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Dubious Battle Tactics

December 21, 2022
art, history, strategy, unions
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Film Review: “In Dubious Battle,” Directed by James Franco, 1917

Movie Review

“In Dubious Battle,” directed by James Franco, 1917

Prime video still has “In Dubious Battle” for a few more days. It’s an interesting and progressive film with a strong pro-worker attitude.

Jim and Mac are farm worker organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1933. Even though the fighting Wobblies were largely crushed in most industries by the red scare during and after World War I, their Agricultural Department outlasted all their other fine efforts. Pulitzer winner John Steinbeck wrote the book around 1937 based on strikes and labor battles in California. It isn’t as well known as his “Of Mice and Men,” nor “Grapes of Wrath,” but it’s about the same people: itinerant farm workers of the Great Depression.

Mac is the old hand. He’s rather cynical as he teaches the neophyte Jim how to focus on agitating a battle to the exclusion of any other considerations. They take jobs as apple pickers in order to encourage the downtrodden workers to rise up and fight their exploiting bosses. In that regard, the film is quite inspirational and really sounds close to what really happened.

Actually, I kind of hope it isn’t what really happened, because the bosses and their hired terrorists seem to get and keep the upper hand. I watched the film with a genuine union organizer with real experience, and she had severe criticisms of the way the strike was begun and handled.

As art, though, the film is pretty good. I don’t know how the producers were able to do it, but they assembled quite an assortment of headliners in the main speaking parts. We spotted Selena Gomez, Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Sam Shepard, Ed Harris and Bryan Cranston. James Franco directed himself in the main role.

The result is a film that is fine for inspiration, but not for learning organizing tactics. If there were real people like Mac and Jim, they should have learned this: it is not sufficient to fight. It is also necessary to win!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9 Central Time. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Employers’ Terrorists

November 7, 2022
civil rights, democracy, history, politics, strategy, unions
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Book Review:

Pearson, Chad E., “Capital’s Terrorists. Klansmen, Lawmen and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century.” University of North Carolina Press, 2022

Pearson brings us a new understanding of America’s terrorists. From April 9, 1865 to January 6, 2022, our terrorists were not primarily motivated by race hatred or stupidity, as we are usually told. Instead, they were instruments organized, and often physically led, by America’s employer class. Big capital used the most shameful events in all of American history to one end: keeping working families down.

Pearson starts with the Ku Klux Klan. They weren’t just random racists. They were deliberately organized and carefully led to force former slaves to work for little or nothing. They still are. Later organizations may have been called “Law and Order Leagues,” or “Citizens’ Alliances,” but they continued to use vigilantes when it suited them. Their purpose was exactly the same: making sure that working families could not successfully organize.

Even though employers could usually county on judges, local police, national guards and even the U.S. Army to side with them, they also found it expedient to organize illegal terrorist activities. That’s what the book is about.

Pearson organizes his explanation with biographical information on the main ideologues for employer terrorism. One of the worst was a newspaper owner; another was a best-selling author of fiction. Both were expert propagandists justifying all legal and extralegal means available to keep workers down.

For us in Dallas, there are some local angles to the story. Martin Irons was a great union man who was ruined and martyred by the terrorists. He called the 1885 Southwest Railroad Strike during a convention in nearby Sherman. His grave is in Bruceville, halfway to Austin, where he died in poverty.

Except for some very good analysis of the January 6 attack on the nation’s capitol, the book limits itself to the 19th century. If it were brought a few years closer to today, it might have talked about Henry Ford’s “Service Department” of goons and criminals that maimed and murdered union supporters on behalf of the company.  

There are several accounts of Harry Bennett and Henry Ford’s “Service Department” of goons, criminals and murderers. https://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/henry_fords_reign_of_terror_greed_and_murder_in_depression_era_detroit/

Another account mentions a ex-wrestler named Fats Perry in the late 1930s. https://books.google.com/books?id=MJJOl7SMWIoC&pg=PA172&lpg=PA172&dq=Fats+Perry&source=bl&ots=7WajZJonOm&sig=ACfU3U3_OvtR3dgVWul8wuROQxLia1vfBQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiK7bjN5Zz7AhV2lGoFHUs6CZQQ6AF6BAhTEAM#v=onepage&q=Fats%20Perry&f=false.

