Friday, March 11, 2011

Herbert Hoover and the Labor Movement

Since the racist reactionary neo-conservative right wing, the so called Tea Party, has taken over the Republican party during the "worst recession since the Great Depression" and is behind the recent attacks on union rights and the public sector in Wisconsin and around the U.S.

Let's go back to the Republican President during that time; Herbert Hoover, and see what his relationship was to the Labor Movement of his day and his political economic solution to America's post war problems.

The whole of Hoovers chapter on Labour from his Memoirs is posted below.


My views on labor relations in general rested on two propositions which I ceaselessly stated in one form or another:

First, I held that there are great areas of mutual interest between employee and employer which must be discovered and cultivated, and that it is hopeless to attempt progress if management and labor are to be set up as separate "classes" fighting each other. They are both producers, they are not classes.

And, second, I supported continuously the organization of labor and collective bargaining by representatives of labor's own choosing. I insisted that labor was not a "commodity."

On September 5, 1925, I stated:
It is my opinion that our nation is very fortunate in having the American Federation of Labor. It has exercised a powerful influence in stabilizing industry, and in maintaining an American standard of citizenship.


He was on good terms with Samuel Gompers, the founder of the AFL and even asked for his help when Democrats were smearing him during an election. Gompers died in 1924, so this must have occurred during an election campaign earlier than the 1928 election.

"The Democratic underworld made a finished job at these low levels with several favorite libels Another attack was laid on with a defter touch. Some years before, I had taken an interest in a group of young men to enable them to buy a ranch near Bakersfield, California. From over devotion, they had named it the "Hoover Ranch" and had painted the name on the gatepost. Agents of the Democratic County Committee painted a sign "No White Help Wanted" and, hanging it on the gate below the name, had it photographed and distributed the prints all over the country. The reference was to the employment of Asiatics. The ranch never had employed any such help. Through my friend Samuel Gompers, I at once secured an investigation by the Kern County labor union leaders. Their report was an indignant denial, but we were never able to catch up with the lie. This smear was used for years afterwards."
The Presidential Campaign of 1928
Hoover was proud of his relationship to the American Labour Movement, and despite having to intervene in the Great Rail Strike he placed the blame squarely on finance capital, the bankers on Wall Street.

In a statement from his memoirs his critique of finance capital is as pertinent today as it was then.
He blames the continued conflict not on the owners or workers, Hoover was of the progressive school that saw government as a partnership of the productive classes; workers and owners. Instead he blames continued conflict in the rail industry on the Stock Brokers and Investment Bankers of the day.

It is a safe generalization for the period to say that where industrial leaders were undominated by New York promoter-bankers, they were progressive and constructive in outlook. Some of the so-called bankers in New York were not bankers at all. They were stock promoters. They manipulated the voting control of many of the railway, industrial, and distributing corporations, and appointed such officials as would insure to themselves the banking and finance. They were not simply providing credit to business in order to lubricate production. Their social instinct belonged to an early Egyptian period.
Hoover thus exemplified the early 20th Century American Producer ideal, that all Americans were producers, either farmers or workers, even the capitalist. Producerism resulted in political economic ideologies of wealth redistribution popular at the end of WWI; both Social Credit and the ideal of Cooperative Socialism.

Hoover offers a liberal / utilitarian compromise between these two. Hoovers ideas came from his engineering background, which was the new management ideal that developed immediately after WWI.

It is reflected in Hoovers ideal of a scientific solution to American economic problems.
typical is the picture of the engineer presented by J.E. Hobson, Director of
Stanford's Research Institute in the 1950:" the engineer is not playing with
scientific matters for the pleasure he derives from his studies he has a very
specific purpose an objective in mind: that of applying his technical knowledge
to an economic problem".

This concept of scientific social engineering is an American phenomena reflected in Scientific Management that resulted in Fordism , and the idea of Technocracy based on Thorstien Veblen's (a Wisconsinite)
"The Engineer and the Price System

Hoover was no Tea Party Republican, nor was he an Ayn Rand individualist nor did he embrace the economics of the Austrian School, he embraced scientific management of the political economy while having a similar distrust of finance capital as Veblen.


His American Individualism was not that of the American Libertarian Right nor the current Republican leadership.We would call him a Progressive Conservative in the Canadian context or a Liberal Democrat in the UK. Something Left Wing Historian William Appleman Williams goes to great pains to document.

The Postwar Need of the United States for Reconstruction

It was apparent that from war, inflation, over-expanded agriculture, great national debt, delayed housing and postponed modernization of industry, demoralization of our foreign trade, high taxes and swollen bureaucracy, we were, as I have said, faced with need for reconstruction at home. Moreover, not only were there these difficulties arising from the war but there was the letdown from the nation's high idealism to the realistic problems that must be confronted. Deeper still was a vague unrest in great masses of the people.
Our marginal faults badly needed correction. We were neglecting the primary obligations of health and education of our children over large backward areas. Most of our employers were concertedly fighting the legitimate development of trade unions, and thereby stimulating the emergence of radical leaders and, at the same time, class cleavage. The twelve-hour day and eighty-four-hour week were still extant in many industries.
During my whole European experience I had been trying to formulate some orderly definition of the American System. After my return I began a series of articles and addresses to sum up its excellent points and its marginal weaknesses.
Constantly I insisted that spiritual and intellectual freedom could not continue to exist without economic freedom. If one died, all would die. I wove this philosophy, sometimes with European contrasts, into the background of my addresses and magazine articles on problems of the day. Along with these ideas, I elaborated a basis of economic recovery and progress. I did not claim that it was original.2
It involved increasing national efficiency through certain fundamental principles. They were (a) that reconstruction and economic progress and therefore most social progress required, as a first step, lowering the costs of production and distribution by scientific research and transformation of its discoveries into labor-saving devices and new articles of use; (b) that we must constantly eliminate industrial waste; (c) that we must increase the skill of our workers and managers; (d) that we must assure that these reductions in cost were passed on to consumers in lower prices; (e) that to do this we must maintain a competitive system; (f) that with lower prices the people could buy more goods, and thereby create more jobs at higher real wages, more new enterprises, and constantly higher standards of living. I insisted that we must push machines and not men and provide every safeguard of health and proper leisure.
I listed the great wastes: failure to conserve properly our national resources; strikes and lockouts; failure to keep machines up to date; the undue intermittent employment in seasonal trades; the trade-union limitation on effort by workers under the illusion that it would provide more jobs; waste in transportation; waste in unnecessary variety of articles used in manufacture; lack of standard[s] in commodities; lack of cooperation between employers and labor; failure to develop our water resources; and a dozen other factors. I insisted that these improvements could be effected without governmental control, but that the government should cooperate by research, intellectual leadership, and prohibitions upon the abuse of power.
I contended that within these concepts we could overcome the losses of the war.
Aside from the better living to all that might come from such an invigorated national economy, I emphasized the need to thaw out frozen and inactive capital and the inherited control of the tools of production by increased inheritance taxes. We had long since recognized this danger, by the laws against primogeniture. On the other hand, I proposed that to increase initiative we should lower the income taxes, and make the tax on earned income much lower than that on incomes from interest, dividends, and rent.
I declared that we should have governmental regulation of the public markets to eliminate vicious speculation, and that we must more rigidly control blue sky stock promotion.
At that time these ideas were denounced by some elements as "radical."

