Industrial Workers of the World

“Nature has no outline but imagination has.” — William Blake http://www.autodidactproject.org/ " Feed on our flesh and blood, Capitalist hyena; it is your funeral feast." "...The unemployed meeting was held on a piece of land near the Workingmen's College. At the conclusion of the meeting, old John White and I carried the calico banner which had written on it: Feed on our flesh and blood, Capitalist hyena; it is your funeral feast. When the unemployed arrived at the Trades Hall they were attacked by unionists. During the fight the banner was destroyed. The police came and ended the fight..." On being expelled from Trades Hall Council in 1904, Fleming made the following statement: "...I am going to be expelled because I am an anarchist. I am in the company of Tolstoy, Spencer and the most advanced thinkers of the world. Workers will never get their rights while they look to Parliament. A general strike would be more effective than all the Parliaments in the world. I have got a fine stick and I am going to use it. Expel me if you like. I am an anarchist. We have been hanged in Chicago, electrocuted in New York, guillotined in Paris and strangled in Italy, and I will go with my comrades. I am opposed to your Government and to your authority. Down with them. Do your worst. Long live Anarchy." the difficulties which confronted working-class readers made the discovery of that ‘truly worthwhile book’ all the more rewarding. Chummy Fleming, a Melbourne bootmaker, is a vivid example [and a deadset anarchist… to boot!]. His father an Irish weaver, his mother a factory hand, Fleming had a scant and indifferent schooling. At the age of 10 he was sent to work in a boot factory; there a 14-hour day left little time for reading. Only when he was ‘laid up with sickness’, ‘broken by confinement and toil’, did Fleming begin to wonder at the world around him. ‘It was like a flash of light’, he remembered, ‘one summer’s morning’ when he began his reading. [William] Lane used the same image to describe his ‘discovery’ of Byron and Shelley. These and a few other radical books . . . [kept me] in touch with the growing progressive thought that was emerging from the long dark night of ignorance and despair. Thus did I, like many others, find the light and embark upon a life long [sic] crusade against the capitalist exploiter. For the working-class autodidact, books were [and remain] much more than a source of ‘joy and enlightenment’. With romantic poets, dead for over half a century, Lane developed an intensely personal relationship. ‘Throughout my life’, he declared, ‘Shelley has been with me, not only as a great revolutionary . . . but as a dearest friend and comrade.’ In books were ‘a source of inspiration that has never deserted me’. Through reading, Lane ‘felt comradeship with all the great ones of the earth’ . . . – Bruce Scates, “Knowledge is Power”: Radical Literary Culture and the Experience of Reading, paper presented to the Second History of the Book in Australia (HOBA) Conference, State Library of NSW, 10-11 August 1996 http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A080543b.htm