Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Rise, like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you- Ye are manythey are few.

Shellys Masque of Anarchy has been a spectral presence for nearly two hundred years, summoned at climactic moments of civil warfare. Composed to memorialize the 1819 Peterloo massacre, the poem commemorates the sixty thousand people who gathered at the very dawn of the industrial revolution to demand a radical expansion of suffrage, especially to those laboring in Englands dark satanic mills. Dozens died, hundreds were wounded.

The poem wasnt published for over a decade, until the Chartist movement took it up in 1832. Another ten years after that, it became the anthem of an almost nationwide general strike. Participants referred to the time leading up to that moment and the strikes that preceded it as holy days.

Since then Ye are manythey are few has inspired rebellion, resistance, and liberation again and again. The New York garment worker strikes of 1911, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, May 1968 in Paris, and, most recently, the pro-democracy congregations during the Arab Spring and the Occupy uprisings of 2011 are all etched in our collective memory.

There are also largely unknown, but hardly less remarkable, general strikes: not just those that shut down Winnipeg and Seattle in 1919, London and the Midlands in 1926, and San Francisco in 1934, but also Amsterdam under the Nazis in February 1941 and again in April 1943, Turin and Milan on April 25, 1945 which Italians now celebrate as the penultimate moment of their liberation and the Algerian general strike of January 1957, which closed schools, shops, and factories in support of the independence movement. In 1972, Quebec saw a series of province-wide general strikes that linked a quest for national identity with a cross-class protest against austerity.

The general strike in Poland, which lasted just half a day on March 27, 1981, engaged more than twelve million workers and citizens. It announced to the world and to the thin strata of Communist functionaries still in power that Solidarity constituted a majoritarian and national movement. From that moment on the elite had but two choices: military repression, which it invoked later that year, or a regime-changing, world-historic capitulation, which finally came in 1989.

Shellys immortal lines were not heard during the recent calls for a Womens Strike or General Strike against the Trump regime or even as planning proceeds for the upcoming May Day strikes, which a number of trade unions in New York, Illinois, and California have endorsed. But what is sometimes loosely called the resistance certainly gestures in that direction. Its as if something in the air evokes the unvanquishable number, the lions shaking chains to earth like dew.

How else can we explain the sudden announcements of general strikes when nothing on the ground suggests that they might happen? Less than a decade ago, elements within Occupy Wall Street issued regular calls for mass action without any chance of realizing their plans. Novelist Francine Proses call for a general strike in January went viral before fading another immaculate conception, subsequently aborted.

The idea that something radical and forceful must be done persists in the most unlikely places. In February, fifty Hollywood writers, producers, and creatives held a house meeting in Hancock Park, California, to plan their response to the Trump administration. A strike, general or otherwise, was high on the agenda.

After listening to two labor historians brief them on past insurgencies, the organizers announced that they had already hired a PR firm to write a press release and organize publicity for their movement. The firms suggested slogan Strike for Democracy isnt bad, even if the aging leftists in attendance blanched at their method for coming up with it.

Three weeks later, Salud Carbajal, Santa Barbaras newly elected House representative, held a district meeting that new locus of resistance politics. The event was packed with constituents who cheered the spokeswoman from Planned Parenthood, expressed solidarity with advocates for immigrant rights, and heartily denounced GOP efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act.

But when he tried to answer what is to be done, Carbajal got an exceedingly cool reception. He told the energized crowd to write and e-mail Congress and then prepare for the off-year elections. A veteran of the 1960s, now retired after a distinguished career as a UCLA physician, objected, recalling the years when he and his comrades at Columbia shut it down. The crowd agreed.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. But then again, this desire to conjure up something forceful could still produce results maybe not a general strike, which demands a high level of organization and preparation, but perhaps upsurges, rebellions, boycotts, demonstrations, protests, and job actions of the most varied and unexpected sort.

Surprisingly, these recent calls for strike come primarily from middle-class activists, usually without the faintest connection to the labor movement. They summon people to deploy a weapon linked, since Peterloo, to an oppressed working class in revolt while decrying what they understand as white working-class backlash. The very incongruous timing and social location of these calls makes them odd, awkward, and naive, but also socially and culturally imaginative.

After all, what remains of the organized labor movement has avoided strikes like the plague for a long time; unions are simply too weak to conduct them. As late as 1975, each year witnessed more than four hundred strikes, involving more than a thousand workers. Today, ten or fifteen work stoppages occur, mostly for defensive reasons to preserve pensions, wages, or health insurance against an aggressive employer.

Strikes have cropped up among unorganized, low-wage workers, sometimes assisted by outside unions. The Fight for $15 movement has generated a good deal of social energy and achieved some legislative success on the state and local level. But as important and even heroic as such struggles are, these strikes-cum-referendum-campaigns hardly disturb the countrys economic machinery.

Critics have blamed an ossified trade union bureaucracy, a Democratic Party elite that has marginalized the interests of the working class, and a growing conservative hegemony openly hostile to workers, regardless of the pseudo-populist rhetoric its spokespeople sometimes trot out.

However we account for it, the strike as a theater of combat has faded. As a mythic ideal, however, it is flourishing.

This years calls for work stoppages have relinquished their once-organic connection to the work site and relegated the labor movement to the margins. Nevertheless, this new, often middle-class sensibility resurrects the strike in a kind of hyperactive afterlife. It has become the newly powerlesss dream state in the wake of an election from hell.

Unlike its working-class antecedents, todays strike does not arise out of relationships formed on the factory floor, at the water cooler, or near the checkout counter. On the contrary, todays would-be picketers have highly atomized working lives, pervaded by notions of self-fulfillment both on and off the job. Contemporary labor has dissolved solidaritys connective tissue, damning the strike before it even begins.

For decades, the working class has been forcefully reminded how little it counts in the affairs of the nation. The political and cultural right has captured and channeled this disillusionment, not only in the North American Rust Belt but also in Britain, France, and other polities where social democracy once flourished.

