"Who has betrayed us? Social democrats!" became a slogan almost a century ago for good reason. It's in #socialfascism nature to oppose the #workingclass and give #capitalism time to prepare "emergency" ( #fascist) measures to protect itself.
If your " #left leaders" are still promoting the 1%-owned, genocidal #imperialist #DemocraticParty as part of a solution to the problems facing the #US #workingclass & the exploited & oppressed of the #globalsouth, they're not leaders; they're misleaders.
It's a hard truth to face, but it's true.
Social #democratic reformists like #BernieSanders exist to channel #workingclass anger back into the " #leftwing" of #capitalism.
I supported #Sanders in 2016 as a major step forward with the hope that he'd take the obvious opportunity to lead 10 Million out of the #DemocraticParty.
He refused.
I love Las Vegas's Fremont Street in the morning. Under it all, it's a working class town, just regular people trying to get by. Here fake Spider-man and Buzz Lightyear chat as they walk to work, another day standing in the heat, inside a painted circle on the ground, hustling tourist dollars to pose for pictures. It's a living.
It's easy to make fun, but I feel for these folks.
Today in Labor History April 14, 1930: Over 100 Mexican and Filipino farm workers were arrested for union activities in Imperial Valley, CA. 8 were convicted of “criminal syndicalism.”
Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #dustbowl #GreatDepression #JohnSteinbeck #GrapesOfWrath #refugees #poverty #fiction #books #author #writer #Oklahoma #texas @bookstadon
Today in Labor History April 14, 1919: Workers in Limerick, Ireland, initiated a General Strike against the British military occupation. They ran the city as a soviet for two weeks. Workers printed their own newspaper and issued their own currency, which local businesses accepted. They also regulated food supplies to keep prices low and prevent profiteering. Numerous other soviets were created during the Irish War of Independence.
Today in Labor History April 14, 1917: IWW sailors went on strike in Philadelphia and won a ten dollar per month raise. Ben Fletcher, an African-American IWW organizer, was instrumental in organizing the Philadelphia waterfront. Fletcher was born in Philly in 1890. He joined the Wobblies (IWW) in 1912, became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913.
In 1913, Fletcher led 10,000 IWW Philly dockworkers on a strike. Within two weeks, they won a 10-hr day, overtime pay, & created one of the most successful antiracist, anticapitalist union locals in the U.S. At the time, roughly one-third of the dockers on the Philadelphia waterfront were black. Another 33% were Irish. And about 33% were Polish and Lithuanian. Prior to the IWW organizing drive, the employers routinely pitted black workers against white, and Polish against Irish. The IWW was one of the only unions of the era that organized workers into the same locals, regardless of race or ethnicity. And its main leader in Philadelphia was an African American, Ben Fletcher.
By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the union maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color.
Fletcher also traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. And in 1918, the state arrested him, sentencing him to ten years for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years.
You can read my full biography of Ben Fletcher here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/05/13/ben-fletcher-and-the-iww-dockers/
#BernieSanders had multiple opportunities to do call out the #Democrats, but refused to for being afraid of being a pariah in the political environment.
From the end of the day of the flowery rhetoric and policy positions #Sanders & #AOC are just hood ornaments to the #DemocraticParty and are loyal to the #Democrats than to the #workers.
When the call begins, they will stand behind #Washington than the #WorkingClass!
Fuck AI. And fuck the fat phobia inherent in this parody. But it does do a good job of poking fun at the likely consequences of Trump's policies for white working class MAGA supporters.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1894: The Great Northern rail strike began in Helena, Montana. It quickly spread to St. Paul. The strike was led Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union. Workers succeeded in shutting down most of the critical rail links. Consequently, the owners gave in to nearly all of the union’s demands. The successful strike led to thousands of rail workers joining the new union. Debs would go on to lead numerous other strikes, run for president of the U.S. several times, including from his prison cell, and to cofound the revolutionary union IWW, along with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Lucy Parsons, and others.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1873: The Colfax massacre, occurred in Colfax, Louisiana. A mob of former Confederate soldiers and current KKK members murdered 60-153 black militiamen after they surrendered. The militiamen were guarding the parish courthouse in the wake of the contested 1872 election for governor. Southern elections during Reconstruction were regularly marred by violence and fraud. It was the worst act of racist violence during Reconstruction.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1975: Phalangists in Lebanon killed 26 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This marked the start of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War. 120,000 people died in the war and nearly one million people fled the country. One of the worst atrocities of the war was the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Lebanese Phalangists, allied with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), slaughtered 3,500 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp. IDF soldiers facilitated the slaughter by blocking exits and preventing civilians from escaping. In 1983, the Kahan Commission found then-Israeli Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, personally responsible for the massacre. He resigned and then became Prime Minister.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1953: CIA Director Allen Dulles launched the MKUltra mind control program. The program ran from 1953 to 1973. It involved giving human subjects LSD and other drugs, often without their knowledge. Then, researchers would try to “weaken” their minds and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. Over 7,000 U.S. war veterans were unwitting test subjects, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians. The program was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA, recruited many of these Nazi torturers in the wake of World War II to exploit their knowledge and research. MKUltra was headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who later devised plans to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, and saturating his shoes with radioactive thallium to make his beard fall out. He also tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of Congo, with poison. Several well-known liberals and radicals knowingly participated in MKUltra and its OSS predecessors, either as test subjects (e.g., Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hunter), or as researchers (e.g., anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson). Others who have been alleged to have been victims or volunteers include Sirhan Sirhan, Ted Kaczyinski, Charles Manson, and Whitey Bulger.
