Motown: Lessons from 50 years of struggle

by Chris Mahin

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman ,University of Georgia Press, September 2025, 216 pp; pbk: rrp £31.95, hbk rrp £124.95

This is a moving account of one of the most important organisations in the United States during the late 1960s written by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman. Scott was a leader of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) who helped organise a walk-out to protest unsafe conditions at Chrysler Corporation’s Detroit Forge plant. That wildcat strike at a strategic factory shut down Chrysler production throughout the entire world for one week. Walda Katz-Fishman is a revolutionary and scholar who received her Ph.D. in sociology from Wayne State University in Detroit. Since the late 1970s she has worked closely with veterans of the LRBW and she helped coordinate the League’s oral history project.  
Motown is  the product of 50 years of struggle and almost a decade of preparation. In December 2015, veterans of the LRBW began planning a history of the organisation. The need for such a history became increasingly urgent as some of the LRBW’s most important leaders began to die. In 2016 and 2017, the authors took part in videotaped interviews with more than 40 people.  Motown includes extensive excerpts from those interviews.
The result is both an extraordinary collective memoir and a detailed history of Detroit. This book recounts how the leaders of the Black workers’ insurgency in Detroit in the 1960s found their way to Marxism and how they used it as a guide to understand the profound changes which have swept the world since.  
In the interviews, former members of the LRBW recount the horrific conditions in the auto plants, the challenges the League faced, and the long struggle to build other revolutionary organisations after the LRBW split in 1971. To their credit, the people interviewed do not simply reminisce – they reflect deeply on what the hard-fought battles of the 1960s mean for today. They are frank and self-critical about mistakes that were made – particularly about the way women were treated in the LRBW. They are brutally realistic about how different the economic and political conditions are today,
the Motor City
Part One includes a detailed historical materialist analysis of the auto industry and Detroit. 
From the first quarter of the 20th century until the 1970s, Detroit was the leading producer of motor-cars in the entire world. The city earned its nickname – “The Motor City” – or simply “Motown”. Detroit’s diverse proletariat included Black workers whose families had fled the Jim Crow South; white workers who had travelled up the “Hillbilly Highway” from the Appalachian Mountains; workers from Mexico; Arab workers from Palestine, Yemen and other parts of the Middle East; and workers from many other parts of the world. 
In the 20th century, Black auto workers were concentrated in the most dangerous and difficult jobs, enduring racist mistreatment and unsafe conditions.  The car workers’ trade union in the United States – the United Auto Workers – was run by a clique of right-wing social-democrats who had conducted witch-hunts against communist trade unionists during the 1950s.  
In July 1967, police brutality against Black workers sparked the massive Detroit Rebellion. In 1968 Black workers walked out of Dodge Main – a factory of 10,000 workers. They created the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). Soon, Black workers at other factories were forming Revolutionary Union Movement (RUM) groupings. Eventually, these formations combined into one umbrella organisation – the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. 
In mid-1971, the LRBW went into crisis. Some of its top leaders wanted to expand into other cities. Many LRBW members in the factories questioned that approach. They wanted to deepen the LRBW’s involvement in the day-to-day struggle in Detroit. 
On 12th June 1971, the LRBW split in two. After some of the most prominent leaders left, the members who remained – workers based in the factories -- discussed what to do next. Resolved to continue the struggle, they knew they needed to step back and assess – and study. In the LRBW, the top leaders had read some Marxism, but there had never been a full-fledged education programme for the entire membership. Determined to change that situation, the LRBW cadre who remained after the split reached out to revolutionaries in California. They ultimately established contact with veteran Marxist-Leninists who had taken part in the fight against revisionism within the Communist Party USA during the 1950s and were now part of the Communist League. 
What followed was a year of intense discussion and study. At first, some of those from the LRBW were wary of joining a multi-ethnic organisation. Detailed discussions of Lenin and Stalin’s writings on the national colonial question were extremely helpful. The revolutionaries from the LRBW ultimately joined the Communist League. That decision helped set the stage for a Congress of Marxist-Leninists which founded the Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America in 1974. Later, former LRBW leaders were also instrumental in creating the League of Revolutionaries for a New America in the 1990s.

Today...

