On this day

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 21st October 1970 the first women's liberation demonstration took place in Japan in Tokyo, kickstarting a new wave of the feminist movement in the country. The women were demanding legalisation of the contraceptive pill and opposing any prohibition of abortion. After the failure of the mass movement against the Japan-US security treaty, women student activists finally felt able to express their demands as women, which they had kept quiet so as not to be seen to "undermine" the struggle against the treaty. Sexual liberation and free love also exploded following the failure of the student movement, and without contraceptives, millions of women were having to have abortions. The pill was only eventually legalised in 1999.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 22nd October 1935, British colonial authorities declared a state of emergency on the Caribbean island of St Vincent to repress a rebellion against prices which had been kept high to benefit sugar interests. At midnight that morning a British warship arrived to reinforce local police. Though disorder in the capital, Kingstown, had subsided, the uprising continued for two days in rural areas, and police met strong resistance in Byera's Hill, Campden Park and Stubbs, where demands for land and for higher wages were heard. The state of emergency was continued for three weeks.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 23rd October 1956, a nationwide revolt in Hungary saw thousands of people organise themselves into workers’ councils and militias, demanding not a transition to capitalism but rather a socialism controlled by the working class itself.

Peter Fryer, a member of the British Communist Party and a journalist for the Party newspaper the Daily Worker wrote in his first dispatch: "After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship dressed up as a Socialist society-a police dictatorship backed up by Soviet armed might. And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years. . . . They turned what could have been the outstanding example of people’s democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism. They reared and trained a secret police which tortured all-Communists as well as non-Communists-who dared to open their mouths against injustices. It was a secret police which in these last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be."

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 24th October 1975, 90% of women in Iceland went on general strike for equality with men. At the time, women in the country earned over 40% less than men on average.

A radical feminist group called the Red Stockings initially proposed the idea of a strike against low pay and to show the centrality of women's paid and unpaid labour to the capitalist economy. A committee of feminist organisations then decided to call for a "day off" for women, which was then supported by key trade unions.

One woman, Annadis Rudolfsdottir later recalled to the Guardian: "In the days preceding the 24th it seemed that women everywhere were grouping together, drinking coffee, smoking incessantly but doing a lot of agitated talking. My granny, who was working incredibly hard in a fish factory, was not going to take the day off. But the questions raised by the women's movements whirred around her mind. Why were young men taking home higher wages than her when her job was no less physically strenuous?"

The "day off" was hugely successful: the vast majority of Iceland's wage-earning women stayed home, and house workers refused to cook, clean and look after children. Newspapers were not printed, telephone calls weren't connected, and many schools were closed. Flights were cancelled, fish factories closed, and many other businesses disrupted. 25,000 women then rallied in the capitol, Reykjavík, bringing traffic to a standstill.

The year after the strike, the Icelandic government passed the Gender Equality Act outlawing sex discrimination and formed a Gender Equality Council. Today Iceland has the lowest gender inequality in the world, although women still earn only 80% of men’s wages, so discrimination and the struggle against it continues.

 

[Pickman's model]

today in 1945 vidkun quisling, first of that name, was executed

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 25th October 1983, the Hayes Cottage Hospital in England was occupied by its staff and run under workers' control in protest at its proposed closure the following week.

A leaflet about the occupation issued at the time stated: "This action was taken after a lot of thought but it was clearly the only way to stop the closure after other avenues had been exhausted.

"The reaction of the people of Hayes has been really magnificent. We have had visitors coming round with food, supplies and money…
"G.P's connected with the hospital are to start admitting patients again so we will be running just as before. Certainly, the patients in the Cottage Hospital are solidly behind the "work-in. Fifteen of them have signed a petition demanding the retention of the hospital and one patient has insisted that if any attempt is made to move her she intends to die in the ambulance".

