[Marxism] Reflections on Organizing in the Berkshires (was Re: PSL: Organizing the unemployed: 'Fight--don't starve)

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the article, Eli.

  We've got a few things going on here locally in the Berkshires.

It's hard to know where to begin when speaking of the Berkshires.  
There's the Berkshire Blues, by Randy Weston, and the Lenox School of  
Jazz, and Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and the whole Tanglewood  
retinue of musicians over the years. One summer's eve Miles famously  
turned his back on the all white audience while performing, saying  
later he didn't much like playing for white people (only).  But  
nowadays its James Taylor and Yo Yo Ma every year. I mean, I like  
James Taylor and all, and he is a local, but now even some of the  
jokes are the same from year to year.

Ten miles down the road from Lenox sits Pittsfield, one of the poorer  
mid-sized towns in the state, if not the country.  Pittsfield is the  
town where Melville wrote "Moby Dick". He supposedly wrote it while  
staring at Mt. Greylock out his window, which he said looked very  
much like a whale. Just the other day here a woman stabbed her  
husband in the leg and he bled to death. Neighbors had visited them  
the night in question and no one noticed anything wrong.  A few  
months back a man walked into a Pittsfield bar and shot dead one  
person there. He left, then came back and wounded two others,  
intentionally, as in not shooting to kill. Then he left again. Police  
were quoted as saying the next day only one person would speak to  
them about the incident. Police said they suspected organized crime,  
a professional hit. Maybe drug-related. This kind of violence is  
episodic and not a daily occurrence, so it still shocks the people  
who live here. I wonder if Melville would be shocked to read the  
headlines. I kind of doubt it.

The Berkshires has a little bit of everything, even a local version  
of big town street gangs. Smaller and less lethal but still drug- 
related.  Pittsfield has an ongoing crack epidemic, a cyclical rash  
of late-night burglaries of main st. businesses, and so on. The other  
day twenty- something police and FBI raided a local illicit  
operation, seizing in comparison for the effort expended in bodies a  
relatively small amount of cocaine and a few thousand bucks. The  
police don't make too many drug busts in Pittsfield.

The Berkshires is a study in contrasts, refracted in the social  
dynamics of class, easily observable in the small town milieu. It has  
experienced until recently a booming second home tourist economy. The  
influx of capital here in the '80's and '90's changed the area in a  
short time. Once a series of small new england towns, originally mill  
towns surrounded by farms and supported by small businesses, with one  
merging into another with little notice or fanfare, the Berkshires  
became flooded with tourists, spawning B&B's, chain hotels and  
restaurants,  The tourists come mainly in the summer season, but also  
to some extent during the winter months. There are ski slopes here,  
but lately the warmer winters has meant less snowfall. But they just  
make the stuff anyway.  30 years ago, a local painter told me  
recently, Great Barrington was ringed with working-class bars and had  
a vibrant night life. But on the 4th of July, people stayed at home  
on their farms or visited with family, leaving the streets deserted.   
Now on the 4th, the main street is bumper to bumper SUV traffic, he  
said, and the main street through town is lined with overpriced shops  
and fancy restaurants for the tourists.

Actually, old money quietly moved into the Berkshire area many years  
ago, buying up choice land and constructing huge mansions, which are  
located mainly between Lenox and Stockbridge.  Most are still  
standing and owned by the original families. Some were sold to  
corporate interests, which constructed luxury spas and golf courses  
on them.  Nowadays occupancy rates are down roughly 40% at all these  
spas. They might make it through this summer, but this time next year  
I'll be surprised if any of them are still in business.

And then there was the jesuit monastery set on a hill above the  
Stockbridge bowl. It burned down and was rebuilt and later sold to  
some ashram hippies. They started Kripalu there in the '80's. Kripalu  
is a yoga spa, but not so luxurious as some of its competitors. Still  
has some of that spartan mix of jesuit and yoga discipline. It is  
rumored the Native Americans thought of the area as a sacred site.

The small Berkshire towns are surrounded by lush, rolling hills and  
small mountains, these divided by a criss-cross of rivers and lakes.   
It's easy to see why the Native Americans thought of the area as  
sacred. The vistas really are superb. These days it's skiing in  
winter and music in the summer. Hell, skiing in the summer too. The  
Berkshires is resident to Tanglewood, Shakespeare & Co., and the  
Norman Rockwell museum.  Tourists from NY or Boston mix with the  
local working poor, the Old Money, and the petit bourgeois shop  
owners. There is also some medium sized industry such as a plastics  
plant here, an old paper mill there, and of course all the forward  
and backward linkages associated with cars and strip malls, not to  
mention some real corporate shit heels.

The Big Rumor here lately is that the local mall on the north side of  
Pittsfield is set to close, leaving maybe the theatres and a bestbuys  
standing.
Pittsfield has endured a legacy of industrial plant closings, such as  
GE twenty years ago, and more recently, massive lay-offs at Kay-bee  
Toys. The only thing GE left in its wake was a chronically under/ 
unemployed population and PCB pollution of the town itself as well as  
of the Housatonic river, which is still being cleaned up.

A friend of mine, owner of a bookstore in Lenox, once quipped he was  
planning to open a second bookstore in Pittsfield called the  
Pittsfield Community Bookstore, PCB for short. But that's just Lenox  
snobbery at play. Sorry Matthew. Actually I SHOULD apologize. Matt  
carries all the good left rags and has a great collection of new and  
used books. He even has Alice's art work on the wall. As in Alice's  
restaurant. No kidding. She's still around and she also has a book  
out about giving massage to cats. It's a cartoon comic. Matt lets me  
sit in the corner and play on my computer if I stay reasonably quiet,  
which is hard to do. You could meet anyone and everyone at "The  
Bookstore".

One late afternoon before new years there one german woman began to  
speak about WWI and the famous xmas truce, and I talked about Joyeux  
Noel, the movie, and a Scotsman corrected me on a few points, while a  
Polish man browsed in the background and listened in on the  
conversation. Matt just sat back and smiled, conducting the symphony  
in his mind, emerging now and again to ask a question or make a comment.

But back to Pittsfield.

As Barbara Tedlock wrote in a study of Pittsfield, before the river  
was polluted the poor could augment their miserable wages by fishing  
in the river or hunting for game. With the PCB's and the  
overabundance of second homes and condo complexes dotting the rural  
landscapes, even that is on the downswing, although nowadays over  
here in the budding metropolis of Otis, as well as in Lee and  
Beckett,  (home of community- controlled water, the former, and  
appropriately named, the latter),  the multitude of clean lakes and  
reservoirs is dotted with huddled groups of ice fishermen, who sit  
stoically on the frozen glaze and endure the windy cold through the  
excessive consumption of propane heat and alcohol. Clean, of course  
is a relative word around here. What passes for clean is really  
infested with acid rain and foreign algae. Clean means no straight  
toxic chemicals, just diluted heavy metal residue.

No doubt the ice fishermen and all their neighbors are still  
complaining about the lack of prompt state government intervention  
during the recent devastating ice storm back in december, with hill  
town residents of higher elevations suffering from power outages for  
weeks while towns closer to the metropolitan Boston area received  
swift service. Very few out of state crews in comparison were  
designated for the hill towns of the berkshires. Folks would come  
down from the hills to shower at a neighbor's house and fill up on  
water, while some stayed at local hotels. The lucky ones, of course,  
just picked up and left.

Late afternoon I dodge the ice holes left by these fishermen while  
back-country skiing, and ruminate over their stoic new england  
resilience, a very real presence in contrast to what I initially  
thought would turn out to be a mythical chimera. Nope, not at all.

Oh, almost forgot, there's still a General Dynamics plant in  
Pittsfield making switches and whatnot for sophisticated weaponry. As  
I remarked to a man with a GD badge in the bagel shop one morning  
just after the beginning of the Iraq war, "I guess business is pretty  
good for you guys these days".  He smiled enthusiastically and nodded  
his head vigorously, unaware of my underlying hint of sarcasm, my  
"safe" sarcasm. Oh yes, that "enterprising" yankee ingenuity thing,  
that legacy of shipbuilding and finance for the slaughter of the  
whales and the transport of the slaves, here it stands in front of me  
like Ahab on meth, reincarnate in a bagel shop with a cream cheese  
eating, cheshire cat grin.

 From below and to the left, there is a local group called Western  
Mass Labor Action which has been working in the Pittsfield community  
for years now, day to day, month to month. Mass pressure on  
government services, free provision of dental and medical care, etc.  
There below the radar, knocking on doors, visiting and listening,  
helping to maintain the embattled working class/section eight  
communities.

