Today in Labor History June 20, 1912: Voltairine de Cleyre, one of the earliest feminist anarchists, died at the age 45, following a long illness. Two thousand supporters attended her funeral at Waldheim cemetery, in Chicago, where she was buried next to the Haymarket Martyrs. De Cleyre opposed capitalism and marriage and the domination of religion over sexuality and women’s lives. Her father, a radical abolitionist, named her after the Enlightenment writer and satirist, Voltaire. Her biographer Paul Avrich said that she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist." The Haymarket affair, and the wrongful execution of anarchists in Chicago, radicalized her against the state and capitalism. She was also a prolific writer, and poet, publishing dozens of essays and poems in her short life.
Happy Juneteenth. May we see a true end to slavery in our lifetimes.
This is a casual reminder that slavery is still not only legal but fundamental to the US economy. When the state of California says it would "cost" the economy 1.5 billion dollars per year to end prisoner slavery, they are telling us how deeply invested they are in its survival. That's not even touching historic reparations, that's 1.5bn per year taken directly out of black and brown livelihoods, and the incalculable damage to families and communities that the state inflicts through mass incarceration.
Today in Labor History June 16, 1848: Rebellious citizens captured the Berlin arsenal, as revolution swept across 50 European states, mostly affiliated with the German Confederation and Austria. While the middle classes were fighting for a unified German state and increased civil liberties, the working class had more revolutionary aspirations. Participants in the revolution included communist and anarchist revolutionaries like Marx, Engels and Mikhail Bakunin, as well as the composer Wagner. The revolutions were all eventually suppressed, with great loss of life and mass imprisonment. Many fled to the U.S. and became known as “forty-eighters.” They moved to places like Cincinnati’s Ober der Rhine neighborhood, or Saint Louis. After risking their lives fighting against serfdom in Europe, many were so horrified by the persistence of slavery in their new country that they dedicated themselves to the cause of abolition and free thinking, joining organizations like the Freimӓnverein (Society of Freemen) and the Wide Awakes (a radical militia that defended free blacks and fought confederates in the streets). Some of them also became publishers, like Henry Boernstein, who had previously published “Vorwärts!” in Paris with Karl Marx, Engels, Heinrich Heine and others.
Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, where he met Daniel O'Connell, Ireland's nationalist leader and a vocal critic of slavery. “I am the friend of liberty in every clime, class and colour. My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island. No — it extends itself to every corner of the earth," O'Connell said at a meeting of his Repeal Association that Douglass attended in September 1845. Here's a look at how his words influenced Douglass's activism: "Agitate, agitate, agitate."
Today in Writing History June 4, 1917: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall won the first Pulitzer prize for biography. They wrote about their mother Julia Ward Howe, the feminist, abolitionist, pacifist author and poet. You can read the biography here.
Howe not only wrote the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic; she also wrote the pacifist 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation. Also known as the Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World, the proclamation called on women to unite worldwide for peace. In 1872, Howe called for a Mother’s Day for Peace to be celebrated each year on June 2. Yet today, women throughout the U.S. and Europe (along with the men) are calling for ever more heavy weaponry and NATO troops to be sent to the Ukrainian killing fields, where over 200,000 Ukrainians have already lost their lives, and where this now direct NATO involvement risks precipitating WWIII between nuclear-armed powers, neither of which show any indication that they are willing to back down or negotiate an end to the slaughter. Where is the peace movement today? Or, is some slaughter justified in the name of capitalism (er, I mean against despotism)? And, if that is true, where are all the people screaming for war against India? Philippines? Italy? Saudi Arabia? El Salvador? Egypt? Sudan? And Israel?
"[authoritarian communist groups and vanguard parties] depend on recruiting newly radicalized people, energetic and inexperienced, and without existing connections to other radicals that could warn them off.
This zine is an intervention. Written for people newer to radical politics, it outlines red flags to look out for, provides some history of the most well-known authoritarian communist groups’ harmful behavior, and offers a few alternatives to joining them. Give this to the new people you’re seeing join movements, it could help them avoid lots of grief and serious harm."
