Happy may day!
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
—
Preamble to the IWW Constitution
Spending the morning getting kind of worked up reading the news
Confronting Adamic’s text seventy-five years after the fact demands that readers ask themselves a number of difficult and politically loaded questions: to what extent is our seemingly peaceful labor system already (and always) bound up in the latent violence of capital? The very notion of a post-war labor “peace” conceals the underlying violence upon which that “peace” was brokered. The illusion of labor peace is predicated upon the state’s power to unleash violence against workers should they break their end of the deal. Was the subsumption of the American labor movement under layers of government bureaucracy–in exchange for an end to violence–on the whole a victory for workers? Or has the post-war labor peace been an unequal compromise? Certainly, no unionist is nostalgic for the days when a worker could be shot dead for walking a picket line, but the alternative we have isn’t that great either.
We Came to Work
We grew up walking every picket line in town, whether my parents worked there or not. We took food to strikers, talked Union at the dinner table, and to hear my family tell it, the working class would save the human race. [via]
I am simultaneously sad, homesick, & optimistic after being home last weekend, and now reading this.
![Draplin [via]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/2m8BXUfrihb8k5nw0Bn9RXI5o1_400.jpg)
Idled workers occupy factory in Chicago
Outraged and determined Chicago factory workers who were abruptly laid off this week have occupied their former workplace and say they won’t leave until they get the severance and vacation pay they say they’re owed. The employees say they received three days notice their plant was closing. In the second day of a sit-in on the factory floor Saturday, about 250 union workers occupied the building in shifts while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind. About 50 workers sat on pallets and chairs inside the Republic Windows and Doors plant, supplied with donated food, sleeping bags and blankets. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give its 300 employees the 60 days’ notice required by law before shutting. During the takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said. “We’re doing something we haven’t done since the 1930s, so we’re trying to make it work,” Fried said. [via]
anthropophagous
Archive Audio Images RSS FeedThis is just a collection of things I think are neat.
A general overview of 'things I think are neat':abandonment/the post-industrial midwest, anarchism (syndicalism, insurrectionalism, etc), race/ethnicity (esp. defining/constructing the boundaries of whiteness), gender, class (talking/thinking about class generally seems to be an underrated activity), health care (access to, the experience of obtaining, etc), art, science fiction, punk music, conservative talk radio and anthropology (which probably incorporates almost everything else about people).
