96: Bill Stott's Documentary Expression

In Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Bill Stott looks at 1930s America through the lens of the documentary genre.  Documentary is a form of expression that purports to represent reality but in which it is difficult for viewers to separate the false from the true.  Stott argues that at its base, the 1930s documentary had a left politics, a desire to look not just at the world as it is but at the world of the poor, the downtrodden, and the ordinary, with the intention not just of rendering it vivid and lifelike but also of constructing an audience response or instigating some progressive reform.  The different ways people created and used documentaries in the 1930s indicate, to paraphrase Agee, that the world can be improved and yet must be celebrated.

Stott considers a wide range of documentary forms and uses, and shows how documentary conventions were both developed and subverted.  Radio, examined through Edward R. Murrow, soap operas, and War of the Worlds, was the "paradigmatic medium of documentary" in the 1930s because it combined the two methods of documentary, "the direct and the vicarious, the unmediated experience and the interpretative commentary" in constant juxtaposition with one another.  Photography and documentary films, as Stott shows, were also forms in which apparent reality was actually heavily mediated, particularly when they were made by the government.  By contrast, Agee and Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explodes social documentary by both critiquing the world of the tenant farmers and celebrating it in all its beauty, all well being self-conscious about the role of the narrator in the creation of a work of art that reveals the most intimate details and suffering in people's lives in order to, perhaps, instigate social reform.

While Stott's analysis is somewhat limited by his choice of documentaries - he works primarily with cultural products created by people who worked for the federal government or for private corporations - and while he could do a bit more with the conditions of production, his visual and textual analysis are strong, and his discussion of documentary as a particularly valid entry into American culture in the 1930s makes sense.  What better way to see what people might have thought about what their world was like?

89: Miriam Ching Yoon Louie's Sweatshop Warriors

Miriam Ching Yoon Louie's Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory is both energetic activist scholarship and history from the bottom up.  Louie, a lifelong activist, builds on interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Mexicana immigrant sweatshop workers from five independent community-based workers' centers in New York, El Paso, Oakland, San Antonio and LA (from 1997-2000) to argue that "grassroots immigrant women [are] agents of change... the very heartbeat of the labor and anti-sweatshop movements."  By combining the experiences of these women with a structural analysis of the global sweatshop industry, Louie turns the story of their progress form workers to warriors into a handbook for other activists for social change.

Plenty of theorists and historians have explored the development of global capitalism.  Where Louie's account is unique is in her focus on (and identification with) immigrant sweatshop workers in the United States.  Working from this perspective, Louie shows that, first, the global sweatshop pyramid of exploitation takes advantage of the "exceptional" and the "different" in order to "relegate certain strata of the population into super-exploited positions and other to more privileged buffer positions;" the "exceptions" being gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and so on.  She thus exposes the exploitation of social difference as the heart of the global capitalist enterprise.  Second, she shows that immigrant sweatshop labor in the US is itself a product of US expansion abroad: many of the women argue that "we are here because you were there."  And third, this perspective also allows her to show concretely and in detail how global capitalism can and is being resisted by the people at the very bottom of the pyramid, who use both their differences in language and in origin AND their common experiences to fight for basic rights like a minimum wage, safe working conditions, a cap on hours, greater corporate accountability... as well as food, education, rights to housing, and so on.

Louie brings the voices and experiences of women who have turned their differences into an asset and begun working together for social change.  And, conscious of her readers' probable ignorance of these women's lives, she asks that we not be voyeurs or consumers of their work and their lives, but that we join to help them in their struggles.

76: Piven & Cloward's Poor People's Movements

In Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Piven and Cloward study four American social movements, two from the 1930s and two from the 1960s, to identify patterns in protester behavior, political and social context, and state responses that might inform lower-class political movements in the future.  And they determine that in any social social movement (and all social movements, for their purposes, come from the working classes), "whatever the people won was a response to their turbulence and not to their organized numbers."  In other words, uncontrollable mass insurgency, not SMOs, are what cause changes in society and win more rights for oppressed groups.

The reason SMOs kill a social movement instead of fueling it is that organizational development involves creating a disciplined, orderly membership and on getting resources, usually from elites, to sustain the organization.  Elites are more than happy to help fund these organizations, because they're a way of calming down angry people and bringing them into orderly obedience again - or at least a way of distracting them from their revolutionary goals.  "Organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their revolutionary politics, and therefore SMOs kill social movements.