Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: an international day for celebrating the achievements of workers and the struggle for organized labor.

You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not so; the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted and promoted in an effort to throw a bone to labor while erasing the radicalism implicit in May Day (a holiday declared by workers, in honor of the campaign for the eight hour day and in memory of the Haymarket martyrs). As a low-calorie substitute for workers’ struggle to come into their own, we get a celebration of labor … so long as it rigidly adheres to the AFL-line orthodoxy of collective bargaining, appeasement, and power to the union bosses and government bureaucrats. That this holiday emerged and solidified at exactly the same historical moment as the unholy alliance of conservative (statist, nativist, racist, and misogynist) unionism with corporate barons and the Progressive regulation movement is no coincidence. That AFL-line unions continue to use Labor Day as a chance to co-opt the historic successes of radical, libertarian unions in campaigns such as the fight for the eight-hour day or the five-day week is no coincidence, either.

Too many of my comrades on the Left fall into the trap of taking the Labor Day version of history for granted: modern unions are trumpeted as the main channel for the voice of workers; the institutionalization of the system through the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and the ensuing spike in union membership during the New Deal period, are regarded as one of the great triumphs for workers of the past century.

You may not be surprised to find out that I don’t find this picture of history entirely persuasive. The Wagner Act was the capstone of years of government promotion of conservative, AFL-line unions in order to subvert the organizing efforts of decentralized, uncompromising, radical unions such as the IWW and to avoid the previous year’s tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. The labor movement as we know it today was created by government bureaucrats who effectively created a massive subsidy program for conservative unions which followed the AFL and CIO models of organizing–which emphatically did not include general strikes or demands for worker ownership of firms. Once the NRLB-recognized unions had swept over the workforce and co-opted most of the movement for organized labor, the second blow of the one-two punch fell: government benefits always mean government strings attached, and in this case it was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which pulled the activities of the recognized unions firmly into the regulatory grip of the federal government. Both the internal culture of post-Wagner mainstream unions, and the external controls of the federal labor regulatory apparatus, have dramatically hamstrung the labor movement for the past half-century. Union methods are legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes (which cannot legally be expanded to secondary strikes, and which can be, and have been, broken by arbitrary fiat of the President). Union hiring halls are banned. Union resources have been systematically sapped by banning closed shop contracts, and encouraging states to ban union shop contracts–thus forcing unions to represent free-riding employees who do not join them and do not contribute dues. Union demands are effectively constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and conditions. And, since modern unions can do so little to achieve their professed goals, and since their professed goals have been substantially lowered anyway, unionization of the workforce continues its decades-long slide.

May Day is a celebration of the original conception of the labor movement, as expressed by anarchist organizers such as Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, Benjamin Tucker, and others: a movement for workers to come into their own, by banding together, supporting one another, and taking direct action in the form of boycotts, work stoppages, general strikes, and the creation of workers’ spaces such as local co-operatives and union hiring halls. The spirit was best expressed by John Brill’s famous exhortation to Dump the bosses off your back–by which he did not mean to go to a government mediator and get them to make the boss sit down with you and work out a slightly more beneficial arrangement. Dump the bosses off your back! meant: organize and create local institutions that let you bypass the bosses. Negotiate with them if it’ll do some good; ignore them if it won’t. The signal achievements of the labor movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th century were achievements in this spirit: the campaigns that won the 8 hour day and the weekend off in many workplaces, for example, emerged from a unilateral work stoppage by rank-and-file workers, declared by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, and organized especially by the explicitly anarchist International Working People’s Association, after legislative efforts by the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor failed. The stagnant, or even backsliding, state of organized labor over the past half century is the direct result of government colonization and the ascendency of government-subsidized unions.

