Today in Labor History June 27, 1869: Anarchist, feminist and labor activist Emma Goldman was born in Lithuania. She helped plot the assassination of steel magnate, Henry Clay Frick, with her lover and comrade Alexander Berkman. Frick was fiercely anti-union and hired hundreds of Pinkertons to suppress the Homestead steel strike in 1892. In a gun battle, the Pinkertons killed nine strikers. Seven Pinkertons died, as well. Later that year, Berkman carried out the assassination attempt, but failed, and spent many years in prison. It was supposed to be an attentat, or propaganda by the deed. Like many anarchists of that era, they believed that their violent action would inspire working people around the world to rise up against capitalism and its leaders, like Frick. After that, Goldman publicly spoke out against attentats, because they weren’t inspiring the masses into action, but they were increasing state repression against their movement.
The state did imprison Goldman numerous times for other offenses, like “inciting to riot,” war resistance, and illegally distributing information about birth control. They even arrested her in 1901, in connection with the assassination of President McKinley, though she had nothing to do with it. They eventually released her and executed a mentally ill, registered Republican named Leon Czolgosz for the crime. In December, 1919, they deported her and Berkman to Russia. She had initially been supportive of the Bolshevik revolution and was excited to be there to witness its fruits, but denounced them after the massacre of more than a thousand sailors during the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. Soon after, she and Berkman left Russia, completely disillusioned. However, in Germany and England, leftists were offended by her denunciations of the Soviet Union. Berkman died in 1936. That same year, she travelled to Spain to support the anarchists during the Civil War. She died a few years later in Toronto, at the age of 70.
Today in Labor History June 23, 1848: Workers rose up in Paris. The rebellion lasted until the 26th. They were rebelling against plans to close the National Workshops created by the Second Republic to provide work and income for the unemployed. The National Guard killed up to 10,000 people. They deported another 4,000 to Algeria. This was after the Revolution of February, 1848, which overthrew King Louis Philippe and established the Second Republic.
Today in Labor History June 20, 1763: Wolfe Tone, Irish rebel leader, was born. He helped create the United Irishmen, a Republican organization that fought against British rule in Ireland. The United Irishmen was a relatively nonsectarian organization that united Irishmen of both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds. Wolfe Tone also led the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The leaders of this major uprising were inspired by the French and American Revolutions. They started off strong, winning many battles. However, in the end, the British prevailed, killing up to 50,000 rebels and civilians. Wolfe Tone said, “Our independence must be had at all hazards. If the men with property will not support us, they must fall. We can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community: the men of no property.” The British captured Wolfe Tone in November, 1798. Scholars believe he committed suicide in prison a few days later.
Clarence Thomas belatedly admits luxury trips were paid for by rightwing billionaire
Supreme court justice amended his financial disclosure to confirm rightwing mega-donor Harlan #Crow funded travel
#Thomas’s relationship with Crow set off calls for more transparency by the justices and calls for more transparency.
ProPublica also reported last year that Samuel #Alito, another of the court’s conservative justices, flew on a private jet and vacationed with a billionaire who had business before the court.
Alito was granted a 90-day extension to file his report, something he has routinely sought.
Alito is also under scrutiny after reports from the New York Times that there was an upside-down US #flag flying outside of his home in Virginia as well as an Appeal to Heaven flag flying outside of a beach home in New Jersey.
The former is associated with the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the latter with #Christian#nationalism.
The supreme court’s nine justices all agreed to a code of conduct last year, though some experts have noted it does not go far enough and there is no way to adequately enforce it.
@cdarwin SCOTUS's Code of Conduct needs be drawn up by independent legal scholars, not the partisan "Federalist Society", to align with ethics rules normal federal judges are subjected to.
And every matter possibly corrupting justices' independence (optimistically taken as given) needs to be put on record & requires consequences relating to justices' participation in judicial processes involving actors contributing to possibly influence & corrupt justices' decisions.
Today in Labor History June 5, 1832: The poor of Paris revolted against the new monarchy, in the wake of crop failures, food shortages and a cholera epidemic, which killed over 100,000 people in France. The poor were especially hard hit by the outbreak. Many believed that the wealthy had poisoned their wells. The Society of the Rights of Man organized an army and raised the red flag, declaring "Liberty or Death." Nearly 100 Republicans died in their attempt to overthrow the government. Over 70 monarchists died defending it. The uprising was the inspiration for Victor Hugo's “Les Miserables,” which depicts the period leading up to the rebellion. Hugo was living in Paris at the time, working on a play. When he heard the gunfire, he ran outside to see what was happening, and quickly got pinned down by gunfire, taking shelter between Republican barricades.
Today in Labor History May 30, 1814: Russian anarchist militant and philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was born. In Paris, in the 1840’s, he met Marx and Proudhon, who were early influences on him. He was later expelled from France for opposing Russia’s occupation of Poland. In 1849, the authorities arrested him in Dresden for participating in the Czech rebellion of 1848. They deported him back to Russia, where the authorities imprisoned him and then exiled him to Siberia in 1857. During his imprisonment, he lost all his teeth due to scurvy. However, he eventually escaped and made it to England.
