#left wing unions

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Because Finns predominated on the far left of the labour movement, their shared cultural and political ties could mitigate the antagonisms between rival organizations and leaders. The relationship between the OBU [One Big Union] and the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] was not always antagonistic largely because the Finns predominated in both organizations. The IWW’s General Executive Board (GEB) kept track of the spread of organizations referring to themselves as the “One Big Union” throughout the world and reported their success in the various Wobbly papers. Space was also set aside in the IWW organ, the One Big Union Monthly, to list “the most important resolutions [of the meetings in Calgary], as a matter of record, and to allow of comparison with our own movement and similar movements in other countries.” It was suggested that the resolutions, in their entirety, would meet with a good response in the United States and provide an example of the success that industrial unionism could have.

Still, the GEB also advanced some criticisms of the OBU. The program of the Canadian One Big Union, it argued, was “sufficiently like the IWW program to make us forget the small differences.” A core principle of the IWW remained its resistance to political action. The Canadian (and Australian) adoption of political activism was seen as a characteristic of their newborn status. The GEB believed that over time this political focus would be abandoned, as it had been in the United States, “to save [their] life as an industrial organization.” Until that day, the OBU in Canada and Australia, having “both declared for industrial unions by means of which to take over the means of production and distribution,” could be regarded as allies.

Wobblies viewed Bolshevism as a great popular uprising against the upper class of the Old World. They looked to the continuing fight in Russia, as well as events in Germany and Eastern Europe, as inspirations for the fight in North America. They argued, however, that the Bolshevik revolution was still a political revolution and the culmination of political socialism. The method by which power had been obtained in Russia – the capture of the government and the replacement of tsarist officials with socialists – still fell within “the institutions we call ‘the state.’” The GEB argued that although the Bolsheviks and the IWW used the same expressions – “the abolition of classes,” “the abolition of capitalism,” “the socialization of the means of production,” “the establishment of the socialist republic” – they did not actually use them to mean the same things.

Even the Soviets, the central pillars of the new system in Russia, were viewed as “hasty” and, as a result, unable to properly take over the means of production. The growing tendency of the ruling party to resort to cooperative movements and direct state control was, the IWW argued, the root of the problems in Russia. “In short,” the GEB argued, “the Bolshevik revolution in Russia has not resulted in Industrial Democracy, but in a makeshift or temporary arrangement without stability, without any pretense of a final solution.”

The Bolshevik revolution did serve as an opportunity for the IWW to argue that

economic reconstruction of society cannot be accomplished by a government trying to order things with a high hand through laws and regulations, but has to be an organic outgrowth from the bottom, through the industrial organization of the workers at the place of work.

“Bolshevism,” it contended, “is the fire that clears off the old vegetation, ‘the brush.’ To plow, sow, reap among the charred stumps will be the immense task they will bequeath to us, the industrial organizers, the builders of the One Big Union.” Understandably, supporters of the Bolsheviks in the United States viewed the IWW as essentially revolutionary, yet “starting at the wrong end.” Their position was that the “revolutionary proletariat must first seize the power of the state.” The IWW countered by arguing that it would rather see “a gradual transition than a ‘revolutionary’ shock.” The IWW evidently believed that “as industrial evolution progresses the parliamentary state will become more and more inadequate for handling the problems of society.” The apparatus established by the IWW would assume control of these functions. Other left organizations in the United States, oriented more to the achievement of the dictatorship of the proletariat, advanced very different analyses.

Contradicting its prewar policy, most postwar intellectuals of the IWW viewed the “shocks of revolution” as

undesirable, because they cause bloodshed and suffering. On the other hand, we do not consider it advisable to destroy social organs, before we have the new organ ready which is to take its place. We think it is about time that men disabuse their minds of the idea that violence is absolutely necessary or desirable for social change.

Public consent, these Wobblies argued, would be the necessary precondition of radical change – and not vanguard-orchestrated mass action “à la Bolshevik.” Socialists and workers, it was argued, need only look to Canada and Australia and to the fifteen unions the IWW had organized “over the last 12 years” to see success. In addition, where were the revolutionists to come from? Did any plans exist concerning how the revolution would progress and what the next step would be for power to be obtained? “Social changes are not made,” the GEB argued, “in the wink of an eye, like changing your shirt.”"

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 77-78.