Brexit and Trumps electoral victory may have made a substantial proportion of the white working class feel momentarily powerful, but the rest of the working class immigrants and people of color as well as the cosmopolitan and once-solid middle class saw the election as illegitimate, profoundly disempowering, and an affront to their moral sensibilities.

They now face the kind of insecurity and exclusion that Americas alienated and unorganized blue-collar workers have long experienced. High school teachers, retired architects, and medical professionals all feel as disrespected and insecure as Walmart clerks and McDonalds grill cooks.

They earn a lot more money, but these energized middle-class workers especially among that cohort labeled millennial is nevertheless affronted by the profound inequities, self-seeking, and imperial arrogance of the new ruling elite. At least under Obama, they could recognize parts of themselves in the coalition. Now, to many, electoral democracy and the conventional institutions of political life appear hollowed out, corrupt, fake.

If power is no longer accessible through party politics, if the system rolls on unperturbed, glacially indifferent to the well-being not only of the working class but also of the vanishing middle classes, then reaching back to a more combative past seems imperative.

This is happening not out of the blue, but at a moment when mass action has become a flesh-and-blood reality once again. The 2006 Day Without Immigrants was a revelation; it resembled an actual strike and conjoined political, economic, and cultural identities and desires. In Greece and all though Central and Western Europe not to mention Latin America and the Middle East social conflict has escaped the boundaries of conventional politics or carved out new spaces on the electoral map, making way for insurgencies that didnt originate in the voting booth. Reveries of recaptured power might be nurtured in this soil, where the strike implies more than a commercial impasse and becomes synonymous with taking a stand.

Strike, Strike, Strike, the closing chorus of Clifford Odets 1935 play Waiting for Lefty carries its chanters beyond the pedestrian realm in which hours and wages are negotiated. Likewise, todays strike appeals have less to do with a specific organizational form than with creating a pathway to power.

In this, they recall a time when the strike was multivalent a tactic to be sure, but also a manifestation of a fundamental social antagonism.

This hasnt always been true. Radical social reformers of the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century eschewed strikes. They saw them as selfish, fixated on the parochial needs of one class.

The socialists of that era hunted bigger prey. They sought a complete overhaul of society that would reestablish or, rather, establish for the first time the harmony of all. Hence, the founders of utopian communities like New Lanark and Brook Farm or the Shakers of the Oneida commune tried to purge their experiments of all forms of social conflict.

Industrialization imposed a different reality. Strikes became commonplace, nowhere more so and nowhere more violently than in the United States. Marx and Engels considered the strike a form of class struggle, a kind of guerilla warfare that would steadily advance from the slogan a fair days wage for a fair days work to the abolition of the wages system. Even when defeated, strikers feel bound to proclaim that they shall not be made to bow to circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings.

Radicals socialists, anarchists, populists, even champions of the Cooperative Commonwealth like the Knights of Labor welcomed strikes, encouraged them, led them, and theorized and mythologized about them. Why?

First, the strike sparked fierce resistance in employers, often abetted by the governments coercive arm. Blood was spilled; protesters lost their lives. Whatever particular grievance precipitated the strike, it ultimately struggled against the new and profoundly disruptive system of wage labor.

This seemed inherently radical. Talk of wage slavery and other incendiary metaphors were common even in the most common strikes. The frequency with which governments police, state and federal troops, courts, governors, even the president intervened on behalf of the ownership class immediately raised the stakes; strikes took on a political meaning even when conservative unionists like Samuel Gompers or a youthful Eugene V. Debs eschewed radicalism.

Underlying indictments about wage slavery had spread so far that every local encounter became the potential site of a mass movement.

We tend to think of the trade union strike as a finite event between two parties arguing over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The rest of the world stands by and, for the most part, watches. But something quite different was happening during the formative stages of industrialization, as millions of people were being converted into the countrys founding proletariat.

All through the late nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, events sometimes called mass strikes embraced multitudes. They enlisted not only those immediately involved in a particular strike, but a whole social universe that included other sympathetic workers, neighbors, families, shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, merchants, clergymen, newspaper editors, writers and artists, nearby farmers, and even local militiamen unwilling to fire on their friends and coworkers.

The Great Railroad Uprising of 1877, the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the Uprising of the 20,000 in New York in 1911, the Lawrence and Paterson strikes in the following two years, the Great Steel Strike and Seattle General Strike of 1919, the San Francisco and Minneapolis general strikes of 1934, the sit-down strikes later that decade all stand as landmark moments in American history. As they unfolded, they laid bare the mass strikes rhythm and social reach. These are only the most noted; in the years following the Civil War and into the new century, many localized mass strikes erupted in towns and small cities nationwide, eliciting what has been called a strange enthusiasm.

The mass strike came much closer to turning the world upside down than an ordinary strike. Transgressive by nature, these events were widespread and open ended. They shattered and then recombined dozens of more local attachments. They exploded at a thousand points, leaping across boundaries of skill, gender, nativity, ethnicity, and race, winning the support of even those whose economic interests did not depend on the outcome.

Often enough, the mass strikes momentum sufficed to win concessions on wages, hours, and other working conditions although they might be provisional, not inscribed in contracts, and subject to being violated or outright ignored when law and order returned.

The mass strikes intense heat fused disparate elements into something ever more daring and generous. Indeed, its tactical repertoire which relied on the boycott and the sympathy strike embodied that vision. These weapons fit a worker-citizen movement whose social character and capacious programmatic embrace made it look like the kernel of a new commonwealth.

Boycotts and sympathy strikes expressed solidarity as an organized social emotion, as palpable reality, the spirit come to life. The form of the mass strike was its content, the medium the message.

Everything about them was unscripted. They had a rhythm all their own, syncopated and unpredictable as they spread from workplace to marketplace to slum. There was no central command, nor were they the result of some mysterious instance of spontaneous combustion. Each had dozens of choreographers, all directing local uprisings that remained elastic enough to cohere with one another while remaining distinct.