The workers self-managed the hospital until December, when the health authority caved in and agreed to keep it open. The hospital remained open until the 1990s, when it was turned into a nursing home.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 26th October 1983, the Northwood and Pinner hospital in England was occupied by its workers in protest at its proposed closure, led by matron Jean Carey. From the following day, they ran the hospital themselves collectively and eventually the workers won, and it stayed open for a further 25 years.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 3rd November 1918, in the German port city of Kiel, sailors and workers elected the first Council of Soldiers in Germany. Before, in the morning, hundreds of armed sailors of the German Navy had gathered at the house of the local trade unions. A few days earlier, around 1,000 sailors had been imprisoned for mutiny after refusing to go into battle against the British navy. Fearing a wide-spread rebellion, the admirals had called off the attack.

After Karl Artelt, a sailor and machinist from Magdeburg, and the sailor Lothar Popp from Bavaria called the sailors to free their comrades, the men marched to local factories first to ask workers to join, and workers began to walk out on strike. When 6,000 sailors and workers were about to approach the prison on the Landstraße near the Cafe Kaiser, they faced a line of soldiers, rifles in hand. Their lieutenant, named Steinhäuser, gave the order to shoot. Nine demonstrators died. A sailor shot back, killing the lieutenant. A few minutes later the local admiral, unsure of the loyalty of his own troops opened the prison gates and the prisoners were free.

In the evening, the sailors and workers introduced working class democracy to Kiel, to Germany by electing the Council of Soldiers with Karl Artelt as chairman. As their first action, the Council presented demands to the local military commander, Bartels: Abdication of the Kaiser, free elections and women’s right to vote. Flabbergasted, Bartels responded: “But gentlemen, this is a political program.” Afterwards, dozens of sailors’ delegations set off into the night by railroad to carry the revolt into the country. By November 5th, the red flag was flying over ships in Kiel harbour, while the mutiny spread, and the German revolution gathered momentum.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 5th November 1921, German Jewish communist resistance fighter and nurse Marianne Prager-Joachim was born. After the Nazis took power, she worked as a forced labourer in the Siemens factory in Berlin, where she joined the Baum resistance group in the plant, which consisted of other Jewish communist workers. She was executed in 1943 for her part in an arson attack on a Nazi anti-communist propaganda exhibition the previous year.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 7th November 1917, the October revolution began in Russia (named because of the different calendar which was in use at the time). Bolsheviks, anarchists and Left-Socialist Revolutionaries participated in the overthrow of the Alexander Kerensky-led provisional government, which was committed to continuing Russia's participation in the disastrous First World War. They seized control of key locations in St Petersburg, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace.




Pictured : Image from the 1920 film, The Storming of the Winter Palace, recreating the event.

 

[platinumsage]

On this day, 7th November 1917, the October revolution began in Russia (named because of the different calendar which was in use at the time). Bolsheviks, anarchists and Left-Socialist Revolutionaries participated in the overthrow of the Alexander Kerensky-led provisional government, which was committed to continuing Russia's participation in the disastrous First World War. They seized control of key locations in St Petersburg, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace.


View attachment 350567

A year later evangelist Billy Graham was born.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 8th November 1939, factory worker and folk musician Georg Elser attempted to assassinate German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. He bombed the pub where Hitler stayed every year on the anniversary of the Nazi putsch of 1923.
Elser began work in an arms factory in 1936, and decided to try to kill Hitler. Under police interrogation he explained he made the decision because he believed Hitler was preparing to bring Germany into another war, among other reasons like how wages had been driven so low by the Nazi regime.

In 1938 Elser began stealing small amounts of explosives from the factory where he worked, and knew that Hitler travelled to the Buergerbraukeller beer hall in Munich each year to celebrate the putsch. So he moved to Munich and attempted to get a job in the pub. In this effort he was unsuccessful, so he got a job in a quarry where he could steal more explosives, and began eating in the pub every day. Just before closing, he hid in a cupboard, and after everyone had left he began hollowing out a pillar to house a timebomb.

