A Witness At Ludlow

A Witness At Ludlow

A nugget of working class history from the archive of The Western Socialist, the old paper of the World Socialist Party of the United States, that has recently been posted on the WSPUS website.

The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 was one of the most notorious episodes of murderous class war in the history of the American Labor Movement. Forty-five men, women and children murdered by the Colorado National Guard in the midst of a Colorado Coal Strike.

Some readers of the piece might know of the "Infamous Baldwin-Felts thugs" mentioned in the piece via John Sayles's classic 1980s labour movement film, Matewan.

And of course, most people know of John D. Rockefeller Jr. - the Rockefeller Family name, the Rockefeller Center, and all that jazz - and some people nowadays are prone to get sentimental about the 'old money' of yesteryear and contrast their seeming noblesse oblige with today's rapacious parasites but please bear in mind that they bought their 'blue blood' via the red blood of workers like those murdered at Ludlow.

The author of the piece, the late Sam Orner, was a IWW soap-boxer in his youth before joining the Workers/World Socialist Party of the United States - the companion party of the SPGB - sometime in the early 1920s. (That's a guess on my part, btw. It could have been as early as 1919 . . . as late as 1923.)

He was by all accounts a fascinating and robust character and you definitely get a flavour of that from his reminiscences of that period in the piece. He has his own footnote in American working class history for his role in 1934 Taxi Cab Drivers Strike (Scroll down for the sub-section entitled 'New York City' for further details.)

I know an older Scottish comrade from the SPGB who, from his frequent trips to the States these past 40 years, got to know Sam Orner when the latter was in his 60s and 70s and, by all accounts, Sam was the same combative and fiery straight talking revolutionary socialist right up till the very end of his life. The sort of old school comrade who could walk into a empty room, and come out the other side with a split, a faction fight and a paper sale of 27 copies of the 'Western Socialist'.

PS - I've posted the MySpace Socialist Standard page link to the article rather than the original piece from the WSPUS website because I've tagged on some 'further links' at the bottom of the piece, but please visit the article at the original source and check out the website in the greater depth. There's further nuggets to be unearthed, and why shouldn't you discover them before I do?

New Socialist Website

Bookmarks at the ready.

Kudos to Morgan M. (and his mate FN Brill) for the spade work in putting together the new website for the World Socialist Party of the United States. Now you have all those impossibilist hyperlinks at your fingertips.

It looks like a nice blend of contemporary articles alongside reprints of material from the long history of the *cough* World Socialists* in North America.

Articles that caught my eye on the 'is it a website or is it a blog?' include:

How Money Downed the Minneapolis Bridge

The Ballot Over The Bullet

The Wildcat Strike (from The Western Socialist, July-August, 1953)

Paul Mattick's review of Hayek's 'Road To Serfdom' (from The Western Socialist, September 1946)

Interview With a WSPUS Union Organizer

Who will do the dirty work? We all will!

I have to make a special mention of the innovation - for the WSM, that is - of including mp3s on the website. Of course, front and centre is the 'heavy stuff'; SPGB talks on 'War' and 'Israel, Intifada and Peace' (plus an interesting recording from 68/69, where the late Socialist Party of Canada member, Bill Pritchard, recounts the foundation of the One Big Union in 1919), but I also like the decision to include 'light stuff' such as the following mp3s:

The Fugs', 'Kill For Peace'

Chumbawamba's, 'That’s How Grateful We Are'

Groucho Marx's, 'I'm Against It'

Fatima Mansions, 'Shiny Happy People'

No doubt this FN Brill bloke was influenced by the classic 2003 SPGB Mix compilation CD, 'The Secret Melody of the Class Struggle',** that was specially produced for the SPGB stall at Glastonbury that year.

*The *cough* is in place 'cos I think the term 'World Socialists' is a bit naff.

**Original working title for the political pop music compilation CD was 'The Best Impossibilist Album in the World...Ever!'

A Prisoner of the Past*

Couple of good posts from Alan J. over at his Mailstrom blog:

Anton Pancakes

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us

With the 'Anton Pancakes' post, it looks like Alan's taken on the task of scouring the Dead Socialist Watch list over at Virtual Stoa, as he follows up his post on Dietzgen with a piece on Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer and Council Communist. (Alan, I'm looking forward to your 5000 word essay on Beatrice Webb on Monday.)

