In the Smithy of His Soul: A Steel Worker and Scholar ~~ PETER LINEBAUGH

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/30/in-the-smithy-of-his-soul-a-steel-worker-scholar/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Noel Ignatiev speaking at Occupy Boston.

On May Day 1986 Noel Ignatiev, the former steel worker, was aboard the good ship “New Boston,” on a harbor cruise from Rowe’s Wharf in Boston to Mary Mount in Quincy Bay. With fellow passengers from Haiti, Ethiopia, Peru, Somerville, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, and Southie, he was celebrating with the kids dancing around the May Pole at the Harbor campus of the University of Massachusetts, and now he was sailing to the first May Pole dance in North America by anti-Puritanical “savages” in 1627 at Mary Mount over there in Quincy. Looking spiffy as ever and with an eloquence born in decades of Marxist revolutionary agitation, Noel spoke of the struggle of the working class from then to the present day in 1986, the centenary.

The signs of the times were clear. Four days earlier reactor number four at Chernobyl, Ukraine, broke into an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, initiating days of radioactive isotopes of caesium, strontium and iodine which were wind carried across Europe menacing water, fauna, and flora. Four days later on May Day itself in 1986 1.6 million workers in South Africa, under a new organization, Congress of South African Trade Unions, embarked on a general strike called a “stay away.” This massive show of force did not end apartheid at once, but it started it. The people’s toi toi dance had begun.

What did we make of those signs of the times, the mortalities inherent in constant capital (the machine), the possibility of liberation in variable capital (the people)? Thirty-five years later amidst plague, flood, fire, and extinctions conditions are dire.

Having worked at the International Harvester Tractor Works and U.S. Steel blast furnace division Noel spoke with authority. He came from Chicago to Boston, from the city of Carl Sandburg, Nelson Algren, Jane Addams, and “Jane” (code for underground abortion access) to work for a Harvard Ph.D. in the city of Cotton Mather, and gangs of tight-lipped bankers, blue-stockings, and snobs.

It was the hundredth anniversary of the Haymarket massacre. Noel told us the story of Haymarket from the iron molders strike for the eight hour day to the rainy meeting at Haymarket Square which the cops sought to disperse. Dynamite exploded, a cop was killed, and hell’s gates opened to the repression afterwards. Four were hanged. The story is now known all over the world; it is labor’s day, a day for the international working class. It began in America, in Chicago, among metal workers.

That’s what Noel Ignatief had to tell us: The story of the working class.

In a perverse way that is also the story of steel. Steel forms the plates making ships’ hulls. Steel forms the girders to bridges and skyscrapers. Steel makes the bodies and engines of cars. Steel makes the railways and the trains. Home appliances. Tools. Weapons of war. “Structure” and “infrastructure” alike consists of steel. That is the material of our world.

What have we become? The issue is clear: not only do men make steel, it makes them. Under what conditions? Who? Whom?

Noel edited four journals: Urgent Tasks, The Calumet Insurgent Worker, Race Traitor (“treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”), and the last one, Hard Crackers, takes its name from the meager fare dished out to Union soldiers during the Civil War. Hard Crackers brings our attention to another Civil War kind of sustenance, the food for thought found in Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, published in 1861. Taking place in Wheeling, West Virginia, it is about the steel production necessary for that first war dependent on railways, or the iron and steel workers who made possible the mobilization and transportation of soldiers and the victory over the slaveocracy.

In lines that might apply to Noel’s Gary, Indiana, works, she wrote, “Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of the system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army. By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially veiled; but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begin with fresh, breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like gods in pain.” The only difference a century later was the absence of a Sunday break. In Noel’s time it was 24/7.

“Their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking – God and the distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?” This was capitalism red in tooth and claw. The boss’s son pays a visit, and the steel worker responds, “Never! He had no words for such a thought [of equality], but he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. Never!” On the workers’ side of that gulf in 1861 were Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and mixed race people of color.

“Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl.” Korl is the rock-like substance left over as slag from the the iron has been separated from the ore. The puddler is an artist! “I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan, woeful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, Its unfinished work.”

And, now, seventy years later, we might well ask, what is the unfinished work?

The struggle to form a union took another eighty years after the Homestead defeat (1892), to the Great Steel Strike of 1919, to the Memorial Day Massacre in south Chicago (1937). The National Labor Tribune, March 1878, quoted the effort to bring together the crafts to make the “industrial union.” (The iron puddler worked among heat and fumes and was generally finished off by his thirties.)

Heater, roller, rougher,

Catcher, puddler, helper,

All unite and join the fight

And might (for right) encounter;

In the name of truth and justice

Stem the tide of evil practice

Mammon’s sordid might and avarice

Our land from ruin save.

Katherine Stone, “The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry,” Review of Radical Political Economy, 6 (1974) describes the introduction of the stop watch, clipboard, and white coat, that is “scientific management.”

Sometime after the three month steel strike of 1959 John F. Kennedy ran for president and Noel Ignatiev walked under the gates of U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana.

Studs Terkel, another Chicago voice, wrote Working (1972),describes what it was like for steel workers around the time that Noel passed under those gates. Terkel interviewed Steve Dubi, hired on by U.S. Steel as a waterboy in 1929. He worked forty years. He was still paying off mortgage on his house and loan for his car. “You’re just a number out there. Just like a prisoner. A lot of people die. Who knows what they die of?” He continued, “I told my sons, ‘If you ever wind up in that steel mill like me, I’m gonna hit you right over your head. Don’t be foolish. Get yourself schooling. Stay out of the steel mill or you’ll wind up the same way I did and what have I got to show for it. Nothing.” Why would Noel enter a mill?

Another steel worker, Mike Lefevre says, “I’m a dying breed. A laborer. Strictly muscle work… pick it up, put it down, pick it up, put it down.” And then mocking the naïve communist wannabe who infiltrated the mill, “I cannot picture myself singing to a tractor, I just can’t. (Laughs.) Or singing to steel. (Singsongs.) Oh whoop-dee-doo. I’m at the bonderizer, oh how I love this heavy steel. No thanks. Never happen.” (The bonderizer coats the steel with an anticorrosive phosphate solution, usually in preparation for the application of paint, enamel, or lacquer.)

It’s a famous passage, the epitome of ‘the blue collar blues.’ Fifty years later looking at Mike Lefevre testimony and something else stands out. He wouldn’t fight back in the same way against the foreman who demanded, not work, but obedience. The foreman pointed his finger at Mike who grabbed his finger instead of his throat! He was no longer single but married. It’s not just for his wife, the mother of his children, but the children who he wants to stay out of the mill and wear a coat and tie. 5-10. The nuclear family is the rebel’s ball and chain.

Noel liked Marx: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Communist Manifesto), or “Labor in the white skin cannot be free where in the black it is branded” (Capital). He admired the oratory and writing of Wendell Phillips. He liked C.L.R. James. He loved John Henry who died with a hammer in his hand, lord, lord. But it was to W.E.B. DuBois to whom Noel turned again and again – the wages of whiteness, the historian’s blind spot, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935).

Those in the know, the militants who paid attention, the cognoscenti of the struggle, already knew Noel from the coinage, “white skin privilege,” a coinage at the center of the politics of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO). Formed in the wake of the disintegration of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), it took its name from the former slave of Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth (1797-1883). She ran away to freedom, became an abolitionist, a charismatic preacher, militant during the Civil War, an organizer who refused to abide by the street car conductor ordering her off the vehicle, and became an advocate for land for the former slaves now free.