Back up the food chain to Lenox, Stockbridge and the spa resorts.  
Canyon Ranch Kripalu and Cranwell are the biggest employers by far in  
Berkshire county, well over 1500 employees total. There are also some  
smaller more exclusive resorts like Wheatley and Blantyre. Lenox is  
also home to the Lenox High School Millionaires. I'm not kidding. You  
should see some of the spoofy local headlines in the sports pages of  
the "Berkshire Eagle", that mix financial phraseology with sports- 
speak. It's really dreadful stuff. With the Millionaires having a  
banner year in cross country skiing and the stock market in the tank  
the sports writing should improve. A stone's throw away in  
Stockbridge sits the Red Lion Inn, the epicenter of the berkshires  
and preferred watering hole of Old Money. A perfect future stick up  
locale. Lenox is serviced by the working class communities of  
Pittsfield and nearby Lenoxdale, while Stockbridge is fairly self- 
enclosed. Lenoxdale gets some of that suck ass undrinkable pcb water,  
the poor fucks. Their cancer rate has got to be through the roof.   
Nearby West Stockbridge still suffers the indignity of an unsolved  
murder involving a female official for the NY SEIU. Someone slit her  
throat on the side of the road three years ago, right down the road  
from what was once "Alice's Restaurant". Lenoxdale gets some of that  
suck ass undrinkable pcb water, the poor fucks. Their cancer rate has  
got to be through the roof.

The spas have laid off well over 100 people since October 2008.  
Kripalu fired 60 staff as a xmas present, and without warning, a  
flagrant violation of the WARN act. They're also looking at EEOC  
violations for a pattern of senior staff dismissals. Canyon Ranch has  
laid off 30 plus employees in Lenox and even more in Tucson, and just  
the other day they introduced across the board 8% wage reductions.

But never fear, your local ghost chapter of the IWW is here to help  
coordinate the legal fight and yet another round of organizing.  In  
the wake of the latest firings, some of the newly unemployed are  
beginning to lay the groundwork to organize an all-inclusive spa  
workers union. This is the third attempt in five years.  Since I was  
in the middle of the last two, (actually I got canned before the  
first one really took off) in some form or fashion, I'm taking a back  
seat this time round, doing a little here, a little there, but not  
much really.  Mainly I'm just voicing encouragement. Besides, if I  
never again see the inside of a resort spa I can't say I would be  
disappointed.

As you head south toward Great Barrington there's Arlo Guthrie's  
Church to help even the score a little bit. Great venue, great music,  
always. Barrington is home to  a number of talented local musicians,  
and there's always good live music at the tiny Hogsbreath or the  
overpriced Mahaiwe.

Great Barrington is also home to the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, who  
grew up there. The remains of his country home are located on the  
outskirts of South Egremont, on land now owned by UMass at Amherst.  
The site has fallen into disrepair. We thought it would be the  
perfect setting for an anti-war march, and so also to dramatize the  
local issue, we organized a little protest there back in 2003.  It  
began in South Egremont and ended up at the rural site of Du Bois.  
Some IWW's, an old Black Panther and his close friend, some local  
peace action church folk, some Quakers, the female Reverend of the  
local AME church (she was the long term leader of the W.E.B. DuBois  
campaign in Great Barrington, tragically killed by her drunken  
husband last year in a domestic dispute), and a few new age kripalu  
hippie kids, all took part in the march.

We demanded attention be paid to the archaeological remains,  and  
that something be done locally to expand upon and ensure the  
preservation of the heritage of that great man. A fucking solid  
statement of support, if that's not too much to ask.

The local authorities were gonna name the newly built middle school  
after him, but after some old fogey anti-communist opposition, they  
ended up calling it 'muddy brook'. Assholes. So we ended up with  
Dubois markers at all the entryways into Great Barrington, and a  
historical legacy archive building on the outskirts of town. That was  
what we got after marching in the rain, hounded by a few drunken  
goons related to the sheriff of South Egremont, payback for my sharp  
words over the phone telling her we were going to march through her  
town, period. (The porkers wouldn't even let us park at the post  
office, even though it was after hours).

Cut to the present.

So here I am, stuck in the Berkshires, thinking of lightening my  
load, moving out and putting all my books and records in storage,  
auctioning off personal items I don't need, and waiting to hear from  
unemployment to give us all a second tier three month extension, this  
time of federal funds. They're just waiting to hit the 6% mark and  
then out go the letters. I should be good until the end of may under  
that hopeful prognosis, and then the settlement checks arrive by  
July. (Those damn lawyers sure know how to drag things out). But then  
again its always best to prepare for the worst.

Anyway, do let me know of any regional or national demos in the  
offing like what was mentioned in your posting. We'll do that old  
caravan thing from pittsfield to boston.

We'll call it a tea party or something.

Greg McDonald



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