I am the One True Dave. I used to like being in gunfights but now I know better. I'm not saying anything Black women haven't already tried to tell you. Old enough to be a great grandpa, FWIW.
On this day, 19 July 1883, thousands of telegraphers working for Western Union across the United States walked out on strike demanding equal pay for equal work for men and women, along with other demands, like a pay increase and an eight-hour day.
The bosses had threatened the previous day that if equal pay were implemented, it would mean that they would prefer to just use men, who they alleged “can be availed of for a greater variety of service than women”. The workers, organised in the Brotherhood of Telegraphers, ignored the threats and after management failed to respond to them, walked out.
The strike began when Frank R Phillips stood on a table in the New York office and blew a whistle. Beginning in major cities, the strike spread to rural areas. In Concord, North Carolina, the lone operator Mary Ormand walked out, and the Home and Democrat newspaper reported her office was shut and wires cut by Western Union as they “could not persuade the brave Miss Ormand to be false to her womanhood.” In total around 8,000 workers across the country participated in the strike, including between 300 and 1,000 women. Unfortunately Western Union was determined to break the workers, and decided to try to starve them back to work.
The strikers had hoped to received support from the Knights of Labor union, but when this did not occur, the strikers were eventually forced to return to work defeated after their funds ran out. Some managers decided not to rehire strike activists, although some strikers refused to return on principle. One woman told a reporter “I will never touch a key again in my life… I would rather cut off my right hand than humiliate myself by asking for my old place.”
Pictured: an illustration of Western Union workers around this time https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1764772757041200/?type=3
On this day, 19 July 1936, in response to a right-wing coup by general Francisco Franco, workers across Spain took up arms and launched one of the most far-reaching social revolutions in history. The ensuing civil war pitted the working class against the Spanish capitalists, who were backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In the revolutionary areas, anarchist and socialist workers and peasants took over workplaces and land and began to run them collectively.
Thousands of mostly working class people came from all over the world to aid the workers of Spain. One of them was British socialist author George Orwell, who described the scene in Barcelona: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties… Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised… Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’”.
Western democracies, including Britain and France, abandoned the republic and enforced a blockade on Spain which stopped the flow of aid and weapons to the anti-fascists. Meanwhile, Italy and Germany openly flouted the ban, and the US oil giant Texaco supplied the nationalists with oil and other supplies without even demanding payment, while stopping any supplies to the republic.
Ultimately, after nearly three years of bitter and bloody warfare, the nationalists with their superior weaponry and equipment, were victorious.
In podcast episodes 39-40, we give an overview of the events: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1764574270394382/?type=3
disney: we’re taking all of our movies off of streaming services and we’re going to charge you $10 a month to watch them on our own streaming app
me:
More like
Disney: “We’re going to take all our movies off of streaming sites INCLUDING THE ONE WE ALREADY OWN (Hulu) so we can put them on a separate one and milk even more money out of you.”
If you were to resort to piracy over being exhausted over the various streaming services recreating the nickling and diming of the cable television industry (and I’m not saying you should - just… if you happen to find yourself there), a full VPN is not required.
You can have your torrent activity go through a proxy (while the rest of your traffic isn’t shuttled through there) using services like BTGuard. All the torrent activity is run through the proxy:
If your ISP has bandwidth caps, you’ll still run into those. But they won’t know what you’re transferring.
Just… information out there that you might find useful, in the age of ten-thousand different streaming services that all want you to keep adding more paid subscriptions.
I'm very in favor of abolishing the police and prisons, but I still have strong feelings of wanting to see the "bad person get what they deserve". I know the vast majority of people in prison are in for nonviolent crimes and prison is torture and the whole system's fucked but I don't know what to do with the beliefs about justice I've been taught my whole life. I know revenge/punishment isn't justice but I'm not sure I know what is. Do you have any recommendations (books, articles, videos, etc)?
hey, grappling with this is normal. if you’ve ever heard the phrase “kill the cop in your head,” that’s partly what it refers to. reframing what justice means to us and the kinds of justice we can envision is one of the first and most important steps of thinking about abolition.
luckily, abolitionists have been organizing, thinking about, writing about, dreaming about, and sharing this information for decades. people who are new to abolition don’t have to imagine a new kind of justice. in many areas, that justice is already in practice.
i’m going to link to and mention a lot of information here, so i really advise that interested folks take their time and come back to these resources as they’re able.
Abolition Journal put together a study guide here that’s full of great resources. i recommend checking the whole thing out, but Week 6 in particular goes into alternatives to prison.
Transformharm.org, created by Mariame Kaba, is truly a treasure trove of resources, articles, and curricula for people who are new to transformative justice.
The Abolitionist Toolkit created by Critical Resistance is another great resource that I frequently share. (Critical Resistance in general is a terrific place for more info.)
Survived and Punished is an amazing organization and they’ve curated a bunch of resources here.
Many of the above guides and hubs combine written, audio and visual resources so I hope people are able to find what works for them. If you have specific access needs, let me know and I’ll see what I can round up.
For podcasts, I highly recommend Rustbelt Abolition Radio.
For books that I personally have read/own, I recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis; Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman; The Revolution Starts at Home (anthology); and We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba.
as you can see, there is just so, so much information out there, developed over decades by people who intimately understand harm, injustice and the carceral system. I actually had to reign in how much info I could have shared just to keep this post from being eight miles long lol. The question of “what do we do instead of police and prisons?” isn’t a simple one, of course, and it isn’t a question one person has the answer to. Hopefully these resources are a useful jumping off point for you.
This “bad people get what they deserve” mentality is also why the rights of criminals and prisoners are often overlooked. Abuse of inmates is seen as something total normal that goes together with being incarcerated, but it shouldn’t be.
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unbossed Said: