Okay, people are going to be having kittens. Let me jump in and correct a historical mistake in this video. Solidarity Forever is NOT a communist song. It was written for the “Little Red Songbook” and used by organizers for the IWW, an anarchist (properly, anarcho-syndicalist) union. They were not communists: they opposed communism from the left. In 1921, Lenin crushed the anarchist movement in Russia; during the Spanish civil war the Soviet Union forced a split in the Republican ranks (perhaps fatally weakening them) by getting its communist allies to turn on the anarchists.
This song has a long connection with the mainstream American labor movement. I learned to sing it while walking the picket line at Berkeley during the TA strike of 1992. We were organized by the UAW, and this song (usually only the first two verses) was at the time sung at UAW congresses.
Of course, it is interesting as the song “Solidarity Forever” was intentionally adopted to by the American labor movement to reject any links with Leninism, Communism or anti-clericalism.
American Labor, along with the other trade union centres affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, were exemplary in their opposition to Communism and any other form of phony trade unionisnm.
During that period, conservativism gave us some respect. After all, collective bargaining doesn’t look so bad to teh bosses when the alternative is the nationalization of your company and the workers rising up to slit your throat.
Let me be clear I have no objections to the song: I sang this to my kids as a lullabye for years. The music in the previous version was the famous Utah Phillips version which can be downloaded for free at
If you have ever been on strike, marched on a picket line for hours, and sung Solidarity Forever over and over and over, and then sung it again, and then sung it some more, hearing it one more time is not an unalloyed pleasure.
I remember hearing a woman comic telling a joke about a friend of hers who was in labor (the birthing kind, not the union kind) for 36 hours, and the comic said, “I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours!”
Sorry, but I think the recitation of a vintage union song from the days of true, life and death, labor strife merely underlines the superficial nature of today’s labor “battles”.
The current issues are budget struggles between two entrenched, partisan interest groups, nothing more.
Okay, people are going to be having kittens. Let me jump in and correct a historical mistake in this video. Solidarity Forever is NOT a communist song. It was written for the “Little Red Songbook” and used by organizers for the IWW, an anarchist (properly, anarcho-syndicalist) union. They were not communists: they opposed communism from the left. In 1921, Lenin crushed the anarchist movement in Russia; during the Spanish civil war the Soviet Union forced a split in the Republican ranks (perhaps fatally weakening them) by getting its communist allies to turn on the anarchists.
This song has a long connection with the mainstream American labor movement. I learned to sing it while walking the picket line at Berkeley during the TA strike of 1992. We were organized by the UAW, and this song (usually only the first two verses) was at the time sung at UAW congresses.
Of course, it is interesting as the song “Solidarity Forever” was intentionally adopted to by the American labor movement to reject any links with Leninism, Communism or anti-clericalism.
American Labor, along with the other trade union centres affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, were exemplary in their opposition to Communism and any other form of phony trade unionisnm.
During that period, conservativism gave us some respect. After all, collective bargaining doesn’t look so bad to teh bosses when the alternative is the nationalization of your company and the workers rising up to slit your throat.
I have substituted a different version to address the objections.
Let me be clear I have no objections to the song: I sang this to my kids as a lullabye for years. The music in the previous version was the famous Utah Phillips version which can be downloaded for free at
this site
If you have ever been on strike, marched on a picket line for hours, and sung Solidarity Forever over and over and over, and then sung it again, and then sung it some more, hearing it one more time is not an unalloyed pleasure.
I remember hearing a woman comic telling a joke about a friend of hers who was in labor (the birthing kind, not the union kind) for 36 hours, and the comic said, “I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours!”
Sorry, but I think the recitation of a vintage union song from the days of true, life and death, labor strife merely underlines the superficial nature of today’s labor “battles”.
The current issues are budget struggles between two entrenched, partisan interest groups, nothing more.
or more classically: