April 2024 Monthly Roundup
It’s a pleasure to meet you here on the eve of May Day (a.k.a. International Workers’ Day), you rabble-rousing Waywards reader.
Since we’re here, please allow me to share one piece I wrote for commission that was published in April:
When Blue Collar Work Means More Energy for Art / The Daily Yonder / 4-16-24
As for other work, the piece about undergraduate student worker organizing I mentioned in my previous Waywards post has been given the greenlight by an outlet. Far be it for me to get your hopes up, dear Waywards reader, but you might just see it listed in the next monthly roundup.
Apropos 5/1, I discussed a chapter from Peter Linebaugh’s “The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day,” in my labor studies class yesterday. In case it’s of interest to the Waywards crew, Linebaugh did an interview about that book a few years back, which you might feel inclined to check out for the occassion.
Following the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions publication of a call to action, members of the IWW Freelance Journalists Union decided to strike in solidarity tomorrow. Seeing as how I’m an IWW FJU member, I won’t be engaging in any regular journalistic labor on 5/1.
Finally, you can find a May Day-related poem I wrote below. It’s one I crafted several years back but just recently recast. Along with that, two other poems I wrote this month can be located beneath this image of me shooting hoops in April.
Stoking that Subterranean Fire
Some 300,000 US workers in 1886 out on strike
To toil a little less and make a wrong world right
They demanded an eight-hour day
Some 50,000 in the streets of Chicago that first of May
More showed out there than in any other industrial city
Workers at the McCormick Harvester plant got fired
And although organizers were surely tired
They gathered folks on May 3rd for a demonstration
Police extended themselves an invitation
August Spies spoke but the factory bell rang several blocks away
Workers headed to the plant that day in May
Spies watched as officers shot at and battered guys who inveighed
He hurried back to the Arbeiter-Zeitung and wrote with impatience: “You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have for years suffered immeasurable iniquities; you have worked yourselves to death; you have endured the pangs of want and hunger; your children you have sacrificed to the factory lords—in short you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years. Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed and fill the coffers of your lazy thieving masters! When you ask him now to lessen your burden, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, to kill you!”
People gathered at Chicago’s Haymarket Square the day after
About 1,200 showed for the affair, which some later called a riot or disaster
Again, Spies spoke, with the power of methane, propane and other explosive gasses: “Now is the chance to strike for the existence of the oppressed classes. The oppressors want us to be content. They will kill us. The thought of liberty which inspired your sires ought to animate you today. The day is not far distant when we will resort to hanging these men.”
And he added, the following, smashing the hammer upon the proverbial nail: “Don’t make any threats, they are of no avail. Whenever you get ready to do something do it and don’t make any threats beforehand. There are in the city today between forty and fifty thousand men locked out because they refuse to obey the supreme will … of a small number of men.”
Fellow anarchist organizer Albert Parsons also delivered a prescient warning: “I am not here for the purpose of inciting anybody, but to speak out, to tell the facts as they exist, even though it shall cost me my life before morning."
Biting wind blew
Rain poured too
Samuel Fielden then told the crowd what he believed to be true: “The law is your enemy. We are rebels against it. The law is only framed for those that are your enslavers.”
And then those enforcing the law did workers no favors
Police approached and told people to peaceably disperse
A dynamite bomb flew through the air after officers got terse
It detonated near the rank of law enforcement situated first
One officer died and others were taken aback
They regrouped and attacked
A barrage of bullets killed four
The law arrested eight men from the ranks of the rebellious working poor
Lack of evidence aside, both Spies and Parsons faced charges
The Chicago Daily Mail had gone at them the hardest
On May 1, the paper readied an op-ed on the double that read: “There are two dangerous ruffians at large in this city; two sneaking cowards who are trying to create trouble. One of them is named Parsons; the other is named Spies. Should trouble come they would be the first to skulk away from the scene of danger,” and “the first to shirk responsibility.”
Continuing, the Mail came with more editorial hostility: “Hold them personally responsible for any trouble that occurs," adding: "Make an example of them if trouble does occur.”
The New York Times was similarly direct, no need to infer: “No disturbance to the peace that has occurred in the United States since the war of the rebellion has excited public sentiment through the Union as it is excited by the Anarchist’s murder of police men in Chicago on Tuesday night.”