2 Twenty years later an economic institution in Washington, with loud trumpet-blasts of publicity, announced this as a new economic discovery.


I came across the Hoover memoirs thanks to this interesting article;

John L. Lewis as Herbert Hoover's Secretary of Labor


In *The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency
1920-1933,* pp. 221-2, Hoover wrote as follows concerning his choice of a
Cabinet after his election in 1928:

"When I formed the Cabinet, I came under strong pressure to appoint John L.
Lewis Secretary of Labor. He was the ablest man in the labor world. In view,
however, of a disgraceful incident at Herndon, Illinois, which had been
greatly used against him, it seemed impossible. He, however, maintained a
friendly attitude. As he stated publicly in later years, 'I at times
disagreed with the President but he always told me what he would or would not
do.' Lewis is a complex character. He is a man of superior intelligence with
the equivalent of a higher education, which he had won by reading of the
widest range. He could repeat, literally, long passages from Shakespeare,
Milton, and the Bible. His word was always good. He was blunt and even brutal
in his methods of negotiation, and he assumed and asserted that employers
were cut from the same cloth. His loyalty to his men was beyond question. He
was not a socialist. He believed in 'free enterprise.' One of his favorite
monologues had for its burden: 'I don't want government ownership of the
mines or business; no labor leader can deal with bureaucracy and the
government, and lick them. I want these economic royalists on the job; they
are the only people who have learned the know-how; they work eighteen hours a
day, seven days a week; my only quarrel with them is over our share in the
productive pie.'

"If Lewis's great abilities could have been turned onto the side of the
government, they would have produced a great public servant."


(There is no "Herndon, Illinois"; this is obviously a misprint for "Herrin,
Illinois." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrin_massacre and
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7847/massacre.htm for the details of the
1922 "Herrin massacre.")

Anyway, Hoover decided to re-appoint the Harding-Coolidge Secretary of Labor,
James J. Davis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Davis But in November
1930, a second opportunity arose to appoint Lewis. Davis was elected to the
US Senate from Pennsylvania and Hoover had to choose a succesor.

According to Irving Bernstein, *The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker,
1920-1933*, p. 354

"The American Federation of Labor had traditionally regarded the Department
of Labor as its own and the Secretary of Labor as its voice in the Cabinet.
Gompers had played the decisive role in the creation of the Department on
March 4, 1913. No one from outside the AFL had ever been Secretary of
Labor...Shortly after the Davis announcement, [William] Green [Gompers'
successor as head of the AFL] called at the White House to ask the President
to name a man from the Federation. He suggested five prominent leaders:
William L. Hutcheson of the Carpenters, John L. Lewis of the Miners, Matthew
Woll of the Photo-Engravers, John P. Frey of the Metal Trades, and John R.
Alpine of the Plumbers. Green urged Hoover to 'maintain the precedent set by
your predecessors.'

"The President, however, chose to break with tradition. He appointed William
N. Doak of the independent Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen as Secretary of
Labor. In Hoover's judgment the AFL could be ignored even on an issue of
moment."

The idea of Lewis as Hoover's Secretary of Labor intrigues me in part because
the two men were philosophically compatible in many ways. I don't just mean
Lewis' opposition to socialism and communism--that was commonplace among
American trade unionists. What was more unusual is that Lewis shared the
engineer Hoover's enthusiasm for technological advance and modernization.
Notoriously, many labor leaders opposed the introduction of new technology
for fear it would put people out of work. Lewis, however, wanted the coal
industry to become more modern even if that meant employing fewer coal
miners. Mechanization would help put out of business the smaller, less
efficient mines that were driving down coal prices and wages. As Lewis put
it, "We decided it is better to have a half million men working in the
industry at good wages...than it is to have a million working in the industry
in poverty." (Bernstein, p. 225) Moreover, Lewis endorsed Hoover for the
presidency not only in 1928 but for re-election in 1932 as well (despite
Hoover's having turned him down for Secretary of Labor twice). Lewis'
politics later in the 1930's could hardly have pleased Hoover, but in 1940
they were allies again--Lewis even trying to get the Republicans to nominate
Hoover for president on a stay-out-of-the-war platform.


The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency

1920-1933,


CHAPTER 15
___________________________________________________________
LABOR RELATIONS
From a technical point of view labor problems were in the hands of the Secretary of Labor, James J. Davis. He was a most amiable man who through his natural abilities had climbed from the ranks on the ladder of labor union politics. He was skillful in handling industrial disturbances—"keeping labor quiet," as Mr. Coolidge remarked. He proved to be good at repair of cracks. He had a genuine genius for friendship and associational activities. If all the members of all the organizations to which he belonged had voted for him, he could have been elected to anything, any time, anywhere.
When I accepted membership in the Harding Cabinet I had stipulated that I must have a voice on major policies involving labor, since I had no belief that commerce and industry could make progress unless labor advanced with them. Secretary Davis was very cooperative. I have already related my part in the Economic Conference of 1921, which bears upon these activities.
My views on labor relations in general rested on two propositions which I ceaselessly stated in one form or another:
First, I held that there are great areas of mutual interest between employee and employer which must be discovered and cultivated, and that it is hopeless to attempt progress if management and labor are to be set up as separate "classes" fighting each other. They are both producers, they are not classes.
And, second, I supported continuously the organization of labor and collective bargaining by representatives of labor's own choosing. I insisted that labor was not a "commodity." I opposed the closed shop and "feather bedding" as denials of fundamental human freedom.

I held that the government could be an influence in bringing better relations about, not by compulsory laws nor by fanning class hate, but by leadership.
The labor unions in that period were wholly anti-Socialist and anti-Communist. On September 5, 1925, I stated:
It is my opinion that our nation is very fortunate in having the American Federation of Labor. It has exercised a powerful influence in stabilizing industry, and in maintaining an American standard of citizenship. Those forces of the old world that would destroy our institutions and our civilization have been met in the front-line trenches by the Federation of Labor and routed at every turn.1

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
One result of the Industrial Conference of 1919 was an attempt on my part to convince the private insurance companies that it was to their advantage as well as that of the people at large to work out a method of unemployment insurance. I spoke on the subject at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company managers' conference on January 27, 1923, stating my belief that in some industries, such as the railways and the utilities, the fluctuations in employment were not widespread, and that there was in them actuarial experience which would give a foundation and a start to such an insurance. However, the companies did not wish even to experiment with it.