Ted Allen wrote, “We believe that three centuries of history show that the key to bourgeois domination in this country is white supremacy, as we have said before: The principal aspect of United States capitalist society is not merely bourgeois domination but bourgeois white supremacist domination. It follows from this that proletarian revolutionary strategy in the United States must direct the main blow at white supremacy.”

Noel wrote in the preface to Workplace Papers (STO), “Briefly stated, this perspective was as follows: in modern industrial societies, bourgeois rule depends on the development of a variety of ‘systems’ that channel the outbreaks of the exploited class and allow their absorption by capital; that the specifically American framework for this process is the white-skin privilege system — the conferring of a favored status on the white sector of the proletariat; and that the trade unions cannot be understood apart from this framework.”

Or, again, “The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give support to a system that degrades them.”

Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life provided a special issue for the spring 2021 as tribute to Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019. It contains testimony, memories, critique, biography, correspondence, a poem, jokes, argument, good humor, and lots of love. John Garvey summed up: Noel had a profound influence on several generations of political activists – the student radicals of 1968, the anti-fascist Anti-Racist Action activists of the 1980s, the anti-globalization protesters of the turn of the century, the Occupiers during the last decade, and anti-police insurgents of today.”

At Harvard (the Harvard Corporation) Noel leaned back in his easy chair and gloated, “If the guys back in Gary, Indiana, knew how good I have it here, the entire steel industry would come to a halt.” Noel studied Ireland and Irish Americans. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) concludes with words that apply to Noel and his revolutionary yearnings. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” A former steel worker and an aspiring scholar, anti-capitalism was as clear as ever in his sights. In 1995 he submitted his dissertation and a year later it was published as How the Irish Became White.

Acceptable Men is the title of Noel’s memoire. It is actually about his years employed in the blast furnace division of the U.S. Steel, Gary, Indiana works. It was the largest steel mill in the U.S. in the largest steel corporation. The book has a clear description of he labor process and its architecture. It amasses well told stories, worker’s witticisms, deft characterization, humorous anecdotes, straight up political opinion, and persistent solidarity with all his fellow workers, cleaving to the black. Iron ore originating in the Mesabi of range of northern Minnesota was shipped from Duluth in freighters upon Lakes Superior and Michigan. Here I must make another digression. Well so it seems. Actually it gives us two clues as to our unfinished business.

Many of the miners in the Mesabi range were Finnish, specifically ‘forest Finns’ who migrated at the beginning of the last century. Oral poetry maintained the memory of the mythic origins of the world. My colleague, Mikael Lövgren, explained to me that in Finland these became the Kalevala, the national saga. And were brought to the Mesabi iron range of Minnesota by Finnish miners and metal workers. A blacksmith and shaman, the archetypal artificer, named Ilmarinen forges Sampo, a wealth-making machine, or talisman, often interpreted as the sun. Ilmarinen is akin to Daedalus. There are many stories of his search for a wife and his failure, until he forges a woman of gold! With bellows, forge, and ore he fashions cross bow, skiff, heifer, and plow. These creations do not please. He then creates Sampo, solar like source of energy and power.

The eternal magic artist,
Ancient blacksmith, Ilmarinen,
First of all the iron-workers,
Mixed together certain metals,
Put the mixture in the caldron,
Laid it deep within the furnace,
Called the hirelings to the forging.
Skilfully they work the bellows,
Tend the fire and add the fuel,
Three most lovely days of summer,
Three short nights of bright midsummer,
Till the rocks begin to blossom,
In the foot-prints of the workmen,
From the magic heat and furnace.

….

Leave my native fields and woodlands,
Never shall I, in my life-time,
Say farewell to maiden freedom,
Nor to summer cares and labors,
Lest the harvest be ungarnered,
Lest the berries be ungathered,
Lest the song-birds leave the forest,
Lest the mermaids leave the waters,
Lest I sing with them no longer.

The clues here are first, gender, and second, meaning myth. The steel worker for all his brawn, bravery, and bull cannot have whatever woman he chooses. Certainly not if she must leave the harvest and the birds. He may be allied with the fire, she is allied with earth and air. The problem of climate change will not be solved without smashing the patriarchy. She simply will not have it. Such is the meaning supplied by the tale of Ilmarinen. Superstition or class consciousness? It was part of the lore of the Finns. The other clue may also be found in West Africa.

The Yoruba deity, Ogun, was the orisha, or spirit of iron and metal working. Among the Mande of West Africa the forge was an altar and sanctuary as well as a place of craft. Iron smelting was active in Dahomey and Benin cultures from six centuries B.C.E. Children were apprenticed to learn the nyama, an axiom that knowledge is power if property articulated. The weapons and the agricultural implements upon which material subsistence depended were made by these iron workers. They are also strict gender regimes. Robert Farris Thompson writes, “Thus, across the Atlantic, iron instruments are all, in the end, the children of Ogun, carried on his broad and mighty shoulders…. Oguin marches only with the spiritually vital and the quick of hand.” It was Ogun who throughout African America, Bahia to Haiti, accompanied the liberation fighters against slavery.

The archaeologist and historian V. Gordon Childe explains that the metal worker was the first crafts person in human history preceding even the potter and the weaver. The craft involved discoveries of geology and chemistry and transformation under heat. Smelting and casting were not simple procedures. The abstruse knowledge or craft lore was bound with magic, and eventually the workers formed a “mystery” or guild.

Noel Ignatiev did not hear these historically profound myths, one from Scandinavia and the other from West Africa, though his fellow workers had ancestors from both regions. We cannot imagine for a moment that Ogun hovered over the men in the maintenance shed at the U.S. Steel’s Gary works, men playing cards, men napping on the bench, men sharing a cold sandwich, men hassled, annoyed or destroyed by a thousand tricks played by management. Nor do we find Ilmarinen among them glorifying his powers of creation. Alienation is the theme, refusal of work is the survival method, and with it a mite of joy, a tad of pilfering. To read how the maintenance crew, black and white, repaired a motor-boat engine and organized a fishing trip is the feint sign of another world of self-activity, commoning, and cooperation. It becomes one of those anecdotes of what Noel comes to call “ordinary people.” He has faith enough in us not to call it “prefigurative.” We could do that ourselves.

Noel writes with pleasure and wit, prodding and smiling as he goes. The memoire is introduced with a quotation from The Apocrypha, “For gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.” Much of the adversity is unsaid. Of course it involves longing for the other half of the human race. Ogun, Ilmarinen, and Rebecca Harding Davis help discern it. More is involved than, as the I.W.W. used to say, pork chops.

Let us conclude with DuBois who can still help us with our ‘unfinished business’ and ‘uncreated conscience.’ He said that the “basic principles of Reconstruction in the United states during 1867-1876 – Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.” He omits the basic person, the native American, who is essential to the world to come. A word about each, land, light, and leading. “Land” must mean the expropriation of the expropriators and the first nations. No longer real estate, no longer scenery, no longer resources to be extracted. Here was the anti-ecological, metabolic rift. “Light” is the learning, it is the knowledge, the art, the experiences of the class expressed. It is epitomized by the korl sculpture of the woman mill worker . “Leading” is when the corner stone is the stone the builders rejected. It is strategic. It turns the world upside down.

https://archive.iww.org/history/biography/LucyParsons/1/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Lucy Parsons: Woman of Will

By the Women's History Information Project For almost 70 years, Lucy Parsons fought for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised in the face of an increasingly oppressive industrial economic system. Lucy's radical activism challenged the racist and sexist sentiment in a time when even radical Americans believed that a woman's place was in the home.

Early Life

Little is known about the early life of Lucy Parsons. She had an African American, Native American, and Mexican ancestry. She was born in Texas around 1853, during the Civil War Era, and it is likely that her parents were slaves. During her lifetime, in order to disguise her racial origins in a prejudiced society, Lucy went under many surnames. She often went by Lucy Gonzales, denying her African American roots, while claiming her Mexican heritage as the cause of her dark skin tone.

Around 1870, while living with a former slave named Oliver Gathings, Lucy met Albert Parsons, who would soon become her husband. Their marriage, however, was probably not legal, since miscegenation laws (laws forbidding marriage or cohabitation between white people and members of other races) prevented interracial marriages at the time.

In 1872, while the South was instituting repressive Jim Crow segregation laws, Lucy and Albert were forced to leave Texas due to their political involvement. Albert had worked diligently on registering Black voters and was shot in the leg and threatened with lynching. He and Lucy also felt threatened because of their interracial marriage.

Lucy and Albert arrived in Chicago in 1873, where Albert quickly found a job as a printer for the Chicago Times. This was a difficult time for working people all over the nation, especially in industrial cities like Chicago, because the country had fallen into a depression, leaving millions of people unemployed. The passing of the Contract Labor Law of 1864 allowed American businesses to contract and bring in immigrant laborers. A large, unskilled pool of workers grew in Chicago, which drove wages down. The laboring population, however, was being radicalized by the introduction of socialist and anarchist ideology to the United States.

Inspirations and Actions

In the summer of 1877, one of the greatest mass strikes in US history took place in response to the depression. Rail workers all over the country joined the picket line to protest wage cuts enacted by the Baltimore Ohio Railroad. In July, the strike moved to Chicago, where rail workers waged a militant battle. They derailed an engine and baggage cars and engaged in sporadic battles with police who attempted to disperse them and break the strike. Albert addressed crowds of up to twenty-five thousand people to promote peaceful ways of negotiating. This helped to bring him into the forefront of the anarchist movement in Chicago.

Because of his involvement in organizing workers, Albert was fired from his job at the Times and blacklisted in the Chicago printing trade. Lucy opened a dress shop to support their family, and, with her friend Lizzie Swank, hosted meetings for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Lucy found herself juggling her career, as well as her political work, which was becoming more and more involved.

Lucy began to write for many radical publications, including The Socialist and The Alarm, an anarchist weekly published by the International Working People's Association (IWPA), which she and Albert had helped found in 1883. She had little sympathy for bosses who were paying their workers substandard wages. Her most famous article, "To Tramps," advocated "propaganda by the deed," a philosophy that held that only violent direct action or the threat of such action will ultimately win the demands of the workers. She was often considered more "dangerous" than her husband because she was so outspoken in her beliefs on the rights of the poor. Lucy was also threatening as a militant and radical woman who refused to assume the role of a homemaker.

May Uprisings

By 1886, it was becoming exceedingly difficult to keep the lid on the kettle. People across the country were boiling up in resistance to their working conditions and the squelching of their union activities by authorities. Across the US, people were calling for an eight hour work day, proclaiming, "whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases your pay." May 1st was chosen as the date to kick off the official movement for the eight hour day.

The strategy was this: workers would demand eight hours work with no cut in pay, and if this was received with opposition, they would strike. As a result, 350,000 workers across the nation walked off their jobs to participate in a mass general strike. Forty thousand workers struck in Chicago, creating a whirlwind of radical activity and convincing prominent radical leaders, such as Lucy Parsons, that the country was ready for a mass workers' revolution.

On May 3rd, a strike at McCormick Harvest Works in Chicago became violent as police fired into a crowd of unarmed strikers. Many strikers were wounded, and four were killed. Reacting to the events, radicals called a meeting in Haymarket Square to discuss the situation. The peaceful meeting was disrupted by police, and an unknown figure threw a bomb, killing one officer. One of the worst violations of US civil rights occured over the next few days, as police swept the town looking for any and all anarchists and radicals. Although he was not even at Haymarket Square that day, Albert was one of the eight men accused of the bombing. He went into hiding until the first trial date, at which point he walked into court to turn himself in and sit with his comrades.

During this period, Lucy was under constant surveillance by the police. She was arrested under the slightest suspicions that she knew the whereabouts of her husband. Although authorities looked upon Lucy as a threat to the status quo, she was never charged with conspiracy in the bombing. The rationale of the authorities was that the chances of a woman being convicted of murder and receiving the death penalty were too slim, and if a woman were to stand trial with the men it would decrease the chance of the men receiving such a harsh conviction. Women were not believed to be capable of such radical and militant action.

The Haymarket Affair

The movement for the eight hour workday was one of the most difficult struggles for laboring people in the United States. It is filled with stories of huge protests which were broken up by police and Pinkertons (private security). Many people were maimed and killed before demands to shorten the workday were finally met. One of the most famous events in the history of the eight hour struggle was the Haymarket Affair.

In response to a huge protest at a mill in Chicago in which a few workers were killed by the police, local radical activists organized a meeting at Haymarket Square in downtown Chicago. Over 2,000 people showed up to hear the speakers. Even the Mayor of Chicago appeared, and reported that the event was peaceful. However, after the Mayor left and the meeting's numbers dwindled, a huge army of police marched towards the crowd and gave them an order to disperse. During the confusion, an unknown person threw a bomb into the crowd of police, killing an officer. A riot broke out in which both workers and police were injured and killed.

The days that followed were bleak, as nearly every anarchist and socialist in town was arrested and detained. Many radical anarchist papers were illegally shut down, and homes, meeting halls, and offices where outspoken supporters of the eight hour movement lived and did political work were raided without warrant. Oscar Neebe, Adolph Fisher, August Spies, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, Carl Engel, and Lucy Parsons' husband Albert Parsons were scapegoated for the riot and brought to trial, even though many of the men were not even at Haymarket Square at the time of the melee.

With a jury of twelve men who were actively opposed to radicalism, the defendants were found guilty. After the appeals, four of the men were sentenced to hanging, three were given lengthy prison sentences, and one committed suicide while in his cell.

The Haymarket Affair influenced many prominent anarchists, including Emma Goldman and Voltarine De Cleyere. It also serves as a reminder of the difficulties involved in the eight hour struggle as well as the need to remain vigilant and not allow these gains to wither away.

Don't Mourn... Organize!

After Albert turned himself in to the police, the trial proceeded. In October, 1887, after a lengthy trial wrought with injustices, the men were sentenced to death by hanging; however, eventually one man committed suicide while in prison, two were given life sentences, and one received fifteen years imprisonment in an appeal. Lucy, stricken with both anger and pride that her husband would die for his beliefs in anarchism, headed a campaign for clemency. She toured the country distributing information about the unjust trial and gathering funds. Everywhere she went, Lucy was greeted by armed police who barred her entrance into meeting halls.

In her hard attempts to save the lives of the convicted men, Lucy confronted another battle, this one within the labor movement's own ranks. The leadership of the Knights of Labor, the group to which she belonged for over ten years, took a strong stand against the Haymarket activists. Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights, took a passive approach to the labor struggle of the time. He opposed strikes, often discouraging members of his group from using those means of obtaining their demands. In addition, he was strongly opposed to the growing trends towards radicalism. Powderly stood against the Haymarket defendants with the belief that the government should make an example of them. Although she found herself without support from the Knights, Lucy continued her speaking tour, gaining more and more people's interest in the Haymarket case and making a big name for herself.