For a really fascinating look at Margaret Mead's and Gregory Bateson’s exploration with hallucinogens and their connection to MKUltra, check out the recent book, Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen. And for a truly amazing documentary on the 1961 CIA-supported coup in Congo, check out the 2024 documentary, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.” But the film is really about so much more than the coup. It covers Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations in the early 1960s; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #cia #mindcontrol #torture #lsd #mkultra #castro #nazis #oss #allenginsberg #lumumba #malcolmx #coltrane #jazz #imperialism #kenkesey #margaretmead #charlesmanson #mescaline #castro #soviet #coldwar #books #nonfiction #ussr #communism #film #documentary @bookstadon
Today in Labor History April 12, 1963: Mexican journalist and human rights activist, Lydia Cacho, was born on this day. She has reported extensively on violence and sexual abuse against women in Mexico. In 2006, she reported on the hundreds of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. That same year, a tape emerged of a conversation between businessman Kamel Nacif Borge and the governor of Puebla, in which they conspired to have her beaten and raped for her reporting.
Today in Labor History April 12, 1935: 150,000 college students protested across the U.S. in the first nationwide student strike against war. Between 1936 and 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 college students (almost 50% of all American college students at the time) in annual one-hour strikes against war.
Today in Labor History April 12, 1934: The Toledo (Ohio) Auto-Lite General Strike began on this day. Initially, 6,000 workers struck for union recognition and higher pay. In late May, there was a five-day battle between the strikers and 1,300 members of the Ohio National Guard. The militia fired on workers. They shot tear gas, which the workers threw back at them. They attacked with bayonets and the workers retaliated with bricks, injuring several soldiers. The “Battle of Toledo,” left two strikers dead and more than 200 injured. The strike lasted for two months and resulted in a win for the union. It was one of the most important labor struggles of the 20th century. During that same spring, there were also General Strikes in San Francisco and Minneapolis.
Today in Labor History April 12, 1927: The Shanghai massacre of 1927 occurred on this day. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the right-wing, nationalist Kuomintang, ordered the execution of Chinese Communist Party members in Shanghai, ending the First United Front. They killed up to 10,000 people.
Today in Labor History April 12, 1924: Curtis Turner was born on this day in Floyd, Va. Turner, along with Fireball Roberts and Tim Flock, tried to organize the NASCAR drivers into a union in 1961 (the Federation of Professional Athletes). Their goals were bigger purses, a share in broadcasting rights, and retirement benefits for the drivers. NASCAR founder Bill France Sr banned all the union drivers. Eventually, every union driver except for Turner and Flock, quit the union so they could race again. Turner sued to be reinstated, but lost his lawsuit. The court said he was an individual contractor, not an employee of NASCAR or any track. But he was reinstated four years later.
As a racer, he won 360 races, including 22 in the NASCAR Convertible Division in 1956, alone, as well as 17 in the NASCAR Grand National Series. He got his start in driving as a bootlegger for the illegal whiskey his dad made. He never got caught running booze. However, he almost got caught with a 500 lb bag of stolen sugar (for making alcohol) in the days after WWII when sugar was still being rationed. However, after fighting a gun battle with the law, he managed to successfully evade a dragnet, as he drove 300 miles on backroads to get back home, where the cops were waiting for him. Then, during his trial, he convinced the jury that the sugar was for making apple butter. The judge sentenced him to $1,000 and a 2-year suspended sentence.