Today in Labor History June 2, 1863: Backed by three gunboats, Harriet Tubman and her force of 300 black soldiers, freed 800 slaves in the Combahee River Raid, South Carolina. Furthermore, they set fire to the plantations and destroyed millions of dollars-worth of stores, cotton and homes of the wealthy, without losing a single person. Additionally, it was the only military engagement in American history where a woman, black or white, “led the raid and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.” Tubman devised her war strategy after repeatedly penetrating across enemy lines and spying on Confederate troop movements. In the aftermath, Confederate Captain John F. Lay said, “The enemy seems to have been well posted as to the character and capacity of our troops and their small chance of encountering opposition, and to have been well guided by persons thoroughly acquainted with the river and country.” Most Americans know of Tubman’s role in the Underground Railroad. However, she was also a spy for the Union Army. And in the late 1850s, she helped John Brown plan his raid on Harper’s Ferry and recruit supporters for the raid.
Today in Labor History June 2, 1780: The Gordon Riots began on this date in England and lasted through June 9. The riots began as a pogrom against Catholics. However, it grew into a mass worker insurrection that included ex-slaves, impressed sailors and debtors, English, Irish, Italians, Germans and Jews. The insurrectionists liberated two thousand prisoners and destroyed every major prison in London. They wrote on the prison walls, “Freed by the Authority of His Majesty, King Mob." Rioters also destroyed the homes members of the ruling elite, as well as toll houses and the Bank of England. The rich fled the city in terror. It was the most destructive protest in the history of London. The military was called in. They slaughtered up to 700 workers. The political context for the insurrection included low wages and inflation due to England’s wars with the U.S., Spain and France, as well as the desire for universal suffrage.
Today in Labor History May 28, 1802: 400 rebellious slaves, led by Louis Delgrès, blew themselves up in In Guadeloupe, rather than submit to Napoleon's troops. Delgres had fought as an officer for Revolutionary France against Great Britain. The Jacobins had freed the slaves, but Napoleon threatened to reimpose slavery throughout the empire. During his resistance, the French army drove Delgrès and his followers into a fort. When they realized there was no escape, they committed suicide by igniting the gunpowder stores, attempting to kill as many French troops as possible in the process. Much later, the French built a memorial for him opposite that of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution. However, the true location of both men’s remains are a mystery.
Today in Labor History May 24, 1856: The Pottawatomie Massacre occurred in Kansas. On May 21 pro-slavery forces sacked Lawrence, Kansas, which had been settled by abolitionist “Free-Staters.” The next day, they attacked Senator Charles Sumner for speaking out against slavery in Kansas. In response, John Brown, and his supporters in the Pottawatomie Rifles, killed five pro-slavery settlers in front of their families. This led to a mini-civil war in Kansas that was a prelude to the national Civil War that would follow a few years later.
Today in Labor History May 23, 1832: The authorities executed Jamaican national hero Samuel Sharpe for his role in the 1831 Slave Rebellion which helped end slavery on the island. It started as a peaceful protest, but evolved into Jamaica’s largest slave rebellion, mobilizing 60,000 enslaved people and spreading throughout the entire country. It lasted 10 days. They killed 14 whites, but troops slaughtered over 200 rebels and then executed over 300 more.
I live near Bathurst jail. I used to live across the corner from it, but now we've moved about 10 minutes away.
While we lived across the corner I'd often see people released from the jail and start the 50 minute walk down to the station as they were just dumped back into society with less and less assistance or support in place. I'd often pop out the front door and ask of they wanted a lift, a number of times they'd say yes and I'd drive them down to the station (and once to Lithgow because he missed the train). People who do their time at Bathurst have been shipped in from all over the state, and are expected to just be able to get home again.
They also all carry their belongings in a clear plastic baggie the jail has given them, and everyone here knows if someone is carrying that bag they've just been released.. and a lot of people treat them like shit.
I started keeping a reusable shopping bag in my car to give them instead of using the clear baggie. Then I started stocking the bag with some essentials (masks, soap, socks, deodorant, snacks, drink, water, crossword book, pen, etc), so they might have a bit of comfort on their journey home.
Today I drove past the jail after dropping my housemate to work, and there was a guy standing at the bus stop with a clear baggie, so I asked if he wanted a lift to the station and gave him my jail bag.
He's excited to get home and see his dog after 16 months.
