THE ORGANIZER

July 2009 • Issue #17.

The Twin Cities General Membership Branch of theIWW planned and executed an ambitious series of events over the weekend of May 1, 2, and 3 for the2009 May Day celebration. We ended up marching intwo parades, rallying in celebration both for workersand immigrant rights communities, and hosting a line-upof bands in a joint fund-raising event with Sisters'Camelot.

Despite some setbacks, the Twin Cities GMBrose to the occasion and hada very successful weekend,increasing our visibility andshowing our solidarity withallied organizations.

FRIDAY MAY 1

ALL OUT FOR THE ANTI-CAPITALIST BLOC!On Friday, May 1 fellowworkers from the GMB withtheir spouses,children andfriends joined with the MayDay Coalition organized bythe Midwestern ImmigrantRights Action Coalition, alsoknown as MIRAc. Membersof the GMB worked withmembers of MIRAc in someof the planning sessions leading up to the event.With their main statement of "Since 1889, We StandUnited in Celebration of International Worker's Day"MIRAc's "March and Community Festival to Com-memorate and Celebrate Mayday!" for 2009 was thefourth year of the event. The march and festival's strongfocus remains on Latino brothers and sisters whiledeveloping, in the words of the Resource Center forthe Americas, "a diverse environment where we can beinspired by and learn from a variety of groups andforces that are working to create a more just, beautifuland dignified community for everyone!" Indeed, eachyear the parade and festival con-tinually grows in diversity andcelebration.At the March GMB meeting, wediscussed participation in the MI-RAc May Day celebration and afellow worker said that he wantedto see "hundreds of red and black flags at the march." The better toput true fear into the hearts of the parasitic oligarchs who arebleeding our economic systemdry? So, another fellow workerdecided to make this dream areality! While not numbering inthe hundreds, we did delivernearly 40 red and black flags, in-cluding two large five foot ban-ners on eight foot flag poleswhich can be seen even by bosseswith very poor eyesight. Ironically,the Minneapolis Star and Tribunefeatured the flags of the Anti-capitalist Bloc in the business sec-tion of the paper the very nextday, in an article about the "diffi-culties" the Starbucks Worker'sUnion is making for the bosses.The Star Tribune article in-creased visibility for the TwinCities GWB and despite itsanti-union perspective (sur-prise!), it still served to drawattention to the ongoing la-bor issues arising from thecurrent economic situation.Plans were formalized by thebranch to continue our GMBtradition of sponsoring anAnti-capitalist Bloc for themarch. A formal call forcommunity participation wasdrafted in compelling andeloquent form by a FW. Insolidarity with the MIRAcdemands, the Anti-capitalistBloc called for a five pointplatform outlining principles of solidarity:

1. ABOLITION OF CAPITALISM

We seek to abolish capitalism infavor of a system based on directand democratic control of themeans of production.

The pov-erty, warfare, oppression and envi-ronmental devastation that areinherent in the capitalist systemcan only be ended by eliminating

continued on page 5Editorial

Editor Ericco Hedake onthe death of Wobbly iconand troubadour UtahPhillips.

Page 2Fire in Greece

In part one of anextended analysis, an FW discusses recent uprisingsin Greece.

Pages 3 & 6Where There’sSmoke...

Wobbly and anarchist perspectives onorganizing after the RNC.

Pages 4, 7, & 8InternationalWorkers’ Day

A brief history of Mayday and its signiﬁcance as aworkers’ holiday.

Pages 6 & 7

Upcoming Events

Find out what the OneBig Union is planning inthe Twin Cities.

Page 8

Twin Cities IWW May Day Celebrations for 2009

E O

RGANIZER

A monthly publication of theTwin Cities General Membership Branch of theIndustrial Workers of the World.The IWW is a union for all workers, dedicated to organizing on the job for better conditionstoday, and a world without bosses tomorrow.You are invited to contact theBranch Secretary-Treasurer or any Delegate listed below for no-pressure conversations about your issues on the job.

