Well, What IS Wrong with Workers of the World Uniting?

Part I of an essay exploring the ideological source of the modern totalitarian state

The year was 2003. I was standing with 200 of my colleagues in a hotel conference room in downtown Sacramento, California. The non-profit association we all worked for had recently been taken over by an international union headquartered in Washington DC, and the little man who had been appointed General Manager was yelling at me. At us. At the world.

“We stand in solidarity with London cab drivers and hotel maids in Lisbon!” he shouted. “If you’re not a true believer, you can get out now!”

I was dallying with the Green Party at the time, and did not understand that the words he was shouting had nothing to do with the message he was conveying. Or that he was, in fact, communicating the most famous Communist slogan of all, formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Manifesto of 1848: “Workers of the World, Unite!”

But this is not a story about me, or my 200 colleagues, or that nameless little comrade, or Sacramento, or the takeover by the international union. This story is about you: the people who wonder “what do office workers in California have in common with cab drivers in London and hotel maids in Lisbon, and why should someone’s job be threatened if they don’t believe in communist solidarity?”

To answer that question, we need to ask a different one: “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” And to understand that we need to take a trip back in time to the former Cold War country of Czechoslovakia in 1978.

For the moment, let us accept at face value the words of our anonymous general manager. If he’s right, then the activism of public employees in Sacramento can result in better working conditions for Portuguese hotel maids at the Olissippo Lapa Palace hotel in Lisbon. And when London cabbies go on strike, they can secure better labor contracts for government employees at the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. That is, if they are “standing in solidarity” with each other.

Which is, of course, absurd hogwash. I know this partly because I was living in the UK in 1979, and the London Garbage Strike of that year did not prevent President Ronald Reagan from firing the striking U.S. air traffic controllers in 1981.

Also, as recently as 2010, some of my colleagues mentioned above were still bitterly and publicly clinging to what the PATCO strike did to the labor movement, but not a single one of them ever mentioned how they benefited from the direct action of Lisbon hotel maids.

So what was really going on in that Sacramento conference room, why would the General Manager of an American non-profit denigrate his workers for failing to be true believers in Communism, and why does it matter in the year 2022?

First, it matters to me personally because the Berlin Wall was still standing when I left the UK in 1980; it didn’t come down until 1990, the year I took the job with that non-profit association; the year it did come down was just a few years before my first daughter was born; in 2022 that same daughter says she’s a Socialist without realizing that the goal of Socialism is Communism; and finally because Communism is a pseudo-reality created by people who can’t cope with the real world and want to force all of us to live behind the Wall of their delusion.

Second, it matters to all Americans because a significant number of our fellow citizens are seriously asking what’s wrong with workers of the world uniting — as if they believe a pseudo-reality can solve the problems of a society, as messy and unfair as it is, that was built on the free exchange of goods and ideas.

And finally, it matters to the “general will” of society because all of us have a genuine interest in the slogans that we and our neighbors plant in our front yards, whether those slogans mean what they say, and what those slogans are in fact asking us to truly believe.

It’s the Winter of 1978 and You’re Freezing in Prague

So, to find out “what’s wrong with workers of the world uniting,” imagine it’s the “catastrophic winter of 1978,” and you’re standing in line, freezing, outside your corner grocery store in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The greengrocer is just opening up for the day. You watch as he puts a sign in the window: “Workers of the world, unite!”

Signs with the same slogan are displayed up and down streets all over the city, even though today they are hidden by snow drifts six feet deep. You have been shopping at this store for years, and you usually ignore the sign because you can’t remember a time when it was not in the window.

But today is different, because yesterday a friend gave you a crumpled 30-page essay written by a local poet named Vaclav Havel, who is asking some shocking questions about the greengrocer and his sign:

“Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?”

You would lose your job, and very possibly your freedom, if your Communist boss knew you possessed such a document. Nevertheless, the essay is folded up in your pocket right now, and your plan is to give it to your best friend after you finish shopping.

The slogan “contains a subliminal but very definite message,” says Havel. “Verbally, it might be expressed this way: ‘I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.’”

As you check out with your meager supply of vegetables for the day, you remember something else Havel wrote: “The message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers.”

Havel’s words have awakened something within you. You know they are true, because you wonder if your friend is an informer, you wonder if the greengrocer is an informer, and you know they wonder the same about you.

You also know it is dangerous to be a dissident, but you realize that’s what you’ve become. You hope your friend won’t turn you in, but you’re willing to take the risk because of the look in the greengrocer’s eyes as he hands you your change.

You’re lucky you got in line early, because the grocer has run out of vegetables. The economic privation exhausts you. But what’s worse is living in a world of suspicion and lies.

These are Not the Slogans You are Looking For

When I snap my fingers, you will be back in the year 2022, wondering if you would have been the shopper, the greengrocer, the greengrocer’s superior, or if being one or the other would have made any difference.