Lucy's efforts, however, did not sway the courts of the Governor of Illinois who was under political pressure to execute the men although all evidence against them had been circumstantial. Four men were executed on November 11, 1887. Lucy brought her two children to see their father one last time, but she was arrested, along with her kids, taken to jail, forced to strip, and left naked with her children in a cold cell until the hanging of her husband was over. In tears upon her release, she vowed to continue to fight injustice even though her husband had been killed and she feared the same fate for herself.

After the execution, Lucy lived in poverty, receiving eight dollars a week from the Poineer Aid and Support Association, a group formed to support the families of the Haymarket martyrs and others deprived of support because of working for labor interests.

New Struggles

Soon Lucy's affiliations within the labor struggle changed again as different factions in the movement arose in response to the upcoming elections of 1890. Many opted to organize for reformative measures and to support the Democratic Party, swaying the vote of the workers in this direction. Lucy vehemently opposed the new emphasis, feeling that reform would weaken the movement and that collaboration with oppressive parties would mean doom for the independent labor parties after their success in the 1887 elections. She held an uncompromising syndicalist position that envisioned a voluntary association of workers supporting and enforcing common regulations. Her political perspective was firmly based in class consciousness - she identified a class heirarchy as the pivotal problem in the oppressive systems of her time. Because of this, she scoffed at reform measures within the existing government where the rich still lorded over the working class. The 1888-1889 Economic Forums called by the city of Chicago exemplified the new liberal reformist tendancies. Though they attempted to address labor issues by allowing representatives from labor and business to meet, Lucy continued to question and critique these measures as not enough because they still preserved this society's system of class segregation.

In October of 1888 Lucy went to London to address the Socialist League of England. On her return, the struggle for free speech consumed her as she compared the freedom she found in England with the repression at home in the US. Through force and arrest, the city continually thwarted her efforts to speak and fined her for selling copies of her pamphlet Anarchism on the street. She felt that the free speech struggle was of primary importance and harbored frustration toward others who did not fight with as much dedication. Even after Judge Tuley's 1889 ruling that anarchists also have the right to free speech, she continued to fight for this right throughout her life in constant conflict with the forces wanting to silence her.

By 1890 craft unionism, with which Lucy and Albert had been heavily involved, witnessed major defeats due to the increased technology and the industrial scale of the workplace. With these new parameters to the labor struggle, Lucy saw the importance of an international scope to the movement. In 1891 Lucy with Lizzy Holmes began editing Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly in which she proclaimed that the major labor struggles of 1892, such as the ones at the Carnegie steel mills in Pennsylvania and the silver mines of Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, meant that revolution was coming. Conditions for workers worsened as the Reading and Philadelphia Railroads closed and millions were left unemployed. In 1894 Pullman workers went on strike after their organizers had been fired. At first, the boycott was a success, under the leadership of Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union, yet it was crushed in the end by President Grover Clevland. For Lucy the success within this struggle was another example of the strength of the workers and the coming of the revolution. During this time, Lucy spoke to the disenfranchised, agitated amongst the downtrodden at the Spruce Valley Coal Co., spoke to Coxey's army as it prepared to march on Washington, and boycotted State Street stores during the Chicago Teamsters' strike.

Rifts Within the Movements

Lucy's relationship to the anarchist movement had always been vague. As part of the IWPA Lucy was identified as an anarchist, a label intended to be derogatory by the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) who held animosity toward the IWPA. Because Albert died for the anarchist movement, Lucy was devoted to defending the anarchist cause. Nevertheless, the 1890's witnessed the formation of a major rift between her and others in the movement, especially Emma Goldman, over the more abstract arguments that anarchist papers carried at the time. Most of these anarchist debates pivoted around the issue of free love. Lucy believed that marriage and the family existed naturally in the human condition and criticized anarchist papers for carrying articles attacking these institutions. Her speeches against these topics, which she felt were far below the importance of directly working against capitalist oppression, alienated her from other anarchist leaders.

The IWW

In response to the growing labor unrest throughout the country, the labor movement in Chicago mobilized, planning a Continental Congress of labor for June 1905. Before that, however, Big Bill Haywood called a convention drawing anarchists, syndicalists and trade unionists. This was the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which united these groups with the new revolutionary model it offered. For Lucy Parsons, the second woman to join this new organization, the class conscious perspective of the IWW mirrored her political leanings. She believed that a revolution could only come through a well-organized working class movement that seized the methods of production, and that the IWW's tactics of militant strikes and direct action would enable this movement. Lucy promoted the idea of a general strike and spoke strongly for this at the founding convention.

After a major shift towards industrial unionism, in 1905 Lucy began editing The Liberator, a paper published by the IWW and based in Chicago. Through this medium, she took her stand on other women's issues, supporting a woman's right to divorce, remarry, and have access to birth control. She also wrote a column about famous women and a history of the working class.

From 1907-1908, a period encompassing huge economic crashes, Lucy organized against hunger and unemployment. In San Francisco Lucy and the IWW took over the Unemployment Committee, pressuring the state to begin a public works project. The San Francisco government's refusal to acknowledge the committee gave rise to a march of ten thousand people. At the front were unemployed women. The success of Lucy's Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915 pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Jane Addam's Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12. Two weeks after this demonstration, the government began planning for a decentralization of hunger and unemployment policy.

Later Communist Work

In 1925 Lucy began working with the newly formed Communist Party. Though she didn't officially join until 1939, she held an affinity with the party, seeing them work toward revolution from a perspective of class consciousness. At this point, after major conflicts with the new directions of the anarchist movement and watching its momentum slow, Lucy felt that the anarchist movement had no future as it no longer actively moved the people toward revolution.

During this period, Lucy mainly worked with the coalition for International Labor Defense, a Communist Party group, aiding with the Scottsboro Eight and Angelo Hearndon cases. Both of these cases were situations where the establishment charged African-American organizers with crimes they did not commit. This was Lucy's first return to the South and her first work on issues involving race. Her work in these areas and on the Tom Mooney case illustrates her lifelong dedication, after the murder of her husband, to expose the fascism of the judicial system. Though controversy exists over the Communist Party's involvement in both of these cases, especially its indictment of the NAACP and its party propaganda during the Scottsboro Boys' Trial, they extended the Communist Party's influence in African-American communities, where Communist Party members helped organize unions.

The Scottsboro Trial

In the Spring of 1931, eight young African American men and boys were hoboing a train to Memphis trying to find work in the Depression-torn South. On this ride, they were accused of raping two white women who were on the train. The young men - from age 13 on up - were put into jail in Scottsboro, Alabama to await trial. They were ultimately found guilty of rape and were sentenced to death.

The trial and conviction of the Scottsboro Eight would have all but been forgotten if not for the clemency campaign initiated by the International Labor Defense (ILD) of the Communist Party, a group to which Lucy Parsons dedicated much of her energy. The ILD's clemency campaign for the Scottsboro Eight was the first time racism was openly challenged in the United States courts.

The ILD was able to launch an effective campaign in support of the young men. One of the women accusers even recanted her testimony, thus dismissing the bulk of the incriminating evidence. Eventually the death penalty was dropped for the defendants; however, it was only a partial victory as they still served lengthy prison sentences for a crime which they did not commit.

