Today in Labor History April 2, 1863: Bread riots occurred in Richmond, Virginia, as a result of a drought the previous year, combined with a blockade by the Union Army and overall Civil War-related shortages. Food riots occurred throughout the South around this time, led primarily by women. During the Richmond riot, women broke into storehouses and shops, stealing food, clothing and jewelry before the militia was able to restore order.
Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
If you live in tyranny, like Russia - then only death means something. It is a death race between you and the tyrant, who will die first?- How much years will you lose before the tyrant perish? What will left from you and your life in the end? Is it really worth waiting ? Maybe a flash of glorious self-destructing rebellion is preferable, while you still have some dignity to light it? #russia#anarchism#tyranny#rebellion#resistance#revolution#rebellious
👉L'AG des membres de l'April, c'est samedi 16 mars à Paris (5e)
▶️ intervention de @mathildesaliou sur diversité de genre, inclusivité
▶️ vote sur rapport d'activité, bilan financier ; élection du CA
▶️ distribution des nouveaux autocollants 😉
▶️ soirée festive sur l'air de l'Italie (surprise) 🎉
Vous souhaitez être des nôtres ? N'oubliez pas de vous inscrire 🙏
C'est indispensable pour nous permettre de gérer aisément la logistique 👍
Today in Labor History March 11, 1858: The Great Indian Mutiny, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, ended with massacres by the British. 6,000 British troops died in the fighting. However, at least 800,000 Indians died in the fighting and from the famines and epidemics that resulted.
Those "9 out of 10 #Filipinos" are very gullible then. The #AFP is very incompetent at militarily resolving the #communist#rebellion, and it shows in the repetitive #brokenpromises of "ending the CPP-NPA-NDF by the end of [insert year here]".
Today in Labor History March 5, 1965: A Leftist uprising against British colonialism erupted in Bahrain, known as the March Intifada. The uprising began after the Bahrain Petroleum Company laid off hundreds of workers at on March 5, 1965. Students at Manama High School, the only high school in Bahrain, went out into the streets to protest the lay-offs. Several people died in the clashes between protesters and police. The authorities quickly suppressed the uprising. However, as news of the crackdown spread, protests erupted throughout the country, creating a nationwide uprising which lasted for a month.
Today in Labor History March 4, 1804: Irish convicts rose up against British colonial authority in the Colony of New South Wales in the Castle Hill Rebellion. It was the first major convict uprising in Australian history to be suppressed under martial law. The prisoners escaped from a prison farm with the goal of stealing ships and sailing back to Ireland. With a few days, the authorities suppressed the uprising. They executed nine leaders and punished hundreds of others.
Today in Labor History March 1, 1921: Anarchist and leftwing communist soldiers and sailors rose up against the Russian Bolsheviks in the Kronstadt uprising. The rebellion, which lasted until March 16, was the last major revolt against the Bolsheviks. It began when they sent delegates to Petrograd in solidarity with strikes going on in that city, and demanded the restoration of civil rights for workers, economic and political freedom for workers and peasants, including free speech, and that soviet councils include anarchists and left socialists. The Bolshevik forces, directed by Trotsky, killed over 1,000 Kronstadt rebels in battle, and executed another 2,100 in the aftermath. As many as 1,400 government troops died in their attempt to quash the rebellion.
Today in Labor History February 23, 1882: B. Traven was born on this date in Poznan, Poland. Traven’s real name was probably Ret Marut. He was active in the Bavarian uprising and the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. When the German state quashed the Republic and started arresting and executing activists, he fled to Mexico, where he began writing novels. Traven was a brilliant satirist and wrote novels sympathetic to workers and peasants, including the “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Death Ship,” “The White Rose,” as well as his Jungle Series of novel depicting the plight of Indigenous campesinos in Mexico.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Nat Turner, who led the only effective, sustained slave revolt in U.S. history (in 1831). They killed over 50 people, mostly whites, but the authorities put down the rebellion after a few days. Turner survived in hiding for several months. The militia and racist mobs, in turn, slaughtered up to 120 free and enslaved black people, and the state executed another 56, and severely punished dozens of non-slaves in the frenzy that followed the uprising. Turner’s revolt set off a new wave of oppressive legislation by whites, prohibiting the education, movement and assembly of enslaved and free blacks, alike.
Today in Labor History February 4, 1900: Jacques Prévert was born (1900-1977). Prevert was a poet, surrealist and libertarian socialist who glorified the spirit of rebellion & revolt.
Excerpt from “Song in the Blood”
There are great puddles of blood on the world
Where’s it going all this spilled blood
Murder’s blood. . . war’s blood. . .
Misery’s blood. . .
