In the month of May we celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, a vast subject when considering the source cultures from which such Americans arise; two thirds of whom are born elsewhere. If proximity in time and generation to the source culture of one’s family indicates the degree of influence it may have on our personal culture, what we ourselves think and do, its importance in a multicultural nation such as ours cannot be overstated.
Traitor Trump has attempted to erase it with all of our other celebrations of diversity and inclusion, and our fellow Americans who are nonwhite as well in this utterly Un-American violation of our values and national identity, and this we must Resist.
Herein I offer my reading list for Modern American Literature under the subheading Asian American Literature; I have posted my World Literature lists for China, Japan, India, and Islamic Peoples on my literary blog separately; it’s a huge and diverse subject, and I have lived or traveled in all four of these homelands and diasporas and many others as well, and have in many cases read these works in their original languages.
My intention as a high school English teacher in creating and offering these reading lists to students, which include lists for over twenty national literatures, was to provide a broad and inclusive curriculum free from politization, censorship, and control by school boards and other authorizing institutions, wherein students may find themselves reflected, explore the legacies of our histories and the consequences of our choices among unknown futures and possibilities, and discover adaptive strategies and maps of becoming human.
One ongoing project which I ran using these lists in high school may be useful for reading or home study groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then as partners select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation about each one to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values, goals, and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed; and often taught, led discussions, scored critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
Who am I, an American with fractional 1.2% Asian ancestry by DNA from ancestors predating the American Revolution, including .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka from an Indian ancestor who claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poet Shahzadi Zeb-un-Nissa and was grandmother to Henry who crossed the Delaware with Washington in 1776, and in the next generation .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa from an ancestor of the Ottoman Empire diaspora, to claim any basis for judging works of Asian literature as classics equal to those of Shakespeare or the King James Bible, and creating such lists? This is an excellent question, for reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
To this question there are two answers; first, you must read into the literature of a people and discover for yourself what is useful to you in becoming human. We are all unique individuals with our own personal history, and what may help you create yourself today will be different from such works in the past and in the future, because identity is a thing of change.
Second, some works are foundational and universally acclaimed for reasons which are compelling; for example, one cannot be Pakistani without the poetry of Iqbal. And though the study of literature by teenagers for purposes of identity construction is radically different from that of a scholar who seeks entrance into new and utterly alien ways of being human, both are a quest to discover who we ourselves can become, from others who are different as well as those alike.
The question of whose story is this remains primary, which is why I choose voices of members of the culture for study in preference to those of outsiders, with the exception of notable secondary and critical works of scholarship regarding history, biography, and other contexts.
We may not yet be able to change the world, but we can change ourselves. I hope that in so doing we may also one day change how we choose to be human together, as negotiated truths, values, and meaning.
As to my qualifications as a fellow reader of reasonably unbiased and noncoercive intentions, and one aware of the perils of Orientalism, fetishization, assimilation, and other forms of colonialism, let me begin with the primary layer of identity, language.
Languages are a hobby of mine, and I get lost trying to account for all of them, over fifty now throughout my lifetime, but Chinese is my second language, which I studied formally for ten years from the age of nine including traditional inkbrush calligraphy and spoken forms of Standard Hong Kong Cantonese and the Wu dialect of Shanghai, with some Japanese and Mandarin. During this formative period I also studied Zen Buddhism which I claimed as my religion on official documents through much of my twenties, whose sources are both Chinese and Japanese; and I loved the poetry of Basho so much that I was once inspired to walk his hundred mile trail to see where they were written.
In Kashmir my scholarship of Sufi literature as a member of the Naqshbandi order required literacy in Classical Quranic Arabic, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish; the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur. I already knew some conversational Levantine Arabic from Beirut before my senior undergraduate year, and was familiar with Rumi’s poetry, which I carried with me everywhere and led me to this area of study.
In Nepal I became literate in Classical Tibetan as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order, conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley, Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir. Hindi was my fifth local language, though of course I already had some familiarity with it, having studied Tantra with a priestess of Kali and on another of my travels been a member of the Shaivite Aghori brotherhood of warriors during my graduate school years, and during my Freshman year at university read Shankara’s works and those of Ramakrishna through the Vedanta Society.
Beyond my literary studies of the major great civilizations of Asia, I did cross much of it on foot during my Great Trek and have sailed throughout its seas, including on a traditional Phinisi schooner under the Bugis tribal captain Starfollower. I’ve trekked along the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and later returned to Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, lived in the Golden Triangle with the Karen and Shan peoples in Thailand and Burma and fought in their wars of independence, with the Kachin who guided me across the Kumon Range along the route used by Merrill’s Marauders in World War Two, with the Naga of north India, the Iban of Sarawak, and the Mentawai Islanders when I was castaway in a storm off Sumatra, where I built an outrigger canoe and sailed to the main port of Padang, then learned the martial art or Silat of Raja Harimau while living with the Minangkabau. I fought a revolution in Nepal, a war of liberation against India’s imperial conquest in Kashmir, and a piratical campaign to free slaves at sea throughout the Sultanate of Sulawesi, Borneo, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, to the Bay of Bengal and the whole of South Asia between.
From my time in the Golden Triangle and Shan States I learned Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, the Singpho language of the Kachin Confederation of northern Burma and India, and the Sino-Tibetan language of the Konyak Naga.
From my voyages and treks in South Asia, where I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, I Iearned Malay in which I am literate and so count among my Voices, this being the major language of the region, of sailors, and of my initial scholarship of Naqshbandi Sufism which is a pan-Islamic warrior brotherhood synonymous with the martial arts of silat, and Buginese which is the language of the Bugis people of the Sultanate of Sulawesi who are the primary shipbuilders and navigators of South Asia, where half of all shipped freight is still by sail, and of the pirates with whom I waged an antislavery campaign led by our Captain Starfollower.
Then came the Minangkabu of Sumatra where I studied the martial art of Raja Harimau, briefly I learned what I could of one of the many languages of the Mentawai Islands where I was castaway in a storm at sea and with an indigenous tribe built an outrigger or Oceanic Proa over a couple months to sail ten hours across open seas to the mainland of Sumatra at Padaung, Iban which is a language of the indigenous Dayak peoples of Borneo, and Hokkien Chinese in its Penang and Singaporean variants which is understood throughout the Peranankan or Straits Chinese communities.
Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty four languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, and Afrikaans which was invented at the court of an exiled Islamic Malay king as a trade language from indigenous African Khoisian and Bantu mixed with Dutch to create the only Germanic language written in Arabic script, and twenty seven of literacy, a total of over fifty.
I currently write and publish in over a dozen languages including Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.
Everywhere I have traveled, I learned what I could, helped where I could, reimagined and transformed myself as I could. For myself, the purpose of travel is to be broken open to new ways of becoming human. I am become a thing of interfaces between bounded realms of history, culture, and identity, and I now live in the empty spaces beyond our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, among the unknown and limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
I believe it is also important to recognize that we are all members of such multiplicities; that culture is layered and distributed in relational hierarchies of influence, and that we ourselves are the ultimate arbiter of such informing and motivating sources.
We are all pluralities.
And they are all in motion, our identities; processes of change, reimagination, and transformation.
We are speaking here of identity as a function of history and memory, as a prochronism or history expressed in our form of our choices in adaptation like the shell of a fantastic sea creature, but it is in our power to command such resources rather than be mastered by them, and our struggle to free ourselves from the tyranny of other people’s ideas, which confers our liberation and self-ownership as self-created and unique human beings.
Of the past and of traditional culture, let us understand what we must bring a reckoning for and discard in order to create a better humankind, and bring with us into the future only that which serves us in becoming human.
Rejoice and embrace that which we claim and which in return claims us in membership and community, and resist to the death whatever authority claims us without our consent; to this we offer only challenge and defiance.
September 25 2023 My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages
February 2 2025 James Joyce, On His Birthday: the Quest For A Universal Language and Transpersonal Human Consciousness As Reimagination and Transformative Change
Hawai’I seizes me with an immediacy and vividness in the context of Asian American literature and history, for it embodies both the terror of our racist and imperial-colonial history and our hopes for a better future as a diverse and inclusive United Humankind in which all human beings are truly equal. Between the systemic evils in which we are complicit and our liberation from unequal power and elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness there lies a long path of reckoning and emergence; but first we must find a vision of who we want to become, we humans, and in Hawai’I this too we may discover.
Hawai’I is a Cuba that never found a liberator.
Hawai’I as an idea lives close to my skin, for decades being the midwinter escape destination for my partner Theresa and her parents, siblings, and their children, for two weeks each January decamping en masse to one or more of the family vacation homes on the islands. Her favorite was sadly Lahaina on Maui, now ashes since the fire in 2023, and like much that was beautiful and full of joy only memories.
You may notice that herein I do not follow my usual rule of including only works by authors who are members of a historical people and may speak both of and for them, which in this case would limit my selection to books by native indigenous persons of Kānaka Maoli identity.
What is a Hawaiian, or an American? In Hawaii we see an image of our possible future as a united humankind, multiethnic and transhistorical, protean, inclusive, and diverse beyond limit or categorization.
In such a society, to claim membership is to become a member without question or qualification. To write as such a member is to negotiate the legacies of our history, which include epigenetic harms of racism and colonialism, and to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here are works by people born in Hawaii, or written in Hawaii from within its many layered and interdependent communities.
This is also true of its two great ancestor spirits, guardians and guides of the soul, who speak to us through dreams and poetic vision of our futures from a mythic past, Barack Obama and Maxine Hong Kingston. Some scholars argue that they were once living human beings like any other, who became exalted and deified in a remote age not because they were embodiments of Hegelian world-historical forces, but because they changed such forces and processes through poetic vision and a realized action of human values, and the nature and fate of humankind changed with them.
May we all become such fulcrums of change, and help to dream and to realize a free society of equals.
Hawaii, like America and all humankind, speaks here with many voices, all of which belong.
History and Culture
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’I, by Hokulani K. Aikau (Editor)
Pacific Worlds, by Matt K. Matsuda
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii, by Susanna Moore
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Honolulu: The First Century, by Gavan Daws
Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America’s First Imperial Adventure, by Julia Flynn Siler
Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
Captive Paradise: The Story of the United States and Hawaii, by James L. Haley
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’I, by Haunani-Kay Trask
Waikiki: A History of Forgetting & Remembering, by Andrea Feeser
Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai’I, by Liz Prato
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz
A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai’I, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Unearthing the Polynesian Past. Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist, by Patrick Vinton Kirch
No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa, by Henry Nalaielua, Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek
Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island,
by Lucinda Fleeson
My Time in Hawaii: A Polynesian Memoir by Victoria Nelson
Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Warren Beckwith
Ancient Hawai’I, by Herb Kawainui Kane
The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant, by Keaulumoku
The Burning Island: Myth and History of the Hawaiian Volcano Country, by Pamela Frierson
Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music, by John W. Troutman
The Haumana Hula Handbook: A Manual for the Student of Hawaiian Dance,
by Mahealani Uchiyama
Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past, by John R.K. Clark
Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai’I,
by Isaiah Helekunihi Walker
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan
Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary,
by David Liittschwager, Susan Middleton
Sam Choy’s Island Flavors, Sam Choy Woks the Wok : Stir Fry Cooking at Its Island Best, The Choy of Seafood: Sam Choy’s Pacific Harvest, Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen: More Than 150 Authentic Dishes from One of the World’s Most Delicious and Overlooked Cuisines, by Sam Choy
Written By Outsiders Looking In, as was said of Timothy Leary by The Moody Blues:
Hotel Honolulu, by Paul Theroux
The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Crist (Editor), Ralph Steadman (Illustrator)
Travelers’ Tales Hawai‘I, By Rick & Marcie Carroll
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands: Among Hawaii’s Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes, by Isabella Lucy Bird
Literature
Shark Dialogues, House of Many Gods, Kiana Davenport
Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, by Haunani-Kay Trask
This is Paradise: stories, Kristiana Kahakauwila
The Heart of Being Hawaiian, by Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Shadow Child, by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
The Tattoo, by Chris McKinney
School for Hawaiian Girls, by Georgia Ka’Apuni McMillen
The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn
Diamond Head, by Cecily Wong
Language of the Geckos and Other Stories, A Ricepaper Airplane, by Gary Pak
Hawaii Nei: Island Plays, by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Molokai, Kaaawa: A Novel about Hawaii in the 1850s, by O.A. Bushnell
A Little Too Much Is Enough, Makai, by Kathleen Tyau
Jan Ken Po, by Dennis M. Ogawa
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, by W.S. Merwin
Moloka’I, Daughter of Moloka’I, Honolulu, by Alan Brennert
Aloha Las Vegas: And Other Plays, by Edward Sakamoto
Picture Bride, The Land Of Bliss, Cloud Moving Hands, by Cathy Song
On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems, All-Night Lingo Tango, Babel, Holoholo: Poems, Delirium: Poems, The Alphabet of Desire, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, by Barbara Hamby
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, We Can Be Better: The Influential Speeches of Barack Obama, The Promiser: Barack Obama’s Fireside Chats, A Promised Land, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick
Woman Warrior, China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of the Woman Warrior and China Men, by Maureen Sabine
The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources,
by Yan Gao
Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Fiction,
by Jeanne Rosier Smith
Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature, by Brandy Nālani McDougall
The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History, by Noenoe K. Silva
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”, as written by Karl Marx.
Karl Marx transformed the history and evolution of humankind with a unique primary insight, simple to tell though it has many layers; we humans are self created beings, whose souls are artifacts of our civilization as historical and social constructions, interdependent with those of others, and if we change how we relate to each other as systems, narratives of identity, informing, motivating, and shaping forces, if we change the nature of our relationships, we also change the nature of humankind.
Are we not made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to each other?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership.
“The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” So wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which remains the most impactful revisioning of human relations, being, meaning, and values in the history of civilization.
Celebrate with me today the birthday of Karl Marx, who shaped from the Humanist tradition of the Enlightenment a toolkit for the realization of our potential humanity, of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and of the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power, from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and from the tyranny and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
An enduring legacy of Karl Marx is his instrumentalization of Socratic method as a tool of understanding unequal power as dialectical process, which can be generally applied in human sciences. This he demonstrated at length in the example of economics because he wanted to place it on a footing as science, much as Freud insisted on defining his new talking cure for madness as medical science to confer authority on it.
Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, May 15 1969. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third a part of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital. In this interpretation I was influenced by my context of growing up in a Reformed Church community, where spoken English reflected that of the King James Bible whose rhythms shape my writing still, and the influence of Coleridge, Blake, and other Romantic Idealists and religious symbolism in medieval art through my mother, who was a scholar of both.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean during the gap between junior and senior undergraduate years ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Camus and Sartre, Beckett and Pinter, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe free of any meaning or value we ourselves do not create, and the madness of our historical attempts to control fate and nature including our own in a mad world, where security is an illusion, truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, and relational, and our fear has been weaponized globally by carceral states in service to power, the centralization of authority, and our enslavement and dehumanization. In this second unfolding of understanding I found guidance and allyship with fellow revolutionaries and scholars of Marxist thought and its praxis, as we waged liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, American imperialism in Central America, and other theatres of Resistance to tyranny and oppression. During the period of my campaigns from my Baccalaureate program graduation in 1983 to a few months before I helped bring down the Berlin Wall with Bluey’s crew, my team included Soviet advisors and Cuban soldiers among many other fellow revolutionaries, from whom I had the benefit of guidance and training for my work in liberation struggle.
The third time I read Marx was over a decade after my baptism by fire in Beirut, this time as a counselor seeking to better understand and help my clients. I remain as I was then, a scholar of the intersection of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, whose primary field is the origin of human evil and its consequences as violence, though of course I have been greatly changed by my life experience, and my understanding has changed with me.
My third reading of Marx coincides with my Defining Moment of understanding the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force from which evil, violence, and fascist tyranny arise, a Ring of Power which requires the renunciation of love to wield, and a pathology which can be healed by the redemptive power of love. Here Marx helps us to understand the dynamics of unequal power as a system of oppression, a model which can be applied generally to issues including those of gender, race, and class.
We often have difficulty envisioning a therapeutic model of finding balance and harmony in society rather than a coercive one; we may align ourselves on the side of freedom against tyranny and the force and control of the carceral state, but how can we abolish the police and throw open the gates of the prisons, abolish borders and the counterinsurgency model of policing which enforces white supremacist and patriarchal terror, renounce the social use of force and abandon violence and war, cast down law and order from their thrones and forge a civilization of liberty and chaos in its place?
Let me provide you with an example of what that might look like. On my return from adventures abroad in my thirties, a period of recovery during my Great Trek of ten years, I took a job as a counselor in a program called Vision Quest run through a Native American tribe for court mandated youth, under the flags of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers with the Army’s permission, and with gorgeous Union Army blues parade uniforms.
As described to me, I would lead a group of fifteen boys through the program from a three month impact or boot camp in Arizona near the historic Fort, then ride horses to Denver and Philadelphia, sleeping in a tipi as one of several such teams while they learned riding and parade horse drill, and finish the program on a tall ship in the Florida Keys teaching them to sail. They would earn their GED high school equivalency certificate, and graduates would have served their sentences and be provided with jobs and transitional supervised community based housing. There was no lockdown; just men learning to live together without violence.
This sounded like a grand adventure, and for most of my life if you told me something was going to be an adventure, or as Obi-Wan says in the first Star Wars film “some damn fool idealistic crusade”, I’d likely do it. It’s the part they leave out of the pitch you need to worry about with this kind of thing; what no one told me was that the clients were mainly violent felons with four or five year sentences that would eventually land them in adult prisons if they washed out, with issues like psychotic rage and often highly trained and indoctrinated gang soldiers, cult zealots, and fanatics of political terror as well. It turned out to be both much tougher and much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and became my entry point into working as a counselor with this kind of client.
America at this time was caught up in a highly politicized racist hysteria over gangs and rising crime, whose emergence was to me clearly a consequence of the failures of capitalism as our civilization began to collapse from the inherent contradictions of our systems of unequal power. One reply to these conditions was to use greater force; the solution of stop and frisk policies, the school to prison pipeline whose design is to create prison bond labor and the re-enslavement of Black citizens, militarization of police, and the universalization of state terror as the counterinsurgency model of policing. This has two problems; it fails to address underlying causes of crime in wealth disparity, and it asks us to throw our children away.
They were some of the toughest and most unreachable boys in our nation, mainly Black and from the ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, with issues of abuse, abandonment, and addiction as consequences of structural and systemic inequalities and injustices, internalized oppression, and the legacy of slavery. And they were boys and future citizens our nation had thrown away.
We had a three percent recidivism rate from that program; 97% of our clients had no further contact with the law after completion. This amazing success with teenagers our society had pronounced violent and unreformable criminals began with an awareness that perpetrators are also victims, both and neither good nor evil, and was won by providing a constructive way for them to earn honor and membership; so far like many other programs based on military models of identity construction.
But it was the horses, wild mustangs given to each new client as their own personal mount who had to break and learn to ride them, that allowed them to forge the ability to bond with others, because you can trust a horse and it will never betray you. Teambuilding exercises did the rest, as in the military but without the purpose of violence.
So it was, with The Communist Manifesto in my saddlebag and dreaming with serenity between a former gang enforcer and extremist of Louis Farrakhan’s racial separatist Nation of Islam who had been shot six times in six different gunfights with other Black teenagers his ideology had classified as enemies and whose joy was to recite poetry from my copy of Rumi, and on the other side a former Jamaican Posse drug lord who had two million dollars in cash in his pockets when his reign of terror in Philly ended in betrayal and arrest and who had discovered a genius for choreography in adapting reggae to parade drill, that I had a primary insight and realization of the nature of violence as a disease of power, of addiction to power and of unequal power, which operates multigenerationally as epigenetic trauma and historical legacies of slavery and racism, and often a result of secret power.
Dehumanization is the end result of commodification; Jean Genet famously called the quest for wealth and power necrophilia for this reason. William S. Burroughs coined the term the Algebra of Need as a metaphor of Capitalism. And with his invention of the philosophy of Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre explored the implications of Marx’s primary insights as a psychology of the consequences of unequal power relations and the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions as alienation, falsification, commodification, internalized oppression, and the disfigurement and theft of the soul by hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and the hegemonic forces of those who would enslave us.
As a systemic and pervasive means of transforming persons into things, capitalism is an enabler which acts as a force multiplier for a host of evils, inequalities of racism and patriarchy, and divisions of exclusionary otherness, touching every aspect of our lives including our identity and social relations and confronting individuals with enormous and weaponized forces with which we must wrestle.
And our best response to these threats is solidarity in refusal to submit or be isolated by our modern pathology of disconnectedness, divided by otherness and identitarian categories of exclusion and privilege and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and subjugated by authorized identities and the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power; to unite as a band of brothers, sisters, and others and to shelter and protect our humanity and viability through and with others as a United Humankind.
In our revolutionary struggle for our souls, for autonomy and self ownership, for liberty and our uniqueness as self created beings, and for the liberation of humankind, we are each other’s best resource of action.
We are not designed to survive alone, and it can be difficult to get people in crisis to reach out for help, and for our institutions of caregiving to find where help is needed before things spiral downwards into violence, nor can violence be cured with violence or state repression. But this is the great mission of our humanity; to unite across the boundaries of our differences in revolutionary struggle to become better.
Let us defy the malign forces that would divide and enslave us and consume our souls. So I say with Karl Marx, the great visionary of liberty and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; People of the world, unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.
We celebrate today the liberation of Mexico from the Austrian Empire, a glorious victory of anticolonialism which continues to inspire a nation today. Where then are the Mexicans in American History?
How did Texas and much of America become a quasi white ethnostate whose wealth and power are created by the de facto slave labor of Mexican and other noncitizen workers, workers who must remain illegal and hence exploitable and invisible in service to white elites resulting in our humanitarian crisis at the border? For if all the huddled masses yearning to be free were welcomed as fellow citizens and builders of the nation, not just the white ones, we would have to pay them a fair and equal wage and the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites would crumble into nothingness.
This is the real reason for the demonization of migrants by the Republican Party; they must have a vast pool of illegal and nearly free labor with almost no rules about what can be done to workers, and so wage a class war to enforce the capture of our society by the Fourth Reich.
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
And these imposed conditions of struggle emerge from the history of slavery and the role of Texas as a Confederate bastion, as migrant labor replaces slave labor.
The historical legacy of slavery links racism against Black Americans and Mexican-Americans emanating from Texas, the heart of darkness.
Founded by theft from Mexico and the lawless banditry of slave owners who refused to emancipate their slaves, Texas remained a rogue state in fact long after joining the United States, a persistent delusion of its mad quasi-emperor Sam Houston and the displaced Confederates who recolonized and tried to use it as a base from which to seize Mexico after the Civil War. This is why Sherman parked an army on the border after the war, and ran guns and covert operations into Mexico against the Confederate exiles and on behalf of the Juarez revolt; Wild Bill Hickok was his most famous commando.
Texas was not always a den of racism and violence; founded in 1579 as a colony of exiled Jews by Spain, the grandees who settled and ruled it dreamed of a new Sepharad wherein peoples of all races and faiths may live under the same law, arguably a nearer model of freedom and equality than ancient Greece and Rome for the new nations of Protestant Europe and a historical influence on American democracy.
This first ideal of Texas as an inclusive and egalitarian society ended in 1595 when Louis de Carvajal, the founder and Governor of the Kingdom of New Leon- current Mexico and Texas- was arrested as a practicing Jew and died in prison; his sister Francesca and her four children Isabel, Catalina, Leonor, and Luis were tortured and burned at the stake as Jews by the Inquisition in 1596, her last child Mariana joining them at the stake in 1601. Of de Carvajal’s legacy, only the city he founded, Monterrey, remains.
Whether this idea of Texas as a multiracial and multifaith refuge was realized before being infiltrated and seized by the tyrannies of the Spanish Empire and its Inquisition is beside the point; there is an alternate story and Golden Age to reclaim, the dream of Texas as a glorious Andalus.
In recent years I have been given a measure of hope for our future and joy in this moment of great darkness, amorality, hate, and cruelty as embodied in our captured state of Vichy America and the fascist Trump regime; the birth of a nephew, Nicolas Santiago Sweeney, to my partner Dolly’s nephew, son of her sister Lisa, Nicolas Sweeney, and his wife Melissa Iliana Rocha Sweeney.
Let us make a better future than we have the past, and redeem the hope of our ideals.
As I wrote in my post of March 16 2020, Walls of Hate, Tyranny, and Empire: America’s Global Borders; As we are inundated with the global awakening to fear of the coronavirus pandemic, it becomes clear that this is a natural triggering stressor which parallels a manufactured one, that of borders and refugee crises, in its behaviors and effects in our social and political environment as leverage for nationalist and fascist tyrannies of force and control in the subversion of democracy and the transformation of our world into a vast prison.
Overwhelming and generalized fear is a necessary precondition of authoritarian regimes, and of violence and the use of social force generally, which together with submission to authority may be regarded as a First Cause of the disease of power in the sense that Thomas Aquinas argued causality and being, though in the absolute sense which he used all causes are recursive and enfold each other; ”If there is no First Cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.”
Authority and fear also alienate us from ourselves, dehumanize and commodify us as does capitalism as its outer form; for this is about the theft of our identity and power by those who would enslave us.
The first consequence of the emergence of authority and the disempowerment of its subjects is the modern pathology of disconnectedness; and this is the link which binds authority and tyranny together, and its weak point. Here is where resistance and revolution must act to shatter the knot of interdependent and mutually reinforcing systems which rob us of our humanity and our freedom.
We must build bridges not walls, togetherness not isolation, unity not division, and forge a borderless world and a free society of equals.
Todd Miller describes America’s empire of borders in a Jacobin interview; “Since coming into office, the Trump administration has launched unrelenting racist attacks on immigrants and refugees. He seems determined to build his wall by any means necessary and has unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to conduct raids, arrest people, throw them in concentration camps, and deport them.”
“ But, contrary to widespread liberal illusions, Trump did not start this war on migrants, but only intensified it.
In fact, as Todd Miller demonstrates in his new book, Empire of Borders, politicians in both major parties have collaborated over the last few decades to construct a massive border regime that polices migrants not only in the United States but throughout the world. In this interview with Jacobin contributor Ashley Smith, Miller discusses the origins and features of this new imperial strategy — and the international resistance against it.
AS
One of the points you make throughout your book is that this border regime did not begin with Trump but has been a feature of the United States from its founding. How has the US state internationalized its border regime over the last few decades, and how does it operate today?
TM
The US state established its borders through colonization, dispossession, genocide, slavery, and exploitation. This is especially true of its border with Mexico in the nineteenth century.
That violent process of conquest is too often legitimized by mainstream historians when they use innocuous-sounding phrases like “westward expansion,” dress up imperial bullying like the Gadsden Purchase as “agreements,” and craft self-congratulatory accounts of the Mexican-American War.
But there is no way to make the white supremacy of “manifest destiny” palatable. The United States seized land, planted its flag, and killed anyone that resisted, especially indigenous peoples, all in the name of God and European civilization.
It expanded its border regime through its imperial seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American War. By the early twentieth century, the United States had established its territorial border, set up semicolonies, and policed seemingly independent states in its hemisphere with “gunboat diplomacy.”
Even knowing this history, it took me a while to understand that the US border extended well beyond its mainland. I think the first time I grasped this was while covering the migration out of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010. I quickly realized that this was not a migration story but a border story.
Shortly after the earthquake, as hundreds of thousands of people were still in the rubble of their homes, a US jumbo jet flew overhead blasting out an announcement from the Haitian ambassador. He warned in Creole, “If you think you will reach the United States and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right in the water and send you back home where you came from.”
Soon after, sixteen Coast Guard cutters came right up to the Haitian shore to stop the flight of any refugees. Then Washington contracted the private prison company GEO Group for “guard services” (presumably in a tent city in Guantánamo Bay) to in effect jail the victims.
At once I saw that the US border was: 1) geographically removed from where I normally had thought it was; 2) elastic and able to extend at will very far from the US mainland; and 3) not passive, but aggressive. In a nutshell, the border was much bigger — much, much bigger — than I ever thought it was.
For example, in 2012, when I was on an investigative trip to Puerto Rico, I learned that the tiny Mona Island — a mere thirty miles from the Dominican shore — was also literally part of the US border.
So when a sinking boat carrying Haitians to another destination crashed onto the shores of that small island, they were absorbed by the US border: detained, arrested, incarcerated, and eventually deported by the US Department of Homeland Security back to Haiti.
This is just one instance. Another is the Dominican Border Patrol, which the United States trained and equipped after its creation in 2007. And a third is Guatemala’s new Chorti border patrol, which the US Embassy, one commander told me, helped create to police its Honduran borderlands.
This wasn’t limited just to the Western Hemisphere. On other trips I found out that US funds created a Kenyan border patrol and a massive surveillance system on the Jordanian-Syrian border. And this is just scratching the surface.
To understand this, I think it’s important to go back to the 9/11 Commission Report’s paradigm-changing statement: “The American Homeland is the planet.” Since 2003, CBP has created twenty-three embassy attaches from Nairobi to Tokyo to Berlin to Brasilia and is at work in nearly one hundred countries through various border programs — creating, essentially, an empire of borders.
While the United States has always had such international border operations, it dramatically expanded them after 9/11. When I asked one CBP official at its Washington headquarters to describe with one word how much they’ve grown since then, he answered: “exponentially.”
AS
So that’s how the United States controls the global flow of people. How do its policies cause migration to begin with?
TM
Washington’s climate, economic, and military policies bear an enormous responsibility for creating the conditions that drive people from their countries. The United States has long been history’s top emitter of greenhouse gases (since 1900 it has emitted nearly seven hundred times more than Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador combined), driving up temperatures, causing desertification, raising sea levels, exacerbating preexisting situations (often of intense poverty, especially in rural areas), effectively making it a force behind displacement.
While borders have been hardened to deter, arrest, incarcerate, expel, and ultimately sort and classify the world’s most vulnerable people, destructive forces that cause migration can go where they please. One example of this is the “open border” policy in place for the US military.
With its forces deployed in over eight hundred bases around the world, Washington has conducted countless military interventions and coups, leading people to flee to other countries for safety. For example, in 1954 the United States intervened in Guatemala to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, resulting in a thirty-six-year armed conflict and brutal military repression.
Another example is Washington-driven neoliberal economics. It has forced indebted countries to privatize state-owned companies, slash their welfare states, and open up their economies to US multinationals. While that made money for local and international capitalists, it wrecked the lives of small farmers and workers, many of whom left their countries for the United States and other advanced capitalist countries to find work as criminalized cheap labor.
And if countries didn’t agree to neoliberalism, the United States often forced it upon them at gunpoint. If you look in Central America, Mexico, all around the world, this convergence of military and neoliberal policies has both done considerable damage and caused massive displacement of people.
As the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman wrote so presciently and unselfconsciously in 1999, for the “hidden hand of the market” to work you need the “hidden fist” of the military to back it up and enforce it. And part of that hidden fist is the border regime that polices the migrants and refugees at its borders.
AS
This border regime, as you argue in your book, has generated a booming new industry in border security. What does this look like, and how does it intensify the attack on migrants in the United States and throughout the world?
TM
The US empire of borders has spawned a whole new dimension of carceral capitalism. It’s raking in enormous profits off the proliferation of walls, surveillance technology, checkpoints, and detention facilities.