Don’t get me wrong: the modern labor movement, for all its flaws and limitations, is the reflection (no matter how distorted) of an honorable effort; it deserves our support and does some good. Union bosses, corporate bosses, and government bureaucrats may work to co-opt organized labor to their own ends, but rank-and-file workers have perfectly good reasons to support AFL-style union organizing: modern unions may not be accountable enough to rank-and-file workers, but they are more accountable than corporate bureaucracy; modern unions bosses don’t care enough about giving workers direct control in their own workplace, but they care more than corporate bosses, who make most of their living by denying workers such control. The labor movement, like all too many other honorable movements for social justice in the 20^th century, has become a prisoner of politics: a political situation has been created in which the most rational thing for most workers to do is to muddle through with a co-opted and carefully regulated labor movement that helps them in some ways but undermines their long-term prospects. It doesn’t make sense to respond to a situation like that with blanket denunciations of organized labor; the best thing to do is to support our fellow workers within the labor movement as it is constrained today, but also to work to change the political situation that constrains it, and to set it free. That means loosening the ties that bind the union bosses to the corporate and government bureaucrats, by working to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, and abolish the apparatus of the NLRB, and working to build free, vibrant, militant unions once again.

Dump the bosses off your back. Free the unions, and all political prisoners!

I had some far-off hopes that the general atmosphere of backstabbing chaos currently reigning within the state GOP might have derailed the awful abortion bills pending in the Alabama legislature from moving forward. Unfortunately not; the majorities managed to put everything else aside and force through a vote before the end of the session, and just sent the governor two bills directly intended to obstruct abortion access in the state of Alabama. They haven’t yet been signed into law, and are awaiting the governor’s approval. Here is the latest in Alabama Republican reproductive regulation:

• SB 363 is a procedure ban on Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) abortions. Since 2015, a number of state anti-abortion outfits have been pushing these bills (here called Dismemberment Abortions, a propagandistic phrase coined by anti-abortion activists, parallel to the coining and use of Partial Birth Abortion to push Intact Dilation and Extraction procedure bans over the last two decades). Since they already won a federal prohibition on the most common procedure used for second-trimester abortions after 20 weeks, they’re now pushing for state prohibitions on the most common procedure used for second-trimester abortions before 20 weeks.^[1] If they have their way, some day it will be technically legal to get an abortion in the state of Alabama, it’ll just be illegal to use any actually existing medical technique to get one.

• SB 205 is a bizarre TRAP law that would prohibit the Alabama Department of Health from issuing or renewing licenses to abortion clinics located within 2,000 feet or less of a public school. This is the same perimeter that the state uses to exclude convicted sex offenders from living or working near a school. The bill’s sponsor claims that it is intended to prevent children from seeing the chaos that surrounds abortion clinics. By chaos, he means anti-abortion protesters; when a howling crowd of anti-abortion protesters harasses your building every business day, Republican state legislators decide that instead of convincing the anti-abortion to move, you have to pick up and move your building. The bill appears deliberately designed to force two of the five clinics in the state (Huntsville and Tuscaloosa) to shut down temporarily and undergo the expense of relocating. The Huntsville clinic in particular is in its current location, near a public middle school, because two years ago the state legislature forced it to close down and relocate there from its former downtown location with a previous TRAP law mandating special building standards for abortion clinics which were impossible to meet in their downtown location. So forcing them to shut their doors for months and relocate to their present location near a Huntsville middle school, the state legislature turns around and says Ha, nope, not there. Some day, if they have their way, you’ll technically be legally permitted to get an abortion in Alabama, it’s just that there will be not a square inch of land left in the state where anyone can actually operate a clinic.

These bills continue years of a deliberate policy of harassment by constant, ever-changing, unpredictable, ever-more-invasive hyperregulation of clinics, by anti-abortion legislators who pile on layer after layer of invasive hyperregulation, with an overt intent to destroy de facto access to abortion in Alabama without ever enacting a formal de jure ban that would be overturned in court. While politicians continue to pretend that abortion rights aree primarily a political battle conducted between those who favor permissive policies and those who favor restrictive policies, in real life, on the ground, the most dangerous threat to abortion and reproductive healthcare is the ever-growing, ever-shifting expansive power of the state to harass and regulate providers out of existence through licensure requirements and invasive, micromanaging targeted regulation.