...Detroit is no longer the epicentre of world auto production. Globalisation and automation have changed that. Today, former LRBW members are involved in the fight against homelessness and poverty and against the growth of fascism in the United States. 
Part Four of the book looks to the future. One key lesson is the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. Every person interviewed for this book spoke with great feeling and gratitude about the education they received in the LRBW and the organisations that succeeded it – Marxist political education. All stated emphatically that they would never have been able to continue as life-long revolutionaries without that education. 
Ultimately Motown is about how revolutionaries adapt without betraying their principles. It’s the story of how young people were forged into revolutionaries while working in the crucible of a very dangerous industry. At a moment of crisis, those revolutionaries had to step back to study and assess – in order to return to the practical movement and fight with greater clarity in a changed environment. 
Since its publication in September 2025 Motown has attracted considerable attention from young revolutionaries in the United States. Hopefully, the hard-won lessons in this collective memoir will help that new generation as it steps forward to continue the fight for a new world.

Motown is available on the Liverpool University Press website at https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/

USA: Brave voices speak out for peace

 

Solidarity action in Chicago

by Chris Mahin

“It feels like the new McCarthyism”. That’s how Genevieve Lakier described the mood in the United States since the Gaza crisis began in early October. Genevieve is a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose work focuses on freedom of speech. In an interview with Politico in early November, she compared attacks on those who oppose Israel’s brutal attacks in Gaza to the anti-communist Red Scare campaign spearheaded by US Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s.
Dima Khalidi, the director of Palestine Legal, an organisation that seeks to preserve the civil rights of supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States, told The Intercept: “We are seeing people being fired from their jobs, being investigated by HR over their social media posts or conversations with colleagues, and having job offers rescinded.”
The attacks on freedom of speech started almost as soon as the crisis erupted on 7th October. Some examples:

On 7th October at Harvard University, 34 student groups co-signed a statement calling on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.” Within days, personal information about the signers was being posted online and their family members were being threatened. Numerous CEOs from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Newman called for the list of signers to be made public so that companies could blacklist them. A truck with a digital billboard – paid for by a right-wing group – circled Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts, flashing the names and photos of the student signers under the headline “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites”.

On 10th October New York University Law School student body president Ryna Workman sent an intra-community message to classmates expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians”. As a result, Workman was ousted as student body president, had a job offer from a prestigious law firm withdrawn, and received many death threats online.

On 19th October the prestigious arts magazine Artforum published an open letter on its website calling for a ceasefire and suggesting that Israel is responsible for a genocide. The letter condemned all violence against civilians. It criticised the silence of cultural institutions about the Israeli bombing of residents in Gaza. The statement was signed by thousands of artists, academics, and cultural workers, including the magazine’s top editor, David Velasco. On October 26, Velasco was fired by his publisher Penske Media. Velasco had been at Artforum or 18 years. After Velasco was fired, multiple top editors at Artforum quit, and some contributors announced that they would boycott the magazine.

On 20th October Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to appear at the 92NY in New York, a prominent cultural hub, to promote his new memoire A Man of Two Faces. Earlier in the week, Nguyen had joined more than 700 other writers in signing an open letter published in the London Review of Books calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A few hours before the event was supposed to take place, a spokesperson for the ‘Y’ said that the event had been “postponed”.

On 23rd October Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that he was being replaced as the editor- in-chief of eLife, a prominent open-access science journal, for retweeting a satirical article from The Onion critical of Israel. 

 On 24th October Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s colleges to shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Florida was the first state to outlaw the group on its campuses.
On 25th October the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote to the presidents of almost 200 colleges and universities urgently requesting them to investigate the chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine on their campuses. The ADL claimed that these students should be investigated for “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”

On 27th October the US Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning what it called “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” across the country.

On 7th November, perhaps the most high-level attempt to silence dissent about Gaza took place. That evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 234-188 to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian-American in the US Congress. (The tally included 22 Democrats voting in favour of the censure.) The censure resolution viciously distorted comments that Tlaib had made about the Gaza crisis.

In addition to the cases which have garnered widespread publicity, there have also been many others involving less prominent people. Just weeks after the crisis began, the Palestine Legal organization had received more than 200 reports of retribution against people speaking out on the Gaza crisis. A concerted effort is underway to use the Gaza crisis to further limit what people are allowed to say at work or on their workplace social media and to punish those who challenge the status quo. This is extremely dangerous and is setting a terrible precedent which will curtail discussion and debate on many issues other than American policy in the Middle East.
However, at the same time that censorship is growing, so is the resistance to it. The crisis has spurred many people of good will to speak up and loudly defend freedom of speech for those advocating a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israeli apartheid. In many of the cases where speaking engagements were cancelled or editors fired, tremendous outrage and protest has followed. More of this is needed. We cannot allow a new McCarthyism to take root in this country!