CHILD LABOR
The Federal statutory prohibition of child labor had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I had joined during 1920 in several efforts to secure a new Constitutional prohibition. Soon after I entered the Cabinet Senator Lenroot consulted me about the text of a new Constitutional amendment which he proposed to introduce into the Congress. I objected to his draft, as he had placed the age limit— eighteen—so high as to generate great public opposition. I agreed that this standard was ultimately desirable, but I feared that the lunatic fringe was demanding two years more than was attainable.

Senator, however, refused to change it and passed the amendment through the Congress. I was proved right as to the strength of the opposition. I spoke several times in support of the amendment, for instance, in April and December, 1921, and June, 1922.
When I became President I urged the adoption of the amendment by the states, but some of them, particularly the Democratic-controlled ones, would not ratify it. Roosevelt during his four years as governor of New York did not give more than lip service to its passage.
In the meantime, the agitation, particularly of the American Child Health Association, drove many of the Republican states to pass better laws prohibiting child labor. By the end of my administration in 1932 this evil was largely confined to the backward states.

ABOLISHING THE TWELVE-HOUR DAY
For the practical improvement of working conditions I undertook a campaign to reduce the work hours in certain industries. This black spot on American industry had long been the subject of public concern and agitation. Early in 1922 I instituted an investigation by the Department of Commerce into the twelve-hour day and the eighty-four hour week. It was barbaric, and we were able to demonstrate that it was uneconomic. With my facts in hand I opened the battle by inducing President Harding to call a dinner conference of steel manu-facturers at the White House on May 18, 1922.
All the principal "steel men" attended. I presented the case as I saw it. A number of the manufacturers, such as Charles M. Schwab and Judge Elbert H. Gary, resented my statement, asserting that it was "unsocial and uneconomic." We had some bitter discussion. I was supported by Alexander Legge and Charles R. Hook, whose concerns had already installed the eight-hour day and six-day week. However, we were verbally overwhelmed. The President, to bring the acrid debate to an end, finally persuaded the group to set up a committee to "investigate," under the chairmanship of Judge Gary.
I left the dinner much disheartened, in less than a good humor, resolved to lay the matter before the public. The press representatives were waiting on the portico of the White House to find out what this meeting of "reactionaries" was about. I startled them with the
information that the President was trying to persuade the steel industry to adopt the eight-hour shift and the forty-eight-hour week, in place of the twelve-hour day and eighty-four-hour week. At once a great public discussion ensued. I stirred up my friends in the engineering societies, and on November 1, 1922, they issued a report which endorsed the eight-hour day. I wrote an introduction to this report, eulogizing its conclusions, and got the President to sign it. We kept the pot boiling in the press.
Judge Gary's committee delayed making a report for a year—until June, 1923—although it was frequently promised. They said that the industry, "was going to do something." When their report came out, it was full of humane sentiments, but amounted merely to a stall for more time. I drafted a letter from Mr. Harding to Judge Gary, expressing great disappointment, and gave it to the press. The public reaction was so severe against the industry that Judge Gary called another meeting of the committee and backed down entirely.
On July 3 he telegraphed to the President, saying that they would accede. I was then with Mr. Harding at Tacoma en route to Alaska. He had requested me to give him some paragraphs for his Fourth of July speech. I did so, and made the announcement of the abolition of the twelve-hour day in the steel industry a most important part of the address. He did not have time to look over my part of his manuscript before he took the platform. When he had finished with the American Eagle and arrived at my paragraphs, he stumbled badly over my en-tirely different vocabulary and diction. During a period of applause which followed my segment, he turned to me and said: "Why don't you learn to write the same English that I do?" That would have required a special vocabulary for embellishment purposes. Anyway, owing to public opinion and some pushing on our part, the twelve-hour day was on the way out in American industry—and also the ten-hour day and the seven-day week.
When I became Secretary of Commerce, the working hours of 27 per cent of American industry were sixty or more per week, and those of nearly 75 per cent were fifty-four or more per week. When I left the White House only 4.6 per cent were working sixty hours or more,
while only 13.5 per cent worked fifty-four hours or more. This progress was accomplished by the influence of public opinion and the efforts of the workers in a free democracy, without the aid of a single law —except in the railways.

INDUSTRIAL CONFLICTS
During the years of my service in the Department we had comparatively little labor disturbance. Because of general prosperity and increasing efficiency, wages were increasing steadily in unorganized as well as organized industries—in the former to some degree because employers stood off organization by paying wages at least as high as those in the organized industries. But, in the main, employers willingly shared their larger profits with employees. We had only two bad conflicts.
In 1922, the railway shopmen and the organized bituminous coal miners went on strike at the same time. President Harding assigned the coal strike to Secretary Davis and requested me to negotiate a settlement of the railway strike. I was to learn some bitter lessons. I had arranged that the railway employees' leaders see the President and disclose confidentially to him their minimum demands, which were as usual considerably below the demands which they announced publicly. Through President Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the chairman of the Railway Managers' Committee, I secured a confidential statement of their maximum concessions. I found that the two antagonists were not far apart and suggested some modifications which seemed to me to be fair. The Employees' Committee believed they could carry the settlement. Mr. Willard's committee agreed to support the settlement on this basis. The railway presidents called a meeting in New York to consider the proposal. Mr. Willard asked me to attend the meeting and give him support. I secured a message from President Harding to open my statement. I was kept waiting outside the meeting for some time and was finally ushered in and introduced by the chairman with an attitude which seemed to convey, "Well, what have you got to say here?" Most of the two hundred men present were very antagonistic. I learned afterwards they had already repudiated Willard and his
committee. Anyway, I certainly had a freezing reception. Paradoxically, my temperature rose somewhat and my preachment upon social relations raised their temperatures and made my exit more welcome.
The railway executives now refused every concession. The men continued the strike until the roads represented by Willard's committee fell away from the rest and gave the men even better terms than the original formula. Then they all gave way.
While thenceforth I was not devotedly loved by certain railway magnates, their lack of affection was more than offset by friendship of others. Especially among these friends was Daniel Willard, who remained unwavering during the quarter-century before his death. He was respected by the whole American people and beloved by every B. & 0. man. There were many fine citizens among the railway presidents. At that time and in later years I had many devoted friends among them, such as Sargent, German, Budd, Crawford, Shoup, Gray, Storey, Downs, Scandrett, and Gurley, mostly western railway presidents. It was a suggestive thing that the railway presidents who led the opposition had their offices in New York City. They have mostly gone to their rest in graves unknown to all the public except the sexton, or they still dodder around their clubs, quavering that "labor must be disciplined."
A by-product of this incident gave me deep pain. An editor of the New York Tribune came to see me after the meeting in New York. He was a man with a fine conception of public right; he was greatly outraged at the whole action of the majority of railway presidents. The following morning the Tribune's leading editorial gave them a deserved blistering. The next day the editor informed me that Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Sr., who dominated the paper, had ordered his instant dismissal after many years of service. The dear old lady was a righteous and generous woman, but a partial misfit with the changing times. In the science of social relations she was the true daughter of a great western pioneer, Darius 0. Mills. When the editor came to see me in Washington, while he had no regrets, it was easy to see that he was wholly unstrung by his tragedy and distracted by anxieties over growing family obligations and lack of resources. At once we gave him an economic mission in Europe, during which he somewhat recovered his spirits and was able to keep his family going. But he never really regained his grip.
It is a safe generalization for the period to say that where industrial leaders were undominated by New York promoter-bankers, they were progressive and constructive in outlook. Some of the so-called bankers in New York were not bankers at all. They were stock promoters. They manipulated the voting control of many of the railway, industrial, and distributing corporations, and appointed such officials as would insure to themselves the banking and finance. They were not simply providing credit to business in order to lubricate production. Their social instinct belonged to an early Egyptian period. Wherever industrial, transportation, and distribution concerns were free from such banker domination, we had little trouble in getting cooperation.
Others of the Department's services to labor sprang from its broad economic programs. However, our emphasis on the needs and rights of organized labor and our constant insistence on cooperation of employers and employees as the means of reducing the areas of friction brought no little change in public attitudes.