He set it to go off at 9:20 PM on November 8, by which time Hitler had previously arrived. But on this occasion, unbeknownst to Elser, Hitler cancelled his stay and left just 13 minutes earlier. Instead the bomb killed six senior Nazis as well as a waitress.
Despite torture, Elser refused to implicate anyone else in the attack, and he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp where he was murdered a few days before liberation.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

Kristallnacht happened 84 years ago today.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 11th November 1887, four of the Haymarket martyrs were executed in Chicago. They were anarchist labour organisers framed for a bombing because of their role in the fight for the 8-hour day. The May Day holiday around May 1 each year commemorates the martyrs. Lucy Parsons, a formerly-enslaved Black anarchist activist, and wife of Albert Parsons, one of the martyrs, recalled that day:

"On that gloomy morning of November 11, 1887, I took our two little children to the jail to bid my beloved husband farewell. I found the jail roped off with heavy cables. Policemen with pistols walked in the enclosure. I asked them to allow us to go to our loved one before they murdered him. They said nothing. Then I said, 'Let these children bid their father goodby, let them receive his blessing. They can do no harm.' In a few minutes a patrol wagon drove up and we were locked up in a police station while the hellish deed was done. Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs but I am still a rebel."

The others to be executed were George Engel, Adolph Fischer, August Spies and Louis Lingg, although Lingg cheated the hangman by blowing himself up the previous night.

Upon his sentencing, Spies told the court: "if you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement — the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation — if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand."
On the gallows, he said: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 12th November 1977, the first Reclaim The Night march took place in the UK in Leeds, York, Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Brighton and London. They were called by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, who were inspired by news of co-ordinated women-only ‘Take Back The Night’ marches against sexual harassment, held across towns and cities in West Germany on 30 April 1977.

This was particularly significant to women in the area because of the serial murders by Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed by the press as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, who sexually attacked and murdered thirteen women across Yorkshire between 1975 and 1980. Women in the area were angry that the police response to these murders seemed slow and that the press barely reported on them when it was mainly women involved in sex work who were murdered. But when a young female student was murdered, the press and the police seemed to take more notice.

The police response was to tell women not to go out at night, effectively putting them under curfew. This was not a helpful suggestion, especially for women working late shifts or night shifts, or those involved in sex work who often had no choice about whether they went out at night or not.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 16th November 2019, Chilean street "riot dog" Rucio Capucha was injured by police water cannon during a protest in Santiago. Rucio Capucha was following in the pawprints of legendary protest dog Negro Matapacos, frequently joining riots on the side of protesters and confronting the police. As with other Chilean protest dogs, he was thus often subjected to violent attacks by the police. On this occasion, video shows he was clearly deliberately targeted by police in a water cannon truck, who blasted him with it as he walked through an empty section of street during a protest. The blast left him with a contusion on his left lung, but he was cared for by veterinary students and survived. He was then adopted and lives happily with a family.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 17th November 1983, six people of Indigenous and mestize origin founded the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. 11 years later, around 3,000 armed EZLN members launched an uprising taking control of a considerable amount of land in the region, freeing prisoners and destroying police and army barracks. In a counter-attack by the Mexican army, the guerrillas lost control of many towns and cities and retreated into the Lacandon jungle.

Subsequently the Zapatistas established a number of self-governing autonomous communities, with a population of over 300,000 people who are mostly from the Chol, Kanjobal, Mame, Tjolobal, Tzeltal, Tzozil, and Zoque Indigenous communities. Other than personal property, private ownership was abolished, with collective ownership of land and collectively owned and run workplaces. Radical, democratic schools, where pupils are not graded, were established, as was a universal healthcare service, drastically improving public health and reducing infant mortality. The communities also have a strong commitment to Indigenous, women's and LGBT+ rights.

So if you know five people who think like you, set up a group!

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 18th November 1949, security forces massacred 21 striking miners and a bystander at the British government-owned coal mine at Enugu in Nigeria. Britain's Labour government led by Clement Atlee was keen to maximise output in order to fund the rebuilding of infrastructure and repay debts to the US in the wake of World War II.

