Today in Labor History April 17, 2014: Journalist and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on this day. Affectionately known as Gabo, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Two of his most famous books were, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Garcia Marquez was a socialist and an anti-imperialist, and critical of U.S. policy in Latin America.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #GabrielGarciaMarquez #columbia #author #writer #fiction #nobelprize #books #Literature @bookstadon

Today in Labor History April 17, 1996: Brazilian police attacked 2,000 landless peasants, killing 19 and wounding 69. Over 1,000 would be killed in similar protests throughout the 1990s.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #peasant #massacre #brazil #police #policebrutality #policemurder

Today in Labor History April 17, 1912: Miners struck at the Lena gold fields in eastern Siberia to protest long hours, appalling working conditions, and starvation wages. Strike leaders were arrested and troops fired on a peaceful strikers’ march, killing over 200. Anger over the mass murder fueled a subsequent wave of strikes across the country.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #russia #lena #massacre #strike #mining #siberia #mining #gold

Today in Labor History April 17, 1944: The militant Lodge 68 of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), in San Francisco, began a ban against overtime work. During the ban, which lasted four months, all machinists refused to work more than eight hours per day, and on Sundays. They began this job action in protest of a wage freeze that had been in place throughout World War Two, as high wartime inflation eroded the value of their wages.

Roosevelt’s economic stabilization czar, Fred Vinson, said they had to “stamp out” this example of labor militancy and defiance of the government before it spread across the entire country. The bosses, as well as most of organized labor, including the Communist-oriented ILWU, agreed, and they collaborated to undermine and crush Lodge 68. During World War Two, Lodge 68 had more strikes than all the other unions in the Bay Area combined. Together with Oakland's Local 1304 of the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee, they openly defied the National War Labor Board (NWLB), the FBI, the White House, as well as the CIO, ILWU and Communist Party.

Prior to WWII, the IAM and ILWU had been closely allied. In 1934, IAM members led the call for the San Francisco General Strike after the San Francisco police murdered two striking union members on the waterfront. During WWII, however, the ILWU took a much more collaborationist attitude toward the U.S. government. Harry Bridges felt that defeating Hitler took precedence over working conditions and working-class solidarity at home, and that wartime strikes undermined this goal. One of the loudest voices within the Regional War Labor Board calling for government against the machinists was ILWU vice-president Louis Goldblatt.

In September, 1944, the U.S. Navy took over control of most of the machinery industry in San Francisco and its industrial suburbs, suspending union contracts, grievance procedure, and collective bargaining rights. They fired machinists Martin Joos and Arthur Burke for continuing to do their jobs as union representatives in violation of their suspension of union rights and blacklisted them from other jobs. Just prior to their firing, the FBI interrogated them for violating wartime antistrike legislation. They also revoked ration cards for numerous other IAM members and referred others to the Selective Service for immediate induction into the military. At the same time, FBI agents fanned out through the Bay Area’s working-class communities, interrogating thousands of machinists in their homes. These heavy-handed tactics ultimately ended the overtime ban.

To learn more, see this article from libcom: https://libcom.org/article/class-conscious-machinists-stormy-petrels-west-coast-labor

#workingclass #LaborHistory #FBI #communism #union #strike #ilwu #hitler #fascism #nazis #machinists #solidarity #militancy

Drilling bits of steel listening to Billy Bragg 🥰✊

#music #union #workingclass

Today in Labor History April 16, 1994: Ralph Ellison died on this day. Ellison was a part of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for his book, “The Invisible Man.” He was friends with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He became active in the Communist Party, as did many of his peers. But he became disillusioned with them during World War II when he felt they became reformist. He wrote The Invisible Man during this era (published in 1952), in part, as a response their betrayal. But the book also looks at the relationship between black identity and Marxism, the reformism of Booker T. Washington, and issues of individuality and personal identity.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #ralphellison #Harlem #marxism #racism #communism #fiction #literature #books #author #writer #BlackMastodon @bookstadon

Today in Labor History April 16, 1947: 581 workers died in Texas City, Texas, on Galveston Bay, in the deadliest industrial disaster in U.S. history. 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate, on board a ship docked in the port of Texas City, detonated and set off a chain reaction of explosions and fires on other ships and nearby oil storage facilities. Thousands were seriously injured. As a result, changes in chemical manufacturing and new regulations for the bagging, handling, and shipping of chemicals were enacted.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #texas #galveston #explosion #disaster #workplacesafety #workplacedeaths

Today in Labor History, April 16, 1943: Albert Hoffman accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic effects of LSD on this day. And forever after, working-class people could afford to take inexpensive trips without ever leaving their homes. Hoffman, who was a chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, first synthesized LSD in1938. He set the drug aside for five years, before accidentally ingesting some on this date in 1943. Three days later, April 19, he deliberately ingested 250 micrograms of LSD, believing this tiny dosage would be barely, if at all, noticeable. Turns out, this is a pretty strong dose. He watched people morph into weird creatures, office furniture become “alive,” and he felt like he was possessed by otherworldly forces. He tried to ride his bicycle home, to safety, but things just got weirder. April 19 is now known as “Bicycle Day,” in commemoration of the first deliberate LSD trip.

He also named and synthesized the principal psychedelic chemicals psilocybin and psilocin, found in psilocybin mushrooms. And in 1929 he discovered the structure of chitin, the polysaccharide found in the cell walls of fungi, and in the shells of arthropods, like shrimp, crabs, spiders and insects, and in the beaks and radula of mollusks, like snails and octopi. He wrote over 100 scientific articles in his lifetime, and the book: LSD: Mein Sorgenkind (LSD: My Problem Child). In 1962, he traveled to Mexico to obtain samples of Salvia divinorum, but was never able to isolate the psychoactive alkaloids. He also discovered a close relative of LSD in Morning Glory seeds. In an interview just before his 100th birthday, Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul." Angered by its worldwide legal bans, he said argued that it had been used successfully for ten years in psychoanalysis prior to its U.S. prohibition. He also criticized its “misuse” by the counterculture of the 1960s.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #LSD #psychedelic #AlbertHoffman #chemistry #mushrooms #psilocybin #sandoz #salvia

Today in Labor History April 16, 1884: Anatole France was born. He was a poet and novelist and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921. Many of his works satirized religious and political ideas. The son of a bookseller, France spent much of his childhood in his family’s bookstore, reading voraciously, and meeting many of the writers who frequented the store. He was active in the movement to free Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely accused of espionage. And he signed Emile Zola’s letter in support of Dreyfus, “J’accuse.” France wrote about wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel “Monsieur Bergeret.” France's novel, “Penguin Island” depicts penguins transformed into humans after the birds have been mistakenly baptized by the almost-blind Abbot Mael. “The Gods Are Athirst” (1912), about a true-believing follower of Maximilien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror of 1793–94, is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism. “The Revolt of the Angels” (1914) it tells the story of Arcade, a bored guardian angel who starts reading his mentee’s books on theology and becomes an atheist, moves to Paris, falls in love, and loses his virginity causing his wings to fall off. He then joins the revolutionary movement of fallen angels.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #dreyfus #antisemitism #anatolefrance #french #nobelprize #literature #fiction #books #writer #author @bookstadon

Jesse Welles and The Great Class War

#politics #poverty #equality #inequality #billionaires #socialjustice #social #workingclass #bootstrap #CEO #humanrights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4qXFbCHm3s