I HAVE A FRIEND named Paul, whose father works at a blast furnace at a steel mill in Gary. Indiana Paul relates this story: at least five times a week his father comes home from work sometime after midnight, having done his time on the middle shift 1 p.m. to midnight at the mill. Apparently he cannot bring himself to go to bed; the heat, the lean and the tension of his work do not allow him to sleep, but instead compel him to turn on an all night local country music station, which he plass so loud that no one else in the house is able to sleep either. Finally, usually around dawn, Paul's father drops off to sleep in a chair, even though the music from she radio is at least loud enough to stifle out the leaguing sounds of the mill's machines, which make conversation below a scream impossible, and the sensation of the blast furnace's heat, which would melt human flesh were it not for specially made suits that the workers facing the ordeal-wear.

Paul tells me that these moments between midnight and dawn are probably his father's happiest his "tree time." They are certainly the only time when he can escape from the human being transformed into machine existence of the factory and listen silently while other people sing to him about divorces, unhappy love successful love rural roots, homesickness, and dreams. Perhaps Paul's father listens to Merle Haggard sing.

Where I've been or where I'm going didn't take a lot of knowing, but I take a lot of pride in what I am

The music is his escape front permanent relegation to the world of things: as a steelworker, he is less efficient--less "productive"--than the machines and-furnaces that define most of his life. But in the volume of music that drips with sentimentality and remembrances of good things past--which may never have happened in his lifetime, but perhaps in his father's or grandfather's world, he believes--he can overcome the life of the present. The sound of the music, for him, is louder than the sounds of the factory. And it is even possible that the music which speaks of a rural, better past simultaneously holds but the promise of a free, decent community oriented future.

When I was in the West last summer, there was one song that people requested from country bands at just about every bar I went to. It is a bad song: John Denver's "Country Roads." Still, the words express the yearnings of many American workers:

Country roads, take me home to the place where I belong West Virginia...

The music is not repressive in itself, just as other elements of popular culture, such as sports. Hollywood movies and TV situation comedies are not wholly repressive. These parts of American culture do not lie but symbolize the American worker's image of himself and his life situation: they are the evidence of a wish to run away from a present which does not recognize human needs for community, communication and creativity in work as legitimate. They are a protest--however submerged--against the life of the factory, the sales counter, and the office. Yet, the way the escape is made is the symbol of a history, which can explain both the distorted American view of social liberation and the traditionalism that is misunderstood as conservatism among the working class.

THIS HISTORY encompasses the period from the nation's founding to at least the 1930's, and if the ideology based on this historical experience is no longer valid, it still exerts a powerful hold--as an idea which does not jibe with present reality--on working class consciousness. This ideology is the myth of escape from industrialization, an escape from the industrial city to the pre-industrial country, and by its nature is an individualist wish for self-reliance and liberation.

This liberation did once exist: workers--for example, in the middle and late nineteenth century--could accumulate some money, and hope to purchase and farm land in the open frontier of the Midwest and West. American workers were confronted with the same brutal present as workers in every Western country--and lately, many Third World Countries--have been faced with. The critical difference is that other nations' workers saw no real hope for escape in recovering the past: for them, present-day reality could only be challenged by a belief in a glorious future free from capitalism. Socialism, anarcho-syndicalism and communism were the direct denials of the disciplined rhythm of the machine which characterized factory life. For other countries' workers, socialism and the future meant freedom.

Freedom in America, however, has been represented by the past. This is not difficult to see think of constant references to the liberties handed down by the Founding Fathers--the definition of freedom in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, which Jefferson himself believed was based on a nation of small, freeholding farmers. Virtually every group in American politics--including workers believes that the past contained a great measure of true freedom, and that the degree of liberty present now can be calculated by our distance from the idea of the Constitution.

THE IDEAL for Americans is a rural members characterized by individual family farms and unrestricted right to political participation through voting. Social movements for liberation--leftist movements of the sixties, for example--have always harkened to the pre-industrial past to protest the development of capitalism in its various stages inevitably, mass protests of the dissatisfied and dispossessed have used the values of the past, and movements insisting that the past is gone and cannot be relived--such as the Socialist and Communist movements--have never found much support from American workers.

Populism--with a clear rural social base and back-to-the-land rhetoric--sprang up in the late nineteenth century to challenge the growing capitalism which was to destroy its social powers. The Communist movement in politics and culture in the 1930's depression days tried to integrate this American remembrance with a future-oriented Marxism consider Grandpa Joad's line in The Grapes of Wrath "I' m stickin' with my farm until Idie"), and Woody Guthrie's "Roll On Columbia." In which he applauds "Tom Jefferson's vision" which "could not let him rest"--that vision being the endless expansion of American farmland westward.

Even the counterculture of the '60s--which was genuinely in opposition to advanced, bureaucratized capitalism and the stilted, unspontaneous him in beings it created--could not transcend this vision of the past. The hip Left's retreat into rural communalism and undisciplined, leaderless opposition was essentially in keeping with America's Jeffersonian traditions. In American style, a large part of the '60s Left could not make a virtue of organized planned collectivism but instead tried to create a vision of society which was small scale, often rural, and largely anarchic. In a society and economy as interdependent and complex as U.S. society is such a social program is hopelessly utopian--as utopian as similar plans put forth by Leftist anarchists and Rightist libertarians--and could not be achieved. In America, revolutionary opposition to capitalism often takes on a largely reactionary content, a desire to return to a simpler past rather than advance into an uncertain future. So, capitalism progresses while oppositions to it sporadically break out--but these oppositions posit a chance for return to a dream and a world which is lost.

THIS BACKGROUND to Andrew Levison's The Working Class Majority helps explain both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Most important, Levison is decisive on a central matter: is the present-day working class potentially revolutionary or only potentially liberal? Ultimately, Levison says liberal in the short run and perhaps socialist and revolutionary in the long run. This point is significant, because Levison is a McGovern liberal, and through the book's serialization in The New Yorker it might come to have high currency among the middle-class Left. As a whole. Levison attempts to provide the basis for a worker-affluent liberal alliance; his advocacy of socialism as the completion of American democracy shows the response of a good portion of the liberal intellectuals presently confronted with economic and cultural crisis (Pete Hamill's "Socialism in America" in recent Village Voice is further evidence of some liberal Democrats' left-ward movement.)

Levison sees revolutionary possibilities in American workers--he does not fall into a moronic "classless society" argument. For Levison, workers are a progressive force in the present, capable of fighting for redistributive taxation, a full employment economy, national health reform, representation in the workplace and workers' control. All of these issues are part of working-class self-interest, and Levison sees the potential to go beyond this advanced welfare-state liberalism: