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Today's
Stories
October
3 / 5, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
All Armi
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
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|
Weekend
Edition
October 3 / 5, 2003
Rhymsters and Revolutionaries
Joe
Hill and the IWW
By PETER LINEBAUGH
Franklin Rosemont, Joe
Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass
Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr: Chicago, 2003).
It's the right man by the right biographer
at the right time.
Joe Hill's the man, the artist and song-writer
of the Industrial Workers of the World. Franklin Rosemont's the
biographer, the Chicago surrealist activist and publisher; the
time is ours when warring monotheistic capitalism rains terror
against a polyglot planetary proletariat privatized out of clean
water, health care, and home. Joe Hill composed a song while
awaiting execution under sentence of death by the authorities
of the state of Utah. The song unifies the demands of the antiglobalization
movement, not for "Communism," but a commons of actual
equality and reparations of actual justice.
Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might;
Take the wealth that you are making,
It belongs to you by right.
No one will for bread be crying,
We'll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Workers' Commonwealth.
This magnificent, practical, irreverent,
and (as one might say) magisterial book has sixteen chapters
and more than six hundred pages, profusely illustrated with 137
cartoons, pictures of posters, portraits, stickerettes, and buttons
or badges, just dying to be photocopied. It is written in a direct,
passionate, sometimes funny, deeply searching style. Its slang
and hard-boiled prole talk attains summits of lyricism and is
itself a tribute to the Wobs and its elusive, martyred troubador
of discontent. It is a labor of love. Rosemont came across the
Wobs in 1959 and took out a red card of membership in 1964.
Founded in 1905 their convention adopted
a preamble saying the workers and employers had nothing in common,
that a "struggle must go on until the workers of the world
organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery
of production, and abolish the wage system." Its language
was demotic; its innovations of communication included song and
slogans. Abolition of the Wage System, An Injury to One is an
Injury to All, the New Society within the Shell of the Old: these
were the principles contained in the Preamble. There were many
other slogans:
Dump the Bosses Off your Backs!
Workers of the World, Unite!
Don't Mourn, Organize!
Direct Action Gets the Goods!
Sit Down and Watch Your Pay Go Up!
Bread & Roses!
Solidarity Forever!
The Good Old Wooden Shoe!
The Thousand Mile Picket Line.
It was a talking, speaking, soapboxing,
arguing, singing movement. Thirteen of the fifty songs in the
Little Red Song Book (1973) were written by Joe Hill.
"Mr Block," "The Rebel Girl," "Scissor
Bill," "There is Power in a Union," "Workers
of the World, Awaken," "Casey Jones--The Union Scab,"
"Where the Fraser Flows," and "The Preacher and
the Slave" are the most well-known.
The Wobbly songs originated in Spokane,
Washington, in competition with the Salvation Army. The authorities
opposed the Wobs, so the Free Speech fights resulted. The singing
victorious Wobblies rode the rods as the Overalls Brigade to
the 1908 Chicago convention, and threw the Socialists out. A
debate ensued. One faction felt only the written and spoken word
could effectively educate the workers in the class struggle.
Joe Hill answered, "a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never
read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated
over and over...." In addition to the didactic purpose,
songs are politics taking refuge. They calm down beating hearts,
or they rouse torpid souls, they cheer a picket line. They fan
the flames of discontent, as the sub-title says.
Joe Hill was musical. Born Joel Hägglund
in Sweden, he came to the U.S.A. in 1902. He played banjo, violin,
guitar, accordion and piano. This was before TV or radio. He
didn't smoke or drink. He was a good cook of Chinese food (the
word "Wobbly" derves from a Chinese prounciation of
IWW). He was a longshoreman in San Pedro, California. He took
an active part in the Mexican revolution; he loaded sugar in
Honolulu; he helped out strikes of Canadian railroad workers.
In January 1914 he was arrested in Salt Lake City and charged
with murder. The victim was a grocer and ex-cop. The police,
the copper trust, and the Mormon Church launched a campaign of
vilification. The San Pedro police chief favored execution explaining,
"he is somewhat of a musician and writer of songs for the
IWW songbook." The Joe Hill Defense Committee got to work.