The program resisted easy codification. At one moment, it was about free speech, at another about a foremans chronic abuse, here about the presence of scabs and armed thugs, there about a wage cut.

Ranging effortlessly from a change in the piece rate to the nationalization of the countrys infrastructure, the mass strike defied the new order. Blunt yet profound, it defined the irreducible minimum of a just and humane civilization.

In so far as the mass strike had an ideology, it was ecumenical and apocalyptic. These early twentieth century syndicalist upheavals, from Brussels to Barcelona, St Petersburg to Seattle, constituted a freedom movement, bending the arc of social justice toward equality, solidarity, and emancipation.

During the Industrial Workers of the Worldled Paterson strike in 1913, Emma Goldman sent a message to the workers, promising that [w]hen all the textile workers, machinists, taxi cab drivers . . . join you in the general strike . . . which to all appearances is but a question of a few days, that would be death knell of the commercialism which has tried to crush human sympathy.

During World War I, all the combatant countries experienced a flood of strikes, some industry-wide, some convulsing whole cities. In the United States, Helen Keller advocated a general Strike Against the War.

This supercharged atmosphere gave rise to speculative thinking about how the strike could inaugurate a new world.

Talk of general strikes, political strikes, and mass strikes ran through all the left literatures: syndicalism, anarchism, socialism, and communism all devised various formulations that described an impending revolutionary crisis in which the strike performed heroics beyond the modest work-a-day improvements we now associate with Western trade unionism.

Big Bill Haywood, a founder of the IWW, explained how the strike functioned in the syndicalist schema. His 1911 pamphlet The General Strike compared it to the Paris Commune of a generation earlier.

The strike, he wrote, gives the vote to women, it re-enfranchises the black man, and places the ballot in the hands of every girl and boy employed in the shop. Wobblies advocated a peopled strike, a form of passive resistance on the job, and outright sabotage: two strategies for moving toward industrial democracy.

While committed to electoral politics as the leader of the American Socialist Party, Eugene Debs made no bones about the fact that the Pullman strike made him a socialist: through the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle, the class struggle was revealed and the whole apparatus of the state implicated. His comrade AM Simmons agreed: strikes, boycotts, lockouts, and injunctions are the birth pangs of a new society . . . and thereby rulership and slavery shall pass from the off the earth.

Rosa Luxembourg became the mass strikes seminal theorist, drawing heavily on the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution. She referred to the soviets the Russian word for popular assemblies as a political mass strike for freedom against absolutism. She wanted her experiences to serve as a corrective to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which drew a sharp distinction between the political and economic struggle and insisted on a central command structure.

Luxembourg drew a sociological correlative: in periods of heightened social fracture, she argued, the unorganized elements of the working class proved to be the most radical-minded. The mass strike, she wrote, on the whole does not proceed from the economic to the political struggle, or even the reverse.

In a letter to Karl Kautsky, a theorist close to the SPD leadership, Luxembourg saluted the European workers quiet heroism for their solidarity with their Russian compatriots and for their efforts to form worker-elected factory committees to run things without the help of trade union or party hierarchs. The German trade union establishment, however, saw the general strike as general nonsense.

George Sorel went furthest in transforming the strike into a kind of permanent apocalypse. By the time Reflections on Violence was published in 1902, the general strike had become a well-established part of working-class life.

Sorel recognized the general strikes transcendent character, which he thought leapt beyond the boundaries of the More, the incremental economic advances that chained the Left to bourgeois norms, a prisoner of envy and resentment. Mass strikes were simultaneously the moral equivalent of earlier forms of proprietorship, and the pathway to a heroic conception of life an epic state of mind.

Sorel and others felt that the modern worlds disenchantment expressed a deep human need for social dreams. Emotion and the poetry of life produced wisdom, not the rationalism so celebrated by utilitarian society, a faith in reason that much of the oppositional left also held. What Sorel admired in Marx was his catastrophic conception, his refusal to block out in advance some socially engineered model of the future society.

Revolutionary syndicalism, of which there were various renditions, was often understood to dispense with parliamentary methods in favor of violence. Instead, revolutionary violence served purely tactical purposes. Sorel and others, like Haywood, saw the general strike as a vehicle of democratic takeover, one that would avoid empowering a new managerial class, even a socialist one.

There was a millenarian thinking undergirding these conceptions. Like the Christian apocalypse, the general strike especially for Sorel carried moral inspiration, nurtured devotion, and would curb meaner instincts; a living myth through which virtue could take root. It would serve as a last judgment on what capitalism had wrought. The struggle needed no fixed objective; it served as its own justification. And it had the additional appeal that it refused compromise, rejecting equivocation and delay.

The strange enthusiasm continued to light up the labor movement through the Great Depression. Leon Trotsky praised the mass sit-down strikes in the United States not merely as a shrewd stratagem that would make it harder for the police and National Guard to direct violence against the workers, but also as a movement that would shake up the principle of bourgeois property.

Indeed, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) again and again drew on the support networks in communities, among workers, and between merchants, neighbors, coreligionists, ethnic fraternal societies, and other organs of working-class life. The last truly general strike in the United States took place in Oakland, California in 1946. It began among low-paid women retail workers and, after 130,000 stopped work for two days, called for the unionization of the whole city.

From the 1930s onward, employers and the politicians who support them have ghettoized the strike, routinized and limited its political and social meaning and consequences. This was no easy task the labor movement and its opponents have both tried to enlist the state as an ally and weapon in such combat.

The incident that touched off the Oakland General Strike, as was true in just about every other mass conflict from 1877 onward, involved employer efforts to enlist the police and militia to tilt the balance of power toward capital. Management enlisted the police with the enthusiastic support of right-wing city fathers, strongly backed by William Knowlands Oakland Tribune as escorts for trucks and scab workers resupplying downtown department stores.

