Forget 2016? No. Remember 1919.

Tomorrow 2016 will end and 1919 will begin again.

A piece of information floating around my head: in some lecture, I recall a reference to a book written in the 1970s in which the author first proposed “firefighter” and “police officer” and a whole slew of gender neutral terms. The lecturer read passages from this 1970s feminist book predicting that it would take generations to change language use, that to get people to say “he or she” would be nice but is not realistic… and then about 20 years later all of her suggestions for gender neutral terms are in wide circulation. It was miraculous.

I remember distinctly that the lecturer said that “freshman” was not in her list of terms that need to be fixed, and, so, we still say “freshman” instead of “fresh person:” an oversight, or maybe due to the etymology of the word “freshman” itself. One of the points of the lecture was that the proposals in book were thought through carefully, a creative and well constructed list of new terms. The author proposed “chair” of a committee instead of “chairperson” and this “firefighter” she thought would be a good term, more action, and more appealing than “fire person.”

If these claims were right, then this author could claim to have as much individual influence on English language usage as any single modern person. So, I wanted to go back and find the lecture to make sure I was giving this credit to the right author from the 1970s.

I thought maybe lecture 21 of this series was the right place… but no. Then I tried to reverse Google to find out who was the first person to propose so much specific gender neutral terminology. A 1975 book called Language and a Woman’s Place could be the book, making Robin Lakoff this influential person. There are other possibilities. It’s kind of important to identify the right book. And then I would like to buy a copy.

Robin Lakoff might be the author I mean

Tyranny of the dead

This story — a single book changing the way English speakers use language — would mean we as a people can decide to change the way we speak. It’s not only something that happens to us, sort of by osmosis or some natural tendency of language: we can also chose to change.

I like the metaphor.

If we can chose to change language, we can chose to change laws. We can chose to change economics. We create these structures — languages, constitutions, economic systems, markets — then act like some god ruled that we have to keep doing things as people in the past did them.

The tyranny of the dead is the worst form of oppression. Laws written on paper become written on stone. The most obviously dysfunctional systems keep on keeping on.

I live in a country with amateur 42 town judges because in 1808 or whenever it was asking people to travel 20 miles to the county seat to have a hearing with a professional judge was a burden. I pay property taxes because in 1790 the only way to get a sense of who was richer and who was poorer was to count the number of chimneys and windows each person had.

We have two national security operations, the NSA and the CIA. Before World War II, we didn’t have any permanent spy agencies. The Cold War is over. Did anyone ever think of maybe scaling down or eliminating excess institutional baggage that seems to serve no productive purpose (or only a top secret positive benefit to the people)? I could go on talking about the counterproductive money sucking Deep State, but that might be dangerous.

Empirical evidence is available to predict which incarcerated people are likely to re-offend and who would benefit most from which types of education prior to release. We can know with some certainty that people need to maintain a network of friends and relatives while in prison in order to re-integrate upon release. We can know that eyewitness testimony is faulty, that defendants perceived as good looking receive lower sentences, to say nothing of race, and that what a person is accused of, or convicted of, is far less significant to how much time that person may serve in jail than where the offense was committed and who happened to get the case on their desk, and of course how much money the accused can scrounge up.

I could go on in many fields of government and other institutions. Much of what we do, we do because it is what we do without any rational reason to keep doing it.

“Slow down, there, hothead!” says Mr. Burke

If I were to call for sweeping away massive amounts of built up oppression from the past, Edmund Burke rolls over in his grave and says, “Remember the Jacobins!”

Conservative theorist Edmund Burke

How do I know about Burke? You guessed it: a lecture. But which one? This one? This great series? I’m sure I must have stumbled across Burke in college, but if I did, I don’t remember it.