The ACLU has a petition up urging the governor to veto these invasive laws:

1. ^[1]There are no exceptions to the ban for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest, there is no general exception for abortions necessary for the health of the mother; the only exception is that the procedure is allowed only if necessary to prevent serious health risk, defined in the text as meaning a condition that so complicates her medical condition that it necessitates the abortion of her pregnancy to avert her death or to avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.↩

So I’m happy to announce that brand-new print copies of Kevin Carson’s recently-released fourth book, The Desktop Regulatory State (2016) are now available for purchase from the Distro of the Libertarian Left, hot off the presses and part of the Bookshelf of the Libertarian Left trade-paperback book series. Check it out; here’s a bit about the book:

The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks

Kevin A. Carson, 2016.

Defenders of the modern state often claim that it's needed to protect us — from terrorists, invaders, bullies, and rapacious corporations. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, famously argued that the state was a source of "countervailing power" that kept other social institutions in check. But what if those "countervailing" institution — corporations, government agencies and domesticated labor unions — in practice collude more than they "countervail" each other? And what if network communications technology and digital platforms now enable us to take on all those dinosaur hierarchies as equals — and more than equals. In The Desktop Regulatory State, Kevin Carson shows how the power of self-regulation, which people engaged in social cooperation have always possessed, has been amplified and intensifed by changes in consciousness — as people have become aware of their own power and of their ability to care for themselves without the state — and in technology — especially information technology. Drawing as usual on a wide array of insights from diverse disciplines, Carson paints an inspiring, challenging, and optimistic portrait of a humane future without the state, and points provocatively toward the steps we need to take in order to achieve it. [Read more]

Kevin A. Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and a prolific writer on subjects including free-market anti-cap­it­al­ism, the in­div­idualist anarchist tradition, grassroots technology and radical unionism. He is the author of "The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand", Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, and The Desktop Regulatory State. He keeps a blog at mutualist.blogspot.com and frequently publishes short columns and longer research reports for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

Since my article on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Walmart, and alt-labor is appearing this morning at Reason.com, a fair number of y’all passing by may be readers who are more or less new to the blog.

So–welcome! I’m Charles W. Johnson; often, I write online under the handle Rad Geek. (Not because I’m trying to hide who I am, but because it suits me, and because sometimes it helps me avoid being confused with some folks I am not.) I’m an individualist anarchist, living in Alabama. I write this blog, I co-edited (together with Gary Chartier) the left-wing market anarchist anthology, Markets Not Capitalism (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia: 2011). I write occasional columns for libertarian and anarchist outlets including The Freeman, Reason.com, Free Voices, and The Industrial Radical. I publish a lot of small-press anarchist and left-libertarian literature through the Distro of the Libertarian Left. If you’re new to the blog here, and trying to get oriented, here’s some things you might find interesting to read, which will give you some broad idea of where I’m coming from, and what I care about.

I’ve written a lot over the years about the C.I.W., both basic event coverage of some of their main campaigns, and also a fair amount of my own commentary on what I take to be the significance of their use of social protest and state-free, market-based methods in their activism.^[1] If you’ve come here from the article and you want to read more about the C.I.W. or the context of its campaigns, I have some links, both to my own writing and also to a number of other sources that I consulted while preparing the column on the recent Walmart victory. Those are at the bottom of the post, though, so feel free to scroll right down past the following, which is mostly just orientation on me and where I’m coming from.