When I was traveling in Israel and Palestine in 2017 with an international group, a man from South Africa told me that what we were seeing was worse than apartheid era in his country. He made the point that in South Africa, while it was bad from 1948 to the early 1990s, there weren’t all the checkpoints, walls, armed agents and soldiers, and technologies that we were seeing in the occupied territories.
During that trip we went to one of the biggest weapons and technology conferences in Israel. In the Tel Aviv convention center, Israeli companies pitched “proven” technologies, which they boasted had been tested on Palestinians under occupation, to governments from all over the world to police their own borders and oppressed populations.
At another homeland security expo in Tel Aviv I saw the demonstration of the Orbiter III, which they called the “suicide drone.” The weapons dealer said that it could conduct surveillance on a target, and then, if they so decided, dive-bomb it and utterly destroy it.
Even though Israel is the “homeland security/surveillance capital” of the world, as scholar Neve Gordon put it, the industry has metastasized throughout the world. I have been to similar border regime bazaars in San Antonio, in Paris, and in Mexico City.
This whole industry has boomed as states across the globe have built more than seventy border walls (up from fifteen in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall), spent billions on surveillance technologies, and hired hundreds of thousands of armed agents to guard the jagged frontier of the Global North and Global South. Corporations are profiting off border policing, adding crass capitalist interest to crude state repression.
AS
What are the domestic impacts of the border regime in the United States? How has it created a new caste division in the working class, deepened racial divisions, and built a state more prepared to repress its population?
TM
Border regimes, by their very nature, are systems of exclusion. They are enforced not only by guards but bureaucracies that oversee elaborate rules intended to make noncitizens work hard for their papers as if they were gaining membership to an exclusive club.
In this sense, the border is much more than the international boundary line. In the United States, the border zone, or jurisdiction, extends a hundred miles inland along the 2,000-mile Mexican border, 4,000-mile Canadian border, and both coasts. That’s a good swath of country where Homeland Security forces operates in what the American Civil Liberties Union has called a “constitution-free zone.”
Over 200 million people, approximately two-thirds of the US population, live in this zone, where the Border Patrol can set up checkpoints, do roving patrols, work with local and state police, and racially profile and target people for arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the last twenty-five years,
the number of agents has ballooned from 4,000 to 21,000, and annual budgets have gone up from $1.5 billion in 1994 to $23 billion in 2018. Detention centers now exceed 250 and can be found throughout the country.
This massive apparatus is only growing larger and becoming more invasive. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has been testing new small- and medium-sized drones with the ability to “fly unnoticed by human hearing and sight” along a “predetermined route observing and reporting unusual activity and identifying faces and vehicles involved in that activity comparing them to profile pictures and license plate data.”
All of this amounts to a gargantuan, and profitable, exclusion apparatus, effectively creating a modern caste system that extends throughout the country and indeed the globe.
AS
Amid the struggle to close down Trump’s concentration camps, activists are again debating what we should demand. Why should we call for an end to the border regime and open borders?
TM
I was just listening to a podcast featuring Vox founder Ezra Klein, who said that he would be open to an argument for open borders if it were shown that it would not destabilize the country. Of course, Klein isn’t the only one with that view, it’s a mainstream one in many ways.
However, what I think is the exact opposite. Hardened borders exist and are proliferating to police a world precisely because the global situation is already precarious and unstable. As I mentioned before, Washington’s climate, economic, and military policies (and to take it further, those of border-building Western regimes such as the European Union and Australia) have wrecked whole sections of the world.
When the United States responds to these people by militarizing the border, it only exacerbates the instability. It doesn’t solve the causes of migration but locks them in place; creates chaos at the border, especially for migrants; stimulates corporate investment in the border regime; compromises our civil rights and liberties; and encourages demagogues like Trump to whip up xenophobia and racism.
I think of the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar who, after removing a piece of the US-Mexico border wall near San Diego, said “I will not accept that this wall is in my face.” The whole purpose of Jarrar’s art is not only to dismantle a border apparatus, but also to transform into something more utilitarian.
For example, he pounded a sledgehammer into the concrete wall that separated west from east Jerusalem, took out chunks of cement, and turned them into sculptures of soccer balls and cleats to give back to the kids whose soccer fields the wall had taken away. I often think of Jarrar’s question: why do we accept that these borders are in our face?
It is akin to accepting a global caste system, a system of segregation long rejected by civil rights movements and internationally condemned by anti-apartheid movements. The one silver lining in the age of Trump is that his racist attacks on refugees and migrants has produced a new movement to challenge and dismantle the global border regime.’
In the words of Lenin which founded a political party and a Revolution; “What is to be done?”
As I wrote in my post of December 18 2023, International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”; We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the archetype and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
A few days ago Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and identity politics.
The other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Gaza and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
Living Undocumented series trailer/Netflix
From Executive Producer Selena Gomez
John Oliver on Trump deportations: ‘usually blatantly racist and always cruel’:
The Last Week Tonight host decries Trump’s fearmongering on immigration and disregard for the rule of law
America as a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Jay’s Revised Modern Canon
Modern American Literature 2025 Edition
Hispanic-American History
Century of the Wind, Eduardo Galeano
Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, Zaragosa Vargas
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, Miriam Pawel
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, John Storm Roberts
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, Diego Rivera
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, Carlos Fuentes intro
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, Dolores Tierney, Deborah Shaw, & Ann Davies, Editors
Hispanic-American Literature
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, The Sum of Our Days, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, The Sum of Our Days, Conversations With Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabele Allende
Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion, Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Latin Moon in Manhattan, Our Lives Are the Rivers: A Novel,
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Silvio Sirias
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena ViramontesT
Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Water Museum, The House of Broken Angels, Tijuana Book of the Dead, Luis Alberto Urrea
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Oscar Hijuelos
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Harold Bloom
House of the Impossible Beauties, Joseph Cassara
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Spanish
5 de mayo de 2026 Cinco de Mayo: sobre esta celebración de la liberación anticolonial, cuestionando la eliminación de los mexicanos de la historia estadounidense y amplificando la solidaridad histórica de los pueblos negros y mexicanos en la historia reescrita de Texas
Celebramos hoy la liberación de México del Imperio Austriaco, una gloriosa victoria del anticolonialismo que continúa inspirando a una nación hoy. ¿Dónde están entonces los mexicanos en la historia estadounidense?
¿Cómo se convirtió Texas en un etnoestado cuasi blanco cuya riqueza y poder son creados por el trabajo esclavo de facto de los trabajadores mexicanos, trabajadores que deben seguir siendo ilegales y, por lo tanto, explotables e invisibles al servicio de las élites blancas, lo que resultó en nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera? Porque si todas las masas apiñadas que anhelan ser libres fueran bienvenidas como conciudadanos y constructores de la nación, no sólo las blancas, tendríamos que pagarles un salario justo e igualitario y la riqueza, el poder y los privilegios de las elites hegemónicas se verían afectados. desmoronarse en la nada.
Ésta es la verdadera razón de la demonización de los inmigrantes por parte del Partido Republicano; deben tener una vasta reserva de mano de obra casi libre y casi sin reglas sobre lo que se les puede hacer a los trabajadores, y así librar una guerra de clases para imponer su captura de nuestra sociedad.
¿Para qué tenemos una frontera? Hemos trazado una línea en la arena para explotar la disparidad y crear mano de obra migrante ilegal; un recurso invisible de aquellos sin existencia legal a quienes podemos hacer cualquier cosa sin represalias, y cuya mano de obra barata alimenta vastas industrias de agricultura, hotelería, cuidado y manufactura.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo.
Y estas condiciones de lucha impuestas surgen de la historia de la esclavitud y del papel de Texas como bastión confederado, a medida que la mano de obra migrante reemplaza al trabajo esclavo.
El legado histórico de la esclavitud vincula el racismo contra los afroamericanos y los mexicano-estadounidenses que emana de Texas, el corazón de las tinieblas.
Fundado por el robo a México y el bandidaje ilegal de los dueños de esclavos que se negaron a emancipar a sus esclavos, Texas siguió siendo un estado rebelde mucho después de unirse a los Estados Unidos, una ilusión persistente de su loco cuasi-emperador Sam Houston y los confederados desplazados que recolonizaron y trató de utilizarlo como base desde la cual apoderarse de México después de la Guerra Civil.
Texas no siempre fue una guarida de racismo y violencia; Fundada en 1579 como una colonia de judíos exiliados por España, los grandes que la establecieron y gobernaron soñaron con una nueva Sefarad en la que pueblos de todas las razas y religiones pudieran vivir bajo la misma ley, posiblemente un modelo de libertad e igualdad más cercano que la antigua Grecia y Roma para las nuevas naciones de la Europa protestante y una influencia histórica en la democracia estadounidense.
Este primer ideal de Texas como sociedad inclusiva e igualitaria terminó en 1595 cuando Luis de Carvajal, fundador y Gobernador del Reino de Nuevo León -actuales México y Texas- fue arrestado como judío practicante y murió en prisión; su hermana Francesca y sus cuatro hijos Isabel, Catalina, Leonor y Luis fueron torturados y quemados en la hoguera como judíos por la Inquisición en 1596; su última hija, Mariana, se unió a ellos en la hoguera en 1601. Del legado de De Carvajal, sólo la ciudad fundó, Monterrey, permanece.
No viene al caso si esta idea de Texas como un refugio multirracial y multirreligioso se hizo realidad antes de ser infiltrada y tomada por las tiranías del Imperio español y su Inquisición; hay una historia alternativa y una Edad de Oro que recuperar, el sueño de Texas como un Andalus glorioso.
Hagamos un futuro mejor que el pasado y redimamos la esperanza de nuestros ideales.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 16 de marzo de 2020, Muros de odio, tiranía e imperio: las fronteras globales de Estados Unidos; A medida que nos vemos inundados por el despertar global al miedo a la pandemia de coronavirus, queda claro que se trata de un factor estresante desencadenante natural que es paralelo a uno fabricado, el de las fronteras y las crisis de refugiados, en sus comportamientos y efectos en nuestro entorno social y político. palanca para las tiranías nacionalistas y fascistas de fuerza y control en la subversión de la democracia y la transformación de nuestro mundo en una gran prisión.
El miedo abrumador y generalizado es una precondición necesaria de los regímenes autoritarios, y de la violencia y el uso de la fuerza social en general, que junto con la sumisión a la autoridad puede considerarse como una primera causa de la enfermedad del poder en el sentido en que Tomás de Aquino argumentó la causalidad y siendo, aunque en el sentido absoluto en que él usó, todas las causas son recursivas y se envuelven unas a otras; “Si no existe la Causa Primera, entonces el universo es como una gran cadena con muchos eslabones; cada eslabón está sostenido por el eslabón que está encima de él, pero toda la cadena no está sostenida por nada”.
La autoridad y el miedo también nos alienan de nosotros mismos, nos deshumanizan y mercantilizan, al igual que el capitalismo como su forma exterior; porque se trata del robo de nuestra identidad y poder por parte de aquellos que nos esclavizarían.
La primera consecuencia de El surgimiento de la autoridad y la pérdida de poder de sus súbditos es la patología moderna de la desconexión; y éste es el vínculo que une la autoridad y la tiranía, y su punto débil. Aquí es donde la resistencia y la revolución deben actuar para romper el nudo de sistemas interdependientes y que se refuerzan mutuamente y que nos roban nuestra humanidad y nuestra libertad.
Debemos construir puentes, no muros, unión y no aislamiento, unidad y no división, y forjar un mundo sin fronteras y una sociedad libre de iguales.
En palabras de Lenin que fundó un partido político y una Revolución; “¿Lo que se debe hacer?”
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de diciembre de 2023, Día Internacional del Migrante: “No hay crisis migratoria; Hay una crisis de solidaridad”;
Celebramos hoy la voluntad humana de llegar a ser, de explorar, de descubrir nuevos mundos y de crear nuevas posibilidades de llegar a ser humanos, en la figura icónica del migrante como epítome y fuerza impulsora de la civilización.
A menudo, el migrante también representa el arquetipo y la alegoría del Extraño, con todas las ambigüedades, peligros y oportunidades para la reimaginación y transformación del ser humano, el significado y el valor implícitos en los temas de este psicodrama universal primario.
Hace unos días, Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, citó el libro que mantuvo en su mesita de noche durante años en lugar de una Biblia, Mein Kampf, ante multitudes que lo vitoreaban durante un mitin electoral en referencia a los migrantes; “Están envenenando nuestra sangre”.
No importa dónde se empiece con las ideas de la alteridad como una amenaza a la identidad, el origen de todo fascismo, siempre se termina a las puertas de Auschwitz.
Demos al fascismo la única respuesta que merece; ¡Nunca más!
La ola de fascismo que recorre el mundo estos últimos años se origina en un miedo primario a la alteridad como pérdida del yo; esto es utilizado como arma al servicio del poder por aquellos que nos esclavizarían, se convierte en divisiones y jerarquías de pertenencia a élites y alteridad excluyente, racismo, patriarcado, nacionalismo, y todo esto se cohesiona en identidades autorizadas y políticas de identidad.
El otro es siempre nuestro propio reflejo y no podemos escapar el uno del otro. Por eso el fascismo y la tiranía son inherentemente inestables y siempre colapsan en la depravación y la ruina; cuando proyectamos lo que no nos gusta de nosotros mismos sobre los demás, como objetos de los que abusar, como si exorcizaramos nuestros demonios, nos deshumanizamos a nosotros mismos y a ellos. Y esa negación fracasa como estrategia de transformación y adaptación al cambio, engrandeciendo instituciones y sistemas osificados hasta convertirlos en amenazas en lugar de soluciones, y todo el edificio se derrumba debido a las fallas mecánicas de sus contradicciones, como está sucediendo ahora en Estados Unidos y en toda la civilización humana.
Por eso la aceptación de nuestra propia oscuridad y monstruosidad es crucial para la lucha por la liberación; ¿De qué otra manera podemos lograr cambios en los sistemas de opresión si no podemos enfrentarlos en nosotros mismos? Especialmente debemos mantenernos cerca e interrogar sentimientos como el disgusto, la repulsión, la ira y otros atavismos del instinto que arrastramos detrás de nosotros como una cola invisible de reptil con el reconocimiento de que nada de lo que sentimos es bueno o malo, sino sólo cómo los usamos en nuestras acciones.
Al final, lo único que importa es qué hacemos con nuestro miedo y cómo usamos nuestro poder.
Contra este Anillo Wagneriano de miedo, poder y fuerza debemos lanzar un contrafuego de solidaridad y amor, porque sólo esto puede hacernos libres. Debemos hablar directamente de ese miedo a la alteridad como pérdida de identidad y de poder si queremos cambiar el rumbo de la historia hacia una sociedad libre de iguales y no tiranías fascistas de sangre, fe y suelo, hacia la democracia y una sociedad diversa e inclusiva. Humanidad unida y no estados carcelarios de fuerza y control, hacia el amor y no el odio.
Somos más fuertes juntos que solos, como demostró Benjamín Franklin con su haz de flechas en referencia a Eclesiastés 4:12 y el Gran Pacificador iroqués llamó en algunos contextos Deganawidah. Una sociedad diversa e inclusiva nos hace más poderosos aunque de diferentes maneras, más ricos, más resilientes y adaptables, ofrece alegrías desconocidas y abre nuevas perspectivas y posibilidades de convertirnos en humanos.
El cambio no tiene por qué significar miedo y pérdida; porque también ofrece nuevas maravillas ilimitadas. Debemos ser agentes de cambio y portadores del Caos, si queremos convertirnos en un punto de apoyo y cambiar el equilibrio de poder en el mundo.
La idea de los derechos humanos ha sido abandonada por sus antiguas naciones garantes, y pueblos enteros en Gaza y Ucrania han sido borrados en guerras de limpieza étnica como muestras de atrocidades y crímenes contra la humanidad, y debido a este y muchos otros fallos de los sistemas, la civilización está colapsando; cosas efímeras e ilusorias como la riqueza y el poder no tienen sentido a la sombra de nuestra degradación y el terror de nuestra nada frente a la muerte.
El comentario de un lector en mi publicación del 8 de diciembre, La caída de Estados Unidos como garante de la democracia y los derechos humanos, contenía la frase “más esperanzados en el bien de la mayoría de las personas”.
Aquí sigue mi respuesta; Yo también creí alguna vez en cosas como la bondad humana, pero después de cuarenta años de guerras, revoluciones, resistencia y lucha de liberación en todo el mundo, no puedo. En lo que confío y espero, si no en lo que creo, es en la solidaridad de acción en la lucha contra los sistemas de opresión y las hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios de las élites. Así es mi fe; la igualdad de las necesidades humanas y la necesidad de nuestra unidad en las tomas de poder para crear un Libertad sociedad de iguales.
Según lo escrito por Jean Genet, quien me hizo prestar el juramento de la Resistencia y me encaminó en el camino de mi vida durante el asedio de Beirut en 1982; “Si nos comportamos como los del otro lado, entonces somos el otro lado. En lugar de cambiar el mundo, lo único que lograremos será un reflejo del que queremos destruir”.
¿Cómo acogeremos al extranjero?
Estados Unidos como un faro de esperanza para el mundo, según lo escrito por Emma Lazarus;
“No como el gigante descarado de la fama griega,
Con miembros conquistadores a horcajadas de tierra en tierra;
Aquí, en nuestras puertas del atardecer bañadas por el mar, se alzarán
Una mujer poderosa con una antorcha, cuya llama
Es el relámpago aprisionado, y su nombre
Madre de los Exiliados. De su mano-faro
Resplandece la bienvenida mundial; sus ojos dulces mandan
El puerto con puente aéreo que enmarcan las ciudades gemelas.
“¡Conserven, tierras antiguas, su pompa histórica!” ella llora
Con labios silenciosos. “Dame tus cansados, tus pobres,
Tus masas apiñadas anhelan respirar libres,
Los miserables desechos de tu repleta costa.
Envíame a estos, los desamparados, tempestuosos,
¡Levanto mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada!”
Family album: Nick and Melissa Sweeney
If our future looks like this, maybe we’ll be okay. It’s a possibility that gives us something to fight for.
Melli versus the pinata at the wedding, at the old McKay farm, as Nick celebrates her victory
McKay Family
Rocha Family
I’m reasonably certain, within less than two futures out of every one hundred, that humankind will be extinct in less than a thousand years, after centuries of an Age of Tyrants and wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with weapons of un imaginable horror and death.
But I could be wrong; there may be possible futures I can not foresee.
If we are to survive, we humans, it must look something like this; love overcoming our differences and the legacies of our history.
Melissa and Nick, thank you for a vision of hope, and may little Nico help create a future we can all share.
Today we remember the horrific repression and mass murder by police which numbers among the most brutal and senseless crimes of state terror in our nation’s history, but also the valiant resistance of students throughout America to a government which was and yet remains an unjust and violent perpetrator of crimes against humanity both at home and abroad.
The national student strike which the massacre unleashed was a turning point for American involvement in Vietnam, and remains a model for mass action today. Its primary lesson is simple; to unite everyone, from all classes and stratum of society, in action against an existential threat said threat must be universal as well as clear and direct. Such a universal mass protest now unfolds in the shadow of the Israel Genocide of the Palestinians and the echoes and reflections of the Kent State Massacre.
A parallel student movement for peace and divestiture now engulfs our nation and our world, a clarion call for solidarity with the oppressed in the genocide of the Palestinians and the deaths of thousands of children and civilians paid for by our taxes, as our government and the Trump regime abandon our ideas of universal human rights and the historic role of America as their guarantor state, and like the university peace movement to end the Vietnam War is met not with celebration of our rights of free speech and the co-ownership of the state by all of its citizens, not with a President who joins the protests as the champion of democracy and our universal human rights, but with police terror and repression of dissent.
Our leaders have betrayed us, and in the abandonment of our human rights and of our rights as citizens Biden and the Democratic Party handed the 2024 election to Trump and his criminal Party of Treason whose mission is the sabotage of democracy and its replacement by a theocratic tyranny of patriarchal and white supremacist terror. For if you sponsor and authorize genocide, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you; and in this I am far from alone.
The Democratic Party is now considering offering us Kommandant Kamala once again, a committed Zionist and overseer of the carceral state who as California’s Prosecuting Attorney led the state campaign of re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor for trivial drug offences, a policy which lives at the heart of the capitalist -white supremacist ideological convergence. If we are once again forced to choose between abandoning democracy and abandoning our universal human rights, the fascists win.
We are caught by the horns of a dilemma in this crucial period of Vichy America, captured state of the Fourth Reich, with liberty or tyranny at stake not merely for our nation but for the whole of humankind and throughout the coming millennia. We must bring our dog to heel through Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel until the genocide and the Occupation end, and with it the Netanyahu settler regime of ethnic cleansing and theocratic terror.
If we cannot, and choose instead to continue to ally and identify our nation with imperial conquest and dominion, theocratic sectarian state terror and tyranny, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the sacrifice of others lives in service to our own power, those of us who remember what it means to be an American and a human being must resist the treasonous and criminal Trump regime By Any Means Necessary.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends, as the passage in the play Julius Caesar underlined by Nelson Mandela in what is called the Robbin Island Bible to authorize direct action against the Apartheid regime of South Africa teaches us.
Trump and Netanyahu planned the October 7 attack, using infiltration agents, deniable forces of settler militia, and blind or unwitting assets among Hamas and others, to create a casus belli for Israel’s Final Solution of the Palestinians and to drive a wedge between the progressive and collaborationist wings of the Democratic Party
I ask you now, all of us; don’t let complicity in genocide be the reason democracy falls in America and Israel. We must bring regime change to both our nations, and like the people of Vietnam leave the Palestinians to create themselves as they choose, with liberty and justice for all..
What lessons can we learn from the Kent State Massacre?
In the words of eyewitness Mike Alewitz writing in Counterpunch; “We were peacefully protesting the US invasion of Cambodia when the Ohio National Guard launched a teargas attack and then opened fire at us.
67 shots in 13 seconds left our campus strewn with dead and wounded. Four dead in Ohio – nine wounded, one paralyzed for life.
Ten days later, 75 Mississippi state police, armed with carbines, shotguns and submachine guns, fired 460 rounds into a dormitory at protesting students at Jackson State. The barrage left two dead and an unknown number of wounded.
And in between, rarely noted, was the largest black uprising in a southern city during the civil rights era.
On May 11, 1970, the black community in Augusta, Georgia rebelled, after the burned and tortured body of an incarcerated 16-year old retarded black youth was dumped by his jailers at a local hospital.
The rebellion left six African-American men dead – all shot in the back.
The invasion of Cambodia and killings at Kent sparked an unprecedented national student strike. Over 400 campuses were shut down and occupied by the students. Millions of people joined street demonstrations demanding an end to the war.
1970 marked a turning point in history as the majority of GIs came to recognize that Washington had knowingly sent them to die in a war that was unwinnable. Our movement became so powerful that, along with the determined resistance of the Vietnamese people, we forced the government to withdraw from Southeast Asia.
Ending the war, on the heels of the civil rights movement, was a tremendous victory for working people. The momentum gave rise to the rebirth of the women’s movement, the gay movement and other social movements that transformed the country.
Today we face an unprecedented medical, ecological, social and economic crisis. We cannot continue to pour trillions of dollars into an insatiable war machine while healthcare workers go begging for masks. While our schools and restaurants are closed. While millions are unemployed. While lines at food pantries stretch for miles.
The finances and resources of society must be changed to go towards healing our planet and ourselves. The memory of the martyrs of Kent and Jackson cries out for us to continue the struggle for which they gave their lives – to demand money for jobs and education, not for war; to put an end to all US wars and occupations and sanctions.”
As described by Steve Early in Jacobin; “In May 1970, 4 million students went on strike across the country, shutting down classes at hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools and demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, their rebellion remains an inspiration, as radical student politics is back on the agenda.
Over the course of this unprecedented campus uprising, about two thousand students were arrested. After thirty buildings used by the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) were bombed or set on fire, heavily armed National Guards were deployed on twenty-one campuses in sixteen states.
On May 4, at Kent State University in Ohio, Guard members fresh from policing a Teamster wildcat strike shot and killed four students and wounded nine. Ten days later, Mississippi State Police opened fire on a women’s dormitory at Jackson State University, killing two more students”.
“The strike across campuses revealed the power of collective action. Born out of the shutdown, there was an explosion of activity by hundreds of thousands of students not previously engaged in anti-war activity, creating major political tremors across the country, including helping to curtail military intervention in Southeast Asia.”
“Nixon claimed to have a “secret plan” to bring peace to Vietnam and withdraw the five hundred thousand US troops still deployed there.
Once unveiled, Nixon’s plan turned out to be “Vietnamization” — shifting the combat burden to troops loyal to the US-backed government in Saigon, while conducting massive bombing of targets throughout Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. By April 30, 1970, the United States was sending ground troops into Cambodia as well.
Students at elite private institutions long associated with anti-war agitation were among the first to react. Protest strikes were quickly declared at Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and Yale, where many students had already voted to boycott class in support of the Black Panther Party, then on trial in New Haven.
Meanwhile, a Friday night riot outside student bars in downtown Kent, Ohio, was followed by the burning of a Kent State ROTC building over the weekend. Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered a thousand National Guard troops to occupy the campus and prevent rallies of any kind.
The Guard came geared with bayonets, tear gas grenades, shotguns, and M1s, a military rifle with long range and high velocity. Chasing a hostile but unarmed crowd of students across campus on May 4, one unit of weekend warriors suddenly wheeled and fired, killing four students.”
“The deaths of Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder had a powerful impact on hundreds of thousands of students at Kent State and beyond.”
“The resulting calls for campus shutdowns came from every direction. Students at MIT tracked which schools were on strike for a National Strike Information Center operating at Brandeis nearby. Soon the list was ten feet long. Despite its initial association with militant protest, most strike activity was peaceful and legal. It consisted of student assemblies taking strike votes, and then further mass meetings, speeches and lectures, vigils and memorial services, plus endless informal “rapping” about politics and the war.
The strike brought together a wide range of undergraduates, faculty members, and administrators — despite their past disagreements about on-campus protest activity. Thirty-four college and university presidents sent an open letter to Nixon calling for a speedy end to the war. The strike also united students from private and public colleges and local public high schools in working-class communities. On May 8, in Philadelphia, students from many different backgrounds and neighborhoods marched from five different directions to Independence Hall, where a crowd of one hundred thousand gathered outside. City high school attendance that day dropped to 10 percent, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.”
“In a Boston Globe interview on the thirtieth anniversary of this upsurge, Isserman argued that it was “the product of unique circumstances that, not surprisingly, provoked outrage from a generation of students already accustomed to protest and demonstration. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a movement quite like this again.”
“Yet over the past two decades, college and high-school students have walked out again, across the country, in highly visible and coordinated fashion. In March 2003, they poured out of 350 schools to protest the impending US invasion of Iraq. Fifteen years later, about 1 million students at 3,000 schools walked out to join a seventeen-minute vigil organized in response to the mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida. And just last September, hundreds of thousands of students left school to join rallies and marches organized as part of a Global Climate Strike.
Universities and high schools are now experiencing a shutdown of their campuses, albeit of a very different kind. But when these institutions open back up, conditions will require a new set of political demands. A return to normal will not be good enough. When school is back in session, the history of a strike occurring after the shadow of death fell on campuses fifty years ago, thanks to Richard Nixon, may become more relevant to challenging “national policy”.
4 مايو 2026 ثمن السلام: ذكرى مذبحة ولاية كينت في ظل الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين
إننا نتذكر اليوم القمع المروع والقتل الجماعي الذي ارتكبته الشرطة والذي يعد من بين أكثر جرائم إرهاب الدولة وحشية وحماقة في تاريخ أمتنا، ولكننا نتذكر أيضًا المقاومة الشجاعة للطلاب في جميع أنحاء أمريكا ضد الحكومة التي كانت ولا تزال مرتكبة ظالمة وعنيفة. الجرائم ضد الإنسانية في الداخل والخارج.
كان الإضراب الطلابي الوطني الذي أطلقته المذبحة بمثابة نقطة تحول في التدخل الأمريكي في فيتنام، ويظل نموذجًا للعمل الجماهيري حتى اليوم. الدرس الأساسي بسيط. لتوحيد الجميع، من جميع طبقات وطبقات المجتمع، في العمل ضد التهديد الوجودي، يجب أن يكون التهديد عالميًا وواضحًا ومباشرًا. إن مثل هذا الاحتجاج الجماهيري العالمي يتكشف الآن في ظل الإبادة الجماعية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين وأصداء وانعكاسات مذبحة ولاية كينت.
إن حركة طلابية موازية من أجل السلام وسحب الاستثمارات تجتاح الآن أمتنا وعالمنا، وهي دعوة واضحة للتضامن مع المضطهدين في الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين ومقتل الآلاف من الأطفال والمدنيين الذين تدفع ثمنهم ضرائبنا، كما فعلت حكومتنا والإبادة الجماعية. يتخلى جو عن أفكارنا حول حقوق الإنسان العالمية والدور التاريخي لأمريكا كدولة ضامنة لها، ومثل حركة السلام الجامعية لإنهاء حرب فيتنام لا تقابل بالاحتفال بحقوقنا في حرية التعبير والملكية المشتركة للدولة من قبل الجميع. مواطنيها، ليس مع رئيس ينضم إلى الاحتجاجات باعتباره بطل الديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، ولكن مع إرهاب الشرطة وقمع المعارضة.
لقد خاننا قادتنا، وبالتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية وحقوقنا كمواطنين، ربما يكون بايدن والحزب الديمقراطي قد سلموا الانتخابات المقبلة إلى ترامب والحزب الجمهوري الذي تتمثل مهمته في تخريب الديمقراطية واستبدالها بحكومة ثيوقراطية. طغيان الإرهاب الأبوي والعنصري الأبيض. لأنه إذا كنت ترعى وتأذن بالإبادة الجماعية، فلا أستطيع التصويت لك، وسوف أقاتلك؛ وفي هذا لست وحدي.
إننا نواجه معضلة في هذا العام الانتخابي الحاسم، حيث الحرية أو الاستبداد على المحك ليس فقط بالنسبة لأمتنا ولكن للبشرية جمعاء وعلى مدى آلاف السنين القادمة. يجب علينا أن نخضع كلبنا من خلال المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات على إسرائيل حتى تنتهي الإبادة الجماعية والاحتلال، ومعها نظام نتنياهو الاستيطاني القائم على التطهير العرقي والإرهاب الثيوقراطي. إذا لم نتمكن من ذلك، واخترنا بدلاً من ذلك التحالف وتحديد هوية أمتنا مرة أخرى من خلال الغزو والسيطرة الإمبراطورية، وإرهاب الدولة والطغيان، وتضحيات الآخرين التي تعيش في خدمة قوتنا، فإن أولئك منا الذين يتذكرون ما يعنيه أن تكون دولة يجب على الأميركي والإنساني أن يرفضوا التصويت لبايدن، أرضاً يفوز ترامب بالرئاسة؛ هذا هو الدافع الحقيقي لتدبير إسرائيل لمأساة 7 أكتوبر، بهدف مزدوج مع خلق سبب للحرب من أجل الحل النهائي للفلسطينيين وغزو الشرق الأوسط.
أسألكم الآن جميعاً؛ لا تدع التواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية يكون السبب وراء سقوط الديمقراطية في أمريكا.
