Photographs of Portsmouth Square
By David Bacon
In presenting these images of Portsmouth Square, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I’ve tried to keep in mind some of the ideas of Paul Strand, the great modernist and realist photographer.
Strand was a radical, a founder of the Photo League in New York City in the 1930s, and a teacher who guided its work. After World War Two, as McCarthyite hysteria gripped the country, and especially the world of media and the arts, he was put on a blacklist (along with the Photo League itself) by the U.S. Justice Department. He went into exile in France, never returning to live in the U.S. For the next three decades he photographed people in traditional communities, and in newly independent countries during the period of decolonization and national liberation.
Strand was one of the founders of modernism in photography – the idea that photographs had to be connected with the world and depict it cleanly and simply. He combined those visual ideas with social justice politics, not in a dogmatic or simplistic way, but in an effort to create socially meaningful art with its own philosophy and set of principles.
Strand’s books were documents about place, presenting people in the context of their physical world. The subject of this set of photographs is also a place, one very familiar to me over many years – Portsmouth Square in San Francisco. These photographs were taken over 20 years. I’ve sequenced them, as Strand might have done, I think, in an order that emphasizes their social, as well as visual, content.
I was an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We set up a Garment Workers Center on Commercial Street, a block from the square. The workers who came into the center were Chinese women and men who worked in shops all over the city, from outer Third Street to Chinatown itself. I was just beginning to take photographs in a conscious way in those days, and because I was a union organizer, there was never a possibility that the sweatshop owners would let me inside to document the conditions. I was a union militant, interested and committed to documenting work, so this was a big regret. But walking through Portsmouth Square every day gave me a sense of the lives of people in this community, in the hours they spent outside the sewing shops.
In those years the number of unhoused people on the streets was much smaller than today. I would see perhaps one or two people sleeping on the sidewalk in the twenty blocks I traveled between our union’s central office and the square, and rarely anyone sleeping the square itself. Today that has changed. Like any San Francisco park, Portsmouth Square has been made a home, or at least a sleeping place, by several people with nowhere else to go. The first series of photographs shows a few of these individuals, in their relationship to the facilities of the square, including its benches, castoff cardboard boxes, and the sidewalk itself.
As an organizer I came to realize that Portsmouth Square is home to many activities, and has many levels of meaning to the people of Chinatown. They relax, play cards and enjoy themselves on the benches whenever the city’s notoriously uncertain weather permits. Over the years I’ve often returned to take photographs and been struck by how many people play games here. On one level, it is a place where people get together, in a community where many live with many family members sharing small apartments. Portsmouth Square means space to breathe, to be noisy and extroverted, to play the games people were taught by mothers and fathers in the generations that came before. It is a deep expression of the history and culture people share.
Organized cultural events also take place in the Square. On a recent walk I was pulled towards the performance space by the music of the erhu and other traditional Chinese instruments. An ensemble of musicians, organized by A Better Chinatown Tomorrow, had assembled to give a concert for the card players and the families wandering through the square. One woman sang while another danced – stylized voice and motions in humble street clothes.
The culture of Chinatown includes the social movements in which people organized support for revolutions in China itself, and protests over the oppressive conditions and discrimination that people have faced at work. It is an old history. A few blocks away, in St. Mary’s Square, a statue of Sun Yat Sen by Beniamino Bufano honors the fact that part of the Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the dowager Manchu empress, was planned by Chinese exiles, including those in San Francisco.
Chinatown is one of the politically most vibrant communities in San Francisco, and Portsmouth Square has always provided space for demonstrations, marches, meetings and leafleting. When the bombing began in Afghanistan, and the media began its deafening war drumbeat that preceded the invasion of Iraq, Chinatown’s internationalists gathered in Portsmouth Square. There they held signs calling for peace, and for spending on human needs instead of bombs. After listening to speeches in Chinese, the contingent marched down to Market Street and joined thousands of others from homes across the city, protesting what became a 20-year war.
Perhaps Strand, who took his photographs slowly and deliberately with a large view camera, might have had conflicting feelings in seeing these photographs. In taking them I took advantage of the mobility of a small camera, moving much more freely than he could with his large apparatus. He carefully constructed his images, seeing them on the large ground glass at the rear of the camera. I try to be conscious of the image and its elements as I take my pictures too. But sometimes I feel that not everything happens on a conscious level. Working quickly, I depend on a less conscious part of the brain to order the visual pieces of the image. Perhaps that was also true for him.
“Certain realities of the world had to be made clear. To be deeply moved was not enough.” Mike Weaver on Paul Strand’s philosophy
But what I take from Strand, and what he might have seen as a commonality in our work, are his aesthetic and political principles. In his idea of dynamic realism a successful photograph has to encompass three ideas. It has to be partisan – committed to social change and seeing that change as necessary and possible. Especially after he left the U.S. during the worst of the Cold War years, he worked in collaboration with radical, often Communist, activists. They brought him to the communities he photographed, and wrote text accompanying the photographs.
Strand was a committed realist, but he believed that a successful photograph had to do more than just record the reality in front of the lens. Mike Weaver says in his description of Strand’s philosophy, “Certain realities of the world had to be made clear. To be deeply moved was not enough.” Strand’s concept of specificity meant that an image of a particular person had to go beyond her or his individuality, to encompass a more universal truth. Commenting on a Dorothea Lange photograph he said, “The cotton picker is an unforgettable photograph in which is epitomized not only this one man bending down under the oppressive sky, but the lot of thousands of his fellows.”
Strand did not deny the individuality of the people in his images. None could have had more dignity, or been photographed with greater care or in more detail. But without being able to see beyond the individual to greater universality, “photography collapsed into record making, emphasizing the exceptional at the expense of the universal … One person who has been studied very deeply and penetratingly can become all persons. Therefore it seems to me that art is very specific and not at all general.”
Strand’s third principle was dimensionality, referring both to the qualities of the image itself, and how they resonate with its social content. In an image different elements have a relationship to each other, just as the photograph has a relation to the reality it depicts. That relationship, within the image, has to have a sensation of movement, he believed. Even a very still, posed photograph has to have “a sensation of movement through the eye … simply a reflection of the material fact that everything is in movement … It is the reflection that in the world things are actually related to each other, even though sometimes we cannot readily see it.”
These images of Portsmouth Square have been assembled into a sequence, as Strand did in his careful juxtaposition of the images in his books Some were taken twenty years ago and the most recent just a few weeks back. Over this period of time I was able to work, and see Portsmouth Square, as an activist myself – an organizer and participant, or sometimes a supporter at a distance, of some of the community’s social movements. The images document the reality of people enduring the pain of marginalization, of the social networks and culture centered on this place, and the efforts to change social reality and fight for justice.
Whether the images succeed in attaining Strand’s goal of specificity, or universality, and how well they work as images internally, is up to the viewer to judge. But taking and sequencing them has forced me to reexamine my own process as a photographer. I’ve always considered myself a realist and materialist. I’ve paid a lot of attention to the relationships that make my work possible, and I hope socially useful. But I’ve given less thought to the aesthetics or the principles behind their conception. It’s seemed enough to say that a photograph either works or it doesn’t.
Strand, however, demands a greater commitment. He voiced a political philosophy that provides a coherent way to analyze photography that is deeply connected to the world. That forced me to give more attention to the way politics and aesthetic ideas interact in my own work. Here’s his reaction to the unconsidered and unthought realism (photojournalistic and otherwise) of his day (he died in 1976):
“We must reject both this venal realism as well as the mere slice-of-life naturalism which is completely static in its unwillingness to be involved in the struggle … towards a better and fuller life.
“On the contrary, we should conceive of realism as dynamic, as truth which sees and understands a changing world and in its turn is capable of changing it, in the interests of peace, human progress, and the eradication of human misery and cruelty, and towards the unity of all people. We must take sides.”
Thanks to “Dynamic Realist,” by Mike Weaver, in “Paul Strand, Essays on his Life and Work”, Aperture, 1990
All photographs by David Bacon
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When “Rosie the Riveter” Went Viral
By Lincoln Cushing
How an obscure in-house WWII corporate poster became a popular progressive meme
A major World War II feminist/labor icon which has inspired hundreds of modified homages is popularly known as “Rosie the Riveter,” memorialized in numerous posters, magazine covers, t-shirts, coffee mugs and advertisements. This spunky gal is proudly holding up her buffed arm and encouraging us to get it done. The problem is, she’s not Rosie the Riveter.
Her thought balloon says: “We Can Do It!”, and she was produced by Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller as an in-house poster by the Westinghouse corporation’s War Production Coordinating Committee in 1942. It was displayed for only two weeks in their Midwest factories where women were making helmet liners. Ed Reis, Volunteer Historian for Westinghouse, was interviewed in 2003 by California Federation of Teachers publications director Jane Hundertmark, and he explained that Westinghouse made 13 million plastic helmet liners out of a material called Mycarta, the predecessor of Formica (which means “formerly Mycarta”).
On the other hand, “Rosie the Riveter” was a snappy and highly publicized national meme. Even during a war with broad public support such as WWII, the government needed media to maintain patriotic participation in the face of hardship and despair. The Office of War Information (1942-1945) was the principal agency responsible for that task. Previously organized as a photographic unit under the Farm Security Administration in 1939, in 1942 the OWI shifted gears from documenting the agricultural and economic impact of the Great Depression to documenting and supporting the Homefront. And when the workforce started to run out of men, the nation needed women.
During the war, the most popular image of “Rosie the Riveter” was a painting by Norman Rockwell that appeared on a cover of a May 29, 1943 Saturday Evening Post. The phrase had entered the public sphere a few months earlier on the radio as a snappy song with that title by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. In 1944 Republic Pictures released a musical film.
Rockwell’s cover, which is subject to strict copyright and can’t be reproduced here, was inspired by Michelangelo’s 1511 rendition of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel.
But how and when did the popular “Rosie the Riveter” term get indelibly linked to an obscure WWII poster image? The most thorough academic analysis of this meme is “Visual rhetoric representing Rosie the Riveter: myth and misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ poster” by James J. Kimble and Lester C. Olson, published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Winter 2006. The authors scratch their heads and note that “Thus far the earliest reproduction of (or reference to) the ‘We Can Do It!’ poster that we have found in the postwar years is in a 1982 Washington Post Magazine article that discussed poster reproductions then available from the National Archives.” Well, they were on the right track.
Nailing down the details of art history require a lot of digging. As a graphic activist with many connections in the social justice community, I started by looking through mail order catalogs and advertisements in alternative publications – the way people used to learn about new posters before the Internet.
What I found was a fascinating confluence of feminist and labor media efforts influencing each other, directly and indirectly. The key step was made by Helaine Victoria Press, the feminist/labor publishing organization co-founded by pioneers Jocelyn Helaine Cohen and Nancy Taylor Victoria Poore. They’d met in 1972 and moved to Indiana a few years later.
