The CW and Work discussion texts October '24

Peter used to talk endlessly about work in relation to bodily and mental health, and in his vision of the integrated life—a life in which man would be as happy as possible in his labors—Peter always talked of the necessity of our using our bodies as well as our minds. He pointed with scorn to the fact that men in factories were alluded to as “hands,” and that field workers in our huge industrial system of farming are considered “hands,” also. It is well-known, of course, that Peter opposed the capitalist, industrial system on the land as well as in the city. He well recognized the plight of the migrant workers who are necessary to keep such a system of agriculture going. The thing he always kept pointing out was that we did not take into consideration the needs of man...

- Dorothy Day

 

Easy Essays

Peter Maurin

No Pleasure in Work
1. Carlyle says
“He who has found his work let him look for no other blessedness.”
2. But workmen cannot find happiness in mechanized work.
3. As Charles Devas says,
“The great majority having to perform some mechanized operation which requires little thought and allows no originality and which concerns an object in the transformation of which whether previous or subsequent they have no part, cannot take pleasure in their work.”
4. As D. Marshall says
“Previously the workman fashioned every article with his own hands, bringing to bear on it all the skill of the craft which was his; now all of this is done by the machine.”

Industrialism and Art
1. The notion of work has been separated from the notion of art.
2. The notion of the useful has been separated from the notion of the beautiful.
3. The artist, that is to say, the responsible workman, has been separated from all other workmen.
4. The factory hand has no responsibility for what he produces.
5. He has been reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility.
6. Industrialism has released the artist from the necessity of making anything useful.
7. Industrialism has also released the workman from making anything amusing.

 

 

The Church and Work (1946 - edited for length)

- Dorothy Day

I have before me Canon Cardijn’s pamphlet, “The Spirit of the Young Christian Workers,” and on Page 21 of that pamphlet he says: “It is useless to steer clear of the vital and therefore most difficult problems under the pretext of Catholic Unity.” So I shall try to write about most difficult and vital things such as the factory and the land, and the workers.

Beginning at the beginning of the pamphlet, there is that much quoted line, “Without work there will be no host, no wine, no chalice, no altar and no Church,” and I wish to fling down the challenge at once, that what is the great disaster is that priests and laity alike have lost the concept of work, they have lost a philosophy of labor, as Peter Maurin has always said. They have lost the concept of work, and those who do not know what work in the factory is, have romanticized both it and the workers, and in emphasizing the dignity of the worker, have perhaps unconsciously emphasized the dignity of work which is slavery, and which degrades and dehumanizes man.

Can one sanctify a saloon, a house of ill fame? When one is in the occasion of sin, is it not necessary to remove oneself from it? If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots?

And when we are talking about sin, I’m not talking about adultery, fornication, theft, drunkenness as such. In the great clean shining factories, with good lights and air and the most sanitary conditions, an eight-hour day, five-day week, with the worker chained to the belt, to the machine, there is no opportunity for sinning as the outsider thinks of sin. No, it is far more subtle than that, it is submitting oneself to a process which degrades, dehumanizes. To be an efficient factory worker, one must become a hand, and the more efficient one is, the less one thinks. Take typewriting, for instance, as an example we all know – or driving a car, or a sewing machine. These machines may be considered good tools, an extension of the hand of man. We are not chained to them as to a belt, but even so, we all know that as soon as one starts to think of what one is doing, we slip and make mistakes. One IS NOT SUPPOSED TO THINK. TO THINK is dangerous at a machine. One is liable to lose a finger or a hand, and then go on the scrap heap and spend the rest of one’s life fighting for compensation for one’s own carelessness, as the factory owners say, for not using the safety devices invented and so plentiful, for the benefit of the workers. The existence of those same safety devices is an example of the truth of what I write.

AND HERE IS THE DANGEROUS PART, it is not so much the loss of the hand or the arm, but the loss of one’s soul. When one gives one’s self up to one’s work, when one ceases to think and becomes a machine himself, the devil enters in. We cannot lose ourselves in our work without grave danger. As soon as one becomes beside one’s self, as soon as we lose ourselves, as soon as we give ourselves up to anything, whether it is sex, or drink, or work at the machine, there is the danger of the devil entering in. He looks for just such opportunities, and modern life is full of them. See our recreations football, baseball. These are supposed to be recreations and yet they enjoy themselves most who most thoroughly lose themselves in the mob. And the mob is a mob whether friendly or hostile, as Eugene Debs, the great socialist labor leader pointed out.

