Uphold Rose Schneiderman thought

[bloodygranuaile]

I've been a big fan of Erik Loomis' writing over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money for years. Additionally, as I believe I mentioned in my review of John Nichols' The "S" Word, I had an American history event to run for DSA and nowhere near enough time to read Zinn for it! Fortunately, Loomis' new book A History of America in Ten Strikes, which I have been waiting for for several months, had the goodness to be published only three weeks ago, and the BPL system had some copies. I was able to cram about the first third of this book before I left for Vegas, which I was able to use to flesh out the presentation, and read the rest of it on the T and the plane, taking mental notes about stuff to use to fix the second half of the presentation when I got back to a computer the morning of the event.

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sittin’ in the T station, readin’ about strikes #fridayreads

A post shared by bloodygranuaile (@bloodygranuaile) on Oct 19, 2018 at 5:23am PDT

Fortunately, this book is extremely readable and covers a lot of ground, which made it both immensely helpful for the presentation and easy enough to cram into my brain that it didn't feel like entirely inappropriate vacation reading (although the last time I went to Vegas I was reading a poker strategy book on the way out, which has math, so I guess I'm just bad at vacation reading). It's also vintage Erik — straightforward, dryly funny, relentlessly judgmental about the left's strategic weaknesses, but still militantly supportive of the dignity of all working people. One of the recurring themes, which is also a recurring theme in his blogging and also a recurring theme in American politics, is the role of racism in tanking attempts at labor solidarity and class consciousness in the U.S., or, more bluntly, that white people consistently decide they'd rather be racist than have nice things, and that's why we as a country can't have nice things.

 

The book covers a pretty well-rounded range of strikes, from the early industrial strikes of the Lowell Mill Girls up through the Justice for Janitors strikes and the current hubs of action in the labor movement. In between, we read about the big IWW-led strikes in heavy industry that everyone stereotypically associates with the labor movement, but ample attention is also given to strikes in female-dominated industries such as garment work and strikes by workers of color, such as the mass self-emancipation of slaves during the Civil War.

 

While there are some really great stories in this book — Loomis isn't going to miss a chance to recount my favorite failed historical assassination, Andrew Berkman and Emma Goldman's bungled attack on Henry Clay Frick — it's certainly not intended to be merely a repository of historical curiosities. There are valuable lessons that the current activist left can learn from the successes and failures of the past, and if you don't pick up on them just from hearing the stories, Erik will explicitly spell them out for you. Big ones include "It's important to get some less-terrible people into office so that you can work them" and "Workers of color are the future of the labor movement, and white people should strongly consider stop being so fucking racist, although there's no reason to assume they'll actually do that." He also makes sure you don't miss how incredibly violent much of labor history is, both in terms of the lengths to which capitalists and the state have gone to suppress even the mildest, most reasonable forms of worker organizing, and the militancy with which our labor ancestors worked to obtain the rights that we take for granted and which are being rapidly degraded as the New Gilded Age marches on (you know, stuff like "weekends"). The contrast with -- and parallels to -- the current whinging over "civility" in our current political discourse is illustrative.

 

Anyway, strikes are rad and they're making a comeback, so this is a timely book for anyone looking to be informed about them. It will make you fun at cocktail parties, assuming you go to the kind of cocktail parties that are full of weird nerds who like stories about anarchosyndicalists fucking up the Paterson silk mills, which are the only good kind of cocktail party to go to anyway.