emma_goldman
27th July 2006, 17:51
Kinda messed up with the copy and paste but you get the point. ;) And book titles aren't italisized on this..
<3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amanda Woods
Mrs. Barling
English III
1 March 2006
Red Nelson: The Influence of Libertarian Socialism in Algren’s Works
Throughout Nelson Algren’s seventy-two years, it is easy to see his close relationship with the American left. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, a city marked by class struggle at the age of three, to a working class immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. He was educated in Chicago and studied journalism at the University of Illinois. During his one-month incarceration for the crime of stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom, and faced with the possibility of an additional three years, he became deeply affectionate for the outsiders and outcasts of “respectable society” which would later become the protagonists of his novels. After he was released, he joined the John Reed’s Club, the literary arm of the Communist Party dedicated to John Silas Reed, the revolutionary writer and communist activist. Despite the lack of partisanship Algren displayed publicly, a strong libertarian socialist tendency (a broad grouping of political philosophies that includes social ecology, autonomous Marxism, council communism, mutualism, anarcho-syndicalism, and anarchist communism) is seen in his work, possibly owing to his earliest exposures, due to his misgivings about the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie, a sense of solidarity with the proletariat (and identification with), a high regard for the individual, and the interpolation of legendary figures in the libertarian socialist tendency in his novels A Devil’s Stocking, A Walk on the Wild Side, The Man with the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning, and Chicago: City on the Make.
Nelson Algren is most receptive to the excessive inequality in the capitalist model. He remarks in A Walk on the Wild Side, “What was the use of a world that failed to reward the deserving while heaping all manner of goodies on people who ought simply to be given a kick in the teeth and sent flying?” (134). Because of this inequality, in the long term, it spawns a vicious cycle. Perhaps, this may be because of a lack of motivation among the poorer classes to improve their status coupled with a sense of hopelessness. However, the system is unabashedly biased in favor of those who have greater resources. For instance, the rich will be able to insure a good education for their children and in many cases, pass down a portion of their wealth. Of course, the proletariat is not to be faulted for this as Nelson Algren believes and reinforces when writing of their character Fort in A Walk on the Wild Side, “All his life he had been lapped by competition too fast for a nice. All his life he had been outclassed. Therefore, no failure had been his own. How could a man who never had a proper start be blamed for anything?” (134). Because of the barriers set in place to prevent social mobility on the one hand, and favor the bourgeoisie in pursuing more wealth and power on the other, breaking free of this cycle is exceedingly galling. Again, this is bound to create an ever widening disparity between the classes. And thus Algren sees the nature of capitalism to be unfairness.
Furthermore, with the adequate financial means and incentives, the bourgeoisie have much more political liberty. Their voices are more readily received and they are more effective in lobbying for favorable legislation. Therefore, it is evident, the system quickly becomes corrupt. In A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren writes, “For every statute, they had a little loophole - that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured by them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes - panders and madams and such as that - had a harder time squeezing through” (108). In opposition to this practice, Algren automatically is reinforcing the idea of a direct democracy, a more equable system for its citizens with sovereignty in citizen assemblies.
Additionally, in capitalism there is a loss of humanity because humans are placed below property. The “class that is economically empowered becomes emotionally hollowed” (Algren 104). The bourgeoisie care little about anything more than securing and expanding their wealth. The workers they employ are but commodities to them and are exploited in return for their hard labor. Algren writes of this exploitation in A Walk on the Wild Side, “ ‘It don’t do no good for a man to rise these days son,’ was Country Kline’s curious philosophy, ‘for that can’t be done anymore except on the necks of others and when you make it that way all the satisfaction is taken our of it” (322). Because the bourgeoisie are only concerned with their laborers so much as they can profit off them, they would rather deny basic human needs than spare a lost penny. “You don’t work you don’t eat” (Algren 133).
If humans are constantly viewed as commodities, they treat themselves and others in this way. In A Devil’s Stocking, Tracy, a prostitute, is remarking on the desensitization that happens in capitalism and what ensues when people can no longer feel. “But if the only thing a man can feel is pain, he has to settle for that, else he’s dead. He pays you so he can feel alive, in any way at all it has nothing to do with sex directly. I don’t know why business kills but I know it does” (75). When describing police brutality, Algren ascribes to the same philosophy, “The correction officers acted as if they felt they could not feel themselves to be men against until they had made every man on the ground feel he was less than man” (211). Hence, the root of exploitation is seen and it is not unique to the workers. To have the ability to exploit, is exploitation in itself. Ergo, socialism benefits everyone.