THE RAILWAY LABOR BOARD
It was obvious that we must find some other solution to railway labor conflict than strikes, with their terrible penalties upon the innocent public. Therefore, early in 1926, I began separate conferences with the major railway brotherhoods on one hand, and the more constructive railway presidents, under Daniel Willard, on the other. I discarded compulsory measures but developed the idea of a Railway Labor Mediation Board, which would investigate, mediate, and, if necessary, publish its conclusions as to a fair settlement, with stays in strike action pending these processes. Having found support in both groups, I called a private dinner at my home of some ten leaders, half from each side—and I omitted extremists of both ends from the meeting. We agreed upon support of this idea and appointed a committee to draft a law. We presented it to the Congress, and with some secondary modifications it was passed on May 20, 1926. This machinery, with some later improvements, preserved peace in the railways during the entire period of my service in Washington.

Commenting upon the progress of labor relations I was able to say in an address on May 12, 1926:
There is a marked change . . . in the attitude of employers and employees. . . . It is not so many years ago that the employer considered it was in his interest to use the opportunities of unemployment and immigration to lower wages irrespective of other considerations. The lowest wages and longest hours were then conceived as the means to attain lowest production costs and largest profits. Nor is it many years ago that our labor unions considered that the maximum of jobs and the greatest security in a job were to be attained by restricting individual effort.
But we are a long way on the road to new conceptions. The very essence of great production is high wages and low prices, because it depends upon a widening range of consumption only to be obtained from the purchasing power of high real wages and increasing standards of living. . . .
Parallel with this conception there has been an equal revolution in the views of labor.
No one will doubt that labor has always accepted the dictum of the high wage, but labor has only gradually come to the view that unrestricted individual effort, driving of machinery to its utmost, and elimination of every waste in production, are the only secure foundations upon which a high real wage can be builded, because the greater die production the greater will be the quantity to divide.
The acceptance of these ideas is obviously not universal. Not all employers . . . nor has every union abandoned the fallacy of restricted effort. . . . But . . . for both employer and employee to think in terms of the mutual interest of increased production has gained greatly in strength. It is a long cry from the conceptions of the old economics.
1 The C.I.O., with its socialist and Communist control in its early stages, was not organized until several years later.
2 Indeed, it preserved peace until the presidents failed to give moral support to the Board's recommendations and its potency was largely destroyed.
3 A list of my more important statements upon labor as Secretary of Commerce appears in the Appendix, under the heading Chapter 15.

CHAPTER 15
1921: April 1, article in Industrial Management; Nov. 4, address at New York; statement in Labor on strikes.
1922: Feb. 18, statement on Coal Strike; Aug. 7, on Railroad Strike.
1923: Jan. 27, May 8, addresses at New York.
1925: April 11, address at New York; May 19, on the Seven-Day Work Week; Sept. 5, at American Federation of Labor; Dec. 28, on Labor Arbitration.
1926: May 12, address at Washington.
1927: Aug. Foreword to Year Book on Commercial Arbitration in the United States, 1927 (American Arbitration Association).
1928: Feb. 25, Report to President from Secretaries of State, Commerce, Labor, on immigration.
___________________________________________________________

Workers Of The World Unite

I was shocked, pleasantly so, to hear this from Chris Matthews as he opened his show Hardball on Wednesday March 10, 2011. He quoted Marx and Engels in his pre-show opener as he discussed the attack by Republicans on union rights in Wisconsin.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Workers of the world unite. Let`s play HARDBALL. Good evening. I`m Chris Matthews in Washington. Leading off tonight: The Ash Wednesday ambush. The Republicans have won their battle with the unions in Wisconsin....


But its not just Matthews who is expressing this its also the American left who allowed the Republican financed Tea Party movement to take the political lead in expressing outrage over government bail outs of Big Finance and Big Business, and identifying the problem as not being capitalism but Big Government, Big Unions along with its racist attacks on President Obama as NOT being an American like them.

US left finds its voice over Wisconsin attack on union rights

State capitol building under occupation as tens of thousands turn out for biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam war

Proudly displayed in a corner window of the Barriques coffee shop, a block from Wisconsin's state capitol building, is a poster advocating Workers of the World Unite – not the kind of sign normally seen in shops in America.

But the last fortnight has been unusual. Tens of thousands have been turning out in this normally quiet midwest city for the biggest demonstrations in the US since the Vietnam war, and the state capitol building is under occupation day and night.

After a year dominated by the Tea Party, the American left has found its voice, and a cause, united against a bill backed by the state's Republican governor, Scott Walker, to neuter public sector unions.

What needs to be done now is to Build The General Strike for Workers Rights! The fact both these old Class War slogans have been embraced by American Workers in the 21st Century, when we have been assured by the right wing and its media that unions are a thing of the past, well as the saying goes; the more things change.....

Calls for a general strike are growing among union members and supporters as the state Legislature advanced a law stripping public sector unions of almost all bargaining rights, but it remains unclear whether strikes or pickets will appear soon.

Union leaders say the Republicans' fast-track passage of the bill has fueled strike talk, but for now most are urging legal measures such as recall of Republican legislators as a way to repeal the law.

"A general strike would be playing the trump card, and you don't play the trump right away, you build up to that," said Jim Cavanaugh, president of the 45,000-member South Central Federal of Labor in Madison.

The federation endorsed a general strike on Feb. 21 and on Thursday began distributing educational materials on how such a strike can be accomplished.

Madison firefighters’ union president

calls for general strike

Joe Conway, president of the Madison firefighters’ union, said recently that the political situation has grown so dire in Wisconsin, he’d support a general strike.