“I have only experienced the friendly mob,” be said once, when I was released from jail, and they met me and bore me on their shoulders. It was a friendly mob but it smelt like a beast. The beast was there.”

“Work is not a punishment, a curse, or enslavement, but the cooperation of the laborer with his Creator and Redeemer,” Canon Cardijn writes.

But what kind of work? “Without the worker there will he no host, no wine, etc.”

In the last few issues of the Farm Labor News, published by the Farm Labor Union which has its headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, it is stated:–there are 6,744,000 family workers, migratory workers on the land. These are homeless, landless people, wandering around harvesting crops. In that same issue they speak of a 50,000 acre plantation where 10,000 human beings work. They deal with the machine, the cotton picker, and the flame-thrower weed killer which is about to displace “one half the present population engaged in cotton farming” according to the Department of Agriculture.

“The House of Haves has just about gotten farming fixed” R. E. Paris of Florence Arkansas, writes to the editor. “I cannot find any place where the tenant farmer and sharecropper fit in this machine age. I am going to liken the machine age in farming to the man who built his house upon the sand. The storm came and the wind blew and the house fell and great was the fall thereof.”

“The Department of Agriculture expresses the pious hope that the displaced workers will find jobs in industry,” according to the story. The very use of the word pious shows the undercurrent of bitterness to religion, though the union works with ministers all through the south.

I have these papers before me and so I quote from them but the same goes for wheat growers who have 100,000 acre farms and gamble in their one crop farming and live in the cities. They grow the wheat and homeless laborers harvest it. It is milled in big cities and all the good taken out of it in the way of wheat germ, and the dead product sold to the consumer. Is this the kind of wheat our Lord took into His hands when He consecrated it and said, “TAKE, EAT.”

CAN we sanctify such work?

“Too much cotton and none to wear,” reads another story. There are twenty-two million bales in the warehouses of the world and the price is over twenty-six cents a pound, the highest it has been in twenty-two years. The only way workers will get cotton in clothes, work clothes, comforters, curtains, sheets, towels (one can’t use silk or rayon or nylon for these) is to wait for the U. S. Government to work out a world agreement with other countries to limit the acreage and set the prices. Meanwhile the cotton is held in the storehouse. Can one sanctify such practices as these? Oh, the efficiency of modern business which leads to war!

Yes, I accuse the leaders, the teachers, the intellectuals, the clergy, of having a romantic attitude towards the workers. They write with fervor and glowing words–they dramatize the struggle, they are walking on picket lines, they love the man in the dungarees and the blue or plaid shirt they write glowingly of his callused hands–they take these leaves from the communist notebook–they are glorifying the proletariat, the dispossessed, the propertyless, the homeless, and the workers can hang a holy medal on their machine or over their bunk in the fo’castle and pray as they begin and finish their work, and go home to their two-room or three-room apartment and surrounded by children and an exhausted wife, sanctify their surroundings– or forget them in the nearest tavern with polluted beer, adulterated wine, or hard liquor. The YCW comment at the end of Canon Cardijn’s pamphlet is this: “The YCW shows the workers that whatever a man’s state (which after all is according to the dispensation of providence) his primary struggle is against himself, and when that is well in hand the rest is largely a question of adapting himself to his surroundings, in order to get the very best out of them both spiritually and temporally.”

In other words, accept the machine, accept the factory, the speed-up system, the work in which you are spent–so spent indeed, that on coming out of the factory exhausted, though not physically (the work is light, many say), one seeks the anodyne of drink or sex. A man is “spent” in his work. He is emptied. He is emasculated.

I speak frankly as a lay person to priests, of this vain attempt of priests to urge the workers to sanctify one’s surroundings, to adapt oneself to one’s surroundings. What kind of homes do priests live in? How large are their rectories their monasteries, their house of studies? How can they speak of “home” so glowingly, how can they talk of the large family with such unction, when they see the two-room apartments, the four-room apartments on Mulberry street, on Mott street?

