April, 21, 1913 –Andre Soudy and Raymond Callemin, members of the anarchist Bonnot Gang, were executed. Callemin had started the individualist paper “L’anarchie” withVictor Serge. The Bonnot Gang was a band of French anarchists (plus Serge, who was Russian) who tried to fund their movement through robberies in 1911-1912. The Bonnot Gang was unique, not only for their politics, but for their innovative use of technology, too. They were among the first to use cars and automatic rifles to help them steal, technology that even the French police were not using. While many of the gang members were sentenced to death, Serge got five years and eventually went on to participate in (and survive) the Barcelona and Soviet uprisings. Later, while living in exile, Serge wrote The Birth of Our Power. (From the Daily Bleed and Wikipedia)
On this day 100 years ago: Mother Jones
From the Modern School:
February 12, 1913 – Mary Harris “Mother” Jones led a protest against conditions in the West Virginia mines was arrested. (On May 8, newly-elected Governor Hatfield releases her from jail.) A government official once called Mary Jones “The most dangerous woman in America.” She was still out there at age 83. No rockin’ chair for her… (From the Daily Bleed)
Related articles
- Mother Jones Deserves Her Own Stamp (counterpunch.org)
Robert Capa
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01 Jan 1938
A portrait of Hungarian-born photojournalist Robert Capa (1913 – 1954) used to introduce an article, featuring his pictures of the Spanish Civil War, in Picture Post, 3rd December 1938. (Photo by Pict… Read more
By: Picture Post
Collection: Hulton Archive
People: Robert Capa
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Via Jonathan Woods, who has the full un-watermarked image.
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On this day
January 7, 1919 – This date marked the beginning of Argentina’s “Bloody Week” (AKA Tragic Week) in Buenos Aires. Workers (led by Italian anarchists) were demonstrating for the 8-hour work day and were fired upon by the authorities, leaving four dead and nearly 30 wounded. Clashes with the authorities on the day of the funerals left another 50 dead. A General Strike was called and strikers were attacked by trade union reformists and paramilitary groups collaborating with the police. By January 16 the strike was crushed, with as many as 700 dead and 2000 wounded, many of whom were Jewish-Russian immigrants targeted by racists and anti-Bolshevik hysteria.(From the Daily Bleed and Wikipedia)January 7, 1939 – Tom Mooney, a labor activist wrongly convicted of murder in the San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing in July 1916, was freed after 22 ½ years in jail, granted an unconditional pardon by Governor Culbert Olson.(From the Daily Bleed)
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75 years ago: killed by fascist bombs
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13 Nov 1937
Bodies of children awaiting burial after a Nationalist air raid on their school at Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
By: Keystone
Collection: Hulton Archive
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Hands off Suez! Hands off Hungary!
From Entdinglichung:
Hands off Suez! Hands off Hungary! (pdf file, 1.13 mb), a 1956 brochure from the anti-Stalinist Marxist Vanguard circle around Walter Kendall (1926-2003), which opposes the imperialist intervention in Suez and the Soviet intervention in Hungary and seeks to popularize these positions in the TUC:
Related articles
- Hungary’s Needy Given Money to Burn (in Their Furnaces) (blacklistednews.com)
On this day 100 years ago: Bread and Roses
N.Y. – Lawrence strike meeting (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)
From the Modern School:
September 30, 1912 – The Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike was in full swing. On this date, 12,000 textile workers walked out of mills to protest the arrests of two leaders of the strike. Police clubbed strikers and arrested many, while the bosses fired 1,500. IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood threatened another general strike to get the workers reinstated. Strike leaders Arturo Giovannitti and Joe Ettor were eventually acquitted 58 days later. (From Workday Minnesota)
Related articles
- Bread and Roses strike centennial (myfoxboston.com)
- BREAD AND ROSES: How the 99 Percent Beat the 1 Percent (And Why You Won’t Hear Much About It) (talkingunion.wordpress.com)
- Lawrence celebrates Bread and Roses Strike (bostonherald.com)
- Bread & Roses STRIKE Centennial “Double Feature!” (talkingunion.wordpress.com)
- Bread and Roses Interview: Uaw Organizer Rose Bookbinder (breadandrosesradio.wordpress.com)
Music Mondays: Woody Guthrie at 100
[This post is cross-posted from Bob's Beats]
Saturday would have been Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday (thanks to Carl for blogging about this already). Woody Guthrie is one of my favourite singers, and surely one of the greatest ever songwriters as well as a great American radical. As a wordsmith, he is up there with Bob Dylan (whose whole oeuvre is un-imaginable without Guthrie’s influence), with John Steinbeck or Kenneth Patchen.
My mother brought me up on Woody, and I believe her parents brought her up on him. I’ve passed him on to my sons, who sing songs like “Pretty Boy Floyd” and the Car Song.
A number of blogs have featured nice tributes to him: my comrade Jim Denham at Shiraz Socialist, Ernie at 27 Leggies, and Boyhowdy at Cover Lay Down. That last one is covers, of which Jeffrey Foucault’s “Philadelphia Lawyer“, John McCutcheon’ “1913 Massacre“, Pierce Pettis’ ”Pastures Of Plenty“ and Slaid Cleaves‘ ”This Morning I Am Born Again” are particularly good. Beck is not up there with them, but is surprisingly good.
