Today in Labor History February 11, 1938: BBC Television produced the world's first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that coined the term "robot." He derived the word “robot” from the Czech word for forced labor by Serfs. R.U.R. is an archetype for many of the science fiction stories and films that followed, like Bladerunner, West World and Terminator, and others about robots, replicants and hosts that rebel against humans. However, “R.U.R.,” like Čapek’s 1936 novel “War with the Newts,” is also a satirical critique of totalitarianism, which was already on the rise in Europe at the time he wrote the play.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Nat Turner, who led the only effective, sustained slave revolt in U.S. history (in 1831). They killed over 50 people, mostly whites, but the authorities put down the rebellion after a few days. Turner survived in hiding for several months. The militia and racist mobs, in turn, slaughtered up to 120 free and enslaved black people, and the state executed another 56, and severely punished dozens of non-slaves in the frenzy that followed the uprising. Turner’s revolt set off a new wave of oppressive legislation by whites, prohibiting the education, movement and assembly of enslaved and free blacks, alike.
'The men who built our state’s most iconic building, although they were enslaved, left a legacy for all North Carolinians. Their contribution to the construction of the State Capitol during the 1830s has been researched by a team of historians who will present their initial findings during an upcoming virtual Lunch & Learn program hosted by the State Archives.'
Gentle reminder that usually what is called too radical today, like government taking over vacant buildings under eminent domain for low cost housing, is both the way of the future and moral.
This example of a US pre-revolutionary abolitionist Quaker is a perfect one. He harangued, lobbied and shamed his fellows in order to get slavery and indentured servitude destroyed. Yet he was called a radical then (and to some extent even now) for his actions. Even today, I reckon he would be called a radical by half the White population for wanting to abolish slavery completely as in prison labor.
Moral: todays progressive radical is often tomorrows moral hero. #slavery #prison #servitude #radical #freedom #hero
Today, for Black History Month, we remember events of February 6, 1694: When the Brazilian authorities captured Dandara, warrior queen of the runaway slaves in Quilombo dos Palmares. She committed suicide to avoid being forced back into slavery. Quilombo dos Palmares was a community of Afro-Brazilian people who freed themselves from enslavement. The community survived for nearly 90 years, with up to 30,000 residents, before the government finally suppressed it in 1694. Members of the community would raid plantations, slaughter the owners and free the slaves to come join them in Palmares. They used guerilla warfare, using weapons obtained from Portuguese traders and, possibly, capoeira.
As a young girl, Dandara joined a group of Afro-Brazilians to fight against slavery in Brazil. As an adult, she helped create military strategies to protect Palmares. She played an important role in making her husband, Zumbi dos Palmares, cut ties with his uncle Ganga-Zumba, who was the first big chief of Quilombo dos Palmares. In 1678, Ganga-Zumba signed a peace treaty with the government. All those born in Palmares were to be free and given permission to engage in commerce. However, in exchange, they had to stop giving refuge to runaway slaves and collaborate with the Portuguese authorities in arresting runaways. Dandara and Zumbi opposed the deal because it did not end slavery and made Palmares complicit in its perpetuation.
The story of Zumbi, Dandara and the Quilombo do Palmares is depicted in the truly superb 1984 film “Quilombo,” directed by Carlos Diegues, with music by Gilberto Gil.
Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
"Civilian workers are guaranteed basic rights and protections by OSHA and laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, but prisoners, who are often not legally considered employees, are denied many of those entitlements and cannot protest or form unions.
“They may be doing the exact same work as people who are not incarcerated, but they don’t have the training, they don’t have the experience, they don’t have the protective equipment,” said Jennifer Turner, lead author of a 2022 American Civil Liberties Union report on prison labor.
Almost all of the country’s state and federal adult prisons have some sort of work program, employing around 800,000 people, the report said. It noted the vast majority of those jobs are connected to tasks like maintaining prisons, laundry or kitchen work, which typically pay a few cents an hour if anything at all. And the few who land the highest-paying state industry jobs may earn only a dollar an hour.
Altogether, labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021, the ACLU report said. That includes everything from making mattresses to solar panels, but does not account for work-release and other programs run through local jails, detention and immigration centers and even drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities.
Some incarcerated workers with just a few months or years left on their sentences have been employed everywhere from popular restaurant chains like Burger King to major retail stores and meat-processing plants. Unlike work crews picking up litter in orange jumpsuits, they go largely unnoticed, often wearing the same uniforms as their civilian counterparts. "
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
Today in Labor History February 1, 1865: President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. However, the 13th Amendment does not abolish all forms of slavery. The state is still permitted to force prisoners to work for free, or for wages far below the minimum wage. They are even allowed to do this and sell the products made by prisoners for a profit. And, so long as capitalism exists, wage slavery will still persist.
"Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance." https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e
Slavery: Real People and Their Stories of Enslavement
Slavery is a comprehensive look at the history of an abomination. Words and images reveal the story of slavery around the world and across the centuries, focusing on slavery in the United States in the 1800s.
> Suriname’s Saamaka Maroons still grow #rice from seeds an ancestor escaping from a #plantation carried in her hair. Now a gene bank seeks to widen use of the rare species to help fight the #ClimateCrisis
Today in Labor History January 25, 1787: Daniel Shays and 800 followers marched to Springfield, Massachusetts to seize the Federal arsenal during Shays’ Rebellion. The Massachusetts State militia ultimately defeated them. They were trying to end the imprisonment of farmers for debts, confiscation of their lands and other attempts by the wealthy to make the poor pay for the Revolutionary War. The authorities convicted and hanged many of Shays’ followers for treason. Shays, himself, fled to Vermont. He eventually won a pardon. The U.S. Constitution, written in the wake of Shays’ rebellion, was designed in part to prevent other similar uprisings by the common people against slave owners, bankers, landlords and businessmen.
A popular response to anticapitalist discourse is that capitalism is intrinsically good but it was corrupted at some point in the recent past and whatever anticapitalists are complaining about is really due to that fall from grace rather than capitalism itself. The election of Ronald Reagan is popular for this.
People who sincerely believe this are so historically illiterate that it's impossible to have a serious discussion with them so I don't (usually) engage, and when I do it's disappointing. But if they could talk sense about it what I'd really want to hear from them is when do they think capitalism got good? A fall from grace implies a prior state of grace and when was that for capitalism?
For hundreds of years, since its beginning, capitalism was fueled by slavery, murder, torture, armed robbery. Marx's famous characterization of its birth as "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" is an understatement. When did this end, do they think?
I mean, explicit slavery is mostly illegal, although that only happened generally within my great-grandparents' generation, so not that long ago, but slavery was pretty seamlessly replaced with systems of exploitation that were and are only visibly less violent. This has to be the case because the profits never shrank. When did capitalism get good in order to be able to get bad in the 1980s?
Anyway, yes, this is a subtoot. Since they're incapable of responding sensibly I'm shouting it into the void instead.
🗣 The call for papers for the workshop "The gains of their sorrow: Slavery, the slave trade, and the rise of capitalism in the other South" will close on 31 January.
The aim of the meeting is to open a debate on bridges connecting research focused on the Middle Passage and the one focused on mines, plantations, urban jobs, etc.