Here are key elements of the timeline:
1. 1975 – The Coalition of Labor Union Women holds their founding conference in Detroit. An AP news story headlined “They want Rosie the Riveter to have a new image” explains “They want Rosie the Riveter to give way to Rosie the international vice president, Rosie the shop steward. and Rosie the president of the local.” A cartoon by John Milt Morris accompanying the article showed a CLUW woman posing in a manner that resembles the “We Can Do It!” image, but it’s unlikely that Morris was familiar with the Westinghouse poster.
2. Circa late 1970s – The U.S. National Archives produce a postcard of the WCDI image. According to a footnote in Kimble and Olson’s essay, the poster is so popular that the National Archives ranks it among its top ten most requested images.
3. 1980 – Connie Field produces her “The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter” film, but no promotional material uses WCDI image.
4. 1982-1983 – Helaine Victoria Press begins distributing postcards from the National Archives. HVP co-founder Jocelyn Cohen remembers: “The NA had several propaganda postcards from posters with women and the war effort and we sold those too. But Rosie was the one that sold like hotcakes.” The WCDI card appears in their 1982-1983 catalog, which mentions “In the spring of 1982 we were delighted to receive funding from the Indiana Committee for the Humanities for a community outreach program. We will use this stipend to sponsor a discussion and two films – ‘Rosie the Riveter’ and ‘Four Women Artists’ – in Martinsville in May.”
5. 1985 – Helaine Victoria Press produces their own version of WCDI postcard, from one seen at National Archives, tying “Rosie the Riveter” title to the WCDI image for the first time in the backside caption. They also make a T-shirt.
6. 1987 – HVP WCDI postcard ads appear in the Minneapolis-based Northland Poster Collective“By our hands” labor art project catalog. Leeds Postcards (England) publishes their own edition after successfully carrying the HVP version for several years.
7. 1988 – Northland Poster Collective and Syracuse Cultural Workers put the “new” WCDI poster in their catalog. Ads also appear in National Women’s History Resources catalog 1988-1989.
So there you have it – the convoluted emergence of an iconic image that has become fodder for innumerable interpretations, from Black WWII welders to abortion rights to Bernie Sanders. Long live Rosie the Riveter.
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The Rosie the Riveter Trust, which supports the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, is honoring home front workers during Riveter Days on March 19-21, 2022. Honor the labor that helped defeat fascism.
Addendum:
I recently became aware of earlier research on this same subject. How could I not have known? There are several reasons. First, Chidgey’s chapter is embedded in an academic publication under relatively obscure field of “memory studies” rather than art history or labor history, and online mentions or reviews of her WCDI! research were not evident. And none of the key participants in this research, with whom I had multiple email communications, mentioned Chidgey’s work. This is truly an example of parallel and unconnected research. Chidgey’s focus is on evolving feminist iconography, and my focus is on the mechanics of how images get shared across space and time. It takes a village to assemble our own history.
Feminist Afterlives: Assemblage Memory in Activist Times, Red Chidgey, Palgrave Macmillan Memory studies, 2018
Wake Up Everybody! Midterms Are Almost Here
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
Wake up everybody no more sleepin’ in bed
No more backward thinkin’ — time for thinkin’ ahead
The world has changed so very much
From what it used to be
There is so much hatred, war an’ poverty
The world won’t get no better if we just let it be
The world won’t get no better we gotta change it — yeah, just you and me.
People had better wake up soon, because we are only months away from the November 2022 midterm elections. And yet there’s already a troubling “common sense” narrative emerging: “The Congressional 2022 midterm elections are going to be a disaster, with Democrats losing their majorities in both chambers. Which in turn, will destroy President Biden’s chances to achieve positive legislative change, resulting in Republicans winning the White House in 2024.”
A very bleak scenario indeed! Not surprisingly, this paralyzing narrative is reiterated daily in the news media. What is most concerning however, is that so many progressives have adopted this mantra as well. “The House is lost, and the Senate is teetering on becoming Mitch McConnell land again.” This discussion of the importance of the midterms is hardly new. After the Biden victory and the Senate gains in Georgia, we urged labor and our allies to focus on the 2022 midterms. It was immediately obvious that the margins in the Senate were too close to achieve Biden’s (and Bernie’s!) anti-austerity agenda—let alone progressive measures like Medicare for All, the PRO Act, and the Green New Deal.
Yes, the leadership of the Democratic Party is corporate and awful. But after the January 6 insurrection and subsequent Republican actions, the urgency of the situation has become clear: we are fighting to stop an ultra-right takeover. Blocking it, while also strengthening the progressive movement, is a key task of the moment. Undertaking that work—especially in the labor movement—is a particularly important challenge that we must not shy away from.
Republicans have indeed made some progress in a number of states to suppress votes and use partisan election officials in an attempt to rig the results. Yet, one fact remains: a significant majority of voters support the Democratic Party’s agenda. The real challenge—and it’s a big one – is to get these voters to the ballot box. And what was true in 2020 is true again in November 2022: they can’t steal an election if we don’t win it first!
What will it take to engage labor?
Now we have to grapple with two tough questions: “What will it take to wake up union members and their families to the real dangers of losing majorities in the House and Senate?” and “What will it take to get union leaders to break out of their funk and mobilize tens of thousands of members to start registering nonvoters, identifying supporters, and motivating infrequent or casual voters?”
We sure wish we had the answers! But for starters, it might help to build a sense of urgency. This moment should be compared to Spain in 1938 and the failed fight to block Franco’s rise to power. Simply put, failure to block the ultra-right white supremacists from building momentum in 2022 could lead to an authoritarian takeover of the national government in 2024.
We can also point to what worked in 2020. The election was won by the determined efforts of many groups, both large and small. But one of the most important factors was the contribution of those people who deployed to battleground states where margins were ultimately only in the thousands. Working in close coordination with local allies, unions like UNITE HERE safely and courageously sent their members to hit the doors to talk to voters in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Their intensive canvassing often provided the winning margin through their tireless efforts working with organizations of immigrants and people of color.
Any hope of prevailing in the midterms must not only replicate that work, but substantially expand it. This is not an exercise in blind faith: it’s all about turnout. AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer points out in his email newsletter that there are plenty of positive factors to be optimistic about the 2022 turnout:
“…[T]here is a realistic path to prevailing against [the] odds. A clear and growing majority of Americans reject MAGA – Clinton by 3 million in 2016, and House Democrats and Biden by seven to eight million in 2018 and 2020. They will do so again in 2022 if it’s clear what’s at stake.” Further, “[I]n 2018, 25 million Biden voters showed up who had not voted in midterms previously, a 13-point advantage over Trump voters.”
In the House of Representatives, Podhorzer says, there are 190 solid seats for Democrats and 195 solid for Republicans, with 50 seats “in play.” Of those 50, 27 presently swing in favor of the Democrat. That is not a final majority, but it does mean that with sufficient effort Democrats could hold the House.
The Senate is even better. There it’s possible to imagine winning enough seats to make the traitorous Manchin and Sinema irrelevant. There are 17 Republican seats up with the potential to flip seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Ohio.
Drawing on data compiled by Catalist, Podhorzer cites an important advantage for the Democrats: “This is the first midterm…that a president’s party has had this reservoir of votes hanging over. That’s the way Democrats can avoid the usual losses in the midterm: They have the names and addresses….
“In 2022, we know that nearly everyone who votes will have voted in 2020. That means that nearly everyone will have voted for either Biden or Trump in 2020, and, of course, there are 7.1 million more of the former than the latter. So, the best way to understand the Democrats’ challenge is simply as ensuring that as many of the 80 million who voted for Biden return, and that as few of them as possible defect.”
Gerrymandering: Not a Done Deal
On the gerrymandering front there is good news too: According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, Republicans were set to gain at least five seats from population shifts away from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. But efforts in Democratic-led states like Illinois and California have eliminated some of those gains. A little over halfway into the redistricting process it looks like Republicans won’t win the US House after the midterm elections based solely on the redistricting process.
While Build Back Better is not going to be the ambitious program we had hoped for, there are other factors that will give us ammunition on the hustings. In many places, this election will still be about Trump, because the Looney far right will make it about him. The early signs are that they will be running some real wingnuts.
“[N]o strategy can succeed if it is not anchored by people who are committed to give the fight everything they’ve got. And beyond that, to do what it takes to raise the spirits and stiffen the spines of all those who are daunted by the enemy’s ruthlessness and seeming strength.”Max Elbaum, Organizing Upgrade, January 25, 2022
Elbaum, and many others, are calling for all the political forces that united in the 2020 election – Move On, Swing Left, Seed the Vote, Our Revolution, Working Families Party, and the countless community, immigrant rights and organizations of people of color – to come together again for the battleground races.
The authors, along with a few other labor activists, have been convening meetings on Zoom with union leaders hoping that many will follow the lead of UNITE HERE by joining (or replicating) that union’s commitment to canvassing in key battleground elections.
On the last Zoom call, Working Families Party National Campaigns Director Joe Dinkin spoke about Republican efforts to pass voter suppression laws. Dinkin emphasized two ways to counter voter suppression: “Voters need to be armed with accurate information to feel comfortable voting. Secondly, they need to hear the truth: the voter suppression laws are only coming because the right wing is scared of their votes — and that’s why using your vote is so important. It can be a huge motivator.”
Instead of predicting what hasn’t happened, let’s imagine defying history in 2022 by building a labor-fueled movement to elect pro-labor majorities in the House and Senate. There’s a pathway for that to happen if enough of the labor movement gets on the phones, sends the postcards—and most importantly—gets on the doors in 2022!
This piece is being jointly published by the Stansbury Forum and Convergence
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Why the Legacy of the Italian Communist Party Matters Today: The Difference Between the Swastika and the Hammer and Sickle
By Matt Hancock
“I discover a cultural, political and economic legacy that was radically different from the reality I had grown up in: a legacy that had workers and farmers at its core, not simply as beneficiaries of social-democratic policies, but as agents in the development of a new society, economy and culture …”
When I first moved to Italy I was twenty years old. I had taken a year off from College and moved to Urbino, to study at the University there. I wanted to become fluent in Italian and immerse myself in the culture. I had no idea that my junior year abroad would also have had such a profound impact on me, politically.
The birthplace of the painter Raphael, Urbino is a walled city, nestled among the hills of the Marche region. When the surrounding valley is blanketed in mist, it seems like a city floating among the clouds. The region was also one of Italy’s “Red Regions,” which included Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria and Le Marche. These were the regions where the Italian Communist Party (PCI) dominated local and regional elections between 1946 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At the time I was largely oblivious to this rich history. In hindsight this seems impossible, but perhaps it isn’t so surprising. While I would have described myself as an activist, it was firmly in the American liberal tradition of the word: you could fight hard for a better world but attempts to move beyond capitalism could only lead to one place: totalitarianism. Back then, I was active in the environmental movement and supported protecting civil liberties. I was supportive of the idea of unions, and aware of the anti-sweatshop movement, but I had no real connection to working class struggles or actual unions. I remember following the “Battle of Seattle” on the front page of Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper from my dorm room in Italy. The Italian press was sympathetic to the protesters. I had the sense that those in the streets were on the right side but had little understanding of what they were really fighting for. My junior year abroad was also ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By then the successor to the PCI, the “Left Democrats” had replaced the hammer and sickle with the red rose and had more in common with Tony Blair than Enrico Berlinguer.
