I am a libertarian ...

[Fantastic Anarchist]

12. Oh, and don't forget that it was us who got the 8 hour workday ...

... and other labor rights. It was us original libertarians (of the socialist variety) who agitated for labor rights in the US historically. It was later in the 50s and 60s when the right-wing co-opted our term for their private tyranny.

But keep looking down your nose at me with disdain. "Libertarian site" ... really? Classic BlueCaliDem.




LABOR'S MARTYRS


Haymarket
1887

Sacco and Vanzetti
1927


By Vito Marcantonio

Introduction by Wm. Z. Foster




Introduction

By William Z. Foster


On November 11, 1937, it is just fifty years since Albert R. Parsons,
August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel and Louis Lingg, leaders of the
great eight-hour day national strike of 1886, were executed in Chicago on
the framed-up charge of having organized the Haymarket bomb explosion that
caused the death of a number of policemen. These early martyrs to labor's
cause were legally lynched because of their loyal and intelligent struggle
for and with the working class. Their murder was encompassed by the same
capitalist forces which, in our day, we have seen sacrifice Tom Mooney,
Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, McNamara, and a host of other
champions of the oppressed.

Parsons and his comrades were revolutionary trade unionists, they were
Anarcho-Syndicalists rather than Anarchists. In the early 'eighties, when
they developed their great mass following, the mass of the workers were
just learning to organize to resist the fierce exploitation of a ruthless
capitalism. The great eight-hour strike movement led by the "Chicago
Anarchists" gave an enormous impulse to trade union organization
everywhere and it was for this that the employing interests had them
hanged. When, for example, the older Chicago unions nowadays go out on
parade on Labor Day, banner after banner bears the historic dale of 1886.
Indeed, the A. F. of L. was practically established nationally at that
time. Although the A. F. of L. had been founded in 1881, it never got a
real hold among the masses until the big strike movement of 1886, which
established the unions in man pew trades and industries and brought about
the reorganization and renaming of the A. F. of L.

In many respects 1937 bears a kinship to 1886. Once again labor is making
a vast surge forward, but on a much higher political level. In 1886, and
the years following, the best that the working class could do in the way
of organization was to produce the craft union movement, which,
notwithstanding all its failings, was an advance in liveability at least,
over the amorphous and confused Knights of Labor. But now, the working
class, grown stronger, more experienced and more ideologically developed,
has given birth to the C.I.O. movement, with its industrial unionism,
trade union democracy, organized political action and generally advanced
conception of the workers' struggle. The militant trade union movement of
today, heading towards a broad People's Front, is the direct lineal
descendant of the great strike movement of the 1886 Chicago martyrs.

Not only has labor matured very much in the fifty years that have passed
since 1886, but so also has the capitalist system that gives it birth. In
1886 American capitalism was young, strong and growing. It had before it a
long period of unparalleled expansion, during which the workers became
afflicted with many illusions about the possibilities of prosperity under
capitalism. Now, however, American capitalism, like the world capitalist
system of which it is a part, has exhausted its constructive role of
building the industries. It is now obsolete and gradually sinking into
decay. Industrial crises follow each other with increasing severity and
the masses are becoming more and more pauperized. The growth of fascism
and war is the attempt of this outworn capitalist system to keep in
existence although history has imperatively summoned it to leave the stage
and to make way for the next order, socialism.

The modern working class, although it has not learned all the needed
lessons of the situation in which it finds itself, is nevertheless rapidly
becoming free from capitalist illusions and is reorganizing itself
accordingly, industrially and politically. Of this renaissance, the C.I.O.
is the greatest mass expression.

The Haymarket martyrs were bold pioneer fighters for socialism and they
paid with their lives for their devotion and clear-sightedness. Although
they sleep all these years in Waldheim Cemetery, their work was not in
vain and they are not forgotten. In keeping green the memories of these
proletarian heroes, the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party
and other progressive and revolutionary organizations are preserving one
of the most glorious of all American revolutionary traditions. The lives
of Parsons, Fischer, Engel, Spies and Lingg, and Sacco and Vanzetti, must
be made more than ever the inspiration of the proletarian youth. We must
indeed realize in life the noble last words of Spies, spoken as he stood
on the gallows with the hangman's noose around his neck:

_"There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than
the voices you are strangling today."_