2023-08-31
Labor Day
Over at Best of the Blogs Groom writes about Labor Day:
It was a holiday that projected the power of organized labor. Not only what the movement could do for its members in terms of wages, hours and working conditions, but at the ballot box. Senators and congressmen with blue collar names like Lausche and DiSalle would show up at weekend gatherings of 50,000 or more and assure a male-dominated, whitebread work force and their families that they would be knocking at the White House door with the next uptick in the Consumer Price Index. And they did.
When healthy, and corrupt (just like the politicians) the labor movement was a feature within our system of social organization that helped resolve incipient class conflict. Now that creeping corporativism, the export of capital and the export of jobs has forced organized labor to go down for count, the conflict resolution mechanism has gone with it...
...Class conflict. Always has been. Always will be... it's more than a Marx-Engels thing...
There was class conflict in America when the US Army was sent up against striking workers at the Pullman factory in Chicago, and at the steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and across the border to the copper mines at Cananea, Mexico. There was class conflict when Henry Ford sent his department of social research goons to beat up on the Detroit work force. There was class conflict and mucha sangre when the American Federation of Labor (AFL) locked horns with the CIO.
It's unfortunate that the history of people's struggles in this country have been swept under the carpet. In many ways today's struggles are a memory war. Those in power do everything they can to destroy the history of resistance. Labor day is a good example. Why do we celebrate Labor Day and not May Day. Why are books like Jeremy Brecher's Strike and Howard Zinn's A People's History not taught in schools?
If we forget history, if we fail to remember the struggle for the 8 hour day and other struggles by working people, then we loose our foundation. We can only know our power today by knowing our history.
We've lost control of our country. People talk of electing a democrat like Howard Dean and they seem to believe that is the answer. Well, we've been down that road folks. We know where it goes. I'm not saying the answer will be found in a third party. I'm saying the answer lies outside of electoral politics. We need a movement that will not stop until true democracy is achieved.
We sell ourselves very short if our battle cry is Howard Dean. Our battle cry should be Freedom, Liberty, and Justice. It's time to finish the American Revolution.
(no perma link to the story was available...)