After the death of #communism and the beginning of the end of history the #SocialDemocrats established the new social marked politics to incorporate neoliberal policies into the mainstream democratic working class movements to sodomize, with help of the Bertelsman foundation, the western #WorkingClass.

Hence it was not a new far right manifest, nor the yet undiscovered fifth evangelium of Adolf Hitler, that created the return of the Nazi. 2/3

Today in Labor History, February 4, 1913: Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. In 1943, she joined the NAACP, eventually becoming the branch secretary, where she investigated cases and organized protest campaigns around cases of racial and sexual violence. In spite of local policies to disenfranchise African American voters, she still registered to vote and did vote from 1943 on. In 1955, she refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in a planned direct action against Jim Crow, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Later in her life, she became a supporter of the Black Power Movement and an anti-Apartheid activist.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #blackhistorymonth #civilrights #rosaparks #directaction #jimcrow #racism #BlackMastodon

Today in Labor History February 4, 1979: Six workers were killed by police in the massacre of Cromotex, Lima Peru. The workers had taken over the factory after it went bankrupt and its owners tried to close it down. Led by a hardline revolutionary, Hemigidio Huertas, workers armed with sticks took the premises over. They held out for a week, killing a police captain in the process. When police later stormed the factory, they killed six workers including Huertas. One of the survivors, Nestor Cerpa, was arrested and jailed for 10 months. After his release, he went underground and started to organize the MRTA, or Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #Peru, #tupacamaru #MRTA #massacre #policebrutality #tupac #union #strike #police #Revolutionary

Today in Labor History February 4, 1921: A massacre at San Gregorio, Chile, left 565 nitrate miners dead. 1920 was a year of brutal repression of the workers movement. Many locals were burnt down, many agitators murdered, workers sent to prison. Prior to the San Gregorio massacre, the Chilean IWW led a three-month strike protesting the export of grain during a food shortage. Four years later, the Chilean government murdered another 500 saltpeter miners and family members in the Marusia massacre.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #union #strike #IWW #massacre #Chile #murder #prison

Today in Labor History February 4, 1900: Jacques Prévert was born (1900-1977). Prevert was a poet, surrealist and libertarian socialist who glorified the spirit of rebellion & revolt.

Excerpt from “Song in the Blood”
There are great puddles of blood on the world
Where’s it going all this spilled blood
Murder’s blood. . . war’s blood. . .
Misery’s blood. . .
And the blood of men tortured in prisons. . .
The blood of children calmly tortured by their papa
And their mama. . .
And the blood of men whose heads bleed in
Padded cells
And the roofer’s blood
When the roofer slips and falls from the roof

The Minister of War:
I continue.
A destroyed hospital: ten, a hundred -
and I am modest -
can be rebuilt
And, the project adopted unanimously,
night has fallen,
the hospital was blown up with a few scraps of the neighborhood around.
Day breaks over the city
where the laughter dwindles, dissipates and disappears.
Everything becomes serious again.
Life, like the stock market, resumes its course
and general mobilization continues as normal.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #prévert #Ferlinghetti #antiwar #socialism #poetry #Poet #surrealism #rebellion #books #revolt @bookstadon

In honor of Black History Month, a short biography of Ben Fletcher (April 13, 1890 – 1949), Wobbly and revolutionary. Fletcher joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1912 and became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913. Also in 1913, he led a successful strike of over 10,000 dockers. At that time, roughly one-third of the dockers on the Philadelphia waterfront were black. Another 33% were Irish. And about 33% were Polish and Lithuanian. Prior to the IWW organizing drive, the employers routinely pitted black workers against white, and Polish against Irish. The IWW was one of the only unions of the era that organized workers into the same locals, regardless of race or ethnicity. And its main leader in Philadelphia was an African American, Ben Fletcher.

By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the IWW maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. After the 1913 strike, Fletcher travelled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color. In 1918, the state arrested him for treason, sentencing him to ten years, for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years. Fletcher supposedly said to Big Bill Haywood after the trial that the judge had been using “very ungrammatical language. . . His sentences are much too long.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #benfletcher #union #strike #philadelphia #longshore #docker #waterfront #worldwarone #prison #antiwar #freespeech #racism #blackhistorymonth #BlackMastodon

Today in Labor History February 4, 1869: Labor leader and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) co-founder William D. "Big Bill" Haywood was born. Haywood started mining at age nine. He became secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in 1900 and co-founded the IWW in 1905. He was a WFM organizer during the Colorado Labor Wars (1903-1904), in which 33 miners were killed.

At the IWW’s first convention (1905), he said, “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism. The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.” With the IWW, he came up with the propaganda ploy of sending workers’ kids out of town, for their own safety, during the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912), leading to a media backlash against the mill owners and the ultimate victory for the workers.

