Working Class Culture: The Culture of the Poor

 

Certain topics fail to enter our historical memory, or are barely mentioned. Such is the case with the working class culture that arose from the labour movement. There is a premeditated desire to ensure that the history of solidarity between the poor is permanently hidden, along with an attempt to hide how they have been capable of being agents of change in their own lives, constructing amazing realities from small beginnings.

Poor working class militants didn’t look exclusively to improve their material lot. Above all, they sought to generate a new culture that allowed them to create and sustain organisations that could bring about political and economic revolution. This coordinated action is summarised very well in the phrase of one member of the First International: “Man lives only from political and economic demands”. Benoit Malon continues by saying that “a political and economic transformation cannot be separated from a moral revolution”. This spirit remains intact in the slogan of the Spaniards present at that same internationalist meeting: “Misery and ignorance are the main enemies of the people. Wage war on ignorance and misery! To fight ignorance, revolutionise newspapers and books; to end misery, encourage cooperation and collaboration”.

The components of this working-class culture had an overwhelming sense of morality. This explains why the most conscious militants placed immense importance on their own personal conduct and lifestyle. This was an expression of the comprehensive character of the culture they defended. Ricardo Mella illustrates this morality: “I remember the courageous combatants of the past with great admiration! They were serious, upright, of unfailing morality, and capable of great audacity without resorting to ridiculous rudeness. They were thoughtful and reflective to the point of never compromising the interests of the proletariat, fighting for their ideas with determination and without weakness. They spread their ideas tirelessly but without rowdiness, and when the moments of struggle arrived, they would never turn their backs or beg for mercy if defeated.

The history of the workers’ movement has been a history of liberation – of changing situations of oppression and injustice into situations of emancipation. However, we must not hide the fact that it has also been a history of betrayal, with workers’ organisations choosing bureaucracy over commitment to activism, and alliance with the powers that be over freedom.

Qatar: the migrant workers forced to work for no pay in World Cup host country - video

  Qatar, one of the richest countries on the planet, will be hosting the World Cup in 2022. But much of the Gulf state's expansion is being built by some of the poorest migrant workers in the world. In the worst cases, employees are not being paid and work in conditions of forced labour. Each month dozens of young Nepalese migrant workers are returning home in coffins

"The leadership has failed. I believe in masses"

Luxemburg's last known words, written on the evening of her murder, were about her belief in the masses, and in what she saw as the inevitability of revolution:

Luxemburg speaking to a crowd in 1907.

"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror:I was, I am, I shall be

Rosa Luxemburg

Simone Weil

Saturday, september 7 . Day o fasting and prayer for PEACE IN SYRIA

To be GOVERNED

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

few own the many. HELEN KELLER

"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease."

HELEN KELLER 

IWW member, 1911

Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)

Questions from a Worker who Reads’ by Bertolt Brecht

Statue Berthold-Brecht-Platz (Mitte)

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.

Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

And Babylon, many times demolished

Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome

Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis

The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?

Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?

Frederick the Second won the Seven Years War. Who
Else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?

Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.

‘Questions from a Worker who Reads’ by Bertolt Brecht

1 May: International Workers' Day

International Workers' Day (also known as May Day) is a celebration of the international labour movement. May 1 is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated unofficially in many other countries. International Workers' Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago. The police were trying to disperse a public assembly during a general strike for the eight-hour workday, when an unidentified person threw a bomb at them. The police reacted by firing on the workers, killing four demonstrators. "Reliable witnesses testified that all the pistol flashes came from the center of the street, where the police were standing, and none from the crowd. Moreover, initial newspaper reports made no mention of firing by civilians. A telegraph pole at the scene was filled with bullet holes, all coming from the direction of the police." In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. Subsequently, the May Day Riots of 1894 occurred. In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." The congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers." In many countries, the working classes sought to make May Day an official holiday, and their efforts largely succeeded. May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations. In the United States and Canada, however, the official holiday for workers is Labor Day in September. In 1955, the Catholic Church dedicated May 1 to "Saint Joseph The Worker". The Catholic Church considers Saint Joseph the patron saint of workers and craftsmen. However, do our students know why 1st May is a day off? Lesson Plan: 1 May, International Workers' Day Objectives - Getting students to understand their connection to the history of organized labour. - Getting students to reflect on the organized non-violent fight of international workers’ in order to get rights we are currently losing. - Getting students to consider ways to apply what they have learned to improve working conditions today.

OUR LABOR CREATES ALL WEALTH