I see trade unions as the cutting edge of the labour movement because workers hold the real power in the economic sphere; we create all the wealth that society depends on.

Through our organised strength in unions, we can directly challenge the capitalist system and the state, both of which exploit and oppress us. I believe in workers’ self-management and solidarity, and that by building strong, federated unions based on direct action like strikes and workplace control, we prepare ourselves not only to improve our immediate conditions but to ultimately abolish wage slavery, capitalism, and the state itself.

In other words, our unions are the foundation for a new society where workers truly run the economy and make decisions democratically, without bosses or politicians standing above us.

Don't get distracted. The #Trump administration is still funding #IDF coordinated #genocide in #Gaza that is starving women and children in #Palestine as a war tactic. These are #WarCrimes!

The same administration that ran on releasing the #Epstein files that implicates #republicans and #democrats now wants you to forget and keep blaming #immigrants and #Obama for their failures.

Both parties have always known and been complicit. #Capitalism #commodifies misery.

#workingclass
#solidarity

Americans are struggling financially, grappling with debt and the rising cost of living, and are blaming the Trump administration and corporate interests for worsening economic outlooks for working families... #USeconomy #CostOfLiving #trumpadministration #americanlife #inflation #economics #workingclass https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/01/trump-inflation-cost-of-living-poll

Today in Labor History August 1, 1938: Police opened fire on 200 unarmed trade unionists protesting the unloading of a ship in Hilo Harbor, on the Big Island of Hawaii, in what became known as "the Hilo Massacre." The protest was in support of striking waterfront workers. 50 workers were injured. Police also used tear gas and bayonets. The workers came from numerous ethnic backgrounds, including Japanese, Chinese, Native Hawaiian, Luso (Portuguese) and Filipino. They belonged to several unions, including the ILWU. They were fighting for equal pay to dockers on the U.S. west coast and for a closed, union shop. Harry Kamoku (depicted in the original woodblock poster shown in this post) was the primary organizer and leader of the strike, as well as a member of Hawaii’s first union to be legally recognized. He was a Chinese-Hawaiian, a longshoreman, born in Hilo.

Today in Labor History August 1, 1921: Sheriff Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were murdered by Baldwin-Felts private cops. They did it in retaliation for Hatfield’s role in the Matewan labor battle in 1920, when two Felts family thugs were killed by Hatfield and his deputies. Sheriff Hatfield had sided with the coal miners during their strike. The private cops executed Hatfield and Chambers on the Welch County courthouse steps in front of their wives. This led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, where 20,000 coal miners marched to the anti-union stronghold Logan County to overthrow Sheriff Dan Chaffin, the coal company tyrant who murdered miners with impunity. The Battle of Blair Mountain started in September 1921. The armed miners battled 3,000 police, private cops and vigilantes, who were backed by the coal bosses. It was the largest labor uprising in U.S. history, and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The president of the U.S. eventually sent in 27,000 national guards. Over 1 million rounds were fired. Up to 100 miners were killed, along with 10-30 Baldwin-Felts detectives and 3 national guards. They even dropped bombs on the miners from planes, the second time in history that the U.S. bombed its own citizens (the first being the pogrom against black residents of Tulsa, earlier that same year).

Several novels portray the Battle of Blair Mountain, including Storming Heaven, by Denise Giardina, (1987), Blair Mountain, by Jonathan Lynn (2006), and Carla Rising, by Topper Sherwood (2015). And one of my favorite films of all time, “Matewan,” by John Sayles (1987), portrays the Matewan Massacre and the strike leading up to it. The film has a fantastic soundtrack of Appalachian music from the period. And the great West Virginia bluegrass singer, Hazel Dickens, sings the title track, "Fire in the Hole." She also appears in the film as a member of the Freewill Baptist Church.

You can read my complete article on the Battle of Blair Mountain, and Matewan, here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/14/the-battle-of-blair-mountain/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #mining #westvirginia #strike #union #police #vigilantes #uprising #racism #riots #blackwallstreet #film #novel #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History August 1, 1917: IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Montana. Little was a Cherokee miner and member of the IWW. He went to Butte during the Speculator Mine strike to help organize the miners. Little had previously helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He had participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” On August 1, 1917, vigilantes broke into the boarding house where he was staying. They dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car and then hanged him from a railroad trestle.

