When I was an up and coming young socialist high-school, then college student, moving gradually away from Liberation Theology, towards some form of democratic socialist-humanism, the example of the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939 made a major impact on my thinking. I knew instinctively and without question Stalinism and Maoism had nothing to offer. How could two of the century's most brutal dictators have anything to say about creating a future free of oppression. What I was looking for was historical examples of a new stage in the movement toward full human freedom, one in which working class people were in control of their lives and their future. No bosses, no party bureaucrats, no cults of personality and increasingly, in a departure from my past, no gods. Probably the first and certainly one of the most influential works of revolutionary literature that I encountered was Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia , hence my Orwell attachment to this day. Soon following were the equall...

Congratulations to the former Republic Windows Workers, now New Era Windows Owners, on the opening of their worker owned cooperative!  Tune in to Labor Express Radio Monday morning at 10 AM at 88.7 FM for more on their story... New Era Windows Grand Opening

For pictures from today's May Day rallies and march, see the following link... https://photos.app.goo.gl/BAMrVLtrcc7BKH8j7

1877-2011: 134 Years of Social Struggle in Pilsen Haymarket’s Crucible / Rodištì Revoluce: As German immigrant August Spies made his way down Blue Island Avenue to a rally of striking lumberyard workers on May 3rd 1886, the day before the Haymarket incident, he would have heard other recent immigrants conversing in Czech (or Bohemian as it was than called). Some of them may have been carrying that day’s edition of Svornost, Chicago’s Czech language daily for “freethinkers,” or Budoucnost, the city’s Czech anarchist newspaper. He may have passed one of the Sokol Halls in the neighborhood, Czech community centers and meeting places for athletic, artistic, cultural and political activities. In the 1880’s, Pilsen, the Lower West Side Chicago industrial neighborhood sandwiched between the Union Pacific railroad tracks and the South Branch of the Chicago River, was a Czech enclave. Hence its name, a transplant from the Czech city of Plzen in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, like many of...