“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” – 75 years later

Woody Guthrie

by Chris Mahin

A song of solidarity with immigrants still rings true years after the tragedy

The fire began over Los Gatos Canyon. It started in the left engine-driven fuel pump. The plane crashed 20 miles west of Coalinga, California, on 28th January 1948. It came down into hills which, as one commentator noted, at that time of year are “a beautiful green, splendid with wildflowers … a place of breathtaking beauty.”
    Newspaper articles at the time described an accident involving a Douglas DC-3 carrying immigrant workers from Oakland, California to the El Centro, California Deportation Center. Those accounts gave the name of the plane’s pilot (Frank Atkinson), and co-pilot (Marion Ewing). They mentioned the name of the flight attendant (Bobbi Atkinson) and the guard (Frank E. Chapin). However, the newspaper stories that reported the crash did not include the names of any of the 27 men or of the one woman who were passengers on that flight, victims who were buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California. Those reports simply dismissed them as “deportees.”
    One visitor to the crash site described the scene this way: “I was born and raised in Coalinga and can remember going to the crash site the day after the incident. My father, older sister, and I viewed the crash and even though I was about six years old at the time, I can remember it as if it happened yesterday. It was a cold and damp day and even though the reports were that the site had been cleaned up, this was not the case. The sadness of seeing the meager possessions of the passengers and the total lack of respect by those who had the task of removing the bodies will be something I will never forget or forgive.”
    Three thousand miles away, a man who had himself once been forced to leave his family to look for work took notice. Musician Woody Guthrie left his birthplace in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and then did plenty of “hard traveling” before ultimately ending up in New York. He was outraged by the callous indifference of the news stories which couldn’t be bothered to mention the names of the workers who died in the crash. Out of his anger came a song – Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee), a ballad in which he assigned symbolic names to the dead:


Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees” …

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves …

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?

The song, as Woody Guthrie wrote it, was without music; Guthrie chanted the words. “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)” was not performed publicly until 10 years after the plane crash, when a school teacher named Martin Hoffman added a haunting melody and Woody’s friend Pete Seeger began performing the song in concerts. The song’s eloquent plea for justice for immigrant workers has stirred the conscience of fair-minded people ever since.
    Often referred to simply as Deportee, the song’s continuing broad appeal can be seen in the fact that it has been recorded by wide variety of artists (and artists on both sides of the Atlantic.) Among the musicians who have covered the song have been Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Bruce Springsteen, as well as Christy Moore and Billy Bragg. The list also includes the Kingston Trio; Cisco Houston; Judy Collins; The Byrds; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Sweet Honey in the Rock; Hoyt Axton; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Roy Brown Ramirez, Tito Auger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Paddy Reilly among others.
    The lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s song about the disaster sound as if they were written just days ago, not more than seven decades in the past. (This is especially true of the verse “They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”)
    The great labour leader Mother Jones once said that we should mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living. We should pay special heed to the appeal for the unity of all workers which rings out so beautifully from Woody Guthrie’s song. Today, we can honor the dead of 28 January 1948 best by speaking up in defense of the living immigrant workers of today – regardless of documentation status -- and by demanding that the exploiters cease their cowardly attempts to use the immigration issue as a wedge to divide workers.

World mourns loss of renowned “Red poet”

