Love of Labor
As Geoghegan writes: “The weaker labor becomes, the more (in the U.S. at least) it is resented. It holds up in a few bastions, shrinks into a smaller, privileged elite, where everyone makes $13.00 an hour, and everyone else is cut out. So labor, beaten to a pulp, helpless, in retreat on every front, appears more privileged, more remote, more irrelevant to the working majority. Yet this isn’t labor’s fault. Labor could not organize these people even if it wanted to . . .”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Which Side Are You On? also contemplates the state of its author, lawyer to this “weak, shrunken thing,” who’s turned 40 and makes a hell of a lot less than his pals from Harvard Law back east. “I really am poor. I can barely get by on $60,000 a year,” he writes, knowing how this sounds. And he muses, “I crawl at the very bottom of the upper class. This makes me a natural political radical or malcontent: $60,000 a year is probably what Lenin made just before the Revolution . . .
We told Geoghegan the other day that it seems proper to speak of a new Chicago literary school of scrupulous testimony: we’d put his book alongside Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and John Conroy’s Belfast Diary.
“It’s an attempt to explain myself. I’m thinking of friends in the east whom I don’t see very much–my friends here sort of know me in context. The other reason is not one I started with but picked up halfway through. I think when you hit 40 there may be something that goes click inside you, especially if you feel you’ve been on some sort of long journey somewhere, that makes you want to explain it to somebody younger than you. I don’t think young students in law school who get savaged for selling out have much sense of what alternatives there are–not just for practicing law but for how to live your life. And also, I realized halfway through, ‘What’s the point of writing a book for someone my own age?’ Even now I can be impressed by a book, but it’s on the order of Milton’s Paradise Lost. People who might read a book of mine and be impressed by it are in their early 20s, maybe in law school now. So what the hell! Why not write it for them?”
“Well, not rural Mexico,” he said.
So although Geoghegan has sharp things to say in his book on behalf of the workers of America about political strategy and public policy, he suspects he is knocking on a door to an empty room. He told us, “One of the sad things is that 30 or 40 years ago anyone in this country who was on the progressive left of the spectrum would have known something about unions, organized labor.” Today, the only unions anyone thinks about are in Poland.