Since people are viewed solely by their labor power and profit making ability, they are seen as “things” and individuality is threatened. Algren is a strong supporter of the individual. As Malcolm Cowley writes in the introduction to A Man with the Golden Arm, “Algren’s defense of the individual…brings a new dimension of naturalism” (Algren 3). Libertarians also hold the individual in high esteem, believing in their right to have the liberty to do whatever they wish. This is a key part of Libertarian socialism (albeit the fact that Libertarians and Libertarian socialists disagree largely on the connotations of this point).
Algren rejects the capitalistic idea of being judged by what profits you can make and, what profits you have made. From Chicago: City on the Make, “How much did he have, is what we demand to know when we hear good old Joe Felso has gone to reward. Never what was he, in human terms” (75).
Coupled with a strong distrust of the bourgeoisie, clear idolization of the proletariat is seen in Algren’s works. Brothers Judd calls it “a romantic reverence for the poor” (par.3.). Perhaps Algren himself describes this tendency best when speaking of his reason for writing A Walk on the Wild Side, “The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those that have never been lost before. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind” (Algren 7). The characters of his stories reflect this adoration. A picture of this characterization is painted in these lines from A Walk on the Wild Side, “And coasted easily and unseeing past broken men and breaking ones, wingies, dingies, zanies, and lop-sided kukes, cokies and queers and threadbare whores, ulcerous panhandlers and cancerous, tubercular pencil peddlers, staggering lushes” (96 - 97). Even more explicitly Algren states later on in the book:
All I found was men and women and all the women were fallen sports of
The world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was drawing
flies, I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you
never could treat one too bad. Yet, I wouldn’t trade off the worst of the
lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the
earth. (332)
Algren invokes pictures of legendary libertarian socialists. When Algren writes in Chicago: City on the Make about “the big dark grudge cast by the four standing in white muslin robes, hands cuffed behind at the gallows head, for the hope of the eight-hour day” he is referring to August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel, anarchists who organized a strike for the eight hour day in Chicago and were subsequently hanged, also knows as the Haymarket Martyrs (62). He commemorates the statement of Haymarket martyr and organizer, Louis Lingg that is so decidedly anarchistic, “I repeat that I am the enemy of the order today and I repeat that I shall combat it despite your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it” (82). Warren Lemming remarked “Algren never forgot the Haymarket episode” (par.6). Further anarchist sympathies can be seen when quoting Edna St. Vincent Millay on the injustice inherent in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, in which two Italian anarchists were put to death for crimes they did not commit, as saying “These men were put to death because they made you nervous” (81).
A knowledge of anarcho-syndicalism ideas (a branch of libertarian socialism chiefly concerned with the labor movement and based in the most part on worker’s solidarity, direct action, and worker’s self management) is manifest when Algren praises the “one big union” idea of Big Bill Haywood, founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and others (64).
The ideas of Eugene Victor Debs, five time Socialist Party Candidate, are seen more than once in Algren’s works. Speaking to the jury after being convicted on a sedition charge, he quotes Debs as saying “While there is a soul in prison I am not free” (95). In the introduction to Never Come Morning, the same point is set forth with a quote from Walt Whitman “I am one of them - I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself. And henceforth I will not deny them - for how can I deny myself” (Algren 1).
He describes the same idea, further in this passage from A Devil’s Stocking:
Nothing is more dangerous than making the state feel useless. What if it
became apparent that prisons themselves are unnecessary? What would
happen to the contractors and politicians whose whole lives are invested
in protecting society from criminals? What if it looked as if there were no
real difference, no basic difference, between people inside the walls and
people outside? God almighty, what a fright that would be, top to bottom. (214)
Algren never expounded the solutions to the problems he wrote of in his novels, but he certainly knew them. In A Devil’s Stocking, Algren likes a prison riot to a proletarian revolution, “Helpless all their lives, they now held their society helpless. They felt a confidence they had never felt before; one not out of all proportion to their true capability” (203). In keeping with the Marxist tradition in parts of libertarian socialist doctrine, Algren regards the proletariats as the backbone of society (Skoch par.7). The prison rioters stay adamant, believing in their influence. They yell, “No amnesty! No transportation! We are going to stay and die here! The world revolution is at hand! It is beginning here!” (204 - 205). One voice cries out, “The masses are on their way! They shall overcome! Overcome state police! Overcome the national guards!” (205).
Algren alludes to his underlying beliefs again, here, in Chicago: City on the make, “In times when the levers power are held by those who have lost the will to act honestly, it is those who have been excluded from the privileges of our society, and left only its horrors, who forge new levers by which return honesty to us” (105). No statement of intended purpose or doctrine is needed to clarify. It’s unmistakable enough: Algren was in the red.