And the blood of men tortured in prisons. . .
The blood of children calmly tortured by their papa
And their mama. . .
And the blood of men whose heads bleed in
Padded cells
And the roofer’s blood
When the roofer slips and falls from the roof
Today in Labor History January 29, 1834: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal workers rioted. President Jackson sent in troops to quell the unrest. It was the first time the government used troops to suppress a domestic labor dispute. Workers rebelled because of deadly working conditions and low pay. George Washington had designed the canal project. He intended it to facilitate transportation of goods from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River Valley. Construction teams were made up mostly of Irish, German, Dutch and black workers. They toiled long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions. From this, and similar projects of the era, came the line: “the banks of the canals are lined with the bones of dead Irishmen.” Also from this project came the poem:
Ten thousand Micks,
They swung their picks,
To build the new canal.
But the choleray
Was stronger ‘n they
And twice it killed ‘em all.
Today in Labor History January 26, 1808: Soldiers took over New South Wales, Australia, during the Rum Rebellion. It was Australia’s only military coup. At the time, NSW was a British penal colony. William Bligh was governor of the territory. This was the same William Bligh who was an officer under Captain Cook when he attempted to kidnap the King of Hawai’i. He was also the same William Bligh who was overthrown in the Mutiny on the Bounty, in 1789. It is questionable why the British thought he’d do better in charge of a bunch of prisoners and unruly soldiers, than he did with a bunch of sailors. Perhaps they were just desperate. One of Bligh’s commissions was to reign in the Rum Corps, which held a monopoly on the illegal rum trade in Australia. They also controlled the sale of other commodities. Bligh started to enforce penalties for the illegal sale and importation of liquor. He also tried to provide relief to farmers, suffering from recent flooding and price-gouging by the Rum Corps, by providing provisions from the colony’s stores. The monopolists didn’t like his looting of the stores, from which they were profiting handsomely, nor his enforcement of the liquor laws. So, they arrested him and deported him to Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land. The military remained in control of NSW until 1810.
Today in Labor History January 25, 1787: Daniel Shays and 800 followers marched to Springfield, Massachusetts to seize the Federal arsenal during Shays’ Rebellion. The Massachusetts State militia ultimately defeated them. They were trying to end the imprisonment of farmers for debts, confiscation of their lands and other attempts by the wealthy to make the poor pay for the Revolutionary War. The authorities convicted and hanged many of Shays’ followers for treason. Shays, himself, fled to Vermont. He eventually won a pardon. The U.S. Constitution, written in the wake of Shays’ rebellion, was designed in part to prevent other similar uprisings by the common people against slave owners, bankers, landlords and businessmen.
Today in Labor History January 19, 1812: Luddites torched Oatlands Mill in Yorkshire, England. In order to avoid losing their jobs to machines, Luddites destroyed equipment in protest. Their movement was named for Ned Ludd, a fictional weaver who supposedly smashed knitting frames after being whipped by his boss. Luddite rebellions continued from 1811-1816, until the military quashed their uprising.
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood
His feats I but little admire
I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.
The sentiment for this poem comes from the fact that Robin Hood was a paternalistic hero, a displaced aristocrat who stole from his class brethren and gave to the poor; whereas Ned Ludd represented the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the working class.
Today in Labor History January 15, 1919: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Spartacist League and the German Communist Party, were murdered. On January 7, the Spartacists called a General Strike to overthrow the moderate Social Democratic government. 500,000 workers participated. To quash the rebellion, the Social Democrats utilized the Freikorps, a right-wing paramilitary composed of World War I veterans, many of whom were suffering from PTSD, and many of whom went on to become Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler. The Freikorps slaughtered 200 people during the week-long uprising. Demonstrations and further unrest broke out in response to the assassinations of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The Freikorps quashed these, too, as well as the soviets that had been implemented in Bavaria and other parts of Germany. In all, they slaughtered over 5,000 people.
Today in Labor History December 17, 1918: 1,000 workers, led by Harold Nelson and the Australian Workers' Union, marched on Government House in Darwin, Australia & demanded the resignation of the territory’s Administrator, John Gilruth. They were protesting unemployment, taxation, high prices, lack of political representation, and corruption by the district’s two main employers: Vestey’s Meatworks and the Commonwealth of Australia. They roughed up Gilruth as he attempted to flee inside, broke windows and burned Gilruth's effigy. Gilruth later admitted that if he had he promised to reduce the price of beer (at taxpayers’ expense) the mob would have left peacefully. The Government responded by sending a gunboat. Most people were unaware of the rebellion for several days due to wartime censorship. The press blamed a Soviet establishment in Darwin, along with an uncaring federal government and Gilruth himself.