#OnThisDay, July 28, in 2002, nine coal miners trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine in Somerset County, PA, were rescued after 77 hours underground (depicted in The Pennsylvania Miners' Story, 2002)

#Movies #Film #Miners #ThePennsylvaniaMiners #TodayInHistory #WorkingClassHistory #QuecreekMine #Histodons @histodons

seizing the means of production :anarchistflag:
Listening to the Working Class History podcast about the Portuguese revolution of 1974 where workers took over factories and managed them collectively, I wondered to myself if this could ever happen today? Well it can, and did at an automotive factory in Florence, Italy, this year. When the bosses made the workers redundant the workers occupied the factory, and have raised money to buy back the factory with the plan to form a workers’ cooperative building cargo bikes.

https://novaramedia.com/2023/05/26/bosses-tried-to-sack-these-automotive-workers-so-they-took-over-their-factory/

https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e41-42-the-portuguese-revolution/
#cooperative #WorkingClassHistory #collectivism #NovaraMedia

#PeasantsRebellion
#JohnBall
#WorkingClassHistory

More here: https://libcom.org/library/5-john-wycliffe-english-peasants%E2%80%99-rebellion

@workingclasshistory

“Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.” #workingclasshistory #slavery #karlmarx
https://blackd.substack.com/p/atlantic-chattel-slavery-and-english

From my #WorkingClassHistory calendar:

29 May 1972

Dalit Panthers formed, India

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_Panthers

This is a very normal May Day procession in Great Chart in Kent during the 1900s... until you look closer... and realise someone went a bit gothic with the papier maché.

#gothic #MayDay #SeasonalCustoms #folklore #history #WorkingClassHistory #EnglishHistory #UK #England #Kent #GreatChart

Other historical mass trespasses include the 17th century Diggers who attempted to reclaim common land in Surrey, Kent, Northamptonshire, and Buckinghamshire (and they claimed in at least six further counties), where they were met with murderous violence from land-lords and the state. Their presence was erased so thoroughly that historians are unable to trace exactly where Diggers lived. Today St George's Hill is a 4 square km (965 acre) private gated community with some of the most expensive housing in the UK - in 2014 at least 72 properties, £282+ million of assets, were registered offshore in tax havens.

Before the Diggers squatted St George's Hill it was probably "Crown land" acquired by the monarchy through invasion, conquest, confiscation, English "clearances", the Harrying of the North, and evictions from newly enclosed "Crown land" such as "royal hunting forests". Which brings us back around to the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass on land kept exclusively by the ruling classes for hunting and intensive farming of birds for shooting. /end thread

In 1649, to St. George's Hill,
A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's will.
They defied the landlords. They defied the laws.
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.
"We come in peace," they said, "to dig and sow.
We come to work the land in common, and to make the waste land grow.
This Earth divided we will make whole so it will be a common treasury for all."

Nancy Kerr sings The World Turned Upside Down, by Leon Rosselson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJlWymJFY7k

#FolkMusic #FolkSong #Folk #music #rambling #hiking #RightToRoam #trespass #UK #England #Surrey #WorkingClassHistory #EnglishHistory #diggers #commons #TaxAvoidance #TaxEvasion #TaxTheRich #AbolishTheMonarchy #NotMyKing

The 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass wasn't the first, although its ripples were significant. There were trespasses involving over ten thousand people up Winter Hill in Lancashire in 1896: “Will yo' come o' Sunday morning, for a walk o'er Winter Hill? Ten thousand went last Sunday, But there's room for thousands still! Oh the moors are rare and bonny, And the heather's sweet and fine, And the roads across the hilltops are the people's - yours and mine!”

#rambling #hiking #RightToRoam #trespass #UK #England #Lancashire #WorkingClassHistory

On the anniversary of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, which also happens to be St George's Day for those who celebrate, it's important to ask why we commoners have been dispossessed of our land rights: the right to roam; the right to forage for and grow our own food; the right to living space; and the right to stop ecocide and ecocidal action.

Variations of the following poem have been recorded since at least the 19th century but land theft by enclosure began centuries earlier.

The law condemns the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The Askew Sisters - Goose & Common

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJk9EutQ6s

#FolkMusic #FolkSong #Folk #music #rambling #hiking #RightToRoam #trespass #UK #England #WorkingClassHistory #ecocide #ClimateCrisis #commons #StGeorgesDay

I've watched this three times now... a short, fun, song filled, documentary about the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, by the Young'uns with Boff Whalley, for the anniversary tomorrow. I've mentioned all the individual songs in the above post except The Great Tomorrow by the Young'uns (on their concept album The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff)

From mine and mill and field and shipyard, from behind the company door,
From the playing fields of Eton to the warrens of the poor,
From Helsinki to Buenos Aires our reasons are the same,
From Melbourne to Vancouver now we have come to Spain,
For if you sing a song of freedom then it does not matter where,
If your song is freedom then you sing it everywhere.

The Young'uns and Boff Whalley on Kinder Scout (20mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0LNS2mv0fc

#FolkMusic #FolkSong #Folk #music #rambling #hiking #RightToRoam #trespass #Derbyshire #PeakDistrict #UK #England #WorkingClassHistory

I've watched this three times now... a short, fun, song filled, documentary about the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, by the Young'uns with Boff Whalley, for the anniversary tomorrow. I've mentioned all the individual songs in the above post except The Great Tomorrow by the Young'uns (on their concept album The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff)

From mine and mill and field and shipyard, from behind the company door,
From the playing fields of Eton to the warrens of the poor,
From Helsinki to Buenos Aires our reasons are the same,
From Melbourne to Vancouver now we have come to Spain,
For if you sing a song of freedom then it does not matter where,
If your song is freedom then you sing it everywhere.