The miners, many of whom were British Army veterans who served in south-east Asia, had occupied their mine demanding backpay for a period of time where they were paid according to a casual system called "rostering" which was later declared illegal.
The British Colonial Office had dispatched union bureaucrats from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) all around the Empire in order to try to organise workers in ways that their discontent could be integrated into the system. A local TUC adviser tried to divide the mine workers up into five separate branches, which ran contrary to the local Igbo workers Jiffy culture of organising together in mass meetings, so they ignored him.

Since striking was illegal at the time, workers began a wildcat go-slow, adopted from miners in Durham, England and known as "welu nwayo" in Igbo. The workers were sacked, so they then occupied the mine.

Violence began when a British policeman, Captain F.S. Philip panicked when he saw some of the African miners dancing and chanting and shot a young miner called Sunday Anyasado, killing him. He then killed a machine worker, Livinus Okechukwuma, and when, hearing all the noise, Okafor Ageni emerged from the mine to ask “Anything wrong?” he was murdered. Shooting continued for several minutes, hitting dozens of workers, many in the back, and security forces left the wounded to die on the ground. In addition to 22 deaths, 51 people were wounded.

The massacre fuelled rapid support for the anti-colonial movement.



Pictured: a memorial to the massacre

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 21st November 1920, soldiers of the Irish Republican Army assassinated 15 suspected British intelligence officers. In retaliation, policemen from the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) raided Croke Park stadium where a Gaelic football match was being watched by thousands of spectators. The RIC fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 14 people, including one of the players, Michael Hogan. 80 people were also injured.

The names of the others who were killed were Jerome O'Leary, 10, William Robinson, 11, John Scott, 14, Jane Boyle, 28, James Burke, 44, Daniel Carroll, 30, Michael Feery, 30, Tom Hogan, 19, James Mathews, 48, Patrick O'Dowd, 57, Thomas Ryan, 27, James Teehan, 26, and Joe Traynor, 20.

 

[Pickman's model]

.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 21st November 1922, Mexican revolutionary leader of Zapotec and mestizo descent, Ricardo Flores Magón, died after months of illness and neglect in Leavenworth Prison, Kansas.

His anarchist communist ideas were highly influential in the Mexican revolution, and he was a leader of the revolutionary Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). Flores Magón also organised with the Industrial Workers of the World union and edited the newspaper Regeneración, which helped spark the initial rebellion against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. He popularised what became the central slogan of the revolution: "Tierra y libertad" ("Land and Liberty").

Flores Magón and other editors of Regeneración fled Mexico to the US in order to keep publishing after constant raids and repression by Mexican authorities. But he then began to be persecuted by US authorities, who were working with the Mexican government. After playing a cat and mouse game with agents for several years, Flores Magón was eventually arrested and imprisoned for supposedly obstructing the US war effort during World War I.

While in prison, he described how he experienced the persecution of the US government, and how he felt “caught by the formidable mechanism of a monstrous machine, and my flesh may get ripped open, and my bones crushed, and my moans fill the space and make the very infinite shudder, but the machine will not stop grinding, grinding, grinding.”

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 1st December 1955 Rosa Parks, a Black civil rights activist, refused her bus driver’s order that she give up her seat in the "coloured" section to a white passenger after the white section was filled in Montgomery, Alabama.
Contrary to the popular myth that Parks was simply a woman who was tired at the end of the work day and so refused to stand up, she was actually an activist dedicated to fighting segregation, had attended direct action training and had undertaken fundraising work to support other Black women who had previously been arrested for refusing to vacate their seats for white people, like 15 year old Claudette Colvin. Parks later declared "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Parks' act triggered a widespread bus boycott across the city, which successfully desegregated public transport in the area. The protest also gave added impetus to the civil rights movement across the US.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

Should've posted this yesterday -

On the 1st December 1921, striking workers at Castleconnell fisheries in Ireland occupied their workplace and declared a soviet (workers council). The following day at a Dáil cabinet meeting, labour minister Constance Markiewicz was instructed to contact the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) and inform them that the soviet would be suppressed by the Irish Republican Army. Police and volunteers were also to be used to evict the strikers. However it appears this did not transpire, and the workers eventually vacated the premises voluntarily on December 22nd after the boss agreed to arbitration, which later ruled in favour of the workers.





