he reproached. As I walked away, I found myself yelling over my shoulder, “I AM an activist—that’s why I’m so burned out!”

I admire and resent the saints, the people who give everything to a worthy cause. Part of me has always suspected that on a planet like ours, only a saint’s life can be defended. How can one be so selfish as to hoard one’s time, one’s energy, one’s material resources when others are in such need? (I am speaking now, by and large, of more urgent struggles than the unionization of a bunch of lumpen bourgeois academics—but somehow the dynamics I’m discussing seem to infuse our union effort as well.) What gives us the right to hold anything back?

One easy retort to this counsel of virtuous excess is that many of the saints turn out to have feet of clay. They are egotists who have discovered that identifying themselves completely with a worthy cause is a great way to make other people do what they want. They have a messiah complex. Or they are flash in the pan saints who look very impressive for a little while but soon move on to less saintly pastures (like all those more-revolutionary-than-thou people from the Sixties who ended up right-wing).

While there’s truth to this, I don’t think it excuses me. The false saints don’t prove that there aren’t some real ones somewhere. And even if real ones so far haven’t been sighted, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep looking.

I have decided, though, that I am not a saint. I am an ordinary person. I am an artist. I claim the right to the selfishness of my art, even if it doesn’t reach very many people. I claim the right to the selfishness of having time by myself with a notebook, time to take walks and let my mind cavort, time to write words that will not necessarily communicate a motivating message. I claim the right not to be harried all the time, not to fall ill from constant stress, not to feel continually under the pressure to interact, to answer phone messages and e-mails, to sit through endless meetings in ugly rooms, to achieve concrete results in all cases. I claim the right to be an activist and still be sane, to participate in campaigns for social change without becoming a “campaign junkie,” as a friend of mine who works for an environmental organization on the West Coast terms the sorts of folks who have a seemingly limitless appetite for a certain type of organizational punishment.

I march for bread and roses.

I want to be a citizen.

I want to be one of those imperfect people who participates, who gives what she can reasonably give, who dutifully sacrifices more in times of great need but does not cleave to social emergency as a way of life.

(How odd—isn’t it the basic premise of this blog that all life on earth is at this point a most desperate social emergency?)

I want to be a citizen in a society where people understand that their lives are incomplete if they confine themselves simply to bettering their own economic situations and responding to the emotional needs of personal friends and family. I want, at least, to be a citizen in a society where “educated” people do not typically think like the faculty colleague I spoke with on the telephone not long ago, who couldn’t see the merit in our union’s insistence that New School adjuncts deserve job security. Why, she herself had a friend who’d just lost a job—it happened to be a job outside academia—for no reason other than the employer’s whim. Why should we expect better treatment than people in the corporate sector?

This woman lacked any conception that what’s typical practice in non-unionized workplaces might not be something that unionized workers ought to put up with. (That it might not be fair.) She appeared to have been completely brainwashed by the corporate-dominated, super-individualistic, devil-take-the-hindmost ideology that prevails throughout the land and has thoroughly penetrated even supposedly liberal, not-for-profit institutions.

I want to be a citizen in a society where people readily grasp the concept that a union is a structure for workers to help themselves, not a service organization or the purveyor of a consumer product. I want out of this point-and-click, “add this item to your shopping cart,” so-called democracy.

I guess I really do want to move to Andorra.

Or, at the very least, France.

Running Tab

From Charles Isherwood’s October 3, 2005 New York Times obituary of playwright August Wilson, who died on October 2 at the age of 60: “When a Hollywood studio optioned ‘Fences,’ Mr. Wilson caused a ruckus by insisting on a black director. In a 1990 article in Spin magazine…he said, ‘I am not carrying a banner for black directors. I think they should carry their own. I am not trying to get work for black directors. I am trying to get the film of my play made in the best possible way. I declined a white director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans.’”

I learned from the obituary that August Wilson terminated his formal schooling at the age of 15. After abortive early experiments in playwrighting, he returned to the form when he got a job in St. Paul creating children’s plays from Native American oral literature. Isherwood quotes from a Paris Review interview in which Wilson cited the blues as his primary influence, followed by Jorge Luis Borges, Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden: “‘From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.’”