Should the worker sanctify his surroundings in the lumber camps where huge forests are being denuded all over the country, for profit. Do they bring him homes: Where did all the lumber go? It is tragic, as I write on this white paper to think that trees were cut down to make this paper, and the billions of Daily News, True Stories, detective fiction, movie magazines that fill the drug stores and the bus stations. “Pennsylvania used to have 28,650,000 acres of forest. Now less than 4,000 acres of forest remain within the commonwealth and Pennsylvania has dropped in lumber production from the first to twenty-fourth place among the states.” (Circular from the Department of Forests of Pa.)

Do we just “adapt ourselves” to this evil of destruction and waste, not only of men but of raw materials? We can no more bless it “sanctify it” than the priest can bless the scrap iron which he sprinkles with holy water in the church yard before it sets off to kill Japanese or Germans. (A picture of this was in the Hearst paper in Chicago.)

And yet, that is what the clergy are doing, when they accept this system, this industrial capitalism. Canon Cardijn is opposed to the materialism of the day, but most priests when they sensitively use the word materialism, rather than communism or red fascism, are meaning the same thing.

“Where Christ is present among the masses, in all their circumstances, conditions, modes of life, there Christian mysticism, which is union with Christ, takes on a deeper and more extensive reality.” I am still quoting from the pamphlet. But I deny that Christ is present in the factories, among the workers, that they take Him there “The workers of the world are lost to the church.” They are still lost for all the Jocist YCW, CYO, and Catholic Action that is going on. It is impossible to sanctify a house of shame. It is a delusion, a deception, and once more the workers are being betrayed. For a while they may be aroused to hope, they may lose themselves in meetings, in mass demonstrations, in pilgrimages to the Holy Father and filled with the afterglow of these glorious experiences warm their factories with them, but it will not be lasting. Communism creeps inexorably on, and shows its influence one way or another. The Popular Republican Movement of France, which has as part of its economic program nationalization or national control has elicited this comment from the Holy Father, in his letter to the Social Study Week held by French Catholics in Strasbourg recently:

“IT IS EVIDENT THAT INSTEAD OF ATTENUATING THE MECHANICAL NATURE OF LIFE AND LABOR IN COMMON, NATIONALIZATION, EVEN WHEN LICIT, THREATENS TO ACCENTUATE THESE STILL MORE, AND CONSEQUENTLY THE BENEFIT DERIVING FROM IT TO A TRUE COMMUNITY IS VERY MUCH OPEN TO QUESTION”

"It is evident that instead of attenuating the mechanical nature of life and labor in common, nationalization, even when licit, threatens to accentuate these still more, and consequently the benefit deriving from it to a true community is very much open to question."

In 1939, in an address to the International Congress of Catholic Women’s League, the Holy Father said: “In this age of mechanization the human person becomes merely a more perfect tool in industrial production and how sad it is to say it, a perfected tool for mechanized warfare. And at the same time material and ready-made amusement is only thing which stirs and sets the limits to the aspirations of the masses . . . In this disintegration of human personality efforts are being made to restore unity. But the plans proposed are vitiated from the start because they set out from the self-same principle as the evil they intend to cure.The wounds and bruises of individualistic and materialistic mankind cannot be healed in a system which is materialistic in its own principles and mechanistic in the application of its principles . . . To heal the wound there is one sovereign remedy, that is a return of the heart and mind of mankind to knowledge and love of God the common Father, and of Him whom God has sent to save the world, Jesus Christ.”

Continuing this charge of sentimentalizing or romanticizing of the proletariat, we would like to call attention to the use of the word Masses. I used to work for the Old Masses, and I had quite a few articles in The New Masses published by the Communists in New York City. One of my articles on the birth of my daughter in a public hospital was reprinted all over Russia and, according to my old friend Michael Gold of the Daily Worker staff, I have quite a bit of royalties coming to me in Russia since it was translated and reprinted in many languages. Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist, told me in 1929 that he had read it when he was in Russia. It was he, in fact, that told me it had been reprinted. The Masses. What a glowing word it was to us then. To speak to the Masses. To write to the Masses, to be a part of the Masses–our hearts during those years, glowed within us at the idea.

And now the Holy Father in one of his great Christmas messages, points out the difference between the Masses and the people. He tells us that the expression, the Masses, conveys the idea of the inert mass, being moved this way and that, swayed as by a wind, controlled by the demagogue. Whereas “the people” conveys the idea of persons, creatures of body and soul, temples of the Holy Ghost, men and women and children made to the likeness of God, divinized by their baptism and made sons of God.

