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EIA Special Investigative Report:
The Cafeteria Manifesto
Item:
Reporter Chris Peterson of the
Washington City Paper writes a cover story for
the November 11 edition about the Washington, DC members of the Communist
Party USA. Near the end of the story is this single sentence: "Local
communist meetings aren't found only in dark bars, living rooms, and coffee
shops. Every month the comrades get a hot lunch, too -- at the National
Education Association cafeteria on 16th Street NW."
Item:
Nationally syndicated columnist Robert Novak spots the Peterson story and
mentions it as part of his November 20 column, with the subhead "Reds at NEA."
The full item reads: "The District of Columbia cell of the Communist Party
USA has been revealed as holding a monthly luncheon in the cafeteria of the
National Education Association, without the sponsorship but not with the
disapproval of the huge, politically powerful schoolteachers union.
"The Communist meetings were reported
by Chris Peterson in the Washington City Paper
edition of Nov. 11-17. A lawyer attending the September meeting bolted from
the cafeteria when he learned a reporter was present.
'''We had no knowledge of this,' NEA
spokeswoman Denise Cardinal told this column, 'because the NEA does not
screen the patrons of our cafeteria or listen in on conversations. It's open
to the public.'"
Item:
The Education Intelligence Agency learns that the Communist Party USA has
been meeting in the NEA cafeteria since
at least May 1999, and that the cafeteria has hosted other individuals
with suspect political beliefs (see
here and
here).
Item:
An unknown individual leaves a copy of this document on the doorstep of the
EIA Operations Center. We reproduce it below:
The Cafeteria Manifesto
A spectre is haunting eateries -- the
spectre of communism.
It is high time that Communists should
openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims,
their appetites, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with
a manifesto of the party itself.
The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of gastric struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and
plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended,
either in a revolutionary reconstitution of cafes at large, or in the common
ruin of the dining classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we
find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of eateries into various
orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. So it has been with the NEA
cafeteria. The defenders of the public gruel exploit the masses while
retaining superior fare for themselves. The cheap prices of commodities are
the heavy artillery with which they batter down all Chinese walls, with
which they force the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of subsidized
cuisine to capitulate.
We see then: the means of production and
of exchange, on whose foundation the NEA built itself up, were generated in
feudal society. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. The
modern NEA cafeteria, with its relations of coerced dues money to support a
dining facility frequented by its apparatchiki, a cafeteria that has
conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells.
Thus the proletariat is born. With its
birth begins its struggle with the cafeteria. At first the contest is
carried on by individual diners, then by informal groups of lunch-eaters,
then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual
cafe that directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
conditions of production, but against the instruments of production
themselves; they destroy imported flatware that competes with their labour,
they smash to pieces crockery, they set cherries jubilee ablaze, they seek
to restore by force the vanished status of the diner of the Middle Ages.
Here and there, the contest breaks out
into food fights.
The development of the modern bistro,
therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the cafe
produces and appropriates products. What the cafeteria therefore produces,
above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.
The immediate aim of the Communists is
the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the
proletariat into a class, overthrow of the NEA cafe supremacy, conquest of
political power by the proletariat.
In this sense, the theory of the
Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private
provender.
The proletariat will use its political
supremacy to wrest, by degree, all dining facilities from the NEA, to
centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of
the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total
productive forces as rapidly as possible.
The Communists
disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends
can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing restaurant
conditions. Let NEA headquarters tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their made-to-order
chicken-and-havarti sandwiches.
They have a world to win.
SNACKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! |