Pictured: a soviet at Bruree Creamery, 1921.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 3rd December 1944, British-trained and equipped Greek police, alongside Nazi collaborators, fired on an anti-Nazi demonstration in Athens, killing 28 people, while US and British troops watched. Previously British forces had attempted to disperse the crowd and shot tracer fire overheads of demonstrators, to no avail. The rationale behind the move was to weaken the anti-Nazi partisans, who had been allied with Britain for the previous three years, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill felt they had been too influenced by communists.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

Fred Hampton - murdered by cops 4th December 1969.

“We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we’re gonna organise and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.”

- Fred Hampton, Black Panther & Revolutionary.


On the 4th December 1969, Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered while asleep in his bed during a raid on his apartment by Chicago Police in conjunction with the FBI. He was killed along with three other Panther activists. Aged just 21, he was an active, charismatic and effective organiser, who had been making significant inroads into making links with working class whites and latino radical groups before his murder by the state.

Throughout 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latino group the Young Lords Organisation and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots - this move by the Panthers, terrified the US authorities.

Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. Fred Hampton emphasised the need to keep focused on the real enemy and not be sidetracked, diverted, divided and weakened as a movement: “Black people need some peace, white people need some peace, and we're gonna have to fight, we're gonna have to struggle, we're gonna have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they're a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers and they don't even understand what peace means.”

 

[AmateurAgitator]

On this day, 6th December 1918, Black soldiers in the British West Indies Regiment stationed in Taranto, Italy, mutinied and attacked their officers against appalling and racist treatment. The regiment consisted of over 15,000 people from the Caribbean. Many had been spurred to volunteer by activists like Marcus Garvey, who believed that if Black people showed loyalty to the British king, then they would show they deserved to be treated equally with whites.

Hundreds of volunteers never made it to England, suffering frostbite on the journey and being discharged without compensation. Those who made it to the war zone discovered that they were not allowed to fight, and instead were assigned dangerous and dirty work like digging trenches and loading ammunition. All of the commanding officers were white, and Black soldiers could not rise above the rank of sergeant.

A poem by one of the regiment, illustrated how the man felt:
"Stripped to the waist and sweated chest
Midday's reprieve brings much-needed rest
From trenches deep toward the sky.
Non-fighting troops and yet we die."

After the war ended, BWIR troops in Italy were forced to perform menial tasks, like cleaning toilets for white soldiers. And they discovered that white soldiers received a pay rise while they did not.
On December 6, tensions exploded and soldiers in the 9th Battalion revolted and attacked their Black officers. Three days later, the 10th Battalion went on strike, and a senior commander who had ordered them to clean the toilets of a white unit was assaulted.

A machine-gun company and another battalion were sent to suppress the mutiny, and one mutineer was shot. Key organisers were arrested, and 60 put on trial for mutiny, of whom one was executed and others jailed for three-20 years.

Although rebellion was crushed, many of the participants resolved to oppose colonialism back home and organise strikes for better pay. And many veterans participated in the strike wave in the Caribbean after the war.

 

[Orang Utan]

AmateurAgitator
while I'm grateful for these posts, shouldn't you be crediting and linking to where you got them from?

 

[AmateurAgitator]

AmateurAgitator
while I'm grateful for these posts, shouldn't you be crediting and linking to where you got them from?

Its something I'm sure I've done on this thread previously, but why is it really necessary?

 

[Orang Utan]

Its something I'm sure I've done on this thread previously, but why is it really necessary?

So people don’t erroneously think you wrote these, and to acknowledge the originators. It’s good manners.
To do otherwise is rather deceitful

 

[SysOut]

Its something I'm sure I've done on this thread previously, but why is it really necessary?

To give credit to those who who did the research etc. So that we too can go and read those sources. It's a socialist attitude. Sharing.