Some books to look at.
"The Columbine Massacre, sometimes called the Columbine Mine Massacre, occurred in 1927, in the town of Serene, Colorado. A fight broke out between Colorado state police and a group of striking coal miners, during which the unarmed miners were attacked with machine guns. It is unclear whether the machine guns were used by the police or by guards working for the mine. Six strikers were killed, and dozens were injured."
From the articleon Serene, CO:
"The area that once was the company town of Serene is now a public landfill in extreme southwestern Weld County, just outside the limits of the town of Erie and the city of Broomfield."
Propaganda for the angry wage worker.
I will print out, assemble, and post a free hardcopy of any pamphlet on this website for anybody who wants one. (Send requests to cynic@mretc.net)
This is the online click-through version of the prole.info pamphlet. I will print out, assemble, and post a free hard copy of this pamphlet for anybody who wants one. (Send requests to cynic@mretc.net)
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!
Those silly utopian socialists.
"The Haymarket affair is generally considered significant as the origin of international May Day observances for workers."
"Unless you’re a southern Coloradan with roots in the area, or a union member well-versed in the hard-fought rights of fellow workers or a history buff who has delved into books on the topic, you could easily not know that in the height of the so-called Progressive Era, the state of Colorado killed scores of strikers at the behest of the world’s richest family. Most U.S. history schoolbooks don’t mention Ludlow. Those that do generally treat it as a blip."
Josef Stalin interviewed by HG Wells [1934].
I loved reading this interview. I've never read Stalin before (partly because I find his politics to be atrocious), but it turns out he was very good at explaining Marxism; and Wells, with his "Anglo-Saxon Socialism" and mishmash of liberal sociology and worship of order for the sake of order, was very good at making Marxism sound appealing.
(Mirror: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm)
100 years ago today in Ludlow, Colorado.
Piketty's "Capital" has been getting a lot of attention. It sounds interesting and like he has done the tedious empirical work that I would never do. I'll have to read it... after I finally read Graeber's "Debt".
This is a link to the first of a four-part review. Find the next three parts immediately following it in Wolff's weblog archives.
"The purpose of the investigation, of course, may just have been to discourage activism, but in this case it had the opposite effect: People were inspired by the activists’ refusal to testify against one another in the face of what even four years ago looked to be a clear instance of a law enforcement agency overreaching."
"The U.S. Embassy in Haiti worked closely with factory owners contracted by Levi’s, Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom to aggressively block a paltry minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables."
See also The Nation's reporting on the same, "WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day: The US Embassy aided Levi’s, Hanes contractors in their fight against an increase in Haiti’s minimum wage." (http://www.thenation.com/article/161057/wikileaks-haiti-let-them-live-3-day)
The link to the Wikileak cables in question is broken in both articles. A working link is: http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/06/09PORTAUPRINCE553.html
Mike Leung and David Ellerman’s page about wage slavery and worker cooperatives.