Today in Labor History May 15, 1872: Julia Ward Howe declared the first Mother's Day as an anti-war holiday. Howe was an abolitionist and a feminist who wrote the lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic. However, despite her disgust with slavery, she never thought black and white people were equal. She wanted to create a "Mother's Day For Peace," where mothers would ask that their husbands and sons to no longer get killed in wars. In 1870, she called upon mothers of all nationalities to promote the "amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace." In 1907, Anna Jarvis held the first official Mother’s Day at an Episcopalian Church in Virginia. She wanted to honor Howe’s original vision, and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world."
after #abolition many Black people who had nowhere to go, were charged rents by their former plantation owners if they didn't leave. if they didn't pay, they were either re-enslaved thru prison OR indentured into financial servitude.
when the numbers of indentured Black servants weren't enough, that's when poor migrant workers became key to this new form of renter slavery.
this is what GOP fascists want to bring back with #prisons & #farms
The Republicans Were Woke Long Before Your Great Great Grandparents Were Born
On October 3, 1860, 10,000 men and boys marched in a three-mile procession through Chicago. Many were immigrants from Europe, veterans of the Revolutions of 1848. They wore capes and military-style hats, and carried six-foot long torches. Some marched with guns. Others held signs with the image of a large eyeball. They were the Wide Awakes, a Radical Republican abolitionist militia, active in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War.
Their name, Wide Awakes, like today’s use of the word “woke,” was meant to convey that they were awake or alert to racial and other social injustices. However, the Wide Awakes were also on the lookout for secessionists, racists, and others who wanted to keep African Americans enslaved and oppressed, and they were ready and willing to battle them in the streets, which they did on several occasions.
One of the Wide Awakes leaders in St. Louis was Henry Boernstein, a German who had participated in the 1848 Paris Revolution. Prior to that, he had published the radical journal Vorwärts! in Paris, with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Ludwig Bernays, the poet Heinrich Heine, and others. Boernstein idolized Bernays, who helped radicalize him. At the same time, Bernays simultaneously had affairs with both Boernstein’s wife and daughter. Marx joked that Bernays was a prisoner of love, being kept by a cabal of calculating Boernstein women.
Today in Labor History April 24, 1954: Mumia Abu Jamal, death row activist, journalist and former Black Panther, was born on this date. Mumia is currently in prison on trumped-up charges of killing a cop. He is also extremely ill with congestive heart failure, diabetes, and a number of other maladies.
Today in Labor History April 21, 1910: Mark Twain died. William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature." He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” He apprenticed with a printer and worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother Orion Clemens. He later worked as a riverboat pilot before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. Twain was famous for his wit and brilliant writing. However, he also had extremely progressive politics for his era. Later in his life, he became an ardent anti-imperialist. “I have read carefully the treaty of Paris and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem… And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” During the Boxer Rebellion, he said that "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success." From 1901, until his death in 1910, he was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the U.S. He was also critical of European imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II of Belgium, who attempted to establish colonies in African. He also supported the Russian revolutionaries fighting against the Tsar.
Many people have criticized him for his racism. Indeed, schools have banned “Huckleberry Finn.” However, Twain was an adamant supporter of abolition and said that the Emancipation Proclamation “not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also." He also fought for the rights of immigrants, particularly the Chinese. "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible... but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him." And though his early writings were racist against indigenous peoples, he later wrote that “in colonized lands all over the world, "savages" have always been wronged by "whites" in the most merciless ways, such as "robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whiskey."
Twain was also an early feminist, who campaigned for women's suffrage. He also wrote in support of unions and the labor movement, especially the Knights of Labor, one of the most important unions of the era. “Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.”
The history of American Union Busting and the Pinkertons go hand in hand. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, created by Allan Pinkerton in 1850, plays a prominent role in my novels, particularly Anywhere But Schuylkill. The powerful Reading Railroad, which owned most of the Schuylkill County coalfields, hired them to keep their workers in line. The Pinkertons planted spies and agents provocateur in the miners’ union. Together with the Coal & Iron Police, they stoked sectarian violence between the ethnic groups that made up Pennsylvania’s mining workforce. And their agents provided the bogus evidence and perjured testimony that resulted in the executions of twenty innocent Irishmen in 1877. John Dos Passos portrayed the brutality of both the Pinkertons, and the Coal & Iron Police, in his USA Trilogy.