<3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amanda Woods
Mrs. Barling
English III
1 March 2006
Red Nelson: The Influence of Libertarian Socialism in Algren’s Works
Throughout Nelson Algren’s seventy-two years, it is easy to see his close relationship with the American left. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, a city marked by class struggle at the age of three, to a working class immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. He was educated in Chicago and studied journalism at the University of Illinois. During his one-month incarceration for the crime of stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom, and faced with the possibility of an additional three years, he became deeply affectionate for the outsiders and outcasts of “respectable society” which would later become the protagonists of his novels. After he was released, he joined the John Reed’s Club, the literary arm of the Communist Party dedicated to John Silas Reed, the revolutionary writer and communist activist. Despite the lack of partisanship Algren displayed publicly, a strong libertarian socialist tendency (a broad grouping of political philosophies that includes social ecology, autonomous Marxism, council communism, mutualism, anarcho-syndicalism, and anarchist communism) is seen in his work, possibly owing to his earliest exposures, due to his misgivings about the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie, a sense of solidarity with the proletariat (and identification with), a high regard for the individual, and the interpolation of legendary figures in the libertarian socialist tendency in his novels A Devil’s Stocking, A Walk on the Wild Side, The Man with the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning, and Chicago: City on the Make.
Nelson Algren is most receptive to the excessive inequality in the capitalist model. He remarks in A Walk on the Wild Side, “What was the use of a world that failed to reward the deserving while heaping all manner of goodies on people who ought simply to be given a kick in the teeth and sent flying?” (134). Because of this inequality, in the long term, it spawns a vicious cycle. Perhaps, this may be because of a lack of motivation among the poorer classes to improve their status coupled with a sense of hopelessness. However, the system is unabashedly biased in favor of those who have greater resources. For instance, the rich will be able to insure a good education for their children and in many cases, pass down a portion of their wealth. Of course, the proletariat is not to be faulted for this as Nelson Algren believes and reinforces when writing of their character Fort in A Walk on the Wild Side, “All his life he had been lapped by competition too fast for a nice. All his life he had been outclassed. Therefore, no failure had been his own. How could a man who never had a proper start be blamed for anything?” (134). Because of the barriers set in place to prevent social mobility on the one hand, and favor the bourgeoisie in pursuing more wealth and power on the other, breaking free of this cycle is exceedingly galling. Again, this is bound to create an ever widening disparity between the classes. And thus Algren sees the nature of capitalism to be unfairness.
Furthermore, with the adequate financial means and incentives, the bourgeoisie have much more political liberty. Their voices are more readily received and they are more effective in lobbying for favorable legislation. Therefore, it is evident, the system quickly becomes corrupt. In A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren writes, “For every statute, they had a little loophole - that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured by them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes - panders and madams and such as that - had a harder time squeezing through” (108). In opposition to this practice, Algren automatically is reinforcing the idea of a direct democracy, a more equable system for its citizens with sovereignty in citizen assemblies.
Additionally, in capitalism there is a loss of humanity because humans are placed below property. The “class that is economically empowered becomes emotionally hollowed” (Algren 104). The bourgeoisie care little about anything more than securing and expanding their wealth. The workers they employ are but commodities to them and are exploited in return for their hard labor. Algren writes of this exploitation in A Walk on the Wild Side, “ ‘It don’t do no good for a man to rise these days son,’ was Country Kline’s curious philosophy, ‘for that can’t be done anymore except on the necks of others and when you make it that way all the satisfaction is taken our of it” (322). Because the bourgeoisie are only concerned with their laborers so much as they can profit off them, they would rather deny basic human needs than spare a lost penny. “You don’t work you don’t eat” (Algren 133).
If humans are constantly viewed as commodities, they treat themselves and others in this way. In A Devil’s Stocking, Tracy, a prostitute, is remarking on the desensitization that happens in capitalism and what ensues when people can no longer feel. “But if the only thing a man can feel is pain, he has to settle for that, else he’s dead. He pays you so he can feel alive, in any way at all it has nothing to do with sex directly. I don’t know why business kills but I know it does” (75). When describing police brutality, Algren ascribes to the same philosophy, “The correction officers acted as if they felt they could not feel themselves to be men against until they had made every man on the ground feel he was less than man” (211). Hence, the root of exploitation is seen and it is not unique to the workers. To have the ability to exploit, is exploitation in itself. Ergo, socialism benefits everyone.