Speaking generally, I am a market anarchist: I am radically opposed to any invasion of economic liberty and to the state as such, and I am in favor of freed markets, free exchange, voluntary association, open competition and individual ownership of property. But, unlike many pro-capitalist libertarians, I argue that one of the likely and important features of freed markets is their tendency to cut against socioeconomic inequalities, to provide a space for economic alternatives to status-quo corporate capitalism, and to undermine and replace traditional top-down firms or employer-employee relationships. The kind of things I believe are often called free market anticapitalism or left-wing market anarchism. For more on what I mean by all that, and why I believe it:

• Pigs as a Paradigm (17 August 2013) and We Know Other Marketplaces (20 August 2013)

• Mutual Markets vs. Corporate Capitalism: A Formulation (10 October 2010)

• Introduction to Markets Not Capitalism (14 October 2011)

• Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism (May 2010)

• Writing about the C.I.W.’s boycotts, and responding to some common, but I think misguided, objections from fellow libertarians, actually played a major role in clarifying these issues for me; see, in particular, my discussion with Dan D’Amico and Art Carden in ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! (23 March 2005) and in Anarquistas por La Causa (31 March 2005).

I also think that rambunctious nonviolent social activism, worker-owned enterprises and radical labor unions, based on voluntary association without government privilege, and an anti-authoritarian culture of worker solidarity, are all an important part of a flourishing free market.

• On free-market unionism, in general, Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)! (1 May 2004)

• And also In reply to a reply by J.H. Huebert and Walter Block

• On free-market social and economic activism generally, We Are Market Forces (12 June 2009)

• Toward a Really Social Safety Net (23 March 2013)

• I’m against Civil Rights Acts because I’m for Civil Rights Movements, in The Freeman (September 2010) on direct action and anti-racist activism

• Radical healthcare reform (25 October 2007) and Universal health care does not mean government health care (28 May 2012), on corporate healthcare and grassroots alternatives

Since Walmart is at the center of the story, I should say that, while I am immensely pleased to see Walmart signing an agreement for the Fair Food Program, I think that many of the common criticisms of Walmart’s business model, exploitative labor practices, and economic dominance are justified, and that I would be quite happy in general to see Walmart constantly confronted and challenged with some really vigorous and uncompromising competition, social criticism and alt-labor organizing and activism. I say this not because I object to business, or to low prices, or whatever, but because I object to highly centralized state-capitalist business models that depend on, and heavily exploit, corporate welfare, eminent domain, and other favors from corporatist local governments.

• Écrasez l’Wal-Mart (2 May 2005)

• Three notes for the critics of the critics of apologists for Wal-Mart (25 April 2009)

• Enclosure comes to Los Angeles (14 June 2006)

More broadly, much of my writing on economic questions aims to focus attention on the relationship between the economic privileges granted by the State, class, poverty, and corporate power.

• Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It, in The Freeman (December 2007)

• Trickle-Down Politics: The Only Good Government Is No Government, in The Freeman (23 August 2010)

• On crutches and crowbars (6 March 2008), on why left-libertarian views on economic privilege and labor do not imply any compromise or gradualism on the abolition of all statist controls, including regulations that supposedly help workers.

I am an Anarchist. I don’t care about smaller government, or limited government, or about Constitutions, or about electing libertarian candidates to political office. I am the farthest thing possible from a conservative. I believe in abolishing the State as such, and in doing so through the practice of education, solidarity, and direct action.

• GT 2010-03-02: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity discusses at length why I am an anarchist, and why I think that limited government is actually an incoherent and destructive goal for libertarians to adopt.

• GT 2008-01-25: Take the A-Train discusses why I think that market anarchists should make their primary political alliances with other anarchists, not with Constitutionalists or minimal-statists.

• GT 2008-01-26: In which I fail to be reassured

• GT 2009-02-07: Counter-economic optimism

• GT 2008-09-17: The statist We don’t, GT 2005-09-17: International Ignore the Constitution Day, and GT 2007-12-28: A Higher Law Than the Constitution explain why I'm not a Constitutionalist, and why I think appeals to the paper Constitution are either useless or harmful struggles for liberty and peace.

• GT 2009-04-04: The State of the Debate, GT 2008-02-25: I am shocked!–shocked!–to find that politics is going on in here! and GT 2008-09-10: The Stupid Campaign Season Distraction and GT 2013-08-17: Direction of Fit (Progressive President Edition) discuss problems with electoral politics, as a strategy, that I take to be built in to the structure of partisan elections.

