#working classes

[seanofbeankeep]

With all news that high % of uneducated voted for Trump. Or those uneducated on politics and what tariffs mean etc.

There’s lot of posts mocking those who are now only learning the mistake they made at the election. I understand this desire to get angry at them. To get angry at the uneducated for not educating themselves before voting. Like it is bloody frustrating when the information is out there and so obvious etc etc Brexit and Tory victories always brought out worse in me, bitter hatred, deep disappointment, feeling of fuck it all.

But

It’s also a failure of the opposition that their message never reached these people. Or only reached them afterwards. Campaigners need hard look at where they failed. Not just blaming others and moving on not changing or adapting strategy etc

Left wing politics has always strived to improve literacy levels for uneducated and often working classes who are always left with no options in past. You got to know that person could easily be you or in another life could be you. Esp with misinformation fooling not just uneducated etc

But more so

If your message is not accessible to the uneducated and illiterate. If it only reaches those with privilege to get into higher education. Your movement isn’t about freedom or equality and it will fail.

Peasant revolts, working class movements before libraries were public show that you don’t need high literacy to understand oppression and inequality. They feel and see it when overworked, when hungry, when they have no money and the boss has more for less work. They are reachable and aren’t always your enemies if the root cause is a poor education and lack of accessibility to the information. The liars who exploit their lack of education are the enemies.

No matter how hard it is or how much other message is louder. You shouldn’t give up or not try. This shit is struggle, it’s tough, it always has been but every now and again someone or some message breaks through and you’ll never find it if you don’t believe it exists or you don’t try. Even in the face of being ignored, mocked or rage.

Too many politicians do give up easy on this but often grassroots activists who live there don’t. Make sure to support people fighting with heart who haven’t given up yet to get the message through. You got to help them or start the long discussion and strategy meetings on ‘how can we reach those who are not engaged, not highly educated, who vote based on misinformation etc’

Note: because bigotry is part of this election this is not a call to put yourself in dangerous situations with people who want to hurt you. Yeah cut those people out. Find safe communities. This is more aimed at political campaigning or those who want socialist message to be heard to all which can be delivered directly or indirectly these days

[liberashen]

“These artificial divisions and antagonisms between British and colonial workers, already costly in toll of generations of colonial wars and ever-recurrent crises, have delayed fundamental social change in Britain, and form the very basis of colour prejudice. The small top section of the working class, bribed and corrupted, and benefiting from this colonial robbery, have been imbued with this racist ‘white superiority’ poison.” 

— Claudia Jones

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their belief that soccer-worship is exactly the religion people deserve. Possessed by soccer, the proles think with their feet, which is the only way they can think, and through such primitive ecstasy they fulfill their dreams. The animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riff-raff get what they want. In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate soccer because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardor. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers’ consciousness becomes atrophied and they let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.

- Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano was a famous Uruguayan writer, journalist, and left wing political activist until his death in 2015. He was most widely regarded for what his supporters called a series of incisive critiques of Western imperialism and capitalism. On this I think he was more wrong than right, but he when he was right he was right.

Above all I had a grudging respect for his lilting, graceful prose. He was a great prose stylist.

His most notable work, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (or Open Veins of Latin America) offered a sort of people’s history of Latin America, weaving a narrative framed by economic exploitation and political instability. His life’s work was committed to telling the story of Latin America, describing his own work as a writer as “obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.”

Football fans will know him as the author of El fútbol a sol y sombra, or Soccer in Sun and Shadow. The book offers a cultural history of the beautiful game, using his trademark poignant verse to shape history and politics and economics and personal experience into a sort of paper sculpture - beautiful, unexpected, and somewhat transient.

There’s a lot of darkness in the story Galeano tells - the “shadow” in the book title, as it were - yet he unfurls and shares his joy and love for the sport throughout. Football, for Galeano, was an intimate and indelible part of life - and more often than not, it represented the better parts of it. Galeano was more than a fan; he was a pilgrim, telling a story that was equal parts hard labour sentence, passionate love affair and fleeting moment of rapture.

I first came across his works by accident when I was backpacking across Argentina with my sister and Argentine friends who were football mad. Even if disagreed with his politics I could heartily agree with him about football, for here he was an incisive and wrote as a fan of the beautiful game. Many football fans would share his lament, “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”

As a football fan who can disagree?

[kathekollwitzmakesmecry]

Käthe Kollwitz. Zertretene (The Downtrodden). 1900.

Etching and aquatint on paper. 12 1/8 × 9 3/4 in (30.8 × 24.8 cm). 

