We should always honour our heroes, we have many, but if we don't record them they will disappear from history, and we will be the poorer for that.
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views and poetry from an anarchist perspective.
Read the full article HERE:The trust and solidarity required to mount a successful strike was not magically born on January 11 and 12, 1912, when workers walked off the job due to a reduction in their pay. Some 20 active foreign-language chapters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were present in the city for at least five years. IWW organizer James P. Thompson stated in the October 1912 issue of Solidarity: "It is absolutely foolish to say the strike 'happened without any apparent cause'; 'that it was lightning out of a clear sky,' etc. As a matter of fact, it was a harvest, it was a result of seeds sown before. . . "
Read the full article HERE:KURT GUSTAV WILCKENS was born 3 November 1886 at Bad Bramstedt in Schleswig-Holstein, close to the Danish border in Germany, one of the five sons of August Wilckens and Johanna Harms. Of average height with red hair and light blue eyes, he loved nature and hated cities. Starting work as a miner in Silesia, he emigrated at the age of 24 to the United States where he got work in the Arizona mines.
In Arizona he became involved in the agitation of the revolutionary workers’ organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World (popularly known as the Wobblies). Wilckens took part in strikes and became an orator in the miners’ mass meetings, The IWW organised successfully among Mexicans and South Europeans, the lowest paid of the miners. As a result of the growing might of the miners in the Bisbee area, the local businessmen and scab miners organised into Loyalty Leagues. Early on 12 July 1916, 2000 Loyalty Leaguers commenced a round-up of miners. One miner shot dead a Loyalty leaguer in self-defence and was gunned down. There were robberies, vandalism, and beatings and abuse of women carried out by the Leaguers during the round-up. 1,186 men, including 104 Wobblies, among them Wilckens, were herded into cattle trucks and dumped across the border in the New Mexico desert. Wilckens, by now an anarchist as well as an IWW member, was interned in a camp for German prisoners. He escaped from there, was recaptured and deported to Germany in 1920 from where he departed to Argentina, arriving there in late September.---
More than fifty years since the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the events have faded and their meaning and importance to socialists perhaps lost in time. The struggles, the barricades, the workers councils and resistance to Russian imperialism are a vague memory even for those involved in the movement at the time. The real struggles and aspirations of the Hungarian revolution will be reduced even further to the strong box of history by the official commemorations attended by the great and the good of the bourgeoisie who will claim the mantle of the freedom fighters of 1956. In so doing they will continue such myth as the decisive role in the fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe was played by the prayers of Pope John Paul II and the foreign policy of the American President Ronald Reagan and his ally Thatcher.Read the full article HERE:
The First International Syndicalist Congress was a meeting of European and Latin American syndicalist organizations at Holborn Town Hall in London from September 27 to October 2, 1913. Upon a proposal by the Dutch National Labor Secretariat (NAS) and the British Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL), most European syndicalist groups, both trade unions and advocacy groups, agreed to congregate at a meeting in London. The only exception was the biggest syndicalist organization worldwide, the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT). Nevertheless, the congress was held with organizations from twelve countries participating. It was marked by heated debate and constant disagreements over both tactics and principles. Yet, it succeeded in creating the International Syndicalist Information Bureau as a vehicle of exchange and solidarity between the various organizations and the Bulletin international du mouvement syndicaliste as a means of communication. It would be viewed as a success by almost all who participated.For some of Glasgow's working class history visit Strugglepedia.
In early July 1917, Little arrived in Butte, Montana, to help organize a copper miners' union and lead a miners' strike against the Anaconda Copper Company. In the early hours of August 1, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room.[1] He was beaten and taken to the edge of town where he was lynched from a railroad trestle.[1] A note with the words "First and last warning" was pinned to his chest, along with the initials of other union leaders, and the numbers 3-7-77 (a vigilante code famously used by the vigilance committee of Virginia City, Montana).[1]ann arky's home.
It was widely believed that Pinkerton agents were involved, but no serious attempt was made by the police to apprehend Little's murderers. His funeral procession was followed by thousands as he was laid to rest in Butte's Mountain View Cemetery.
September 11th was the day that, in 1973, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army Augusto Pinochet took power over the democratically elected president Allende. Pinochet killed and tortured thousands in his dictatorial rule, until 1990. On the same day, in 1998, anarchist Claudia López was shot dead by cops of the reinstated democracy while she fought at a barricade during a commemoration of the 1973 coup d’etat. Since then, under the slogan of ‘Black September’ demonstrators fight state repression in remembrance of Claudia and all of those who fell in combat
"----The miners voted to strike. Evicted from their huts by the coal companies, they packed their belongings onto carts and onto their backs and walked through a mountain blizzard to tent colonies set up by the United Mine Workers. It was September 1913. There they lived for the next seven months, enduring hunger and sickness, picketing the mines to prevent strikebreakers from entering, and defending themselves against armed assaults. The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, hired by the Rockefellers to break the morale of the strikers, used rifles, shotguns, and a machine gun mounted on an armored car, which roved the countryside and fired into the tents where the miners lived.Read the full article HERE:
They would not give up the strike, however, and the National Guard was called in by the governor. A letter from the vice president of Colorado Fuel & Iron to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in New York explained:
You will be interested to know that we have been able to secure the cooperation of all the bankers in the city, who have had three or four interviews with our little cowboy governor, agreeing to back the State and lend it all funds necessary to maintain the militia and afford ample protection so our miners could return to work.... Another mighty power has been rounded up on behalf of the operators by the getting together of fourteen of the editors of the most important newspapers in the state-----"
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The Mexican Guerrilla and Forgetfulness
History tells us that the Nazis cleansed Berlin of Jews in the days leading up to 1936 Summer Olympics. Before everyone arrived from abroad, the Jews had been pushed out of sight, the brutality and pogroms hidden away. The city was brightened, the roads were cleaned, and the shops were open. Three years earlier, Hitler had presided over May Day celebrations, having successfully hijacked the ideas of socialism and revolution from the Marxists, many of whom also happened to be Jews. In 1945, Hitler killed himself and had his body burnt. The war he started before his death consigned the world to its current fate of authoritarian domination. Long after he died, the SS patrolled the streets and Nazi rockets filled the sky. In 1968, the students of Mexico City (DF) began boarding buses and handing out literature, marching in the streets against the PRI government, and withstanding heavy assaults by the police. They fought to free their imprisoned friends, to keep beauty alive, and to destroy the capitalist terror around them. They were executed in cold rooms after defending the occupied UNAM, the wandered drunkenly down Insurgentes knowing their future was gone, they fucked in dirty bathrooms knowing the world was against them, and they witnessed the tumultuous expansion of the world revolutionary Geist before their intoxicated eyes. Some of them were part of the Anarchist International, although we may never know to what extent.Ten days prior to the opening of the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics, the PRI government sent a group of paramilitaries called the Olympic Brigade to liquidate the student movement. The Brigade was created to cleanse the city and erase all unwanted disturbance. In the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, hundreds of students were killed outright, their blood and life and beauty permanently staining the dry ground of the capitol.
ann arky's home.In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed.The colonial conquest of the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, by European powers set up the structure of our current economic system.History books have done a good job depicting the brutality of this period. In many places, Europeans wiped out 99% of the native populations. In places where the natives did survive, many of them were captured and made to do hard labor. In Potosi, Bolivia, for instance, native Bolivians were forced to work silver mines that snaked deep into the earth. So many miners died, that a popular saying goes “enough silver was taken from the mine in Potosi to build a bridge to Madrid, Spain, and if the bones of the dead miners were pulled from the bowels of the mine, one could build a bridge all the way back.”