Anyway, Burke, an Englishman, supported the American Revolution but condemned the French Revolution. He was one of the first people to articulate a conservative political philosophy. Until Burke wrote his essay on the French Revolution BEFORE the terror killed as many as 30,000 people, conservatives didn’t need an explicit philosophy. The church, social class, the monarchy don’t need to be justified by a theory: they just are. Burke offered a theory basically saying that tradition is valuable, necessary, and that if you chuck the whole thing out, you get the terror.

Robspierre

A Jacobin could counter that if the tradition bound nations of Europe, every single one of them, had not conspired with a sizable minority within France to attack the revolutionary government, creating civil and international war affecting large parts of the country, there might have been no terror. It was war and foreign-reactionary attack on what was, in fact, the most democratically elected government in European history, with a wide base of popular support and a program of reform so great that no one will ever be able to take it away (as indeed no one could: after the restoration of the old monarchy, almost all of the administrative reforms of the Revolution remained in place).

America, interrupted

But that’s France. Even if Burke has a point in the abstract, or about France, excessive reform hardly seems like a realistic danger in America. We have the opposite problem.

Another lecture: the last one of this series about 1919 and 1920, as a reference. 1919 was some year.

International Socialists in 1912 declared “the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” Two years after promising to remain loyal to class and resist a capitalist, nationalist war, all the socialist parties of Europe fell into line and supported their individual national war efforts. By necessity and as a reward, after the war, socialists and labor parties were incorporated into the political structure of European political systems.

Eugene Debs

Not so in the US. Eugene Debs spent the war in prison for resisting the capitalist war. In 1919 and 1920 the US saw: 1) a peaceful, well organized general strike in Seattle collapse in the face of a threat by the mayor to call in troops and attacks on strikers in mainstream press; 2) an effort to organize the police force in Boston collapse when the Massachusetts governor, Calvin Coolidge, called in the National Guard and attacks on the police in the mainstream press; 3) a steelworkers strike collapse under media criticism and an attack that left 12 strikers dead; 4) the Tulsa race riot, over 300 black people killed by a white mob with police standing by; 5) the forced deportation of immigrants if they were perceived as pro-labor in the Soviet Arc; 6) another racial attack in Chicago that left approximately 28 black residents dead; 7) the passage of the amendment prohibiting alcohol sales in the US.

Greenwood, OK “Black Wall Street”

All of the stuff in that list happened in a little over a year.

Far more violence in the drive for a US labor movement than in any European country

Chicago 1919

Did someone say stike? Seattle 1919

New York Times, 1919, Fake News on behalf of the oligarchs for 100 years

In short, while Europe was accepting labor into the structure of government, workers in America using the same basic tactics were being crushed by force, by divide and conquer with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. The media and the government, local and national, conspired to repress the labor movement in the United States. There was repression in America before 1919 and in Europe. It’s just by 1919 it became clear that the ruling class in Europe had to compromise in a way the rule class in America was unwilling and did not have to do.

Bernie’s stump speech: do 1919 over

I wrote a piece about 1971 and 2016 here. Now, I am drawing a direct line between 1919 and 2016. If we had managed to get a labor movement incorporated into the political structure of America in 1919 like the Europeans, we would have national healthcare now, like they do. We would have tuition free college like they do. We would have a decent minimum wage like northern Europeans. Bernie wouldn’t have had a stump speech.

Bernie’s stump speech is basically calling for us to re-do 1919 and not break up the Seattle strike but compromise with the workers, to not stir up racism and Klan membership in the Midwest but to bring black people into unions with white workers as brothers and sisters, to not demonize immigrants as radicals and deny basic civil rights to people have committed no crime, to not distract the populace in smaller towns with nonsensical campaigns blaming alcohol for a society that is not humane to the workers who build the economy.

Unfortunately, so far 2016 is looking not like the counterfactual 1919 but the actual 1919.

The DNC/CNN types think we’re going to forget the rigging of the 2016 primary? Not me. I’m still pissed about Seattle and Tulsa in 1919.

