A brief foreword: this essay is the first in a series, written about events in Scotland which explore and champion women’s rights. Each of these events is taking place within the space of a fortnight, and it feels like a turning point in mainstream conversations about sex and gender – worth a spot of feminist […]
The working conditions we have today were born in struggle and paid for in blood. We don’t understand the sacrifices others made for us these days. Not completely our fault as the Powers that Be have employed several strategies against the working class, most notably, divide and conquer, to ensure that the mass movements of the past do not crop up again and threaten the established norms of society.
Take note, single day marchers, that what you are doing is almost completely for your benefit. Your single day of action is meek, unoffensive, and for the most part condoned by those who make the rules.
Why? Because everything goes back to normal once you go home. You benefit from venting and feeling like you’ve done something (as insipid as it happens to be) and life goes on. Problem NOT solved.
Effective protesting is not convenient, short-term, or easy. It requires a dedicated mass of people who are willing to put their lives on the line and make the society around them,most inconveniently, grind to halt. The press will demonize you, the anti-union thugs will beat you, and the police will most likely end up killing you because you are not falling in line with the elite’s rules and expectations.
In 1919, workers in Winnipeg said, “Enough”.
“A combination of social and economic inequality and a growing awareness among the working class of these disparities led somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 workers to walk off the job for 42 days, beginning on May 15.
The reasons so many people put their livelihoods at risk by striking in a harshly anti-union climate were manifold.
Poor work conditions, inadequate wages and the refusal by many employers to recognize and negotiate with unions culminated in the unrest that spilled into the streets and left two men dead by the end of the six-week strike.”
The willingness for people exploit other people is almost unlimited.
“Employment offices sprouted up across Winnipeg to connect those workers with jobs. Some agencies “lived to fleece newly arrived immigrants” by charging them steep job-finding fees and locking them into contracts with measly salaries and steep room and board charges, Doug Smith wrote in his book Let us Rise: An Illustrated History of the Manitoba Labour Movement”
Fresh and new to Canada? Let’s exploit you and your family, ASAP. This is the base standard for human behaviour in society. Not pretty, but unless we organize against it, it is what we will get.
“The railway yard-adjacent communities were also a public health nightmare.
Unsanitary, crowded conditions meant infections and diseases spread with impunity. There were annual outbreaks of typhoid due to the unclean water supply in the late 19th century: nearly 1,300 Winnipeggers — just over five per cent of the city’s population — were diagnosed with the bacterial infection in 1904.
The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 1,200 people in Winnipeg, and the working class and immigrant neighbourhoods of the north were worst hit.
Poor children, like these kids on the mud roads of ‘New Jerusalem’ around 1904, had no space for play and miserable living conditions. (Archives of Manitoba)
“It was a deplorable area in which to live: communicable diseases were rampant; it had one of the highest child mortality rates of anywhere in the country; up until the aqueduct [from Shoal Lake] came through, the water supply was a serious danger to the citizens,” Siamandas said.
“These were the seeds of what led to the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.”
Without equal access to health care, suitable housing, fair wages and education opportunities, and with few of the creature comforts enjoyed by the upper crust, a great unrest was brewing in blue-collar Winnipeg.”
If you ever wondered how bad it has to get before people will act, it is like this. Gross inequality, squalor, disease and high child mortality.
The Barretts were staunchly anti-union and against collective bargaining. As a matter of principle, the brothers said, they would only deal directly with their workers on an individual basis.
“This is a free country and … as far as we are concerned, the day will never come when we will have to take orders from any union,” Leonard wrote in 1916, refusing to meet a committee of his employees over concerns related to wages and work conditions.
Edward and Leonard Barrett obtained court injunctions forbidding workers from picketing outside Vulcan Iron Works in the early 1900s. (Winnipeg Evening Tribune)
“There was fierce resistance from all employers, public and private, to unionization, and if you dared go on a picket line in Winnipeg, there were injunctions slapped on you and you were in the courts,” said Paul Moist, former national president of Canada’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
This antagonism toward unions continued as working-class tensions deepened during the war.”
Indeed it is a free country. Freedom has different means depending on which social class you happen to inhabit. I’m guessing most of my readership is not in the business elite, and as evinced in 1919, the business class has its political shit together we currently do not. The structures of society are on their side, along with the coercive elements like the police and army. This is what we have to acknowledge and prepare for if we want to society for the better.
“Leonard scoffed at the suggestion and declared, “God gave me this plant, and by God I’ll run it the way I want to.”
About 45 firms and 1,000 employees went on strike July 22, 1918, after the trades council proposed wage increases and eight-hour days for auto and metalworkers. Though a few of the shops complied, most refused to negotiate with the council, so it was back to work — but the men’s dissatisfaction became a catalyst of the Winnipeg General Strike.