Perry and a handful of other gangsters were fired from Ford’s East Dallas assembly plant on suspicion of theft. They complained to the newly-formed National Labor Relations Board, where a young attorney named Nat Wells wrote down their testimony. They told Wells about kidnapping, tar and feathering, and whipping suspected union organizers on behalf of Ford. They indicated that they had plenty of help from local police and the Dallas Morning News. Wells wrote it all down and it became part of the United Auto Workers’ legal action against Ford Motor Company – and that played a big role in the UAW’s successful organizing drive in 1941, four years after their triumph at General Motors. Thanks to Joe Wells and Dr George Green for keeping this story in our histories.

Dr Chad Pearson teaches history at University of North Texas in Denton. I intend to interview him for my podcast as soon as I can get his contact information.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.ORG’s “Workers Beat” talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, you might look at my personal web site

Two Ideas are Enough

November 5, 2022
democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy
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Just to boil everything down to its essence, only two slogans are sufficient to mobilize the mass movement and change the world:

Tax the Rich!

Stop the Wars!

Here in the United States, we achieved a relatively high degree of democracy by 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was implemented. I say “relatively” to mean that our democracy was better than it had ever been. It took centuries of struggle to get that good. Since those days, democracy has been chiseled off some, but it’s still a lot better than it was than, say, when lynching was common and accepted.

The big deficiencies in our democracy have to do with 1) economics and 2) foreign policy. The ordinary person has very little say-so about either one, and never has. The bosses who run America reserve economic and foreign policy decisions for themselves. We don’t get a vote about fiscal or monetary policy, and we don’t get a vote about who to bomb next. If we did, we’d be qualitatively better off. “We,” meaning working families. “They,” meaning the bosses, would be worse off. In fact “they” would no longer be the ruling class.

The Russians had three slogans in 1917: “Bread, Land, and Peace.” Those were really good slogans for them in those days and they worked. But “bread” isn’t synonymous with “economic well being” nowadays. “Land” isn’t the dream of modern workers who left their farms generations ago. “Peace” is still a good slogan, but it doesn’t cover the proxy wars that imperialism is sponsoring all over the globe. Many Americans probably think that our nation is at “peace” now.

“Tax the rich” is the solution to economic inequality. Since the relatively “good” economic days of 1935-1947, inequality has steadily worsened. The bosses cut their own taxes, cut our social spending, and raised our taxes. Their money just keeps piling up. The current economic crisis in the United States, a looming recession, could be resolved quickly and easily with a change in fiscal policy, but instead the bosses are using monetary policy to squeeze the job market. In other words, working families are being sacrificed on the altar of capitalist greed. “Tax the rich” would end the threat of recession while ending the headlong rush to total inequality.

“Stop the wars” would give working families some power over the military-industrial complex. That’s power that we do not have today. The bosses like to be able to foment wars whenever they want, because that way they can keep other nations economically subservient to them. Case in point: while Russians and Ukrainians are dying by the thousands, American military producers and American oil companies are enjoying a bonanza. When it’s all over, American oil companies will have a lot of the markets that the Russians used to have, and the Russians and Ukrainians still living will have diddledy squat.

As important as these two slogans are to working families, they are just as important to the bosses who currently enjoy exclusive economic and military power. Making a change would be difficult, but clarity on our side would help.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” program at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Help Me Write a Sci-Fi Novel?

August 5, 2022
civil rights, democracy, economy, education, elections, environment, history, politics, strategy, unions
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Would you help me write a futuristic novel about what happens after the revolution? Help me speculate about what Commissioner Leo Torres does after his election to the World Council chartered to develop a model for future living and human happiness.