Although it did not save his life, it laid the groundwork for
the legend. He was executed by firing squad the following year
refusing morphine or a shot of whiskey. His funeral was the largest
in American history. His last will and testament combined Buddhist
purity with proletarian reality.
My Will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide
My kin don't need to fuss and moan
'Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.'
My body?--Oh!--If I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower
then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final Will.
Good luck to all of you.
Joe Hill.
The cardinal significance of Joe Hill
is that he sang; the capital importance of him is that he was
shot. He epitomized the IWW at its best as he was victimized
by capitalist terror at its worst. "If angels are persons,
how is it that they can fly?" asked the child, and the sage
replied, "because they take themselves lightly." This
is why Joe Hill is also known as The Man Who Never Died. It is
the theme of the song, "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night."
The legend also works in the opposite
way inasmuch as his significance and importance are constantly
being lost and in need of re-discovery. For instance, take the
opening of one of the major Wobby autobiographies, Ralph Chaplin's.
"The battle-scarred old-time "stiffs" who fought
in the Industrial Workers of the World's wild crusade for economic
justice a generation ago are aged and scattered. In the fo'c'sle
head on the high seas, in secluded stump ranch cabins, or around
an occasional "jungle" fire under a railroad bridge,
the saga is still being told. But, when the last of the old-time
migratory revolutionary dies, the story must not die with him."
The defeat is felt in two ways. First,
it is felt as excess. Why declare the project of equality as
"wild crusade," except as a tale to be told, if not
by an idiot then a marginalized, old man? It is an honorable
trope--The Last of the True Wobs. For this trope to work effectively,
a prior forgetting is helpful. Thus, the IWW "has all but
been erased from popular consciousness," as Radical America
put it. The early articles of Telos liked to say that
they were discovering the I.W.W. from the oblivion of neglect
or of design. Rosemont observes that discovering the IWW was
a "compelling spiritual need of the time." Second,
the defeat is noticed in miniature, in the necessity Chaplin
felt to enclose "stiff" and "jungle" in quotation
marks. The living talk of the Wobs had become too vulgar for
the requisite decorum of prose.
Ralph Chaplin published his story in
1948. The physical setting which both hides and preserves the
saga is the labor process. The self-activity of the primary work
group generated the workers' control; it was documented by Paul
Romano; James Boggs found it the starting point of the anti-racist
American Revolution; Stan Weir found it essential for development
of  theory and vision to overcome
the surliness of sectarians. They came from the Trotskyist movement,
whose congruence with the Wobbly emphasis on point-of-production
democracy omitted acknowledgement, and provides the exception
to the rule of continual rediscovery.
The subject brought up different generational,
as well as sectarian, hang-ups. While tens of thousands dreamt
they'd seen Joe Hill only last night, "alive as you and
me," indeed sang him into their political subconscious by
listening over and over again to recordings of Paul Robeson in
Carnegie Hall and Joan Baez at Woodstock. The superego of a new
generation thus had a baritone and soprano register to its nostalgia.
First the songs, then the prose. This was the truth of the Civil
Rights Movement in America. Al Haber traces the origins of the
first SDS chapter to the Folksong Society at the University of
Michigan where the union songs and the Wobbly songs sung during
the 1950s drew the politicos together. (Thompson's Muggletonians,
also a remnant from revolution, spoke no sermons but sang.)
While the student movement in the USA
organized as peaceniks or as the Weather Underground against
the Vietnam war, in Europe as early as 1967 intellectuals at
the University of Padua re-assessed the October Revolution, the
German worker's councils, and the experience of the IWW in the
United States, as a thee-fold articulation of the global struggle
against capitalism. The conference influenced student militance
and its ideas played a part in the "hot autumn" of
1969. They pointed to the importance of Taylorism in decomposing
a work-task into a precise set of motions which become the basis
of the total objectification of work. Henry Ford and the assembly-line
re-engineered production around the wage. The Wobblies provided
an answer based on mobility and the socialization the class struggle
outside of the factory. The former gave us the mass worker, and
the latter the social wildcat. The Wobs discovered the revolutionary
character of collective worker. These Italian comrades of the
late 60s and early 70s laid the ground work for the movement
of the autonomists.