The Young'uns and Boff Whalley on Kinder Scout (20mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0LNS2mv0fc

#FolkMusic #FolkSong #Folk #music #rambling #hiking #RightToRoam #trespass #Derbyshire #PeakDistrict #UK #England #WorkingClassHistory

Anniversary of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass on Sunday 23 April so here's Commoners Choir with From Below. If you want more related folk songs then there's Manchester Rambler by Ewan MacColl, and the rearranged version by John Tams, and Trespassers by the Young'uns (on their album Tiny Notes on Bandcamp). And there's a short, song filled, documentary about the Kinder Scout trespass by the Young'uns with Boff Whalley on youtube. If you can't find links for any of these let me know and I'll post them.

For every footprint on the land,
For all the banners and the banned,
Should we keep to the landlord’s plans? Hell no!
‘Cos real change comes from below.

From Below - Commoners Choir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLkIlWD1PKs

#FolkMusic #FolkSong #Folk #music #rambling #hiking #RightToRoam #trespass #Derbyshire #PeakDistrict #UK #England #WorkingClassHistory

“The dancers wear white shirts... dark trousers and belt.The blade from hilt to tip is 19 inches in length... The Betty, a man-woman, wears a bonnet & a dress of coloured stuff & carries a rapper. Holding her sword horizontally above her head, harlequin-fashion, she dances up and down outside the dancers, throughout the performance, encouraging them from time to time with wild and uncouth cries.” (Cecil Sharp).#folkmusic #workingclasshistory #folkdance #dragqueen #miners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEvhAIxzKVo&list=RDNEvhAIxzKVo&start_radio=1

#workingclasshistory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JydjP23QAVc

A meter maid photo bombs a fashion photo shoot at Fulham Road. London, 1967. Credit to Old London Photographs, FB page. #workingclasshistory

#OnThisDay, 11 Mar 1928, hundreds of women march through London to a Communist Party rally, demanding better working conditions.

[photo via https://redflagwalks.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/pawky-comments-in-downing-street-the-march-of-the-women-on-11th-march-1928/ ]

#WomenInHistory #WorkingClassHistory #BritishHistory #Histodons #WomensHistoryMonth

The archive of a magazine chronicling the lives of Britain’s black community during the 70s and 80s will be available online for the first time.

Race Today magazine, first launched in 1973, combined radical journalism with campaigning zeal to shine a light on the issues affecting Britain’s black communities, as well as providing insight and commentary on politics in Britain and abroad.

#RaceToday #BlackBritain #BlackHistory #RadicalHistory #WorkingClassHistory #History

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/race-today-archive-chronicling-black-britons-lives-launches-online

I've now read to page 332 of The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes and realised there's a 100% chance this was written by a public school "educated" person so I googled and, yes, he's "public school and Cambridge".

On page 332 Hayes berates the poors for "dehumanising" the rich, without giving any relevant examples, and in the same paragraph dehumanises the non-rich as "robotic" in his characterisation of plans for fair taxation as "tired, robotic resentment". Then in the next paragraph he dehumanises the culture of English poors as a "stagnant pool of loosely defined resentment" to erase our humanity and intellectual culture, as he has done throughout the book to the working classes, GRT people, Black people, women, and everyone else who dares to deviate from the permitted straight and narrow path of Posh White Men Like Nick Hayes.

Hayes also claims that what he acknowledges as a humorous slogan, "Eat the Rich", is an unfair "focus on the character of the rich"... I mean, yes, if the characteristic is "rich" because that's the point, lmao. How else can we focus on the fact that extremely "rich" people shouldn't exist in a fair society without describing the fact of their economic privilege? Another example of Hayes trying to ban useful words and terms, exactly as he tried to erase "patriarchy" and "racism" earlier in the book (antizygonist racism against GRT people first, which he claimed is about "mobility" not racialisation/ethnicity, and then anti-Black racism, which he claimed is about the economics of enslavement - erm, yes, that incentivised codifying anti-Blackness but anti-Blackness already existed in medieval European culture and before, just read the literature). I don't want, for example, Richard Drax taxed fairly because he's an unpleasant character, I want him taxed because it's fair and reasonable to tax the rich. (And a solution to overconfidently ignorant ex-public school boys is to tax public schools as businesses and tax businesses fairly.)

This book is poor-hating classist propaganda which erases whole groups of disprivileged and oppressed people. Hayes has been employed as a "communications" professional and presumably knows what he's doing when he dehumanises working class people as "robotic" "stagnant pools", while he reaps rewards from the interests he's serving: bestselling book and media jobs (and probably an Order of the British Empire if he stays on this career path).

P.S. For some reason these 386 pages of propaganda notably fail to record successful challenges to the status quo... almost as if the author doesn't want you to know change is real and we can make it ourselves together.

#trespass #TheBookOfTrespass #RightToRoam #reading #books #WorkingClassHistory #SocialHistory #UK #classism #ClassWar #EatTheRich #taxation #dehumanisation

I've been spending some time with this amazing map from @workingclasshistory

Do yourself a favor and explore the map. Get inspired. Share it.

#WorkingClassHistory #labor #union #LaborStruggles #socialism #antifa #AntiFascist #WorkersRights #justice #history #map #strike

https://map.workingclasshistory.com/#map=0.44/0/-73.5&%26map=1.77/15.6/-25.7

@Llosgi Sorry to "well, actually", and it's a good poem, but... your version is adapted from a poem written by William Hutton in 1798:

"The crime is small, in man or woman,
Should they a goose steal from a common;
But what can plead that man's excuse
Who steals a common from a goose?"

#enclosures #inequality #SocialHistory #WorkingClassHistory #poetry