Luckily for the strikers, the resultant traffic jam stopped streetcars and buses, and their unionized drivers were soon outraged by the scab-herding police. All transport came to a stop, stores and factories closed, and jukeboxes were hauled onto the street to create a festive, communal air.

After shutting down the city for more than two days, the union movement turned its energies to politics. The resultant reforms did not quite represent a municipal revolution, but they did exemplify the close relationship of midcentury unionism and political power.

The same dynamic appeared on an even bigger scale in Detroit a year later when the United Automobile Workers (UAW), then the United States largest and most dynamic union, flooded Cadillac Square with more than a quarter million workers to protest the Taft-Hartley Act. Laborites called the new legislation a slave labor law; it curbed strike power and disqualified radicals from labor leadership.

Then as now, the demonstrations leaders were divided over tactics. The Left wanted to shut down factories so that American unions could deploy, as one top officer put it, the kind of political power which is most effective in Europe. More cautious unionists, led by the ex-socialist UAW president Walter Reuther, agreed on a huge demonstration, but wanted one that began after workers clocked out for the day.

Capitalizing on these internal divisions, and on the early Cold War hostility to labor radicalism and political insurgency, the auto companies took their pound of flesh. They fired key militants and ended the tradition of working-class strike demonstrations in industrial cities for the rest of the twentieth century.

Plenty of big strikes have taken place since then, but, for both employers and workers, they have been self-contained, insular affairs, whose impact no longer resonated with the social movements and currents still roiling the American landscape. This represented a huge victory for conservatives and employers, who no longer feared that the labor movement would enlist the community or even decisive elements thereof, such as feminists, Latinos, or African Americans.

Indeed, the consignment of unions to an economic interest group all too frequently put these institutions into opposition with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to expand the content and scope of American democracy.

By the time Ronald Reagan smashed the PATCO strike in 1981, the unions had become isolated and vulnerable. The flight of capital out of production into finance and out of the country into the low-wage global South helped neuter work stoppages and collective bargaining.

The labor movement shrank in size and potency, emboldening conservatives to further undermine union power, as the wave of so-called right-to-work laws enacted over the past few years in several Midwestern states attests. During the last decade, unions have called only 143 strikes, compared to 3,500 during a similar time frame forty years ago.

And yet we cannot divorce politics from the quest for economic and social democracy. Even as the strike and collective bargaining have become almost entirely devalued, the same issues that animated radicalism a century ago remain front and center: economic justice and liberation, social inequality, the meaning of citizenship, and the democratic character of our governing institutions.

In the 1960s, even as intellectuals like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse began to turn away from the labor metaphysic, the strike in its classic, proletarian form still retained an imaginative grasp on leftists and reformers from Memphis to Paris. Martin Luther Kings very last campaign came in the form of a black municipal workers strike, the meaning of which transcended the stolid boundaries of midcentury collective bargaining and the outlaw struggle for union recognition in the public sector.

King wanted to create a transracial organization of the poor, using weapons honed not only in the civil rights movement but borrowed from radical labors arsenal as well. As he told the striking garbage men on the eve of his assassination, You may have to escalate the struggle a bit . . . just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.

Six weeks later in Paris, a fleeting alliance of students and workers seemed like the manifestation of every transformative dream to emerge from the sixties. The events of MayJune 1968 shut down Paris and swept eleven million workers into its orbit.

George Sorel, relegated to infamy thanks to Mussolinis fondness for the theorists mystifications when he was remembered at all, suddenly appeared on everyones reading list, but now with a hedonistic flavor. Under the cobblestones, the beach! chanted the Parisian students who saw utopia in distinctly Californian terms.

A year later, even the liberals who had enlisted in and assumed leadership roles in the American antiwar movement deployed a strike ethos to advance their agenda. The 1969 Moratoriums to End the War in Vietnam, among the largest demonstrations of that decade, had originally been planned as shut-it-down strikes, scheduled for a workday.

The sixties passed half a century ago; the Wobblies more than a century. But ideas of popular resistance, collective power, strike action, and Ye are many they are few are enjoying a remarkable renaissance. The May Day strike is winning support not only from many unions but also from immigrant groups and others seeking to demonstrate the power of a resistant citizenry.

This action may have the wherewithal to translate the wishful thinking of the Occupy militants, of Francine Prose and Womens Strike organizers, of Black Lives Matter allies, and of all the grassroots mobilizing against the Trump regime into a more robust reality. The proletariat remains a powerful force even if its ranks and spirit have been severely depleted.

Indeed, these mobilizations may signal the awakening of a new proletariat, one less like the industrial workers of the twentieth century than the ancient Roman proletariat the discarded and disempowered, cast-off by postindustrial society. Like the unorganized in Rosa Luxembourgs imagination, they are ready for action, neither backward nor bourgeois. Working classes both the well and poorly rewarded, both the remnants of the organized and the sea of unorganized might yet launch a mass strike that can deliver a new and humane future.

The rest is here:

Which Way to the Barricades? - Jacobin magazine

Alt-Left Insanity: 'Trump Will Try to Stage A Coup' NewsBusters (blog) The asylum escapees from ItsGoingDown, said of May Day, Wage Slaves Revolt! Clearly, they don't get that slaves don't get paid. And real slavery is a heck of a lot worse than working at McDonald's. The snowflakes rioted in Portland, which isn't ...

Originally posted here:

Alt-Left Insanity: 'Trump Will Try to Stage A Coup' - NewsBusters (blog)

Rockland Judith Lawson died April 18, 2017, at Maine Medical Center after a brief illness. Her good friends kept vigil at her bedside.

She was born Judith Wright Zillessen April 28, 1942. As a girl in Palm Beach, Fla., she was an avid steeplechase rider. She graduated from Georgetown University.

Judith was the first American woman sailor ever to start in the legendary Original Single-handed Trans Atlantic Race. About her countless exploits as a solo sailor and Outward Bound instructor on Hurricane Island she said: The question you ask yourself is, will I do this thing as I've planned and hoped, and have dreamed about doing, and the answer is the act of doing it.

