==The Labor Wars==

Sept. 20, 2025

So I've been reading The Labor Wars by Sidney Lens, which is an overview of organized labor history in the US. Specifically things like the Molly Maguires, steel strikes, mining strikes, rail strikes. Most of those strikes have casualties. Like people get killed striking for eight hour work days, getting their pay back after it's docked, and because their jobs pay so little they are literally starving to death and can't afford housing.

Interestingly enough, even talking about labor organizing led to several prominent labor organizers going to court facing life sentences. Usually sedition laws were used as a pretense. Kinda like if you accused someone of being a terrorist today. People were framed and everything! Security companies like Pinkerton would infiltrate their organization and try to encourage bomb-making or just plant evidence to entrap people for organizing strikes for an eight hour work day! And on top of that, picketers got shot. And in each of those major strike campaigns, there were gunfights between strikers and a combination of National Guard, police, and Pinkertons.

But despite public campaigns to smear some of those organizers as insurrectionists, they still successfuly organized workers because the issues were so serious. If you can't eat, and your boss is starving you, then he calls in a favor and gets the National Guard to attack you... Well, you do the math. And people read about it in the papers too. Bad PR. So one of the strategies was to arrest organizers for speaking publically. You know. Because they're posing an economic and political threat.

Been thinking lately about free speech and how different people understand it too. About a hundred years ago, almost exactly, members of the Industrial Workers of the World staged "free speech fights" in cities around the country. As an organization, the wobblies were apolitical, but many of their most famous members were avowed leftists. And I don't mean democrats or democratic socialists or progressives or whatever. Self-defined communists, anarchists, and syndicalists. So the "free speech fights" were designed to fight against laws that prohibited labor organizing. In other words, a clear 1st amendment violation.

So wobblies would start speaking on a street corner, trying to get people to join their union, or speaking about upcoming strike plans against local abusive employers. And they'd let cops arrest them one by one, to fill up the local jail, making shutting down their speeches a huge resource drain. Organizers of those campaigns faced sedition charges as communists. Essentially the early twentieth century version of a terrorism designation in our time. So free speech faced one of its first major proletarian challenges as a result of labor organizers. Specifically Leftists. Other wobblies were thrown in prison for advocating abstention from WWI. Usually under the pretext of sedition and suspected (or proven) communism. But don't get confused. They were charged for speaking in favor of pacifism.

Interestingly, some people now accuse liberal of being against free speech. And many of them are. Against free speech that legitimately threatens political and economic institutions. This means things like organizing largescale direct actions. You know. The ones the police get called out to respond to. You've seen them on the news. In other words, liberal politicians (not voters necessarily) fit the bill of supporting limiting speech. But they are willing to let innocuous leftist speech go. Imagine things like academic studies that reach a small, specialized audience, versus the perceived threat of the George Floyd Uprising a few years ago, where a threat of long-term direct actions caused scaled police responses, US marshals were deployed, etc.

People were getting black bagged of the street and interrogated for protesting! But all that's to say, the content of the speech itself determines if it gets censored or not. You'll hear liberal and conservative views all day, despite their "much exaggerated" myriad "cancellations." That's because they are safe views. But what about far-right views? I hear they're being censored all the time. But you know what? They're not. That's why you KNOW ABOUT THEM! At this point, being "cancelled" is like a merit badge. But that's a discussion for another time. Too deep. Too off-topic.

The point is that no one really cares about repressing right-wing speech. Sure. Sometimes people protest an individual speaker. It rarely shuts them down. But right-wing views don't typically present any serious cultural or political challenges to government or business. Center to far right ideas are ubiquitous, and many people in power are willing to stoke them because they're much safer discussion topics than labor organizing, which DOES pose a threat to political and economic institutions. You know. The ones they run. When it comes to right-wingers and liberals feeding each other to the dogs, the only risk to them issocial instability. I mean. Worst comes to worst, they can deploy police and national guard (as we've seen more than once) across the country to beat up on journalists and angry citizens until they stop showing up. Sometimes it takes a while.

My point in all this is that free speech has been contentious for a long time. And some people actually fought and lost a lot of things to defend it. But the people I see crying about free-speech all the time now are millionaires who babble into microphones 3-5 hours per day. And sorry to break it to you. If you do your free speech fighting from a chair in front of a microphone talk radio style, one of the most oppressed demographics in the US (self-reported), you aren't doing any free speech fighting. You're just cosplaying it. For a paycheck! Stolen valor. All that. It's just another entertainment trope. Free speech? As limited as ever, but with worse optics than usual.

That's enough for now though.