Since people are viewed solely by their labor power and profit making ability, they are seen as “things” and individuality is threatened. Algren is a strong supporter of the individual. As Malcolm Cowley writes in the introduction to A Man with the Golden Arm, “Algren’s defense of the individual…brings a new dimension of naturalism” (Algren 3). Libertarians also hold the individual in high esteem, believing in their right to have the liberty to do whatever they wish. This is a key part of Libertarian socialism (albeit the fact that Libertarians and Libertarian socialists disagree largely on the connotations of this point).
Algren rejects the capitalistic idea of being judged by what profits you can make and, what profits you have made. From Chicago: City on the Make, “How much did he have, is what we demand to know when we hear good old Joe Felso has gone to reward. Never what was he, in human terms” (75).
Coupled with a strong distrust of the bourgeoisie, clear idolization of the proletariat is seen in Algren’s works. Brothers Judd calls it “a romantic reverence for the poor” (par.3.). Perhaps Algren himself describes this tendency best when speaking of his reason for writing A Walk on the Wild Side, “The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those that have never been lost before. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind” (Algren 7). The characters of his stories reflect this adoration. A picture of this characterization is painted in these lines from A Walk on the Wild Side, “And coasted easily and unseeing past broken men and breaking ones, wingies, dingies, zanies, and lop-sided kukes, cokies and queers and threadbare whores, ulcerous panhandlers and cancerous, tubercular pencil peddlers, staggering lushes” (96 - 97). Even more explicitly Algren states later on in the book:
All I found was men and women and all the women were fallen sports of
The world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was drawing
flies, I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you
never could treat one too bad. Yet, I wouldn’t trade off the worst of the
lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the
earth. (332)
Algren invokes pictures of legendary libertarian socialists. When Algren writes in Chicago: City on the Make about “the big dark grudge cast by the four standing in white muslin robes, hands cuffed behind at the gallows head, for the hope of the eight-hour day” he is referring to August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel, anarchists who organized a strike for the eight hour day in Chicago and were subsequently hanged, also knows as the Haymarket Martyrs (62). He commemorates the statement of Haymarket martyr and organizer, Louis Lingg that is so decidedly anarchistic, “I repeat that I am the enemy of the order today and I repeat that I shall combat it despite your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it” (82). Warren Lemming remarked “Algren never forgot the Haymarket episode” (par.6). Further anarchist sympathies can be seen when quoting Edna St. Vincent Millay on the injustice inherent in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, in which two Italian anarchists were put to death for crimes they did not commit, as saying “These men were put to death because they made you nervous” (81).
A knowledge of anarcho-syndicalism ideas (a branch of libertarian socialism chiefly concerned with the labor movement and based in the most part on worker’s solidarity, direct action, and worker’s self management) is manifest when Algren praises the “one big union” idea of Big Bill Haywood, founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and others (64).
The ideas of Eugene Victor Debs, five time Socialist Party Candidate, are seen more than once in Algren’s works. Speaking to the jury after being convicted on a sedition charge, he quotes Debs as saying “While there is a soul in prison I am not free” (95). In the introduction to Never Come Morning, the same point is set forth with a quote from Walt Whitman “I am one of them - I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself. And henceforth I will not deny them - for how can I deny myself” (Algren 1).
He describes the same idea, further in this passage from A Devil’s Stocking:
Nothing is more dangerous than making the state feel useless. What if it
became apparent that prisons themselves are unnecessary? What would
happen to the contractors and politicians whose whole lives are invested
in protecting society from criminals? What if it looked as if there were no
real difference, no basic difference, between people inside the walls and
people outside? God almighty, what a fright that would be, top to bottom. (214)
Algren never expounded the solutions to the problems he wrote of in his novels, but he certainly knew them. In A Devil’s Stocking, Algren likes a prison riot to a proletarian revolution, “Helpless all their lives, they now held their society helpless. They felt a confidence they had never felt before; one not out of all proportion to their true capability” (203). In keeping with the Marxist tradition in parts of libertarian socialist doctrine, Algren regards the proletariats as the backbone of society (Skoch par.7). The prison rioters stay adamant, believing in their influence. They yell, “No amnesty! No transportation! We are going to stay and die here! The world revolution is at hand! It is beginning here!” (204 - 205). One voice cries out, “The masses are on their way! They shall overcome! Overcome state police! Overcome the national guards!” (205).
Algren alludes to his underlying beliefs again, here, in Chicago: City on the make, “In times when the levers power are held by those who have lost the will to act honestly, it is those who have been excluded from the privileges of our society, and left only its horrors, who forge new levers by which return honesty to us” (105). No statement of intended purpose or doctrine is needed to clarify. It’s unmistakable enough: Algren was in the red.