“We should start walking out tomorrow, the next day … See how long they can last,” he told reporters with The Uptake. “This is a nation-wide movement to attack all working men and women in Wisconsin and the United States.”

His call mirrors one from filmmaker Michael Moore, who’s called on high school students and working people of all stripes to restart the American democracy movement and fight back in this latest round of “class war” against the middle class.

This video is from The Uptake, published Thursday, March 10, 2011.

When Is It Time for a General Strike?

"General strike" has been one of the chants that resounded through the Capitol during massive protests Wednesday and Thursday after the Legislature passed a bill that would remove bargaining rights for about 175,000 workers and create major obstacles to basic operations for unions representing teachers, state workers and local government employees.

As the Wisconsin State Senate rammed through their union-busting bill Wednesday night, people in the capitol chanted "General strike!" And I heard an echo. Not of 1934, the last time there was a general strike in the US, but earlier.

It was 1909, in the crowded Great Hall at New York's Cooper Union; a big union boss was talking about talks and a 16-year-old girl shouted out from the back: "WALK OUT"

More than 30,000 shirtwaist factory workers walked off their jobs after that. This week's International Women's Day celebrates the anniversary of that strike, by mostly young, immigrant women like 16 year old Clara Lemlich. 700 women were arrested, many more beaten and spat on for being "On strike against God."

They struck for eleven weeks. It was the first successful uprising of women workers in this country--but their success didn't go far enough.


And the General Strike is being proposed in the UK in response to austerity measures, again a nice term for attacks on public sector workers to pay for the bail out of the banks!


The threat of a general strike increases

As expected, John Hutton’s review of public sector pensions has recommended that final salary schemes end. Hutton was across the broadcasters this morning, explaining that he was reflecting an “inescapable reality”:

“The solution to this problem is not a race to the bottom, it's not to hack away at the value of public service pensions. It’s to manage the risks and costs sensibly. The responsible thing to do is to accept that because we are living longer we should work for longer.”

Beside realism, Hutton’s guiding principle has been fairness. Final salary schemes encourage a “massive cross-subsidy from low-paid public servants to high-paid public servants” to pay for the “sudden spike” in pay at the end of a career. Hutton is “deeply troubled” by a policy that forces younger generations of public sector workers to “shoulder the cost and burden change”. Therefore, pensions should be determined by career average earnings.

At the moment, opposition to Hutton is split. Dave Prentis, the General Secretary of Unison, shied from attacking Hutton. Instead, he condemned the government’s decision to increase contributions at a time of “massive increases in the cost of living and pay freezes." On the other hand, Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, nonchalantly promised that “strikes are inevitable”, which places him among the ranks of the militant with Len McCluskey and Bob Crow. Christine Blower, General Secretary of the NUT, was adamant that “public sector pensions are not 'gold plated' and they are affordable.” The threat of a general strike across the public sector is now more serious; not least because its pensions are protected by complicated legal contracts. This will be an arduous struggle.


Pension reforms: Public sector workers to pay more and retire later


The Guardian - 23 hours ago
All state employees in the UK will be affected, creating the first legal basis for ... less likely that the entire public sector will go on general strike, ...
Delegates: 'Go out like Wisconsin'- Morning Star Online
Now doctors and headteachers threaten to strike over pensions- Independent


The Guardian

'Secret plan' to counter general strikes in UK


TwoCircles.net - 22 Feb 2011
By IRNA, London : A secret 'war plan' to counter a general strike has been drawn up by British ministers, with thousands of union-busting workers lined up ...

Class War-ren Buffet


The Labour movement in the United States responded to the attacks on public sector workers union rights in Wisconsin with a limp defeatist campaign entitled Stop the War on Workers....at least Warren Buffet, America's folksy Billionaire, got it right....it's Class War!

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, t

he rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett,

quoted in the New York Times, November 2006


“I believe we are in the midst of an irrepressible labor conflict that has pitted the haves versus the have-nots,”
said University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, history professor Andrew Kersten at the conference. “As Warren Buffett has said recently, ‘There is a class war, alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s waging it, and we’re winning.’ It’s not merely the money or the political power they crave, they seek to transform the way we think and act on a daily basis.”


Warren Buffett created a stir in the billionaires' club when he told a New York Times reporter that America is in the midst of class warfare and that the rich are winning. Buffett made this comment as deregulation in the banking industry, tax cuts for the rich and runaway spending on Middle Eastern wars were setting the world up for a global recession. The predictable economic collapse which was made inevitable by tax cuts, wars and deregulation is now being deepened by political leaders who insist that the way out of this disaster is -- and please try to resist sticking a sharp stick in your eye when you read this -- by tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation and doubling down in our war in Afghanistan.

All in all there is a class warfare currently going on, under the covers,
which even the great Warren Buffet has admitted to in an interview in 2005 with CNN's Lou Dobbs, wherein they said: "DOBBS: ... In 1983, Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, he had a very simple idea: raise taxes. That's what you're saying here. BUFFETT: Sure. But I wouldn't raise the 12-point and a fraction payroll tax, I would raise the taxable base to above $90,000. DOBBS: That's a progressive idea. In other words, the rich people would pay more? BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good. DOBBS: What a radical idea. BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be..."

Money Talks.

But, oh no, we can't raise marginal tax rates a lousy 4.6 percent on incomes above $250,000. Perish the thought. Never mind that the past 30 years have seen the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increase their share of the national wealth from 7 percent to approximately 23 percent. Nor that, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, corporate CEOs who made 24 times more than a typical worker in 1965 now earn about 275 times more than the guys in the shop. Assuming the shop hasn't closed down and moved to Thailand, that is.

But heaven forbid we bring back Clinton-era tax rates. Instead, let's stimulate the economy by putting a few hundred thousand federal employees on the street. That'll work.

"There's class warfare, all right," Warren Buffett, the multibillionaire investor told the New York Times in 2006, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a brand-new Republican governor largely financed by the infamous Koch brothers, the Scrooge McDuck type of billionaire, has identified even more sinister enemies of the common man: schoolteachers, nurses and the guys who drive snowplows.

Gov. Scott Walker, an Eagle Scout and career politician, came into office spouting the usual Tea Party humbug: lower taxes, fiscal restraint. Then he pulled a bait and switch worthy of the cheesiest kind of used car dealer. First, he persuaded the Republican-controlled Legislature to pass $140 million in corporate tax cuts. Then he announced a $137 million budget deficit that could only be closed by making public employees pay a substantially higher share -- as much as 12 percent of their salaries -- for their healthcare and pensions.


As events in Egypt showed, you never know what will set off mass protest.

Here at home, over-reaching by a novice Republican governor of Wisconsin has finally triggered the protest marches that have been eerily missing during the more than three years of an economic crisis that has savaged the middle and bottom and rewarded the top.

It's not as if we lack a politics of class. As mega-investor Warren Buffett famously said, there is plenty of class warfare in America, but the billionaire class is winning.

