[lbo-talk] History of Anarchist /Communist Unity: May Day

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Sun Jan 29 07:20:12 PST 2012


Hurray, Hurray for The Very First of May ! Black and White , unite and fight, like Lucy and Albert Parsons . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Parsons

Albert Parsons had been a Confederate soldier.

Albert Richard Parsons (June 20, 1848 – November 11, 1887) was a pioneer America...n socialist and later anarchist newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. Parsons is best remembered as one of four Chicago radical leaders convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembe...

...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_ParsonsLucy Parsons - Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons (born c. 1853 – March 7, 1942) was an American labo...r organizer and radical socialist. She is remembered as a powerful orator.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/BB/crane06.gif...http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/BB/crane06.gif ‎74.220.215.218

http://www.marxists.org/subject/mayday/index.htm..May Day - About the International Workers' Holiday www.marxists.org May Day

Shorter Work Week with no cut in pay means more jobs more leisure for the 99%. It is a no growth captialism solution to the economic crisis. It is the only solution to the constant revolution in the instruments of production which is permanent to capitalism. May Day is on the Way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Parsons

Lucy (or Lucia) Eldine Gonzalez was born around 1853 in Texas, likely as a slave, to parents of Native American, Black American and Mexican ancestry.[1] In 1871 she married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier. They were forced to flee from Texas north by intolerant reactions to their interracial marriage. They settled in Chicago, Illinois.

Red, Black , Brown and White unite and fight the

Career as activistDescribed by the Chicago Police Department as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" in the 1920s, Parsons and her husband had become highly effective anarchist organizers primarily involved in the labor movement in the late 19th century, but also participating in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women. She began writing for The Socialist and The Alarm, the journal of the International Working People's Association (IWPA) which she and Parsons, among others, founded in 1883. In 1886 her husband, who had been heavily involved in campaigning for the eight hour day, was arrested, tried and executed on November 11, 1887, by the state of Illinois on charges that he had conspired in the Haymarket Riot — an event which was widely regarded as a political frame-up and which marked the beginning of May Day labor rallies in protest.[2][3]

In 1892 she briefly published a periodical, Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly. She was often arrested for giving public speeches or distributing anarchist literature. While she continued championing the anarchist cause, she came into ideological conflict with some of her contemporaries, including Emma Goldman, over her focus on class politics over gender and sexual struggles.[4]

Photograph of Parsons in 1886In 1905 she participated in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, and began editing the Liberator, an anarchist newspaper that supported the IWW in Chicago. Lucy's focus shifted somewhat to class struggles around poverty and unemployment, and she organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915, which pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Jane Addams' Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12. Parsons was also quoted as saying, "My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production."[5] Parsons anticipated the sit-down strikes in the US and, later, workers' factory takeovers in Argentina. (Parsons a

In 1925 she began working with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense in 1927, a communist-led organization that defended labor activists and unjustly-accused African Americans such as the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon. While it is commonly accepted by nearly all biographical accounts (including those of the Lucy Parsons Center, the IWW, and Joe Knowles) that Parsons joined the Communist Party in 1939, there is some dispute, notably in Gale Ahrens' essay "Lucy Parsons: Mystery Revolutionist, More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters", which can be found in the anthology Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. Ahrens also points out, in "Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878 - 1937", that the obituary which the Communist Party had published on her death made no claim that she had been a member.

Parsons continued to give fiery speeches in Chicago's Bughouse Square into her 80s, where she inspired Studs Terkel.[6] One of her last major appearances was at the International Harvester in February 1941.

She died on March 7, 1942, in a house fire. Her lover, George Markstall,[7] died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. She was believed to be 89 years old.[8] After her death, police seized her library of over 1,500 books and all of her personal papers. She is buried near her husband at Waldheim Cemetery, near the Haymarket Monument.[9] (now Forest Home Cemetery), in Forest Park, Illinois (then part of the city of Chicago).



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