“Käthe Kollwitz believed that art should effect social change. She originally envisioned The Downtrodden as part of a triptych related to her cycle of etchings called The Weaver’s Rebellion, but ultimately developed it as an independent work. 

The Downtrodden forces viewers to confront the vulnerability of working-class people struggling to survive. A woman cradles the head of dead or ailing child in her lap; the man standing to her left turns away, covering his face with a hand. 

As an expressionist artist, Kollwitz skillfully manipulated her black-and-white medium to maximize the etching’s emotional impact on viewers. Kollwitz contrasted the inky background with the delicate cross-hatching that defines the adult figures. Against these dark areas, the child’s head and shoulders appear startlingly pale. 

In The Downtrodden, Kollwitz also acknowledged the range of emotion that the illness or death of a child can wrought. The quiet concern of the woman’s face contrasts with the man’s clenching left hand—a gesture that powerfully signifies the anguished expression it obscures.” - National Museum of Women In The Arts, Washington, D.C. 

[kahuladragon]

Azim Premji: The interests of workers, businesses are deeply aligned, especially in these times of crisis

Wipro founder expressed shock over states diluting labour laws related to settling disputes.

Sixteen young men were mowed down by a train. The details are still being investigated. But we do know the basic truth. Like millions of others who lost their livelihood, they were starving. So, they decided to walk a few hundred kilometres to their homes and slept on the tracks assuming no trains would run, since it was the lockdown. Some kind of a lockdown was necessary to tackle the pandemic, but these deaths are an unforgiveable tragedy. I don’t use the word ‘unforgiveable’ lightly. The blame is squarely ours; the society that we have built. This tragedy is just one of the most wrenching markers of the tremendous misery that hundreds of millions of our fellow citizens are bearing, those who are the weakest and the poorest.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Chicago in the 1960s was a brutal place for poor people. Black, brown and white people all dealt with poverty, unemployment, police violence, substandard housing, inadequate schools and a lack of social services. Ethnic and racial groups each created their own social service and activist networks to combat every kind of oppression. One was the Young Patriot Organization (YPO), which was based in Hillbilly Harlem, an uptown neighborhood of Chicago populated by displaced white southerners. Many YPO members were racist, and they flaunted controversial symbols associated with southern pride, such as the Confederate flag. But like blacks and Latinos, the white Young Patriots and their families experienced discrimination in Chicago. In their case, it was because they were poor and from the South. In his short time as a Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton wanted to advance the group’s goals by forming a “Rainbow Coalition” of working class and poor people of all races. Former members of the Chicago Panthers and YPO tell different versions of the same story of how the groups connected: Each attended the other’s organizing meetings and decided to work together on their common issues. Over time, the Black Panthers learned to tolerate Confederate flags as intransigent signs for rebellion. Their only stipulation was that the white Young Patriots denounce racism. Eventually, Young Patriots rejected their deeply embedded ideas of white supremacy – and even the Confederate flag – as they realized how much they had in common with the Black Panthers and Latino Young Lords. Assumed to be natural enemies, these groups united in their calls for economic justice. In the Aug. 9, 1969 issue of The Black Panther newspaper, the party’s chief of staff, David Hilliard, admiringly called the Young Patriots “the only revolutionaries we respect that ever came out of the mother country.” Recalling his work with the YPO, former Black Panther Bobby Lee explained that “The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle.” In the end, the Illinois Panthers brought together various elements of the black community, Confederate flag-waving southern white migrants (Young Patriots), Puerto Ricans (Young Lords), poor white ethnic groups (Rising Up Angry, JOIN Community Union, and the Intercommunal Survival Committee), students and the women’s movement. The disparate groups under the coalition’s umbrella pooled resources and shared strategies for providing community services and aid that the government and private sector would not. Initiatives included health clinics, feeding homeless and hungry people, and legal advice for those dealing with unethical landlords and police brutality.

Colette Gaiter, “Chicago 1969: When Black Panthers aligned with Confederate-flag-wielding, working-class whites” (January 8th 2017).

[brooklynmuseum]

With only a few Summer Fridays left, we'll be exploring Coney Island every Friday this month by showcasing artworks depicting our local seaside escape.

Pictured here is a work by Irving Underhill, a commercial photographer who helped spread the image of Coney Island as a capital of leisure—one accessible to families with a small disposable income and only one day of the week free. Interestingly enough, in the 18th-century, sea bathing was considered a fashionable spa experience reserved only for the upper-class. But, thanks to growing public transportation, it soon became associated with pleasure more than health and spread to the working classes in the 19th-century. 

Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960). Balmer's Great Atlantic Bathing and Swimming Baths, Coney Island, 1906. Gelatin dry glass plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.8-B9616. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)