• GT 2013-12-23: The Age of Bronze, on why conservative nostalgia for the old America is a pure fantasy of social privilege.

As an Anarchist, and as a human being, I am utterly and irreconcilably opposed to all forms of government warfare.

• GT 2009-01-25: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? and GT 2011-05-04: Military targets discuss the wars inflicted on the world under our current Progressive Peace President.

• GT 2005-08-09: A day that will live in infamy, GT 2007-12-26: Bomb after bomb, and GT 2009-01-05: In which commentary becomes copy-and-paste explain some of the reasons why I’m not just opposed to The War here and now, but in fact condemn all government wars, on principle, and in all nations and all ages. I don’t believe in good wars and bad wars; in fact, I think that the wars people tend to be most invested in passing off as good wars — wars like World War II or the American Civil War — are typically the worst, most ghastly wars in recorded history.

I believe that the nationalistic violence of the warfare State is closely linked with the paramilitary patrols, police state, and nationalistic violence of government border controls — which are nothing other than international apartheid. See for example:

• GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis (on the use of government border laws against war refugees)
• GT 2008-01-31: Bordercrats Against Joy and Plenty (on government border controls in the perpetual military siege of Gaza)
• GT 2007-11-12: Sin Fronteras

I also believe that the violence of the U.S. government’s imperial military abroad is closely linked with the repressive violence of (increasingly militarized) paramilitary police forces within the U.S. See for example:

• GT 2013-08-08: By the book
• GT 2008-09-25: How cops see themselves
• GT 2008-09-19: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter…. (#6)
• GT 2008-05-10: Cops are here to protect you (#3)
• GT 2010-01-23: Siege mentality

And as a feminist I think that the violence of men’s wars and of men’s law enforcement are closely linked with the violent ideals of masculinity and patriarchy that men are brought up with in our society. For more, see:

• GT 2006-07-31: War and Manhood
• GT 2009-08-24: Rapists on patrol (#6) / Men in Uniform (#4)
• GT 2008-05-16: Women and the Invisible Fist
• Charles Johnson and Roderick Long (2005): Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

I’m against all forms of Intellectual Property restrictions, which represent not genuine forms of property, but a grant of monopoly privileges over the minds of other people — which I view both as tyrannical in themselves and also as immensely, lethally destructive in the effects of the coercive monopolies that they grant:

• Anticopyright (6 February 2013)

• GT 2005-07-06: Libertarians for Protectionism

• GT 2003-02-13: Patents kill, part III

Thanks for coming on down; I hope you stay a while, do some reading, and enjoy the blog. So, come, let us Reason together . . . .

Further reading on C.I.W., the Fair Food Program and Alt-Labor

As I mentioned, I’ve been following the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Program for over a decade now. Here are some other articles that I’ve written on C.I.W.:

• GT 2001-08-30: ¡Sí se puede!, on the Taco Bell boycott, and the UFW’s endorsement of CIW’s campaign
• GT 2005-03-23: ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!, on CIW’s victory in the Taco Bell boycott, the non-state methods of the CIW, and a response to misguided attacks by Dan D’Amico and Art Carden
• GT 2005-03-31: Anarquistas por La Causa, more exchange with Dan D’Amico on labor organizing, capitalism, and free markets.
• GT 2007-04-19: The CIW wins a groundbreaking wages and conditions agreement with McDonalds
• GT 2007-11-30: Coalition of Immokalee Workers marches in Miami
• GT 2007-12-06: Solidaridad
• GT 2008-05-23: Victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the Burger King penny-per-pound campaign
• GT 2008-05-27: Even better than I thought: victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers against the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, too
• GT 2008-07-03: ¡Chipotle, escucha: estamos en la lucha!
• GT 2008-09-08: Slavery in Florida’s tomato fields
• GT 2008-09-10: Coalition of Immokalee Workers announces another victory in penny-per-pound agreement with Whole Foods
• GT 2008-12-02: Victory to the farmworkers! Coalition of Immokalee Workers announces that Subway has signed on to the penny-per-pound pass-through agreement
• GT 2012-10-19: Coalition of Immokalee Workers victory in Denver; struggle in Miami

And here are a bunch of things that other people have written, which I consulted at some point or another recently while preparing my column, and which you might find useful as elaboration, context or backdrop about C.I.W., the Fair Food campaign and the creative activism used to win it, or the development and direction of alt-labor groups in general.

