Taking No Action Contrary to Nature
For nearly fifty years now, I have been an itinerant scholar and heavy industrial maritime worker. I joined the ILWU Inland Boat Union in San Francisco in the mid-1980s and led organizing efforts around convergent International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW) programs for controls of climate-change corporate criminals in hydrocarbon shipping transport. We stopped the highest work death rate in California and highest point source of deadly smog emissions in San Francisco at the same time.1
Along the way, we initiated much innovation in labor history, including helping to overcome fifty years of separation between the likes of OCAW and ILWU—oil, longshore, transport and energy workers unions—by fostering science-based issues that encouraged Tony Mazzocchi and Barry Commoner's steering toward a Labor Party.
My own perspective has been formed by the principles underlying Science and Civilisation in China, a series of volumes produced during the second half of the twentieth century at Cambridge University, with the leadership of the English biochemist and embryologist Joseph Needham and his partner and frequent co-author Lu Gwei Djen, who came to his laboratory in the late 1930s.2 Their partnership initiated the study of Chinese science history along lines suggested by the innovative work of Bukharin, Vavilov, and especially Boris Hessen, the author of “Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia.” That essay showed the relations of science and society quite clearly in a classic case study. It was published originally in 1931 as part of a collection called Science at the Crossroads, the record of a delegation led by Bukharin to England, republished in 1971, with a foreword by Needham.3
I have been in China now for about five years, with no particular charge or task to accomplish – after a literal dream to be near the banana tree, with a good partner, where the water buffalo lives, and where I can teach. I've helped an overseas Chinese textile worker to escape a couple of decades of severe criminal labor practices in Honolulu. Her hometown, in the Taishan Guangdong district, is one that has been responsible for a vast amount of Chinese American creativity throughout the American West, including construction of the western parts of the transcontinental railroad, a reprise of which is now scheduled for construction along the Old Silk Routes, in a new Afro-Eurasian Transcontinental Railroad.
This long life-course had been encouraged by many people, especially at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio), including Warren Z. Watson, Oliver S. Loud, and others in the work-study program designed by Tennessee Valley Authority hydraulic engineer Arthur Morgan. This is a reflection of deep old hydraulic civilization such as has been born and developed in Chinese history. The Needham series demonstrates the profound and unusually peaceful force of nearly all the science and technology which the Chinese people now apply and creatively adapt in steering their ships of stately capacity toward a new socialist world, out of the ashes of the wreckage being left behind by the privateers who love money more than anything else. Human Laws and Laws of Nature must prevail, to take a title from an essay of Needham's.
That goes along with the phrase from Lao Tzu which is discussed in Volume 2 of the big series. It is beneath my signature below: Taking No Action Contrary to Nature. A compass pointing the Way.
Further thanks must go to the Bay Area Labor History Workshop and the Southwest Labor Studies Association, with principals like Don Watson and oral historian Harvey Schwartz, as well as ILWU archivists Carol Cuenod and Gene Vrana. And last, at the sternpost rudder, steering for the past several years: thanks to labor political activists and the Secretary Treasurer of the largest refinery local in the country, Kathleen O'Nan and Dave Campbell at USW Local 675 in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The sternpost rudder? A Chinese invention. See Volume IV, Part 3, on construction, hydraulic engineering, and nautical technologies, of Science and Civilisation in China. Special thanks to Francesca Bray, to Needham Research Institute Librarian John Moffett, their associated scholar Nathan Sivin, and Susan Bennett, an organizing dueña for that Institute.
Toward Ecological Civilization, where almost all rivers will run to the sea!
Jeff Wickham
Guangdong Taishan, China, April 2018
Taking No Action Contrary to Nature
[Jeff Wickham invites communications, which may be sent to him in care of the Editor-at-Large, Victor Wallis (zendive@aol.com).]
Footnotes
1 See Labor Occupational Health Monitor. 16:1 Spring 1988. http://cdn.calisphere.org/data/28722/2v/bk0003s8j2v/files/bk0003s8j2v-FID1.pdf
2 Joseph Needham Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. https://archive.org/details/ScienceAndCivilisationInChina
3 International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. Science at the Crossroads. London: Kniga, 1931. https://archive.org/details/scienceatcrossro00inte