Since that great message the Holy Father (these comments of his were only a part of it) I have hesitated ever again to use the word “Masses.” Canon Cardijn or his translator uses it thirteen times in a twenty-page pamphlet. He used crowd once– “to capture the crowd,” and multitude, once.

I would like to go on with comments on passages from the pamphlet, “The Young Christian Worker.” The lay apostle, Canon Cardijn says, “must aim at getting hold of the Crowd.” I say, with Dom Chautard, that he must aim at the handful, the few, as Canon Cardijn himself did when he started his parish work with six young people to train as lay apostles. Beware of the Mass! Of the Crowd! Remember Debs’ words about the beast there is in it. Our Lord knew what was in men and when the crowd cheered Him as He came into Jerusalem He knew that the following week they would crucify Him.

“The worker’s life is a prayer and a sacrifice.” Can a hand, or tool pray or sacrifice? Can a man who is not whole, be holy? “We may speak of the mysticism of labor without exaggeration.” But when a man loses himself is it God or the devil who is going to enter in? De Rougement’s book is important reading. It was reviewed by The Catholic World, and though written by a non-Catholic, it contains only Catholic truths, according to the reviewer. De Rougement is the Protestant leader, a Swiss, of the personalist and communitarian movement in Paris, of which Emmanuel Mounier is the Catholic leader.

“This supernaturalized ideal of labor must needs be accompanied by a supernaturalized ETHIC of labor, by a proper morality in working conditions. Such influences as self interest, hatred and violence have no place in it. Catholic teaching on this point is in direct opposition to that of the atheist, the agnostic, and the materialist, and it is these who have the ear of the laboring classes in the matter of work.” Here again is the pacifist in the class struggle. Yes, we are all pacifists in the class struggle, though not in international wars, alas! Although if ever war was justified, one would think that people could fight for their homes for their lands for their families their work. (Half of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the South are going to be evicted in the interests of big business, remember, within the next five years, according to the Department of Agriculture of the U. S.)

Supernatural selfishness is in order here, and a hatred of such work that degrades and dehumanizes. We must hate evil. I am not arguing for class war, for resistance at the point of machine guns, for barricades (which go, by the way, with the city streets), There must be some probability of success; that is one of the conditions for a just war. But I am in favor of the nonviolent techniques of the strike, the withdrawal of labor, violence will be inflicted, but let it not be on the part of the worker. In Steinbeck’s book, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, about a strike of the migratory workers in California, the closing pages tell of the killing of the organizer of the workers, and the satisfaction of the communists at this shedding of blood. One must lay down one’s life for one’s brothers, they say, we must sacrifice even to the shedding of blood. Of course they do not stop there. But they do regard the shedding of one’s blood as so essential that I have seen the workers goading the police to bring about this violence so satisfying to man, who has not been taught the use of his spiritual weapons so that he may take heaven by violence, and make it more possible to praise and worship God here and now thus beginning one’s heaven on earth to what extent it is possible.

“The basic ideal of family life is to”multiply the number of the elect“. Let this be brought home to the working classes, for they in particular are equal to the acts of generosity, devotion and self denial which such an ideal demands.”

What about wages, housing, the mother working, the father withdrawn for long hours from the home, so that under our present civilization a child might as well not have a father. And are not the clergy “laying burdens too heavy for them to bear,” on the shoulders of the workers, and themselves not willing to lighten them by lifting a finger, to change the conditions of their life. It is not right that heroic sanctity be demanded of the worker and the women of his family. We are all called to be saints, St. Paul says, and Pope Pius XI has repeated in his encyclical on St. Francis de Sales. It should be an ordinary thing, not a heroic thing. What is being done to make it possible for the worker to be a saint, a good ordinary saint, following the Little Way.

“Maybe the worker’s life is a Way of the Cross, but . . . it is a continuation of the mission of Christ the Worker. Let these His successors grasp the possibilities and the dignity of their state, and they will be proud of it, instead of trying to change it.” Woe, woe to the shepherds who do not feed the sheep good sound teaching. Woe to the shepherds who feed themselves and do not feed the sheep. In Ezekial there are terrible warnings and a terrible threat. If the workers are lost to the church, who will be held responsible?

Bob Black's The Abolition of Work