Capital’s war on the working class w/ Prof. Chad Pearson and Prof. Ahmed White (G&R 168)

“The remedy” to labor troubles, said J. West Goodwin, a Missouri businessman and newspaperman “is a counter organization.”

In a fascinating conversation around the history of capital and labor, we dive deep into the business sector's remedies to workers organizing unions, blacks seeking greater liberation and other forms of progress. We talk about laws criminalizing syndicalism and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), vigilante groups from the Ku Klux Klan to committees of "law and order" doing the bidding of the ruling class and private security forces that the bosses hire to repress labor organizing.  We also discuss current events paralleling the earlier periods of labor and progressive repression. 

We talk about race, class and the iron heel of the state coming down on all those that resist it. 

We talk with Prof. Ahmed White at the University of Colardo Boulder, and Prof. Chad Pearson at Collin College about their forthcoming books (see the bios below) on the topics. 

Bios//

Ahmed White is the Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor of Law at the University of Colorado-Boulder where he has taught labor and criminal law since 2000. He is the author of The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016) as well as a great many law review articles, book chapters, reviews, and essays.  His current book, Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers, will be published later this year by the University of California Press and he is presently at work on another book, this one about communist organizing and labor repression in the 1920s and 1930s.

Chad Pearson teaches history at Collin College, a community college in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and is co-editor with Rosemary Feurer (pronounced Foyer) of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). He has published essays in Counterpunch, History Compass, Jacobin, Journal of Labor and Society, Labor History, Labour/Le Travail, and Monthly Review. His current book, Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press later this year.

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Outro// "Union Burying Ground" by Woody Guthrie

Links//

• Pearson: Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (https://bit.ly/3zQ8anh)
• White: Under the Iron Heel The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical (https://bit.ly/3n301Ev)
• The Ku Klux Klan Was Also a Bosses’ Association (https://bit.ly/3y8tQtn)
• The Right-Wing Violence Trump Has Encouraged Has Deep Roots in American History (https://bit.ly/3tSrr3v)
• Memorial Day, 1937 (https://bit.ly/39Fo611)
• Law, Labor, and the Hard Edge of Progressivism: The Legal Repression of Radical Unionism and the American Labor Movement's Long Decline (https://bit.ly/3HEbW55)

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This is a Green and Red Podcast  (@PodcastGreenRed) production. Produced by Bob (@bobbuzzanco) and Scott  (@sparki1969).  “Green and Red Blues"  by Moody.  Editing by Isaac.