This economic crisis, after all, was brought on by excesses on Wall Street. Yet with the rest of the economy still mired in high unemployment and fiscal crises of public services, Wall Street was first to be bailed out, the first to return to exorbitant profitability, and the last to be held accountable.

Month after month, progressives have been asking each other, where are the mass protests?

You might expect popular indignation to be focused on the banks. Instead, the economic unease of ordinary people has been substantially captured by the Tea Party right and directed against government, while Beltway politicians of both parties are outdoing one another to vie for the role of more austere deficit hawk, which will hardly win back popular support for the public sector.

Then the newly energized Republicans made a couple of big mistakes. One was trying to cut too deep, on the heels of a massive tax cut for the rich. But the other miscalculation was to declare war on the one bastion of organized economic representation of regular people -- the labor movement.

With new legislative majorities in 18 states, several freshman Republican governors are hoping to withdraw collective bargaining rights from public employees and to otherwise demonize nurses, teachers, fire-fighters, cops, sanitation workers and others who have managed to hang on to decent pensions and health coverage.

This looked to be a cakewalk. Public workers, seemingly, are an easy target. After all, they still have jobs and benefits. Instead of demanding to know why our own pension and health coverage is so lousy, the rest of us are supposed to resent middle income workers in the public sector for having health and pension benefits better than ours. It is a carefully cultivated politics of division and resentment.

But this time, Republicans overreached, and the long smoldering economic unease has finally sparked mass demonstrations. Rather than following the script and resenting public employees as a privileged "other," the citizens of Madison increasingly view teachers, nurses, cops, firefighters, and other public workers as their violated neighbors.

One recent poll showed that two-thirds of Wisconsin citizens polled (none from public employee families) felt that Walker had gone too far. Even citizens who wanted public workers to pay more of the costs of their benefits concluded that his scheme was excessive. Another poll, sponsored by an Illinois Manufacturers Association, found a similar result.

Now, mass protest has broken out in other states where Republican governors are attacking unions, tens of thousands of other citizens are joining their union brothers and sisters, and even the mainstream press is taking sympathetic notice. In a fine piece in Saturday's Times, Michael Cooper and Kit Seelye asked: "Is Wisconsin the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights?"

Maybe it is. And not just of collective bargaining rights.

At long last, resentment against the economic crisis is beginning to find its natural home, where it always belonged -- against financial elites, their privileges and Republican allies. It is dawning on ordinary voters that something is wrong when hedge fund billionaires and investment bankers are making more than ever, while public workers (average Wisconsin pay: $48,000) are being made the scapegoats.

Workers of the World Unite...

The analysis of Karl Marx, believed archaic and irrelevant only a few short years ago, have again become highly relevant. Our social and economic conditions, for all the bluster and noise of the 20th century, are fundamentally unchanged from where they were in the 1800s.

The 20th century was a time of optimism. The American dream was validated. The radicalism of the previous century was forgotten after World War 2. Radicals like Karl Marx were proven to be wrong. Since 2008 however, the jury has reconvened. And in that jury box we come cannot help but be impressed. Consider, for an example, these two quotes from the Communist Manifesto, written 1848:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarians, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

And...

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.

If Marx were alive today, if he were witness to the struggles through Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and America he would not be surprised. He saw it coming. He saw it coming because he understood the nature of capitalism.

While we may not want to run out and join our local band of communists, we may want to reconsider many of the observations that were relevant in the 19th century not only from Marx, but from others. Strangely enough, for all the progress we have made over the past century, we seem to be back, more or less, where we started from.

We now live in a time of ruthless, predatory capitalism.It takes no prisoners and when it does, it tortures them. Since the 1980s workers have faced stark choices. Threats to move manufacturing abroad have actually been promises. Unions have become crippled and powerless.

The two pillars of working class strength, strong unions and public spending, have been reduced to ineffective shadows of their former selves. The social democratic response is limited to asking for more, for a larger piece of the pie. That is because the fundamental ideology of social democratic movements and parties are reformist. The aim is to reform capitalism; to redistribute wealth. In the past this objective has been met in some places more so than in others. And if we learn anything from history, we know that you don't 'ask' the billionaire class for anything. You demand and you are prepared to back your demands, or stay home.

Today, unions are powerless because the bosses have become radical and right wing to the extreme. The only principles they adhere to beyond cold pragmaticism are cold and calculating neo liberal policies, policies that boldly proclaim, it's every man for himself. Sink or swim. They would rather ship jobs away or close shop than negotiate. Social democratic political parties merely parrot the wishes and policies of the private sector. If social democrats want to strengthen the safety net, a powerful assault from the right, from bond rating agencies and even the IMF will efficiently put them down.


Thursday, March 10, 2011

International Working Women’s Day Originated in the US

Was what International Women's Day was originally called. It originated, as did May Day, in the United States. It was a union and socialist holiday recognizing women workers rights to organize unions, a struggle that still is with us today as the battle in Wisconsin shows.

American Socialists organised a mass meeting on the suffrage in New York
on Sunday 8 March 1908. The first National Woman’s Day (woman’s in the singular) was held on 23 Feb 1909 in the USA, and American women kept the custom of gathering on the last Sunday of February. Sundays were preferred so that people would not miss a day of work.

Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at New York's Barnard College
, says the holiday was created as the country's workers, including large numbers of women, were losing patience with poor labor conditions.

Early American women's activist Rose Schneiderman speaks at a union rally around 1910.

"I would date it back to 1908 and the strike of some 15,000 women in the garment industry on the Lower East Side who were suffering low pay and terrible working conditions, and who walked off the job and protested," Rosenberg says.

Among their complaints was the fact that employers refused to recognize workers' unions.

"Unionization is such an enormous issue in the United States today," Rosenberg says. "It's poignant to think about this 100th anniversary in that context."


It was the International proletariat organizations in Europe that responded to the call from workers organizations in the United States to celebrate both events.
And both are based on tragedy, May Day the Haymarket Massacre and IWD the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Indeed the struggle of women workers in America would continue with the great Patterson Mill Strike of 1913.

And while American workers, both women and men, have made great leaps forward as has American Capitalism, class war has been declared once again on workers rights to organize.

The International Ladies' Garment Workers Union organized workers in the women's clothing trade. Many of the garment workers before 1911 were unorganized, partly because they were young immigrant women intimidated by the alien surroundings. Others were more daring, though. All were ripe for action against the poor working conditions. In 1909, an incident at the Triangle Factory sparked a spontaneous walkout of its 400 employees. The Women's Trade Union League, a progressive association of middle class white women, helped the young women workers picket and fence off thugs and police provocation. At a historic meeting at Cooper Union, thousands of garment workers from all over the city followed young Clara Lemlich's call for a general strike.

Women's labour unrest continued in the U.S. through 1909, with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union staging a short-lived strike in September in New York City. On Nov. 22, a general strike was called, dubbed the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, which lasted 13 weeks and eventually led to a fairer contract for 15,000 labourers.

