Vol. 73/No. 13      April 6, 2009

Now in its third week, the strike has spread to include more than 150,000 miners—85 percent of the total—in England, Scotland, and Wales.

Squads of "flying pickets" organized from Yorkshire, South Wales, Kent, and Scotland spread throughout the country shutting down pits, stopping the movement of coal, and building solidarity actions in Britain's major cities.

"First of all, we meet the police everywhere we go," one miner told me. "In spite of that, we've already got North Wales shut down." He was referring to the two coal mines in North Wales that were successfully picketed out early this week.  
 
April 6, 1959
The labor-exploiting class that owns the banks, factories, mines, and mills of this country claims the "right" to deprive workers of the only means they have to provide food and shelter for their families—by working for wages. This "right" to cut off the means of livelihood of workers is accepted as a matter of course by the present government of the United States.

This is the real meaning of the callous disregard of cries for help from the unemployed by the White House and Congress. And this is why they act as if five million jobless are a normal part of a "healthy" economic "shakeout."

The labor movement is beginning to champion a different concept, the concept that every man, woman, and child has the inalienable right to a decent standard of living—regardless of the ups and downs of the capitalist business cycle.  
 
April 7, 1934
Last year's May Day demonstrations were held under the slogan of solidarity with the German workers and against advancing Fascism. Since that time the heroic fight of the Austrian workers and socialists was drowned in blood and now murderous Clerical Fascism with its program of black reaction rules in Austria.

Decaying capitalism, with no other way out of its crisis, is resorting to the arming of murderous bands for the crushing of every semblance of independent working-class organization. Faced with a divided working class, it marches forward everywhere. The heroism of Communists, Socialists, and trade union members in Austria, in Italy, and in the prison camps of Hitler, serve but to show the devotion, courage, and readiness to struggle in the ranks of the workers, which, if united, could smash the Fascist menace in one country after another.  
 
 
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