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That was my first big construction job ever. I didn’t even know that when huge excavators swing, they got a counterweight that’s wider than the tracks. So these guys would grab me and be like, “Yo, motherfucker,” when this thing would swing around. I came off a fucking ranch into that. I didn’t thi…

In 1909, the socialist publisher Charles Kerr published Connolly’s powerful, closely argued pamphlet Socialism Made Easy, which combined propaganda for the socialist cause with a call for Industrial Unionism as the way forward. He insisted that “it is not the theorists who make history; it is histo…

One place where the IWW had been successful was in Goldfield, Nevada, where the WFM had established an IWW local and unionised the whole town, starting with the newsboys. As the IWW newspaper proclaimed they had organised “miners, engineers, clerks, stenographers, teamsters, dishwashers, waiters”, …

On Tuesday 27 June 1905, Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) called the first and founding convention of the IWW to order. He told the 200 delegates and observers assembled in Brand’s Hall, Chicago, that they had come together “to confederate the workers of this country into a wo…

There’s a sentence of Alice Miller’s looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: “Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.” It’s the main thing I’ve learne…