[badolmen]

They don’t even attempt to assassinate US politicians anymore. You notice that? Not since the anthrax scare back for… who was it, Barack? And even that… pathetic. This new generation has no respect for an honest hitman. I’m not sure this new generation has any honest hitman - you see that shit with Boeing? Sloppy, fucking disgraceful - you kill the whistleblowers before they get halfway to a lawsuit. What kind of fucking amateur is doing faked suicides the night before testimony? Goddamn greenhorns. Back in my day someone tried to shoot Ronald Reagan in broad daylight. There used to be bomb threats to Congress. I took out a few union leaders in the utilities sector myself. Today’s generation? Won’t even threaten to throw a punch - not even over on that - what’s it now, ‘X’? They got no guts. None! And they don’t even have poor impulse control to boot! Too much of that - that panopticon anxiety bullshit. “Oh what if I get a called out post???” People used to send the president letters full of bioweapons. In the mail! Today’s generation? Not a chance. All because of woke.

[k-wame]

this is the level of information literacy i wanna achieve

[hoping-for-novelty]

I think online political movements have a tendency to decide that it's all nothing, realize that getting everything isn't possible, and then become useless and inert

[hakaiika]

Hakaii'ka's Notes Day 4

"Any bureaucracy that domineers the working class, directing their work, setting their compensation, and deciding their production & distribution inherently reproduces a class system" -Mikhail Bakunin

[dn-838]

I saw some Neoconservative claim that the world has “gone so far-left” that the Soviet Union is now right-wing…

At this point I seriously question if 60% of people should even legally have the right to comment on political discourse because what!

[archersgoon]

wait finnikin is fantasy irish. of course he's from the eastern suburbs

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Unlike most of their brothers and sisters in eastern Canada, socialists in both Port Arthur and Fort William [now Thunder Bay] wholeheartedly embraced the creation of the OBU [One Big Union]. By October 1919, all 160 starch workers, all the bakers, and 18 general workers in Fort William united with the members of the IWW’s LWIU [Lumber Workers International Union] in Port Arthur and joined. The FOC’s [Finnish Organization of Canada] decision to declare itself a propaganda organization of the OBU created an auxiliary in Port Arthur that gained control of the Finnish Labour Temple by assuming its debt.

In the midst of the election campaign of October 1919, local newspapers reported that the OBU had established branches in the region and that an OBU-affiliated Central Labour Council (CLC) had been established in Fort William. The council adopted the structure, constitution, and bylaws of the Winnipeg council. Well attended by workers of all nationalities and by a variety of unions, the council heard predictions that the local trades and labour councils would disappear within the next few months. The newly formed executive board of the CLC reported that both the coal handlers of Fort William, who had been responsible for a number of the strikes before the First World War, and the pulp and paper mill workers were engaged in discussions that would see them joining the OBU within the next few weeks. The Brotherhood of Carpenters local, consisting of 250 members, had already gone over to the OBU. The General Workers’ Unit reported 60 new members in the last week alone.

The OBU thus appealed to a variety of strata within the working class and, in principle and up to a point in reality, transcended the region’s deep-seated ethnic divisions. Finnish workers, however, made up by far the largest ethnic group within its ranks. Well aware of this fact, and in order to discourage their further radicalization, police in both cities began a campaign of repression and harassment that, not incidentally, coincided with the 1919 election. Soon after the establishment of the first OBU branches in Port Arthur, for example, a series of raids shook that city’s “Finnish quarter” (the area immediately around the Finnish Labour Temple on Bay Street). Both local and Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP) admitted to having searched, on 9 October, seven homes described as “propaganda depots,” confiscating a large amount of “Bolshevik” literature and arresting seven “Finlanders.” These arrests were followed the next day by the search and seizure of “red” material at the Fort William bookstore of Edward Ollikkala, including a large amount of IWW literature. The RNWMP was quick to point out that “of the three centers of foreign population,” the Fort William coal dock section remained quiet and those arrested were not “enemy aliens,” merely “aliens.”