by Chris Mahin

The world has lost a great poet – and a militant communist. Jack Hirschman died suddenly on 22nd August at his home in the North Beach district of San Francisco. He was 87 years old. He died in his sleep, shortly before he was scheduled to take part in a Zoom meeting of the World Poetry Movement (WPA), a group of which he had recently been appointed coordinator.
    As the sad news spread, expressions of sympathy poured in from around the world – from other poets, former students, and fellow revolutionaries and political activists. In a statement issued to the Turkish news media, the World Poetry Movement called Hirschman’s death “a great loss to American and world poetry.” The organisation’s statement pledged that “WPA and the poets of the world, who share his humanist and revolutionary ideals, will keep the memory of this great poet alive; will continue to work … for a freer, more just and egalitarian world.”
    Jack Hirschman was a brilliant poet, scholar, and translator -- and a proud communist. (The documentary film made about him in 2010 is fittingly entitled Red Poet). In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he stated: “The most important thing as a poet is that I worked for the communist movement for 45 years, and the new class of impoverished and homeless people.”
    In addition to publishing more than 100 volumes of his own poetry, Hirschman translated over two dozen books from languages including Russian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Albanian, Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Creole. He was deeply committed to ensuring that the works of revolutionaries like Pablo Neruda of Chile, Nazim Hikmet of Turkey, and Rene Depestre of Haiti were available in English in the United States.
    Hirschman was named poet laureate of San Francisco in 2006 by then-mayor Gavin Newsom, a post that allowed Hirschman to create the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. Three years later, he became the poet in residence at the San Francisco public library.
    Jack Hirschman was born on 13th December in New York City in 1933 into a Russian Jewish family and grew up in the Bronx. While still a teenager attending the City College of New York, he worked as a sub-editor for the Associated Press. Later he taught at Dartmouth in New England and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Hirschman was fired from UCLA in the 1970s for encouraging his students to resist the draft during the Vietnam War.
    In 1973, he moved to San Francisco where he became part of the city’s vibrant literary scene, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the writers from the Beat generation grouped around City Lights bookstore in North Beach.
    For decades, Jack Hirschman was a constant presence in San Francisco’s streets and cafes, attending innumerable poetry readings and political rallies, distributing copies of his poetry and the People’s Tribune newspaper. Hirschman served as the assistant editor for the literary journal Left Curve, formed the Union of Left Writers in San Francisco and was a founder of the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
    I first met Jack in the early 1980s. He was always warm, funny, and totally unpretentious. He went out of his way to encourage anyone who wanted to write – provided they were going to stand on the side of the oppressed. Whenever I sent him an issue of the New Worker containing an article on US history that I had written, the man who wrote more than 100 volumes of poetry somehow always found the time to write back. His response would invariably contain kind words of praise for my article and for the New Worker – often with a few exclamations in Italian or Russian thrown in for emphasis.
    Above all else, Jack Hirschman had a warrior’s spirit, a fierce determination to oppose injustice anywhere in the world. As he himself once wrote: “Poetry is really a weapon. It’s a spiritual weapon for the transformation of the world. And, of course, all my poems are love poems. The nicest thing in the world is to propagandize for love.” Rest well, Comrade Jack. Others will take up your weapon.

1837: The Murder of Elijah Lovejoy

by Chris Mahin

His killing by racists shocked the conscience of America – and led to a nationwide outpouring of indignation, just as the murder of George Floyd did many years later. His murder constituted a brutal attack on freedom of the press – long before a president denounced “fake news” and cheered on physical assaults against journalists. This year, as the United States grapples with its long history of racial oppression and the ongoing efforts to muzzle the media, it’s important to honour the memory of 19th century anti-slavery journalist Elijah Lovejoy, killed 183 years ago.
    At about three o’clock in the morning on November 7th  1837, the steamboat Missouri Fulton unloaded a printing press it was delivering to the Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois. The printing press was brought into a warehouse owned by a businessman sympathetic to the fight against slavery. That printing press was supposed to produce the Alton Observer, an anti-slavery newspaper edited by Elijah Lovejoy, a 34-year-old Presbyterian minister. Soon, a drunken mob of 200 people began throwing stones. When attempts were made to set the warehouse’s roof on fire, Lovejoy emerged from inside the building in an effort to stop the burning. Five shots rang out, killing him.
    The mob broke apart the printing press and threw the pieces into the Mississippi river. It was not the first time that one of Lovejoy’s presses had been destroyed. Lovejoy began his journalistic career in St Louis in the mid-1830s. There, his printing press had been demolished and his home burglarised because of his anti-slavery editorials. In May 1836, Lovejoy was forced to flee St Louis. He moved his family across the Mississippi river to the town of Alton in the free state of Illinois. There, he continued to editorialise against slavery. Pro-slavery mobs in Alton destroyed his presses several times. Each time, Lovejoy obtained a new printing press and continued to speak out against slavery.
    The death of Lovejoy set off a chain of events which transformed America. Public meetings of protest were held throughout the North and Midwest. Former President John Quincy Adams described Lovejoy as America’s first martyr to freedom of the press and the freedom of the slave. Abraham Lincoln denounced the killing. The great orator Wendell Phillips launched his life-long campaign against slavery and injustice with a heartfelt speech in Boston’s Faneuil Hall condemning Lovejoy’s murder. At a meeting in Ohio, John Brown stood up, raised his hand – as if swearing an oath – and pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to the fight against slavery.
    The horrific murder of Lovejoy helped people understand that slavery was wrong and that it not only destroyed the freedom of the enslaved, but also endangered the freedom of the people of the North and West as well.
     Like the young activists protesting in the streets today, the abolitionists of the 19th century felt an obligation to speak out against the most horrific wrongs of their generation. In Lovejoy’s time, the 10,000 families that controlled the largest Southern plantations (and owned most of the slaves in the United States) completely dominated the political life of the country. That handful of people, a tiny percentage of the 30 million human beings then residing in the United States, were prepared to do anything necessary to maintain their political control. (They certainly showed that by killing Lovejoy.) Today, one per cent of the population of the United States controls the vast majority of the wealth and dominates the political life of the country.
    Elijah Lovejoy was forced to flee the city of St Louis in May 1836. The Dred Scott case which ended with a vicious, racist US Supreme Court decision denying the humanity of African Americans was first filed in St Louis in April 1846. In November 2020, Cori Bush, an African American nurse active in the fight against police brutality, was elected to the US House of Representatives — representing St Louis. The spirit of Elijah Lovejoy and Dred Scott lives on in all those who continue the struggle for justice today and who persevere in the fight to end the domination of this country by the wealthy one per cent.