In the 21st century, we are being asked to display the same slogan; and, in fact, an increasing number of us do. Baristas of the world unite. Kellog’s workers of the world unite. Domestic workers of the world unite. Workers of the world unite. Workers and the world unite.

Many of us are also displaying other, more modern, slogans that also do not mean what they say. Chief among them is the ubiquitous “We Believe” sign — “Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights are Human Rights, No Human is Illegal, Science is Real, Love is Love, Kindness is Everything, Diversity Makes Us Stronger.”

In 2020, the head of the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health said that sign is “the heart of the progressive movement.” The author who described the sign’s history wrote that it is “a litmus test, in effect, for the entire political left.” They are both correct.

In the Czechoslovakia of 1978, the greengrocer passed his litmus test in the vain hope that the Communists who had violently occupied his country would allow him to live in peace.

Here in America, millions of people calculated in 2020 that they could encourage a violent uprising but suffer none of the consequences if they just said “Black Lives Matter.”

Those Americans did not realize that two of the three BLM co-founders self-identified as “trained Marxists,” and they never bothered to think critically about what message the “We Believe” slogans actually communicate.

In an age when we are told that transgender men are literal women, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” actually means “A Woman Needs a Uterus Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.” Would you put that sign in your front yard?

If “Diversity Makes Us Stronger” actually means what the words say, then university professors who say “White Lives Don’t Matter” are, in fact, weakening their institutions of higher learning.

Also, what should a university do when a college student threatens to “stab” the next person who says “all lives matter” and watch them “bleed out”? Make her write “Kindness is Everything” 100 times on the whiteboard?

If “Science is Real” means science is real, then the science of climate change can’t possibly be “settled.” The meaning behind the slogan is “Science is Settled and Climate Deniers must be Sued into Silence,” but no one puts that sign in their yard, either.

Thankfully, we don’t live under Communist oppression. Yet. But just as the greengrocer’s sign meant something different from what the words said, none of the “We Believe” slogans mean what they say, either.

The Expiration of Kindness

Would you believe me if I said the woman who came up with the “We Believe” slogan in the first place does not believe “Kindness is Everything”? Well, you don’t have to take my word for it. If she were making that slogan today, she said she would replace it with “Anger is Justified.”

The leftists who curate the slogan admit there is “uncertainty” about that content and it was too kind for “the Trump years.” But they have also “come to accept it as part of the sign’s poetic flow.”

This “poetic flow” is what Shelby Steele calls “poetic truth” — a deception that allows its believers to justify their anger.

It should be obvious by now that the “heart of the progressive movement” rests on the the ever-shifting sands of nice-sounding slogans that never mean what they say — and what they do say always comes with an expiration date.

Thus, the Kindness of leftists has thus been replaced by the Anger of leftists, and their justified anger is aimed at people like me who actually do what the words of the slogans say I must do.

For instance, I know America can be a strong, diverse, pluralist society. I know science is real and the climate is changing. I can, and do, love individual gay and transgender persons.

But none of that matters because I do not do what the meaning of the slogans say I must do. I do not accept that transgender men are literal women, and my actual love for them is not predicated on the condition that we agree on their gender identity, so I am “transphobic.” I do not believe in “multiculturalism,” preferring instead the traditional American motto of e pluribus unum — out of many, one — so I am a “white nationalist.” I think the religious dogma of Global Warming was renamed Climate Change for political, not scientific, reasons, so I am a “climate denier.”

All people who accept the words but understand and deny their subliminal message must be excommunicated. And if you know someone like that, it is your duty to inform your superiors in the movement.

The Expression of Loyalty

As you may have surmised, I do not own a “We Believe” sign, but plenty of my local shops do. And in the interest of “can’t we all just get along” it is vital that we determine exactly what “vital interests” those slogans reflect.

Just like every worker in every place and time, the real-world interests of modern workers are something along the lines of “feeding my family, leaving my children better off than I was, and retaining some dignity while doing it.”

Similarly, the vital interests of Black Lives Matter supporters include a “desire that black Americans live in dignity, without police brutality and racism.”

Those interests are real. But, as we have seen, those are not the interests communicated by the slogans. The meaning of “Workers of the World Unite” is “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” The meaning of the “We Believe” sign is “This virtue signal in my front yard proves how kind I am, unlike you racists, bigots, homophobes, and climate deniers.”

Havel rightly observes that everyone — you, me, and the greengrocer — “would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of [our] own degradation in the shop window.” Even Marx, Engels, and the trained Marxist BLM founders knew that, so they formulated acceptable slogans, or, as Havel put it, an “expression of loyalty.”

But this loyalty pledge doesn’t just allow us to retain some semblance of dignity. It also allows us to hide the source of the degradation from ourselves. As Havel puts it (emphasis mine): “the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.”

And it is the ideology that asks — with the straight face of someone who would inform on you — “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”

In Part II of this essay, we will find out that the modern “anti-fascist” movement must invent domestic enemies in order to exist.