In 1868, he joined the International Working Men’s Association, leading the rapidly growing anarchist faction. He argued for federations of self-governing workplaces and communes to replace the state. This was in contrast to Marx, who argued for the state to help bring about socialism. However, he agreed with Marx’s class analysis. Nevertheless, in 1872, they expelled Bakunin from the International.
Bakunin died in 1876 in Bern, Switzerland. He influenced anarchist movements throughout the world, but especially in Italy and Spain. He also influenced the IWW, Noam Chomsky, Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, and Emma Goldman.
Today in Labor History May 30, 1381: Tax collector John Bampton sparked the Peasants’ Revolt in Brentwood, Essex. The mass uprising, also known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, or the Great Rising, began because of attempts to collect a poll tax. However, tensions were already high because of the economic misery and hunger caused by the Black Death pandemic of the 1340s, and the Hundred Years’ War. During the uprising, rebels burned public records and freed prisoners. King Richard II, 14 years old, hid in the Tower of London. Rebels entered the Tower and killed the Lord Chancellor and the Lord High Treasurer, but not the king. It took nearly six months for the authorities to suppress the Peasants’ Revolt. They slaughtered over 1,400 rebels. Roughly 600 years later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried again to impose a poll tax on Britain’s working class. It also sparked a revolt which brought an end both to the tax and Thatcher’s regime. Billy Bragg references Thatcher’s poll tax in his song, All You Fascists.
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 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.
Today in Labor History May 20, 1911: Anarchist Magonistas published a proclamation calling for the peasants to take collective possession of the land in Baja California. They had already defeated government forces there. Members of the IWW traveled south to help them. During their short revolution, they encouraged the people to take collective possession of the lands. They also supported the creation of cooperatives and opposed the establishment of any new government. Ricardo Flores Magon organized the rebellion from Los Angeles, where he lived. In addition to Tijuana, they also took the cities of Ensenada and Mexicali. However, in the end, the forces of Madero suppressed the uprising. LAPD arrested Magon and his brother Enrique. As a result, both spend nearly two years in prison. Many of the IWW members who fought in the rebellion, later participated in the San Diego free speech fight. Lowell Blaisdell writes about it in his now hard to find book, “The Desert Revolution,” (1962). Read my article on the San Diego Free Speech fight here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2022/02/01/today-in-labor-history-february-1/
Today in Labor History May 18, 1814: Russian anarchist militant and philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was born. In Paris, in the 1840’s, he met Marx and Proudhon, who were early influences on him. He was later expelled from France for opposing Russia’s occupation of Poland. In 1849, the authorities arrested him in Dresden for participating in the Czech rebellion of 1848. They deported him back to Russia, where the authorities imprisoned him and then exiled him to Siberia in 1857. However, he escaped through Japan and fled to the U.S. and then England.
In 1868, he joined the International Working Men’s Association, leading the rapidly growing anarchist faction. He argued for federations of self-governing workplaces and communes to replace the state. This was in contrast to Marx, who argued for the state to help bring about socialism. In 1872, they expelled Bakunin from the International. Bakunin had an influence on the IWW, Noam Chomsky, Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, Emma Goldman, and the Spanish CNT and FAI.
Today in Labor History, May 16: Romani Resistance Day, commemorating the Roma people who fought the fascists during World War II. The date was chosen due to a Holocaust survivor stating that on 16 May 1944, there was a rebellion of Roma detainees at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. However subsequent research by the Auschwitz Museum discovered that this date was most likely incorrect. It was actually in early April that a number of Roma prisoners refused orders from the SS to leave to work in Germany. Instead, a Polish prisoner was ordered to make a list of Roma able to work to be transported later. By 2 August 1944, those Roma able to work had been transported elsewhere, when the SS came to take the others to the gas chambers. The prisoners armed themselves with crowbars and fought back, but were eventually overcome and gassed. And just a few days ago, The European Committee for Social Rights (ECSR) unanimously concluded that Italy’s new fascism government was violating the European Social Charter as regards the housing rights of the Roma, 15,000 of whom are currently living in shanty towns on the margins of big cities such as Rome, Milan and Naples.
Today in Writing History May 7, 1867: Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont was born. His best-known work is the award-winning four-volume novel Chłopi (The Peasants), which won him the 1924 Nobel Prize in Literature. Also in 1924, he published his novel “Revolt,” about a rebellion of farm animals fighting for equality. However, the revolt quickly degenerates into bloody terror. It was a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution. Consequently, the Polish authorities banned it from 1945 to 1989. Reymont’s farm animal rebellion predated Orwell’s by 21 years.
@DemocracyMattersALot Instead of openly withdrawing their mandated ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, the neo-Confederate subverters of Lincoln's Republican party obviously think it smarter to just torpedo any officially granted right based on a SCOTUS decision referring to any of the Reconstruction Amendments.
Which amounts to rebellious attacks on the Constitution, too.
Today in Labor History May 3, 1968: The first battles of the May Upheaval began in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The police arrested 500 students meeting at the University of Sorbonne to protest repression at Nanterre. Revolt broke out along the route taken by police vans, with thousands fighting against the police. Throughout the month of May and part of June, workers and students occupied schools, factories and offices. By mid-May, 10 million workers were on strike.