• C.I.W., BREAKING NEWS: Walmart joins CIW’s Fair Food Program! (16 January 2014), original release from Coalition of Immokalee Workers about the agreement.
• C.I.W., American history happens in a watermelon shed… (January 20, 2014). ciw-online.org. Press round-up of reaction to the C.I.W.’s winning an agreement from Walmart.
• Associated Press, Wal-Mart joins initiative on farmworker pay in Fla (January 16, 2014). Washington Post.
• Bernice Young, Wal-Mart signs deal with farmworker program that fights harassment (January 16, 2014). The Center for Investigative Reporting. Report focusing on the code of conduct included in Fair Food Program certification, and especially its efforts to address problems of sexual harassment and rape in the fields.
• Willy Blackmore, Here’s Why Florida Farmworkers Are Thrilled About Walmart’s Extra Pennies (January 17, 2014). takepart.
• Barry Estabrook, Labor Takes Historic Stride Forward as Walmart Joins Fair Food Program (January 17, 2014). CivilEats.com.
• Katrina vanden Heuvel, Sweet Victory: Coalition of Immokalee Workers Wins (23 May 2008), an analysis from back when C.I.W. won an agreement from Burger King, including some interesting discussion by Eric Schlosser on the C.I.W.’s strategy of deliberately avoiding governmental or political mechanisms, in favor of market action.
• Fair Food Standards Council: Fair Food Program Report 2011-2013 (20 November 2013). 62pp detailed glossy PDF report with facts, figures, testimonials, and descriptions about the first two years of the full implementation of the Fair Food Program in Florida, how the program works, the amount of money passed through to workers in the first 3 years, the new code of conduct policies, etc.
• C.I.W.: PUBLIX, news on C.I.W.’s ongoing picket and protest campaign to convince the Publix grocery store chain to join the Fair Food Program.
• C.I.W. (video interview), Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) talks about Radio Conciencia (20 November 2012). YouTube. A nice interview about one of their ongoing community projects, a low-power FM station for community news and discussion, based in Immokalee. More about the low-power FM station at ciw-online, Radio Anniversary Report (9 December 2002), ciw-online.
• C.I.W., Community Center News (10 May 2009). ciw-online.org. Another community program, the community center that C.I.W. has built in Immokalee.
• Josh Eidelson, Alt-labor (29 January 2013). The American Prospect.
• Josh Eidelson, Who Should Fund Alt-Labor? (17 July 2013), The Nation.
• J. D. Tuccille, Organized Labor Discovers the Joys of Voluntary Association (16 October 2013), Reason.com.
• Robert VerBruggen, Why Conservatives Should Love Alt-Labor (16 October 2013), RealClearPolicy, and Reihan Salam, The Virtues of Alt-Labor (October 16, 2013), National Review. A couple of conservative views in favor of alt-labor, or at least the shift towards alt-labor and away from NLRB unionism.
• F. Vincent Vernuccio, Attack of the UFOs (4 September 2013), Capital Research Center, and WorkerCenters.com: Labor’s Loophole. A couple of fairly comical conservative attacks on alt-labor, in which conservative pro-business lobbies stick up for limited government and free enterprise by moaning about loopholes in the labor law, and asking Congress to pass more rigorous labor regulations so that the NLRB can intervene more often in labor disputes.
• WorkerCenters.com: Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Worker Center Watch: Coalition of Immokalee Workers, much the same, focused on the grave evils of the C.I.W., in particular, operating through unregulated market processes.
• Rural Migration News, Florida and NC: FLOC and CIW Boycotts (July 2010). Rural Migration News. Analysis of secondary boycott strategies by farmworkers’ groups, including CIW.
• OUR Walmart, OUR Walmart, Supply Chain and Warehouse Workers Renew Calls for Improving Jobs At Walmart (January 16, 2014). OUR Walmart, an alt-labor group which has been using pickets and high-profile walk-outs to organize associates on Walmart shopfloors, takes notice of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ win, and says that it intends to keep up its own pressure on Walmart for improved pay and conditions for employees working within Walmart retail shops, in spite of Walmart’s large-scale retaliatory firings.