Despite all of this, the PCI’s legacy left an indelible mark on me, affecting my political consciousness profoundly, if subconsciously as first. Perhaps it was because seeing the hammer and sickle on campaign posters was still commonplace at the time (the town council had been elected a few months before my arrival and the center-left coalition included the Communist Refoundation Party and the Italian Communist Party). Perhaps it was the way my friend described her vision of communism to me, describing what it would be like to raise children in a communist society. And no one identifying as a communist appeared to eat children.
I would only realize the impact my year in Urbino had on me politically as I was wrapping up my oral exam in contemporary European history. My professor asked me what the most important thing I had learned that year was. Though I had never reflected on this before, without even thinking I said: “that the hammer and sickle was not the same thing as the Swastika.”
Post-Soviet Rock in Red Bologna
I would return to live in Italy, this time in “Red Bologna,” in the summer of 2003, just in time for the national “Festa dell’Unita’.” Originally organized in 1945 by the PCI to finance “L’Unita” the influential party newspaper founded by Antonio Gramsci, the Festa was one of the few legacies of the PCI maintained by its successor, the Left Democrats. Imagine a state fair with some of the best cuisine in the world and the leading intellectuals of the mainstream left, plus great concerts with major recording artists and that’s sort of what the Festa is. That year or the year after, I would see performances by the group CSI (the former CCCP, a self-described Soviet-aligned Italian punk band) and sit in on interviews with Gore Vidal and the Polish Marxist Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In attendance were some of Italy’s most important center-left politicians.
This time, my politics were radically different from just three years earlier. This time I had returned to Italy specifically to learn about the PCI, the Italian way to socialism, and the role of the labor and cooperative movements in economic development in the red regions. By the time I returned, I had graduated college and had just come off two intense years in the student movement as a part of the group who founded Campus Greens, an offshoot of the Nader 2000 campaign. In 2001 we had organized the founding convention, in Chicago, brought together representatives from hundreds of college campuses around the US, and modified and approved the by-laws using a consensus method with at least 100 delegates. We capped off the convention with a super-rally, 32 days before 9/11, at the Congress Theater in Chicago, with speeches from, among others, Ralph Nader, Cornell West and Winona LaDuke. Patti Smith and Ani DiFranco brought their bands to the Rally as well.
I was later elected to Campus Greens’ National Steering Committee, then moved to Chicago permanently to take on the role of National Organizing Director. By the fall of 2002 the organization was being pulled apart by the politics of the student movement. In 2003 I took a part-time job at the Center for Labor and Community Research. Our offices were just down the hall from Carl Davidson, former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) co-chair and “third wave” Marxist theoretician. In the few months I was there, I learned about the labor movement and the American Marxist tradition, and became interested in worker-self management and cooperatives as a viable model for socialism. When I told my boss I was moving to Bologna, Italy, he told me: great, go study Antonio Gramsci, the PCI, the labor and co-op movements.
By the time I attended my first Festa dell’Unita’ in August of 2003 in Bologna, I was a self-described communist, eager to learn about “actually existing socialism” through the experience of the PCI in Emilia-Romagna, and the left-aligned labor and cooperative movements. This radical shift in my thinking was only possible because of my experience, three years earlier in Urbino, helped me see past the liberal view that communism and fascism were just two sides of the same coin, inevitably leading to totalitarianism.
This time, I would spend nearly three years in Bologna, studying worker participation and industrial districts at the Institute for Labor (IPL) and learning about cooperatives while earning a Master’s in Cooperative Economics from the University of Bologna. Through interviews, research, and friendships, I came to know and appreciate the rich legacy of the PCI in Italy: a legacy that went far beyond the party’s stunning and sustained electoral success.
I would interview generations of rank-and-file union members and leaders, members and founders of cooperatives, leaders in the cooperative movement and elected officials. Most of the people I interviewed came from working class families or families of sharecroppers (an institution that persisted into the 1960s). Some came from professional families of modest means. Most of them began their political activism through the PCI, which, at different times, either exercised direct leadership, provided influence, managed conflict, or helped create consensus among the various institutions in the region. Most remained in the Party throughout their lives, even after its transformation. Some joined later, after experiences in the extreme parliamentary or extra-parliamentary left. Others had exited and then came back. Some were expelled (I remember interviewing a rank-and-file union member who proudly recounted being expelled in 1969, along with the rest of his comrades associated with the dissident newspaper Il Manifesto, which you can read in English here). In all cases, the PCI was a key reference point, a cultural influence, and a critical vehicle for working class people to collectively express their voice on a national stage, even in opposition to the Party.
While I wouldn’t find “actually existing socialism” in Emilia-Romagna, I did discover a cultural, political and economic legacy that was radically different from the reality I had grown up in: a legacy that had workers and farmers at its core, not simply as beneficiaries of social-democratic policies, but as agents in the development of a new society, economy and culture, led by a political party that, until its dissolution in 1991, remained rooted in the working class and committed to a socialist revolution. If the point of Communism was to put the working class and other marginalized social groups in the conditions to be the new ruling class, for the benefit of the majority, surely the example of Italy—especially in the Red Regions—is among the most important in our collective history.
Founding of the PCI
On January 15, 1921, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) began its 17th Congress in the port city of Livorno. At the time of the 17th Congress, the Socialists were the single largest political party in Italy. The Congress came on the heels of the “Red Biennial,” a period of massive social unrest in the industrialized north (factory occupations, brutal confrontations between workers and the military in the streets of Turin) along with the flourishing of the working class movement and culture. It was in these years that the main labor federation in Italy was created, the left press flourished and workers, by the hundreds of thousands, joined the PSI. Observers, on the left and right, worried (or hoped) that after the October Revolution, Italy could be home to the next socialist revolution.
Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, Antonio Gramsci and Amedeo Bordiga attempted to convince a majority of PSI delegates in Livorno to adhere to the Third International’s 21 Conditions (among which were “unconditional support” for the soviet republics’ repression of counter-revolutionaries and removal from positions of power in the labor movement of leaders who didn’t support the 21 conditions). The debate at the congress was bitter. The Bolshevik faction, however, failed to convince enough delegates. Following the vote, they marched out of the 17th Congress, with a handful of delegates, founded the Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCdI) and voted to join the Third International. The Communists closed their convention singing L’Internationale while the Socialists concluded with the Worker’s Anthem.
Of course, the Red Biennial was followed by two years of fascist terrorism against unions, co-operatives, socialists, and communists. Fascist squads descended on towns governed by the Socialists and literally laid siege to them, with relative impunity. This violence culminated in the March on Rome in October 1922. Twenty days later, with just seven seats in parliament held by the Fascists, the King of Italy named Mussolini head of government. Preferring fascist terrorists to democratic socialists, Italy’s liberals and moderate rightwing groups joined forces with Mussolini’s fascists to create an electoral alliance that would win north of 60% of seats in parliament by 1924. And, as they say, the rest is history.
From Margin to Hegemony
The PCI presented its own candidates for parliament for the first time during the elections of 1921. That year the Communists won less than 5% of the vote, against the Socialists’ nearly 25%. In 1924 the PCI’s share of the vote dropped to under 4%. On November 6, 1926, all political parties except for the National Fascist Party were banned. Two days later Antonio Gramsci was arrested. He would die in prison nearly 11 years later. Gramsci’s words during his 1928 trial before the Special Fascist Court, would prove prophetic:
“I think… that all types of military dictatorship will, sooner or later, be upended by war. It seems evident to me, in that case, that it will be up to the proletariat to replace the ruling classes, taking over from them the reins of the country to lift up the fortunes of the nation… you will bring Italy to ruin, and it will be up to us Communists to save it.”
The PCI, because of its democratic centralist organizational model, support from Moscow and connection to the Third International, was the only Italian political party capable of operating clandestinely, which it do so until the liberation of Italy from Nazi occupation in 1945. This allowed the PCI to become the major force behind Italy’s armed resistance to Fascism, which began officially in 1943. Following liberation Italians flocked, by the millions to the PCI, which they saw as the legitimate heir to the October Revolution and the party of the anti-Fascist resistance. The PCI, along with the US-backed Christian Democrats, drafted the new anti-fascist constitution and began, quite literally, to rebuild Italian society. Because of the PCI, Italians were able to approve, via universal suffrage, one of Europe’s most progressive constitutions, recognizing Italy as a republic “founded on labor,” guaranteeing citizens work, healthcare, collective bargaining, formally declaring Italy’s “repudiation of war,” and guaranteeing asylum to citizens in other countries whose constitutions failed to guarantee the same rights as those guaranteed to Italians by theirs.
At the dawn of the new Italian Republic, the PCI emerged on the national and world stage as a revolutionary, mass political party, rooted in the tradition of the October Revolution, but with sights set on an Italian road to socialism: one that would be gradual, democratic and in coalition with a broad array of anti-Fascist social forces, led by the working class and farmers.
By 1946 the PCI counted 1.8 million members, a number that the Christian Democrats would not come close to until 1958. For the millions who joined the PCI during that time, the Party meant so much more than just electoral politics: the PCI taught millions of illiterate Italians how to read, and about political economy. This massive investment in education allowed the PCI to train and place a generation of sophisticated leaders, from the working class, in town councils, labor unions and associations, in parliament and the institutions of the state. Through the PCI millions of working class Italians participated in rebuilding and governing their society. Electorally, the PCI reached its peak in 1976, when it counted 1.81 million members, or just over 3 percent of the population of Italy. That year, the PCI won over 34% of the seats in both chambers of parliament, just behind the Christian Democrats. The party with the next highest percentage of votes that year were the socialists, with just under 10%.
And of course, in the Red Regions the PCI was second to none. Here, through municipal government and the party’s influence on the labor, cooperatives and small businesses, the PCI was the main force in rebuilding society and governing the development of one of the most important manufacturing regions in the world, built not on foreign direct investment and Taylorism, but by networks of small and medium businesses, many of which were also cooperatives, who, through a collaborative model, could match the technological sophistication and economies of scale of larger, vertically integrated foreign competitors. Through conflict and consensus, the PCI and its constellation of related institutions, ensured that economic development was also equitable and sustainable.
Even in those regions where the PCI was not the dominant political power, the Party would nonetheless have a profound impact on the lives of millions of workers and farmers throughout Italy. Through its network of offices and related social clubs, the PCI touched the lives of people in even the smallest, least developed and isolated towns. Deeply rooted in local communities and popular struggles, the PCI was a hub of social life for those identifying with the left and served as a leadership development school for the working class, an institution that helped millions achieve a sense of collective agency through participation in their local governments, unions, cooperatives, and community-based organizations. Through the PCI, working class people ascended to positions of power and influence throughout Italian society, including the institutions of the state and in parliament. Through a continual process of participation, debate and inclusion, millions of working class Italians would participate in, and have a direct impact on, the development of their communities and society.