Today in Labor History April 2, 1863: Bread riots occurred in Richmond, Virginia, as a result of a drought the previous year, combined with a blockade by the Union Army and overall Civil War-related shortages. Food riots occurred throughout the South around this time, led primarily by women. During the Richmond riot, women broke into storehouses and shops, stealing food, clothing and jewelry before the militia was able to restore order.
Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
Today in Labor History March 11, 1858: The Great Indian Mutiny, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, ended with massacres by the British. 6,000 British troops died in the fighting. However, at least 800,000 Indians died in the fighting and from the famines and epidemics that resulted.
Today in Labor History March 7, 1942: IWW cofounder and anarchist labor organizer Lucy Parsons died on this date in Chicago, Illinois. Lucy Parsons was part African American and part Native American. Her mother had been a slave. In 1871, she married Albert Parsons, a Confederate soldier, in Waco, Texas. Soon after, they were forced to flee due to racism, moving to Chicago. There they participated in the Great Upheaval of worker rebellions that swept across the U.S. in 1877. They were also active in the movement for the 8-hour day and other worker movements. In 1887, the authorities executed Albert, along with several other anarchists, for the Haymarket bombing, even most hadn’t been present at the bombing. In 1905, Lucy Parsons cofounded the IWW, along with Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and others. In 1915, she organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations. They were so effective that they pushed the AFL, the Socialist Labor Party and the Hull House to participate. In 1925, she participated in the International Labor Defense, which defended workers, communists, the Scottsboro Nine and others.
Today in Labor History March 7, 1921: Select forces of the Red Army (commanded by Leon Trotsky) opened fire on the rebellious sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt. The left-wing rebellion against the Bolshevik government began on March 1, and continued until March 18. Bolshevik government forces killed over 1,000 Kronstadt rebels in battle, and executed another 2,100 in the aftermath. As many as 1,400 government troops died in their attempt to quash the rebellion. The rebels were demanding that soviet councils include anarchists and left socialists, the restoration of civil rights for workers, and economic freedom for workers and peasants.
Today in Labor History March 5, 1965: A Leftist uprising against British colonialism erupted in Bahrain, known as the March Intifada. The uprising began after the Bahrain Petroleum Company laid off hundreds of workers at on March 5, 1965. Students at Manama High School, the only high school in Bahrain, went out into the streets to protest the lay-offs. Several people died in the clashes between protesters and police. The authorities quickly suppressed the uprising. However, as news of the crackdown spread, protests erupted throughout the country, creating a nationwide uprising which lasted for a month.
Today in Labor History March 5, 1906: U.S. Army troops beat the native Moros in the First Battle of Bud Dajo, during Moro Rebellion, Philippines. However, it wasn’t even close to being a battle. The U.S. had overwhelming firepower, slaughtering nearly everyone they encountered, men, women and children, and then posed with the corpses. Only six people survived. Mark Twain said, “In what way was it a battle? We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people.” The Moro Rebellion (1899-1913) was a liberation struggle against U.S. colonialism by Muslims in the Southern Philippines, (Mindanao, Jolo and the neighboring Sulu Archipelago).
Today in Labor History March 4, 1804: Irish convicts rose up against British colonial authority in the Colony of New South Wales in the Castle Hill Rebellion. It was the first major convict uprising in Australian history to be suppressed under martial law. The prisoners escaped from a prison farm with the goal of stealing ships and sailing back to Ireland. With a few days, the authorities suppressed the uprising. They executed nine leaders and punished hundreds of others.
Today in Labor History March 1, 1921: Anarchist and leftwing communist soldiers and sailors rose up against the Russian Bolsheviks in the Kronstadt uprising. The rebellion, which lasted until March 16, was the last major revolt against the Bolsheviks. It began when they sent delegates to Petrograd in solidarity with strikes going on in that city, and demanded the restoration of civil rights for workers, economic and political freedom for workers and peasants, including free speech, and that soviet councils include anarchists and left socialists. The Bolshevik forces, directed by Trotsky, killed over 1,000 Kronstadt rebels in battle, and executed another 2,100 in the aftermath. As many as 1,400 government troops died in their attempt to quash the rebellion.
👁👁 Eye-opening for those, who may not have known yet.
[Note: Split up into paragraphs for further clarity]
"When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it was obvious why Section 3 was included. When a nation cannot disqualify from public office those who have sought to destroy it, it casts doubt on its own legitimacy.
That is especially true of the unrepentant Trump. Even Confederate generals admitted they lost by swearing allegiance to the United States. Trump still insists that he didn’t lose.
Meanwhile, most Republicans dodge whether President Joe Biden won the election legitimately by grudgingly acknowledging that Biden is president.
The MAGA faction is not “conservative,” and even calling it “extremist” misses the point dangerously. Those advocating for conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a democratic polity.
But those acting in ways that reject legitimately constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme. They are criminal.
Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen, decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s, do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States.
They, like their Confederate ancestors, are not patriots."