In 1907, he was falsely charged with the bombing murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg, but was acquitted with the counsel of Clarence Darrow. The WFM dismissed him in 1918 because of his radicalism. That same year, the Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (future first commissioner of Major League Baseball) convicted him of violating the Alien and Sedition acts during the first Red Scare for his antiwar activism. They sentenced him to 20 years in prison. However, he jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928 from heart failure and alcoholism. His ashes were split between the Kremlin Wall Mausoleum and the Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #bigbillhaywood #IWW #WFM #haymarket #union #strike #capitalism #antiwar #socialism #sabotage #Soviet #communism #sabotage #GeneralStrike #mlb #kremlin

From the death of industry to the squeezing of the #HighStreet, the UK #WorkingClass hasn’t just been forgotten - they’ve been failed by a political class that’s lost the plot. Enough is enough!

#UKPolitics #WorkingClass #CostOfLivingCrisis #BrokenBritain #GeneralElectionNOW

“What I want is for every dirty, lousy tramp to arm himself with a revolver or knife on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out.”
-Lucy Parsons

This was what Lucy Parsons, then in her 80’s, told a crowd at a May Day rally in Chicago, at the height of the Great Depression. The way folk singer Utah Phillips tells the story, she was the image of everybody’s grandmother, prim and proper, face creased with age, tiny voice, hair tied back in a bun.

Little is known about Lucy Parson’s early life, but various records indicate that she was born to an enslaved African American woman, in Virginia, sometime around 1848-1851. She may also have had indigenous and Mexican ancestry. Some documents record her name as Lucia Gonzalez. In 1863, her family moved to Waco, Texas. There, as a teenager, she married a freedman named Oliver Benton. But she later married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate officer from Waco, who had become a radical Republican after the war. He worked for the Waco Spectator, which criticized the Klan and demanded sociopolitical equality for African Americans. Vigilantes shot Albert in the leg and threatened to lynch him for helping African Americans register to vote. It is unclear whether her initial marriage was ever dissolved, and likely that her second marriage was more of a common-law arrangement, considering the anti-miscegenation laws that existed then.

In 1873, Lucy and Albert moved to Chicago to get away from the racist violence and threats of the KKK. There, they joined the socialist International Workingmen’s Association, and the Knights of Labor, a radical labor union that organized all workers, regardless of race or gender. They had two children in the 1870s, one of whom died from illness at the age of eight. Lucy worked as a seamstress. Albert worked as a printer for the Chicago Times. These were incredibly difficult times for workers. The Long Depression had just begun, one of the worst, and longest, depressions in U.S. history. Jobs were scarce and wages were low. Additionally, bosses were exploiting the Contract Labor Law of 1864 to bring in immigrant workers who they could pay even less than native-born workers.

Lucy and Albert Parsons helped organize protests and strikes in Chicago during the Great Upheaval. The police violence against the workers there was intense. One journalist wrote, “The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” During the Battle of the Viaduct (July 25, 1877), the police slaughtered thirty workers and injured over one hundred. Albert was fired from his job and blacklisted, because of his revolutionary street corner speeches.

After the Great Upheaval, they both moved away from electoral politics and began to support more radical anarchist activism. Lucy condoned political violence, self-defense against racial violence, and class struggle against religion. Along with Lizzie Swank, and others, she helped found the Chicago Working Women’s Union (WWU), which encouraged women workers to unionize and promoted the eight-hour workday.

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers went on strike across the U.S. to demand the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, Albert and Lucy led a peaceful demonstration of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue. It was the world’s first May Day/International Workers’ Day demonstration—an event that has been celebrated ever since, by nearly every country in the world, except for the U.S. Two days later, another anarchist, August Spies, addressed striking workers at the McCormick Reaper factory. Chicago Police and Pinkertons attacked the crowd, killing at least one person. On May 4, anarchists organized a demonstration at Haymarket Square to protest that police violence. The police ordered the protesters to disperse. Somebody threw a bomb, which killed at least one cop. The police opened fire, killing another seven workers. Six police also died, likely from “friendly fire” by other cops.

The authorities, in their outrage, went on a witch hunt, rounding up most of the city’s leading anarchists and radical labor leaders, including Albert Parsons and August Spies. Despite her efforts, and those of other activists fighting to free the Haymarket anarchists, the courts ultimately convicted the seven men of killing the cops, even though none of them were present at Haymarket Square when the bomb was thrown. They executed four of them in 1887, including Albert Parsons. On the morning of his execution, Lucy brought their children to see him for the last time. But the police arrested her and strip-searched her for explosives. Albert’s casket was later brought to Lucy’s sewing shop, where over 10,000 people came to pay their respects. 15,000 people attended his funeral. Several years later, the governor of Illinois pardoned all seven men, determining that neither the police, nor the Pinkertons, who testified against them, were reliable witnesses.

You can read my complete biography of Lucy here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/24/lucy-parsons/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #lucyparsons #IWW #KnightsOfLabor #union #strike #racism #civilwar #generalstrike #sabotage #texas #chicago #haymarket #police #policebrutality #pinkertons #prison #blackhistorymonth #BlackMastodon

Today in Labor History February 3, 1964: 464,000 students (45% of all students) boycotted New York City schools to protest racial segregation and poor learning conditions.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #education #schools #children #boycott #newyork #racism #segregation #civilrights

Today in Labor History February 3, 1910: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones addressed Milwaukee brewery workers during a two-month stint working alongside women bottle-washers while on leave from the United Mine Workers:

"Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul-mouthed, brutal foremen . . . the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, in their wet shoes and rags, for they cannot buy clothes on the pittance doled out to them. . . . Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption . . . An illustration of what these girls must submit to, one about to become a mother told me with tears in her eyes that every other day a depraved specimen of mankind took delight in measuring her girth & passing comments."