In Europe, women's issues were also top of mind. In 1907, the first meeting of Finnish parliament included 19 women. In 1910, an International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen, featuring representation from 17 countries, including union leaders and the Finnish parliamentarians.

Clara Zetkin, the founder of International Women's Day, is seen at left with friend Rosa Luxemburg. Zetkin came up with the idea during a womens' labour conference in 1910.Clara Zetkin, the founder of International Women's Day, is seen at left with friend Rosa Luxemburg. Zetkin came up with the idea during a womens' labour conference in 1910. WikiMedia Commons

Clara Zetkin, head of the women's office for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, first raised the idea of an annual women's day when women all over the world would be able to air their grievances about labour conditions, suffrage and the need for women in parliament.

The first International Women's Day was held on March 19, 1911, (moved to March 8 in 1913), with rallies in Germany, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland. More than one million women and men attended.

One week later, a devastating fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City drew further attention to the horrible working conditions female workers, mostly immigrants, were forced to endure.

275 girls started to collect their belongings as they were leaving work at 4:45 PM on Saturday. Within twenty minutes some of girls' charred bodies were lined up along the East Side of Greene Street. Those girls who flung themselves from the ninth floor were merely covered with tarpaulins where they hit the concrete. The Bellevue morgue was overrun with bodies and a makeshift morgue was set up on the adjoining pier on the East River. Hundred's of parents and family members came to identify their lost loved ones. 146 employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were dead the night of March 25, 1911. The horror of their deaths led to numerous changes in occupational safety standards that currently ensure the safety of workers today.

To an entire generation of urban reformers, activist clergy, progressives,
feminists, and trade-unionists, the Triangle fire instantly became an emotion charged
symbol, a kind of menetekel, representing all the evils that they had
combated for so long; it became the impetus of a moral crusade to prevent things
like this from ever happening again. Many of the people who made modern America
2
- political leaders like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Fiorello
Laguardia, and Robert Wagner; social activists like Frances Perkins; and tradeunionists
like Rose Schneiderman and Dave Dubinsky, were all directly or indirectly
inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. A direct genealogical line can be drawn
from the fire, to a host of New York City and New York State progressive reforms,
to the New Deal of the 1930s. No wonder that almost every American history
textbook lists the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as one of the key events of
Progressive era America. “In the end,” write Ric Burns and James Sanders, in their
history of New York City, “the carnage of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire would
prove to have been one of the most transforming events in American political
history.”2 It seems obvious that the Triangle Fire would assume the meaning that it
did. And yet, when one interrogates the obvious, one encounters the problematic.
“This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city,” trade
unionist Rose Schneiderman bitterly remarked to mourners just after the fire,3 and
in fact this was not the worst fire in New York City history, nor was it the only
industrial accident of this kind. Why then did the Triangle Fire become such an
incandescent icon for so many?


Striking laborers rallied against unfair labor practices with two of the most publicized strikes occuring in 1910: The garment workers in New York City and the strike that took place at the Los Angeles Times. However, one labor union strike would significantly define the labor movement: the Patterson Strike of 1913. To understand the pros and cons of striking unions, it's necessary to recall that few federal or state laws had been enacted at that time to protect workers from unsafe working conditions or from exploitation through which laborers earned unimaginably low wages while working fourteen or fifteen hours a day.

When IWW organizers began to arrive at textile mills to proclaim the doctrine of industrial democracy, a substantial number of workers were interested. By 1908, after leading a number of minor strikes, the IWW could claim 5,000 members for its National Industrial Union of Textile Workers headed by James P, Thompson. The biggest textile challenge came four years later when pay cuts led to a groundswell of strike sentiment in Lawrence, Massachusetts. IWW Local 20 had been on the scene for more than four years, and its members had an excellent grasp of the conditions of the 60,000 Lawrence residents dependent on the mills for their livelihood. Prompted by local IWWs, the strikers sent for seasoned organizer Joe Ettor, an IWW orator who had already been in Lawrence, and Arturo Giovannitti, Secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation and editor of its organ, Il Proletario.

Faced with having to organize workers from twenty-four major national groups speaking twenty-two different languages, the Lawrence leadership devised an organizational structure that became the standard IWW mode of operation. Each language group was given representatives on the strike committee, which numbered from 250 to 300 members. All decisions regarding tactics and settlements were democratically voted on by the committee, with the IWW organizers acting strictly as advisors.

The Lawrence strikers realized that their battle went beyond wages and work conditions to address the question of the quality and purpose of life. Female strikers expressed their needs in an unforgettable phrase when they appeared on the picket line with a homemade placard declaring, "We Want Bread and Roses Too," a demand which became a fixture in the labor and ferninist movements. But neither roses nor bread were possible without the most militant kind of strike and innovative worker tactics. Women would show the way on both scores. More female pickets than males were to be arrested for intimidating strikebreakers, and rank and file women provided decisive leadership at key moments in the strike.

Prohibited from massing before individual mills by law, the male and female strikers formed a moving picket line around the entire mill district! This human chain involving thousands of spirited workers moved twenty-four hours a day for the entire duration of the ten-week strike. Augmenting the awesome picket lines were frequent parades through town of from 3,000 to 6,000 strikers marching to militant labor songs. When a city ordinance was passed forbidding parades and mass meetings, the strikers improvised sidewalk parades in which twenty to fifty individuals locked arms and swept through the streets. They passed through department stores disrupting normal business and otherwise succeeded in bringing commerce to a halt. At night strikers serenaded the homes of scabs trying to get a good night's sleep, and in some cases the names of scabs were sent back to their native lands to shame their entire clan.

When striker Annie Lo Pezzo was killed during one of the demonstrations, Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested on murder charges; they were said to have provoked workers to illegal acts which in turn resulted in the death. Their places were promptly taken by Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Trautman, and Carlo Resca. Haywood's arrival in Lawrence was tumultuous. Fifteen thousand strikers greeted him at the railroad station and 25,000 listened to him speak on the Lawrence Commons. During the course of the strike, there were dynamite schemes by employers, a proclamation of martial law, the death of a Syrian teenage boy from a militiaman's bayonet, and repeated physical confrontations between strikers and law enforcement groups. Women again played a critical role when it was decided to have the children of the strikers cared for by sympathizers in other cities. After some groups of children had left Lawrence, the army resolved to block further removals. In the ensuing physical confrontation, many women were beaten and two pregnant women miscarried, The brutal incident led to the national publicity and governmental hearings that resulted in victory for the strikers.

In the wake of the Lawrence triumph came strikes in other textile centers under IWW leadership and a successful campaign to free Ettor and Giovannitti. Prominent women such as socialist humanitarian Helen Keller, birth control activist Margaret Sanger and AFL organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan enthusiastically supported various IWW initiatives. Textile owners not yet faced with strikes began to grant wage increases unilaterally in hopes of averting unionization. The Detroit News estimated that 438,000 textile workers received nearly fifteen million dollars in raises as an indirect consequence of the Lawrence strike, with the biggest gains scored by the 275,000 workers in New England.