Branch Contacts

Twin Cities IWW P.O Box 14111 Minneapolis, MN 55414Tel. (612) 336-1266email. twincities@iww.org web. twincities.iww.org

Branch Secretary-Treasurers

Bob Adamsrogead@rogead.comDavid Boehnkedboehnke@gmail.com

Editors

Errico Hedake Jake Bell

Policy

Stories, letters to the editors,and belly-aching can beaddressed totc-organizer@riseup.net Unless otherwise stated, theopinions expressed are not necessarily the ofﬁcial positionof the local branch or the unionas a whole. Many of our members areengaged in active organizing campaigns, and some use analias, occasionally their unioncard number, or ‘x’ number. Weprefer transparency over secrecy whenever possible, but will always honor requests for anonymity .

I.W.W. troubador and "GoldenVoice of the Southwest" U. UtahPhillips, who died in 2008, had amotto: "The long memory is themost radical idea in America."Connected to that, he was alsofond of saying that the I.W.W. wasthe only organization of whichhe'd been a part, that had neverbroken faith with its elders. Of allthe wonderful wordsto come out of Utah's mouth, thosewere the ones of which I was perhapsmost proud. Theintergenerationalnature of our union,where fellow work-ers mingle as fellowworkers and equals,and learn from eachother's experiences,has a great deal todo with our abilityto persevere. Theelder generation isnot the only onethat must be wel-comed and listened to in our un-ion - children and parents mustalso be accommodated. Most fel-low workers will have children atsome point - their need for or-ganization doesn't disappear withthe increase in their childrearingduties.So I'd like to honor one man whohas just passed away. He wasnever a member of the IWW, buthe rubbed elbows with a lot of New York wobblies as a youngmen and considered himself aworking class radical most of hislife.My father-in-law died a few daysbefore this last May Day, whichwould have been his ninetiethbirthday.

Karl Leone was the sonof working-class Sicilian immi-grants and grew up in New York city in neighborhoods where hewas the minority. His neighbor-hood was primarily composed of working class Jews who spokeYiddish; so he learned Yiddish andspoke it to some extent to theend of his life. As a young man hehired on at Jewish resorts in theCatskills. He served in the militaryduring World War II in the Air-borne and then attended dentalschool on the GI Bill.In 1949 he was present at the riotat Mohegan Lake. Black activist,singer, and actor Paul

Robesongave a concert there (near theindustrial center of Peekskill, New York),and joined a sponta-neous crowd of un-ion activists and fel-low workers to pro-tect Robeson againstthe organized vigilan-tes who had prom-ised to murder him if he dared show hisface at the concert.During the redbait-ing of the ﬁfties hewas asked to sign aloyalty oath and todeclare any connec-tion to communistorganizations - he refused inearthy terms, and received hishonorable discharge after alengthy struggle.He married a Jewish woman andhad two daughters, and over along and quiet career he paid forboth daughters to ﬁnish college,and then watched his wife andone daughter fall to cancer.

Aftera period as a widower, he marriedmy wife's mother and befriendedher during her late adolescence.I only met Karl late in life, andwish I'd known him longer - as itwas I was privileged to learn agreat deal of history from him,with a very particular perspective.One of the few things I was ableto teach him was that the nearlymythical I got familiar with hiscontinued passion for justice, hisrefusal to accept undeservedprivilege, and his anger at oppres-sion. He'll stay with me in mymemory, as well as in the memoryof my wife and my two children. – FW Ericco Hedake

THE ORGANIZER

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Editorial

It has now been approximately six months since a so-cial rebellion erupted in Greece December 9th 2008,after the police murdered a ﬁfteen-year old in Athens.

I use the word

“erupted” with great care since themainstream capitalist media has worked to present therebellion as if it emerged all-of-a-sudden from a void,sparked merely by outrage in response to police vio-lence and frustration about the lagging economy.

Therebellion “erupted,” yes, but only because the ﬁre hadalready been built – through a strong radical labormovement, student movement, immigrants rightsmovement/anti-fascist movement, through social cen-ters and squats, through independent radical media, andthrough the networks and solidarity built through manyyears of struggle.