She had a wanderers heart, a brave soul, and the calluses on her bare feet to prove it.

Judith also became a tireless advocate activist for the sustainability of our blue planet home. In her own words:

"Educated for the diplomatic service, I threw over wage-slavery to go sailing and see the world. Hand-picked in 1967 to be The Washington Post's sailing writer and outdoors columnist, I was there during the paper's halcyon years -- the Watergate investigation, learning by osmosis how to follow the money and spy unprofessionally while covering the world's major yacht-racing events for The Post, The (London) Daily Telegraph and The Toronto Globe & Mail. I edited and wrote for two small newspapers in Annapolis, Md., and one in Santa Fe, N.M., which was, shall we say, provocative (The New Mexico Broadside).

"I've jumped in over my head many times. The NM Broadside was far and away the most dangerous jump, moving me squarely into the uncensored investigative reporting that's always been my first calling. Mano a mano, our tiny little paper confronted the massive corporate powers that run Los Alamos National Laboratory, aka, the heart of the global nuclear weapons industry. Retreating bloody and shocked, I moved back to Maine to once again educate and inform readers about climate change, GMOs, pollution and other less explosive subjects and in 2013 organized a major event for 350.org. In September 2014, I was a part of the Peoples' Climate March."

She was also well grounded in energy-based healing. She practiced as a professional teacher of yoga, and she was a humble student of qigung. Yoga and qigung both intend to free up the energy of life Itself so that it can flow without obstruction through the body, heart and soul. She has now jumped in over her head into life Itself. May she find herself barefoot on a beach on the other shore.

She is survived by her brother, Jack Zillessen, of Jupiter, Fla.

All donations will go towards final arrangements and can be made online at youcaring.com/judithlawsonmemorialfund-810286 or by mail to: c/o Valli Geiger, 1 Green Way, Rockland, ME 04841

The community will hold a celebration in Rockland Sunday May 21, at 2 p.m., the site is to be announced and posted on Village Soup and on the Facebook pages of Judith Lawson and organizer Gretchen Kuhn.

More:

Judith Lawson - Courier-Gazette & Camden Herald (subscription)

God bless America.

I mean that ironically. Not because the US has nothing to praise; on the contrary. Ironically because we generalists or we, the forgetful of historical struggles, dont credit America enough for its contributions to socialism the very word socialism makes even modern Americans aggressive. This isnt only about their thinking. And dont brand me a socialist, this is just a trickle-down of history.

Many good things we enjoy today around the world came out of America that is obvious and undeniable. Yet these things are not restricted to ingenuity and high principle; important legacies we may take for granted are the result of others hardship. May Day is one of them.

May Day is synonymous with International Workers Day. Originally, it commemorated the killing of some workers by police in a general strike in Chicago in 1886.

Rights for everyone were nowhere near part of the American Dream then. That term was coined decades later. As the period of spreading peace and prosperity approached described alternatively in the US as a Golden Age and in France (light of Europe) as the Belle Epoch less fortunate ordinary people on both continents were suffering.

Wage slavery (meaning working for terribly low pay supposedly by choice but in reality because the alternatives were almost zero), economic exploitation in societies split into almost impenetrable layers this was what allowed owners, resourceful entrepreneurs and the ruthless to amass wealth. Historically, this is normal.

But humanity was approaching a critical mass of not only increasingly distributable knowledge (education) but of social conscience. And that growing awareness was concentrating on notions that unequal bargaining power between labour and capital was unjust. Something had to give.

Those killings in Chicago happened barely 100 years after France had had its world-shaking revolution (17891799). They came 110 years after the United States Declaration of Independence, which pounded the table for peoples rights.

Its second sentence reads: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Well, was that naive?

Thank you Creator, but big industry wasnt having it. Another revolution was under full steam by now: the Industrial Revolution (lets say it lumbered to life between 1760 to 1840). Industrialisation may have put an end to feudalism in the old continent, with growing scientific knowledge and ideas of practical organisation, but it also harnessed capital (for the sake of simplicity, lets say this is excess money in some form or another that the owner doesnt need to use right now, and so can take his time deciding what to spend it on) it harnessed capital as never before. This was capitalism.

Capitalism put people to work, productively. While they were working so hard, however, it was difficult to negotiate individually or collectively for fair conditions. Thinking about this fell mostly to non-workers, such as intellectuals, such as perhaps the most famous one, Karl Marx (German, 1818-1883).

A few years after the Chicago killings, in 1894 there were violent May Day demonstrations in Cleveland, as the US was sliding into a severe depression. The nations well-off (predominantly of the political right) became steadily warier of leftist politics and organised labour. (In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution would not be long in coming.) But labour, against the odds, managed to organise.

The 1904 International Socialist Conference in Amsterdam called on proletarian organisations in all countries to stop work on May 1. Socialist, communist and anarchist groups were largely successful in making this official.

It is now a national holiday in more than 80 countries.

And in the United States (and Canada)? To soften the possible link with the Chicago killings, the US made Labor Day in September the official day for workers celebrations, with May 1 to be celebrated as Loyalty Day.

God bless America.

Read the original:

The dark origins of May Day - euronews

May Day, Los Angeles, 2017

In the 1705 pro-slavery tract History and Present State of Virginia, planter Robert Beverley wrote that Sufficient distinction is also made between servants and slaves: for a white woman is rarely put in the groundand to discourage all planters from using women so. Their law imposes the heaviest taxes upon female-servants working in the groundwhereas it is a common thing to work a woman slave out of doors; nor does the law make any distinction in her taxes whether her work be abroad or at home. Beverley argued that the basic condition of black women was one of enslavement. White women indentured servants had temporary servant status (and never slave status) while black womens bodies produced new slaves, provided the lifeblood for the capitalist plantation economy, and the moral justification for white supremacist sexual exploitation. As Beverley so brutally and vividly framed it, Slaves are the Negroes and their posterity, following the condition of the Mother, according to the maxim, partus sequitur ventrem [status follows the womb]. They are calld slaves, in respect of the time of their servitude, because it is for life.