The newspaper of record had some nerve
The piece claimed the “cowardly savages who plotted and carried out this murder shall suffer the death they deserve.”
A business publication told readers: “This week’s happenings at Chicago go to show that the threats of the anarchists against the existing order of society are not merely idle vaporings,” adding: “There is no room for anarchy in the political system of the United States.”
The St. Louis Globe Democrat foretold the Haymarket martyrs’ fate: “There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists,” was the Globe Democrat’s directive
The Columbus Ohio Journal echoed the call an amplifited it another few decibels: “There are too many unhung anarchists and rebels.”
And the Cleveland reader suggested anarchist-socialists embodied evil: “The anarchist wolf, unwisely permitted to take up its abode and propagate its bloodthirsty species in this country – has fastened its hideous, poisonous fangs in the body corporate of the American people.”
The insults kept coming, spewing from all the pages
Whipping the public into a panic is commercial media’s M.O.; it continues unabated
The Washington Post labeled anarchists a “horde of foreigners, representing the lower stratum found in humanity’s formation.”
WaPo had internalized elite interests and waxed xenophobic without hesitation
Four Haymarket organizers were convicted on charges of conspiracy and later hanged
Prior to his execution, Spies harangued: “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement … the movement from which the downtrodden millions who toil in want and misery expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.”
On the gallows, with the other three martyrs, the flames were fanned
Spies delivered his final statement on November 11, 1887
He spoke to the irrepressible struggle for earthly heaven: “There will come a time, when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
And, I dare say, his spirit lives on; it never went away
We can recall, recover and stoke that subterranean fire this May!
Information, ideas and inspiration for this poem came from the following sources, (most likely) among others that don’t immediately come to mind: Henry David, “The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American and Social-Revolutionary Movements” (1936); Sharon Smith, “Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States” (2006); James Green, “Death in the Haymarket” (2006); Peter Linebaugh, “The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day” (2016)
Know Thyself: You’re (We’re) Much More than You (We) Might Think Focus on yourself That’s what they say Egotistic egoism sells Capital gets its way But, “What is the self?” I ask, if I may. “Why care, pray tell?” In response you might say Well, you didn’t simply appear Out of nowhere on earth A womb carried you here By another you were birthed We’re organisms with needs We can’t meet them alone We’re edified by good deeds Experience has shown Market-driven fetishism Renders others invisible Humanity’s elision Unperceived, like a dog whistle It’s a silly myth That one needs no help To become super rich Or amass wealth Exchange via markets Conceals human labor That plays a key part in Producing items you pay for When our generative activities Are estranged, what then? Then the life of our species Seems mere means to an end* We’ve learned to exhibit A reluctance, a hesitancy A knee-jerk fear of what is Our exquisite codependency Individuality assumes meaning Via relations that make us whole Your sense of identity is teeming With myriad reflected appraisals Being exists as Being-with Dasein as Mitsein** That’s how we live Shaping each other in time You view the world in a limited way You also see a different part than me Thus, it’s only, as the Zaptistas say, That “together can we truly see reality.”*** When people communicate with you They share a bit of who they are In so doing, they alter your brain too They’re just a memory away—not far Even your definition of success, Your goals and your dreams Imply human connectedness Know that thyself is more than it seems! --- *Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marxists.org, 2000[2009]), 31-32. **For more on Mitsein in relation to Dasein, see: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Harper & Row, New York: 1962[2008]), 263; 514 ***Quoted in an interview with R. Vera in Kara Zugman, “Autonomy in a Poetic Voice: Zapatistas and Political Organizing in Los Angeles,” Latino Studies 3 (2005), 335.
A Sonnet of Sorts
My spirit was broken and raggedy
Her empathy was like Kundalini
I was relieved of all that agony
She devoured all that had ever hurt me*
With an electric, sertraline presence
No bottle nor metaphor could capture
Gentle wings lifted me to the heavens
What arousing, restorative rapture
Sadly, I failed to earn the ecstasy
She took me to a place I could not stay
From paradise I thought she expelled me
It was not Eve, though, who led me astray
Conquered by my inner Adversary**
I dug the hole where true love lies buried
---
*I listened to someone online who described Kundalini as that which rises to consume existing, accumulated pain and blockages.
**I'm riffing on what some Kabbalists have shared.
The pleasure has been all mine, Waywards reader. Do me a favor and take care of yourself, ‘til we tango again.