Anywhere Else Than Here Today
When, exactly, did the labor movement keel over and die? How did the struggle for decent wages, tolerable working conditions, and adequate benefits become indistinguishable from communist insurrection? Who convinced us that whatever is good for the Fortune 500 CEO is good for the country, even as he builds his newest assembly plant overseas and ships foreign nationals here to toil in underground sweatshops?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Perhaps as a nation we still swoon from our Reagan-induced infatuation with opulence, idolizing capitalism’s supposed triumph over socialism in the cold war (a propaganda war created primarily to keep the coffers of military industrialists overstuffed). The folks at Theater Oobleck, on the other hand, have managed to keep their heads on straight. While 99 percent of political theater in Chicago has all the insight and sophistication of Highlights for Children, Oobleck grapples with one of the most pressing and confounding political questions of our day: What will become of the workers’ struggle for an egalitarian, classless society now that Marx and his ilk have been told to sit silently in the corner for the rest of eternity?
To him, ants live in the perfect egalitarian society, where “everyone is free because everyone knows exactly what to do.” He sidesteps one troubling point–that this “free” society is ruled by a queen–by dismissing her as a figurehead. Some may call her anthill a fascist regime, but he declares, echoing the Sex Pistols, “She ain’t no human being!” Of course, the mindlessness of an austere ant society–“To the ant, the Amish seem positively rococo,” he yelps–throws into high relief one of the central crises of Marx’s social determinism: the question of free will. The ant-in-training easily bargains away his free will for the chance to become an unalienated laborer: a worker ant experiences no schism between who he is and what he does. He’ll even throw away any sense of personal identity. “One ant alone is really no ant at all,” he explains, sounding very much like the Entrepreneur and the Captain, who can’t exist without underlings. In the final analysis, this crew member is simply the inverse of his own worst enemies.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Phil Cantor.
