In the Spirit of Haymarket

In the spirit of Haymarket, over 200 of our brothers and sisters have chosen this past week to directly occupy the means of production in Chicago for the first time in over half a century. Workers from Chicago once again have shown us the way forward. But this is only the first step, only a beginning.

Over the past half century, the wealthy have openly engaged in ever more intensive class war against working people in this nation, and it is long past time we respond. We know how they talk about us on their golf courses, of surplus humanity, to be sold or disregarded, while they continue to live their privileged lives using the wealth and profits earned on the back of our labor and openly stolen from the public treasury.

It is long past time that they respect us as human beings, not children or slaves to be abused and socialized in their sick sociopathic ways. We must not let them successfully divide us, whether between migrant and local, by race or religion, or inter-generationally by having us sacrifice and disregard the needs of those who have retired with the same open contempt that they disregard us. These are their sick and twisted values, not ours!

The time has come to confront capital, not just for ourselves, but for our children, for their future. For it is about whether they will have the chance to live as free and eqaul human beings, whether we have a society where every human being matters, or a society where the needs of the many are sacrificed for the greed of a very few, where a very few live in obscene luxury at the expense of others, while most will live in absolute poverty.

We must organize, both individually and en masse. We must form worker committees at our workplaces, committees that can act fully independently but which will support others when needed for mass actions. Where unions still exist that do support our causes, we must support them. Where unions exist that have sold their leadership to capitalists, we must either reclaim or abandon them. For those needing help organizing, this is a good time to speak to those retirees that the capitalists wish us to sacrifice, as well support from those organizations, like for example the IWW, or even Hipatia, an international association I choose to participate in, all of which have good ideas of how to achieve workplace mobilization and free societies.

We must choose now to rescue ourselves, because nobody will rescue us, our families, or our children's futures.