Remember Antietam!

Lincoln with his generals after the battle

by Chris Mahin

It was the bloodiest single day of fighting ever to take place in North America. On that day, more than 2,000 men gave their lives to halt a slaveholders’ army. Within days of their sacrifice, the first step was taken to abolish slavery in the United States. The Civil War’s Battle of Antietam deserves to be commemorated by all those fighting to transform society today.
    In a sense, the process of abolishing unjust property relations in this country began on 17th September 1862, on a battlefield near Antietam Creek in western Maryland. Twelve hours of hard fighting by brave soldiers that day gave the Union Army a victory of sorts. That gave Abraham Lincoln the political protection he needed to begin steps that would transform the Civil War from a defensive war to save the Union into a revolutionary war to abolish slavery.
    Five days after Antietam, Lincoln convened his Cabinet and announced that, if the Confederate states were still in rebellion on 1st January 1863, he would free all their slaves. Lincoln was true to his word and, on New Year’s Day in 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This executive order freed only the slaves in those states or parts of states that were in rebellion. It did not abolish slavery throughout the United States. However, it transformed the nature of the war, and unleashed a process that led inexorably to the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which did abolish slavery throughout the United States.
    By the time of the Civil War, slavery in the United States was dominated by wealthy capitalists, most of whom owned thousands of slaves. This tiny elite represented about one percent of the population of the United States. They sold their cotton and other commodities on the world market and were an important part of the world capitalist system. Since the average price of a slave was $1,000 and there were four million slaves in the United States, emancipation removed $4 billion in value from the hands of capitalists.
    At its time, the abolition of slavery in the United States was the greatest blow to a form of capitalist private property which had ever taken place in history. (That remained true until the Soviet Revolution of 1917)
    So, in a sense, the process of abolishing unjust property relations in this country began on the Antietam battlefield. The stage for the battle was set in early September 1862. Emboldened by several recent victories, General Robert E Lee moved the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland, a slave state that had remained in the Union. A major Confederate victory inside Union territory would strengthen pro-Confederate sentiment in the North right before the autumn 1862 Congressional elections. It might also convince some European powers to intervene in the war on the side of the Confederacy.
    Lee believed that the commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac – General George B McClellan – was cautious to the point of cowardice. Lee also thought that McClellan’s army would be demoralised from recent defeats. As historian Stephen W Sears has pointed out, these assessments were “only half right”.
    McClellan was a supporter of slavery who constantly made excuses for why he would not fight the Confederate Army. At the Battle of Antietam, McClellan’s conduct fully justified Lee’s contempt for him. McClellan had learned Lee’s plans and had more troops at his disposal than Lee did. Still, he refused to move decisively against Lee, and allowed Lee’s army to escape after the battle.
    But if McClellan violated all the principles of warfare at Antietam, the same cannot be said for his soldiers. Forced to attack in “driblets” (as one Union general put it), the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac fought bravely.
    The courage of the Union troops was vividly demonstrated in the struggle to take “The Sunken Road” – a small depression at the edge of a farm. After several attacks against this strategic position failed, the task of capturing it fell to one of the Union Army’s most celebrated units – the Irish Brigade. This unit was known for marching into combat behind emerald green battle flags bearing gold shamrocks and harps. Shouting its battle cry (“Clear the way!”) in Irish, the Irish Brigade advanced across an open field. Intense enemy cannon and rifle fire “cut lanes” into its ranks. Within minutes, hundreds of its soldiers were killed or wounded. Ever since, the Sunken Road has been known as the “Bloody Lane.”
    In all, 2,108 Union soldiers were killed at Antietam; 9,549 were wounded; and 753 ended up missing. The carnage that day was so terrible that – as one Union soldier put it – “the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.” This sacrifice saved the day for the Union; Lee was forced to retreat back into Virginia.
    There are moments in history when the future of humanity rests on what a relatively few people are willing to endure. September 17th 1862, was such a moment. The bravery of the Union soldiers that day did not end the Civil War. Lee’s army would invade Union territory again, and the war would drag on for two more long years.
    The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, the fruit of Antietam, did not guarantee equality for African Americans or a just society. Eventually, the post-Civil War Reconstruction governments would be overthrown and the South plunged into a reign of terror which rivalled slavery. But acknowledging those grim facts should not blind us to the reality that, in a sense, the fight for a new America began at Antietam. The Union victory there transformed the Civil War into a revolutionary war to abolish one specific form of capitalist private property: chattel slavery.
    The finest tribute we can pay to those who died at Antietam is to finish their work. At Antietam, every soldier knew he risked his life if he drew enemy fire upon himself by picking up a flag dropped by a slain flag bearer. But battle flags in motion were absolutely necessary to signal the motion of troops, and so, time after time, a Union soldier picked up the fallen standard and raised it high again. In the Irish Brigade’s attempt to take the “Bloody Lane,” 16 of its flag-bearers were shot dead, one after another.
    Today, “picking up the flag” means fighting to end the rule of all capitalists, just as those who served in the Union Army helped end the rule of one kind of capitalist, the slave-owning capitalist. When we fight that good fight, we pay our best homage to those who bled for freedom’s cause years ago beside a winding creek, on a day when the very landscape itself seemed to turn red.