The main victory of the case can be seen on a larger level in terms of how it affected racism in this country. The membership of the Ku Klux Klan, at a high in the 1920's, dipped drastically in the 1930's. Also, to some extent, capital punishment against African Americans was used less frequently than it had been in the past.

Scottsboro and the ILD helped pave the road for the civil rights movement nearly three decades later and served as an inspiration for activists for generations to come.

Lucy's Death and a Continuing Struggle for Free Speech

Even with her eyesight failing, Lucy Parsons was active in the fight against oppression until her death. Continuing to inspire crowds, she spoke at the International Harvester in February 1941, one of her last major appearances. An accidental fire killed her on March 7, 1942 at the age of 89. Her lover George Markstall died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. To add to this tragedy, Lucy's library of 1,500 books on sex, socialism and anarchy were mysteriously stolen, along with all of her personal papers. Neither the FBI nor the Chicago police told Irving Abrams, who had come to rescue the library, that the FBI had already confiscated all of her books. The struggle for fundamental freedom of speech, in which Lucy had engaged throughout her life, continued through her death as authorities still tried to silence this radical woman by robbing her of the work fof her lifetime.

Though she affiliated herself with many different groups throughout her lifetime, Lucy Parsons' strong politics and beliefs remained distinctly individual and uncompromising. She never sought less than revolution to change the oppressive capitalist system surrounding her. Working with a clear focus from a perspective of class consciousness, Lucy fought with the workers first, seeing issues of sex and race as intertwined with the larger struggle. Because she was a woman of action and strong words, the establishment tried to repress her individual voice, often relegating her to merely the role of a bereaved widow. Yet the legacy of her seventy years of fighting stay with us to inspire our similar struggles today.

Ben Fletcher’s One Big Union ~~ Robin D.G. Kelly

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ben-fletchers-one-big-union

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Ben Fletcher, once one of the most important black labor figures in the United States, has faded into obscurity. But he couldn’t be more relevant to the most urgent political projects of the present.

Re-reading Peter Cole’s marvelous Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly amidst a global pandemic has been something of a revelation. The book makes a case for Fletcher’s relevance to the most urgent political projects of the present, and reminds us of his important role in history. This spring, sheltered at home, I streamed Reds—Warren Beatty’s three-hour masterwork about the Russian Revolution as told through the romance of American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant. The movie reminded me how acutely Fletcher has been missing from accounts of the past.

I hadn’t seen Reds since its theatrical release in the early 1980s. A college student and die-hard Marxist who spent the previous summer reading the first two volumes of Capital and all three volumes of Lenin: Selected Works, I vividly recall tearing up as Reed and Bryant joined throngs of workers marching down the streets of Petrograd toward the Winter Palace, singing the “Internationale” in Russian.

Seeing it again after all these years, I suddenly remembered that I had also found the film unsettling because of its whitewashing of the left. Here was a considerable slice of American-Communist history without Negroes or a “Negro Question.” One would never know from the film that John Reed was the first American to address the Communist International on “The Negro Question in America.” Delivered on July 25, 1920, just three months before his untimely death, his speech excoriated U.S. racism, condemned lynching and disfranchisement, and heralded a new revolutionary movement among black workers and intellectuals such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the socialist-leaning Messenger magazine. And yet, while urging Communists to support black struggles for social and political equality, Reed argued that their main task should be “to organize Negroes in the same unions as the whites. This is the best and quickest way to root out racial prejudice and awaken class solidarity.” The Industrial Workers of the World, he insisted, had been doing this all along.

In fact, Benjamin Harrison Fletcher should have shown up in Reds, and not just in cameo. Reed first met Fletcher in 1910 and, like everyone in the IWW’s circle, came to regard him as one of the most talented organizers the Wobblies ever produced. Even those hostile to the Wobblies acknowledged Fletcher’s venerated status. The Messenger dubbed him “The most prominent Negro Labor Leader in America.” A target of the First World War’s Red Scare, Fletcher also became one of the most prominent black political prisoners in the country. He was the only African American among the 101 Wobblies convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act, for which he served nearly three years in Leavenworth. Even after his death in 1949, long past the Wobblies’ heyday, Fletcher remained widely respected. The fairly conservative black-owned newspaper the Atlanta Daily World ran a glowing obituary calling Fletcher “One of the most brilliant Negroes ever associated with a leftist organization” and “highly respected for his scholastic ability and his oratorical efforts.” That author’s point, that Fletcher was jailed because “mass hysteria swept the country and new laws, criminal syndicalism made its appearance . . . as a weapon to prosecute supposed subversives,” was not lost on readers living through a second, more virulent Red Scare.

By the time Reds hit the big screen, Fletcher had faded into obscurity, and it was precisely the whiteness of Reds that led me to Philip S. Foner’s American Socialism and Black Americans, where I first encountered Fletcher. I found traces of him in Sterling Spero and Abram Harris’s classic 1931 text The Black Worker, in Robert Allen’s Reluctant Reformers, in Melvyn Dubofsky’s massive history of the IWW, We Shall Be All, and in a smattering of obscure journals. But these sources did not capture his complicated experiences as an independent black socialist labor leader, the breadth of his intellect and strategic brilliance, and his triumphs and disappointments, not to mention his razor-sharp wit and wicked sense of humor.

That changed in 2006 when a young historian named Peter Cole published the first edition of Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly with Charles H. Kerr, the iconoclastic publishing house then run by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont. It was soon followed by Cole’s magnificent monograph, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia, which placed Fletcher squarely at the center of (dock)worker organizing in the early twentieth century. That meant reckoning with the dynamics of race and class, not to mention the potentialities and limits of direct-action vs. bread-and-butter unionism in an interracial but predominantly black labor union. Fleshing out Fletcher, as Cole did, unsettled not only U.S. labor history but also histories of American radicalism and Black Studies. We learn that Fletcher was more than a “Black Wobbly.” He exemplified the “New Negro” of the post–First World War era, though he was never included among its celebrated intellectuals, artists, and activists. Cole’s scrupulous introduction to Ben Fletcher, which is followed by collected writings by and about Fletcher, reveal his radical vision. Fletcher rejected both emigration and inclusion within the existing system in favor of a revolution that would transform all social, cultural, political, economic, and juridical institutions to the core. Fletcher understood that only workers’ power could usher in a new society—and that required obliterating the color line, building a durable solidarity, and attending to working people’s immediate needs. As a consequence, Fletcher was frequently deemed too radical by some and too conservative by others, evidence of a praxis that exceeded the terms of syndicalism, socialism, anarchism, and industrial unionism. Rather, Fletcher might be best described as a radical pragmatist in that he paid attention to context, emphasized solidarity, and approached the work in an improvisatory and flexible manner, all without ever losing sight of the long-term goal: the emancipation of the working class from capital.

Fletcher had no choice. His survival depended on a keen wit and a fugitive’s acumen. He knew that, as a black organizer of an interracial movement, he was especially susceptible to lethal violence. Company thugs, mobs, and cops wouldn’t stop at roughing him up a bit. As white men savagely murdered hundreds of African Americans with impunity, Fletcher was locked up for promoting industrial unionism, interracial solidarity, socialism, and an end to war. In a 1931 interview with the New York Amsterdam News, Fletcher recalled narrowly escaping a possible lynching in Norfolk in 1917. “One night, friends, fearing that my life was in danger, smuggled me aboard a northbound ship to Boston.” Upon arrival, he found work in a soap factory and continued agitating. When a cop spotted him distributing Wobbly literature, he was taken into custody and interrogated by an FBI agent. Upon questioning, Fletcher cunningly pretended to disavow his membership, convincing the agent that he “discovered the folly of this as he has been unable to secure or keep any kind of job since his connection as organizer of the IWW.”

