Wow, I didn't know that Berkman set the cause of unionism back that far! Do the labor historians know about this? I thought that the cause of revolutionary unionism was defeated by other measures, such as the embrace of the reformist AFL/CIO by the capitalists who saw the handwriting on the wall.
Berkman did something that was tactically foolish, even if it was the moral thing to do. He did his time in jail and I think all anarchists since that time have learned that propaganda by the deed is pretty pointless. You kill one leader and another one takes their place.
> In the spring of 1917 a gang of anarchists decided to rob the bank in a small
> mining town about 5 miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. Five of the six or
> seven anarchists were killed in the ensuing gunfight with the local
> citizenry. One or two of the anarchists did get away with cash and it was
> suspected that they had fled to Russia to join the Russian revolution. Since
> I grew up in this neighborhood, when I was a kid I knew a few of the old
> timers who had participated in the gunfight with the anarchists. These men
> were either union men or pro-union and friends of Phil Murray and John Lewis.
Cool! Never heard about that. I'll have to look that one up.
BTW, the anarchist Bonnot Gang invented the getaway car.
> Growing up I also knew fellows of Russian/Polish descent and Italian descent
> whose grandfathers or great grandfathers had been influenced by anarchists.
> Some of the scrapes their grandfathers had gotten into weren't very pretty and
> caused their mainstream union brothers big trouble.
Well, the mainstream union boys have caused all of us trouble for the last 60 years. They have been sitting in the capitalist's laps for far too long.
> So, all in all the anarchist movement in the past has done nothing, but, play
> into the hands of the Chicago school's analysis of the American labor
> movement. The caricature of the foreign born and foreign influenced bomb
> thrower.
Are you a mainstream journalist or something? Do you have any understanding of how the mechanics of red-baiting work? It seems like you are pretty knowledgeable aboput labor history, yet believe what the boss press wants everybody to believe. The press inflated the incidents of propaganda by the deed way out of proportion to the number that were actually committed.
> Max and I have been around in the past on this whole question of how you
> figure these reactionary libertine/libertarian/anarchist types too. Like the
> Cato and Heritage Institutes.
Well, I hope you are sitting down. On Saturday night I had dinner with a writer from Reason magazine.
OK, you can stand up now.
Jesse and I have some common goals, but we do disagree fundamentally on some things. He's kind of in the borderlands of the overlap between anarchists and right-libertarians. Normally, I can't stand Cato-type libertarians, but I have met a few that I like.
-- Chuck0
Mid-Atlantic Infoshop http://www.infoshop.org/
Leonard Peltier Freedom Month Executive Clemency For Peltier! http://www.freepeltier.org/lpfreedommonth.html
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now! http://www.infoshop.org/gulag/mumia_idx.html
"A society is a healthy society only to the degree that it exhibits anarchistic traits."
- Jens Bjørneboe