Unlike most American Sci-Fi, there is no dystopian end-of-the-world in this one. Thinking people have managed to stop all the current trends toward certain annihilation. A coalition of the Progressive Party and the Green Party has wrested control from the old economic rulers. All the people who are still alive after the devastation caused by our current system have a chance to meet their basic needs.

Leo Torres was a very minor figure in the Progressive Party during the revolutionary days. By a fluke of time and place, he achieved great popularity, or possibly notoriety. In his first novel, the Progressive Party leaders asked him to take on the title of “Commissioner” and resolve a very minor problem in an obscure part of Oklahoma. In the second novel, he gets a somewhat more complicated assignment, but still minor, in the Texas Panhandle.

Because of his undeserved but considerable popularity, and because he has shown himself to be trustworthy, the Progressives decide to make him a candidate for World Council in the third novel. He learns a few things as he travels the country in his successful campaign. All the preceding novels are on-line at http://lilleskole.us.

Should he take his seat on the World Council?

What priorities should he have?

What assignments or committees will he be assigned?

What laws and legislation would YOU want enacted, if you were in Leo’s place?

Help me out by sending your ideas to genelantz19@gmail.com.

Useful Chaos

February 10, 2022
democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy
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Dark money from the U.S. is supporting truck riots in Canada. Can you see why?

Can you see why Republicans block legislation that would benefit their districts? Some Republicans even try to take credit for beneficial legislation that they voted and campaigned AGAINST! Why? Why did the Republican National Convention condone the January 6 insurrectionists? Why are Republican think tanks supplying scripts for crazies who disrupt school board meetings? Why are apparently sane Republicans who get vaccinated arguing that other people shouldn’t? Why take the side of disease over good health? Why underwrite chaos?

The reason that normal Americans can’t understand today’s political events is that nothing like this has ever happened in our country before. It is outside our experience. The only historical precedents are from other countries like, say, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Spain, and Germany. In those countries, chaos was used to help bring down participatory government to benefit autocrats. Possibly the best example for us, because a number of us are old enough to remember it, and because we know more about it, is Chile in 1973.

If you think about it, you might see that, for certain politicians, chaos is a good thing. It worked for the CIA and General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Truckers were involved then, too, as some of them are now. Google “Trucks AND Chile.” Read the New York Times article from August 18, 1973, “Chile Calls Truck Strike ‘Catastrophic.'”

It says that a 23-day trucker’s strike has had “catastrophic’ repercussions on Chile’s already ailing economy.

“This is a political strike aimed at overthrowing the Government, with the help of imperialism,” said Gonzalo Martner, Minister of National Planning and one of the chief policy makers for President Salvador Allende Gossens’s socialist government.

I’m not sure how reliable the Times’ account is, because they were probably in on it. But it is well known now that the chaos in Chile was designed and abetted by the CIA, United States of America! For would-be dictators, chaos has its uses, then and now!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. My podcast, “Workers Beat Extra” is posted on Soundcloud.com every Wednesday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Afraid to Predict?

December 29, 2021
civil rights, democracy, economy, education, elections, environment, history, politics, strategy, unions
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Every New Years, I’ve tried to get people to make predictions. Hardly any of them will. The best I have received so far is a stock broker who called KNON. After I prodded him, he responded, “The rich will get richer.” That’s about the safest prediction I ever heard.

My 2022 Predictions:

