I am listening to “Tiene Sabor” on WWOZ, an excellent Latin show, but I am here to discuss a different kind of music.
It appears that one reason the T.A. strike at NYU failed is that labor simply cannot bring enough financial pressure on a university to make a difference. By the time the T.A.’s walked out, NYU had already received the bulk of its tuition money and other income for the year. I wonder whether it would have helped if more labor sectors had walked out in solidarity with these T.A.’s.
I have been thinking of the question of organizing in general, for reasons the assiduous reader is probably able to deduce. Today’s song, therefore, is I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, by Alfred Hayes.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he,
“I never died” says he.
“In Salt Lake, Joe, by God” says I,
Him standing by my bed
“They framed you on a murder charge”
Says Joe “But I ain’t dead,”
Says Joe “But I ain’t dead.”
“The copper bosses killed you Joe,
They shot you Joe” says I
“Takes more than guns to kill a man”
Says Joe “I didn’t die,”
Says Joe “I didn’t die.”
And standing there as big as life,
And smiling with his eyes
Joe says “What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize,
Went on to organize.”
“Joe Hill ain’t dead” he says to me,
“Joe Hill ain’t never died
Where workingmen are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side.”
From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,
Says he “You’ll find Joe Hill,”
Says he “You’ll find Joe Hill.”
The University of Utah’s station KUED maintains a wonderful site about Joe Hill, who wrote and sung as he organized. And this slide show from Filmstrips International shows why Joe Hill walks among us today.
We are organizing as workers and as citizens. But we must grow stronger, and create a broader and deeper web of solidarity, every day. I may be right, and I may be wrong, change is within reach, but it won’t be for long, we’ll miss our rights once they are gone.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
ah, Joe Hill, organzier and songwriter for the IWW.
Lots of terrific Wobbly songs out there – many recorded by Utah Phillips.
It’s always a good time to reflect on how others – like Joe Hill – were organizing during tough times – and learn from what they did and take heart too.
~~the Rebel Girl
Don’t mourn for me – organize. — Joe Hill
Joe Hill coined the phrase “pie in the sky.” I love using that phrase. LOL!
And speaking of “pie in the sky,” Utah Phillips recorded a song by that title. Billy Brag, another of my all time faves, also recorded a song he dedicated to Joe Hill.
As a former international union organizer, stories of Joe Hill, May Day, Haymarket, Bread and Roses, the Great Seattle Strike, and Mother Jones, continue to be my favorite bedtime stories.
This is our history.
I have lived in a small town where, mere months before my birth, there were machine guns on the roof of the grocery store the workers had to pass when they marched. By the mid ’50s, the mine was unionized. The unionized mine was owned by a South African company.
I am beneficiary of a healthcare system that farmers and townsfolk, common folk, risked their lives to implement, against the doctors and politicians who knew it would bring an end to their graft. They still fight us over Canada’s universal health care system.
Thanks for the lyrics. I heard Joan Baez.
thanks for the joe hill lyrics. I often think of the lines “what they forgot to kill, went on to organize.”
I come from very strong pro-union folks. My hometown was wracked by violent strikes at the stockyards and beef-packing plants throughout the 70s, strikes so violent that people actually died. So Joe Hill’s words ring very true for me.
I’ve often written of my mom, who was a union president. She would no more have turned her back on the union than turned her back on her children.
ah, Billy Bragg!
He’s one for keeping the spirit alive.
Just saw him two weks ago in L.A. (yes, I am bragging about Bragg.)
Professor,
Do you know this book?
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/top3mset/0ad8c7f5e632c141a19afeb4da09e526.html
Persistent inequalities : wage disparity under capitalist competition
by Howard Botwinick
I have it, but when I Googled for it I found this WorldCat link that ought to help people find it in a library instead of the usual Amazon link jumping on top of everything. So maybe it’s out of print?
Anyway, it is one of my favorite examples of how practically useful _real_ Marxist scholarship is, especially in Marx’s field of economics. The very field that postmodernist scholars, along with their antiMarxist predecessors in academia, dismiss first. But I say, Marx stands or falls by how good his theory of capitalism is, and it looks to me like _Capital_ is a vastly superior model to any rival economic theory I have ever heard of.
Although you might not guess it from the title, the book is essentially all about groundwork for labor organization, and it endorses a return to militant, cross-industry mass organization drives, detailing reasons why the neoclassical marginalist claims that workers ought to just cooperate with the nice boss are so much bunk. It analyzes the conditions that allow workers to effectively organize and contrasts a Marxist analysis of the constraints on capitalists and workers to the marginalist one, which it cuts to ribbons.
Botwinick can’t promise working people the moon but he does show that it is up to us, not the grace of our betters, and if we do it smart and bold (meaning, among other things, solidarity outside our narrow workplace and field) we can get our share of the rising product from rising productivity.
I found out where he is working now:
http://www.cortland.edu/economics/faculty.html
Apparently that’s SUNY Cortland; people in the East may know just where in NY that is.
And I found a damning with faint praise review
http://www.reading.ac.uk/RevSoc/archive/volume10/number1/10-1r.htm
that sniffs that it’s a pipe dream if workers don’t organize across divisions:
No shit, Sherlock! It’s been a while since I last read Botwinck, but I think that was a big part of his point–organizers can’t focus on this or that bunch of workers and leave out their potential replacements. What organizers can do, with Botwinck’s approach to a Marxist analysis of a field to be organized, is estimate how much margin there is between the actual profit the _leading producer_ in the field is making and the prevailing rate of profit in the overall investment marketplace, and make sure to organize the leader as well as as many other places in the same line as possible.
The idea that of course you have to organize not just white guys but people of all genders and ethnicities who might possibly take the job instead should be obvious, and I think it is to leftists if not to Oxford professors like this Grint dude who wrote that review. And Botwinck puts it all into global framework, pointing out how if for instance the industry leader is located overseas the workers in that field are going to need to organize at an international level. Grint the reviewer says “The globalization of economic production suggests that global trade unions and global labour solidarity are the kind of response that Botwinick is seeking but the history of labour movements does not bode well for such strategies, and images of Don Quixote spring, unfortunately but rapidly, to mind.”
Well the funny thing is, about when Grint was grunting that, in the late ’90s, it seemed to me that international solidarity was exactly the kind of thing that was starting to actually happen. I got a distinct feeling in the ’90s that even Americans were beginning to get that we are in fact global citizens, that what happens overseas affects us, that working people in foreign countries may have more in common with us than with either of our governments and ruling classes–and that global solidarity was in fact possible. In 2000 protestors rocked the Seattle WTO conference, for instance.
I feel the Bush Administration was installed precisely with the mission of trying to torpedo American globalist consciousness. Hence 9/11/01 and the Patriot Act and the so-called War on Terror. It is essential to the Ownership Society to drive as many wedges between working people as possible.
Mark – very interesting indeed, and I am fascinated
with this:
I feel the Bush Administration was installed precisely with the mission of trying to torpedo American globalist consciousness. Hence 9/11/01 and the Patriot Act and the so-called War on Terror. It is essential to the Ownership Society to drive as many wedges between working people as possible.
And everybody, I didn’t realize the pie in the sky song was Joe Hill’s (“work and pray / live on hay / you’ll get pie in the sky when you die”) nor heard Utah Phillips — what a great thread!
Utah Phillips is a treasure.
Check out the colloborations he has done with Ani di Franco – The Past Didn’t go Anywhere — is wonderful.