The social relations of Fordist production
were based on the repression of constant capital. In concert
with the repression of the machine was the direct discipline
of terror. This provides us with the background for understanding
the significance of the judicial murder of Joe Hill. The postwar
repression--the Palmer raids, the Chicago trial against the Wobblies,
the incarceration of militants, the creation of the FBI--had
begun earlier with capital punishment and lynchings. The Ku Klux
Klan, to quote Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's father, "swelled up
like a tick--night riding, killing stock, burning barns and crops,
lynching, burning crosses. Good Christians they were." Thousands
were lynched in order a) to preserve white supremacy, b) to please
the oil, wheat, and timber interests, and c) to produce human
beings who would submit to the assembly line. The photographic
evidence of that terror is published. The aquiline noses, the
Panama hats, the suspenders, occasional starched collar, ties
on the boys--leant an air of Aryan respectability to many of
these stinking burnings and mutilations whose nauseating, exemplary
cruelty became a national characteristic, the Terror of the Racial
Capitalist Nation. And the Klan passed out little red-white-and-blue
cards saying, "We are watching you."
Joe Hill's execution opened a campaign
of economic, racial terrorism. The deafening noise, the unremitting
toil, the goon squads, the armed security guards, the speed-up,
the physical intimidation, the assembly line of Ford anticipated
the work-camps of the gulag and Auschwitz alike. The terror
inherent in the full socialization of capital in both production
and reproduction was recorded by Frieda Kahlo. Her cool, indigenous
eye depicted the fear and pain of the Dearborn hospital and her
intelligence and knowledge of revolutionary Marxism linked the
terror to that of River Rouge. Thus she provided the witness
to the unity of the capitalist circuit, the production of carriages
and the miscarriages of reproduction.
Rosemont is especially interested in
the women Wobs, such as the founder of the Catholic Worker movement,
Dorothy Day, or the advocate of birth control, Margaret Sanger,
or the Oklahoma advocate of wages for housework, Mary Inman,
or the boardinghouse keeper and publisher of song, Mary Gallagher,
or the western writer of the Indian common, Mary Austin, or the
editor, rhymster, and economist, Marcy Marcy, to name a few.
Mary Inman fled Tulsa, the Oklahoma epicenter
of the mid-continent oil field, in 1917 while the local newspaper,
screamed, "Kill them, just as you would kill any other kind
of snake. Don't scotch 'em; kill 'em dead. It's no time to waste
money on trials and continuances and things like that. All that
is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad." Wobblies
organized its roughnecks; and lynch mobs cracked the necks of
the Wobblies. Silence and amnesia was one result. Pure phantasy
was another like the Broadway musical "Oklahoma" (1942?).
The terror suppressed the Wobbly dream of the common wealth.
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki the reign of nuclear terror began.
This takes us to E.P. Thompson, the Brit, the vet, the Red, and
Ban-the-Bomber.
The Rosemont's subtitle, The Making
of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture alludes to
E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class of
forty years previous. Rosemont's book, like Thompson's, has a
job to do, making the class which brings to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old. There are differences. For instance,
Rosemont has little time for types of work--house work, assembly
line work, outdoors work (he makes one word out of working class),
or the details of the labor process as did the postwar Trotskyists
or the 1960s Italian autonomists. Against the corporate media,
against Hollywood, Rosemont's theme is counterculture, reminding
us that the American gloss on Thompson's Making was culturalist.
Both books are part of that "awakening" Joe Hill sang
of before he was shot in the heart. From trying towrite
the working class into existence, Thompson went on to the peace
movement.