Hebrew
4 במאי 2026 מחיר השלום: יום השנה לטבח במדינת קנט בצל רצח העם של הפלסטינים
היום אנו זוכרים את הדיכוי הנורא והרצח ההמוני על ידי המשטרה, שהם בין הפשעים האכזריים וחסרי ההיגיון של טרור המדינה בתולדות האומה שלנו, אבל גם את ההתנגדות האמיצה של סטודנטים ברחבי אמריקה לממשלה שהיתה ועדיין נותרה עבריין לא צודק ואלים של פשעים נגד האנושות הן בבית והן מחוצה לה.
שביתת הסטודנטים הלאומית שהטבח חולל הייתה נקודת מפנה למעורבות האמריקנית בווייטנאם, והיא נותרה מודל לפעולה המונית כיום. הלקח העיקרי שלה הוא פשוט; כדי לאחד את כולם, מכל המעמדות והשכבות של החברה, בפעולה נגד איום קיומי האיום האמור חייב להיות אוניברסלי וכן ברור וישיר. מחאה המונית אוניברסלית כזו מתרחשת כעת בצל רצח העם הישראלי של הפלסטינים וההדים וההרהורים של הטבח במדינת קנט.
תנועת סטודנטים מקבילה לשלום והסרה בולעת כעת את האומה שלנו ואת העולם שלנו, קריאה מובהקת לסולידריות עם המדוכאים ברצח העם של הפלסטינים ובמותם של אלפי ילדים ואזרחים המשולמים על ידי המסים שלנו, כממשלתנו ורצח העם. ג’ו נוטש את הרעיונות שלנו בדבר זכויות אדם אוניברסליות ותפקידה ההיסטורי של אמריקה כמדינה הערבית שלהם, וכמו תנועת השלום האוניברסיטאית לסיום מלחמת וייטנאם אינה זוכה לחגיגה של זכויות הביטוי שלנו והבעלות המשותפת על המדינה על ידי כולם של אזרחיה, לא עם נשיא שמצטרף להפגנות בתור אלוף הדמוקרטיה וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, אלא עם טרור משטרתי ודיכוי התנגדות.
המנהיגים שלנו בגדו בנו, ובנטישת זכויות האדם שלנו וזכויותינו כאזרחים, ייתכן שבידן והמפלגה הדמוקרטית העבירו את הבחירות הבאות לטראמפ ולמפלגה הרפובליקנית שמשימתן היא חבלה בדמוקרטיה והחלפתה בתאוקרטיה. עריצות של טרור פטריארכלי ולבן. כי אם אתה נותן חסות ותאשר רצח עם, אני לא יכול להצביע עבורך, ואני אלחם בך; ובזה אני רחוק מלהיות לבד.
אנו נלכדים בקרנות של דילמה בשנת בחירות מכרעת זו, עם חירות או עריצות על כף המאזניים לא רק עבור האומה שלנו אלא עבור המין האנושי כולו ולאורך אלפי השנים הקרובות. עלינו להביא את הכלב שלנו לעקב באמצעות חרם, ביטול וסנקציה של ישראל עד לסיום רצח העם והכיבוש, ואיתו משטר המתנחלים נתניהו של טיהור אתני וטרור תיאוקרטי. אם איננו יכולים, ובמקום זאת בוחרים ליצור ברית ולזהות את האומה שלנו שוב עם כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית, טרור מדינה ועריצות, והקרבת חיים של אחרים בשירות לכוחנו, אלו מאיתנו שזוכרים מה זה אומר להיות אמריקאי ובן אנוש חייבים לסרב להצביע עבור ביידן, קרקע שטראמפ יזכה בנשיאות; זהו המניע האמיתי לתזמור של ישראל את הטרגדיה של 7 באוקטובר, במטרה כפולה עם יצירת קאזוס באלי לפתרון הסופי של הפלסטינים ולכיבוש המזרח התיכון.
אני שואל אתכם עכשיו, כולנו; אל תתנו לשותפות ברצח עם להיות הסיבה שהדמוקרטיה נופלת באמריקה.
We celebrate the glorious Resistance of the people of Chicago today and remember the tragedy of their brutal police repression in the Haymarket Riot, which echoes throughout history and the world in countless horrifically parallel events today.
Herein unfold legacies of our history, repression and resistance, solidarity and class war, witness and remembrance, both those we must escape and those we must keep alive, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As we unite in solidarity and mass action to challenge the theft of our liberty and our humanity, our rights of free speech and protest as citizens and as human beings, by the treasonous and criminal fascist tyranny and police terror of the Trump regime, let us remember our history and this moment.
Once again we are confronted with an example of Benjamin Franklin’s principle of unity and the costs of division, which he demonstrated so ably with his bundle of arrows, paraphrasing the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy Tadadaho Canasetoga the Peacemaker, “One arrow can easily be broken; many arrows together are unbreakable”.
As written by Jeff Schuhrke in Jacobin, in an article entitled Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs; “International Workers’ Day traces its roots to the 1886 Haymarket affair, when labor radicals in Chicago were unjustly executed. Ever since, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.
On a visit to Chicago in 1988, Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano asked local friends to take him to Haymarket Square, the place forever associated with, as he put it, “the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st.” He was quickly disappointed by what he found. “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” Galeano lamented a few years later. “Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.”
In Uruguay, as around the globe, the Chicago anarchists executed in the 1880s while fighting for the eight-hour day have long been considered labor martyrs. But as Galeano’s fruitless search for a memorial demonstrates, in the United States — particularly in Chicago — the memory of the Haymarket martyrs has traditionally been suppressed, and the meaning of what happened to them has been contested for well over a century.
Reactionaries and those in power have typically presented the Haymarket affair as the quintessential story of “the thin blue line,” in which heroic police officers saved civilization from a lawless mob of terrorists. As recently as October 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot compared the current moment to the 1880s, when “people feared for their safety from groups of anarchists who routinely created chaos in the streets.”
But generations of Chicagoans — including many that voted out Lightfoot this year and elected progressive trade unionist Brandon Johnson — have rebuffed that narrative. They instead tell a story of exploited workers struggling for human dignity, having their lives deliberately destroyed, and yet meeting their fate with courage and thus inspiring a movement for working-class liberation.
While the epic of the Haymarket affair has rightly been told and retold countless times, the story of this battle over historical memory — and how it specifically played out in Chicago — remains relatively unknown.
The Martyrs
On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of US workers went on strike and marched to demand the eight-hour workday — a day of action called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the precursor to the American Federation of Labor. Thanks to radical labor organizers like Albert Parsons and August Spies, Chicago saw the biggest demonstrations of the day, which remained peaceful.
But two days later, police shot several striking workers at the city’s large McCormick Reaper Works as they scuffled with scabs. Witnessing this firsthand, a horrified Spies called for a rally to “denounce the latest atrocious act of the police.”
The next night, May 4, around 2,500 workers — most of them immigrants — gathered at Haymarket Square to listen to local anarchists deliver speeches from atop a wagon. Mayor Carter Harrison was in attendance and judged the gathering to be “tame.” As the rally wound down and the crowd dwindled to two hundred people, Harrison headed home, but not before telling the 175 police officers stationed a couple blocks away to stand down.
Ignoring the mayor’s instructions, the police marched toward the protesters and ordered them to disperse as the last speaker was wrapping up. That’s when a still-unknown assailant threw a homemade bomb into the phalanx of cops, which immediately exploded. Frantic, officers began shooting wildly, and some of the rally-goers allegedly shot back. In the end, seven police officers and at least three workers died. Officer Mathias Degan was killed by the eruption, but historians generally believe the other cops died after being hit by friendly fire from fellow officers.
The business press immediately labeled the incident “the Haymarket Riot” and demanded blood. Martial law was declared in the city. Chicago police ransacked union halls, radical newspapers, and private homes, arresting hundreds of anarchists, socialists, and labor activists without due process.
That summer, eight of the city’s most outspoken anarchists — Parsons, Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe — were put on trial for the murder of the seven police officers. With no physical evidence directly tying the men to the bomb, they were instead tried for their revolutionary beliefs and found guilty.
The judge sentenced Neebe to fifteen years in prison, but the other seven were condemned to execution. Over the next year, Lucy Parsons, Albert’s wife and fellow anarchist, led an international campaign demanding clemency for the men, whom sympathizers began calling the Haymarket martyrs. Radicals, liberals, and trade unionists worldwide rushed to support the cause, viewing the trial as a sham and an attempt to crush the labor movement.
The Illinois governor commuted the sentences of two of the condemned men — Fielden and Schwab — to life in prison, but did nothing to spare the lives of the others. On the eve of the scheduled executions, Lingg died of an apparent suicide in his jail cell. Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel were hanged together on November 11, 1887. They were buried in Waldheim Cemetery in the western suburb of Forest Park — no graveyard in the city was willing to accept their remains.
On May 1, 1890, invoking the memory of the Haymarket martyrs, workers in multiple countries staged strikes and demonstrations demanding the eight-hour day. From then on, May 1, or May Day, was International Workers’ Day.
But in Chicago, a struggle over the meaning and memory of the Haymarket affair exploded almost immediately — and has continued for over a century.
Two Monuments
In September 1887, six weeks before the execution of the convicted anarchists, a group of prominent Chicago-area businessmen launched a fundraising drive to build a monument honoring the police officers killed and wounded at the Haymarket affair. With the Chicago Tribune hyping the campaign, the group quickly raised $10,000 to erect a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of a cop with his arm outstretched and palm facing forward. An inscription on the pedestal read: “In the name of the People of Illinois, I command peace.”
The police monument, which was placed in Haymarket Square, sparked protest even before its official unveiling in May 1889. On May 3, 1889, a leaflet was placed on the new monument’s pedestal asking, “Have you ever given a thought to . . .the base murder of five of the real victims of the haymarket tragedy…?” The anonymously authored pamphlet continued: “The time will come for an ample justification of our comrades, but it is not quite yet. On the monument at the haymarket should be inscribed in letters of fire these words: ‘Erected to commemorate the strangling of free speech and the shame of an enslaved people!’”
Authorities shrugged off this “blatant anarchist screed,” as the Tribune called it, and moved forward with the police monument’s dedication ceremony on May 30, Memorial Day. Meanwhile, the widowed Lucy Parsons and her comrades established the Pioneer Aid and Support Association to solicit donations for the families of the Haymarket martyrs. The association also raised money for a monument at the site of the martyrs’ tomb — a response to the police statue in Haymarket Square.
After nearly six years, enough money had been collected for sculptor Albert Weinert to build the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument: a statue of a hooded woman, representing Justice, protecting a fallen worker and placing a laurel wreath on his head. August Spies’s final words from the gallows are inscribed on the monument: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
On June 25, 1893, at a ceremony attended by eight thousand people, the monument was unveiled at the grave of the executed anarchists in Waldheim Cemetery. The following day, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld — a prolabor Democrat elected the previous November — pardoned the Haymarket anarchists, freeing Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe while excoriating the trial and executions as a gross miscarriage of justice.
Altgeld’s pardon, along with his refusal to support the deployment of federal troops to crush the Pullman strike the following year, effectively ended his political career. He lost his reelection bid and never held public office again.
Remembering
In the decades following the Haymarket affair, as trade unionists and radicals around the world cemented the tradition of marking May 1 as International Workers’ Day, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument became a place of pilgrimage for leftists and labor activists.
Eugene Debs, who had led the 1894 Pullman strike and would later become the standard-bearer of the Socialist Party, paid a visit to Waldheim Cemetery in the late 1890s and penned an essay celebrating the Haymarket anarchists. Describing them as “the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,” Debs wrote that he looked forward to the day “when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues.”
Around the same time, famed anarchist Emma Goldman also came to Chicago and paid her respects at the monument, which she called “the embodiment of the ideals for which the men had died.” At her request, Goldman was herself buried at Waldheim in a grave plot near the Haymarket anarchists after her death in 1940.
As for the police monument at Haymarket Square, after nearby property owners complained that it took up too much space, it was moved about a mile west to the intersection of Randolph Street and Ogden Avenue in 1900. Every year on May 4, the Veterans of the Haymarket Riot — an organization of surviving police officers from the night of the bomb — would gather for a memorial service in front of the statue and rededicate themselves to preserving “law and order.”
On May 4, 1927, a streetcar making the turn from Randolph to Ogden jumped the tracks and crashed into the monument’s pedestal, toppling the statue. The motorman claimed it was an accident caused by unresponsive air brakes, but legend has it he was later overheard saying he “was sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised.” It is indeed a curious coincidence that the collision happened on the anniversary of the Haymarket incident. To avoid similar traffic accidents, the police statue was moved the following year to nearby Union Park, where it would remain mostly out of sight for the next three decades.
Describing them as ‘the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,’ Debs wrote that he looked forward to the day ‘when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues.’
During the great labor upsurge of the 1930s, a new generation of working-class radicals — particularly the youthful Communist organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — embraced the legacy of the Haymarket martyrs. In early 1938, the CIO-affiliated, Communist-led Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) successfully unionized International Harvester’s Tractor Works — the McCormick family–owned plant where August Spies witnessed police brutalizing strikers in 1886, prompting the fateful Haymarket rally.
In February 1941, around one thousand FE members rallying outside the tractor plant were addressed by none other than Lucy Parsons, who was now in her eighties and losing her eyesight. It would be one of Parsons’s last public appearances, as she tragically died in a house fire the following year. Her ashes were buried in Waldheim close to the grave of Albert and his comrades — a fitting resting place given that Lucy, more than any other individual, had kept the revolutionary spirit of the Haymarket martyrs alive through her more than fifty-year career as an agitator and organizer.
“Declaration of War”
As McCarthyite hysteria smothered the country, May Day went virtually unrecognized in Chicago and the broader United States for many years. The police monument was even refurbished and moved back to Haymarket Square in May 1958. The martyrs’ monument in Waldheim Cemetery was maintained only thanks to the efforts of Irving Abrams, a longtime Wobbly and the last member of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association.
In the late 1960s, Chicago was rocked by unrest reminiscent of the Haymarket affair, as the forces of “law and order” sought to quell social movements and silence radical agitators. Following Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968, young black residents rebelled against racial injustice, and Mayor Richard J. Daley infamously ordered police to “shoot to kill” suspected rioters. That summer, thousands of anti–Vietnam War activists converged in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, only to be met with a bloody police crackdown that culminated in a conspiracy trial against protest leaders.
A local group of unionists — CIO veterans Leslie Orear, Bill Garvey, and Mollie Lieber West, along with University of Illinois Chicago labor historian Bill Adelman — believed it was a critical moment to resurrect the history and lessons of the Haymarket affair. On May 4, 1969, they organized a wreath-laying ceremony at Haymarket Square, emceed by renowned Chicago broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel. Connecting history with the present moment, they emphasized how the 1886 rally had been a protest against police brutality. The committee then incorporated as the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS) and began pushing for a new, pro-worker memorial in Haymarket Square.
Five months later, on the night of October 6, the Haymarket police statue was blown to pieces when explosives were placed between its legs. The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) took responsibility, blowing up the statue to inaugurate their weeklong “Days of Rage” demonstrations.
The leader of the Chicago Police Sergeants’ Association described the statue bombing as “a declaration of war between the police and the SDS and other anarchist groups,” and declared it was now a “kill or be killed” situation for cops. Only two months later, Chicago police, alongside the FBI, brutally murdered Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark.
The cop statue was quickly rebuilt, but the Weathermen destroyed it a second time on October 5, 1970. After the statue was put up again, an exasperated Mayor Daley ordered round-the-clock police protection of the monument, costing the public an estimated $67,440 per year.
Orear, president of the recently formed ILHS, wrote to Daley recommending the city move the police monument to a different location. Swayed by the fiscal logic of the argument, the city relocated the statue in early 1972 from Haymarket Square for the last time. It was initially placed in the lobby of police headquarters for four years, then spent three decades in the courtyard of the police academy — where would-be vandals could not get to it.
Preservation
For years, Chicago officials rejected the ILHS’s appeal for a new monument or park in Haymarket Square. “It’s all a part of a deliberate amnesia,” Orear complained. “Our story is that Haymarket was a police riot — nobody did a damn thing till the police came. Their story is that [the incident] saved the city from anarchist terrorism.”
In May 1986, a coalition of artists, activists, unionists, teachers, historians, clergy, and other community members came together to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket affair. Scores of public events were held around Chicago, including marches, rallies, art exhibits, poetry recitals, a dramatization of the Haymarket trial performed by members of Actors’ Equity, and musical performances by Pete Seeger, among others. Mayor Harold Washington gave his stamp of approval to the festivities by declaring May 1986 “Labor History Month.”
Finally, by the early 2000s, the city agreed to erect a new monument in Haymarket Square.
Made by artist Mary Brōgger, the Haymarket Memorial was dedicated in September 2004 — over 118 years after the bomb was thrown. Located at the exact spot where the speakers’ wagon stood on the night of May 4, 1886, the memorial is a rust-colored sculpture depicting a wagon with human shapes speaking atop it.
‘Over the years,’ a carefully worded plaque on the memorial’s base reads, ‘the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements.’
At the dedication ceremony, the presidents of both the Chicago Federation of Labor and Fraternal Order of Police gave speeches — and each was heckled by different crowd members with competing interpretations of the Haymarket affair. “Over the years,” a carefully worded plaque on the memorial’s base reads, “the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements.”
Despite the memorial’s intended ambiguity, it has been claimed by the labor movement and frequently serves as a rallying point for marches organized by leftist protesters of various stripes.
Not to be outdone, in June 2007, the Haymarket police statue was again refurbished, given a new pedestal, and moved to Chicago Police Headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. The rededication ceremony featured the great-granddaughter of Mathias Degan, the one officer historians agree was killed by the bomb.
Rebirth
In recent decades, Chicago’s growing working-class Latino community has embraced the Haymarket story, which is perhaps not surprising given the almost saintlike status of the Haymarket martyrs in Latin America’s labor movements.
On May Day 2006, up to four hundred thousand Latino workers marched in Chicago as part of the historic “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations, some of them stopping to pay homage at the new memorial in Haymarket Square. A few weeks later, Eduardo Galeano returned to the Windy City during a book tour and discussed the significance of the Haymarket affair with some of the local unionists who had led the march.
Latino Chicagoans especially celebrate Lucy Parsons, who claimed Mexican ancestry. In 2017, a portion of Kedzie Avenue in the Logan Square neighborhood, near where Parsons resided for several years, was honorarily named “Lucy Gonzales Parsons Way” with support from socialist alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa. Fellow socialist Anthony Quezada, a newly elected Cook County commissioner, successfully introduced a resolution last month formally recognizing May 1 as International Workers’ Day and commemorating the lives of the Haymarket martyrs. And last year, young Latino artists with Yollocalli Arts Reach — the youth initiative of Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art — painted a new mural of the Haymarket martyrs on the exterior of Grace Elementary School in the city’s Little Village neighborhood. The mural is titled “Que La Libertad Nos Bese En Los Labios Siempre” (“May Freedom Kiss Us on the Lips Forever”).
“You have to swim in whatever pool there is and rebuild and rebuild,” said the ILHS’s Orear, who died in 2014 at the age of 103. “This is the story of American labor — defeat, starvation and rebirth.”
Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs, Jeff Schuhrke
On this thirty third World Press Freedom Day I call for the universal recognition of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth which supersedes the rights of any state to authorize and enforce versions of it in service to power and identitarian politics, and for a United Humankind in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal rights, which include the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; to Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, that last including the vigilant practices of Disbelief and Disobedience, and to preserve the independence of the press and the transparency of all governments as institutions which must answer ultimately to their people.
Antisemitism as a charge used by the Trump regime is a fiction of state propaganda and thought control used in defense of enormous profits from military support of Israel in her mad imperial war of genocide and conquest of Palestine. And it is a pretext for the centralization of totalitarian power to authority, the subversion of democracy, the theft of our rights and of meaningful citizenship.
Freedom of the press and of information, the right to speak, write, teach, organize, research and publish in an environment of transparency of the state, along with rights of protest and strike, are instrumental to the agency of citizens and to the idea and meaningfulness of democracy.
Any power or authority held by a government of any form is granted by its citizens or has been appropriated from them unjustly, and it is the highest principle of natural law as articulated in our Declaration of Independence that we may seize and reclaim it at any time it is held without our participation and co-ownership, or used against our general interests.
True democracy as a free society of equals requires the four ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and one thing more; an engaged electorate of truth tellers and witnesses of history who will hold our representatives and the institutions of our government responsible for enacting our values
Like the role of a free press in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the role of a citizen is to be a truth teller. Both serve Truth, and truth is necessary to the just balance of power between individuals which is the purpose of the state.
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.
Much talk of late has employed the terms antisemitism and cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of white supremacist and patriarchal sexual terror, incitement to violence and dehumanization.
Conversely, antifascist action in defense of equality and our universal human rights such as platform denial and forms of peer ostracism and boycott are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong, the gruesome butchery of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia in their games of imperial dominion, the Israeli policy of targeted assassinations of Palestinian journalists that we might not witness the horrors of the genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Israel in imitation of the Nazis, and the fascist campaign of the Trump regime of the American Fourth Reich to repress dissent, criminalize antifascist action, and capture the guarantor institutions of our liberty like The Washington Post and CNN.
This list of crimes of state terror and tyranny I updated one year ago today in 2025 to include the assassination of Palestinian witness of history Shireen Abu Aqleh by Israel in service to state terror and genocide, America’s loathsome vendetta against Julian Assange, the torture and murder of Viktoriia Roshchyna by Russia, the Trump regime’s aberrant and un-American campaign of repression of dissent in our universities embodied in the figure of Mahmoud Khalil, and countless others.
The state is embodied violence.
Against this we have only our loyalty to and solidarity with each other, our witness of history and the bond of our word, and our power of vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, our ways of being human with each other, and our future possibilities of becoming human.
But the values and issues which the phenomenon of repression of dissent raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others. Freedom from is as important as freedom to.
Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force and control in shaping others to our own image, as tribalism in general, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience, and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.
The autonomy of individuals takes precedence over all rights of authority and the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves. The state protects us from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue; and others from our own.
Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.
Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of humanity, citizenship, and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.
To make an idea about a kind of people is a hate crime and an act of violence.
I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which a friend, a fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.
Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.
Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.
On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.
Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and f*** respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”
What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”
But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.
To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability with you, and their little dog normality too.
Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As written by Kai Falkenberg in The Guardian, in an article entitled The US used to be the gold standard for press freedom. Not any more: The Trump administration is creating a chilling effect on independent reporting and public dissent; “This week is World Press Freedom Day. That used to be a time when we pointed fingers at governments that kept journalists from doing their jobs – places like Turkey, where reporters are imprisoned for libel, or Saudi Arabia, where government censorship is a part of daily life. From our privileged perch here in the US, we highlighted the struggle of journalists suffering under authoritarian rule. But this year, the ones suffocating aren’t halfway around the world – they’re right here at home.
In my 20 years as a media lawyer, I’ve always seen the United States as the gold standard for press freedom – a model admired by journalists around the world. But in just a few short months, the Trump administration has severely undermined those protections, creating a chilling effect on independent reporting and public dissent. Today, the White House is waging an increasingly hostile campaign against the press, pushing to control coverage in ways that go far beyond anything we saw during the president’s first term
Borrowing tactics from press-repressive regimes, the attacks have come from all sides – billion-dollar lawsuits, government investigations, blocked access and outright withdrawal of funding. All of it is unfolding at a time when public trust in the media is at an all-time low, emboldening juries to hand down record-breaking verdicts.
Trump has long used lawsuits to intimidate the press, but what has changed is the judicial landscape. He has appointed over a quarter of all active federal judges, and he has been strategic in making sure cases targeting the media end up in courtrooms that lean his way.
Take his $20bn lawsuit against CBS News, for example – a staggering figure tied to how 60 Minutes edited its interview with Kamala Harris. He claims the segment defrauded viewers in Texas under the state’s consumer protection laws. So why file in Texas? The case was brought in Amarillo, a district with just one judge – and yes, he’s a Trump appointee.
It’s a far-fetched, fantastical claim – yet CBS is reportedly considering a mediated settlement. Why back down from a case they could probably win? It’s a cold, calculated decision – one that others in Trump’s crosshairs have also made. Just weeks after his election, ABC News settled a defamation suit with him for $16m. It was a defensible case. But Disney, ABC’s parent company, knew any major business deal over the next four years would need the administration’s blessing. So they did the math: better to stay in the good graces of a president known for holding grudges than risk jeopardizing future profits.
It wasn’t just Trump they feared – it was the prospect of facing a Florida jury. After years of Trump branding legitimate investigative reporting as “fake news”, we now have a deeply polarized country where juries can be swayed by political rhetoric, posing real threats to the survival of major news outlets.
In a recent libel case against CNN, filed in a Florida district that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, the trial foreshadowed what his promised crackdown on the press would look like in his second term. The plaintiff’s argument echoed Trump’s relentless attacks on the press, urging jurors to punish the so-called “lamestream” media.
After an unfavorable ruling on liability, CNN ultimately decided to settle, afraid of what the jury might do. When the case ended, the jury forewoman revealed she would have pushed for $100m in damages had the trial continued. A verdict that large would have caused serious harm – and there was nothing in the case that justified it.
Beyond the risk of huge jury verdicts, several news organizations are now under government scrutiny. Comcast, Verizon and Disney are all facing FCC investigations over allegedly unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Companies like Yahoo and Gannett have already begun rolling back their diversity initiatives. Meanwhile, executive orders targeting law firms raise serious free speech concerns, sending a chilling message to attorneys who might otherwise support or work with the press.
That support has never been more essential. In a blatant attempt to shape media coverage, the White House banned Associated Press reporters from the press pool after the outlet refused to follow an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico. AP’s lawyers argued that punishing a news organization for not using government-approved language is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination – and the judge, a Trump appointee, agreed. The court ordered the White House to reinstate AP’s access to the press pool and related events. Instead, the administration eliminated the spot reserved for wire services entirely and openly defied the court’s order. Now, the government plans to take the case to the supreme court. Fortunately, AP’s legal team is standing firm.
As AP’s chief White House reporter Zeke Miller testified, the government’s actions have already had a chilling effect on the press. Since the AP was banned, the tone of questions directed at the president has noticeably softened. Reporters also say that sources — not just in politics, but in science and other fields — are now more hesitant to speak publicly. Some outlets are already facing leak investigations, and with Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinding the Biden-era policy that discouraged subpoenas against journalists last Friday, even more legal pressure is expected. That includes the very real prospect of criminal prosecution.
The administration’s strategy of using funding as leverage is also having a serious effect on the media. It has pulled financial support from the US Agency for Global Media, which backs broadcasters such as Voice of America and Radio Free Asia – a move that undermines US efforts to promote democracy and fight disinformation abroad. After a congressional hearing last month, the administration is proposing to eliminate nearly all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS and local public media outlets. Such a loss could severely affect the sustainability of these essential sources of news and information.
All of this is happening at a time when longstanding legal protections for the press are under renewed attack. Opponents of media freedom are actively seeking to dismantle New York Times v Sullivan – the landmark supreme court decision that has safeguarded journalists for decades. That ruling established that public officials must prove “actual malice” to succeed in a libel suit, recognizing that the press needs breathing room to report freely, even if it sometimes gets things wrong. Under Sullivan, media outlets are only liable in cases brought by public figures if they knowingly publish false information or act with reckless disregard for the truth.
Now, that precedent is being directly challenged. Sarah Palin, who this week lost the retrial of her libel suit against the New York Times, has openly stated her intent to use the case as a vehicle to overturn Times v Sullivan. It’s unclear whether enough justices on the current court are prepared to go that far. Even if the decision stands, the legal landscape for journalists has become far less forgiving. With trust in the media at historic lows, judges are increasingly willing to let even the weakest defamation cases proceed – prolonging litigation, draining resources and placing a heavier burden on the press.
It takes real courage to keep holding power to account in the face of growing legal threats. But it’s more important than ever that we do – and that we draw strength from the example of journalists around the world who have been reporting under pressure far greater, and for far longer, than we have.”
As written by Annie Kelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled There is a war on journalists raging around the world: let their voices be heard; “There is a war on journalists raging across the world. Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded the highest number of media workers killed since it began collecting data three decades ago.
According to that data, at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed in 2024 – nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
Journalists were also killed while doing their jobs in Sudan, Pakistan, Mexico, Syria, Myanmar, Iraq and Haiti. Hundreds more were detained and imprisoned elsewhere, while others were harassed, assaulted and faced relentless threats and abuse online, as well as in their communities and places of work.
Attacks on press freedom and independent news outlets by governments and authoritarian regimes from Russia to Turkey to Belarus are also rising, along with the tsunami of misinformation that is being disseminated on social media and the internet.
In the US, Donald Trump labelled journalists the “enemies of the people” in his first term, and is now waging lawsuits against leading news organisations and ordering federal investigations against others.
Today, as we mark Unesco’s World Press Freedom Day, we are reporting on the vital fight to maintain a free and independent global media.
In my job as the editor of the Guardian’s Rights and Freedom series, I work closely with journalists across the world operating in increasingly fraught and frightening environments.
Where once a blue press vest offered some guarantee of protection, now many journalists in war zones say it feels like it puts a target on their backs.
In Afghanistan, where the free press has been all but dismantled, we work with female reporters who are in hiding, conducting their interviews in secret and living in daily terror of being discovered by the Taliban.
Just a few of the stories we have covered on attacks on press freedom in the past year include the attempted murder of an Iranian journalist in London, the incarceration of female journalists in Iran who reported on the death of Mahsa Amini, and the death of a Ukrainian reporter in Russian detention.
Often, I feel a deep sense of helplessness when I see how dangerous this job can be for some journalists, who demonstrate extraordinary bravery but find their jobs, their liberty and sometimes even their lives on the line for their reporting. Equally often, I am completely humbled by their passion and belief in journalism as a public service and as a force for positive change, something for which they are willing to risk everything.
So what can we do from our position of relative safety and security? When I ask reporters struggling under state repression, they tell me what they want is to be heard – and for media organisations such as the Guardian to help fight for press freedom by publishing their work and to keep shining a spotlight on the battle for a free press.
The Guardian’s ability to do this kind of work – and to remain free and independent – is due to the direct financial backing of our readers. If you believe in the importance of a free press, you can support our work by clicking here.
We would also encourage you to read and directly support the work of other independent news operations – locally and in countries where there is a direct threat to media groups.
At a time when press freedom is facing this barrage of attacks on many fronts, it has never been more important for journalists to be able to work freely and safely, and for the protections they are granted under international human rights laws to be respected and defended.”
As written by Antonio Zappulla in The Guardian, in an article entitled It is safe for me to write this article – and for you to read it. But globally, those rights are under grave threat: The act of labelling journalists ‘foreign agents’ is deliberately chilling. On World Press Freedom Day, be aware of the peril involved in seeking the truth; “Last month, Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili approved a new law inflicting criminal charges, including prison sentences and fines, on any organisation or individual who fails to comply with the country’s “foreign influence” bill.
The news didn’t trouble the front pages of the international press and went largely unnoticed, but it marks a significant inflection point in the decline of global press freedom.
The original bill, first adopted in May 2024, mandated all independent media and NGOs receiving over 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “acting in the interest of a foreign power”. The previous month, Kyrgyzstan had adopted an almost identical piece of legislation. In August, it was Venezuela’s turn. Turkey tabled a draft bill in October, before Paraguay signed its into action in November.
Over the span of just seven months, countries in eastern Europe, central Asia and South America were awash with these laws, all with the same basic premise – organisations and individuals receiving foreign funding must make themselves known to the government.