End of an Era
On June 5, 1989, an unknown man blocked four tanks driving down an avenue in Beijing. Those tanks had just helped to clear pro-democracy protesters from Tiananmen Square. The day before the famous “tank man” picture was taken Poland held its first pluralistic elections since 1947, in which the dissident union Solidarity won 99 out of 100 seats in the Senate. That fall, on November 9, 1989 the German Democratic Republic (GDR) announced that East Germans could freely travel to West Germany. Three days later in Bologna, on a visit to the Bolognina neighborhood to commemorate an important battle of the Resistance, newly elected Party Secretary Achille Occhetto announced his openness to changing the name of the Italian Communist Party. That day, November 12, 1989, is now known as the “turning point,” or svolta. On December 22, 1989, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was opened. On June 13, 1990, the demolition of the Berlin Wall officially began and the two Germanies unified. Less than 18 months later, on December 9, 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR voted to dissolve itself and the USSR.
The Italian Communist Party would not survive these epochal changes. Less than two months after the dissolution of the USSR, on January 31, 1991, the PCI held its final congress during which it decided to change its name to the Left Democratic Party, a victory for the centrist faction in the PCI. The Party’s left was split, with some remaining and others leaving to create the Communist Refoundation Party. The Left Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism and, for the first time since the PCI’s exclusion from government in 1948, former communists joined Italy’s governing coalitions, including two governments headed by former Communist Massimo d’Alema.
The current heir to the PCI is Italy’s Democratic Party (PD), a socially progressive, pro-EU, centrist formation in perpetual identity crisis. In 2013 former Florence mayor and paid Mohammed Bin Salman apologist, Matteo Renzi took over the Party. As Secretary and also Prime Minister, Renzi eliminated the Workers Bill of Rights (one of the most significant achievements of the Italian working class since passage of the Constitution) and led the Democrats to their worst electoral showing in their history, winning just 19% of the votes in 2018’s parliamentary elections.
To the left of the Democratic Party are Article 1 (as in Article One of the Constitution, “Italy is a Democratic Republic founded on Labor), Italian Left and Possible (which collectively, in coalition in the 2018 elections, received just 3.4% of the vote), Power to the People (1.1%) and the Communist Party (.33%). The Communist Refoundation Party, which at its height in 1996, commanded nearly 9% of the vote for Italy’s lower house, isn’t even a blip on the radar.
According to the most recent polling, if elections were held today in Italy, the Democrats would be the top vote getters, just barely edging out the post-fascist Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia). Despite this improvement over the Democrats’ performance in 2018, just 9 percent of working class voters support the Democrats. Almost 31% of working class voters surveyed would vote for the socially conservative, pro-business League (Lega), while nearly 20% would support the Brothers of Italy.
“As if Catholics were Presented with Incontrovertible Proof that God Didn’t Exist”
The PCI, until its voluntary dissolution in 1991, was a mass political party, deeply rooted in working class communities and struggles, and committed to a “third way” to socialism (not the neo-liberal “third way” of Tony Blair). Throughout its existence, the PCI neither surrendered to neo-liberalism nor remained in thrall to the October Revolution. Lucio Magri, expelled from the PCI in 1969 because of his leadership in the left Manifesto group and later re-admitted, serving in leadership positions, effectively and succinctly sums up the uniqueness of the PCI’s strategy and ideology:
“… the PCI represented… the most serious attempt… to open the road to a “third way:” to marry… partial reforms… broad social and political alliances, the faithful use of parliamentary democracy, along with bitter social struggles, with an explicit and shared critique of capitalist society; to build a mass party that was also deeply cohesive, militant, and rich in well trained cadres; affirming its membership in the global movement for revolutionary change, accepting the limits of such membership, but in relative autonomy… the unifying strategic idea was that the consolidation and evolution of ‘actually existing socialism’ did not constitute a model that, one day, could be applied in the West, but was the necessary historical background for the realization of another type of socialism that respected liberties.”
On the eve of its dissolution, the PCI was still Italy’s second most important political party. In the final parliamentary elections, the PCI would participate in, in 1987, the Party won 27% and 28% of the vote in the House and Senate, respectively. During the 1989 elections for the European parliament the PCI won 28% of the seats assigned to Italy. And in the year prior to its dissolution, the Party counted 1.26 million members. Still the PCI was not able to survive, in name or in substance, the end of actually existing socialism.
In December 1981, ten years before the PCI voted to dissolve itself, a Soviet-backed military junta seized power in Poland, declared martial law and violently repressed the dissident union Solidarity. Days later, in a public press conference, Party Secretary and one of Italy’s most beloved politicians, Enrico Berlinguer, would reflect on the events in Poland, the rise of the USSR and the significance of the October Revolution. Berlinguer described the October Revolution as “the most significant revolutionary event of our epoch,” an event which served as the “propulsive thrust” behind struggles and important victories in the movement for working class emancipation. For Berlinguer, however, the events in Poland signaled the end of the October Revolution’s propulsive thrust and the ability of the USSR to act as a progressive force for working class liberation.
A friend of mine, Benito Benati, (a PCI member and leader in the cooperative movement) described the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union for Communists would be as if Christians were presented with incontrovertible proof that God did not exist: an event from which one could not recover. Perhaps this explains why the PCI, despite all of its victories, millions of members and place in Italian society, was so unprepared for the collapse of actually existing socialism, and unable to find its footing in a post-Soviet world in which capitalism seemed, at least temporarily, victorious.
The Propulsive Thrust of the PCI
After 16 years in the United States I returned to Bologna in January 2021, this time as an Italian citizen, where I now live with my two children and work with Italy’s largest, and historically left-aligned, labor confederation CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro or the Italian General Confederation of Labor) and their Institute for Economic and Social Research in Emilia-Romagna, studying the impact of changes in technology and the economy on labor relations and workplace participation.
The current state of the electoral left here is, quite frankly, depressing. Despite 20 years of efforts, no credible anti-capitalist political party has emerged. And during that same timeframe, two generations of politicians have totally squandered the immense cultural patrimony of the PCI (I recently learned that the Democratic Party in Bologna, which after recent electoral disasters now promises to be “close to the people,” had closed the party’s workplace-based social circles).
Of course, the current state of electoral politics has multiple causes and reflects the transformation of the traditional working class as well as the crisis of elite consensus globally. In this sense, the dissolution of the PCI is both a cause and symptom of this more general crisis. With its dissolution into the Left Democratic Party, Italy lost its largest mass political party. The PCI was also independent, self-funded by individual member dues. As such, Italy’s labor and social movements lost their most important voice in parliament. The PCI also impacted popular participation in political life indirectly, if no less profoundly: as Lucio Magri because the PCI brought millions of citizens from Italy’s popular classes into politics in an organized fashion, it forced Italy’s other major parties to develop their own mass bases. Today, no such vehicle exists.
However, the legacy of the PCI, and the anti-Fascist resistance it led, are all around us today, in the labor, environmental and other contemporary social movements. These movements, even without effective political leadership like that provided by the PCI, involve millions of Italians in the fight against neo-liberalism, patriarchy, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant discrimination, and environmental destruction. Here are just a few examples:
- A peculiar feature of the Italian economy is the presence of cooperative enterprises, more per capita here than anywhere else in the world. The bulk of the cooperative movement has historically been aligned with the Left (though Catholic-aligned cooperatives are a significant force as well). Since the 2008 financial crisis, Italians have turned increasingly to the cooperative model as both a means of resistance and of building an alternative. Since the crisis, workers together with their unions, the cooperative movement, supportive national legislation, local governments and a network of banks and cooperative investors have saved hundreds of bankrupt firms through conversion to worker-owned co-ops. Having been saved they are now thriving through conversion to worker-owned co-ops. As a signal of how important this model has become, the main labor federations and the cooperative movement recently developed a formal agreement to marshal resources and jointly support worker buyouts. Italians are also turning toward cooperatives as a way of explicitly moving beyond, or outright rejecting, traditional market relationships. The experience of “community cooperatives” creating a Green New Deal from below by redefining the role of citizens as producers, consumers and collective owners, is but one example. The emergence of the movement for food solidarity “Campi Aperti” (Common Fields), connected with Bologna’s squatter movement, unites farmers and consumers as “co-producers.” The related self-managed consumer co-op, Camilla (the first in Italy), seeks fair treatment of workers, a “just price” for producers and ecological sustainability through a model of “participatory certification” of producers. These new cooperatives are reclaiming a progressive role for the movement in Italian society, rooted in the resistance to Neo-liberalism and environmental degradation. Most compelling, the spirit that animates these new cooperatives harkens back the values of the 18th century workers’ mutual aid societies, from which the modern cooperative, labor and socialist movements were born.
- On March 22, 2021, as Amazon workers in Bessemer were turning in their NLRB ballots for union recognition, Italy’s main labor federations, led by CGIL, successfully pulled off a day-long strike, involving Amazon’s entire supply chain. The strike, which according to Italy’s financial paper Il Sole 24 Ore, involved 40,000 workers, halted deliveries throughout the peninsula that day. Though primarily designed to support the bargaining efforts of last-mile drivers, the strike would have an impact on Amazon employees as well. While the company contends that no more than 20% of workers struck, Amazon and its supply chain nonetheless felt compelled to return to the bargaining table, making important concessions to workers. Equally significant, shortly after the strike, workers in Amazon’s Piacenza “fulfillment center” elected a plant-based bargaining unit (Rappresentanza Sindacale Unitaria); the first bargaining unit recognized anywhere in the world in an Amazon workplace.
- About 200 kilometers southwest of Piacenza, in Campo Bisenzio just outside of Florence, workers at Driveline GKN, owned by British investment fund Melrose Financial, received an email on July 9, 2021, announcing the immediate closure of the plant. Workers there, represented primarily by CGIL’s metalworkers’ union, FIOM, and self-organized in the plant for a number of years as “The Collective,” decided to fight back by occupying the plant. The town’s mayor, a member of the Democratic Party, issued a local ordinance preventing trucks from entering or leaving the plant.
Meanwhile, through their collective, the GKN workers mobilized national support for their cause under the slogan “Rise Up” (Insorgiamo), harkening to their collective roots in the anti-Fascist resistance. On September 18, GKN workers organized a national rally in Florence to protest the proposed plant-closure, inviting others from throughout Italy, not just to come support their cause, but as a call to action to rise up and fight back against similar situations elsewhere. According to the press, 20,000 supporters showed up. Organizers put the number closer to 40,000. Protesters joined from all over Italy, and included other workers facing layoffs and plant closure, like the Whirlpool workers in Naples fighting the closure of their plant. Additional protests were members of Italy’s National Association of Partisans, students and environmentalists. FIOM, the union, succeeded in getting a court order to block the mass layoffs and the company is now at the bargaining table, along with the union and the national government. To support the workers, and reinforce the connection between their struggle and the struggle against Fascism, the mayor celebrated the 77th anniversary of Campo Bisenzio’s liberation from Nazi occupation in front of the GKN plant gates, saying “this is a defining moment: each one of us… has to say without mincing words who’s side are we on… the side of the workers, of the business as an instrument for improving the lives of people and the local community… or the side of profit, finance, speculation.”