Workers at Vulcan and two other metal shops declared on May 1, 1919, that they would strike again for the right to unionization and a collective bargaining process. The strike started the next day.”
The rest is history, but people today need to know the attitudes that are behind the levers of power. They cannot be negotiated with when they think they have all the power in the situation. Power will never cede power willingly. Only through organized resistance en mass can gains be made.
Please consider this the next time you schedule your appearance at a one day march : who is it benefiting and will your actions change the social bedrock of society.
“I’d argue that money certainly is part of the solution. In a capitalist society, money represents value and power. In America, when you put money into something, you give it meaning. Students are more than capable of grasping that when school funding is being cut, it’s because we as a society have decided that investing in public education doesn’t carry enough value or meaning.
The prioritization of spending on the military, as well as the emphasis of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans on a staggering tax cut for the rich, corporate tax evasion, and the dismantling of what’s left of the social safety net couldn’t send a louder message about how much of a priority the well-being of the majority of this nation’s kids actually is. The 2019 federal budget invested $716 billion in national security, $686 billion of which has been earmarked for the Department of Defense (with even more staggering figures expected next year). Compare that to the $59.9 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education and the expected future cuts to its budget. Point made, no?”
On March 4th,2018 – Derrick Jensen (one of the co-founders of DGR) held a public talk at the Eugene Public Library. His talk, which was about the destruction of the planet and the patriarchal violation imperative, was met with such vocal and threatening hostility that Derrick was forced to hire security from a private local security firm.
This is a public event hosted at the library in Eugene. TRA’s tried boycotting it, threw stink bombs and were harassing anyone trying to see Derrick Jensen’s talk. Thankfully, it wasn’t at a school, and they let him speak because it was a public space, but the TRAS tried to drown out his livestream of the event by being extra-woke douchebags that scream and cough over things they don’t like.
“When asked about the sizable chunk of the population who thinks that equal pay is a non-issue, Patel suggests that it may come from a lack of first-hand experience.
“If you’re not living it,” he says, “maybe you’re blissfully unaware.”
Funny how that happens when the status quo happens to be your friend.
Not really surprising, but its nice to see fact emerging past the babble of his rabid dudish fanbase.
“In summary, even though the political function of Enuma Elish is obvious and important enough to have been mentioned by three of Peterson’s own sources — Heidel, Campbell, and Neumann — it only figures into Maps of Meaning in the form of a dismissive footnote that appears to miss the point of what it dismisses. In 12 Rules for Life, that dismissal resurfaces as a straw man argument that utterly fails to engage with the history all three of his sources were referencing. By Peterson’s own admission, his interest lies not in accurately grasping the historical context of myth, but in using myth to support preconceived notions about archetypes as “eternal ‘categories’ of imagination.” And yet his evidence for the primacy of those categories comes from the myths themselves, leaving us with a tail-biting bout of circular reasoning that calls to mind the illustration of the ouroboros that Peterson uses to illustrate the concept of chaos.
If Peterson effectively demonstrates anything with his reading of Enuma Elish, it’s that his personal philosophy regarding the entire nature of human consciousness maps neatly onto a patriarchal myth cobbled together from disparate sources in order to justify a power grab. He’s wrong about mapping the universe of human experience onto this story for the same reason fundamentalist Christians often have incorrect notions about the Bible—he completely ignores how the stories got here, and imagines instead that they are simply evidence of some cosmic, eternal truth that just so happens to line up with his politics.
[…]
It is not chaos, but our fear and visceral disgust toward the idea of chaos undermining civilization — often stemming from a lack of familiarity with what we fear — that drives us to build prisons, wage wars, and develop weapons which are the embodiment of all-consuming fire. Because we do not conceptualize the earth and its natural cycles as sacred, we disregard treaties made with the Indigenous peoples whose lands we have colonized and arrest those who designate themselves “water protectors.” Peterson’s philosophy, while it may inspire motivation at the individual level, is a deadly engine of status quo maintenance and self-justification at the cultural level. It is an ideology that denies it is ideology; hissing insults and flinging lawsuits at those who challenge its god-like powers of complacency.
All of that said, I do not believe that everyone who has found himself helped by Peterson’s fatherly counsel is totally deluded, at least not insurmountably. There is value in standing up straight with your shoulders back; it just can’t necessarily be read as a primal decree from ancient Mesopotamia. The cult of capitalism dictates that competitiveness is hard-wired into us to the exclusion of all other virtues, but there is also evidence that our ability to share and cooperate has played a formative role in our evolutionary development. One of Jordan Peterson’s strengths is that he seems to understand how confirmation bias and unconscious motivations structure our belief systems, at least in theory. When he fails, it’s because he has forgotten to turn this wisdom on himself.”
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