  • Massive evictions will put millions into the ‘homeless’ category.
  • Vigilantes and illegal militias will flourish.
  • Political violence will become commonplace.
  • Police will tend to allow the anti-worker outrages to flame, while suppressing any activity of pro-worker forces. This was the precedent set in Germany in the 1920s and has generally held.
  • Poverty and hunger will grow, especially among children.
  • The formal educational system will continue to deteriorate as Republicans undermine them with schemes like “charter” schools and assaults on officials. More and more parents will begin to seek out internet solutions.
  • Big corporations will try to privatize the internet and everything else, including all utilities and municipal services.
  • Persistent inflation will force the federal reserve to cut back on “quantitative easing” and near-zero interest rates. Stocks and bonds will crumble but the “real economy” won’t be hit so hard.
  • Little if anything will get done about the environmental crisis. Freak weather disasters will increase and worsen.
  • As world economies teeter, governments will advocate new wars.
  • Omicron will hit early and hard. After it peaks early in the year, a solid majority of Americans will have some immunity from vaccination or from having already suffered through COVID. By late summer, it will no longer be the top of every news story
  • The democratic party will continue unraveling while the Republican Party will grow more homogeneous and harder.
  • Independent movements, particularly the women’s movement, will grow. We will see a revival of unemployed and homeless advocacy groups similar to those of the 1930s.
  • These independent movements will be larger, better informed, and better integrated than anything we have ever seen in history. This is because people are better informed and have infinitely better communications.
  • Unions will not initially lead these powerful independent movements. Unions will be drawn into the larger movement. They will play an important role in guiding and financing the movement.
  • The 2022 elections will show people voting increasingly for 3rd or 4th parties, Greens, Working Family, Democrats, and Independents.
  • One thing that the strong progressive organizations will agree on is this: vote for no Republican!
  • Americans will begin to experiment with the kind of political strikes that have been known in other countries.
  • And slowly, the way forward will begin to show itself.

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. The program and a supplemental “Workers Beat Extra” are podcast on Soundcloud.com every Wednesday. My January 5 podcast includes these predictions. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Peterloo and Class Strategies

April 21, 2019
art, democracy, history, politics, strategy, women
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Movie Review: “Peterloo,” Written and Directed by Mike Leigh, 2 hours 23 minutes




How strikes were ended

The new British historical epic was released in Dallas on April 19. I imagine they would like to hope it would run until August 16, the 200th anniversary of the slaughter of hopeful worker activists around Manchester. The run time will almost certainly be disappointing, because movies with a solid political message seldom last longer than one week in our town.

My movie buddy and I went to see it because we knew that the writer/director was capable of saying very good things about working families. Nearly all movies are about the affluent or the artistic. We were certainly not disappointed with “Peterloo!”

Another great thing about Leigh is his ability to develop women characters. Even though history only names the men who organized the effort and the men who did the murdering, women must have been very important in the struggle for British reforms. They show up well in “Peterloo.”

Moviegoers who have no interest in improving the condition of humanity are probably going to think that this film is a tad too long, covers too many characters, and includes too many speeches. Those of us who want to learn from history in order to make a better future, a large group that almost certainly includes Mike Leigh, think it was too short.

In 1819, a reform movement was sweeping through the miserable lives of British manufacturing workers. The heroes in this story are the weavers, men and women, in Manchester. The setting alone is fascinating, because Frederich Engels, lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx, wrote his important literary work, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” about these very Manchester families.

Leigh did not stint on spending for this film. Every frame rings with authenticity. The one or two short scenes of the great mechanical looms in the textile mill must have cost a small fortune. Every set, every costume, every sallow-complexioned worker, convinces us that we are actually watching what happened in that great historical worker upheaval.

Know your constituency

As a lesson in strategies, Peterloo is superb! Leigh establishes exactly what the workers must have been thinking in 1819, and he goes over every painful question they had to answer as they prepared to go on strike and carry out a massive demonstration involving over 60,000 people.

Every moviegoer already knows how successful they are going to be, as history doesn’t say “Peterloo” without saying “massacre.” Discerning activists will be watching to see what might have been done differently so that the workers might have found success. We also watch to see how we can refine our efforts today.

As the lower tactical level, it would be hard to fault the weavers. They did a wonderful job of convincing tens of thousands of exploited people to come together.

Know your enemies

But at the higher strategic level, they made a tragic mistake that all of us must learn and apply to today’s thinking: they were so caught up in their efforts to organize and unify themselves that they did not give proper consideration to their enemy. Class struggle isn’t one sided. There is another class on the other side, fighting against us, and they cannot be ignored. Most important, they cannot be underestimated.