1. ^[1]Full disclosure: besides having written frequently about the C.I.W., many years ago I was also indirectly involved in setting up an organizing workshop for C.I.W. that led to an impromptu radical cheerleading picket at our local Taco Bell in Auburn.↩

As we approach the New Year, we naturally think of ends, and of beginnings; what has changed, and what we have lost. So hey, libertarians, let’s all get together and feel sorry about the golden age of Limited Government and Individual Liberty we have lost. Remember the ancient liberties that we all enjoyed only 60 years ago, back in the 1950s? Back when all military-age men were subject to the draft, people were being interrogated before a permanent committee of Congress over their political beliefs, the FBI was conducting massive illegal wiretapping, surveillance and disruption against nonviolent civil rights activists, the National Security Agency was established as a completely secret surveillance arm of the federal government, it was illegal for married or unmarried women to buy basic birth control, it was made illegal for anyone to buy any scheduled drug without a doctor’s prescription, government was conducting medical experiments on unwilling human subjects^[1], Urban Renewal was demolishing the core of every major U.S. city to build government highways and housing projects, and massive community-wide immigration raids were terrorizing undocumented migrants throughout the Southwest.

Or like back in the 1940s when government spending was over 50% of GDP, nearly the entire consumer economy was subject to government rationing, Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps, and a secret government conspiracy was building an entire network of secret cities in order to build atomic bombs to drop on civilian centers.

Or like back in the 1930s when the entire institutional groundwork of the New Deal was being implemented, Roosevelt was making himself president-for-life, government attempted to seize all gold or silver bullion in private hands, the federal government first instituted the Drug War, Jim Crow was the law of the land, Congress created the INS, Jews fleeing the incipient Holocaust in Europe were being turned away by immigration authorities, and psychiatrists were using massive electric shocks or literally mutilating the brains of women and men confined to asylums.

Or like the 1920s when it was illegal to buy alcoholic drinks anywhere in the United States, tariff rates were nearly 40% on dutiable imports, Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered by the state of Massachusetts, the Invisible Empire Second Era Klan effectively took over the state governments of Colorado, Indiana, and Alabama, hundreds of black victims were massacred in race riots in Tulsa and Rosewood, when Congress created the Federal Radio Commission^[2], the US Border Patrol, passed the Emergency [sic] Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, and the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the authority of the state to forcibly sterilize women deemed “feeble-minded” or “promiscuous” for eugenic purposes.

Or the 1910s, when the federal government seized control of foreign-owned companies to facilitate production of chemical weapons, imposed the first-ever use of federal conscription to fight an overseas war, invaded Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico^[3], Russia, and Europe, passed criminal anarchy and criminal syndicalism statutes, tried and convicted hundreds of people for belonging to radical unions, imprisoned hundreds of people for protesting the draft during World War I (ordered by the President of the United States and upheld by the Supreme Court in one of its most radical anti-free-speech decisions), deported hundreds of people solely for holding anti-state political beliefs, the Mann Act made it illegal to “transport women across statelines for immoral purposes” [sic], the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and burned alive striking miners and their families in order to break a UMWA organizing campaign, and Congress created the Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, the Espionage Act, and the Sedition Act.

Or maybe like the 1900s. . . . .

1. ^[1]See also the biological and radiological experiments documented here, and the Guatemala syphilis experiment conducted from 1946-1948.↩
2. ^[2]Created in 1926; later converted into the Federal Communications Commission in 1934.↩
3. ^[3]In 1914, and then again in 1916-1917↩