Wednesday, May 04, 2005

A Birthday Message from the IWW: Rebel, And Mean It

By Michael K. Smith

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Posted 05/04 | Add a Comment

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  1. Brilliant and inspirational! Thank you Mr Smith and thank you Mark Hand for posting this. Absolutely timely. This really and truly shows the way, as well as the SPIRIT of the way: be unafraid of the ruling class and show how weak they really are, and how the tables can be turned. This is the path to true love; let the Christian fundamentalists put THAT in their pipe and smoke it! Best in solidarity!

    Posted by Reza F from Here  on  05/05  at  08:57 AM

  2. Wobblies!
    A Graphic History of the IWW
    by Louis Proyect

    Book Review

    Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, Verso, ISBN 1-84467-525-4, 305 pages, $25.00.

    (Swans - April 11, 2005) Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World is edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. Buhle is a long-time chronicler of the American radical movement and popular culture. Schulman is an artist on the editorial board of World War 3 Illustrated, which began “seventeen years ago as an anti-war comic book, inspired by the experience of growing up under the shadow of nuclear weapons and by the shock of a second rate actor’s finger on the button.”

    Wobblies is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the IWW and a traveling exhibition of IWW memorabilia that Buhle helped curate (http://www.wobblyshow.org/). For today’s radicals, the IWW has a powerful mystique since many of the leading figures were martyrs to the cause, including the hobo and folksinger Joe Hill. Hill’s songs have enormous staying power as demonstrated by Billy Bragg’s cover of “There is Power in a Union”:

    There is power in a factory, power in the land
    Power in the hand of the worker
    But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand
    There is power in a Union

    full: http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy24.html

    Posted by Louis Proyect from NYC  on  05/05  at  09:07 AM

  3. Having just read Louis Proyect’s review of the book by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman ...
    A very signigicant point is made in the review. The Wobblies’ tradition is fundamental to filling the gap, or providing the missing link between the American school of radicalism and practically-possible socialism; with the political component missing, however. A political party is the last link. But in building even the political party, the Wobblies come in again, providing the language, the ‘cultural’ link. This is not just a ‘political convenience’. No. That’s bullshit. The importance of the ‘cultural’ is very significant, as Gramsci as informed. All societies are composite, complex organisms. Within them are competing and contradictory tendencies that have been there for as long as the current capitalist world system has existed. So, when societies formulate themselves politically-radically, they always leave signatures on future generations. Why re-invent the wheel all over again, when you’ve already done half the job (at least) with tools you’ve already got? Or, why try to borrow a foreign language to say what you’ve already developed in your own language, to mean the same thing? Get the concepts from others, exchange concepts with others, develope the concepts internatioanlly, but don’t lose your own language.  The more languages speak the same socialistic meaning, the more possibly can we build a true internationale.
    Solidarity!

    Posted by Reza F from Here  on  05/05  at  09:58 AM

  4. Hold on, Smith, there’s unfinished business. Commenting on your last piece for this site - a lamentably ignorant one on Noam Chomsky - I issued this challenge:

    “Smith claimed that the US gave a $43 million gift to the Taliban. Faced with the incontrovertible fact that the source for this fantasy misrepresented his source material, Smith now wishes to insinuate that that material was all an official deceit, and that there is a higher truth that only he, Smith, alone in the world, has discerned. So go ahead, Smith: show us - by citing NOT garbled secondary sources who are as incompetent as you, but verifiable, checkable data on financial flows to aid recipients (the OECD compiles such data) - the existence of this $43 million gift to the Taliban. Do it now.

    “I’m sorry to have to advise readers that I am able to predict with complete certainty that Smith will duck this challenge, whereupon we may draw our own conclusions about whether to take seriously anything he says on this or any other subject, ever.”

    Whereupon - bless my soul, what do you know? - precisely in line with my prediction, Smith did a runner. He describes himself as a historian - despite having no training, background or qualifications in the study of history, and no notion of intellectual integrity (e.g. he thinks the fabrication of source material is a trifling and pedanctic complaint). Let me therefore point out to him - as he plainly has never come across it before - the historian’s responsibility to correct claims that not only cannot be substantiated but are demonstrably false.

    Then we may start on the rest of the 20-odd howlers that he included in the rest of the piece.

    Posted by Oliver Kamm from London  on  05/13  at  06:45 AM

  5. Kamm’s approach to discourse is like that of his new mentor, Moonbat Horowitz. He doesn’t make any pretense towards rationality. He berates his targets the way a retired National Guard colonel sets a taxi cab driver straight for being too cautious at intersections.