Knowing this sordid history, one would be forgiven for thinking that Allan Pinkerton was nothing but a one-dimensional bull dog for the plutocrats. But his history was much more complex, and interesting. Prior to his role as a union buster, he was friends with abolitionist John Brown. He helped several enslaved people escape into Canada. He was also friends with Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, Pinkerton created the Secret Service. He also served as a Union spy, providing exaggerated troop numbers that undermined Union war efforts. And in his youth, Pinkerton was a vandal, arsonist, and armed insurrectionist, in Britain’s radical Chartist movement. In fact, the only reason he came to the U.S. was to avoid prison.
This story about prison tech/tablet providers bribing sheriffs nationwide to stop in-person visits, making big $$ from tablets, has been on my mind since Alec K and Civil Rights Corps broke it last week.
In an alarming new intersection of policing and online surveillance, American cops are getting court orders demanding Google turn over names, addresses, and telephone numbers for tens of thousands of people who simply watched (however briefly) a YouTube video:
"Privacy experts said the orders were unconstitutional because they threatened to undo protections in the 1st and 4th Amendments covering free speech and freedom from unreasonable searches. “This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets. It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying and it’s happening every day,” said Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I’m horrified that the courts are allowing this.”
Although neither of the two cases mentioned in this article are likely to provide sympathetic victims (a suspected bitcoin seller, and folks watching a live stream of a publicly placed camera online) in the war against policing online spaces and mass surveillance, the plain truth here is that giving murderpigs the power to unmask perhaps hundreds of thousands of people for watching a video on Youtube sets a very dangerous precedent. We're not talking about CSAM here, and in a society that is actively criminalizing things like antifascist resistance, feeding unhoused people, and protesting an ongoing genocide, this extension of police powers (that is most certainly unconstitutional,) represents a clear and present danger to pretty much everyone who isn't obeying the current status quo.
Furthermore, I don't think it's wise to view this violation of civil rights in a vacuum. Court orders like this also dovetail into increasing repressive attempts by Pig Empire states to police online activity as a whole while collecting identifying data from pretty much everyone; take for example the attempts by American GOP governors to obtain government identification from literally every social media user in their state, or bills like the Kids Online Safety Act, which is ultimately a fascist trojan horse designed to ban LGBTQ content under the guise of "protecting children." As America slides more and more into an overt fascist order, it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to allow the violent reactionary enforcers of that order the power to reach into your viewing history on online platforms with clearly enforced terms of service. You can say that you don't have anything to hide, but the simple truth is that with an American judiciary and legislative branch riddled with fascists, that can change at any time they want to pass a new law, or redefine how an old one is enforced.
Hey, speaking of alarming new precedents in police surveillance and privacy laws, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that because there's a lot of video cameras in our modern society, you no longer have an reasonable expectation of privacy in front of your own house; so it's totally okay for the feds to tape you there without a warrant:
"Law enforcement in Kansas recorded the front of a man’s home for 68 days straight, 15 hours a day, and obtained evidence to prove him guilty on 16 charges. The officers did not have a search warrant, using a camera on a pole positioned across the street to capture Bruce Hay’s home. A federal court ruled on Tuesday that it was fine for law enforcement to do so, in what’s potentially a major reduction in privacy law.
“Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” said the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision on U.S. vs Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”
This one is pretty mind-numbing because although the judge's assertion that anyone walking by the defendant's house could see what the police recorded makes sense on the surface, that argument falls apart once you realize the pigs used a camera placed on a pole in front of his yard to record the guy's front door for fifteen hours a day, over the course of 68 days; without a warrant and based on nothing more than a tip they received. Do any of your neighbors hate you enough to "think" you might be committing a crime? Well as of now, that's enough to allow unsupervised chucklefuck murderpigs to make hundreds of hours worth of legally admissible home movies of your front porch.
Although this case stems out of a fraud investigation involving a defendant allegedly lying about his disability status to collect VA benefits, once again we're talking about a ruling that has sweeping potential consequences in an increasingly fascist society actively criminalizing dissent. In a country where we know the muderpigs are surveilling and harassing protestors, social justice advocates, and anti-fascists, giving them the ability to actively record the comings and goings of people who a tipster alleges may be involved in a crime, without judicial supervision, is quite frankly unconscionable. While you may not think this affects you because you're "not a criminal" there's literally no guarantee that statement will remain true in a country where legally-empowered fascist officials are redefining the law to make politically opposing fascism, or the actions of the state, a crime in and of itself.