Centuries later, the insidious shadow of white supremacys slave breeder/Mammy/ Jezebel trifecta continues to inform representations of black womens work. From the shiftless lazy welfare queen to the amoral prostitute and the faceless caregiver who cleans up after hapless white folk, caricatures of black womens work play a key role in propping up income and wealth inequality while reinforcing the myth of American free enterprise. As workers mobilize for May Day and beyond, Trumpist assaults on health care, reproductive justice, environmental protections, voting rights, public education, living wage jobs, unionization and collective bargaining have made the stakes for black women workers even higher.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, black women have the highest workforce participation among all women in the U.S.; at 59.2%, compared to 57% of women overall. Despite this reality, black women have the least wealth of any group in the nation. Fulltime black female wage earners make only 60 cents to the dollar of white men and 80% of white womens weekly earnings. Wealthwhich represents total assets, such as savings, property and investmentsis ultimately a far more important measure of economic wellness than income. And the persistent wealth gap between white and black women remains despite the fact that black women have the highest growth rate of college enrollment in the nation.

The intersection of racism, sexism, heterosexism and global capitalism drives black womens overrepresentation in the workforce. Post-emancipation, Jim Crow and de facto segregationist suppression of black wages and institutionalized discrimination in employment, housing and education meant that the majority of black women could never stay home out of the paid workforce like many white women. Indeed, the epic resistance of black women civil rights freedom fighters was always connected to achieving self-determination and human rights in the very homes, buses, factories, train stations, schools, churches and plants where black women endured wage and sexual exploitation. Under these conditions, black households depended on two, three and sometimes four or more incomes to stay afloat. With the post Cold War decline of unionized manufacturing jobs, black womens wages plummeted even further. In the post-industrial age, disappearing public sector jobs with union protection have undermined black economic mobility as black women are more likely to be employed in the public sector than white women. (African American women have greater representation in public sector employment than both African American men and white women.) As the New York Times noted, a combination of strong anti-government and anti-tax sentiment in some places has kept down public payrolls. These factors, coupled with attempts to curb collective bargaining, have kneecapped unions.

The Institute for Womens Policy and Research (IWPR) estimates that the gender wage gap for black women widened from 2004 to 2014: Black womens real median annual earnings for full-time, year-round work declined by 5.0 percentmore than three times as much as womens earnings overall.

The through line between eighteenth century injunctions against putting white women in the ground and contemporary race/gender schisms in wealth and wages could not be clearer. As black communities and black women workers hang in the balance, a socialist redistribution of wealth should be at the center of anti-Trumpist racial and gender justice agendas.

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Which Working Women? From Plantation to Public Sector - Huffington Post

Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has stated that governors and lawmakers were seeking an epic battle by backing the bill which seeks to remove the National Minimum Wage from the exclusive to the concurrent legislative list.

NLC President, Ayuba Wabba, accused some members of the Nigeria Governors Forum of sponsoring such anti-workers legislation.

The bill which scaled through the first reading before the House embarked on Easter recess, is set for second reading on the floor of the House where members will debate on it.

Wabba said labour would explore every legitimate legal means to protect workers.

We have done in the past and we are going to deplore it, he said.

The Congress said it planned to mobilise its affiliates to campaign against all political office holders linked with anti-workers legislations and policies ahead of the 2018 and 2019 general elections.

All over the world, minimum wage is on the exclusive list. We are talking about protecting the most vulnerable group, that is the principle and philosophy. It is an ILO core issue under decent work agenda. It is a core ILO issue that all countries are conformed to, he told The Nation.

So, first is that it is the level of ignorance because he thinks that it is only for the state. No. It is for the self-employed for those that are from the private sector to protect the most vulnerable people from being exploited from false labour and slavery. That is why minimum wage law is there.

It is a core ILO convention and in many countries of the world, including capitalist economy. As capitalist as the United Stated (U.S.) is, they have a minimum wage law.

So, we must first understand the concept. It is not the state government. It is all employers of labour generally, both private and public. So, for public sector, who fixes their own? That is why it is a tripartite issue. I think that there is a level of ignorance he has demonstrated in this without even knowing what minimum wage law is all about.

First, we condemn it in its entirety. We are going to respond immediately and effectively. Two, let him also go back to the archives. This issue was introduced even by some cabals within the Governors Forum at the last constitution amendment and it was defeated.

It went to a referendum and it was defeated. So, we should start from where we stopped and not to take us back to areas we have actually advanced on, he said.

Wabba said that millions of Nigerians who were self-employed and those working in the private sector will be subjected to undue exploitation if the national minimum wage is removed from the exclusive list to the concurrent list.

Who will regulate the case of the self-employed; for instance now, you are self-employed, you are not working under either the state or the federal government where you can even negotiate.

So, the implication is that once you remove that from the exclusive list, workers will be exploited. We are not even talking of the maximum, we are talking about the minimum.

Assuming the alteration bill sells through in the National Assembly, what will organised labour, especially the leadership of the NLC, do? It will not said through because we will stop it at all cost. Nigerian workers will not accept this.

The proponent of the bill, Ayeola Abayomi Abdulkadir (APC-Lagos), seeks to alter the Second Schedule, Part 1 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) by deleting item 34 from the exclusive legislative list and renumbering the existing item 35 as item 34 and subsequent items accordingly.

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Governors, lawmakers looking for trouble NLC warns over minimum wage bill - Daily Post Nigeria

This is the rainsite. If weather permits, vigil will be held outside Sadove.https://www.facebook.com/events/431126463904161

May 1st is a day for workers and immigrants. May Day has been important for the labor movement, from the national workers strike for the eight-hour day in 1886 onwards. A vigil is a silent protest to raise awareness, often done long into the night. What's the point of a silent protest during the day? Today is a day to put your money where your mouth is.