Having helped to revive the old English
peace movement (CND), now enlarged as the European Nuclear Disarmament
(END) to include West Europe and with its sights upon east Europe,
Thompson called the American peace movement to attention for
a bracing talking to. The aftermath of the June 12, 1982, demonstration
in New York was too introverted, its self-criticisms too therapeutic;
the mixture of race, gender, class, age, sexual preference issues
too willy-nilly or indulgent. Only by deconstructing the hegemonic
ruling ideology of the 'nation' could the aggressive, deluding
system of exterminism be defeated. Authentic, American internationalism
needed to be discovered, and this was the task of poets and historians,
he argued. The level of peace consciousness was rising, and it
needed to rise even higher. He said, "We need, in some new
form, a 'Wobbly' vocabulary of mutual aid and of plain duty to
each other in the face of power."
The old man of the peace movement, the
veteran of political and military battles in the East and in
the West, the most influential social historian of the late 20th
century, and the lonely bustard of Muggletonian Marxism, was
turning to the myth of the Wobs, trying out for size the overalls
of the last of the true Wobs including their anarchist tag ("mutual
aid").
To Staughton Lynd what Edward associated
with the Wobs was passion; to Bryan Palmer, Edward used the Wobs
to assert a "moral agenda" over "traditional Marxism."
These are the gut reactions of the thirsty, parched from the
dessicated deserts of American ideology. But Thompson was not
moralizing, or speaking only in a passion. There was more to
his conception of the Wobblies. His oldest American comrades
were a North Dakota poet, Tom McGrath, and a Texan sociologist,
C. Wright Mills. They too sometime spoke as The Last of the True
Wobs.
The IWW flourished in the second decade
of the 20th century which was characterized by a) vast geographic
of expansion of capitalism, b) growth of industrial as opposed
to craft unions, c) World War I, d) a population which was one
third immigrants or children of immigrants, e) rapid unionization
among sailors, railway, and streetcar worker, finally, f) the
Wobs made, in the words of David Montgomery, "the myth of
'One Big Union' ubiquitous." The Wobs adapted language to
immigrant workers, and they adapted hymns from the immigrants'
one cultural institution, the churches. In a sense Thompson's
emphasis on vocabulary is appropriate.
The Wobs were an organization of poets,
making it dear to the heart of Rosemont, and his chapters on
the classic Ralph Chaplin, the gothic Arturo Giovannitti, the
gnomic T-Bone Slim, the spell-binding houseworker, Laura Tanne,
and the dandy seer, Covington Hall put Joe Hill in an uncanonized,
radical poetic pantheon. A revolutionary organization has to
be poetic on the grounds that the future requires present imagination.
The Wobs recited Shelley and Whitman, they rose to the Bardic
responsibility outlined by Blake. They influenced Claude McKay,
Kenneth Rexroth, Carl Sandburg, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder,
Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos. However, one Wobbly poet is
not here, E.P. Thompson's friend, Tom McGrath.
Tom McGrath's long poem Letter to
an Imaginary Friend (1962, 1970) nearly begins with a powerful
description of a Wobbly harvest organizer named Cal. It is a
rite of passage to manhood. The poet, as a youngster, doted on
Cal, "the last of the true Wobs,"
What he tried to each me was how to take
my time
Tried to each me when to laugh and when to be serious,
When to laugh at the serious, be serious in my laughter.
Cal was neither shaman of the tribe nor
Chairman of the Party. He was one in a spitting circle of harvest
stiffs who happened to be the first man to fold his arms and
speak up for the crew at the critical moment, after the wheat
was cut and before it was threshed, and took a beating as a result.
McGrath was taught at a very specific moment in the geo-historical
development of capitalism--the mobility of the harvest gangs,
the male proletariat, reaping the fruits of soil and the germ-plasm,
maintained by eons of the indigenous people just as the Great
Plains formed the bread basket of the planet.
Like other possessors of the gift of
gab, poetic as in Tom or voluble as in Thompson, or lyric and
cynic like Joe Hill, when the taciturn loosened his tongue, or
the reticient stood to speak, they listened with all their heart.
