Haymarket Originals: Fragile Juggernaut

Episode 16 is the last in our three-episode regional series, offering a view of the CIO from the West Coast. Andrew, Ben, Emma, and Tim discuss what was distinct about the economy of the West: in this underdeveloped imperial context, working-class activity followed the supply chain, from coastal ports to inland warehouses and processing centers to the fertile valleys of California. This distribution-transportation nexus became a key battleground of jurisdictional disputes with the AFL, only to be scrambled again by an influx of wartime defense spending.  Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/505-introducing-haymarket-originals] podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut] and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way. Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts Buy Revolution in Seattle, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/872-revolution-in-seattle

Episode 15 of Fragile Juggernaut is the second of our trio of regional episodes, landing this time in the South. Ben, Emma, and Tim are joined by the celebrated historian Robin D.G. Kelley to discuss the patterns of Southern development, the rich organizational ecology of the region, the strategic misfires of the CIO, and the political and social bases of fascism in America. Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/505-introducing-haymarket-originals] podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut] and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way. Buy Class Struggle and the Color Line, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/946-class-struggle-and-the-color-line [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/946-class-struggle-and-the-color-line] Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts

This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our third special bonus episode. Alex, Ben, Emma, Gabe, and Tim converged at Chicago’s Socialism conference to discuss what the CIO can make us alive to in the contemporary labor movement and our conjuncture more broadly. Our series has probed the history of the labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s–detailing its heroism, anatomizing its tragedies, confronting its limits, and rethinking the whole turbulent era of the Great Depression, World War, fascism and antifascism from the vantage point of the mass worker. But the labor movement isn’t something to be memorialized: it’s something we’re building again anew. What can we learn and better understand about the present when we come to terms with the labor movement's past?  Read Andrew Elrod’s “What Was Bidenomics [https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/what-was-bidenomics/]” in Phenomenal World  Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/505-introducing-haymarket-originals] podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut] and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.  Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts

Episode 14 of Fragile Juggernaut is the first of our trio of regional episodes. It dials into New York City, the seat of the country’s largest manufacturing base, but one composed of a vast constellation of small and diverse shops; and also host to the nation’s largest port, transport system, white collar and cultural complex, and more. With the eminent historian Joshua Freeman, Gabe and Ben talk about worker organizing outside the CIO cast–public transit workers, teachers, laundry workers and domestics–as well as what made New York City, a non-fordist city in the age of Ford, so exemplary compared to other parts of the country. The episode features James Baldwin and Truman Capote; Irish dance halls and cruising on the piers; burial societies, Tammany Hall, and clandestine organizations; the origins of bodegas and how the mob got rackets into organized labor; the trade union origins of “Strange Fruit”; Ella Baker and Esther Cooper Jackson; the IRA and Broadway musicals; how transit workers built their union campaigning against big squeegees; the hybrid combinations of craft and industrial unionism; and the limits to workplace organization in a city defined by tremendous ethnic, religious, and neighborhood segmentation.  Featured music: “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Count Basie; “It's Better With A Union Man” by Pins and Needles Orchestra; “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday; “The Boys of the Lough” by Michael Coleman; “Talking Sailor” by Woody Guthrie; “One Big Union for Two” by the Pins and Needles Orchestra; “New York Town” by Woody Guthrie. Archival audio credits: Esther Cooper Jackson discusses domestic work research; Mike Quill debates Rep. Fred Hartley on ABC news; longshoreman and sailor Stan Weir describes conservatizing effects of the racket on the docks.  Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/505-introducing-haymarket-originals] podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut] and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.  Buy Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/991-organized-labor-and-the-black-worker-1619-1981 [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/991-organized-labor-and-the-black-worker-1619-1981]

Episode 13 of Fragile Juggernaut surveys the impasse of the Second New Deal with the historian Ahmed White, when the newfound power of working-class organization in mass production confronted the counterattack of property and established social hierarchy.  During 1937, the “Little Steel” Strike, the “Roosevelt Recession,” and the political dilemmas of union power in the two-party system challenged the growth of the CIO and began to change its character. In prior chronological episodes, the movement of mass worker organizing has gone from strength to strength, culminating in the effervescence of sitdown strikes amongst very different kinds of workers and the landslide political victories of 1936. But within the year, capital responds with a strike of its own–producing the Roosevelt recession–which leads state agents to turn toward repression of the labor movement rather than conciliation, FDR to reshuffle the basis of his coalition, and workers to find themselves without the leverage that they had possessed a few months earlier. The CIO responds to these new circumstances with new strategies. Some redouble their commitments to FDR’s coalition, while others begin seeking autonomy from its confines. The left, however, vacillates, becoming the prime victim to this new moment in the history of the CIO—unable to cohere or politically articulate a new wave of wildcat strikes that take off.  Featured music: “Ballad of Harry Bridges” by the Almanac Singers; “CIO song” by Aunt Molly Jackson; “No More Mourning” by John L. Handcox; “Alabama Trio Mill Blues” by Ralph Willis. Archival audio credits: labor organizer Boris Ross from the "Documenting Social History: Chicago's Elderly Speak"; interview with Chicago activist Mollie West; Gaumont British Newsreel on Little Steel Strike; organizer and Congressman John Brenard. Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/505-introducing-haymarket-originals] podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut] and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.  Buy Women and the American Labor Movement, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1168-women-and-the-american-labor-movement [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1168-women-and-the-american-labor-movement]