Don't shop. Don't bank. Don't go to work if you can. Amplify the voices of the hundred of thousands of workers and immigrants on strike. Instead of chanting, speak with your actions and your wallet.

Need another reason for a silent vigil? The words attributed to American labor activist August Spies, in the aftermath of the first May Day strike: "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

We stand with those fighting for a living wage. We stand with the undocumented immigrants who are the backbone of our economy. We stand against deportations. We stand for the would-be legal immigrants who came here for school or a job, who wait for years, who positively impact our society and economy, and who may be denied citizenship and torn away from their communities. We stand with sex workers. We stand with fast-food service workers. We stand with tipped employees. We stand with those working in unsafe environments, physically, mentally, and otherwise. We stand with disabled workers whose inclusion is often overlooked. We stand with LGBTQ+ workersover half the states in our nation do not have workplace protections against firing people for sexual orientation or gender identity. We stand with sexually harassed workers. We stand with workers unable to access de facto protections that exist de jure. We stand with workers for whom those protections are too late and not enough.

We cannot stand for immigrants without recognizing the stolen land we are on. This land is not ours to deny or grant others access to, and we must stand in friendship with this land as much as with all peoples on it. No immigrant strike can be intersectional without embracing decolonialization. We cannot stand for labor without recognizing the stolen (and forced) labor of slaves, who were forcibly migrated, the effects of which are still felt today. We cannot strike for labor without mentioning reparation, what would be debt past due were payment intended plus amends for dehumanization. We cannot stand for labor without mentioning prison labor, a currently legal form of slavery.

We stand with the workers on our own campus who are often overlooked, such as Maintenance and Operations (Physical Plant) staff and Bon Appetite staff. If you need us, we are here to listen and to make your voices heard. We stand for your rights for fair yearly raises; for your rights to an environment free from racist, sexist, agist, and classist discrimination by other community members; for your rights as equal parts of this community.

We stand with the students, faculty, and staff who are immigrants, hope to be immigrants, or come from immigrant families. If you need us, we are here to listen and to make your voices heard. Our community would not be as strong without you. We can support you better in your endeavors to make this home, and to bring enriching elements of your home to our USA-centric campus.

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Workers & Immigrants Vigil - Hamilton College News

Its an increasingly accepted notion that growing inequality is the greatest threat facing capitalist democracies, especially the United States. The much-vaunted middle class is disappearingor has disappeared alreadyand weve slipped back into a societal mould more akin to the early 20th century than what we would expect in 2017, say a growing number of voices.

MIT economist Peter Temin makes the argument in a tight and compellingly argued study that goes beyond much of the recent work on this subject by foregrounding it with a vitally important race analysis. In doing so, its appropriate that he draws on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist W. Arthur Lewis. Lewis, of Caribbean origin, is the only black Nobel laureate in the field of economics, and one of only 15 black Nobel laureates in total (out of over 800 recipients of the prestigious award). Lewis pioneered the notion of the dual economy, which Temin describes thus: a dual economy exists when there are two separate economics sectors within one country, divided by different levels of development, technology, and patterns of demand.

But Lewis economic model has serious political implications. [T]he political policies that grow out of our dual economy have made the United States appear more and more like a developing country, writes Temin.

Temins basic argument is this. The US is now characterized by a dual economy. On the one hand are the rich eliteswhat he refers to as the FTE sector because they are predominantly though not exclusively comprised of people working in the finance, technology and electronics industriesand the low-wage sector. Instead of a single economy, with a healthy middle class connecting the rich elites and the low-wage sector, the middle-class has disappeared. A minority of the former middle-class have entered the elite FTE sector; the majority have slipped into the low-wage sector.

The two economies are separate and it is the FTE sector that has the political power in todays society. Temin demonstrates that most policymakers listen almost exclusively to the demands of the FTE, not the majority low-wage sector. This underscores the erosion of democracy in the United States, since its supposed to be the majority, not the minority (however rich), that holds sway.

The FTE sector has also become effective at political campaigning, and dominates political discourse through a variety of methods (which Temin briefly explores), ensuring that in the rare instances where democratic choices are put to the public, its candidates and policies prevail. This is also achieved by the more blunt process of excluding low-wage workers from democratic decision making, either by making it too difficult for them to vote, i.e., costly identification cards, elections held during working days and hours when precarious workers cant get time off to vote, or other limitations to the voting process; denying them the education they need to make an informed vote, or the more blunt tool of outright exclusion, i.e., through the mass incarceration of low-wage workers, including African-Americans and Latinos.

Additionally, the FTE sector promotes policies that benefits only its members, not the broader economy. In fact the self-serving policies it promotestax cuts, spending cuts, privatization of public services, etc.are actually damaging to the broader economy. Yet it is this elite sector, with its policy goals that sink the economy, to which policymakers (mostly elite themselves) now listen.

Historically, the way out of the low-wage into the middle-class, or from the middle-class into the elite FTE sector, was through education. Yet in order to ensure a precarious, desperate and low-wage workforce, the FTE sector has rammed through policies which have systematically destroyed the public education system. At the K-12 end theyve undermined school funding for all but the elite private schools; at the post-secondary end theyve shifted the burden of funding onto the backs of students by increasing tuition fees, with the result that students are now too burdened with debt to either complete their degrees, achieve higher income levels, or effectively contribute to the economy and achieve upward mobility.

The other important element of this, which Temin interjects to the analysis, is the role of race, or as he describes it, racecraft (this reflects the fact theres no biological basis to race; its a construction which serves specific political and social goals). The FTE sector has achieved many of its pernicious policies by actively exploiting racism. Welfare cuts are sold to a majority white populace by implying (incorrectly) that its mostly African Americans who benefit from welfare and that this isnt fair to hard-working white people. Similarly, mass incarceration is enabled by convincing majority whites that African Americans are dangerous.