On the face of it, this seems like a justifiable measure to protect national security. Foreign interference is a very real threat for many countries, especially during election cycles. Just this year, a host of foreign actors waged mass disinformation campaigns on Germany’s elections, spreading false accusations that candidates for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) were victims of election fraud.
But the devil is in the detail. And – as is so often the case with these laws – there very deliberately isn’t any.
Their power lies in vague, broad wording. Wording that can, and has been, easily weaponised to inflict legal penalties and crippling stigma to such an extent that it renders the work of anyone implicated effectively impossible. Especially journalists.
Take the archetypal example: Russia’s “foreign agent” law. Initially adopted in the aftermath of protests against Vladimir Putin’s return as Russian president in 2012, the law stipulates a “foreign agent” to be any individual or organisation that receives foreign funding and engages in “political activities”. Yet, the definition of political activities is so vague as to encompass absolutely anything that could influence public opinion, from hosting an educational event to simply printing opinion polls.
Once labelled as such, a journalist or newsroom would have to register with the justice ministry, submit regular reports on their activities, finances and interactions, facing fines and prison sentences if they so much as miss a deadline.
Their assets can be frozen, bank accounts closed and the donations or grants that once kept them afloat cut off. They are even barred from entering educational facilities such as schools, universities or kindergartens.
And then there’s the social stigma. This is baked into the very label itself – “foreign agent”. It is purposely couched in the rhetoric of espionage, designed to evoke memories for those old enough to remember the fate of citizens branded as such during Soviet-era purges: arrests, executions and gulags.
For many, the strain is too much to bear. At least 93 independent media outlets are known to have been forced into exile from Russia. In Belarus, which adopted its even harsher version of this law in 2023, the majority have left.
But even in exile they cannot escape the label. By law, they are required to include a disclaimer on all published materials, stating “this is the product of an organisation designated as a foreign agent”. Even so much as a personal Facebook post. This often deters audiences back home from reading their reporting, afraid of attracting increased state surveillance through association. The tag is such a visceral part of many Russian and Belarusian exiled journalists’ identity that some now print it on T-shirts or even tattoo it on their bodies.
The impact on future generations of budding journalists from these countries is also devastating, limiting their aspirations and ability to develop skills in an industry that is vilified, leaving a void in which there is no counter to state propaganda.
It would be naive to think this is a problem solely reserved for autocratic states, however. As disinformation campaigns and electoral interference become more prevalent, many democracies are also considering this type of legislation – Italy and the UK, to name two.
They have every right to do so. But it is vital that the finer details are fleshed out. As we have seen over recent years, a country that is democratic now can quickly backslide into authoritarianism. When this happens, autocratic leaders will take advantage of these loosely defined, albeit well-intentioned, laws to stamp out dissent.
There is some evidence to suggest that strategic domestic and international pressure campaigns – especially if tied to the continuance of foreign direct investment into those countries – may be effective in pushing back against foreign agent-style laws. Turkey’s draft 2024 bill, for example, has been subsequently withdrawn for the time being thanks to a coordinated effort from legal associations, human rights advocacy groups and media freedom organisations.
But in many countries the damage is already done. More than anything now, these journalists and newsrooms, whether in exile or staying home to fight on, need legal representation and guidance.
Since 2022, the Thomson Reuters Foundation has been supporting exiled independent newsrooms to set up their operations in new jurisdictions and to build their legal resilience to withstand these “lawfare” attacks.
For many, Georgia seemed like a natural place for them to initially reset. Russian nationals, for example, could travel freely to the country and the land border crossing made it practical to move quickly. Yet, this year, we have been devastated to find some of the first newsrooms we helped set up in exile there are being forced to flee once more.
Journalists are quite literally being chased across borders by foreign agent-style laws, hounded and harassed from one country to the next. These are profoundly worrying times, but we are scaling up our work. We can and will respond.”
As written last year by Jonathan Watts in The Guardian, in an article entitled Across the world, journalists are under threat for sharing the truth: Last year was the most dangerous to be a reporter since 2015. Without the courage of correspondents risking everything to report from conflict areas, we could be at risk of ‘zones of silence’ spreading around the world; “Conflict in Gaza, war in Ukraine, a battle over the global environment – the world is becoming an increasingly hostile place, particularly for frontline journalists.
Last year saw 99 killings of reporters, up 44% on 2022 and the highest toll since 2015.
Without the courage of correspondents to continue working in conflict areas, press organisations warn the world will start to see “zones of silence”, where the risks are so great that important stories go unreported.
Last year’s high toll was almost entirely due to Gaza, where a Guardian editorial noted “no war has killed so many journalists so quickly”.
The vast majority are Palestinian reporters who, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, appear to have been targeted by Israeli forces. The Guardian was among more than 30 news organisations that signed an open letter expressing solidarity with journalists working in Gaza and calling for their protection and freedom to report.
This is much more than a matter of principle; solidarity is a matter of survival. Over the years, Guardian reporters have been kidnapped in Iraq and Afghanistan, beaten in Pakistan, expelled from Russia, and arrested in Egypt, Zimbabwe and China.
The search for the truth can come at a horrific cost.
Two years ago, a regular Guardian contributor, Dom Phillips, was murdered in the Brazilian Amazon, with the Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. On the first anniversary of the killings last year, the Guardian joined an international collaboration to amplify their work.
A group of Dom’s journalist friends, including myself, are also working on a crowdfunded project to finish the book that he was working on at the time of his death: How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know. It will be published next year.
Reporting on the war against nature might generate fewer headlines than Gaza or Ukraine, but it is also high risk with little legal protection. The number of environmental journalists being attacked or killed is rising and it continues to be one of the most dangerous fields of journalism after war reporting. Though the trend is accelerating, prosecutions remain dismally low, with very few cases leading to convictions.
Instead, the law appears to be increasingly used against journalists. One of the most disturbing trends in recent years has been the arrests or police harassment of journalists covering environmental protests. This has stirred outrage in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Canada, Australia, Azerbaijan, the US and China, which is consistently the biggest jailer of reporters.
But huge challenges remain for the media in general.
Throughout this week we will be marking Friday’s World Press Freedom Day with a series of articles about different threats posed to all types of reporters, from those working in exile and still facing threats from their home states, to environmental journalists facing up to violence and censorship as well as female journalists being targeted because of their sex. We want to use our platform to highlight the work they are doing, often in incredibly dangerous circumstances.
The risks may be growing, and the space to operate may be increasingly constrained, but we are more determined than ever to tell the stories of our age so that you, the readers, have the information to act as voters, citizens, consumers and participants in the web of life on Earth.”
Where can we look for a model free press, even one beset by catch and kill journalism as election interference, propaganda and falsification from every angle, hate speech disguised as free speech, and the erosion of truth and meaningful public debate? When most of our world is enslaved by tyrannies who enforce state power with brutal repression, there are few where one can mock a ruler and be met with humor and on equal terms by the ruler himself.
Here follows the speech of President Biden at the 2023 White House Correspondent’s Dinner; “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Steve, for that introduction. And a special thanks to the 42% of you who actually applauded.
I’m really excited to be here tonight with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have. That’s hard to say after what we just saw.
This is the first time a president attended this dinner in six years. It’s understandable. We had a horrible plague followed by two years of Covid.
Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year. Now, that would really have been a real coup if that occurred. A little tough, huh?
But I’m honored to be here at such an event with so much history.
As already referenced, the very first president to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was Calvin Coolidge in 1924. I had just been elected to the United States Senate. And I reme — I remember telling him, “Cal, just be yourself. Get up there and speak from the heart. You’re going to be great, kid. You’re going to do it well.”
Of course, Jill is with me tonight. Jilly, how are you, kid? I think — I think she’s doing an incredible job as first lady. The first lady to continue working full-time, and she does as a professor.
She doesn’t pay much attention to the polls, though she did say the other day: Instead of introducing myself as Jill Biden’s husband, maybe I should introduce myself as her roommate.
I’ve attended this dinner many times, but this is my first time as president. And the organizers had — had it hard — made it pretty hard for me tonight. Although the good news is, if all goes well, I have a real shot at replacing James Corden.
It was great having him over at the White House the other day, just as he announced he’s leaving the show. A great performer is going out on top after eight years in the job. Sounds just about right to me.
And it’s tough to follow pros like James and Billy Eichner. Billy, where are you again? Do you — where is he?
Well, Billy, you’re famous for interviewing — your interviewing skills. Billy, you should know what you’re doing, pal. You know it, you know it well. And you should — I think — you should host “Meet the Press.” Maybe they’ll start to watch it again.
I’ve never had — never had to — I’ve never had to open — I’ll never be — I’ll never be invited to “Meet the Press” again. Anyway.
I’ve never had to open before Trevor Noah. Trevor is great. When I was elected, he did a show and he called me “America’s new dad.” Let me tell you something, pal: I’m flattered anybody would call me a “new” anything. You’re my guy.
And, folks, it’s been a tough few years for the country. That’s one reason why it’s great to be here again.
Everyone at the White House is so excited. I told my grandkids and Pete Buttigieg they could stay up late and watch this show tonight.
Tonight — tonight we come here and answer a very important question on everybody’s mind: Why in the hell are we still doing this?
I know there are — I know there are questions about whether we should gather here tonight because of Covid. Well, we’re here to show the country that we’re getting through this pandemic. Plus, everyone had to prove they were fully vaccinated and boosted.
So, if you’re at home watching this and you’re wondering how to do that, just contact your favorite Fox News reporter. They’re all here, vaccinated and boosted — all of them.
And, look, Fox — Fox News, I’m — I’m really sorry your preferred candidate lost the last election. To make it up to you, I’m happy to give my chief of staff to you all so he can tell Sean Hannity what to say every day.
In fact, Ron Klain is here at the CBS table, which hired Mick Mulvaney. Mick, on CBS? I was stunned. I figured he’d end up on “The Masked Singer” with Rudy.
Amazing hire, guys. Really quite amazing.
Look, I know this is a tough town. I came to office with an ambitious agenda, and I expected it to face stiff opposition in the Senate. I just hoped it would be from Republicans.
But I’m not worried about the midterms. I’m not worried about them. We may end up with more partisan gridlock, but I’m confident we can work it out during my remaining six years in the presidency.
And, folks, I’m not really here to roast the GOP. That’s not my style. Besides, there’s nothing I can say about the GOP that Kevin McCarthy hasn’t already put on tape.
And, you know, at the same — at the same time, a lot of people say the Republican Party is too extreme, too divisive, too controlled by one person. They say, “It’s not your father’s Republican Party.”
Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down.” Today’s Republicans say, “Tear down Mickey Mouse’s house.” And pretty soon, they’ll be storming Cinderella’s castle, you can be sure of it.
But Republicans seem to support one fella — some guy named Brandon. He’s having a really good year, and I’m kind of happy for him.
Let me conclude with a serious word.
We live in serious times. We’re coming through a devastating pandemic, and we have to stay vigilant. I know Kamala wanted to be here, for example, and thankfully she’s doing well. You should all know she sends her best.
We’re in a time when what we so long have taken for granted is facing the gravest of threats. And I’m being deadly earnest.
Overseas, the liberal world order that laid the foundation for global peace, stability and prosperity since World War II is genuinely, seriously under assault.
And at home, a poison is running through our democracy of all — all of this taking place with disinformation massively on the rise, where the truth is buried by lies and the lies live on as truth.
What’s clear — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century. No, I really mean it.
I’ve always believed that good journalism holds up a mirror to ourselves, to reflect on the good, the bad and the true. Tonight, I want to congratulate the awardees and the scholarship winners who carry on that sacred tradition.
We’ve all seen the courage of the Ukrainian people because of the courage of American reporters in this room and your colleagues across the world, who are on the ground, taking their lives in their own hands.
We just — we just saw a heartbreaking video: Nine have been killed reporting from Kyiv — struck by a kamikaze drone strike after a shopping mall attack; shot in the neck while decounci- [sic] — while — while documenting Ukrainians fleeing; killed when Russian missiles hit the television tower in a residential neighborhood. One journalist from Radio Liberty just killed days ago.
So many of you telling the stories and taking the photos and recording the videos of what’s happening there, the unvarnished truth shown — showing the — the destruction and the devastation and, yes, the war crimes.
Tonight, we also honor the legacy of two historic reporters, and that is Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne. I’m glad you saw that tonight. I didn’t know you were doing that. These are the first Black women to be White House reporters, who shattered convention to cover a segregated nation.
We honor journalists killed, missing, imprisoned, detained and tortured; covering war, exposing corruption and holding leaders accountable.
We honor members of the press, both national and local, covering a once-in-a-century pandemic where we lost a million Americans, a generation reckoning on race and the existential threat of climate change.
The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.
President Kennedy once said, and I quote, “Without debate, without criticism, no administration, no country can succeed, and no republic can survive.”
The First Amendment grants a free press extraordinary protection, but with it comes, as many of you know, a very heavy obligation: to seek the truth as best you can — not to inflame or entertain, but to illuminate and educate.
I know it’s tough. And I’m not being solicitous. The industry is changing significantly.
There’s incredible pressure on you all to deliver heat instead of shed light, because the technology is changing so much, the system is changing. But it matters. No kidding. It matters. The truth matters.
American democracy is not a reality show. It’s not a reality show. It’s reality itself. And the reality is that we are a great country.
Our future is bright. It’s not guaranteed, because democracy is never guaranteed. It has to be earned. It has to be defended. It has to be protected.
As you’ve heard me say many times: There’s not a damn thing this country can’t do when we stand united and do it together. And I know we can do anything we want to do that’s right.
I’ve been around a long time, as has been pointed out many times tonight. But I give you my word as a Biden: I’ve never been more optimistic about America than I am today. I really mean it.
At times of enormous change, it presents enormous opportunities. For despite all the crises, all the partisanship, all the shouting and the showmanship,
I really know this and you know it too: We are a great nation because we’re basically a good people.
And here in America, good journalism, good satire about our leaders, about our society is quintessentially an American thing. It demonstrates the power of our example.
And I, honest to God, believe it reveals our soul — the soul of our nation. And that’s what I’d like to toast tonight, if I may.
(The President offers a toast.)
To the journalists and their families, to the people and their elected representatives, to the United States of America.
And by the way, Madeleine Albright was right: We are the indispensable nation.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to turn this over to Trevor now, strap myself into my seat.
And, Trevor, the really good news is: Now you get to roast the President of the United States and, unlike in Moscow, you won’t go to jail.
The podium is yours.”
As written by Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian, in an article entitled When journalists are persecuted, we all suffer; “Jodie Ginsberg remembers an important lesson from her decade as a Reuters foreign correspondent and bureau chief: there simply is no substitute for being at the scene.
“The first and most important source is what journalists see in front of them – their ability to give a firsthand, eyewitness account,” says Ginsberg, now the president of Committee to Protect Journalists, the non-profit advocacy organization based in New York City.
A memorable case in point was how two Associated Press journalists last year were able to tell what was happening on the ground in Mariupol, Ukraine. As a Russian siege largely destroyed the city, children’s bodies filled mass graves and shells demolished a maternity hospital, but Russian officials tried to deny it and called the horror stories nothing but fiction.
“The Russians said this was all a fake, but the AP journalists at the scene were able to say no, and tell the real story,” Ginsberg said. One of them, Yevgeny Maloletka, took an unforgettable photograph, seen on front pages around the world, of an injured pregnant woman being carried on a gurney from the bombed-out hospital by emergency workers; her baby was born dead and she died soon afterwards.
But with journalists threatened with harassment, danger and even imprisonment around the world, that crucial ability to report on the ground – to get the invaluable eyewitness account – has been sorely diminished.
The situation is dire; as democracy declines worldwide, there are more journalists in prison now than at any time since the CPJ began keeping track. The organization’s annual prison census showed 363 reporters in prison at the end of last year – an increase of 20% from the previous year, with the most journalists jailed in Iran, China, Myanmar, Turkey and Belarus.
This ugly trend means less on-the-ground reporting – not only by the imprisoned journalists but by many others who flee conflict zones or are forced to censor themselves in order to avoid the growing dangers.
When the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in late March on false espionage charges in Russia – he remains imprisoned – many western journalists finally fled the country joining those who had left months earlier. The threats had simply become untenable.
“Evan’s arrest sends a powerful message to other journalists – that you may face something similar,” Ginsberg told me. “That has a chilling effect on reporting, which is the aim of the repressive governments doing this kind of harassment and imprisonment. It is meant to silence journalists.”
No longer is it just war correspondents who face extreme danger. These days, the dominance of authoritarian governments around the world make life hazardous for all kinds of journalists. Local and regional reporters around the world may bear the brunt most, partly because they don’t have the protection and legal resources of large news organizations.
In addition to the countries named above, Ginsberg said that Mexico, Haiti, Russia and parts of Latin and South America are particularly difficult places for journalists to do their work now.
Concerned people can help. They can show they care about journalism by subscribing to news organizations or donating to free-speech and press-rights organizations including CPJ, Pen America and Reporters Without Borders.
And perhaps most important of all, they can keep jailed journalists in mind, and keep their plight in the public consciousness. That goes for Austin Tice, a freelance journalist who went missing in Syria in 2012 and is believed to be a captive of the Syrian government. It goes for Gershkovich, of course, and for the hundreds of lesser known reporters who are threatened or jailed around the world.
It was encouraging to hear Joe Biden bring up Tice and Gershkovich at the White House correspondents’ dinner last weekend in Washington DC. He spoke of Evan’s “absolute courage”, and said US officials are working every day to bring him home.
“Our message is this,” Biden added. “Journalism is not a crime.”
Not only is journalism not a crime, it’s a necessity – one that’s becoming harder than ever to carry out with every passing month.
That’s not only terrible for those directly involved. It also hurts everyone who cares about the truth.”
As written last year by Oliver Holmes in The Guardian, in an article entitled Media freedom in dire state in record number of countries, report finds: World Press Freedom Index report warns disinformation and AI pose mounting threats to journalism; “Media freedom is in dire health in a record number of countries, according to the latest annual snapshot, which warns that disinformation, propaganda and artificial intelligence pose mounting threats to journalism.
The World Press Freedom Index revealed a shocking slide, with an unprecedented 31 countries deemed to be in a “very serious situation”, the lowest ranking in the report, up from 21 just two years ago.
Increased aggressiveness from autocratic governments – and some that are considered democratic – coupled with “massive disinformation or propaganda campaigns” has caused the situation to go from bad to worse, according to the list, released by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“There is more red on the RSF map this year than ever before, as authoritarian leaders become increasingly bold in their attempts to silence the press,” the RSF secretary general, Christophe Deloire, told the Guardian. “The international community needs to wake up to reality, and act together, decisively and fast, to reverse this dangerous trend.”
Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of the first World Press Freedom Day, which was created to remind governments of their duty to uphold freedom of expression. However, the environment for journalism today is considered “bad” in seven out of 10 countries, and satisfactory in only three out of 10, according to RSF. The UN says 85% of people live in countries where media freedom has declined in the past five years.
The survey assesses the state of the media in 180 countries and territories, looking at the ability of journalists to publish news in the public interest without interference andwithout threats to their own safety.
It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before.
“The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information,” the report said. “The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself.”
Artificial intelligence was “wreaking further havoc on the media world”, the report said, with AI tools “digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability”.
This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds.
At the same time, governments are increasingly fighting a propaganda war. Russia, which already plummeted in the rankings last year after the invasion of Ukraine, dropped another nine places, as state media slavishly parrots the Kremlin line while opposition outlets are driven into exile. Last month, Moscow arrested the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, the first US journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges since the end of the cold war.
Meanwhile, three countries: Tajikistan, India and Turkey, dropped from being in a “problematic situation” into the lowest category. India has been in particularly sharp decline, sinking 11 places to 161 after media takeovers by oligarchs close to Narendra Modi. The Indian press used to be seen as fairly progressive, but things changed radically after the Hindu nationalist prime minister took over. This year, the BBC was raided by the country’s financial crimes agency in a move widely condemned as an act of intimidation after a BBC documentary was critical of Modi.
In Turkey, the administration of the hardline president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had stepped up its persecution of journalists in the run-up to elections scheduled for 14 May, RSF said. Turkey jails more journalists than any other democracy.
Some of the 2023 index’s biggest falls were in Africa. Until recently a regional model, Senegal fell 31 places, mainly because of criminal charges brought against two journalists, Pape Alé Niang and Pape Ndiaye. Tunisia fell 27 places as a result of President Kais Saied’s growing authoritarianism.
The Middle East is the world’s most dangerous region for journalists. But the Americas no longer have any country coloured green, meaning “good”, on the press freedom map. The US fell three places to 45th. The Asia Pacific region is dragged down by regimes hostile to reporters, such as Myanmar (173rd) and Afghanistan (152nd).
“We are witnessing worrying trends, but the big question is if these trends are a hiccup or a sign of a world going backwards,” said Guilherme Canela, the global lead on freedom of speech at Unesco. “Physical attacks, digital attacks, the economic situation, and regulatory tightening: we are facing a perfect storm.”
A separate Unesco report released on Wednesday said healthy freedom of expression helped many other fundamental rights to flourish.
Nordic countries have long topped the RSF rankings, and Norway stayed in first place in the press freedom index for the seventh year running. But a non-Nordic country was ranked second: Ireland. The Netherlands returned to the top 10, rising 22 places, following the 2021 murder of the crime reporter Peter R de Vries. The UK was listed at 26.
The western world’s media landscape remains mixed, according to RSF and other press freedom groups, with political and financial pressures. In the first quarter of this year, news media job cuts in the UK and North America ran at a rate of 1,000 jobs a month, a Press Gazette analysis found.
Last week, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists released a report warning against complacency in the EU, which has traditionally been considered among the world’s safest and freest places for journalists.
The group expressed concern about rising populism and illiberal governments such as in Hungary and Poland trampling on the rule of law, including press freedom. The Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and the Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak had been murdered in connection with their work.”
As written by Kelly Walls in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trust, diversity and independence: three key elements for a thriving press: Newspapers’ power is being eroded and disinformation is rife – but there is a way forward; “Our understanding of the world is driven by information. It feeds our ability to make informed decisions about our lives, our communities, the way we’re governed. This fundamental freedom, the power to be able to access reliable information, sits at the heart of a thriving democratic society.
But increasingly that power is being eroded. Indeed, some never had it to begin with. Press freedom is being threatened, compromised and denied in an increasing number of countries around the world.
In parallel, trust in news among the general public is declining. Financial pressures are multiplying. And for every technological advancement to counter disinformation, there is another that can more effectively spread it.
As the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa put it recently: “This is not a content problem, it isn’t a freedom of speech problem, it is a distribution problem. It is the fact that by design, lies are distributed faster and further than facts.”
Ahead of the 30th anniversary this week of World Press Freedom Day, it is becoming clearer than ever that three things have to happen to assure a future for media organisations.
The first is financial independence. The Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) say that media can only be truly independent if there are no financial strings. They created Plūrālis for this reason, a blended funding model that combines philanthropic and commercial capital to make interventions when media are most vulnerable, acting as a shield against capture from governments or individuals who seek to compromise their editorial independence. “A new approach was needed and this was an experiment, but it really could be a model for the future,” their chief strategy officer, Patrice Schneider, said.
But beyond philanthropic grants and investment, ultimately media organisations strive to be self-sustaining. To that end, more are turning to membership and reader revenue models. In a world where so much information is available for free, to persuade a reader to voluntarily pay for news is tough. It relies on an exchange of value and trust.
In recent months, the Guardian Foundation team, in collaboration with our colleagues at the Guardian, have worked with the Kyiv Independent, Holod, Telex and +972, to exchange knowledge, skills and tactics. The hope is that if we can share with young, vibrant, independent startups what is working for others, they will flourish in parts of the world that desperately need them.
Zakhar Protsiuk, chief operating officer of the Kyiv Independent, said the mentorship “gave us practical advice that we could act on quickly. One tip resulted in an increase of more than 150% in reader support that week.”
They went on to achieve their goal of 10,000 members. At the recent International Journalism festival, editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko reflected on their broader journey over the last 18 months: “We just hope that other media can draw from our success and that this isn’t just something for us.” This is key: a community of independent media who are working together in solidarity, not competition.
The second vital factor is plurality of voice and agency. News organisations must include diverse perspectives and reporting by journalists from a broad range of backgrounds. If certain communities are excluded or misrepresented in the news coverage they see, then trust is lost. To combat this effectively, the barriers to entry and progression in the industry must be broken, alongside the recognition that more inclusive and representative news organisations create better journalism and engage the audiences they seek to serve in a more successful way.
The third crucial element is news literacy. If the long-term sustainability of news organisations relies, at least in part, on people willing to pay for it, then audiences who can seek out, value and trust those organisations must exist. A report by Impress, based on research by the universities of Leeds and Derby, found a link between lack of trust in journalism and low levels of news literacy among the UK population.
Without educating audiences to critically evaluate sources and discern reliable information, trust cannot be built. Without trust, news has no value, meaning readers won’t pay for it, news organisations won’t be viable and public access to fact-based journalism will decrease. With that, our ability to make informed decisions and hold power to account is weakened.
Thankfully, news and media literacy is gaining more support, being seen as a vital part of the journalism ecosystem and an underpinning of democracy.
So as World Press Freedom Day approaches, while we must recognise the very real threats, let’s also take a moment to look forward with some hope for a society in which people can find and use their power to participate, influence and act.”
My Writings On Truth Telling, Witness, Silence, Freedom of the Press and Journalism As A Sacred Calling In Pursuit of Truth
March 28 2025 Witness of the Martyr Hossam Shabat, and His Eulogy By Sharif Abdel Kouddous
August 12 2024 A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth: the Case of Salman Rushdie, Champion of Our Liberty In Writing As A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth
And to place the performance of Truth telling, remembrances, and the witness of history in political context as seizure of power and their roles in identity formation as mimesis, reimagination, and transformative rebirth, my writing on the figure of Loki the Trickster:
October 11 2024 Silenced Loki: a Figure and Symbol of Poetic Vision and Creativity as Rebellion Against Authority and Revolutionary Struggle
“People should be scared’: convictions in US ‘antifa’ trial set dangerous precedent: Experts say verdict gives Trump officials scope to crack down on leftwing views using spurious ‘terrorism’ label
‘Numerous signs of torture’: a Ukrainian journalist’s detention and death in Russian prison: The Guardian, working with media partners, has tracked down first-hand accounts to reconstruct Viktoriia Roshchyna’s final months
Social injustice is the crack in the Liberty Bell; as we stand united in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world in our wonderfully diverse human family, with our essential workers who during the Pandemic, this particular one for now it seems held at bay but a threat which may return in new and terrible forms like the Black Death at any time, risked their own lives and those of their families to guarantee basic services to us all, and with our vulnerable populations who bear the true costs of what wealth and hegemony of power and privilege we may enjoy, let us always remember that among the causes and origins of our current problems is the failure of our political and economic systems to realize our founding value of equality.
What is the meaning of the Pandemic? Among other things it has exposed the faultlines of our civilization and the internal contradictions whose mechanical failures now threaten us all with civilizational collapse and extinction as consequences of capitalism and colonialism as systems of unequal power, and of control and dominion of nature as flawed coping strategies for our fear of her as uncontrollable, irrational, chaotic, and free; fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For in this failure of our grasp to reach the limits of our vision we have allowed a failing capitalism to try and bring us down with it, to subvert democracy and the structural safeguards of our freedom embodied in our government as a free society of equals, and as our devastation of the environment creates pandemics and poisons our world to threaten our very lives.
When we will say, Enough! When will we reclaim our liberty and ownership of the public resources we have let slip away into the hands of those who would enslave us?
When we think of labor unions, of strikes and the right of workers to organize in defense of fair and safe work, we must think not only of our universal human rights and our duty of care for each other in solidarity, but also of the systems of oppression and unequal power in which such seizures of power become necessary and arise as imposed conditions of struggle. The event we celebrate today of over one hundred years ago, the Seattle General Strike, was such a victory, one which in large part founded organized labor.
From Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin comes an inspirational account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 in the wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and conditions of austerity and worker exploitation much like those today. May we learn from the examples of history how better to meet the challenges of the future.
“The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
November 11, 1918. The war was finished. There were wild celebrations everywhere — everywhere, that is, in France, Britain, and the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness erupted, and millions took to the streets of Paris, London, and New York.
In Seattle, the Star pronounced, “War is Over!” The city learned of the armistice on Sunday night, November 10; at once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets filled, his planned proclamation of a holiday irrelevant; his wish for a proper, orderly, patriotic manifestation was superseded.
Revelers celebrated not just the end of the war, but also what they thought to be the end of the so-called Spanish flu. Over the course of that day, makeshift bands appeared, with people banging garbage-can lids and lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Workers abandoned the shipyards, longshoremen quit the waterfront, and the city center was gridlocked. The city’s health authorities, too, were taken aback. There were no masks to be seen; social distancing was defiantly disregarded. They had their own plans in the works, perhaps with some recklessness, to withdraw their edicts, their restrictions on crowds and mandatory masking, and to triumphantly pronounce the influenza beaten.
Sailors, first carriers of the influenza and also its first victims, were ordered into the crowds to ensure that the celebration was official and properly patriotic. The November celebrations were also suggestive of a level of underlying discontent, a prelude to another war coming, to a return of “normalcy” in the nation’s most class-divided, strike-prone city — above all to the great “Seattle Strike.”
“The war to end all wars,” the papers repeated without a blush. Yet 10 million had been lost in the slaughter on the Western Front; millions more were maimed, emotionally as well as physically. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were vast swaths of devastation, the heart of the continent was in ruins, and there were new armies, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory, of “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” “democracy at full tilt.” “We won the war!”
The workers of Seattle, however, had never really supported this war, unless one reduced it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. Still, they celebrated; especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, conscription; to “sedition” charges and “criminal syndicalism” laws; to the red squads, raids, and prison sentences. The killing — nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I, and 53,000 were killed in action — was not restricted to the trenches. On the home front, the influenza killed 675,000, and more than 1,500 deaths were recorded in Seattle.
The Flu Comes to Seattle
In the winter of 1918, much of the city — the schools, and most public places — was still reopening. It remained unclear if the epidemic was, in fact, finished, with a second spike just before Christmas. The heavy rains had begun. The first loggers were drifting back; they joined others — wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for spring and work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle in winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. Some were sick. The Union Record, the city’s union-owned daily newspaper, reported that “peace” abroad was bringing hunger at home. One man, a union representative from the Metal Trades Council (MTC), told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in one night, all for bed and board.”
It had taken time for the influenza to reach Seattle. This city of three hundred thousand, situated in the far northwestern corner of the nation, was two mountain ranges and several long days from Chicago by train; it was weeks from the East Coast by the Panama Canal, and still much longer around the Strait of Magellan. Seattle was, in this sense, isolated, yet by war’s end, it had become the center of trade with Asia, two days closer to Vladivostok than its rival to the south, San Francisco. It was the gateway to Alaska and its fisheries. Wheat from the great fields of the Palouse was shipped from its docks.