I’ve written a fair amount on Woody before, at BobFromBrockley and Poumista. Here’s some links: “Folk music”, folk music, trad jazz, and the trad left; This Land Is Our Land; Good and bad versions of Deportees; Our Humanly Race; Stalinist songs of the Spanish Civil War (scroll down); Jesus Christ; We Shall Be Free; Vigilante Man; Hobo’s Lullaby.
Like Jim, I have reservations about a hagiographic approach to Woody Guthrie, who was at the very least a close fellow traveller of the Communist Party at a time when the Stalinist regime was committing some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. (Jim recommends Scott Borchert’s very interesting “Woody Guthrie: Redder than Remembered” from Monthly Review.) But that does not diminish him as an artist in my eyes.
I’ve had a hard time choosing which song to accompany with post with, but I think “Jesus Christ”, which Carl’s post featured, is the right one:
On this day in history
Image via Wikipedia
June 16, 1836 – The London Working Men’s Association was formed, launching the Chartist movement.The Chartists took their name from the People’s Charter, which demanded universal suffrage for men, regardless of social class. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1848 – The Berlin arsenal was captured by rebellious citizens. The “German Revolutions” of 1848 swept across 50 European states, mostly affiliated with the German Confederation and Austria. While the middle classes were fighting for a unified German state and increased civil liberties, the working class had more revolutionary aspirations. Participants in the revolution included communist and anarchist revolutionaries like Marx, Engels and Mikhail Bakunin, as well as the composer Wagner. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1869 – In the small mining town of Ricamarie, France, troops were called in to suppress a workers’ strike, opening fire on demonstrators protesting the arrest of 40 workers, killing 14 (including a 17-month-old girl in her mother’s arms) and wounding 60 others (including 10 children). (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1918 –Eugene Debs delivered his famous Canton, Ohio anti-war Speech. America was at war with Germany, at the time, and radicals were being routinely rounded up and jailed, often illegally, when Debs gave this speech. The new Espionage Act was being used to prosecute people for their opposition to the war and Deb’s speech was used to make the case that he had violated the Act. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1920 – The U.S. Marines began fighting in Haiti to defend U.S. “interests” there. (From the Daily Bleed)
June 16, 1933 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which recognized the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively through unions. The legislation was later found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it helped inspire a wave of union organizing and pave the way for the National Labor Relations Act, which was passed in 1935. (From Workday Minnesota)
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| International Brigadiers at the Battle of Belchite |
June 16, 1937 – The Trotskyist POUM, a significant constituent of the Spanish Republican forces (and the group with which George Orwell fought) was outlawed and its militants persecuted by the counter-revolutionary Stalinists and the Republic’s police, thus making the Republic and the Stalinists more vulnerable to the fascists. (From the Daily Bleed). For a good fictionalization of the Spanish war against the fascists, and the POUM’s and anarchist’s betrayal by the Stalinists, see Ken Loach’s Tierra y Libertad.
June 16, 1953 – Jack Hall of the ILWU and six others (the “Hawai‘i Seven”) were convicted under the Smith Act for being communists. (From the Daily Bleed)
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This day in 1903: George Orwell born
“I was born in 1903 at Motihari, Bengal, the second child of an Anglo-Indian family. I was educated at Eton, 1917-21, as I had been lucky enough to win a scholarship, but I did no work there and learned very little, and I don’t feel that Eton has been much of a formative influence in my life…”
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75 years ago today: Orwell flees Spain
The square in Barcelona re-named in honour of George Orwell
On the morning of June 23rd 1937, George Orwell boarded a train at Barcelona station with his wife, Eileen, and two companions, John McNair and Stafford Cottman. The train was bound for the French border and Orwell (or Eric Blair – he had yet to adopt his now famous nom de plume) was posing as a wealthy English businessman travelling with his wife and associates. In reality, they were fugitives, hunted not only by the fascist forces they’d come to Spain to fight, but also by the communists. McNair was leader of a contingent of fighters organised by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) who had left England to try and stem the rising fascist tide. This small group of revolutionaries and idealists – one among many such groups from all over the world –included Orwell. Prior to boarding the train that morning he had spent much of the previous six months in the trenches until a sniper’s bullet pierced his throat. By the time he’d sufficiently recovered to leave hospital, the internal divisions within the anti-fascist forces had shattered whatever slim chances they’d had of defeating Franco and his allies. [READ THE REST, from Jim Bliss]
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75 years ago today: the May Days
Thanks to Liz for a link to the wonderful Warwick Spanish Civil War archive, Trabajadores. It includes a timeline. Here’s where we are now, roughly:
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3-8 May |
‘Events of May’ in Barcelona: Divisions between different Republican groups (Communists, socialists and anarchists) result in street fighting. Those killed include the trade union leader and socialist politician Antonio Sesé
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And loads of great material from entdinglichung:
* George Orwell: Mein Katalonien (Nemesis)
* Manifesto & Policy of the POUM during the Barcelona May Days (La Bataille Socialiste)
* Augustin Souchy: The Tragic Week in May (The Struggle Site)
* Grandizo Munis: The Spanish Left in its Own Words (Marxists Internet Archive)
* Hugo Oehler: Barricades in Barcelona (Revolutionary History)
* Waldemar Bolze: Where are the Real Saboteurs? (Revolutionary History)
* Andreu Nin: The May Days in Barcelona (Marxists Internet Archive)
* Katia Landau: Stalinism in Spain (Marxists Internet Archive)
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75 years ago: bloody end of May days, Barcelona
Image via Wikipedia
- May 7
- The fighting in Barcelona concludes, with more than 500 dead and over 1500 wounded. Many are still under illegal arrest in several Communist-controlled police stations, militia barracks and secret prisons.