    He hopes to drag comment threads into hair splitting sessions where he may play a game of “he said, she said” over the quantitative aspects of a transaction, rather than the qualitative, and thus obfuscate his bogus premises. “Assume for a minute that the earth is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. . . .” Lest anyone think a discussion of his bogus premises would go any better, please be aware that Kamm is fully capable of deliberately fabulating those of his opponents and arguing accordingly. One such attempt is dissected here.

    He has identified the major weakness of people whose ideological grounding entails a regard for the right to free speech and carved out a nice little niche. He’s made a career of it. If his bête noire, Noam Chomsky, were to learn that Kamm was to be punished by the state for his deliberate distortions, he would come to his defense. “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

    A website with an open policy where all views may be argued is vulnerable to Kamm. My view is that his bad faith commentary should be deleted, along with this comment. Both tend to take the focus off a good discussion of the Wobblies. The net being what it is, someone is bound to come along and take Kamm’s orotund styling seriously, address it directly and unwittingly enable his net kook games.

    Posted by Hary from  on  05/14  at  04:38 AM

  6. “The most famous—and infamous—of Wobblies was the nationally renowned “Big Bill” Haywood. A child of the West, he was recognized on the streets of New York the way a star athlete might be today. Adored by women and instinctively obeyed by men, he was the most popular unionist in the country. Possessed of the manners of a gentleman, he packed a revolver, cried like a baby when reciting poetry, and delivered thunderous orations that ignited crowds of workers like a wick in a powder keg.”

    Yeah, right.  He also feigned being a friend of the working man, when all he really could be was a violent rabblerouser wrapped up in his ego.  Madman is more like it.  Arming men to violent means and inciting riots is insurgency and nothing else.  A purdy trashy way to go through life.  The part about ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was ignored by the knucklehead, too.

    I don’t want to deny anybody a means to make a living.  It is their right.  Using violent means to achieve those goals is immoral action.

    4.50 per day for five days was the equivalent of an ounce of gold and two silver dollars in 1906.  Which equals 442 dollars in today’s dollars.  After a year of work, you aren’t poor.

    Farmers called the IWW by what it was rightly deserved:  I Won’t Work.

    Marxism is nothing more than State capitalism with nothing going to the working man.  I, for one, can find more enjoyable methods to live life.  Marxism is for the birds. 

    Unicor is just another gulag.  Republicans are just another arm of the Communist Party.  They make their money with tax payers forced contributions via the income tax.

    I’ll do without Marxists, Republicans, Democrats, Christian fundamentalists and others of their ilk.  Give me liberty and not the American brand.  That ain’t anything like liberty.

    Long-haired preachers come out every night,

    Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;

    But when asked how ‘bout something to eat

    They will answer with voices so sweet:

    You will eat, bye and bye

    In that glorious land above the sky;

    Work and pray,

    Live on hay,

    You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. - Joe Hill

    give me a break

    Posted by MDPB from  on  05/14  at  02:06 PM

  7. I’m still waiting, Smith, for the evidence showing that the US donated $43 million to the Taliban, as you claimed in your original article, or for you to issue a correction. Likewise with your remark that Chomsky’s dishonesty is an ‘unproven hypothesis’ - which just goes to demonstrate you have read neither him nor any serious historian. I have already challenged another participant in this forum to come up with a verifiable source for the “explicit statement” attributed by Chomsky (in Chronicles of Dissent, p. 38) to Abba Eban that “the task of Israeli agitprop is to make it clear that any criticism of Israel is either anti-Semitism or the position of self-hating Jews”, and I challenge you to do the same. I predict with complete certainty, however, that you will duck this challenge just as you did with the last one.

    Posted by Oliver Kamm from London  on  05/16  at  03:01 AM

  8. Kamm has challenged you several times to justify your claim about the Taliban aid, so what are you waiting for??

    Posted by Anon from Edinburgh  on  05/19  at  07:24 AM

  9. I think Kamm’s screeds should remain here, both on the principle of respect for free speech, but also so all may see how dishonest cretins like him operate.  His evident facility with language makes his brand of political legerdemain interesting, if contemptible.  Mr. Smith has wisely opted out of further engaging with this fool.  The speciousness of Kamm’s ostensible respect for history and historical scholarship is evident to anyone who spends a few minutes reading his diatribes against Chomsky.

    Posted by whats_his_name from  on  06/11  at  11:02 AM

  10. “The speciousness of Kamm’s ostensible respect for history...”

    Does this mean you agree with Smith that the US gave $43 million in aid to the Taliban? Why do you not defend this claim explicitly? Where is your evidence? Do you think that Smith’s silence on the point is due to his wisdom and my foolishness, or to his being entirely unable to defend a falsehood that he gullibly retailed from the Internet?

    Please be specific in your answers.

    Posted by Oliver Kamm from London  on  07/14  at  08:37 AM

    11. Next entry: My Dog or Your Child? Ethical Dilemmas and the Hierarchy of Moral Value

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