Beardy Star Stuff 🏴🌹🇵🇸
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Want to know how we go about fighting #fascism? We're already doing some of that everyday as we defend and support our immigrant brothers and sisters. What else? I suggest that we read A People's History of the United States, particularly chapters 11 to 13 if we want jump right to the direct action of the late 1800s to early 1900s. Not really a manual but it describes the #generalstrikes from the rural to the urban. This is the spirit of #struggle and day-to-day #resistance we need.
Page from A People's History of the United States:
that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class without affiliation with any political party....
idea of craft unions:
One of the IWW pamphlets explained why it broke with the AFL
The directory of unions of Chicago shows in 1903 a total of 56 different trades unions of the American Federation of Labor. unions in the packing houses, divided up still more in 14 different national What a horrible example of an army divided against itself in the face of a strong combination of employers...
The IWW (or "Wobblies," as they came to be called, for reasons not really clear) aimed at organizing all workers in any industry into "One Big Union," undivided by sex, race, or skills. They argued against making contracts with the employer, because this had so often prevented workers from striking on their own, or in sympathy with other strikers, and thus turned union people into strikebreakers. Negotiations by lead-es for contracts replaced continuous struggle by the rank and file, the Wobblies believed. They spoke of "direct action":
Direct action means industrial action directly by, for, and of the workers themselves, without the treacherous aid of labor misleaders or scheming politi-cians. A strike that is initiated, controlled, and settled by the workers directly afected is direct action... Direct action is industrial democracy.
One IWW pamphlet said: "Shall I tell you what direct action..
Page from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States:One morning in June 1905, there met in a hall in Chicago a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States. They were forming the I.W. W-the Industrial Workers of the World. Big Bill Haywood, a leader of the Western Federation of Miners, recalled in his autobiography that he picked up a piece of board that lay on the platform and used it for a gavel to open the convention:
Fellow workers.... This is the Continental Congress of the working class. 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 dist-bution, without regard to the capitalist masters.
On the speakers' platform with Haywood were Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist party, and Mother Mary Jones, a seventy-five-year-old white-haired woman who was an organizer for the United Mine Workes of America. The convention drew up a constitution, whose preamble said:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have al
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