Here you can watch a video of their anthem, Che Fatica Che Ti Chiedo, Oggi Devi Scioperare (What a Sacrifice I Ask of you, Today You Must Strike) with scenes from their movement of resistance.
- The workers at GKN are represented primarily by FIOM (Federazione Italiana di Operai Metalmeccanici or the Italian Federation of Italian Metalmechanical Workers), the militant metalworkers union federated under Italy’s largest labor federation, CGIL. CGIL, after Italy’s liberation allied with the PCI, has 5.5 million members, including pensioners, or just over 10% of the adult population in Italy. Because of Italy’s model of labor relations, nearly all workers in the economy are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. CGIL’s mission is to represent workers in all facets of their life. As such, CGIL’s work extends far beyond the bargaining table, to include advocating for higher quality, publicly funded healthcare, good schools, environmental issues, immigrant and women’s rights, environmental issues, and LGBTQ+ rights. After the recent failure of the “Zan” law, anti-discrimination legislation particularly focused on the LGBTQ+ community, the CGIL lamented the defeat with a press release that promised “… our Battle Continues.”
On Saturday September 9, 2021, during an anti-vax rally, protesters, led by known leaders of Italy’s neo-Fascist movement, broke into and ransacked CGIL’s national headquarters in Rome. The next day, all across Italy, thousands flocked to their local CGIL office to show support for the union.
The following month, on October 16, 200,000 supporters, arriving by train, bus and car, poured into Italy’s capital in a peaceful show of anti-Fascist force, declaring “no more fascisms.” All three of Italy’s labor federations came together for the rally, as did leaders of every center-left political party, students, environmentalists and members of Italy’s National Association of Partisans. Maurizio Landini, CGIL’s top leader and former head of the militant FIOM union, explicitly and elegantly linked the anti-Fascist resistance to today’s social, labor and environmental movements. Participants concluded the rally by singing “Bella Ciao,” the partisan song and Italy’s unofficial national anthem.
Conclusion
In a paradox symptomatic of the current crisis of political representation, some of those workers who took to the streets that day to support CGIL are the same workers who, on election day, vote for Italy’s two rightwing, reactionary parties. I think this paradox, coupled with the strength and vibrancy of Italy’s labor and social movements, are also a testament to something else: that the propulsive thrust of the anti-fascist resistance and the legacy of the PCI has hardly exhausted itself among Italy’s popular classes. The real crisis is of political representation.
For activists searching for answers to what a 21st century political project for revolutionary change might look like, the history of Italy’s Communist Party offers critical insights as well as profound inspiration. For groups like the Democratic Socialists of America some of the questions that discovering the rich history of the PCI can help leaders grapple with are:
- Where would a truly majoritarian Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) derive its legitimacy, beyond the strength of its ideas or association with specific political campaigns? What “propulsive thrust” would be capable of sustaining a movement for democratic socialism over decades?
- How would a mass, revolutionary political party balance the need for vibrant internal democracy with the need to be able to speak with one voice on important issues?
- In a radically transformed, global capitalist economy, where the “proletariat” (in the theoretical sense Marx intended by the term) makes up a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall working class, what are the class forces that could be organized to resist and overcome capitalism?
- How does a revolutionary political force govern effectively under capitalism in ways that meet peoples’ needs now, while building support — and laying the groundwork — for a more radical rupture later?
- How would a mass movement for Democratic Socialism understand and confront the rise of reactionary movements?
- How would a movement for Democratic Socialism achieve cultural hegemony, an essential element in the long “war of position,” to borrow a term from Gramsci, against global capitalism?
- Finally, what would it look like for a majoritarian DSA movement to relate to the labor movement, and how would the DSA effectively train millions of working class people to participate, as leaders, in politics, society and the economy, radically opposed to capitalism and capable of self-government for the benefit of the majority?
…
Reparations Revisited
By Ernest DiStefano
Oct. 11, 1924, Kansas City, Mo. – Photo by J.E. Mille[r], K.C. Library of Congress
You may recall that on January 23, 2020, the Stansbury Forum published my essay, “The Rippling Manifesto.” As you also may recall, it was based on a letter I sent to Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred a week earlier, calling on Major League Baseball to provide financial reparations to Negro League players and their surviving family members (including the players who played in the Negro Leagues after MLB integration). I would now like to update you on those efforts.
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Winter/Spring, 2020
After the publication of “The Rippling Manifesto,” a groundswell of nationwide support emerged for the cause of Negro League reparations, which led to numerous on-air radio interviews, including on Etan Thomas’ syndicated ESPN radio show, “The Collision: Sports & Politics,” and Jeff Fannell’s Sports 360 Podcast.
These events provided the opportunity for me to establish a core group of leaders in the fields of social justice, labor, law, visual media, and professional baseball, who share my passion and commitment to achieving financial reparations for Negro League players and their families. We now comprise the Executive Committee of the Ripple of Hope Project, with the objective of pursuing social justice for oppressed populations, particularly within communities of color. I also established a Facebook Group for the Ripple of Hope Project, which continues to this day and has members nationwide who support the cause of Negro League reparations.
Summer, 2020
I and the other ROH Project Committee members continued efforts to reach out to Negro League families, and other parties, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent to the murder of George Floyd and resulting widespread protests against racial injustice. Here were the outcomes of those efforts:
August 9, 2020: I connected with the Grandniece of Negro League pitching great John Donaldson, as well as other members of the Donaldson family. They expressed full support for the ROH Project’s cause for Negro League reparations and offered their assistance.
August 27, 2020: I sent letters to the ownership groups of the thirty MLB franchises, informing them of my previous letter to Commissioner Manfred, and urging their support and assistance in our efforts to achieve Negro League reparations.
Fall, 2020
November 5, 2020: I received unanimous approval from the Board of Directors of my 501 c-3 non-profit organization, which I founded in 2015, Comeback Athletes & Artists Network, Inc. (CAAN, Inc.), to amend the organization’s Mission Statement to include social justice outreach and to allow the ROH Project to operate as the social justice arm of the organization.
Winter, 2020/2021
December 16, 2020: Major League Baseball announced that Negro League player statistics from 1920-1948 would now be included in the MLB record books.
December 23, 2020: I sent a letter to Ms. Michele Meyer-Shipp, Esq., MLB’s Chief People & Culture Officer, informing her of the ROH Project’s mission and efforts, and requesting her assistance and support in these efforts.
December 30, 2020: I connected with a representative of a core group of Negro League families and surviving Negro League players. This representative read my manifesto and requested a Zoom meeting to discuss the possibility of forming an alliance between the ROH Project and a core group of Negro League players’ families and surviving Negro League players.
January 5, 2021: Subsequent to MLB’s December 16, 2020 announcement, the ROH Project Committee conducted a Zoom Meeting with the aforementioned core group of Negro League families, several of whom run non-profit organizations serving Negro League players, their families, and the community. The result of that meeting was the establishment of their support for the pursuit of Negro League reparations.
Spring 2021-Present
The ROH Project continues its work toward achieving the mission of Negro League reparations. We are currently working on a written proposal to present to Major League Baseball, describing our plan for achieving Negro League reparations, as a starting point in that process. I am also nearing completion of a book that describes our plan in detail and the Negro League players whom I believe should be eligible for financial reparations.
As of this writing, we have still not received a response from Commissioner Manfred, the thirty MLB ownership groups, or Ms. Meyer-Shipp. I am therefore asking for your assistance with making our goal of Negro League reparations a reality. You can do so by voicing your support for the cause to Commissioner Manfred at:
The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
212-931-7800.
You may also contact Commissioner Manfred on his Twitter account (twitter@RobManfred).
Please also consider voicing your support to the front offices of your hometown MLB teams. The more allies we have in this mission, the greater our chance for achieving victory!
Thank you.
…
Organizing the Unorganized and Union Transformation – An Interview with Jeff Hermanson
By Peter Olney
“It is in the struggle to organize the unorganized and to empower the rank and file that the US labor movement will be transformed.” Jeff Hermanson
I remember hearing Jeff make this statement countless times in discussions of organizing. Hermanson brings a long and impressive bio to the labor-organizing table. He has been the director of organizing for multiple organizations: the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Writer’s Guild of America West, the NYC Carpenters District Council and Workers United. His organizing successes cross national boundaries, and he is now working as Organizing Director with the Solidarity Center in Mexico.
Peter Olney (PO) What does your organizing look like right now in Mexico?
Jeff Hermanson (JH) Working with Mexican unions and workers’ rights organizations, we are planning and supporting a major organizing program to transform the corporatist Mexican labor relations regime dominated by pro-company “protection unions” through organizing with existing independent and democratic unions (most of which are enterprise unions that up to now have shown little desire to organize beyond their factory walls), and by supporting the formation of new independent and democratic unions with an industrial outlook. In the few industries – petroleum, railroads, electric energy, education – where there are national industrial unions, a legacy of nationalized industries weakened by privatization, and for the most part controlled by entrenched and undemocratic leaders, we will support democratic movements within the unions.
Our aspirational model is the CIO mass organizing of the 1930s, which demonstrated the thesis that reform of a labor movement requires new organizing to break the hold of the dominant ideology – craft narrowness in the AFL of the 1930s, anti-communism, protectionism and business unionism in the US of the 1990s, corporatism, corruption, nationalism and enterprise unionism in the Mexican labor movement of today – and create a new paradigm of inclusive, militant, internationalist industrial unionism.
(PO) What about some of your experience in the USA with organizing as the road to union transformation?
(JH) My own experience in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) demonstrates this thesis as well, within limits: How did the ILGWU give up, or at least moderate, its protectionist “Buy American” and “Stop Imports” campaign in the 1980s and 1990s? By organizing the tens of thousands of immigrant garment workers from the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, and Asia. Then, as the US apparel manufacturing industry passed into history, and the union’s major employers became the apparel distribution centers handling imported goods for brands and retailers, the union, now called Workers United, adopted an activist internationalism to support garment workers in other countries as part of their campaign to organize the distribution centers of firms like H&M, VF Corp., and Gap.
Again, at the Writers Guild of America West, the effort to organize reality television resulted in the election of a militant reform leadership slate, the firing of the business-oriented executive director, a former CBS executive, and his replacement by David Young, a labor radical and “blue-collar” union organizer. The subsequent WGAW campaign to organize “America’s Next Top Model” through a recognition strike, while ultimately unsuccessful, led to a strengthening of the militant leadership and was part of the build-up to the 100-day Writers’ Strike in 2007 that won jurisdiction for the union over writing for the Internet, now the principal source of employment for writers.
