After the first of the year, I wrapped up the novels I was reading and made a promiss to myself to be a little more selective. To only read high caliber writing. That’s how I came upon In Dubious Battle. I wasn’t aware of the buildup to an apple pickers’ strike until I was bending back the binding so the pages eased open in my hands. And strikes are turning out to be very good scenarios for expressions of the social economic side of the economy.
Take what Mac says here to Dr. Burton, who has been brought in to be on hand to mend any of the strikers who get caught up in a tussle. Mac’s trying to figure out why Burton keeps showing up when he doesn’t get paid, nor does he seem interested in the cause. In other words Mac can’t figure out the ambitions for what he refers to as ‘work’ when it falls neither in the private or public sphere.
“Yes, you. You’re not a Party man, but you work with all the time; you never get anything for it. I don’t know whether you believe in what we’re doing or not, you never say, you just work. I’ve been out with you be fore, and I’m not sure you believe in the cause at all.”
Dr. Burton laughed softly. “It would be hard to say. I could tell you some of the things I think; you might not like them. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like them.”
“Well, let’s hear them, anyway.”
“Well, you say I don’t believe in the cause. That’s like not believing in the moon. There ‘ve been communes be fore, and there will be again. But you people have an idea that if you can establish the thing, the job’ll be done. Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away. Establish a commune, and the same gradual flux will continue.”
“Then you don’t think the cause is good?”
Burton sighed. “You see? We’re going to pile up on that old rock again. That’s why I don’t like to talk very often. Listen to me, Mac. My senses aren’t above reproach, but they’re all I have. I want to see the whole picture as nearly as I can. I don’t want to put on the blinders of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and limit my vision. If I used the term ‘good’ on a thing I’d lose my license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don’t you see? I want to be able to look at the whole thing.”
Burton turns out to be a bit of a philosopher. He’s there putting in the work so he can understand the why of it all. He and I agree the flux will continue. That the whole pricing mechanism is always in motion, and for that reason time must be understood. He also is indifferent to the ‘good’ of it. He isn’t going to shuffle through the risks versus the rewards, he is there trying to understand the beams that turn the wheel and the flow of the water that pushes on the buckets.
In the following few pages Dr. Burton talks about group-men. “I watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like a single man. A man in a group isn’t himself at all: he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. I want to watch the group, and see what it’s like.”
I’m looking forward to reading what else Burton observes.
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