Seattle had become an imperial outpost. The Puget Sound country bristled with warship building and armed encampments. Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, was the largest such base in the West. Bremerton, across the bay, was home port for the navy’s North Pacific fleet. Sailors trained there; warships, meant for the Asian “theater,” were built in its yards. The real war, of course, was an ocean away in the other direction. In spite of this, Seattle’s shipyards — the city’s “basic industry” — produced more ships for the war (ninety in total, steel hulled) than any other shipyard in the country. The yards were “the life” of the city, “pulsing through every [other] industry, affecting all workers.” These yards employed some thirty five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
The influenza, despite its name, originated not in Spain but in Kansas in 1917, settling in Camp Riley. It was well traveled by the following summer’s end. It had first spread eastward, moving from camp to camp, reaching Europe with the arriving American Expeditionary Forces. It swept across Europe, adding a new dimension of horror to the trenches of the Western Front. Then home again to the United States, it returned with soldiers and sailors, killing ferociously. Public health officers in Seattle certainly knew about it and expected it, yet, as elsewhere, they were caught off guard when it actually appeared. It came in late September, by way of infected sailors in Boston dispatched to Philadelphia, then with the 334 of these who set sail from Philadelphia for Puget Sound. On arrival, many were desperately ill.
“In the event the disease appears here,” announced Seattle’s commissioner of health, Dr J.S. McBride, on September 28, “and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming an epidemic.” Isolation would begin with places of amusement, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, and saloons. It was also presented as an opportunity to shut down the city’s notorious Skid Row, with its flophouses, saloons, brothels, and various other places of unsavory amusement, including the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Industry, however, would carry on, indeed be encouraged — the city’s “interests” were anxious to remain open, free of wartime restrictions, determined to reestablish the “open shop.”
McBride and his staff watched for the first signs of the influenza; these came initially in the Navy’s facilities in Bremerton, then in Camp Lewis with, suddenly, reports of hundreds of cases of a severe influenza. These, the authorities initially insisted, were simply the flu, though noting that, in some cases, this flu quickly became pneumonia. Bremerton reported fourteen deaths. Sailors were ordered to avoid large gatherings. Visitors were banned. Camp Lewis was placed under quarantine.
Still, in Seattle, McBride and staff looked in the wrong places, even when hundreds of cadets at the Naval Training Station at the University of Washington were reported to be suffering from a mild flu. For some reason, they saw the university as set apart. Their demesne was the city; McBride continued to pronounce Seattle influenza-free. Then, on October 4, one cadet was reported dead, hundreds more ill, and four hundred hospitalized. Precious time had been wasted. That night, two influenza cases were reported in the city — each resulting in death.
The next morning, McBride met with the mayor, Ole Hanson, a real estate broker; together they announced to the public that the influenza had found its way to Seattle. McBride ordered all private and public dances prohibited, declared that streetcars and theaters had to be well ventilated, and ordered police to strictly enforce the anti-spitting ordinance. He appealed to the public to practice a voluntary quarantine. Over the next days, however, closings were ordered — first church services, then places of entertainment, then the public schools.
The suddenness of the closures took the public by surprise and sparked some resistance. The superintendent of schools, Frank Cooper, believed them to be unwise: “I consider it more dangerous to have children running around the streets loose than to have them in school where they will be under strict medical supervision.” Crowds of people continued to congregate in the city’s theater district, large numbers of sailors mixing with them, despite police efforts to keep amusements closed. The police organized an “Influenza Squad” to enforce the orders, but results were mixed. Those who could began leaving the city, some to mountain retreats, others further afield. The writer Mary McCarthy’s parents evacuated to Chicago, where they each were stricken, dying before the year’s end, leaving their children orphans. McCarthy was returned to Seattle and put in the care of an aging aunt.
Seattle’s officials singled out the shipyards for attention, though more in keeping with wartime patriotism than with concern for the health of the workers. The yards, after all, far from healthy places, were well known as rough-and-tumble work sites where “men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Influenza added to this toll. Still, McBride wanted to keep these workers on the job. He believed he could, especially as many of these workers toiled outside, where they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease than other factory workers.
Nevertheless, he sought to inoculate the entire workforce with one of the sera that had been developed. “Let no question of money or men interfere with your work.” When requests came from others, he responded, “Seattle needs all the serum we can grow, and we will share with nobody until our shipyard workers and other citizens have been properly inoculated.” Workers were skeptical; war, the virus, and the brutality of work had produced widespread fatalism, a realism in the face of calamity in all quarters. The numbers of the sick and the dead rose, and by mid-October, four thousand cases had been reported; no evidence ever appeared to suggest the sera had been of use.
Hanson and McBride were stubbornly confident that isolation and closures would work. Hanson maintained to the end that the influenza was really just a form of the flu, a “grippe.” He believed that it would last no more than a week. They were wrong. In no large American city was the influenza contained quickly.
Within days, the flu reached all sections of Seattle, though “south of Yesler” and the Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and the cheap housing of the workers, suffered most. Frustrated, the authorities blamed a noncompliant public for the influenza’s persistence. They continued to work to see that the closure orders were widened and enforced. On October 28, McBride issued new orders, including mandatory wearing of flu masks. These were worn reluctantly; they came to be the symbols of Seattle besieged. Streetcar conductors were ordered to bar people not donning a face covering. Hanson told commuters that they had better find a mask and wear it, “or tomorrow morning they will walk to work.” In late October, however, the numbers of new cases of infection leveled off and then began to fall.
Strike Town
Seattle’s shipyard workers believed they had sacrificed unreasonably for the sake of the war. Their hours had been long, their work grueling. Hulet Wells, the onetime socialist president of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC), also president of the state’s Socialist Party, while awaiting sentencing for opposing conscription, found work at Skinner & Eddy, the largest of the yards. There he encountered a; “howling bedlam . . . a wilderness of strange machines, whirling belts and belching fires . . . The human ant heap boiled with all the specialists that fit into the modern shipyard. Everywhere there was deafening noise, boilers rang, planers screamed, long white-hot rods were smashed into bolt machines. Here was the angle-bending floor where black men beat a tattoo with heavy sledges, and here a steam hammer thumped its measured blows . . . [as well as] the wrenching scenes of the injured, the sirens of the ambulances, and the dying or dead being carted off into the chaos of the waterfront roadways.”
In 1917 and 1918, the city’s unions increasingly felt pressure from the federal government and its shipping board. The shipyard workers had worked with standards set nationally by labor boards in Washington, DC, even when believing themselves punished by these standards. It was indisputable that prices were higher on the West Coast — above all in Seattle — than in the East. The unions were especially intent on raising the wages of the unskilled and semiskilled, an immediate necessity in breaking down divisions in the shops. However, wage demands were repeatedly rejected. Seattle’s workers, inheritors of a decade of intense conflict, by the war’s end, believed themselves betrayed by the government. They had been lied to, they believed, by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight. They voted to strike in December. The January strike was inevitable.
The men walked out on the morning of January 21, 1919. There were women scattered through their ranks, as well as black workers, though they were few and their union status unclear. Virtually all the AFL’s international unions in these trades barred women and blacks. A. E. Miller, the chairman of the MTC, announced the strike “absolutely clean,” meaning that thirty-five thousand workers struck en masse, and none came to take their places. They showed “splendid solidarity and great enthusiasm,” undaunted by the winter rain. Tacoma and Aberdeen quickly followed. Speaking on behalf of the workers, John McKelvey defied the owners. The “shipyard millionaires have been getting all the credit for the ships we have built. Oh yes, they’re ship builders. If they think they can build ships let ’em go ahead and build them!”
The Union Record brought news of the strikers’ plight to its fifty thousand subscribers, supporting the strike without qualification. Next to its front-page lead on January 2, “45,000 Men Out in Sound Cities,” it ran an article titled, “Tremendous Profits Made by Seattle Shipbuilding Firms,” revealing the businesses’ costs, sales, and profits. The day’s editorial, “A Great Strike,” explained: “The whole question of wages is bound up in the tremendous increase in the cost of living in Seattle.”
The strike, however, was not just a symptom — real enough in itself — but an indication as well of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years — “an epidemic of strikes” — was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism. Seattle was both a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism; its unions’ commitment to workers’ control ran deep, and support for the Russian Revolution was widespread. Kate Sadler, the workers’ “Joan of Arc,” had led Seattle’s delegation to the Mooney conference. Crystal Eastman in the Liberator reported that Sadler led her city’s “wild ones,” who insisted on a general strike no later than May Day to free the framed San Francisco union man. “Russia Did It!” would be the lead of a leaflet penned by the young Harvey O’Connor (illustrated with a brawny worker and a fat capitalist in a coffin — twenty thousand were distributed).
At the same time, Seattle was filling up with unemployed, homeless, demobilized young men, and it was still not entirely free from the flu. In response, the MTC packed the Hippodrome with thousands to announce the formation of a “Soldiers, Sailors and Workers Council.” The meeting went forward despite the authorities, who surrounded the hall with military police. Thousands gathered in Tacoma as well, with Camp Lewis soldiers, no longer under quarantine, in attendance.
It was increasingly clear that unions did not know with whom they were to negotiate: the national board or the local employers. In either case, the employers refused to budge, as did the eastern board members, the shippers, and their allies in the national AFL unions. The MTC thus turned to Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), the federation of 110 local unions — the organization that, in defiance of the AFL, was built from the bottom up, that championed industrial unions, supported sympathy strikes, cooperated with the IWW, and was led by socialists — with a request for the strike.
“The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale,” wrote O’Connor. On January 22, in an assembly of the CLC, in the Labor Temple, the metal workers made their case, requesting that Seattle’s workers join them in a general strike. The aim would be not only to win their demands but also to present a show of force in the face of the employers’ renewed open-shop campaign. They believed that the fate of the organized labor movement itself was at stake. Representatives of the city’s local trade unions and rank-and-file militants packed the Labor Temple. According to O’Connor, “Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives . . . were hooted down” or interrupted by shouting, clapping, and singing.
The CLC proposed a referendum on the strike, which passed unanimously. The enthusiasm that evening brought with it high rhetoric, emotion, even tears. Then came a cornucopia of demands; appetites grew, delegates revealing their own grievances and aspirations, hopeful that these, too, might be addressed. The metal workers, however, insisted that the strike’s demands be limited to those of the shipyard workers already out — what they wanted was a “clean-cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor.”
The meeting ended in an uproar when delegate Fred Nelson unfurled a banner showing a soldier and a sailor in uniform with a worker in overalls and the slogan “Together We Will Win.” This was followed by “a storm of applause which lasted several minutes,” abating only when delegate Ben King of the Painters, just returned from the Mooney Congress in Chicago, recounted “sleeping between soldiers and sailors and they are all with us.” The applause “broke out afresh.”
America’s First General Strike
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers — all of them — struck. In doing so, they literally took control of the city. They brought the city to a halt — a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront, where “nothing moved but the tide.” The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated — the strikers were joined by workers not in unions, unemployed workers, and family members. The city’s authorities were rendered powerless — there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?” — the red, white, and blue, or the red. The mayor, Hanson, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds. The general strike was not a revolution. It was a coordinated action in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, there had never been anything quite like it. The strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that was, in fact, revolutionary in some places — a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia.
It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air — terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead. Hence the Union Record’s February 6 editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong: “ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M. There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor.”
Seattle’s streets were quiet, and some thought this a problem. “Seattle Strikers Too Polite,” led the Appeal to Reason, the Midwestern Socialist newspaper. But this missed the point. The strikers feared provocation and had good reason to — it had been used time and again in the war against the Wobblies. Where the workers gathered, however, in the “feeding stations,” the union halls, the co-op markets, or the neighborhoods where workers and their families lived, it was another story.
The “feeding stations” were showcases of self-organization. They may have been authorized by the strike committees; on the ground, they depended on the creativity of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers took on the strike’s tasks, including running the kitchens, organizing milk distribution, and policing the city. The process of handing out milk was elaborate. “The dairies supplied by the milk dealers were only eleven in number, [and] so located that it would have been impossible for the mothers of Seattle to secure milk unless they owned automobiles.” The milk wagon drivers therefore “chose 35 locations spaced throughout the city, secured the use of space in stores, and proceeded to set up neighborhood milk stations.” Strong asked if the kitchens ever gave away meals. “Lots of them,” was the response. “We don’t refuse anyone, union or non-union if they can’t pay.” The strike may well have been the only occasion, before or since, when no one in Seattle went hungry.
On Saturday night, the strikers held a dance, and as late as Monday, they organized massive strike rallies. In the Georgetown neighborhood, the crowd was so large that the building sank somewhat and had to be evacuated. The meeting reconvened, and with “great enthusiasm . . . it was decided to make the meetings a regular weekly event . . . it was unanimous that the strike should continue until a living wage had been obtained by the shipyard workers. . . . Many of those present expressed the opinion that the scope of the meetings should be enlarged to include the wives and daughters of the workers, and to make them real community gatherings for the discussion of questions in which all are concerned.”
In all these places, the strike was the topic. It was analyzed, criticized, extolled, and debated, and when the workers’ representatives packed the rowdy, emotion-filled strike committee meetings, they came prepared; they were making history, and they knew it. The general strike served notice that Seattle’s workers had become a class “for themselves” — class conscious and “there at the creation,” as the late historian E. P. Thompson put it. “Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way,” he wrote in The Making of the English Working Class.
Stopping Short
Alas, “The exhilaration from the marvelous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began to give way to apprehension,” wrote O’Connor. By the third day of the strike, they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood alone. The strike had not spread down the coast to California, nor was there support from across the nation. There was little, O’Connor observed, “to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor movements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.” And, against them, the response of the authorities was unrelenting, especially the fearmongers. They frantically forecast a terrible future at hand: Bolshevism, anarchy.
Hanson, egged on by the papers, denounced the strike as “un-American” and refused to negotiate. The Post-Intelligencer observed: “The big fact that stands out from the temporary confusion of business is that Seattle, given a brief time for readjustment, would be well off, if not better than before, if the whole of its striking population [were] suddenly withdrawn from the city.” Hanson threatened martial law if the strike were not ended by 10 a.m. on Saturday. The “interests” in New York and Washington, DC, joined the chorus. The AFL denounced the strike, with the Teamsters Joint Council ordering the strikers back to work. There were telephone calls and telegrams, and a deluge of intimidation, threats, and vilification from the international offices.
The AFL censored the Central Labor Council and would later take credit for defeating its “strike.” Then the international officers arrived in person, threatening to rescind charters, seize union properties, and fire staff. Meanwhile, the shipyards in the East and California carried on as usual. The risk of the owners permanently shutting down the Seattle yards now seemed only too real — deliberative, political deindustrialization.
On Saturday, February 8, several unions returned, though this was by no means a stampede. The Executive Committee voted eleven to two to end the strike. They chose Jimmy Duncan, president of the CLC, not a delegate, to speak to the strike committee for them. He tried to convince those in attendance that continuing the walkout was futile. He failed. The strike committee, infuriated by Hanson’s threats and still committed to victory, overwhelmingly voted to continue the strike, as did the longshoremen and the Metal Trades unions. The divide increasingly became one between the rank and file, on the one hand, and the executive committee, on the other.
Then on Monday, with more unions yielding, Duncan returned to the strike committee. He recommended ending the strike on Tuesday at noon. He requested that those unions that had returned to their jobs come back out so that the strikers could return united; as they had left on Thursday, they would return on Tuesday. The shipyard strikers remained out one month longer.
A Class in Conflict
How is this strike to be assessed? Harvey O’Connor wrote, “For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds.”
This sentiment was widely shared among Seattle’s workers. The CLC’s minutes are laden with messages of congratulations: the Metal Trades Council in Aberdeen commended Seattle’s workers “for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike [and urged] one big union and a 24-hour strike on May 1st to demonstrate our solidarity.” From the Astoria Central Labor Council came a communiqué “complimenting Organized Labor for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike.” Mine Workers Locals No. 2917, 1044, 1890, and 4309 sent resolutions “condemning the attitude of the ‘Star’ upon the strike and expressing willingness to lay down tools if conditions warrant.” The King County Pomona Grange pledged support by furnishing produce and finances to the strikers, while cash and expressions of solidarity came from local businesses.
Others concurred. The Socialists’ New York Call wrote:
Whatever may be said of the Seattle strike, it certainly is not a case of ‘blind striking,’ as the Journal of Commerce affirms. It has been calculated and prepared and is one of the finest examples of sacrifice and solidarity that workingmen have displayed in many years. It is a sympathetic strike participated in by workers who have no grievance of their own, at least none that they are raising at this time. They have walked out in support of another group of workers, with the view of aiding the latter to secure a speedy victory.
Max Eastman, editor of the Liberator, had visited Seattle that winter. What he may have contributed to the cause there, if anything, is not recorded. He did, however, record his evaluation: “The General Strike in this city of Seattle filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth. . . . You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”
The academic version of this story, which remains widely accepted, comes via the work of Robert L. Friedheim. “The first major general strike in the United States ended quietly at noon on February 11, 1919,” he wrote, adding without evidence, “Somewhat sheepishly, Seattle’s workers returned to their jobs in shops, factories, mills, hotels, warehouses and trolley barns. The strike had been a failure, and they all knew it. In the days ahead, they were to learn that it was worse than a failure — it was a disaster.” The CLC’s own strike committee, however, and to its great credit, commissioned a committee to produce a history of the strike. Anna Louise Strong at once penned her own findings:
The vast majority [of workers] struck to express their solidarity . . . and they succeeded beyond their expectations. They saw the labor movement come out almost as one man and tie up the industries of the city. They saw the Japanese and the IWW and many individual workers join in the strike, and they responded with a glow of appreciation. They saw garbage wagons and laundry wagons going along the streets marked “exempt by strike committee.” They saw the attention of the whole continent turned on the Seattle shipyards. They learned a great deal more than they expected to learn — more than anyone in Seattle knew before. They learned how a city is taken apart and put together again. They learned what it meant to supply milk to the babies of the city, to feed 30,000 people with a brand-new organization. They came close for the first time in their lives to the problems of management.
In the course of the strike’s five days, there had been no lockouts or significant dismissals. There had been no strikebreakers, no “replacement” workers needing protection. No mass arrests, thus no search for lawyers, no defense funds to build. There had been no violence — hence no funerals, no wakes, no widows with children to support. The leaders of the strike committee and the Central Labor Council worked to get the strike’s handful of victims — casualties were few — back to work. They remained quite capable of achieving this.
The fact was that the employers dared not test the workers, not in the short run. Seattle remained a union city. There was, of course, a sense of things getting back to normal, the exception being the waterfront, where the roller-coaster conflict continued. The shippers imposed the open shop, only to have this reversed in August. Now, at last, the ILA achieved job control and a single, alphabetical list. Seattle’s workers remained “strike prone,” among the most combative in the nation right into 1920–21. Wages remained relatively high in the city, as did the cost of living, leveling off but remaining above national averages through 1921.
Seattle’s workers had formed themselves as a class in conflict — in struggles that took place in the forests, on the waterfront, in cafés, and in laundries. They forged their class identity in the long, hard fight for industrial unions and the closed shop, and in the fight for workers’ power. At an early moment, the utopians of the Cooperative Commonwealth had taught socialism and attempted to practice what they preached. Later, the IWW and the Socialist Party fought for it, with the CLC, one step at a time, intent on implementing it.
The 1910s had been a decade of organizing, cooperating, and striking, the most basic weapons of working people in battles that were sometimes won and sometimes lost. Consciousness arose in the utopian colonies, in logging camps and mills, in free speech fights, and on the waterfront, in war and in dissent, in strikes of the “telephone girls,” waitresses, hotel maids, “lady barbers,” and laundry workers, in co-ops and in working-class neighborhoods.
Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death, and grief, into a great celebration of the living, if only for five days. The general strike was, for Seattle’s workers, a giant step toward a future that might be theirs. This aspiration was surely valid in terms of their own experience. They insisted that their vision was by no means the “pie in the sky” of the preachers and the politicians. A better world was possible. It still is.”
Cal Winslow places the General Strike in the context of the birth of America’s labor movement in Seattle in his article in Jacobin entitled
Seattle, “the Soviet of Washington”; “Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.
Seattle gleams under the grey skies that characterize its climate. Container ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to unload, while tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. The Great Wheel towers over Pier 57, and there are tourists everywhere. Two gigantic sports arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront, where in times past seamen brawled and the longshoremen struck the great ships — losing in 1916, winning at last in 1934. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who obtained the public funding for its construction. The best seats in the house sell for more than $1,000 and the approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is building a head-office complex for another tech firm, Amazon, complete with interlinked spherical glasshouses enclosing a miniature rainforest. Facebook and Google are also moving in. Powered by these new developments, the Emerald City has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the US. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both reside here.
Seattle flourishes, then — it is an important place. But can we ask: what sort of place? A stage set, perhaps, for the new Gilded Age, in which corporate wealth and “vibrant” street life can distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions. Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors. However, public space is at a premium and access to its beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high rating for “livability,” yet the cost of housing is rising even quicker than in the Bay Area and the traffic is often unbearable. Hundreds sleep on the street each night. Tent cities appear, reminiscent of the 1930s “Hooverville” shanty town erected in the mud flats south of the business district, and just as unwelcome to the authorities. Meanwhile elsewhere in the city, second homes abound.
Still, there are ghosts dwelling here: old memories — dimly held, to be sure. Here is Yesler Way, once better known as Skid Road because of the logs rolled downhill along its course to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. Nowadays a nondescript thoroughfare dotted with cafes frequented by tourists, including a branch of the city’s ubiquitous Starbucks chain, it used to heave with disreputable saloons, brothels, and flophouses, making Skid Road synonymous with any district where the down-and-out may gather: places that are rough, sometimes radical. The Industrial Workers of the World put down roots in this quarter among loggers, itinerant farm workers, and miners bound for the Yukon, as well as the shipyard workers who led the Seattle General Strike of February 6–10, 1919, the only true general strike in US history and the one occasion when American workers have actually taken over the running of a city — the sort of endeavor which earned this state, now given over to the billionaires of the new economy, the appellation “the Soviet of Washington.”
Pacific Hub
Seattle is situated on a vertical strip of land between Puget Sound — an “inland sea” off the northern Pacific — and the freshwater Lake Washington. Nonindigenous settlement began with the arrival of a couple of dozen migrants from Illinois in 1851, a few years after the Oregon Treaty fixed the border between the United States and British America at the 49th parallel. The incomers named the township after Chief Sealth of the area’s Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869, the city had just two thousand inhabitants. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. As places of note, Seattle and Tacoma, thirty miles to the south, were the warring creations of competing northern railroads. Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and Asian markets, Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim, usurping San Francisco’s former hegemony over the entire Pacific Slope. In addition to its command of Washington State’s forests and the great wheat belt of the Palouse steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska, whose economy was boosted by an influx of prospectors during the Klondike gold rush. Jobs in distributive and wholesale trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracted migrants fleeing slums, unemployment, and poverty in the East — blacklisted railroad workers, redundant miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte, the class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919 he recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards. If Minnesota and neighbouring farm states appealed to the more prosperous Scandinavian immigrants, Swedes above all, western Washington with its extractive industries drew in the much poorer Norwegians and Finns, though core activists in the General Strike came from the British Isles.
The timber economy of Western Washington was dominated by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Trust, which mounted a full-scale assault on the vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock, and Douglas fir forest. Timber from Washington State would buttress the copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. The loggers toiled for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in company shacks. Conditions in the mills were neither easier nor safer: giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire. When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their bindlestiffs and fled to Skid Road. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods. They were despised by Seattle’s bourgeoisie as “timber beasts.”
The well-to-do lived away from Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol hills, along Magnolia Bluff and overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park. They boasted a flourishing cultural life, including a fine university built in the French Renaissance style in Union Bay. The politicians and their newspapers might feud — what to do with the infamous Skid Road? — but Seattle was staunchly progressive: women’s suffrage, co-operatives, municipal ownership, growth. As it expanded from a low-lying base around Pioneer Square, the tops of surrounding hills were lopped off — “regraded” — for the benefit of developers. The neighboring town of Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years later, a blow for the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to force down rates. The new Port of Seattle developed some of the best waterfront facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still used in container terminals today. The construction of a ship canal connecting Puget Sound with Lake Washington also commenced in these years.
In the 1890s, utopian land-settlement schemes in Seattle’s vicinity drew in idealists and free-thinkers. Harry Ault, Union Record editor, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. He recalled his mother feeding workers in Coxey’s Army of the unemployed as it passed through Cincinnati in 1894. In the 1910s, Seattle’s established working-class communities — Ballard, “South of Yesler,” and into Rainier Valley — were blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, or the great mountain ranges beyond — all that the city cherished, and still does. This rarely registered as a problem, however, among municipal reformers.
Manual labor was dangerous as well as poorly rewarded: wrote one labor activist at the time, “Every day or so some unlucky shipyard workers would be carried out in the dead wagon.” When the US Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings in the city in 1914, Wisconsin’s great labor specialist, John Commons, noted a “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.” Seattle’s workers fought back against their oppressors as a class — and as a class, created a culture of their own: unions that were “clean,” not run by gangsters; a mass-circulation labor-owned newspaper, the Union Record — it became a daily in 1918, the only one of its kind; its circulation topped one hundred thousand in the aftermath of the strike. Socialist schools ran lectures indoors and out; IWW singing groups; community dances, and picnics. Milwaukee may have had its socialist congressman, Victor Berger; Los Angeles almost had a socialist mayor, Job Harriman; but Seattle’s socialists were working class and “Red.” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs judged Washington State the “most advanced” and long suspected that it might be the first to achieve socialism. Electoral success proved elusive, but Washington claimed several thousand paid-up adherents, ranking second only to Oklahoma in the proportion of party members per head of population. The Left took control of the party in Seattle in 1912 after a protracted factional struggle. Proponents of industrial unionism, they were thorns in the side of national party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions — and by implication, workers’ control. “I believe that 95 per cent of us agree that the workers should control industry,” wrote Ault. Still, most unions retained their affiliation to the AFL. Progressives were critical of craft divisions but thought the IWW impractical and wanted to remain in the “mainstream.” They looked to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council, for leadership. A metal worker born in Fife, Scotland, clearly influenced by syndicalism, his compromise formula came to be known as “Duncanism.” The city’s labor movement was centralized around the SCLC, which coordinated rather than supplanted the craft unions to ensure that all contracts for crafts within a particular industry ran concurrently, allowing for bargaining as a unit. Though a consistent critic of the IWW which challenged the AFL from the left, Duncan nevertheless acknowledged it as “a pacesetter.” In this environment, social democracy and revolutionary unionism could intermingle. Seattle was an IWW no less than a Socialist Party stronghold, home to its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and scene of free-speech fights ending in mass arrests, beatings, and victories. “Two card” workers were commonplace: an AFL card for the job, an IWW card for the principle.
Class solidarity wasn’t all-embracing, however. As late as September 1917, the Daily Call reported that one of the issues in a meatpackers’ strike was the workers’ demand for a white cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. The relatively few black workers in Seattle at this point, just 1 percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916. There were, however, signs of a shift in attitudes among the white majority. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, the socialist’s firebrand Kate Sadler, talked at black churches and was a scathing critic of exclusion and shop-floor segregation. The Union Record likewise insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” Ault told a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration that he had “little patience with racial prejudice,” recalling his early childhood in segregated Kentucky.
Voyage of the Verona
The opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 lifted West Coast trade, offsetting the recession which had hung over the States since the previous year. Seeking a share of the shipping companies’ profits, longshoremen struck on June 1, 1916 for a closed shop, higher wages, and a nine-hour day. Workers in San Francisco quickly settled, but Seattle and Tacoma stayed out. When Andrew Furuseth, head of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, defended the San Francisco leadership at an SCLC meeting in September, he was chased from the hall with shouts of “coward” and “quitter.” The strike shook Seattle. The Washington National Guard deployed along its harbor, which “resembled a battleground. Non-union men went uptown looking for fights. Union longshoremen beat up scabs on docks and ship. There were fist fights, knife fights, docks bombed, pier fires, shots fired and murders.” By the strike’s end on October 4 — Tacoma and a number of smaller locals held out longer — there were 850 scabs working the docks and the longshoremen had lost control of the waterfront. They returned to work under the open shop plus the “fink hall” which screened out the International Longshoremen’s Association and IWW.
The shingle weavers of Everett, the “City of Smokestacks” thirty miles to Seattle’s north, were engaged in their own desperate strike — victims of nothing short of a reign of terror. “At every stage the Everett police and the private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking on their streets,” recalled Anna Louise Strong, who reported on the unrest for the New York Evening Post. On November 5, 1916, three hundred Wobblies embarked on the steamships Verona and Calista bound for the mill town. No one aboard expected a warm welcome from the authorities, but murder was not foreseen. On its arrival, the Verona was met with gunfire from lawmen and vigilantes. At least five workers were killed, all of them unarmed, and dozens injured. Two “citizen deputies” were also slain, although the fatal shots were fired from the shore, seventy-four people aboard the Verona were charged with murder. The Everett massacre was in some ways a Pacific Northwest Peterloo: an assault on free speech, fair play, and the very notion of “rights.” Disbelief, then anger, coursed through Seattle’s working-class districts. The IWW turned Everett into a cause célèbre, stumping the West on behalf of the accused. “These seventy-four men represent the migratory worker, the element that while necessary is ferociously exploited in this Western country,” declared IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a dozen rallies. “They want the good things in life as much as any other member of the human race and they are organizing in the IWW to get them.” There was a sea change in popular opinion, a massive swing to the left. The SCLC persuaded Seattle lawyer George Vanderveer, “Attorney for the Damned,” to assist the Verona defendants. He secured their acquittal the following spring. The Daily Call reported that IWW membership had risen to twenty thousand and that the Wobblies now employed a dozen paid organizers — exaggerated figures, perhaps, but after the serious setback on the docks the IWW had undeniably gained fresh impetus.
The Wobblies took this forward momentum into the woods: a general strike involving some fifty thousand loggers and mill workers. “They breathe bad air in the camps. That ruins their lungs. They eat bad food. That ruins their stomachs. The foul conditions shorten their lives and make their short lives miserable,” lumber organizer James Thompson told the Industrial Commission during hearings in Seattle. The IWW had always idolized the itinerant workers of the West. They set out from Seattle to organize them and succeeded. Their demands were typically straightforward: an eight-hour day, no work on Sundays or public holidays, sanitary kitchens and satisfactory food, single spring beds with clean bedding, no workers under sixteen in the mills, no discrimination against IWW members. In July 2017, the IWW held a mass rally of 3,500 workers at Seattle’s Dreamland Rink. The meeting began with the singing of “Solidarity Forever.” Kate Sadler and IWW organizer J. T. “Red” Doran were the featured speakers.
The police, sheriffs, National Guard, and US Army responded to the strike with savage repression. The jails filled up; prisoners were beaten. Strike leader James Rowan and twenty IWW members were arrested in a single swoop in the city of Spokane. The federal government organized a rival organization, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. As the strike spluttered, the Wobblies adjusted their tactics: a “strike on the job,” the loggers working their desired eight-hour shifts. The conclusion, in March 1918, was a sensation: the eight-hour day won and a long list of improvements in the camps. It was one of the IWW’s greatest accomplishments and a source of class pride well beyond the ranks of the IWW. Duncan drew the obvious moral: “the terribly effective force which takes the name of IWW … is largely made up of men who consider regular trade unionism ‘too slow.’” It was, he acknowledged, a “threat to the prestige of trade unionism on the Coast.”