The presence of the OBU at the Lakehead worried the TLC [Trades and Labour Congress of Canada] so much that it sent William Varley, an American Federation of Labor (AFL) organizer from Toronto, to the region in late October to address the local Trades and Labour Councils and the General Workers’ Unit of the OBU in Fort William. Varley devoted much of his time to demonizing the Winnipeg General Strike and the “hopelessness of this form of action.” He contended that the AFL “had done much for the workers and was the only form of organization.” Not surprisingly, his comments were met with ridicule, contempt, and often laughter. Rather than promoting a discussion about bridging the growing division among the region’s more radical unions, the ILP [Independent Labour Party], and TLC members, the meeting intensified the general hostility towards the distant labour centre. ILP alderman A.H. Dennis, for example, contended that the TLC and it alone was to blame for the division that existed both locally and nationally among workers. As he suggestively remarked, “Labour had shown by the elections in Fort William, what they could do when it got together.” The TLC, he suggested, “was out of harmony altogether with the workers,” and it no longer represented “the workers any more than the Government did the people.” The OBU, the majority present agreed, was a necessity because of the past actions of the TLC and the AFL. It appears that at this point both leftists and centrists at the Lakehead supported the OBU and identified it as the defender of regional interests against the aloof bureaucrats of the TLC. As one delegate, tired of the double-speak and manipulation demonstrated by Varley, declared: “Well, if that’s what you want, let’s hand in our charter.”"

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 70-71.

[nietp]

Ma meuf a fait ce meme très slay c'est sur notre histoire d'amour

[makymakvrchat]

Freedom of Speech is dead or dying in Europe , police arresting people for social media postings

[naynaychan00]

A Soviet's Prayer - That Didn't Happen

Upon telling people about the horrors of communism as someone whose family still bears the emotional scars, I often come across a particularly hurtful comment from Western leftists

"USSR wasn't real communism" And I believed it, until a talk with a person born in Vietnam who complained that she couldn't talk with Westerners about the horrors of communism because she'd get the same reaction snapped me out of it Why is this phrase so hurtful to CEEs?

Well, first of all, when you say that USSR communism wasn't real communism, you're dismissing the lived experience of not just me, but millions of people

By telling us that our experience isn't real, you're invalidating us

You're asserting yourself, a privileged Western leftist who never grew up in the USSR above us, who did and whose homes and lives are still threatened by the USSR's successor, Russia

So, what can you do?

The same thing you tell others to do. CHECK YOUR GODDAMN PRIVILEGE AND LISTEN! You talk about listening to marginalized people, so take your own advice and LISTEN TO US!

Critically examine your chosen leftist political system the same way you examine capitalism with emphasis on CEEs' lived experiences

Sit down and examine your cognitive dissonance. Why does it make you feel uncomfortable when people with lived experience tell you "hey, our experience with communism fucking SUUUUUUCKED" to the point where you have to dismiss our lived experience?

Don't say that the USSR communism wasn't real communism. It was real to us This is part 1 of 6 of my script notes for my upcoming comic, The Soviet's Prayer, which is a rageucational comic about the pain of a CEE leftist when dealing with Westerners

[linksvonlenin]

A KPD or Communist/Socialist lead Germany, whether pro or anti Stalin wouldn’t have found itself in a war against the Soviet Union, the n4z1s wanted invade the Soviet Union from the start making it big part of the ideology to destroy judeo bolshevikism and colonize the land enslaving and murdering the slavic Population and building new germanic cities. So no H1tl3r and n4z1s weren’t leftist or Communist

Adding that it probably would‘ve been militarized but not in a comparable way to what actually happened cause there would no need to since they wouldn’t fight a war of extermination, total war, and so on

[troythecatfish]

Things you can thank a union for:

-Weekends

-An 8 hour workday

-Minimum wage

-Overtime pay

-Child labor laws

-Paid vacation

-Sick leave

-Breaks at work

-Employer-based health coverage

Don’t have some of these? Maybe it’s time to form a union.

[youarenotthewalrus]

I really need to get caught up on Dungeon Meshi because I keep seeing people posting about how Chilchuck is a work-to-rule union man who would never ever do a single thing for his job that wasn't on-the-clock and explicitly part of his job description and yet the first thing we see him do in canon is agree to embark on an extended, extremely dangerous mission for his totally bankrupt adventuring party that two other members of the group immediately quit over and given that unlike Marcille and Laios he doesn't seem to have any particular attachment to Fallin I need to know how these two facts could possibly be recounciled.

[dugaodna]

friendlyjordies fell off

[oh-wellian]

So I finally listened to that oliver anthony song and this schmuck really drags you in with the first verse thinking it's gonna be a hard hitting worker's rights song, and like look at him

He's singing his heart out

But no! He's a fucker who misses the point entirely. Anyway I'm gonna listen to Pete Seeger about it