In actual fact, far more poor whites suffer from the resulting policies than African Americans. Yet blinded by the illusions of racecraft (in other words, racism), whites continue to vote for or allow such policies, not realizing that they are in fact the ones most negatively impacted by them (numerically speaking). And now that Latino immigrants outnumber African Americans, the same exploitation of racismracecraftis deployed against them as well, while ultimately facilitating policies that ensure the dominance of a small and almost exclusively white tier of elites over everyone else in American society.

The phenomenon of a vanishing middle class is not a new one, but Temin does an incredibly effective job at interjecting a broader race and class analysis into the phenomenon. He offers a powerful indictment of Americas ongoing legacy of racism. A society which was built on slavery purportedly rejected slavery over 150 years ago, yet it still oppresses the descendants of slaves in a powerful and deliberate way. He charts the trajectory of this process, from Jim Crow laws and segregation in the post-Civil War southern US, to President Nixons efforts to target African-Americans through the war on drugs and fiscal policies in the 70s. Nixons legacy has been perpetuated by a powerful white judicial and legislative establishment which has systematically eroded the small and brief gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s.

Contemporary examples of this ongoing oppression abound. Under slavery, it was illegal to educate slaves. The African-American descendants of slaves continue to be deprived of education through deliberately underfunded public schools in black neighbourhoods. Under slavery, slaves could not vote. Todays African-Americans are also widely denied the right to vote through the mechanisms outlined earlier. Slavery relied on brutal surveillance and disciplining of slaves; African-Americans face similar treatment today through mass incarceration. While white elites routinely escape serious punishment for major drug infractions, African-Americans are punished disproportionately for even minor ones. And while the policies that make this racism possible are generally supported by a fearful white majority population, what the majority of poor whites fail to realize is that those policies are also used to target them, as well.

It sounds like a bleak analysis, and it is, but its refreshing in its unabashed exposure of the role of racism and pure greed on the part of elites which is whats sinking todays economy. Tar from a rhetorical manifesto, which it might otherwise come across as, Temins analysis is rigorously reinforced with empirical data, as befitting an economists take on the situation.

Nor is the situation entirely hopeless. Temins aim in exposing the nature of contemporary inequality, like that of other recent writers on the topic like Thomas Piketty, is to show that the outcomes were experiencing in todays economy and society are the result of deliberate policy decisions. There was, and is, nothing inevitable about any of this. There are plenty of occasions, he demonstrates, where America could have changed course, with significantly different results. And that means we still have the ability today to make policy decisions that could turn the worsening situation around.

Temin offers several urgent recommendations in conclusion: publicly-funded universal education including post-secondary; elimination of mass incarceration and the policies that support it; renewing public infrastructure and forgiving low-wage debt; strengthening democratic governance by expanding public services; and putting a special focus on achieving the integration and reconstruction that never really effectively happened after the US Civil War. But the more inequality grows, the more our window of opportunity to turn things around shrinks.

There are a great many books to be read on the problem of growing inequality and the attendant social, political and economic issues that both cause it and result from it. If you had to read only one book on the growing crisis, The Vanishing Middle Class is it. Its powerful combination of race and class analysis doesnt hold back any punches in exposing the deliberate and systematic exploitation of the poor and the racialized by a minority of wealthy and mostly white elites in todays America.

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A Divided Economy Will Not Stand America and 'The Vanishing Middle Class' - PopMatters

Labour's lazy ill-thought out policies will only promise to cast more on the dole and tank the economy completely

WE never thought Ed Milibands sums added up. At least hed done some.

Jeremy Corbyn and his Marxist mob arent even bothering with the maths as they churn out ever more outlandish promises in a panic at voters abandoning their sinking ship.

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So now its bumper pay rises, more national holidays and all our problems magically solved.

Twelve pledges and just one means of funding them all: a massive hike in corporation tax.

Like all old Trots, Corbyn considers private firms predatory profiteers keeping staff in wage slavery.

EPA

But low corporation tax creates investment.

It means jobs for ordinary people, mortgages paid, families fed.

It is part of the Tories incredible success in slashing unemployment and getting record numbers into work.

A dramatic increase would cast huge numbers on the dole, shrink the tax base, tank the economy and wreck services.

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Corbyn has no grasp of this. But then as recently as 2013 he was hailing the triumph of socialism in oil-rich Venezuela.

Now its people are starving to death.

We doubt Labour will talk up Venezuela now. But who knows? Their idiocy is without limit.

THERE must be an amnesty for soldiers who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

The Defence Select Committee has called for it and we couldnt agree more.

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It is appalling that veterans are at risk of long jail terms for alleged crimes while keeping the peace decades ago while terrorist murderers get off scot-free or face trifling sentences.

One, IRA Hyde Park massacre suspect John Downey, dodged justice after a blunder by the last Labour Government and we are proud to back the campaign to prosecute him.

The Government must know from the disastrous IHAT Iraq inquiry what a can of worms a police witch-hunt into veterans of the Troubles will become.

It will heap misery on ageing servicemen who deserve to be remembered for their bravery in hellish circumstances.

Theresa May must put a stop to it.

THE Tories would be mad even to consider sidelining Boris Johnson during the election campaign.

OK, hes not flavour of the month with diehard Remainers still unable to process their shock defeat last June.

PA:Press Association

So what? Hes still the second most popular politician in Britain after Theresa May much more so than those colleagues apparently briefing against him.

Boriss charm and oratory helped secure Brexit. Alongside the PM he is one of the chief attractions for millions now considering voting Tory for the first time.

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Jeremy Corbyn and his Marxist lot have set about making firms the enemy in their outlandish election promises - The Sun

Dhaka Tribune

Can you see the cracks? Dhaka Tribune But while large corporations such as these have created many alliances and accords and pledged to weed out wage slavery from their factories and sweatshops, they continue to bypass accountability and shift responsibility to the factory owners they ... and more »

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Can you see the cracks? - Dhaka Tribune