Nevertheless, traditional unionism also thrived amid the industrial boom stoked by federal military procurement as Woodrow Wilson took the US into the First World War. “A red-letter year in the history of organized labour,” Duncan celebrated in July 1917. “A dozen new unions have been organized and all of the Seattle unions are flourishing.” He singled out the streetcar men whose membership had risen to 1,600; the telephone operators with nearly 1,100. Industrial action by the laundresses in particular had struck fear into Seattle’s respectable classes. Within a week, all the city’s major laundries had more or less closed down. Hotels and clubs began to run short of clean linen. The bourgeois Seattle Times fretted that the “family washtub would emerge from oblivion in thousands of Seattle homes.” The laundry workers took their case into the neighborhoods: a fair in Fremont, a parade in Rainier Valley. Stung by hostile public opinion, the employers rapidly capitulated. But if such triumphs deepened working-class consciousness, they brought down fierce repression, foretelling worse to come. William Preston, Jr, has revealed that “the lumber operators of the Northwest provided the initial impetus in the evolution of federal policy” — that is, the “Red Scare” and the Palmer raids. The workers’ movement in Seattle was strong, certainly, but not in Gramsci’s sense hegemonic. US entry into the European bloodbath in April 1917 turned dissent into treason. Gloves off, the federal government moved decisively against the IWW, indicting its top leadership. In Chicago, 101 members were tried and convicted of a range of alleged conspiracies. State vigilantism was visited upon Seattle, regarded as a center of both pro-German and pro-Bolshevik sentiment. The Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. despised the city’s workers as “the scum of the earth” who recognized “no law and no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” There were police raids, ransacked offices, mass arrests. Emil Herman, state secretary of the Socialist Party was charged with violations of the Espionage Act and imprisoned in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Hulet Wells, a former president of the SCLC, was sentenced to two years in federal prisons for passing out “No Conscription” handbills, along with Sam Sadler, one-time president of the longshoremen.
Feting the Shilka
In this extraordinarily tense atmosphere, the revolution came to Seattle on the Friday before Christmas, 1917. The Russian cargo vessel Shilka, red flags flying, steamed into Elliott Bay. Seattle’s socialists, its Wobblies, its dockers, metal workers, waitresses and shingle weavers, scrambled to the docks to greet the newcomers, as did naval officers and city police wary that the ship might contain Bolshevik gold, even perhaps munitions. In fact, the Shilka carried only beans and peas in its hold, and simply needed to refuel. But the arrival of a soviet of Russian sailors was momentous in itself. For the workers, its arrival greatly added to the festive mood. The sailors were fêted. There were testimonials, speeches and spontaneous singing — the “Marseillaise,” also the “Red Flag.” Hundreds of Seattleites jammed into the IWW Hall on Second Avenue where they greeted a young sailor, Danil Teraninoff, on stage with rapturous applause. “Never in Seattle has there been such a demonstration of revolutionary sentiment as at the moment the Russian fellow worker ascended the platform,” reported the socialist Daily Call. The visit of the Shilka sealed the extraordinary romance of Seattle’s working people with the October days, their passionate sympathy and solidarity with the revolution unparalleled in an American context. According to the late Philip Foner, “no labour body was a more consistent defender of the Russian revolution than the Seattle Central Labor Council.” Seattle delegates to AFL national conventions pressed for official recognition of the fledgling workers’ state, to no avail. The longshoremen intercepted railroad cars with loads labeled “sewing machines,” unearthing rifles and ammunition bound for Admiral Kolchak’s White armies on the Siberian front. The IWW resolved that they would “rather starve than receive wages for loading ships on a mission of murder.” The authorities, alarmed when not hysterical, “discovered,” among other things, Bolshevik conspiracies which trade unionists had every practical reason to deny. Until recently historians tended to accept these denials at face value, in so doing diminishing these remarkable events. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution was indeed a factor — a contradictory one, yes: inspiring the Left while terrifying the upper classes — in Seattle’s General Strike.
The political culture of Seattle in these years was shaped not only by its own tumultuous industrial-relations history but also by currents sweeping through working-class movements internationally. The Union Record published letters from Lenin including his “Letter to American Workers”; the Industrial Worker reported on a Labour socialist conference in Leeds where Ramsey MacDonald, flanked by Tom Mann, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, “hailed” the Russian Revolution. The new spirit of industrial radicalism spread far beyond its natural home in the IWW. Even where issues with management were “pure and simple,” bitter conflicts ensued. The AFL also felt the heat, its collaboration with employers and strict insistence on the sanctity of contracts, jurisdictional division by craft, and the authority of national officials rejected by growing numbers of workers.
The celebrations of 1917 were the prelude, then, to the great strikes of 1919. Seattle workers saw in the October Revolution their own image, the embodiment of what they were fighting for at home. “No single event,” wrote Duncan, “throughout the whole world today can, from the standpoint of workers everywhere, compare in importance with the successful piloting of the Russian Soviet Republic past the treacherous rocks of international capitalist greed and the determination of these plunderers to ruin what they cannot rule.” When two thousand longshoremen, overflowing their hall, celebrated the second anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1919, they rose in “tremendous cheering,” as the IWW’s J. T. Doran walked from the vestibule to the rostrum and began to speak. Doran, free on bail from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, delivered, according to Magden, a rousing speech in which he described the workers’ revolution in Russia as “the most stupendous event since the fall of feudalism.”
Union City
By the end of the First World War, trade union membership in Seattle had quadrupled since 1915 to create, in effect, a closed-shop city. The General Strike would require no pickets, since there were no strikebreakers. Prejudice toward minorities eased, challenging management’s ever-ready divide-and-rule tactic. On the eve of the strike, Japanese unions appealed to the SCLC to join the strike committee and were accepted. “Even in the midst of strike excitement, let us stop for a moment to recognize the action of the Japanese barbers and restaurant workers who, through their own unions, voted to take part in the General Strike,” commented the Union Record. “The Japanese deserve the greater credit because they have been denied admission and affiliation with the rest of the labor movement and have joined the strike of their own initiative. We hope that this evidence of labor’s solidarity will have an influence on the relations between the two races in the future.” Black workers were accepted as full members of Seattle’s unions later the same year. The General Strike began with an appeal from the shipyard workers to the SCLC for support in a pay dispute following a period of wartime wage repression. There were thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle out of a total population of around three hundred thousand — fifteen thousand more in Tacoma. The industry fused together the two sectors of the local working class, the seasonal lumber and harvest workers and the city’s skilled trades, in a potent combination. Seattle had delivered more vessels to the Navy than any other port, even though its labor movement was strongly anti-war. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand workers, including many unemployed, answered the General Strike Committee’s call. For the best part of a week, they fed the people, patrolled the streets, and celebrated workers’ power as a lived reality, until the combined weight of the forces ranged against them — the police and the special constables drafted in by Seattle’s belligerent mayor, Ole Hanson; the federal troops deployed by Secretary of War Newton Baker; the big newspapers; and the national leaders of the AFL and its affiliates — broke the striking unions’ resolve.
At the outset of the hostilities, Anna Louise Strong wrote that a Seattle walkout wouldn’t in itself greatly trouble the big commercial combines in the East. “But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order — this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.” Stirred by the Everett case, Strong had taken a job as second-in-command at the Union Record. Probably an IWW member, she lived and worked in Socialist circles, also retaining acquaintances from her earlier life — including Russian émigrés, one a friend of Lenin’s. She organized much of the paper’s international coverage, notably a Russia department, and also wrote its editorials; as often as not she was the voice of the General Strike.
Against a remarkable backdrop of communist uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, red flags on the Clyde, and the hot summer in Turin, the Seattle strike fired the starting pistol for an extraordinary year of working-class rebellion in the States, the like of which has not been seen since: the Boston police strike; industry-wide action in steel, coal mining, and textiles. The subsequent era of working-class retreat began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution — the American Plan. In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into redundancy, while the Waterfront Employers’ Association reintroduced the open shop. But labor radicalism didn’t die after 1919. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground; also in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. Along with an underlay of Scandinavian progressivism, this legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which brought an alliance of CIO unions and progressive farmers to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. It was in 1936 that FDR’s postmaster general, David Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington,” a phrase later popularized in the writings of Mary McCarthy.”
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2023, Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power; In what ways will such class struggles between capital and labor define our nation, democracy, and the fate of humankind?
In this moment we test and observe enormous forces of history in the crucible of America, this absurd experiment in which one human being is as good as any other, and of equal value as an inherent quality of our humanity.
What a revolutionary notion; and possibly the origin of all true revolution.
Among the vast systems of dehumanization we must wrestle with to achieve a free society of equals, privatization and theft of the commons has unleashed a death spiral of capitalism wherein all wealth accumulates at the top embodied in a few apex predators and oligarchs in an increasingly narrow hegemonic elite of wealth, power, and privilege, as those whose labor creates that wealth and power become nearer to true slaves under forces of falsification, commodification, and theft of the soul.
This is late stage capitalism, as it reaches the point of civilizational collapse, as we are witnessing now with the hollowing out of the middle class and the emergence of a mass precariat in the shadow of plutocratic extravagance and decadence.
So for the political and social threats we now face; and all of this dovetails horrifically with civilization as war on nature which of late has in fires and floods sent us signs of our impending doom and the existential threat of a dying earth and the extinction of our species.
Yet we have ready examples at hand of different paths we may take, we human beings, and of how we may choose to be human together.
Here I am thinking of the courageous and glorious history of organized labor and of the 1919 Seattle General Strike which shaped labor unions in America, which seeks to change the relationships between capitalist and labor classes.
We celebrate this day a festival in Red and Green; socialism as labor solidarity and class struggle, and ecology as stewardship of our world. What unites these two origins and purposes of May Day is the idea of interconnectedness, mutualism, and interdependence in the social and natural worlds, and of our duty of care for each other and our fragile ark of life on our journey together through the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos.
This day also finds our universities embattled by forces of repression of dissent, as a new generation finds its heart and its voice in solidarity with the people of Palestine against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity paid for by our taxes and authorized by both Traitor Trump and Genocide Joe and the apparatus of state terror and tyranny they represent. We refuse to be made complicit by silence in the face of this historic abandonment of our universal human rights and the role of America as their guarantor throughout the world.
We have brought the war home. Now our universal human rights in the genocide of the Palestinians paid for by our taxes and our rights of dissent and co ownership of the state will be tested; has democracy become performative in America, or does it still stand and have meaning? This, friends, is the true reason the Netanyahu regime engineered October 7; to aide Trump in the subversion of democracy and to create a casus belli for the conquest of the Middle East and the Final Solution of the Palestinians.
The divestiture, peace, and Occupy movement and protests have gathered momentum as an unstoppable tide as did the Black Lives Matter wave of mass action, and to the tyrants of death and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil let us say with the Mockingbird; “If we burn, you burn with us.”
Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.
I think now of the iconic May Day speech of Jean Genet for the Black Panthers at a university under siege by authorities to whom the function of universities is as a success filter which enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorizes hierarchies and identities of reified membership and exclusionary otherness in terms of race, class, and gender.
Sadly, in this nothing has changed, which can be read all too clearly in the police terror and repression of dissent at the peace protests and encampments for divestiture throughout our nation’s universities. The struggle between conservative and revolutionary forces in universities reflects that of all our institutions and systems of oppression; states and the wealthy who operate and fund them understand universities as a success filter and intend to enforce and control membership in elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as class war, white supremacist tyranny, and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, while universities are at the same time a forge of questioning and organizing for a true free society of equals, for seizures of power as class struggle, for the constitution of a revolutionary intelligentsia able to lead an engaged citizen electorate, and for change and liberation struggle of all kinds.
For many years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach whose methods centered Socratic dialog, I taught my students that the uniqueness of our civilization founded in the deimos of the Forum of Athens and in the Trial of Socrates was that it is a self-questioning system which totally rejects authority as a source of truth. This I call the Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Long ago now, I would have said that this defines being an American, and no American would willfully collaborate in the deification of authority and the devaluation of truth and of questioning authority as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Education comes from the Greek educatus; to bring forth, not to stuff facts in; we must choose between training and education. The great question for us now regarding education at all levels is whether it serves tyranny and obedience to authority or democracy and the questioning of ourselves and of the world.
As written by Jacqueline Frost in Social Text, in an article entitled Jean Genet’s May Day Speech, 1970: “Your Real Life Depends on the Black Panther Party”; “In Genet’s final call to action, he asks white intellectuals to follow the directives of the BPP, even if this means “desert[ing] your universities” in order to support Bobby Seale. In a time of recession, which promises to be even more hostile to radical intellectuals, this call to desertion is one among many of the experiments in political inheritance that Genet’s example conjures. His desire to “destroy all the habitual reasons for living in order to discover others,” as recounted in his Thief’s Journal, reminds us to promote mischief in our intellectual comportments, the kind that existentially threatens “good student”-type university meritocrats.
More pressing however, is the experiment that Genet’s May Day Speech generates in the form of a question, a question which we cannot but feel as our own today: how will the whites, through the elaboration of solidarity and the relinquishment of power, destroy racism and salvage love?”
As I wrote in my post of May 1 2023, Socialism is Compassion in Action: On Compassion as a Defining Quality of Humankind; What is human? Of the transgression of our boundaries I have often written; it remains the primary act of individuation and the creation of identity as a seizure of power from Authority and from the Forbidden, but what quality defines us and sets humankind apart from beasts, from the artificial intelligences of the transhuman, and from the future possibilities of posthuman species?
To this role as a defining human quality I nominate love as altruism, compassion, and empathy; the ability to bond and connect with others as extensions of ourselves, to feel the pain of others and respond to our common needs and frailties, mercy and charity, and the whole spectrum of our emotional awareness which shapes, informs, and motivates us and which we recognize as forms of love.
As Wagner teaches us in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who renounce love may wield the Ring of Fear, Power, and Force. Those who would enslave us and claim power over others as tyrants in the theft of our souls must first dehumanize themselves. Against such tyranny we have inherent powers of hope as refusal to submit which confers autonomy and of love as solidarity of action.
Love defines what is human. That which is without love is wholly other.
To be human is to share a continuity of being which is transpersonal; love makes us greater than ourselves. Through love we transcend the limits of the flags of our skin, and the divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness.
How then may we describe the action of this value in social relations and in political context? Love is mutable and a fulcrum of change, a process of transformation and redemption, embracing contradictions and filled with resonances and echoes, is at once immanent in nature and transcendent as the rapture and terror of our awareness of the Infinite. It is also the way in which we experience our connection and interdependence with others; Socialism is compassion in action, and it is this praxis and function of our humanity which I call to your attention as we celebrate May Day.
As Christina Feldman writes in Lions Roar; “In Buddhist iconography, compassion is embodied in the bodhisattva Kuan Yin, who is said to manifest wherever beings need help. Engendering such compassion is not only good for others, says Christina Feldman, it is also good for us. By putting others first, we loosen the bonds of our self-fixation, and in doing so, inch closer to our own liberation.
Compassion is no stranger to any of us: we know what it feels like to be deeply moved by the pain and suffering of others. All people receive their own measure of sorrow and struggle in this life. Bodies age, health becomes fragile, minds can be beset by confusion and obsession, hearts are broken. We see many people asked to bear the unbearable—starvation, tragedy, and hardship beyond our imagining. Our loved ones experience illness, pain, and heartache, and we long to ease their burden.
The human story is a story of love, redemption, kindness, and generosity. It is also a story of violence, division, neglect, and cruelty. Faced with all of this, we can soften, reach out, and do all we can to ease suffering. Or we can choose to live with fear and denial—doing all we can to guard our hearts from being touched, afraid of drowning in this ocean of sorrow.
Again and again we are asked to learn one of life’s clearest lessons: that to run from suffering—to harden our hearts, to turn away from pain—is to deny life and to live in fear. So, as difficult as it is to open our hearts toward suffering, doing so is the most direct path to transformation and liberation.
To discover an awakened heart within ourselves, it is crucial not to idealize or romanticize compassion. Our compassion simply grows out of our willingness to meet pain rather than to flee from it.”
How can we respond to the suffering that is woven into the very fabric of life? How can we discover a heart that is truly liberated from fear, anger, and alienation? Is there a way to discover a depth of wisdom and compassion that can genuinely make a difference in this confused and destructive world?
We may be tempted to see compassion as a feeling, an emotional response we occasionally experience when we are touched by an encounter with acute pain. In these moments of openness, the layers of our defenses crumble; intuitively we feel an immediacy of response and we glimpse the power of nonseparation. Milarepa, a great Tibetan sage, expressed this when he said, “Just as I instinctively reach out to touch and heal a wound in my leg as part of my own body, so too I reach out to touch and heal the pain in another as part of this body.” Too often these moments of profound compassion fade, and once more we find ourselves protecting, defending, and distancing ourselves from pain. Yet they are powerful glimpses that encourage us to question whether compassion can be something more than an accident we stumble across.
No matter how hard we try, we can’t make ourselves feel compassionate. But we can incline our hearts toward compassion. In one of the stories in the early Buddhist literature, the ascetic Sumedha reflects on the vast inner journey required to discover unshakeable wisdom and compassion. He describes compassion as a tapestry woven of many threads: generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity. When we embody all of these in our lives, we develop the kind of compassion that has the power to heal suffering.
A few years ago, an elderly monk arrived in India after fleeing from prison in Tibet. Meeting with the Dalai Lama, he recounted the years he had been imprisoned, the hardship and beatings he had endured, the hunger and loneliness he had lived with, and the torture he had faced.
At one point the Dalai Lama asked him, “Was there ever a time you felt your life was truly in danger?”
The old monk answered, “In truth, the only time I truly felt at risk was when I felt in danger of losing compassion for my jailers.”
Hearing stories like this, we are often left feeling skeptical and bewildered. We may be tempted to idealize both those who are compassionate and the quality of compassion itself. We imagine these people as saints, possessed of powers inaccessible to us. Yet stories of great suffering are often stories of ordinary people who have found greatness of heart. To discover an awakened heart within ourselves, it is crucial not to idealize or romanticize compassion. Our compassion simply grows out of our willingness to meet pain rather than to flee from it.
We may never find ourselves in situations of such peril that our lives are endangered; yet anguish and pain are undeniable aspects of our lives. None of us can build walls around our hearts that are invulnerable to being breached by life. Facing the sorrow we meet in this life, we have a choice: Our hearts can close, our minds recoil, our bodies contract, and we can experience the heart that lives in a state of painful refusal. We can also dive deeply within ourselves to nurture the courage, balance, patience, and wisdom that enable us to care.
If we do so, we will find that compassion is not a state. It is a way of engaging with the fragile and unpredictable world. Its domain is not only the world of those you love and care for, but equally the world of those who threaten us, disturb us, and cause us harm. It is the world of the countless beings we never meet who are facing an unendurable life. The ultimate journey of a human being is to discover how much our hearts can encompass. Our capacity to cause suffering as well as to heal suffering live side by side within us. If we choose to develop the capacity to heal, which is the challenge of every human life, we will find our hearts can encompass a great deal, and we can learn to heal—rather than increase—the schisms that divide us from one another.
In the first century in northern India, probably in what is now part of Afghanistan, the Lotus Sutra was composed. One of the most powerful texts in the Buddhist tradition, it is a celebration of the liberated heart expressing itself in a powerful and boundless compassion, pervading all corners of the universe, relieving suffering wherever it finds it.
When the Lotus Sutra was translated into Chinese, Kuan Yin, the “one who hears the cries of the world,” emerged as an embodiment of compassion that has occupied a central place in Buddhist teaching and practice ever since. Over the centuries Kuan Yin has been portrayed in a variety of forms. At times she is depicted as a feminine presence, face serene, arms outstretched, and eyes open. At times she holds a willow branch, symbolizing her resilience—able to bend in the face of the most fierce storms without being broken. At other times she is portrayed with a thousand arms and hands, each with an open eye in its center, depicting her constant awareness of anguish and her all-embracing responsiveness. Sometimes she takes the form of a warrior armed with a multitude of weapons, embodying the fierce aspect of compassion committed to uprooting the causes of suffering. A protector and guardian, she is fully engaged with life.
To cultivate the willingness to listen deeply to sorrow wherever we meet it is to take the first step on the journey of compassion. Our capacity to listen follows on the heels of this willingness. We may make heroic efforts in our lives to shield ourselves from the anguish that can surround us and live within us, but in truth a life of avoidance and defense is one of anxiety and painful separation.
True compassion is not forged at a distance from pain but in its fires. We do not always have a solution for suffering. We cannot always fix pain. However, we can find the commitment to stay connected and to listen deeply. Compassion does not always demand heroic acts or great words. In the times of darkest distress, what is most deeply needed is the fearless presence of a person who can be wholeheartedly receptive.
It can seem to us that being aware and opening our hearts to sorrow makes us suffer more. It is true that awareness brings with it an increased sensitivity to our inner and outer worlds. Awareness opens our hearts and minds to a world of pain and distress that previously only glanced off the surface of consciousness, like a stone skipping across water. But awareness also teaches us to read between the lines and to see beneath the world of appearances. We begin to sense the loneliness, need, and fear in others that was previously invisible. Beneath words of anger, blame, and agitation we hear the fragility of another person’s heart. Awareness deepens because we hear more acutely the cries of the world. Each of those cries has written within it the plea to be received.
Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear and hate what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy with pain because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace suffering without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet affliction, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.
Shantideva, a deeply compassionate master who taught in India in the eighth century, said, “Whatever you are doing, be aware of the state of your mind. Accomplish good; this is the path of compassion.” How would our life be if we carried this commitment into all of our encounters? What if we asked ourselves what it is we are dedicated to when we meet a homeless person on the street, a child in tears, a person we have long struggled with, or someone who disappoints us? We cannot always change the heart or the life of another person, but we can always take care of the state of our own mind. Can we let go of our resistance, judgments, and fear? Can we listen wholeheartedly to understand another person’s world? Can we find the courage to remain present when we want to flee? Can we equally find the compassion to forgive our wish to disconnect? Compassion is a journey. Every step, every moment of cultivation, is a gesture of deep wisdom.”
“As the etymology of the word indicates, “compassion” is the ability to “feel with,” and that involves a leap of empathy and a willingness to go beyond the borders of our own experience and judgments. What would it mean to place myself in the heart of that begging child? What would it be like to never know if I will eat today, depending entirely on the handouts of strangers? Journeying beyond our familiar borders, our hearts can tremble; then, we have the possibility of accomplishing good.
Milarepa once said, “Long accustomed to contemplating compassion, I have forgotten all difference between self and other.” Genuine compassion is without boundaries or hierarchies. The smallest sorrow is as worthy of compassion as the greatest anguish. The heartache we experience in the face of betrayal asks as much for compassion as a person caught in the midst of tragedy. Those we love and those we disdain ask for compassion; those who are blameless and those who cause suffering are all enfolded in the tapestry of compassion. An old Zen monk once proclaimed, “O, that my monk’s robes were wide enough to gather up all of the suffering in this floating world.” Compassion is the liberated heart’s response to pain wherever it is met.
When we see those we love in pain, our compassion is instinctive. Our heart can be broken. It can also be broken open. We are most sorely tested when we are faced with a loved one’s pain that we cannot fix. We reach out to shield those we love from harm, but life continues to teach us that our power has limits. Wisdom tells us that to insist that impermanence and frailty should not touch those we love is to fall into the near enemy of compassion, which is attachment to result and the insistence that life must be other than it actually is.
Compassion means offering a refuge to those who have no refuge. The refuge is born of our willingness to bear what at times feels unbearable—to see a loved one suffer. The letting go of our insistence that those we love should not suffer is not a relinquishment of love but a release of illusion—the illusion that love can protect anyone from life’s natural rhythms. In the face of a loved one’s pain, we are asked to understand what it means to be steadfast and patient in the midst of our own fear. In our most intimate relationships, love and fear grow simultaneously. A compassionate heart knows this to be true and does not demand that fear disappear. It knows that only in the midst of fear can we begin to discover the fearlessness of compassion.
Some people, carrying long histories of a lack of self-worth or denial, find it most difficult to extend compassion toward themselves. Aware of the vastness of suffering in the world, they may feel it is self-indulgent to care for their aching body, their broken heart, or their confused mind. Yet this too is suffering, and genuine compassion makes no distinction between self and other. If we do not know how to embrace our own frailties and imperfections, how do we imagine we could find room in our heart for anyone else?
The Buddha once said that you could search the whole world and not find anyone more deserving of your love and compassion than yourself. Instead, too many people find themselves directing levels of harshness, demand, and judgment inward that they would never dream of directing toward another person, knowing the harm that would be incurred. They are willing to do to themselves what they would not do to others.
Anger can be the beginning of abandonment or the beginning of commitment to helping others.
In the pursuit of an idealized compassion, many people can neglect themselves. Compassion “listens to the cries of the world,” and we are part of that world. The path of compassion does not ask us to abandon ourselves on the altar of an idealized state of perfection. A path of healing makes no distinctions: within the sorrow of our own frustrations, disappointments, fears, and bitterness, we learn the lessons of patience, acceptance, generosity, and ultimately, compassion.
The deepest compassion is nurtured in the midst of the deepest suffering. Faced with the struggle of those we love or those who are blameless in this world, compassion arises instinctively. Faced with people who inflict pain upon others, we must dive deep within ourselves to find the steadfastness and understanding that enables us to remain open. Connecting with those who perpetrate harm is hard practice, yet compassion is somewhat shallow if it turns away those who—lost in ignorance, rage, and fear—harm others. The mountain of suffering in the world can never be lessened by adding yet more bitterness, resentment, rage, and blame to it.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the beloved Vietnamese teacher, said, “Anger and hatred are the materials from which hell is made.” It is not that the compassionate heart will never feel anger. Faced with the terrible injustice, oppression, and violence in our world, our hearts tremble not only with compassion but also with anger. A person without anger may be a person who has not been deeply touched by harmful acts that scar the lives of too many people. Anger can be the beginning of abandonment or the beginning of commitment to helping others.
We can be startled into wakefulness by exposure to suffering, and this wakefulness can become part of the fabric of our own rage, or part of the fabric of wise and compassionate action. If we align ourselves with hatred, we equally align ourselves with the perpetrators of harm. We can also align ourselves with a commitment to bringing to an end the causes of suffering. It is easy to forget the portrayal of Kuan Yin as an armed warrior, profoundly dedicated to protecting all beings, fearless and resolved to bring suffering to an end.
Rarely are words and acts of healing and reconciliation born of an agitated heart. One of the great arts in the cultivation of compassion is to ask if we can embrace anger without blame. Blame agitates our hearts, keeps them contracted, and ultimately leads to despair. To surrender blame is to maintain the discriminating wisdom that knows clearly what suffering is and what causes it. To surrender blame is to surrender the separation that makes compassion impossible.
Compassion is not a magical device that can instantly dispel all suffering. The path of compassion is altruistic but not idealistic. Walking this path we are not asked to lay down our life, find a solution for all of the struggles in this world, or immediately rescue all beings. We are asked to explore how we may transform our own hearts and minds in the moment. Can we understand the transparency of division and separation? Can we liberate our hearts from ill will, fear, and cruelty? Can we find the steadfastness, patience, generosity, and commitment not to abandon anyone or anything in this world? Can we learn how to listen deeply and discover the heart that trembles in the face of suffering?
The path of compassion is cultivated one step and one moment at a time. Each of those steps lessens the mountain of sorrow in the world.”
May Day remains an international celebration of the promise and triumph of socialism, labor organization, and mass action as a praxis or value in action of love, and it is this political and social context of revolutionary struggle that we think of it today throughout the world as a holiday for all humankind.
As written by Jonah Walters in Jacobin;’’ “The first May Day was celebrated in 1886, with a general strike of three hundred thousand workers at thirteen thousand businesses across the United States. It was a tremendous show of force for the American labor movement, which was among the most militant in the world.
Many of the striking workers — who numbered forty thousand in Chicago alone — rallied under the banners of anarchist and socialist organizations. Trade unionists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds — many of them recent immigrants — marched shoulder-to-shoulder, making a unified demand for the eight-hour day.
The movement to limit the workday posed a significant threat to American industrialists, who were accustomed to demanding much longer hours from their workers.
In the late nineteenth century, successive waves of immigration brought millions of immigrants to the United States, many of whom sought work in factories. Because unemployment was so high, employers could easily replace any worker who demanded better conditions or sufficient wages — so long as that worker acted alone. As individuals, workers were in no position to oppose the dehumanizing work their bosses expected of them.
But when workers acted together, they could exercise tremendous power over their employers and over society as a whole. Working-class radicals understood the unique power of collective action, fighting to ensure that the aggression of employers was often met by a groundswell of workers’ resistance.
For the last decades of the nineteenth century, industrial titans like Andrew Carnegie and George Pullman could get no peace. Periodic explosions of working-class activity provided a check on their power and prestige. But industrialists and their allies in government often responded with brutal force, quelling waves of worker militancy that demanded a fundamentally different kind of American prosperity, one in which the poor and downtrodden were included.
The movement for the eight-hour day was one such mass struggle. On May 1, 1886, workers all over the country took to the streets to demand a better life and a more just economy. The demonstrations lasted for days.
But this surge of working-class resistance ended in tragedy. In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a police massacre claimed the lives of several workers after someone — likely a provocateur working for one of the city’s industrial barons — tossed a homemade bomb into the crowd. The Chicago authorities took the bombing as an opportunity to arrest and execute four of the movement’s most prominent leaders — including the anarchist and trade unionist August Spies.
It was a severe setback to the workers’ movement. But the repression wasn’t enough to douse the struggle for good. As August Spies said during his trial:
[I]f you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement — the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation — if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.
These words would prove prophetic. The next May Day, and every May Day since, workers across the world took to the streets to contest the terms of capitalist prosperity and gesture toward a fundamentally different world — a world in which production is motivated not by profit, but by human need.
Today, the power of the American labor movement is at a low. Many of its most important gains — including the right to the eight-hour day — have been dismantled by the anti-labor neoliberal consensus. But May Day still looms as a lasting legacy of the international movement for working-class liberation.
Obviously, a great deal has changed since those explosive decades at the end of the nineteenth century. The defeats suffered by the American workers’ movement may seem so profound that it can be tempting to regard the militancy that once rattled tycoons and presidents alike as nothing more than a piece of history.
But we don’t have to gaze so far into the past for inspiring examples of struggle. Far more recent May Days provide glimpses at the transformative potential of worker movements.
Just ten years ago, in 2006, immigrant workers across the country stood up to restrictive immigration laws and abusive labor practices, organizing a massive movement of undocumented laborers that culminated in the so-called Great American Boycott (El Gran Paro Estadounidense). On May Day of that year, immigrant organizations and some labor unions came together to organize a one-day withdrawal of immigrant labor — dubbed “A Day Without Immigrants” — to demonstrate the essential role of immigrant workers in American industry.
Protests began in March and continued for eight weeks. The numbers are staggering — 100,000 marchers in Chicago kicked off the wave of demonstrations, followed by half a million marchers in Los Angeles a few weeks later, and then a coordinated day of action on April 10, which saw demonstrations in 102 cities across the country, including a march of between 350,000 and 500,000 protesters in Dallas.
By May Day, the movement had gained momentum, winning popular support all over the United States and around the world. On May 1 of that year, more than a million took to the streets in Los Angeles, joined by 700,000 marchers in Chicago, 200,000 in New York, 70,000 in Milwaukee, and thousands more in cities across the country. In solidarity with Latin American immigrants in the United States, labor unions around the world celebrated “Nothing Gringo Day,” a one-day boycott of all American products.
Ever since, May Day has been recognized as a day of solidarity with undocumented immigrants — a fitting reminder of May Day’s origins in a movement that saw native-born and immigrant workers standing together to defend their common interests.
And this year, May Day presents us with more opportunities to mobilize support around an American labor movement showing signs of revitalization. This May Day, workers and activists across the country will stand in solidarity with the almost forty thousand striking Verizon workers, whose intransigent managers have thus far refused to bargain with the union in good faith.