Tom, through Cal, struck deep notes,
The commune
and the round dance ...
kachina
These notes were the barely audible expressions
of the indigenous solidarity, the actual utopian experience,
McGrath gestures towards a deeply suppressed truth. His poetic
line becomes jazz, the breaths between utterances, and the listening,
give them their meanings. He studied and absorbed Hopi religion.
The indigenous people are not ghosts, or figments of imagination,
or stereotypes. They are Fellow Workers. Tom whispered these
notes and Thompson heard them.
Thompson, in turn, compared McGrath to
Wordsworth, and indeed the moment with Cal was a Wordsworthian
'spot in time.' McGrath's father shared fraternity with the Sioux;
he grew up in the awful wake of Wounded Knee. McGrath, like Wordsworth,
recognized in their spots of time, Jacobin and Wobbly respectively,
a transformation of the social relations of land. This was the
root of all. Expropriation: enclosure: conquest.
If McGrath replenished his commonist
hopes by the dreams of the Indian commune. Thompson re-discovered
the 'moral economy' and the common rights of the English open-field
system. This wasn't primitive communism, yet both were discovering
the historical evidence of actual anti-capitalism and its continuities.
Thompson could be patronizing in an English way to Americans,
an attitude which concealed his debt. The "Folded Arms of
the Workers" and "Direct Action Gets the Goods"
were Wobbly pricks to the English social historian.
Rosemont has a crucial chapter on the
indigenous people. Lucy Parsons, "whose high cheek bones
of her Indian ancestors" as her biographer says, provided
the physiognomy of a countenance of utter inspiration when she
spoke at the founding convention of the IWW August Spies lived
with the Ojibways; Big Bill Haywood attended pow-wows. Abner
Woodruff, a Wob, had a chapter on Indian agriculture in his Evolution
of American Agriculture (1915-6). The Wobblies were "the
spiritual successors to the Red Indians as number one public
enemy and conscience botherers." Frank Little, the most
effective Wobbly organizer, was lynched in Butte, Montana, by
the same hard rock copper "bosses" which caused Joe
Hill to be shot. Little was a Cherokee Indian.
Ralph Chaplin drifted into dreams of
the Indians (Only the Drums Remembered, 1960) in much
the same way that William Morris remembered the 'dream of John
Ball.' In the era of Sigmund Freud, the oneiric faculty preserved
the radice, or radical root, which the conscious mind was politically
required to repress. "No matter how many times he told me,"
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz remembers of her father, "I loved to
hear his agenda of Wobbly dreams: abolition of interest and profits,
public ownership of everything, no military draft, no military,
no police, the equality of women and all races. 'The O-B-U, One
Big Union,' he would say and smile to himself, lost in memory."
One of Thompson's American comrades took a dreamy stance to the
Wobs which enabled him, against Communist orthodoxy, to compare
American indigenous experience with the European commune.
Thompson's other American comrade, C.
Wright Mills, as Thompson recalls, often referred to himself
as a Wob. When the Cuban revolution came C. Wright Mills was
reminded of the Wobblies by its improvisation, its egalitarianism,
its ideological openness, and the self-activity of the campasinos.
The "vocabulary" was part of a revolutionary movement:
if the movement is repressed, the vocab is put in quotation marks,
or specialized dictionaries, the formaldyhyde of speech. Thompson
explained how the Wobblies "never fell into that most dangerous
error which supposes that socialist endeavor achieves some consummation
in State Power ... and Mills' study of Weber, Sorel, Simmel,
Mosca, and Michels had served to confirm in his mind the wisdom
which had come instinctively to the transport-workers and lumber-jacks
of the old IWW." They didn't trust politicians.
Instinct is a term of unwelcome ambiguity
alluding to social Darwinism as if the transport-workers and
lumber-jacks were primitive, or pre-literate, or beastly and
animalish. Thompson's category of "experience" might
be better in this context as mediating between the concrete realities
of the labor process and the counter-hegemonic cultural practises
of the working class. To be sure, there is no "instinct"
to study that long list of European professors, any more than
there is "instinct" to file a grievance and wait months
for redress, or an "instinct" to put a paper in a ballot
box every four years and wait for regime change. Those are capitalist
socializations, respectively, of knowledge, production, and politics.