As Cole points out, Fletcher was a funny man. His capacity to find humor in the direst of circumstances caught the attention of those who knew him, including IWW leader William “Big Bill” Haywood. Much of his humor turned on the absurdity of racism, which not only made him vulnerable to lethal violence, but also rendered him invisible. When he learned about the federal indictment against him, Fletcher promptly left Boston and returned to Philadelphia to await his arrest. He took a job at a Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse, never concealing his identity. Five months passed before agents tracked him down and arrested him. While out on bail, he received a summons to appear in court in Chicago. Delayed by a train accident, Fletcher arrived at the courthouse a few hours late. As he later recalled, “Making my way through the Federal agents and police who swarmed the corridors I was blocked at the courtroom door by the chief bailiff, who inquired:

“What do you want in here?”

“I belong in here.”

“Oh, a wise boy from the South Side want to see the show?”

“No, I’m one of the actors.”

“Take that stuff away. You can’t get in here.”

He had to produce identification just to prove he was the one and only Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. It was enough to finally persuade the chief bailiff to let him enter. “And then I walked into the courtroom and into the Federal penitentiary.”

By the time he left prison and returned to organizing, Fletcher encountered two big challenges. The first was an old problem: white workers whose loyalty to white supremacy undermined interracial solidarity and class struggle. While his enthusiasm for “One Big Union” never waned, he complained in the Messenger, “Organized labor, for the most part be it radical or conservative, thinks and acts, in the terms of the White Race.” Of course, the Wobblies never paid special attention to the specific situation of African Americans. The IWW sought, too simply, to rise above the racism and ethnocentrism of the working class and its capitalist masters. To solve the class question, they argued, was to solve the race question—a position Fletcher endorsed.

The second challenge was the Communist Party, to which he became bitterly opposed. But not right away. He was willing to work with Communists, and in 1925, he was recruited as a principal speaker at the first American Negro Labor Congress organized by the CPUSA. According to lore, he was slated to lead the ANLC if not for his former Wobbly comrade Lovett Fort-Whiteman. Credited as the first black person to officially join the Communist Party, Fort-Whiteman jealously opposed Fletcher holding a leadership role in the Congress. Fletcher also complained that Communists were attempting to take over the IWW and the unions they had built. As the CPUSA’s star rose in the 1930s, Fletcher clung to the rapidly declining IWW, even after it became a shadow of its former self. Neither anticommunism nor organizational loyalty kept him tethered to Wobblies. Rather, he held on to the idea of industrial unionism. He predicted in 1931, “Inevitably, the IWW will be revived . . . with the full exposure of the insincerity of the American Communists and the continued rationalization of industry which obliviates craft lines, making the trade unions of the A.F. of L. obsolete and necessitating the building of industrial unions such as those of the Industrial Workers of the World.” He was partly right. While the IWW never achieved the status it enjoyed during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a few years after Fletcher’s prediction, the Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed.

Ben Fletcher believed in the working class and its capacity to win. He never wavered from his belief that capitalism would end and that it was only an organized working class that could end it—a truly organized working class that would have to eliminate all vestiges of racism and xenophobia to redirect our collective anger toward the capitalist class. His was not a blind optimism, or a naïve belief that persuasive arguments could wipe away color prejudice and unite the proletariat. Rather, he knew that our survival depends on the overthrow of capitalism—and he had lived through an era when it appeared that the working class had capital by the throat. The state’s decision to imprison him, along with one hundred of his fellow Wobblies, was evidence of a terrified ruling class.

That meant working people had to be ready to take power. He said as much in a letter penned from his cell in Leavenworth to Milwaukee socialist Othelia Hampel. Written on New Year’s Eve 1919, at the close of arguably the most revolutionary year in U.S. and world history, he declared, “We are living in momentous times. . . . None of us are gifted with the power [of] ‘clairvoyancy’ as to be able to foretell the day or the hour, therefore the first and most important duty is for all of us to prepare ourselves for the final chapter in the life of Capitalism.”

---

Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, is author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. 

This text was adapted from Robin D. G. Kelley’s introduction to the upcoming new edition of Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, out this December from PM Press.

The General Strike ~~ Bill Haywood

https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike/

Among the best parts are in the questions and answers at the end.

Snips:

We are met to-night to consider the general strike as a weapon of the working class. about the power of the general strike. They seem to lack the foresight, the penetration to interpret political power. They seem to lack the understanding that the broadest interpretation of political power comes through the industrial organization; that the industrial organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the capitalists from disfranchising the worker; it gives the vote to women, it reenfranchises the black man and places the ballot in the hands of every boy and girl employed in a shop, makes them eligible to take part in the general strike, makes them eligible to legislate for themselves where they are most interested in changing conditions, namely, in the place where they work.

Going back not so far as the Commune of Paris, which occurred in 1871, we find the great strike in Spain in 1874, when the workers of that country won in spite of combined opposition against them and took control of the civil affairs. We find the great strike in Bilboa, in Brussels. And coming down through the halls of time, the greatest strike is the [1905] general strike of Russia, when the workers of that country compelled the government to establish a constitution, to give them a form of government--which, by the way, has since been taken from them, and it would cause one to look on the political force, of Russia at least, as a bauble not worth fighting for. They gave up the general strike for a political constitution. The general strike could and did win for them many concessions they could gain in no other way.

While across the water I visited Sweden, the scene of a great general strike, and I discovered that there they won many concessions, political as well as economic; and I happened to be in France, the home of all revolutions, during the strike on the railroads, on the state as well as the privately owned roads. There had been standing in the parliament of France many laws looking toward the improvement of the men employed on the railroads. They became dissatisfied and disgruntled with the continued dilatory practices of the politicians and they declared a general strike.

The demands of the workers were for an increase of wages from three to five francs a day, for a reduction of hours and for the retraction of the pension law. They were on strike three days. It was a general strike as far as the railroads were concerned. It tied up transportation and communication from Paris to all the seaport towns. The strike had not been on three days when the government granted every demand of the workers. Previous to this, however, Briand had issued his infamous order making the railroaders soldiers --reservists. The men went back as conscripts; and many scabs, as we call them over here (I don't know what the French call them; in England they call them "blacklegs"), were put on the roads to take the places Of 3,500 discharged men.

 The strike apparently was broken, officially declared off by the workers. It's true their demands had all been granted, but remember there were 3,500 of their fellow-workers discharged. The strikers immediately started a campaign to have the victimized workers reinstated. And their campaign was a part of the general strike. It was what they called the "grove perlee," or the "drop strike" --if you can conceive of a strike while everybody is at work; everybody belonging to the union receiving full time, and many of them getting overtime, and the strike in full force and very effective. This is the way it worked--and I tell it to you in hopes that you will spread the good news to your fellow-workers and apply it yourselves whenever occasion demands--namely, that of making the capitalist suffer. Now there is only one way to do that; that is, to strike him in the place where he carries his heart and soul, his center of feeling--the pocketbook. And that is what those strikers did. They began at once to make the railroads lose money, to make the government lose money, to make transportation a farce so far as France was concerned. Before I left that country, on my first visit--and it was during the time that the strike was on--there were 50,000 tons of freight piled up at Havre, and a proportionately large amount at every other seaport town. This freight the railroaders would not move. They did not move it at first, and when they did it was in this way: they would load a trainload of freight for Paris and by some mistake it would be billed through Lyons, and when the freight was found at Lyons, instead of being sent to the consignee at Paris it was carried straight through the town on to Bayonne or Marseilles or some other place--to any place but where it properly belonged. Perishable freight was taken out by the trainload and sidetracked. The condition became such that the merchants themselves were compelled to send their agents down into the depots to look up their consignments of freight--and with very little assurance of finding it at all. That this was the systematic work of the railroaders there is no question, because a package addressed to Merle, one of the editors of "La Guerre Sociale," now occupying a cell in the Prison of the Saint, was marked with an inscription on the corner, "Sabotagers please note address." This package went through posthaste. It worked so well that some of the merchants began using the name of "La Guerre Sociale" to have their packages immediately delivered. It was necessary for the managers of the paper to threaten to sue them unless they refrained from using the name of the paper for railroad purposes.