(PO) With your emphasis on organizing the unorganized do you mean to say that reform movements are inconsequential?
(JH) This is not to say that reform movements should be abandoned, and all efforts put into organizing the unorganized. Both aspects of struggle are essential, and reinforce each other, and sometimes one becomes the leading aspect, as in the CIO drives of the 1930s, and sometimes the other, as in the Ron Carey campaign of the 1990s that led to the militant UPS strike of 1997. Right now there is a lot of volatility in the US labor movement, with unions like the Bakery Confectionery Tobacco and Grain Millers, International Association of Machinists and United Auto Workers forced by circumstances to confront their declining bargaining power and take militant action as the employers invest billions in Mexico and close plants in the USA. This volatility can be seen in the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers, now confronting Amazon in the logistics and transport sector. The victory of the O’Brien-Zuckerman Teamsters United slate in the recent election reflects this volatility and is an important step toward a more militant and member-driven approach in the Teamsters union, which will have a big impact on the upcoming UPS negotiations and in organizing in Amazon and FedEx.
(PO) One of the Teamster United slate Vice Presidents, John Palmer, was recently quoted in an article in Labor Notes:
“The organizing department needs restructuring too,” said Palmer, who worked there for years. “We waste a tremendous amount of money flying organizers around the country,” he said. “That time and resources could allow us to train people out of locals to do this. We need to have that skill on the ground everywhere; we don’t need a lot of specialists airdropped from D.C. who disappear the minute a campaign is over.” What do you thin k of that statement based on your years of experience successfully organizing in many sectors?
(JH) Of course, it is good to have organizing assets on the ground everywhere, and there should be training for members out of locals; but to take on global corporations and to run national campaigns, you need a centralized campaign headquarters and “specialists” like Andy Banks and directors like Bob Muehlenkamp and John August (who ran the 1997 IBT UPS strike). You also need experienced organizers that can be sent to key locations to mount surprise attacks where they are least expected, as when the Teamsters were able to strike UPS at Paris and other European locations during that 1997 strike.
I am totally in favor of member-participatory strategies; the 2007-8 Writers Strike was totally run by the WGA members, who made all the important decisions through their executive board, composed of working writers, and through strike authorization. But they also had a strong executive director in David Young, an excellent research department, a professional communications department, and a committed staff to meet with small groups of writers, train strike captains, organize events, make sure picket signs got to the right place at the right times, and come up with effective tactics like picketing film and TV locations and shutting down the Golden Globes. It is the combination of intense member involvement and competent and experienced staff that gets the job done and done right; and with a national and international adversary, it is the combination of power on the ground in every locality where we can confront them and a strong centralized strategic direction that will win the day.
(PO) What do you make of the current strike wave, the present political landscape and what organizers should be focused on?
(JH) The current strike wave in food processing, manufacturing, health care, etc., and increasing tempo of organizing in certain sectors – digital media, higher education, and logistics – is a result of forty years of an employer offensive that depressed wages, closed union factories, busted unions and created the greatest economic and social inequality in the history of the world, with two families holding as much wealth as half the population, and with organized labor at its lowest percentage of the working population since the 1920s. The employers’ callous disregard for the lives of workers in the Covid-19 pandemic, notably in the food-processing industry and in healthcare – exposed the brutal nature of capitalist exploitation as never before; and the economic dislocation further exacerbated the declining standard of living of most working people. Pushed to the limit, large segments of the US working class rebelled against the political elites, in some cases in self-destructive political directions, in other cases by electing socialists and progressives; and in the workplaces we see a rebellion against the employer offensive, and in some cases against union leadership that hasn’t gotten the message that their members have decided it’s time to fight back with all we’ve got.
In the context of rising pressures and tensions in the economic sphere, caused by the decades-long employer offensive and the continuing decline of US capitalism, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ and authoritarian political ideologists, funded and supported by the corporate wing of the ruling class, have captured the Republican Party and provided an outlet for the fears and resentments of some segments of the working class and for the owners of small and medium-sized businesses. Other segments of the multi-racial, multi-national US working class have responded to the crisis of capitalism, exacerbated by the pandemic, with a fight-back against racial injustice, gender oppression, xenophobia, and anti-LGBTQ prejudice, and have supported progressive and democratic socialist candidates in local, state-wide, and national elections. I believe it is fair to say that many working people are disgusted with the current political landscape, their declining standard of living, the failure to deal effectively with the Covid-19 pandemic or the climate crisis, and the inability to chart a course forward to restore prosperity and a positive outlook for the future. Perhaps the best, and maybe the only way to turn this disgust into positive action is for the labor movement to aggressively organize at the grass-roots level and take on the corporate overlords in the workplaces and at the ballot box.
My view is that the primary, leading aspect for change in the US labor movement should be recovering the lost bargaining power through organizing the unorganized, including through cross-border campaigns in the supply chains of unionized and non-union firms alike, and through militant strike strategies that use our bargaining power to gain some control over investment decisions and to eliminate the two-tier and other contract terms that weaken our unity and our power. Those struggles can inspire the rank and file to the confidence and self-assurance that will lead to a greater role in the governance of the unions that are the basic instrument of the working class.
(PO) Thanks Jeff. Look forward to tracking your battles in Mexico!
…
Peter Haberfeld (1941-2021)
By Steve Bingham
Peter Haberfeld, a lawyer for the people and community organizer, died of a heart attack at his home in Oakland on December 1, 2021. He was 80 years old. After earning a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley, Peter embarked on a life of activism as a lawyer and labor and political organizer.
As a law student in 1966, Peter worked in Albany GA for C.B. King, the pioneering civil rights attorney and only Black lawyer in Southwest Georgia. King deeply influenced Peter, firming up his determination to use the tool of the law to defend those who are marginalized, abandoned and powerless.
Between 1968 and 1975 Peter was an attorney and organizer in the California Central Valley, providing legal aid to Latino youth and farmworkers. In 1975, he joined the United Farm Workers legal staff, part of the legendary battle for farm worker union recognition. He was influenced by iconic leaders Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and his mentor, renowned union organizer Fred Ross, Sr. Peter helped win the landmark, Murgia v. Municipal Court, which successfully limited racially discriminatory prosecution of defendant UFW members.
Peter was the first staff person hired to run the new office of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. He worked at the Youth Law Center, California Rural Legal Assistance and the Bar Sinister legal collective in Los Angeles. His audacious combination of lawyering and organizing incurred the wrath of the conservative legal and political establishment everywhere he went. When Governor Ronald Reagan tried to defund CRLA, he specifically cited Peter’s legal work, including his involvement with the Black Panther Party in Marysville.
Peter later organized and advocated for back-to-the-land folks in Shasta County. He was a lawyer for the California Department of Industrial Relations, the state Occupational Safety and Health Agency, and the Public Employment Relations Board. He later became a union organizer for teachers in Fremont, Oakland (Oakland Education Association) and Vallejo. He then worked for the Oakland Community Organization, organizing teachers and parents for school reform in Oakland. Peter fought his final court battles at the law firm of Siegel & Yee including an epic case that ensured the survival of the National Union of Healthcare Workers.
Peter was proud of his record of four arrests:
– During the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement
– While serving as a poll watcher during the election campaign of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to elect candidates to the state’s legislature in 1967
– At People’s Park in 1969
– And with his wife Victoria Griffith in San Francisco protesting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq
Throughout his life, Peter was always ‘presente’ to ‘fight the good fight’ against abuses of power – in occupational safety, school reform, civil rights and more. Peter worked well into retirement, volunteering on Barak Obama’s and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns as well as helping friends and family with legal needs.
Peter, whose Swiss and Austrian parents escaped the rise of Nazism, was born in Portland, OR on October 23, 1941 eight minutes before his identical twin and grew up on his family’s farms in Oregon and rural Los Angeles. He attended Reed College and the University of California Berkeley School of Law. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1968.
Peter was a lifelong learner — deeply engaged with the world and people around him. In recent years, he and his wife Tory traveled and lived in South America. He wrote until the very end of his life on political issues in Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru and most recently France where he and Tory spent a very special time together in Montpellier and on a small farm.
Peter, whose early years were spent on his family’s farm, returned to farming in France – harvesting olives, caring for sheep and horses and milking cows while “Wwoofing” (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). Peter and Tory lived off and on in France for the last four years of his life. He spent time with his two daughters and granddaughters there, which delighted him.
Peter summed up why he wrote this past year a detailed unpublished memoir of his lifelong engagement in ‘good trouble.’ With modesty, he wrote: “If [it] …appears as though I consider myself a hero or a major player in any way, I do not. I have described my experiences merely to convey what was happening during the period and how I participated.”
Peter is survived by his wife, Victoria (Tory) Griffith with whom he shared a passion for political organizing, his daughters Demetria (Demi) Rhine of Oakland and Selena Haberfeld Rhine of New York; two granddaughters, Marina and Alexa Escobar; the mother of his daughters, Barbara Rhine of Oakland; his ex-wife Dorothy Bender of Palo Alto; his brother Steven (Rena), living in Israel; his sister Mimi Haberfeld, living in Mexico; many nieces and his mother-in-law Marilyn Griffith of Redwood City.
Peter was dearly loved and will be terribly missed by legions of people who admired his gutsy and creative lawyering and organizing as well as the many who considered him central to their lives, for both personal and political reasons. A memorial will be planned for the spring. Donations may be made to The East Oakland Collective, an organization that Peter supported which addresses the needs of unhoused people in East Oakland.
Peter beautifully summed up what motivated him to be the always-engaged political person that he was in this letter he wrote to the son of one of his oldest friends. It’s well worth the read, especially for young advocates wondering whether anything they do in life will make a difference in people’s lives.
Dear Dylan:
What I say here is not to try to convince you that you and your dad are wrong to articulate doomsday visions of our future. I do not know how things will turn out and I will be long gone as all the evidence comes in. Simply, I will tell you what motivates me.
Something in my background has caused me to be an activist. Perhaps it is because my parents taught us that if an injustice exists, big or small, do something about it.
My involvement has always made me optimistic. I stood alongside many of my generation who fought for civil liberties, civil rights, and an end to injustices. I met people who were courageous, who dared speak and fight for a better future. I felt our collective power and saw that positive change can come about without a majority being mobilized. It was sufficient that well-intentioned, hard-working activists took a stand.
The Civil Rights Movement sacrifices led to improvements, growing consciousness, and access by young people to the college education that prepared them to become important scholars, writers, commentators. It is they who are developing a new and improved narrative for the present Movement and that which will come.
The Farm Workers Movement awakened the Chicano Youth. It put in motion the Latino leadership that has taken over in California to make it a Democrat-run State. Our State, as deficient as it is, is still a beacon to the residents of Mississippi and other slave states as well as the fly-over states.
The Women’s Movement has transformed the consciousness about women’s equality. It has led young women to become doctors, lawyers, leaders in all spheres, who have begun to influence how people perceive their living conditions. It still has a way to go to bring about wage equality and an end to physical and sexual abuse. But you cannot deny the progress that came about because people fought for something better.