The Green Corn Rebellion of August 1917

 by Chris Mahin

 

Some would have us believe that the South, the West, and the rural areas of the United States have always been conservative. The month of August contains the anniversary of an event which disproves that claim.

 On 2^nd August 1917, the Green Corn Rebellion began in Oklahoma. This little-known chapter of US history was an armed rebellion led by impoverished tenant farmers and former railroad workers.

            The rebellion took place just weeks after the federal government began military conscription. (The United States entered the First World War on 6^th April 1917) While the Green Corn Rebellion included African-Americans and Native Americans, the overwhelming majority of the insurgents were white Southern rural people.

Times were hard in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. After the Civil War ended the “robber barons” made huge fortunes. The expansion of the railroads drove many small farmers into poverty.  Farming in Oklahoma was commercial; tenant farmers were wage labourers. Cotton production doubled between 1909 and 1919, making Oklahoma the fourth-largest cotton producer among the states of the United States. 

            Over 60 per cent of mortgaged farms were lost to foreclosure during the two years before the Green Corn Rebellion. More than half the farms were worked by tenants. The rates were even higher in the south-eastern Oklahoma counties where the rebellion took place.

            Conditions were harsh. Even a grade-school education was rare. People were very poor and always in debt.

            Far from being conservatives, the tenant farmers and rural workers of Oklahoma of that time were often very radical. Between 1906 and 1917, the ‘Wobblies’ – the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the Socialist Party recruited many people. In 1914, the Socialist Party had more dues-paying members in Oklahoma than in any other state. (It had 57,000 members in Oklahoma who were organised in 1,500 locals) That year, Oklahoma elected over 100 Socialists to office. In 1914, the Socialist Party candidate for governor won 21 per cent of the vote.

            The Green Corn Rebellion was organised by the Working Class Union (WCU). The group’s constitution said that all members of the working class over the age of 18, “regardless of race, sex, colour, or occupation” could join, and that “any means necessary” would be used to better the conditions of the working people. The group’s first demand was for the “total abolition of the crime, disease, and death-producing practice of rent, interest, and profit-taking.”

            Even after two of its leaders – “Rube” Munson and Homer Spence – had been indicted for obstructing the draft, the Working Class Union continued to organise in eastern Oklahoma. By midsummer 1917, it had recruited a membership of between 18,000 to 35,000 people. On August 2, the Seminole County sheriff and some deputies set out to investigate alleged radical activities in an area known for its WCU sympathies. The lawmen were ambushed and forced to flee by five black men who were part of the WCU. That evening, the WCU called a secret meeting on a sandbar in the Canadian River.

            Munson and Spence – who were free on bail – urged resisters to arm themselves and prepare for a fight. Opposition to the war and the draft had been on the rise since the spring.

            On the morning of 3^rd August, resisters gathered on a bluff near a farm. (The owner had hoisted the red flag of rebellion above his barn a few days before.) During the night, raiding parties went out to cut telegraph and telephone wires and burn railroad bridges in the area. They also blew up some oil pipelines. Other rebels moved into the poor cotton country south of the Canadian River where they called for armed action against the draft.

            The main group of militants on Spears’ Bluff assembled more supporters from the surrounding tenant country. This support included a group of black sharecroppers who were members of the WCU and several Native Americans.