Nearly all the workers have been reinstated at the present time on the railroads of France.

That is certainly one splendid example of what the general strike can accomplish for the working class.

Another is the strike of the railroaders in Italy. The railroaders there are organized in one great industrial union, one card, taking into membership the stenographers, train dispatchers, freight handlers, train crews and section crews. Everyone who works on the railroad is a member of the organization; not like it is in this country, split up into as many divisions as they can possibly get them into. There they are all one. There was a great general strike. It resulted in the country taking over the railroads. But the government made the mistake of placing politicians in control, giving politicians the management of the railroads. This operated but little better than under private capitalism. The service was inefficient. They could make no money. The rolling stock was rapidly going to wreck. Then the railroad organizations issued this ultimatum to the government, and it now stands: "Turn the railroads over to us. We will operate them and give you the most efficient service to be found on railroads in any country." Would that be a success for the general strike? I rather think so.

And in Wales it was my good fortune to be there, not to theorize but to take part in the general strike among the coal miners. Previous to my coming, or in previous strikes, the Welsh miners had been in the habit of quitting work, carrying out their tools, permitting the mine managers to run the pumps, allowing the engine winders to remain at work, carrying food down to the horses, keeping the mines in good shape, while the miners themselves were marching from place to place singing their old-time songs, gathering on the meeting grounds of the ancient Druids and listening to the speeches of the labor leaders; starving for weeks contentedly, and on all occasions acting most peaceably; going back to work when they were compelled to by starvation. But this last strike was an entirely different one. It was like the shoemakers' strike in Brooklyn. Some new methods had been injected into the strike. I had spoken there on a number of occasions previous to the strike being inaugurated, and I told them of the methods that we adopted in the West, where every man employed in and around the mine belongs to the same organization; where, when we went on strike, the mine closed down. They thought that that was a very excellent system. So the strike was declared. They at once notified the engine winders, who had a separate contract with the mine owners, that they would not be allowed to work. The engine winders passed a resolution saying that they would not work. The haulers took the same position. No one was allowed to approach the mines to run the machinery. Well, the mine manager, like the mine managers everywhere, taking unto himself the idea that the mines belonged to him, said, "Certainly the men won't interfere with us. We will go up and run the machinery. And they took along the office force. But the miners had a different notion and they said, "You can work in the office, but you can't run this machinery. That isn't your work. If you run that you will be scabbing; and we don't permit you to scab--not in this section of the country, now." They were compelled to go back to the office. There were 325 horses underground, which the manager, Llewellyn, complained about being in a starving condition. The officials of the union said, "We will hoist the horses out of the mine."

"Oh, no," he said, "we don't want to bring them up. We will all be friends in a few days."

"You will either bring up the horses now or you will let them stay there."

He said, "No, we won't bring them up now."

The pumps were closed down on the Cambria mine. 12,000 miners were there to see that they didn't open. Llewellyn started a hue and cry that the horses would be drowned, and the king sent the police, sent the soldiers and sent a message to Llewellyn asking "if the horses were still safe." He didn't say anything about his subjects, the men. Guarded by soldiers, a few scabs, assisted by the office force, were able to run the pumps. Llewellyn himself and his bookkeeping force went down and fed the horses.

Had there been an industrial organization comprising the railroaders and every other branch of industry, the mines of Wales would be closed down to-day.

We found the same condition throughout the West. We never had any trouble about closing the mines down; and could keep them closed down for an indefinite period. It was always the craft unions that caused us to lose our fights when we did lose. I recall the first general strike in the Coeur d'Alenes, when all the mines in that district were closed down to prevent a reduction of wages. The mine owners brought in thugs the first thing. They attempted to man the mines with men carrying six-shooters and rifles. There was a pitched battle between miners and thugs. A few were killed on each side. And then the mine owners asked for the soldiers, and the soldiers came. Who brought the soldiers? Railroads manned by union men; engines fired with coal mined by union men. That is the division of labor that might have lost us the strike in the Coeur d'Alenes. It didn't lose it, however. We were successful in that issue. But in Leadville we lost the strike there because they were able to bring in scab labor from other communities where they had the force of the government behind them, and the force of the troops. In 1899 we were compelled to fight the battle over in a great general strike in the Coeur d'Alenes again. Then came the general strike in Cripple Creek, the strike that has become a household word in labor circles throughout the world. In Cripple Creek 5,000 men were on strike in sympathy with 45 men belonging to the Millmen's Union in Colorado City; 45 men who had been discharged simply because they were trying to improve their standard of living. By using the state troops and the influence of the Federal government they were able to man the mills in Colorado City with scab millmen; and after months of hardship, after 1,600 of our men had been arrested and placed in the Victor Armory in one single room that they called the "bullpen," after 400 of them had been loaded aboard special trains guarded by soldiers, shipped away from their homes, dumped out on the prairies down in New Mexico and Kansas; after the women who had taken up the work of distributing strike relief had been placed under arrest--we find then that they were able to man the mines with scabs, the mills running with scabs, the railroads conveying the ore from Cripple Creek to Colorado City run by union men--the connecting link of a proposition that was scabby at both ends! We were not thoroughly organized. There has been no time when there has been a general strike in this country.

Here is the position that we find the working class and the capitalists in. The capitalists have wealth; they have money. They invest the money in machinery, in the resources of the earth. They operate a factory, a mine, a railroad, a mill. They will keep that factory running just as long as there are profits coming in. When anything happens to disturb the profits, what do the capitalists do? They go on strike, don't they? They withdraw their finances from that particular mill. They close it down because there are no profits to be made there. They don't care what becomes of the working class. But the working class, on the other hand, has always been taught to take care of the capitalist's interest in the property. You don't look after your own interest, your labor power, realizing that without a certain amount of provision you can't reproduce it. You are always looking after the interest of the capitalist, while a general strike would displace his interest and would put you in possession of it.

That is what I want to urge upon the working class; to become so organized on the economic field that they can take and hold the industries in which they are employed. Can you conceive of such a thing? Is it possible? What are the forces that prevent you from doing so? You have all the industries in your own hands at the present time. There is this justification for political action, and that is, to control the forces of the capitalists that they use against us; to be in a position to control the power of government so as to make the work of the army ineffective, so as to abolish totally the secret service and the force of detectives. That is the reason that you want the power of government. That is the reason that you should fully understand the power of the ballot. Now, there isn't any one, Socialist, S. L. P., Industrial Worker or any other workingman or woman, no matter what society you belong to, but what believes in the ballot. There are those--and I am one of them--who refuse to have the ballot interpreted for them. I know, or think I know, the power of it, and I know that the industrial organization, as I stated in the beginning, is its broadest interpretation. I know, too, that when the workers are brought together in a great organization they are not going to cease to vote. That is when the workers will begin to vote, to vote for directors to operate the industries in which they are all employed.