Without this, no spark could havegenerated the ﬁres – bothliterally and ﬁguratively – that emerged in Greece inDecember 2008.

The ﬂames spread throughneighborhoods and commu-nities, through schools andworkplaces, through net-works and through elec-tronic communication.

Themovement never consistedof isolated activists or anar-chists acting alone in thestreets, rather, many youthand workers became radical-ized (or re-radicalized)through popular struggle.

Greece has a strong right-wing, fascist movement, yetin general the population supported and were impera-tive to the rebellion.

There were certainly folks actingin the streets who just wanted to destroy things anddid not care about having popular support (and I’m notsaying their rage is illegitimate), but in general folksspeciﬁcally targeted the state, corporations, and fas-cists, and sought to work to bring people into thestruggle by spreading occupations and popularassemblies.

People worked hard to create new solidarities andrelationships born in mutual struggle and support, andto increase their control over their own lives.

Struggleis not only about attack and the creation of points of rupture, but it is also the creation of new possibilities,new ideas, and new relationships so that space of rup-ture does not disappear as quickly as it was created.

Destruction can be a creative act, but it is never sus-tainable without continual creation.

A communiquéfrom December signed “girls in revolt” described theprocess of revolt as“This incomprehensible, unpredictable convulsion of social rhythms, of the broken time/space, of the struc-tures structured no more, of the border between whatis and what is to come.

A mo-ment of joy and play, of fear, pas-sion, and rage, of confusion andsome consciousness that is griev-ous, dynamic and full of promises.

A moment which, regardless, willeither frighten itself and preservethe automations that created it orwill deny itself constantly in orderto become at each momentsomething different than what itwas before: all in order to avoidending up at the causality of re-volts suffocated in normality, re-volts becoming another form of authority while defending them-selves…We are what we do inorder to change who we are.

Wewant this historical moment toadopt the content we have set forourselves and not the meaningsfrom which it can escapeovernight.”

We saw this process of both re-volt and creation, of new ways of being and relating, new solidaritiesunfold in Greece as the rebellionspread.

People created communi-ties together in autonomousspaces, they created room fornew articulations, and new soli-darities as immigrants, workers,farmers, prisoners, feminists, etc.struggled together and supportedone another.

The Haunt of Albanian Migrants, ina statement titled “These days areours, too” was one of the ﬁrst toarticulate both their solidarity andtheir own experiences, needs, anddesires in what originally seemedto be a riot of students.

Theirpresence and their own struggle,as with many others, in turnspread and strengthened the re-volt and further transformed boththe meanings and the potential of the struggle.

The struggle againstthe police state, the right-wing,and for autonomy and means of self-support was theirs as much asthe students and/or the anar-chists, as they asserted, and theirself-organizing and self-articulation strengthened ratherthan diluted the rebellion.The “girls in revolt” pointout that it was state violencetoward a “good,” innocentmiddle-class white youththat sparked the rebellionand the widespread supportof anger toward aninjustice.

If Alex had beenan immigrant, a working classwoman, queer, or someonewho was differently-abled,for example, then the inci-dent would not have gener-ated such popular outrage.

Yet despite the source of thespark, the rebellion itself created new spaces for ar-ticulations such as those of the “Haunt of Albanian Migrants”and the “girls in revolt,” and newsolidarities across intersectionaloppressions.The “girls in revolt” supported therebellion, but they critically as-serted within the movement thevalidity of many forms of “mili-tancy” and “revolt” and ques-tioned the patriarchal authority of both the police and those whoﬁght them in the streets.

Theyargue that “moral order and malesovereignty” are the prerogativeof the state and the figure of thepolice officer, yet “if the rebelsneed to muster up their masculin-ity in order to fight the cop, theyneed to question it at the sametime because it constitutes theauthority they use to fight thecop.”It is these critical discussions,

continued on page 6

THE ORGANIZER

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Fire in Greece part.1