            At Spears’ Bluff, “Rube” Munson told the group that other uprisings were taking place and that a large army of Wobblies would march on Washington and put an end to the war and the draft. The Working Class Union should start its own march to Washington and link up with thousands of other farmers and workers.

            However, the rebels never started for Washington. After hearing about the insurgents’ activities, a posse of 70 men mobilised and headed for the rebels’ encampment. When the insurgents saw the armed posse moving toward them, they dispersed. “The papers said we were cowards, but we weren’t,” one rebel explained. “Some of the men in the posse were neighbours of ours and we couldn’t shoot ’em down in cold blood. That’s the way we felt ’bout the Germans too. … We didn’t have no quarrel with them at all.”

            For the next week, posses hunted down hundreds. They fought several bloody engagements with hold-outs but within days the authorities had crushed the rebellion. Of the 450 men arrested, 150 were convicted.

            The rebellion’s leaders were given stiff sentences. Some were not released until a presidential pardon in 1921. The supporters of the war and the enemies of labour blamed the Socialist Party for the rebellion. There were cross-burnings all over the state as the Ku Klux Klan grew.

            The attacks on civil liberties in Oklahoma coincided with a nationwide assault on free speech and the labour movement. These attacks destroyed the Socialist Party in Oklahoma and the Industrial Workers of the World throughout the country.

            The Green Corn Rebellion has much to teach us. In a time of great turmoil, when the wealth of the country was concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of robber barons, the poor of the South took a stand against economic injustice and a war they felt their country had no business being involved in.

            The wisdom of the Green Corn rebels can be seen in the words on one of their posters, found along the country roads in Marshall and Bryan counties: “Now is the time to rebel against the war with Germany, boys. Get together, boys, and don’t go. Rich man’s war. Poor man’s fight. If you don’t go, J P Morgan & Co is lost. Speculation is the only cause of war. Rebel now.”

 While the world is very different today than it was in 1917, one thing hasn’t changed: When the United States goes to war, it is still the rich who benefit, and the poor who do the fighting and dying.

US history: The Great Textile Strike of 1934

By Chris Mahin

In a Northern state, the governor declared martial law after striking workers armed with rocks, flower pots, and broken headstones from a nearby cemetery battled troops armed with machine guns. In a Southern state, the governor declared martial law and then ordered the National Guard to arrest all picketers in the state, holding them in a former First World War prisoner of war camp for trial by a military tribunal.

September marks the anniversary of the Great Textile Strike of 1934, the largest work stoppage in the history of the USA at the time it took place. Although this nationwide walk-out was defeated, it ultimately helped pave the way for some of the most important laws enacted during US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration.

The textile strike of 1934 stretched from New England to the Southeast. It involved more than 400,000 workers. Whilst it included workers in the worsted mills of Massachusetts and the silk mills of the Mid-Atlantic region, the strike’s centre of gravity was located in the cotton mills of the Southeast.

The textile industry had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933, Southern mills produced more than 70 per cent of the cotton and woollen textiles of the USA. These mills were more modern than those of the Northeast. The owners of these mills relied on the South’s large pool of dispossessed farmers willing to work for 40 per cent less than Northern workers.

The Great Strike of 1934 was the culmination of processes that had been at work for many years. The demand for cotton goods declined sharply after the First World War ended, leading to a crisis of overproduction. The owners attempted to resolve this crisis by squeezing as much work as they could out of each worker. This procedure was known as the ‘stretch-out system’. The ‘stretch-out’ involved speeding up production by increasing the number of looms assigned to each factory worker, limiting break times, paying workers by the piece and increasing the number of supervisors (who pushed the workers incessantly).

The ‘stretch-out’ system sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast. It led to more than 80 strikes in 1929 in South Carolina alone. Almost all of these strikes were spontaneous walk-outs, without any formal leadership. The year 1929 also saw the massive strikes that began in Gastonia, North Carolina and Elizabethton, Tennessee. Both were violently suppressed by local police officers and vigilantes.

The stock market crash of October 1929 ushered in the Great Depression. This had momentous consequences. The Depression bankrupted some manufacturers. Those who survived laid off many workers and increased the amount and pace of work for their remaining employees even further.

In response, textile workers all over the East Coast engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, despite the fact that thousands of unemployed workers were willing – even eager – to take the strikers’ places.

The victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 US presidential election seemed to present an opportunity for labour. In June 1933, a Roosevelt-supported measure, the National Industrial Recovery Act, was passed by the US Congress. This measure called for “co-operation” between business, labour and the government, and established “codes of conduct” for businesses. It created the National Recovery Administration (NRA).

Despite all the rhetoric surrounding its formation, the NRA soon proved itself to be toothless. The National Industrial Recovery Act did, however, contain a provision that seemed to legitimise unions. Even this ambiguous language – which only implied the possibility of a right to join a union – was inspiring to many desperate industrial workers. After the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the main union representing textile workers – the United Textile Workers of America (UTWA) – dramatically increased its membership. The union had at most 15,000 members in February 1933; by June 1934, the UTWA contained 250,000 members, half of them cotton mill workers.

The National Recovery Administration issued a code for the cotton industry that regulated workers’ hours and established a minimum wage. It also set up a committee to study the problem of workloads. The employers responded to the new minimum wage by speeding up the work. When the labour board decreed a 40-hour work week, the mill owners simply changed the rules to require that the same amount of work be done in those 40 hours as had been done in the previous 50–60 hour week.

By August 1934, textile workers had filed 4,000 complaints to the labour board protesting “code chiselling” by their employers. The board found in favour of only one worker.

Tensions in the mills mounted, as union supporters lost their jobs and found themselves blacklisted. In May 1934, the mill owners reduced the cotton mill employees’ hours still further without raising their hourly rate. (This was done with the blessing of the NRA.)

The UTWA called a special convention in New York City on 13^th August 1934 and drew up a list of demands for the industry as a whole. These included: a 30-hour week; minimum wages from $13 to $30 per week; elimination of the ‘stretch-out’; union recognition; and reinstatement of workers fired for union activities.

The delegates – especially those from the South – voted overwhelmingly to strike the cotton mills on 1^st September 1934 if these demands were not met – and to bring out the woollen, silk and rayon workers at a date to be set later.

After the employers refused to even meet with the union, the strike swept through the Southern cotton mills. Within a week, more than 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the textile industry was shut down. Within days, governors from Maine to Georgia were calling out the National Guard.

The strikers displayed great determination. At the Victor Mill in Greer, South Carolina, the union staged a brief sit-down strike on the company’s railroad siding, preventing the mill from unloading coal at its own boilers. At one point in the 22-day conflict, about half of the textile workers in North and South Carolina and about three-quarters of those in Georgia were on strike.

Despite the bravery of the workers however, the strike’s weaknesses soon became apparent. The UTWA had only shallow roots in the South and just a few regular organisers there. In the South, local governments refused to provide any relief assistance to the strikers, and there were few sympathetic churches or other unions willing to help. Although the union had pledged before the walkout to feed the strikers, it was utterly incapable of keeping that promise.

Gradually, workers began to drift back to work. Struck plants began reopening, even if only with skeleton crews. Then, the mediation board that President Roosevelt had appointed in the first week of the strike issued its report. The report equivocated. It called for further study of the problems in the industry and suggested that the president create a new Textile Labor Relations Board. Roosevelt quickly announced his support for the report. He urged the workers to return to the mills and the manufacturers to accept the commission’s recommendations.

The UTWA responded by declaring that the strike had been won and by organising a number of parades to celebrate the end of the strike. Despite this bravado, the strike was a stunning defeat for the union, especially in the South. The union did not force the mill owners to recognise it. The UTWA did not obtain any of its economic demands. Employers in the South refused to reinstate strikers; thousands of workers never returned to work in the mills.

The bitter memory of blacklisting and defeat soured many Southern textile workers on unions for decades. It would take more than 40 years for unions to win major organising drives in the South.

Although the 1934 textile strike ended in defeat, that strike and a series of other strikes in 1934 by truckers, rubber workers and dock workers helped to pave the way for major changes in the way labour and the employers dealt with one another. A section of the capitalist class of the USA eventually realised that its interests would be better served if there was class peace rather than outright industrial warfare on the factory floors of the USA.

In 1935, the US Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This law made unions legal in the USA and created the modern grievance and arbitration procedure. The passage of the NLRA marked the beginning of a social contract, an unspoken agreement between labour and the employers of the USA. That agreement said that if workers worked hard and played by the rules, they could have an opportunity to obtain a good life – at least some workers in the largest and most important industries could.

That social contract prevailed for several decades but today it is being destroyed. The textile factories that began moving to the South in the 1880s have now largely left the USA entirely. De-industrialisation and the rise of electronics are creating a poverty greater than that which inspired the 1934 textile strike. In this environment, we need new tactics, a new spirit and new forms of organisation. Without romanticising what happened in the 1934 textile strike or covering up the mistakes made, we should learn from the fighting spirit of the Great Textile Strike of 1934. We need that spirit again as we face the challenges of today.