We never got over Seattle and Tulsa. We never got a labor movement and race is still there to be used to stir us up anytime the oligarchs get nervous. Don’t pretend like 1919 is ancient history, a different America. It’s the same exact dynamic with zip zero change.

Onward to a humane America

We, the human community, make up words over time. The words refer to things in the universe that are real but the words are just conventions we made up to refer to reality. A cat is a real animal. The word “cat” could just as easily be “gato” or whatever. If we want to, we can change language. Mira, es muy facil. Ahora hemos cambiado de idioma sin problema.

Just because we invented it and it doesn’t really exist in the world outside of our collective minds doesn’t mean language isn’t powerful. The Greek gods could do things like shoot individuals with lightning bolts from the sky, and Barack Obama can do the same thing. Shiva could destroy worlds, and so can we, as Robert Oppenheimer pointed out. How did we get to be more powerful than our own ancient gods? By sharing information over time and space.

Money is something we humans made up too. The Native American on the East Coast used wampum. The Lydians invented coins a few thousand years ago. Bank notes turned into paper money. Now, the Federal Reserve can create money on a computer in their basement, increasing the money supply like this: 10,000,000. There, we just made ten million dollars that didn’t exist before.

Value is real. My dog loves to chew sticks but if I show up with a piece of meat, he drops the stick and runs over to get the meat. The meat is vastly more valuable to him than the stick. Value is like the real cat in my language analogy. Money expresses something real in the world: value.

Some skills are more valuable than others for making more money. Some items are more valuable than others to certain people. From value and money we move to markets. Markets have been a great boon to human well being. Markets are also incredibly powerful institutions we invented and only really exist in our own brains. The Language Revolution occurred probably 100,000 years ago or longer. The Industrial Revolution around 1800 lead to a massive acceleration in the rate of increase in life expectancy and population and markets were a part of that.

Money and words are some powerful stuff. We can control them through collective action expressed by democratic institutions and with social determination.

But some people have 50 billion dollars. This list of rich people does not include the king of Saudi Arabia and so I’m a bit suspicious of it. About 800 million people on the planet get by with less than $2 a day. What this says is that some people are billions of times more valuable than other people. We in the middle might not think about it much, but most of us are closer on the bell curve of income to the 800 million than to the .1%.

Here is the idea about money:

Money today is fiat money, a symbol of value created by the human imagination with no intrinsic value of its own. … A coin or paper currency note has value because people accept it as a symbolic medium of exchange. The economic value of money as measured by its purchasing power is a subject of economic theory.

Caitlin Johnstone wrote about narratives:

Political power is held in place by narratives; the only reason anyone has any power is because everyone else agrees to pretend that that’s where the power is. Government, money, and in fact all of human culture are made up of conceptual constructs invented by humans to serve humans. Whoever controls those conceptual constructs controls the world, so it makes sense that the powers that be are so desperate to maintain control of the narrative. Without that, they’ve got nothing.

Caitlin Johnstone, nice article, good writer

Now, put the idea about money with the idea about narratives. Yes, some inequality is necessary. Yes, Mr. Burke, change can get out of hand in theory, although that has never happened in America. But even so, the degree of inequality and the arbitrariness of control, the establishment of a permanent oligarchy, is simply intolerable.

We tried to revolt in 1919 and they beat us. We tried again in 2016 and they beat us again. We’re not well organized. We up against a vicious establishment.

Martin Luther King, 1955

And as we stand and sit here this evening and as we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go out with the grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of people, a black people, ‘fleecy locks and black complexion’, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.” And we’re going to do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late. As we proceed with our program, let us think of these things.

Wobblies wobble but they don’t fall down

Let’s do 1919 over. We need a national organization for working people. We need truth in media, free of corporate control. The New York Times and the like are getting a bit long in the tooth and you’d think we’d see them for what they are after 100 years of bullshit. We must never be race baited, red baited, or immgrant baited. We take no more bait.

John Brown, abolitionist, did not have public and private positions, hung from the neck until dead, meant what he said.