Seth rebutted this pretty well, but Carroll trumped him by pointing out that prison guards are bad. I would add to seth's perspective that not only did UMWA members live and breathe their very radical union like it was a pentecostal church back then--- they also (in '22 I think?) literally staged the largest armed uprising in post-civil war us history. Something on the order of tens of thousands of armed miners marched into logan and mingo counties in west virginia, for the purpose of hanging the murderous anti-union sherriff there and establishing a new local of the umwa.
Sorry, that's different from today.
Also, the railroad brotherhoods and some other unions had some big confrontations in the 20s. Problem is, they all lost. The decade turned into a period of vicious reaction, during which many lefties gave up on the US, others went into bonkers sectarian land. Which sounds like the present day, except that then it went on for a single decade; here it's gone on much longer, and I would (with sadness) bet it goes on a decade or more at least longer still. Thus the constant worrying that there is something new under the stars in contemporary class struggle politics. Are we dealing with a fundamentally different and tougher terrain?
Well, (at least) we certainly don't get shot at like on the banks of the monongahela.
On other hand, Homestead had a whole town to shoot back with.
> >Europe from 1848
> >to 1945
> >
Yeah, this is a very out-there assertion. Up there for wackyness in terms of anything on the list.
> I do try to figure out what people think and why. One of the things
> I've noticed about autonomists, anarchists, and the like is that they
> claim to be more democratic than everyone else, but have almost no
> popular support at all, and don't seem to care much about that.
Totally off-thread (but I don't get onto here much lately, sorry to muddle), but I come from anarchy-world politically, have never felt a moment of decisive rejection for what anarchisms main philosophical points are about, and yet doug's observation here is on something that has always seemed enormous to me. Isn't it an awful big black-and-red elephant in the room to have an ideology whose utopian society involves everyone in the entire world agreeing on fundamentals (so that those bad baddies over in the non-anarchyland territory don't take advantage of anarchyland's position to loot it for whatever wealth it hasn't yet cooked into a dumptered-lentil stew?), and yet has by far the most minute support of any ideology in the world today (a world where the hindu fundamentalist RSS ranks as the world's largest voluntary organization, and where the are more internet livejournal discussion groups about being a 'furry' than about being an anarchist (or marxist)?!?!)?!?!
>
> Somehow, to my displeasure, we ended up watching Wild
> Hogs, the movie with Tim Allen and John Travolta. (NOT
> MY IDEA!) Total red-state, Blue Collar Comedy,
> low-brow type horse shit of a movie. It was pretty
> painful. Anyway, a running theme of the jokes, besides
> poop, is homosexuality -- effeminate men,
Final, off-thread post--- just to chime in here, it's important (if only from a comedy-afficionado perspective) to remember that the supposedly monolithically right-wing blue collar comedy tour are far from that, about sexuality. I'm basically just talking about Ron White (by far theirbest comic), who has a really really great bit about how everyone is really bisexual. Ya'll should check it out. Good stuff.