So, I finally watched it.  A movie apparently so important that even my Republican father insisted that I see it.

Matewan is a great movie.  Good cast, powerful story.

Quality aside, the movie struck a tense cord for me.  Though I still carry my red card (IWW membership card), I feel very ambivalent about "Red" movements such as the communist party and the wobblies.

The message of these movements are summarized well by a comment that one of the movie characters, Joe Kenehan, makes, "They got you fightin' white against colored, native against foreign...when you know there ain't but two sides in the world - them that work and them that don't.  That's all you got to know about the enemy."  The preamble to the constitution of the IWW, or wobblies, states, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life."  The Communist Manifesto states: "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."

These statements are fundamental to "Red" movements, though their strategies may differ.  Where the communists see the need for a centralized, revolutionary party for working people to lead the fight, wobblies envision "One Big Union" through which workers can organize a great General Strike and bring capitalism to its knees.  Both movements, however, rely on the simple separation of people into one of two opposing classes, worker and employer.

This categorization may have been accurate in the days of robber baron capitalism, in fact it was probably a vital distinction to the survival of working people.  But today, with workers' 401k retirement plans being dependent on the stock market, the waters are a great deal murkier.

And tell me this, is an American worker more like a sweat shop worker in China, or more like the bourgeoisie?  Can a cubicle be compared to a textile mill?  Can a library of bureaucratic policies be compared to the gun barrel that supervises third world workers?  Can a manufactured home be compared to a lean-to in a Calcutta slum?  We are now the people who "have all the good things in life".

I think it is vitally important to maintain a powerful hold on our history, not just the history of political leaders and big wars, but the real living history that has made life today what it is.  Our freedoms were won more, by far, by the blood of Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Haymarket martyrs than they were by any war we have fought in the last fifty years.  It is to the labor movement of the old days that we owe our way of life.  And I value the movie Matewan for reminding us of this simple truth.

I also believe that if Americans were better educated about our own history, our social justice movements would be a heck of a lot more powerful.  But I am discouraged by the tendency among the left to hold on to old, pretty slogans and stick figure ideologies that no longer hold much water.  We need a new social analysis, respectful of but free from the Marxian theories of past days.