This May Day we follow in the footsteps of generations of labor radicals. These radicals saw in capitalism the horrors of an unjust economy, but dared to dream of something different — a reimagined economy in which the fruits of prosperity could be shared equally, among all people, in a just and democratic society.
Despite the setbacks of the labor movement — at home and worldwide — that dream is still living. The struggle continues.
Happy May Day. Take to the streets.”
Yet there are other ideas of May Day, though interrelated; the Red and the Green, which reawakens our interdependence with nature and echoes the primordial celebration of May Day as a rite of renewal and of spring.
As written by Paul Street in 2020 in Counterpunch; “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
If the United States were not plagued by Orwellian, capital-induced amnesia regarding its own labor and sociopolitical history, much of the nation would have recoiled in historical disgust when Donald Trump designated May First – May Day – as the date for the premature “re-opening of America.”
It’s terrible that Trump wants to send tens of millions of Americans back to work before COVID-19 has ceased to pose grave health risks within and beyond workplaces and shopping centers.
Red May Day
Unbeknownst to Trump (in all likelihood), picking May First as his target added rich historical insult to injury. May Day has been the real international and American Labor and Working-Class holiday ever since the great U.S. Eight Hour strikes and marches of May 1st, 1886. Headquartered in industrial Chicago, the Eight Hour Movement was dedicated to the notion that working people need and deserve enough leisure beyond the supervision of their capitalist bosses to enjoy balanced and healthy lives and to participate meaningfully in the nation’s much ballyhooed “democracy.” The Eight Hour struggle’s leaders were radical militants who shared young Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ idea that the capitalist profits system would either between overthrown and replaced with socialism by the proletariat or give rise to the “common ruin” of all.
The 1886 struggle ended with the Haymarket bomb, a giant wave of anti-union repression, and the brutal execution of four top radical leaders – the Haymarket Martyrs. May 1st been labor and the Left’s special historical day – celebrated by workers, radicals, and laborites the world over – ever since. It ought to be understood as deeply offensive for Trump to try to please his fellow right-wing capitalists and his deluded white-nationalist minions by trying to order millions of people back into hazardous working conditions on that day of the year.
Green May Day
But that’s not all. May Day has different and older, “green” roots in a time-honored pagan celebration of nature’s beauty and fertility amid spring’s full flowering in northern temperate zones. Dating to ancient Rome, this naturalist May Day is rooted in the seasonal rhythms of Mother Earth and agriculture. It reached across the Atlantic with the European conquest of what became known as the Americas. It is a day of leisure, to be spent outdoors, dancing and wearing flowers and soaking up the wind and sun. While rooted in custom, it was an official holiday in the British Tudor monarchy by at least the early 16th century. (The bourgeois-revolutionary Puritan Parliaments of 1649-1660 suspended the holiday, which was reinstated with the restoration of Charles II.)
Red and Green Common Ground
It is not hard to imagine the ancient green May Day merging with the modern red and proletarian May Day. “Eight Hours for What We Will,” union banners proclaimed in 1886. “For what we will” included time out of doors, in the free-flowing presence of nature, beyond the dirty, dangerous and depressing mills, mines and factories of Dickensian and Gilded Age capitalism—and away from the rigid “time-work discipline” (a term coined by British historian E.P. Thompson) imposed by despotic employers in what Marx called “the hidden abode of production.” It was an era when many, perhaps most, wage-earners retained connections to pre-industrial and more communalist and rural ways of life.
The workers’ movements of 19th century North America drew on the rolling, recurrently immigration-fed tension between the more naturally embedded and pre-industrial agricultural and artisanal ways of life on one hand and the authoritarian, speeded-up and nonstop “jungle” (detailed by American author Upton Sinclair) of industrial capitalist “modernity” on the other.
One delicious connection is that the eight-hour-day struggle in Chicago was particularly focused on the city’s McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant, manufacturer of a farm technology that famously displaced millions of laborers from agricultural work while helping industrialize the North American and global countryside.
Consistent with this melding of the red and green May Days, “modern” capitalism assaulted nature and created the wage-dependent proletariat at one and the same time through the long enclosure of “the commons.” The commons are the vast swaths of land, stream and forest in which pre-capitalist people found sustenance, insulating them from having to rent out their labor power to capitalists to garner the money required to purchase life’s necessities as commodities. As the brilliant left historian Peter Linebaugh notes in his book “Stop Thief!” “A single term, ‘the commons,’ expresses, first, that which the working class lost when subsistence resources were taken away, and, second, the idealized visions of liberté, egalité, fraternité,”
Rooted in a vast human history that long predated the ascendancy of “the commodity with its individualism and privatization,” the commons, Linebaugh writes, “is antithetical to capital.” The Protestant radical group known as Diggers and others with roots in the village commons who opposed capital’s rise to supremacy understood that “expropriation leads to exploitation, the Haves and the Have Nots.”
The Diggers, the first modern communists, were led by Gerrard Winstanley. They sought to pre-empt the coming new soulless wage, money and commodity slavery of the capitalist order (the bourgeois regime that Marx and Engels would justly accuse of “resolv[ing] personal worth into exchange value”) by claiming earth as “a common treasury for all.” Writing as England was becoming the first fully capitalist nation where most of the adult working-age population toiled for wages, Winstanley and his followers practiced what Linebaugh calls “commoning,” the merging of “labor” and “natural resources” in the spirit of “all for one and one for all.”
“The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”
Trump has insulted the green May Day as well the related red and proletarian one. His ruthless shredding of environmental regulations, recently escalated under the cover of COVID-19, is a frontal assault on livable ecology. The fossil-fuel-mad president of the United States seems hellbent on the doing everything he can to turn the planet to turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. In the name of economic recovery, Trump has granted American corporations an “open license to pollute.” As CBS reported three weeks ago, “The Trump administration introduced a sweeping relaxation of environmental laws and fines during the coronavirus pandemic. According to new guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), companies will largely be exempt from consequences for polluting the air or water during the outbreak.”
Last week, Trump’s EPA announced that it would weaken controls on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-powered plants.
It’s with Trump’s frankly ecocidal agenda in mind above all that our leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky has recently and properly identified Trump as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” – as a person wielding the most powerful office in world history to bring about the end of an decent and organized human existence. Adolph Hitler’s goal, Chomsky notes, “was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But [unlike Trump,] Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future [along with millions of other species.”
Mayday! Mayday!
The 20th Century brought a third meaning to the phrase “Mayday.” I am referring to what a pilot says into his radio as her plane plummets to earth: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”
It is environmental “Mayday” indeed for humanity under the command of capital and far-right authoritarian lunatics like Trump and Jair Bolsonaro these days. “Spaceship Earth” is on exterminist path that is rapidly accelerating, as the latest findings on melting Arctic ice cover, rising global temperature, ocean acidification, species die-offs. and looming permafrost release regularly tell us. The capitalogenic COVID-19 crisis – a consequence of capital’s relentless quest for accumulation and profit – is just one among many eco-exterminist symptoms, many worse than even a virulent pandemic in the ever-shortening “long term.”
If the current environmental trajectory is not significantly reversed (and one silver lining in the COVID-19 nightmare is the drastic reduction of carbon emissions and other forms of capitalist pollution), the left’s long-standing struggle for equality and democracy is reduced to a debate over how to more equitably share a poisoned pie. Who wants to “turn the world upside down” (Winstanley’s phrase) only to find out that it is a steaming pile of overheated toxic and pathogen-ridden waste?
If the Earth celebrated by the Green May Day is irreversibly poisoned in a capital-imposed environmental and epidemiological Mayday!, then the radical social justice and democracy sought by friends of the Red May Day becomes sadly beside the point. The “common ruin of the contending classes” will have trumped the “revolutionary reconstitution of society-at-large,” rendering it obsolete.
Postscript
Here is one of the smartest calls to action I have ever read – from Cooperation Jackson last March 31st: “A Call to Action: Toward a May 1st General Strike to End the COVID 19 Crisis and Create a New World.” Please read it and then act on its call:
“We must stop the worst most deadly version of this pandemic from becoming a reality, and we have to ensure that we never return to the society that enabled this pandemic to emerge and have the impact it is having in the first place. We must do everything that we can to create a new, just, equitable and ecologically regenerative economy. “
“The question is how? To fight back we have to use the greatest power we have at our disposal – our collective labor. We can shut the system down to break the power of the state and capitalist class. We must send a clear message that things cannot and will not go back to normal. In order to do this, we need to call for collective work and shopping stoppages, leading to a general strike that is centered around clear, comprehensive demands. We must make demands that will transform our broken and inequitable society, and build a new society run by and for us – the working class, poor, oppressed majority. “
Rosa Luxemburg explains the history of May Day; “he happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day.
The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.
In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage which they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a proletarian celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole proletarian world.
The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day two hundred thousand of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers for many years from repeating this [size of] demonstration. However in 1888 they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be May 1, 1890.
In the meanwhile, the workers’ movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers’ Congress in 1889. At this congress, attended by four hundred delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on May 1, 1890, and the congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian celebration.
In this case, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years.
Naturally no one could predict the lightning-like way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate the May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution.
The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands.
And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.”
Here is the historic 1923 May Day speech of Eugene V. Debs, with a preface by Shawn Gude, published in Jacobin; “In 1923, Eugene V. Debs wrote a powerful May Day address for the black socialist magazine the Messenger that called for “the emancipation of all races from the oppressive and degrading yoke of wage slavery.” We republish it here in full, for the first time since it appeared 100 years ago.
In the spring of 1923, the black socialist magazine the Messenger published a May Day greeting from leading US socialist Eugene V. Debs.
The Harlem-based magazine had gotten its start in 1917. Edited by two young radicals, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, it vehemently opposed World War I (both editors were briefly taken into police custody for polemicizing against the war) and relentlessly criticized the “Old Crowd” of moderate black leaders. In place of elite-led, accommodationist “racial uplift,” the Messenger proposed an unrelenting fight against Jim Crow, lynch law, and economic exploitation using the battering ram of mass organization.
Debs was an early friend of the Messenger, and he shared the magazine’s pro-labor, “New Negro” politics. Especially toward the end of his life (he died in 1926), Debs supported a militant struggle for racial equality as part of a broader struggle for worker emancipation. That socialist vision was on full display in his May Day remarks.
Racial domination had kept Africans Americans “in abject servitude beneath the iron heel of his exploiting master,” Debs declared. “But our black brother is beginning to awaken from his lethargy in spite of all the deadening influences that surround him . . . and he is coming to realize that his place is in the Socialist movement along with . . . the worker of every other race, creed and color.”
Jacobin is pleased to reprint Debs’s May Day remarks in full for the first time since they appeared in 1923.—Shawn Gude
“It is more than gratifying to me in looking over the current Messenger to note the high excellence of its contents as a literary periodical and as a propaganda publication. It is edited with marked ability and it contains a variety of matter that would do credit to any magazine in the land.
All my life I have been especially interested in the problem of the Negro race, and I have always had full sympathy with every effort put forth to encourage our colored fellow-workers to join the Socialist movement and to make common cause with all other workers in the international struggle for the overthrow of capitalist despotism and the emancipation of all races from the oppressive and degrading yoke of wage slavery.
Due to the ignorance, prejudice, and unreasoning hatred of the white race in relation to the Negro, the latter has fared cruelly indeed and he has had but little encouragement from the “superior” race to improve his economic, intellectual and moral condition, but on the contrary, almost everything has been done to discourage every tendency on the part of the Negro toward self-improvement and to keep him in abject servitude beneath the iron heel of his exploiting master.
But our black brother is beginning to awaken from his lethargy in spite of all the deadening influences that surround him; he has had his experience in the war and especially since the war, and he is coming to realize that his place is in the Socialist movement along with the white worker and the worker of every other race, creed and color, and the Messenger is doing its full share to spread the light in dark places and to arouse the Negro masses to the necessity of taking their place and doing their part in the great struggle that is to emancipate the workers of all races and all nations from the insufferable curse of industrial slavery and social degradation.
May Day is now dawning and its spirit prompts me to hail the Messenger as a herald of light and freedom.
On May Day the workers of the world celebrate the beginning of their international solidarity and register the high resolve to clasp hands all around the globe and to move forward in one solid phalanx toward the sunrise and the better day.
On that day we drink deeply at the fountain of proletarian inspiration; we know no nationality to the exclusion of any other, nor any creed, or any color, but we do know that we are all workers, that we are conscious of our interests and our power as a class, and we propose to develop and make use of that power in breaking our fetters and in rising from servitude to the mastery of the world.”
As written in Oregon’s Bay Area; “Good morning! May Day arrives this year not as a quaint nod to labor history, but as a live experiment in what happens when the people who actually keep the system running decide, at least for a day, to stop. Across the country, more than 500 unions, student groups, and community organizations are calling for no work, no school, and no shopping, a coordinated refusal aimed squarely at what organizers describe as a billionaire takeover of government. Tens of thousands of students are expected to walk out, entire school districts are closing because staff won’t show up, and the message, subtle as a brick through a boardroom window, is that the economy isn’t some abstract force of nature. It’s people; and people have agency.
If there’s a single thread running through everything this week, war, profits, policy, and now protest, it’s this: we have built an economy, and increasingly a government, that treats extracting value as the highest form of intelligence and contributing back as optional. We celebrate the cleverness of paying as little tax as possible, we admire the efficiency of squeezing costs out of supply chains, and we reward the ability to turn public systems into private gain. Every so often, reality taps us on the shoulder and says: you do realize someone has to pay for all this, right?
Enter economist Richard Wolff, who, politely, methodically, and with the patience of someone who has watched this movie before, points out that what we’re experiencing isn’t a mysterious breakdown. It’s the bill coming due. For decades, corporations chased profit by stretching production across the globe, building long, fragile supply chains not because technology required it, but because labor was cheaper elsewhere and profits were higher. As Wolff put it, “This is a wonderful example of what in economics is called the difference between private cost and social cost.” The catch? Corporations didn’t account for the costs they didn’t have to pay: political instability, environmental damage, chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, or what happens when a war interrupts the whole delicate arrangement. “The corporation doesn’t do that because it doesn’t count the costs it does not have to cover,” Wolff explained. Those costs didn’t disappear; they were outsourced to all of us.
Now we’re living with it. Energy shocks ripple through economies, fertilizer prices spike, food costs rise, industries stall, workers lose jobs, and suddenly the “efficient” system looks a lot like a house of cards built on the assumption that nothing would ever go wrong.
This is the oldest trick in the book: privatize the profits, socialize the risk. When the bets pay off, the gains flow upward. When they don’t, when the supply chain snaps, when the climate bill comes due, when the war drives up energy prices, the costs are distributed across everyone who didn’t get a dividend check.
Which brings us to oil. While households are adjusting to higher prices, cutting back, and discovering new and exciting ways to make pasta feel like a luxury item, oil and gas companies are having what can only be described as a banner year. War has been very, very good for business. Profits are soaring, dividends are rising, and buybacks are doubling, all thanks to an energy shock driven by conflict in the Middle East. Naturally, this has revived calls for windfall taxes, those radical, borderline unthinkable ideas where companies that profit from global crises might be asked to share a portion of those gains with the people absorbing the damage. European finance ministers argued that such a tax would “send a clear message that those who profit from the consequences of war must do their part to ease the burden on the general public.” Industry, predictably, is horrified: BP’s chief executive called a broader windfall tax a “highly flawed response” to the war in Iran.
Nothing says “free market” like insisting profits are sacred but losses are a group project. And just in case anyone thought this dynamic was limited to corporations, Washington is here to remind us that the same logic applies at the highest levels of government.
Today marks the 60-day deadline under the War Powers Resolution for Congress to authorize the use of force in Iran. You may remember Congress, the branch of government theoretically responsible for declaring war. Their response to this looming constitutional moment? They went on vacation. Republicans, after weeks of mild throat-clearing about oversight, have decided to defer to Trump, while the administration argues that the law doesn’t apply because the war is… vibes-based, apparently.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered the administration’s magical pause-button theory: “We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means, the 60-day clock pauses or stops.” Sen. Susan Collins, to her credit, was not buying the constitutional jazz hands, warning that “the president’s authority as commander-in-chief is not without limits,” and that the 60-day deadline is “not a suggestion, it is a requirement.” Sen. Adam Schiff was even more direct: “Ceasing to use some forces while using others does not somehow stop the clock.”
It’s a bold legal theory: if you simply redefine reality, accountability disappears. Not everyone in Congress is thrilled with this approach, but enthusiasm for actually doing something about it remains… limited. Rep. Adam Smith captured the mood with bleak efficiency: “Is the expectation that the Trump administration is going to follow the law? I do not have that expectation.” Which is how you end up with a system where corporations don’t pay for the risks they create, and the government doesn’t enforce the laws that are supposed to constrain it.
There was at least one room in Washington yesterday where someone tried to ask questions. If Pete Hegseth thought the Senate would be a friendlier stage, someone forgot to tell the senators. What started as a routine pitch for a $1.5 trillion “Department of War” budget quickly unraveled into a full-blown credibility audit, with Democrats, and a few increasingly uneasy Republicans, methodically dismantling the administration’s “historic success” narrative. The problem, as Sen. Jack Reed put it with admirable restraint, is that the war Hegseth keeps describing doesn’t appear to exist anywhere outside his talking points. Reed called Hegseth’s claims “dangerously exaggerated” and went further, accusing him of telling Trump “what he wants to hear instead of what he needs to hear,” with “bold assurances of success” that do a disservice to both the commander in chief and the troops risking their lives. Sen. Elissa Slotkin put it more plainly: “Until the Strait of Hormuz is open, I don’t think we can credibly say that with any seriousness.” The regime is intact, the nuclear program remains viable, Americans are paying at the pump, and Hegseth insists the real problem isn’t the strategy, the costs, or the outcomes, it’s the critics. As he put it, the “biggest adversary” is the “defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.” A bold position for anyone, but it lands a little differently when you’re asking Congress to hand you roughly $1.5 trillion and not ask too many follow-ups.
Then there’s the part where things went from uncomfortable to genuinely alarming. Asked by Slotkin whether he would refuse an illegal order to deploy troops to seize ballots in a future election, Hegseth tried to dodge, deflect, and finally landed on the carefully lawyered, “I’ve never been ordered to do anything illegal and I won’t,” which is not exactly the ringing defense of constitutional limits one hopes for from a Defense Secretary. Sen. Mark Kelly pressed him on his “no quarter, no mercy” rhetoric, reminding him that under the Pentagon’s own law-of-war framework, “no quarter” means legitimate surrender can be refused or detainees executed. Hegseth would only say, “We fight to win and we follow the law.” By the end, the through line was hard to miss: a secretary far more comfortable projecting strength than explaining strategy, far quicker to attack critics than answer questions, and now asking to manage a budget so large it requires commas most of us don’t use in daily life, while treating basic oversight like a hostile act.
This is what “billionaire takeover of government” looks like when you zoom in past the slogan and into the spreadsheet. And if you are looking for a cleaner, almost textbook example of how all of this comes together, public power, private gain, and the polite fiction that none of it is connected, you don’t have to look much further than Kazakhstan.
A shell company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump has merged into a mining venture tied to up to $1.6 billion in U.S. government-backed support for tungsten extraction, a resource suddenly very important to national security. The timeline is… tidy. Investment, merger, government backing, strategic asset. And while there is, of course, “no suggestion” that anyone knew anything or influenced anything, the company’s CEO has already credited direct assistance from Trump and top officials in securing the project.
The phrase “no suggestion of wrongdoing” starts to feel like a legal incantation, something you say out loud in the hope that reality will politely comply.
There’s a version of this story where the billionaires are the protagonists, the builders, the job creators, the indispensable engines of everything. It’s a compelling narrative, and they’ve spent considerable money making sure you’ve heard it. But today offers a useful corrective.
The fruit gets picked, the patients get treated, the children get taught, the trucks get loaded, the power stays on, and the country functions because of people whose names don’t appear on Forbes lists. Not because of the people who own the orchards, the hospitals, the school management companies, or the logistics platforms, but because of the people who actually show up every single day. When they don’t, as today is demonstrating, the machine doesn’t run itself. It just stops.
The oligarchs have money, influence, lawyers, lobbyists, and a surprisingly large number of senators. What they don’t have is the ability to pick up and run the country without the people they’ve spent decades telling don’t have power. May Day exists, has always existed, to make that point visible, to turn an invisible truth into an undeniable one, at least for a day.
After a week of war profiteering, fragile systems, vanishing accountability, and increasingly creative interpretations of both law and reality, people across the country are being asked to do something remarkably simple: stop.
No work. No school. No shopping. Three words that, taken together, are a minor inconvenience or a fairly precise description of what keeps the whole arrangement running, depending on which side of a dividend check you’re on.
More than 500 unions, student groups, and community organizations are behind today’s actions, coordinated under the banner of May Day Strong, with over 3,000 events planned from Los Angeles to Boston. The demands are specific: tax the rich, abolish ICE, end the war, protect the vote, keep billionaires out of the machinery of government. But underneath the platform is a simpler argument, if the economy depends on labor, consumption, and compliance, and it does, then withdrawing all three, even briefly, is more than symbolic. It’s a reminder. A correction. A moment where the abstract becomes concrete.
We’ve spent years normalizing a system that privatizes profit and socializes risk. The people marching today didn’t invent that critique; they’re just the ones currently absorbing the bill for it — in gutted schools, in ICE raids on their neighbors, in healthcare priced like a luxury item and wages priced like an afterthought.
The question May Day is asking, quietly in some places, loudly in others, is what happens when the people carrying that risk decide they’ve had enough.
Maybe this is why I keep coming back to the language of vassals and vassal states, a framework I’ve been wrestling with for weeks now. I finally started reading Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism for research, which has of course triggered the inevitable round of edits in my draft, because I enjoy giving myself homework, it seems.
Once you start looking through that lens, the pattern is hard to unsee. Workers become disposable inputs. Nations become resource territories. Public institutions become enforcement arms for private wealth. The powerful extract rent, demand loyalty, and call it freedom.
Maybe May Day is not just about labor in the narrow sense. Maybe it is about refusing the role assigned to us in this new feudal order: taxpayer, consumer, worker, subject, collateral damage. Maybe it is about remembering that the people being asked to absorb the risk, pay the bills, fight the wars, staff the schools, stock the shelves, drive the buses, and keep the lights on are not serfs. If the lords of extraction have forgotten that, May Day seems like a very good time to remind them.
Marz and I send our love and appreciation for you all.”
In the words with which Lenin began the Russian Revolution, What is to be done?
As written by Lex McMenamin in The Guardian, in an article entitled Thousands in US to join ‘no school, no work, no shopping’ May Day protest in economic blackout: Walkouts, marches and other gatherings planned for ‘May Day Strong’ demonstrations across the country; “Thousands are expected to join an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day , as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country today. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” with walkouts, marches, block parties and other gatherings planned into the evening.
On the east coast, protests were already under way by the early morning. In Manhattan, a group of Amazon workers, Teamsters and local politicians marched from the New York public library’s main branch to Amazon’s nearby corporate offices to demand the corporation cut its contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the nation’s capital, protesters with the organization Free DC shut down intersections across the city, holding handmade banners reading “Workers over billionaires” and “Healthcare not warfare”.
By midday, six protesters with youth-led Sunrise Movement were arrested for blocking a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Portland, Oregon, Sunrise protesters occupied a Hilton hotel lobby where DHS officials are allegedly staying.
May Day has long been an annual day of protest for the labor movement, and this year, many active movements are converging to demand no ICE, no war, and taxing the rich. The May Day Strong coalition includes labor unions, immigrants rights groups, political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, and the organizers behind the No Kings protests. Friday’s economic disruption builds on a similar coordinated effort out of Minnesota in January, when tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents took off from school and work to flood the streets in protest of federal immigration agents storming the city.
Leah Greenberg of Indivisible, one of the main organizations behind No Kings, described the May Day economic blackout as a “structure test” for the movement.
“We are asking people to take a step into further exerting their power in all aspects of their lives – as workers, as students, as members of local organizing hubs,” she said. “It’s important as it builds muscles towards greater non-cooperation.”
Teachers’ unions and students are an active part of the fight, a continuation of their months of organizing against ICE. At least 15 school districts in North Carolina have given teachers the day off to join a statewide May Day “Kids Over Corporations” rally for public education funding. In Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago Teachers Union fought and won to have May Day made a “day of civic action”.
“As educators, we feel a very real accountability to the young people in the families that we serve,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and Illinois Federation of Teachers, said earlier this week. “We want to connect people not just to the affordability crisis but the crisis of our institutions being marginalized in this moment and the impact on our young people.”
Sanshray Kukutla, a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and organizer with the campus’s Sunrise Movement chapter, is helping coordinate a local walkout for students, teachers, workers and residents. “We’re taking collective action to send a message to the billionaire class: it’s our labor, our spending and our participation that keeps the whole system running, and if we don’t work, they don’t have profits,” said Kukutla.
Organizers say the day of action is an effort to build toward a general strike, which was essentially outlawed through the 1946 Taft-Hartley Act and hasn’t happened in the US since. As a workaround, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has called for unions to work toward a general strike on 1 May 2028, by having existing union contracts expire in unison.”
As written by Kim Kelley in The Guardian, in an article entitled What is May Day Strong, the ‘no work, no school, no shopping’ protests against Trump?
Day of action to support workers set for 1 May – who is organizing May Day Strong, and how can people join?; “Anyone who attended one of the 3,000 No Kings protests in March might have learned of the latest effort to protest against Trump administration policies: May Day Strong.
The single-day protest on 1 May is taking its cue from the massive day of action that shut down Minneapolis in January by asking Americans not to shop, work or go to school. Rallies, marches and teach-ins will also take place across the country.
“The labor movement in our country cannot advance while ignoring the assault on democracy,” said Neidi Dominguez, founding executive director of Organized Power in Numbers and executive team member of May Day Strong.
“And the pro-democracy movement can’t ask working people to defend abstract principles while they can’t afford housing, paying bills or accessing healthcare. We need a national movement that does both. That’s why labor and community organizations are throwing down hard this May 1.”
What is May Day Strong?
Organizers are expecting more than 3,500 actions across the country – from street protests to walkouts – “under the banner of workers over billionaires, taxing the rich, demanding ICE out, money for people not wars, and expanding democracy”, said Dominguez.
Since 2024, the May Day Strong coalition has been hosting Solidarity School organizing trainings, sharing toolkits and encouraging people to set up their own May Day events. The labor unions involved are already using their institutional muscle to help, too: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) successfully fought to have 1 May declared a “day of civic action” in the city, and the National Education Association (NEA) has posted a handy May Day planning guide on its website.
The goal is “a nationwide day of economic disruption”, organizers said – by bringing business as usual to a halt, protesters will show how powerful the working class can be when it flexes its collective muscle.
Who is organizing May Day Strong?
The May Day Strong coalition is made up of a formidable list of unions, Democratic Socialists of America chapters, pro-democracy groups such as Indivisible (who have jumped on board to amplify the May Day message), and labor, racial justice, anti-war, pro-democracy, climate justice, immigrant rights and reproductive justice organizations.
That intersectional approach is a core aspect of their work, Dominguez said: “There’s more of us than there are of them. We just have to organize ourselves together.”
Where can I find May Day Strong events in my area?
May Day Strong’s website has a searchable map to help people find May Day actions and sign up to host their own. Signing the May Day pledge is another way to get connected and receive more information about events.
Is it a general strike (and does that matter)?
No – at least not in 2026. “A general strike is basically a work stoppage that paralyzes multiple major industries,” said Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University.
That’s not what May Day Strong is planning for this year. As many organizers have noted, it will take years to organize a full-on, sustained general strike in the US – which is why 2028 has emerged as a target date.
Rather, May Day Strong organizers are amplifying the call for “no work, no school, no shopping” that anchored Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom on 23 January, bringing millions of protesters out to demand an end to ICE’s occupation in their cities.
General strikes are rare in the US, though historically they have been one of organized labor’s most powerful tools. In 1877, railroad workers launched a strike that paralyzed the nation; in 1919, workers in Seattle shut down the city for five days. Minneapolis saw its own general strike in 1934, when unionized truck drivers brought the city to a standstill and lit a signal fire for other workers across the midwest to organize.
However, the passage of the 1946 Taft-Hartley Act essentially outlawed the general strike and severely limited workers’ ability to strike in solidarity with one another. The US hasn’t seen a true general strike since.
The tactic remains a potent lever for political change in other countries, such as India and Italy. “Experience across the world suggests that it may take such an action – or at least the credible threat of one – to reverse authoritarianism in the US,” said Blanc.
What is the May Day 2028 general strike?
That inconvenient piece of anti-labor legislation is exactly why the United Auto Workers’ call for a May Day general strike in 2028 has generated so much excitement. The union and its lawyers are well aware of those legal constraints, which is why they had to find a loophole.
In April 2024, Shawn Fain, president of the UAW, publicly called on all unions, across industries and sectors, to align their contract expiration dates for 1 May 2028. If those unions’ contracts expire, so do the no-strike clauses that many contain; with no contract, there’s nothing stopping members from going on strike. If it just so happens that thousands – or millions – of workers find themselves in that situation on the same day, well, there’s not much the law can do to stop it.
Several major unions, including the CTU, the NEA, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Postal Workers Union, have already pledged to join them. The May Day Strong coalition is also working to support the 2028 general strike by giving non-union organizations a way to get their members ready to participate.
“The fact is: without workers, the world stops running,” Fain wrote in an op-ed for In These Times. “A successful general strike is going to take time, mass coordination, and a whole lot of work by the labor movement. As working people, we must come together. We can no longer allow corporations, politicians and borders to divide us.”
What is the history behind May Day?
May Day, or International Workers’ Day, was first celebrated in the US in 1886, when anarchist labor organizers Lucy and Albert Parsons led 300,000 striking workers in Chicago on the first American May Day parade. While the first of May has a much older history rooted in ancient pagan rites and the changing seasons, in a political context it has since become known as a global day of celebration, struggle and remembrance for the working class.
May Day is an official holiday in 66 countries and is celebrated informally in many others, marked by marches, parades, strikes and demonstrations. However, in the US, 1 May is designated “Loyalty Day”; the workers’ holiday, Labor Day, has been relegated to the first Monday in September. And, yes, the lack of recognition for May Day is very much intentional. This has been a source of frustration for labor’s left flank for decades, and the recently renewed focus on 1 May as a day of collective action nods to labor’s history as well as its future.
As Fain said: “It’s time we reclaimed May Day for the working class.”
As written by Working Class History; “Today, May 1, is International Workers’ Day! It commemorates the sentencing to death of seven anarchist workers in Chicago who were wrongly convicted for throwing a bomb at police who attacked a strike demonstration in May 1886.
80,000 workers in Chicago had walked out on May 1 demanding a maximum 8-hour working day, alongside over 200,000 other workers across the US. Employers and the government were determined to crush the movement, and four of the anarchists were executed, with the fifth cheating the hangman by killing himself. An eighth was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. The surviving three were later pardoned, and the fight for the 8-hour day continued.
Before his execution, defendant August Spies told the court: “if you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement – the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”
Police Clear Columbia Protest — Just As They Did On Same Day 56 Years Ago
On April 30, 1968, police flooded onto Columbia University’s campus to end a demonstration students had staged — a scene that was eerily repeated 56 years later.
Could student protesters and other mass action turn the next election?