- May 8
- In Barcelona, police find the horribly mutilated bodies of 12 murdered young men. Eight of the bodies are so mutilated that they cannot be identified. The four identified bodies belong to young anarchists, illegally arrested together with eight friends on May 4 outside the Communist militia barracks in Barcelona, when they were passing by on a truck with “CNT” written on it. The names of the identified young men are: Cesar Fernández Neri, Jose Villena, Juan Antonio, and Luis Carneras. Police also found the dead bodies of the Italian anarchist professor Camillo Berneri and two of his friends, who were arrested during the May incidents by Communist militias. (As squads of Communist Party of Spain members (apparently under orders from Joseph Stalin) took to the streets in order to hunt down leading anarchists, Berneri had been dragged from his home and murdered. His body, riddled with bullets, was found during the night, near the headquarters of the Generalitat de Catalunya.)
Also read:
- Barricades in Barcelona by Hugo Oehler
- The Tragic Week in May by Augustin Souchy
- Manifesto of the poum during the Barcelona may-days
75 years ago: May days, Barcelona
Image via Wikipedia
May 5
Luis Companys obtains a fragile truce between the different fighting groups, on the basis of which Rodriguez Salas, now blamed for the police action against the telephone central, has to resign. Communist commandos are still arresting people. Wikipedia
May 6
“Neutral” police troops from Valencia arrive in Barcelona to stop the fighting. The 5,000 Assault Guards (chosen more or less carefully for their political opinions, to ensure a “neutral” force and the trust of both sides) occupy several strategic points throughout the city. The workers abandon the barricades and the telephone central is handed over to the government. When the Assault Guards enter the city and passed by the central building of the anarchist CNT, several hundreds of them salute the black and red Anarchist flag on the building. Nevertheless, reprisals against the anti-Stalinist left are starting throughout the Republic.
Today in 1939: Spanish refugees
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01 Feb 1939
1st February 1939: Two members of a rescue party assist an elderly woman fleeing the Spanish Civil War. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
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01 Jan 1939
circa 1939: Wounded Loyalist at the special commissary’s office at Le Perthus, Spain. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)
By: Three Lions
Collection: Hulton Archive
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01 Jan 1939
FRANCE – CIRCA 1939: War of Spain. Exodus. France, February 1939. RV-221838. (Photo by Gaston Paris/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)
By: Gaston Paris
Collection: Roger Viollet
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Today in 1939: Returning from Spain
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01 Jan 1939
Irish volunteers injured during the Spanish Civil War arrive back in Dublin. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
By: Keystone
Collection: Hulton Archive
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A hundred years ago today: Madero presidente
Today in 1911, Francisco Madero took over the presidency of Mexico, marking the victory of the democratic forces over the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, but also the defeat of the proletarian/peasant revolution by the capitalist class.
Listen: La Revolución Mexicana
Today in 1943
From IISG: Antecedents of Ester Borras
Membership card FEDIP, 1945Arch José Ester Borrás 5
As an anarchist, José Ester Borras (1913-1980) fled from Spain to France. There he was active in the underground during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo on 30 October 1943, he was deported to Mauthausen. He survived and established the Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (FEDIP) in Toulouse shortly after liberation. The FEDIP offered relief to Spaniards like Ester Borras, who were politicial refugees and had been interned in concentration camps. Borras was one of the first members of his own organization. The IISH has the archives of both Ester Borras and the FEDIP.
See also:
He’d turned 40 just days previously. Here’s his Daily Bleed page:
[October 26:] 1913 — José Ester Borrás (1913-1980) lives, Berga (province of Barcelona). Spanish anarchist, active in the resistance in France & in the Mauthausen concentration camp, & co-founder of the founder of the Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (Spanish Federation of Former Political prisoners & camp inmates [FEDIP]).
Ester fought in the famed Colonna Tierra y Libertad during the Spanish Revolution of 1936. He was arrested by the communists, fled to France, arrested & tortured by the Gestapo…
[Details / context]
A letter from Orwell, this day in 1948
And finally, I enjoyed this 1948 letter from George Orwell, which is mainly about 1984. But the last paragraph on Sartre is a gem!
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