#workingclass #LaborHistory #MotherJones #workingconditions #women #exploitation #milwaukee #publichealth #wages #wageslavery

Zwei Bücher zum Thema "Schere zwischen Arm & Reich".
Julia Friedrichs guckt genau hin, spricht mit den Menschen, analysiert wie Reichtum und Armut funktionieren und dokumentiert das Selbstverständnis, das Menschen haben - wenn sie mit und ohne goldenen Löffel im Mund geboren wurden. Beide Bücher sind fast "spannend" geschrieben und lesen sich richtig gut. Mir haben sie viele Erkenntnisse gebracht - es wird höchste Zeit für #taxtherich !
#spaltung #workingclass #gesellschaft #goodread #books

Today in Labor History February 2, 1988: Four lesbians disrupted the UK House of Lords to protest the homophobic Section 28 legislation. The law prohibited schools from teaching or promoting the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." The vagueness of the law, and its punishments, led many teachers to self-censor. Chumbawamba, who came out with their song “Homophobia” in 1994, performed in an anti-Section 28 benefit concert in 1988, along with over 50 other performers. The Section 28 law was ultimately repealed in Scotland in 2000, and in Wales and England in 2003. The recent attacks on trans people in the UK has drawn comparisons to Section 28 and the homophobic hysteria of the 1980s and ‘90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4758hDY9fY&list=RDH4758hDY9fY&start_radio=1

#workingclass #LaborHistory #lgbtq #homophobia #transphobia #uk #schools #children #teachers #protest

Today in Labor History February 2, 1938: Emma Tenayuca led a strike at the Southern Pecan-Shelling Company in San Antonio, Texas. The workers were fighting against low wages and inhumane working conditions. Tenayuca first became interested in activism before graduating from High School and was first arrested at age 16, in 1933, when she joined a picket line against the Finck Cigar Company. She later founded two international ladies' garment workers unions, and was involved in the Woman's League for Peace and Freedom. She also organized a protest in response to the beating of Mexican migrants by US Border Patrol. She was arrested several times for her participation in strikes and other activism. 12,000 women, mostly Mexicana and Chicana, participated in the Pecan-Shelling strike. Police clubbed, gassed, arrested and jailed the women. The strike ended in October, with an arbitrated raise to 25 cents per hour.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #chicano #union #strike #EmmaTenayuca #mexico #wages #women #feminist #prison #police #policebrutality

Today in Labor History February 2, 1931: U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage were “repatriated” to Mexico. During the decade’s first four years, the federal government deported anywhere from several hundred thousand to 1.8 million Mexicans. 40-60% of those deported were U.S. citizens and overwhelmingly children. President Hoover blamed Mexicans for the Great Depression and deported them in huge numbers to win support from his right-wing base. Sound familiar?

#workingclass #LaborHistory #mexico #chicano #racism #potus #hoover #xenophobia #deportation #immigration

People waving goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 Mexicans from Los Angeles on August 20, 1931.

Today in Labor History February 2, 1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the U.S. war with Mexico. As a result of the treaty, Mexico was forced to cede over 1/3 of its territory to the U.S., including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Texas. 25,000 Mexicans and 12,000 Americans died in the war.

Video of Tijuana No, with Kid Frost, performing “Stolen at Gunpoint.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jlO5RqXFLM

#workingclass #LaborHistory #mexico #treaty #imperialism #tijuanano #california #arizona #texas #nevada #NewMexico #colorado #utah

Today in Labor History February 2, 1438: The authorities executed nine leaders of the Transylvanian Peasant Revolt. The uprising began in 1437 in the eastern territories of the Kingdom of Hungary. The revolt broke out after the bishop of Transylvania tried to collect years’ worth of tithes all at once. The peasants were already furious about increased taxes and duties. Thousands of peasants and miners participated, killing noblemen and conquering abbeys and towns. The nobility ultimately quashed the rebellion and executed its leaders. They mutilated the bodies of many participants.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #transylvania #romania #revolt #rebellion #peasants #hungary #taxes

Today in Labor History February 2, 1942: The Osvald Group took the first anti-Nazi action in Norway, to protest the inauguration of Vidkun Quisling, by bombing the Oslo East Station. Over 200 members of the Osvald Group committed at least 110 acts of sabotage against the Nazis and Quisling’s collaborationist government during World War II. The Osvald Group was aligned with, and support by, the Soviet Union. The Nazis occupied Norway starting on April 9, 1940. The Osvald Group continued its sabotage until 1944, when the USSR officially disbanded the organization.

Statue outside the Central Station, Oslo, is entitled Smash Naziism

#workingclass #LaborHistory #nazis #fascism #antifa #antifascist #antinazi #osvaldgroup #oslo #norway #ussr #soviet #communism #sabotage #bombing #ww2