I would disagree with Alan on one point: I think there is a case to be made that Pannekoek as a theorist has an greater influence today that he had during the latter part of his life, and an influence that far outstrips that of the SPGB.

AK Press republished his Workers' Councils a few years back, and there is no doubt that the celebrity endorsement from Chomsky - who in interviews I've read, always maintained that as a young man he was always more sympathetic to the council communism of Pannekoek and Mattick, rather than the various hues of Leninism - has gone some way in Pannekoek finding a new audience.

As Alan mentions, a lot of anarchists have a soft spot for Pannekoek. If I was being a cheeky bastard, it's a case of hyper-activists chasing after a theory, but I'm not a cheeky bastard.

It was always funny, though, that at various festivals, demos and bookfairs etc etc when you'd get the familiar sneer from the youthful badged-up anarcho-surbanite for admitting to being an SPGBer (using the line: "honest mate, they aren't my Socialist Standards. I'm carrying them for a bet." never used to work for me), they'd always have the Pannekoek pamphlet published by Collective Action Notes, with his articles reprinted from The Western Socialist, the old WSPUS journal, on their literature table.

Mention of the Western Socialist reminds me of this excerpt from an anniversary issue of the journal from 1966 which, when writing of socialist activity in Boston in the 30s and 40s, makes mention of Pannekoek:

"And the Sunday night forums at the old headquarters at 12 Hayward Place! One of the most memorable of these forums was the occasion of the visit to Boston by the late Dutch astronomer and Marxist, Anton Pannekoek (author of Marxism and Darwinism and Anthropogenesis). Pannekoek had come to accept an honorary degree from Harvard University for his work in astrophysics. Yet instead of hobnobbing with the intellectuals of Harvard, he chase to deliver a lecture at the W.S.P. headquarters to a working class audience seeking the truth about society from a scientist and philosopher. Pannekoek said that he was more at home with workers than he was with the professors." (From From The Western Socialist Issue 4, 1966)

I don't really have to write too much in connection with the second piece, 'O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us', from Alan's blog . . .except perhaps to ask: what the hell did he have in his cocoa when coming up with the title of the post?

Alan's found some old posts on the google discussion list alt.politics.socialism.trotsky, where the well known science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod, does a bang up job defending the history and politics of the SPGB from the usual misunderstandings, misrepresentations and miscreants.

Regular readers of the blog will know that Ken MacLeod has a history of sorts with the SPGB. Not in a 'Literature Secretary of Enfield and Haringey Branch 1986-1988' kind of way, but more as someone who has in times past spoken at our Summer School, written a guest article in the Socialist Standard, and has also written warmly of the Party and its members in one of his novels, The Stone Canal, which is, erm, novel.

My only grumble is that it sticks in the craw when a non-member puts in a better performance of defending the politics of the Party than I ever could. I think I'll stick to blogging about music, footie and Sarah Silverman . . .but I do want that badge, though.

*Listening to Prefab Sprout.

Mattick on Trotsky

"The masses had to be led; but the leaders could lead only in accordance with their own necessities. The need for leadership of the kind practiced by bolshevism finally indicates nothing else than the need to discipline and terrorize the masses, so that they may work and live in harmony with the plans of the ruling social group. This kind of leadership in itself demonstrates the existence of class relations, class politics and economics, and an irreconcilable opposition between the leaders and the led. The over-towering personality of Leon Trotsky reveals the non-proletarian character of the Bolshevik Revolution just as well as the mummified and deified Lenin in the Moscow Mausoleum."

The above is an excerpt from the article on the political legacy of Leon Trotsky that the German Council Communist, Paul Mattick, wrote in the wake of Trotsky's murder in 1940. It has been recently added to the Marxist Internet Archive through the good work of a comrade who has been transcribing many of Mattick's forgotten texts and book reviews from Mattick's own political journals, New Essays and Living Marxism, as well as from the sadly now defunct World Socialist Party of the United States journal, The Western Socialist.

Well worth checking out.