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” program at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious as to what I really think, check out my personal web site

Let’s Do Woody Guthrie on July 14

June 4, 2018
art, history, strategy
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Let’s do a Woody Guthrie festival on his birthday this year! Are you in?

woodyquot-hateasong

If he had survived, he would have been 106 on July 14. It’s a Saturday and a good day for a cookout and a singalong. The incredible Gerardo Contreras of UAW 848 is willing to do the cooking. I believe that both KNON’s “Workers Beat” program and Dallas AFL-CIO would sponsor and benefit from any money we raise.

My idea is to assemble a small choir to perform and lead audience participation songs, just as Woody or Pete Seeger would have done. Individuals or groups might want to do their own performances, but some songs, like “This Land Is Your Land” cry out to have everybody sing.

There are hundreds of songs to choose from, but here are some of the best-known ones.

All You Fascists Bound to Lose  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ (choir- singalong)

Biggest Thing that Man Has Ever Done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB-YnV0e3Lc

Deportee (Anthony Esparza)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu-duTWccy

Do Re Mi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46mO7jx3JEw

Hard traveling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfq5b1bppJQ

I Ain’t Got No Home / Old Man Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jANuVKeYezs

I’ve Got to Know https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyo_Hilxlj0

Jesus Christ  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDS00Pnhkqk

“Talking Unions” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU2RUoakYIM

Oklahoma Hills https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYFUUxxn6Vk

Philadelphia Lawyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjeen-Hl8uc

Pretty Boy Floyd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBF3aXvquHs

Ranger’s Command https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FznriVNbWCI

This Land Is Your Land (choir-singalong) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s

Tom Joad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dimhKln0KBg

Union Maid  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1g4ddaXRs0

You Gotta Go Down  and Join the Union https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN8kGzHH00I

Labor’s musical tradition tends to get lost every now and then. Let’s re-discover some of it!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio 89.3 FM in Dallas at 9 AM central time every Saturday. Podcasts are available from the “events” tab. If you want to know what I really think, check out my personal web site

What Do I Know?

October 9, 2016
elections, strategy
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The 2016 elections confuse and dumbfound me.

me-sanantonio
I think I may have predicted the wrong winner in every presidential election since Goldwater in 1964. I was pretty sure Dukakis would beat Reagan because “people just aren’t that dumb,” as I used to say.

A year ago, I’d have bet money that the 2016 race would be between Hillary and Jeb Bush, so certain was I that we live in a plutocracy. Jimmy Carter said we live in a plutocracy, so it made sense that the plutocrats would be picking both candidates.

Today, I don’t think that corporate America picked Donald Trump. I don’t even think that the Koch brothers right-wing fascist trend of the Republican party picked Trump. When I was certain it would be Jeb Bush,  I underestimated the extent of America’s limited democracy.

Two days ago, when the newspaper ran side-by-side articles with scandals against Clinton and Trump, I thought that Clinton’s close association with Wall Street billionaires would weigh more heavily against her than Trump’s dumbass sexism would hurt him, but I’m apparently wrong about that, too. I don’t think anybody even remembers, two days later, that Clinton made all those cozy statements to the bankers, but the news is full of Trump’s groping women.

Today, while high-profile Republicans are abandoning Trump everywhere, the polls and pundits all say that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. I’m afraid to agree with them for fear I might put a hex on labor’s candidate. It’s been demonstrated over and over that I am usually wrong. Don’t listen to me, friends!

I Actually Do Know One Thing

I know which side I’m on.

Even though I may not be so smart, I am at least persistent. I’ve been on the side of working people all my life and quite consciously for almost 50 years. Reagan may have beat the workers black and blue, but some of us constantly worked against him. Right now I’m working for labor’s candidates and causes, win or lose.

Sooner or later, all of us will have a choice to make. We will either lapse into fascism and court the destruction of the planet or we will give up superstition and idealism and form a rational society for ourselves and our children. Average people, maybe some but not a lot smarter than me, will choose the same side I chose.

–Gene Lantz

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