In 1913, John Reed (later famous for his firsthand account of the Russian Revolution) met Bill Haywood, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Reed ventured to Paterson, New Jersey, to learn about the Wobbly-led silk workers’ strike then in progress and decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden and ended with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the “Internationale,” the anthem of international socialism. Unfortunately, neither the pageant nor the strike ended on a triumphant note. The pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism.

The celebrated New York Armory Show in early 1913 introduced Picasso, Matisse, Cubism and Dada to the American scene. Three months later, 1,200 striking textile workers from Paterson, N.J. staged a pageant in Madison Square Garden to dramatize their demands. Green, who is fond of cultural juxtapositions ( Children of the Sun, etc.), links these two events with the lame argument that modern art and revolutionary politics share a spiritual, transcendental goal. He takes us inside the salon of Mabel Dodge, the wealthy art patron and labor pageant organizer, who was ensconced in respectability yet actively subverted it. He also takes us into the Wobblies' union halls where people of any race or nationality were welcome and workers' poems were composed on the spot. The pageant saw hostilities flare up between leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; Green believes the event marked the beginning of the International Workers of the World's slow decline. His atmospheric study limns a brief moment when art and politics came together. Photos. (Nov.)

Also See:

Lucy Parsons Redux

Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons

IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

Whose Family Values?
Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism
"proletarii, propertyless citizens whose service to the State was to raise children (proles).”
Classical Antiquity; Rome, Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Verso Press 1974

For the Revolutionary Youth in the Middle East

Marat Sade- The Revolution




Marat Sade Lyrics
Judy Collins

Four years he fought and he fought unafraid
Sniffing down traitors by traitors betrayed
Marat in the courtroom
Marat underground
Sometimes the otter and sometimes the hound

Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest
The business man the bourgeois the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
Of the sons of the ass licking dying regime

We've got new generals our leaders are new
They sit and they argue and all that they do
is sell their own colleagues
And ride upon their backs
Or jail them
Or break them
Or give them all the ax
Screaming in language that no one understand
Of the rights that we grab with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses
And stormed threw the wall of the prison you told us would outlast us all

Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make us wait any more.
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want a revolution
Now





Wont Get Fooled Again


We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again

Change it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that's all
But the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do ya?


There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust



One of my favorite songs.
The evocative imagery of her poetry haunts me even now, forty years later.

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
I am a hopeless romantic.


DIAMONDS AND RUST

(Words and Music by Joan Baez)

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

© 1975 Chandos Music (ASCAP)


And here are some other versions

Blackmore's Night - Diamonds and Rust




Judas Priest



Judy Collins



Diamonds and Rust Judy and Joan at Newport Folk Festival 2009



Diamonds and Rust: Joan Baez cover (LiliAna Rose)



Soiree's 'Diamonds & Rust'



A cover of Joan Baez song by Finnish power-metal band Thunderstone

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Wage Increases = Economic Growth


Found this on the web and thought I would share it with ya' all. While Capitalist governments around the world attempt to reduce workers wages with austerity measures, union busting, and government reductions in public sector employment, lets remember who keeps capitalism functioning, the workers who produce the goods and buy them. And as Marx pointed out the declining rate of profit, which is key to the continuing cyclical crisis nature of capitalism results from overcapacity. Take the auto industry as an example.

Development Through Wage-Led Growth


By
Henry C.K. Liu



Part I: Stagnant Worker Wage Income Leads to Overcapacity

This article appeared in AToL on November 24, 2010


In the economics of development, there is an iron-clad rule that “income is all”. The rule states that the effectiveness of developmental policies, programs and measures should be evaluated by their effect on raising the wage income of workers; and that a low-wage economy is an underdeveloped economy because it keeps aggregate consumer demand below its optimum level, thus causing overcapacity in the economy that needs to be absorbed by export.

Workers income is the key factor in generating national wealth in a country. Export through low-wage production is merely shipping under-priced national wealth outside the national border without adequate compensation, by under-pricing labor within the nation. During the age of industrial imperialism, export of manufactured goods was promoted by high-wage economies to the low-wage colonies in return for gold-back money, so that more investment could be made to provide more jobs for high-wage workers at home. In post-industrial finance economies, cross-border wage arbitrage in unregulated global trade exploits workers in low-wage economies to produce for consumers in higher wage economies to earn fiat crrency in the form of the dollar that cannot be spent in the exporting economy.

Globalization of Trade Preempts Domestic Development in All Countries

This “income is all” rule has been mostly obscured in recent decades during which globalized foreign trade promoted by neoliberals has pre-empted domestic development as the engine of economic growth in all market economies around the world. In today’s game of globalized international trade, the new operative rule is that “profit is all” and that high profit in competitive export trade requires low domestic wages, even if low local wages retard domestic economic development by reducing aggregate purchasing power in the domestic market to cause overcapacity that rely on export. As workers wages are not sufficient to buy the goods they produce, domestic markets fall into underdevelopment and export to high-wage economies is needed to produce profit for companies.

Excessive Corporate Profit From Low Wages Leads to Overcapacity

This new rule of globalized trade is designed to produce short-term maximization of corporate profit for an export sector. But in the post industrial finance economy, the export sectors in low-wage economies are largely owned or financed by cross-border international capital. This type of international trade incurs inevitable long-term stagnation in the domestic economies of all trading nations because the low wages paid by international capital lead to insufficient aggregate domestic consumer demand. Stagnant wages everywhere in turn reduce aggregate global purchasing power needed for the expansion of international trade. It is a clear case of imbalanced economic sub-optimization.

Foreign Capital Invested in International Trade Has No Incentive to Raise Local Wages

The export sector of foreign trade in any economy naturally does not consider the purchasing power of local workers as being of any consequence because the goods produced and services provided by local workers in the export sector are sold in higher-wage foreign markets for profit denominated in the reserve currency generally accepted in international trade, which since the end of World War II has been the US dollar.

As a result, the import sector in foreign trade in all economies also underperforms because of insufficient domestic purchasing power for both domestic products and needed imports. This is true in varying degrees for all economies that participate in international trade. The only exception is the US economy whose gold-backed currency had been generally accepted as the reserve currency for international trade since the end of World War II. But the dollar has been a fiat currency since 1971 when it was detached from gold.

In the advanced financial economies, consumer debt is used to overcome stagnant consumer purchasing power caused by low wages. Low wages have been the fundamental cause of recurring debt bubbles in advanced economies. Even for the US, cross-border wage arbitrage has also kept US wages stagnant, which US policy makers compensated with a policy of high consumer debt that was unsustainable by stagnant wages. The biggest item in consumer debt is home mortgage. This excessive debt in relation to wage income has been the real cause behind the current global financial crisis.