Author Dashiell Hammett had been working in Butte at the time as a strike breaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They had tried to get him to murder Little, offering him $5,000, but he refused. He later wrote about the experience in his novel, “Red Harvest.” It supposedly haunted him throughout his life that anyone would think he would do such a thing. He was also investigated by the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) because of his ties to socialism.

Read my complete biography of Little here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/05/frank-little/
Read my complete article on the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/
Read my bio of Dashiell Hammett here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/05/dashiell-hammett/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #union #strike #racism #indigenous #immigration #mining #freespeech #civildisobedience #civilrights #antiwar #author #books #fiction #writer #novel @bookstadon

JEALOUS?
...of bougie thieves?

Today in Labor History July 31, 1970: British sailors were given their very last officially sanctioned ration of rum. Black Tot Day took away from sailors one of the very few remaining benefits of the job. The lash has never been formally abolished. And sodomy was never officially permitted.

Today in Labor History July 31, 1968: Students protested the Olympics in Mexico City. They occupied schools and began a General Strike. Cops violently attacked them. The violence culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre, October 2, during which the cops slaughtered 350-400 people, using snipers. They arrested and tortured over 1,300.

Alejandro Jodorowsky dramatized the massacre in his surreal film, “The Holy Mountain” (1973). In it, he showed birds, fruits, vegetables and other things falling and being ripped out of the wounds of the dying students. The late author, Roberto Bolaño, recounted the massacre in his novel “Amulet” (1999). He also retells the story in his novel, “The Savage Detectives.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #students #olympics #mexico #protest #massacre #tlatelolco #generalstrike #police #policebrutality #policemurder #robertobolaño #film #author #books #fiction #novel #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History July 31, 1922: A General Strike against Fascism began in Italy, running from July 31 to August 2. Socialists led the strike, which the fascists defeated. Rudolph Rocker, an Anarcho-Syndicalist of the period, said: "… the democratic government armed the Fascist hordes and throttled this last attempt at the defense of freedom and right. But Italian democracy had dug its own grave. It thought it could use Mussolini as a tool against the workers, but thus it became its own grave-digger." In October, 1922, the fascists led a march through Rome, which ultimately led to a coup and their ascension to power. During the march, Mussolini was in Milan, supposedly with a ticket for an ocean liner to flee the country should the fascists fail in the coup.

I don't think I could ever deliberately write or design for a Middle-Class audience (like, I enjoy Glorantha but I'm probably not who anyone would want to write for it), but a lot of my audience _is_ Middle Class.

As a trailer-park kid who currently lives in a little old house in an alley, I often kind of marvel at that. I wonder how it works. Why it works.

#KshamaSawant: AOC's Rotten Record on #Gaza
#AOC #Democrats #UniParty #USpol #Socialism #WorkingClass #MedicareForAll #Washington #AdamSmith #genocide #stopgazagenocide‌now #FreePalenstine #GHF #famine #HungerGames #mosquitoprotocol #britishcolonialism #Israel
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6Wo6QJ9Tdt8

Ground beef just hit $7/lb in the U.S.

Federal minimum wage is still just $7.25/hr, exactly what it was in 2009, when it was already too low to support a family. (FYI: 1st fed min wage law in U.S. came in response to the 1912 IWW Lawrence textile strike, in which 3 workers were killed)

Think about that: 2 hrs labor/day, just to feed your family 1 meal. That's not even counting rent, medical, clothing, utilities, transportation to & from work.

https://wreg.com/wreg-price-tracker/wreg-price-tracker-ground-beef-hits-7-and-school-lunch-staples-spike/

Christian Smalls, Amazon Union Leader, Beaten Up And Detained By Israel for participation in Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

https://blackstarnews.com/christian-smalls-amazon-union-leader-beaten-up-and-detained-by-israel/