You can say the same about the LBGT Movement and same sex marriage. The quote from Frederick Douglass about “not getting anything unless you fight for it” is still relevant. The totalitarian control and exploitation of millions of slaves would be with us today if it had not been for the minority of the population who fought it and moved the country to a new, although still unacceptable, stage.
The anti-War movement trained activists to understand the dangers of a fascist takeover of the US, now in police departments. Hopefully, soon they will oppose US Imperialism. We helped stop the imperialist expansion in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other places our misleaders would have taken young US soldiers had it not been for the “Vietnam Syndrome”, had it not been for the people my twin brother now refers to as the “peaceniks” who thwarted the glorious war mongers.
My association with activists has made me an optimist. I have learned to combat my cynicism and pessimism by going to work with people who share my perspective. Recently, for example, as I sat in a meeting of 25 people on a Sunday morning talking about what brought us to go into the precincts to talk with voters about Bernie, I was excited to be connected to intelligent, well-informed, life affirming people who dared to win and risked to lose.
People like us who have grown up in bourgeois settings, satisfying our desires with material goods, embrace a mentality that is less prevalent farther down the economic ladder. We expect that all we have to do is make up our minds and become the person we imagine. We believe that there will always be progress. Our view is very short term. We have come to expect immediate solutions. We have a rough time adjusting to negative events. We have to, instead, see that history plays out over a long period, and that what is important in our lives is to be pushing for change to happen as quickly as possible.
Handwringing gets us nowhere. In fact, it is too often a pastime people use to excuse their lack of courage to fight for something better. It is appealing to reach a negative conclusion. If it is all bad, has always been bad, and will always be bad, only stupid (or unrealistic) people get involved in the struggle for something better. And they miss the exhilarating experiences of joining others who have the courage to face the negative forces by marching, petitioning, talking with others, and organizing collective power among the people to confront the wealth and military power of the fascists.
I have organized teachers strikes among other actions. This takes a long time. People must develop a consciousness about what is bad and what could be better. Then, they must conclude that there is no other acceptable choice but that of fighting for what is right, risking losing, losing pay, being scared, offending people who decide to break the strike. The job of the organizer is to lead people through a set of experiences that develops that consciousness.
It teaches us to view current political events through the lens of an organizer. We have to look at what is going on in the US as a consciousness-building experience. We challenge the police for what they do to unarmed young men and women of color. They respond by revealing their violence-prone nature. A shift is occurring, and the participants see that it is a product of their effort. They want more victories. Their demands become more far-reaching. Their analysis of the problem becomes more profound. Others, initially bystanders, join the effort. There is a payoff from viewing the glass as half filled, not half empty: we see what works, where we have to go from here, and we enjoy being hopeful, even if the next turn in the road is negative.
The only alternative is the unacceptable one of going passively to the slaughterhouse. That does not appeal to me as a fulfilling way to live.
(Have you read “the People’s History of the US” by Howard Zinn and “People’s History of France” by Gerard Noiriel? I think that they make the point much better than I can ever hope to do.)
You have talent and skills to help tell the story that combats the narrative of the forces in power. I look forward to a film that makes that kind of mark and to Jean’s advertising campaign that raises people to a higher level of consciousness and greater readiness to take on the people’s enemies.
Love to you dear comrades
Peter
…
The River, The Workers and The Wall: Las Cruces, NM and El Paso, TX
By David Bacon
The Rio Bravo is the border between Mexico and the U.S. from El Paso and Juarez to Brownsville and Matamoros. Just upriver from El Paso it passes through New Mexico, or it would if there were water in it. Today, though, the mighty river is dry.
There are eight major dams on the Rio Bravo. The big one at Elephant Butte, near Truth or Consequences, controls the flow down through Las Cruces and El Paso. Welcoming the release of the water from Elephant Butte used to be an occasion, when people would come to greet the river as it came alive, submerging dry sand and brush under the new flow.
That flow, fed by the runoff from rains and snow in the Rockies, would begin in February and finally run dry in October. But climate change alters everything. In 2020 water began to course down the riverbed in March and petered out in September. This past year the river only flowed from June through July – two months instead of nine.
The dry river is the watercourse along Route 28, the old two-lane road that follows it through the Mesilla Valley from Las Cruces south to El Paso, marking the border between New Mexico and Texas. It is pecan country, where rundown buildings line the highway as it runs through old farmworker towns.
Its people may be poor, but pecans are New Mexico’s most profitable crop, worth over $220 million each year. Today Doña Ana County harvests more of the nuts than any other in the country.
From late December through early January alligator-like machines snake through the orchards, grabbing each tree between rubber-coated jaws, shaking the pecans off the branches. Another machine follows behind, sweeping the nuts into long rows.
Then the workers arrive. They clean out branches and debris that would otherwise choke the final set of machines in the groves – the giant vacuum cleaners that suck up the nuts, spit out the leaves, and haul the crop down to the sheds.
Pecan workers were some of the Southwest’s first labor activists. Emma Tenayuca, a young Communist organizer trained at the Universidad Obrera in Mexico City, led twelve thousand young Mexican and Chicana women out on strike in San Antonio in 1938.
This generation of pecan workers, however, may be the last. The trees yield big profits for growers, but they need water, and the river is drying up. The aquifer below the valley depends on river flow, so pumping water is a solution that will only work for a while longer.
According to Kevin Bixby, director of the Southwest Environmental Center, “it’s only a matter of time until people understand that growing pecans in the desert is not sustainable. Water is a resource of public trust, which means that the government has the duty as an administrator to manage this resource for the benefit of all, including future generations.”
Below the Mesilla Valley, just before the riverbed becomes the border between Mexico and the U.S., the new barrier wall stretches through chamisa and sagebrush, across the desert west of El Paso.
In El Paso itself, the city of Juarez is visible through an older section of the wall and its network of wire mesh. Elevated roadways hug the borderline, while underneath it lies an abandoned landscape of empty lots and abandoned buildings from an earlier era.
People arriving from the south produced the pecan industry and its profits. But the wall remains a potent symbol of the hostility of Texas and U.S. authorities towards migrants, wanting their labor but denying their human dignity.
…
“REQUIEM FOR THE WARRIORS”
By Ernest DiStefano
In 2015, after thirty years of experience as a criminal justice professional, of which I spent seventeen years working in a prison, I founded the Comeback Athletes & Artists Network, (CAAN, Inc.), a non-profit organization with the mission of using athletics and the arts to assist at-risk and impoverished communities. My previous work with combat athletes as a co-manager and mental training coach convinced me that these athletes are the most vulnerable and at-risk athletes in the sports world. In this essay, I will use the cause and effect process and medical research to defend this belief. I will also discuss the solutions put forth by others, and our organization’s own solution, for helping to eradicate the oppressive plight of professional combat athletes.
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PART I: CAUSE & EFFECT
Cause: Poverty
Writer Walter Mosley said, “Poor men box, because it’s the only choice they have. A poor man, of any color, is fighting for his life in the ring. And the only reason they’re fighting for their lives in the ring, is because it’s a little bit safer than fighting for your life on the streets of America.”
Effect: A willingness to risk one’s own life to alleviate those circumstances
In the specific case of boxers and other combat athletes, the risk involved is potential brain injury and/or death from the violent nature of their chosen professions.
Effect: Combat Sports-Related Deaths
In the past 131 years, 1,878 boxers have died as a direct result of injuries sustained in the ring. This is an average of more than fourteen deaths per year and more than one death each month. Prior to that, from 1740 to 1889, when boxers fought bare-knuckled (a sport which is currently growing in popularity), there were 266 documented deaths (“Death in the Boxing,” by Rupert Taylor, April 29, 2021). Since MMA’s inception in the mid-1990’s there have been sixteen reported deaths among MMA fighters directly related to injuries sustained in the Octagon (“How Many Fighters Have Died in the Ring: Boxing and MMA,” by Ross Canning).
A 2014 study by Eastern Michigan University, which examined professional wrestlers who were under the age of sixty-five and active between 1985 and 2011, found that the mortality rates for professional wrestlers were up to 2.9 times higher than the mortality rate for men in the wider United States Population. A separate report in 2014 by John Moriarty of the University of Manchester and Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight found that the mortality rate for professional wrestlers is higher than that of athletes in other sports. It is suggested among experts that a combination of the physical nature of the professional wrestling industry, no off-season, and the drug culture of the 1970’s and 1980’s contributes to the aforementioned high mortality rates for professional wrestlers. The former two factors of the physical nature of their sports and no off-season also applies to other combat sports. Another study credits the higher death rate among professional wrestlers to cardiovascular disease.
Effect: Head and Brian Injuries
A 2015 research study, “Epidemiology of Injuries in Full-Contact Combat,” written by Reider P. Lystad of Central Queensland University, Sydney Australia, found that the proportion of neck and head injuries for the sport of boxing was 84%; 74% for karate; and 64% for MMA. This research also showed that Karate had a concussion rate of 19%, Boxing had a concussion rate of 14%, and MMA had a concussion rate of 4%. It also showed that MMA had the vast majority of life-threatening, or life-changing injuries, coming as a result of head trauma, while also revealing that that professional boxers were: 1) more likely to experience loss of consciousness, 2) more likely to suffer eye injuries (detached retina), and twice as likely to sustain a concussion that involved a loss of consciousness. Further this research showed that medical suspensions for boxers were a minimum of twenty-six days, compared to medical suspensions for MMA fighters, which are for an average of twenty days.
“because it’s all I know.” Brian “The Bull’ Barbosa
The life of former professional boxing champion, Brian “The Bull’ Barbosa, is an illustration of this cause and effect dynamic. Through my personal involvement in assisting Brian, I have come to learn his life story. Brian endured poverty and abuse as a child, which drove him to the boxing gym, which in turn resulted in a professional fight career. Although Brian was rewarded for his efforts in the ring with a world championship, he also sustained serious brain trauma and injury along the way. This, combined with his life experiences, affected his decision-making abilities and left him vulnerable to the less than honorable elements in the fight game. When I first spoke with Brian, he expressed a desire to resume his fight career. When I asked him why, Brian said, “because it’s all I know.”
On September 21, 2021, Brian courageously shared his story on the Dr. Phil Show. Brian continues to battle the inner demons created by his physical and personal trauma, and is currently receiving treatment to exorcise those demons.
PART II: SOLUTIONS
There have been several possible solutions put forth to address the aforementioned issues. Those I have heard expressed most often are these:
- Outlaw Combat Sports. The frequency of brain injuries and death in the sport of boxing has motivated some to call for making it illegal. I firmly believe, however, that if combat sports are outlawed, it will drive those sports “underground” and make it even more dangerous for combat athletes. Instead of outlawing boxing, we should work harder to remove illegal and unethical behavior from the combat sport industry.
