Revolutionary Ghosts of Waldheim Cemetery

From Andrea Gibbons, on a Chicago cemetary, a year ago. Some extracts:

Haymarket…back from the time we didn’t have at least the stated standard of an 8 hour day. To win it there was a general strike on May 1st, 1884. On May 3rd, police killed two strikers. On May 4th there was a rally in Haymarket square, a bomb went off, people died. I think it was probably the Pinkertons, but the police arrested 8 anarchists for simply inciting the act and hanged 4 of them. It didn’t help when they were later cleared of all blame…the damage was done, the press had crucified all ideals of justice and so we live in a country that inspired May Day and yet has never celebrated it properly…

Lingg was one of the defendants, but not one of those hanged. He blew himself up in his cell.

If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement, 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.
August Spies

…if I am to die on account of being an Anarchist, on account of my love for liberty, fraternity and equality, then I will not remonstrate. If death is the penalty for our love of the freedom of the human race, the I say openly I have forfeited my life…
Adolph Fischer

I am an Anarchist. Now strike! But hear me before you strike. What is Socialism, or Anarchism? Briefly stated, it is the right of the toiler to the free and equal use of the tools of production, and the right of the producers to their product.
Albert Parsons

…as long as workingmen are economically enslaved they cannot be politically free
George Engel

And around this monument are gathered the graves of so many bright lights of the movement. Lucy Parsons, Black, Mexican, Native American…in a time and place where none of those was worthy of respect, she fought tirelessly her entire life for a better world.

Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs, but I am still a rebel.

The disinherited must work out their own salvation in their own way

Chicago Police Department description of Lucy Parsons: “More dangerous than a thousand rioters…”

And Emma Goldman, it was her birthday on Saturday!

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.

Voltairine de Cleyre, another anarchist and feminist

I never expect men to give us liberty. No, women, we are not worthy until we take it.

Josef Dietzgen, one of the inspirations for Marx, he developed his own theory of dialectical materialism independently, and fought in the 1848 uprising…

The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so “mixed” together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them- for it is dialectic. […]

Raya Dunayevskaya, founder (is that the word?) of Marxist Humanism. a theorist and the secretary of Trotsky while he was in Mexico…she broke with him though, and formed the Johnson-Forest tendency with CLR James

He who glorifies theory and genius but fails to recognize the limits of a theoretical work, fails likewise to recognize the indispensability of the theoretician. All of history is the history of the struggle for freedom. If, as a theoretician, one’s ears are attuned to the new impulse from the workers, new “categories” will be created, a new way of thinking, a new step forward in philosophic cognition. […]

And so many more. Being a small piece of this movement, this struggle for a better world, is no small thing. Amazing people have come before me and so many more will come after…