Today in Labor History July 30, 2006: Murray Bookchin died. He was an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, social theorist, libertarian socialist, and founder of social ecology. He published over two dozen books. In the 1990s, disillusioned by the increasingly “apolitical, lifestylism” of mainstream anarchism, he stopped calling himself an anarchist and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology that he called “communalism,” which sought to combine elements of Marxism and anarchosyndicalism. His ideas, more generally, have influenced numerous movements, including the New Left, anti-nuclear, Occupy Wall Street, and the People Defense Units (YPG) and the Rojava Kurdish Autonomous Region of Syria. In 1988, along with Howie Hawkins, he cofounded the Left-Green Network, as a radical alternative to the liberal Greens, with a focus on Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. His critique of Deep Ecology, popular among many in the radical Earth First! Movement, led many Earth Firsters to refer to him as Bernie Munchkin. He rejected the popular view of Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich that the environmental crisis was caused by technology or overpopulation, or human nature, but was rather the product of capitalism, its “grow or die imperative,” and its emphasis on profit or human life and security.

Today in Labor History July 30, 1866: Police shot into a group of recently freed black workers outside the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans, in the wake of the Civil War. This was the site of a reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention. A crowd of whites then stormed the hall. By the time federal troops restored order, 38 were dead and 136 wounded — almost all of them black. The mob was made up of recently defeated Confederate soldiers. National outrage at the New Orleans Massacre, and the Memphis Riots in May, helped the Radical Republicans win a majority in both houses of Congress and catalyzed support for passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the Reconstruction Act, authorizing military occupation of the South.

Today in Labor History July 30, 1676: Nathaniel Bacon issued the "Declaration of the People of Virginia," beginning Bacon's Rebellion, an armed insurrection against the rule of Governor William Berkeley. It was the first insurrection in the American colonies and the first class uprising in North America. Thousands of indentured white Europeans united with free, indentured, and enslaved black people to demand rights and privileges they were being denied. They took up arms and drove Berkeley from Jamestown, burning the colonial capital to the ground. It took several years for the authorities to put down all the pockets of resistance. Bacon died of dysentery. However, Berkeley executed 23 of his followers. King Charles, disillusioned with Berkeley’s rule, recalled him to England. The king said "That old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father."

The unification of poor blacks and whites scared the hell out of the ruling class. Consequently, they realized they needed to sow divisions between the poor, so they would fight among each other rather than unify in another uprising against the rich. This led to a hardening of the color lines and the development of the ideas of race and racial superiority. The ruling elite used the uprising to justify passage of the Virginia slave code of 1705 and many of the first laws that distinguished between black and white people. They shifted from their reliance on indentured white servitude to chattel slavery, and bestowed new status and privileges on poor and formerly indentured whites. Further, they used the uprising, and Bacon’s own hatred of Native Americans, to unify all white farmers, large and small, against the Indigenous peoples.

Today in Labor History July 29, 1962: British aristocrat and fascist leader, Oswald Mosely, was beaten by antifascists in London’s east end. Even after police began to escort him away, activists from the antifascist 62 Group (AKA 62 Committee), led by Jewish, communist, and black activists, were able to pelt him with eggs, fruit and rocks. He later called a rally, which the activists successfully disrupted with shouts of “down with fascists.” The only people arrested were antifascist activists.

62 Group disrupted fascist meetings throughout the early to mid-60s, beating up or attacking fascists whenever they had the chance, much like the Jewish antifascist 43 Group did in the 1940s. As a result, they were able to significantly reduce the power and effectiveness of the fascists in the 1960s.

Mosely had been a Labor MP and junior minister from 1918-1931. As the leader of the British Union of Fascists, publicly supported antisemitism and tried to form alliances with Mussolini and Hitler. During the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, antifascist demonstrators including unions, anarchists, socialists, communists, liberals and Jews, prevented the BUF from marching through the East End of London. During World War Two, Moseley and his wife were imprisoned as threats to the national security.

Mosely is portrayed in numerous works of fiction, including the television series, The Peaky Blinders. He is portrayed in Pink Floyd’s the wall; Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel, Point Counter Point; HG Wells's 1939 novel The Holy Terror; PG Wodehouse's Jeeves series; and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #oswaldmosely #fascism #antifascism #london #antisemitism #anarchism #communism #socialism #racism #books #novel #author #writer #fiction @bookstadon