Featured Editorials

Anti-trans ballot initiative fails to make ballot in California

Submitted by Robyn on Tue, 12/22/2015 - 1:25pm

A group called Privacy for All announced yesterday that it had failed in its attempt to qualify the so-called Personal Privacy Protection Act for the November 2016 ballot.

The PPPA would have forced transgender and gender nonconforming people to use public facilities reserved for our birth sex.

Anti-trans activists needed to get 365800 signatures to place the initiative on the ballot but fell short. They are not saying by how much.

Hellraisers Journal: "This is the Story of the Success of the Agricultural Workers' Organization."

Submitted by JayRaye on Tue, 12/22/2015 - 12:56pm
With no treasury they declared war against the millions of dollars
robbed from the agricultural workers.
Perhaps never in the history of the world was there a war more unequal,
or a success more unexpected.
-ISR on the AWO, December 1915

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Wednesday December 22, 1915
From the International Socialist Review: No Budget, No Problem for the Agricultural Workers' Organization

From the Review of December 1915:

A NEW CHAPTER IN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

By J. A. Macdonald
Agricultural Workers Organization, Big Bill Haywood, Day Book, Sept 24, 1915.png

THIS is the story of the success of the Agricultural Workers' organization. This story is not finished, it cannot be till the doomed industrial system of today has also been damned and over thrown. It is the story of the moving of the propaganda of revolutionary industrial unionism from the open forum and the street corner, to the primary theater of the industrial revolution—the job.

The wise men of the labor movement—generally too wise to work—the philosophers of the easy chair and the big salary, said the migratory worker could not be organized. They said the work was too casual. A union for them would have to be too migratory. It would have to have its office in a box car.

Making me feel old

Submitted by Robyn on Mon, 12/21/2015 - 2:53pm

Esquire magazine has an article about a time long ago: 5 Transgender Americans on the Hardships of Transitioning, Then and Now.

Transgender men and women have lived openly for decades in America. Most of them transitioned before it was remotely acceptable to the wider culture—and so made possible the social transformation in gender identity that we are seeing today. The three women and two men on these pages lived much of their lives as one sex and then, along with thousands of others, have lived long, accomplished (and dangerous) lives as another. They are a comment on the abiding nature of the human impulse to change sexual identity (at a moment when it's almost regarded as a fad) and also emblematic of those who did so when it was so much harder.

Full disclosure: The author of this diary began transition 23 years ago.

Hellraisers Journal: Nils Hanson on the Organizing Drive of the AWO in the Mid-Western Wheat Fields

Submitted by JayRaye on Mon, 12/21/2015 - 12:55pm
Thirty thousand Negroes will come and 30,000 I. W. W.'s will go back.
The red card is cherished as much and its objects understood as well
by a black man as by a white one.
-Solidarity, Fall 1915

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Tuesday December 21, 1915
From the International Socialist Review: Nils Hanson on Organizing in the Wheat Fields

IWW Membership Card.png

In the latest edition of the Review, Nils Hanson discusses working conditions, living conditions, and the great organizing drive, launched by the Agricultural Workers Organization, this past fall in the harvest fields of the mid-western states. He tells of following the wheat harvest from Kansas on up to North Dakota.

The A. W. O. of the Industrial Workers of the World, has become such a menace that the North Dakota farmers claim they will import Negroes as harvest hands next year. In response to that threat, the I. W. W. newspaper, Solidarity, recently gave "John Farmer" this warning:

The I. W. W. has some good Negro organizers, just itching for a chance of this kind. Thirty thousand Negroes will come and 30,000 I. W. W.'s will go bak. The red card is cherished as much and its objects understood as well by a black man as by a white one.

Hellraisers Journal: The Rockefeller Plan, Built Upon the Ashes of the Women and Children of Ludlow

Submitted by JayRaye on Sun, 12/20/2015 - 12:55pm

I stand facing the far east
sounding the voices of the babes of Ludlow.
-Mother Jones

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No one listened. No one cared. The tickers in the offices of 26 Broadway sounded louder than the
sobs of women and children. Men in the steam heated luxury of Broadway offices could not
feel the stinging cold of Colorado hillsides where families lived in tents.
Then came Ludlow and the nation heard.
Little children roasted alive make a front page story.
Dying by inches of starvation and exposure does not.
-Mother Jones

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Monday December 20, 1915
From The Labor World: The Inside Story of How Rockefeller Won the Miners' Vote for a Company Union

CO Justice, Detail, Masses, Nov 1914.png
The Rockefeller Industrial Representation Plan-Established Upon the Ashes of Ludlow

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