I am voting for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whether or not she runs for the Presidency. Give us a President with heart, moral vision, and the courage to speak truth to power.
To the Democratic Party of which I am an elected precinct captain, most viable lever available to us in resistance to tyranny and terror, to the Republican Party which is an institution of the Fourth Reich; If you sponsor genocide or other crimes against humanity, and make us all complicit as our taxes buy the deaths of children, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.
Don’t fret over whether it’s called Democratic Capitalism, Stakeholder Capitalism, Democratic Socialism, or whatever. Here’s the only system that can survive.
May 2 2024 The Crack in the Liberty Bell: Social Injustice, Unequal Power, the 1918 Flu Pandemic, and the Birth of Organized Labor in the 1919 Seattle General Strike
July 16 2024 Party of Treason Show Day One: Theft of Public Wealth Through Deregulation, Privatization, and Austerity As the Neoliberal Order Collapses in the Death Spiral of Capitalism
September 20 2023 Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power
Ten Principles for the Movement against Immigration Policing
1. We are in a fight with the federal government. This means taking risks, and the law will not always be on our side. Stopping ICE will require more than legal observing, reform, and other strategies that play within the rules of the existing order. We can only stop ICE through mass resistance that interrupts, prevents, and deters deportation operations. We should evaluate tactics and strategies according to how much they enable people to engage in this kind of resistance. For example, the mass distribution of whistles and other tools that equip people to intervene against ICE and police operations is a step towards the kind of resistance we need.
2. We do not police the actions of other protesters. No one way works. It will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. The mass resistance we need cannot be directed by any one group or limited to any one strategy. It will require many different approaches and experiments, filling different roles in the struggle towards abolishing ICE. We should seek to make our efforts complementary and collaborative rather than trying to control or denounce each other.
3. No one person or organization can speak for all immigrants or organizers. Anyone claiming to should be viewed with suspicion. No community is a monolith. Immigrant organizers themselves differ on what strategies are best, what the movement’s ultimate goals should be, and what tactics they support. We should not unthinkingly defer to any one organizer or group, but develop our own analyses, articulate our own proposals, and respectfully talk through our disagreements.
4. We keep us safe by fighting together. Though some will tell us to defer to the most cautious and “respectable” elements in this movement, we should follow the lead of those who demonstrate the most effective tactics. Immigrants have long been at the forefront of resisting the deportation machine: besieging ICE facilities, blockading highways and airports, organizing resistance from inside detention centers, taking the streets, and chasing ICE out of neighborhoods. Many immigrants believe that the greatest chance of safety and collective power is to be found in direct resistance.
5. There are no good pol/ICE; there are no bad immigrants and no bad protesters. All immigrants deserve the same access to a life with dignity and community that citizens do. All protesters who face attacks from the government and stand strong without turning on the movement deserve our support. The regime wants to divide us according to false dichotomies—respectable/criminal, documented/undocumented, upper class/lower class, guilty/innocent, civil/uncivil, violent/non-violent. This is a strategy to turn us against each other so they can defeat us. We want to de-escalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy. We stand in solidarity with all who are disrupting ICE and resisting the criminalization of immigrants.
6. Turn to each other, not politicians. This violence did not begin with Trump. Entrenched politicians of all stripes have perpetuated it for decades. Across the country, local politicians claim to oppose ICE while sending police to suppress the resistance or making backroom deals with the regime. Politicians will not save us. At best, they are powerless; at worst, they are complicit. We must build the collective power and resources we will need to defend our communities ourselves.
7. Stop waiting for permission. We all have a responsibility to take the initiative in the fight against ICE. Our oppressors win by convincing us that we lack the power to act immediately for liberation—that we must wait for permission or guidance from authorities, leaders, or specialists. A culture of resistance emerges from the recognition that all of us have the ability to imagine different realities, the power to act to bring about those realities, and the responsibility to do so. The density of many different autonomous projects is what has made the resistance against ICE effective.
8. Build trust to defeat fear. A genuinely popular movement will require rapidly building new relationships and trust on the basis of shared values or shared experience taking action together. Taking small risks together today can prepare us to take bigger risks together tomorrow. There are many forms of action that do not require high levels of preexisting trust—for example, mass Signal chats enable rapid response work more effectively when they are open to everyone who needs to coordinate. Work with people you know and trust on projects that involve greater risk or sensitive information. Sometimes, moving at the speed of trust means moving at the speed you can chase off an ICE van.
9. Leave no one behind. We should not settle for empty promises or minor reforms intended to placate us. We don’t want to push ICE off our streets only to have local cops do their dirty work for them. We refuse deals that would make us choose between the freedoms of different communities, trading minor gains for some people for increased policing or misery for others. The unity of our resistance in the streets and our neighborhoods has taught us that none of us are free until all of us are free.
10. Be a good neighbor. We must overcome decades of division and exclusion that have turned us against each other, instilling fear of those who look different, speak different languages, practice different traditions, or have less wealth or property. Excluding people endangers them and weakens our communities. Let us build bridges across all lines of division, fostering a culture of neighborly love based on collective care and abundance. We need communities built on respect, understanding, and celebrating our differences—neighborhoods where people can root into relationships to each other without fear of being displaced at the whim of a landlord, corporation, or government.
On this night of the great fire festival of Beltane and of the amok time of Witches Night, in which we traditionally burned effigies of ourselves into which are summoned all of the negative qualities and things we would destroy and recreate in ourselves, or leave behind as we enter the future and explore new possibilities of becoming human free of our former limits and of colonization by authority, and of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Waelburga, whose name in Old High German which emerged from the unifying conquest of Charlemagne means Refuge of the Dead, a form of the Three Fates and weaver whose symbols as a fertility goddess are a priapic dog named the Nahrungshund or Nourishment Hound, and a bundle of grain, is chased for nine nights before the first of May by the Wild Hunt and offered sanctuary in a bale of grain within a triangular symbol of the female organ of generation and of transformation, rebirth, seasonal change, and the peaceful transfer of political power called a valknut, which also declares a place of sanctuary beyond all law.
The Valknut is today a unifying symbol of Norse and Germannic paganism, and is also historically used to memorialize warriors slain in battle, as on the Tängelgårda Stone on the island of Gottland and is now associated with Odin, with seidr or poetic vision, and in its unicursal form as a continuous path of three interlocking triangles symbolizes Infinity as a kind of Moebius Loop. Snorri Sturluson describes it as the heart of the jötunn Hrungnir in the Skáldskaparmál as “three sharp-pointed corners just like the carved symbol hrungnishjarta.” This makes it a symbol both of Odin as a death and battle god and of Waelburga as the Great Mother goddess in her aspect as death and winter; a unitary symbol of the chthonic forces of both masculinity and femininity as coequals and King and Queen of the Wild Hunt.
May Day is a time of maypoles, courtship, and celebrations of the arrival of Spring and of fertility as a festival of light; but tonight is a festival of darkness, wildness, and of the flight of the forces of winter before the coming of spring, an order which will once again be reversed in half a year as the forces of darkness and light share rulership of our world.
Walpurgisnacht is a mirror image of Halloween, in which we may enter the spirit world through the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams rather than one wherein spirits may enter our world as intrusive forces, which together divide the year at six months to a day. Dance and music, feasts, derangement of the senses and forbidden sexuality, and the use of psychedelics in ecstatic vision in the flying ritual, but most especially the enactment of unauthorized identities and transgressive personae through masquerade, are all part of the carnival aspects of these rites of spring. As with Tibetan mask dances, sometimes we must let our demons out to play. The purpose is to break the bonds of the old order, and achieve a new vision of ourselves.
As written by Octave Mirbeau; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
I question and challenge the idea of normality, the authorization of identities, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
Dreams of Walpurgisnacht
Tonight I will not sleep
But I will dream
For in dreams
We forge new truths
Cast off your illusions
With me and together
We will remake the oaths and bindings
Of our world
We will transgress the boundaries
Of the Forbidden
And discover new identities and
Dimensions of human being
Unleash the thousands of myriads
Of our forms
And reawaken the wildness of nature
And the wildness of ourselves.
German:
Träume von Walpurgisnacht
Heute Nacht werde ich nicht schlafen
Aber ich werde träumen
Denn in Träumen
Wir schmieden neue Wahrheiten
Lass deine Illusionen los
Mit mir und zusammen
Wir werden die Eide und Bindungen neu machen
Von unserer Welt
Wir werden die Grenzen überschreiten
Vom Verbotenen
Und neue Identitäten entdecken und
Dimensionen des Menschen
Entfessle die Tausenden von Myriaden
Von unseren Formen
Und erwecke die Wildheit der Natur wieder
Und die Wildheit von uns.
Norwegian:
Drømmer om Hekser Natt
I kveld skal jeg ikke sove
Men jeg vil drømme
For i drømmer
Vi forfalske nye sannheter
Kast av illusjonene dine
Med meg og sammen
Vi vil gjenskape edene og bindingene
Av vår verden
Vi vil overskride grensene
Av de forbudte
Og oppdage nye identiteter og
Mål av menneske
Slipp løs de tusenvis av myriader
Av våre former
Og vekke naturens villskap på nytt
Og villskapen til oss selv.
Walpurgis Night illustration from Goethe’s Faust
Faust: Parts I & II, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eugène Delacroix (Illustrator), A.S. Kline (Translator)
Much as I adore the passage on Walpurgisnacht by Goethe in Faust, no one has ever described it better than Robert Burns. An unforgettable poem for me, as I discovered it when my mother had a friend come to her English class to declaim it in his fabulous kilt, prefacing the poem with his story of how he was abducted while volunteer teaching Palestinian children; they put a bag over his head, and that was the last time he saw the light of day for seven years. The whole time he had only the works he had memorized to keep him sane, including the whole of Robert Burns.
Tam O ‘Shanter
By Robert Burns
When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors neebors meet,
As market-days are wearing late,
And folk begin to tak the gate;
While we sit bousin, at the nappy,
And gettin fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
This truth fand honest Tam o’ Shanter,
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:
(Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonie lasses.)
O Tam! had’st thou but been sae wise
As taen thy ain wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,
A bletherin, blusterin, drunken blellum;
That frae November till October,
Ae market-day thou was na sober;
That ilka melder wi’ the miller,
Thou sat as lang as thou had siller;
That ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on,
The smith and thee gat roarin fou on;
That at the Lord’s house, ev’n on Sunday,
Thou drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday.
She prophesied, that, late or soon,
Thou would be found deep drown’d in Doon;
Ot catch’d wi’ warlocks in the mirk,
By Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.
Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen’d sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!
But to our tale:—Ae market night,
Tam had got planted unco right,
Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi’ reaming swats that drank divinely;
And at his elbow, Souter Johnie,
His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony:
Tam lo’ed him like a vera brither;
They had been fou for weeks thegither.
The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter;
And ay the ale was growing better:
The landlady and Tam grew gracious
Wi’ secret favours, sweet, and precious:
The souter tauld his queerest stories;
The landlord’s laugh was ready chorus:
The storm without might rair and rustle,
Tam did na mind the storm a whistle.
Care, mad to see a man sae happy,
E’en drown’d himsel amang the nappy:
As bees flee hame wi’ lades o’ treasure,
The minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure;
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white—then melts forever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.
Nae man can tether time or tide:
The hour approaches Tam maun ride,—
That hour, o’ night’s black arch the key-stane
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
And sic a night he taks the road in,
As ne’er poor sinner was abroad in.
The wind blew as ‘twad blawn its last;
The rattling show’rs rose on the blast;
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d;
Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellow’d:
That night, a child might understand,
The Deil had business on his hand.
Weel mounted on his grey mare, Meg,—
A better never lifted leg,—
Tam skelpit on thro’ dub and mire,
Despising wind and rain and fire;
Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet,
Whiles crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet,
Whiles glowrin round wi’ prudent cares,
Lest bogles catch him unawares.
Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,
Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry.
By this time he was cross the ford,
Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor’d;
And past the birks and meikle stane,
Whare drucken Charlie brak’s neckbane:
And thro’ the whins, and by the cairn,
Whare hunters fand the murder’d bairn;
And near the thorn, aboon the well,
Whare Mungo’s mither hang’d hersel.
Before him Doon pours all his floods;
The doubling storm roars thro’ the woods;
The lightnings flash from pole to pole,
Near and more near the thunders roll;
When, glimmering thro’ the groaning trees,
Kirk-Alloway seem’d in a bleeze:
Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing,
And loud resounded mirth and dancing.
Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou can’st make us scorn!
Wi’ tippenny we fear nae evil;
Wi’ usquebae we’ll face the devil!
The swats sae ream’d in Tammie’s noddle,
Fair play, he car’d na deils a boddle.
But Maggie stood right sair astonish’d,
Till, by the heel and hand admonish’d,
She ventur’d forward on the light;
And, wow! Tam saw an unco sight!
Warlocks and witches in a dance;
Nae cotillion brent-new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels
Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock bunker in the east,
There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast:
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge;
He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.—
Coffins stood round like open presses,
That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses;
And by some devilish cantraip sleight
Each in its cauld hand held a light,
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table
A murderer’s banes in gibbet airns;
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns;
A thief, new-cutted frae the rape—
Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape;
Five tomahawks, wi’ blude red-rusted;
Five scimitars, wi’ murder crusted;
A garter, which a babe had strangled;
A knife, a father’s throat had mangled,
Whom his ain son o’ life bereft—
The grey hairs yet stack to the heft;
Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awfu’,
Which ev’n to name wad be unlawfu’.
As Tammie glowr’d, amaz’d and curious,
The mirth and fun grew fast and furious:
The piper loud and louder blew,
The dancers quick and quicker flew;
They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit
And coost her duddies to the wark
And linket at it in her sark!
Now Tam, O Tam! had thae been queans,
A’ plump and strapping in their teens!
Their sarks, instead o’ creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!—
Thir breeks o’ mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o’ gude blue hair,
I wad hae gien them aff y hurdies,
For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies!
But wither’d beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal,
Lowping and flinging on a crummock.
I wonder didna turn thy stomach.
But Tam ken’d what was what fu’ brawlie;
There was ae winsom wench and walie,
That night enlisted in the core
(Lang after ken’d on Carrick shore.
For mony a beast to dead she shot,
And perish’d mony a bonie boat,
And shook baith meikle corn and bear,
And kept the country-side in fear);
Her cutty sark o’ Paisley harn,
That while a lassie she had worn,
In longitude tho’ sorely scanty,
It was her best, and she was vauntie.
Ah! little ken’d thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches!
But here my Muse her wing maun cow’r,
Sic flights are far beyond her pow’r;
To sing how Nannie lap and flang,
(A souple jad she was and strang),
And how Tam stood like ane bewitch’d,
And thought his very een enrich’d;
Even Satan glowr’d and fidg’d fu’ fain,
And hotch’d and blew wi’ might and main:
Till first ae caper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reason a’ thegither,
And roars out, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!”
And in an instant all was dark:
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied,
When out the hellish legion sallied.
As bees bizz out wi’ angry fyke,
When plundering herds assail their byke;
As open pussie’s mortal foes,
When, pop! she starts before their nose;
As eager runs the market-crowd,
When “Catch the thief!” resounds aloud;
So Maggie runs, the witches follow,
Wi’ mony an eldritch skriech and hollo.
Ah, Tam! ah, Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin!
In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin!
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin!
Kate soon will be a woefu’ woman!
Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane of the brig:
There at them thou thy tail may toss,
A running stream they dare na cross.
But ere the key-stane she could make,
The fient a tail she had to shake!
For Nannie far before the rest,
Hard upon noble Maggie prest,
And flew at Tam wi’ furious ettle;
But little wist she Maggie’s mettle—
Ae spring brought aff her master hale
But left behind her ain grey tail:
The carlin claught her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.
Now, wha this tale o’ truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother’s son, take heed,
Whene’er to drink you are inclin’d,
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,
Think, ye may buy the joys o’er dear,
Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mear.
Best masculine fragrance for dancing with the devil; a perfume of utterly ravishing beauty, and one of my top six choices of a lifetime. For wolves with Red Hot Riding Hood admirers.
“Gretchen standing in white, with her eyes shut tight. To the left of her are Mephistopheles, in red, and Faust. They are surrounded by flying witches holding pitchforks, and in the background are the rocky slopes of the Brocken.”
Celebrate with me this anniversary of the joyous victory of Vietnam over America and the end of the Thousand Day War; for the day we abandoned Saigon we were liberated from our complicity in a great evil and the atrocity of an imperialist war which violated our own values and traditions of liberty and anticolonial revolutionary struggle as never before, though clearly not for the first nor the last time.
The glorious triumph of the people of Vietnam over horrific foreign oppression redeemed America from the dishonor of our enslavement to our betrayers, a malign and corrupt government of authoritarian force and control which sought to impose an exploitative regime and plunder by might of arms rather than to win accord by moral suasion. The famous photograph of the last helicopter fleeing our besieged embassy forever records the moment of liberation of both our peoples.
I was a Freshman in high school in 1975 when that photo of the Fall of Saigon engulfed America and the world like a tidal wave, changing everything, an event greeted with jubilation and a sense of being rescued from the hangman by teenage boys under threat of being drafted. My experience of the war had been as newsreels of remote horrors, from the vantage point of Telegraph Avenue and Haight Street and the seething cauldron of questioning and the total reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value it had ignited in our society as the old order died and a new one was born.
From this event whose image became a character in the story of all humankind and in my own, I learned wonderful, terrible things; no matter how vast and all-seeing, authority becomes meaningless and delegitimized when the lies and illusions with which it manufactures consent and subjugates us are questioned, exposed, and disbelieved, and no matter how monstrous and enormous, power is irrelevant when met with disobedience and refusal to submit.
Tyranny need not always triumph over liberty.
How can we achieve this marvelous thing? Here we may look to the heroic and triumphant example of Vietnam as a model.
My own understanding and praxis of revolutionary struggle is shaped and informed by, though far from limited to, the Vietnamese strategy of which it is a rough translation, that of Dau Tranh, which means to struggle, and recasts Mao’s Long Game in the context of mass action. The goal of Dau Tranh, and what makes it unique, is to achieve a total war of civilizational transformation and systemic change by control of the enemy’s perceptions and ideas, wherein force is used only in the context of what Atherton called the Wilderness of Mirrors; for when the enemy realizes he cannot win against people who refuse to submit, that force is meaningless without legitimacy, that authority and the manufacture of consent to be governed is dispelled by disbelief and power made hollow by disobedience, systems and regimes of tyranny and unequal power shatter, collapse, and fade into nothingness.
Herein we ourselves are become the arbiters of our fate and bringers of change as Living Autonomous Zones, and the instruments of our own liberation and autonomy.
Three kinds of praxis or actions of values define Dau Tranh; action among the enemy on his own ground, action among the people on one’s own ground, and action among the enemy military which includes building peace movements and networks of alliance.
As written anonymously in a wargaming site;
“The Protracted War conflict model
Prosecution of the war followed the Maoist model, closely integrating political and military efforts into the concept of one struggle, or dau tranh. Dau Tranh was and remains the stated basis of PAVN operations, and was held to spring from the history of Vietnamese resistance and patriotism, the superiority of Marxism-Leninism and the Party, the overwhelming justice of Vietnam’s cause, and the support of the world’s socialist and progressive forces. War was to be waged on all fronts: diplomatic, ideological, organizational, economic and military.
Dau Tranh was divided into military and political spheres:
Political dau tranh: three elements
Dan Van- Action among your people: Total mobilization of propaganda, motivational & organizational measures to manipulate internal masses and fighting units. Example: Intensive indoctrination and total mobilization of all civilian and military personnel in North Vietnam.
Binh Van- Action among enemy military: Subversion, proselytizing, and propaganda to encourage desertion, defection and lowered morale among enemy troops. Example: contribution to large number of South Vietnamese Army deserters and draft evaders in early years.
Dich Van- Action among enemy’s people: Total propaganda effort to sow discontent, defeatism, dissent and disloyalty among enemy’s population. Involves creation and/or manipulation of front groups and sympathizers. Example: work among South Vietnamese and US media, activist and academic circles.
Military dau tranh: the three phases
The strategy of the communist forces generally followed the protracted Revolutionary Warfare model of Mao in China, as diagrammed above. These phases were not static, and elements from one appear in others. Guerrilla warfare for example co-existed alongside conventional operations, and propaganda and terrorism would always be deployed throughout the conflict.
Preparation, organization and propaganda phase.
Guerrilla warfare, terrorism phase.
General offensive – conventional war phase including big unit and mobile warfare.
As part of the final stage, emphasis was placed on the Khoi Nghia, or “General Uprising” of the masses, in conjunction with the liberation forces. This spontaneous uprising of the masses would sweep away the imperialists and their puppets who would already be sorely weakened by earlier guerrilla and mobile warfare. The Communist leadership thus had a clear vision, strategy and method to guide their operations.
Translation of Dau Tranh doctrine into military action
Militarily this strategy translated into a flexible mix of approaches on the ground:
Continued efforts to build the revolutionary VC infrastructure and weaken GVN forces via propaganda and organization.
Broad use of terrorism and low intensity guerrilla warfare.
Widening the field of conflict logistically by expanding bases and troop movement in Laos and Cambodia.
Small-unit mobile warfare using VC Main Forces and NVA regulars over the expanded space- especially during seasonal offensive thrusts.
Limited conventional operations where overwhelming numerical superiority could be concentrated to liquidate the maximum number of enemy effectives or control strategic blocks of territory.
A General Uprising by the aggrieved masses as the enemy weakened.
Full scale offensives by conventional forces with secondary guerrilla support.
Overall, this approach was successful. It did not occur in a vacuum however. It both shaped and reacted to events in the arena of struggle.”
As written by James A. Warren in the introduction to his biography of Giap, the general who defeated both France and America; “With the sage guidance of Ho Chí Minh and [political leader] Truong Chinh, Giáp developed a highly nuanced and sophisticated understanding of how to use socio-political activity—organization, mobilization, and thought control or “consciousness-raising”—to focus the energies of the entire population under Vietminh control on achieving the Revolution’s objectives. Taken together, these techniques of political dau tranh allowed Giáp to mobilize an astonishing amount of on-going human activity, choreographed in minute detail, toward (1) building an alternative society and government, marked by revolutionary fervor, high morale, and unity of purpose as defined by the senior leadership; and (2) the breakdown of the legitimacy of the colonial puppet government in the eyes of the entire country. Thus, political dau tranh was at once a constructive and a corrosive activity.”
“[General Võ Nguyên Giáp] brilliantly applied what historian Douglas Pike calls the “two pincers” of revolutionary power, political struggle and armed struggle, placing greater emphasis on one form over the other at various stages of the Revolution. Perhaps Giáp’s most important contributions to protracted warfare were his flexible integration of three types of forces (local militia in the villages, regional forces, and full-time main force units), and his creative use of various “fighting forms”—guerilla warfare, mobile independent operations by battalions, conventional set-piece battles, and political mobilization.”
[He presented] the Communist revolution as the only way to give the people power to shape their own history and destiny. Whether this was true or not in some objective sense…hardly mattered. What did matter was that the people and the soldiers loyal to the Revolution believed it was true.”
In the words of the magnificent Ho Chi Minh, who lived with grandeur and whose vision of our future possibilities of becoming human illuminated the soul of a nation and won her liberty; “The great victory of April 30 represents the triumph of the entire nation, of justice over brutality and of humanity over tyranny.”
So for my fascination with this glorious victory over imperialist forces of enormously more vast and terrible power and material superiority as a model of how we may seize power under such imposed conditions of struggle.
Far more revealing of the origins and processes of unequal power and the state as embodied violence are the myriad ways in which Vietnam and America are bound together by trauma and history through this war which was a journey through nightmares of ten thousand days, and became a Defining Moment of both our nations.
Whereas Vietnam experienced the War as a Theatre of Cruelty which unified a nation and a forge of national identity which consigned traditional society to the flames in liberation struggle, America’s lived experience was of the War as degradation, dehumanization, and amorality in the shattering of our lies and illusions as loss of national identity, like the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, and the delegitimation of the state and the idea of America as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights through exposure of the horrors and atrocities of our colonial and imperial conquest and dominion of others in service to the wealth and power of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us.
Often do I write of the legacies of history from which we must emerge in becoming human together; there are stories we must escape, and those we must keep, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Ngày 30 tháng 4 năm 2024 Kỷ niệm Việt Nam đánh Mỹ và kết thúc cuộc chiến tranh ngàn ngày
Ngày mai hãy cùng tôi kỷ niệm chiến thắng vui vẻ của Việt Nam trước Mỹ và sự kết thúc của Chiến tranh Ngàn Ngày; vì ngày chúng ta rời bỏ Sài Gòn, chúng ta đã được giải phóng khỏi sự đồng lõa với một tội ác to lớn và sự tàn bạo của một cuộc chiến tranh đế quốc xâm phạm các giá trị và truyền thống tự do của chúng ta và cuộc đấu tranh cách mạng chống thực dân hơn bao giờ hết, mặc dù rõ ràng không phải là lần đầu tiên cũng như lần cuối cùng .
Chiến thắng vẻ vang của nhân dân Việt Nam trước sự áp bức khủng khiếp của ngoại bang đã cứu nước Mỹ khỏi sự nhục nhã của cảnh nô lệ cho những kẻ phản bội, một chính phủ độc ác và tham nhũng của sức mạnh và sự kiểm soát độc tài, tìm cách áp đặt một chế độ bóc lột và cướp bóc bằng sức mạnh vũ khí hơn là để giành được sự đồng tình bằng sự thuyết phục về mặt đạo đức. Bức ảnh nổi tiếng về chiếc trực thăng cuối cùng chạy trốn khỏi đại sứ quán đang bị bao vây của chúng ta mãi mãi ghi lại khoảnh khắc giải phóng của hai dân tộc chúng ta.
Tôi mười lăm tuổi và là sinh viên năm nhất trung học khi bức ảnh Sài Gòn sụp đổ nhấn chìm nước Mỹ và thế giới như một cơn thủy triều, thay đổi mọi thứ, một sự kiện được chào đón bằng niềm hân hoan và cảm giác được các cậu thiếu niên giải cứu khỏi tay treo cổ dưới sự đe dọa của đang được soạn thảo. Trải nghiệm của tôi về chiến tranh giống như những cuộn phim thời sự về những nỗi kinh hoàng xa xôi, từ vị trí thuận lợi của Đại lộ Telegraph và Phố Haight cho đến cái vạc sôi sục của những câu hỏi cũng như sự tái tưởng tượng và biến đổi hoàn toàn về con người, ý nghĩa và giá trị mà nó đã khơi dậy trong xã hội chúng ta như trật tự cũ đã chết và một trật tự mới được sinh ra.
Từ sự kiện mà hình ảnh của nó đã trở thành nhân vật trong câu chuyện của toàn nhân loại và của chính tôi, tôi đã học được những điều tuyệt vời, khủng khiếp; cho dù rộng lớn và toàn diện đến đâu, quyền lực vẫn trở nên vô nghĩa và bị ủy quyền khi những lời dối trá và ảo tưởng mà nó tạo ra sự đồng ý và khuất phục chúng ta bị nghi ngờ, vạch trần và không tin tưởng, và dù có quái dị và to lớn đến đâu, quyền lực cũng không có ý nghĩa gì khi gặp phải sự bất tuân và từ chối nộp.
Chế độ chuyên chế không phải lúc nào cũng cần phải chiến thắng tự do.
Làm thế nào chúng ta có thể đạt được điều kỳ diệu này? Ở đây chúng ta có thể lấy tấm gương anh hùng và chiến thắng của Việt Nam làm hình mẫu.
Sự hiểu biết và thực tiễn đấu tranh cách mạng của riêng tôi được định hình và cung cấp thông tin, mặc dù không chỉ giới hạn ở, chiến lược của Việt Nam mà nó được dịch thô, chiến lược của Đầu Tranh, có nghĩa là đấu tranh, và viết lại Trò chơi dài của Mao trong bối cảnh hành động quần chúng. Mục tiêu của Đầu Tranh, và điều khiến nó trở nên độc đáo, là đạt được một cuộc chiến tổng thể nhằm chuyển đổi nền văn minh và thay đổi hệ thống bằng cách kiểm soát nhận thức và ý tưởng của kẻ thù, trong đó vũ lực chỉ được sử dụng trong bối cảnh mà Atherton gọi là Vùng hoang dã của những tấm gương; vì khi kẻ thù nhận ra rằng hắn không thể chiến thắng những người không chịu khuất phục, thì sức mạnh đó sẽ vô nghĩa nếu không có tính hợp pháp, quyền lực và việc tạo ra sự đồng ý để được cai trị sẽ bị xua tan bởi sự hoài nghi và quyền lực bị biến thành rỗng tuếch bởi sự bất tuân, các hệ thống và chế độ chuyên chế và bất bình đẳng sức mạnh tan vỡ, sụp đổ và tan biến vào hư vô.
Ở đây, chính chúng ta trở thành trọng tài cho số phận của mình và là người mang lại sự thay đổi với tư cách là các Khu tự trị sống, đồng thời là công cụ giải phóng và tự chủ của chính chúng ta.
Ba loại hành động giá trị xác định Đấu Tranh; hành động giữa kẻ thù trên mảnh đất của mình, hành động giữa người dân trên mảnh đất của mình và hành động giữa quân đội kẻ thù, bao gồm việc xây dựng các phong trào hòa bình và mạng lưới liên minh.
Vì vậy, niềm đam mê của tôi với chiến thắng vẻ vang này trước các lực lượng đế quốc có sức mạnh vô cùng to lớn, khủng khiếp và ưu thế vật chất như một hình mẫu về cách chúng ta có thể nắm quyền trong những điều kiện đấu tranh áp đặt như vậy.
Tiết lộ nhiều hơn về nguồn gốc và quá trình của quyền lực bất bình đẳng và nhà nước được thể hiện bằng bạo lực là vô số cách mà Việt Nam và Hoa Kỳ gắn kết với nhau bởi chấn thương và lịch sử thông qua cuộc chiến này, một cuộc hành trình xuyên qua những cơn ác mộng kéo dài mười nghìn ngày và đã trở thành một Thời điểm xác định của cả hai quốc gia chúng ta
Trong khi Việt Nam trải qua Chiến tranh như một Nhà hát Tàn ác thống nhất một dân tộc và rèn giũa bản sắc dân tộc, đốt cháy xã hội truyền thống trong cuộc đấu tranh giải phóng, kinh nghiệm sống của Hoa Kỳ coi Chiến tranh là sự suy thoái, mất nhân tính và vô đạo đức trong việc làm tan vỡ nền văn hóa của chúng ta. dối trá và ảo tưởng như sự mất đi bản sắc dân tộc, như Tấm gương vỡ của Hobgoblin, và sự ủy quyền của nhà nước cũng như ý tưởng coi nước Mỹ là người bảo đảm cho nền dân chủ và nhân quyền toàn cầu của chúng ta thông qua việc phơi bày sự khủng khiếp và tàn bạo của cuộc chinh phục thuộc địa và đế quốc của chúng ta và sự thống trị của người khác nhằm phục vụ cho sự giàu có và quyền lực của giới tinh hoa bá quyền và những kẻ sẽ bắt chúng ta làm nô lệ.
Tôi thường viết về những di sản của lịch sử mà từ đó chúng ta phải cùng nhau trở thành con người; có những câu chuyện chúng ta phải trốn tránh, có những câu chuyện chúng ta phải giữ lại, và nếu chúng ta rất may mắn thì chúng không phải lúc nào cũng giống nhau.
Torch of Liberty 