- Do Nothing. There are many who, in fact, believe that the sport of boxing should remain unchanged, that the brutality and violence of the sport is what makes it appealing to the public. They also cite the concussion issues in other sports like football and soccer. Those points are undeniable; however, we must also remember that professional football is structured under one central governing authority, The National Football League (NFL). Soccer is governed internationally by the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which is comprised of 211 national associations worldwide. The central governance paradigm allowed American football and soccer, and other sports with the same structure, to address the issue of concussions and head injuries and eventually establish one unified set of concussion and head injury protocols.
Our Solution
Based on my work with Brian Barbosa and other combat athletes, we believe that the solution to the current predicament faced by professional combat athletes should include their access to information, services and assistance that enable them to make independent career decisions driven not by desperate life circumstances, but in the best interests of themselves and their families. In other words, we believe combat athletes should not fight to survive, but fight to thrive. Our organization provides access to assistance, and is currently developing additional avenues of access, that promote the aforementioned objective, such as:
- Banking, Financial Investment, and Financial Planning Assistance:
Such assistance can provide combat athletes with a pathway for ensuring financial stability and security for themselves and their families, as well as a happy and secure retirement. I recently established a partnership with the Del-One Credit Union and our organization to provide combat athletes with access to savings and checking accounts, financial management assistance, financial investment assistance and opportunities (including retirement accounts), and insurance. We hope to be able to expand these services upon acquiring sufficient funding to do so.
- Independent Contractual Review/Consultation:
Combat athletes should have access to affordable legal assistance on issues relevant to the fight game and their professional fight careers; specifically, promoter contract review and consultation. Combat Athletes should also educate on the Muhammad Ali Act, a federal law that was passed in 2000 to provide boxers with legal protections against unlawful practices within the boxing industry (at the time of this writing, the Ali Act pertained to the sport boxing and bouts of ten rounds or longer). Our organization has reached out to licensed attorneys to request their pro bono assistance to combat athletes, when requested by the fighter(s), with contract review and consultation assistance. I ask any licensed attorneys to contact us who are reading this essay and are interested in offering such services to combat athletes.
NOTE: CAAN, Inc. does not provide legal services of any kind, as we are not a licensed law firm, but merely provide referrals to combat athletes for outside legal consultation and assistance, upon the combat athlete’s request. Any additional professional arrangements made between the combat athletes and the attorneys are strictly between said combat athletes and attorneys. CAAN, Inc. serves no role in said arrangements whatsoever.
- Educational/Vocational Training: Combat athletes should have access to educational programming and vocational training that will give them the opportunity to establish additional revenue streams for themselves and their families. This will, in turn, provide combat athletes with leverage to make better decisions with respect to their professional fight careers.
- Clinical Treatment: Combat athletes should have access to affordable treatment interventions to address any physical, neurological, psychological, emotional, or substance abuse issues.I recently brokered a partnership between GoodRx and our organization to provide prescription discount cards to professional combat athletes. We hope to expand the available GoodRx discount services offered to combat athletes upon acquiring sufficient funding to do so.
Our organization is so committed to our mission that we offer our time and efforts as volunteers, receiving no financial compensation of any kind. We have established a CAAN, Inc. Facebook Group through which we are gaining momentum and support for our cause. One such supporter is well-known and well-respected boxing promoter, Roy Foreman, who is also the brother of former world heavyweight champion George Foreman. Mr. Former agreed to partner with our organization and allow his fighters access to our services. I call on professional combat athletes, and other professionals of the fight game, to join our cause and help us move it forward. You can go on Facebook and send a request to join our CAAN, Inc. Group. You can also email us at happyathlete24@gmail.com or visit our website at www.caangroup.org. We are happy to answer any questions. Thank you.
…
Olney Odyssey # 19 California, Christina and Beyond
By Peter Olney
While I had traveled to England and Italy in my early twenties, I was basically a Massachusetts guy. Worcester – 60 miles from Boston- was the West for me. An occasional trip south to New York City or north to Maine and New Hampshire were the limits of my domestic adventures. California was Hollywood and the telecast of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. Imagine going to a football game on January 1 wearing shorts and a T-shirt and basking in the sun while denizens of the Northeast froze.
My dear friend and Boston City Hospital co-worker, Steve Eurenius, had visited California and had New Hampshire friends in Lake Tahoe so he was down for a road trip to the West Coast. Neither of us had cars that would make the trek so we decided to do a “drive away”. My old buddy from the Lewd Moose Commune Buck Bagot had relocated to California a few years back and was living in San Francisco so that was determined to be our final destination.
A “drive away” car was not a new concept. My father had driven some wealthy businessman’s wife and daughter across country from New York to California when he got back from WW II. My Dad had memories of visiting the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles and going up the coast to Santa Maria and visiting the Norwegian parents of his brother-in-law, Winston Johnson. He then drove Winston’s car Back East.
“We were hungry but not takers!”
Steve and I found an Italian American retiree from Framingham, Massachusetts who was relocating to the “warmer” climes of Scottsdale Arizona, at the time the Spring Training home of the Boston Red Sox and the city where the BoSox slugger Ted Williams’ brain has been cryogenically frozen and preserved. We drove out to Framingham and encountered Angelo Fosco sitting on his shaded porch surrounded by grapevines and wearing a classic sleeveless T-shirt, known in some circles as a Guinea T. Angelo seemed very happy in Framingham, but his children had encouraged him to retire to Arizona to avoid the New England winters. We found Angelo through a service that paired up soon to be Sun Belt retirees with drivers desiring to get somewhere without the expense of air or bus or the wear and tear on your own car.
The “Captain” and I packed our bags into Angelo’s car and headed off to Maricopa County, Arizona to deliver the car in Scottsdale where he would be flying to shortly. We left Boston in mid-August and the trip across country was pretty uneventful. There was a stop in Nashville to visit some friends and hear my cousin David Olney play music. Before arriving in Arizona we stopped in Amarillo Texas and had a meal at the Big Texan restaurant. This is the home of the Famous 72 oz. steak. The way this works is you just tell your wait staff person that you want to take the 72 oz. steak challenge. They escort you to a table on a small stage at the front of the humongous main dining room. Beside you on the table is a large digital count down clock. If you consume the 72 oz. steak and all the trimmings that go with it in 60 minutes (one hour) the steak is free. If you fail, you pay $70.00. We were hungry but not takers!
We arrived in Scottsdale in the scorching summer 100 plus degree heat of the Arizona desert. This was travel before GPS so we needed help finding Angelo’s new residence. There was no one on the street to ask directions so we found a fire station and rang the call button, and a fireman came out to point us on the way. We were not in Boston any more! I’ll never forget finding Angelo sitting in his air conditioned living room looking miserable –confined to the indoors and without his community of friends in Framingham. He was physically altered and ruing the move to Arizona. It probably hastened his passing.
While I have since come to appreciate Arizona and particularly Maricopa County and the greater Phoenix area – I spent two weeks there helping to get out the vote for Biden/Harris in 2020, we were not interested in spending any more time in the air conditioned desert. Even liquor stores or “packies” as we called them in Massachusetts had drive thru windows so that customers did not have to get out of their cars and face the extreme heat. We got on a Greyhound bus bound for San Diego and California. Most of our trip was on Interstate 8, which in the California section hugs the Mexican border. At one point the bus was stopped by the Immigration and Naturalization Service border patrol, and we were boarded by their agents asking everyone on the bus for their papers.
“… it was a Friday evening September 3rd encounter that would be life changing”
Greyhound left us at their downtown San Diego terminal on National Boulevard. At that time downtown San Diego was a gritty entertainment center for the Marines and Navy. We stayed at a fleabag motel and the next morning we got ourselves a car from “Rent a Wreck” and started our drive north to San Francisco. We traveled north on Interstate 5 and just south of downtown Los Angeles we encountered a stretch of highway enclosed by high concrete walls and a citadel like building in the style of an Assyrian palace. This was an empty factory building that had been closed by Uniroyal in 1978. This stretch of concrete was very intimidating and suggested to me that Los Angeles was not worth stopping to see so we kept on trucking until we got over the Grapevine into the San Joaquin valley. We steamed northward on the 5 freeway and then crossed over westward on Lost Hills Road to Paso Robles where we encountered a huge gathering of cowboys on horseback participating in the San Luis Obispo County fair. Then it was further west to Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1) which took us up to Big Sur traveling north and finally arriving in the picturesque resort town of Carmel where in 1986 actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor on a no growth platform, serving one term. The Italian Communist party in Rome celebrated Eastwood’s no growth stand when they did battle against the siting of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. Strange bedfellows!
From Carmel it is a short 121 mile hop – in California terms – to San Francisco our ultimate destination. I was at the wheel when we crossed the Bay Bridge from Oakland to The City. I can still remember being dead tired but transfixed by the iconic view of the San Francisco skyline as we crossed the span from Yerba Buena Island to the Embarcadero. We had arrived, and I found my friend Buck Bagot and his house on 400 Gates Street in the Bernal Heights neighborhood on Wednesday, September 1, 1982. Buck caught me up on his community organizing exploits and led me around the neighborhood introducing me to some of his close friends and allies. We visited Jean Hamer at San Francisco General Hospital. She was on oxygen and suffering from emphysema, but still outspoken and a dynamic community force. She was Native American and married to a 300 lb. Tongan. She was the first Board President of the Bernal Heights Community Foundation, which Buck helped to found. We also connected with Sharon Johnson on Clayton Street. Sharon was a long time aide to the legendary State Senator John Burton, and was a single Mom raising three challenging teen-agers. All of these encounters were interesting and stimulating, but it was a Friday evening September 3rdencounter that would be life changing.
That afternoon Buck and I went out jogging in the neighborhood and were relaxing in our shorts in the basement apartment in advance of his departure for Cleveland on the red eye that evening. There was a knock on the door and Buck yelled, “Come in Christina!” In walked the most stunning looking woman I had ever seen. She had jet back hair, brown skin and high cheekbones and indigenous features. I wasn’t in Boston any more! Buck later told us that the “mutual attraction was scaldingly obvious.” The moment calls to mind the wonderful Sinatra tune, “Strangers in the Night”. While many can critique “Ole Blue Eyes” for his rightward political drift in old age, it is important to remember his early stands on civil rights and the fact that he almost alone among the Italian American crooners kept his original Italian name at a time when the assimilation bias changed the names of such notables as Tony Bennett and Bobby Darin. This about sums up our meeting on September 3, 1982 one night before I was scheduled to return to Boston and my job at Boston City Hospital:
“Strangers in the night exchanging glances
Wond’ring in the night what were the chances
We’d be sharing love before the night was through
Something in your eyes was so inviting
Something in your smile was so exciting
Something in my heart told me I must have you
and
Ever since that night we’ve been together
Lovers at first sight, in love forever
It turned out so right for strangers in the night”
That chance encounter, Christina Perez just happened to be visiting Buck on the same weekend, completely changed the course of my life. Do opposites attract? Can a New England Yankee blue blood find love and happiness with a Southern California Mexican American with Chichimec indigenous blood? Stay tuned as a transcontinental romance blossoms in Olney Odyssey # 20.
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