So the general strike is a fighting weapon as well as a constructive force. It can be used, and should be used, equally as forcefully by the Socialist as by the Industrial Worker.

The Socialists believe in the general strike. They also believe in the organization of industrial forces after the general strike is successful. So, on this great force of the working class I believe we can agree that we should unite into one great organization--big enough to take in the children that are now working; big enough to take in the black man; the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities--an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world. (Applause.)

I have been lecturing in and around New York now for three weeks; my general topic has been Industrialism, which is the only force under which the general strike can possibly be operated. If there are any here interested in industrial unionism, and they want any knowledge that I have, I will be more than pleased to answer questions, because it is only by industrial unionism that the general strike becomes possible. The A. F. of L. couldn't have a general strike if they wanted to. They are not organized for a general strike. They have 271,000 different agreements that expire 27,000 different minutes of the year. They will either have to break all of those sacred contracts or there is no such thing as a general strike in that so-called "labor organization." I said, "so-called"; I say so advisedly. It is not a labor organization; it is simply a combination of job trusts. 

Questions and Answers

Question #1 - Don't you think there is a lot of waste involved in the general strike in that the sufferers would be the workers in larger portion than the capitalists? The capitalist class always has money and can buy food, while the workers will just have to starve and wait. I was a strong believer in the general strike myself until I read some articles in The Call a while ago on this particular phase.

Big Bill Haywood - The working class haven't got anything. They can't lose anything. While the capitalist class have got all the money and all the credit, still if the working class laid off, the capitalists couldn't get food at any price. This is the power of the working class: If the workers are organized (remember now, I say "if they are organized"--by that I don't mean 100 per cent, but a good strong minority), all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped. The working class can stand it a week without anything to eat--I have gone pretty nearly that long myself, and I wasn't on strike. In the meantime I hadn't lost any meals; I just postponed them. (Laughter.) I didn't do it voluntarily, I tell you that. But all the workers have to do is to organize so that they can put their hands in their pockets; when they have got their hands there, the capitalists can't get theirs in. If the workers can organize so that they can stand idle they will then be strong enough so that they can take the factories. Now, I hope to see the day when the man who goes out of the factory will be the one who will be called a scab; when the good union man will stay in the factory, whether the capitalists like it or not; when we lock the bosses out and run the factories to suit ourselves. That is our program. We will do it.

Question #2 - Doesn't the trend of your talk lead to direct action, or what we call revolution? For instance, we try to throw the bosses out; don't you think the bosses will strike back?

Another thing: Of course, the working class can starve eight days, but they can't starve nine. You don't have to teach the workingman how to starve, because there were teachers before you. There is no way out but fight, as I understand it. Do you think you will get your industrialism through peace or through revolution?

Big Bill Haywood - Well, comrade, you have no peace now. The capitalist system, as peaceable as it is, is killing off hundreds of thousands of workers every year. That isn't peace. One hundred thousand workers were injured in this state last year. I do not care whether it's peaceable or not; I want to see it come.

As for starving the workers eight days, I made no such program. I said that they could, but I don't want to see them do it. The fact that I was compelled to postpone a few meals was because I wasn't in the vicinity of any grub. I suggest that you break down that idea that you must protect the boss's property. That is all we are fighting for--what the boss calls his "private property," what he calls his private interest in the things that the people must have, as a whole, to live. Those are the things we are after.

Question #3 - Do the Industrial Unionists believe in political action? Have they got any special platforms that they support?

Big Bill Haywood - The Industrial Workers of the World is not a political organization.

Question #4 - Just like the A. F. of L.?

Big Bill Haywood - No.

Audience Member (commenting) - They don't believe in any political action, either, so far as that is concerned.

Big Bill Haywood - Yes, the A. F. of L. does believe in political action. It is a political organization. The Industrial Workers of the World is an economic organization without affiliation with any political party or any non-political sect. I as an Industrialist say that industrial unionism is the broadest possible political interpretation of the working-class political power, because by organizing the workers industrially you at once enfranchise the women in the shops, you at once give the black men who are disfranchised politically a voice in the operation of the industries; and the same would extend to every worker. That to my mind is the kind of political action that the working class wants. You must not be content to come to the ballot box on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the ballot box erected by the capitalist class, guarded by capitalist henchmen, and deposit your ballot to be counted by black-handed thugs, and say, "That is political action." You must protect your ballot with an organization that will enforce the mandates of your class. I want political action that counts. I want a working class that can hold an election every day if they want to.

Question #5 - By what means could an Industrial Unionist propagate Industrial Unionism in his organization of the A. F. of L.? He would be fired out and lose his job.

Big Bill Haywood - Well, the time is coming when he will have to quit the A. F. of L. anyway. And remember, that there are 35,000,000 workers in the United States who can't get in the A. F. of L. And when you quit you are quitting a caste, you are getting back into your class. The Socialists have been going along maintaining the Civic Federation long enough. The time has almost arrived when you will have to quit and become free men and women. I believe that the A. F. of L. won't take in the working class. They don't want the working class. It isn't a working-class organization. It's a craft organization. They realize that by improving the labor power of a few individuals and keeping them on the inside of a corral, keeping others out with initiation fees, and closing the books, and so on, that the favored few are made valuable to the capitalists. They form a little job trust. It's a system of slavery from which free people ought to break away. And they will, soon.

Question#6 - About the political action we had in Milwaukee: there we didn't have Industrial Unionism, we won by the ballot; and while we haven't compelled the government to pass any bills yet, we are at it now.

Big Bill Haywood - Yes, they are at it. But you really don't think that Congressman Berger is going to compel the government to pass any bills in Congress? This Insurgent bunch that is growing up in the country is going to give you more than the reform Socialists ever asked for yet. The opportunists will be like the Labor party in England. I was in the office of the Labor Leader and Mr. Whiteside said to me: "Really, I don't know what we are going to do with this fellow, Lloyd-George. He has taken every bit of ground from under our feet. He has given the working class more than the Labor party had dared to ask for." And so it will be with the Insurgents, the "Progressives" or whatever they propose to call themselves. They will give you eight-hour laws, compensation laws, liability laws, old-age pensions. They will give you eight hours; that is what we are striking for, too--eight hours. But they won't get off the workers' backs. The Insurgents simply say, "It's cruel, the way the capitalists are exploiting the workers. Why, look! whenever they go to shear them they take off a part of the hide. We will take all the wool, but we will leave the hide." (Laughter.)

Question #7 - Isn't a strike, theoretically, a situation where the workingmen lay down their tools and the capitalist class sits and waits, and they both say, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" And if they go beyond that, and go outside the law, is it any longer a strike? Isn't it a revolution?

Big Bill Haywood - A strike is an incipient revolution. Many large revolutions have grown out of a small strike.

Audience Member (commenting) - Well, I heartily believe in the general strike if it is a first step toward the revolution, and I believe in what you intimate, that the workers are damn fools if they don't take what they want, when they can't get it any other way. (Applause.)

Big Bill Haywood - That is a better speech than I can make. If I didn't think that the general strike was leading on to the great revolution which will emancipate the working class I wouldn't be here. I am with you because I believe that in this little meeting there is a nucleus here that will carry on the work and propagate the seed that will grow into the great revolution that will overthrow the capitalist class.