Today In Labor History May 1, 1830: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was born. Mother Jones was renowned for her militancy and fiery oration, as well as her many juicy quotes. She once said, “I’m no lady. I’m a hell-raiser.” She also was an internationalist, saying “My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.” Despite the difficulties of constant travel, poor living and jail, she lived to be 100. She was also a cofounder of the anarchosyndicalist IWW.
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies brings together world-leading experts from across the globe to reimagine the future of mineral exploration and mining in a post-fossil fuel world.
How can we grapple with the environmental, social and geopolitical challenges caused by the extraction and use of these critical resources?
People are starting to talk about deep sea mining. There are minerals down there - cobalt, manganese, nickel & more - potentially useful for creating a cleaner, greener electrified world. But taking them would cause huge damage to one of Earth's last great wildernesses. So what do we know about this trade-off? What lives down there? And should we cross this line? For Fully Charged, I went to the Natural History Museum in London to investigate:
On June 21, 1877, the authorities hanged ten Irish miners in a single day in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Known as Black Thursday, or Day of the Rope, it was the second largest mass execution in U.S. history. (The largest was in 1862, when the U.S. government executed 38 Dakota warriors). They convicted the Irishmen of murder, and accused them of being terrorists from a secret organization called the Molly Maguires. They executed ten more over the next two years, and imprisoned another twenty suspected Molly Maguires. Most of the convicted men were union activists. Some even held public office, as sheriffs and school board members.
However, there is no evidence that an organization called the Molly Maguires ever existed in the U.S. The only serious evidence against the men was presented by a spy, James McParland, working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who provided the plans and weapons the men purportedly used in their crimes. The entire legal process was a travesty: a private corporation (the Reading Railroad) set up the investigation through a private police force (the Pinkerton Detective Agency) and prosecuted them with their own company attorneys. No jurors were Irish, though several were recent German immigrants who had trouble understanding the proceedings.
Nearly everything people “know” today about the Molly Maguires comes from Allan Pinkerton’s own work of fiction, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), which he marketed as nonfiction. His heavily biased book was the primary source for dozens of academic works, and for several pieces of fiction, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel, Valley of Fear (1915), and the 1970 Sean Connery film, Molly Maguires.
My novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill, tells a truer story of these union miners and their persecution by the Pinkertons.
Deep-sea expedition captures stunning images of creatures in Pacific mining zone.
CNN has images of "fantastic creatures discovered 1,640 miles (5,000 meters) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean in a pristine area that’s earmarked as a site for deep-sea mining of critical and rare metals."
Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
This shows that there is no fictitious money in the strict sense of value not being based on material work and ressources. Every monetary unit depends on some kind of administrative process, and in the case of Bitcoin #mining very much so.
It actually seems to make sense for #capitalism to waste lots of energy in the process of generating Bitcoins. Every commodity produced bases on extractive procedures like mining and fossil fuels, on employing human work which again has to be renewed in social reproduction.
All this leaves lots of waste which can't be exploited anymore but remains as a kind of negative equivalent to the capital accumulated as exchange value.
So #climate catastrophe produces negative value in itself which is to be used as a new kind of value for #green capitalism. Waste is not only an outcome of #capital accumulation but already needed in the beginning what gives the energy invested in Bitcoins the meaning of one production factor among others.
Tesla says it has a zero tolerance policy around child labor. But Swedish publication Aftonbladet found 51 shipments of mica to Tesla since October 2022 that likely contain minerals from child mines.
There was a drug store in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania that plays prominently in my novel, ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL. It was run by a Polish immigrant known as Doc Luks. He was sympathetic to the miners and would often provide medicine and treatment for free during strikes, when the workers had no money to pay him.
His son, George Luks, became a successful artist, of the Ashcan School, a politically rebellious art movement that was influenced by Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and which portrayed the everyday lives of working class people and immigrants. Luks’s art, in particular, was influenced by the poverty and oppression suffered by the miners he grew up with.
Today in Labor History December 1, 1912: The rustling card system was put into place by the Anaconda Mining and Smelter Company. Rustling cards verified employees’ identities and employment status. The company used spies to identify union agitators and refused them rustling cards and jobs. In 1920, the IWW called a strike at the mines around Butte. They demanded the end of the rustling cards system, and the implementation of the 8-hour day and higher wages. On 4/21/1920, guards opened fire on unarmed picketers, killing one and injuring sixteen. Dashiell Hammett depicted the strike in his first novel, “Red Harvest.”
#FolkloreMoment : So, there's a certain folk narrative where a poor miner can't keep up with his costs of living due to circumstances (a large family, a poor mother, a frail constitution). He despairs, but a mountain spirit appears for him and takes pity on him. He offers to do his work on the condition that he must keep their association a secret.
Suddenly, the miner earns a lot more money because "he" accomplishes a lot more work! But other miners get jealous, make all sorts of accusations, or get him drunk until he finally spills the secret.
Enraged, the mountain spirit kills the miner. Then he shows the corpse to the other miners who pressured him to reveal his secret, and berates them: "This is YOUR fault that I killed him, because you pressured him to reveal our secret!"
And I am like... DUDE, how about simply... not killing him, due to extenuating circumstances? Don't act like you didn't have a choice in this matter!
“Michael Dunn has created the characters that bring the 19th Century's Mine Wars to life for today's readers. Anywhere but Schuylkill will remind readers of John Sayles and Tillie Olsen and the best in the long tradition of labor literature.”
—James Tracy, co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing
Do you know of any good sources on the history of the mining concerns of #Venice in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, in particular how they acquired the rare minerals for their famous glass production?
It's okay if the sources are in #Italian - I am trying to learn the language.