The Wobbly vocabulary of mutual aid that Thompson called for
is not going to be found in theory, or in instinct, but it might
in song. Here we need Rosemont and Joe Hill.
Rosemont's chapter on the beats particularly
Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder introduces the Wobbly concept of
the "hip" and the theme of west coast Buddhism. In
light of the widespread influence of Buddhism in general and
Zen in particular in the American peace movement and the suspicion
between the political and the spiritual impulse, we should dig
deeper in this particular past. Furthermore, since the Asian
financial crisis of 1997 capitalism is importing more than cheap
goods and spiritualism from the Pacific. The history goes back
to the American transcendentalists. D. T. Suzuki, who did much
to introduce Zen in the early 20th century, was a vigorous opponent
of anarchism and working-class direct action. However, his was
not the only Zen tradition available.
Manuel Yang has shown me that Kotoku
Shusui maintained a correspondence with Wobblies in north America.
He was a Japanese anarchist who was executed in 1911 with his
comrades in what was known as the Great Treason case accused
of conspiring to take the life of the Emperor of Japan. Four
Buddhist priests were arrested in the same case, three imprisoned
for life and one, the Soto Zen priest, Gudo Uichiyama, who had
operated a socialist and anarchist printing press behind the
huge temple statue of the Buddha, was also executed. He had criticized
the doctrine of karma, pie-in-the-sky again. In 1961 Gary Snyder
published his manifesto "Buddhist Anarchism" in the
Journal for the Protection of All Beings.
Nyogen Senzaki, the old Zen master, once
was talking with McGrath, the Wobbly free-thinker, in Los Angeles.
Zen touched the Wob, "No Zen is Zen also," said the
master to the poet. Perhaps the "folded arms of the workers"
may become amudra of meditation.
What has changed since those Freeze times
when E.P. Thompson urged us to Wobby mutual aid? First, the revolt
of the indigenous people of central America in 1994 led by the
Zapatistas; second, the antiglobalization movement initiated
with such a Wobbly bang at the 'battle of Seattle.' Third, world-wide
'war on terror.'
One of Rosemont's most important themes
is that the moral authority IWW has increased, is increasing,
and ought to increase more. This volume says it for song, not
theory, though, for the epistemologically inclined, Joe Hill
did suggest a notion.
If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still.
Peter Linebaugh
teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author
of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
Readings
Sergio Bologna, "Class Composition
and the Theory of the Party," Telos: An International
Cultural Quarterly 13 (Fall 1972)
Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble
Story of an American Radical (The University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 1948).
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing
up Okie (Verso: New York, 1997).
Ferruccio Gambino, "A Critique of
the Fordism of the Regulation School" in Werner Bonefeld
(ed.), Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political
Politics (Autonomedia: N.Y., 2003).
Dan Georgakas, Stewart Bird and Deborah
Shaffer, "'We Always Sang those Wonderful Songs,' Sophie
Cohen, Joe Murphy and the I.W.W.," Radical America,
March-June 1985
Joyce L. Kornbluh (ed.), Rebel Voices:
An I.W.W. Anthology (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor,
1964).
Staughton Lynd, Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical's
Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement (Cornell Univesity Press:
Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).
David Montgomery, The Fall of the
House of Labor: The workplace, the state, and American labor
activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
1987).
Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary
Friend, parts I & II (The Swallow Press: Chicago, 1970).
North Dakota Quarterly, volume 50, no. 4 (Fall 1982), festschrift for
Tom McGrath.
E.P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers
(Merlin Press: London, 1985).
Mario Tronti, "Workers and Capital,
Telos: An International Cultural Quarterly 14 (1972)
Mario Tronti, "Social Capital,"
Telos: An International Cultural Quarterly 17 (1973)
Brian Victoria, Zen at War (Weatherhill:
New York, 1997).
Stan Weir, "Class Forces in the
1970s," Radical America, volume 6, no. 1 (May 1972).
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
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